Robbie's key part in Beat group shoot

Robertson present in classic City Lights pics

ONE OF MY earliest encounters with the day-to-day reality of America’s quotidian heartland was encountered in the presence of the Band and a rousing supporting cast.

I’d been in the US for a number of months, recently basking in the glow of the Chrysler, the glint of the Golden Gate, but as my summer 1978 journey unwrapped, sitting in a cinema in downtown Baton Rouge felt a long way from the glamour of the two coasts.

In a matinee screening, the just-released The Last Waltz was being beamed across the aching emptiness of that movie theatre, just me and my travelling companion watching the cinematic concert drama unfold, the projector cranked up for us and us alone.

Clearly on a heavily humid Tuesday, Martin Scorsese‘s latest production was not capturing the hearts and minds of that particular part of Louisiana but, as the gallery of stars of this famed farewell gig delivered their denouement, this still felt like a touch of Stateside glitz, a different kind – big screen, Deep South, a swelling well of North American roots music – for this pair of still wide-eyed English travellers.

I was thinking about this as the news of Robbie Robertson‘s death at the age of 80 arrived from across the Atlantic, the passing of an important guitarist and songwriter in the history of North American popular music but sad for more than just simple reasons of his demise.

Pictured above: Robbie Robertson in action

Robertson, a very young man of 22 pictured in those magnificent black and white shots of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure standing outside San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop in 1965, was an individual who perhaps never fully delivered on his potential.

Okay, his early work with the Band was fine indeed and, of course, he was a crucial figure in that deeply controversial electric trail that his friend Dylan undertook in 1966.

Yet there is a strong sense that once his great group reached the end of the road, a moment obviously commemorated in the frames of Scorsese’s rock flick and a performance also recorded in the city of San Francisco, Robertson’s output in the next few decades fell somewhat short of expectations.

However, there was a decade of golden historical moments: the fruitful years at Big Pink in upstate New York and the era-defining moments of the global ‘Judas!’ trek.

Pictured above: An image from the City Lights shoot with Robertson left

Already an important member of that amplified odyssey, in December 1965 Robertson was a participant in those memorable photographs, sealing the symbolic compact between the Beat poets and the new rock stars. In those shots, we see a tall and rangy, bright and hopeful, musician, even if his eyes are sometimes coolly hidden behind shades.

The images were meant to be part of the cover plans for the forthcoming Dylan double album Blonde on Blonde, but they were never used. Nonetheless the eye-catching snaps became a crucial episode in the Zimmerman legend as he and the young Robertson mixed with the very hippest writers of the day.

There were a number of cameramen present in the alley adjacent to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s magnificent bookstore and, of course, there were further pictures taken outside the premises which would later be dubbed the Last Gathering of the Beats, with David Meltzer, Peter Orlovsky, Richard Brautigan and others involved.

The Canadian spoke later in his autobiography about the nerves and anxiety he felt at mixing with that elevated company as a virtual unknown. But he came through eventually to make his own important mark, even if that highly fertile ten years from the mid-60s to the mid-70s proved ultimately to be his years of highest attainment. 

Pictured above: Larry Keenan’s shot on Warner book cover

After that, despite some minor splashes in the musical pool from his solo work, the chapters that followed paled and his really significant period was quite quickly over. But he will be remembered, of course, for his epic contributions to a magical combo, in many ways the font of Americana as we know it, and certainly for that City Lights photo session.

In 2011, as my book Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll was in preparation, I was deeply honoured to be given permission by Chelsea Keenan, daughter of legendary Bay Area cameraman Larry Keenan, to use one of his famed shots, with Robertson in place, from that afternoon in the alley by the bookstore when cult writers and visionary rockers put their friendship on public display.