Testimony: A Memoir

Testimony: A Memoir (2016) is an autobiography by Canadian musician and author Robbie Robertson. The book focuses on Robertson's life and career up until 1976, the year his musical group the Band split up. Robertson's "tale is a kind of tragedy, in terms of lives damaged and music lost" (The Guardian).

Born in 1943 to a Jewish father and a part-Mohawk mother, Robertson grows up in the Toronto, Canada area. Throughout his upbringing, Robertson takes numerous trips to the Six Nations Reserve southwest of Toronto to visit his mother's family. There, his older cousin Herb Myke teaches Robertson how to play guitar. He soon falls in love with the R&B and Rock & Roll records played by DJ George "Hound Dog" Lorenz on the radio. When his parents separate, his mother reveals that his true biological father was a Jewish professional gambler killed in a hit-and-run accident shortly before Robertson's birth.

As a teenager, Robertson joins his first band, Little Caesar and the Consuls. He later forms a band called the Suedes. In 1959, when Robertson is only 16, the Canadian Rock & Roll pioneer Ronnie Hawkins sees the Suedes play and is impressed. Soon, Hawkins hires Robertson to come on tour as a member of the road crew for his band, the Hawks. When the Hawks' bassist leaves the group, Hawkins hires Robertson as the band's new bass player. Around this time, Robertson becomes close friends with the Hawks' drummer, Levon Helm. As the Hawks tour the United States and Canada in the early 1960s, Hawkins hires Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson who, along with Helm, will form the core of Robertson's future musical group, The Band.



By 1964, Robertson and the rest of the Hawks grow tired of playing Hawkins's rockabilly style, preferring instead to play blues and soul music. After dubbing themselves Levon and the Hawks, they embark on a national tour and record several singles, all original songs written by Robertson.

The following year, Mary Martin, an old friend of the group from Canada suggests to Bob Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that the Hawks work with their client. At the time, Dylan is one of the biggest folk stars in the country, though of late he experiments with a rawer, electrified sound. When Dylan says he only wants Robertson to join his backup group as a guitarist, Robertson refuses unless the rest of the Hawks are invited as well. Following a September 1965 rehearsal with the full Hawks band in September, Dylan invites them to serve as his backup band on his fall tour of the United States. Robertson and Dylan become close friends, visiting New York on off-days and partying with the likes of the Beatles, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol. Dylan invites Robertson to be the sole witness to his secret courthouse wedding to Sara Lownds in November 1965.

During a world tour the following year, Robertson and the Hawks are involved in one of the most iconic moments of Dylan's career. At a May 17 concert in Manchester, England, disgruntled fans angry at Dylan for abandoning folk music boo and heckle the performer. One audience member even calls Dylan "Judas," a moment immortalized on a bootleg release of the concert. By that point, Robertson says that Dylan's use of amphetamines had grown out of control. The night after the Manchester concert, Robertson claims to have entered Dylan's hotel room because the Beatles were outside his door wanting to hang out with him. According to Robertson, he pulled a barely conscious Dylan from the bathtub, rescuing him from drowning.



In July 1966, shortly after the end of the tour, Dylan suffers a near-fatal motorcycle accident that causes him to reevaluate his life and to retreat for a time to a quiet domestic existence in upstate New York. For many months in the middle of 1967, Dylan invites the Hawks to his aptly named "Big Pink" house in the country to rehearse in a makeshift studio in the basement. Though not officially released until 1975, the Basement Tapes are some of the most beloved recordings of either Dylan or Robertson's careers.

In 1968, Robertson and the Hawks release their first recordings under their new moniker, The Band. While singles from their debut album Music from Big Pink fail initially to have much of a commercial impact, that changes when artists like Aretha Franklin and the Temptations release popular cover versions of "The Weight," a song written by Robertson with Helm on lead vocals. The following year, the group rents a house in Hollywood and records 1969's self-titled album, The Band, referred to by fans as "The Brown Album." The record receives near-universal praise from critics and reaches #9 on the American charts.

Unfortunately, this would be the apex of the Band's career. Suddenly flush with money, the group members begin to adopt a hedonistic lifestyle of sex and drugs. Robertson claims to have avoided the worst of these excesses—heroin—unlike his bandmates. Already by the time of The Band's recording sessions, Robertson feels he must pick up the slack in the songwriting department from his increasingly distracted, drugged-out band members. As a result, increasingly the songwriting royalties go to Robertson, igniting a feud with the rest of the band—in particular, Helm—that would only intensify into total estrangement over the years.



The Band's final moment of glory comes in 1975 when they play their last-ever show at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom. Immortalized by director Martin Scorsese in his film, The Last Waltz, the concert features guest performances by Dylan, Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, among others. Despite performing brilliantly together, Robertson and Helm are barely on speaking terms at the time of the concert.

Testimony is a fascinating chronicle of a man who watched Rock & Roll evolve before his very eyes, populated by a cast of legendary musicians.