Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South
One of rock's icons tells the story, in his own voice, of how a barely reformed 1950s street punk turned himself into a top-notch rock & roller. Here is Chapter One of four: "Enter Jaime Robertson"
INTRODUCTION
Robbie Robertson died in August 2023, but not before leaving his mark, and then some, on the world. Between 1967 (Music from Big Pink) and 1976 (The Last Waltz), Jaime Robertson (the artist’s proper name) was the chief songwriter, sole guitarist, and, towards the end, de facto leader of arguably America’s most influential rock group, the Band. Who doesn’t know “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” or “The Weight,” words and music by Robbie Robertson? Or those stinging, instantly recognizable guitar lines (listen again to one of rock’s great guitar solos, which speaks volumes in one brief chorus, climaxing the song “King Harvest Has Surely Come” and putting an emphatic period on the group’s finest album, 1969’s The Band)? A resounding silence follows that song’s, and the album’s, final chord, and I experience that same, ringing silence every time I listen today, more than 50 years later.
Over the course of a six-hour interview in autumn 1991 (we connected on other occasions as well), I managed to penetrate the smokescreen that Robbie Robertson instinctively put between himself and the world. He liked to cultivate an air of mystery. In 1997, in a revised fourth edition of his seminal 1975 book Mystery Train, my fellow Substack subscriber Greil Marcus wrote, “Robertson has often spoken of writing his own book, and the very long interview he did with Tony Scherman, published as “Youngblood: The Wild Youth of Robbie Robertson,” the [memories] of a born raconteur, all blood, sweat, and booze, gives the best sense of how rich a book that might be.” “Youngblood” appeared in the December 1991 issue of Musician, where I was then an editor.
Robertson indeed wrote his book, Testimony, published in 2016. To nobody’s surprise, it is a rich book, parts of which confirm and others contradict my Musician piece. Testimony takes The Band through its 1976 farewell, the famous Last Waltz concert. My Musician piece overlaps only partly with Robbie’s book. What I chose to explore was The Band’s prehistory, a ten-year span which, in 1991, hardly anybody knew anything about, and to which, probably for that reason, I was always drawn. “Youngblood: The Wild Youth of Robbie Robertson” starts in the mid-1950s, when the music that emanated from America’s deep South first mesmerized an imaginative kid from Toronto, and literally pulled him South. The story takes Robbie through the years he spent, from age 16 to age 22, with the wild-eyed rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, who ruled his crack backup band, the Hawks, with an iron hand.
To be finicky, what Greil called an “interview” was not that, but a first-person narrative, Robbie’s, which I shaped from our many hours of conversation: the story of the years Robbie spent on America’s, largely the deep South’s, back roads, which ends with a memorable police bust in West Helena, Arkansas, shortly after which Bob Dylan, who had heard good things about the Hawks, especially their hot guitarist, reached down and pulled the band out of obscurity. Those half-dozen years, 1959 to 1965, a provided Robbie with much of the material that went into the songs he wrote for the Band.
I meant my piece to read like a novel. Once he realized that I was up to something potentially interesting, Robertson could not have been more generous with his time, nor willing to wrack his brain for decades-old memories.
I undertook the assignment on the occasion of the release of Storyville, Robertson’s second solo album. I chose not to adhere to the ages-old practice, the mutual invention of record-company publicists and magazine editors, of using a new album as the “peg” for an article about the artist. I ignored Storyville entirely to write about the years of Robertson’s apprenticeship.
Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks worked the bucket-of-blood circuit—clubs, frat parties, and the occasional concert—that ran in those days from the deep South to Ontario. What we have here, apart from the written portions, is a sort of audio book: the choicest parts of that “very long interview” of 1991. Robbie Robertson was a teenager—an infant, rather—when the story begins, a middle-aged man when he told it to me, and has now departed. Not that his songs, his electrifying musicianship, and the stories he told, here and elsewhere, will ever be forgotten. We’re going to start with Robbie’s own prehistory, which retains its own mysteries; there is nothing simple, and much that is compelling, about Robbie Robertson’s roots. Based as it is on the 1991 Musician interview, the following four-part series, “Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South,” concludes with the entry into Robertson’s life of Bob Dylan.
The audio of the first of four interview segments (there will also be several audio mini-segments) is below, beneath Footnote 1.
Chapter 1: Enter Jaime Robertson
In 1991, Robbie Robertson had yet to speak at length about his Native American heritage. His mother, born Rosemarie Myke in 1922, was Mohawk and Cayuga, raised on the Six Nations Indian Reserve, seventy-five miles south of Toronto. In 1922, not to mention the years of Robbie’s childhood and youth, being Native was, as he put it, “not cool.” The school that Rosemarie, whom her family called Dolly, attended at Six Nations was similar in intent to the famous, now infamous, Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, to which the great athlete Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma, was brought for indoctrination. In the Six Nations school, as at Carlisle, students were forbidden to speak their native language or, as Robbie writes, “to practice any of your bloodline traditions. From an early age, I remember a phrase being quietly passed around our relatives at Six Nations: ‘Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.’” Or, as Robertson told me in an interview for a 1994 New York Times profile, “My mother’s generation was like, ‘If they ask you what you are, tell them you’re Canadian.’” Her son followed Dolly’s example for years.
Left: “Dolly”: Rosemarie Myke Robertson, mid-1940s
Middle: Alex Klegerman, ca. 1940-42
Bottom: A young Robbie Robertson with his Klegerman uncles, Morrie and Natie, date unk.
In her teens, Rosemarie Myke was sent to live with an aunt in Toronto, where she worked in a gold-plating factory and met James Robertson, a white Canadian, whom she was soon dating. As World War II began, Jim Robertson joined the Canadian Army and was shipped off to Newfoundland for training. Rosemarie found a highly unlikely romantic partner, Alexander David Klegerman, a talented, good-looking professional gambler whose family was prominent in Toronto’s thriving Jewish underworld. Klegerman and Dolly had barely begun their affair when the gambler was killed in a suspicious hit-and-run accident. Soon afterwards, Jim Robertson finished his tour of duty, and he and Dolly married. Nobody, including Dolly, knew that she was pregnant.
On July 5, 1943, Jaime Royal Robertson was born. (1) Dolly alone knew, nor would anyone know for years, that her baby was Alex Klegerman’s son, not her husband’s. Nor, although he spoke freely about his Native heritage, did Robbie tell me that he was not merely half-Native American, but half-Jewish as well. The Six Nations meet the Twelve Tribes, indeed. Robbie was well into his teens by the time that Rosemarie told him who his real father was, and introduced him to his paternal family. Robbie’s Klegerman uncles, Morrie and Natie, embraced Robbie warmly, and were eager for him to join the various family businesses, not all of which—indeed, few of which—were above-board. The more Robbie learned about Morrie and Natie and their sources of income, the greater his discomfort. Morrie’s and especially Natie’s connections to the Mafia were giving them a reputation as Canada’s Meyer Lanskys; Lansky, of course, was “the Mob’s Accountant,” as he was known, a major Jewish crime figure in the USA. When Natie, of whom Robbie had grown especially fond, was convicted of possessing stolen diamonds and given a six-year sentence, Robbie was “devastated,” he writes, “to see someone I loved and appreciated being hauled away in handcuffs. It was a terrible feeling of helplessness to have him taken down. It broke me in two, a loss that pushed me deeper into my refuge, music.” He was already deep into music. He was a Hawk.
“Hey Boba Lou,” one of Robbie Robertson’s first compositions (he wrote it at age 15) and one of the first to be recorded, on Ronnie Hawkins’s 1959 album Mr. Dynamo
Robbie’s given name, which he never changed, is Jaime (pronounced “Jamie”) Robertson. To Jim Robertson’s irritation, Dolly wanted to name her son “Jamie,” but worried that people would pronounce it “Jammie,” so she improvised. “But when you’re going to school,” Robertson told me, “you could get kidded with a name like Jaime. ‘Robbie’ just evolved from Robertson, and it wore well.” (In the credits for the blues singer John Hammond’s 1965 album So Many Roads, on which Robbie, Levon, and Garth Hudson played, Robbie is listed as “Jaime R. Robertson.)