Tracks 7 and 13 from Stage Fright (1970)

Track 5 from Cahoots (1971)

Tracks 4 and 12 from Northern Lights -- Southern Cross (1975)

In The Band's storied beginnings, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson first came together as a backing band for Toronto singer Ronnie Hawkins, dubbed The Hawks. Then came their legendary run as Bob Dylan's backing band, followed by The Band making its own classic albums. 

One of the most unique things about The Band is that most of their songwriting was credited to Robertson but it was usually Helm, Manuel, or Danko singing his lyrics. Helm later asserted that The Band's songwriting was more collaborative than the liner notes indicate, so there's always been some skepticism in how Robertson sort of positioned himself as the focal point, both in writing credits and in The Last Waltz. The Band got their name from simply being referred to as 'Bob Dylan & The Band' during the Dylan tours and keeping that anti-brand going when recording without Dylan, but it's appropriate because they always seemed like such a strong collective unit, five distinctive instrumentals, several distinctive singers. 

Robertson eventually released solo albums where he sang lead, but you don't hear his voice much on The Band's albums outside of "Knockin' Lost John" and shared vocals with Manuel on "To Kingdom Come." I've made a couple albums with four or five other people singing my lyrics, though, inspired in part by unusual bands like The Band, so I relate to what Robertson did. For that matter, seeing Levon Helm's amazing performance in The Last Waltz really gave me confidence to try singing and playing drums at the same time. 

All in all, Robertson is probably one of the best songwriters Canada has ever produced, alongside Jon Mitchell, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Gordon Lightfoot. Great guitarist too, "Forbidden Fruit," "The Rumor" and "The Unfaithful Servant" feature some of my favorite guitar playing by Robertson. And I really love a lot of the singing on The Band's records, particularly Helm's voice, so I think they made some pretty canny decisions about who sang what. 

A lot of The Band's early repertoire was worked up in the basement of the fabled 'Big Pink' house in Saugerties, New York, near where Dylan had holed up in Woodstock during his reclusive period after a motorcycle accident. The songs they recorded there were mostly sent off to publishers to be re-recorded by other artists, given the high demand on the pop charts for Bob Dylan songs performed by more commercial vocalists. Those heavily bootlegged recordings, mostly from 1967, were finally released in 1975 as the landmark double album The Basement Tapes, with 16 songs sung by Dylan and 8 sung by members of The Band. By that point, The Band had sold millions own their own, and had also reunited with Dylan for Planet Waves, a huge tour, and the Before The Flood live album. 

Like a lot of people, particularly people who weren't alive during their peak, my introduction to The Band (aside from hearing "The Weight" on the radio) was seeing The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's film of their star-studded farewell concert. While that movie and soundtrack album has some great performances of some of their best songs, I was kind of pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of other great songs in the studio albums. I was also surprised to learn that The Band reunited without Robertson less than a decade later, releasing three more studio albums in the '90s (which included a couple of old recordings like "Country Boy" with Manuel, who died in 1986).