Robbie, Robbie’s the lead guitar player. I’ve… Rob… I’ve known Robbie for some time.
~Nat Hentoff (The Playboy) Interview (autumn (leaves) 1965)
[Do you get any help from the group that you play with… that you write your songs…]
Robbie, the lead guitar player, sometimes we play the guitars together… something might come up… but I know it’s going to be right. I’ll be just sitting around playing so I can write up some words. I don’t get any ideas, though, any kind of ideas… of what I want to, you know, or what’s really going to happen here.
~San Francisco Press Conference, December 1965
the only mathematical guitar genius I’ve ever run into who does not offend my intestinal nervousness with his rearguard sound.
~ New York Herald Tribune, December 1965
It’s like I have to laugh at Robbie (the Band’s Robbie Robertson) in ‘The Last Waltz’ when he talks about giving up the road. It ain’t gonna happen. Once you’re on it, you’re on it…
~to Robert Hilburn, May 1978
The Band had their own sound, that’s for sure. When they were playin’ behind me, the weren’t the Band; they were called Levon and the Hawks. What came out on record as the Band – it was like night and day. Robbie [Robertson] started playing that real pinched, squeezed guitar sound – he had never played like that
before in his life. They could cover songs great. They used to do Motown songs, and that, to me, is when I think of them as being at their best. Even more so than “King Harvest” and “The Weight” and all of that. When I think of them, I think of them singin’ somethin’ like “Baby Don’t You Do It,” covering Marvin Gaye and that kind of thing. Those were the golden days of the Band, even more so than when they played behind me.
~to Kurt Loder, October 1987
Once in the midsummer madness [late 60’s after the motorcycle accident] I was riding in a car with Robbie Robertson, the guitar player in what later was to be called The Band. I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system. He says to me, “Where do you think you’re gonna take it?”
I said, “Take what?”
“You know, the whole music scene.” The whole music scene! The car window was rolled down about an inch. I rolled it clown the rest of the way, felt a gust of wind blow into my face and waited for what he said to die away—it was like dealing with a conspiracy. No place was far enough away. I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream.
~From “Chronicles, Volume One” by Bob Dylan. To be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. © 2004 by Bob Dylan.