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      ‘Fast Car’ and 5 More Cross-Generational Covers

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      With Luke Combs’s version of Tracy Chapman’s hit at No. 2 on the Hot 100, revisit the origins of Björk, the Clash and Nirvana songs.Tracy Chapman in 1988.John Redman/Associated PressDear listeners,This summer, a lot of people who were born after 1988 are discovering who Tracy Chapman is thanks to Luke Combs’s hit cover of her classic “Fast Car,” which currently sits at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.Often, when an artist has a hit with a song from the past, a major stylistic reboot is necessary to appeal to a new generation — think Soft Cell, in 1981, turning Gloria Jones’s 1964 Northern Soul jam “Tainted Love” into a ubiquitous new wave smash. But the strangest thing about Combs’s “Fast Car” is how faithful it is to Chapman’s original: same acoustic-guitar riff, same sparse arrangement (though Combs kicks up the rhythm section to something a little more arena-ready), same dynamic surging of emotion in the song’s anthemic chorus.The fact that “Fast Car” didn’t need to get souped up to once again connect with listeners 35 years after its release is a testament to Chapman’s timeless songwriting. It also earned her a rather double-edged accolade: Last month, when Combs’s “Fast Car” climbed to No. 1 on the country charts, it made her the first Black woman in history to write a No. 1 country hit.But is “Fast Car” a country song? It wasn’t considered one in 1988, and it’s hard to believe that the grainy North Carolina twang in Combs’s voice is enough to completely transform the song’s genre. Modern, mainstream country music, though — and especially country radio, which can still help boost a song to No. 1 like almost nothing else — is still largely perceived as a straight white man’s game, despite the many (many, many) more diverse artists releasing excellent country singles on a regular basis.In a time of kneejerk polarization, weaponized identity politics and another country song pitting groups of people against one another (ahem), there’s another way to consider the “Fast Car” resurgence. What if it’s also a story of a great song’s essential humanity? A Black woman from Ohio wrote a song that reflected back to a younger white man from the South something true about himself and his own community’s struggle. And in one of the most culturally divided moments in either of their lifetimes, something about that song is resonating with people hearing it again, or maybe for the first time.As Combs said recently, “I have played it in my live show now for six-plus years and everyone — I mean everyone — across all these stadiums relates to this song and sings along.” The power of that chorus, after all, comes from its plain-spoken reminder of what so many of us want, deep down: “I had a feeling that I belonged/I had a feeling I could be someone.”I have listened to, shouted along with and occasionally cried over Chapman’s “Fast Car” so many times that I cannot imagine people not being familiar with it. But that’s the thing about music fans: They keep being born, farther and farther from the date that I was. Discovering older artists should be celebrated. So should the covers that point the way. So in honor of “Fast Car,” today’s playlist is a collection of what I’m calling cross-generational covers.Yes, the aforementioned “Tainted Love” is on there. So is the greatest Nirvana song that David Bowie ever wrote, a proto-punk song that transformed into an actual punk song, and so much more.Listen along on Spotify as you read. (YouTube links are included on each artist name.)1. Tracy Chapman (1988)2. Luke Combs (2023): “Fast Car”Chapman has stayed out of the public eye in recent years, and even given the unexpected attention to “Fast Car,” she has kept to herself. She did, however, issue a brief statement last month: “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there. I’m happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’” Bless her, and her bank account.3. David Bowie (1970)4. Nirvana (1993): “The Man Who Sold the World”Kurt Cobain often used the platform of his success to point his fans toward artists he admired. During Nirvana’s famous November 1993 “MTV Unplugged” performance, recorded a few months before he died, the band played a set heavy on obscure covers from the likes of the Vaselines, the Meat Puppets and Lead Belly that included the title track from an early, underappreciated Bowie album. Bowie and Cobain never got to meet, a fact that Bowie later bemoaned: “I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’”5. Gloria Jones (1964)6. Soft Cell (1981): “Tainted Love”The soul singer-songwriter Gloria Jones — later the partner of T. Rex leader Marc Bolan — first recorded a jumping, brassy rendition of this song in 1964. It became a kind of underground hit in the U.K. a decade later, when it became a staple of the Northern Soul scene. Then in the early 1980s, as new wave and synth-pop hit the mainstream, the British duo Soft Cell made it a global smash. (The song’s extended mix featured an interpolation of another ’60s classic, the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?”) Soft Cell’s rendition of “Tainted Love” set the record, at the time, for the longest consecutive run on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (43 weeks), and was later sampled on Rihanna’s No. 1 single “SOS.”7. The Bobby Fuller Four (1965)8. The Clash (1979): “I Fought the Law”First recorded by a post-Buddy Holly Crickets in 1959, “I Fought the Law” didn’t become a hit until Bobby Fuller’s eponymous rock band covered it in 1965. Sadly, like his hero and fellow Texan Holly, Fuller died tragically young. The Clash introduced his music to a new generation — and also demonstrated how punk a lot of early rock ’n’ roll was — when it released a sneering, revved-up cover of this classic outlaw anthem in 1979.9. Betty Hutton (1951)10. Björk (1995): “It’s Oh So Quiet”Thanks in part to its indelible, Spike Jonze-directed music video, Björk’s biggest and most recognizable hit is still her faithful cover of this zany 1951 B-side recorded by the actress and singer Betty Hutton. Spiritually true to the original, Björk has a blast accentuating the song’s contrasting dynamics from its hushed verses to its joyful, explosive chorus. Shhhh!11. Leonard Cohen (1984) and … well, everyone, but mostly12. Jeff Buckley (1994): “Hallelujah”“Hallelujah” is at once the apex and the nadir of the cross-generational cover. Plucked from semi-obscurity by a series of artists including John Cale and Jeff Buckley, Cohen’s long-toiled-over opus has transformed from an if-you-know-you-know secret track to one of the most over-covered songs in pop musical history. And yet — with all due respect to the wounded beauty of Buckley’s interpretation — there’s still a lived-in wisdom and a wry humor that remains unique to Cohen’s original version, and that no one else may ever capture. Nor should they try.I remember when we were driving,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Cross-Generational Covers” track listTrack 1: Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car”Track 2: Luke Combs, “Fast Car”Track 3: David Bowie, “The Man Who Sold the World”Track 4: Nirvana, “The Man Who Sold the World”Track 5: Gloria Jones, “Tainted Love”Track 6: Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”Track 7: The Bobby Fuller Four, “I Fought the Law”Track 8: The Clash, “I Fought the Law”Track 9: Betty Hutton, “It’s Oh So Quiet”Track 10: Björk, “It’s Oh So Quiet”Track 11: Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”Track 12: Jeff Buckley, “Hallelujah”Bonus tracksSpeaking of artists who introduced older songs and styles of music to a new generation of listeners: Rest in peace, Robbie Robertson. Jon Pareles put together a fantastic playlist of 16 of Robertson’s essential tracks, and Rob Tannenbaum wrote an ode to a movie I’m sure some of us will be rewatching this weekend, “The Last Waltz.”Also, I cannot stop watching these very joyful videos of Carly Rae Jepsen performing multiple sets for a rotating crop of fans at the tiny Rockwood Music Hall, after bad weather cut short her Monday night show at the outdoor venue Pier 17. Jepfriends, unite!And on this week’s new music Playlist, the pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo is back! Hear her fun new single “Bad Idea Right?” along with fresh tracks from Noname, Ian Sweet and more. More

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      Robbie Robertson, 80, Dies; Canadian Songwriter Captured American Spirit

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      As the chief songwriter and guitarist for the Band, he offered a rustic vision of his adopted country that helped inspire the genre that came to be known as Americana.Robbie Robertson, the chief composer and lead guitarist for the Band, whose work offered a rustic vision of America that seemed at once mythic and authentic, in the process helping to inspire the genre that came to be known as Americana, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.His manager, Jared Levine, said he died after a long illness.The songs that Mr. Robertson, a Canadian, wrote for the Band used enigmatic lyrics to evoke a hard and colorful America of yore, a feat coming from someone not born in the United States. With uncommon conviction, they conjured a wild place, often centered in the South, peopled by rough-hewed characters, from the defeated Confederate soldier in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to the tough union worker of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” to the shady creatures in “Life Is a Carnival.”The music he matched to his passionate yarns mined the roots of every essential American genre, including folk, country, blues and gospel. Yet when his history-minded compositions first appeared on albums by the Band in the late 1960s, they felt vital as well as vintage.“I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality,” Mr. Robertson said in a 1995 interview for “Shakespeares in the Alley,” an episode of the public television series “Rock & Roll.”Speaking of the Band in the 2020 documentary “Once Were Brothers,” Bruce Springsteen said, “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there.”In its day, the Band’s music also stood out by inverting the increasing volume and mania of psychedelic rock, and also by sidestepping its accent on youthful rebellion. “We just went completely left when everyone else went right,” Mr. Robertson said.The ripple effect of that sound and image — unveiled on the Band’s first album, “Music From Big Pink,” released in 1968 — went wide on impact, landing the group on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 and inspiring a host of major artists to create their own homespun amalgams, from the Grateful Dead’s album “American Beauty” (1970) to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection,” released the next year.The Band’s music so affected Mr. Robertson’s fellow guitarist Eric Clapton that he lobbied for entry into their ranks. (The offer was politely declined.) A quarter-century later, the Band’s music provided a key template for the acts first labeled Americana, including Son Volt, Wilco and Lucinda Williams, as well as for their sonic heirs.Though Mr. Robertson dominated the Band’s writing credits, he frequently emphasized the importance of all five members. “Everybody did something that raised the level of what we were doing to a stronger place,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “They’re all unique characters you could read about in a book,” he told Musician magazine in 1982.The Band in the late 1960s, from left: Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Mr. Robertson and Rick Danko. Though Mr. Robertson dominated the group’s songwriting credits, he frequently emphasized the importance of all five members.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThree of his fellow members — the drummer Levon Helm, the pianist Richard Manuel and the bassist Rick Danko — expressed those characters in distinctly aching vocals. Mr. Robertson rarely sang lead, instead finding his voice in the guitar.A Southern MuseWhile the texture of his playing was often flinty, his licks and leads were flush with feeling. In Mr. Helm, Mr. Robertson found a special muse, as well as a true link to the South; born in Arkansas, Mr. Helm was the only member of the Band not born in Canada.“I know at the time that it seemed strange that somebody from Canada would be writing this Southern anthem,” Mr. Robertson said in “Shakespeares in the Alley,” referring to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which Mr. Helm sang. “It took somebody coming in the from the outside to really see these things.”The lofty stature of the Band was further burnished by their participation in several seminal events in the history of Bob Dylan. They served as his backing group during the historic 1965-66 tour that found him “going electric,” to the horror of folk fundamentalists who booed his move away from his original acoustic style. “When people boo you night after night, it can affect your confidence,” Mr. Robertson told The Guardian. But, he added, “We didn’t budge. The more they booed, the louder we got.”In “Once Were Brothers,” Mr. Dylan called the group “gallant knights” for sticking with him.In the summer of 1967, the Band went to live near Mr. Dylan’s home in Woodstock, N.Y., and together they recorded a trove of important songs, some of which later leaked out in the form of the first significant bootleg record, nicknamed “The Great White Wonder.” Key songs from those sessions, mainly written by Mr. Dylan but augmented by pieces written by members of the Band, including Mr. Robertson, didn’t enjoy an official release until 1975, as the double album “The Basement Tapes.” It became a Top 10 hit and inspired the New York Times critic John Rockwell to call it “one of the greatest albums in the history of American popular music.”In 1974, the Band reunited with Mr. Dylan, backing him on the album “Planet Waves,” which became a No. 1 Billboard hit, and then launching a tour that yielded the gold concert recording “Before the Flood.”Two years later, the Band gave what at the time was called its final concert, held in San Francisco and billed as “The Last Waltz.” An all-star affair, it featured guest artists from Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison to Muddy Waters and Neil Young, as well as Mr. Dylan. A film of the show, released in 1978 and directed by Martin Scorsese, was lionized by Rolling Stone magazine in 2020 as “the greatest concert movie of all time.” The Band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.From left, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan and Mr. Robertson in Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Waltz,” which documented what was billed as the Band’s last concert and featured an all-star cast of guest artists. United Artists/Getty ImagesSome years after the group’s demise, in 1987, Mr. Robertson began a solo career with an album simply titled “Robbie Robertson.” In the decades that followed, he released four more solo albums, though only the first one went gold.Most of his post-Band professional efforts were devoted to work in film, often in collaboration with Mr. Scorsese, as either a music producer or supervisor or as a composer of scores. The two worked together on noted films like “Raging Bull” and “Casino.” Mr. Robertson also served as a music producer or composer on scores of soundtracks for film and television projects, and even did some acting, co-starring with Jodie Foster and Gary Busey in the 1980 film “Carny.”‘The Guitar Looks Pretty Cool’Jaime Royal Robertson was born on July 5, 1943, in Toronto. His mother, Rosemary Dolly Chrysler, was a Mohawk who had been raised on the Six Nations Reserve near Toronto. The man whom he believed to be his father and who raised him until he was in his early teens, James Robertson, was a factory worker.When he was a child, his mother often took him to the Six Nations Reserve where, Mr. Robertson told The Guardian, “it seemed to me that everyone played a musical instrument or sang or danced. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get into this club. I said, ‘I think the guitar looks pretty cool.’”His mother bought him one.“Rock ‘n’ roll suddenly hit me when I was 13 years old,” he told Classic Rock magazine in 2019. “That was it for me. Within weeks I was in my first band.”Around that time his parents separated, and his mother told him that his biological father was a Jewish professional gambler named Alexander David Klegerman, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident before she met James Robertson. In his memoir, “Testimony” (2016), Mr. Robertson wryly commented on his Indian and Jewish heritage.“You could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution,” he wrote.Martin Scorsese with Mr. Robertson in 1978 at the Cannes International Film Festival in France, where they presented “The Last Waltz.” Associated PressHis first band, Little Caesar and the Consuls, performed covers of the current hits. A group he joined three years later, in 1959, the Suedes, got a crucial break when they were seen by the Arkansas-based rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins.Mr. Hawkins saw enough in Mr. Robertson to write two songs with him, which he recorded, and he later invited the teenage guitarist to join his band, the Hawks, initially on bass. The Hawks also included Levon Helm on drums; by 1961, the other future members of the Band were also in the fold. They toured with Mr. Hawkins for two more years and recorded for Roulette Records. By 1964, they had gone off on their own as Levon and the Hawks.Enter Bob DylanThat group recorded a few singles for Atco, all written by Mr. Robertson, and in 1965 he was contacted by Mr. Dylan’s management and invited to be part of his backing group. While he initially refused, he did perform with Mr. Dylan in New York and Los Angeles, bringing along Mr. Helm for those gigs. At Mr. Robertson’s insistence, Mr. Dylan wound up hiring most of the other future members of the Band for the full tour.He also invited Mr. Robertson to perform on a session in 1966 for his album “Blonde on Blonde.” The next year, he asked the Hawks to move to his new base in the Woodstock area, and they rented a house in nearby Saugerties that was later known as Big Pink. It was there that they recorded the music later released as “The Basement Tapes” and worked on the songs that would be included on “Music From Big Pink.”“It was like a clubhouse where we could shut out the outside world,” Mr. Robertson wrote in his memoir. “It was my belief something magical would happen. And some true magic did happen.”When “Music From Big Pink” was released in the summer of 1968, it boasted seminal songs written by Mr. Robertson like “The Weight” and “Chest Fever,” along with strong pieces composed by other members of the Band and by Mr. Dylan. “This album was recorded in approximately two weeks,” another close Dylan associate, Al Kooper, wrote in a review in Rolling Stone. “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”For the Band’s follow-up album, “The Band,” released in 1969, Mr. Robertson either wrote or co-wrote every song, including some of his most enduring creations, among them “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Rag Mama Rag,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which became a Top Five Billboard hit in a version recorded by Joan Baez. The album reached No. 9 on the magazine’s chart.The Band’s next effort, “Stage Fright,” released in 1970, shot even higher, peaking at No. 5, buoyed by Robertson compositions like the title track and “The Shape I’m In.” Those songs, like many on the album, expressed deep anxiety and doubt, a theme that carried over to “Cahoots,” released in 1971. And while that album broke Billboard’s Top 20, it wasn’t as rapturously received as its predecessors.A collection of blues and R&B covers, “Moondog Matinee,” was released in 1973, and Mr. Robertson’s muse fully returned in 1975 on the album “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” which included “Acadian Driftwood,” his first composition with a Canadian theme. The original group’s final release, “Islands” (1977), consisted of leftover pieces and was issued mainly to fulfill the group’s contract with its label, Capitol Records.Mr. Robertson in 2015. After the Band’s demise in 1987, he released five solo albums but devoted most of his effort to movies, as a music producer or score composer.Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressThe same year as “The Last Waltz,” Mr. Robertson produced a Top Five platinum album for Neil Diamond, “Beautiful Noise,” and a double live album by Mr. Diamond, “Live at the Greek,” which made Billboard’s Top Ten and sold more than two million copies.Mr. Robertson told Musician magazine that he broke up the Band because “we had done it for 16 years and there was really nothing else to learn from it.” Another strong factor was Mr. Robertson’s frustration over hard drug use by most of the other members.Without Mr. Robertson, the other members of the Band released three albums in the 1990s; the last, “Jubilation” in 1998, was without Mr. Manuel, who had died by suicide 12 years earlier at 40. Mr. Danko died of heart failure in 1999 at 56, Mr. Helm of throat cancer in 2012 at 71.Over the years, other members of the Band accused Mr. Robertson of taking more songwriting credits than he deserved. To them, it was a cooperative effort, with the other members adding important arrangements and contributing elements that helped define the essential character of the recordings. Mr. Helm was particularly vociferous in his condemnation, amplified by his furious 1993 memoir, “This Wheel’s on Fire.”In his own memoir, Mr. Robertson wrote of Mr. Helm, “it was like some demon had crawled into my friend’s soul and pushed a crazy, angry button.”Mr. Robertson’s final solo album appeared in 2019 with a title, “Sinematic,” which underscored his devotion to film work in the last four decades of his life. He recently completed the score for his 14th film project, Mr. Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is to be released this fall.Mr. Robertson is survived by his wife, Janet; his children, Alexandra, Sebastian and Delphine; and five grandchildren. His marriage to Dominique Bourgeois ended in divorce.Marveling over where life had taken him, Mr. Robertson once told Classic Rock magazine: “People used to say to me, ‘You’re just a dreamer. You’re gonna end up working down the street, just like me.’ Part of that was crushing, and the other part is, ‘Oh yeah? I’m on a mission. I’m moving on. And if you look for me, there’s only going to be dust.’” More

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      ‘The Last Waltz’ With Robbie Robertson Is One of Rock’s Great Docs

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      The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem.By the mid-1970s, the Band was well known as the group that had backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour and released a series of its own reverentially reviewed albums that returned music to a pre-psychedelic era and augured a return-to-basics movement in rock. But in 1976, with the quality and sales of its albums both declining, the Band announced a farewell show, full of illustrious guest stars, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day. The gala concert would be filmed by Martin Scorsese, who in the last few years had directed the provocative and acclaimed films “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Taxi Driver.”The music documentaries of the late ’60s and early ’70s — “Don’t Look Back,” starring a scabrous Dylan, in 1967, then the concert films “Monterey Pop” in 1968 and “Woodstock” in 1970, as well as the Rolling Stones debacle “Gimme Shelter” the same year — were low-budget affairs, underground in their lighting, camerawork and sound. D.A. Pennebaker shot “Don’t Look Back” by himself, using a hand-held camera and 16-millimeter film.“The Last Waltz” — which put a spotlight on the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who died this week at 80 — was a confident, dramatic upgrade with an atypical structure. It begins with the concert’s final song, and incorporates band interviews and B-roll shots to give personality to each member. The 1978 film employs highly stylized backlighting and footlights, avoids audience shots and uses nearly every camera angle except low angle front, which is how bands are traditionally seen by members of an audience. The musicians dressed like western gunslingers ready to face their end, and to counteract all the mythic imagery, the interviews are full of the kind of artifice other films edit out, including awkward exchanges between the band members and Scorsese, their stumbling inquisitor. The movie dwells in shades of purple, the color of bruises and cabernet sauvignon.It didn’t take long for critics to laud “The Last Waltz.” In the British music weekly Record Mirror, Mike Gardner called it “the first rock movie to eschew the shambling amateurism that passes for rock cinema and replace it with the most illustrious professionals within Hollywood.” More resoundingly, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker (no big fan of cinéma vérité) wrote that it was “the most beautiful rock movie ever.”These days, “The Last Waltz” is by consensus one of the best music films in the canon, neck and neck with “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film by Jonathan Demme. Many deconstructions of the Scorsese film describe it as a crucial and irreversible departure in rock filmmaking, a move away from naïve image-capturing and the “shaky camera” of Jonas Mekas, and toward canny image-making.The star power in front of the camera — guests included Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr and Muddy Waters — was matched by the filmmaking expertise behind it. The crew included the director of photography Michael Chapman, plus seven camera operators, including the renowned Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, all shooting with 35-millimeter film, as well as the recording engineer and Neil Young collaborator Elliot Mazer. The production designer Boris Leven dressed the Winterland stage with columns, chandeliers and wall hangings from the San Francisco Opera’s staging of “La Traviata,” bringing some 19th-century Italian brio to the farewell concert.How did it all come together? Once the Band decided to disband, Robertson wanted to find “someone special to capture this event on film,” he wrote in “Testimony,” his 2016 memoir. He considered most of the emerging young directors of the mid-70s — Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman — but picked Scorsese, who had been an assistant director and editor on “Woodstock” and was already considered gifted at using music cues onscreen, most notably Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” in “Taxi Driver,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by the Rolling Stones, in “Mean Streets.”Robertson, the most sophisticated, charming and socially fluent member of the Band, met Scorsese through Jon Taplin, a Princeton graduate who had been a road manager for the Band, and later produced “Mean Streets.” Once Scorsese signed on, he asked for lyrics to each song in the concert, so he could plan camera movements and lighting changes. He eventually wrote a 200-page shooting script, according to Robertson. Other sources say it was 300 pages.The director and the guitarist grew close, especially during postproduction, and pretty soon they were living together and jetting off to parties in Paris or Rome. That closeness caused friction: Despite the acclaim for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the film about him, rather than about them.The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire.” He called the movie “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of making Robertson look great while ignoring other band members.By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very different levels of success and financial comfort. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some people reflexively side with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s book came out, Robertson’s reputation suffered in some circles, and possibly influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” especially after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.“The movie’s real subject is not the Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Film Quarterly, adding that “virtually every visual and thematic aspect of ‘The Last Waltz’ is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “may be the best film ever made about the music scene,” one that, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the business.Nearly 25 years after the release of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the best music documentaries was so common that the consensus around the film was ripe for a challenge. “‘The Last Waltz’ has inexplicably been called the greatest rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the movie that same year, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that “part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”The movie is more skeptically understood now, but its stature has never waned. Even its stoutest opponents recognize its quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his book, “and I suppose that’s true.” More

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      Taylor Swift Announces Fourth Album Rerecording During Eras Tour

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      Swift announced the October release of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” during a concert in California on Wednesday.It’s Taylor Swift’s summer. We’re all just living in it.During a concert for her Eras Tour in California on Wednesday night, Swift announced the release date of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, “1989.” It will come out on Oct. 27, the same date that the original album was released nine years ago.It should come as no surprise that fans, both in the stadium and on the internet, freaked out.“Surprise!!” Swift wrote on social media. “The 1989 album changed my life in countless ways, and it fills me with such excitement to announce that my version of it will be out October 27th.” She added that this was her “most FAVORITE rerecord I’ve ever done.”The album includes hits like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space.”Taylor Swift announcing #1989TaylorsVersion tonight at SoFi Stadium! #LATStheerastour #TSTheErasTour pic.twitter.com/zCSzcEWT2b— The Eras Tour (@TSTheErasTour) August 10, 2023
      Swift has been rerecording her first six albums to regain control of them after the master recordings were sold. In 2019, the music executive Scooter Braun purchased Big Machine, Swift’s old label — and with it, the original recordings for Swift’s first six albums. The sale, Swift said at the time, had “stripped me of my life’s work.”Since then, the back catalog has changed hands again. Braun’s company sold the rights to Swift’s music to Shamrock Capital, an investment firm founded by Roy E. Disney, a nephew of Walt Disney, for more than $300 million.In 2019, Swift announced her plan to rerecord the albums, and she has since released “Fearless,” “Red” and “Speak Now.”Announcing the new version of “Fearless” in 2021, Swift wrote on Twitter that, “Artists should own their own work for so many reasons, but the most screamingly obvious one is that the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work.”That album, called “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” came with six additional songs that were not featured on the original “Fearless,” Swift’s 2009 mainstream breakthrough that won four Grammy Awards.Now, Swift is in the middle of her Eras Tour, which has become an international business and cultural juggernaut this summer, with fans clamoring for tickets and demand putting ticketing systems under stress.The show Wednesday night was the sixth at SoFi stadium outside Los Angeles, and the final one in the first United States leg of the tour. (More shows are planned in the United States in fall 2024.) Swift’s next shows will be in Mexico this month, with later dates in Argentina, Brazil, Japan and Europe. In total, 146 stadium dates have been booked for the Eras Tour.Although Swift’s box office numbers aren’t publicly released, the trade publication Pollstar has estimated that Eras Tour earnings will surpass $1 billion when she gets to Singapore in March.Swift fans — or “Swifties” — are known to see signs in everything Swift does or posts online, and they had speculated that she might announce her rerecording of “1989” on Wednesday night. SoFi Stadium had also teased a “surprise” on social media. More

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      How Hip-Hop Conquered the World

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      How Hip-HopConqueredthe World A crowd in Harlem watching Doug E. Fresh, 1995.David Corio The Great Read How Hip-Hop Conquered the World Fifty years ago, a party in the Bronx jumpstarted an essential American artform. For decades the genre has thrived by explaining the country to itself. Aug. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET We’ve gathered here […] More

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      Robbie Robertson’s 12 Essential Songs

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      The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Hear some of the best tracks led by the songwriter and guitarist, who died this week at 80, alongside standout solo material.In Robbie Robertson’s music, earthiness and mystery were never far apart.Robertson, who died on Wednesday at 80, wrote songs that were firmly and widely rooted. Although he was Canadian, his music was steeped in Americana: in blues, country, ragtime, Cajun music, parlor songs, Appalachian ballads, gospel, circus bands, vaudeville and his Indigenous heritage. The way he deployed his guitar was twangy, sly and rigorously pithy, allowing no wasted motion. The lyrics he wrote could be cryptic or narrative, character studies or tall tales or riddles, and they were informed by history, myth and paradox.Particularly in the luminous years of the Band’s recording career — from 1968 to 1976, but forged by a full decade of playing together before that — Robertson shaped an ensemble sound that was down-home and communal but laced with thoughtful details. In a late-1960s pop moment of florid psychedelia and sprawling, be-here-now jams, the Band was a counterweight: measured, grown-up and fully aware of a long past.The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Robert’s pointed guitar licks teased against Garth Hudson’s ornate keyboards; vocal harmonies tumbled in from odd directions, and little musical nooks and crannies hinted at secrets just out of reach. With Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel all in the Band, Robertson didn’t need to be a lead singer.After the Band’s decisive farewell in 1976, Robertson depended on his own limited voice — often bolstered by guest singers — and he worked with studio groups that hadn’t built the road-tested reflexes of the Band. But he continued to write songs steeped in American lore, very much including his own embrace of his Native American ancestry. Earnestness had fully replaced the Band’s jovial camaraderie, but Robertson’s ambitions were undiminished.Here are 16 essential Robertson recordings:Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1966)Some of Bob Dylan’s British fans were still outraged that he’d gone electric when he toured in 1966; he was backed by the Hawks, a precursor of the Band. Their response to folky resistance was to dig in and turn up the volume, in performances that still ring with jubilant defiance. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” from “Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” was actually recorded in Manchester at a show that was bootlegged and mislabeled for years. The tempo is louche and unhurried, and Robertson and Hudson use the spaces between Dylan’s taunting lines to carry on a merry country-vs.-calliope wrangle.The Band, “Yazoo Street Scandal” (1967)“Yazoo Street Scandal” appears on the 1975 collection “The Basement Tapes”: songs recorded in 1967 in Woodstock and Saugerties, N.Y., by Dylan and the Band while he was in seclusion after his 1966 motorcycle accident. “Yazoo Street Scandal” is the Band on its own, with a wiry, stop-time riff and Helm yowling lyrics that juggle bawdiness and biblical allusions.The Band, “The Weight” (1968)A fable of callous indifference. A series of setups and punchlines. Some scattered biblical allusions. A stolid march and a potential hymn. “The Weight” is all of those, droll and haggard at the same time, paced by Helm’s laconic drum thumps. Helm and Danko trade verses, and group harmonies stack up in a rising, hopeful chorus before the narrator realizes, once again, “They put the load right on me.”The Band, “Chest Fever” (1968)Robertson’s cackling guitar counters the pomp of Garth Hudson’s organ intro and the hefty chords in the verses. Richard Manuel sings about a tantalizing, bewildering woman. In the chorus, as “my mind unweaves/I feel the freeze down in my knees,” organ, piano and guitar capture the vertigo in woozy stereo syncopation, topped by groaning lead guitar licks that insist on comedy.The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1969)Robertson wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” based on the Southern memories of Helm, the only American in a band with four Canadians. The song captures wounded pride, multigenerational loyalties and lingering bitterness in a mournful processional. Helm’s swelling, extended drum rolls hint at military funerals, and after each chorus, there’s a solemn pause, as if facing the next verse is almost too much to bear.The Band, “Up on Cripple Creek” (1969)A happy trucker narrates “Up on Cripple Creek,” praising Bessie, his free-spirited hookup in Lake Charles, La. “If I spring a leak, she mends me/I don’t have to speak, she defends me,” Helm exults. A ratchety groove grows out of Robertson’s opening guitar licks, and before the end, Helm is yodeling with glee.The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” (1969)In “King Harvest,” a farmer faces calamities — drought, fire, a horse gone mad — and finds his last hope in joining a union, as sharecroppers did during the Depression. His rising desperation comes through as Manuel sings the verses, and in the subdued choruses, his love of the land endures.The Band, “The Shape I’m In” (1970)The beat is peppy, almost eager, and Hudson’s note-bending organ interludes and outro are downright jaunty. But Manuel sings about a mounting collection of woes: loneliness, jail, homelessness. Robertson’s guitar provides brief hints of the blues, but this narrator is just going to have to muddle through.The Band, “Stage Fright” (1970)Performing in the spotlight is “Just one more nightmare you can stand” in “Stage Fright,” a reflection on trauma and fame that may have been autobiographical. “For the price that the poor boy has paid/He gets to sing just like a bird,” Danko sang with a quaver, leaping into falsetto for a few notes after “bird.” The music pushes the fearful singer onstage and the song understands the compulsion to perform despite it all: “When he gets to the end, he wants to start all over again.”The Band, “Life Is a Carnival” (1971)Robertson worked at carnivals as a young man, and he remained fascinated by a traveling carnival’s perpetual mix of fun and sleaze; after the Band broke up, he co-wrote and acted in a 1980 movie, “Carny.” He and the Band came up with a staggered, prismatic funk for “Life Is a Carnival.” Amid cheerfully cynical lyrics — “Hey buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap?” — and a syncopated horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint, Robertson lets loose some of his most aggressive lead guitar.The Band, “Acadian Driftwood” (1975)Robertson turned to Canadian history in “Acadian Driftwood,” writing about the British deportation of Acadians from eastern Canada in the mid-18th century; some ended up in Louisiana, where Acadians became Cajuns, although the narrator sings, “I got winter in my blood.” Between verses, Cajun fiddle trades off with what sounds like British fife (actually Hudson on piccolo), nodding to history.The Band, “It Makes No Difference” (1976)The heartache is palpable in “The Last Waltz” version of “It Makes No Difference,” a straightforward soul ballad that brought out a riveting Danko vocal: quivering, aching, almost sobbing, as he sings about a sunless world of unbearable hurt and sorrow after a breakup. But he has his pride: “It’s all I can do just to keep myself from telling you/I never felt so alone before,” he confesses.Robbie Robertson, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” (1987)Robertson narrates the verses with a knowing growl in the noirish “Somewhere Down the Crazy River.” He piles up archetypes — “a jukebox coming from up the levee,” “Madame X,” “a ’59 Chevy,” “a blue train” — over sleek, echoey 1980s funk.Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble, “Ghost Dance” (1994)Robertson provided soundtrack music for a 1994 mini-series, “The Native Americans,” striving to mesh contemporary pop with Native American tradition. “Ghost Dance” mixes Native American-style drums, flutes and chanting with a stoic march of remembrance and perseverance: “They outlawed the ghost dance/But we shall live again,” he vows.Robbie Robertson, “Unbound” (1998)Robertson embraced electronica on his 1998 album, “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.” In “Unbound,” he’s enveloped by sustained synthesizer chords and looping percussion as he sings about irresistible desire. The wordless vocals of Caroline McKendrick draw him like a siren song.Robbie Robertson, “Once Were Brothers” (2019)In “Once Were Brothers,” a stately march with touches of harmonica, Robertson mourns the estrangement of comrades: “We lost a connection after the war,” he sings. “There’ll be no revival/There’ll be no encore.” Could he have been thinking of bandmates? More

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      Rodriguez, Singer Whose Career Was Resurrected, Dies at 81

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      Two albums in the early 1970s went largely unnoticed in the United States, but not overseas. Then came the 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.”Rodriguez, a Detroit musician whose songs, full of protest and stark imagery from the urban streets, failed to find an American audience in the early 1970s but resonated in Australia and especially South Africa, leading to a late-career resurgence captured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in 2012, died on Tuesday. He was 81.A posting on his official website announced his death but did not say where he died or provide a cause.Rodriguez’s story was, as The New York Times put it in 2012, “a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion.”Rodriguez — who performed under just his surname but whose full name was Sixto Diaz Rodriguez — was playing bars in Detroit in the late 1960s, his folk-rock reminding those who heard it of Bob Dylan, when the producer Harry Balk signed him. In the documentary, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who would go on to produce his first album, “Cold Fact” (1970), told of hearing Rodriguez at a particularly smoky establishment called the Sewer on the Detroit River, where he was playing, as he often did, with his back to the audience.“Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics, because you couldn’t see the guy’s face,” Mr. Coffey said.A single released under the name “Rod Riguez” went nowhere. “Cold Fact,” released on the Sussex label, drew a smattering of favorable notices; its first track, “Sugar Man,” gave the documentary its title.“Rodriguez is a singing poet/journalist, telling stories of today,” Jim Knippenberg wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He does it with a voice much like Dylan’s, very Dylanesque imagery and a musical backing dominated almost entirely by a guitar. But he’s not a Dylan carbon. Rodriguez is much more explicit.”Mostly, though, the album went unnoticed in America, as did its follow-up a year later, “Coming From Reality.”“Getting the records cut was easy,” Rodriguez told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1979. “Getting them played was a lot harder.”Rodriguez performing in Paris in 2013. He found a fan base overseas and went on tour after the documentary was released to rave reviews.Pierre Andrieu/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper that year because, while he had settled into a life as a laborer and office worker in Detroit (though still playing bars and even running unsuccessfully for various political offices), he had — unknown to him — been developing fans overseas. Australia was one place where his music had found an audience, and in 1979 he was invited to tour there. He returned in 1981 for a few shows with the band Midnight Oil and released a live album in Australia.Rodriguez’s music had found an even bigger following in South Africa, which was still under apartheid and cut off from the rest of the world in many respects. He seemed to have no idea how popular he was there, especially among white South Africans uncomfortable with apartheid and the country’s rigidly conservative culture.“To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,” Stephen Segerman, owner of a Cape Town record store, said in the documentary. “In the mid-’70s, if you walked into a random white, liberal, middle-class household that had a turntable and a pile of pop records, and if you flipped through the records, you would always see ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles, you’d always see ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel, and you would always see ‘Cold Fact’ by Rodriguez. To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time. The message it had was ‘Be anti-establishment.’”In the mid-1990s Mr. Segerman began trying to find out more about the mysterious artist known as Rodriguez and how he had died; rumors were rampant that he had killed himself onstage, died of an overdose, and so on. He joined forces with Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist who was also searching for Rodriguez, and eventually they found the singer, still living in Detroit. A 1998 tour of South Africa followed, with Rodriguez playing six sold-out shows at 5,000-seat arenas.“It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 2009.After the South Africa tour he played shows in England, Sweden and other countries. In the United States, the label Light in the Attic rereleased “Cold Fact” in 2008 and “Coming From Reality” in 2009.“Searching for Sugar Man,” which focused on two men and their search for Rodriguez, won the Oscar for best documentary feature.Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett Collection
      And there was another round of rediscovery ahead. In 2012 Malik Bendjelloul released “Searching for Sugar Man,” his first and only documentary (he died in 2014), to rave reviews. The film, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature, concentrated on the search by Mr. Segerman and Mr. Bartholomew-Strydom and included an interview with Rodriguez, who in the aftermath found himself at the Hamptons International Film Festival and embarking on a fresh round of touring.Matt Sullivan founded Light in the Attic Records, which reissued Rodriguez’s albums.“His words and music were brutally honest and raw to the core,” he said by email. “It instantly struck a chord the second we heard it, and still does, nearly 20 years later.”Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942, in Detroit. His mother, Maria, died when he was a boy. His father, Ramon, was a laborer who became a foreman at a steel plant.He said that he started playing the guitar at 16.“Of course I’ve been into Dylan forever,” he told The Times in 2012, “and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”During his period of relative anonymity after the release of his albums, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.The “Coming From Reality” album includes a song called “Cause,” a lament about hard times and life’s disappointments.“They told me everybody’s got to pay their dues,” Rodriguez sings. “And I explained that I had overpaid them.”But in the 2009 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he was more serene about his unusual career path.“My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he said. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.” More

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      Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Through the Eyes of a Dance Critic

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      The choreography on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour doesn’t ask her to do too much, but she knows how to use her simple moves to her advantage.Since it’s an understatement to call Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour the dominant pop concert of the year, it isn’t surprising that snippets of the show, captured by fans on their phones, have been flooding social media sites for months. Watch a few of these clips, and it might strike you that the dance moves, in contrast to the designer costumes and visual effects, are rather simple and unoriginal, the sort of thing anyone might be able to pull off.At least that’s what I thought before seeing the Eras Tour live. Experiencing it in Los Angeles, at the end of its first United States leg, I changed my mind. As dance, the show is simple and unoriginal — yet exceptionally effective.Swift is a pop superstar who dances but is not known for her dancing. Even many of her admirers will admit that in this respect she’s no Beyoncé, no Britney Spears — that as hard as she tries, she’s a little stiff and awkward. Be that as it may, body language is crucial to how the three-hour-plus performance works.Swift’s Eras Tour is wrapping up its initial U.S. leg with a run of shows in Los Angeles.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Friday, at the second of six Los Angeles concerts, the most significant gesture came early, between songs. Basking in the deafening roar of 70,000 fans, Swift struck a coy “Who, me?” pose and said she wanted to try something. She pointed at a section of SoFi Stadium, and the cheering from that section somehow got louder.“I feel so powerful,” she said, kissing a bicep. But the power she was flexing wasn’t muscular. It was her ability — with the magnification of giant video screens — to connect with every member of the crowd. The choreography helped keep that connection a live wire.I don’t just mean the dance numbers, though there are plenty of those, choreographed by Mandy Moore (“La La Land,” “So You Think You Can Dance?”). The backup dancers sometimes contributed to the spectacle. They handled the billowing floral parachutes that concealed and revealed Swift at the start. They wielded glowing orbs during “Willow,” clouds on ladders during “Lavender Haze,” umbrellas during “Midnight Rain.” Not especially imaginative, this was all just something big enough to see.Elsewhere, the dancers helped suggest the situations of the songs. The bicep kiss was a segue to “The Man,” a complaint about gender double standards that was staged as an ascent up the stairs and levels of an office set populated by chest-thumping workers. In other songs, a few dancers played roles: the boyfriend that Swift berates for emotional neglect across (and atop) a long dinner table in “Tolerate It,” or the scandalizing socialite protagonist of “The Last Great American Dynasty.”Backup dancers help suggest the situations of some Swift songs, but mostly serve as a friend group or party guests.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut really, the concert has only one character, Swift. In “Look What You Made Me Do,” the dancers were costumed as earlier versions of her, trapped in transparent boxes like dolls. Mostly, though, they served as a friend group or party guests. A happy, diverse bunch, they did a little ballroom dancing to evoke the romantic fantasy of “Lover,” a little vogueing to give “Bejeweled” some shimmer.And then they left. Which is to say, they left the audience alone with Swift, again and again, re-establishing the thrill of mass intimacy. Other pop stars use this effect, but it’s especially potent with Swift because she’s also a singer-songwriter, who can sit at a piano or tap into the iconography of a guitar-slinging truth teller.The most intense moments of the show were in this mode: the 10-minute extended version of “All Too Well” and the acoustic mini-set of “secret songs” that differ from night to night. This is almost pointedly not dancing, but it requires a particular physicality at which Swift excels. She has the wide stance, both confident and confiding. She looks grounded, comfortable, at home.The tour will begin its international leg later this month in Mexico.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat’s generally true when she isn’t dancing. She can strut or skip around the huge catwalk and stage that extend across the stadium floor without looking small. She can strike over-the-shoulder poses for the camera. She can inhabit her many sparkly costumes — rolling her hips in fringe dresses and Louboutin boots, using the flowy sleeves on her “Folklore” dress the way Stevie Nicks uses scarves.So does it matter that in the cafe chair burlesque routine for “Vigilante ___,” a homage to louche Bob Fosse dances, she’s imprecise and physically uncommitted to the pleasures and dangers of sex? (She caresses her body like she’s afraid to.) It doesn’t, because her fans love her anyway. And it does, because this imperfect dancing is, I think, part of her nonthreatening Everywoman image. It makes her easier to identify with.And that is what the whole concert is about, the identification between Swift and the fans she continually thanks and flatters, the fans who know every word to every song. Swift told the L.A. crowd that when those fans sing her lyrics along with her, she takes that as a sign that they too have felt what she felt.It makes sense, then, that she moves the way anyone might move. So that anyone might imagine being her — just pointing and feeling powerful. More