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    The Grim Heartbeat Propelling ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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    Early in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an Osage woman named Mollie gives her gravely unsuitable white suitor, Ernest, a Stetson. It’s a large off-white hat with a bound-edge brim and a wide ribbon around the band. It’s a gift but it feels more like a benediction, and anyone who’s ever watched an old western film (or “Star Wars”) will recognize the symbolism of her largess. Mollie is telling Ernest that she sees him as a good guy, even if the movie has already violently upended the familiar dualism of the white hat vs. black.That dichotomy shapes “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a deeply American story of greed, betrayal and murder told through the anguished relationship between Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s around 1919 and Ernest is wearing his World War I uniform when he dismounts a train in Fairfax, an Oklahoma boomtown where luxury cars rumble down dirt roads. He’s come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a smooth-talking rancher who, in one breath, asks him if he has seen bloodshed and, in the next, describes the Osage as the finest and “and most beautiful people on God’s earth.”The movie is based on David Grann’s appalling, all-too-true crime book from 2017, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.” In adapting it to the screen, Scorsese and Eric Roth have dramatically narrowed the role of the F.B.I. to focus on the multiple murders — scores, perhaps hundreds — of Osage members that took place largely in the 1920s on the tribe’s oil-rich reservation in northern Oklahoma. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, oil made the tribe among the wealthiest people in the world. It also made them the target of numerous white predators. As a 1920 article in Harper’s ominously put it: “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”The following year, Congress passed a law that required the Osage to prove they could handle their reserves “responsibly.” If they couldn’t, they were declared incompetent and appointed a guardian; it was a status, as Grann explains, that was usually given to full-blooded Osage like Mollie. It’s instructive then that the first time you see Mollie in “Killers,” she is in an office being asked to state her name by an unseen man. “I’m Mollie Kyle, incompetent,” she says, her face a serene blank. The man is her guardian, yet another smooth talker, though one with a picture of a Ku Klux Klan rider on his wall. When Mollie leaves his office, Scorsese cuts to a shot of her feet on a doormat imprinted with “KIGY,” an abbreviation for “Klansman, I greet you.”Mollie gives Ernest the Stetson soon afterward in a sequence that both lays out many of the story’s themes and beautifully illustrates dialectical filmmaking in four or so revelatory minutes. It opens at the 22-minute mark with Mollie walking away from the camera while coyly looking over her shoulder at Ernest, who’s watching her from a car. By that point, he has started working as a chauffeur ferrying around locals. She’s one of his regulars, and he thinks she’s sweet on him, which pleases Hale. If “we mix these families together,” he tells Ernest, Mollie’s money “will come to us.” As he often does, Ernest looks utterly baffled by his uncle.As Mollie walks toward her house, a pulsing bass line revs up. The soundtrack includes original music by Scorsese’s friend and frequent collaborator Robbie Robertson (who died in August), as well as old songs like the jumpy blues number that’s playing when Ernest and Mollie first meet in town. The notes that begin pulsing now create an entirely different mood and feeling simply because they sound like a heartbeat, if one that sometimes skips. And for good reason: The song is “Heartbeat Theme/Ni-U-Kon-Ska,” the meaning of which becomes clear when, after a few more cuts, the camera settles on Ernest’s face. “I am an Osage brave,” he says in halting voice-over, his words creating an odd counter-rhythm to the thumping.Apple TV+Ernest’s voice-over continues as the movie cuts to a brief bird’s-eye view of him pulling away from Mollie’s house followed by a close-up of his hand holding an opened illustrated book. Scorsese — working with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker — holds on the shot long enough for you to scan both pages, the chapter heading (“Osage Culture & History”) and the simple illustrations, including of a woman near a tepee, some men dancing around a fire and others on horseback. As Ernest speaks, he turns the page, revealing other images — a buffalo hunt, a map of Indian Territory — and it becomes clear that he’s reading, either aloud or in his head, from this book. Ni-U-Kon-Ska, he says, means “children of the middle waters.”Titled “Lilly’s Wild Tales Among the Indians,” the book belongs to Hale, who had earlier instructed Ernest to school himself on the Osage. It resembles the kind of old-fashioned children’s primers from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were still floating around the New York City school system midcentury, so it’s easy to imagine that a book like this drifted into Scorsese’s life at one point. (The main illustration in the movie is based on one such volume from 1901.) The book is as crudely simplistic as you would expect, yet when Ernest reads the words, “‘Move,’ said the Great White Father, from Missouri, from Arkansas, from Kansas,” he is also speaking to the grimly true history that informs Scorsese’s movie.Ernest reads a caption on an illustration, his finger tracing the words, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Just as he finishes the sentence, you hear the metallic jangling of a door opening, and the camera hurriedly pans up to find Ernest’s brother, Byron (Scott Shepherd) — in another light-colored hat — bursting into the room. “All right,” Byron says. “Let’s go.” The men rush to join a third, Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz), who’s waiting in an idling car. Ernest’s voice-over continues as they drive off, and a wailing harmonica joins the heartbeat, Ernest’s voice briefly dropping out when the men — now all wearing hoods over their heads — excitedly rob a wealthy Osage couple at gunpoint.The men convene at a billiard parlor (Scorsese is working fast!) where Ernest, as will be his habit for the remainder of the movie, makes a catastrophically wrong bet. “I love money! I love money!” he exclaims just before losing his night’s take. It’s first light when the men leave the parlor, and as they walk out Ernest’s voice-over resumes: “Dawn was always a sacred time for prayers.” The movie then cuts to a long shot of Mollie praying at a riverbank, an image that’s followed by a rapid volley of shots — of the sun, moon and fire — that ends on a vast green field dotted with the purple and white flowers that give the movie its title. It’s as if, Ernest says, Wah’kon-tah, the Osage word for God, had sprinkled the Earth with sugar candy.Although Ernest’s voice-over pauses during the robbery, it only fully ends when he and Mollie are at an outdoor christening, a nod at the life and the children they will soon make together. The strange heartbeat, though, continues as Ernest drives Mollie to her house, bringing the sequence full circle. This time, though, he walks Mollie to her front door, where she stops to give him the Stetson before they enter the house, where her mother is. Before they do, he puts on the hat. It’s preposterously large. It’s also a near-match for the pale 10-gallon hat that the John B. Stetson Company custom made for the silent-film star Tom Mix, a Hollywood hero who helped popularize the country’s romantic myth of itself that Scorsese furiously dismantles in this brilliant movie shot by shot, scene by scene, heartbeat by heartbeat. More

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      A Playlist to Remember the Musicians We Lost in 2023

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      A playlist honoring David Crosby, Wayne Shorter, Sinead O’Connor, Jimmy Buffett and other musicians who died this year.David Crosby, a founding member of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, died in January.Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty ImagesDear listeners,Doesn’t it seem like the “In Memoriam” segments on awards shows get longer with each passing year? It can sometimes feel like we’re in a perpetual state of mourning, saying goodbye to one brilliant musician after the next. Social media, the 24-hour news cycle and an aging population of era-defining artists all contribute to the perception that we’re constantly suffering huge losses.Even by that light, 2023 was a year of exceptional grief in the music world. We bid farewell to some absolute titans (Harry Belafonte, Tina Turner, Tony Bennett), countercultural icons (David Crosby, Robbie Robertson, Jeff Beck), and beloved rebels (Sinead O’Connor, Tom Verlaine, Shane MacGowan), among many others.For today’s newsletter — the final Amplifier of 2023 — I thought it would be fitting to compile my own “In Memoriam” segment, in the form of a playlist honoring those we lost throughout the year. It’s an eclectic collection in terms of genre, generation and geography; Japanese electro-pop legends sit alongside American jazz greats and Canadian folk revivalists. This may be cold comfort, but we’ll take any silver lining we can get: The magnitude of those we lost this year means this is a very, very good playlist.Like any “In Memoriam” tribute, this one inevitably omits a few names. But I hope it honors some of the musicians who meant something to you and that it introduces a few unfamiliar artists whose discographies are ripe for posthumous discovery.One programming note: As I mentioned, this is the last Amplifier of the year, as we’re taking a one-week break over the holidays. We’ll be back the first week of January with a roundup of the best older songs you discovered in 2023. I’m loving all the submissions we’ve received so far; keep them coming! We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.As ever, thanks to each and every one of you for reading and listening this year. Happy 2024.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Jeff Beck: “Over the Rainbow”Let’s start off with a classic, reimagined as a soaring, wordless aria by the guitar legend Jeff Beck, who died on Jan. 10 at 78. “For all his speed and dexterity,” my colleague Jon Pareles wrote in an appreciation of this performance, “Beck never underestimated the beauty of a sustained melody.” (Listen on YouTube)2. David Crosby: “Laughing”On Jan. 19, the world lost the irascible, angel-voiced David Crosby, who defined the sound of folk-rock in the 1960s and ’70s as a founding member of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I’m a fan of his meanderingly beautiful 1971 solo album “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” and this track in particular. I also count myself absurdly lucky to have interviewed Crosby over the phone about a year and a half before he died; he called beforehand to ask if he could push back our conversation a few minutes because his hotel breakfast had just arrived. I said of course, and he called back maybe half an hour later, still grateful, easefully friendly and very forthcoming. Rest in peace to a man who appreciated a good breakfast. (Listen on YouTube)3. Television: “See No Evil”There’s a rare pantheon of records that, regardless of passing trends, will always sound effortlessly and undeniably cool to each new generation that discovers them. Television’s “Marquee Moon” is one of those albums, in large part because of the frontman Tom Verlaine, who died on Jan. 28 at 73. As a guitarist, Verlaine had chops to spare, but it took a certain attitude — heard on this leadoff track of “Marquee Moon” — to make virtuosity sound punk. (Listen on YouTube)4. Dusty Springfield: “(They Long to Be) Close to You”Burt Bacharach, who died on Feb. 8 at age 94, wrote a seemingly infinite number of perfect pop songs, like this one that the Carpenters made a No. 1 smash in 1970. Dusty Springfield’s earlier version, recorded in 1964, isn’t as well known, but it’s every bit as stirring, thanks in large part to the emotional acuity of Bacharach’s timeless composition. (Listen on YouTube)5. Wayne Shorter: “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum”Until his death on March 2 at 89, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter was considered by many to be the greatest living jazz composer. His singular, expressive playing on this highlight from his 1966 album, “Speak No Evil,” is one of many recordings that suggest why. (Listen on YouTube)6. Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Technopolis”The pioneering Japanese electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra lost two of its three principal members this year: the drummer and vocalist Yukihiro Takahashi on Jan. 11 and, a little over two months later, the keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto. Both had long and varied solo careers as well, but their work in Y.M.O., like on this leadoff track from the 1979 album “Solid State Survivor,” is still enduringly influential and instantly recognizable. (Listen on YouTube)7. Harry Belafonte: “Jamaica Farewell”“Calypso,” the blockbuster 1956 release by the Jamaican American singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte, helped bring Caribbean sounds to the masses: It is said to be the first LP by a solo artist to sell over a million copies. This wistful West Indian folk tune was the album’s lead single, and it long remained a signature song for Belafonte, who died on April 25 at 96. (Listen on YouTube)8. Gordon Lightfoot: “Sundown”The Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, who died on May 1 at 84, was a familiar presence on AM radio in the early 1970s, when he scored hit after unlikely hit. None charted higher than the infectious “Sundown,” the title track off his 1974 album and his only song to hit No. 1 in the United States. The track’s buoyant rhythm and lush harmonies contrast with its lyrical preoccupation with jealousy, inebriation and mistrust, creating an alluringly dark pop song. (Listen on YouTube)9. Tina Turner: “What’s Love Got to Do With It”Talk about a comeback. The mighty Tina Turner hadn’t had a Top 10 hit in the U.S. in more than a decade when in 1984 she returned with a vengeance, belting out this anthem and strutting down the streets of New York in its unforgettable music video. “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” released when Turner was 44, was her long-awaited liberation, and the force of her vocal delivery tells you how much life — and rock-star attitude — she had in her. She died May 24 at 83. (Listen on YouTube)10. Astrud Gilberto: “Berimbau”The 83-year-old Brazilian bossa nova singer Astrud Gilberto, who died on June 5, was best known as the serenely stylish vocalist who sang Stan Getz’s “The Girl From Ipanema.” But her discography is full of other treasures, like her lovely 1966 album of songs arranged by Gil Evans, “Look to the Rainbow,” on which this elegant, atmospheric track named for a one-stringed Brazilian instrument appears. (Listen on YouTube)11. The Band: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”Robbie Robertson’s music had an almost eerie way of fusing the past and the present, creating compositions that sound at once rooted and untethered to linear time. This song — a Canadian musician’s evocation of Civil War-era America, with a little help from his then-Bandmate, the Arkansas-born Levon Helm — is an ambiguous document, still sparking fresh debate more than 50 years after its release. But above all it is a testament to the slippery songwriting power of Robertson, who died on Aug. 9 at 80. (Listen on YouTube)12. Jane Birkin: “Jane B.”The iconic Jane Birkin — perhaps the most quintessentially French person ever to be born outside of France — was so much more than just the namesake of a coveted Hermès bag. As a musician, too, she was more than just a coquettish co-conspirator with her onetime husband Serge Gainsbourg; she forged a long solo career that continued after they split in 1980. This orchestral, Chopin-inspired ballad is from one of their greatest collaborations, the 1969 album “Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg,” but here it’s Birkin, who died on July 16 at 76, who takes the lead. (Listen on YouTube)13. Tony Bennett: “(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco”Tony Bennett was a New Yorker through and through, but for the three-minute span of this classic, you could have sworn he was a Frisco kid. Bennett, who died on July 21 at 96, showed off both the crystalline purity of his voice and his ample lung power on the song that became his most recognizable standard. (Listen on YouTube)14. Sinead O’Connor: “Black Boys on Mopeds”On July 26, music lost one of its great and most uncompromising truth tellers. The piercing voice, moral courage and fierce compassion of Sinead O’Connor are all front and center on this acoustic ballad from her second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” a track as devastatingly relevant today as it was when she wrote it in 1990. (Listen on YouTube)15. Rodriguez: “Crucify Your Mind”The final decade of the folk singer Sixto Rodriguez’s life was a prolonged and deserved victory lap, thanks to the Oscar-winning 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugar Man,” which introduced his once-obscure music to a whole new audience. His performance of this song on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” 42 years after its release, still haunts me. (Listen on YouTube)16. Jimmy Buffett: “A Pirate Looks at Forty”The Mayor of Margaritaville left us on Sept. 1 at 76. Though best known for his party anthems, this meditation on mortality, “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” proves that Buffet was no stranger to the introspective ballad — albeit one seasoned with his own special salt. (Listen on YouTube)17. The Isley Brothers: “Livin’ in the Life”Though his brother Ronald usually sang lead, Rudolph Isley, who died on Oct. 11 at 84, provides a memorable assist on this sublimely funky single from their group’s 1977 album “Go for Your Guns.” (Listen on YouTube)18. The Pogues: “If I Should Fall From Grace With God”Music lost one of its most cantankerous poets on Nov. 30, when Shane MacGowan, the lead singer and songwriter of the Celtic punk band the Pogues, died at 65. This defiantly rousing title track from the band’s 1988 album should serve as an appropriately unsentimental requiem: “If I’m buried ’neath the sod, but the angels won’t receive me/Let me go, boys/Let me go, boys/Let me go down in the mud where the rivers all run dry.” (Listen on YouTube)To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“In Memoriam: Musicians We Lost in 2023” track listTrack 1: Jeff Beck, “Over the Rainbow”Track 2: David Crosby, “Laughing”Track 3: Television, “See No Evil”Track 4: Dusty Springfield, “(They Long to Be) Close to You”Track 5: Wayne Shorter, “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum”Track 6: Yellow Magic Orchestra, “Technopolis”Track 7: Harry Belafonte, “Jamaica Farewell”Track 8: Gordon Lightfoot, “Sundown”Track 9: Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It”Track 10: Astrud Gilberto, “Berimbau”Track 11: The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”Track 12: Jane Birkin, “Jane B.”Track 13: Tony Bennett, “(I Left My Heart) In San Francisco”Track 14: Sinead O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds”Track 15: Rodriguez, “Crucify Your Mind”Track 16: Jimmy Buffett, “A Pirate Looks at Forty”Track 17: The Isley Brothers, “Livin’ in the Life”Track 18: The Pogues, “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” 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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      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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      Ronnie Hawkins, Rockabilly Road Warrior, Is Dead at 87

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      Besides performing, he mentored other musicians, including stars like Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko, who went on to form the Band.Ronnie Hawkins, who combined the gregarious stage presence of a natural showman and a commitment to turbocharged rockabilly music in a rowdy career that spanned more than a half-century, died on Sunday. He was 87.His daughter Leah confirmed his death. She did not specify where he died or the cause, though she said he had been quite ill.Mr. Hawkins started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s and became a legendary roadhouse entertainer based in Canada in the 1960s, his music forever rooted in the primal rock ‘n’ roll rhythms of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.For all of his success, his biggest claim to fame was not the music he produced but the musicians he attracted and mentored. His backup musicians of the early 1960s, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, went on to form the Band, which backed Bob Dylan and became one of the most admired and influential bands in rock history.But those musicians, like many of Mr. Hawkins’s fans, never lost their reverence for the man known as the Hawk.“Ronnie’s whole style,” Mr. Robertson once said, was for he and his band to play “faster and more violent and explosive than anyone had ever heard before.”Ronald Cornett Hawkins was born on Jan. 10, 1935, two days after Elvis Presley, in Huntsville, Ark. When he was 9, his family moved to nearby Fayetteville, where his father, Jasper, opened a barbershop and his mother, Flora, taught school. His musical education began at the barbershop where a shoeshine boy named Buddy Hayes had a blues band that rehearsed with a piano player named Little Joe.It was there that he began to imbibe the crazy quilt music of the South, with blues and jazz filtered through snatches of country and the minstrel and medicine shows that traveled through town. Before long, something new was added, the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll, which was percolating out of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio in Memphis.Mr. Hawkins brought to all that an element of danger — as a teenager, he had driven a souped-up Model A Ford running bootleg whiskey from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma, making as much as $300 a day.He put together bands, enrolled in and dropped out of the University of Arkansas, joined the Army in 1957 and then quit the same year, intent on making it in the music business. While in the Army, he fronted a rock ‘n’ roll band, the Black Hawks, made up of African American musicians, a daring and usually welcome effort in the segregated South.Demos he recorded at Sun after he left the Army fell flat, but he and the guitarist on his Sun session, Luke Paulman, put together a band with Mr. Hawkins as the athletic frontman given to backflips and handstands. Over the years, his trademark became the camel walk, an early version of what became Michael Jackson’s moonwalk decades later.In 1958, the country music singer Conway Twitty said American rock ‘n’ roll bands could make a killing in Canada. Heeding that advice, Mr. Hawkins moved to a place he once said was “as cold as an accountant’s heart.” Toronto and other places in Ontario turned into his home base for the rest of his career.Mr. Hawkins in the 1970s. While he was known for performing in roadhouses, he also appeared in movies, including the disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Hawkins liked to talk, perhaps with some embellishment, about regular parties, brawling, sex and drinking that, as he put it, “Nero would have been ashamed of.” But there was nothing glamorous about being a rock ‘n’ roll musician playing nonstop in bars and roadhouses on a circuit centered on Ontario, Quebec and U.S. cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland.“When I started playing rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, “you were two pay grades below a prisoner of war.”He built up a loyal following based on his magnetic stage presence, the proficiency of his bands and the raw energy of his music. He had modest hits with “Forty Days,” his revised version of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” and “Mary Lou,” a Top 30 hit on the U.S. charts.Later successful recordings include “Who Do You Love?” and “Hey Bo Diddley.”Morris Levy of Mr. Hawkins’s label, Roulette Records, billed him as someone who “moved better than Elvis, he looked better than Elvis and he sang better than Elvis.” He saw a vacuum he thought Mr. Hawkins could fill as the original rockabilly artists slowed down or flamed out. But Mr. Hawkins was not so sure, as he watched clean-cut teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell take over from their more rough-hewed progenitors.To Mr. Levy’s chagrin, Mr. Hawkins opted to own the road in Canada rather than to swing for the fences as a recording star in the U.S., building up a remunerative career working nonstop, even though he never built an epic recording career. He also became known as a one-of-a-kind character and raconteur.“The Hawk had been to college and could quote Shakespeare when he was in the mood,” Mr. Helm wrote in his autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire.” “He was also the most vulgar and outrageous rockabilly character I’ve ever met in my life. He’d say and do anything to shock you.”Mr. Hawkins was more than just the consummate rockabilly road warrior. In 1969, he hosted John Lennon and Yoko Ono at his ranch outside Toronto during their world tour to promote world peace as the Plastic Ono Band. Bob Dylan was a longtime fan who in 1975 cast Mr. Hawkins to play the role of “Bob Dylan” in his experimental and largely panned movie “Renaldo and Clara.”Mr. Hawkins in an undated photo. He started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s before settling in Canada in the 1960s.Michael Ochs Archives / StringerHe also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 concert film “The Last Waltz,” as one of the invited stars who joined the Band in the final performance of the original group at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. (The Band later reunited without Mr. Robertson.)Mr. Hawkins growled and hollered his way through a memorable performance of “Who Do You Love” with the Band, good-naturedly fanning Mr. Robertson’s guitar with his cowboy hat as if cooling it off after a particularly torrid solo.And he became a friend of his fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton when he was governor, as well as a conspicuous part of the Arkansas entourage during President Clinton’s Inaugural in 1992. Mr. Clinton also paid tribute to Mr. Hawkins in a 2004 documentary titled “Ronnie Hawkins Still Alive and Kickin’.’’Mr. Hawkins did other acting, including a supporting role in Michael Cimino’s disastrous 1980 western “Heaven’s Gate,” and he morphed into a respected elder statesman of Canadian music. He invested wisely, lived like a country squire in a sprawling lakefront estate and owned several businesses.Still, he was a master of honing his bad-boy image and playing to type, including in his 1989 autobiography, “Last of the Good Ol’ Boys.”“Ninety percent of what I made went to women, whiskey, drugs and cars,” he said. “I guess I just wasted the other 10 percent.”Besides his daughter Leah, survivors include his wife, Wanda, and two other children, Ronnie Jr. and Robin, and four grandchildren.Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting. More