During the final moments of the Band’s last live show, Robbie Robertson ripped into the guitar solo on Don’t Do It, the song with that gut-wrenching refrain “Pleeease, don’t do it, don’t you break my heart.” In that moment, he writes in his 2016 memoir Testimony, “there were only the five of us in the world … My eyes circled the stage, taking in my brothers, Garth, Richard, Rick and Levon. This can’t be the final anything. This cannot be the end. What we have can never die, never fade away.”

When it comes to the Band’s music, it remains as brilliant and revelatory today as the day the vinyl was pressed – or that night in 1976 at The Last Waltz, the star-studded farewell concert immortalized on film by Martin Scorsese. Today’s young artists, be it in folk, R&B, country or rock, continue to cover their songs – like The Weight, Up on Cripple Creek and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – paying homage to the four laid-back Canadians and one charismatic American who defied boundaries and classification as they hopped back and forth over the border in the 1960s, their roots intertwined. With the music that Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Levon Helm made in a basement in Woodstock, N.Y., surrounded by the Catskill mountains, they became every musician’s favourite band and pioneered what is now known as the Americana genre – all the while acknowledging they’ve got winter in their blood.

While the music lives on, individually the world has lost them all. The last surviving member, organist and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Hudson, passed away earlier this year, and was buried in Woodstock, just a stone’s throw from two of his bandmates, Helm and Danko. With the entirety of his one-time backing band now gone, Bob Dylan paid his respects: “Sorry to hear the news about Garth Hudson,” he posted. “He was a beautiful guy and the real driving force behind the Band. Just listen to the original recording of The Weight and you’ll see.”

Leave it to Bob to stir the pot. When Helm died in 2012, Dylan called him his “bosom buddy friend to the end,” and he remembered Robertson in 2023 as “a lifelong friend.” But only with Hudson did Dylan weigh in on any of the band members’ musical contributions. Who really was the driving force? Who deserves the most credit for that game-changing sound? The Band’s authorship issues have been endlessly debated ever since their final bow. “It is inconsequential to me who wrote the songs,” penned renowned literary critic Harold Bloom in a 2002 essay. “Helm disputes Robertson’s assertions as to sole credit, and Manuel evidently made considerable contributions. What matters is the songs at their best always seem to have been there, until refined by the Band.”

On Nov. 15, 2023, one famous face after another made their way into The Village Studios off Santa Monica Blvd., in L.A. Jackson Browne fronted an impressive group of multi-generational musicians, with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Joni Mitchell in the audience as Martin Scorsese delivered a 30-minute eulogy for Robbie Robertson, his collaborator of the last 45 years. “We were friends, but more than that – confidantes,” Scorsese said, recalling how they lived together for a year and a half at the director’s L.A. home, working on The Last Waltz edits. “We had informal classes, music class for me and film class for him. We really shared what we loved and maybe we learned from each other.” Robertson would go on to act as music supervisor and composer on many of Scorsese’s films, including Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon (for which he earned his first Oscar nomination, posthumously). “It was a kind of folie à deux – a madness of two. That is, two individuals came together and did something that on their own they wouldn’t have done.”

That night was invite-only, but I made a pilgrimage to The Village last fall. Standing in the same room where the memorial was held, the staff shared decades of stories about Robertson, who kept an office upstairs at this famed recording studio – which has hosted everyone from Etta James and Fleetwood Mac to Dr. Dre and the Smashing Pumpkins. Robertson came here in the ’70s, bringing the Wurlitzer piano used in The Last Waltz and his guitars, which he hung on the walls. “He was very quiet and didn’t really have an ego,” says studio manager Tina Morris. “He’d come to work, with his satchel, in jeans, a button-up shirt, comfy loafers and his sunglasses. He’d say hi, walk upstairs and then he’d be in his office, composing, just jamming out, having meetings, whatever. And then at five o’clock, he’d walk back downstairs and go home. Literally 9 to 5.”

On the night of the memorial, says Village CEO Jeff Greenberg, “as everyone was leaving, the musicians were playing The Weight. It still really gets to me just thinking about it. It still crushes me, because I got to know a very shy and sweet man.” While he had a reputation for being quiet – Scorsese said Robertson once told him, “The less you say the deeper the impression, the better off you are” – the guitarist held his own with movers and shakers. “He was here every day, when he wasn’t on David Geffen’s boat with Oprah,” joked Greenberg. It’s easy to imagine Robertson enrapturing even the biggest names in showbiz with the kinds of anecdotes that everyone wanted to hear – the stories of the Band.

It all started when rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins and his backing group, the Hawks, made their way from Arkansas to Toronto to play the clubs along Yonge St. – and 15-year-old Robertson caught one of the shows. He had what he called “a scattered and not normal upbringing.” His mother was Mohawk and Cayuga and had grown up on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Southern Ontario, which Robertson would visit every summer, enthralled by the nightly music sessions. His biological father was a Jewish gangster who was murdered before Robbie was born. And when Robertson met that side of his family as a teen, he said they understood his “vision and ambition” to play rock ’n’ roll. He taught himself the guitar and how to write songs, which he took to Hawkins. Robertson then dropped out of high school, joined the band and was on the road at 17. Hawkins would end up replacing all his Arkansan musicians (except drummer Helm) with Ontarians – bassist Danko from Norfolk County, piano player Manuel from Stratford and Hudson from Windsor – each one as clean cut and attractive as the next. “Ronnie only hired good-looking guys to draw girls to the places we worked,” Helm wrote in his 1993 memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire. “The boys were sure to follow the girls, and we’d all have a party.”

But after 16 years of Hawkins-style rock ’n’ roll debauchery, the Hawks went out on their own, boasting three frontman-worthy voices (Helm’s country drawl, Manuel’s deep soulfulness and Danko’s plaintive tenor), a master lyrical songwriter in Robertson, and Hudson’s classically trained virtuosity. “It was a great time to launch a band in Toronto because the place was jumping,” writes Helm, the only non-Canadian, although he did marry a Torontonian in the 1960s to avoid the Vietnam draft. “On a weekend night on that Yonge Street strip you could catch Oscar Peterson, Carl Perkins, Ray Charles … There was a folk scene with young singers like Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young in the Yorkville coffeehouses. And it wasn’t just music, Toronto was also the publishing, fashion and style capital of Canada. The city was swinging at least a year before so-called ‘Swinging London.’”

Last year’s Oscar-nominated A Complete Unknown wraps up Bob Dylan’s story seven weeks before he travels to Toronto, on the recommendation of a friend, to check out the Hawks. But there’s a natural sequel that should start on the day that Dylan walked into Friar’s Tavern on Yonge St. and found the five rock stalwarts confident enough to support him on his infamous 1966 electric world tour, where they were booed at every stop. “The guys who were with me, we were all in it together, putting our heads in the lion’s mouth,” Dylan says in his No Direction Home documentary. “I had to admire them for sticking it out. In my book, they were gallant knights for even standing behind me.”

Like with Hawkins, this talented quintet wasn’t destined to stand behind Dylan forever. After the tour, they followed him to Woodstock, but then it was their turn to evolve. Holed up in the basement of a rural pink house in the Catskills, their original sound came together, not to mention their old-timey country gentleman look. “The band began to grow mustaches and beards and wear hats,” says a 1968 Rolling Stone profile introducing these gorgeous mountain men, who were well on their way to becoming mythologized. The article goes on to say that it was in Woodstock where people started referring to them simply as “the Band,” and it noted 24-year-old Robbie as the leader – although the journalist admitted he wasn’t sure “if the band bothered itself with such considerations.” Robertson told the magazine, “We’ve played everywhere from Molasses, Texas, to Timmins, Canada, which is a mining town about 100 miles from the tree line.” And the Rolling Stone writer was duly impressed, adding that “you can hear the grit when you listen to [their debut] Music from Big Pink.”

The cover of that album featured a painting by Dylan, and inside the gatefold was a photo taken in Simcoe, Ont. The Band’s members had invited their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins to meet them at Danko’s family farm for a “Next of Kin” photo. “In the ’60s, part of the rebellion was rejecting one’s elders, rejecting one’s parents,” says the photographer Elliott Landy in the 2019 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, recalling his early sessions with the group. “The guys wanted to say, ‘Hey, that’s not right, we love our parents, they worked very hard to bring us up and care for us.’ So they wanted to have a picture of their families in the album.”

A mixture of soul, country, rock and even gospel, the music felt completely unique, and featured a bygone-era sensibility in the lyrics, which often referred to farmers, soldiers, magistrates, union men and familial expectation and pride. Scorsese said he found a vein of “19th century American literature” running through it. “I never heard that sound before. It was like Melville’s stories, a sense of searching.” Meanwhile, Elton John wrote in his 2019 memoir, Me, “Their songs felt like someone switching a torch on and showing us a new path to follow, a way we could do what we wanted to do. They were white musicians making soul music without covering In the Midnight Hour, or doing something that was just a pale imitation of what Black artists did. It was a revelation.” And Eric Clapton regularly tells the story of how he broke up his group Cream after hearing Music from Big Pink, and headed to Woodstock, hoping to become the sixth member of the Band: “I was wearing pink boots and had curly hair, just psychedelic – and they were really earthy. I was in awe of their brotherhood; it was the soul of the band.”

After nearly two decades together as the Hawks, their time as the Band was short – only five years and seven albums – and bittersweet. As much as they were lauded and beloved, and loved each other, they were pulled apart by alcohol, hard drugs, reckless behaviour (including multiple near-fatal drunken car crashes) and changing priorities. The Band eventually moved to L.A. on Robertson’s urging. But while he and Hudson were carrying the heavy load of making music, the others were battling demons. “This is hard, this is painful, this could be tragic. Why are we doing this?” Robertson recalls about their later years in Once Were Brothers. He wanted to keep writing songs with the other guys, but he was done touring. Meanwhile, the rhythm section wasn’t feeling all that disciplined but still had a taste for the road. Whether they wanted it that way or not, The Last Waltz would be the last time all five of them were in sync.

After they went their own ways, everyone but Robertson eventually moved back to Woodstock – and they would tour on and off as the Band without him. Over the years, tensions flared, often at funerals. When Manuel died by suicide in 1986, three of his Band brothers travelled to Stratford for his burial. Helm says in his book that Robertson was supposed to give the eulogy, but he didn’t show up. “Garth played I Shall Be Released,” writes Helm, “which Bob Dylan wrote for Richard to sing. Through all three verses there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.” Thirteen years later, they would mourn Danko (who died of heart failure) in Woodstock, and Robertson did speak at a celebration of Rick’s life, which was open to the public. So Helm stayed away. He sat next door at a Chinese restaurant, unable to bring himself to go in. When the drummer was dying of throat cancer in 2012, Robertson visited him in the hospital, holding his hand while he was unconscious – but he didn’t attend the funeral. And when Robertson died of prostate cancer in 2023, Hudson was too frail to make it to Scorsese’s L.A. memorial. These former bandmates now lie across two countries, in the three locales that defined their sound and provided the backdrop to their dramatic saga.

Last October, Scorsese threw a second tribute to Robertson – this time it was an all-star concert in front of 18,000 fans at Kia Forum in L.A. – that he plans to turn into a concert film, a bookend to The Last Waltz. The show featured Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Mavis Staples and other legends performing Band songs and hits from Robertson’s solo albums, where he often drew on his Indigenous roots. The hours-long event was both moving and laborious – missing the magic that the Band brought to those timeless compositions. As Bruce Springsteen once said: “When they came together something happened that could not have occurred on their own or individually. Something miraculous occurred.”

There was one unexpected highlight, though, and it was reminiscent of the ultimate tear-jerking Canadian rock moment in The Last Waltz when Neil Young and Joni Mitchell joined the Band onstage to sing Young’s north Ontario ballad, Helpless. Five decades later, three Canadian singers – Allison Russell, Julian Taylor and Logan Staats – were joined by Toronto-based superstar producer Daniel Lanois for the most joyous performance of the night. They mesmerizingly harmonized on Acadian Driftwood, one of the Band’s most homeward-looking songs, with references to a Canadian cold front, ice fishin’ and a final chorus sung in Acadian French. “I grew up on the Six Nations reserve, just around the corner from where Robbie used to visit,” Staats tells me. “And my earliest memories were driving in my dad’s car listening to cassette tapes of the Band. And he’d always say, ‘You know, Robbie’s from here. He’s from just down the road. He’s Six Nation. He’s Mohawk. He made it.” And, adds Staats, Robertson’s culture is at the heart of his success. “I always feel what really, really connects Robbie to the Mohawk people is our traditional way of telling stories and how good he is at implementing that in his music.” 

It’s true – those yarns Robertson told in his songs are so powerful and evocative, only to be matched by the epic tale that he lived with Garth, Richard, Rick and Levon. “I don’t know of any other group of musicians with a story equivalent to the story of the Band,” Robbie said in Once Were Brothers. “And it was a beautiful thing, so beautiful it went up in flames.”

A version of this article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue with the headline ‘Down From The Mountains’, p. 54.