Legacy & Influence / The Songwriting Dispute

The Songwriting Dispute

Robbie Robertson is credited as sole or primary writer on the large majority of the group's catalog. He also sang lead on only three studio tracks in the group's entire history. That gap between who wrote the songs and who the public heard singing them became the deepest, longest-running conflict inside the group, one that outlasted the band itself by decades.

Levon Helm made the case most publicly, in his 1993 memoir This Wheel's on Fire. He argued that the group's songs were routinely worked out collectively, in the room, with melodies, arrangements, and often lyrics shaped by whoever was playing at the time, not handed down finished by Robertson alone. He pointed to songs like "Chest Fever," where he said the words were essentially improvised by himself and Richard Manuel on the spot, credited to Robertson regardless. Money followed the credit, and by Helm's account, the imbalance meant Robertson and manager Albert Grossman ended up with most of it while the rest of the band lived on considerably less despite the group's critical success. Rick Danko agreed with Helm's version publicly, saying Helm's book got at exactly where Robertson and Grossman had gone wrong.

Robertson's side of it, laid out most fully in his own 2016 memoir Testimony, doesn't concede the point. He has denied that Helm wrote songs credited to him, and has noted that when Helm made his own solo records, he rarely wrote the material himself either, relying on outside songwriters much the way session singers do. Robertson's version treats his songwriting credits as accurate reflections of who actually sat down and built the songs, not a case of one member claiming a group's collective work as his own.

The dispute had real financial teeth. In 2002, Robertson bought out the other surviving former members' financial interests in the group's catalog, Helm's specifically excepted, which gave him outsized control over how the material got packaged, licensed, and presented for years afterward, including decisions around The Last Waltz's ongoing commercial life. Helm never forgave him for how the film's profits worked, or for how the farewell itself had been decided.

It never fully resolved, and it also never stayed permanently frozen. Robertson said in a 2020 interview that he still shared songwriting and publishing credit with Helm specifically on the group's catalog, years after the other former members had sold their own shares. When Helm was dying of throat cancer in 2012, Robertson visited him at the hospital. He wrote afterward that he'd been thinking about the beautiful times they'd shared together, and described Helm as something close to an older brother. Whatever the money never settled, that visit suggests the two men found a smaller kind of peace before it was too late for either of them to offer it.