Swamp Rabbit and I were talking about the death at age 80 of Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and main songwriter in the Band, one of the most artful and influential acts in rock ‘n’ roll history.

I’m tempted to use the word “legendary.” Robertson’s most enduring work with the Band — the studio albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Stage Fright — were released way back in 1968, 1969 and 1970, respectively.

“Don’t forget that live album, Rock of Ages,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Is that the perfect title, or what?”

Life on the road took its toll, and Robertson had a gradual falling-out with his bandmates in the 1970s. Their final concert together was captured in Martin Scorsese’s classic film The Last Waltz (1978). After the breakup, Robertson was happy to engage in a decades-long goodbye, recounting for numerous interviewers and in his memoir Testimony (2016) how he and the other Band members — drummer Levon Helm, piano man Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and organist Garth Hudson — drew on American roots music to forge their eclectic, inimitable sound.

Many music fans who are the same age now as Robertson was at his songwriting peak are probably unfamiliar with most of his recordings with the Band and unaware of the long, strange trip he made from Toronto, near the Indian reservation where his mother was born, to commercial success and critical acclaim in America. The obits are informative, but the Band’s history and legacy are complex. How do you explain the miracle of great art?

“I don’t know, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said, rolling his eyes. “How do you do that?”

You don’t even try, I told him. You direct listeners to the Band’s recordings to hear for themselves how Robertson and his fellow misfits — three of them also from Canada, one from Arkansas — evolved into a tight unit that sounded both old-timey and strikingly original. “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there,” Bruce Springsteen said in the documentary Once Were Brothers (2020).

You tell them that the Band spent years mastering their craft by backing up the wild journeyman rocker Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan before succeeding on their own. And how it’s no accident that Robertson, the son of a Native American mother and a Jewish gangster father, populated his songs with colorful outsiders who brought to life his “mythic but authentic” vision of America.

You point to the interviews with Robertson in The Last Waltz. Has there ever been a cooler or more articulate self-appointed champion of rock ‘n’ roll music? Will there be another in our time?

“Your second question is so ridiculous, it don’t even deserve an answer,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Footnote: Robertson didn’t dry up after the Band’s demise. He made solo albums and wrote soundtracks for Scorsese and other filmmakers. His last score with Scorsese was for Killers of the Flower Moon, set for theatrical release in October.

One more: Check out the scholarly, insightful and heartfelt essay on the Band in Greil Marcus’s book Mystery Train; Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music