Albert Grossman: Last News

A.D. Amorosi As news spread May 1 of Canadian songwriting and singing legend Gordon Lightfoot’s death, realizing the full impact of his artistry and the breadth of his catalog felt all the more jolting. To hear Lightfoot’s virtuosic work is to have been pierced by its beauty. In a 2020 interview with this writer, Lightfoot rhetorically questioned his own storied craft. “Am I psychologically invested and involved?” he quizzed himself. “Yes. Are these songs me? I guess. It’s very important that I do the work that I do to get me there, writing these songs. All the poetic license allowed me from those around me helps. But when they ask where it is that all of this comes from, I still always say it is my imagination.” Then, with a sense of gallows humor, Lightfoot teased, “When I croak, will people remember that, remember my work?”

A.D. Amorosi There’s a handsome backstory to Friday night’s concert “The Town Hall and T Bone Burnett Present a Tribute to Bob Dylan” — produced in partnership with the Bob Dylan Center — that went beyond present-day artists merely doing a set of covers. Dylan. New York City’s Town Hall. The two go hand-in-hand like whiskey and soda. In 1963, when the bourgeoning poet-folkie could no longer be confined by Greenwich Village’s coffee houses, his shrewd then-manager Albert Grossman chose the civic hall built by the League for Political Education to mark Dylan’s major league debut and unite his social consciousness with commerce for the first (but not the last) time.Dylan and T Bone Burnett also go hand-in-hand like whiskey and pretty-much-anything. Not only did Dylan pluck Burnett to be a guitarist on his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of the late 1970s, Burnett recently produced Dylan’s one-off recording of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for Burnett’s Ionic Original acetate-format project with an auction price of nearly $1.8M. (Burnett is also linked to Town Hall with his smart co-production of 2013’s “Another Day, Another Time at the Hall”) in celebration of the Coen Brothers’ cinematic ’60s folk love letter “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorThe Band’s Robbie Robertson has joined the growing catalog-sale party and sold his music publishing, recorded interests and name, image & likeness rights to Iconoclast, a new firm founded by Olivier Chastan, the former CEO of Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group. The news was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.The acquisition covers Robertson’s entire six-decade career, from his early 1960s compositions with early outfits like the Hawks to his classic songs with the Band to his solo and film soundtrack material.Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources tell Variety the deal was for around $25 million, for a catalog including such iconic songs as “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Shape I’m In,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and more.

Bob Dylan‘s former manager Albert and star of the singer’s most iconic cover art, has died aged 81.Grossman’s niece Anna Buehler confirmed to Rolling Stone that she died in her sleep at home in Woodstock, New York last week (March 10).Few knew who Grossman was when she appeared next to Dylan on the striking cover of 1965’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ LP, but it was revealed in time that she was the wife of Dylan’s then-manager Albert Grossman.The Grossmans both had a significant impact on Dylan’s career and also worked with Janis Joplin, The Band, among others.After her husband’s death from s heart attack on a flight from the United States to Europe in 1986, Grossman carried on his legacy by overseeing his legendary studio Bearsville and