Obviously, Robertson is getting the last word with this long book. And yet his strong point of view is offset by the tenderness he shows, and his stress on his own experience is set within a craftsman’s effort to tell the story whole — an effort to do justice to their adventures as young men, talented, stylish, successful and lucky, who knew the joy of creative friendship besides ... Robertson has a strong memory and a gift for recalling, or providing, dialogue, whole scenes of it ... Testimony is high-spirited, hugely enjoyable and generous from start to finish.
Robust, wry, gritty and wise to the vicissitudes of a career in rock ’n’ roll, it is just what the reader wants, marred only occasionally by stiff dialogue ... add to the mix a steel-trap memory and a muddled childhood—featuring two fathers, numerous gangsters, alcoholism and some diamond smuggling—and you have the makings of a Dickensian bildungsroman ... Here is by far the fullest first-person account of the early electric tours of [Bob] Dylan ... Occasionally one has the impression that Mr. Robertson is tiptoeing around awkward issues, always to the detriment of the book ... Generosity suits him, and whatever the truth, Testimony is a graceful epitaph.?
Testimony is a book for the fans. Robertson is a fun raconteur, with a good memory for a compliment ... The grossest moment in Testimony comes when Robertson answers the charge that has dogged him for years — that he stole publishing rights from his former bandmates ... Robertson has the good sense to leave off testifying just when most people would stop caring, but I wish he had spared a few pages for his solo albums, or for the months in the late Seventies when he shacked up with Marty Scorsese.
Testimony ends when its author was still relatively young, but it is packed with incident ... His memoir is confident and well oiled. At times it has the mythic sweep of an early Terrence Malick movie ... Mr. Robertson, in Testimony, occasionally leans too heavily on mythopoeticism. But just as often his writing is wonderfully perceptive.
Unfortunately for Robertson, his well-documented ego keeps getting the better of him. Although Testimony is decidedly well-structured and compelling, it’s also Robertson’s attempt to paint the self-portrait of a tortured genius ... this is exactly the kind of book that students of rock history should have expected from Robertson: a one-sided testimony from a star witness, representing himself, with no defense team on hand to cross-examine. Case dismissed.
Mr. Robertson glosses over some of the ugliness, such as his strained relationship with drummer Levon Helm ... Testimony shines in the opening chapters, as Robbie Robertson recounts his early years running down the Southern juke joints and Canadian supper clubs as a teen-age guitarist with Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas-based rockabilly star ... Robbie Robertson wisely chooses to end Testimony with reminiscences from The Last Waltz.
His memoir has a discreetly self-admiring tone – the good ideas seem invariably to have been his – but in its early passages it provides an entertaining and valuable description of a rock’n’roll apprenticeship
Testimony, Robertson’s account of his life as a teenage member of the rockabilly band Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and as the guitarist and a songwriter for the Band, a group that in the late 1960s rewrote the American story as surely as Mark Twain, Mae West, Uncle Dave Macon, or Robert Johnson had done before them, is a book about the revelation of such moments … Except for an account of a guitar duel for his job in the Hawks, Robertson doesn’t write effectively about music—he can’t make a song or a moment in it a story in and of itself … Robertson has told many of the stories he tells here more eloquently in interviews. Often his writing is workmanlike. But that, I think, is not what will stay with the reader. More likely to be remembered is his description of his own recording of his song ‘Yazoo Street Scandal.’
His biography covers a 33-year span, but he writes in scenes rather than as a chronology. It’s an interesting choice, but it probably makes those scenes less emotionally powerful than a typical life story. But when those scenes are about music, they are beautifully crafted ... 'We had all completely fallen under the spell of this atmosphere of devil-may-care creativity,' Robertson writes. Many readers will feel the same way about Testimony, which by detailing a legendary time in musical creativity, casts its own magic.
