So what’s scarier? Having an ice pick waved under your throat by a notoriously sadistic mobster, getting chased out of Arkansas by racist cops during the height of segregation—or going on-stage with Bob Dylan in 1966?

“Ha! It’s up there! I’d never seen anything like that before,” says Robbie Robertson of the tour that shook the world, when a hardscrabble rock ’n’ roll outfit from Canada called the Hawks hooked up with a speed-gobbling Bob Dylan and declared war on their audience. (“The emergence of a new species” is Robertson’s impression of the Mighty Zim at the time.) “I’d never seen people charging the stage with…”—he pauses, and chuckles again—“venom coming out of their eyes. So angry! And they not only charged the stage—they got on the stage. I thought, ‘Ah! It’s a revolution! Okay! Then we’ll treat it as a revolution.’ ”

Pondering that notorious chapter in the lives of both Dylan and the Band in his newly published memoir, Testimony, Robertson writes, “Either the audience was right or we were right.” History would determine the winner, and 50 years later, the man who composed “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight” (inspired, he reveals, by Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, of all things) has set it all down in prose, from his upbringing divided between the Six Nations Reserve and Toronto—that’s where the surprisingly deep organized-crime connections come in, a career opportunity from the Jewish side of the family tree that Robertson didn’t pursue—to his last stand with his Band-mates at rock promoter Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1976.

Speaking of The Last Waltz, that star-studded affair pales beside the dizzying array of cameos crammed into Testimony’s breathless 500 pages. Inside the first four chapters, Robertson is taking advice on guitar tone from Buddy Holly, and he’s barely past adolescence by the time he’s watching a junk-sick Ray Charles try to record in New York. From there Robertson crosses paths with everyone from Ornette Coleman and the Beatles to Bobby Kennedy, Marlon Brando, and Salvador Dali (who pleads: “Play some good music, not that noise”). Jack Ruby even makes an appearance in this parade of major cultural figures from a legendary time, while an affair with Edie Sedgwick reminds us that there’s still some Band history left to pick over. Or maybe to adjust.

“Well, there’s been so much written about the Band and about me and about Bob Dylan and about what was happening in this journey, and so much of it is absolutely wrong and bullshit,” Robertson says, calling the Straight from Los Angeles. “I was there. These other people weren’t there, you know?” Robertson avoids citing the title of arguably the primary reader on the Band, published by a well-known British music journalist in 1993. “I didn’t get 20 pages into it. It was so wrong that it made me nauseous,” he says, adding that past attempts to work closely with other biographers were no more satisfactory.

“Each time that I tried it, I had to walk away from it. I gave the money back. I just couldn’t tolerate them trying to find my voice,” Robertson explains. “Finally, a few years ago I just thought, ‘I can’t carry around all these stories anymore. It’s too heavy, it’s weighing me down, and I have to set them free.’ And so then I did and I thought, ‘Ah, you see? There! Now that’s honest. That’s truth. That’s what happened.’ ”

Band fanatics will immediately note that Robertson’s truth differs in some significant and painful ways from Levon Helm’s, which was set out in the vocalist-drummer’s 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire. Where Testimony shines is in Robertson’s vivid descriptions of the Hawks’ hard-up road years, of capers including revenge arson and a mercifully aborted armed robbery, and, best of all, of being holed up with Dylan and the boys in Woodstock in ’67, a period of near-supernatural creativity that produced The Basement Tapes and the Band’s Music From Big Pink. “A feeling of beautiful indulgence” is how Robertson describes it to the Straight.

If it all comes with the niggling sense that giants of this magnitude have never roamed the Earth again, that popular music post Elvis, Dylan, and the Beatles has been a game of diminishing returns, Robertson offers: “Well, it’s all about a test of time. Some people might think quite differently about it. Some people might think, ‘What about Prince? What about Kurt Cobain?’ I dunno—it’s not for me to judge. I’m just here to do my own shit.” Fair enough; both on the phone and in the book, Robertson talks a lot about being “open” to what life has to offer, and it helps to make sense of a career that’s been marked by forward momentum, experimentation, and more than a few risks—including the monumental one he took with Dylan half a century ago.

“Yeah. Yeah,” he snorts. “Open, but not stupid.”

Robbie Robertson discusses Testimony at a Vancouver Writers Fest event at Christ Church Cathedral on Tuesday (December 6).