Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Once Were Brothers (2019)
The great film about The Band—and one of the greatest concert documentaries ever—was Martin Scorsese’s record of their 1976 farewell, The Last Waltz. Scorsese must be a fan. He is credited as executive producer of the excellent 2019 documentary on the group, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, out now on Blu-ray.
Director Daniel Roher lets guitarist Robbie Robertson tell the story, but of course, there is little choice in the matter. Robertson (along with multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson) is the sole survivor. Rock critics and historians generally agree that once he dominated The Band, their creativity declined. Their first two albums were genuinely group efforts—The Band was then, in the words of a Bruce Springsteen clip included in the documentary—“greater than the sum of their parts.” When The Band became more or less Robertson’s band, they were still good, just not startlingly great when measured against the seminal accomplishments of Music From Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969).
Robertson explains the shift in one word: heroin. He may have tried but unlike some of his Bandmates, he never got hooked. Suddenly musicians who had been playing together since their teenage years—sometimes six nights a week on the road in Canada, then backing Bob Dylan on his world electric tour when narrowminded folkies came to jeer—stopped being in tune with each other. “The junkie denial,” Robertson calls the dishonesty that seeped into their relationships. As he was busy writing, some of the other guys nodded out.
Robertson’s own story is interesting enough. His childhood was divided between Toronto and his mother’s Six Nations Indian Reserve. Hearing rock and roll, which hit Canada “overnight, like out of nowhere,” changed his course. At 13 he was in bands and was soon playing behind Ronnie Hawkins, a first-rate rockabilly who was bigger in Canada than his homeland. At 15 Hawkins recorded Robertson’s first songs. Drumming in that band was Arkansas-reared Levon Helm, who filled Robertson’s imagination with muggy images and sharply drawn characters from the American South.
The Band’s first two albums were the antithesis of rock and pop as the ‘60s ended and helped set the stage for much Americana to come with their unique transmutation of blues, Dixieland, funk and country into something timeless. If rock music had existed during the Civil War, it might have sounded something like The Band.
