Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019): Still Fresh

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, as the title implies, is a documentary and personal retrospective about the hallowed rock group known simply as The Band.  For those who may not have been around in the late sixties and early seventies and for those boomers who were there, but whose memory of that period is (understandably) a little vague, I’ll start with the basics. 

The Band was a rock group that first came to our attention in the late 1960s and became extremely popular among the cognoscenti (a demographic of whom there were a heck of a lot more members then than now). In 1968, they more or less introduced the world to the musical genre known as Americana; threw a big party (“The Last Waltz”) on Thanksgiving day 1976 to announce its/their retirement from touring; and then broke up, as most rock bands do, in a  rather ugly spat between the two founding and leading members of the ensemble.  The Band initially came together in the early 1960s as The Hawks, Ronnie Hawkins’ backup band, then went on to be Bob Dylan’s touring band in 1965 and 1966 (and later again in 1974). At Dylan’s invitation, they famously moved to Woodstock, NY in 1967 and living and working in a modest pink house there, developed their idiosyncratic style: a mélange of folk, country, blues, hillbilly, honky-tonk and rock’n’roll music.

The Band was blessed with three of the best, most evocative male voices of late 20^th century popular music in Levon Helm (lead singer in, for example, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and ”Rag Mama Rag”), Rick Danko (e.g. “This Wheel’s On Fire”, “Stage Fright”) and Richard Manuel (e.g. “Tears of Rage”, “I Shall Be Released”). It was also blessed with some of the best songwriters in Robertson and Dylan. Dylan wrote or co-wrote three of the eleven songs on the group’s seminal first album, Music from Big Pink. Robertson wrote another four on that album and wrote or co-wrote all the songs on the next two. It is an amazing collection of material and an astonishingly original sound.  Bruce Springsteen gushes that the songs “sound like you’ve never heard them before - and like they were always there.”

Music from Big Pink released in 1968 at the height of psychedelia’s musical sway, but it was something different altogether. And something great. A year later, the next album, simply titled The Band was just as good, if not better.  Each of these albums were ranked in the top 50 rock albums of all time by the folks at Rolling Stone Magazine a few years ago. The Band itself was ranked as one of the top fifty rock artists of all time. 

The demise of great (and not so great) rock outfits due to personality clashes is such a common occurrence - the most famous instance being, perhaps, The Beatles’ dissolution in 1970 - that it was the core subject of one of the best satirical movies of all time: This Is Spinal Tap (1984). In the case of The Band, the end came due to friction between co-founders Robbie Robertson, the guitarist and principle songwriter, and Levon Helm, the drummer/singer.  

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band wisely de-emphasizes the break-up, focusing instead on how the group came together and the elements they melded to make their sound so musically interesting. The history of the group is filtered primarily through Robertson’s recollections, based on his 2016 memoir,  Testimony, as well as extensive interviews with him.  This is mostly a good thing, as Robertson has a fantastic memory for detail and is an intelligent and engaging raconteur.  His story is remarkable in itself – for example, how he left his Canadian home at age 15 to travel into the American South to audition for and successfully join fellow Canadian Ronnie Hawkins’ rock and roll outfit. (Interestingly, four of the five members of The Band were Canadian, the only exception being Helm, from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.)  

Although three of the five original members of the Band (Manuel, Danko and Helm) are deceased and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson is notoriously reticent, the film nonetheless includes commentary from them through the use of archival clips. Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique, fills in a lot of the blanks about the personalities of some of these guys, too. Other commentators include Hawkins, Dylan, Eric Clapton (relating how he made a pilgrimage to Woodstock in hopes of joining The Band!), Neil Young, and other luminaries and admirers.

There are also numerous clips of the group in performance at various stages of their career, some never seen before; most are relatively short but there are a couple of terrific extended versions. If you want to see more of The Band in performance, check out Martin Scorsese’s film of their final concert, The Last Waltz (1978), to which Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band is somewhat of a companion piece. [The Last Waltz is available free to Amazon Prime subscribers and to rent from iTunes and elsewhere.]

I quite enjoyed Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band. After seeing it, I revisited all of my favorite music from The Band – which was quite a thrill, because it still sounds and feels fresh. If you are a fan of The Band, of rock and/or popular music history, of Americana or American music generally, and/or if you just appreciate an interesting story well told, this may be for you too.

1 hour 42 minutes

Grade: B+

Opens in select theaters nationwide Friday, February 28, 2020