Robbie Robertson looks back on The Band’s history
The Band, the Canadian/american ensemble that blended traditional music heritage with rock ’n’ roll power, has had its story told countless times over the years.
“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band” is something different, as director Daniel Roher takes his cues first and foremost from guitarist and songwriter Robertson’s 2016 memoir, “Testimony.”
“(Roher) made it very, very clear from the beginning that ‘Testimony,’ the book, was the Bible in this, and that everything in the perspective of this film was from that point of view,” Robertson said. “This is not the story of The Band, it’s my perspective of the story of The Band. It’s my experience.
“So that’s what he was centered on because I thought I can only speak on my own behalf and that’s what my book was. I don’t know how to write a book about somebody else’s perspective, so I just had to be honest about that.”
Roher and Robertson compellingly chart the first few decades of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s life from his roots in the Mohawk community of the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario to his time as a teen wonder in rocker Ronnie Hawkins’ backing group, the Hawks.
There, he’d connect with the fellow members of what eventually became The Band: Arkansas native Levon Helm and fellow Canadians Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson.
By the mid-’60s, Robertson and company had parted ways with Hawkins and were making plenty of noise for themselves on the nightclub circuit at hotspots like Tony Mart’s in Somers Point outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey, shouted out in archival material in “Once Were Brothers.”
“The crowds were incredible,” Robertson said of the storied time at the Jersey Shore. “There was such a powerful enthusiasm in these people, in the Jersey people, towards music. It was like, ‘Wow, this isn’t just something in the background, they are so into it.’”
The Hawks went from clubs to some of the most contentious concert settings in memory as they played behind a gone-electric Bob Dylan, getting booed by bitter folk purists around the world, in 1965 and ’66.
Robertson and the guys eventually decamped to the upstate New York enclave of Woodstock, where the iconoclastic outfit The Band was truly born and their momentous 1968 debut album, “Music From Big Pink,” was created.
“The one thing we did come away (from) the (Dylan) tour with, obviously, was thicker skin,” said Robertson. “And I think that we were able to feel brave in a musical way. To say, ‘Listen, what we’re doing. I don’t care if it’s trendy. I’m not interested in trendy. I’m interested in finding an original voice.’”
It was a working mentality that gave the world classics like Robertson’s anthem “The Weight” and the Dylanpenned “I Shall Be Released” in a setting that has been chronicled to a point bordering on mythology. But “Once Were Brothers” director Roher, a relative newcomer at 26, captures the story with vigorous urgency and passion that fits the music itself.
“He’s a young guy and some of the people in the production end of things thought, ‘God, is he too young? It’s ridiculous,’” Robertson recounted. “And as I’ve said before I thought, ‘Well, I was 24 when I made ‘Music From Big Pink,’ maybe I can have a little faith here.”
Roher’s support system on the film included a trio of Oscar-winning executive producers: Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and longtime Robertson collaborator Martin Scorsese.
Robertson’s peers, collaborators and famous admirers, including Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison and Taj Mahal, are all on hand to pay tribute, while archival footage adds the voices of the late Danko, Manuel and Helm posthumously.
The film is a gripping saga of triumph and tribulation, the saga of a fractured brotherhood which took its final collective bow at the 1976 concert documented in Scorsese’s landmark film “The Last Waltz.”
And while “Once Were Brothers” is fundamentally Robertson’s story, he was still surprised by the final product.
“I didn’t see how moving, how emotional the story was going to be,” Robertson said. “I didn’t see that coming. And when I saw the first rough cut of it, I was very moved by it by myself, and I liked that. And I tried to get that across in my book. That’s how I feel about losing these brothers and celebrating this brotherhood. I felt grateful for that.”