Once Were Brothers
Director: Daniel Roher
The story of The Band’s rise and demise, told mainly from Robbie Robertson’s perspective.
Self-effacing as their moniker might be, it says something about The Band’s supremacy. Was there ever a finer band, whose parts were so formidable and yet who added up to so much greater than those parts? Watching the too-scant early footage of Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko clinched in sync, it’s as if they were more than ‘brothers’, and were operating at a telepathic level of collective empathy. They rocked, they rolled, they swung, they grooved like no other rock entity.
Among the peers director Daniel Roher has assembled to heap praise on them are Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, who praises them as “knights” for taking the flak with him every night as they toured with him in his mid-60s electric phase, a lengthy baptism of fire. Ronnie Hawkins, still with us, the man with whom the Band’s members first learned their chops in Toronto in the early 60s, provides great testimony.
Perhaps the band’s secret was that they were all-American in the best sense; a prodigious guitarist, Robertson was deeply inf luenced by his native American heritage. Meanwhile, blues, bluegrass, country and rock were all part of the weave that made their debut album such a timeless piece of Americana, as young as yesterday, as old as the hills.
With Danko, Manuel and Helm now dead, and Garth Hudson a recluse, it falls to Robertson to tell the story of how he and his compadres, once thick as thieves, fell apart. Alas it seems the riotous rock’n’roll lifestyle in which they indulged in their Woodstock base was the main culprit; booze, heroin and their attendant misadventures are all documented, including Manuel taking Robertson’s wife for a drive while pissed, assuring her: “I always sober up at the wheel.” They ended up in a ditch.
It would have been helpful to get some sense of the beefs the rest of the band had with Robertson (this film ends with The Last Waltz, their swansong, which hints at the animosity growing at Robertson’s increasing domination of the group). But despite this inevitable bias, Robertson comes across as thoughtful, reasonable and, above all, saddened in his testimony, based largely on his 2016 biography. Certainly he seems to have cleaned up his act more effectively than some of his compadres. An only child, he invested deeply in their brotherhood. He misses The Band. So should we all. ■■■■■■■■■■