The Band is the single most influential musical group in modern history that literally no one younger than 40 years old has ever heard of, so if there is a flaw in the documentary “Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band,” it is that it was arguably assembled and released two to three decades too late.
Or perhaps not, because while time has robbed us of three of the five members of The Band (Garth Hudson and, of course, Robbie Robertson are still with us), I suspect it might have lent director Daniel Roher the clarity of emotional distance that Martin Scorsese arguably lacked when he directed the documentary of The Band’s final concert in 1976, which was released as “The Last Waltz” in 1978.
Joe Queenan, who’s a far smarter and meaner movie reviewer than me, wryly observed that it was entirely on-brand for The Band to invite so many guest performers to their final concert that they were outshined during their own swan song.
Because while the cross-cultural origins of The Band’s genesis are fascinating, it’s telling that even their decline was marked by relatively little drama, especially when compared to the excesses of their fellow successful musicians, both of that era and in the decades since.
Just as The Band’s deliberately understated name would indicate, these were five highly talented guys who simply wanted to make good music together, and their respective skills were so well-matched with one another that, before the drinking and drugging got in the way, no one member of The Band commanded any more attention than the others.
In retrospect, it’s a bit of a different story, not only because Robertson is one of the two members of The Band who’s still alive, but also because he’s enjoyed the greatest measure of musical and multimedia success outside of The Band (I first saw him when my mom’s friend, Victoria Seever, sent me a VHS tape of some MTV videos that included Robertson’s 1987 “Showdown at Big Sky”).
Robertson’s upbringing was a tug-of-war between the Toronto neighborhoods where his parents raised him and the First Nations reservation where his mother grew up, and after working summer jobs in the traveling carnival circuit, his performing and songwriting got him a spot in rockabilly musician Ronnie Hawkins’ backup band, the Hawks, which became the Petri dish for bringing together future members of The Band.
This heady melange of Native and Southern influences gained a folk flavor when The Band began touring with Bob Dylan just as he made his controversial transition into rock, all of which added up to the recipe for The Band to essentially invent the Americana subgenre of rock, retreating into the rock genre’s rustic roots, when so many of their contemporaries were going psychedelic.
Even as someone who’s already well familiar with The Band’s scope of influence, it’s still a trip to see Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Peter Gabriel and, yes, Martin Scorsese, all showing up simply to gush over how much they loved The Band (Clapton was such an unabashed fanboy that he even tried to become a member).
With so many fans who are far more famous than The Band itself, one might be forgiven for wondering why The Band never made it as big as, say, The Beatles, to whom they’re compared at least once in this film. But again, what this film underscores is that these guys were never fame-seekers, even when a number of them were mired in their more dissolute downhill slides.
Indeed, part of the reason why Robertson, who only started out writing a fraction of The Band’s songs, became its driving force by the end was because he was the only one who never let the drink or drugs overwhelm him.
Given how content Robertson was before to write a number of The Band’s songs, but still be one of five equally-sized faces on the covers of its albums, the fact that he was thrust into such a proactive leadership role by default, can’t help but remind me of the quote routinely attributed to the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, to wit: “Someone has to do something. It’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.”
In spite of this film basically serving as a eulogy for both The Band and the majority of its members, it doesn’t really end on a downbeat note. I was far from the only one laughing out loud in the theater at the anecdotes told about The Band’s antics and travails, which included at least one instance of onstage hypnotherapy and a whole slew of bawdy quotes by Ronnie Hawkins.
In an age of entertainment franchises being endlessly resurrected for nostalgia value, there’s something almost novel about the fact that The Band is gone for good, so all we can do is honor its legacy.