History is written by the victors—and as a corollary, winners usually become the focus of music documentaries. When it comes to the tragic tale of the Band, guitarist and main songwriter Robbie Robertson definitely has emerged triumphant. Three of the five members of this influential rock group are dead, and the other survivor, keyboardist Garth Hudson, shuns the spotlight. Hudson doesn’t even speak in Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band—although he was interviewed.
The great irony of the Band is that they became pioneers and paragons of what came to be known as Americana, although only one member (awesome drummer/vocalist Levon Helm) was American. The rest of the Band—Robertson, Hudson, bassist Rick Danko, and pianist/vocalist Richard Manuel—were Canadians who cut their teeth in rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins’s group as the Hawks, and then further honed their chops while on tour with Bob Dylan in the mid 1960s, as that folk icon shifted into his electric-rock phase. Those apprenticeships, though, helped to forge their creativity, and the rest is musical history.
