2020-03-16_The_New_Yorker

THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 33

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OLD-IS-NEWDEPT.

BANDMATES

W

hen Robbie Robertson, the gui-
tarist and principal songwriter for
the Band, wrote for the group’s three
singers—Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and
Richard Manuel—he thought of him-
self as composing “movie songs.”
“I was like their director,” Robertson,
who is seventy-six, said the other day. “I
knew each of their instruments, their
voices, their playing, so I was casting them
to play these characters.” He cast Helm
as Virgil Caine in “The Night They Drove
Old Dixie Down”; Danko embodied the
man caught in the spotlight in “Stage
Fright”; Manuel was seven lives in to his
allotted nine in “The Shape I’m In.”
Even new, those songs sounded old.
Now that the Band’s vocalists are dead—
the wizardly keyboardist Garth Hudson
is the only other surviving member—
the characters that Robertson concocted
for his bandmates loom even more
mythic. One day, Virgil Caine might be
all of Levon Helm that listeners will
know. But not if Robertson can help it.
He was visiting New York for the
première of a documentary about the
Band, “Once Were Brothers,” based on
his 2016 memoir, “Testimony.” The film,
directed by the twenty-six-year-old Dan-
iel Roher—one of the few non-gray hairs
in the audience, at Lincoln Center—
counteracts the mythmaking of the songs

by introducing viewers to the musicians

as they were before fame found them.

“Once Were Brothers” locates the ge-

nius of the Band’s music in the early

years they spent backing Ronnie Haw-

kins, the Arkansas-born rockabilly singer.

“We played the Chitlin Circuit, we heard

incredible gospel music, fantastic moun-

tain music, great blues, and tremendous

rock and roll,” Robertson said a couple

of days after the première, seated on a

white leather banquette in the Pleiades

bar, in the Surrey hotel on Madison Av-

enue, as the Rolling Stones played from

a speaker overhead. “And then Garth

would turn us on to certain classical pieces

that were haunting and beautiful.”

When the five sat down to make music

of their own, facing one another in a cir-

cle in the basement of Big Pink, their

house in Woodstock, New York, all those

influences came out, and the result

sounded so unlike anything else being

recorded at the time (the late sixties to

the mid-seventies) that it birthed a new

genre: Americana. “We were just mix-

ing some of this with some of that, and,

holy shit, it had an effect,” Robertson

said. “It sent rumbles around the world.”

Drugs and alcohol hit the Band’s

rhythm section hard: “I would be, like,

‘Guys! I don’t want to be the guy whin-

ing, but we got work to do! And this is

getting in the way!’” (Still, as he recalls

in “Testimony,” he fought to get Helm

off cocaine, but then continued to snort

it himself.) “My mother was a Mohawk

Indian,” Robertson went on. “Her and

all of her relatives, they would have one

drink and change personalities.” At the

bar, he left his glass of wine unfinished.

Helm, in his book, “This Wheel’s on

Fire,” written seventeen years after the

Band played its last concert, in 1976

(Martin Scorsese made “The Last Waltz”

about it), portrayed Robertson as a canny

operator who saw the opportunity—

when the others were addled by sub-

stance abuse—to help himself to what

should have been their share of the pub-

lishing royalties. Robertson said that he

felt “awful” about the unfair accusation,

which the others didn’t support, but he

didn’t respond publicly. “Levon used to

say shit about the booking agent, the

manager, the lawyer, the accountant, ev-

erybody,” Robertson explained. “As Rick

Danko said to me, ‘That’s just Levon.’”

“The Last Waltz” became the first gig

in Robertson’s second career, scoring films,

many of them Scorsese’s. Meanwhile, the

rest of the Band soldiered on without a

lead guitarist. They never broke up. “We

just wanted a little breather, and then we

would come back together and pull a rab-

bit out of the hat,” Robertson said. The

group had even booked a date at a stu-

dio. “And I went to the studio and I waited

and I waited, and nobody showed up.

Everybody just forgot to come back.”

Manuel hanged himself in 1986;

Danko died of heart failure in 1999, at

fifty-two; and Helm, who remained in

Woodstock and hosted musical nights

in his barn, succumbed to cancer in 2012.

Robertson visited Helm before he died,

but the former drummer was too far

gone, already unresponsive.

Robertson is going full steam. “I just

had maybe the busiest year of my life,”

he said. It included the documentary,

which he narrates; the score for “The

Irishman”; a new album, “Sinematic”;

and a fiftieth-anniversary edition of the

Band’s second album, which includes

an unreleased set at the Woodstock fes-

tival. He also has five grandkids, who

call him Papa Rob. “And I’m just about

to sign the papers with Warner Bros.

Pictures to make the story of the Band!”

he announced. Jez Butterworth, the Brit-

ish playwright and screenwriter, is writ-

ing the script. It took fifty years, but Rob-

ertson’s movie songs are finally coming

to the multiplex. Who will play him?

—John Seabrook

Robbie Robertson

on his street in Jerusalem. “People man-
age to live together and to respect one
another,” he said. As for the U.S. elec-
tions, Imam feels that the best candidate
is sitting on the sidelines. “He’s very suc-
cessful, he’s a good human, he’s very pop-
ular,” he said. “He knows how to recruit
people, which is very important for a pol-
itician. People love winners.” The man?
“Nick Saban. He is really a genius. He’d
definitely be elected. As President! Easy.”
He considered Saban’s platform: “He has
a lot of compassion for people that did
not have everything in life, poor people,
less privileged people. He would defi-
nitely be a Democrat.”
—Zach Helfand