Robbie Robertson is a stoic, imposing figure, but as he sits with Yahoo Entertainment discussing Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, the new documentary executive-produced by his longtime cinematic collaborator Martin Scorsese, he can’t help but get a little choked up. At the very top of the film, which premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival and hits theaters nationwide this week, Robertson describe the kinship between his former Band-mates thusly: “It was so beautiful, it went up in flames." It’s a quote that resonates with both the viewer and the subject.

“We had one of the most unusual and extraordinary stories of any group in music history. There is nothing comparable to it,” muses Robertson. “Where we started out from, the combination of things — it's so much to go into, you’ve got to see the movie. But in this relationship, and what this documentary is about, is really a lot about the brotherhood. We were so locked in, in a musicality, and in a personal way, that we invented something that had a big effect on the course of music.”

Once Were Brothers traces Robertson’s story from his childhood growing up on a Native American reservation; to Robertson’s then-little-known Hawks (who later evolved into the Band) backing Bob Dylan on tour during Dylan’s “Judas” period (as seen in the exclusive movie clip below); to the creation of the Band’s landmark albums Music From Big Pink and The Band; to their Scorsese-directed farewell concert film The Last Waltz. The documentary is a welcome remind of the Band’s legacy and influence, which extended to the their A-list peers of the day.

“When we came to make our first record, Music From Big Pink, when it came out, people were like, ‘Oh my God. Where did this come from? What's going on?’” Robertson says with a chuckle. “Because it had nothing to do with what was happening in music. It completely separated itself from the pack. …We went into a world, into a dimension of music, and all the things that we had gathered over these years, we put it all in our own gumbo and stirred it up. And when we made this music, it was just about the honesty of what we had gathered in this. So, it had such a strong identity, it had such a strong look, it changed the way people were dressing. We were like, What's going on here?’ These people came, Eric Clapton said, ‘I heard this record, I'm leaving Cream.’ I was like, ‘I don't want that responsibility!’ It sent ripples through music, and through the culture.”





View photos Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, and Garth Hudson of The Band pose for a group portrait in London in June 1971. (Phot: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns) More

Robertson continues: “So, then, we did this next record, and it was unheard of at this time, that we were like, ‘Well, we're not doing this in a studio. We're making or own world, our own atmosphere.’ It was really just to cut off the world, go in and do what we needed to do. The music that came out of that cemented the deal. This group that was so non-‘we want to be pop stars’… It was the opposite of everything, and somehow, again, the honesty in this music and the depth of it had, you could hear the sound coming from everybody after that. It was a wonderful feeling, but it had nothing to do with it being a plan. It wasn't a plan at all. We weren't trendy, because we didn't know what the trend was, and didn't want to.

“We were, really, again, going into our own world, our own dimension, and discovering a musicality, a sound, everything. So when this record came out it didn't sound like other records, the songs weren't about anything else that anybody was writing about. I wrote a song about the Civil War from the Southern point of view, and people were like, ‘What made you think of that?’ And I thought, ‘It's all I thought of at the time.’ I don't know the answer to any of those things, except that what seemed like a good idea in that moment.”