Were
Brothers – New Documentary on The Band
I was
looking forward to seeing this film in a real movie theater, but fate
intervened. So I put out $7 to rent it for 48 hours and listened to it on my
phone and then watched it on my laptop via Youtube, and needed the diversion
and distraction from the current reality.
It’s a
very good film for those who are familiar with The Band and their story, but it
was kind of sad for me because of my personal association with them, that is
all of them except Robbie Robertson, the only original member of this Band of
Brothers who I have not met.
This is
basically Robbie Robertson’s side of the story, a sort of prequel to Martin
Scorese’s The Last Waltz, some say the best concert movie ever produced.
The
first article I had published in the now defunct Atlantic City Sun newspaper
was about how Levon and the Hawks, before they were The Band, played Tony Marts
nightclub in Somers Point, NJ for six weeks in the summer of ’65. It was at the
time they hooked up with Bob Dylan, then went on his first “electric tour,”
were soundly booed at every venue, and then retreated to the artists colony of
Woodstock, New York, before it was famous.
I first
saw The Band in downtown Cleveland in 1969, then at the Spectrum in Philly a
few times, and then more than once when they backed Dylan. I also caught them
at a small club off the Black Horse Pike in Berlin and at a Bowling alley in
Pennsauken when Blondie Chaplin and a blues harpist Paul Butterfield joined
them.
Then
after the Last Waltz, I booked them myself (for $7,000) in the mid-1980s to
play a Tony Marts Reunion concert at Egos nightclub, the site of the former
Tony Marts.
Attorney
and former Camden prosecutor Harris Berman and his brother apparently sold a
Florida hotel and had a few million they had to burn, so they purchased the old,
dilapidated Bay Shores, tore it down and built the Waterfront. Then went across
the street and purchased Tony Marts, tore it down and built Egos, a classy
disco.
Jody
Kish owned Mark’s News on the corner of 8th and Central Ave. in
Ocean City, a central community junction for decades. In 1985 Jody and I decided to
bring The Band back to Somers Point, and asked Berman if we could use Egos, as
the former site of Tony Marts. He wanted to see The Band for himself, so a
bunch of us piled into his limo and drove to New York City where we caught The
Band at The Lone Star Cafe, a Country-Western bar in the East Village.
Renoun
jazz bassist Jaco Pastoris was there, and I got a good picture of him with his
guitar covering one eye, but he was too drunk and high to jam with The Band
that night. But Berman liked the music, and agreed to let us four wall it, and
we got Levon and the boys to agree to play for us a few months later for
$7,000. And I got to know Rick Danko better as we sat and had a few beers
together and talked.
A few
weeks later I caught Rick and Richard Manual do a duo show at the Chestnut
Cabaret in Philly, and helped them carry their equipment out to the curb.
Richard said he was really looking forward to returning to Somers Point, as he
had some good times there, and seeing Tony again. Rick then imitated Tony
Marotta’s deep husky Tom Waits type voice, “You boys stay away from the dance
girls now….”
Then we
all laughed.
But as
Robbie Robertson says in Once Were Brothers, - “It was a beautiful thing. It was
so beautiful it went up in flames.”
Between
the Chestnut Cabaret show and the Tony Marts reunion, Richard hanged himself in
a Florida motel shower, The Band’s manager Albert Grossman, who took Dylan and
them to Woodstock, and Tony Marotta, Sr. himself died.
But the
show went on. Garth needed a Hammond B3 organ that we rented, and drove down in
a rented car from Woodstock. The rest of The Band showed up, and despite Harris
Berman’s agreement to put them up in one of his boardwalk motels, I had to put
their rooms on my mother’s credit card. Rick stayed at my house, and when I was
driving him over the Ocean City-Somers Point causeway he asked me to write the
true history of The Band.
And
while I thought seriously about it, the story is too sad for me to put into
words. And Robbie’s film Once Were Brothers reaffirms that opinion.
As
Robbie Robertson put it, “I was an only child, and this brotherhood thing was
so powerful.”
His
mother, Dolly, was an Indian from the Six Nations and his father Alexander
Klegerman, who died before he was born, was Jewish, and he was raised by an
abusive step father. When he went to visit his mother’s family on a
reservation, he says, “When the sun went down the instruments came out.”
Robbie
got a little guitar with a cowboy on it and learned to play, then rock and roll
exploded – Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – “For me it was a life
altering moment. A revolutionary moment.That’s it. I don’t know what you people
are going to do, but I know what I’m going to do. Within a week I was in a
band. It was like having your own bowling alley.”
Opening
for Rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Robertson was totally impressed,
especially with drummer Levon Helm. After the show Robbie says, “I just hung
around to let them rub off on me.”
After
overhearing Hawkins say, “I got to do a record and need some new songs,”
Robertson ran home and locked himself in a room until he had written two songs
that he gave to Hawkins.
When a
guitar slot opened in the Hawks, Robertson sold his prized ’56 Stratocaster and
took a train to Arkansas in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, the
fountainhead of rock and roll and home to Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson,
James Cotton, Levon Helm – “so many great musicians came out of there, down and
dirty and heavy, just like the air.”
And he
got the job, telling Hawkins that “you will never have to tell me to work
harder.”
As for
money, Hawkins said, “Don’t worry about money, you will get more pussy than
Frank Sinatra.”
The
fifteen year old Robertson bonded most closely with drummer Levon Helm, and
they became like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Robbie wrote many of the songs, while Levon
arranged them. They were soon joined by other Canadians – Rick Danko on bass,
Richard Manuel on keys and Garth Hudson on organ. Garth was the best musician
of the bunch, and Danko, Manual and Helm all sang.
When
they finally got jammnig, Hawkins said, “They hit me like a bolt of lightning.”
They
went on the road, mainly playing the Southern “Chitlin’ Circuit,” and continued
on the road for years. Finally, in 1965, Hawkins got married and went home to
settle down as the group continued on the road as Levon and the Hawks.
Eventually
they told their Canadian manager, Colonel Kutlets, that they wanted to settle down too,
and needed a steady gig, and he arranged for them to be the house band for the
summer at Tony Marts in Somers Point. Just across the bay from dry Ocean City,
N.J., Somers Point had over a dozen bars and most of them featured live music.
The two biggest bars were Bay Shores on the waterfront and across Bay Avenue
was Tony Marts Café – A photo of place is in the movie Once Were Brothers –
around 26 minutes into the film, and there’s also a photo of them sitting on
stools by the bar, dressed in black suits and ties.
They
played three sets a night, six days a week, and had Mondays off, when most of
the bartenders and musicians from the Bay Avenue juke joints played a game of
softball with the local policemen – the Hangover League they called it. And
when Conway Twitty was the headliner while the Hawks were there, he was a
ringer as a former professional ballplayer.
Rather
than play ball, Robbie Robertson went to New York City where he went to Tin Pan
Alley, the home of songwriters, and hooked up with John Hammond, Jr., a white
blues player who took Robertson to the Columbia recording studio where his
father, John Hammond, Sr. worked as a talent scout. Having “discovered,” Robert
Johnson, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Hammond, Sr. had four
aces in his hand.
At the
studio, Robertson heard Dylan play a recording of his new song, “Like A Rolling
Stone,” and a few weeks later Dylan
decided he wanted to go on the road with a real rock and roll band as that song
requires. Sitting in his manger Albert Grossman’s office, Dylan asked about
putting a band together, comlete with drums, electric guitars and keyboards.
Grossman’s secretary, who happened to be from Toronto, recommended the Hawks,
and John Hammond, Jr. reminded Bob that he had met Robbie Robertson from the
Hawks.
Dylan
called Tony Marts and talked to Levon, who was not familiar with folk music or
Dylan, though he had heard the Byrd’s version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and liked
it. Before “Murder So Foul,” the Byrd’s version of Dylan’s song was the only
number one hit Dylan had.
Robertson
returned to New York and jammed with Dylan, and when Dylan asked him to go on
tour with him, Robertson explained that he was in a band, and they had to stick
together.
So
Robertson returned to Somers Point and explained to Tony that they had a big
opportunity in New York and wanted to get out of the last week of their
contract – Labor Day week, the biggest week of the summer. Tony said that they
were the best band he’s ever had, and later said, “they were the last of the
gentlemen.”
Tony
called Colonel Kutlets and asked for another good band for the Labor Day week
and Kutlets sent him Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, who had a hit on the
charts at the time – “Devil with the Blue Dress.”
Dylan
was roundly booed at the Newport Folk Festival when he brought out his electric
guitar, Levon and the Hawks - Levon and Robbie
backed Dylan in New York, where they played outdoors at a tennis stadium, and
were booed again.
As
Robertson put it, “We would go in and set up and play and they would boo.
Everywhere we went.I thought it was a strange way to make a buck.”
Levon
got tired of it, quit playing and went down to Louisiana to work on an off
shore oil rig, being replaced by Micky Jones of The Monkeys fame.
They did
a tour of Europe, and were booed again, mainly by the folk music crowd, but the
general public bought “Like a Rolling Stone” and it shot up the charts to
Number Two, cut off from the top spot by the Beatles.
Then
when they returned to the States, Dylan went to Woodstock to stay at Grossman’s
house, and had a motorcycle accident, so he stuck around there to recuperate.
Meanwhile, Dylan and Grossman had put Robertson, Manuel and Danko on permanent
retainer, so they didn’t have to work, and Danko rented a large pink house in
West Saugerties, just outside of Woodstock they called “Big Pink.”
Robertson
had met a fellow Canadian in Paris, the vivacious Dominique, and they lived in
Woodstock together, and they all began to meet at Big Pink where they would
write songs on a type writer they put out, and Garth set up a recording studio
in the garage-basement where they would jam and record new songs, and
eventually Levon returned to fill out The Band, the name that the local
townsfolk called them.
Big Pink
As Bruce
Springsteen says, “There is no band greater than the some of the parts than The
Band. Just the name says it all.”
They
went out on the road together, introduced as, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” The Band
to promote their first two albums that included “The Weight,” “The Night They
Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” et al., and then backed Bob Dylan
on a number of tours that really rocked.
They
played the first Woodstock festival in 1969 without Dylan, but Grossman their
manager wouldn’t let them be included in the film. The song “The Weight” became
a big hit after it was included in the film “Easy Rider,” but once again, it
was a cover version as Grossman didn’t want them in the popular record of that cult
movie.
Eventually,
at some point, as Robertson puts it, “Then it was broken, fractured, like
glass, and it was hard to put back together.
Alochol,
drugs, cocaine and heroin did them in, except for Garth, the musical mainstay
of The Band, and with Robertson, the last survivor.
Garth’s
classic song “Chest Fever” includes the lines “Going down to the Dunes with the
Goons,” that I think is a reference to the old all night rock joint The Dunes,
where the bouncers were known to be brutal.
Robertson
wanted out, and wanted to go out with a bang, so he arranged for Martin
Scorsese to film a concert at Winterland in San Francisco, where Bill Graham
had arranged for them to play their first show as The Band, and they called it “The Last Waltz.”
For
Robertson it was, but for the rest of The Band, they eventually kept going. I
saw them with and without Robertson, dozens of times over the years, besides
booking them myself for the Tony Marts Reunion.
In 1990
I saw them practice and then play in Roger Walter’s The Wall at the Berlin Wall
when they were dismantling it. I got a picture of Rick and me, and me and
Ronnie Hawkins – the original Hawk, but they are color slides and I don’t know
how to convert them to digital, yet.
It was
quite sad though, because Rick had a babysitter that wouldn’t let him have a
drink with us, or even socialize with anyone. A few years later Rick brought
his own band to Somers Point to play the Good Old Days Picnic on the Saturday
after Labor Day and my brother stopped by on his bicycle as he was riding in
the Maloney’s bike a thon. We stood next to the stage, and Rick played and sang
well, as a video of the show indicates, but Rick looked terrible, overweight and
puffy, and I felt sorry for him, though we hugged each other like old friends.
Rick’s
teenage son had died of an overdose, Richard hung himself, Rick drank himself
to death.
Levon
continued on however, and played Somers Point’s Bubba Mack Shack often,
bringing along his daughter. After a bout of cancer when he couldn’t sing, he
came out on the road again like the good old days, playing and singing, and
even got a headliner gig at an Atlantic City casino, opening for the Black
Crows that I caught.
I took this photo of Levon with a Tony Marts T-shirt I gave him at Bubba Mack Shack
That's Howlin' Wolf's guitarist Hubert Sumlin sitting behind him
Levon
also wrote a book, “This Wheels on Fire,” in which he berated Robbie Robertson
for copyrighting most of the songs, when he arranged them and the whole band
played and sang and deserved some of the royalties that only Robbie was
getting.
That’s
the way the music copyright law works – whoever writes the song gets the dough.
When organist Gary Booker – who makes Procol Harum’s “A White Shade of Pale” a
classic song sued to get some of the royalities, a judge agreed his original instrumental
organ is a defining part of the song, and gave it to him.
When
Kris Kristopherson wrote “Me and Bobby McGee” while he was working as a janitor
at the Columbia studios in Nashville, he overheard one of the session musicians Fred
Foster mention Bobby McGee, wrote the song, and then gave Foster co-author
credit and half the royalties just for saying “Bobby McGee.”
While
Levon may have been right in that songs were a group effort, Robbie penned most
of the words, and he gets the credits and royalties.
And now
with Levon dead, Robbie gets to put out his side of this story, which is beautiful,
yet sad.
When I get out of isolation and my Honda Odyssey is back on the road, and I have a few bucks to play with, I'm going to take a ride up Highway 9 to New York State and visit Woodstock, the artists colony that's thirty miles from the site of the original Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in Bethel. I hope to visit Big Pink, Garth and Levon's daughter Amy, and get their side of the story.
Seeing
this film stimulated me to go back and revive a Roman a Cleff novela I wrote in
2015, fifty years after the events occurred – Waiting On the Angels – the Long
Cool Summer of ’65 Revisited, which includes the story of Levon and the Hawks
at Tony Marts and how they hooked up with Bob Dylan, all based on real people
and true events. Coming soon, so stay tuned.
Video of Robbie singing his new song We Were Brothers
We Were Brothers - Song Lyrics
When the light goes out
And you can't go on
You miss your brothers
But now they're gone
When the light goes out
We go our own way
Nothing here but darkness
No reason to stay
Oh, once we're brothers
Brothers no more
We lost a connection
After the war
There'll be no revival
There'll be no one cold
Once were brothers
Brothers no more
When that curtain comes down
We'll let go of the past
Tomorrow's another day
Some things weren't meant to last
When that curtain comes down
On the final act
And you know, you know deep inside
There's no goin' back
Waiting On the Angels - Part 1
