Original subtitles

This guitar was the beginning of it all for me.

I don't have much of a process of, like,

"I'm thinking about this,

and now I'm gonna write a song, and it's gonna be about that."

A lot of times,

the creative process is trying to catch yourself off guard.

And you sit down, and you've got a blank canvas,

and you don't know what you're gonna do,

and you just see what happens.

How you doin', man?

When you talk about songs that are

reflective of your past,

it becomes a Jigsaw puzzle,

because... you write about what you know.

You write about where you've been.

You write about who you know.

When I stumbled onto this song, "once were brothers"...

It really did, for me, zero in on the band.

I don't know of any other group of musicians

with a story equivalent to the story of the band.

And it was a beautiful thing.

It was so beautiful, it went up in flames.

There is no band that emphasizes

coming together and becoming

greater than the sum of their parts than the band.

Simply their name, the band, that was it.

I've never been in a band that long.

I ran away, usually, and would move on

to the next thing that was attractive to me,

or that was missing in the band I was in. So I didn't

have a sense of brotherhood,

so I was in great awe of their brotherhood.

It was the soul of the band.

Not only did they have the incredible writing,

you know, Robbie's writing, but they had three

of the greatest white singers in rock history.

To have any one of those guys would be the foundation

for a great band. To have three of them in one group,

that was... Just loaded for bear.

This music drew upon country music,

English, Scottish, Irish, the choral sounds

of the Welsh. At the same time,

Mississippi delta, the blues. And there was so much imagery.

This... just didn't seem like anything else.

No one sounded like those guys. You know,

they came in, and they played. And I just loved

that about them, you know, they were about the music.

I think about levon, Richard, Rick, and garth

all the time. We went through things together you could

never replace. You can never give enough credit

to something that special. I was an only child,

so this brotherhood was so powerful.

I think we're warmed up.

Since I was a kid, I see stories

in a different way. I don't see them like fairy tales.

These stories are powerful,

and some of them are dangerous and big.

Maybe that's because my upbringing was

a little bit scattered and not normal in some ways.

My mother was born and raised

in the six nation Indian reserve.

Her name was Dolly.

When she was around 16 years old,

she was sent to live with an aunt in Toronto.

When we would go back to visit

the relatives in the Indian reserve,

I thought this was a magical place.

It seemed like every day,

when the sun started to go down,

the instruments would come out.

And I could sit in the middle of this,

and hear the fingers on the strings,

and the hands rubbing on the skins of the drum.

My parents got me a little guitar

with a cowboy painted on it.

I already know a couple of chords on the guitar

that my relatives at six nations had taught me.

I would practice and practice.

This is where I belong.

This is calling me.

I don't know for sure

whether I would ever have found my way to music

without this experience,

and that's why I have such a deep appreciation

for that place.

And then we crossed into a time zone

when I was 13 years old.

Overnight, out of nowhere,

this new music came pouring out.

For guys my age, it was a life-altering moment.

Like, it just cut against the grain

of the mundaneness of entertainment at that time.

Jann you know, it's raw, it's loud,

it's raucous, it's tough.

You know, the guitar sound is loud and thrilling.

It immediately

imparted to you this entire new way

of living, of looking,

of walking, of talking, of being,

of the possibility of what you might be able to do

with your life. It was a revolutionary moment, you know.

I thought of it as my own personal big bang.

I thought, "that's it. I don't know

what all you people are gonna do,

but I know what I'm gonna do."

Within weeks, I was in my first band.

We were off and running.

My schoolmates, they're like,

"one of these days, I wanna have my own bowling alley."

I'd be like, "oh, my god, your own bowling...

You could bowl for free all you wanted, right?"

I don't have that vision.

I saw something else, and the lights

were really bright.

Within a couple years, we were getting somewhere,

booking different shows around Toronto.

A local dj booked US to open

for Ronnie Hawkins and the hawks.

Ronnie Hawkins and the hawks had

a reputation to be the best

rockabilly band around.

These guys were up there

with Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway twitty,

Carl Perkins, they were in that league.

We didn't know anything about Canada.

We figured, Canada is the wilderness, they've still got

mountain men, you know, eating each other,

stuff like that.

We didn't know nothing about Canada. Boy, and Canada is

the promised land compared to where we came from.

We played our hearts out.

Then Ronnie Hawkins and the hawks take

the stage. Oh, my god. They took flight.

Ronnie Hawkins was

over here. Boom, he was over there.

He was singing just in time.

The piano player would be

playing a solo, keys would be flying off

the piano, he was hitting it so hard.

There was a guy playing drums

who looked like he was 15 years old,

with white-blonde hair,

and he was twirling sticks, and he was laughing,

and smiling,

and he just seemed to glow in the dark,

and his name was levon helm.

Well, I started with Ronnie when I was trying

to get out of high school back in Arkansas.

Ronnie was putting a band together.

I got into it to play drums.

We hit the road, played around for years,

and ended up playing up in Canada.

This is it. This is the most amazing thing

on the planet earth.

After they played, I just stood around.

I wanted to help out in any way I could,

to have this rub off on me,

this music, this talent,

this southern-ness.

I stuck to them like glue.

I knew right off the bat

Robbie had something special. I don't know,

he must've been 15 or 16 years old.

But he was hip. Robbie was street hip.

He was a hell of a young man.

One day, I heard Ronnie Hawkins

saying to the other guys, "I gotta cut a new record.

I need some songs."

I scampered home, went to my room,

and never came out until I wrote two songs.

Robbie was writing songs when he was 15 years old.

I recorded two of said songs on my album

before anybody ever thought about Robbie robertson.

At that time, Robbie dropped out of school.

His mother, Dolly, she was worried about him.

There had been quite a period

where my parents weren't getting along.

My father, Jim robertson,

was being quite abusive with my mother,

and with me.

And one day she said to me,

"sit down, I... I need to tell you something.

And maybe I should've told you this before,

but he's not your real father."

"What?

I... what do you mean, he's not my real father?"

Robbie's real daddy was a Hebrew gangster.

Yeah, they killed him, they shot him on...

Yonge street, I think.

My mother says, "your blood father, his name was

Alexander klegerman.

He got killed before you were born.

He's Jewish."

And she introduced me

to the relatives of my blood father,

natie klegerman and morrie klegerman.

They bring me into their world

with tremendous love and affection.

I met his uncle who'd been in the penitentiary

ten years. He was a gangster too.

Through these relatives of mine,

I'm understanding what's been stirring

inside of me all this time.

They understand vision.

They understand ambition.

When I told the klegermans

I had musical ambitions, they were like,

"rock 'n' roll? You don't wanna be

in furs and diamonds, you wanna be in that...?"

And then they were like, "oh, you mean, show business."

I'm 16 years old now.

Ronnie Hawkins says, "I want you to come down to Arkansas

and try out to become one of the hawks."

If I didn't go down there and try out for this,

I would be sorry the rest of my life.

I sold my '56 stratocaster,

I got the money to take a train from Toronto

to fayetteville, Arkansas.

I'm going to the Mississippi delta,

to the fountainhead of rock 'n' roll.

"This is it, this is it. I've gotta make this work."

So many amazing music people came out of there.

This music

is down and dirty.

And it's heavy,

just like the air.

Growin' up there in the delta,

just in the Memphis, west Memphis area there,

we had as good a radio as you could find.

Our jukeboxes and radios

weren't running short of good songs.

I consider myself fortunate to have

grown up there and heard the kind of music that I did.

Robbie was

a hell of a gifted musician, I can tell you that.

But what made him better than anybody else is

he worked twice as hard.

Finally, Ronnie says,

"I'm gonna offer you the job."

I say, "you'll never have to tell me to work harder."

He said, "I know." So I say, "great.

How much will I get paid working for you?"

And I said, "well, don't worry about the money, kid.

You ain't gonna make much money,

but you'll be gettin' more pussy than frank Sinatra."

And he did.

I depended on levon to show me the road.

He had grown, in my eyes,

bigger than life. When he laughed,

everybody laughed.

They were the best friends you could ever be.

They were like huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

It was a hell of a combination, I thought,

because levon could put the arrangements and stuff together

and do all that, and Robbie could write the songs.

When I saw Robbie play guitar,

it just blew my mind.

Every guitar player in Toronto learned from Robbie.

He changed the whole ballgame up here.

I can remember people discussing,

"how does Robbie make that guitar sound?"

That was the big mystery.

There was, like, stories going around

that, oh, he slashed his speakers,

broke a couple of tubes in the amp.

Every guitar player I met after that was doing the same thing.

I watched them all change from their old style of playing

to the new Robbie style of playing,

and I was... I was one of the pack.

Ronnie depends on levon and I

to help him choose musicians that have potential.

Ronnie wants to have the best band in the land.

Have you ever heard me sing?

I'll better have a good band.

The Arkansas boys would quit

and Ronnie would replace with a Canadian musician.

Within a fairly short time, we had

Richard, Rick, and when garth

finally joined the outfit, I think that gave US a leg up.

We didn't know a musician

that could do what he could do.

Garth understood muddy waters

and bach in the same sentence.

Richard was an incredibly beautiful soul.

You couldn't help but just love the guy.

It was kind of like boot camp.

I mean, we drove ourselves

to as near perfection as we could get, you know?

To the point where we'd really thrill each other.

Rick was one of these people that was like,

"trombone, bass, tuba,

violin, whatever it is, I can do it."

We were kids playing in bars

that you were supposed to be 21 to play in.

We were 17, 18, 19. It can

get pretty outrageous when you're out there that young.

Robbie's mom, Dolly,

she helped the band out more than anybody.

She would give them places to stay cheap,

fed 'em, cooked. She did everything.

She was somethin' else.

We played six days a week and we practiced five.

That's how come they got good.

They were probably the best white rhythm and blues band

in the world at that time. When they were young,

they were absorbing all that knowledge quick.

They shot by me musically like a bolt of lightning.

We were outgrowing the past

and the music that we were playing with Ronnie.

When we left Ronnie, we ended up

playing at a club in New York,

and one day my friend, John Hammond,

a great musician, blues singer,

he came and picked me up at the hotel,

and we're going to the Columbia records building,

to one of the studios.

We go in. I see over in the corner

this guy with dark glasses on

and frizzly hair, and John says,

"this is Bob Dylan."

Bob Dylan's a really respected songwriter.

He was best known to me as a folk singer

with a guitar and he has a harmonica.

And he sings his beautiful songs.

Folk music, from what we knew,

was happening over by a university somewhere,

and people were sipping cappuccinos,

listening to folk music.

Where we're playing,

on the other side of the tracks,

there ain't nobody sipping cappuccinos over there.

I didn't know a whole lot about Bob.

We were more into R&B and blues music.

When we left Ronnie,

I wanna be something original,

I don't wanna be a bar band.

I've gotta come back to writing.

I'm having dreams about finding a sanctuary,

finding a place that we can go,

and we can hone these skills, and we're just not

on the road driving to the next gig.

They were playing these gigs,

trying to get a recording deal. I said, "well, gee, you know,

how about we make a record together?

And I was signed to vanguard records.

And they gave US, like, a three-hour window to record.

I invited my friend Bob Dylan to the recording day.

So I introduced them to Dylan.

And... and Dylan flipped out, I mean,

he thought these guys were phenomenal.

What we didn't know is that Bob's already doing

the rock 'n' roll thing.

He wanted to hire an amazing band

that he could take on tour with him.

So he hired the guys.

Bob Dylan's thing was like a detour.

We're hooking up with this guy,

and he's changing the course of music.

He's like... the king of the folk movement

who now wants a rock 'n' roll band.

Huh! That's not a bad thing

to experience along the way too.

We thought, "let's take that detour."

We hook up with him, and have no idea

that he's the only one

that thinks this is a good idea.

The rest of the world hates this idea.

We play with him and they boo US every night.

It is weird that people could

be this upset about this guy

just wanting to expand his musical horizon

and play with other musicians.

We'd go somewhere, we set up our equipment,

we play.

People come, they boo US,

sometimes throw things. We'd pack up our equipment,

go on to the next place,

set up, play, they boo US.

I think, "what a strange way to make a buck."

Kids would break for the stage,

cops were making open-field tackles...

Out in front of the stage.

And Bob had told US, you know,

whatever happens, just don't stop playing.

Cool car!

Get the bass in with Robbie. Let's go.

Let's go, we have to go now. Hey, tell them we have to go.

Hey, don't pull my fingers!

So long. So long, don't boo me anymore!

When they yell in this weird nasal tone.

Oh. Jesus, you know, I don't understand why they...

How can they buy the tickets up so fast?

Let's get that light off.

Levon expressed to me that there was

something in this whole world

that we had entered into that just didn't feel right to him.

And the idea that we would

go out and play and people would boo US,

he thought that was just ridiculous.

And I... I was much closer to Bob

than the other guys were.

I don't think levon felt good about that, either.

One night, levon comes

to my hotel room and he says,

"I don't like this music. I don't like these people.

I don't wanna be here.

And I don't wanna be in anybody's band.

I wanna go."

He didn't go anywhere without me.

He said, "I'm gonna go down to New Orleans

and maybe work on an oil rig

in the Gulf of Mexico." And I said,

"have you told the other guys?"

He said, "no, I haven't spoke to the other guys.

I'd like you to do that for me."

"Tell them I wish them well,

and I'll see them down the line."

So I walked him down the street,

and I put my arm around his shoulders

as we were walking along.

He felt beat up to me.

And I knew that he was really in pain.

My heart was breaking.

My partner, my brother...

Has left, has gone.

I don't know how to do this without levon...

But I'm gonna have to figure it out.

After levon left,

we had to get another drummer.

Mickey Jones was his name

and he was a terrific guy,

but, boy, they were tough shoes to fill.

Levon left a big hole.

We play all over Europe, and it just gets worse.

We were thinking, "maybe they don't like it here,

but when we go there, they'll probably feel differently."

- No.

Being in the trenches with Bob on this fight

probably reinforced their relationship.

I think they became closer under fire.

It's fun to revolt. Robbie's young,

and you know, throwin' it in the faces

of all these like, pissant,

you know, people that are in tweeds, or whatever.

I remember it well. The show was

in two halves. In the first half, Bob came out and did

his usual thing with the guitar and the harmonica.

In the second half, he came out with the band.

All through that second half, people were getting up

and walking out, shouting,

and Bob just came out and he said, "well, you know,

"you all may know this song. Um, remember how

it goes? Well, here's how it goes now." You know?

I remember saying to the other guys,

"this is good. They're wrong.

This is good."

And then you realize,

you're in a musical revolution.

There is something going on here,

and you have nothing to compare it to.

It just made US

feel like flexing our musical muscles.

We're gonna play this music in your face.

The guys that were with me on that tour,

you know, we were all in it together.

We were puttin' our heads in the lion's mouth.

I had to admire them for sticking it out with me,

just for doing it, in my book they were,

you know... gallant knights

for even, you know, standing behind me.

One day, we were just taking a walk

and looking in stores.

I see two really pretty girls.

We're taking a wonderful walk. It was

the springtime in Paris. There was a gathering of people

somewhere around the corner

who began to talk to US, and asked US what we were doing.

In broken English,

they say they're journalists from Montreal.

I'm like, "wow!

I'm from Canada too.

I'm from Toronto."

And they look like, oh, that's too bad.

And this whole thing at the time

between English-speaking and the French-speaking,

they were in a revolutionary spirit. This is when they were

putting bombs in mailboxes,

and it was rough going.

I'm on neutral territory, I'm in Paris.

He looked like family to me from the beginning.

It was like... I recognized him.

I am fancy dancing the best I can

to charm Dominique

into thinking I'm not a bad person,

I'm not the enemy.

And we've got to spend some time together.

We went to the concert at the Olympia,

and the crowd was roaring

in anger about electric guitars.

I didn't even realize

people were booing anymore. There was something

about her spirit.

There was something about her eyes and her smile,

and it was a fire inside her.

Even though I didn't speak his language,

I spoke a language that touched him.

I was definitely falling in love with Robbie.

When we got back to New York City,

I invited her to come and join me there,

and eventually she did.

The other guys in the hawks and myself

were trying to find a place

where we could start working on our music.

Albert Grossman, Bob's manager,

he had a place up in Woodstock, New York.

Albert was an anomaly in the world

of record business people.

He didn't wear a suit.

His had his hair tied back in a ponytail.

He looked like an overweight Benjamin Franklin.

Albert took very good care of his artists.

But as far as dealing with other people, he was shrewd.

Bob had moved up to Woodstock, got a house.

Albert would go up there on the weekends.

So Albert says, "come up to Woodstock.

There's so much room up there.

You can get a place.

You can make all the sounds you want."

It was a very welcoming possibility.

Rick found US this ugly pink house.

This is just what I've been

dreaming about all these years...

A sanctuary that we could go and write and create.

Oh, my god, I mean, a...

Pretty corny house, you know?

But it was perfect.

So we moved up to Woodstock.

We built a little studio

in the basement, just for writing purposes.

Garth, Richard, and Rick moved into this house.

I called Bob, and I drive him out there

to show him the place.

And he comes in and he looks at this basement,

and he sees all the instruments set up there,

a little tape recorder, some microphones.

He says, "can you record music in this place?"

And I was like, "yeah, we've got that little tape recorder.

It's not... you know, a recording studio,

but it's pretty good for writing and stuff."

He said, "listen, I've got a couple of song ideas

I've been kicking around. Maybe we could try them here."

Great! That's the spirit.

Bob would come by, you know,

every day for about a six, seven-month period,

and we'd... we'd get together every afternoon

six to seven days a week. And just from US

getting together and applying ourselves,

- a lot does come out of that. - In the living room,

there was a couple of typewriters,

because Bob wrote songs on a typewriter.

And he'd say, "guys, let's go, let's go.

I think I got something. Let's go." We'd all go downstairs,

we would record it.

No, not any Harmony,

but Harmony in the background like, ooh!

- You know, just...

- Let me hear you now!

Working with Bob, I saw a door opening.

He was making the possibility

of using poetry in songwriting

like I had never quite seen before.

It gave you a sense of Liberty.

You used to think, "I don't know if you can do that.

I don't know, is it all right to say that?

Can you express things in that kind of way?"

Boom, no rules.

Robbie is a real artist.

He is an amazing creative force.

I never saw him

without a little pad of paper and a pencil,

writing notes about everything.

Some thought, some idea

that he could use later in a song.

When Dominique was becoming my girlfriend,

her connection to French literature,

poetry, music,

was rubbing off on me.

The path that I was on intellectually,

boom, she altered it,

and I was being highly inspired

by what she was bringing to the table as well.

Albert Grossman was thinking about getting

the hawks a record deal.

So he said, "you need to record

a couple of your tunes so I can play them

for some record companies."

So we went into a studio,

and we got a session drummer.

I was really not satisfied with what we did.

If you have a... a table and one of the legs is missing,

it doesn't sit steady.

This was the sign,

it's time for him to come back. We gotta find levon.

We tracked him down and we told him

about the place we had and that we were

gonna get a record deal and all of this,

and you could hear the joy in his voice.

I remember meeting him

and he was such a nice guy. He was such a charming person.

There was a sense of relief

in the band that he was back,

and hopefully he would stay.

Moved into the house there, there was an extra spot for me,

and uh, started gettin' together,

and just putting songs together.

I had the sense that levon realized

he was coming back to a good thing.

They were on a salary,

they were able to make their own music.

Woodstock was full of young people and lots of girls.

It was better than being on an oil rig in the middle

of the Gulf of Mexico. Robbie played the tapes

that they had made, "the basement tapes".

Levon's reaction was

so extraordinary. He was blown away.

We had never that kind of time

on our hands, and there we are in the...

In the catskills, and we don't have a show to play that night,

so we were enjoying it, just sitting around, you know,

the freedom to go down and play some music,

or go outside and throw a football around at each other.

That was just part of a...

A lifestyle that we got to love

in Woodstock, you know, just being able to chop wood,

or hit your thumb with a hammer.

We'd be concerned with fixing the tape recorder

and getting the songs together.

We had come out with a different sound,

a different sensibility. The music didn't

sound anything like what we did

with Ronnie Hawkins, like anything we did

as levon and the hawks.

It didn't sound like anything we did

with Bob Dylan on the infamous tour, so having

a new name felt natural as well.

In the town, people'd say,

"oh, those guys, they play with Bob. They're in the band."

And we kept hearing,

"the band," "the band," "the band."

And it felt unpretentious, UN-jivy,

UN-cute.

Just strictly the band.

We had done a lot of pre-production work, of course,

at big pink. Robbie was doing a lot of the songwriting,

you know, and doing a lot more homework likely

than the rest of US. It was just a question of US

arranging them, and putting them together,

and making them as strong as possible

and working together.

I came back to the house one evening.

I thought, "I gotta do some writing

for this record that we're working on."

And I'm thinking, "what am I gonna write about?"

And I'm sitting there with a guitar,

noodling around.

I look in the guitar, and inside,

on Martin guitars,

it talks about where they're made.

And they're made in nazareth, Pennsylvania.

And it just, it was all coming to me.

Going from Canada

down to the Mississippi delta

when I was 16 years old,

characters and circumstances,

all of it started to come back to me.

And when I got to this chorus...

And I could hear these voices...

And the whole thing just blended together.

We discovered a whole

vocal thing that we weren't aware that we even had.

I remember listening to playbacks

after the sessions of songs and thinking,

"I really like this stuff.

And... I don't have anything to compare it to,

but I really like it, and I hope everybody else does

'cause I really think this is strong."

I was very excited playing this record for Bob.

He hadn't heard a note of it.

"The weight" comes on.

He's like, "wait a minute. Who wrote that?"

And I said, "I... I wrote that."

He said, "you wrote that?" And I could just see

the pride in his eyes.

I think I was in a little coffee shop

in redbank, New Jersey. Kid came in

with music from big pink and put it on the sound system.

It was late at night, after...

After the place was about to close down,

which was a fantastic moment

to be introduced to that music, you know?

And suddenly this music comes on and everything changes.

When I heard big pink, it was as if someone

had like, nailed me through the chest to the wall.

I was just immediately converted.

That was when cream was in its sort of, uh, mid-stage

and pretty much severed my connection with the other two

in the band. And I thought, "this is what I wanna do."

- It changed my life. - They weren't

reading out of the modern book of music.

They went to the source.

You'd say in the Caribbean, "they was musical

to the core, to the bone".

If there was any American musicians

that were comparable to what the Beatles were,

- it would've been them.

This is the middle of psychedelic era

in popular music, so something comes along

that is the antithesis of where music had been moving.

Here come all these voices that sound

like you've never heard them before,

and like they've always been there, forever and ever.

It was very clear the moment I met them

who they were and what they were about.

They were very grounded.

They were very strong. They were very secure.

They were gracious, like country people

are gracious, and they were totally in love

with their music, and they were in love with each other.

I never saw any jealousy, I never saw any arguments,

I never saw them disagree. It was always

supporting each other. They were five brothers,

very clearly five brothers who loved each other,

and I never saw anything but that. In the '60s,

part of the rebellion

was rejecting one's elders, rejecting one's parents.

The guys in the band wanted to say,

"hey, that's not right. We love our parents.

"They worked very hard to bring US up

and care for US." And so

they wanted to have a picture of their families in the album.

It was a magical time within this group.

We're getting somewhere.

They made big pink and then Robbie said, "we wanna go out

on the road." But then Rick drove his car into a ditch...

...and broke his neck.

It was a terrible car accident.

Rick was found wandering in the woods,

which is pretty extraordinary for someone who has

just broken his neck. He was

taken to the hospital and put in traction for

the longest time. We were all

quite scared as to whether he would recover.

We're canceling everything.

Everything just stopped.

Music from big pink becomes this thing,

and we don't show up. We never play a concert.

They're like, "who are these guys?"

We were becoming the most mysterious people

in the music business.

After we recorded big pink,

there is that thing of like,

"whoa, what do we do now? Can we follow that up?"

I was working day and night on musical ideas.

Rick got out of the hospital, and then

boom, we were back in the studio.

You hear timeless songwriting,

painting pictures and telling stories,

a cohesion

which is greater than the sum of the parts.

They were the very first band

who got it together in a country house,

which became a big thing.

When you shut out the rest of the world

and the city, and just concentrate on...

Music-making and performing and each other,

you get a different sort of result.

Taking some of that roots music,

a little bit of muddy waters, a little bit of Hank Williams,

no long guitar solos, it was

just simple, straightforward music.

Nowadays we call it americana.

I was in Boston.

I was sleeping on a couch,

and it was "I shall be released"

was what came on.

I thought, "oh yeah, there's... There's something. I'm

connecting with something here." That's what I thought.

I got an impression there was a lot of mythology going on.

You'd never really heard a sound like that.

It also it reminded me greatly

of 19th century literature, American literature.

Particularly melville. There's something

about the melville stories, and the sense of...

Searching the band brings to mind for me.

Each song is like a little John steinbeck novel.

Steinbeck also gives you these images of america,

of dustbowl america.

I spent quite a bit of time

with the band, and one of the things that Robbie said to me

was the fact that when he wrote a tune, he had

all these different singers who could sing the song.

And he could write lyrics, like, to write a song

knowing that levon was gonna sing it.

You know, you could be... You could write much different

to knowing if you were gonna have to do it yourself.

When they came together, something happened

that could not have occurred on their own

or individually. You know, something...

Miraculous occurred.

We were booked to play our first job

as the band at winterland, in San Francisco,

with bill Graham presenting.

We went up to San Francisco, like,

two days early. Robbie is sick as a dog.

I'm completely drained

and it hits me: The last time we played together,

everybody boos US everywhere we go, right?

Am I having some kind of stage fright thing?

He's got a fever of 103.

I'm saying to bill Graham, "we've gotta cancel. I'm sorry."

Bill Graham says, "impossible. There is

no way in the world that we can cancel this."

And finally bill says,

"what do you think about the idea

of US bringing in a hypnotist?"

A little guy, about 5'8",

black suit, white carnation, shows up,

and he puts him under.

And he's saying, "your stomach will feel

as calm as a lake.

Your head feels as cool as a winter breeze."

The next thing I know, my head doesn't feel

so bad. And I'm thinking,

"I'll be damned, I'm actually feeling

stronger and better than I was before."

He says,

"any time you start to feel too weak,

you look over at me

and I'm gonna say to you, 'grow.'"

And the crowd is yelling and we're playing.

And I look over at him and he goes, "grow."

This guy had to be onstage with Robbie.

This was the first concert I'd ever experienced with them,

so... what did I know? But I did,

I know that usually there's not a hypnotist onstage.

Everybody got their own starring moment.

Rick had his songs.

Garth got to do "chest fever,"

and Richard was brilliant.

So in those first year and a half,

- it was amazing.

Well, when we first went out on tour,

they were famous because of their relationship

with Bob Dylan, but here they were now as themselves.

This was the band. That brought about a fame

to them that they had never had before.

Announcer: Folks, the band.

And I got the chance to go and meet Robbie.

And I went up to Woodstock to hang with him.

And the reason I went up there was to pluck up the nerve

to ask him if I could join the band.

Maybe they needed a rhythm guitar player!

And I was wearing pink boots and I had curly hair,

just psychedelic. And they were

kinda really earthy.

And I was saying, "well, let's jam."

And he said, "we don't jam."

So it was a songwriting outfit.

Robbie's listening to the way

that each of them play, but the way they worked

as a unit was, like, incredible.

Rick was pretty dynamic,

and he was a very powerful energy.

Garth was shy, and I fell in love with Richard.

He was the most mournful, soulful thing I'd ever heard.

God, Richard was such a sensitive man.

Like a wounded bird.

But a beautiful, beautiful soul.

He was very fragile,

and we liked to drink together.

When you put US together, there was an instant bond.

Robbie, in a way, was kind of outside of that

because I saw Robbie as the straight guy.

He was a guy who we could drink with,

but at some point, he would lose interest in that,

you know, whereas me and Richard were the kind of people

that we would like to drink together,

but we'd drink... we'd like drinking even more on our own.

Just when the band was really hitting,

the difference between Robbie and the rest of the band was

his family was incredibly important to him.

He already had a baby.

Dominique was this incredibly vital,

smart woman that he liked hanging with.

She was incredibly beautiful. And the rest of the guys

were still trying to figure out did they want a family or not?

And they were consuming a lot of drugs,

playing a lot,

drinking too much, you know, everything else.

In Woodstock, it was...

At one point, car accidents. And the phone ringing

in the middle of the night to say this one or that one

had totaled the car or was in the ditch.

Rick, he was lucky, you know,

but it became far too

often that there were situations like that.

I had this mustang

that Robbie had bought,

and Richard wanted to drive it.

I said, "really, can you do it?"

And he said, "well, I sober up behind the wheel."

And I said, "please, don't go so fast,

you know, can you see? Can you see?"

And he said, "oh, I can see like a lynx."

You know, and I was naive, frankly.

We hit this curve, and it was like every...

Hit every cement pole in the curve.

We ended up in the ditch.

Then Richard lit a match.

And I thought, "you're gonna blow the car.

We have to get out." Push. "Get out. Get out."

We were at big pink and somebody

came rushing up and said...

"Richard's just had an accident and he's crashed a new car."

Levon you know, jumps into his corvette

and rushes to the scene,

and accidentally crashes into the police car.

The cop threw levon on the back of a car.

I think they handcuffed him. I don't know how long

it took me, you know, to really absorb the shock.

Richard could've killed Dominique.

What do you say?

It pissed me off.

But it was something that we weren't educated in

at the time, of dealing with alcoholism.

And all the things that you think you should do

is mostly the things that you should absolutely not do.

And after that, there was a whole period

where he didn't hardly drink at all.

So we were holding it at bay.

By this point, there was an experimenting going on

that led to heroin.

And I was confused that the guys wanted

to play with that fire.

That was devastating. Nobody had

any understanding of addiction,

that it's a mental disorder. And at the time,

it felt very much like a betrayal.

Robbie might've used,

he might've drank, he might've tried different things,

but he did not have that gene

that would cause him to become an addict.

He had a vision,

and nothing was gonna get in the way

of the vision.

If you think about the summer of 1969 into 1970,

music from big pink, I think Robbie wrote

less than half the songs. By the brown album,

he wrote maybe two thirds of the songs.

By stage fright, he was writing all of the songs.

And it wasn't that he wanted to do that.

Robbie would start writing, like,

at ten in the morning. And to be honest,

levon, and Rick, and Richard, were still asleep.

I loved writing with Richard.

Richard had a beautiful, melodic ear,

and he would come up with chord changes

I would never find,

but somehow it just wasn't happening for him,

and if I pushed too hard, it made him feel bad.

With Richard, it was really poignant.

I very clearly remember Robbie

pleading with Richard, asking him, do you have anything?

Anything to add to the song? Richard just didn't have it.

He didn't have anything to offer.

It was up to Robbie and garth, primarily,

to keep driving the basic creative force,

and hoping that their friends would keep on.

During the recording of stage fright,

heroin was being used.

It had an effect on their energy, their ability

to be present. Levon would sometimes be

nodded out upstairs, and it was a little sad, you know,

because he would come down, and you could still see a look

in his eye that was a little strange,

and it was-- it was difficult.

This is very different from the very energetic levon

that I used to know, who was always very wiry,

always up for action,

up for going after it, whatever it may be,

and now it was like sleepy time. That's not easy to deal with.

It's hard to connect with somebody

who's doing that, it's hard to trust,

it's hard to really keep a friendship going.

It was beginning to feel like a real fracture.

One day I said to levon,

"I can see what's going on. I know you."

And he was doing the junkie denial

and explaining and making excuses

and laughing and slapping me on the back,

and I'd never had this kind of an encounter with him before.

We don't do that. We don't lie to one another.

I still loved him, but something got broken

in that. It was like glass,

it was hard to put back together again.

It was not just an exasperation,

it was a feeling that Robbie could lose everything.

That brotherhood, that friendship,

that bond, that love that they had for each other.

They were terrific guys,

I loved them myself, all of them,

but when you begin to function out of fear

of losing something, it's maddening.

I think I wanted something that I couldn't have,

which was normalcy and a regular schedule.

After the children were born, my focus changed entirely.

Our children were elevating my life,

they were making everything

have a beautiful aura around it,

except when I had to go to work,

and then this darkness, this cloud came back overhead.

My family was my saving grace.

I had to go from Woodstock out to Los Angeles,

and while I was out there, I got a message

that this guy who had a record company

wanted to meet with me, and his name was David geffen.

In every band, there is someone

who ends up being the leader one way or the other.

Usually, the star is the lead singer.

In the band, it wasn't.

Robbie's a star. You put him in any group,

Robbie'll start talking, and telling stories,

and performing, and he's a star.

David geffen was a manager, a record executive.

He thought if he could get Bob Dylan to his record company,

that would cement him as the king of the music business.

David saw Robbie as a way to make that happen.

He started romancing Robbie.

David was incredibly candid,

incredibly straightforward,

and back in Woodstock, in the world

of Albert Grossman, and of Bob Dylan,

a lot was left unsaid.

There was something about meeting with David

that was so open.

I remember saying to Robbie,

of all the places you could live, why pick Woodstock?

Because Albert Grossman lives here?

I thought it was a shithole, I mean, I hated it.

I suggested to Robbie that he move to Malibu.

If you could imagine, that move to Malibu, sight unseen,

it was another twilight zone experiment.

You know? For me.

- I guess for all of US. - Robbie loved it.

It did feel like something fresh.

He woke up every morning at the ocean,

his kids loved it,

his wife loved it. You know, I remember Robbie saying to me,

what the fuck was I doing in Woodstock?

I was like, I'm gonna call the guys, tell 'em to come out here.

I thought it would be very stimulating for Robbie,

I thought it would be stimulating for the band,

and Bob was there.

Robbie was the one who suggested I meet him.

The next thing, David geffen is saying, you know,

it might be a great idea for Bob Dylan and the band

to play together again, and do a tour.

Bob had basically been in hiding in Woodstock

since the tour of '66.

David somehow managed to convince Bob

to come out on the road.

No one had seen Bob for years.

It created quite a stir.

It was what David geffen wanted,

but David was just pure, unleashed ambition.

The last time we played together,

in 1966, it wasn't very well received.

Now we go out, it was embraced

like the second coming.

We didn't change a thing; The world changed.

It was kind of a good feeling.

I had signed the band

and Bob Dylan to asylum records.

I had a handshake agreement with them,

because Bob Dylan said to me,

"is my word good for you?" And I thought, Bob Dylan,

he wrote "blowin' in the wind", "the times they are a-changin'."

Yeah, I'll take your word.

What I remember very clearly,

after the tour of '74, they went on tour as the band,

and not with Bob Dylan.

After a while touring, it was very noticeable

that there was change afoot.

We played a gig in Cleveland...

...Richard had been doing heroin,

and apparently he lost his stash.

Sorry about the delay,

Richard Manuel, the pianist,

has taken ill, he's being taken care of backstage.

The band is gonna go on in a few minutes without Richard.

Hopefully he'll be fine.

They actually played the concert

as a quartet, without Richard, and it sounded so strange.

I kept seeing a lot of looks between everybody.

Obviously very uncomfortable with this.

These guys were soldiers,

but Richard Manuel had a disease.

This band was a real band.

All those spark plugs needed to be ignited, or it didn't work.

At first it was Richard holding everybody back,

he wasn't able to play,

and that's why they called me out there,

to try to scare Richard straight.

Everybody, all of them

was good, young, honest, solid guys, all of 'em.

Two or three years later, they were different personalities.

The rhythm section had definitely fallen into

heavier drugs. And once again,

it was up to Robbie and garth, primarily.

Levon was doing things he'd never done in a million years

if it hadn't been for drugs.

Levon often complained about our lawyer,

about our manager, and it was a kind of paranoia.

I would often say, "don't worry,

if anybody is taking advantage of US,

we are gonna stop that immediately."

But a bitterness set in with him.

Vivino: Levon felt something was being taken away,

you know? But families, man, nobody can feud like a family.

Families can go to the grave feuding.

If a person is getting a little more attention,

resentment can set in, you know, and jealousy.

Robbie kept moving forward, and not everybody could follow.

This is different now. This is hard.

This is kinda painful.

This could be tragic.

I don't know why we're doing this.

Robbie told me he just didn't wanna

go on the road with a suitcase full of heroin.

Robbie was planning the next step in his life.

I've always had that sense, way back

from when we cut the first album and we knew we had something,

and he said he wanted to work with ingmar bergman.

That's not the usual thing that a rock n' roller would say.

"I wanna work with ingmar bergman."

There were many elements that brought this to a head.

It wasn't only because of drugs,

after you've been together for 16 years, you think,

"we need to be able to catch our breath."

I thought,

"if we could get off the treadmill,

if we can go and take care of ourselves,

we might be able to come to our senses."

My solution was,

let's bring it to a culmination in the name of music.

That's how we fight back on this.

And we did.

The concert came together so quickly

it was almost shocking.

I think we started planning a month before we did it.

We decided to do it with our friends.

And that's why we felt comfortable

with the idea of doing "the last waltz".

I'm thinking, we should document it properly.

Let's think of some filmmaker

who could tell this story.

Robbie called me one day,

and he said, "these are some of the names in the lineup:

Joni Mitchell, Neil young, Van Morrison, muddy waters,

Eric Clapton."

Worse comes to worse, the library of congress

will have 35mm footage of these extraordinary people,

performers and artists, and that would be it.

What it became, really, it was a celebration.

It was a celebration. It was all the influences of the band.

Woo! Big time, bill!

Big time! Big time!

Ronnie Hawkins,

when I was 17 years old with him, I would play

and he would come over and fan the guitar

like it's gonna go up in flames if I don't cool it down.

It was just, it was so heartwarming.

Aaaah!

I went out with the boys a month early

just to see the rehearsals because I didn't know

a lot of these people, I'd never met 'em. I knew who they were,

big stars.

You see a lot of weird things out there,

and they paid 35,000 cash

right in front of me for a little ole bit of cocaine.

I snorted a couple lines and I said, "boys,

there's enough flour and sugar in this shit

you'll sneeze biscuits

for three fuckin' months after you snort this."

And they ended up buying another one.

All I remember is that it was more of a celebration

than feeling sad.

If I didn't know all these great-- all these people,

and that was a good gig, it was fun.

There was no pondering it.

It was only gonna happen once. You know, hey, presto.

It was a crazy idea, but we prepared so well.

I remember doing charts as to how to shoot, where to shoot,

which camera picks up which performer,

which lyric, which verse, the chorus, what instrument.

I said, "we shouldn't show the audience

reacting during songs.

We've seen it, so we stay on the stage."

We had hoped to get the way the band works,

the looks, the glances, the moves.

So I decided to stay onstage

with the performers, and how they relate to each other.

And that was the key to the whole piece.

When I found out who was on the bill,

I thought, "my god,

this is huge," you know?

The main memory I have of that thing

is obviously my strap coming off.

Whoa!

His strap broke, so I jumped in.

You've gotta cover his back, he was our guest!

And then he's like, "wait a minute, pal,

let's not get too fancy over there."

What I remember about it, it was just...

So free, it was...

And I mean, nobody knew what was gonna happen next.

And I loved it, I loved it.

I didn't want it to ever end.

"The last waltz"

was such a beautiful thank-you

to this wonderful journey that we'd been on,

and the amazing experiences we had.

The whole thing was so moving.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you. - Thank you very much.

We need a little bit more of the harp

in the intro and in the first turnaround.

You want a little bit more, like, grit on it, or...

Yeah, just a little more atmosphere. Not so dry.

Yeah, got it.

We did "the last waltz"

with the idea that we would put that away,

take care of one another a bit,

and really come back together again

and make music like we had never made before.

That was our dream. That was the idea.

Everybody just forgot to come back.

I was the first one

who was heartbroken, in a way,

because I loved the band so much,

you know, and it felt like

it's closing this book, this chapter.

If somebody had said,

I've got a couple of tunes started,

we're dying to go in and create some music,

I would've said yes in a minute.

By that time

I don't think you could've kept the band together.

Everybody had something they wanted to do,

and after "the last waltz,"

we started chasing those dreams.

Some years later,

levon was having a tough time.

And out of that,

his anger was aimed at me.

In the end, levon contended that somehow

he should've gotten a lot of the songwriting revenue.

And he just got more and more pissed off.

I can see why

levon might say something like that,

because he was really good at helping arrange.

But Robbie wrote all the songs.

Robbie was writing songs when he was 15 years old.

And the rest of the boys helped arrange the songs,

which is a little bit different.

Levon's point was that these were five guys

that all played a role

in making the band what it was.

I mean, the combination of those five guys was so unique,

and so he felt as though Robbie

were claiming all the credit for himself.

You could kinda see in levon, through this bitterness,

that because of his interpretation of what happened,

he was really hurting, you know?

He just let it chew him up.

When levon ran out of money,

that's when he went crazy,

because he had been living high.

But levon's kind of like me, he gets mad

and says things he shouldn't say, and goes crazy.

Levon and Robbie were best friends,

were brothers, I mean, levon showed him the ropes.

So it was very sad

that that's how he felt

and that, you know, that's what he believed.

Years later, I got a message

that levon was in the hospital

and he was dying.

I got on a plane and I went to the hospital.

Levon wasn't conscious anymore.

His daughter was there and she took me into the room,

I sat with him and I held his hand

and I thought about

the amazing times that we had had together.

We'd been on the front lines

of two or three musical revolutions.

And now we're just left with these memories.

So I sat with my brother, and held his hand.

You know, I said,

levon, I'll meet you on the other end.