Robbie Robertson. THR. Pitchfork.
Their final performance on Thanksgiving in 1976 was documented by Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz, which was released in 1978 and is widely considered an all-time classic music documentary.
I haven’t seen “The Last Waltz” and kind of want to (it is available on Criterion) but I’ve seen it described as “Martin Scorsese interviews Robbie Robertson. Also, he interviews some of Robbie Robertson’s friends about how great Robbie Robertson is.”
In 2020, Scorsese produced Once Were Brothers, a documentary about the Band based mostly on Robertson’s accounts.
…
Some of the Band’s biggest songs were “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and “Up on Cripple Creek.” Music from Big Pink, 1969’s The Band, and 1970’s Stage Fright were critical and commercial hits, with Robertson taking the bulk of the songwriting credit and thus getting a larger share of the group’s money. Helm was consistently vocal in his claim that the majority of their songs had been written collaboratively and that Robertson’s publishing share was unfair. In the 2020 documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, Robertson—one of two living members of the band upon its release—claimed that the others had not contributed due to their drug use.
I may be being a little unfair to Mr. Robertson, but it seems like everyone in The Band who wasn’t Robbie Robertson didn’t get along with him. When one person has an issue, okay, one person has an issue. But when the entire band has issues…
On a related side note, should I give pigpen51 a guest account here and leave writing the music-related obits up to him?
This is breaking news: Johnny Hardwick, who voiced “Dale Gribble” on “King of the Hill”. IMDB.
Edited to add: THR obit for Johnny Hardwick.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2023 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Movies, Music, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
I don’t know about writing all the music related obits, but I do have a note or two about Robbie Robertson and the Band. Aside from Once Were Brothers, and The Last Waltz, there was one more documentary type movie made about the Band.
Ain’t In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm is the only one of the three that I have watched. In the last days of his life, Levon Helm was reduced to holding weekly jam sessions in his home, for friends and neighbors, in order to get enough money to pay his bills. He did put out a last album that won a Grammy, but he refused to attend the ceremony, due to the way that he had been treated in the past. He found out by phone that they had won during one of the jam sessions.
I watched this documentary on Kanopy, a service of libraries.
Also, my condolences on your loss to you and your other loved ones. And I am sorry that you had to make a trip like that on such a somber note. Here’s to better days ahead.
Thank you, pigpen.