The Band’s final concert, The Last Waltz, which was held on Thanksgiving, 1976, featured The Band, an assortment of celebrity guests, a brief reading from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a horn section, an estimated 8,000 pounds of cocaine, and exactly 90 gallons of gravy.
It’s odd how few people talk about the 90 gallons of gravy. They’re truly the unheralded stars of The Last Waltz, which was held in Winterland, Bill Graham’s legendary concert hall in San Francisco, and filmed by Martin Scorsese.
Ted Nugent was the headliner the following night. I think the Motor City Madman would have brought The Last Waltz to the next level. Truly, the only thing missing at The Last Waltz was a guy in a loincloth playing “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
Instead of Nugent, we get Neil Diamond, who came on looking like the doppelganger of Jim Jones and sang the forgettable “Dry Your Eyes.” How did he end up at The Last Waltz? That’s what an apoplectic Levon Helm wanted to know. He said to a cowed studio manager, “Go to Robertson to tell Neil Diamond we don’t even know who the fuck he even is!”
The answer was simple. Robertson had recently produced Diamond’s LP Beautiful Noise and wanted to give the album some free publicity. And the song Diamond performed, “Dry Your Eyes,” was co-written by Robertson. It’s a lousy song, but I suspect it gave Robertson’s ego a stroke.
Here’s a fun fact—Robertson spends the concert singing his heart out. It’s inspiring. The chords in his neck stand out! Trouble is, it’s the greatest scam this side of Milli Vanilli, because he couldn’t sing a lick. The techies solved this problem by turning Robertson’s vocal mic off, something they’d been doing for years. So the concert film is a lie. Listen to the show, and you won’t hear Robertson, his histrionics aside, because he was never there in the first place. And Robertson had to know it.
What’s more, the album is almost all overdubs. Robertson and Scorsese heard the original tapes and blanched, then coerced The Band into coming in and redoing their parts. Helm was the only player to say, “Go fuck yourself,” and the irony is that his was the only performance that didn’t need overdubbing. The consummate pro, Helm got it right the first time.
If Robertson and Scorsese were the villains of the film, the heroes included Van Morrison (who disappeared before his performance to return to his hotel because he didn’t like what he was wearing). One can only wonder how sartorially atrocious that original outfit was, because the one he wore on stage was hideous—it glittered, was defiantly gaudy, and, worst of all, was skin-tight. The shirt was beyond form-fitting. It had a scoop neck that revealed a pudgy barrel chest that no one wanted to see.
But if Morrison cut a comic figure, he exploded like an IRA bomb when The Band went into “Caravan.” He stormed across the stage, repeated the same lines (“Turn up your radio”) until they became a mantra, pronounced “radio” like you would “radish,” and in general put that barrel chest to maximum use. He looked mildly annoyed when Robertson cut him off with a guitar solo, but I think everyone was.
But he saved the best for last, doing leg kicks across the stage like a pudgy Rockette until he exited stage right. The audience went crazy. His was the finest performance of the night. And to think he hadn’t been on a stage in two years.
Fun fact: during the evening, somebody shouted “Freebird!” And Lynyrd Skynyrd’s CV-240 hadn’t made its rendezvous with the swamp in Gillsburg, Mississippi, yet.
Robertson was the guy who broke up the band, but he insisted every time he was asked that The Band was only defunct as a touring act—they would go on, Steely Dan-like, as a studio band. “The Band will never break up,” he said. “It’s too late now.”
For the record, the band never entered a studio, and it never happened because Robertson didn’t want it to happen. He’d mostly stopped writing iconic masterpieces, and he knew it. It would be eleven years before he released a solo album, Robbie Robertson, and despite the all-star cast, it’s a pompous, overproduced bore.
The other boys in the band waited years for a phone call from Robertson calling them together. The phone call never came.
When Helm called his Arkansas attorney to say he planned to refuse to do The Last Waltz, said lawyer informed Helm he didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. His advice? Do it, puke, and get out.
For the record, Neil Diamond didn’t exactly enrapture the crowd. Who wants to see Jim Jones singing a mediocre song they’d never heard in their lives? Why didn’t he just sing one of his old classics? And why a do-nothing track from an album that, bad as it was, included several hits? I smell a Robertson.
Two thousand pounds of peeled yams.
Ronnie Hawkins was so happy to be at The Last Waltz, there was real fear he’d go kaboom like an oversized bouncing betty.
Scorsese caught a lot of shit for never once turning his cameras on the audience. No shots of them eating their Thanksgiving dinners, no shots of them dancing, nothing. He may as well have filmed the concert on a soundstage in an empty room and added some canned audience applause. It makes you wonder if the starstruck director even knew the audience was there. If so, they weren’t worth his attention. He had rock stars, the only real people, to camera ogle.
One of the show’s other stars was Neil Young, who wore a maniacal grin and an Army greatcoat and looked like a second-tier member of the Manson Family. He had cocaine eyes and appeared on stage with a giant chunk of cocaine suspended under his nose, which led to great consternation amongst both Neil’s people and the Scorsese camp.
And he almost certainly wouldn’t have appeared in the film had Scorsese not hit upon an ingenious solution—he set an entire team of editors to work methodically erasing the cocaine from every single frame in what the special effects people called a “traveling booger matte.” Oh, and Neil kicked the ass of “Helpless” with the aid of Joni Mitchell, who sang from behind a screen, looking very mysterious.
The Hawk, after watching the film with a very unhappy Helm: “Hey son, don’t look so glum. The goddamn movie’d be awright if it only had a few more shots of Robbie. Haw haw haw haw haw!”
In the end, Robertson may have been right about The Band. They were in decline, free fall actually. But I’ve always thought he was lying about his motives. He was always going on about how the road was an impossible way of life, and it was only a matter of time before death caught up with them.
What he neglected to mention was that he had an incurable case of writer’s block and would never write another song as great as “The Weight” or “Stage Fright.” Besides, he had other revenue streams to look to—he’d caught the film bug from new bestie Martin Scorsese.
Turkey, 5,600 pounds of it. Bullshit, 8,644 pounds of it. The Last Waltz may indeed be the best concert film ever made, but it spelled ruin for all but one member of The Band.
Levon Helm summed it up when he wrote, “He [Robertson]… deserves his place of honor in the history of our music. But to this day, I don’t fully understand why he had to let go of it the way he did. Some of us were going through bad times, and it was a sin not to reach out and help them if you were able. Music is a special category to my way of looking. It’s sinful, the things that haven’t been done for certain artists over the years. To me, it was unforgivable.”
The evening’s most interesting artist was Hell’s Angel Freewheelin Frank. He read a poem. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a big fat bore.
Richard Manuel lived in Mr. Ed’s stable for a while. When he was kicked out of another place, the cleaners found two thousand empty bottles of Grand Marnier. “Some of us were going through bad times…”
The Band changed my life. I’ve watched The Last Waltz maybe a dozen times. Mavis Staples’ performance never fails to give me goose bumps. But if you can’t mock a thing, I don’t think you can say you love it.
Bob Dylan closed the show. Of course. Who else could have? My vote goes to Van the Man!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
