Robbie Robertson on 'The Last Waltz'

On The Band's farewell: "We saw what the dangers were"

This Thanksgiving weekend I noticed the diminished cultural memory of two pivotal events that have been long remembered: The assassination of John F. Kennedy (Nov. 22, 1963), and the Thanksgiving night concert known as “The Last Waltz,” Nov. 25, 1976 at Winterland in San Francisco. I attended that show and wrote about it for short-lived Gig magazine (the Substack story is linked here). I slept in three places in the Bay area: The Chinatown Holiday Inn when I arrived; the couch of the late Ed Ward in the then-year-round rock star city of Sausalito in Marin County; and the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown, where many of the performers stayed, and where one could order sake from room service for a deep Japanese bath. About a year and a half later, Martin Scorsese’s movie “The Last Waltz” was about to open, and Robbie Robertson (1943-2023) was in New York to talk about it. Besides a few prudent edits, the article appeared in Long Island’s Newsday on April 30, 1978.

THERE WAS nothing small-time about The Last Waltz. It was a concert held in San Francisco a year ago last Thanksgiving to mark the final performance by The Band, which was retiring after 16 years of touring.

The Band — Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson — was aided by virtually the entire rank and file membership of the Federation of Anglo-Canadian-American Rock Stars of the World. The concert showcased The Band as both the lead group and as back-up band for Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison, Paul Butterfield and Ronnie Hawkins. It also featured cameo appearances by Ron Wood, Ringo Starr and other friends and acquaintances from the last two decades.

As you might have expected from such a one-of-a-kind conglomeration of rock all-stars, the concert begat both an album and a movie. The three-record live set and two-hour feature film have both recently been released (the film opened Wednesday at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan). Both have their merits. In fact, the movie of The Last Waltz is more enjoyable than the actual concert in San Francisco was.

The Last Waltz is directed by Martin Scorsese, who, despite his Hollywood success with Taxi Driver, and failure with New York, New York, seemed an appropriate choice for the film. Scorsese's early film Mean Streets showed the director's almost unconscious understanding of how to make rock songs work in a dramatic visual context. Before Mean Streets, music fan Scorsese had edited films such as Elvis on Tour and Woodstock.

Robbie Robertson, the leader of The Band and producer of The Last Waltz, handpicked Scorsese for the job. "I've been a movie buff for quite awhile. I know filmmakers, and I know who can do what," said Robertson in an interview at the posh Pierre Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 61st Street in Manhattan. "For my purposes, Scorsese was the only show in town. He knows music better than anyone, the only film director who could get from A to Z on this movie without having to be totally re-educated."

Scorsese, apparently, was enthusiastic about doing The Last Waltz movie despite the fact that it came at a time when his career as a major movie director was gathering momentum.

"It couldn't have been worse timing," Robertson said. "But he said yes immediately. He knows the music, the people, the songs so well. His feeling was that it was never going to happen again. No amount of money was ever going to get all of those egos together at one time. That flower thing is gone. There are no more Woodstocks."

Indeed. Those who go to the movie looking for the kind of spiritual catharsis its stars were able to provide a decade ago may well be disappointed. The music maintains a high degree of efficiency thanks to The Band's years of experience as a back-up band for Arkansas rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and then for Bob Dylan, and its own many years on the road.

But because the concert was more of a sampling of greatness than an exploration of it, there are only a few exhilarating moments. One of them is provided by Eric Clapton, who unleashes one of the most masterful guitar solos of his career in 'Further On up the Road'.

Another comes from the stage-shy perfectionist Van Morrison, who shares a duet with The Band's Richard Manuel on "Tura Lura Lura (That's an Irish Lullabye)" before taking center stage for an inspirational rendition of his 'Caravan'. The song contained a revelation of sorts. For years, many people in this metropolitan area assumed that the song, which alluded to "turning up your radio," contained a reference to New York disc jockey Scott Muni. But it's clear that Morrison doesn't sing: "So you know, Scotso," Muni's former radio nickname. He sings, "So you know, it's got soul." Another illusion shattered.

The film, in fact, is full of illusions. Scorsese and Robertson assembled a team of cinematographers for the movie that matched, in depth and experience, the abilities of the musical performers. Among the six Directors of Photography are Laszlo Kovacs, Vilmos Zsigmond and Hiro Narita, all champions in their field. The movie of The Last Waltz, the first 35-mm rock concert movie, possesses a clarity and cleanliness that those who survived the actual concert might find amusing.

To underline the planned majesty of the event, promoter Bill Graham served turkey dinner for 5,000 the afternoon of the concert. By showtime (9 PM), the floor of Winterland was thick with the remains of 5,600 pounds of turkey, one ton of yams, 18 cases of cranberries and 400 gallons of apple juice. (There had also been a vegetarian table, for which Bob Dylan had bought and flown-in from New York 300 pounds of Nova Scotia salmon.)

But neither the feast nor the audience figure prominently in the movie. "That's on purpose," Robertson said. "When you see all that food, it has a gross, decadent look to it. It wasn't like that at all. It was sweet, all those people eating and dancing to that [waltz] music."

Robertson and Scorsese also agreed that films featuring cutaway shots of the audience, or interviews with members of the audience, had become a rock movie cliché. Instead of using that, Scorsese intermixed musical footage with interviews of The Band in various settings, including their Malibu recording studio, Shangri-La. The questions, posed by Scorsese, were mostly softball lobs that could be answered with a clever sentence or two. "We didn't try to tell The Band's story," Robertson said. "But it's obvious there's a story there."

That story, however, has best been told by The Band in its albums. After eight years of backing Hawkins and Dylan, the group retired to a house in upstate West Saugerties in 1969, where it recorded Music from Big Pink. A reaction to the psychedelic indulgences that had saturated rock at that point, Music from Big Pink marked a return to basic home and family values, as well as to a musical discipline that had been missing from rock for years. Even its generic name, The Band, reflected the members' attempt at egoless identification with the music.

Music From Big Pink and the follow-up album, The Band, made this group America's most influential. Combining rock, blues, country, rhythm and blues, Cajun music, white gospel, Dixieland and whatever else instinctively came to mind, this four-fifths Canadian band (drummer Levon Helm is from Arkansas) made a music of mystery and myth that helped give rock fans a sense of continuity and of community despite the social upheavals of the time.

Many critics feel that The Band's creative hold wasn't sustained after the first two albums (though the third, Stage Fright, remains notably underrated). Robertson doesn't disagree. "Inconsistency is the word for it," he said of The Band's later records. "When we made our first couple of records, we were rebelling against what was going on in music. After that, we were rebelling against ourselves. There were things we were going along with, but which we didn't believe in. We saw what the danger was. So much [of the music business] is not natural to a person's basic emotional capacity. You're blitzed by it. Things become what they're not, and like everyone else, we became sidetracked by it."

The sidetracks included various drug, drinking and personal problems, and a more general loss of creative thrust. There is an underlying sadness in The Last Waltz, the realization that even artists with the best instincts can be consumed in their prime by the high-pressure realities of the music business.

The Band continues to exist as a recording entity; a new studio album will be recorded in June or July. At least two of the members of the band — Levon Helm and Rick Danko — have been unable to resist the lure of the road, and have formed new bands for the promotion of their solo albums, neither of which has matched The Band's records at their most unfocused. (Generally, that low point is generally regarded to be the Cahoots album.)

Robertson is taking advantage of The Band's demise as a touring unit to work on a wider range of projects. Among them is a long musical work "something like a symphony, but not of that structure," that he said is "80 per cent finished." He and Scorsese are thinking about doing a new movie project after Scorsese finishes directing his latest feature, Raging Bull. There's a movie idea that Robertson is working on with John Huston, and there are endless offers for Robertson to produce records by other artists.

One of the surprises provided by The Last Waltz is Robertson's screen impact. He has the moves and look of a matinee idol, and the presence that some established actors might envy. Scorsese has insisted that Robertson should try some serious acting, which Robertson said embarrasses him. "I just say, listen, I'm the producer," he explained somewhat shyly. "I never really thought about acting."

Right now, however, Robertson is luxuriating in getting away from the grind of a perennially touring rock and roll band. "The retirement from the road gives us our chance to survive it," he said. "How many times do you go around on a merry-go- round before it finally throws you off?"

© Wayne Robins, 1978, 2024

Thanks to Rock’s Back Pages of London for digitizing my own back pages.