Bob Dylan (12 page)

The Band headed into an intermission—during which poets, including Emmett Grogan, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, read—with “Acadian Driftwood.” Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were brought back to sing harmony, since they are Canadians, and it is a Canadian song. It did not really hold together. The concert began again, some forty minutes later, with Garth’s long intro to “Chest Fever”—this time, it was more stately than playful—followed by the song itself, and then “The Last Waltz,” which has something of the feel of “Long Black Veil” to it. The next tune was “The Weight.” I have heard the Band perform this song a dozen times, and never, until this night, did it ever seem to come off. Garth plays piano on “The Weight,” and there has always been something so crazed, so country-time about his notes, that has always made it impossible for the rest of the group to follow him. But here, he played with some semblance of order, and the song was shining.

Immediately, Bob Dylan came on, plugged in, and hit the first notes of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” His rhythm guitar was turned up, or mixed up, so loudly that everyone else was drowned out; the sound was rougher, shriller, faster and harder than it had been all night. Dylan rocked out. He danced across the stage, striding off-mike after every verse. His guitar was ringing. He shouted into the mike, tearing off a song he and the Hawks had used as a centerpiece for their shows in 1965 and ’66, slowed the pace with “Hazel,” from
Planet Waves,
and cut back into “I Don’t Believe You,” also one of the finest numbers from the Dylan-Hawks shows of ten years ago. It was a powerful, lyrical piece then; it was this night as well. Dylan swaggered; there was a great urgency in his performance, and unlike those of some other singers, no solemnity and no reverence. He was noisy, and he never stood still. After “Forever Young” he segued without a break—in fact, there hadn’t been a break in time of so much as a note between his songs—back
into “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” He was on, some said, for twenty-five minutes; I would have bet on seven.

The concert reached a formal end with “I Shall Be Released” (“Well,” said a friend, “at least they didn’t do ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’”)—and predictably, everyone, plus Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, came back to sing the finale. That over and the stage cleared, Levon and Ringo laid down a vamp until more musicians—Dr. John, Clapton, Wood, Carl Radle, Neil Young, Steve Stills, and various members of the Band—came back for long and rather typical jams. After thirty minutes, the Band returned alone and punched out “Don’t Do It.” That done, they did. They left.

It was a long night, and until the appearance of Ringo-Woods-Stills (plus Jerry Brown, not dressed in a suit, who waved), there was no sense of super-session. In the main, the people who played together made music only they would have made together; they pushed each other past their limits, and they broke through the nostalgia that was built into the show.

Exactly what is over is not easy to tell. No one expects that the Band’s farewell will turn out to be much like Smokey Robinson’s goodbye or any of David Bowie’s retirements. Perhaps what is over is simply a set of songs, those songs the Band has been playing, and not escaping, for so long. It may be that part of the reason they decided to end their time as a public band was that their own music had driven them into a corner; perhaps they needed to orchestrate an end in order to start over, as individuals, and as a group. Certainly there will be more solo projects; the official line is that the Band will continue to record as the Band, but save for the live album of the Last Waltz, I wonder how long it will be before their name appears on another LP.

The fact is that the Band has never been, to their fans or to their detractors, just another top-flight rock ’roll band; they have always been special, and it was the very idea of a group of men sticking together over the years that along with their music made them special—it was that, no doubt, that made them unique. I’m not truly ready to deal with the likelihood that the songs the Band put into the American tradition now exist only on record, nor am I able
to lay to rest my doubts that the Band has, whatever their intentions, closed only one door.

Weeks ago, I asked Robbie Robertson if a last concert meant the Band was breaking up, and he seemed both surprised and amused at the idea. “The Band will never break up,” he said. “It’s too late to break up.” Well, I hope so. But that line from “Mystery Train” stays in my mind, as does the performance the Band and Butterfield gave to the song, as does a thought from Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, where he wrote that his encounters with the Band taught him that if anything really good were to happen, it would be a long time coming. A long time coming, and a long time gone.

 

The Band,
The Last Waltz
(Warner Bros./Rhino, 2002).

22 May 1978

 

Martin Scorsese lives in the Hollywood hills. His house instantly announces itself as the home of a filmmaker; except for a small Catholic triptych, movie posters are the only form of visual art in the place. Dominating almost every room, they’re of all sorts: arty German collages for Scorsese’s
Mean Streets,
a placard for
Rebel Without a Cause,
a hilariously effete tableau from Stewart Granger’s forgotten
Saraband for Dead Lovers,
a huge ad in which Gary Cooper demonstrates how to fire two pistols simultaneously without dropping Paulette Godard. But this night—just following the first major screening of
The Last Waltz,
the film Scorsese has made of the grand farewell concert the Band staged in San Francisco on Thanksgiving night, 1976—the talk is all rock ’n’ roll.

The Last Waltz
is, by a long way, the best concert movie I’ve ever seen; it is, in a way, far better than the concert itself. I have my
complaints. As he has for so many years now, Garth Hudson remains nearly invisible, and the sound mix doesn’t give his music the prominence it deserves. Richard Manuel doesn’t get the space on the screen he deserves, and his piano is often hard to catch. Still, the impact of the film swallows such reservations, burns them out.

The movie is first a set of performances: the Band as the Band, and the Band with an all-star line-up of friends, mentors, and collaborators. Segued through the film are brief snatches of talk with the Band, a sort of casual meditation on the sixteen years the five men spent as on-the-road rockers, starting in Toronto in 1959 and on as Ronnie Hawkins’s bar-band Hawks, finally emerging on their own, nearly ten years later, with
Music from Big Pink
and
The Band
—their first albums, which, no matter how many the group has made since, still define them.

It’s a long story, and a good one, but in Scorsese’s house little is said of
The Last Waltz.
I want to absorb it, and Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, who produced the picture, want to escape it. Scorsese has put on Van Morrison’s
Astral Weeks,
and we’re simply listening. It’s an album of transcendence: transcendence of childhood fears, adult sins. “Madame George” comes on—“That’s the song,” Scorsese murmurs. I can’t help telling him he’s picked my favorite record of all time, but he’s way ahead of me. “I based the first fifteen minutes of
Taxi Driver
on
Astral Weeks,
” Scorsese says, “and that’s a movie about a man who hates music.” I mentally scurry to recover images of the film so I can figure out what Scorsese means; he must be talking about the sense of doom, or anyway fate, that Morrison insists on.

Scorsese pulls out a Ray Charles album; the song he wants us to hear is “What Would I Do Without You,” from 1957. It’s a slow, tragic blues ballad; there’s the assumption of a happy ending, or at least of resolution, in the lyrics, but not in Ray Charles’s singing. “Leave out a few Billie Holiday tunes, and there’s more heroin in that music than in anything you’ll ever hear,” Robertson says. “Heroin does something to your throat. It makes the voice thicker. Listen.” We do; the title of the song takes on a new, acrid meaning.

“We used to do it,” Robertson says, “‘What Would I Do Without You,’ after we left Ronnie, when it was just the five of us, before Bob, before
Big Pink.
But we couldn’t get away with it. The song was too down, it was death. That’s what it is. People would just sit there, or they’d leave.”

I’d never even heard of the song, and I asked Scorsese how he found it. “It’s the flip of ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So,’” he says. “I heard Alan Freed play it.” In 1957 Scorsese was growing up in New York’s Little Italy, and Freed, the only disc jockey who can be called a founder of rock ’n’ roll, was ruling the New York airwaves. The soundtrack Freed provided for Scorsese’s life later turned up as the soundtrack of
Mean Streets.
“I bought ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So,’ and fell in love with the other side; I bought the 78. I’ve still got it. Right here.”

I mention
American Hot Wax,
the new movie about Alan Freed, but Scorsese and Robertson don’t want to hear about it. To them—Robertson, living in Ontario, was picking up Freed’s original Cleveland broadcasts before 1954, when Freed left for New York—Freed was a real person, a titan. To me, a Californian out of range of Freed’s signal, he was, until well after his death in 1965, no more than a name in the papers from the time when the payola scandals broke. I don’t mind seeing Freed’s life turned into myth; Scorsese and Robertson do. In a crucial way, their own lives are up there on the
American Hot Wax
screen.

“Alan Freed
talked
to me,” Robertson says, as if he can’t quite believe it happened. “We played his shows. The only person who could follow Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks was Jackie Wilson. Alan Freed
loved
Ronnie Hawkins.” I’m stunned; I knew the Hawks, the Band, went a long way back, but I’d never thought of them as taking their first steps right at the center of rock ’n’ roll history, which is what the shows Freed put on were. I try to picture Levon Helm and Robertson, the first of the Band to join Hawkins, sharing a stage with Jackie Wilson.

“You’re a little kid,” Freed said to Robertson in 1959. “How old are you?” “Sixteen,” Robertson replied. “The hell you are,” said Freed—surely worried that along with his indictment for inciting
to riot in Boston (“The cops don’t want you to have a good time,” Freed had said from the stage after the police turned up the house lights), he’d soon be facing charges for violating child labor laws. If you’ve seen
American Hot Wax,
imagine Helm and Robertson—in suits, with narrow ties and short hair—huddling in the wings of the Brooklyn Paramount, psyching themselves up for an audience of New York kids like Martin Scorsese, unconsciously preparing themselves to write and sing “The Weight.”

 

 

The premise of the Last Waltz concert—staged by Bill Graham at Winterland, where, seven-and-a-half years earlier, Graham had produced the Band’s post-
Big Pink
debut—was inescapably sentimental, and Scorsese attacks that sentimentality with his very first shots.
The Last Waltz
opens with Rick Danko at a pool table; Scorsese has him in very tight close-up. The sudden violence of the image is a shock: Danko rams his cue right across the screen with a noise that seems as loud as any in the movie, and whatever mood one might have brought into the theater is broken. “You want to put the other guy’s balls in the pocket, and keep yours on the table,” Danko explains in answer to Scorsese’s query about the game he’s playing. “It’s called Cutthroat.”

Emotionally, Scorsese then cuts not to the warmth of the concert, but to the determination behind it: the concert footage of
The Last Waltz
begins with the concert’s end, as the Band returns to the stage—well after the formal, predictable “I Shall Be Released” finale—for “Baby Don’t You Do It,” the Marvin Gaye tune that had for years stood as the hardest number in their repertoire. Settling into place behind mikes and instruments, the members of the Band look less like tired, satisfied men who’ve just presided over their wake than like the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday cleaning out the last pockets of resistance at the O.K. Corral. For a few seconds, until the film moves on, that’s also what they sound like.

The Last Waltz
is a surprise to the eye: It doesn’t look like a rock ’n’ roll movie. There’s no handheld camera work; it’s all smooth dolly shots, zooms and framed images, and, in the numbers
shot after the concert on an MGM sound stage, elegant crane and tracking shots. Instead of simply watching people play music, we often get to see how the music is made. We pick up the cues one musician tosses to another, the moments of uncertainty and panicky improvisation.

There are historic performances and extraordinary film sequences: Ronnie Hawkins, huge and unbowed, a forty-one-year-old Mike Fink, railing out Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love”; an almost black screen, lit only by a single blue-white spot on Paul Butterfield and Levon Helm (the other lights had failed) as they take “Mystery Train” around a cliff at eighty miles an hour, nearly raising Junior Parker and Elvis from the grave. Muddy Waters holds the screen for almost seven minutes in brutal close-up: he declaims “Mannish Boy” like a voodoo preacher arguing down Saint Peter for a seat in heaven, or maybe talking the devil out of a pit in hell. Muddy Waters first recorded before most of the men in the Band were born, and it’s all they can do to keep up with him. Waters takes his place in the Band’s story; they earn a place in his. Throughout, the sound (as opposed to the clean but often flat sound of the three-LP
Last Waltz
album) is raw, crackling, shaking; when, at that first screening, Van Morrison appeared in the film to sing “Caravan,” he blew out two speakers in the theater.

The film does more than record the presence of the performers. Often, it gives them more presence than they have on stage. Joni Mitchell, swaying her hips for “Coyote,” is mesmerizing; she acts out the role of a goddess on the make, an image only slightly undercut—or reinforced?—by the pack of cigarettes jammed into the waistband of her skirt. Neil Young, as usual, arrives as a refugee from the Dust Bowl, but the way he’s shot roughly intensifies his persona: hunching his body over his guitar, as if he can’t hide his face with his shoulders, Young looks like a child molester, a bad dream—and then he opens his mouth and sings “Helpless” in the voice of a little boy who’s scared of the man we’re watching.