The Last Waltz: Long, Hard Road

The Last Waltz (1978), Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary document of the Band at the terminus of its career, is a concert film about the euphoria of live music—though unlike other rock-and-roll documentaries, which tend toward the light and hagiographical, it also understands the ways in which a lifetime of performing can begin to unravel a person. Those two ideas, held in balance—music can be ecstatic to witness yet devastating to create—give The Last Waltz unprecedented depth. Every astonishing moment, from bassist Rick Danko’s wailing through “It Makes No Difference” (one of the purest and most despairing songs ever written) to the room-quaking glee of “Such a Night” (featuring the New Orleans pianist Dr. John), helps build a true and exhaustive portrait of five men straddling a chasm.

By the midseventies, the Band was brittle, tired, banged-up. The group had been playing together since the late fifties, when they first came together in Toronto to back the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins; a few years later, they did the same for a gone-electric Bob Dylan. Between 1968 and 1975, the Band released several near-perfect records: Music from Big Pink, The Band, Stage Fright, and (with Dylan) The Basement Tapes. They spent those years playing, playing, playing. The Last Waltz records their final moments onstage, after they had made the decision to retire from touring forever.

Long-haul musicians often end up writing at least one dire and worn-out song about life on an endlessly looping road—all that travel starts to corrode the senses. It seems significant that the first sentence we hear spoken onstage in The Last Waltz is neither generous nor kind. Robbie Robertson, the Band’s ungovernable songwriter and lead guitarist, has just shuffled back onstage for an encore. “You’re still there, huh?” he says to the crowd. “We’re gonna do one more song, and that’s it.” Scorsese, too, is not especially interested in what the crowd wants or needs in this particular moment. His camera stays on the players. It is Thanksgiving Day, 1976, in San Francisco. The Band reassembles behind Robertson and starts to play “Don’t Do It,” a groovy, pulsing take on Marvin Gaye’s “Baby Don’t You Do It,” which was written by Holland-Dozier-Holland in 1964. The song itself is pleading—“Please don’t do it, don’t you break my heart”—but whereas Gaye’s rendition is tender, plainly lovesick, the Band’s version sounds nearly mocking. They know we don’t want them to go. They’re going anyway. “Good night,” Robertson says, his voice flat. “Goodbye.”

Though the Band had pitched The Last Waltz as a celebration—why not close out their touring career with a dynamic, indulgent, star-filled party?—the film is plainly elegiac, a kind of weary coda to an era that had culminated at the end of the previous decade, at Woodstock, when pie-in-the-sky ideas of peace and love had become most firmly rooted in the popular imagination. The Band had played the festival, though its set was ultimately cut from Woodstock, the definitive documentary released in 1970. I’ve always found that omission cruel and ironic, considering that Woodstock was nearly a hometown show for the Band. The group had been based in the Catskill Mountains since 1967, when Danko first rented a pink four-bedroom house in West Saugerties and they set up a legendary basement studio. In Testimony, his 2016 autobiography, Robertson writes about leaving New York City’s West Village and resettling upstate with his girlfriend and their ever-expanding brood of house cats. The countryside changed the way the group wrote: “Don’t know if it was because we were living in the mountains, but mountain music started to find its way deep into our vocabulary,” Robertson recalls. The Band’s songs grew rootsier, looser, more dynamic. A few years ago, my family moved from an apartment building in Brooklyn to a small cabin about twenty miles west of Big Pink. I’m not especially prone to thinking about geological energies, but after some time in the area, I nonetheless caught myself keying into certain vibrations. I suspect the Band felt them too.

Robertson and the others thrived in the makeshift studio at Big Pink, but grinding it out on tour started to feel like punishment. For rock musicians of a certain era, this kind of work—sauntering out in front of a shrieking crowd, rotgut whiskey sloshing in an open bottle, lit cigarette listing between the frets of a guitar—was tangled up with punishing ideas about masculinity, toughness, authenticity. It was easy, back then, to conflate self-destructive behavior with freedom; that was the whole beautiful, paradoxical ethos of rock and roll. But after a certain age, the road—where damaging vices are easily indulged, where “home” fades into a foggy and abstract idea—becomes its own kind of addiction. By 1976, Robertson, at least, was overcome by ennui. He was feeling superstitious. Plenty of friends and fellow travelers had been undone by the lifestyle. Besides, his son, Sebastian, was just two years old, and Robertson wanted more time in New York with his family. He started to speak about touring as if it were a form of incarceration. “Sixteen years on the road is long enough,” he tells Scorsese in the film. “Twenty years is unthinkable.”

The summer before Scorsese shot The Last Waltz, pianist Richard Manuel fractured his neck in Austin, Texas, after a boat carrying him to a festival gig hit a wave at the wrong moment and tossed him backward into the water. He had been prescribed six weeks in traction, but, according to This Wheel’s on Fire, drummer Levon Helm’s 1993 autobiography, “someone found a team of Tibetan-trained healers at a foundation in Dallas, who came and gave Richard some therapy and told him to go to bed for three days.” The Band was back at it shortly thereafter, playing a show at the Palladium in New York City. “Richard looked ill, and no one was smiling,” Helm writes. It’s easy to point to Manuel’s accident as the primary reason the Band stepped back from the road, but everyone was feeling the ramifications of drugs, of rootlessness, of too much time away. “On any given night, something or somebody would be broken,” Robertson writes in Testimony. “On some nights we could hit our stride, but more and more it was becoming a painful chore.”

According to Robertson, the choice to stop was agreed upon by everyone involved: “No one was opposed to the idea,” he writes in Testimony. Helm remembers it differently—that Robertson made them quit. Helm pushed back: “I’m not in it for my health,” he told Robertson. “I’m a musician, and I want to live the way I do.” In the end, though, Helm didn’t have much choice but to acquiesce. “I went along with it like a good soldier, but for the record, I didn’t get a lot of joy from seeing the Band fold itself up,” he writes. That original lineup recorded one more album, 1977’s Islands. But by the following year, they had played together for the last time.

Robertson had met Scorsese at a 1973 screening of Mean Streets. Robertson was adamant that the Band work with a filmmaker who “had a special relationship with music”—who understood its grammar—and he appreciated Scorsese’s utter devotion to the art. In 1976, they met for dinner at the Mandarin Restaurant in Beverly Hills. Scorsese, then just thirty-three, was shooting New York, New York, a musical starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli; his schedule was full. But Robertson’s pitch—this would be an expansive and singular swan song for one of the greatest bands of its generation—was too enticing to ignore, and Scorsese signed on to direct despite the conflict. It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker understanding so instinctively what the mandate was. Scorsese not only knew, he went so far as to put it on a title card that kicks off the movie: “This Film Should Be Played Loud!”

Nothing about the production was simple. At first, The Last Waltz was set to be shot on black-and-white video, then on 16 mm film, then on Super 16 mm film, then, finally—ambitiously—with five or six 35 mm film cameras running continuously. Robertson’s primary visual inspiration for the film was Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, an intense, dreamlike, and deeply beautiful experimental film from 1930. It’s a lofty and complex reference point for a rock-and-roll documentary, yet the entire evening ended up having a whiff of the hypnagogic. Robertson selected a 1935 collage by the French surrealist Georges Hugnet for the show’s poster.

It was Graham’s idea to have servers in formal dress deliver Thanksgiving dinner to all five thousand people in the audience. (This required the acquisition and preparation of enormous quantities of food, including more than four thousand pounds of turkey.) While the turkey was being sliced and plated, the Berkeley Promenade Orchestra played classic waltzes, urging couples toward the dance floor. Boris Leven, the film’s production designer, borrowed sets from the San Francisco Opera’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata and hung several chandeliers that were reportedly also featured in Gone with the Wind. There were backlighting and amber footlights and spotlights. There was a row of generators. The dressing room at the Winterland was reimagined as a kind of paean to cocaine: its walls were covered in plastic noses, a tape of sniffling sounds looped over the stereo, and a glass table was set up with an array of drug paraphernalia. Everything was outsize, garnished, fussed-over. Before the show, Robertson had his red 1959 Stratocaster guitar dipped in bronze.

Robertson wrote “The Weight” at Big Pink, on a Martin D-28 guitar with the words “Nazareth, Pennsylvania” printed on a label inside the sound hole. He has said that the lyrics are a mix of characters he recalled from time in the American South and the films of Luis Buñuel (Viridiana especially—and the idea, as Robertson understands it, that “no good deed goes unpunished”). It is possible to hear the chorus as a kind of cheeky metaphor for sexual relations, a double entendre in the filthy and exhilarated spirit of the Delta blues. For years, rumors that “Fanny” was Canadian slang for gonorrhea persisted. Yet it is also possible to read the chorus as ardent and sincere. Give me your suffering—I can bear it. That’s how the Staple Singers understand it. “Take a load off, Fanny / And, and, and / Put the load right on me.” My God. At the end, Mavis Staples merely whispers, “Beautiful.”

There are many unforgettable moments: Van Morrison, in a sparkly crimson vest, roaring through a performance of “Caravan” that feels so rich and vast it’s hard to believe there’s just one guy at the microphone. Toward the end of the song, Morrison is kicking and punching the air. And what of Dylan, in a leather motorcycle jacket and a white fedora, leading the Band through “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” while Robertson solos like a maniac? I’ve never heard Dylan deliver the first line of that chorus—“I would do anything in this God-almighty world!”—with more power or certainty.

At other points in the film, you can sense the Band’s listlessness (it flashes across Robertson’s face most often). But their exhaustion only makes The Last Waltz more miraculous. That a group in this state—tottering on the edge of total physical and spiritual collapse, at odds about the future, unsure of their loyalties—still managed to sound so awake and transcendent is one of rock’s grandest mysteries. In this moment, the Band reminds me again of the landscape that nurtured it—in particular, the final weeks of autumn in the Catskills, when the light is warm and arched, and the trees have briefly exploded into deep, psychedelic color. Seemingly overnight, it’s all gone, dead, done. We can only feel gratitude that it ever happened at all.

The Last Waltz: Long, Hard Road

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