A Thanksgiving at the end of the road
On Thanksgiving night in 1976, Winterland Ballroom smelled of roast turkey and the end of a job. Bill Graham had fed San Francisco before The Band walked out for the concert Robbie Robertson said would be their last. Martin Scorsese does not treat that decision as backstage gossip. He films it as a rite. Sixteen years of road, from Ronnie Hawkins’s Hawks to Dylan’s electric wars to Music from Big Pink, sit in the room before a note is played.
Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson still sound like a band that learned songs by living inside them. The Weight and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down do not arrive as nostalgia. Helm sings as if the dust of the tour is still in his throat. Danko smiles the way a man smiles when he is leaving a house he loves. Manuel looks past the lights. Hudson, almost hidden, keeps the floor from collapsing, which is what his keyboards had always done.
Then the guests turn one ballroom into a map. Muddy Waters takes Mannish Boy as if the amplifiers were built for him. Van Morrison drives Caravan in a suit that throws light. Joni Mitchell sings Coyote. Neil Young leans into Helpless. When Eric Clapton’s strap gives way during Further On Up the Road, Robertson steps in without a speech. Neil Diamond sings Dry Your Eyes like a man surprised to have been asked. Dylan arrives late, in a white hat that refuses the solemnity, and the room remembers who taught this group to breathe in public. A few voices were added later on a soundstage. The weather of the night still holds.
Sixteen years on the road is long enough. Twenty years is unthinkable.
(Robbie Robertson, The Last Waltz, 1978)
The arguments began as soon as the plates were cleared. Helm would say the film crowned Robertson and nudged the others toward the edge, a producer’s version of a band that had never had a single boss. The interview segments, shot on an MGM stage, do give Robertson the longest sentences. The music keeps answering him. When the horns lift, or when Helm leans on the beat, the picture belongs to five people again. Released in the spring of 1978, The Last Waltz feels less like a party than like a jar with the air still inside.
What lasts is not a toast to the sixties. It is a record of a kind of American rock that trusted songs to carry history without announcing the lesson. Dr. John, Ronnie Hawkins, Paul Butterfield, the Staple Singers, Ringo Starr, Ron Wood: the credits read like a last roll call of a circuit about to professionalize itself out of nights like this. Scorsese, between harder years of his own, films sweat and courtesy with the same close attention he gives a story. The road they refuse is the one rock took anyway. The film stays at the table after the chairs are stacked.
