BEFORE: So this was going to be the slot for "The Last Waltz", because that's a very prominent concert that I've heard much about over the years, and I've never watched it. This was probably the biggest glaring omission from my dive into rockumentaries in 2018, and once I saw the cast of the Dylan documentaries, I recognized the names of the members of The Band, and I saw my opportunity to squeeze in "The Last Waltz" not only as connective tissue, but a strong concert that I should definitely move out of the "never watched" column. And a few months back I noticed it was available on Amazon Prime, so great, that's a done deal, right?
But I signed on to my wife's Amazon Prime account last night to find FOUR listings for "The Last Waltz", two older ones that were now unavailable, and a newer version, perhaps re-mastered or some kind of special anniversary gold edition, for rental at the ungodly price of $14.99. Of course, if I'd tried two months ago I could have seen "The Last Waltz" for free, and I'm certainly not paying $14.99 to see it when it's available on iTunes for $3.99.
So I was about to sign off from Amazon on the downstairs TV and pack up my gear to go upstairs to iTunes on my computer, when I saw the listing for this doc, right next to "The Last Waltz" in the recommendations. Wait, the "basement tapes" were a thing, right? And they were recorded after Dylan's motorcycle accident, but before "The Last Waltz", somewhere in the years between 1966 and the 1974 tour, right? So that means this film is a documentation of the chronological connective tissue - "No Direction Home" ended with Dylan's accident, and "The Last Waltz" was recorded in November 1976, so this is kind of like the missing piece in the Bob Dylan puzzle - maybe.
I don't have any extra slots, I've already got an eye on December and how I need to get from "Hellboy" to a Christmas movie in under 12 movies, so I can't just drop in another unplanned film without having an effect on my 2020 endgame - but I can't pass up this opportunity, either. Maybe "The Last Waltz" can wait one more day. Maybe "Black Widow" won't get released in November, and I'll have to move "Hellboy" to early October and I'll gain one more slot that way. Maybe "The New Mutants" won't get released in August and I won't have to watch the connective tissue to include that one, and if I just watch "The Addams Family" instead, I'll gain three more slots. I can't possibly tell if watching this today is going to screw up my December plans, in August maybe I'll get more insight if theaters fail to open up. Who can say?
But in the meantime, why not follow the story of Bob Dylan and turn this into a little documentary trilogy, with Bob & Company carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"?
THE PLOT: The story of Bob Dylan and The Band, the legendary amateur recordings they made together in Woodstock, their re-invention of American music and their continued relationship during the late 1960's and 1970's.
AFTER: I always thought that The Band was perhaps the least creatively band name in history - like, how did that come about, right? Or else maybe it was the most pretentious, like "We are THE Band", the most notable band among all the bands. Finding out that The Band came together as a backing band for Dylan, much like The Eagles formed out of Linda Ronstadt's backing band, sort of explained a few things. The marquee would naturally read BOB DYLAN in big letters, with whatever band name was backing him in much smaller type, so a very bland, nothing-like name such as "The Band" was perfect, nobody was coming to the show to see the backing musicians anyway, so the less it distracted from BOB DYLAN, the better, and in that sense, "The Band" was perfect.
But it could also have been part of many an "Abbott & Costello"-like comedy routine in the 1970's. Like:
"Hey, I heard you got concert tickets, who's playing?"
"The Band"
"I know, it's a band, but which band? What's their name?"
"The Band"
"Well, OK, that's weird, but who else is on the bill?"
"Guess Who."
"I don't want to guess, just tell me the name of the 2nd band!"
"GUESS. WHO."
"Will you just tell me the name of the band already! Never mind, is there a third group playing?"
"Yes."
"Well, are you going to tell me the name of the third group?"
"YES!"
"Then TELL ME ALREADY!"
But by now we all know the story, right? Well, parts of it I knew. It turns out that the members of The Band were formerly The Hawks, and the Jayhawks before that - Ronnie Hawkins was a country rocker from Arkansas who moved up to Toronto for greener pastures, and instead of importing musicians for a backing band from the U.S., which involved a lot of paperwork, he tried recruiting local Canadian musicians and teaching them his songs. This was probably also cheaper, and since the Canadian musicians were having a tough time getting hired to play in Canadian bars, it worked out well for everyone. Ronnie Hawkins called his band The Hawks, Levon Helm did come up from Arkansas, but the new recruits for the Hawks were Ontario natives. The group gelled together, maybe a little too well, because Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel left to start their own band. (This seems to have happened quite often to Hawkins, a later incarnation of the Hawks took off to form Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band.)
Around this time, shortly after Dylan "went electric", he was looking for a back-up band for his 1965 tour, and someone recommended Levon and the Hawks. The team of "Bob Dylan and the Band" performed those half-electric concerts in Manchester, UK and other places, resulting in many boos and someone screaming "Judas" at Dylan (this concert was recorded and mistakenly released as "The Royal Albert Hall Concert", when in fact it was recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall). Then, as we know, Dylan came home, had his motorcycle accident and didn't tour again until 1974. But is that what really happened? Apparently there's a theory out there that there WAS no motorcycle crash, that Dylan entered drug rehab instead, and when that was done, went right into making the "Basement Tapes" with The Band in his house up in Woodstock, NY. That's right, Dylan lived in Woodstock a few years before the big concert in Woodstock, and when the big concert happened there in 1968, he was not in the line-up. Instead he was probably just yelling at all these hippie kids to get off of his lawn.
I have to admit, some things about the motorcycle crash just don't add up - if Dylan had a drug habit and then broke a few vertebrae in his neck, as the story goes, then pain medication for the back injury would have been problematic. Doctors don't tend to prescribe painkillers to addicts, or if they do, then those addicts have a much tougher time after back or neck surgery when they have to get weaned off the medication, and some people end up getting addicted to those painkillers, worse than if they were addicted to recreational drugs. And then a couple years later, Dylan appeared to be clean and adopted his new "Christian" image? Not knowing or being able to confirm anything, somehow the drug rehab story seems more likely to me - also, a convenient "accident" would allow Dylan to get away from the fans who had been booing him on the last tour, and also to then focus on making more music without worrying about what the fans thought about his live performances.
Anyway, for whichever reason, accident or rehab, Dylan stopped touring in July 1966, just a few weeks before the next tour was scheduled to start in New Haven, CT. (Hmm, Dylan was also being rushed into the next tour by his manager, Albert Grossman, and the motorcycle accident happened very close to Grossman's house. New theory - the fake accident was Dylan's way to send a message to his manager that he didn't want to go on the next tour.). But Dylan had The Band (minus Levon Helm, who had left to go work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico) in a NYC hotel, plus he paid drummer Mickey Jones in L.A. for a year to keep him available for touring, so in early 1967, Dylan called The Band and told them to move up to Woodstock so they could record something. (If you're keeping track, that's 7 months for Dylan to recover from a back injury. I'm no expert on back and neck injuries, either, but this seems like a very speedy recovery. I think I'm on to something here, Wikipedia is telling me that no ambulance ever was called to the scene, and Dylan never went to the hospital for his injury - so there you go.)
Anyway, this was the kick-off of a very complicated relationship, where Dylan played with The Band to work out songs and be involved in a sort of free-form, collaborative process, and then every few months, Dylan would fly to Nashville and record a professional album with a different group of session musicians - these albums were "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville Skyline", which included the songs "All Along the Watchtower", "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", "Lay Lady Lay" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", among others.
Meanwhile, what came to be called "The Basement Tapes" produced a wild mix of American folk songs, covers, and a few things that later became hits for Dylan, like "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" or hits for other recording artists, like "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)". Some songs like "This Wheel's on Fire" ended up being recorded on The Band's first album, "Songs from Big Pink". (The members of The Band had rented a big pink house in nearby Saugerties in order to live close to Dylan during this time.). The Basement Tapes also led to what is frequently called the first real prolific bootleg album, "The Great White Wonder", and then some songs from the sessions were released in a big double-album by Columbia Records in June 1975. But consider that these sessions went on for a MONTHS, with maybe 10 or 15 songs being played each day, so the commercial output is probably only a very small sampling of what was recorded.
Look, I think even by this point Bob Dylan had amassed the kind of career where he was free to do whatever he wanted, especially if he was the one footing the bill and signing the checks. If he wanted to keep The Band on retainer in one city while he flew to Nashville to record an album for commercial release, that was his prerogative. If he just needed these guys handy to noodle out some ideas on a daily basis, then put the best of those songs on his next album, or not, that was certainly his right. But considering how The Band was also putting their own first album together at the same time, perhaps this was something of an uneasy alliance. Or maybe this represents a coming together of performers with similar interests, sort of a marriage of convenience, where all the parties involved got something out of the relationship. Also, by this point Dylan was married and had two kids, with a third one on the way, and maybe he just needed to be home for a while to enjoy this.
Whatever happened, however it happened, on some level it seemed like it needed to happen. The Band got their first album out of the deal, and then went off and toured on their own, though they re-joined with Bob Dylan in 1968 for a concert tribute to Woody Guthrie, and again in summer 1969 for the Isle of Wight Festival. Then of course they toured again with Dylan in 1974, as was mentioned in the "Rolling Thunder Revue" film, and that means I've come full circle, this is where I came in two days ago. Consider the important of the Basement Tapes thusly - when the Beatles came back together to record their "Get Back" sessions, their goal was to record in the honest, live, no-frills, no-overdub down-home style of, you guessed it, Dylan's Basement Tapes.
If I'm judging this one as a FILM, it's maybe a little heavy on the "talking heads" format, because the people interviewed here are mostly rock critics and rock biographers, not the rockers themselves - though they did score an interview with one member of the band, Garth Hudson, but he's very old and largely incoherent. I would have liked for this one to lean a little more toward the playing of music, because it is my Big Summer Concert Series, after all, but for shedding light on one little important corner of music history, it's not that bad.
Also starring Garth Hudson (also carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Mickey Jones (ditto), Derek Barker, Robert Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Sid Griffin, Ronnie Hawkins (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Barney Hoskyns, Charlie McCoy, John Simon, and the voice of Thomas Arnold,
with archive footage of Levon Helm (last seen in "Coal Miner's Daughter"), Rick Danko (also carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Richard Manuel (ditto), Robbie Robertson (ditto), Johnny Cash (ditto), David Crosby (ditto), Roger McGuinn (ditto), Eric Clapton (last seen in "Concert for George"), Neil Diamond, Albert Grossman, George Harrison (last seen in "Filmworker"), Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Paul Kantner, John Lennon (last seen in "Filmworker"), Paul McCartney (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Joni Mitchell (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Yoko Ono (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine"), Earl Scruggs, Grace Slick, Ringo Starr (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Ronnie Wood, Neil Young (last seen in "Quincy").
RATING: 5 out of 10 angry British fans
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