BEFORE: Finally it's here, no more dicking around, no more adding documentaries I found on Amazon or Hulu that I wasn't planning on watching - it's time to watch what some people say is the greatest concert film ever made, no pressure. I've sort of been following Martin Scorsese as my guide on this year's documentary chain, if Scorsese's involved then I think the subject matter might have some merit, and he directed this one way back in 1976. Well, it was filmed in 1976, but released as a feature in 1978. Things just took longer back in those days, that was before the age of digital cinema, it might even have been before digital editing, so that means a team of editors had to live in a little booth for a year or so, just sorting, cataloguing and finally splicing together actual pieces of tangible film to create this. Old school.
The members of The Band carry over - Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson. I'm listing them in alphabetical order, but if you listen really close, you can probably hear them arguing over whose name should have come first.
THE PLOT: A film presentation of the final concert of The Band.
AFTER: Well, knowing what I know about The Band now, I think this one really holds up. I remember people watching this movie back when I had a part-time job at the NYU Library's media center, and in those days nothing was digital, if someone wanted to watch this movie at their station, someone like me had to put a VHS tape in a machine and then send the feed to their monitor. This was way back in 1987 or 1988, and I managed to still never get around to watching the film for another 32 years. But I do eventually get to everything, or at least I try.
Now, obviously this was NOT a track-for-track representation of the night in question, which was Thanksgiving 1976. The final concert of The Band started at 9 pm and their last encore was reportedly at 2:15 am, so this concert was over 5 hours long! Even if you allow for breaks between the songs, to change performers or set-ups or make mike adjustments or switch instruments, that's still a ton of material. The film is just under two hours long, and there are interview segments with members of The Band in between the songs, so that means some hard choices needed to be made - there was just no way to get all the music from the live show in to the film.
But that's OK. If you want to see all four and a half hours of the concert, it's available on YouTube now, in three parts. Maybe you'll agree with Scorsese's choices about which songs to cut, and maybe you won't, but that's what a director has to do, condense the time of an event so it fits into a running time that theater owners will be willing to show. Look, the 1970 concert film "Woodstock" is three hours long, but the festival went on for three DAYS? Should the film be three days long, too? I don't know, should a theater provide cots for people to sleep on? Of course not. Three days of peace and love had to be cut down to a manageable, watchable running time, and the same holds true here. I think somebody made a whole second film with the songs that didn't make the "Woodstock" cut, and you can watch that one, too, if you're really into it or you want to see what you missed in the first film.
You can't really second-guess a director like Scorsese, but people are going to go ahead and complain anyway, I suppose. The Band performed a version of their most famous song, "The Weight", but either it wasn't up to snuff or perhaps there was a technical error of some kind, because it was replaced with a version clearly recorded in a studio and NOT on stage at the Winterland Theater in front of a live crowd. But, on the other hand, it has the Staple Singers singing a couple verses, and gospel singers almost always make a rock song better. I much prefer the version of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" that was recorded live for the "Rattle and Hum" album over the one that was released on "The Joshua Tree", just because of the gospel choir (the New Voices of Freedom) that took the song to a whole different place. So I can perhaps see why Scorsese chose to edit in the studio version of "The Weight", it's really good.
Another common complaint is that the songs in the film are out of order - in fact the movie opens with The Band's final encore, "Don't Do It", before snapping back a few hours to the opening of the show. I guess the idea here was to end the concert film with the biggest, highest moment, which is the all-star version of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released". And in 1976, everybody knew that song, so everyone who'd been on the bill the whole evening, PLUS Ringo Starr, PLUS Ronnie Wood, was back on stage for the big finale. That just HAD to be the big, final moment of the movie, but then just before the credits, there's an instrumental performed by the Band, also recorded in a studio instead of on the stage, which happens to be a waltz, duh. Still, I wonder if the footage of "Don't Do It" as an encore could have worked here as well, since it does end with The Band walking off the stage for the final time - or would we all rather just remember them playing, rather than leaving?
(Look, the triple album released doesn't have the performances in the order they were performed, either. Time and space have to be considered differently when one is making a movie or an album. Sometimes the only way to experience the concert in the intended order is to actually go to the damn concert. Rock music fans are even worse than "Star Wars" fans, I think - they're always going to complain about what gets released, and HOW it gets released. There are professional people who edit movies or produce albums, and you'd like to think these people know what they're doing. If songs have to be moved around due to time constraints or to make a better listening order for an album release, these decisions are probably not made lightly. If you want to go spend five hours on YouTube watching the raw feed from the "Last Waltz" concert, you're free to do that now.)
I could spend a lot of time picking apart every track here, but since I only own The Band's Greatest Hits album, I wasn't familiar with some of their songs, like "It Makes No Difference" or even "Evangeline" - and this was after watching two other documentaries about The Band!. I knew "Stage Fright", "Ophelia", "The Shape I'm In", and of course "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek". You couldn't really sing some of these songs these days, because you can't be seen promoting "Dixie" any more, that's out of favor because racism, and you also can't say "cripple" any more, either. I'm surprised that the footage in "The Last Waltz" hasn't already been changed to sound like "Up on Differently-Abled Creek", if I'm being honest. "Up on Handi-Capable Creek"? And the only Band song that was apparently part of the set list that didn't make the film that I really miss would be "Life is a Carnival". I'd vote for putting that one in over, say, "It Makes No Difference". Plus, I think I only know "Chest Fever" from Paul Shaffer's band playing that instrumental during commercial breaks on Letterman's old show.
Some of the performances from the guest performers fit in very well, but others are questionable, to say the least. Neil Diamond's here performing one song, "Dry Your Eyes", a song he apparently co-wrote with Robbie Robertson, so I guess that justifies it. But Van Morrison performs "Caravan", and of all the lame Van Morrison songs (and there are many) I think that's one of the lamest. It's got like four lines before it just deteriorates into "La la la LA la" over and over, so it's one of those "I'll write this part later" songs to me, where an artist just never got around to finding more lyrics where the "La las" ended up. And Joni Mitchell brought the proceedings to a screeching halt by singing "Coyote", which I think was the song she wrote and performed during that Rolling Thunder Revue tour. I'm not a Joni Mitchell fan, not even "Big Yellow Taxi" - I just don't see the appeal.
(The Joni Mitchell song unintentionally highlights a key difference between men and women - the typical male-written rock song about a tour hook-up is something like "I met this chiquita in Omaha, we had a rockin' good time, but when the tour moves on, babe, you know I've gotta leave." It's plain, simple and honest. But the typical female rock song on the same subject is more like "The Coyote's at the door, he pinned me to the dance floor. I chased him into the desert but he faded away." It's way too enigmatic, and also needy. Joni Mitchell was like the Taylor Swift of her time, it turns out, making fans do the work to figure out who she slept with. HINT: It was Sam Shepard. Here's a thought, Joni Mitchell, maybe don't have affairs with married playwrights who have commitment issues if you want to be happy. But hey, you're an adult and you can have an affair with whoever you choose, but then maybe don't gripe about it in a song after it blows up in your face. Nobody cares, and I don't have time to figure out which married person you screwed around with.)
At another point in the proceedings, one Irish guy reads the introduction to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in the original medieval dialect, and that left me scratching my head, too. Another local San Francisco poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti read a parody version of the Lord's Prayer, and I don't see what either thing has to do with the American folk-rock music of The Band. I guess something had to happen on stage while the band took a break, got some water, or more likely, smoked some weed.
But hey, Ronnie Hawkins, The Band's old boss, shows up early in the proceedings to perform "Who Do You Love?", which should remind everyone that it's NOT just a George Thurogood song, it's been around much longer than that. Always good to see Dr. John, and Eric Clapton too. Watch for the moment when Clapton's guitar strap breaks during the solo on "Further on Up the Road", and he yells for Robbie to take over, which Robbie does with only a moment's hesitation. I doubt Clapton would have been so generous in sharing the solo if he didn't have to fix his strap, right? And don't hog the solo, you know Clapton's going to want it back sooner rather than later...
Finally, The Band's OTHER old boss shows up, Bob Dylan in a horrible old-lady hat comes on stage to lead "Forever Young", and from the brief conversation they have on stage, it's clear that his old backing band both respects and fears him. Dylan's in charge of the rest of the show, and The Band falls right back into their old marching order with "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down". (Someone in the crowd really should have yelled "Judas!" here, just for old times sake. How funny would that have been?)
Bob Dylan then looked like Adam Sandler playing Bob Dylan - I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring this up. They sort of sound alike when they sing, too. Did Sandler ever impersonate Dylan when he was on SNL? He must have, just like David Cross must have played Allen Ginsberg before. Can there ever be a biopic made where Sandler plays Dylan, and, I don't know, Bill Hader plays Robbie Robertson? Paul Rudd as Rick Danko, if he brings back his haircut from "Wet Hot American Summer"? Just free associating here.
In the end, this two-hour film represents a watershed moment, some say it's when the music of the 1960's really started to give up, considering that the next year disco took over, and then pop music kind of sucked until MTV kicked off the new wave in 1982. I say this may be the greatest group of musicians assembled on stage, at least after Woodstock and before Live Aid. (And then after Live Aid, there was really nothing comparable until that scene in "Blues Brothers 2000", you know the one. Or is that just me?)
I think I finally (maybe) understand the mentality behind "The Last Waltz" - yesterday I pointed out the discrepancy in Robbie Robertson trying to save the band by hosting a farewell concert. That didn't make sense at the time, but now it kind of does, when you consider that The Beatles went through the same thought process - in 1966 they decided to stop touring, to become a studio-only band. Nothing makes a rock band more money than touring, but nothing is tougher on a set of musicians than constant touring. And as I saw many times in my rockumentary chain in 2018, the process of releasing an album, then touring to promote it, then paying everyone involved, then financing the NEXT album, becomes a sort of never-ending hamster-wheel, where the band members are the hamsters. So perhaps Robertson was trying to save The Band by planning the final live show, but keeping The Band together to make more studio albums, but also allowing them to have personal lives (ideally drug-free, but whatever). And it's at this point that The Band apparently just forgot to come back together.
(Only they DID, which a lot of people forget - a few years after their "Final Concert", the other four got together to play some gigs without Robbie. I think he was just royally pissed that they didn't need him as much as he thought they would.)
(EDIT: Today was the anniversary of the infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan "went electric" and fans allegedly tried to boo him off the stage. Yep, that was 55 years ago today, so appropriate at least that Dylan was in today's film with the band who backed him on his first half-electric tour.)
Also starring Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Martin Scorsese, Bill Graham (all carrying over from "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band"), Emmylou Harris (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Paul Butterfield, Bob Margolin, Pinetop Perkins, Carl Radle, Mavis Staples (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Cleotha Staples, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Yvonne Staples, Ronnie Wood (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band & the Basement Tapes"), Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
RATING: 8 out of 10 turkey dinners
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