The Last Waltz

source: The Last Waltz

I believe this to be the best concert film ever. To start with,it's a series of wonderful performances from people like Ronnie Hawkins, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, shown through masterful lighting and the keen eye of Martin Scorsese. Then there is The Band. This is a group that embraces the world of folk, country, blues, bluegrass, rock and roll; has connections with Dylan; and are masters in performance. They are incredible musicians and arrangers who fill the spaces between guest performances with their outstanding work. One of the highlights comes away from the actual concert--that is Emmylou Harris doing a rendition of Evangeline with the Band in the background, featuring Levon Helm "harmonizing," shot in a cold kind of lighting, mysterious and a contrast to the festive being of the concert. It fades off and the applause comes up. It is quite eerie. I really enjoyed Neil Young--his manic presence and the haunting voice on Helpless. I can't wait to get this on DVD. I strongly urge people to see this. If you don't like some of the single performances, stay for the ride.

The Band was a fine group of musicians who put out some great songs. Marty Debergy (whoops, I'm getting ahead of myself) decided to film it in an apparent attempt to be more 'personal' than that of "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert", and failed utterly. Intercutting (including with hard audio cuts - I guess music is a visual medium to Scorsese) lame attempts at interviews (attempting, occasionally, to star himself), Scorsese manages to make a group of wonderful songs (and singers) into a fairly tedious exercise. "Spinal Tap" (by Rob Riener) skewered this movie and its flaws so completely that I cannot even look at the title without thinking of 'Tap'. I bought the (triple - vinyl) soundtrack, and it is a much more enjoyable without any of the drek of the movie. Check that out instead. For those who annouce this as the 'perfect' concert movie, I point them at "Rust Never Sleeps", made only a year later but a far better 'concert experience' movie.

This review is going to appear lower than what I say here. I like The Band. I love the variety of genres that are in their mix of rock. Blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, folk and jazz are all apparent in their sound. I've heard how good of a rock documentary this is (and how much of it was used as inspiration for the film "This is Spinal Tap") so I was looking forward to watching this. Instead, what you get is the Robbie Robertson ego trip, a film he made against the wishes of his fellow band members, in order to launch his career in Hollywood. That's why, while this is suppose to be a "farewell show", it never feels that way. Instead, it feels like a band at a crossroads with one of their key members ready to call it a day with the others ready to continue on. Levon Helm would confirm all of this in future interviews where he stated he was upset about the film. So what's good about the film? The music is solid and well done. You can't complain about that. - Some of the guests hit it out of the park (Muddy Waters and Joni Mitchell in particular are outstanding) - The cinematography is gorgeous What I don't like: The focus on Robbie as the "leader" is wrong. The Band was always a very democratic unit where all members were on equal footing. This film makes it seem like Robbie was the leader and the other members the sidemen. Kind of like what happened to Sting and the Police, Phil Collins and Genesis, Peter Cetera and Chicago, etc. This had a biased edit in place. - The inter spicing of concert footage with some "studio" performances was clunky and odd at times. Why, if the focus was the farewell concert, was it necessary to have closed studio performances? Seemed oddly out of place - Some of the guests seemed there to collect a paycheck and leave. Neil Young looked atrocious. Van Morrison seemed like he'd rather be anywhere else. - The interviews are pretty basic and insignificant - The boozyness and cocaine haze is scattered all over the place. I know drugs are a part of "rock and roll" but it gets a bit much after a while. It gets hard to take them seriously. - The conflict between Robbie and the others permeates throughout the film. One guy is ready to call it a day, the other four are not, and it's pretty obvious. Overall, it's a good film, but not this legendary thing that many make it out to be. I love good rock music, and The Band had good music, but the pedestal this film continually gets placed on is somewhat undeserved. Watch it for context, but understand the flaws as well.

It's, apparently, "the best rock movie ever made". I found it tiresome, and not really that interesting. It's more like a music video interspersed with some uninteresting prattle. Dull and uninteresting.

Spoilers herein Rock and Roll, despite its self-described rebellion, is about order. Blues is also about order, slightly but emotionally and predictably outside of order. They are both like a bad marriage -- charming at first but tedious in the long run. Country music and its incarnation in folk was then about storytelling. Some time around '66 Bob and Paul and John (and Brian and some others) started writing music cinematically. Some of the Beatles songs come from directly movies: 'All you Need is Love" is from South Pacific, for instance. But all of the later Beatles songs and Dylan songs from this period (beginning with "Tambourine Man") started life as cinematic visions, stories in pictures translated into lyrics and energy. For a good while there, cinematic music was a strong contender for our imagination in the music marketplace, with The Band as the lead vehicle. That's in part because of the mix of Garth Hudson and Levon Helm. Garth is all about discovered disorder. He calls it jazz because something similar often happens there, but disorder in the popular media is something else: Garth's vocabulary is all about lyrics with unexpected emphasis of the ordinary. It is blues outside the lines allowed by the tradition and jazz within street signs. It is beat made pretty. His inspiration is John Ford's innovation: Ford took a dull, bad cowboy actor and taught him how (in "Stagecoach") to utter his lines with an unexpected cadence. Thus began a tradition of performance "jazz" in film acting which Garth adapts and exploits. Helm is a storyteller, from a family of storytellers. The two, Helm and Hudson, together have crafted a novel and lasting entry in the art of cinematic music: stories whose rhythms in telling are different enough that they establish a sort of aural camera. The other members of the band are talented enough, but act primarily as transferral agents from other innovators and traditions rather than innovating themselves. Dylan was the primary experimenter in our age of language, mostly in sounds rather than cadence, until he met The Band while recuperating from a near-death experience. When he tied in with them, magic happened: stories, cadence, poetry, merged, all cinematically rooted -- and it transformed us all. Every one of us of a certain age passed through the portal of this music, following the progress through underground copies of the basement tapes and nearly unreadable late generation xeroxes of stolen galleys of "Tarantula." (This tradition of cinematic music with disordered cadence has been abandoned by the later Dylan, even in singing older songs. It is continued and extended in its pure form by Joni and Van, and was picked up as goofy irony by The Police, Talking Heads and some Genesis. But it is now all but dead and has been appropriated as soap opera by today's so-called country music. This concert was the end and we all knew it, even then. Compare the novel, odd phrasing of the recording of "Forever Young" to his earnest but flat phrasing here. Is it his conscious surrender, or something else?) As with music, so always with cinema: there was a similar battle in the world of film for control over our imagination. The notion of character-informed rhythmic storytelling was led by Scorsese (and Coppola). It is a deeply Italian tradition, as compared to more layered and experimental narrative traditions. That's why Scorsese wanted to do this and why he succeeds so admirably: it is cinematic music finally expressed in cinema, his variety of cinema. It is his only successful story. Is this the best concert film? Yes, in fact it may be the only honest film of a concert possible because the songs come to the film as the film comes to them. They probably never will again. Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Being a huge fan of the band one might expect that I would also be a big fan of this movie. This is certainly not the case. The idea of the Band in my opinion was for them to be a band with five equal members. Mr. Marty Scorsese obviously didn't think so. He must have been under the impression that the Band was a star vehicle for Robbie Robertson, like history has written, and not the group of equal musicians that slowly waltzed out of Big Pink. Like Levon Helm said in his book the band was based on the heart and soul of Richard Manuel, the genius of Garth Hudson, the songwriting of robbie robertson, the hopping rythm of Rick Danko's bass, all pulled together by the tight rythms of Levon and Richard. On top of all that the three best vocalists in rock music, none of which are robbie robertson. Even though half of the film is robbie singing his heart out from behind his ever changing Hollywood wardrobe, he is singing into a microphone that was turned off. Meanwhile you hear an amazing voice that comes from nowhere that you assume to be his but it belongs to the late Richard Manuel who is made to look like a clown in this movie. As far as Scorsese's interview segments go you've got four guys who don't want to be where they are talking about some things they don't want to talk about with an interviewer that they couldn't care less if they never saw again. Then you have robbie robertson trying his best to turn the interview segments into a Hollywood career (which must have come to a complete halt when everyone saw his performance in the Crossing Guard). It's a shame that this is how these folks are remembered, on screen at least, when footage exists of much finer concerts in Japan (Without robertson)that were never officially released. Part of the reason for this is that the rest of the Band didn't have the love for business and money that robertson pumped into the Last Waltz. With the exception of Manuel (who hung himself on a shower rod after a modest turn out at a small venue) the rest of the Band would've been happy playing anywhere for the rest of their lives. And basically, they all did. Sorry if this got a little off track. Buy the albums starting from Music From Big Pink before you ever watch this movie!

If you, as a music lover, have ever wondered what it would be like to see a concert starring the very cream of the crop from the sixties and seventies, you have that opportunity now. Martin Scorcese has produced a film that should be mandatory viewing for anyone who calls themselves a rock lover. While all the performances are memorable, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and, of course, The Band are incredible. Beyond the music, the very premise of the concert is amazing: A big bang to end the era, thanksgiving dinner for thousands, a wicked lineup, great music and some really enlightening interviews. The Last Waltz is a must see if you are a fan of the rock&roll genre, as The Band and friends not only play their hearts out, but also pay tribute to the sound that we all know and love. Watch it, you won't regret the time spent.

Either I'm getting older or the world's getting younger, but when a rock concert documentary film airs on TCM, there should be some sort of pause for a reality check. In a salute to WALTZ'S director Martin Scorsese, the film aired on TCM over the New Year's weekend. I hadn't seen it or thought about it in 25 years. And all I can say is that it hasn't lost any of its power. (And this from someone who's never been to a live rock concert.) The stars of the film- the all-purpose backup and touring band called 'The Band-' give a simple but enlightening insight to the mechanics of their 16 years on the road and how their Thanksgiving Day final concert in San Francisco turned into a revival-like celebration. Even though I grew up on jazz music more so than rock, I can fully appreciate The Band's intense, immense music background- influenced by everything from blues to country to folk music. As for the concert itself you have the likes of Neil Young, Ron Wood, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, and Dr. John (who gives a standout, honky-tonk performance of "Such A Night,") kickin' it on stage before it's all over. And if these live performances weren't enough, there are additional performances done on a sound stage with artists that weren't part of the live show woven into the 117-minute film: a fabulous folk/gospel jam session of the song "The Weight" teamed with the Staples Singers (lead by Mavis Staples, who sounds very Gladys Knight-like) and about thirty minutes later shifting gears into the lovely folk ballad "Evangeline," replete with fiddle, mandolin, and acoustic guitar from Emmylou Harris. Also cool is Muddy Waters bluesing on "Ain't that a Man," and the finale with all the artists of "I Shall Be Released." You just might be.

This movie was only a name to me until I saw it last year. Immediately, I was riveted by everything about it. I've always been a casual fan of The Band, and of Levon Helm in particular. However, I'd never been bowled over by Bob Dylan, except as a songwriter, so much of The Band's work remained unknown to me as well. I wouldn't say I've become a rabid fan, but I am much more interested in their work, now. It's a Scorsese film--how could it not be beautifully photographed, but Scorsese managed a difficult feat: he keeps himself out of the movie, except as interviewer during those sequences. This is not really Scorese's vision of a rock concert. It happened mostly organically, certainly with mistakes, gaffes and grit. This is part of its charm. There are better singers than the guys in The Band, but few better musicians. This can be illustrated with Robbie Robertson in the Clapton song: Clapton's guitar strap comes off and Robertson, with one beat, picks right up on the solo. It looked planned, but wasn't. Joni Mitchell was notoriously hard to back up, due to her original guitar tuning, and ragged song phrasing, but bassist Rick Danko fills in every space with intricate bass figuring. Perhaps we have become too accustomed to the overwrought, over-hyped, overproduced, overexposed, shiny gack that passes for popular music to appreciate the raw, the imperfect, the sheer humanness of this music. Scorsese shows it all. The guys in The Band were largely worn out and sometimes strung out in the interviews. They are tired, scrawny, empty-eyed from the excesses of the road. Rick Danko is hovering on the ragged edge, as his band is dissolved, and he says his goal is to "keep busy." Richard Manuel looks lost as he says "I just want to break even." These are two musicians who desperately needed the music, but who were murdered by the road. We see their bleak destinies in their eyes in this film. It is bittersweet certainly, but also a moment in time, crystallized into something great by the music, the love of friends, the willingness of the director to simply stand back and allow the music to happen. It also reminds us what good music used to sound like and makes me wish could exist again.