By 1976, Robbie Robertson was “tired of being a babysitter”. For the previous decade and a half, Robertson, who has passed away aged 80, had been a driving force in The Band – a Canadian-American affiliation of rock’n’roll outlaws who started out supporting Bob Dylan before blossoming into whiskery superstars in their own right. Yet those years of success were also ones of excess: of pot, cocaine and groupies – and ultimately, of heroin. Unless The Band stopped touring, someone was going to die.
“Our rock’n’roll lifestyle was passing the point of no return,” Robertson would write in his 2016 memoir, Testimony. “The examples of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison – and more recently Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, and Tim Buckley –brought home the dangers of the road.”
He didn’t want to amble into the sunset. Along with the drugs, The Band were fuelled by a tremendous capacity for myth-making. It was only fitting, Robertson felt, that they take their bows in a blaze of glory: with a concert movie featuring cameos by pals such as Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
“We’d been playing live and touring for 15 or 16 years, so it was a shocking proposition. But we couldn’t keep going out. On some nights we could hit our stride, but more and more it was becoming a painful chore. The best painkiller is opiates, and heroin had been creeping back under the door.”
These were the circumstance in which Robertson, The Band and Martin Scorsese made The Last Waltz – perhaps the greatest rock’n’roll movie of all time. And also the most paradoxical. The Band were bowing out to clean up. Robertson, who had never touched heroin, saw himself as the responsible grown-up shepherding his fellow players through a weather front of drugs and sex. He wanted to get off the tracks before they all went to hell. And yet, The Last Waltz came together in a blizzard of bacchanalia.
That was inevitable, given the personalities involved. Scorsese was in the middle of New York, New York, his disastrous musical during which he had embarked on an affair with Liza Minnelli and consumed his body weight in cocaine.
Robertson was over drugs for the time being. But the rest of The Band were coked to the max throughout the iconic Thanksgiving Day shoot at Winterland Ballroom, a more or less derelict 5,000-capacity venue in San Fransisco halfway between Haight-Ashbury hippy enclave and the sketchy Tenderloin district.
The excess took a particularly heavy toll on drummer and vocalist Levon Helm. Robertson suspected he was on heroin throughout The Last Waltz. While this didn’t blunt The Band’s performance, in the accompanying interviews shot by Scorsese, it is evident that all involved are higher than an albatross.
Neil Young, meanwhile, went on stage with a rock of cocaine affixed to his nose. Not even Scorsese was going to let that fly. It wasn’t as if he had any choice: Young’s manager insisted the footage be edited. In the days before computer effects, that meant physically scrubbing out the “cocaine booger” from individual frames of film – at considerable time and cost.
“The most expensive cocaine I ever bought,” Robertson lamented. “As soon as Neil Young took the stage, I could tell no one at Winterland was feeling better than he was.”
At least Young was happy to be on camera. The mercurial Dylan was more reluctant. He’d recently shot a concert movie of his Rolling Thunder Revue tour and was wary of appearing in two films in a short timeframe. He was also sceptical about The Band taking their final bows. No bow was ever final, he felt. Looking Robertson squarely in the eyes, he asked, “Is this going to be one of those Frank Sinatra retirements where you come back a year later?”
Still, Robertson persevered and convinced Dylan to join The Band at Winterland. That was on the understanding Dylan could veto his footage (in the end, he appears in just two numbers, plus a final group singalong).
If anyone was putting their career on the line with The Last Waltz, it was Scorsese. When Robertson pitched him on the film over dinner in Los Angeles – both had brought along vials of cocaine, just in case – the director said he was committed to finishing New York, New York. The studio, he explained, would not look kindly on a director bunking off to make a rock’n’roll movie. But then – and maybe this was the cocaine talking – he changed his heart.
“The hell with it,” he said. “These are my favourite artists, and The Band – oh my God. I have to do it, and that’s it. Fire me. They can fire me. I have to do it.”
Winterland was chosen because of its role in the legend of The Band. It had been the scene of one their early concerts: where better to say goodbye? The job of putting the gig together was entrusted to promoter Bill Graham and the show was slated for Thanksgiving 1976 (New York, New York would be on hiatus, giving Scorsese a chance to slip away). And so Graham insisted on serving full turkey dinners to the 5,000 in attendance – despite Robertson’s fears this would involve “hundreds of gallons of gravy”.
A more significant issue was the shabby venue. “Winterland had been an ice-skating rink and was looking pretty funky,” Robertson remembered. “Bill Graham was concerned about the appearance of the façade of the upper balcony and thought he would need $5,000 out of the budget to fix it. [Cameraman] Michael Chapman and Steve Prince, Marty’s assistant, noted that the floor had “give” to it. With the audience moving around and dancing, this would make the cameras unsteady. Michael said, “It’s going to take some construction.”
On the night, though, everything came together. As soon as Robertson stepped on stage, he could feel the spark (along with the dead weight of his Stratocaster, lacquered in bronze to mark the occasion). It was the end of an era – but it would also be a highlight in the history of The Band.
Scorsese and a crew of seven cameramen were watching on, including Michael Chapman (who would work with Scorsese on Raging Bull) and Easy Rider cinematographer László Kovács. They had taken the risky decision of shooting on 35-millimetre film to give the performance a cinematic sheen. It was unclear whether the cameras were up to the long takes required – or if they might overheat. But what was the point of putting on a rock’n’roll show without a whiff of danger?
The Band were on stage for nearly five hours. Dylan, Neil Young and Van Morrison all enjoyed their cameos. However, the artificial nature of the undertaking was underscored by the decision to include sound-stage recordings of The Weight with the Staple Singers and Evangeline with Emmylou Harris. From the start, The Band had been alive to the importance of burnishing their mythology: that was nowhere truer than with The Last Waltz.
In the case of Scorsese and Robertson, the true excess came after the stage lights had dimmed and the applause faded. The two holed up in Scorsese’s Malibu mansion to edit the reams of footage. They had both recently separated from their wives and were living a second adolescence.
“It was a crazy period,” Robertson would say. “Marty and I were the ‘misunderstood artists,” and our wives threw us out. We were just kind of lost in the storm. You are a tame house pet and you get thrown out in the woods for a while and pretty soon you’re not tame anymore. All of a sudden you are like a wild dog. We just ran amok.”
“You go through periods like that time,” Scorsese would tell Rolling Stone. “People just searching for things, looking for things. Sometimes it takes one form, sometimes it takes another. That’s the form it took at the time.”
Somehow, between the drugs and the late nights, they finished the film, which was acclaimed upon its release in 1978. But while audiences and critics loved The Last Waltz – its instant classic status enduring to this day – Robertson’s bandmates were less impressed and would ultimately reform The Band without him.
Robertson, they felt, had put the film together in such as way that they were portrayed as his glorified sidemen. In his biography, Levon Helm claimed that Robertson’s mic was turned off throughout – those powerhouse vocals were all Helm’s. They were further disgruntled at receiving what they considered unsatisfactory royalties.
At Winterland, though, all involved felt they had made something special. Yet for Robertson, the overwhelming feeling was not so much triumph as relief. They had reached the finish line, despite all the drugs and emotion. “We saluted one another like we had just pulled off one of the best musical celebrations in rock ‘n’ roll history, he remembered. “It really, really does not get any better than this.”
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