C/D: The Last Waltz

"His munificence was engorged with snow" - Ginsberg on Dylan during the Rolling Thunder tour

I'll bet it was

i still like this version of "coyote" by joni mitchell better than the one on hejira

Yes on "Coyote"; I was disappointed when I later heard the Hejira version; not that it's not great, but I'd expected something more like the Last Waltz version.

It's corny but I dig Joni's silhouette (and vocals) on "Helpless".

yeah Joni shoulda done a whole album w/ the Band! Kind of shows how good they were that they could slip into that weird Joni Jazzy vibe so easily.

Didn't Robertson and Danko totally flub the changes to "Helpless," which apparently pissed Young off enough to call them out for it later on (thought I read about it in "Shakey")? I don't notice it in the film or on the soundtrack, so I'm assuming the screw-ups were corrected during the overdubs. You can see Robbie and Richard making faces and looking up to the ceiling during the song, as if they were jokingly trying to hide their mistakes.

they go into the chorus early -- i think you would've been able to hear it if you were there, but they mixed it out on the soundtrack ... maybe "Helpless" is just too easy for the Band ...

frankly neil isn't that great on this anyway

Van on the other hand....what a terrible terrible suit but such an amazing performance

i love this film but god seriously robbie is such a douche throughout this whole thing.

it drives me nuts how he always steps up to the mic during choruses and stuff so ppl watching the film will get the incorrect impression that he can actually sing a fuckin' note....so gross the way he's mincing around for scorcese during all the interviews too.....

even worse cuz he hogs all the camera time and he's by far the LEAST interesting member of the band IMO

otm x 5

Yes, Robbie R is a total dick in this

he can play pretty well and he did write some of the Band's best tunes, but yeah, he's pretty unbearable.

robbie r is an amazing guitarist and wrote some great tunes, but he is hilariously lame in this movie. i can't believe his whole "the road has been so tough, we've been on the road so long, etc." comments throughout ... If you look at their schedule post 1966, The Band was not exactly the hardest touring group in the world, by a long shot. also kind of insane that there's not a single Manuel-penned song on The Last Waltz ...

it's funny reading across the great divide, which i like overall even though i think hoskyns is too much of a fanboy about northern lights southern cross which i just don't like that much...but anyway he sort of points to one of the big things in the band's decline after the third album is manuel's decline as a songwriter which put everything on robbie....

i mean obv robbie is a GREAT songwriter but still manuel sometimes seemed to tap into something more magic and intuitive and special to me, whereas robbie is really a great craftsman, and later on it seems like he's straining to write sort of mythic americana stuff that feels more false (this begins on stage fright and gets worse as time goes on)

Yeah, Robertson is a supreme jerk in the film. I gather the "we're tired" lines were referring to their earlier days with Ronnie Hawkins etc. in the early 60s. According to Helm's autobio they played some tough places. But in 1978 it sounded like a lot of bullshit.

"we're tired" (of staying up all night doing coke in L.A. with clapton and scorcese)

xpost yeah, In A Station & Whispering Pines are pretty much my favorite Band songs -- I think you're right about Manuel being more intuitive/magical than Robertson. Robbie seems like he tries REALLY hard (and comes up with great stuff regularly), whereas w/ Manuel, you can imagine him just sitting down and having those songs come out. It really is a tragedy he didn't write more ...

i remember one of the goddamned wost things i ever heard was Robbie hawking a new solo record on one of the late night talk shows circa mid-90s.

i think scorcese deserves a lot of blame for how robbie comes across in the film but he deserves an infinite amount more credit for capturing the concert so beautifully so i don't know....

Robbie was tight with Scorcese. There was a lot of criticism at the time that Scorcese was setting Robbie R up as the "star" of the Band.

Huh. I was thinking he deserves credit for not hiding (via editing) what a dick RR is.
xpost

yeah but it is weird -- doesn't the movie start with Robbie doing "takes" of his interviews? It does sort of make him out to be the most artificial of the Band members ...

xp but i think scorcese fuckin' loved it!

I believe excessive amounts of cocaine can impair judgement

doesn't the movie start with Robbie doing "takes" of his interviews?
That’s actually one of my favorite parts of the film — a classic Scorsese trick. That and watching Danko adjust his hat during the sloppy jam on “Old Time Religion.”

my fav line in the interviews is when manuel says they were called the honkies but that name was "a little too street"

robbie's best moment is onstage when crapton's string breaks and he fucking owns "god" in the guitar duel

The bottom line is, the movie's closer to fiction than a documentary, but it's great nonetheless.

Manuel breaks my heart in the Last Waltz, because he's so wasted. In Festival Express he's more...elegant.

Robertson wrote my favorite Band songs ("Get Up Jake", "Across the Great Divide", "The Weight"). I don't know that Manuel wrote more "naturally"...is that because he seems more "authentic"? I'm pretty suspicious of that. I've never heard Robertson's solo albums, but I've meant to do for a long time.

I'm not sure "natural" is the right word, but I guess to me a great Robbie song seems like he had a great idea and really executed it well

whereas, a song like "Sleeping" off of Stage Fright, i can't even quite put my finger on why it's so great...what's so spooky about it, it doesn't even make like literal "sense" but the way he delivers lines is so affecting to me..."magic" is the best word to me...

like "sad old ships...a morning eclipse...i spent my whole life guessing" gives me actual goosebumps (just happened a minute ago) but i couldn't tell you what it "meant"

Yeah, I know what you mean. "Sleeping" is terrific; the drums on the bridge are fabulous. I love "In A Station" too. Manuel wrote the most elegant Band songs, I think ("Whispering Pines" too). And oh man do I love his drumming.

yeah actually him playing drums in those staged sequences (the stuff that's not from the concert) is some of my fav stuff, he looks so weird when he plays like strange puppet

okay Caravan is an awesome song but van morrison roaring @ u is not v. tender

ringo is cute in a zizek sorta way in it tho

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/ringo.jpg

always gonna love this movie

weird, i just watched this on Friday. Man, poor Rick Danko during the soundstage songs. dude looked haggard

manuel has the weirdest drum playing mechanics in history. love that man.

i always regret that I didn't go see the 90s incarnation of the Band during their last hurrah. Even if it would be kinda an oldies act, just seeing Dank, Helm and Hudson onstage would've been great. I saw Hudson open for Mercury Rev once. It was bizarre. He was great, his band was bad. He played a lot of saxophone actually.

i would love to have gone back in time and stolen bologna with those dudes

After hearing what a classic this was I found it a huge disappointment.

The theme tune created for the film was beautiful, "The Night They Drove Dixie Down" is brilliantly performed, some of the interviews are nice, Ronnie Hawkins is fun, there is an impressive clip of someone's solo material that got me interested (Danko?) but most of the rest of it seemed just like any other sloppy celebrity sing-along you get at televised festivals and big charity gigs.

yea i don't see it as a classic in the way i see the band's actually good albums (s/t, big pink, etc.) as classics. i see it as a classic as far as depictions go of coked-out 70s rock n roll excess, and for that, it truly is a classic.

Classic if only for this scene alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-rTkqn-4qg

emmylou harris is so beautiful there

On the one hand, I think almost every performance of Band material here is the definitive version of that song, particularly the Levon songs (Cripple Creek and Dixie obliterate the studio versions). On the other hand, almost everything else about this movie is upsetting and vile. A nightmare of cocaine narcissism and litigation and self-promotion. Scorsese letting Robbie think he could act almost ruins the whole thing.

And I'll never forgive Scorsese for botching Muddy Waters' performance--they didn't even record Caldonia, which is the better of the two songs he did, and Mannish Boy was recorded by accident on one camera, a sickening oversight when Scorsese lets the camera linger so lovingly on Robbie Robertson doing coke and talking shit. And that great version of Down South In New Orleans doesn't make the movie at all while Neil Diamond does.

Overall though, a great movie and a better album that has no business being either. The "look at us, doing mountains of blow in west LA and deciding we're gods" aesthetic almost derails it at every turn, but the songs are too good to kill the proceedings completely.

haha, i don't know, i love this movie. music/cocaine/narcissism/fashion/singalongs... it's all great.

yeah I'm with tyler. I unreservedly love it

even van morrison yelling @ me

TURN IT UP

RADIO

JUMPSUIT

i spent a lot of time trying to figure out wtf van was wearing

David Crosby makes face to show that he is not amused, picks fights with all and sundry, including Graham Nash and a very out of it Michael Clarke.

i want this as my xmas card, i'm inbetween levon and garth lookswise at this point in my life

https://www.upstatefilms.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/theband-2048x1307.jpg