Robbie Robertson and The Last Waltz

In the summer of 1979, I worked in a small town in southern Ontario where one day I learned the Rockabilly artist Ronnie Hawkins was playing at a resort within hitch-hiking distance. So on the weekend I made my way with some difficulty to the resort and joyfully attended the sessions in the resort’s club. Why did I go to this trouble? Not so much on account of Hawkins himself, but because I had seen The Last Waltz after its theatrical release the year before, and in that film learned of the American musician’s role in mentoring the members of that exceptional rock group, The Band, drawing most of them from Canada, thus preparing them for their future career. He already convinced a young Robbie Robertson in 1960 that the bass guitarist could play lead guitar. And the memory of that night with Hawkins, back in Canada, mentoring young talent again, and who had demonstrated his own talent during the concert within the documentary, came back to me with the recent news of Robertson’s death.

The Band was among the groups that represented the peak development of American rock, especially its Rockabilly genre, which combined rock, blues, and spirituals as one. Nevertheless, the memory of the group might well have largely passed away if not for the documentary of their final concert, which took place on November 25, 1976, when, assisted by a number of musical friends, the five-man rock ensemble bid their public farewell in a concert billed ‘The Last Waltz.’ Among those friends, which included major rock artists, was another one of their mentors, Bob Dylan, who engaged them for a tour of Britain in the mid-1960s when he switched from folk to rock. He famously worked with them on sessions that were finally released to the public as The Basement Tapes. These were recorded at The Big Pink, near Woodstock, where they were staying. This is also where The Band worked out their breakthrough album, Music from Big Pink, released in 1968.

Both Dylan and The Band declined the invitation to perform at the historic concert there, practically a stone’s throw away from where they were holding their sessions at the time. Somewhat ironically, future filmmaker Martin Scorsese was chief editor of Woodstock (1970), the documentary that arose from the concert, and Robertson invited him to document their own farewell concert almost a decade later. Scorsese’s subsequent “rockumentary,” also entitled The Last Waltz (1978), a cultural artefact that arose in the event’s wake, has turned out to be much more memorable than the concert. On account of the many guests, the film essentially rehearses the history of rock, from the blues, to rockabilly, and so on, to augment the reprisal of The Band’s own contribution to rock. Some of the artists, like Van Morrison, who was in a creative slump at the time, rejuvenated their work and career shortly after the concert. The director added his own touch both to the event and the documentary. Besides arranging the décor on the stage and the interview sequences with the members of The Band, he also chose to focus primarily on the musicians and their performances on stage. This disappointed some critics and pundits, who recalled the scenes where performances in Woodstock were complemented by the audience’s response. It seems obvious the director intended to elevate the art above the event. Unsurprisingly, a quarter of a century after the film’s release, in 2003 Rolling Stone rated Scorsese’s collaboration with The Band as first on their list of “The Best Rock Concerts” on film. An anonymous commentator concluded that the “movie was supposed to be about the end of the road for The Band, instead it celebrates rock & roll as a way of life—with grit and class.”

Neil Miniturn, author and editor of a major reference work on the documentary, wryly notes “rock & roll does not waltz.” Rather it has a highly vivacious nature which is possibly among the reasons that even at its best it was not taken seriously for quite long. The journalist Martha Bayles was among the first to take rock seriously as an art form, arguing the form reached its peak in the mid-1970s. In her Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty & Meaning in American Popular Music (1996), she argues rock flourished when it creatively developed its roots in the blues, becoming more fascicle when it strayed too far from them. This view offers an academic argument for the accomplishment of The Band. The documentary also does more than just rock. Film critic J.P. Tellotte perceptively notes, “What The Last Waltz seems to celebrate . . . are fundamental human tensions, those between life and death, art and reality, the expressive spirit and those limitations it encounters in the self and in our far from expressive world.”

At some points the documentary with its art even reaches out to the transcendent. An important song from the musical event helps demonstrate the connection between religion and rock at its peak. The film captures the inspired rendition of The Band’s classic “The Weight,” with the vocal support of the superlative Gospel group the Staples. The Gospel group did not have to depart from their métier to any great degree in their stirring contribution to this rock song’s performance, almost appropriating it from The Band, and demonstrating its debt to their spiritual musical tradition. Deeply moved by the effort and its poignant result one of the vocalists from the Staples at the very end of “The Weight” exclaims: “Beautiful!”

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” the poet John Keats wrote. The Last Waltz as a documentary is set in its time, of which it creatively captures a weighty fragment, but it is undeniably beautiful. Among other things, the period had something of a secular religion of youth worship partly reflected in Bob Dylan’s hymn-like “Forever young” and its worldly supplication. Unlike the hippies, The Last Waltz has not aged. It is forever beautiful. Now it is also a memorial to a great artist, Robbie Robertson, captured while celebrating his most creative legacy, adding yet another touch of enduring beauty to it.

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