The comical cocaine saga that almost derailed classic rock’s greatest concert film
The story of The Band is one of the most celebrated in music history.
Renowned as the group that backed Bob Dylan during his electric transformation and plenty of other icons before him, they stepped out of the shadows of being ‘touring musicians’ and took a slice of the spotlight themselves. As the creators of their seminal debut album Music from Big Pink, the Canadian-American rockers left an indelible mark on popular culture, blending Americana with classic rock.
Ironically, both of the group’s biggest triumphs bookend their career. The other lauded endeavour was their farewell concert on November 25th, 1976, at San Francisco’s home of the counterculture, the Winterland Ballroom. While the star-studded lineup helped the group ride off into the sunset, it was the 1978 Martin Scorsese-directed concert film, The Last Waltz, that cemented it in pop culture lore.
Although The Band would reunite in 1983 without their leader, Robbie Robertson, the concert film confirmed the performance as one of the finest farewells ever put to tape. This feeling was heightened for fans amid whispers of developing personal schisms within the group and the odd rumour, which Robertson later dismissed, that drummer Levon Helm had taken issue with the inclusion of Neil Diamond on a lineup that featured countercultural legends such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Van Morrison.
Regardless of what may or may not have been going on inside the confines of The Band, there was another saga that did happen that evening. Of course, it will always be best remembered for the sensational performances, typified by Young’s flawless rendition of ‘Helpless’, aided by his old friend Mitchell. But the sordid side of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll also entered the mix.
While Young and Mitchell’s stirring rendition alongside the band came to symbolise the musical quality of the evening, for those involved, it also serves as a reminder of the cocaine-fuelled debauchery going on backstage.
When the movie was released, there was much talk about how a big lump of stardust had to be arduously removed from Young’s nostril at great expense. Forgetting to clean his dusted nose before taking to the stage, after he stepped out, under the bright lights, the rock of coke lodged in his schnoz was visible to all in his vicinity, with the cameras only magnifying its glaring narcotic presence.
A true auteur, Scorsese thought that leaving it in the final product was “rock and roll”, but Young’s manager forced him to remove it, hounding the director to apply special effects to his client’s nose in every scene where it was perceptible. The process was painstaking, and due to the technological limitations of the time, clearing up what was dubbed “the travelling booger matte” took hours.
Making matters worse, Young was barely even high. Roberston, the brains behind the night, lamented the poor quality of the drug that permeated backstage and the saga it caused. “You know, you want to be honest about these things,” he candidly told NME in 2020.
“If there was anything wrong that night, it was that the cocaine wasn’t very good,” Roberston added, perhaps explaining the excessive size of the boulder Young had attempted to ingest. “It was wet and lumpy. I couldn’t indulge anyway; I had too much to be responsible for. I couldn’t mess around with trying to keep my head on straight. Neil didn’t have that problem at all!” Alas, he must’ve indulged enough to know that it wasn’t worth indulging in.
Despite hating the quality of the drug, Robertson joked elsewhere that the cost of editing it out of Young’s sloppy nostril qualified it as “the most expensive cocaine [he] ever bought.” And as a touring musician, he’d bought quite a few. This expensive and painstaking editing job would not be the end of the saga either. In later versions of the film, the nugget returns in all its garage forecourt-smelling glory.
In some way, perhaps its presence, as Scorsese put it, does capture classic “rock ‘n’ roll” not in all of its glory, but in all of its wart-n-all silliness, too. The Band’s farewell, after all, was partly brought about by substance abuse, so its evident presence on the night and the misappropriate funds to temporarily hide it, carries a certain classic rock poetry.
