What is the best performance in ‘The Last Waltz’?
For many a music fan, their first entry into The Band’s roots rock body of work is via their acclaimed 1978 The Last Waltz concert film.
Conceived as a feature to document The Band’s last show with the guitarist and principal songwriter Robbie Robertson, what was dreamed up as a simple parting jamboree soon swelled to a mammoth celebration of the Woodstock generation’s last hurrah.
Taking place in 1976 at the old Band favourite Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, The Last Waltz captured a slice of the old guard’s last moment of essentiality before the new wave’s upending attack shifted the rock climate toward a very different musical universe.
As word got around of the show’s ballooning stature, everybody wanted to get involved. Before long, some of music’s biggest names were eagerly queuing up to sing a number or simply join the jam. As well as former bosses Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan – The Band served as Dylan’s backing group, The Hawks, when going electric – a disparate roll call of rock and pop heavyweights found themselves on the all-star billing, from Eric Clapton, Dr John, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Ringo Starr just a fraction of the illustrious line-up.
While the live show was largely settled, The Last Waltz’s expertise behind the camera was in equally safe hands. Enjoying some musical pedigree as one of the several editors of the Woodstock movie, Martin Scorsese, high off the recent success of Taxi Driver, was recruited to direct the concert film. Immediately, the production was expanded from the original low-key 16mm coverage to a hefty seven 35mm film crew, and a lifelong professional partnership was forged with Robertson, The Band songwriter, lending his musical expertise from Raging Bull right through to as recent as Killers of the Flower Moon.
Any worries of The Last Waltz collapsing in on itself from the lofty weight of its exhaustive programme and Hollywood operation needn’t have worried. With a healthy dose of God-given musical alchemy and grade-A cocaine, everybody seems to pull a fantastic performance out of the bag.
Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’ brings a gloriously ramshackle energy befitting his ‘Ditch’ career chapter, Muddy Waters’ cameo offers a formative blues edge all in the venue owed a debt too, Van Morrison gives a soulful gusto take of ‘Caravan’, and Joni Mitchell’s jazzy finesse on the stirring ‘Coyote’ illustrates The Band’s malleable and dextrous backing chops as they make her intimate piece work amid the otherwise celebratory bluster around them.
The fact is, despite such winning performances, it’s The Band who steal the show. Charged with an electric vitality that comes with knowing such a moment was their last, the suite of performances rolled through after their collab with John Simon. It’s a tough order, but between the list of songs between ‘Ophelia’ and ‘Rag Mama Rag’, it’s hard to dispute ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’s prized place in The Last Waltz’s festivity, a rustic and earthy Civil War snapshot coloured with brass blasts and Levon Helm’s narrative command for a concert and film high point.
Marking a final stamp before the 1970s, finally turned a page on the final vestiges of the counterculture. The Band and their last waltz showed just why the 1960s generation was so exciting in the first place.
