Forever Waltzing

The Band, jamming on some stuff.

Picture the drummer, neck muscles tied taut beneath skin that roils in the heat of the stage, slick wet unmopped sweat falling down his face.  He’s slamming his sticks onto the drumskins, putting more than force or impact into the song but weight, the weight of experience and being that tunings cannot account for, but lilt. It’s the lilt that can be heard in his force, the sound of the oak tree rooted thick in his vocal cords, visions of America sprouting forth with every word not sung but mourned, for what he sings is not observation or commentary but feeling, pure feeling.  He hits that little drum fill, builds the cymbals up for that triumphant crash, and with fear and pain squinched between his eyes lets loose a note, screams it, and peaks the night.  Music as religion.

The Last Waltz is not a display of music, but of community.  Of scene.  Of creation.  When baby boomers and uncreative white males fetishize the 60’s and 70’s as the last time living was good – as if the hippies changed anything – they miss the best selling part of the music; it’s not that it was being made, but that it was being made with each other.  Steve Winwood playing organ on Jimi Hendrix records; Hendrix himself ripping a solo on the first Stephen Stills album; the supergroup of CSNY (I hate CSNY records, but could you imagine a Chris Martin/John Mayer/Kanye West/Thom Yorke supergroup of today?  On second thought, don’t.); and so forth.  The music scene was actually a scene – bands were aware of each other, you got awesome billings like Neil Young & Miles Davis (shown on the cover of the first Neil Young Archive record), and movies like The Last Waltz could be made.  For the uninitiated, it’s a movie about The Band’s last concert, and the circle of friends they enlisted to help them bring their long journey to an end.  The list of friends is long: Young, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Paul Butterfield, and more.  By the time everyone jumps on the stage for a charged performance of “I Shall Be Released,” there’s the idea that something has been accomplished with all of the genius on display.

Of course, I’m quick to separate the image from the reality: The image is that this community is to be lauded for showing up and the reality is that something maybe was accomplished, that maybe genius inspires other genius, that as Levon Helm hit that peak in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and made everyone in the building shiver like they had just prematurely ejaculated on their prom date, soul and heart and all of the things our parents talk about when they say music today isn’t as good were ripped out of the ether, given meaning through blunt trying alone, that as the collective existed on the stage things were being moved.

In high school, I was uncreative.  My favorite singer was Bob Dylan and my favorite song was “Like A Rolling Stone”.  I saw the first Lord of the Rings movie four times in the theater.  I didn’t start wearing jeans until my junior year.  At one point in my senior year, I watched The Last Waltz every night before I went to sleep, admiring the editing that gave The Band such movement, avoiding the troublesome single-camera single-angle approach that many concert films use.  Close ups.  Pans.  No audience shots.  Deliberate lighting based on cues in the song.  It was planned to perfection, and it looks perfect.  If you think about how a perfectly planned rock concert is, you realize that it’s the most un-rock thing there could be, but The Band moves organically and fucks up organically as well.  You can’t plan for everything, and it’s the little mistakes that are the most endearing (Eric Clapton dropping his guitar, Neil Young being coked up, Bob Dylan not giving a shit about playing a coherent song.)  The reason I watched it so much at night is because I was obsessed with that perfection and imperfection – moved by the essence of emotion in each song, awed by their professionalism, envious of their coolness.  In the film I saw what I thought rock music should be – cool, great-sounding, choreographed, and as mentioned before, together.  Everything sounded like it was together, like nothing could go wrong.  Like the last hurrah.

That perhaps is what makes The Last Waltz an “important” document, not because of the music or cultural significance, but because it represents a perfect brand of rock music, where everything comes together.  One thing critics often say is that they can’t imagine something getting any better, which makes it perfect, and the first part is true because most critics are uncreative.  But when Levon sings that song, things cannot get any better.  At the peak of that song, a subset of truth is unlocked, propelled by harmony and sonic tension.  I would be a straight up liar if I said my life wasn’t good in high school, but listening to this music made it better.  The Last Waltz is both the sky of possibility and the earth of stability, a look at what can be using what we know and how it can be perfect.  Is the construction inauthentic?  Is the content any less real for it?  No.  It’s possible that the songs would be less entertaining had Martin Scorsese not edited it, but only the basic image is needed to give the songs more character.  Scorsese could have left a camera lying on the ground and only captured everyone’s faces in a still shot, and those moments still would have been possible.  Such is the power of music when used as religion.