July 26, 2004
the Last Waltz
I finally made it down to Kino's. Among the DVD's, I came away with was the recently released The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's 1978 capsule history of The Band and American popular music.
I was revisiting this particular moment of rock and roll history (I'd seen the video many years before) in the light of this revisionist rock criticism. It certainly is refreshing given all special effects, costume changes and elaborate sets of the superstar concerts, with their giant video screens, background dancers and a circus-style presentation.
The music from The Band's farewell performance at The Winterland in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976, was rawer and more energetic than their later studio albums. There was a touch of desperation, passion and bite in the music was there in the mid- 1960s when they toured Britain with Dylan as the Hawks. That musical expression had long gone, but it returned in the form of rollicking barrel-house fun.
The Last Waltz is commonly seen as the best rock concert "documentary" that has been filmed. If we go beyond the rock glamour we find a documentary film and a stand alone soundtrack that explore cultural myths and musical legends. The surface romanticism of the film is undercut by the darker pessimism of a ruined life on the road and approaching death from booze, drugs, excess and despair. The pessimism was in their music:
"It makes no difference how far I go
Like a scar the hurt will always show
It makes no difference who I meet
They're just a face in the crowd
on a dead end street."
This moment was a summation of the different musical influences that fed into American rock and roll and the confluence of the literary (the beat poets), music and film cultures. Martin Scorsese shot the film whilst finishing New York New York, and he understood that he was a witness to the ending of a cultural period. This is woven into a bittersweet narrative about a group's love for music, and its sorrow at bidding farewell to an experience it loved, yet was destroying them.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 26, 2004 12:36 PM | TrackBack