Last Portal to The Old Weird America
The Last Waltz opens a door to a particular era of American culture and music—for any who care to enter it on its own terms.
Review by Sam Buntz
The first temptation to overcome when reviewing Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is the temptation to wedge it into “the discourse.” Numerous opportunities present themselves to the seasoned freelance hack. Documenting The Band’s epic farewell concert, The Last Waltz is, by nearly universal consent, the greatest concert film of all time, and features performances by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, and Van Morrison—who have all played a role in Pandemic-era drama. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell formed a kind of Boomer Canadian Mafia in attempting to force Joe Rogan off Spotify, due to Rogan’s hosting of COVID vaccine skeptics like Dr. Robert Malone. Van Morrison and Eric Clapton were on the other side of the conflict, opposing lockdowns and mandatory masking. But The Last Waltz should not represent an opportunity to beat various dead horses and re-hash all these issues, using them to demonstrate the final trajectory of the Boomer rock ethos. The Last Waltz is great because it is a liberation from the discourse, from the mindset that wants to politicize all art. It’s the kind of film that music lovers and antiquarians, now forced to dwell entirely within the Archive, find as a respite from the relentlessness of all-devouring discourse, which ruins everything you’ve ever loved.
The Last Waltz is the final distillation of one of the best eras in American music, brought to you courtesy of four Canadians and one Arkansan. It covers nearly every popular American genre at its most developed: Soul and R&B, the Blues, Folk, Country, and of course Rock. The quintessential American songwriter, Bob Dylan, drops by for a few songs, backed by his most iconic backing band—The Band themselves. The Celtic gene in American music is also honored. Van Morrison, dressed in a weird shirt, sings one of his best lesser-known tracks, the show-stopping “Caravan,” one of the film’s highlights. It reminds his detractors how worthwhile it is to meditate on this man’s talent and think twice before slandering him thoughtlessly online. (In fact, Morrison’s latest record project, Latest Record Project Vol. 1, while discourse-heavy, sounds shockingly fresh, almost like recordings from the sessions for Moondance. Even the discourse-laden tracks like “Why Are You on Facebook?” are undeniably catchy.) The viewer may indeed experience a slight frisson when, in an interview, a small Confederate flag is momentarily visible. But even the presence of the Stars and Bars is a reminder of how far the present is from 1976. Somewhat paradoxically, the Confederate Flag is probably visible because no one in the documentary really cares about the Confederate Flag.
They weren’t merely ‘60s hipsters paying homage to this side of the U.S.’s culture, the culture of juke joints and honky tonks, back when you could smoke inside. They were one of its last living artifacts.
To get a sense of how different The Band’s era was from our own, consider “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” a song sung from the perspective of a Confederate soldier. When the band’s main songwriter, Robbie Robertson, was writing the song, he originally included a verse saying something positive about Lincoln. The Arkansas-born drummer, Levon Helm, told him that people in the South might not take kindly to that, so Robertson removed the verse. It is amazing to think that that was the editorial change, when, in the present, even the song title with its evocation of “Dixie” is liable to induce an aneurysm in certain brains.
While, as noted, predominantly Canadian, The Band were remarkably in touch with the “Old Weird America,” as Greil Marcus put it in his study of The Band and Bob Dylan’s recordings. They weren’t merely ‘60s hipsters paying homage to this side of the U.S.’s culture, the culture of juke joints and honky tonks, back when you could smoke inside. They were one of its last living artifacts. For instance, as Robbie Robertson tells Scorsese in the film, they once played a dismal show at a run-down nightclub owned and operated by none other than Jack Ruby. The members of The Band, in these moments of commentary, don’t speak with the abstract theoretical consciousness of a contemporary New York–based musician, who is reading Deleuze and Foucault in his spare time. They speak like the real, working, perpetually on-the-road musicians they actually were. The modern viewer might clutch his or her pearls when Robbie Robertson relates what his old employer, the musician Ronnie Hawkins, told him about life on the road: “Well, son, you won’t make much money, but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.” Yet this unrefined mode of speech just exemplifies that elusive and hard-to-define quality we call authenticity.
Still, the authenticity of The Band’s music isn’t merely or largely in such vulgarity. There is a vital spiritual current in their songs, from the setting of “The Weight” in “Nazareth” (Nazareth, PA?) to the ardent plea for spiritual liberation in “I Shall Be Released,” one of the big final numbers in The Last Waltz. While a Dylan composition, it is also prominently featured on The Band’s biggest record, Music from Big Pink, in which Richard Manuel provides a soulful falsetto rendition. “I Shall Be Released” is, on the literal level, about awaiting release from prison, but its reverberations extend to the notion that the fallen world is a prison. Matthew 24:27 reads, “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Dylan’s chorus to “I Shall Be Released” directly alludes to and echoes this line: “I see my light come shining / From the West down to the East / Any day now, any day now / I shall be released.” Biblical literacy is deftly bundled into the song in a way that likely eludes the modern ear but is plain to catch for those who can catch it.
It is often observed that The Left wants to politicize art, and the Right wants to aestheticize politics. But The Last Waltz is just art.
Another facet of The Last Waltz that should jump out to the modern viewer is the sheer joy of making music together. That might sound a bit trite, but we are living in the era of the EDM DJ, a guy pressing play on a laptop. The experience of musical chemistry between people, so analogous to romantic chemistry, is harder to find these days. Naturally, people still form bands. But the more common and done thing is to sit in front of your computer, for yet a few more hours, crafting beats on Ableton or Logic Pro. This can result in good music, but it can’t quite capture the weird surprises you get when you have to meld your own musical ideas with someone else’s. The Band are so adept at this that they perfectly wield structure and spontaneity. They combine tight songwriting and Dylan-adjacent lyricism with a miraculous freedom, all five members of The Band chiming in together. If this experience of communal musical joy seems a bit repressed these days, one stands a chance of recapturing it after imbibing The Last Waltz.
It is often observed that The Left wants to politicize art, and the Right wants to aestheticize politics. But The Last Waltz is just art. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” isn’t a hymn to the Confederacy; it’s just the tale of some random guy’s experience. The same goes for songs like the ultimate Band tune, “The Weight,” which is simply about the difficulty of trying to be a good person and bear the burdens of life. It’s burden and its struggle are existential rather than political. Songs like “Rag Mama Rag” and “Up on Cripple Creek” trace the journeys of dudes trying to call up their big mamas and tell them that they’ll be rollin’ in after betting on a few more horses at the racetrack. None of the lyrics are discourse-ified. All is literary, more (or merely?) human. All in all, The Last Waltz is a portal to the Old Weird America—one that still beckons to be entered.
Sam Buntz is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Federalist, The Washington Monthly, Pop Matters, and Athwart. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, his writing often focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, and pop culture.
The Last Waltz, directed and filmed by Martin Scorsese, is a documentary of The Band’s concert at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. The film was released on April 26, 1978.
