Can rock music ever go back to the days of “headphone records,” gatefold albums, mysterious liner notes and fans creating their own image of the band in their minds? Music video did much to kill the radio star, by presenting a carefully screened image for mass consumption…but Ed Sullivan started it all rolling downhill and Marty Scorsese might have reached the nadir with what might otherwise be considered the absolute zenith of rock-n-roll cinema, “The Last Waltz.” His sumptuous concert doc made high art out of simple musical performance, and enshrined the legacy (well, a particular version of it, anyway) of an erstwhile relatively-anonymous, workman-like group of musical superstars, the Band.
That simple, partly-modest, partly-conceited monicker underscores the extent that, without a pre-chosen image foisted upon the listener, this band could be whatever you choose. They first rocketed by prominence in 1968, playing on a plain white slab of modified petroleum product – a bootleg called “The Great White Wonder” – that purported to document some of what the mysterious Bob Dylan had been up to in Woodstock since his motorcycle accident. Before that they had been an anonymous touring band on the Canadian rockabilly circuit, before before being booed around the world supporting Dylan’s wee electric experiment. After that, they were on the cover of “Time” magazine (albeit, in a sketchy line drawing that still left much to the imagination) and on the top of the pops (and Ed Sullivan, too!).
The Band were a true ensemble. Three singers, four multi-instrumentalists, one wicked guitar player. Five members total. Two of the singers played the drums (one alternated between the skins and his piano, the other, a mandolin). Listening to the records, without visual aid, it’s easy to imagine all the permutations and guess who’s singing and who’s playing what. Scorsese’s version of the Band presents guitarist Robbie Robertson as the clear leader of the band, an articulate intellectual and philosopher of rock music and the star of many a close-up. Camera pans make out raspy-throated drummer/singer/mandolin-player Levon Helm to be the main singer, while boyish bassist Rick Danko takes a few cameo turns on vocals. Weird, mysterious Garth Hudson gets a bit wonky on his synthesizers, while additional drummer/pianist Richard Manuel seems like a sideman. The camera loves Robbie, and he tells all the best stories (even if they’re not his), while Levon Helm seems the most “homespun” (the Arkansawyer is the only actual American in the “Americana” band).
Helm’s autobiography, “This Wheel’s On Fire” (co-written with Stephen Davis), is a welcome corrective to Scorsese’s “print the legend” version of the Band. First, of course, is the fact that Helm had been the technical leader of the band (at least, as far as the musician’s union was concerned) during their Canadian rockabilly days, and the one who brought them their independence from founder Ronnie Hawkins. Not to mention that he was the one, after Dylan had recruited him and Robertson to fill out his first post-Newport electric rock band (in Forest Hills, hell yeah!), convinced Dylan to hire the entire Band (then known as Levon and the Hawks).
More important corrections to the legend apply to bandmates. Garth Hudson, as hinted at in “The Last Waltz” by the anecdote that the other members had to pay him additional money as a musical tutor (in their pre-salad days), was the true musical director of the band (especially the expanded “Last Waltz” band with its strings and horns). And poor Richard Manuel, who goes mostly overlooked by Scorsese’s cameras, is the Band’s main voice and true heart and soul. The troubled Manuel, who suffered from substance abuse and ultimately took his own life while on the road with the Band, actually sang lead on the lion’s share of the Band’s songs. The way that Scorsese placed the cameras – and given the listener’s ability to create one’s one mental image when listening to the other records – one (and I mean me) could be forgiven for thinking that most of those songs were being sung by Helm or Danko in a higher register than usual.
Although Helm is clearly very critical of Robertson’s role in the demise and subsequent legend of “The Last Waltz,” the author attempts to remain somewhat magnanimous and notes Robertson’s many contributions, both musical and of leadership. However, any criticism must be tempered slightly by the potential of “sour grapes” and the fact that Helm had ceded his own leadership of the Band by abandoning them while on Dylan’s legendary/disastrous 1966 tour of England when the booing of the folk purists became too much for him. By the time he returned to Woodstock, midway through the Basement Tapes period, band dynamics had obviously changed.
Still, Helm avoids actual bitterness until the afterword written for “Wheel’s” 2000 reprint edition, when mourning the death of Rick Danko years of age. Helm attributes Danko’s death at the relatively young age of 56 to a life of “hard work” and bitterly notes that Danko died with his money (royalties from “The Last Waltz” and other recordings) in Robbie Robertson’s pocket.