Honouring Past Loves and Last Waltzes.
There was a piece in the New York Times on the upcoming re-release of the
The Last Waltz (which I alluded to in an earlier post).
Ah, The Band. I love The Band.
Some things end too soon. But some things just seem to run their course, and no amount of tears or regrets will bring them back. Their time had come. They ran out of road. Still, there always comes a time to look back and honour what was beautiful and valuable. So I'm really lookng forward (heh) to the re-issued boxed set of The Last Waltz. The Scorsese film of the band's swansong concert is making the rounds of select theatres, and it's also being released as a DVD, and the soundtrack as an expanded and remastered
boxed set.
Looking back, I realize how this album was a pivitol piece of my musical development. I bought this album ñ a triple-record set on vinyl ñ in the early 80s. It was in the Fall and I was starting my first year of university at UNB, living in a boarding house in Marysville, across the St. John River from Fredericton. My landlord, Elmer Mac-something, was a pasty middle-aged Episcopalian bible-thumper who inherited the old house from his mother, and he kept the parlour ñ not a living room, a parlour ñ pretty much the way she had left it. Doilies and bell jar clocks and such. He had a compulsive behavioural thing where he would have to wash his hands after handling money, including the rent cheque. He gave me the creeps. I was glad to get out of there once a room became available at a university dorm in November.
But while I was there, when I left for school in the morning, the quickest route on foot was to cross a railroad bridge. No walkway. I had to stride along on the railroad ties, looking down at the river flowing far below my feet. When a train had the audacity to insist on sharing the bridge with me, I had to actually climb down over the side of the bridge and wait on one of the huge concrete supports until the train passed. The whole structure would shake. Fun.
When I got home in the evening, I would sit in my tiny room with the yellowing wallpaper and listen to the Last Waltz. Seemed like kind of an appropriate way to listen to the music of The Band and their other fellow travelers like Neil Young, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, etc. This is the music I was listening to when the music world outside my thin wooden walls was becoming all glossy and, and... 80s-y and... well, to me anyway, empty. This music was rich. This music had heritage. This music had relatives. This music had old pictures in old picture frames in its parlour. But it wasn't dead, like Elmer's parlour. It was alive and vibrant, like a tree with roots.
Some of the performances on this album are just so definitive. This version of
"It Makes No Difference", in particular, has always stood out for me. It's just so perfect, musically and emotionally.
Maybe it sometimes feels cathartic to hear someone else singing your sorrows, but this song just taps into the sadness of lost love so deeply, it just tears me apart whenever I listen to it. Tears are mandatory. Spill 'em if ya got 'em. Rick Danko sings this song with such a sense of heartbreak that even though Robbie Robertson wrote it, Danko's singing is almost grounds enough for a co-writing credit. And then there's the harmonies on the chorus: Levon Helm supplying the first level (the tonic? the 3rd?) and Richard Manuel floating in on top, reaching for heaven. Robbie Robertson's guitar playing is so passionate and on-the-money, and Garth Hudson's tenor sax solo is a beautiful study of economy and feeling. Just perfect.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful music. Sad and strong and sexy. Every stream of American music ñ country, blues, gospel, rock 'n' roll, ragtime, folk, even a little jazz ñ coming together, distilled, of course, by a band that was four-fifths Canadian.
Anyway...
if you can't access the article, here's an excerpt:
The Band Is Gone, the Waltz Plays On
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS
When the Band first sauntered onto the music scene in 1968, the group's impact could not have been more profound. Playing haunting songs that explored age-old themes of guilt and redemption, of individual will and the responsibilities of community, the Band drew on the deepest currents of blues, R & B, country, gospel and the essential force of rock 'n' roll pioneers like Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
"Music From Big Pink," the Band's still-gripping debut album, helped end a baroque period of psychedelic excess. Eric Clapton was just one of many musicians on whom the Band's influence was decisive. Mr. Clapton was a member of Cream when "Music From Big Pink" came out, and the ego-free ensemble eloquence of the Band's music made him feel ashamed of his own group's grandiosity. He remembered hearing the album and thinking, "This is what I want to play."
Now, at what seems to be the end of a similar period of extravagance in pop music, the Band's honest, unadorned music is back. With a bit of fuzzy math, the 25th anniversary of "The Last Waltz," the original Band's final performance in an all-star concert in 1976, is being celebrated with a fanfare that rivals both the lavishness of the original event and the hoopla surrounding the release two years later of the acclaimed movie and soundtrack album that documented it....
The Scorsese film is regarded as one of the greatest music documentaries. "Scorsese has caught the exciting spirit of the concert in a brilliant rhapsody of images," the Newsweek critic Jack Kroll wrote in 1978....
Whatever its flaws, "The Last Waltz" returns at a moment in which it can be received far more generously than it was in the mid-70's.... And at a time when audiences both young and old are discovering music with a connection to something more meaningful than a record company's bottom line, as shown in the success of the soundtrack album "O Brother, Where Art Thou," the artists in "The Last Waltz" represent a rare integrity....
So now we have the revival of a farewell. In many ways, this ostentatious anniversary celebration contradicts the powerful point the Band made in 1968. Rather than the lengthy jams, rococo arrangements and trippy lyrics that were so prevalent at the time, songs by the Band like "The Weight" and "Chest Fever" were at once carefully structured and rhythmically loose, plain-spoken and receptive to endless interpretation. Other than Mr. Helm, who is from Arkansas, all the members of the Band were Canadian. But the group's morally ambiguous songs harked back to the oldest traditions in American music ó to medicine shows and spirituals, to murder ballads and eccentric folk character portraits....
It remains to be seen what those "younger generations" will make of "The Last Waltz." At one point in the film, Mr. Scorsese asks Mr. Robertson whether the concert represents "the celebration of a beginning or an end." Mr. Robertson replies, "The beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning." That may have just been rock star insouciance, a flip way of saying, Who knows? to a question he may have considered corny. But as audiences today continue to consider the significance of "The Last Waltz," it may be as true an answer as he could have given, for reasons he probably could not have imagined at the time.
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"It¥s the last waltz
The last waltz with you
But that don¥t mean
The dance is over..."
