The Last Waltz is not a good film about The Band

Now that The Last Waltz is coming up on the podcast, I have a little gripe to air. I know this may seem like a somewhat ridiculous thing to get worked up about. But as a longtime The Band fan… ya know. I can’t help myself.

The Last Waltz is unquestionably one of the greatest concert films ever made. What it isn’t, however, is a good film about The Band. Quite the opposite, actually: it’s a pretty horrendous portrayal of a band that was known for its egalitarian and democratic approach.

The Band was a band. All of them were multi-instrumentalists and three of them were good enough vocalists to be the lead singer of any other band (and indeed at various points were). They switched positions and played different instruments. There really was an egalitarian quality to The Band, particularly on their first two or three records. Their albums and their music were characterized by the fact that every part was necessary, and nothing was allowed to stick out simply for the sake of showing off. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts. A true collective, if you will.

What The Last Waltz presents, though, is essentially The Robbie Robertson Show. Levon Helm gets quite a lot of screen time because he sings. Rick Danko gets some as well. Richard Manuel gets almost none.

By this point, Manuel was deep in a drug addiction (it was touch and go if he would be able to sing his parts, and you can see Dylan covering for him at points at the end), which is also apparent in the interviews. The interviews with Danko and Manuel are fucking depressing, they were shot basically in the morning after heavy bouts of partying, when both of them were barely conscious.

And the person who is almost completely absent from the documentary is arguably the most important member of The Band: Garth Hudson (RIP), whom the others called “the honeydripper” for his ability to sweeten every track. Hudson barely appears at all. This is particularly bizarre because Hudson essentially defined The Band’s sound. His keyboards, organ, saxophone and other instrumentation were absolutely fundamental to what made The Band sound like The Band.

Of course, all of this was shaped by the fact that Robbie Robertson was the one who wanted to break up the band. He was the one who wanted to quit, while the others weren’t really ready to do so. So Robertson comes off as mature and measured in the film, like the only grown up in the room (which is certainly what he had felt like during the height of the others substance abuse). There was already a certain bitterness toward him, which is pretty apparent in the film. Levon Helm, in particular, was not exactly enthusiastic about taking part.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great concert film. It really is. (Buuuuuut it is also heavily overdubbed. You can listen to the original recordings, which [of course] sound much rougher.)

Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up by Ronnie Hawkins’s reaction to Levon Helm after they saw Last Waltz together. The Hawk turned to Levon, slapped him on the shoulder and laughed:
“Ah, the film would have been awright - if it just had more Robbie in it!”