Bob dylan by greil marcu.., p.9
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, page 9
The tour reportedly ended badly—wearing out, with audiences declining, money disappearing into ballooning expenses. You could think this album represents the resentment felt by the musicians toward a public that ultimately refused to salaam to them. Whether that’s so or not, what I hear in this music, in its dogged lack of charm or groove, is utter contempt for the audience. And that contempt may well be the other, duller side of Dylan’s nastiness, of that malicious intensity he exposed on television with “Idiot Wind.” Focused and revealed, that nastiness is at the heart of Dylan’s art. Unfocused—and disguised as camaraderie with busy, chattering music—it’s merely irritating, and, worse, it is empty.
Bob Dylan, Hard Rain (Columbia, 1976).
THAT TRAIN DON’T STOP HERE ANYMORE
Rolling Stone
30 December 1976
The late Junior Parker made the original recording of “Mystery Train” in 1953, taking the first lines—Train I ride
Sixteen
Coaches long
—from the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” which dates from the twenties, though no one knows exactly where the Carter Family got it. It is a very old song. When the Band went after the tune an hour or so into their farewell concert at Winterland Thanksgiving night, the song sounded new. I had heard Parker sing it, and Elvis, and Paul Butterfield, and I had heard the Band’s version, with new lyrics, on Moondog Matinee, their oldies album; this was something else entirely. Both Levon Helm, singing lead, and Richard Manuel played drums; Paul Butterfield played harp; and together they began a jumping beat that kicked with greater force each time the tune turned a corner. I have never heard Butterfield play with such strength: his harmonica was a hoodoo night call hovering over the crowd, cutting through the event of the Band’s last performance to show why such a performance could have become an event in the first place. The Band held nothing back; they played with an intensity I’ve seen them attain only occasionally over the years—behind Dylan in 1965, on the second night of their debut performance at Winterland in 1969, with Dylan in 1974 on “Highway 61 Revisited” and “All Along the Watchtower”—an intensity I’ve never forgotten.
Come down to the station meet my baby at the gate
Ask the stationmaster if the train’s runnin’ late
He said if you’re a-waitin’ on that 4.44
I hate to tell you son that train don’t stop here anymore
Levon sang as if he were pleading for mercy—from God or from the devil, you couldn’t tell.
The concert was billed as the Last Waltz; the Band came up with a song of the same name, written mostly the day before the show and rehearsed backstage during the only break they took in their five-hour performance. As an event the affair was overblown, but the Band escaped the pretensions that surrounded it.
Over the years, the Band has become identified with a set of songs in a manner that distinguishes them, for good or ill, from all other rock groups: they are less their mystique, or their faces, than they are “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and other tunes from Music from Big Pink and The Band. The Band opened the show with such songs and they played them with greater precision and flair than I have seen in a long time. They came out of themselves; Rick Danko bopped across the stage, Robbie Robertson took extravagant solos, Garth Hudson roamed his organ like a tracker, his hair flying, and both Richard Manuel and Levon Helm seemed to sing with a special conviction. As I listened to their first number, “Up on Cripple Creek,” it struck me that I might never hear them play the song again; they had been playing it since that first night in San Francisco eight years ago, and I had never seem them play without it. I had carped that the Band never changed their stage material, but suddenly the song seemed permanent, rightfully unchanging, no more transitory than a personality. At that moment, it made no sense that they would not be playing the tune as long as they lived. I was caught up in the song; I couldn’t deal with it as a last anything, because it was a long way from wearing out.
They moved through various tunes, bringing on Allen Toussaint, there to conduct a horn section, and a fiddler, peaking at the end of “This Wheel’s on Fire,” always one of their high points (with Howard Johnson, who looks a little like Louis Armstrong, a little like Flip Wilson, and a lot like Roy Campanella, singing along, puffing his cheeks to sing just as he does with his tuba). They sang their recent single, “Georgia on My Mind,” recorded as their contribution to Jimmy Carter’s campaign (he was sent the master, and liked it—“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was the appropriate flip). Garth provided an intro straight out of “Song of the South,” while Manuel sang as a crooner, away from the piano. But the Band’s solo set broke open with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” They simply bore down harder on this song than I have ever seen them do before; there was a lot of love in the performance, and a certain desperation as well. The set also included
“The Shape I’m In” (sluggish, as it’s always been onstage), “It Makes No Difference,” “Life Is a Carnival,” “Ophelia” and “Stage Fright”; they closed with “Rag Mama Rag.”
Damned if someone didn’t yell for “Free Bird.”
Then the Band brought Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly singer who recruited them as the Hawks in Toronto in the early sixties, onto the stage. Hawkins is no bigger than any two members of the Band put together; he is the ultimate fantasy of the unreconstructed rocker. He wore a huge, straw snap-brim hat, a black suit, a big beard, flashing eyes, a scarred face and a grin. The Band hit as tough a Bo Diddley beat as you’d ever want to hear and Hawkins commenced to prowl the stage, aiming “Who Do You Love” at the Band (“Take it easy, Garth, dontcha gimme no lip”), who had backed him on his classic recording of the song back in 1963. Hawkins howled, wailed, screamed, storming across the boards to fan Robbie’s guitar with his hat (“Cool it down, boy!”), a riff from the act the six men had shared thirteen years ago, and my favorite moment of the night.
Dr. John, dressed as a fifties hipster—gold shoes, sparkling jacket, beret pulled down over his head—followed, with “Such a Night.” Bobby Charles, also from New Orleans, came on for a rewrite of “Liza Jane”: Dr. John, Charles, Danko, Robertson, Manuel and Helm put across as modest and perfect a piece of New Orleans music as a place like Winterland could contain. Dr. John’s own tune had broken the mood, as the songs of most guests, when unidentified with the Band, would subsequently do, but singing as part of the group he brought it back.
Then came “Mystery Train,” and then, with Butterfield still on the stage, Muddy Waters, with his own guitarist and piano player. He sang a weak version of “Caldonia”; he is, after all, sixty-one. It was nice of the Band to invite him; most of them had played on his Woodstock album, and as Levon and the Hawks they had recorded Waters’s “She’s 19” back in ’63. It made sense. One conceived apologies, and then heard the Band and Muddy tear into “Mannish Boy.” Waters first cut it in 1955, when he was a mere forty, barely younger than Hawkins is now, and suddenly the idea of aging, of over-the-hill, was satirized. Butterfield seemed to hold one dark note throughout the entire performance; Waters danced, jumped up and down; the Band smoked. It went on and on: “I’m a man . . . I’m a rollin’ stone...” They went for everything the song had to give, and when Waters left the stage, there was nothing left. The Last Waltz had been carefully worked out; there were two nights of rehearsals in San Francisco, weeks of rehearsals in L.A., and every number was literally scripted, line by line and shot by shot, for camera angles and setups. “Mannish Boy” might have been run through, but as Muddy and the Band played it, it could hardly have been rehearsed. It was a titanic performance.
Waters was followed by Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Neil Diamond, and for me the show lost its shape with their performances. Clapton played poorly, if spectacularly; neither Young’s tunes (“Helpless” and Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds”) nor Mitchell’s (three from a new album) nor Diamond’s (“Dry Your Eyes”) seemed to have anything to do with the Band musically; here the concert slipped towards more stargazing. It was at this point that speculation about additional guests began; one fan predicted that Buddy Holly would appear precisely at midnight, while another claimed to have seen the deceased Murry Wilson tuning up backstage.
As Diamond left Manuel turned the piano over to John Simon and began to sing “Tura Lura,” a song about an Irish lullaby; just as Manuel finished the last verse, Van Morrison made his entrance—and he turned the show around. I had seen him not many minutes before, prowling the balconies, dressed nondescriptly in a raincoat and jeans, scowling; but there he was onstage, in an absurd purple suit and a green top, singing to the rafters. They cut into “Caravan”—with John Simon waving the Band’s volume up and down, and the horns at their most effective—while Van burned holes in the floor. He was magic, and I thought, why didn’t he join the Band years ago? More than any other singer, he fit in, his music and theirs made sense together. It was a triumph, and as the song ended Van began to kick one leg into the air out of sheer exuberance, and he kicked his way right off the stage like a Rockette. The crowd had given him a fine welcome and they cheered wildly when he left.
The Band headed into an intermission—during which poets, including Emmett Grogan, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, read—with “Acadian Driftwood.” Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were brought back to sing harmony, since they are Canadians, and it is a Canadian song. It did not really hold together. The concert began again, some forty minutes later, with Garth’s long intro to “Chest Fever”—this time, it was more stately than playful—followed by the song itself, and then “The Last Waltz,” which has something of the feel of “Long Black Veil” to it. The next tune was “The Weight.” I have heard the Band perform this song a dozen times, and never, until this night, did it ever seem to come off. Garth plays piano on “The Weight,” and there has always been something so crazed, so country-time about his notes, that has always made it impossible for the rest of the group to follow him. But here, he played with some semblance of order, and the song was shining.
Immediately, Bob Dylan came on, plugged in, and hit the first notes of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” His rhythm guitar was turned up, or mixed up, so loudly that everyone else was drowned out; the sound was rougher, shriller, faster and harder than it had been all night. Dylan rocked out. He danced across the stage, striding off-mike after every verse. His guitar was ringing. He shouted into the mike, tearing off a song he and the Hawks had used as a centerpiece for their shows in 1965 and ’66, slowed the pace with “Hazel,” from Planet Waves, and cut back into “I Don’t Believe You,” also one of the finest numbers from the Dylan-Hawks shows of ten years ago. It was a powerful, lyrical piece then; it was this night as well. Dylan swaggered; there was a great urgency in his performance, and unlike those of some other singers, no solemnity and no reverence. He was noisy, and he never stood still. After “Forever Young” he segued without a break—in fact, there hadn’t been a break in time of so much as a note between his songs—back into “Baby Let Me Follow You Down.” He was on, some said, for twenty-five minutes; I would have bet on seven.
The concert reached a formal end with “I Shall Be Released” (“Well,” said a friend, “at least they didn’t do ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’”)—and predictably, everyone, plus Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, came back to sing the finale. That over and the stage cleared, Levon and Ringo laid down a vamp until more musicians—Dr. John, Clapton, Wood, Carl Radle, Neil Young, Steve Stills, and various members of the Band—came back for long and rather typical jams. After thirty minutes, the Band returned alone and punched out “Don’t Do It.” That done, they did. They left.
It was a long night, and until the appearance of Ringo-Woods-Stills (plus Jerry Brown, not dressed in a suit, who waved), there was no sense of super-session. In the main, the people who played together made music only they would have made together; they pushed each other past their limits, and they broke through the nostalgia that was built into the show.
Exactly what is over is not easy to tell. No one expects that the Band’s farewell will turn out to be much like Smokey Robinson’s goodbye or any of David Bowie’s retirements. Perhaps what is over is simply a set of songs, those songs the Band has been playing, and not escaping, for so long. It may be that part of the reason they decided to end their time as a public band was that their own music had driven them into a corner; perhaps they needed to orchestrate an end in order to start over, as individuals, and as a group. Certainly there will be more solo projects; the official line is that the Band will continue to record as the Band, but save for the live album of the Last Waltz, I wonder how long it will be before their name appears on another LP.
The fact is that the Band has never been, to their fans or to their detractors, just another top-flight rock ’roll band; they have always been special, and it was the very idea of a group of men sticking together over the years that along with their music made them special—it was that, no doubt, that made them unique. I’m not truly ready to deal with the likelihood that the songs the Band put into the American tradition now exist only on record, nor am I able to lay to rest my doubts that the Band has, whatever their intentions, closed only one door.
Weeks ago, I asked Robbie Robertson if a last concert meant the Band was breaking up, and he seemed both surprised and amused at the idea. “The Band will never break up,” he said. “It’s too late to break up.” Well, I hope so. But that line from “Mystery Train” stays in my mind, as does the performance the Band and Butterfield gave to the song, as does a thought from Emmett Grogan’s autobiography, where he wrote that his encounters with the Band taught him that if anything really good were to happen, it would be a long time coming. A long time coming, and a long time gone.
The Band, The Last Waltz (Warner Bros./Rhino, 2002).
SAVE THE LAST WALTZ FOR ME
New West
22 May 1978
Martin Scorsese lives in the Hollywood hills. His house instantly announces itself as the home of a filmmaker; except for a small Catholic triptych, movie posters are the only form of visual art in the place. Dominating almost every room, they’re of all sorts: arty German collages for Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a placard for Rebel Without a Cause, a hilariously effete tableau from Stewart Granger’s forgotten Saraband for Dead Lovers, a huge ad in which Gary Cooper demonstrates how to fire two pistols simultaneously without dropping Paulette Godard. But this night—just following the first major screening of The Last Waltz, the film Scorsese has made of the grand farewell concert the Band staged in San Francisco on Thanksgiving night, 1976—the talk is all rock ’n’ roll.
The Last Waltz is, by a long way, the best concert movie I’ve ever seen; it is, in a way, far better than the concert itself. I have my complaints. As he has for so many years now, Garth Hudson remains nearly invisible, and the sound mix doesn’t give his music the prominence it deserves. Richard Manuel doesn’t get the space on the screen he deserves, and his piano is often hard to catch. Still, the impact of the film swallows such reservations, burns them out.
The movie is first a set of performances: the Band as the Band, and the Band with an all-star line-up of friends, mentors, and collaborators. Segued through the film are brief snatches of talk with the Band, a sort of casual meditation on the sixteen years the five men spent as on-the-road rockers, starting in Toronto in 1959 and on as Ronnie Hawkins’s bar-band Hawks, finally emerging on their own, nearly ten years later, with Music from Big Pink and The Band—their first albums, which, no matter how many the group has made since, still define them.
It’s a long story, and a good one, but in Scorsese’s house little is said of The Last Waltz. I want to absorb it, and Scorsese and Robbie Robertson, who produced the picture, want to escape it. Scorsese has put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and we’re simply listening. It’s an album of transcendence: transcendence of childhood fears, adult sins. “Madame George” comes on—“That’s the song,” Scorsese murmurs. I can’t help telling him he’s picked my favorite record of all time, but he’s way ahead of me. “I based the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver on Astral Weeks,” Scorsese says, “and that’s a movie about a man who hates music.” I mentally scurry to recover images of the film so I can figure out what Scorsese means; he must be talking about the sense of doom, or anyway fate, that Morrison insists on.
Scorsese pulls out a Ray Charles album; the song he wants us to hear is “What Would I Do Without You,” from 1957. It’s a slow, tragic blues ballad; there’s the assumption of a happy ending, or at least of resolution, in the lyrics, but not in Ray Charles’s singing. “Leave out a few Billie Holiday tunes, and there’s more heroin in that music than in anything you’ll ever hear,” Robertson says. “Heroin does something to your throat. It makes the voice thicker. Listen.” We do; the title of the song takes on a new, acrid meaning.
“We used to do it,” Robertson says, “‘What Would I Do Without You,’ after we left Ronnie, when it was just the five of us, before Bob, before Big Pink. But we couldn’t get away with it. The song was too down, it was death. That’s what it is. People would just sit there, or they’d leave.”
I’d never even heard of the song, and I asked Scorsese how he found it. “It’s the flip of ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So,’” he says. “I heard Alan Freed play it.” In 1957 Scorsese was growing up in New York’s Little Italy, and Freed, the only disc jockey who can be called a founder of rock ’n’ roll, was ruling the New York airwaves. The soundtrack Freed provided for Scorsese’s life later turned up as the soundtrack of Mean Streets. “I bought ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So,’ and fell in love with the other side; I bought the 78. I’ve still got it. Right here.”
