by Levon Helm
On June 28 we played outdoors in Santa Barbara, our first appearance in Southern California in six years (excluding the Dylan tour). We got one of those rapturous greetings that we all loved, and as the Fourth of July bicentennial neared, Garth began working American anthems into his “Chest Fever” introduction, which made everybody laugh; a nice part of the show. I remember that Richard could barely sing at that show. His voice was so hoarse that he faltered, but he struggled so hard with “In a Station” that once again everybody’s heart went out to him. Despite all the self-destructive behavior, you just couldn’t be mad at Richard.
Our shows usually started rough but ended smooth. The moment where we faded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” into “Chest Fever” was always magic for me, and Richard sang the thing as if for his very life. “The Band,” said the Los Angeles Times the next day, “reexerted [sic] its role as America’s premier rock band, but it needs to deal more forcefully with the issue of its past vs. its present.” A few days later The New York Times concluded its review of a Westchester show: “Having performed its magnificent early music during the concert’s first half, The Band devoted the last half of its set to more superficial numbers from its more recent albums. The performance was musically impeccable, but it lacked the grand, almost desperate intensity of the first part of the show.”
We really hit our groove late that August when we played three sold-out nights at the Greek Theatre in L.A. All our families and friends came, and the shows were some of our best. I loved looking into the wings and seeing all the Band children—beautiful little boys and girls—dancing and wiggling as they proudly watched their daddies play.
Around this time we played a pretty good show at the Carter Barron Amphitheater in Washington, DC, which was broadcast on a widely syndicated rock radio show called The King Biscuit Flower Hour—pretty ironic, since I’d grown up listening to King Biscuit Time on KFFA back in Helena.
The Band started to unravel maybe two thirds through this tour, which turned out to be our last with the original lineup. Robbie’s son was born around then, making it harder for him to get on that plane and go to the show. We had a couple of bumpy rides on that tour, and it didn’t take too much air turbulance to make us remember our prayers, especially in the wake of Dayton Stratton’s tragic accident.
Around then Rick Danko signed a solo deal with Arista Records. I knew he’d been unhappy with things for a long time, and I think he’d seen the end coming and wanted to get on with his career. As he told me at the time, “For me to sing three or four songs a year, do some background vocals, and then not go on tour... Well, it’s just not enough to keep me occupied, and I can’t afford to go crazy anymore.”
Then in September, just as we really started to play with some real fire, we were forced to cancel ten dates—a quarter of the tour—when Richard injured his neck in a boating accident near Austin, Texas. Robbie got superstitious when this happened. It was part of the last straw for him, since he was already wound up about being away from home and the general situation. We weren’t really talking too much at the time, me and Robbie, and things deteriorated further when he told me he was thinking of hanging it up.
I didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
“I have this, like, premonition,” he told me. “I mean, look at it. You can just tell that something’s gonna happen, that something’s... wrong. I don’t know, Lee. Do we have to spend the rest of our lives on the road? How long before we can’t stand each other or end up like Sam and Dave, man, fucking knife fights in the dressing room?” He took a drag of his cigarette and waved it in the air. “Or maybe it’ll be like the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers: One day we’ll do a show, and they’ll say, ‘Shit, we’ve seen you old guys a million times. Why don’t you go home?’”
“You’re strung pretty tight,” I told him.
“I got a bad feeling,” Robbie repeated. “The numbers don’t add up anymore.”
The doctors had prescribed six weeks of traction for Richard’s injury, but someone found a team of Tibetan-trained healers at a foundation in Dallas, who came and gave Richard some therapy and told him to go to bed for three days. We resumed the tour at the Palladium in Manhattan. Richard looked ill, and no one was smiling. So we opened with “Ophelia,” which led to “The Shape I’m In.” Richard took the first verse and growled it so beautifully that we all grinned at one another in relief.
Sometime in September we got word that Robertson and our management wanted to put it away. Robbie had had enough, and they decided to kill The Band and go out with a bang. At first I thought it might be a joke, but Robertson said he’d had a bellyful and was dead serious. In fact, it turned out they had a plan. Robbie wanted us to play a farewell show in San Francisco, where it all started for us, sometime around Thanksgiving. He wanted everyone we’d played with along the way—from Ronnie Hawkins to Bob Dylan—to perform, but without bringing their own musicians. We would be the backup band for our guests. They were already lining up people from all phases of our career: Hawk, Muddy Waters, Paul Butterfield, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Ringo, Eric Clapton, Allen Toussaint, the Rock of Ages horn section. It was gonna be the concert of the century, maybe the show to end the whole so-called rock era. That’s what they told me, anyway.
The only problem was, I didn’t want any part of it. I didn’t want to break up The Band. And I told this to Robbie one day in early October 1976 at our lawyer’s office. It was one of many acrimonious meetings we had, but even though I always got there on time, I always had the feeling the real meeting had started an hour earlier. I was actually too late.
The lids of his eyes drooped as I spoke. I think he’d been up all night working on a Neil Diamond album he was producing, and he looked real tired and burned out. Robbie lit a fresh cigarette with the end of the one he’d just smoked. I’d known him—or thought I’d known him—for seventeen years, since we were both teenagers. Eight years in the bars and eight years on the arena circuit had come down to this.
Now he was saying he was sick of it all. He said he wanted to keep on recording and making music with us, but he didn’t want to go on the road anymore. “We’re not learning anything, man,” he told me. “It’s not doing anything for us, and in fact it feels dangerous to me. Look what’s happening, Levon. I’m getting superstitious. Look at Dayton Stratton. Every time I get on the plane I’m thinking about this stuff. The whole thing just isn’t healthy anymore.”
“I’m not in it for my health,” I said. “I’m a musician, and I wanna live the way I do.”
He said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to live. I’m tired of the danger out there. How long before the odds run out? How long before someone dies? I am through with the road, man, and that is that. It’s a done deal.”
There was a silence. He lit another cigarette.
I said, “What if the rest of us want to continue as The Band?”
Robbie thought for a minute, and his face darkened. “We could stop it.” By “we” he meant that big business had taken over. I knew he and our management had already approached Warner Bros. about a new record deal, and Warners was real interested in getting The Band. Bill Graham had been contacted about the last concert, and there was even some talk of documenting the whole thing for a feature film. Robertson was saying the rest of us didn’t have any choice other than to do what we were told.
This made me enraged. “The fuck you could stop it,” I said. “I know big business is running this thing now, but if you think you have control over my life and if you want to prove it, I’ll meet you back here in the morning with my lawyer, and we’ll get the fucking stenographer in here, do the goddamn shorthand, and we’ll see who has control. We’ll go over the goddamn contracts and see who ends up running the show, because I’ll fight you tooth and nail just to feel better about it. You may think you’re running the damn show, but I’ll prove to you at ten o’clock in the morning that you ain’t. I’ll show you, you son of a bitch!”
“A
w, Levon, come on...”
“No, man, you come on. I don’t completely understand what your motives are to destroy this group, but I do know it’s a crying shame to take this band from productivity to retirement because you’re superstitious, or for the sake of a final payday. I know you got all our lawyers and accountants and whatever on your side—if you ask me, they could all use a stake driven through their hearts for all the good they did us—but this whole thing is dead wrong.”
He didn’t say anything, and the meeting was over. I walked out.
I didn’t really know what to do about this situation. I thought of fighting it, but then I called Jim Gallman, my lawyer in Arkansas, and told him the story. He thought for a while and told me I was beat. He told me, in short, “You can’t fight ’em and win anything, so my advice is, do whatever the contract says, even if it makes you puke. Do it, puke, and get out of the way. Then you can cuss ’em out, tell ’em whatever you want.”
So that’s what I did. I went back to Woodstock for a while and waited to see what would happen. I talked to the other guys in the group. Some of us figured that The Band could go on as a recording unit, and use that framework as an umbrella to do our own things. Rick told me he’d lost or had to pass up some good opportunities because working under our banner seemed more exclusive than it had to be. He had a record deal of his own to think about anyway.
Once we all agreed to do it, we rationalized that this last big show would give us each a running start to the next phase in our lives. Eventually I got to the point of saying, OK, I’ll put my own band together and see what happens. I was the still the least in favor of “The Last Waltz,” as Robertson was calling this final show of ours. I was the one who insisted he wasn’t tired of traveling and sleeping late in good hotel suites and eating in fine restaurants and playing for people, but I decided I didn’t want to put myself in any intractable position. I could even understand wanting to stay home with your family and work on movie music, but I didn’t want to be that guy. So around this time I called Henry Glover and told him to start thinking about gearing up RCO for another project, and let’s make it a big one.
So The Last Waltz got set up with very limited input from me. I wish we could have put out fifty albums, and played twice as much and reached out to ten times more people than we already had. But I also resolved not to have too many regrets and not to put up with too much horseshit concerning The Last Waltz. I went along with it like a good soldier, but for the record, I didn’t get a lot of joy from seeing The Band fold itself up.
Nor, so we heard, did a lot of people when they were approached to play. Bob Dylan said it made him real sad. Neil Young said he wasn’t ready to hear this bit of news. Bill Graham was shocked as well but saw the dramatic possibilities. He offered the Winterland Ballroom, site of our first show as The Band, on Thanksgiving night, complete with a full turkey dinner with all the fixin’s, dancing to an orchestra, followed by our show. In other words, one of Bill Graham’s patented extravaganzas, at twenty-five bucks a ticket. We took the date.
On October 18 details were released to the press. The next day the news was in every daily paper in the country. The Los Angeles Times: “After sixteen years on the road, The Band—which has put together the most distinguished and acclaimed body of work of any rock group of the last decade—is apparently calling it quits. At least for touring purposes.” The New York Times reported: “The Band, perhaps America’s most respected rock group, will give a ‘Farewell’ concert in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, according to spokesmen close to The Band and to the many guest artists planning to participate....
“Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, confirmed yesterday from Malibu, California, that the concert would take place, but said that all other aspects were still in the planning stage. Mr. Robertson said The Band would not tour ‘ever again’ after Thanksgiving, leaving its five members free for individual projects. But he added that the group would continue to make records. ‘The Band will never break up,’ he said. ‘It’s too late now.’”
This was also what Robbie and our management boys said when they went in and tried to con Mo Ostin at Warner Bros. Records. They told Mo we weren’t retiring, just quitting the road. Gonna continue as a recording unit called The Band, developing new product until the cows come home. In October Capitol released The Best of The Band, a ten-song anthology that was our ninth album for the label. Now we owed them one more under the terms of the contract that Albert Grossman had negotiated for us back in 1967-68, a world away in time. Warners was assured that we would deliver our last album to Capitol by the end of 1976 and be free agents, ready to sign another record deal. The record and movie rights to our Thanksgiving show were also part of the negotiations.
The way it ended up, Warner Bros. put us on retainer instead of under contract. They paid the group two thousand dollars a week each for the next twenty-eight months, and in return got the album and movie rights to what became The Last Waltz.
Jimmy Carter had been kind enough to receive us in the Georgia governer’s mansion when we passed through Atlanta back on the 1974 Dylan tour, and now he was running for President against incumbent Jerry Ford. We’d been getting calls asking us to help the campaign, so that October we released a single of “Georgia on My Mind” in Mr. Carter’s honor. It had been cut at Shangri-La, and Richard sang it with the soul factor turned pretty high. On October 30, 1976, just days before the election, we played “Georgia” on Saturday Night Live, and a few days after that Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States.
When they first told me about making a movie out of The Last Waltz, I was against the idea. I figured that with all the guest artists coming in, we already had to learn more than twenty new songs—chord changes and dynamics—that we’d never played before in our lives, and new artists were being added to the show all the time. In fact, no one we asked turned us down. No one even said, “I’ll think about it,” or, “I’ll get back to you.” They just said, “Where and when?” Musicians got their expenses paid, but no fees. Bill Graham was in for a 10 percent administrative fee to take care of his expenses, but he always maintained he went about fifty thousand dollars in the hole for The Last Waltz. Dr. John came in, then Joni Mitchell was added. (We’d known her in Toronto, and Robbie had played on her Court and Spark album a couple of years earlier.) When I heard that Neil Diamond was going to play, I asked, “What the hell does Neil Diamond have to do with us?”
Robertson just produced his album, I was told.
“But what does he represent to The Band?” I asked.
Robbie called me up at the Miramar. “Well, Neil is like Tin Pan Alley,” he said. “That fifties Brill Building scene, songwriters like Doc Pomus...”
“Why don’t we just get Doc Pomus?” I suggested.
He said that he and Neil had written a couple of songs together, and maybe they could do one of ’em in the show.
I was glad I insisted on Muddy Waters.
Anyway, that was another one we had to learn. I know this put me under a lot of pressure. I asked Robertson how many chances we’d get on each song.
“We’re filming the show live,” he answered. “One take each song.”
And so the film was more or less shoved down our throats too, and we went along with it. Do it, puke, and get out.
Martin Scorsese was part of the movie crew at the Woodstock Festival and had edited the three-screen movie Woodstock. Later he made his mark with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, personal, small-scale films that put him at the top of most people’s Favorite Director lists. The producer of both of these was Jon Taplin, our former road manager. Robbie thought that nervous, fast-talking Marty was his ticket into Hollywood and asked him to film The Last Waltz.
“Van Morrison?” Scorsese said. “Are you shitting me? I’ve got to do this!” This was in early October, maybe six weeks before the show. Scorsese had just finished shooting New York, New York, a big-budget big-band picture with Liza Minnelli and Robert De
Niro. Scorsese’s crew had just been working with a proscenium stage like the one planned for Winterland, but on a soundstage. Many Hollywood production legends—cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, famous lighting and set designers—were still available. Almost overnight, Scorsese and Robertson produced a 150-page shooting script so detailed that lighting cues were matched to chord changes in individual songs.
They went to Mo Ostin and asked him to pay for it, and he said that Warners would put up the money if Bob Dylan was going to be in the movie. That was the condition. So Bob was approached about this, and they told us that Bob didn’t really want to be in the movie because he was working on his own movie, Renaldo and Clara, shot during the previous year’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour. So we explained the situation about Warners wanting to finance only if Bob appeared in the film, and I think Bob said he would think about it. It was an ambiguous answer, but they went ahead and told Warners that Bob was in on the whole deal. That’s how we got Mo Ostin to loan us $1.5 million for the film, even though we weren’t on his label.
Bill Graham, by the way, wasn’t into the movie either. He saw The Last Waltz as a historic live event with The Band bonding in farewell with the same audience that had greeted us in our debut seven years before. He was more concerned with the logistics of feeding the fifty-four hundred expected customers and guests, and didn’t want big movie cameras and booms blocking their view. There was a lot of reassuring before Bill went for the whole film idea.
John Simon’s involvement with The Last Waltz will give you an idea of the atmosphere surrounding the group. “In the old days working with The Band,” he says, “there was nothing on paper, no clear-cut deal that said, ‘If you perform this work, you get so much.’ I was usually so high that I didn’t much notice or even care. If you were broke, you called Albert Grossman, and he’d give you money. Over the years, I eventually noticed that I didn’t get any royalties for the two Band albums I produced. In early 1976 I asked Albert, and he sent me to Robbie. Robbie referred me to their accountant, who said he would check and get back to me. No royalties were due, he claimed.