by Levon Helm
“That autumn Robbie called about The Last Waltz. He said, ‘The concept is that we’re going to be the backup band for our favorite acts. We want you to be the music director. You’re the man to do it.’
“I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to do it. And while we’re at it, would you ask the accountant one more time if you owe me any money?’
“A couple of weeks later, a check arrives for sixty-two thousand dollars. Then Robbie called with some cockamamie story asking if, just for bookkeeping purposes, we could make this the last check for the two albums. Besides, he assured me, The Last Waltz album would be so huge, there wouldn’t be any more financial problems after its release. Being the credulous type, I signed away all future royalties from the first two Band albums—and of course never saw a penny from The Last Waltz. I don’t think many people have, because Warners eventually charged the cost of the film against the album. A lot of people got conned, and you let yourself be conned because they were so attractive.
“I flew out there, and we had rehearsals at Shangri-La, which was a fun place to hang out. It had a bar-lounge, a good pool table, and the master suite had been turned into a recording studio. No one but Garth read music, so I had to arrange and work with The Band to learn the songs. Everything was complicated. Bob Dylan was expected to show up at any minute to rehearse, but never actually made it. Henry Glover, Allen Toussaint, and Tom Malone worked on the horn charts. Joni Mitchell came to rehearsals and couldn’t name the weird tunings her songs were written in, so Garth had to figure out the chords. Ronnie Hawkins was living there, attending the rehearsals and getting to know the big English musicians who liked to hang around the bar at Shangri-La: Eric Clapton and his [future] wife, Patti [George Harrison’s ex, and the inspiration for “Layla”], Ringo, Ron Wood. Hawk was enthusiastic, like a cheerleader. ‘All these big-time English guys,’ he told me, ‘I’ve never seen this. I’m in Toronto. To me, this is the big time! This is it, baby!’”
* * *
I think we got to San Francisco about a week before Thanksgiving and moved into the Miyako Hotel, which had a pretty good sushi bar. Down the street at Winterland, nine big movie cameras were pointed at the stage. Scorsese was so hyper, I couldn’t understand what he was saying most of the time. He talked so speedily that it was unintelligible to me. He and Bill Graham—it was incredible! Bill was worried about the customers, Marty about his film, and it got adversarial. People were crying about money all the time. They had long rows of tables ready for the banquet. I said, “Let’s get some nice amber lamps on those tables, so it’ll look elegant and muted,” and they said, “Are you kidding? There’s no budget for that!” In fact, they kept saying there was no budget for anything.
Famous set designer Boris Leven raided the storage room of the Opera Company of San Francisco for props from La Traviata: columns, chandeliers, crimson wall hangings. That was the “set” of The Last Waltz. Scorsese said it looked like a crazed Luchino Visconti movie. Bill Graham was complaining that the dirty balconies of Winterland wouldn’t look good on camera, and we told him the balconies weren’t gonna be on camera; the cameras were pointing at the stage. But he insisted on spending thousands of dollars to build a painted wood facade over the dirty balconies. Meanwhile, we were having trouble flying in Muddy Waters’s guitar player because he wasn’t in the original budget. There were a lot of fights, a lot of screaming. When Bill Graham let go, boy, the old spit would fly. I didn’t see too much of this, mind you. Bill Graham going off on someone—it was more like something you heard.
Cocaine was a big, big deal at the time. Bill Graham had painted one of the dressing rooms white, walls and ceiling, and put a thick white rug on the floor. The only thing in the room was a sleek glass table with razor blades artfully strewn about. They had cut the noses out of Groucho Marx masks and pasted them up on the white walls. Hundreds of big pink noses and nostrils. A tape played sniffing noises. This was the “Cocteau Room,” and it was often filled with people tapping the razors on the table.
“It was California in the 1970s, and everybody was coked up,” John Simon reflects. “Not me. I was the musical director, the honcho. We had a dress rehearsal at Winterland the night before the show, and it fell to me to call the shots. Someone had to move things along. My favorite rehearsal was with Muddy Waters and Paul Butterfield at the Miyako Hotel. Muddy Waters had the dignity of a king, but he also responded to this great, powerful band, and generally radiated tremendous authority. Muddy Waters and The Band. It was like the confluence of two rivers of music. That was the rehearsal I remember.”
Two days before the show, our studio manager tried to talk to me. He was one of the boys on the other side of the desk. I could tell from the awful look on his face that there was some problem, and he’d been delegated to deal with me.
“Levon,” he said, “we’ve invited too many people. The show’s gonna run for hours! We, uh, we gotta take someone off the show.”
I was in a mood. I snarled, “Go tell Robertson to tell Neil Diamond we don’t even know who the fuck he is!”
Some of the Arkansas contingent who had flown in on my friend Don Tyson’s private plane were in the room and laughed at this, but I wasn’t laughing. I couldn’t believe it, but I knew what was coming.
This flunky said, “Um, we’ve all discussed it, and we’re thinking about, ah, maybe, you know, taking Muddy off the show.”
I just looked at him.
“Anyway, we were hoping maybe you could talk to Muddy for us.”
There was silence for an awful thirty seconds. I was trying to get a grip before I answered, before I lost control. We were all under tremendous pressure because of this movie. The whole damn thing had been hijacked to the nth degree.
I had to clear my throat before I could speak.
“Not only will I talk to Muddy,” I managed, as I began to get worked up, “but I will also take Muddy back to New York, and we will do the goddamn Last Waltz in New York. Him and me. That’s right.” Now I was getting going. “Yes, I’ll talk to Muddy, you no-good, low-grade sumbitch! Now get the hell out of my sight, before I have some of these here Arkansas boys stomp you to death!” And indeed, some of them who’d come up from Springdale and Fayetteville for the party were looking mighty askance at our employee at that point. I began to get up, but he disappeared before I could do any more damage. Muddy stayed in the show.
* * *
The Last Waltz looked great on paper, but I worried how it was going to go down until the last minute. Each of our guests had different sound requirements, so our big dress rehearsal went on for twelve hours as stage positions were blocked out for the cameras and the artists ran through their songs while the hall filled up with friends and the press who’d come from all over America and Europe to cover the event. Nine 35-millimeter cameras were positioned and repositioned, and the light guys worked on their cues, but nothing was filmed. Not enough in the budget to film the dress rehearsal, I was told.
A big mistake.
Bob Dylan rehearsed by himself behind locked doors in the Miyako’s basement piano lounge, the Osaka Room, preferring to keep his own counsel. We went over and played a few things with him, and not a word was exchanged about the possibility of his being in our film. His people said that Bob was still thinking about it.
The lines circled the block well before Winterland opened its doors around six on Thanksgiving. The marquee read: BILL GRAHAM PRESENTS THE BAND IN THE LAST WALTZ. People had dressed up for the occasion, everyone was on their best behavior, and I don’t think there were any hassles out front all night. Bill Graham’s Thanksgiving feast had been prepared from 220 turkeys, 500 pounds of cranberry sauce, 90 gallons of brown gravy simmering in crocks, a ton of candied yams, 800 pounds of mincemeat, 6,000 rolls, and 400 gallons of cider. The stuffing was made of 500 pounds each of onions and celery, 70 bunches of parsley, and sixteen quarts of herbs sautéed in 100 pounds of butter. Everyone got a good meal, and I heard you could go back to the buffet table until you were
full. If you didn’t eat meat, you could sample some of the 400 pounds of fresh salmon from the Alaska fish company owned by Lou Kemp, a Minnesota boyhood friend of Bob Dylan’s. He had organized the Rolling Thunder Revue and was looking after Bob during The Last Waltz.
As people finished, they could get up and dance to a thirty-eight-piece orchestra, encouraged by three teams of professional ballroom dancers. A lot of folks danced, and while they were on the floor Graham’s staff bused the tables and made them disappear.
A little yellow badge got you backstage. People told us they couldn’t believe this was the last time they’d be hearing our songs, so the atmosphere was actually a bit subdued. Muddy Waters waited like an African statue with his piano player, Pinetop Perkins. Van Morrison and Ringo laughed with Richard. Albert Grossman paced around (he managed Butterfield and his band, Better Days), looking more like Benjamin Franklin than ever. The Hawk was hollering that he was so goddamn full of sushi, he felt like a three-hundred-pound thermometer. Joni Mitchell was beautiful in her simple leotard top with a silver thunderbird at her throat. I looked around for a camera: Why wasn’t anybody there with a hand-held camera to get this part of it? But all the cameras were pointed at the stage.
The show began around nine, amid a Peruvian backstage midway between exhilaration and terror. We played a full show (with Robertson’s microphone turned off to avoid the kind of problem we’d had at Woodstock), beginning with “Up on Cripple Creek” and going through “The Shape I’m In,” “It Makes No Difference” (with Garth soloing on that curved soprano), “Life Is a Carnival,” “This Wheel’s on Fire.” At this point the crack horn section, starring Howard Johnson on tuba, stepped up, and we played “W. S. Walcott Medicine Show,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Ophelia,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (maybe the best live performance of this song we ever gave), “Stage Fright,” and finished with “Rag Mama Rag.”
When the applause died down, someone yelled out “Freebird!” and everyone laughed.
There was no break. We’d been onstage for almost two hours, and the guest set had to happen right away. So we brought out Ronnie Hawkins first, as a tribute to our original chief and mentor, the man who taught us all we knew, or at least some of it. The Hawk was in a snap-brim straw cowboy hat, a black suit over a “Hawk” T-shirt, cowboy boots that made him seven feet tall, and was totally in charge. He counted off “Who Do You Love” with a line from “Bo Diddley” and prowled and growled his way through the song (“Take it easy, Garth, doncha gimme no lip!”). When Robbie played his original solo from the record of “Who Do You Love” we’d cut with Ronnie back in 1963, the Hawk took off that hat and fanned the guitar. “Down, boy! Cool it down!” The camera loved it.
Next came Dr. John: shades, beret, gold shoes, sequined jacket, the image of a Crescent City hipster, smoking a cigarette. He dedicated “Such a Night” to all the fellas. I loved Mac Rebennack and appreciated the irony of the lyrics to the song he did with us, “Such a Night,” because he took up with Libby after The Last Waltz, and the two of them were an item for a long time.
We continued our tribute to Louisiana with Bobby Charles, who did “Down South in New Orleans” with us, because this was the music we all loved the best. Then Paul Butterfield came out for “Mystery Train” and played the harp beautifully under the harsh white spotlight. He and I traded verses, and for me it was a special moment.
Then it was was Muddy’s turn. He came out with Pinetop and Bob Margolin, and Butterfield stayed on. We did “Caledonia,” and sixty-one-year-old Muddy was a little shaky at first. I think this annoyed him, because he then tore into “Mannish Boy” like an old bull who had something to prove. Butterfield, who’d been studying breathing techniques, held one sheer harp note for five minutes as Muddy gestured and danced. The whole place woke up to the power of Muddy’s performance, one of the high points of the show. “I’m a hoochiekoochie man... I’m a rolling stone...”
I was trying not to be too conscious of the cameras, but I noticed that they didn’t seem to be shooting Muddy. Later we realized that because of some fuck-up, all but one camera had been turned off. We almost missed his entire segment. As he was walking offstage, I stood up to applaud, and Muddy grabbed my head in his big hands and kissed my forehead! What a feeling! But the director hadn’t bothered to walk Muddy on and offstage, so there was no film of this.
Then Eric Clapton came out and did “All Our Past Times” and “Further on up the Road,” which we’d often played in Levon and the Hawks days. Neil Young did “Helpless” and “Four Strong Winds.” Joni Mitchell sang three songs from her two most recent albums: “Coyote,” “Shadows and Light,” and “Furry Sings the Blues.” Finally, an extremely nervous Neil Diamond did “Dry Your Eyes,” which he’d written with Robbie.
By now it was after midnight, and the crowd was subdued. The momentum of the show had been lost halfway through Joni’s set. Richard Manuel turned the piano over to John Simon and began to sing “Tura Lura Lura,” the Irish lullaby. Van Morrison (in a maroon suit) made his entrance amid much cheering—this was Van’s first appearance onstage in more than two years—and The Last Waltz was suddenly revived with a spectacular version of “Caravan.” John Simon conducted The Band and the horns as Van burned through his great song—“Turn it up! Little bit louder! Radio!”—complete with kick-steps across the stage at the end. Van turned the whole thing around, God bless him for being the showman that he is.
By then we were pretty much wrung out, but we did “Acadian Driftwood” as the last tune before intermission, with Joni and Neil Young singing along in a gesture of Canadian solidarity. We’d been on for more than three hours by then, and my hands were bleeding. We were all half past dead, but there was to be very little rest during the much needed half-hour intermission.
It was a madhouse backstage. Jerry Brown, governor of California, wanted to shake hands with us. We had to rehearse a new song called “Evangeline” that Robbie had written only the night before, because we had to perform it during the last part of the show for the sake of film continuity. In fact, the piece was still unfinished, and Robertson and John Simon were huddled in a corner, frantically trying to figure out an arrangement we could play without rehearsal. As this was going on, the San Francisco poets were declaiming their work onstage. They’d been rounded up by our friend Emmett Grogan, who’d founded the primal hippie activist group the Diggers. Emmett got Michael McClure to recite some Chaucer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti to say his beatnik parody of the Lord’s Prayer, and Diane Di Prima, Lenore Kandel, and others to recite. The music-saturated audience was grateful for the break and gave each poet loud applause that reverberated into our dressing rooms. Meanwhile, all our management people had vanished, and someone was telling us there weren’t enough limos to get Muddy, Pinetop, and Bob Margolin to the airport to make their flight to Chicago. I grabbed the great Don Tyson, explained the situation, and Don put Muddy and company in his own limo so those fuckers that worked for us wouldn’t try anything stupid, like telling Muddy Waters he had to wait.
Bob Dylan had come in with his people during the first part of the show and retreated to a dressing room off-limits to everyone else. Halfway through the intermission, about fifteen minutes before we were due back onstage with Bob, he decided he didn’t want to be in the film.
I wasn’t that surprised. Howard Alk had been saying all week it wasn’t going to work because Bob didn’t want to compete with himself by having The Last Waltz and Renaldo and Clara go head to head. But there was never a decision made until the last minute, and this was it, the last minute. Bob’s lawyer came out of Bob’s dressing room with an awful look on his face. Robbie was totally pale. They said, “Bob doesn’t want to be in the movie.”
Scorsese went nuts. Without Bob there would be no movie. It was all over. More than a million dollars were probably down the drain. Scorsese was beside himself. He demanded to know why Bob wouldn’t be filmed.
Roberts
on said that Bob just wasn’t into it. He just felt there was already too much film of him in his present state. There were ten minutes to go. No one knew what to do. Albert Grossman was there but couldn’t influence Bob; Bob didn’t want to be influenced. So they asked Bill Graham to intercede. He went in and came out shaking his head. Bob, Bill said, claimed he didn’t even know anything about being in our movie. Never heard of it. Bob didn’t want to be filmed. In fact, when he went on, Bill was supposed to make sure that all the cameras were pointing away from the stage. They sent Bill back in to explain to Bob how dire the situation was. “Don’t worry,” Bill said over his shoulder. “I’m gonna make it happen.” Man, they were all biting their nails. I think Bill really pleaded with Bob for us, for the sake of the history of it all. He got Bob to the point where any film that might be shot would be carefully scrutinized by Bob before being considered for use. He was in there for a couple of minutes, but it seemed like an hour. No one could believe this. With about five minutes left, word came down that the last two songs in Bob’s part of the show could be filmed, and only the last two.
Bill Graham saved their asses that night.
Garth started the second half with his stately intro to “Chest Fever,” coaxing a whole palette of techno-sounds from his keyboards. Then we managed to play “Evangeline” in a sort of country two-step, reading the lyrics off cue cards held behind the cameras, but the lack of rehearsal really told the story. We finished with “The Weight”—our song—Garth Hudson shining on piano, and the whole house and the six horn players all singing along.
