The History of The Band and The Last Waltz

And Remembering Robbie Robertson

In the beginning there was Ronald Cornett Hawkins. Ronnie Hawkins. The Hawk. Born and raised in Arkansas, Ronnie sang rock ‘n roll. At some point around 1959 Hawkins and his band, which included a 19 year old drummer named Levon Helm, headed north to Canada. They did well in Canada, so well that they stayed in Toronto.

Every time another new hot band came on the Toronto scene, Hawkins would “beat” them by hiring away the best musicians from those bands. Eventually everyone in Hawkins’ back-up band, The Hawks, aside from Helm, was from Canada - Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson.

Around 1963 or 64, The Hawks got fed up with Hawkins’ management style and song choices and decided to go out on their own. They added a sax player and became the Levon Helm Sextet. Then the sax player left and they became Levon and The Hawks. They recorded a couple of singles that went nowhere.

In 1965, Bob Dylan went electric, debuting at the Newport Folk Festival backed by Mike Bloomfield, Barry Goldberg, Al Kooper, Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay. Following that show Bloomfield, Goldberg, Arnold and Lay all opted to return to Chicago rather than follow Dylan back to New York. Dylan needed to find another band.

Singer and guitarist John Hammond Jr. told Dylan to check out Levon and the Hawks,. (Hammond’s father, John Hammond, signed Dylan to Columbia Records. He also signed Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen.)(Some versions of the story have one of Albert Grossman’s assistants recommending The Band to Dylan.) Dylan liked them, hired them, and they toured with him, billed as Bob Dylan and The Band, from 1965 until Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966.

They moved to Woodstock, New York, and spent time with the recuperating Dylan, recording The Basement Tapes, at first widely bootlegged, then a 2-LP set released in 1975, followed by a 6-CD set in 2014.

And then they started in on their own album. They couldn’t come up with a name for themselves and eventually figured that everyone else referred to them as “the band” so why not just be The Band? The resulting album, Music From Big Pink was released in 1968 and this was one of those albums that Changed Everything. Its impact was seismic, both in the US and the UK. In an era in which psychedelic music and electric blues seemed to rule, this was a universe all its own. It wasn't quite folk or country or rock, it was its own thing, it defied easy categorization.

The album included one Dylan cover (I Shall Be Released), a song Dylan co-wrote with Richard Manuel (Tears of Rage), and a song Dylan co-wrote with Rick Danko (This Wheel’s On Fire) - classics all. But the stand-out, the song that defined them, was Robbie Robertson’s The Weight.

Their second album, simply titled The Band, came out in 1969 and was an even better album than Big Pink. Across the Great Divide, Up on Cripple Creek, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - as timeless an album as any band has ever recorded.

And then …. well, music critic Greil Marcus once postulated that The Band were shell-shocked by the wall of adulation that was hitting them, that after ten years of relative obscurity they weren’t prepared for fame and fortune, and that their sub-conscious way of dealing with it was to just not be as good ever again. I’m sure they would have disputed that and they continued to have some great songs, but they never again managed an album as consistently excellent end to end as either of those first two.

Regardless of their studio output, they remained a great live band. After years on the road, playing everything from dive bars to Woodstock, how could it be otherwise? 1972’s double-live Rock of Ages (later reissued as Live at the Academy of Music), with the addition of a 5-piece horn section (arranged by the great Allen Toussaint), remains one of my favorite live albums.

In 1974 they rejoined Dylan for one studio album, Planet Waves, followed by a tour and a double-live album, Before the Flood. I got to see them on this tour. (This was my only time to see The Band in concert and it was my first time seeing Dylan - I’d go on to see him several more times between 1974 and 2011.)

And then we come to The Last Waltz.

The Band decided (some say Robbie Robertson decided) that they were done and that they’d go out big, with a final show at San Francisco’s Winterland, joined by a group of guest stars.

The guest stars? In order of appearance in the film - Ronnie Hawkins, Michael McClure, Dr. John, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Staples Singers, Neil Diamond, Paul Butterfield, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood and Ringo Starr. Not too shabby.

Luckily for us, they decided to film the concert, with none other than Martin Scorsese directing. Scorsese was just coming off of Taxi Driver and his love of rock music was well known. He had worked as an editor on Woodstock and there was something different in the way Scorsese used rock music in his films, something that said to me he wasn’t just using these songs, that he truly loved them.

Scorsese did some things for The Last Waltz that possibly had never been done before for a concert film. He storyboarded each song, so that the camera operators always had some idea of what was coming and where they needed to focus. The stage was lit for the cameras, not the usual concert lighting, so just about every minute of the concert is brilliantly clear. The film was shot using 35mm film, something completely unheard of for a concert film at the time. There were seven cameras filming simultaneously, an expensive proposition for any kind of film. And behind those cameras? How’s about Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Fugitive), Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, Paper Moon, Ghostbusters), and Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Deliverance, Deer Hunter). So despite the usual unexpected technical issues that cropped up during the filming, the end result looked fantastic.

The Last Waltz is sometimes called “the greatest rock concert film of all time.” It certainly was the greatest of its era. But it’s not strictly a concert film; there are interview segments between each song, with Scorsese himself as the interviewer. And there are two sequences shot on a Hollywood soundstage, one of The Band performing The Weight with The Staple Singers, the other the song Evangeline with Emmylou Harris. I think it’s clear that Scorsese wanted to do something larger than a concert film, he was doing a tribute to the five members of The Band and their entire career, all within the space two hours.

All of the artists were at their peak that night, all of them were firing on all cylinders. It’s hard to pick one favorite segment or song so I’ll just go with Up on Cripple Creek because it’s Levon Helm at his best. 45 years later, is it still the best concert film ever? Maybe not, but I can’t think of a better one (at least not for people of my generation).

The Band would reunite over the years to tour and they even recorded several more albums - all without the participation of Robbie Robertson. In Levon Helm’s final years, he said and wrote some nasty things about Robertson, mostly claiming that Robertson didn’t write those songs on his own, that Helm deserved more credit, all of which Robertson denied. Robertson visited Helm in the hospital when Helm was dying; presumably they made up at the end.

On the other hand, only Robertson is listed as a producer of The Last Waltz film and in the film, the members are not credited in alphabetical order; the order is Robertson, Danko, Manuel, Helm, Hudson. (Rick Danko is the first Band member seen in the film.)

Robbie Robertson was born in 1943 in Toronto. His mother was Cayuga and Mohawk. As for his father, well, when he was in his teens his mother told him that the man he thought was his father was not his father, that his real father was a Jewish gambler who died in a hit-and-run accident before Robertson was born. As a teenager, he worked in carnivals and sideshows before joining his first band in 1956, and then he formed his own band in 1957. He met Ronnie Hawkins in 1959, when he was just 16.

As for Robertson’s post-Band career, he released 5 solo albums - Robbie Robertson (1987), Storyville (1991), Contact From the Underworld of Redboy (1998), How to Become Clairvoyant (2011), Sinematic (2019). I remember vaguely liking the first album and Clairvoyant, but I wouldn’t call any of these essential.

In 1980, he produced, co-wrote and co-starred in the film Carny. He continued to collaborate with Scorsese, serving as Music Supervisor or Music Producer on Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, The Color of Money, Casino, Gangs of New York, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and he composed the soundtrack for Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon.

In 2019 he produced a documentary titled Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band.

Richard Manuel committed suicide in 1986.

Rick Danko died of heart failure in his sleep in 1999.

Levon Helm died in 2012 from throat cancer.

Robbie Robertson died in 2023 from prostate cancer.

Only Garth Hudson, who is 86 years old as I write this, remains with us.

Now deep in the heart of a lonely kid
Who suffered so much for what he did
They gave this ploughboy his fortune and fame
Since that day he ain't been the same

See the man with the stage fright
Just standin' up there to give it all his might
And he got caught in the spotlight
But when we get to the end
He wants to start all over again

P.S. To learn more about the history of The Band, I strongly urge you to listen to the latest episode of Andrew Hickey’s brilliant podcast, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet but I’m certain it’s going to be as brilliant as the last 3 episodes (Cream, Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground). I have learned so much from listening to this guy - and reportedly this is Bob Dylan’s favorite podcast.