Forever young: Revisiting the ground-breaking musical documentary The Last Waltz 50 years later

Irish Times

6 days ago

We were always going to be 'Forever Young' when we gathered in the mothballed mustiness of the Aula Maxima of St Patrick's College,
Maynooth
, in the spring of 1979 to watch
Martin Scorsese
's The Last Waltz.
Bob Dylan
was a guru even for the flotillas of soutaned clerics who mingled and mixed with us cool chicks: an early generation of females allowed to enter the hallowed halls of the pontifical university.
We were straddling the end of flower power and the birth of punk, women's liberation and the conservatism of the recently appointed Pope John Paul II. Thus, our anthems were increasingly replacing the Tantum Ergo of Gregorian chant with the counterculture rock-'n'-roll rebellion defined by the mud fields of Woodstock in August 1969.
Separated by a bridge over the Kilcock road, the old and new campus of this institution – which had trained and educated generations of Irish men in the eternal rewards of abstinence – was, throughout the decade, a hotbed of debates about politics, culture, contraception and divorce.
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So, there was a definite ironic appropriateness about watching this groundbreaking Scorsese documentary within these walls.
The Last Waltz comprised a series of interviews with members of the Canadian-American band called The Band, led by Robbie Robertson, about life on the road and their complex influences, from rockabilly to the blues. It was framed around a farewell concert held on Thanksgiving night 1976 in the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.
The Band consisted of Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm (the only American), Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel and they were Dylan's touring group in 1965 and played backup for The Basement Tapes.
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The film is widely considered to have captured an important moment in the music scene because of The Band's blend of rock, country and folk music as expressed so uniquely in such songs as Up on Cripple Creek, The Weight and The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.
Unsurprisingly, its star-studded guest list greatly enhanced the sense of a spontaneous jamboree. There was Joni Mitchell's Coyote and Van Morrison's, Caravan, Neil Diamond's Dry Your Eyes, Emmylou Harris's Evangeline and Neil Young's Helpless, all backed by The Band.
Of course, we contemporary viewers had no knowledge of all the glitches: technical and personal. There was the artistic disagreement between Robertson and Helm over the inclusion of Diamond with the possible exclusion of Muddy Waters and, indeed, the fact that at the 11th hour Dylan had to be begged to allow some of his appearance be filmed.
Notwithstanding these little challenges, The Last Waltz has been recognised by the Library of Congress for its 'cultural and historical significance', with many considering it a masterpiece of rock cinema.
In fact, Scorsese has opined that 'it was more than just a concert, it was an opera'.
Hard to believe – even accept – that it is almost 50 years since the concert was held, even though all five members of the band have now floated off into the ether.
However, it was so easy to fly back across the decades, indulge the openness and naivety of young adulthood again when
Westport
Town Hall Theatre showed the film recently.
It was for a fundraiser for the annual Westival, which coincidentally was established as a little community arts festival in 1976. It has transformed into one of the many slick cultural gatherings throughout the country: key elements of the social and economic life of many towns.
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As the heavy instrumentation of the theme tune rolled and then the stage opened to The Band's interpretation of Marvin Gaye's Baby Don't Do It, the impact of that first viewing came right back to me.
In the 1970s, we might have all been collecting our vinyl records of Young's Harvest and Van Morrison's Moondance and dancing to Rory Gallagher and Led Zeppelin at hops and parties, but the visual narrative presented in this film defined an era in a visceral way.
Isn't that undoubtedly an initiation young people of today do not experience? From such an early age they are exposed to a multicultural world through the dominance of mass media in their lives. Whether it is music, or all the other noises that are a constant soundtrack to their lives, it seems, from my perspective, that little causes surprises any more. The melee and mishmash of artistic offerings is relentless.
As I immersed myself in the vibes of the 1970s, and swayed to its music, I was also brought back to an era during which our insularity was abandoned. We were beginning to leave the dance halls where our parents had stood, drinking their red lemonades, smoking their Sweet Afton cigarettes, attending sackcloth and ashes sermons by missioners during Lent.
Instead we were heading to the amphitheatre around Slane Castle and the freedom of the Rolling Stones and a contrarian who was originally called Robert Zimmermann.