Visit: A Tale of Two Movies
Charity Alert: The Literacy Site -- Help people read.
In The Community: I'm running the P.A. for FVCC's Adjunct Professors' Appreciation Banquet. (Yeah, they'll feed me too.) Same time, same hotel as the Honors Symposium. The American university system is relying more and more on the expertise of these untenured, underpaid professionals. I, for one, sure appreciate what they do.
First Friday, kind of a fair-weather art walk, is starting again in downtown Kalispell tonight -- only I'm busy at the banquet and can't take photos, or contribute to the scene from the Hockaday.
Media Watch: TCM had three movies by Luis Buñuel last night -- Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert which changed my life after I saw it at 20 years of age. He and Salvador Dali were the most successful artists of the so-called Surrealist Movement.
Wickapedia's Entry: Luis Buñuel
Looking Back: I promised to write about those three music movies I saw last weekend, so here comes one reflection -- The Last Waltz purports to be The Band's final concert in 1976. Maybe it was, as a full-length concert, but they surely PERFORMED afterward -- I saw them on Saturday Night Live in 1977 or 1978. (They may have been promoting this movie.) They also put out at least one album called Islands.
I can't write about The Band without writing about Bob Dylan, and my complicated history of listening to his music, and the music of his peers -- many of whom were also represented by his manager Albert Grossman.
The first time I heard Bob Dylan with The Band was a minor non-hit single of theirs entitled Please Crawl Out Your Window, on the radio in the fall of 1965. I'm not certain that I can find this song, even today, it's so obscure. I think a few more tunes exist from these early sessions, since Dylan mentioned them later, but if they are anything like Window, they are very unusual. I noticed a piano plus organ combination in the background, and a full-chordal lead guitar. It was uncharacteristic of anything else on the radio at the time -- including Dylan's own Like A Rolling Stone or Positively Fourth Street, with Michael Bloomfield's over-the-top guitar, Nashville's studio musicians, and Al Kooper's keening Hammond organ. There was no publicity about his 'road band' at all.
The only other Dylan/Band combination I heard for a long time was the "B" side of I Want You, a slightly off-speed version of Tom Thumb's Blues from the English tour of 1966, but the backing musicians weren't credited.
The raw power of that flawed recording was awe-inspiring, and we fans wanted to hear more, but Dylan was almost killed in a motorcycle accident that year, and quit performing in public for several years. After the powerful Blonde On Blonde Album, which acknowledged Jamie Robbie Robertson on guitar, and was recorded before his crash, his commercial releases became less innovative, and increasingly less good. He claims in his current autobiography that he deliberately withdrew from the despised role (foistered on him by an exuberant press) as a generational spokesperson.
BUT something happened -- a pirated double album of Dylan songs entitled The Great White Wonder sneaked onto the world stage, and was a godsend to us fans -- good songs, fabulous arrangements, original ideas -- everything we loved in Dylan's music. It was also proof that he had been holding back on us -- John Wesley Harding showed only grudging glimmers of his talent.
When Music from Big Pink was released in the summer of 1968, we heard The Weight on the radio, and realized who had been on those incredible Wonder sessions with Dylan. We also were glad that that we could buy more of that same good music, and see it made in concert at last -- even if Dylan wasn't there. They shook up popular music, high and low, with the power of their musicianship, and variety of ideas. Their second album was even better than the first, but fame had it's price.
What about THEIR identities? It was a long time before Jamie (Robbie) Robertson, Garth Fundis, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko were mentioned separately. The Band's main songwriter, Robertson, started to garner all the super-superlatives that had pressured Dylan to hide in the stinking backwaters of Nashville Skyline, Self-Portrait, or Dylan. (Note: the former two have some excellent songs, but they are all lousy albums IMHO. Dylan's nervous, uncommunicative appearence on Johnny Cash's TV show was a misstep too.)
The Band was even on the cover of Time Magazine! It was great publicity, but could expectations that high be bearable? That was an era when Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison dropped dead from drugs and overwork. Albert Grossman's biggest star, Janis Joplin, perished the same way. It must have been scary for them -- Joplin's "Full Tilt Boggie Band" had been stolen away from Canada's Ronnie Hawkins by Grossman, just like they themselves had been, when they went to work behind Dylan.
Other Grossman acts had "big names" going for them, like; Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, The Chambers Brothers, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Peter, Paul, and Mary et al, but they were leading hollow, work-driven lives to various uncertain ends. Maybe The Band's third album Stage Fright was about all these goings-on, but no one will ever know.
Their fourth album Cahoots showed deathlike images of the group on the cover, and the following live 'Greatest Hits' collection was pure morphine-on-vinyl, followed by the ill-advised Moondog Matinee, made up of slack, uninspired arrangements of old Rock N' Roll, long after the "R & R Revial" fad was over.
In the early 70's, Bob Dylan revived his career with New Morning and Blood On The Tracks. The vibes seemed to be good at first when he and the Band toured together and collaborated on the Planet Waves album, but the recorded results of both efforts were dull, and perhaps even cynical -- something was missing from their creativity ten years earlier -- as The Basement Tapes demonstrated when those Wonder sessions were released legally.
When Dylan did his ballyhooed "Rolling Thunder" tour in '77, The Band was nowhere around -- they'd already played and filmed the Last Waltz concert at the Winterland Ballroom in a rather shabby-looking part of San Francisco. There was a false finality in the documentary -- some of the interviews weren't contemporary with the concert, as well as the fact that they continued to record and play between 1976 and 1978, when Waltz was finally released.
I was living in Europe until 1977, and there was no word at all in the gossip-hungry press about The Band breaking up at all. (I saw the Dylan "Hard Rain" concert on Dutch television that summer -- he was VERY strong -- infinitely better than he'd been with Johnny Cash, or George Harrison, or in that terrible Sam Peckinpah movie.)
Guest List: Paul Butterfield -- One of my all-time favorite harmonica players. A fellow-inmate of Grossman's asylum, who led Rock into respectable pastures, along with mercurial guitarist Michael Bloomfield, but died of heroin abuse in 1986, like Bloomfield did in '79. Bobby Charles -- Wrote See You Later, Alligator and the wonderful Tennessee Blues. Eric Clapton -- Not a bad performance, but he was deep into addiction at the time. He's clean, sober and doing his old job in Cream right now (early May 2005). Neil Diamond -- He sang a pretty good song at this gig, but I eventually got tired of him and his voice. Dr. John -- An American treasure who's still going strong as a solo act. Bob Dylan -- There wasn't much magic in this segment, considering their history together, but it was professional. (One of the best concerts I've EVER seen was Dylan in the late 80's, with a small Rock combo -- blues, blues, and more blues, in all forms and genres!) Emmylou Harris -- beautiful music, in one of the first flowerings of her long career. Ronnie Hawkins -- The ol' Canadian bore was almost good. (I've never liked him.) Joni Mitchell -- Congac of Pop music -- love her or hate her, she's accomplished and unique. I'm so lucky I got to see her live in early 1969, when she was just a singer from Canada, playing a guitar, rather than an icon-from-beyond-reality. (She survived all that hyperbole, and I'm happy for her.) Van Morrison -- An inspired performance from someone who was long missing the simple gift of a private life. The Staples Singers -- One of those too-few triumphs of good spirit, and quality, over the evils of fame, and the management of Albert Grossman. I saw them in 1998, before "Pops" Staples passed away. Muddy Waters -- I saw him too! He co-starred with B.B. King at a Park City Blues Festival in the early 80's. His performance of "Mannish Boy" might have been the highlight of this movie. Neil Young -- One more transplanted Canadian -- Dylan's rival in prolific songwriting, but more about him in Year of the Horse, yet to come.
The Last Waltz couldn't hide the fact that Robertson was the one breaking up The Band. His words tell me that he was just plain sick of the road. Danko is obviously bitter about disbanding. Fundis is impossible to read. Helm looks confident, but Manuel looks like he's sick and dying, which he was. I was sorry when drugs finally got him in the 80's, but I was glad when Helm, Fundis, and Danko formed the nucleus of an excellent new version of The Band in the 90's. Too bad Danko's habits killed him, just as they were getting famous again.
Robertson was no villian -- his music over the last decade, hearkening to Native American themes, is excellent and well-done. If you've ever been on the road (as I have) you'll understand why even a phenomenon like The Band can have a finite existence under those pressures. What's very rare is when some of these phenomena transcend the rigors of time and travel, and still endure.
I am very pleased to own Columbia Records' remastered, speed-corrected CD of songs recorded live during Dylan's 1966 English tour at last. I'm also going to get the CD of The Basement Tapes when I see it, since I've owned the LP for 25 years. The creative ferment of these musical moments will always bubble in my psyche.
I'm leaving this essay with a paraphrased quote from one of Rolling Stone's ex post facto histories: "The Band was very good, but they could have made even more great music, and it's sad that they didn't."
(Note: This "Looking Back" section of the blog was revised on 5/8/05 and 5/9/05)
