It starts on a note of pure rock defiance, scrawled right up there on the screen: this film should be played loud. How do you resist something that pushy? You don't. The Last Waltz, in which Martin Scorsese captured the Band's 1976 farewell concert on celluloid, is the best rock movie ever made. It's two hours of blues, folk, country, Tin Pan Alley, old-time gospel religion, whorehouse boogie and nearly anything else you can name (hell, Neil Diamond is in it). When The Last Waltz was released in 1978, detractors wondered what the Band's Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were smoking, playing their no-frills roots music under fancy chandeliers out of Gone With the Wind, with red drapes and candelabras yet. Even the film's advocates are divided: "It's the music that makes it great!" "No, it's what Scorsese did with the music on film!" Know what? They're both right.

Such thoughts rise again as The Last Waltz celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary amid a swirl of hot air and hotter merchandising. (With roots music from the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? topping charts and winning Grammys, The Last Waltz is ripe for rediscovery.) Right this minute, you can catch The Last Waltz in theaters with a digitally remixed and remastered soundtrack, supervised by Robertson, and color-corrected prints, personally spiffed up by Scorsese. Also out there: a four-CD Last Waltz box set ($59.98). Coming up is a Last Waltz special-edition DVD ($24.98) with audio commentaries, featurettes and bonus "jam footage" featuring the Band with Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Ron Wood, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, Carl Radle, Stephen Stills and Neil Young. That's in addition to the film itself, in a pristine digital transfer, with performances (besides those mentioned) by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, Ronnie Hawkins and the Staple Singers.

All that's lacking are collectible remnants of the turkey dinner you got along with the concert if you were one of the lucky 5,000 at San Francisco's Winterland on that Thanksgiving night in 1976. Five hours of music, and all for twenty-five dollars -- the price of a lid of good dope, as Winterland impresario Bill Graham said at the time. Despite the hype, The Last Waltz is all it's cracked up to be -- the real deal in rock movies that only a few pretenders to the throne (see list at right) can come close to matching.

Robertson, fifty-seven and currently an executive with DreamWorks Records, recalls the pressures of that night. "No way I could eat the turkey, my stomach was so tight," he jokes. "It wasn't just our music; we had to learn all these songs, going from Muddy Waters to Joni Mitchell and Dr. John."

As a producer of the film as well as a songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Robertson wanted to preserve the Band's last live performance after sixteen years on the road. "It's a hard life -- it'll kill ya," said Helm, the Arkansas drummer and singer who was the only American in the Band. Robertson, with a Jewish father and a Native American mother, hails from Canada, as do Hudson, organist and horn player; Danko, singer and bass player; and Manuel, singer and keyboardist.

It's nearly impossible to watch The Last Waltz again without thinking of what happened to the Band after 1976. In 1983, the Band members reunited, without Robertson. In 2000, Helm - suffering with throat cancer -- vented on Robertson in Rolling Stone for squeezing him out of credit and money (Robertson denies doing either); Helm called The Last Waltz, The Last Rip-off. It was Helm who cut down the body of Manuel, a longtime alcoholic, who hanged himself in a Florida motel room in 1986. In 1999, Danko, badly overweight and recently arrested on a heroin-possession charge, died in his sleep.

Almost none of this information finds its way into the DVD audio commentary. When I ask Robertson why not, he says, "I just don't have that chip that allows me to analyze this stuff." Robertson does admit that seeing the restored Last Waltz with an audience in March at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin hit him hard. "Watching Rick sing 'It Makes No Difference' -- it just tore my heart out. And Richard, even in the condition Richard was in, made me proud. The majority of younger people in Austin probably don't know about Richard's problems or even that he's not alive anymore. They're just checking out this crazy character. I just felt a tremendous amount of love and warmth watching those guys. It made me miss them terribly."

Scorsese, currently editing his new film, Gangs of New York, thinks restoring The Last Waltz without resorting to ax-grinding and tear-jerking was the right way to go. "The Band is a synthesis of of so many strains of American music," he says. "The movie is about what the Band achieved."

It still is. The Last Waltz jumps off the screen, coming alive for a new generation. "That's the point," says Robertson. "People have been tremendously influenced by this music, but it needs to be an ongoing thing, something to take inspiration from. That's good medicine. If you don't teach, then what you do doesn't mean anything."

All five members of the Band started as pups, playing backup for Ronnie Hawkins and later for Bob Dylan. It wasn't till 1968 that they went out on their own as the Band, playing songs about soldiers and farmers and hitting with their first album, Music From Big Pink, named for the upstate New York house where they lived and worked.

Robertson was on solid ground musically for The Last Waltz, but how to make a movie that didn't look like every other rock documentary? Six weeks before the concert, Jonathan Taplin, who produced Mean Streets, introduced him to Scorsese. The two remain friends and collaborators. Robertson, who is the music supervisor on Gangs of New York, says, "We talked then about how these rock documentaries weren't really movies. It was just people shooting stuff and cutting it together."

Scorsese signed on to direct The Last Waltz even though he was still filming the big-budget musical New York, New York and working on the script for Raging Bull. "I couldn't resist," says Scorsese. "Music is as important to me as cinema. Almost." Scorsese's project "on the side" soon became an obsession. "Robbie was the force behind The Last Waltz," says Scorsese, "but he had gotten someone as crazy as he was to shoot it -- me. We kept daring each other."

It was Scorsese who brought in his friend veteran production designer Boris Leven (West Side Story, Giant). Leven borrowed chandeliers and other props from the San Francisco Opera's production of La Traviata. "The idea was decayed elegance," says Scorsese. "It took its cue from 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' in the sense of the Civil War and a world gone by."

Robertson admits he was dazed at first. "I told Boris, 'Neil Young doesn't do chandeliers!' " But Scorsese used films such as Luchino Visconti's Senso to indicate to him how cinema could encompass all music. Robertson came to believe that The Last Waltz"is operatic in a street kind of way. The story is told through music, and you almost feel what the characters in the songs have gone through."

According to Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the Scorsese of the time was "fueled by a perpetual coke high" and Robertson "had delusions about becoming a movie star." Scorsese deflects, "Biskind wasn't there. Robbie is calm and reasoning. I'm more . . . " Scorsese laughs while struggling for the word: "excitable."

They started, in true rock style, by breaking rules. Rock concerts like Woodstock, on which Scorsese had worked as an editor, were filmed with cheap, mobile 16 mm cameras. "None of that for Marty," recalls Robertson. He wanted 35 mm cameras, the kind major Hollywood movies use to achieve richness and texture. Never mind that a camera load of 35 mm film lasts for maybe ten minutes. That means cameras had to be stopped constantly and reloaded. The concert, of course, never stopped. "It was all take one," says Robertson, who recalls cameras breaking down and their motors being "carried out like dead bodies" while Scorsese used a headset to bark orders at his seven camera operators, including such legends as Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider) and Vilmos Zsigmond (The Deer Hunter).

No one had put this kind of effort into a rock concert before. Scorsese filled 200 pages with detailed notes on each number. "Every important part of a song was covered in a special way, not just grabbed by accident," he says. When accidents did happen, such as Eric Clapton's guitar strap breaking and Robertson rushing in to cover, the cameras were ready. "Marty was interested in the unspoken language between the musicians that you don't see in concert films," says Robertson. You also see interviews with the Band, conducted by Scorsese, that were filmed after the concert and interwoven. What you don't see, except in reverse shots, is the audience. "It was about the relationships of the performers to each other," says Scorsese. "It's as if, when you watch the film, you are the audience."

The resulting intimacy is a key reason why The Last Waltz earns its place on the upper rung. You get to watch the Band play backup -- blazing on "Mannish Boy," with Muddy Waters; "Helpless," with Neil Young; and "Caravan," with a high-kicking Van Morrison -- and also seize center stage. Scorsese boldly opens the film with the Band's cover of Marvin Gaye's "Don't Do It," which was the last song of the night. So the beginning is the end. Full circle. The dancers waltzing over the credits were shot later on a soundstage, as was "Evangeline," with Emmylou Harris, a song Robertson included to better represent country music in the film.

The landmark on that soundstage is "The Weight," with the Staple Singers joining the Band on the gospel harmonies. "They were a big influence on us," raves Robertson. The way Scorsese shoots the number with the camera nearly bouncing in step to that joyful noise is one for the time capsule.

All over? Not just yet. On the CD you can hear Dylan singing "Hazel" - "His passion on that thing is just ridiculous," says Robertson, who is also ardent about Richard Manuel and Van Morrison duetting on "Tura Lura Lural." Those numbers have not been added to the film for one reason: No one can find the footage. "Of all the things to be lost, this is the worst," says Scorsese, who believes the footage could be in a box somewhere, mismarked and moldering. If found, there could be another revision of the film. "Don't say that," Robertson jokes. "This thing keeps coming back to haunt me." But the idea of one more last waltz has the archivist in Scorsese fired up. "It may be," he says, excitedly. "It may be." Remember, this is a guy who admits he actually ate the turkey dinner back in 1976. It's a tribute to the enduring impact of The Last Waltz that most of us would eagerly raid that lost box for another piece of rock history. Like Robertson says, "It's good medicine."

[From Issue 895 — May 9, 2002]