The history of The Band is easily one of the most fascinating in the canon of popular music. We all know the story: four Canadian dudes and another American dude form under the banner of being rockabilly mainstay Ronnie Hawkins’ back-up band, have a falling out with Hawkins, become Bob Dylan’s band, go off on their own to become one of the most critically acclaimed rock groups of the late sixties (all the while achieving middling commercial success) and cap off their illustrious career with one of the most famous rock concerts ever. No big deal or anything.

I must admit, I only had a passing familiarity with The Band until only very recently when I found, to my surprise, that I had been largely ignoring one of the most interesting (not to mention best) rock bands of their era. The Band presents, in its story and in its music, many of the troubling issues surrounding art and culture’s difficult transition from the 1960s to the 1970s and represent a strange place in rock and roll’s canon for a number of reasons. In many ways they are perfectly indicative of that symptom of the culture we call Postmodernism.

The twisted mythologies, the clashing of egos, the displacement of cultural identity and the grasping at straws for the may never have been, ever-present quandaries in the frustrating process of figuring out just what happened to the counterculture, to the sixties, are permanently imbued within The Band’s own mythology, and never is this more prominently displayed than on the 1978 film The Last Waltz (dir. Martin Scorsese). This concert film documenting The Band’s final performance (at least with the classic lineup) in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976 is widely regarded as the greatest concert film of all time, and The Last Waltz is indeed one hell of a show featuring some truly spectacular performances all the while demonstrating Scorsese’s intimidating technical prowess. But what is important here is the moment in history that the film captures so brilliantly; it is 1976’s doomed love letter to that failed, vague thing that is usually defined only by its place in time.

The Last Waltz is not just a film about music, but it is a beautiful, frustrating tapestry where what is important to understanding the significance of the piece lies in what is not seen on screen. Context is everything in this case. It is a classic example of Postmodern film because of what it represents rather than what it does explicitly – it will not grab you to say what it is doing, its curiosity lies in its background and its mythology.

Seeing as context is key with this one, let’s discuss for a while the events leading up to The Last Waltz, and also what makes The Band so darned appealing. The most obvious points to bring up in the case of The Band are their flagrant use of wild pastiche, and the profound sense of cultural displacement that synthesized it.

It’s curious: a hypothetical band that is made up of mostly American members save for one Canadian guy will almost surely be referred to only as an American band, but The Band, despite having only one American member, can only be described as being Canadian-American. Why is this? Well there are two extremely obvious reasons: first, Levon Helm, the token Yank, has such a forceful presence within the group that is so utterly dripping with fiery American-ness that his being American is impossible to ignore. Second, The Band itself is a veritable encyclopedia of popular American music.

Incorporating an alarmingly wide range of influences from basically every genre of American music available to them, The Band created a bold, lively and surprisingly singular brand of music that led to their being one of the most respected groups of the time. Soul, Blues, Country, Rock and Roll, Bluegrass and Gospel pass indiscriminately through The Band’s hove of musical vision, collecting like particles on an ever growing dust ball to form something that was both oddly familiar and completely unheard-of.

The foremost reason for pastiche’s importance within the postmodern aesthetic is its relationship to globalization. Obviously with global communication becoming exponentially more efficient by the minute, cultural boundaries are being torn down at just as frightening a clip. As a result we see within art a growing diversity amongst works, with artists culling influence from any number of sources that will not have been limited to what would have been immediately available within a given region.

So The Band did the pastiche thing, and so was just about everybody else at the time; pastiche had reared its broad head over the arts as early as the mid-sixties and was inevitably becoming the norm. The Band is not special merely for being a good example of musical pastiche, but, again, because of how they achieve this.

How and/or why is it possible that a bunch of white guys, Canadians no less, managed to out-America the whole of working American musicians all the while being completely earnest in their pursuits? How were they the most soulful horde of crackers ever to come out of Toronto’s inexplicably booming mid-sixties rockabilly scene? It is a very strange case.

Of course, these problems can be tied to that omnipresent elephant in the room, CANADIAN IDENTITY. Bet you saw that coming. Nowadays, the typical thread is to say that we can draw our cultural character from cosmopolitanism, from diversity – from the cultural pastiche. Marshall McLuhan once described Canada as being the first twenty-first century nation because it is essentially globalization personified. The hodgepodge has become the standard in cities like Toronto and we have thus been able to turn nonidentity into one that is becoming increasingly strong. We were already prepared for the breaking down of cultural barriers through communications because we had already experienced this first-hand in our cities.

In the days before such cornerstones of contemporary Canada such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canada Health Act were laid down, before Canadian embraced diversity to the degree that we currently have, it is very likely that American culture would have been a much greater cultural influence than it is today. Canadian music? What’s that? We had no regionally defined musical scenes in Toronto and Montreal as we do now, there is no way for a musician to make a large impact within Canada because there is little to compose a Canadian sound. Today our artists remain residents of Canada, but our leading musical luminaries of the sixties and seventies would have headed for the States very early in their careers. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young haven’t lived in Canada for decades, but we still cling to them as being thoroughly our own.

And so it is with the Canadian members of The Band, who formed in Toronto when Hawkins (who apparently has since retired to Peterborough) and Helm moved there to take advantage of the city’s taste for rockabilly – a very, very American concoction of country, blues and boogie music. Shortly after their parting from Hawkins, heading south was a no-brainer and somewhere during the course of their tenure with Bob Dylan, they ended up setting up shop in Woodstock, New York, at a house that would bear the title of their first album, Music From Big Pink.

The Band’s Canadian members, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, would have almost an advantage in creating their music in that their being Canadian would allow them to detach themselves from their American influences and therefore indiscriminately link them all together. They would have been ideally suited to reinterpret American themes and myths into something unique because they were not directly a part of it. Of course, having Mr. Helm and his distinctive Southern personality didn’t hurt their credibility as the drummer/vocalist provided endless character with his powerful, drawling voice to Robertson’s songs about The American Civil War and Colonial American life.

The group’s primary songwriter, Robertson had little interest at the time in exploring his Canadian roots, instead he delved deeply into American history and mythology for inspiration not unlike with the wide majority of Canadian artists of the time. In his most recent solo work however, Robertson was last heard experimenting with sounds that reflect his own Mohawk heritage. It is widely known that Robertson was the primary orchestrator of The Last Waltz, and it is this fact that provides an important contextual note for understanding the importance of the event and the film.

While being interviewed in the film, Robertson cites his being fed up with touring and living on the road as the primary reason for The Band’s decision to stop playing shows and hold their final concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, which was also the sight of their first concert as "The Band." Notably, none of the other members of The Band are seen in the film remarking on this decision. This is likely due to the equally well-known fact that the other members were not in support of it, particularly Helm, who has expressed his vehement opposition in his autobiography. This is problematic because to not tour would have been a less precarious situation for Robertson; holding songwriting credit for the majority of The Band’s catalog, he easily would have been able to live off of royalties whereas the other members had to rely on touring. Nevertheless, Robertson eventually won out and The Last Waltz became an extremely integral part of rock history.

Now, herein lies the rub: the whole of The Last Waltz is a tremendous clashing of various and enormous egos under the guise of a sixties-esque celebration of community and oneness. This is what I mean when I say that the majority of the drama around the film is centered around what the viewer is not immediately privy to, which only intensifies the alienation from the initial goal of Robertson and Scorsese. Throughout the film we see performances of The Band playing on their own and accompanied by a star-studded who’s who of 1976 rock and roll royalty including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Dr. John, Ronnie Hawkins and Muddy Waters. The show culminates in a joyful, heartfelt performance of “I Shall Be Released,” a Band song written by Bob Dylan where The Band are joined by all of their guests for the ensuing sing-along.

The film is intended to be a great celebration of a storied career, a harmonious, ambitious festival of camaraderie and community, and on the surface it succeeds. We see the artists smiling, joking around and reveling in the experience of being together on such a monumental occasion, but given the very nature of the event’s birth, being formed in disagreement and disbandment, this sense of loyalty is extremely suspect. First of all is the aforementioned issue of the majority of The Band’s members not even wanting to participate; second is the choice of artists to be placed on the bill. Ostensibly a reflection of The Band’s influences and contemporaries, the issue of Neil Diamond’s involvement has been to subject of some debate. The most reasonable explanation to this puzzling addition to the lineup, which Helm, once again, was fiercely opposed to, is that Robertson had recently produced Diamond’s then most recent record Beautiful Noise. Diamond further caused controversy when he allegedly got into an argument with Bob Dylan backstage about his performance.

This clashing of egos is paramount to understanding The Last Waltz and also postmodernism. As in the sixties where culture is leaning toward a great sense of community and familiarity, the death of the counterculture and subsequent rise of postmodernism is fueled by the individual in opposition to culture; it is a harsh reaction to the failure of the sixties ideal where all of the cultivated unity is fragmented into the individual against the world. We see this in the dissolution of The Band in a flaming heap of ego nonsense, and the relation between the artists at The Last Waltz viewing the concert as a competition, rather than a celebration.

This is augmented by the notorious fact that The Last Waltz was in fact a gathering of more cocaine addicts in one place than may ever have been seen at the time. From Neil Young’s infamous coke nose to the alleged backstage room painted white and decorated with plastic noses and a tape loop of sniffing noises, The Last Waltz is notorious for its heavy blanketing of cocaine culture all over the film. Of course, while nothing is ever as it seems, it would appear extremely difficult to craft a tribute to artistic family when the only thing that is linking the artists anymore (including Scorsese) is a taste for powder, a drug which is often associated with alienation and excess.

The interesting case of Robbie Robertson – who produced the film – and his own role within The Band can also be seen very clearly within his status in the film. It is very curious that Robertson can be seen in the film even when he is not doing anything particularly interesting (such as when someone else is taking a solo) in almost every single shot of the concert footage. Robertson is rarely off-screen making the other members of the Band appear as sidemen for him. Manuel and Hudson on the other hand reap only miniscule camera time, including the notable example of Manuel’s being completely invisible while dueting with Bob Dylan on “I Shall Be Released.” Furthermore, there have been accounts that Robertson’s microphone was not even active for most of the concert, though he can very clearly be seen singing extremely heartfelt backing vocals in most of the songs. There are many shots where Helm, Danko and Robertson can all be seen singing, but only two voices are audible.

I am not out to demonize Robertson here, the man is an incredible songwriter and guitarist; I merely find it interesting for my purposes that the orchestrator of the event and producer of the film is also very clearly within the film posited as the focal point of The Band. I feel like this strange set of coincidences strengthens my argument regarding the importance of the individual ego within the postmodern aesthetic. The celebratory documentary as told from the perspective of the person who is most likely to be seen as the villain is extremely striking and indeed, Robertson’s fingerprints are all over the film.

Another curious aspect of The Last Waltz that ties in the fascinating Canadian angle of The Band is the timing of the concert. I find it extremely interesting that Robertson, the Canadian enthusiast of American culture, chose to hold the final concert by The Band on American Thanksgiving 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial. On the two hundredth year of the most powerful nation in the world, on the most thoroughly and distinctly American holiday, the Canadian-American encyclopedia of American music decides to hold its last show.

Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused (a film that was originally supposed to have more than a passing mention in this essay), follows a group of teenagers around small-town America in 1976 through a world of boredom, confusion and nothingness. One character, a teacher, mentions near the beginning of the film to remember not to get too caught up in the bicentennial celebrations because one would be celebrating the fact that a group of aristocratic, slave-owning white men didn’t want to pay their taxes – ostensibly the groundwork of America. Later in the film another character laments the lack of character in the 1970s as an epoch, saying that the 1950s were boring, the 1960s were amazing and the 1970s just suck. Dazed and Confused, while essentially a high school/stoner film brings a number of questions to the surface about American life in 1976, now well into the decade spawned by the crash and burn of another. Staring at the harsh face of a new century within a nation that has become such a powerful, alienating machine in the wake of the failure of such promise, the uncertainty, the despondency and the paranoia of the 1970s are evoked wonderfully in Linklater’s film.

With that in mind, we see these same tones running through The Last Waltz as well. The grasping at straws, the yearning for something that may never had existed, but which was ultimately bound to fail regardless. In the joyous, climactic rendition of “I Shall Be Released” when the man singing the song isn’t even visible due to the even greater egos flanking him, we can see this death. We can see the shift from community to the individual. The Last Waltz posits itself as a communal celebration, a hearkening back to the 1960s before addiction and fragmentation, but like the idealism of the 1960s, it is doomed. It is a celebration in the vein of the 1960s, but that is all gone by 1976, it will never come back for Robertson and company – that unity that they all shared will never come back. The Last Waltz is continually reaching for that degree, for that feeling, or emotion – whatever was happening in the late 1960s, in the prime of The Band, in the prime of the counterculture.

Hunter S. Thompson may have described this feeling best in the famous “Wave Speech” from his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1970s yearning for what might have been:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.