Bob Dylan (13 page)

The cameras stay very close to Bob Dylan: we see angles, a flash of face shielded by a blur of straggling curls. Scorsese cuts as if he
wants most of all to reveal the mystery that still hangs on Dylan like a cloak; whatever Scorsese’s intentions, that’s the result. There’s a split second when Dylan shrugs his shoulders—and it nearly brought me out of my seat. It was as if he’d said, Let it come, throw what you’ve got, I was here yesterday, I’ll be here tomorrow—a trivial gesture (in truth, Dylan was merely answering Levon Helm’s question about a change in tempo) that carries more drama than any other moment in the film. Who is this man? you ask. Where did he come from? He’s a visitation, not a singer.

The cuts between Scorsese talking with the Band about their early years and the action on stage almost always have a certain point to make. They establish roots, bring out themes of experience, comradeship, hard times, craziness: We hear about the Hawks’ bewilderment at finding themselves booked into a nightclub featuring a one-armed go-go dancer, and their even greater displacement when they discover the club once belonged to Jack Ruby. We then move right into “The Shape I’m In,” a song about a man with his back to the wall.

There’s the tale of a time when, as the Hawks, the Band hunted up the great blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II. In West Helena, Arkansas, Levon Helm’s home ground, they spent the night jamming—Sonny Boy with a bucket between his knees to catch the blood from his raw lips. We go from there to “Mystery Train,” and Paul Butterfield puts so much force into his harmonica you half look for
his
bucket. Levon speaks of how, when rock ’n’ roll was not the name of a kind of music but just what one heard in the Deep South—a natural mix of blues, country, Cajun, gospel, folk songs and minstrelsy—it seemed grotesque to outsiders. What to Helm was simply local entertainment was to the rest of the country something threatening, vulgar, devilish. The film immediately moves to confirm that such weirdness has yet to be co-opted: following hard on Helm’s words is Van Morrison, overweight, poured into an impossible stage suit, conceding nothing. Yes, he is grotesque, and for a second he reminds me of Rumpelstiltskin stamping his foot straight through the floor when he finds out he
can’t have the spinner’s baby—midway through “Caravan,” you’re afraid Morrison will do just that. Like Little Richard from Macon, Georgia, or Jerry Lee Lewis from Ferriday, Louisiana, Van Morrison, from Belfast, splits the atom. He breaks
The Last Waltz
wide open, and by the time he kicks his way off stage, not an edge of his power or his strangeness has been smoothed, and every edge has cut.

 

 

“It was a punk thing, in the beginning,” Robertson says of the music and the way of life the Band first started to work out on the road in the late fifties and early sixties. “We were like a lot of people. We thought most of what was on the radio was shit; we didn’t care what anyone else thought. We began by rebelling against what there was around us, against what we heard.

“And so”—when the Band first stepped out from behind Bob Dylan with
Music from Big Pink
—“there we were, up in the mountains, in Woodstock, doing what we did, what we’d learned how to do, and we thought, if anyone likes it, fine, and if people hate it, fine. We’ve gone this far; we can keep going. We were still rebelling against what was there, against what we heard.”

What the Band heard was San Francisco music,
Sgt. Pepper,
psychedelia—“chocolate subways,” as Richard Manuel witheringly puts it in
The Last Waltz
—and they thought it was a fraud. What did it have to do with the grace of Johnny Ace, the depth of “What Would I Do Without You,” or the nerve and intelligence of the songs they’d played around the world with Bob Dylan? The nay-saying of the sound of the times seemed easy to the Band; the music seemed all artifice, empty of real emotion. So instead the Band offered music rooted in country and soul and gospel, a set of emblematic songs that did not wear out—affirmations of American life based firmly in an ambiguity that kept them honest, that made room for any listener.

“When those first two records got through like nothing we ever expected—suddenly there was
Time
magazine,
Look,
money, pressures
from all sides—well,” Robertson says, “everything was fine until we went out into the world. Then we started to become what we’d rebelled against: stars, heroes, people who paid too much attention to what other people told us to do. The only thing left to rebel against was ourselves. And we did that; that’s what a lot of the music after
The Band
was about. But that can be very destructive. We found that out. The road was part of it: The road is responsible for a lot of madness, a lot of sickness. It’s very dangerous.”

So the Band put on the Last Waltz, and quit the road. It was no tragedy, nor, as some are claiming, any sort of event comparable to the Beatles’ first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
(if anything, the release of
Music from Big Pink
was that sort of event). Rather, the Last Waltz was one more confirmation of the Band’s commitment to a sense of history as an essential part of one’s life. Unlike most rock ’n’ roll groups, which break up or wander on forever, changing members, replacing strays or corpses, pushing their hits, the Band wrote their own calendar, because they respected calendars. “You can,” Robertson says in the film, calling up the early deaths of Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, and Elvis, “push your luck.”

The question that remains, given
The Last Waltz,
is what that luck—the Band’s career and their music—is worth.

We find out, I think, about a third of the way into the movie, when we see the Band and the Staples—originally a black gospel quartet, Roebuck “Pop” Staples, born in 1915, and his daughters Mavis, Cleotha, and Yvonne have worked as a secular group since the sixties—take their places on the MGM sound stage to sing “The Weight.” “We used to spend more time listening to the Staple Singers’ albums than to anything else,” Robertson says. “We wanted to find out how the vocals worked, how they sang to each other.” The Band did find out; as it was recorded on
Big Pink,
the singing on “The Weight” was about sympathy, obligation, friendship. The singing played against the lyrics, which told the story of a man who, arriving in a strange town with a mission the listener
(and maybe the man himself) never fully understands, can find no sympathy. The only people willing to offer him a hand want something in return—his soul, say.

In the Band’s original version, the song was hilarious, and also unsettling. In
The Last Waltz,
it’s very different. It begins much more slowly—not in terms of tempo, but in terms of how fast the emotion comes out—with striking notes from Robertson’s double-necked Gibson guitar, clear gospel piano from Garth Hudson and a weary, utterly accepting vocal from Levon Helm. He’s seen it all, his voice says; nothing will surprise him. The slightly bemused tone of his singing on
Big Pink
is gone, replaced by something much less easy to pin down.

As the number moves on, with Scorsese’s camera gliding around the ensemble, the whole meaning of the song changes. The series of weird, inexplicable, even horrific events the song’s narrator goes through are given permanence; the song is no longer depicting a trap to break out of, but simply ordinary life. The religious images in the lyrics begin to expand, to take over; the joke of “The Weight” becomes an elegy.

Following the story—the man shows up to do a job and finally hightails it out of town, not knowing if he’s come close to completing it, not knowing if, God help him, he’ll have to come
back
—you begin to hear “The Weight” as a parable of the Band’s career: a version of the eager adventurousness with which teenagers began eighteen years ago (“You won’t make much money,” Robertson remembers Hawkins telling him, “but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra”), and of the fear, in the end, that they were playing on borrowed time.

Watching the Band and the Staples, you see “The Weight” as a statement of the pluralism that has always been at the heart of the Band’s music. As Mavis Staples, then Roebuck Staples, trade verses with the Band, we see an explicit, completely intentional statement of the idea of community that was the most profound affirmation of
Big Pink
and
The Band.
We see men sing to women, women sing to men, blacks sing to whites, whites sing to blacks, northerners
sing to southerners, southerners sing to northerners, the young sing to the old, the old sing to the young. There’s no distance.

It’s a vision of utopia, and, to keep the story honest, it demands at least a partial contradiction.
The Last Waltz
provides it. The film leaves the last high chorus of “The Weight” hanging in the air and cuts directly to the stage at Winterland for “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the post-Civil War story of a Rebel soldier who is desperately trying to pick up the pieces of the old south. It was the strongest number the Band played that night in San Francisco; before the song was over the crowd exploded in cheers, something I’d never seen happen in the dozen times I’d watched the Band do the tune. “There was more anger coming out,” Robertson says of the singing of Levon Helm, the southerner for whom Robertson wrote the song.

What this means, I think, is that even when one has touched or entered a utopia that transcends all limited experiences—be that utopia “The Weight” as we see it in
The Last Waltz,
or the panorama of
The Last Waltz
itself—one should not, cannot, give up the limited experience one brings to others, even if, finally, that experience forces others out, even if it can’t be shared, not in full. In other words, when Levon Helm, as the Confederate veteran Virgil Cane, says that he remembers the night the South went down to defeat, he—Levon Helm—does remember it. In the South in the forties and fifties, when Helm was growing up, the War Between the States wasn’t history, it was part of the present. It was the weight one carried, and people like Helm, and Roebuck Staples, born in Mississippi, hefted it every day. The Band’s songs catch their common ground and define the space between them.

The conjunction in
The Last Waltz
of “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” proves that we can no more blithely use history than we can ignore it—as with the Band’s career, or a conversation that ranged from Van Morrison to Ray Charles to Alan Freed, we can simply try to find our place in it. That place isn’t fixed: That’s the truth of the Band and the Staples’ version of “The Weight.” But it isn’t quite a question of will, of
what one wants, either: That’s the truth of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” One acts, but one also inherits.

From the start, an understanding of the possibilities of adventure and the limits of freedom has been what the Band have had to talk to us about. In
The Last Waltz,
they still speak clearly; they pressed their luck, it seems, just far enough.

 

The Last Waltz,
directed by Martin Scorsese (MGM DVD, 1978/2002).

 

American Hot Wax,
directed by Floyd Mutrux, written by John Kaye (Paramount, 1978).

24 August 1978

 

It saddens me that I can’t find it in my heart to agree with my colleague Dave Marsh that Bob Dylan’s new record is a joke, or anyway a good one. Most of the stuff here is dead air, or close to it. The novelty of the music—soul-chorus backup modeled on Bob Marley’s I-Threes, funk riffs from the band, lots of laconic sax work—quickly fades as you realize how indifferent the playing is: “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power),” the most musically striking number here, is really just a pastiche of the best moments of the Eagles’
Hotel California.
Still, I believe some of the songs on
Street Legal:
those that are too bad to have been made with anything but complete seriousness. Dylan may have once needed a dumptruck to unload his head, but you’d need a Geiger counter to find irony in “Is Your Love in Vain?” or affection in “Baby Stop Crying.”

Both are wretched performances, but “Is Your Love in Vain?” is particularly cruel: compared to Dylan’s posture here, Mick Jagger in “Under My Thumb” is exploring the upper reaches of humility. Not that there’s any bite in the song, as there is in “On the Road Again” or “Don’t Think Twice,” two other numbers in which a
woman gets what the singer thinks she has coming to her. There’s too much distance here for that—distance between an ego and its object. The man speaks to the woman like a sultan checking out a promising servant girl for VD, and his tone is enough to make her fake the pox if that’s what it takes to get away clean. When, after a string of gulf-between-the-sexes insults (which pretty much come down to
Are you good enough for me? I’m hot stuff, you know
), the singer finally makes the big concession (“Alright, I’ll take a chance, I will fall in love with you”—odd notion of how falling in love works), you can almost see the poor girl heading for the exit. “Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow,” the man mouths, apparently making a dumb leap from housewife to earth mother, but in truth just rhyming. Then comes the kicker: “Can you understand my pain?” Women all over America must be saying what a friend of mine said: “Sure, Bob, give me a call sometime. If I’m not home, just leave a message on the answer-phone.” As it happens, “Is Your Love in Vain?” is a high-point on
Street Legal
—or, at least, the most emotionally convincing track on the album. No joke.

Ah, but the singing! The singing, which on other records has redeemed lines nearly as terrible as those I’ve quoted—what about the singing? Well, Bob Dylan has sounded sillier than he does on
Street Legal
(who could forget “Big Yellow Taxi”), more uncomfortable (“The Boxer”), and as uninterested (“Let It Be Me”), but he has never sounded so utterly fake. Though this quality is sometimes cut with playfulness (“Changing of the Guards”), in “Baby Stop Crying” the vocal is so fey, so intolerably smug, that the only reference point is one of those endless spoken intros Barry White was using a few years ago: an imitation of caring that couldn’t fool a stuffed dog. Dave Marsh is right when he says there are echoes of Elvis on
Street Legal
—“Is Your Love in Vain?” plays with the melody of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” before it turns into “Here Comes the Bride”—but not even “(There’s) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car” was quite this creepy.