History / The Last Waltz & Breakup (1976–1978)

The Last Waltz & Breakup (1976–1978)

Richard Manuel nearly drowned in a boating accident early in 1976, and it rattled Robertson enough to start planning an exit. He'd been watching what years on the road did to people, in the Band and elsewhere, and he didn't like what he saw. I was telling the guys, he said later, that I liked the music but didn't want to keep going out there with it, that they weren't learning from it anymore, weren't growing from it. He wanted the group to become a studio-only act, the way the Beatles had gone off the road in 1966. The rest of the band didn't agree. Robertson pushed ahead anyway, and booked the farewell show at Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the same room where they'd played their first-ever headline concert under their own name back in 1969.

They were also, at the exact same time, scrambling to finish an album they still owed Capitol Records. The label wouldn't release them from contract without one more record, and Islands got stitched together out of leftovers and half-finished sessions from the previous two years, worked on in whatever hours weren't already spoken for by rehearsals. Danko finished his harmony vocals on one of the album's tracks in the early hours of November 22, just three days before the concert, after spending the entire prior day rehearsing for it.

They announced the whole thing on Saturday Night Live on October 30, with host Buck Henry telling the audience the group was about to break up on Thanksgiving. With only six weeks to put a film together, Robertson called Martin Scorsese, whom he knew loved rock music, and asked if he'd direct a concert documentary. When Robertson ran down some of the names they'd lined up as guests, Scorsese didn't hesitate. Van Morrison, he said. Are you kidding? I have to do it.

The concert itself, on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976, opened with a full turkey dinner for the more than five thousand people who'd paid twenty-five dollars a ticket, roughly a hundred and twenty dollars today and an absurd price by the standards of the time, when most shows still cost four or five. There was ballroom dancing before the music started, poetry readings from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others, and then the Band came out around nine and played eleven of their own songs with a horn section, arranged again by Allen Toussaint, before the guests started arriving one after another: Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, Ronnie Wood, and finally Bob Dylan. John Simon, who'd produced their first two albums, worked the night as musical director.

Not everything about it was as smooth as the finished film made it look. Backstage, the green room got nicknamed the Cocteau Room after a Jean Cocteau film Robertson had recommended to the crew, and by Helm's account it stayed full of cocaine and razor blades all night. Neil Young performed with visible white residue under his nose, and Robertson later paid to have it edited out of the footage frame by frame, joking afterward that it was the most expensive cocaine he'd ever bought without actually using any. Dylan, midway through the night, briefly refused to let Scorsese keep filming him at all, worried it would compete with his own film project, and had to be talked back into it.

None of that stopped The Last Waltz from becoming one of the most acclaimed concert films ever made when it finally came out in 1978, or from getting preserved decades later in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. But it left real damage behind. Helm never forgave Robertson for how the decision to stop touring got made, and never forgave Scorsese for a film he felt was built around long, flattering close-ups of Robertson while the rest of the group got treated as scenery. He called it, bluntly and for the rest of his life, a scandal, and pointed out for years that only Robertson collected songwriting and production royalties from the film's ongoing sales, while the musicians who'd actually played the notes did not.

Islands came out in March 1977, self-produced, mostly outtakes, and stalled at No. 64, the lowest chart placement any Band album had managed on Capitol. Robertson himself later said flatly that it wasn't really an album at all, just a contractual formality dressed up as one. It was also, whatever anyone wanted to call it, the last studio record the five original members would ever make together. The touring band that had formed out of Ronnie Hawkins's backing group two decades earlier was, as of that Thanksgiving night in San Francisco, finished. What came next, for four of the five, wouldn't happen for another seven years, and it would happen without Robertson at all.