The Last Waltz, Bob Dylan, and Stolen Footage

The lights went down and the cameras stopped rolling. One of rock’s greatest acts had just played their final show, and it had all been caught on film. One hundred sixty thousand feet of thirty-five millimeter footage shot by one of the most acclaimed directors of all time, loaded into trucks. It was four in the morning. A collection of the biggest names in the music industry raged at the afterparty. Then someone pulled the drummer aside. Told him that the unthinkable had just happened. Someone had stolen reels of film off the trucks.

In 1976, the band simply known as the Band performed their last live show at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The show was a who’s who of the biggest names in music at the time. Neil Young. Neil Diamond. Joni Mitchell. Van Morrison. The list goes on. The Band hired the great film director Martin Scorcese, hot off Taxi Driver, to film the whole thing. But the studio wouldn’t greenlight the film unless they were assured that Bob Dylan would be involved. It was a reasonable expectation. The Band first gained fame backing Dylan when he went electric. But Dylan was busy working on his own movie. He was cagey and noncommittal. In the end, he relented and agreed to do it. Then he stole the footage of his performance and held onto it as a negotiating tactic.

The Band got their start as the backing band for Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. Known then as the Hawks, they established themselves as five of the tightest musicians in the game. So when Bob Dylan decided to trade his trademark brand of acoustic folk for raucous rock ‘n roll in 1965, he hired the Hawks as his touring band. They were also the guys he collaborated with while he was holed up in Woodstock, New York after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident. With Dylan’s support, the Band eventually spun off on their own, releasing some of the most critically-acclaimed albums of the 1970s.

But by 1976, the Band were no longer a draw, in terms of record sales or concert venues. An act that had played some of the biggest stages in the world found themselves opening for ZZ Top at the Nashville Fairgrounds.

It wasn’t just a drop in their popularity. The Band’s pianist, Richard Manuel, attempted suicide twice that year, once with a BB gun and once by setting himself on fire. He nearly broke his neck in a boating accident, and he was drinking eight bottles of Grand Marnier a day, on top of a coke habit. The physical toll of constantly being on the road led several members of the Band and their crew to turn to heroin to relieve the pain.

And then there was Robbie Robertson, the Band’s guitarist, who had essentially taken over as the Band’s manager. Richard Manuel’s alcoholism had left Robbie as the Band’s primary songwriter. He was getting more work as a producer, including recording an album for Neil Diamond, and he was looking to get more into film soundtracks.

Plus, the way he saw it, if the Band continued to tour, one or more of its members were going to end up dead.

The rock scene was littered with bodies. Jimi. Janis. Jim Morrison. Robbie Robertson didn’t want to see his friends’ names added to the list.

So Robbie called the rest of the Band together at their lawyers’ offices in Malibu. They needed to quit touring, he said. It didn’t mean the end of the Band. They were currently negotiating a jump from Capitol Records to Warner Brothers. But it meant the end of life on the road.

The other members were furious. They told Robbie he couldn’t do this. He was destroying the Band. But the fact was, he could. The bulk of the Band’s songs were his. If he pulled out, the Band was over.

This was a compromise, a way to stay together in some way. The rest of the Band reluctantly agreed.

Robbie knew he was going to get his way. He’d already made arrangements with legendary promoter Bill Graham to host the Band’s farewell show at the Winterland Ballroom, a reconditioned ice skating rink where the Band had made their debut under that name in 1969.

Robbie had also signed up Martin Scorsese to film the Band’s last concert. Scorsese was currently shooting New York New York, a musical starring Robert DeNiro and Liza Minelli. In fact, Marty brought Liza to the meeting with Robbie to discuss the film. Marty explained that, contractually, he wasn’t allowed to shoot a movie in the middle of shooting another movie. But Robbie and Bill Graham had already decided the show was going to be held on Thanksgiving Day, while shooting for New York New York was technically on a break. And when Robbie read Marty the list of musical guests they had lined up, Marty said there was no way he could miss out on doing the film.

One name noticeably absent from that list was Bob Dylan. It seemed only natural that Dylan would play the show. Ronnie Hawkins, the guy who first put the Band together back in 1958, was on the bill. So of course Dylan, who had brought them to major fame with their work together in the ’60s, would play too. In fact, when Marty and Robbie went to Warner Brothers to ask them to pay for the movie, Warner Brothers said sure, as long as Bob Dylan was involved.

Dylan was happy to do the show, but he didn’t want to do the movie. He was already working on a movie of his own. A documentary of his Rolling Thunder tour called Renaldo and Clara, directed by Dylan himself. That movie wouldn’t see the light of day until a few years later, and critics panned the almost four-hour mix of concert footage and fictional vignettes. Like Eat the Document, the film of Dylan’s 1965 tour with the members of the Band, Renaldo and Clara ended up pulled from distribution and buried, with bootleg copies circulating among Dylan fans.

Footage from BOTH of those movies would be used by Martin Scorsese decades later to make two more Dylan documentaries. But I digress.

In 1976, Dylan didn’t want to be competing against himself at the box office. Robbie and Marty pushed, and Dylan said he’d think about it. Marty and Robbie then lied to the movie studio and told them Bob Dylan … was in.

Thanksgiving 1976. Five thousand people poured into the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Hundreds of tables had been set up with white table cloths, because promoter Bill Graham had decided that if you were going to have people at a show on Thanksgiving Day, it was only proper to serve them a turkey dinner. 220 turkeys, 500 pounds of cranberry sauce, 90 gallons of brown gravy, a ton of candied yams, 6,000 rolls, and 400 gallons of cider. And 400 pounds of salmon Bill had to buy off a friend of Bob Dylan’s, who in addition to organizing Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, and acting as Dylan’s handler this evening, owned an Alaskan fish company.

The stage was decked out with the sets from La Traviata, on loan from the Opera Company of San Francisco.

Nine 35 mm cameras were trained on the stage. Michael Chapman, Martin Scorsese’s cinematographer on Taxi Driver, had insisted they shoot on 35mm, even though no one was sure the 35mm cameras could run constantly for hours without bursting into flames.

Backstage, performers skipped the turkey dinner in favor of visits to the fabled Cocteau room. Bill Graham had painted one of the dressing rooms completely white, the walls and the ceiling. He’d laid down a thick white rug. He cut noses off plastic Groucho Marx masks and affixed them to the walls. He piped in tape loops of sniffing noises. The only furniture in the room was a big glass table with razor blades resting suggestively on it.

In case you’re missing the subtle symbolism, that room was the cocaine room.

If you did miss the symbolism, you wouldn’t have missed the big ol’ cocaine nugget in Neil Young’s nose as he performed.

Bob Dylan showed up with an entourage and immediately retreated to a locked dressing room, deep in the bowels of the Winterland. He’d refused to show up for dress rehearsal at the Winterland. Instead, he made the Band come to him at the piano room of the hotel they were staying in.

No one talked about whether or not he was going to be in the film.

The first set was the Band playing on their own for an hour. That and the turkey dinner would have been worth the $25 ticket price. Robbie Robertson had mentioned to the press that the Band might bring “friends” along, but the audience had no idea what they were in for.

Ronnie Hawkins, the guy who’d first put the band together to back him up in Toronto bars back in 1958, was the first guest to come out, and then it was just one after another. Muddy Waters. Dr. John. Eric Clapton. In order to keep Joni Mitchell a secret, they hid her behind a curtain while she sang harmonies on “Helpless” with Neil Young, then brought her out to thunderous applause.

But backstage, things were not so great. Bob Dylan was still holed up in his room. Fifteen minutes before he was supposed to join the Band on stage, his lawyer emerged from the dressing room.

Dylan wasn’t going to go on.

Someone had to tell Scorsese. Marty lost it. The studio had only agreed to pay for the film if Dylan was in it. Scorsese and Bill Graham were about to be on the hook for all the costs of making the movie.

They sent Albert Grossman in to talk to Dylan. Grossman had been Dylan’s manager since he first started on the New York City folk scene in 1962. The two had split in 1970 after Dylan learned that Grossman had taken half of his publishing rights.

Grossman was somewhat notorious for taking out a $200,000 life insurance policy on his client Janis Joplin just months before she died. The Band were his only real clients at this point. Bob Dylan was not going to listen to Albert Grossman about whether or not he should appear in the film.

So Bill Graham went into the dressing room to try to convince him. It took two tries, but eventually succeeded when he told Dylan that he and his people could go over any footage with him in it before it made it into the film. Bill Graham made this offer without talking to Scorsese, but it was the only thing he could think of to get Bob Dylan out on that stage.

It worked. Or it seemed like it worked. Dylan’s management team and his lawyers were still wheeling and dealing even as Dylan took the stage. He ripped into “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” one of the first electric songs he’d inflicted on the shocked live audience at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

This is a good moment to point out that the Band played 50 songs that night, some of which they’d never played before. They were backing eleven different performers. If anyone needed proof the Band was the greatest backing band in the game, this was it.

But “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” was one they knew by heart. Drummer Levon Helm, his bleeding hands locked around the drumsticks, laid down a beat that pulled Bob Dylan along with it. Levon looked up at Dylan, and then past him at the cameras. No blinking red lights. The cameramen were taking cigarette breaks. The sound techs had taken off their headphones.

No one was filming Bob Dylan’s performance.

But Levon Helm didn’t care. He didn’t want to do this gig anyway. He wasn’t ready for the Band to come off the road. He kept playing, never signaling to his bandmates that the cameras weren’t rolling.

Dylan and the Band played three more songs, then the camera crews snapped into action. When Dylan saw the red lights signaling that the cameras were rolling, he surprised everyone by playing “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” again. It might have confused the audience, but in the end, Dylan wanted that final performance documented.

His management team did not. They were in the wings, shouting at Bill Graham to turn the cameras off, even while the all-star cast took the stage for the big closing number.

There were encores, and the show stretched past three a.m., but then it was over. The Band was finished. At least as a touring band. Robbie Robertson fully intended for the Band to continue as a studio act. He thought of what they were doing as the same as the Beatles had done in 1966: leaving the road to focus on making new music.

For now, though, the acts went back to the hotel for the afterparty. The film crew loaded reel after reel of 35mm film onto a truck. 160,000 feet of film. That’s about a half ton of film, even before you figure for cases.

The mood at the afterparty was subdued, and a little sad. People always talk about the End of the Sixties. Some say it happened at Altamont, or at Kent State. Or when Jimi died, or Janis, or Jim. But it wouldn’t be wrong to say the sixties ended at that show, a Last Waltz not just for the band, but for the kind of music they played, and the scene they brought together one last time.

But meanwhile, outside, members of Bob Dylan’s management team broke into the trucks carrying the film. They found the reels that had Dylan on them. It was only two songs, but one of them was the big singalong finale, an iconic moment that’s been often imitated but never duplicated.

And they took the reels. Every shot from every camera in the Winterland that night. All of the unedited footage with Bob Dylan on it. They’d seen the film that Dylan was working on, the sprawling mess that would become Renaldo and Clara. And they’d seen what happened on the Winterland stage that night. This movie would bury Dylan’s movie at the box office. The only way to prevent that was to deny audiences the chance to see Dylan in the Band’s movie.

Dylan’s people stole the reels. They weren’t even slick about it. The music director for the whole show, who’d served as the producer for a couple of the Band’s albums, watched it happen. He told Levon Helm about it at the afterparty. Neither of them opted to do anything about it. Maybe they knew that they were never going to see any money off this gig.

They were right. In the end, Warner Brothers laid the cost of shooting the film against the advance on the companion live album release, which meant all the money from that album went to Warner Brothers. And the film rights were such a mess that the Band didn’t see much money from that, either.

Dylan’s people held onto the stolen film until they got exactly what Bill Graham had promised. Every shot of Dylan in the film had to be approved by his people. It was something Martin Scorsese never would have agreed to. Letting someone else’s lawyers call the shots on his film. But Dylan’s people didn’t give him any choice.

Levon Helm went back to Woodstock, where the Band really got their start back in the day. He built a studio there where he’d continue to record for decades.

Richard Manuel continued to struggle with drug and alcohol addiction before eventually committing suicide after a Band reunion show, without Robbie Robertson, in 1985.

And Robbie Robertson, who set all this in motion with his decision to stop touring? Robbie, who set up the show with Bill Graham, who brought in Martin Scorsese, who arranged the movie deal with Warner Brothers by bluffing about Bob Dylan’s willingness to participate?

After everyone had a few weeks to cool off, Robbie booked studio time for the Band in Malibu. In his mind, they were about to enter the next phase of their careers. They were ready to be done with the rigors of the road and make their Sgt. Pepper’s, their Pet Sounds. Ideas for songs in hand, he went into the studio, ready to create magic again with four men he counted as his closest friends.

No other members of the Band showed up.

The Last Waltz served as a eulogy for the idyllic sixties scene. Seattle’s nineties grunge scene ended on a darker note, with the murder of an up and coming singer.

But that’s another story.