The Last Waltz Is Still The Gold Standard For Musicians Saying Goodbye

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 8, 2012 3:00PM

Long before Shut up and Play the Hits, James Murphy's love letter to the legacy of LCD Soundsystem in the guise of a movie about that band's final performance (playing this weekend and next at Facets Cinematheque) there was Martin Scorcese's epic 1978 concert film about the last concert of The Band, The Last Waltz, showing this weekend as a bike-in movie at The Hideout. One song definitely stays the same: It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.

Robbie Robertson's wearied look back on the toll 16 years on the road had taken on him and his friends in The Last Waltz is partly echoed by Murphy's evident fatigue in his contemporary film, and both musicians betray an itch to get on to the next thing. The Band was a more co-operative enterprise than LCD Soundsystem, however, and not everyone on board wanted off the carousel just yet. The tensions teased out among Scorcese's plentiful interview footage add drama to an epic 5+ hour performance. All of the drama in Murphy's cinematic farewell, by contrast, is internal. He seems to find ending his project bittersweet but clearly is already thinking about launching his own brand of espresso, or producing the next Arcade Fire record, or whatever, and we have to infer internal conflict from his weary expression, ennui from the way he walks his dog and lassitude from the way he sips latte.

Shut up and Play the Hits was half party, half therapy. The Last Waltz is one quarter party, three-quarters wake. Both films ignore the audience or eschew capturing attendees' experience, satisfied instead to put viewers on stage with the musicians in revelatory close-up. The roster of Last Waltz guests begins with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters and Joni Mitchell and runs very deep, guaranteeing the film's status as the end-all statement of the survivors of the generation that came to full flower in the 1960s. The most frequent criticism of The Last Waltz is the short shrift it gave to everybody not named Robertson, but we will take what we can get: it is especially poignant to watch the late Levon Helm at his absolute best.

It's been 36 years since the concert, 10 years since it was re-released in theaters and less a single year since the last time we told you to go see it. There's a reason this keeps coming around, and an early fall night under the stars with a friend or two is the perfect opportunity to discover it.

The Last Waltz screens this Sunday at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia Ave. Admission is free.