Great Moments on Video №14: The Band - It Makes No Difference

(Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, November 25, 1976)

The Band - It Makes No Difference

(Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, November 25, 1976)

It just dawned on me that, for some strange reason, there is a real big bunch of what I would define as «great moments on video» from the exact year of my birth. It would be nice to simply consider that as an auspicious omen (of the "the night I was born I swear the moon turned a fire red" variety), but from a more scientific angle of reasoning, I think that the mid-Seventies just have a few specific advantages. First, 1975-76 was the right-before-New-Wave period, a good time to flash and flaunt those «classic rock» values that were already becoming a little stale but could still look pretty good on camera — particularly in retrospect. And second, by that time professional camera work had finally caught up with the rock aesthetics, as we start getting higher quality footage on a more consistent basis, not necessarily restricted to major events like Woodstock or Altamont. It may have been a fairly «tacky» period in the history of popular music (though the Eighties would soon come along and rewrite the entire book on «tackiness»), but it was a good time to go and get f... filmed.

Not coincidentally, it was also the very first time in history that a well-established, prominent movie director would «stoop» to directing a full-length documentary of a rock concert. While over in Europe, stuffy old-fashioned people were enjoying the presentation of The Magic Flute by Ingmar Bergman (it’s actually a cool presentation, but obviously far from Bergman’s finest hour), in the States you had Martin Scorsese, fresh from the tremendous success of Taxi Driver, filming The Band and all their friends at their lengthy, pompous, and, as it turned out, fairly symbolic Farewell Concert, the big grandaddy of all «farewell tours» put on by artists who believe that the word farewell has a tremendous monetary ring to it.

I was not a big fan of The Band when watching The Last Waltz for the first time, and distinctly remember myself mostly waiting for all those guest spots from Neil Young, Dr. John, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and, of course, Bob Dylan while enduring the «slog» of ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, ‘Up On Cripple Creek’, and all those other Band classics that did very little for me at the age of 20. The idea that it must have been the music of The Band to act as some sort of natural, God-given glue to cement together all the forms and genres of American and American-influenced popular music also seemed a little ridiculous — it is one thing to have an inflated ego, Mr. Robertson, but another thing to insist that all the world should find itself trapped inside that ego, like a bunch of helpless moths inside an amber piece. Even the Beatles, when they climbed up on the roof of Apple Studios on January 30, 1969, did not think of bringing the entire UK music scene together with them — and they probably had much more of a symbolic right to do that than this self-appointed clique of American Musical Roots Guard Corps.

Because of this, I have never really understood why Scorsese agreed to make the movie in the most ego-tickling fashion — as if it was not really him, but Robbie Robertson himself manning those cameras — but then again, Scorsese’s musical tastes and music-related intuition have always been fairly ordinary, to use a mild word, and he may have indeed been under the spell of The Band’s carefully self-engineered legend a bit too much. In any case, aggrandizing The Band for an epic concert movie was hardly a major crime — and The Last Waltz did, after all, mark the closing of an entire musical era, even if, perhaps, not quite according to the plan that both Robbie and Martin had originally laid out for themselves.

In retrospect, I think that I like The Last Waltz much more if I take it in short, simple snippets rather than in one large sitting, and this concerns both the guest performances and The Band’s own — they generally work much better outside of the overall context than as pieces of a single puzzle. Something like «here’s The Band playing ‘The Shape I’m In’ around 1976» works so much better for me than «here’s the world’s greatest roots-rock band closing the curtain on roots-rock because the ungrateful world just happened to hand it the pink slip», if you know what I mean. Cut out the drama of the circumstances and concentrate on the drama of the music — that’s the way it should be.

And while I did not quite realize it at the age of 20, twenty years later it becomes quite apparent to me that there are very few dramatic moments in music, enhanced by equally dramatic work by the camera, that could rival the intensity and cathartic effect of ‘It Makes No Difference’, arguably the last great song Robertson ever wrote, as captured on that evening of November 25. (The version in the film is slightly abbreviated, with Scorsese cutting out an entire verse and a part of Robbie’s solo, but it is not a big problem; you can always hear the complete version on the audio soundtrack LP, of course).

I sometimes find myself consciously holding back from the effect of Rick Danko’s singing on this song. He delivers every line — not one, not two, not the climactic bits, but the entire song — as if struggling with a huge lump in his throat, as if he is on the verge of flinging down that bass and dissolving in his own tears, and only the stress of a public obligation is keeping him up on his feet. Normally, this would count as «overacting» and could be a natural turn-off (like watching James Brown go through his knee-falling routine with ‘Please Please Please’, for instance) — «emotionality on steroids» is a cheap and efficient manipulative tactic for reality competition shows, not timeless art pieces.

But in this case, there are no actual emotional steroids to cleanse out — what you’re looking at is the real thing. It might just be the natural timbre of Rick’s voice that made it so predisposed to singing all of The Band’s most misery-drenched material, from ‘Long Black Veil’ to ‘Unfaithful Servant’ etc.; he had some solid competition going on here with Richard Manuel, especially in the early days, but Manuel’s misery was of a more smooth, angelic kind, while Danko’s always had that pretty earthly rasp mixed in. However, another thing Danko and Manuel shared with each other is that they were both the most depression-prone members of the group, and carrying your depression out with you on stage is an easy and natural thing to do.

To better appreciate what Rick is doing here, it might be advisable to compare, for instance, Solomon Burke’s cover of The Band’s classic, which the 65-year old veteran of soul put on record in 2005. It’s an excellent recording, and nobody could ever accuse Burke of not under­standing what the song is about (well, it’s not that difficult to understand what it is about for any of us, really!). But he does not feel as if he were living the song; his reading of it is too polite and formal, and we do not get to actually see him fighting the "losing battle" right in front of us as we do with Rick, either on the studio original or on this live performance.

The image, too, is everything: Danko is positively smashing here under Scorsese’s cameras, sporting an absolutely Byronesque romantic look with his baby face, chestnut hair, and modest suit — certainly the ladies (and, quite likely, a large segment of the gentlemen) must have been swooning all over. A far cry from the typical glammy look of the big rock and pop stars in 1976, yet nobody could accuse Rick (or anybody else in The Band, for that matter) of not actually caring for their stage appearance. Fast forward just seven years into the future and see that baby face begin to mutate into an ugly bloated mass, betraying signs of incurable alcoholism and exhaustion — but the voice is mostly still there, conveying the exact same brand of sorrow.

Although the camera predictably and expectedly stays on Danko’s face most of the time (if not for the opening and closing sections, you wouldn’t even be able to tell that he’s keeping up the bass line throughout the song), it occasionally allows itself to move on to Robertson, and for a good reason. All of the bad things you ever hear about Robbie are probably true — the man has always had an inflated ego, the man was never nearly as good a guitar player as he makes himself look, and his desperate need to always come across as the most important figure in the chess set, even on songs where it makes sense to step back and let the others take the lead, can be annoying. (It’s funny how he actually dared to engage in a «guitar battle» with Clapton on ‘Further On Up The Road’ from the same show, prompting Eric to lash out and show the arrogant prick who is the real master of electric blues guitar here).

But all the good things you ever hear about Robbie are also true. Not only did he write the damn sucker, after all, but here he also provides the perfect instrumental counterpoints to Danko’s singing, and for every contorted face he pulls (in a "Rick’s just singing it, but it is ME who is actually channelling all that emotion for the audience!" manner), he plays one of those sharp, dry, stinging high-pitched licks that come across as little dynamic pulls-of-pain to complement the nagging, interminably dull pain from Rick’s voice. In the studio original, the guitar parts are more subdued and less acutely felt inside the general mix, heavily cluttered with keyboards; here, they are sharper and more expressive, and it works.

I have to confess that my favorite instrumental bit from this performance is the little series of nearly ultra-sonic stinging licks that Robbie produces at about 4:20 into the video — the tiny ping, ping, ping bits of the kind you can usually expect of the aforementioned Eric Clapton, or Mark Knopfler — and then there’s this theatrical, but adorable gesture when at the last ping he throws his hand up in the air, shaking it and rubbing the fingers against each other as if he just got seriously burned. It’s a little corny, maybe, but it still feels like somebody getting caught up in the musical ecstasy of the situation. (Here’s a black-and-white version of an alternate performance from the same tour earlier in the year, but Robbie’s solo is not nearly as hard-hitting as it is in the Last Waltz performance).

And then there is a little cinematographic trick from Martin — for most of the song, the cameras were focused exclusively on Rick and Robbie (with just a few extra shots of Levon singing harmony on the chorus), and then at 4:30 we see Garth Hudson suddenly emerging from the left with a saxophone and sending the song into a whole other dimension. For those who only see the video in isolation (like YouTube reactors) this is a complete shock; for those of us who actually see it as part of the movie it is still a bit of a shock, just because (a) Hudson was only seen playing his keyboards before this and (b) we don’t even get to see him pick up the sax, he just emerges there instantaneously, like a jack-in-the-box. (There is even a brief, faintly heard uproar in the audience, who probably saw it coming but were still impressed). And while this is not a particularly long or technically stunning sax performance, it adds a third and very different voice to the song — a melancholic, but calmer and wiser note, almost like the voice of God coming down from Heaven to give some much-needed closure and «repose» to the emotional exhaustion of the first two voices. (Given that Hudson, with his bulky figure and always awesome beard, cuts a very God-the-Father-like figure, the metaphor is more than appropriate, I think).

If you look at the various YouTube comments under the video (or any other version of ‘It Makes No Difference’, for that matter), you shall see that plenty of people use the song as part of a healing process — and, interestingly, even if lyrically it makes a rather clear reference to one’s loneliness after a break-up (or separation), there is a tendency of running into its arms after the actual death of a loved one. Your humble servant here has also made use of this medicine at least several times in his life, and I think that this reaction is perfectly natural — ‘It Makes No Difference’ is way too heavy medicine for commonplace break-up situations; the kind of emotion contained therein is required for truly serious occasions. And while simply listening to the studio version of the song can work just fine, I think we should all be grateful to Martin Scorsese for preserving for us a much more vivid and spontaneous moment in time, with such excellent camera work, such juicy colors, and such emotional devastation.