Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 4, The Band, a.k.a., The Brown Album

Bert Lance died yesterday. I read his obituary in the New York Times on the train home this evening. Lance was a banker, a Jimmy Carter crony, part of the Georgia Mafia that the former governor carted to Washington to help him run the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate Leviathan. 

Lance didn't last long as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was gone, resigning in disgrace, by September of Carter's first year in office. The crimes Lance was accused of were peanuts compared to Nixon's. Lance used his bank to make unsecured loans to support his political interests, and then used his position in the Carter administration to quash a Department of Justice investigation. But the nation's fourth estate and its two-party system had developed an insatiable appetite for political mega-scandal. So Bert Lance's run-of-the-mill corruption, varieties of which are on regular display in county seats and state capitals across the country, got blown up Oz-like into an issue on which the fate of the new government hung. It was absurd.

It seemed like every day that summer of 1977 I listened to breathless news reports about Bert Lance on the AM car radio as my father drove us up and down the Santa Cruz Mountains in his green Chevy Vega.

One could argue that Carter never recovered from the Bert Lance imbroglio, and neither did the nation. Every new presidential administration -- particularly if the commander in chief is a Democrat -- we go through an ersatz Watergate. Think Whitewater, or just recently the purported IRS investigation of Tea Party 501(c)(4)'s at the behest of politicos in the Obama administration. That's why I have argued in a previous Hippies vs. Punks post it would have been better for our body politic if the jejune Georgia Mafia never would have won.

A few nights before the 1976 general election, The Band performed on Saturday Night Live (less than a month before The Last Waltz):

The Band were friends of Jimmy Carter; they were his house guests when he was Governor of Georgia. Richard Manuel's version of "Georgia on My Mind," when performed during Carter's presidential run, was a nod to the peanut farmer.

The 1976 presidential election was extremely close. Not Bush v. Gore close, but close. Carter won seven states by less than 5%, for a total of 146 electoral votes. He beat Ford in the Electoral College by 297 to 240. Among Carter's staunchest supporters were young people and liberals. I think it's pretty safe to say that without a decent turnout by Hippies in Ohio and Wisconsin, which Carter won by the narrowest of margins, 0.27% and 1.68%, respectively, Ford would have won the general election. Were enough Hippies watching Saturday Night Live before Tuesday's election to swing the election Carter's way?

Tonight marks the last post on The Last Waltz, which you'll recall from part 1, I was a devotee of during the time I returned to New York City in the early 1990s and suffered through a divorce. I was attracted to the movie and the soundtrack because it seemed to champion a lifestyle that was a slave to pussy; a lifestyle I was ready to embrace as a newly minted bachelor.

And sure enough, reading Levon Helm and Stephen Davis' This Wheel's on Fire, this idea of The Band being first and foremost constituted for pussy is confirmed. The Hawk, Ronnie Hawkins, was a businessman who had a simple philosophy. Get good-looking women to come to your shows and you fill the bar because all the guys will come to have a crack at the good-looking women. The Hawks, the precursor of The Band, a.k.a., Robertson, Danko, Helms, Manuel and Hudson were put together and drilled to draw the ladies. And they did. Reliably.

Eleven years ago there was a convergence. I left my girlfriend of 11 years and moved out on my own at the same time as the 2002 25th anniversary re-release of The Last Waltz. -- I was out on my own living alone as a bachelor for the first time since my initial immersion in The Last Waltz. It looked to me like I had timed it perfectly.

I went to see the new print at one of the art-house movie theaters in the University District. But rather than shell out for the new four-CD box set, I purchased a used copy of the eponymous The Band (1969), usually referred to as The Brown Album, and this became the soundtrack for my second run at bachelorhood.

The Brown Album, The Band's second album, is the one that marks the group's crossover from critic's choice to super-stardom success. If Music From Big Pink (1968) is high art, The Brown Album is a celebration of the high life. It's chock full of party-time songs: "Across the Great Divide," "Rag Mama Rag," "Up on Cripple Creek," "Jemima Surrender," "Look Out Cleveland," "Jawbone," "King Harvest (Has Surly Come)." It's an album with a heavy Levon Helm vibe; its two most recognized tracks -- "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek" -- are trademark Helms tunes.

The Brown Album traces the trajectory of The Band's future -- not as a quirky group that created the majestic Music From Big Pink but as the arena rockers, corporate Hippies, that would climax in The Last Waltz. And while The Brown Album is truly great, I have some negative associations with it that have to do with my spectacularly brief, thoroughly unsuccessfully run at being a "player," a bachelor able to juggle three girlfriends at once. 

On one particular night, after a couple of months in my newly rented bachelor pad, the wheels not only caught fire but fell off. Two girlfriends broke it off with me in the short span of a bright early evening; and the third, with whom I was still in pursuit and hadn't consummated anything, was a no-call/no-show. I was drinking hefeweizen. And when I finished that, I moved to a fifth of Polish potato vodka. Forlorn and desperate, I started cold-calling women from work. Not a wise move. Outside the sun was brilliant, everything was lit like burning magnesium. I decided to cook some spaghetti and heat up a jar of spaghetti sauce. I had consumed all the alcohol in the apartment. I was plastered and famished. The sun wasn't going anymore; it was late spring in the north country. I gorged myself on a bowl of spaghetti as Side Two blasted at high volume out of my Harman/Kardon computer speakers.

As I drifted off in scorching sunlight streaming through the windows, "Look Out Cleveland" blaring in my ears, I realized that the whole thing -- the drinking, the partying, the fucking -- was a crock of shit, a dead end, an alley that leads to a blank concrete slab wall. The next morning I woke up with a searing hang over. My pillow case was smeared and stained red with spaghetti sauce.

But let's give Levon the last word on The Last Waltz, from his Afterword with Stephen Davis to the 2000 A Capella Books edition of This Wheel's on Fire:

[Rick Danko] was in Chicago the last time I spoke with him. He was on his way back to Woodstock and we were going into the studio with a little recording budget to do some songs together. I was gonna play drums for him, help him put the rhythm section together. 

Rick got home [on December 9, his fifty-sixth birthday], and went to bed on Thursday night. Friday morning he didn't wake up. Everybody else woke up but Rick. 

The only good thing about his dying was that Rick got to die in his own bed. He didn't get killed, a bunch of shit like that. Nobody got to say, "Well, the drugs did him in," or "The bottle done him down," or "If he just wouldn't have played with that gun, dammit." You know what I mean? Old Rick died at home. 

But the hell of it is, Rick still died with his money in their goddamned pockets. That's the hell of it. If Rick's money wasn't in their pockets, I don't think Rick would have died because Rick worked himself to death. Rick liked to live with his family the way they liked to live, and to live that way he had to work all the time. 

I know he's in a better place and all that bullshit. My beef is that he didn't have to be there yet -- not at only fifty-six years old. Rick worked too hard. He wasn't that old and he wasn't that sick. He just worked himself to death. And the reason Rick had to work all the time was because he'd been fucked out of his money. 

People ask me about The Last Waltz all the time. Rick Danko dying at fifty-six is what I think about The Last Waltz. It was the biggest fuckin' rip-off that ever happened to The Band -- without a doubt. 

We held a big funeral for Rick, a hell of a thing. The Traums played, John Sebastian, other friends. I sat there with my daughter, kind of stunned, not really believing it was happening or that I was there. Robertson came from California; he didn't want to be here, but knew he had to be. He got up and spouted off a lot of self-serving tripe about how great Rick had sung the songs that he -- Robertson -- had written. It made me sick to hear. Then he worked the press a little, like a good Hollywood boy, and went back to Los Angeles. 

He knows he's got Rick Danko's money in his pocket. He knows that.