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.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 3, Music From Big Pink

Tonight caps a work week where I was put fully in mind of the Hobbes quote "that Man to Man is an errant wolf." In my case, a wolf, perched atop an ergonomically correct chair, trapped in a carpeted, air-conditioned pen, transfixed by a flat screen. Granted, no one is lighting me up with mortar fire -- it's not truly a "war of all against all" -- but it is, after a fashion, a hell realm.

Fortunately I can still sprint. I sped across six busy of lanes of International Boulevard traffic to catch the bus to the train station, and then I sprang up four flights of stairs and jogged over a skybridge and up an escalator to enter the train car just as it was about to depart. A miserable work week gives way as a promising weekend begins.

Last weekend I kept thinking that it was June. But it's not. It's already August. The light here is already starting to recede ever so slightly. What a joy it was on Saturday night to be alone -- a bachelor at home -- cooking a sirloin and listening to Music From Big Pink (1968):

It was as if after nearly 50 years of existence I have arrived at some sort of dialectical synthesis. The past sublated into a healthy, relaxed, unitary present free of man-woman conflict. For a musical accompaniment I could ask for nothing more than "Tears of Rage," the first track Richard Manuel/Bob Dylan masterpiece:

And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse

When Levon Helm died last year I received a request from my mother, who is a resident in an assisted-living facility, for a copy of Music From Big Pink. Under the impression that I had a copy in my iTunes, I assured her that I'd have it in the mail right away. To my surprise it turned out that I was mistaken. All I had on my computer was The Band (1969) and The Best of the Band (1976). I promptly went online and downloaded the 2000 digital remaster and burned the old gal a copy.

All my other recordings of The Band were on magnetic tape. The copy of Music From Big Pink that I thought I had was actually a used cassette that I purchased the first summer I lived in the Emerald City 23 years ago. If you don't count Planet Waves (1974) and The Basement Tapes (1975), which are Dylan and Band collaborations that were staples of my university days, it was the first album of The Band's that I owned. For me it will always be the best. It is linked in my mind with my first run at being a bachelor.

In 1990 I left my wife in New York City and flew to San Francisco. From there I took a Greyhound to Southern Oregon where I purchased a used Jeep Gladiator pick-up manufactured in the late 1960s. It was a "high, rat-colored car" (which is Flannery O'Connor's description of Hazel Motes' automobile in Wise Blood), and I drove it north up I-5 to Seattle, entering the city the morning after Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter against Detroit.

I worked construction that summer and jogged the ribbon of greenery that I run to this day and listened to Music From Big Pink, Sonic Youth's Goo (1990), The Lemonhead's Lovey (1990), Nick Cave & the Bad Seed's The Good Son (1990) and plenty of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (1975). I drank Midnight Dragon malt liquor and slept on the floor and read about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the national edition of the New York Times. I was a young man alone, estranged from his wife, but okay with it. Rick Danko's cover of "Long Black Veil" spoke to me.

At the beginning of fall that year I traveled back to New York City in an unsuccessful attempt to patch things up with the wife. It was then that The Last Waltz (1978) -- that end-of-the-line love song to arena rockers -- became my manifesto, my lifeline. But my first love is Music From Big Pink. It's my bachelor's anthem, a perfect organic whole of funky, folksy, iridescent, soulful, regenerative music that occupies a timeless space -- a triumphant tribute to the Hippie wisdom contained in Timothy Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out."  -- It can done! The Band proved it at Big Pink.

Phones Down + Northern Lights – Southern Cross

An unexpected windfall at work today -- the hard drive of the phone system crashed and needed to be replaced. It took the technicians all day to secure a replacement drive; in fact, the phones were still down when I left at 5 PM. This meant that from about 10:30 AM on there was a beautiful, still quiet and calm in the office. It was like lounging near a cool pond in the deep forest on a hot summer day. I was able to knock out a significant amount of mind-numbing data entry of cash journals in QuickBooks.

So a good Monday after a thoroughly depressing Sunday. I finished the second half of Levon Helm and Stephen Davis' This Wheel's on Fire. The first half, up until the point where Levon ditches the rest of The Hawks who are backing Dylan on his historic first electric tour, is all good cheer and high times. And that continues through Helm's return to the boys in 1967 at Big Pink in West Saugerties to work on some of The Basement Tapes and then to Music From Big Pink (1968) and The Brown Album (1969), culminating in their appearance on Ed Sullivan, which is pretty much the zenith:

It's downhill from there. Money and drugs (heroin, cocaine, pills) and women and bad feelings over Robbie Robertson monopolizing most of the writing credit take over the book's narrative. By the evening -- I was only 15 or 20 pages from the end; Richard Manuel had already hanged himself -- I was catatonic. It felt like I had been drinking bottle after bottle of Grand Marnier and eating minute steaks cooked on an upturned electric iron, which Richard Manuel was said to have done in the days when he was living on Zuma Beach in Malibu at The Band's Shangri-La Studios. I couldn't fall asleep I was so disturbed and agitated. Finally, after midnight, I drifted off, only to have to get up at the usual rat race time of 4 AM.

I listened to a lot of Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) yesterday; it's the album that precedes the filming of The Last Waltz (Islands (1977) is knocked out quickly following the concert to fulfill The Band's contract with Capitol Records) and sounds the most like what the The Band sounds like in The Last Waltz. Northern Lights – Southern Cross is a good album. Levon Helm says it's one of The Band's best. I would definitely not go that far. The Band does know how to craft a fine song. But by 1975 their sound is tending toward the slick and soulless. You can taste the cocaine and hear the rustling of cash.

Hippies vs. Punks: Subway Sect

Tonight, we're at halftime of the The Last Waltz posts. So it's time for a breather. Next week Hippies vs. Punks will return to The Last Waltz for part three, the main focus of which will be Music From Big Pink. Then on Friday, August 16, we will conclude with The Brown Album.

In the meantime, let's look at a band that performs at the seminal 100 Club Punk Special in London two months before The Last Waltz concert is staged in San Francisco. The 100 Club Punk Special is considered a seminal event because it marks a dividing line, according to an excellent interview with Punk promoter Ron Watts, between the close-knit London pub scene that spawns Punk -- what most people think of when they think of Punk -- and the national and then international celebrity that soon follows (and in so doing hastens the Hippies' extinction).

The Punk festival happened over two nights in September of 1976 just before the equinox. It featured big hitters like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and Buzzcocks. But there were other lesser known bands that performed. One, Subway Sect, so named because they first played together busking in the Hammersmith subway, kicked things off. True to previous posts where I explore undercard bands at Hippie music festivals like the Aquarian Family Festival and the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival, I thought tonight I'd do the same with the 100 Club Punk Special.

Led by singer/songwriter Vic Godard, Subway Sect formed after seeing the Sex Pistols. They were managed by the same guy, Bernie Rhodes, who managed The Clash, for whom the band warmed up on the White Riot tour in 1977. Subway Sect then recorded an album with Rhodes, after which he shit canned the entire group except for Godard. The album went unreleased and was lost except for the single "Ambition," released in 1978, and some tracks that eventually showed up on the 1999 Twenty Odd Years compilation (which sells new for $3K on Amazon!):

The original Subway Sect lineup released only two singles -- "Nobody's Scared" b/w "Don't Split It" (at the top of the post) and "Ambition" b/w "A Different Story." Thank goodness then for the Peel Session from October 1977. I have been listening to it all week -- "Chain Smoking" kicks ass! -- and it captures the punch -- the mojo -- that first iteration of the group had working in 1977:

The young Vic Godard was a skilled songwriter with the looks of Another Side of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan; he sounds at times like Richard Hell, Johnny Rotten and Pete Shelley ( -- a prism of first wave Punk, Godard sings better than all three); plus, he strikes me as a good guy. Reading a November 1976 interview with him in the punk zine Sniffin' Glue, his sincerity and earnestness shine through.

Godard reformed Subway Sect as Vic Godard & Subway Sect with a different set of players. He put out three more albums (two with Subway Sect and one solo effort) and moved through styles -- swing and jazz -- before going to work for the postal service in 1986.

There's a great interview that Godard does with 3:AM magazine from 2002 after he finished working on his Sansend album. (Three of these songs are available as Lazy So and So for MP3 download from Amazon; I've enjoyed listening to it, particularly on the morning train into work.) Godard talks about the process of trying to be creatively productive (i.e., perform and produce an album) while holding down a full-time job. As far as I'm concerned, it's a feat of heroism. Here's his description:

Sansend -- it took years to put it together. Because, really, we were only working on Sunday afternoons. A lot of the time we'd arrive at about six thirty on a Sunday afternoon, so that's why it took so long. There was the odd evening session, but with me being uninformed, and my mate in the group who does all the computer side of it, he's a carpenter, so his hours are basically about ten until six, so by the time he'd finished his carpentry and got down there it took you till about seven thirty and then I've got to be up at four or five the next morning which meant we couldn't work much beyond nine thirty. So we did start off at the beginning with the evening sessions, but we soon reverted back to Sunday afternoons. That explains why there are so many ideas running around in the album. We recorded quite a lot of songs on top of the ones we've put out. The first fourteen that came to us that gelled really well we worked on and we abandoned about six songs I suppose. We just didn't bother working on them. It was all done on a Mac and he was learning it from scratch. So at the beginning it was really slow because he was learning. I wrote all the lyrics except the reggae one which was written by Ken Wisdom. I've changed the odd bits to fit in with what he wrote. He didn't write it to that tune. He gave me a set of lyrics so I fitted them to a tune. So I had to change the odd bit here and there. But it's basically the same.

Godard maintains an active website which features an interesting blog. It's human and alive and not made opaque by commercialism. He continues to tour and make music. He is an exemplar of Punk revolutionary spirit:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 2, Rick Danko 1977

There are two great tracks -- The Last Waltz-level great -- on Rick Danko (1977), "New Mexicoe" (a live version of which appears above) and "Sip the Wine" (below):

Almost all the songs on the 10-song debut solo album by the bass player and vocalist for The Band are good if not excellent. Four of the tracks Danko co-writes with Hippie founding father Emmett Grogan ("Brainwash" is particularly good). Every day last week at work I listened to the album on YouTube. I never tired of it (which is more than I can say for my Oi! immersion of Cock Sparrer and Sham 69's Tell Us the Truth, both from 1978). And that's what makes the poor sales of Rick Danko, followed by his label (Arista) promptly dropping him, so hard to explain. I've come to the conclusion that the album, like Levon Helm's first post-Last Waltz album, Levon Helm and RCO All-Stars (1977), was ahead of its time.

To give Robbie Robertson some credit, as the guy responsible for the break up of The Band and making of The Last Waltz, he saw the end of the Hippies coming, and he got out on his own terms. This is from Robbie Robertson's introduction to the 2002 re-mixed re-released The Last Waltz concert album.

Many of the artists who performed in The Last Waltz have gone on to make great music through the years, and some are still doing brilliant work today, but the spirit of those times turned a corner and never came back. It's been said that the inspiration of those times came out of the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. It was, for sure, a powerful time. There was so much creative electricity, and everybody kept raising the bar higher. Nobody knew it then, but it would be a long time before we'd see that kind of passion in music, movies, and the arts again. 

If the '50s were about rebels without a cause, then the '60s and the '70s were about rebels with a cause. But by the time The Last Waltz came out [the spring of 1978], that revolution was over. It had served its purpose, and everybody was moving on.

This is the fundamental Hippie mistake. It's the belief -- to crib part of the title of a Jimmy Breslin book about the Congressional effort to impeach Nixon -- that the "Good Guys Finally Won." This is slothful thinking. Nothing of the sort happened. Nixon skirted justice. Yes, he resigned in infamy to avoid impeachment, but his handpicked successor pardoned him the next month.

But by Thanksgiving 1976 it's water under the bridge. The peanut farmer who campaigned as a purifier, a national redeemer, is headed to the White House. The Hippies, as drug-addled as ever, are licking their chops in anticipation of continued commercial success and some guilt-free corporate cock sucking. You can see this in The Last Waltz when Scorsese interviews Danko at The Band's Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. Danko plays Scorsese a sample of "Sip the Wine," and you can tell he's ready for solo stardom:

At least this is what I thought when I was enamored with the film back in the early '90s. Now it's not so clear to me. But back then, from the summer 1990 to the end of 1992, I was suffering too much from being dumped by my wife -- my sweetheart, my missing half -- to be curious about tracking down the solo work Danko did after The Last Waltz. I had everything I needed in a song that The Band performs, with Danko on lead vocals, early on in the documentary:

"It Makes No Difference," written by Robbie Robertson, was my separation anthem; I drank and brawled and typed my way clear of my wife while listening to it. I owe a lot to that song. Its great sadness was my life at the time. It helped get me through, which is what art is supposed to do.

And I realize now that The Last Waltz documents a time which corresponds to the collapse of my parents' marriage and the dissolution of our nuclear family. Between the autumn of 1976 (when The Last Waltz is performed) and the spring of 1978 (when The Last Waltz is released) my parents went through a nasty divorce.

My father, who is the coach in the team photo above, showed up drunk to the soccer game at which this picture was taken. He reeked of alcohol. He had been fighting with my mother. Their days as a couple were finished, and he was rebelling against the knowledge. When he got to the field he put everyone in different positions. I was the star, a midfielder, and he stuck me back on defense. -- I'm the kid, middle row, far right, sporting the longest hair, a Prince Valiant cut not unlike Rick Danko's. Everyone on the team was pissed, which you can tell by the large number of frowns. I can't remember if we won or lost. I think we must have lost. One thing about the game I do remember is dribbling the ball from in front of our own goal up to midfield where, to spite my father, I launched a shot. The goalkeeper for the opposing squad misjudged the ball's flight, ran out too late to catch it; and instead, it bounced over his head and into the net for a score. A couple months later and an hour north up Highway 101 The Last Waltz takes place.

By immersing myself in the film and soundtrack during my own divorce it's clear to me that I was unconsciously tapping into the heart of darkness, looking for a cure in the poison. And that cure for me was Rick Danko.

Imagine my shock, my horror, when, in 1991, at the end of my period of marriage mourning, I took my new girlfriend, a woman with whom I would spend the next decade, to see The Band at the Lonestar Roadhouse in Midtown Manhattan and it turns out Rick Danko is an obese grinning buffoon plucking clownish riffs on his bass as Yuppies, hopping up on tables, wriggle ass and cheer him on. I don't know what was more shocking, the sight of Danko or Helm. Danko could have been an impostor. He looked nothing like his younger slender self. His face appeared completely different, and his bloated trunk bore no resemblance to the lithe herky-jerky roots rocker memorialized in the Scorsese picture. Helms looked like a mummified version of The Last Waltz Levon. A wizened gnomish frail old man with raisins for eyes, I saw him exiting a tour bus that was parked in front of the bar on West 52nd St. He was being led by a young woman who I assumed was his daughter.

Before the second song was finished I told my girlfriend that we should go. So we walked out. My heroes had not lived up to expectations. And, like a petulant child, I was upset.

It causes me some pain to relate this. Our heroes should not be disposable. And it caused me pain these last two weeks studying Rick Danko. Not because the music is bad; no, the music is excellent. What caused me pain is that at first I dismissed it, jotting down on a legal pad "boozy, coked-out" and "Hippie TV Party." Then the sound kept getting better and stronger until I fell in love with every song. I had judged too soon, just as Arista had. The album was a legitimate path forward for the Hippies, one that was not followed; it needs to be re-issued.

Look at the Soundstage from early 1978 where Danko performs the material on his album. There's something monstrous about the shaggy full-on Prince Valiant combined with disco duds. (Hippies couldn't figure how to package themselves once they arrived in the mainstream.) Nonetheless, this is how the world looked in 1977-1978. I remember sitting in a junior high school classroom in Southern Oregon the last day of school, and what I remember -- the vibe -- is exactly what appears on this Soundstage video. Whatever it is -- whatever Zeitgeist moved on the face of deep when the Hippies started to go extinct -- it can be found here:

Hippies vs. Punks: The Last Waltz, Pt. 1

We've come to the Hippies vs. Punks Rosetta Stone (at least my personal touchstone) -- The Last Waltz (1978).

A conceit is indulged here. The conceit is that I am an everyman personification of Hippies vs. Punks. I was born the year Kesey and the Merry Pranksters kicked off the Aquarian Age with their bus ride across the country to the 1964 New York World's Fair, and I was raised by parents who went from being solid middle-class liberals to commune-founding Hippies. When I set out on my own as a young man fresh from the university I did so flyin' the flannel, a symbol of Hardcore Punk popularized by bands on the SST Records label. And my first run as a bachelor, at the age of 25 after I parted company with my wife, was done under the guiding light of The Last Waltz.

At the time, from 1990 to 1992, I was living in the crack-infested neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Morningside Heights. I repeatedly viewed, usually drunk and stoned and usually with my buddies, VHS copies of the Scorsese documentary of The Band's final concert at the Winterland Ballroom.

It's a great -- if not the greatest -- rock concert movie. It speaks especially to young men who are coming to the end of their 20s and realizing, as we were, that the high life is actually hard work.

But essentially The Last Waltz, both the film and the album, is a love letter to male beauty, virility, camaraderie and the adoration of women. As Robbie Robertson tells Scorsese early in the documentary, explaining how he came to get a job playing with The Hawk, Ronnie Hawkins, "He called me up, and I said, 'Sure I'd like a job. What does it mean? What do I do?' And he said, 'Well, son, you won't make much money, but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.' " This is what appealed to me as a newly minted bachelor on the dark side of my 20s, carousing the streets of upper Manhattan.

There are many reasons to class The Band as an Uber Hippie group. They were Dylan's band when he made his famous first electric tour of Europe in 1966. Following Dylan to Woodstock, The Band moved to Saugerties, NY, and in 1969, with "The Weight" a featured song in the Uber Hippie movie Easy Rider, they performed at the Uber Hippie music festival.

The more I thought about it this past week, the more I came to conclusion that The Last Waltz -- filmed on Thanksgiving Day in the California Bay Area, only three weeks after Carter squeaked by Ford in the 1976 presidential election, and released to theater audiences the spring of 1978 --  is Hippies vs. Punks ground zero. The period of time from performance to final product is the same time the Punks knock off the Hippies.

I realized too that the movie runs through my life at critical moments: when I graduate from high school in 1982; when I make my first run at being a bachelor, 1990 to 1992; and then again in 2002, during the 25th anniversary re-release, when I make my second run at being a bachelor. I'm now on my third attempt, and I think I've finally got it. And that's part of the realization -- I was trying to be like the guys in The Band -- desired by and enmeshed with women -- but they had it wrong. I think the key to happiness is to be able to avoid women.

All week I listened to Rick Danko (1977). (The cheapest used copy one can get on Amazon is $66.95.) Danko is my favorite member of The Band; he was also the first to be signed by a label as a solo artist (by the ghoulish Clive Davis for Arista Records). Much was revealed by my study of this album. The eventual fate of Danko with Arista is a perfect example of what was to happen to the Hippies forthwith in the late 1970s. But that's next Friday night.

Tonight, suffering a TKO from the work week (I didn't even make it to the grocery store) and with a race Sunday morning, I'm just priming the pump for what will be multiple Hippies vs. Punks posts on The Last Waltz.

Sick-Out + "Caravan"

Monday evening means it's time for a contemplation of the work day. I've taken to calling it "Remember! Work!" after an imperative I believe is necessary to keep one's sanity as a participant in the rat race -- at least try to believe that your paycheck is about the work you do and not whose cunt you kiss or cock you suck.

Today upon arriving at the office I learned that we were looking at something of a sick-out. A large portion of the support staff had called in sick or were on vacation or had meetings outside the building. 

The severity of the short-staff situation lessened as the day wore on. The receptionist, who apparently had broken her glasses at the end of the work day on Friday, was able to have them repaired promptly in the morning rather than taking all Monday as she had anticipated. So she unexpectedly showed up at 10 AM to take her station at the receptionist desk where I was filling in. Then at noon the fellow who processes the dues -- the local's lifeblood -- reported for duty.

There is one young woman though who seemingly calls in sick every Monday. She called in today. She is loathed by almost all of the women in the office. She is selfish and childlike and coddled like a baby. She is horrible for the morale of the group because we're all primates and fairness is hardwired in us; and we all know that our jobs would not be secure if we abused the PTO as she does.

My thing about calling in sick is that I don't do it, unless of course I'm really sick. Fortunately, because I tend to my health, my health is good. I've missed only two days due to illness in the last seven years. I work with migraines and colds. Only if I can't walk or I'm puking do I call in. I find that it's always better to go in.

This evening walking up the hill in the sunshine looking at all the pretty women in their summer clothes I listened to Van Morrison and The Band's performance of "Caravan" from The Last Waltz. It has to be one of the greatest rock 'n' roll recordings of all time. It's like listening to a Hippie prizefighter work the speed bag. The horns and rhythm section punch with precision and power. It's ecstasy.

The Goodbye Party

Tonight it's "Remember! Work!" The story from today at the office is the goodbye party we had for the business manager, the top elected official at the local. He's retiring in about a week. So the support staff chipped in for some barbecue or made food and brought it in. There were shrimp, ribs, hot links, macaroni and cheese, baked beans, vegetables, fruit salad, a huge voodoo cake, cookies, etc. We ate in the first floor meeting hall. There was very little levity, just enough so that it wasn't entirely funereal. This wasn't a bad thing. Most people there have worked together for a long time. There's no reason to bullshit one another. By and large people ate and chatted quietly. It was all about the food.

A couple of realizations about the soporific nature of these goodbye rituals: 1) a form repeated to the point of gross familiarity will put a person to sleep, and 2) eating a lot of food at midday will have the same effect.

Finally, at work don't look too closely because you just might see something real, like that asses are made for shitting.

This weekend I listened to a lot of The Last Waltz (1978), which might be the topic of Friday's Hippies vs. Punks. This evening walking up the hill in the sun on my way to the library I was treated to two excellent back-to-back tracks from Georgia Anne Muldrow's Seeds (2012), "The Birth of Petey Wheatstraw" and "Best Love." I was feeling good.