Album Review: Chest Fever
– The 21st Century Last Waltz — Live at Massey Hall
– The 21st Century Last Waltz — Live at Massey Hall
The Last Waltz is a cult thing: on Thanksgiving night 1976, at Winterland in San Francisco, The Band said goodbye to the stage, and, as they put it themselves in Martin Scorsese's film, goodbye to the road. Almost fifty years later, a band from San Diego called Chest Fever played that night again, at Massey Hall in Toronto, and now the recording is out as The 21st Century Last Waltz – Live at Massey Hall. To understand why anyone would do that, you have to start with the original.
These days plenty of bands in their seventies keep touring stadiums and making money, and that's their business. The Band could have done the same. They had paid for that stage the hard way: they started as Ronnie Hawkins' backing group, and by their own stories, some of which are right there in the film, they went so hungry at times that they literally stole food from supermarkets. Sixteen years later, at the height of their fame, when they could have filled arenas for as long as they liked, they walked away from the road. For them, the music was never about the money.
It was never a way to impress anybody, either. What they played wasn't what counted as cool back home in Canada, and it wasn't what the charts were hungry for. Music From Big Pink came out in the summer of 1968, in the thick of psychedelia, and got no higher than No. 30; its only single to chart, "The Weight," stalled at 63. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," which now sits in every canon there is, never charted for them at all.
"I don't think I chose it. I think it's chosen me," says Dan Cervantes, the leader of Chest Fever, about The Band's music. The same thing happened to The Band themselves. They were found by the mythology of the American South, earthy and dry like cracking clay, and out of that clay they shaped a beautiful statue.
They stayed true to that choice, and it brought them kindred spirits. Some were the greatest names of the era: George Harrison and Eric Clapton called Big Pink a masterpiece, and in 1976 Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Van Morrison came out to see them off. Far more were ordinary listeners who simply gave The Band their hearts. The Last Waltz captures all of it: the farewell, along with the band's own sometimes fun and often touching stories of the road.
What The Band carried was a kind of virus: they searched for themselves with total sincerity, through someone else's mythology and someone else's history, at completely the wrong time and in completely the wrong place. It's only logical that a virus like that started to spread, and everyone it infected got programmed to search for themselves the same way.
Chest Fever are one of those infected. Under their main name, Mrs. Henry, the San Diego group has been playing its own music since 2012, psychedelic boogie stretched out with long improvisations. That name comes from "Please, Mrs. Henry," a song from the Basement Tapes, the sessions on which The Band played behind Dylan. As Chest Fever, they play The Band, and that name comes from a song too — Garth Hudson's organ showcase from Music From Big Pink.
Both names lead back to the same pink house near Woodstock. Chest Fever found themselves too, and their story even echoes the original. Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm were Americans who came up to Toronto and found their people there, the Canadians who would become The Band. Sixty years later, Chest Fever, another bunch of Americans, came up to Ontario on their first tour in 2022, fell in love with the place, and within a year and a half went from a Toronto bar to Massey Hall.
So it's logical that they decided to replay The Last Waltz, as a celebration of that search. The Last Waltz was the one night when everyone The Band's search had brought them to stood on the same stage: their first boss, Ronnie Hawkins; Dylan, whom they had played behind; the bluesmen they learned from; the friends they made along the way. It was The Band's own wake, and even a Beatle and a Rolling Stone, Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, came out for the finale. If you want to celebrate a search like that, there is no better night to play again.
I'm not going to compare how faithfully the songs were played this time against how they were played in the original. I don't see the point: this concert is not that concert. The time is different, the band is a different one and has walked a different path, and the songs themselves have travelled a long way over these decades and picked up more and more context along the way. Some reviews do make that comparison, and it's actually interesting to read, but to me it's not what this story is about. I also don't see much point in digging into it musicologically, or in going through every performer. Dozens of people came onto the stage that evening at Massey Hall, and each of them has a unique voice and brought something special to their song. If I listed them all, this would turn into a reference book that tells you nothing about the concert, and that you wouldn't want to read anyway.
But it's because of those many voices, all merging together, a special something came out which, to my ear, is even bigger than the original. The original was a celebration, of course, but it had a bittersweet note in it, if not a plainly bitter one. All of The Band's music is full of that sadness for an America that has gone, or maybe for an America that never existed at all. And at their farewell concert that bitter note was stronger still, because the group itself was saying goodbye to the stage.
Here, the bitterness is still intact. None of what the songs carry has gone anywhere. And Robbie Robertson, who wrote most of them, died of prostate cancer in August 2023, just three months before the show; part of the night's proceeds went to a prostate cancer centre at a Toronto hospital. And still, despite all of that, this concert comes across as a celebration. All the voices of all the people who took part merge into one festive choir, something like a communion, something that is even a little religious.
You can hear it very clearly on the first single, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." It's a deeply tragic song. It's not only about losing a whole world that will never come back. It's about losing thousands of people who died and who will never come back either, and that sounds painfully current today, with so many wars going on all over the world.
The song carries all of that bitterness, it is tied to death and loss, and the context around it is complicated. It hasn't lost its classic status, but Levon Helm, who sang it, stopped performing it after The Last Waltz, and these days some performers rewrite its lyrics. All of that has its place, it's all part of the story, and it's all true.
And despite all of that, to me "Dixie" in Chest Fever's rendition sounds like a triumph of life, of something primal in it breaking through the sound. All the voices and all the instruments merge into one, and it's like the sound of the cosmos. When you're out somewhere in nature and you stop to listen, you start to hear the distant hum of a city, the flow of a river, the flutter of birds' wings, insects buzzing, leaves rustling, and all of it, maybe even the springs running underground, merges into one giant chord. Honestly, that's how the whole concert sounds to me, and this song most of all.
These days plenty of bands in their seventies keep touring stadiums and making money, and that's their business. The Band could have done the same. They had paid for that stage the hard way: they started as Ronnie Hawkins' backing group, and by their own stories, some of which are right there in the film, they went so hungry at times that they literally stole food from supermarkets. Sixteen years later, at the height of their fame, when they could have filled arenas for as long as they liked, they walked away from the road. For them, the music was never about the money.
It was never a way to impress anybody, either. What they played wasn't what counted as cool back home in Canada, and it wasn't what the charts were hungry for. Music From Big Pink came out in the summer of 1968, in the thick of psychedelia, and got no higher than No. 30; its only single to chart, "The Weight," stalled at 63. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," which now sits in every canon there is, never charted for them at all.
"I don't think I chose it. I think it's chosen me," says Dan Cervantes, the leader of Chest Fever, about The Band's music. The same thing happened to The Band themselves. They were found by the mythology of the American South, earthy and dry like cracking clay, and out of that clay they shaped a beautiful statue.
They stayed true to that choice, and it brought them kindred spirits. Some were the greatest names of the era: George Harrison and Eric Clapton called Big Pink a masterpiece, and in 1976 Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Van Morrison came out to see them off. Far more were ordinary listeners who simply gave The Band their hearts. The Last Waltz captures all of it: the farewell, along with the band's own sometimes fun and often touching stories of the road.
What The Band carried was a kind of virus: they searched for themselves with total sincerity, through someone else's mythology and someone else's history, at completely the wrong time and in completely the wrong place. It's only logical that a virus like that started to spread, and everyone it infected got programmed to search for themselves the same way.
Chest Fever are one of those infected. Under their main name, Mrs. Henry, the San Diego group has been playing its own music since 2012, psychedelic boogie stretched out with long improvisations. That name comes from "Please, Mrs. Henry," a song from the Basement Tapes, the sessions on which The Band played behind Dylan. As Chest Fever, they play The Band, and that name comes from a song too — Garth Hudson's organ showcase from Music From Big Pink.
Both names lead back to the same pink house near Woodstock. Chest Fever found themselves too, and their story even echoes the original. Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm were Americans who came up to Toronto and found their people there, the Canadians who would become The Band. Sixty years later, Chest Fever, another bunch of Americans, came up to Ontario on their first tour in 2022, fell in love with the place, and within a year and a half went from a Toronto bar to Massey Hall.
So it's logical that they decided to replay The Last Waltz, as a celebration of that search. The Last Waltz was the one night when everyone The Band's search had brought them to stood on the same stage: their first boss, Ronnie Hawkins; Dylan, whom they had played behind; the bluesmen they learned from; the friends they made along the way. It was The Band's own wake, and even a Beatle and a Rolling Stone, Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood, came out for the finale. If you want to celebrate a search like that, there is no better night to play again.
I'm not going to compare how faithfully the songs were played this time against how they were played in the original. I don't see the point: this concert is not that concert. The time is different, the band is a different one and has walked a different path, and the songs themselves have travelled a long way over these decades and picked up more and more context along the way. Some reviews do make that comparison, and it's actually interesting to read, but to me it's not what this story is about. I also don't see much point in digging into it musicologically, or in going through every performer. Dozens of people came onto the stage that evening at Massey Hall, and each of them has a unique voice and brought something special to their song. If I listed them all, this would turn into a reference book that tells you nothing about the concert, and that you wouldn't want to read anyway.
But it's because of those many voices, all merging together, a special something came out which, to my ear, is even bigger than the original. The original was a celebration, of course, but it had a bittersweet note in it, if not a plainly bitter one. All of The Band's music is full of that sadness for an America that has gone, or maybe for an America that never existed at all. And at their farewell concert that bitter note was stronger still, because the group itself was saying goodbye to the stage.
Here, the bitterness is still intact. None of what the songs carry has gone anywhere. And Robbie Robertson, who wrote most of them, died of prostate cancer in August 2023, just three months before the show; part of the night's proceeds went to a prostate cancer centre at a Toronto hospital. And still, despite all of that, this concert comes across as a celebration. All the voices of all the people who took part merge into one festive choir, something like a communion, something that is even a little religious.
You can hear it very clearly on the first single, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." It's a deeply tragic song. It's not only about losing a whole world that will never come back. It's about losing thousands of people who died and who will never come back either, and that sounds painfully current today, with so many wars going on all over the world.
The song carries all of that bitterness, it is tied to death and loss, and the context around it is complicated. It hasn't lost its classic status, but Levon Helm, who sang it, stopped performing it after The Last Waltz, and these days some performers rewrite its lyrics. All of that has its place, it's all part of the story, and it's all true.
And despite all of that, to me "Dixie" in Chest Fever's rendition sounds like a triumph of life, of something primal in it breaking through the sound. All the voices and all the instruments merge into one, and it's like the sound of the cosmos. When you're out somewhere in nature and you stop to listen, you start to hear the distant hum of a city, the flow of a river, the flutter of birds' wings, insects buzzing, leaves rustling, and all of it, maybe even the springs running underground, merges into one giant chord. Honestly, that's how the whole concert sounds to me, and this song most of all.
You won't find this rich and, in its own way, unique feeling of oneness in many places. When you see a band replaying a classic concert or record, you know roughly what to expect: often it's a faithful copy with maybe a few cosmetic changes. Here, instead of that, you get an almost otherworldly experience.
Part of the reason is the songs themselves. Back in 1969, Ralph Gleason wrote in Rolling Stone that "Dixie" hardly sounded like a new song at all, more like a folk tune passed down from father to son since the winter of 1865. The Band's songs were made to be handed on, and they grow every time new people pick them up. The rest comes from Chest Fever and all their collaborators. That's where the "one giant chord" I was talking about comes from, along with plenty of other emotions and colours that each song brings.
One of the key things that helped gather this special power together is that this concentration of joint emotions went on for almost five hours. It reminds me of going to the cinema to see Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God. German shot it for six years, from 2000 to 2006, then spent years more editing it, and died in 2013 before it was finished. He once said the only thing that interested him was the chance to build an entire civilization from scratch for that movie (and he did: a whole city was built for the film, and people lived in those sets for years, as if it were their real life).
Every second of that film is full of life. Every frame is packed: something is going on in the background, something else up front, somebody is shouting, something is dripping, something flies past the camera, and you can never take it all in at once. Chest Fever's concert at Massey Hall is like that for the ears. Dozens of musicians, all playing at once, and you keep hearing new things every time you go back. If I had watched Hard to be a God at home, I would have kept getting up and distracting myself, and probably split it into several evenings. But in a cinema you sit there for almost three hours, you can't even go to the toilet, you're literally chained to the screen, and it keeps dragging you further and further in. A lot of people walked out during that screening. But those who stayed were truly rewarded. That kind of emotion that rewards you if you plug into it with full concentration for hours is there in Chest Fever's concert too, and that's another thing that makes it unique.
Of course, I can't do here what I usually do on this blog when I review an album — say something about every song. It wouldn't make sense. Nobody would ever finish reading a review of 61 tracks, one after another. Plus it would also steal something from the concert itself. And it still wouldn't get the thing across, because to feel it you have to sink into it with full concentration (as we said above).
That's why I decided to pick a few songs and share my emotional impressions, bringing in context where it helps. I hope that's enough for a first dose, the way dealers give you the first one to get you hooked: just enough to get you interested in this concert, so that you'll want, first, to listen to the album, and second, to watch the band's performances on YouTube, of which there are plenty. From there, you can dive into this whole world. And if you have the chance, if you live somewhere Chest Fever is playing, I wouldn't miss it. I'd grab tickets to their show as fast as I could, because this is a unique experience, and it's worth living through.
It makes sense now to turn to the other most famous song by The Band played that night: "The Weight," of course. It's a special song. Not just because of how mysterious it is and how many ways people have read it, the way it weaves the mythology of the American South together with the Bible. But also because The Band's own single never became a big hit, while other people did better with the song, above all Aretha Franklin, who took it into the Top 20. What do you call a song like that? A standard. And at a tribute concert, it's especially interesting to hear how the standards come out.
"The Weight" says it straight out: a load gets put on the narrator's shoulders. It's a song about a man who, through one chance encounter after another, keeps getting tangled up in other people's troubles. At Massey Hall, it's as if that layer drops away, and only the mystical, magical layer is left, the one that sets you free and gives you wings, that untangles everything while you're listening. The chorus still asks to take the load off Fanny and put it on the singer, but here the weight stops being a burden and turns into a kind of blessing. The way everyone sings it together on stage and all the instruments merge into one huge canvas of sound: it's as if all the musicians, and the whole hall with them, rise a little off the ground. That's how it feels to me.
Part of the reason is the songs themselves. Back in 1969, Ralph Gleason wrote in Rolling Stone that "Dixie" hardly sounded like a new song at all, more like a folk tune passed down from father to son since the winter of 1865. The Band's songs were made to be handed on, and they grow every time new people pick them up. The rest comes from Chest Fever and all their collaborators. That's where the "one giant chord" I was talking about comes from, along with plenty of other emotions and colours that each song brings.
One of the key things that helped gather this special power together is that this concentration of joint emotions went on for almost five hours. It reminds me of going to the cinema to see Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God. German shot it for six years, from 2000 to 2006, then spent years more editing it, and died in 2013 before it was finished. He once said the only thing that interested him was the chance to build an entire civilization from scratch for that movie (and he did: a whole city was built for the film, and people lived in those sets for years, as if it were their real life).
Every second of that film is full of life. Every frame is packed: something is going on in the background, something else up front, somebody is shouting, something is dripping, something flies past the camera, and you can never take it all in at once. Chest Fever's concert at Massey Hall is like that for the ears. Dozens of musicians, all playing at once, and you keep hearing new things every time you go back. If I had watched Hard to be a God at home, I would have kept getting up and distracting myself, and probably split it into several evenings. But in a cinema you sit there for almost three hours, you can't even go to the toilet, you're literally chained to the screen, and it keeps dragging you further and further in. A lot of people walked out during that screening. But those who stayed were truly rewarded. That kind of emotion that rewards you if you plug into it with full concentration for hours is there in Chest Fever's concert too, and that's another thing that makes it unique.
Of course, I can't do here what I usually do on this blog when I review an album — say something about every song. It wouldn't make sense. Nobody would ever finish reading a review of 61 tracks, one after another. Plus it would also steal something from the concert itself. And it still wouldn't get the thing across, because to feel it you have to sink into it with full concentration (as we said above).
That's why I decided to pick a few songs and share my emotional impressions, bringing in context where it helps. I hope that's enough for a first dose, the way dealers give you the first one to get you hooked: just enough to get you interested in this concert, so that you'll want, first, to listen to the album, and second, to watch the band's performances on YouTube, of which there are plenty. From there, you can dive into this whole world. And if you have the chance, if you live somewhere Chest Fever is playing, I wouldn't miss it. I'd grab tickets to their show as fast as I could, because this is a unique experience, and it's worth living through.
It makes sense now to turn to the other most famous song by The Band played that night: "The Weight," of course. It's a special song. Not just because of how mysterious it is and how many ways people have read it, the way it weaves the mythology of the American South together with the Bible. But also because The Band's own single never became a big hit, while other people did better with the song, above all Aretha Franklin, who took it into the Top 20. What do you call a song like that? A standard. And at a tribute concert, it's especially interesting to hear how the standards come out.
"The Weight" says it straight out: a load gets put on the narrator's shoulders. It's a song about a man who, through one chance encounter after another, keeps getting tangled up in other people's troubles. At Massey Hall, it's as if that layer drops away, and only the mystical, magical layer is left, the one that sets you free and gives you wings, that untangles everything while you're listening. The chorus still asks to take the load off Fanny and put it on the singer, but here the weight stops being a burden and turns into a kind of blessing. The way everyone sings it together on stage and all the instruments merge into one huge canvas of sound: it's as if all the musicians, and the whole hall with them, rise a little off the ground. That's how it feels to me.
A tune that's truly different is "Dry Your Eyes," and it's a radical rework. At The Last Waltz this was Neil Diamond's ballad, the one some fans admit they've always used as a bathroom break. Here only a faint shade of the original is still lying on it, and the emotion inside is completely different. If up to now I've been writing about how many voices melt into one chord, as if you put your ear to the ground and heard the whole universe humming, this one is a showcase for a single voice: Skye Wallace, a Toronto singer-songwriter who discovered punk rock as a kid, and who often writes songs out of Canadian history. What Wallace delivers here is eccentric, raw, dirty and emotional, and I wouldn't even call it a vocal performance. It's more like a solo. The words hardly matter; what matters is that raw emotion pouring out. The band gives it heat and drive too, and the song ends up with a really powerful groove. Next to the dense arrangements of the other songs, it works as a moment to cleanse the palate.
"Ophelia" comes with a backstory. Before the song, Bill Avis, who had been road manager for Ronnie Hawkins, Bob Dylan and The Band, told the crowd a story from the old days. Then his son, Jerome Levon Avis, came out. Jerome is Levon Helm's godson, and he told the hall how Levon loved to sing "Ophelia" "even when he couldn't," during his fight with throat cancer. Then he sang it himself and played the drums on it, and it's a deeply felt vocal. Around him there's that rich, dense arrangement again, and you can feel a wave of delight rushing straight at you. The solos are just as interesting, and they take up a good part of the song. They're porous and tangled; you get lost in them like in hair, or a bowl of spaghetti, or a maze, and that's a thick, spicy, pleasant feeling too (sorry for this crazy sentence, but I had to throw in a bit of poetry to describe this out-of-this-world playing).
On violin here is Scarlet Rivera, and if you love Bob Dylan's Desire the way I do, you know that violin. It's the one tearing through "Hurricane," "Isis" and "Sara," and for me it's a huge part of why that album hits so hard. The story goes that Dylan spotted her walking down a New York street with a violin case in 1975 and invited her to play, and she went on to tour with him in the Rolling Thunder Revue.
Rivera isn't the only legend who came out that night. Tom "Bones" Malone played in the horn section at the original Last Waltz in 1976, and for this show he shared that night's sheet music with Chest Fever's arranger, Jesse Audelo. Next to him was his old partner from the Blues Brothers band, "Blue" Lou Marini, who was also in the original Saturday Night Live band. Cindy Cashdollar grew up in Woodstock, where she knew Levon, Garth, Rick and Richard as friends and played with them; later she won five Grammys with Asleep at the Wheel and played on Dylan's Time Out of Mind. Albert Lee, the English guitarist who played with Emmylou Harris and Eric Clapton. Colin Linden, a Grammy and Juno winner, on whose records members of The Band played. Marc Ford from The Black Crowes. Don Stevenson, the drummer of Moby Grape, who took the first verse of the finale, "I Shall Be Released." And then there was Sylvia Tyson, of Ian & Sylvia, one of the founding figures of Canadian folk. When she walked onto the Massey Hall stage, the whole hall stood up, and she sang the song that had been waiting for her all along: "Four Strong Winds."
The song was written by Ian Tyson, Sylvia's partner in the duo and later her husband, in 1961. It was the first one he ever wrote: until then, he and the duo had only played covers. The story goes that after an evening with Bob Dylan, Ian decided that if Dylan could write his own songs, so could he, and the next day, in the New York apartment of their manager Albert Grossman, who would later manage Dylan and The Band too, he wrote "Four Strong Winds" in about twenty minutes. It's a song about seasonal workers drifting across the country from one harvest to the next, and about what that kind of life does to love. Ian & Sylvia recorded it in 1963, it made them stars in Canada, and in 2005 CBC Radio listeners voted it the greatest Canadian song of all time. At The Last Waltz, Neil Young sang it, though it didn't make it into the film.
And here is what makes this moment at Massey Hall so special. Ian and Sylvia married in 1964, divorced in 1975 and stopped performing together. Ian died in 2022, a year before this show. So Sylvia walked out and sang a song about love that didn't last, written by her former husband, who is no longer alive. In most versions, this song is full of deep sadness, melancholy and fatalism. Here, once again, it's uplifting. It's soaked in acceptance, and even in hope.
On violin here is Scarlet Rivera, and if you love Bob Dylan's Desire the way I do, you know that violin. It's the one tearing through "Hurricane," "Isis" and "Sara," and for me it's a huge part of why that album hits so hard. The story goes that Dylan spotted her walking down a New York street with a violin case in 1975 and invited her to play, and she went on to tour with him in the Rolling Thunder Revue.
Rivera isn't the only legend who came out that night. Tom "Bones" Malone played in the horn section at the original Last Waltz in 1976, and for this show he shared that night's sheet music with Chest Fever's arranger, Jesse Audelo. Next to him was his old partner from the Blues Brothers band, "Blue" Lou Marini, who was also in the original Saturday Night Live band. Cindy Cashdollar grew up in Woodstock, where she knew Levon, Garth, Rick and Richard as friends and played with them; later she won five Grammys with Asleep at the Wheel and played on Dylan's Time Out of Mind. Albert Lee, the English guitarist who played with Emmylou Harris and Eric Clapton. Colin Linden, a Grammy and Juno winner, on whose records members of The Band played. Marc Ford from The Black Crowes. Don Stevenson, the drummer of Moby Grape, who took the first verse of the finale, "I Shall Be Released." And then there was Sylvia Tyson, of Ian & Sylvia, one of the founding figures of Canadian folk. When she walked onto the Massey Hall stage, the whole hall stood up, and she sang the song that had been waiting for her all along: "Four Strong Winds."
The song was written by Ian Tyson, Sylvia's partner in the duo and later her husband, in 1961. It was the first one he ever wrote: until then, he and the duo had only played covers. The story goes that after an evening with Bob Dylan, Ian decided that if Dylan could write his own songs, so could he, and the next day, in the New York apartment of their manager Albert Grossman, who would later manage Dylan and The Band too, he wrote "Four Strong Winds" in about twenty minutes. It's a song about seasonal workers drifting across the country from one harvest to the next, and about what that kind of life does to love. Ian & Sylvia recorded it in 1963, it made them stars in Canada, and in 2005 CBC Radio listeners voted it the greatest Canadian song of all time. At The Last Waltz, Neil Young sang it, though it didn't make it into the film.
And here is what makes this moment at Massey Hall so special. Ian and Sylvia married in 1964, divorced in 1975 and stopped performing together. Ian died in 2022, a year before this show. So Sylvia walked out and sang a song about love that didn't last, written by her former husband, who is no longer alive. In most versions, this song is full of deep sadness, melancholy and fatalism. Here, once again, it's uplifting. It's soaked in acceptance, and even in hope.
That hope isn't just a feeling, either: The Band's own story didn't end at The Last Waltz. They got back together without Robbie Robertson in the '80s, toured, and in 1993 released Jericho, their first new album since the breakup, with three of the original five, Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, still in the lineup. The record opens with "Remedy." Levon sang it, and it was written by Jim Weider, the guitarist who took Robertson's place, together with Colin Linden. At Massey Hall, Linden sang it himself, so this time the song came from the man who wrote it. And what a vocal it is: his voice hits you like a huge open palm, slapping you all over your body. As for the music, I feel like I'm being fried in a giant pan that hisses and sizzles, with a million different flavours in it, and I'm stewing in all of it.
If "Remedy" fries you in a pan, "Helpless" does the opposite: it puts you out on the water. It's Neil Young's song about a town in northern Ontario, and at The Last Waltz he sang it with Joni Mitchell singing along from offstage. At Massey Hall it went to Marc Ford of The Black Crowes, with a whole crowd of guests around him, and there's a small story behind how it sounds. Ford had learned the melody on slide guitar, but when he saw Cindy Cashdollar, the Woodstock steel player I mentioned earlier, he told Dan Cervantes he didn't think he should be playing slide next to her. Cashdollar told him he should: two slides could sound really nice together, and she'd done it before. That's how the song ended up with two slide guitars winding around each other. And it rocks you. It's like being at sea for days and days, until you've almost become part of the sea yourself, and you catch its rhythms, while seabirds circle overhead and their cries sound just like those slide guitars. Or it's like our whole Earth is one giant cradle, hanging in the middle of a huge endless universe and rocking you, until your eyes, your head and your legs all go soft, and you become helpless yourself.
"I Shall Be Released" comes in the finale. At Massey Hall, Don Stevenson, the drummer of Moby Grape, took the first verse, and by the chorus the whole hall was singing. Here, too, you can feel that synergy, the movement of all the muscles of all those souls, on the stage and in the seats, folding together into one unique machine. But until now, the power of this communion was that it turned sad songs another way round and showed completely different sides of them. This song is about release and salvation, and here it really does sound sad. Something hidden comes through in it: the feeling that any salvation is really just a passage from light into dusk and from dusk into light, over and over, and that we keep travelling through millions of worlds, the way Buddhists and Jains believe, reborn again and again. If "Remedy" told us the band didn't die, here we understand that every ending is always a small death, and every salvation is also the end of a stage and the loss of something. And that's sad too. Richard Manuel, the voice that made this song famous, has been gone since 1986. And yet the night didn't end here, either. After a short pause, everyone came back out for "The Weight," and then one more, "Don't Do It." A small death, and then a rebirth.
What makes this album truly of the 21st century, to me, isn't the new arrangements. It's who ended up on that stage. In 1976, The Band were joined by their teachers, their bosses and their peers. At Massey Hall, apart from a few veterans, the stage belonged to their listeners. One of the evening's producers, Tyrell Lisson, hosts a podcast about the history of The Band. Devin Cuddy, who sang "Such a Night," says The Last Waltz was one of the few things that truly inspired him as a kid. Many of the musicians were born long after 1976, and Chest Fever, who brought them all together, started out as fans themselves. Remember those ordinary listeners who gave The Band their hearts? Here, they walked up onto the stage, and the people in the seats sang every word right back at them. That's why this record sounds like a communion: for four and a half hours, there was almost no line left between the stage and the hall.
And that's also what makes the music itself sound the way it does. The Band wove their sound out of a dozen kinds of American music at once: rockabilly, rhythm and blues, country, gospel, folk, ragtime, blues. At Massey Hall, those threads come back as separate people. The Blues Brothers horns bring the rhythm and blues, Cindy Cashdollar brings country steel, The Pairs bring folk harmonies, Marc Ford brings the rock of The Black Crowes, Skye Wallace brings punk. Each of them pulls out the one thread they know best and plays it with all their love, and you start to hear how much music was folded inside these songs all along.
What holds all those threads together is Chest Fever themselves. First of all, they work like hell. Dan Cervantes spent about nine months producing this one show, and after it, when his mother died, he stepped away from the stage for a year and spent it putting these recordings together. But hard work alone doesn't explain this record. They're visionaries. That giant chord, that feeling of oneness this concert gives you, didn't come out of nowhere. They knew in advance that it would be something huge, and that they would bring together a crowd of very different people for it, even while everyone kept telling them it wouldn't work. Maybe they couldn't yet hear in their heads how all this music would sound, but they already knew. Some film directors work like that: they don't tell the actors what to do, they just put them together in the frame, create the conditions, and then life takes over. I don't know if the guys in Chest Fever heard in their heads how grand and how divine this would sound. But even if they didn't hear exactly that, they knew that if you put this many gifted people who love this music on one stage, magic would happen. And it did.
What makes this album truly of the 21st century, to me, isn't the new arrangements. It's who ended up on that stage. In 1976, The Band were joined by their teachers, their bosses and their peers. At Massey Hall, apart from a few veterans, the stage belonged to their listeners. One of the evening's producers, Tyrell Lisson, hosts a podcast about the history of The Band. Devin Cuddy, who sang "Such a Night," says The Last Waltz was one of the few things that truly inspired him as a kid. Many of the musicians were born long after 1976, and Chest Fever, who brought them all together, started out as fans themselves. Remember those ordinary listeners who gave The Band their hearts? Here, they walked up onto the stage, and the people in the seats sang every word right back at them. That's why this record sounds like a communion: for four and a half hours, there was almost no line left between the stage and the hall.
And that's also what makes the music itself sound the way it does. The Band wove their sound out of a dozen kinds of American music at once: rockabilly, rhythm and blues, country, gospel, folk, ragtime, blues. At Massey Hall, those threads come back as separate people. The Blues Brothers horns bring the rhythm and blues, Cindy Cashdollar brings country steel, The Pairs bring folk harmonies, Marc Ford brings the rock of The Black Crowes, Skye Wallace brings punk. Each of them pulls out the one thread they know best and plays it with all their love, and you start to hear how much music was folded inside these songs all along.
What holds all those threads together is Chest Fever themselves. First of all, they work like hell. Dan Cervantes spent about nine months producing this one show, and after it, when his mother died, he stepped away from the stage for a year and spent it putting these recordings together. But hard work alone doesn't explain this record. They're visionaries. That giant chord, that feeling of oneness this concert gives you, didn't come out of nowhere. They knew in advance that it would be something huge, and that they would bring together a crowd of very different people for it, even while everyone kept telling them it wouldn't work. Maybe they couldn't yet hear in their heads how all this music would sound, but they already knew. Some film directors work like that: they don't tell the actors what to do, they just put them together in the frame, create the conditions, and then life takes over. I don't know if the guys in Chest Fever heard in their heads how grand and how divine this would sound. But even if they didn't hear exactly that, they knew that if you put this many gifted people who love this music on one stage, magic would happen. And it did.