A Forgotten Gem of Canadian Culture
In these days of intense Canadian patriotism, on the Canada Day long weekend, it’s an excellent time to recall one shining moment in the country’s cultural history that could have been absolutely epic but never got its due.
Imagine this: At one of the greatest events in rock and roll history, a Canadian Band and two Canadian singer-songwriters (all of them Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees) took the stage to sing a song that a Canadian artist wrote about an episode in Canadian history.
It actually happened.
The event in question was The Last Waltz, the farewell concert staged by The Band at The Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Nov. 26, 1976. The Band – the Canadian ensemble that had once been Bob Dylan’s backup band – headlined the show, which featured guest appearances by such legends as Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Dylan himself. Director Martin Scorsese filmed the concert (the first rock concert ever filmed with 35 mm cameras) and the resulting film The Last Waltz is generally regarded as the greatest rockumentary ever.
The Band itself was an extraordinary musical act. Though four of its members – bassist Rick Danko, keyboard player Garth Hudson, piano player Richard Manuel and lead guitarist Robbie Robertson – hailed from Ontario, The Band was credited with the spurring the vogue of Americana into rock and roll in the late 1960s, which earned them cover story in Time magazine in 1970. Their music reverberated with an earthy honesty, an authenticity brought out by the rich vocals of Manuel, Danko and their drummer, the Arkansas-born Levon Helm. The Band also holds a unique spot in rock and roll annals because of their time backing up Bob Dylan. They added to the brilliance of rock’s brightest luminary, and no other band great in its own right has done anything similar.
Robbie Robertson was the group’s main songwriter and representative in business dealings, and by 1976 he wanted out. He planned The Last Waltz, as a celebratory sendoff. The extravaganza on Thanksgiving began with the audience being served 5,000 turkey dinners, while being entertained by poets and the Berkeley Promenade Orchestra. The Band took the stage at about 9 p.m. and performed 12 of the songs that made them famous before Robertson announced they would be joined by some special guests. Ronnie Hawkins, the rockabilly legend who had first brought Robertson, Helm et al together to play bars in Toronto, was the first guest act. The parade of rock legends that followed included a few Canadians alluding to their homeland, including the Bay of Fundy (in Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote”) and North Ontario (Neil Young’s “Helpless”). Young also sang the Canadian folk standard “Four Strong Winds”, which mentions Alberta.
By the wee hours of the morning, just after Van Morrison brought the house to its feet with a rousing rendition of “Caravan”, Robertson stepped up to the mic and announced, “We're gonna do another Canadian song. We're gonna bring out some of the Canadians to help us do it.”
Mitchell and Young took the stage again as The Band launched into “Acadian Driftwood”, a ballad from the Band’s 1975 studio album Northern Lights, Southern Cross. Written by Robertson, “Acadian Driftwood” tells a story of an unnamed narrator during the Expulsion of the Acadians – Britain’s forced removal of French settlers from Acadia (today Canada’s Maritime provinces and parts of Maine) between 1755 and 1764. The narrator’s family chooses to join relatives in Louisiana, but they find disappointment in the new land. They decide to return to their former home with the bold proclamation, “Set my compass north, I’ve got winter in my blood.”
The rendition of “Acadian Driftwood” at The Last Waltz was tremendous. All three of The Band’s vocalists shared the singing duties, with Young and Mitchell joining on the chorus. Bashful Garth Hudson came to the front of the stage at one point to play a bridge on his accordion. More than anything, this performance should have been remembered as a celebration of Canada: these legendary Canadian performers singing about Canadian history in one of the greatest rock concerts of all time.
A detail of Leo Buckvold’s Last Waltz video: Low quality shot of Levon Helm, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
One little known fact about this performance is its Canadian-ness could have been even more pronounced. Author Nicholas Jennings, in his book Lightfoot, revealed that Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot actually attended The Last Waltz, sitting at Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood’s table. Robbie Robertson invited Lightfoot to take the stage, but the singer was a notorious perfectionist and would never play publicly without proper rehearsals. He didn’t play The Last Waltz, even to join in as a backup singer in “Acadian Driftwood.”
The song was omitted not only from the movie, which premiered in 1978, but also from the triple-record soundtrack, which included a few songs that hadn’t made the movie. The first public release of this live performance of “Acadian Driftwood” came about in the box set of The Last Waltz in 2002.
There are, surprisingly, two videos of the performance available on YouTube – lousy quality, but fascinating to obsessives on the subject of The Band. One is part of an official black and white version of the entire concert filmed by the production crew. The other is a spotty color video filmed from the right of the stage by an attendee called Leo Buckvold. (The time stamp for “Acadian Driftwood” in this YouTube file is 1:08:27.)
These two films and the audio on the box set reveal the élan these great artists displayed in performing this wonderful song. But there should be a more polished version of it. That performance should be remembered as a landmark in Canada’s cultural history, but sadly there is no suitable record of it.
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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Click FREE BOOK at the top of this page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.
