LAITY AND CHURCH: I

...When I was a kid, I was always a sucker for those special-edition comic books that offered a jamboree of heroes, the ones where Batman and Superman teamed up with Archie and Veronica and Casper fear about what by repealing any nection between • the civil rights ie gay life style, tied to meet the win his victory...

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...two institutes------Global Education Associates of East Orange, N.J., is sponsoring two summer conferences on justice and peace...

...Moreover, the interviews in the movie sometimes become a tantalizing commentary on both the group's music and its legend...

...We have just been plopped down in the middle of some room in the middle of a conversation, so we can only catch bits and pieces of what's going on...

...I assume that Martin Scorsese is the same kind of sucker, for with Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Dr...

...colin l. westerbeck, jr...

...But individually earlier, most of them give us our money's worth...

...Commonweal: 437...

...They came from Canada and were on the road for eight years before making it big eight years ago...

...Part of the legend is that because of pianist Garth Hudson, The Band is that rare rock 'n' roll group which knows something about music, and this seems confirmed by lead guitarist Robbie Robertson's admission that in the early days everyone else payed Hudson ten dollars a week for music lessons, at Hudson's insistence...

...There ways a sucker hat offered a an and Super:a and Casper the Ghost to fight crime...

...07079...

...But some of the ironic comments that the other Band members sneak into the film suggest another possibility...

...I eccentric, not concert...

...I don't know what they've been doing musically for the last eight years, but almost all the songs they do in this film were recorded originally eight years ago, at the beginning of their success...

...Robertson, who is present no matter who else is talking, usually does the talking himself, no matter who else is present...

...When they say they once backed a one-armed go-go dancer in a Texas joint that had no roof and belonged to Jack Ruby, it's probably true...

...Not that there's no good music in the film...

...It may not be their wildness that Robertson is covering so much as their docility...

...like the film's title, Robertson's explanations imply something dramatic, a human process that has to build to some climax finally...

...The second is at Georgetown University in Washington, July 17 through 21, with authors Gerald and Pat Mische and Father Richard McSorley, S.J., conducting the sessions on war and peace and a more human world order...

...There's a sing-along sparked by Bob Dylan at the end of the concert/film, and many performers look ill at ease then...

...Albert Hakim, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ...

...I don't care how good the women and the money are on the road...

...There is—lots of it...

...If the other memmers of The Band are letting Robertson speak for them, however, it's a shame...

...Eliot's line about the world's ending "Not with a bang but a whimper" would seem to be as good a lyric as any for this event—and a much better lyric than some of those that actually got sung...

...The implications of the title aside, T.S...

...In the interview, as in most rock songs, we never know where we are...

...Robertson is talking about dead rock stats as part of an explanation, which runs throughout the film, of why The Band is packing it in after sixteen years...

...if rock 'n' roll has left you with any heartstrings that aren't busted, it ought to tug at them now to see Bob Dylan up on a stage with The Band again...

...Nevertheless, that's what the legendary rock group The Band called their final concert, and director Martin Scorsese follows their lead by giving the same title to their film...

...So you have to able to force it to a conclusion before that, and quit...

...At times the interviews also give us the impression that The Band's leader, Robbie Robertson, is keeping the other members on a leash, much as Floyd in the pit band on The Muppet Show keeps the drummer Animal...

...Most of the time Scorsese is an uninspired interviewer, and indeed he seems to use what The Band tells him much the way that rock groups use lyrics in a song—as an oblique, obscure and largely incoherent peek into their private experiences...

...I rather had the impression that what killed Presley off was staying home too much, not being on the road...

...Neveroup The Band lartin Scorsese e to their film, it seem strange grandiloquence ;as the concert k 'n' roll conBand's career whehning conte petered out...

...The first is to be held at Seton Hall July 5-15 (write Dr...

...Since The Band is a legendary group, there is more to the movie than just attending the concert, too...

...At one point, for instance, he laments how many rock stars have been killed by the grueling life on tour: Janis Joplin, Jimi . . . Elvis Presley...

...S. Eliot's line ig but a whimis any for this ; of those that ie film...

...Such performers are usually fronted by rock's other universal type, a more presentable, articulate and faintly hermaphroditic star like Robertson...

...It was knocking around his huge house at "Graceland" at 2 a.m., having nothing to do, firing his pistols through the walls and generally wigging out...

...Adding to this impression is the fact that one of the rooms in which the interviews were done, a kitchen, is lit in the dim and lurid way that the concert stage usually is...

...The Band's own fame came after they played with Bob Dylan on (as I recall) the "Big Pink" album...

...At one time or another they did back up many of the performers at their final concert, so the event is a legitimately sentimental occasion...

...Robertson is charming and likable, but much of what he says is jive...

...It suggests a formal occasion whereas the concert itself was, in that way unique to all rock 'n' roll concerts, a slovenly one...

...John, et al...

...It's not just the musical connotations that seem strange in calling the concert a "waltz," but the grandiloquence of it...

...But the film only mines this material in a very spotty and half-hearted' way...

...Maybe Hudson and drummer Levon Helm and Richard Manuel aren't talking in this film because after sixteen years, they just haven't got the energy to bullshit anybody anymore...

...sharing the stage with The Band itself, the last concert was very much the same kind of jamboree...

...Surliness has always been a part of the rock style, and some performers come on purposely as recluses or wild beasts who snarl threateningly from the caves of their selfhood whenever they're approached...

...If The Band really hasn't had anything new to add in eight years, as the film suggests, it's no wonder they're calling it a day...

...Joni Mitchell's delivery of a song called "Coyote" is especially fine...

...And of course there are all the numbers done by The Band themselves, their greatest songs: "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "Up on Cripple Creek," etc...

...It is therefore also a confirmation of sorts to hear them reminisce...

...It's as if life on the road becomes more and more intense the longer you do it, until you can't take it anymore...

...The music, too, suggests that it may be more from boredom than from dread that The Band is retiring...

...It implies that The Band's career came to some dramatic climax, some overwhelming conclusion, when in fact it seems just to have petered out...

...The real legend of the group came from the mixture of this musical sophistication with their funky, backwoods way of using it and their obscure musical origins...