Behind the curtain of 'The Last Waltz'
The Band's farewell concert film took producer Rob Fraboni to some strange places—physically, spiritually, and psychotically.
Last week I indulged a Thanksgiving tradition as time-honored as sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie: a screening of The Last Waltz. Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film documenting the Band’s star-studded farewell concert recently returned to theaters in celebration of the movie’s 45th anniversary, and it happened to be showing at my local art house.
A few days later, exactly 47 years to the day of that historic show, I spoke to Rob Fraboni, the film’s soundtrack producer, who was present for the event at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1976.
In the early ’70s, Fraboni was chief engineer at the Village Recorder, which just so happened to be Steely Dan’s favorite Los Angeles studio. (Walter Becker and Donald Fagen utilized the Village for Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, Pretzel Logic, Aja, and Gaucho.) During that time, Fraboni served as engineer on Planet Waves, the 1974 album Bob Dylan recorded with the Band, before setting out with them as a sound consultant on the famed Tour ’74, a 40-concert jaunt across North America.
He then helped the Band convert a Malibu ranch called Shangri-La into a studio that became the group’s recording headquarters and clubhouse. There in the hills above Zuma Beach, Fraboni mixed The Basement Tapes (1975) and engineered the final two studio albums from the Band’s classic era, Northern Lights–Southern Cross (1975) and Islands (1977). (The property has been owned since 2011 by producer Rick Rubin.)
In The Last Waltz, Scorsese conducts interviews around Shangri-La. He opens the film with an exchange with bassist Rick Danko beside the studio’s billiards table that slyly points to the splintering of one of the era’s most talented groups:
Scorsese: OK, Rick, what’s the game?
Danko: Cutthroat.
Scorsese: What’s the object of it?
Danko: The object is to keep your balls on the table and knock everybody else’s off.
“Thanksgiving weekend always makes me kind of emotional,” Fraboni says over the phone from his home in Connecticut. His relationship with the Band’s chief songwriter, Robbie Robertson, was complicated by a longtime friendship with drummer-vocalist Levon Helm, who openly railed against his former bandmate in a 1993 autobiography. But he says Robertson’s death in August has turned him especially meditative about life and loss, the way the years have a way of slipping by, and how grateful he is to have been in the right place at the right time to collaborate with a handful of musical geniuses.
“We’re having this conversation, and I swear to God, it’s like the Last Waltz happened yesterday,” Fraboni tells me. “I’m dead serious—it feels like you’re interviewing me the day after the concert.” For nearly two hours, the 72-year-old reflected on his first-hand experience of one of the all-time great concerts: the atmosphere behind the scenes at the Winterland, the film’s grueling postproduction process, Neil Young’s notorious cocaine booger, and more. It’s a goddamn impossible way of life, but he lived to tell the tale.
We must begin with Steely Dan. You were the chief engineer at the Village in the early ’70s when Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were recording their first few albums at that studio. What do you remember about your encounters with them at that time?