I also saw this film (Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm), and I recommend it to any who had a love of the Band. I do not know what the lessons of the documentary are. I do know it is well worth watching if for no other reason to gain a better understanding of the man and his music. He had a great life and lived it to the fullest, but I doubt if he ever found peace with the fact that he and the others could live it but it took Robbie Robertson to write it. It was truly a sad commentary on a life of excess but it was his choice and that is as it should be.
Here are some quotes from a review of the film: "Rock ’n’ roll takes a lot out of those in the profession, few more so than the members of the legendary group the Band. Their first releases “Music From Big Pink” and “The Band” rank 34th and 45th, respectively, in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 best rock ’n’ roll albums of all time, and the Martin Scorsese documentary “The Last Waltz”, about their final performance, is among the best concert films ever made. "But tragedy has been the lot of most of them. Richard Manuel committed suicide in 1986 at the age of 42; Rick Danko died of heart failure in 1999 at the age of 56. And Levon Helm, shrunken and ghost like in the bittersweet, frustratingly impressionistic documentary has, over the years, battled bankruptcy, illness, and heartbreak". www.bostonglobe.com |
I swear Bobby Tony; once again, I see it the same way from my now 61 year old perspective.
Last night, I saw a documentary on Levon Helm's last years, and it just made me sad. He was rail thin, and smoked pot until the near end, drank some too. Very sad. The documentary should have been titled: Levon: Still with us, but Wasting Away. |
Going to college in a parking lot in Atlanta | The Old Rooster Crows, Public Vignettes, Visiting Writers, Literature, The Arts | Chuck Davis African-American Dance Ensemble |
---on whether fame was a contributing factor to his breaking up with The Band -----"It's hard to be clairvoyant enough to see if things would've been different. In the beginning, you're all single and in it together. You mature in different directions. Everybody grows in their own way. And so you start seeing things through different lenses".
---on making music in the late seventies----"A lot of people at that time went into this tunnel of insanity and decadence and self-abuse, and didn't come out the other end. It was a rugged and ragged journey". IDMB MOVIE DATABASE