Yet those years of success were also ones of excess: of pot, cocaine and groupies – and ultimately, of heroin. Unless The Band stopped touring, someone was going to die. “Our rock’n’roll lifestyle was passing the point of no return,” Robertson would write in his 2016 memoir, Testimony. The best painkiller is opiates, and heroin had been creeping back under the door.”These were the circumstance in which Robertson, The Band and Martin Scorsese made The Last Waltz – perhaps the greatest rock’n’roll movie of all time. And yet, The Last Waltz came together in a blizzard of bacchanalia.

Source: The Star August 11, 2023 10:29 UTC