Enjoying reading Andrew Odlyzko's Content is not King article while loving watching/listening to The Last Waltz.

The last waltz...ahhh..If you have not yet seen it, you must (if you like music). I really like Stop Making Sense, and of course, Spinal Tap,(and speaking of Tap, I had to laugh when my Google search for my friend Liz - above - came up with, literally, a "where are they now" column..if you've seen Tap you get it) but this one is about my favorite concert film. I guess that's what comes to being born during the Eisenhower administration.

My younger brother Peter (13 months younger) is a drama/theatre/film guy. He seems to know everything about movies, which from the sound of it, is a much more difficult field to make money in than engineering. He has helped me appreciate excellent film making. Anyway, The Last WaltzMartin Scorsese film was thrown together at the last minute. A few weeks was all they had to put it together. They shot it in 35mm, they had no contract, they had no deal. The film was shot at the Winterland theatre in San Francisco. (It was also Winterland's last waltz...after everybody from the door's, to Hendrix, to The Band played there, it's time was limited and in 1978 it was demolished) In the short time they had, they did the ideal thing - which always is - think about what would be the perfect thing to do, big budget or not. They got Boris Leven (west side story, sound of music, more)to design the format, and planned the shooting like "an Alfred Hitchcock film"...according to Robbie Robertson. You hear all of this on the "special features" section of the dvd

But one of the biggest reasons that I love this film so much goes back to the "Content is not King" story at the begging of this post....the first non-school band that I was in,
"Esquire", back during high school (1974-1978), had Jim Gavuzzi as the lead singer/guitar player. We would stay up very late in his parent's house and play and record music - me on my fender rhodes and him with his ovation guitar. He was later my roommate in college for a year, and I sat in on his (and Chris Conway's) band Urban Umbrella in San Diego in 1983. Those were some fun days. He passed last year at the young age of 41. We must have sat through The Last Waltz in 1998 about a hundred times.