Sound Bites: I Shall Be Released by The Band (from The Last Waltz)
Updated: Sep 2
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Once upon a time, in the era of DVDs, PlayStation 2 and HMV, I bought The Last Waltz (directed by Martin Scorsese) from a store in Belfast, the big one near the city centre, on one of their end of aisle, buy three-for-the-price-of-two offers. When I bought it I had no idea who The Band were or, for that matter, the context of The Last Waltz. But, as someone who loved music and wanted to know more, I thought that I maybe should get to grips with a band who had the audacity to call themselves The Band. I saw it as a gap – one of many – that needed to be filled. So, to gloss quickly, if you don't know, The Band were a Canadian-American rock band formed in Toronto who had their heyday from the end of the sixties through the seventies, culminating in a farewell concert they called The Last Waltz in 1976, on Thanksgiving Day in San Francisco, which featured, alongside The Band, an array of the biggest names in rock music of the day including Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison to name but two.
Anyway, I watched The Last Waltz and loved it. It was at a similar time that I also bought a 'best of' The Old Grey Whistle Test, so to say that I was in a 70s/80s guitar rock phase would be a fair appraisal (I wonder have I ever really left it). And very happily did I inhabit that phase, too. And very happily do I revisit that phase, as I did recently, when this track came on the Radio (Paul Gambaccini's 'The Gambaccini Collection' on Radio 2).
The last song of The Last Waltz is this one, I Shall Be Released, which was actually written by Bob Dylan. The recorded album version of this track by The Band, to my mind, is not as good as this live track; the recorded version is sung at too high a pitch and just makes for uncomfortable listening, but this one, featuring this roll call of the great and good from the world of music, rotating the lead vocals between Dylan and others, with a great chorus of backing singers really sets it off.
Lots of academics and critics like to claim that Bob Dylan was a poet. For me, he wasn't; he wrote poetic song lyrics, and was an excellent songwriter, and I'll give him that, but a poet he was not. John Milton was a poet. John Donne was a poet. Edmund Spenser was a poet. Elizabeth Bishop was a poet. And so on. But Dylan was a musician and a songwriter, and, I'm happy to say, maybe even one of the best ever, even though I don't love all of his music.
But, I do love 'I Shall Be Released'. It's a simple track in many ways with a verse, chorus, verse, chorus structure, without a bridge. The song works because of the simple contrast between the quiet verse and the cathartic chorus, albeit following a narrative of human struggle and escape from that struggle. 'I see my light come shining' is one of the great first chorus lines, surely, in rock music. It's a song of hope, redemption and the fact it's written in the future tense, 'I shall be released' gives it an air of determination, refusal, resistance, resilience. It's not conditional but decisive and assertive, and for that reason affirming. But, given the context of this song for The Band as their final concert (even though The Band did reform in 1983 without their lead vocalist), and the gathering of rock's best and brightest talents, the song becomes an event, an artefact and a symbol of the end of an era of rock music rooted in blues, before giving way to the new punk rock era with the likes of The Ramones and Sex Pistols taking centre stage. There were also questions about the sustainability of the touring lifestyle which may have led the The Band to pack up their plectrums.
But, 'I Shall Be Released' was a fitting, uplifting yet elegiac way for The Band to say goodbye to their fans, their life on the road, as well as an era of music they epitomised, and the like of which we'll never see again.
