The Last Waltz and Heartworn Highways: two 40-year-old films at the birth of Americana

The Bands Scorsese-helmed farewell couldnt be more to different to the long-overlooked outlaw country doc, but both are touchstones for todays roots musicians

January 1976 was as bitter as any winter in Nashville and, as the young New York film-maker Jim Szalapski made his way back north, his camera caught the lands starkness: snow flurries, icy roads, trailers upturned and cargo spilled. Szalapski had just finished shooting a documentary he would name Heartworn Highways, a profile of a new country scene emerging out of Texas and Tennessee; singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and the young Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell who would become known as proponents of outlaw country. Working with a small crew, and even smaller budget, over the course of a few weeks he had caught these musicians playing across liquor-soaked evenings in trailer lots, blacksmiths workshops and penitentiaries, attempting to place their music in a cultural landscape.

Ten months later, over Thanksgiving weekend, Martin Scorsese began shooting The Last Waltz, a recording of Canadian-American group the Bands farewell concert in San Francisco. It featured not only songs by the Band, but also a glut of their musical friends: Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Van Morrison, and the Staple Singers among them. In between, Scorsese ran interviews with the group, reflecting on the end of their 16 years on the road.

The Last Waltz was released two years later, and became one of the most revered music documentaries of all time. Heartworn Highways did not surface until 1981, when it played for a week at the Art Cinema on Eighth Street in New York. And though it has garnered a cult following (and a low-key DVD release) in the years since, it has stood somewhat in the shadows. When he died in 2000, Szalapski believed his great labour of love had been a failure. It is interesting to see 1976 as framed by these two films. That years US album charts were dominated by [Peter Framptons] Frampton Comes Alive, Wings at the Speed of Sound, Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) by Eagles and Stevie Wonders Songs in the Key of Life. Heartworn Highways and The Last Waltz offer something quite different, and helped to spawn the musical genre we have come to know as Americana.

At the time Szalapski began shooting, country music was in the midst of an upheaval. Four years earlier had seen the opening of Opryland, an extravagant theme park that offered rollercoasters and log flumes, and provided a new home for the Grand Ole Opry the phenomenally popular country music radio show recorded before a studio audience, whose organisers considered themselves the fierce conservators of the country sound.

But country had begun to change: in the early 60s, a folk scene had sprung up in the south, promoting not only contemporary and traditional folk artists but blues greats such as Lightnin Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. By the time Bob Dylan arrived in Nashville to record Blonde on Blonde in early 1966, the first of three albums he recorded in the city, it felt as if the formulaic Nashville country sound was giving way to something more reflective of a traditional heritage, and of the decades countercultural movement. In the years that followed, the next generation of country stars drew on these folk and rock influences, as well as honky tonk and rockabilly, and the resulting outlaw country movement, led by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson found a ready audience; in 1976 the compilation Wanted! The Outlaws became the first platinum-selling country music album.

I was not a fan of country music, says Philip Schopper, who edited Heartworn Highways. Im originally from Arizona, and where I grew up and when I grew up, country music represented a frame of mind that I didnt care for it was redneck music. In my mind it was associated with prejudice and intolerance and that sort of thing. Still, he had made a pact with Szalapski some years earlier that if either of them managed to get a film off the ground the other would work on it.

And Szalapski was persuasive. He told Schopper that, these fellas were writing their own material, and it was a new kind of country music, and they were outlaw musicians in the sense that they were outside the mainstream of country music production at that time. Szalapski, he recalls, had already made a couple of field trips down to Texas and Tennessee. He went down with a tape recorder first of all, sat in their homes, their living rooms recording some of the music as they play. The musicians would tend to get together of an evening, playing pickin and grinnin as they call it. He returned to New York enamoured with it, says Schopper: He would play it for people and say: Listen to this! Something should be done with this! And he would try to pitch a film.

Though he was unsure of the commercial value of such a film, Schopper was soon smitten, too. What these folks were playing was different. I was drawn to it. I would hear the writing and the skill of musicianship and was really knocked out by it, and the values it was embracing were much closer to hippy values. These songs were about real people and real experiences, and werent simply songs about driving your truck, getting drunk and cheating on your girlfriend.

Szalapski also proved very convincing to a young British art dealer named Graham Leader. The pair had grown friendly over a couple of years, and when Leader found himself with time on his hands he decided to head to Nashville with his director friend to hear the music Szalapski had raved about.

I just went there on an adventure, he recalls. The thing that really captured my imagination was entering this world, a world I would never have stepped into. And being there, in a way, was a revelation and I thought: Who wouldnt be interested in this music, this world and these people? So I asked Jim what it would take to make the film and he gave me a number and I said: OK, lets just do it. Leader signed on as producer, and five weeks later they were filming.

There has been nothing throughout Leaders career that has given him quite the same satisfaction as Heartworn Highways. Because of its purity, he explains, and the way it was made. Jim was the proverbial fly on the wall, able to get in very close to the subject, whatever the subject. I dont think the music world is a world thats wide open, and its certainly a distrusting world, but because of his nature and his ability to be sublimated to whatever was going on, he was able to move in very close, and through that find the real depth of colours, of tones, of pictures that you would never ever see, normally.

Upon the films brief release in 1981, the New Yorker ran a three-page review of Heartworn Highways, and while it praised the film highly bemoaning the lack of structure or narration. In truthThat perceived messiness was wholly intentional. Jim and I used to joke that we were making a content-free documentary, Schopper laughs. Meaning we had no agenda, we werent out to do a documentary about the music industry or the music business, we were making a film that felt like an experience; you step into it and when you step out of it you feel like youve been somewhere and been immersed in something.

It was non-narrated, and in those days to have a film that was non-narrated and cuts away from the action to action that was going on elsewhere [didnt happen], Leader explains. We wanted the whole film to be like a song, Schopper adds. Everything had to do with feeling. What feels right to be next, until finally we have something all together that took you along on an emotional and musical trip, and you can come away feeling like youve met some people. And not to be overly corny about it, but maybe youve met some friends.

What The Last Waltz had that Heartworn Highways did not was money, famous subjects and a pre-ordained narrative structure. It came together incredibly quickly, recalls the films producer, Jonathan Taplin. We just all ran up to San Francisco, brought the best cameramen we knew and literally arrived the night before. In one night, we got 90% of the film. But like any documentary it begins to have an interesting flow to it, and you begin to tell a story, and that was the story both of the Band but also of the music.

There were hair-raising moments; shooting on 35mm film meant that the magazines had to be changed every 10 minutes, leading to some performances being sacrificed. When Muddy Waters turned up too late to rehearse and announced he would be playing Mannish Boy and Caledonia, Scorsese decided they would change magazines during the first song. Marty didnt understand that Mannish Boy was Muddys term for Im a Man, recalls Taplin. And at those opening chords of Im a Man, Marty just went into complete panic, he realised that was the most important song for Muddy and he had told everyone to turn off their cameras. Only by fluke one of the cameramen had removed his headphones and therefore had not heard Scorseses instruction to stop filming and change the magazine did the the song get filmed.