The Band’s scruffy Asbury Park tape gets a 50-year encore

Four months before The Last Waltz turned The Band’s farewell into rock mythology, the group played a much plainer gig in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and a surviving video now offers a rougher look at what the band was like onstage.

Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene reported that The Band performed at the Casino Arena on July 20, 1976, with multiple cameras placed near the stage. The footage, preserved from a venue video system promoted by John Scher, lacks the shine of Martin Scorsese’s famous concert film, but captures the group without celebrity guests, staged grandeur or post-production fixes.

That makes the tape a striking counterpoint to The Last Waltz, the 1978 film built around The Band’s Thanksgiving 1976 show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. Scorsese filmed that concert in 35mm, and the show included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Neil Diamond, the Staple Singers and Dr. John, among others.

The Winterland stage also carried a piece of Hollywood history: six crystal chandeliers used during the filming of Gone with the Wind, according to Rolling Stone.

A different view of the group

The Asbury Park concert had none of that. Rolling Stone reported that the Casino Arena video is often dark, sometimes leaving faces obscured, and may be degraded from later copies. Still, it shows Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson playing as a working band rather than as the centerpiece of a film production.

Greene noted that the camera does not dwell on Robertson more than the others, while Manuel appears near the center and is often visible during his lead vocals and piano parts. The piece also says no music was added later to the Casino Arena recording.

That detail matters because Helm sharply criticized The Last Waltz in his 1993 memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band. Helm wrote that, for him, the movie was “a disaster” and “a real scandal,” objecting to what he saw as an edit that elevated Robertson and reduced the others.

Helm also complained that Manuel was largely missing from the stage footage, even during “I Shall Be Released,” and faulted Scorsese for not filming rehearsals, the audience or the Thanksgiving meal.

In Helm’s book, producer John Simon said most of the music in The Last Waltz was re-recorded months later, with Helm’s drums and Muddy Waters’ vocal among the live elements he identified as exceptions.

Bad sound, priceless tape

The Asbury Park show was not perfect in the room. Rolling Stone cited multiple reports from the Asbury Park Press saying sound inside the Casino Arena was poor. Staff writer Marty Parkin wrote that listeners in the wrong seats “wouldn’t hear much from the Band,” while also describing the music as soothing despite the crowd, heat and distorted sound.

Concerts stopped being booked at the Casino Arena after 1976, according to Rolling Stone, after a short run that began in 1974. Parkin later wrote that the summer had been strange for Boardwalk rock, with sellouts by the Marshall Tucker Band and The Band, while shows by Patti Smith, Sly and the Family Stone and Janis Ian were canceled for weak ticket sales.

The Casino, referenced in Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 song “Sandy,” is now described by Rolling Stone as a deteriorated shell, with rumors this year of demolition after it was deemed unsafe.

The classic lineup of The Band is also gone. Rolling Stone reported that Hudson’s death last year followed Robertson’s death in 2023, leaving no surviving classic-era members. The group did continue after The Last Waltz, reuniting in 1983 without Robertson and carrying on after Manuel’s 1986 death until Danko died in 1999.

This story draws on original reporting from Rolling Stone.