This is an original first-printing 1977 commemorative concert poster for "The Last Waltz", featuring the final performance of the Band (Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson), along with many special guests. Ron Croci was a surf artist living in Half Moon Bay and the background of the sun setting into the sea was right up his alley.
The recently road-shy Robbie Robertson had a dream; cap this phase of The Band's creativity with a grand musical finale from the place it all started, the Winterland Ballroom. Promoted and organized by Bill Graham, whose home turf was Winterland and who had a long association with The Band, the concert was an elaborate affair. Starting at 5:00 p.m., the audience of 5,000 was served turkey dinners. There was ballroom dancing with music by the Berkeley Promenade Orchestra. Poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lenore Kandel, Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, and others gave readings.
The Band started the concert at around 9:00 and, backed by a large horn section, worked through 13 of their hits and then were joined by a succession of guests. It wasn’t until around 2:15am that The Band came out to perform an encore, "Don't Do It". It was the last time the group performed under the name "The Band" with its classic lineup. It was all captured for posterity in a film that was conceived as 'let's video this for the archives' and grew into a Martin Scorsese-directed extravaganza called by many the greatest rock concert movie of all time.
The poster itself is rather large and thin and so to protect it we had it professionally linen-backed. This "base" acts as a support for framing the poster without having to touch any part of the piece in the process and also preserves it against potential tearing and folding and the PH friendly glues act to neutralize the yellowing effects of oxidation on paper.