The Robbie Robertson Song That Misunderstood His Own Legacy
He might have created something perfectly pitched for New Year's Eve, but got lost along the way.
With “When the Night Was Young” from 2011’s How to Become Clairvoyant, Robbie Robertson might have created a song perfectly pitched for New Year’s Eve.
He’s again hurtling through the Mississippi Delta, racing past old churches with scolding signs out front, hanging out with grifters and cardsharps, searching for something deeper, something real. He’d found it, over and over, with the Band.
This time, it’s different, though. He’s older, with friends and youthful dreams long gone. So many hopes are in pieces all around. But, in sorting through them, Robertson suddenly saw things, new things, that I didn’t.
“What is lost? What is missing?” Robertson plaintively asked on “When The Night Was Young.” “We could change the world, stop the war. … But that was back when the night was young.”
Martin Pradler’s Wurlitzer piano work perfectly echoes the song’s strange sense of plaintive melancholy. Strange because Robertson’s best efforts with the Band were never about changing the world, to my ear, so much as pining for another (better) one.
They weren’t agitators, so much as celebrators of an America that had been misplaced amid the late-1960s din of wartime atrocities, desultory protest and staggering assassinations. Yet, the Band – and this is where I thought Robertson made a rare misstep on “When the Night Was Young” – didn’t take the easy way there.
This was music found in, and sung in commemoration of, the old days and old ways – but with all of the pitched emotions that might go along with that. They weren’t songs of defeat. Darkness might draw near, but it never consumed them.
His Songs With the Band Always Held Onto a Promise
During a period of desperate, numbing displacement, the Band made complex songs that felt simple – and that made them perfect for those times. They could sound exactly like the comforts of home, but they didn’t shy away from our moral dramas: Every family, and every country, has its quiet resentments, its secrets, its separations.
This created a wellspring of dense emotions, from the hauntingly serious (“Tears of Rage,” “Acadian Driftwood,” “King Harvest”) to the adventuresome and free (“Up on Cripple Creek,” “Rag Mama Rag,” “Life is a Carnival”). When the night was, in fact, still young, the Band would never have resorted to each answers, much less something like easy nostalgia.
They faced hard truths, told tall tales and explored our dark myths, while deftly combining rock and folk with New Orleans jazz, Motown, black gospel and bluegrass. There were risks, and more than a few setbacks. But even at the end of their five-man era, on the shambling, pieced-together Islands compilation, the songs still held onto the promise of community, of a new day.
When Robbie Robertson suddenly sank into pathos on “When the Night Was Young,” the natural worry was that he was trailing off into obsolescence. Thankfully, he rebounded elsewhere on How to Become Clairvoyant – and Robertson’s final album, 2019’s Sinematic, showcased a muse rekindled. But, as “When the Night Was Young” initially unfolded, I’d never heard him sounding so defeated.
Of course, wrestling with the legacy of the ’60s and its failed promises couldn’t have been easy. Surviving members of boomer bands had to recalibrate. After all, they’re long past the point of dying before they get old. But the world so many of them longed for – well, certainly, the one the Band talked about so ardently – is still out there to be rediscovered, celebrated and explored.
This feels especially true as the calendar flips from one year to the next. Missing, that world may be, but it’s certainly not lost.
Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso’s next book, ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters,’ will be released in Spring 2025. www.nickderiso.com.