Sweet nostalgia

I was a high school senior in 1968.

I approached the end of school with as much optimism as anyone who ever approached graduation.

Enthusiastically, I went door to door being “Neat and Clean for Gene” (McCarthy); was passionately against the Vietnam War, which I naively thought was a one-time mistake in our country’s history; and I believed that things would continue to get better once the rest of the country caught on to what was really important.

Then, in April of that year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

In June of that year, we lost Bobby Kennedy.

Hate seemed to be winning.

Later that month I graduated from high school. Welcome to the rest of your life, and what happened to all that exuberant optimism?

So what happened next to me was Music from the Big Pink, the Band’s first album.

It’s hard to explain to a non-believer what it was about the Band. In fact, a few months ago I overheard some professional musicians trying to put it into words, and everyone failed.

I found a review of the Big Pink album by Al Kooper, my hero from the Blues Project days. He describes the music as “honest and unaffected.”  All else is commentary.

It’s pretty raw, and sometimes it’s pretty obscure, and it’s also real and insightful and funny and offensive. At 18, I didn’t really know what I was listening to or why it moved me so much. I just know that it was all I wanted to listen to.

And I know that in the fall of 1968, after our friends faced off with police in downtown Chicago and we wondered at our own naivete, the Band became some sort of beacon.

Not of hope, but of the beauty of reality.

What brings this to mind? On the 40th anniversary of the Last Waltz, the Band’s final concert, I got to see some of Portland’s best musicians perform at “The Next Waltz.” It’s an annual tribute to the musicians and the songs from that iconic concert and the Martin Scorsese film that memorialized it.

The musicians played their hearts out, with ultimate respect to the Band and all the other guest artists.  And all of us aging and aged hipsters remembered and rejoiced. And we fell in love with each of them, including Anita Lee Elliott, who doubles on harp/guitar and electric lead guitar; the amazing Steve Kerin who does, among other things, a tremendous Dr. John cover (turns out, Dr. John was one of Steve’s major influences); and the fabulous Kris Deelane, who apparently is the Hardest Working Woman in music.

And then Lewi Longmire  sang Dylan’s “Forever Young.” Beautifully. Soulfully. And as a young man singing to his older listeners.

A reminder that physically, we aren’t.  The possibility of making a difference to the world no longer seems infinite.

And, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the hopeful legacy we always assumed we would leave seemed no more substantial than ashes from that awful pot we were smoking back then.

Yet all of us in that theater were united by something more than nostalgia and regret.

One of the few Shakespeare quotes I know is this: If music be the food of love, play on. And how they fed us that night.

At that moment, we were united in love — of the music; of musicians past and present; of memories of optimism and the hope that after all, love really does trump hate.

I know the Millennials think we screwed up. Perhaps we did. I’ll always have my regrets about not doing more. But the generation that brought them Dylan and the Band can’t have been all bad.