I pulled into Nazareth, I was feeling ‘bout half-past deadline.
Like the narrator in the Band’s classic song, The Weight, I had found myself not in the famous Nazareth of the eastern hemisphere but the one in eastern Pennsylvania, where I was reporting a Washington Post column about a month after Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
With my column due soon, I was still in search of people to interview about why so many American counties had flipped to Trump after voting for Barack Obama twice. So with Luzerne county in mind, I kept driving north-west from Nazareth for another hour or so and stopped into a bar in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania.
It was dusk and the neon beer signs glowed eerily as I entered the bar full of working-class men. I found a stool, ordered a drink and considered how best to approach some of them to talk about their politics.
Almost immediately, I got lucky. A familiar guitar riff came over the sound system. It was the The Weight, featuring Robbie Robertson’s iconic opening lines: “I pulled into Nazareth, I was feeling ‘bout half past dead. I just need a place where I can lay my head.”
Most of the guys, and the woman bartender, too, began singing along. They sang it loud and clear, with all the lyrics known by heart. Maybe they knew it so well because of the Nazareth, Pennsylvania, reference; surely they had all been there many times. Or maybe they were like me and they simply knew it as one of the finest songs of the rock era. I joined in, right up to the crescendo and resolution of the last line: “And, and, and … you put the load right on me.”
After that impromptu singalong, it was easier to start some conversations. These strangers and I had just shared a piece of our souls. I thought about that evening this week, when Robbie Robertson died at age 80, taking with him another little piece of my soul. I was far from alone in feeling that.
“My knees buckled at the news of Robbie Robertson’s passing,” wrote the singer-songwriter Elizabeth Nelson on social media where she posts as The Paranoid Style. “Like his songs, he seemed to me undefinable by age.”
These shocks are relentless. Two Beatles have been dead for decades. Amy Winehouse has been gone for 12 years. David Bowie and Prince died within months of each other in 2016.
David Crosby’s passing last January sent my mind reeling back to a 2015 Crosby, Stills and Nash concert at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater – one of the best shows I’ve seen in a lifetime packed with concertgoing. I remembered the thrill of hearing the first song, a soaring version of Carry On. Now, not only is Crosby gone, but so is the friend I went with. The flavors of these losses blend into each other, bittersweet and personal.
I haven’t met any rock stars, except on well-worn recordings and in films like The Last Waltz – a great collaboration, one of many to come, between Robertson and Martin Scorsese. Yet their departures hit hard.
I’ve heard this explained as a reminder of our own mortality, but that’s not the whole story. For me, at least, the pain comes because this music has been so central to my inner life. The songs are not just soundtrack; they are also emotional teacher and tether, putting notes and words to life’s mysteries, with the power to remind us how how it all felt. And the songs are central to life shared with friends and loved ones; they preserve our moments in musical amber. We live in constant conversation with the music, with our lives then and now, with the loss, betrayal, yearning and joy they tap into.
When my childhood best friend Susan died at the age of 20 in a car accident, along with five of her college classmates, her taste and sensibility were captured forever in the Bob Dylan lyrics she chose to accompany her high school yearbook portrait: “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands, with all memory and fate, driven deep beneath the waves, let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
Thankfully, Dylan – so closely associated with Robertson and the Band – still tours at 82. Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, Paul and Ringo live on into old age. Even Bruce Springsteen, who appears immortal, will turn 74 next month.
I know I will be stunned by the deaths of these greats when they arrive. But in the meantime, I recall Elton John’s Your Song with that beautiful line: “How wonderful life is, while you’re in the world.”
We had best appreciate what we have, and who we have, while that’s still possible. I like to think that the guys at the Pennsylvania bar – who might have just pulled in from Nazareth – would agree.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
