It was like the band — if not quite the Band — had gotten back together.
Under a trio of softly illuminated chandeliers, more than two dozen musicians including Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Mavis Staples, Eric Church and Bob Weir gathered onstage Thursday night at Inglewood’s Kia Forum to pay tribute to Robbie Robertson, the Canadian singer, guitarist, songwriter and composer who died last year at age 80.
The lineup of familiar names — not to mention the elegant lighting scheme — was clearly meant to evoke “The Last Waltz,” director Martin Scorsese’s classic 1978 documentary about the all-star Thanksgiving Day blowout at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom that served as the final gig by Robertson’s beloved roots-rock outfit, the Band. Indeed, Scorsese filmed Thursday’s show — billed officially as “Life Is a Carnival: A Musical Celebration of Robbie Robertson” — for eventual release as a concert movie of its own.
Following the earlier deaths of Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Levon Helm, Robertson’s passing leaves 87-year-old Garth Hudson as the Band’s lone surviving original member. And Robertson wasn’t the only dearly departed mourned at the Forum: Not long into the show, which began around 7 p.m. and ended a few minutes after midnight, Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers noted that Thursday was “kind of a spiritual night for me” because he and his longtime bandmate Benmont Tench were inside one of their old haunts just three days before the late Petty would’ve turned 74.
So: memories upon memories upon memories. Yet at its best, the Robertson tribute — produced by Nashville’s Blackbird Presents, which also put on Willie Nelson’s two-night 90th-birthday extravaganza last year at the Hollywood Bowl — had a liveliness that cut through the many-layered retrospection of it all.
Morrison, who appeared in “The Last Waltz,” gave a tart three-song performance from behind a pair of mirrored aviators, running “Tupelo Honey” into “Days Like This” into “Wonderful Remark,” the last of which he contributed to Scorsese’s 1983 “The King of Comedy,” for which Robertson oversaw the soundtrack. (Robertson went on to work with Scorsese on many of the latter’s movies; this year he earned a posthumous Oscar nomination with his score for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”)
Clapton, who’s repeatedly spoken of having longed to join the Band, played sharp blues guitar in Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Farther Up the Road,” which he performed in “The Last Waltz”; at the Forum he also offered up crisp renditions of the Band’s “The Shape I’m In,” “Chest Fever” and “Forbidden Fruit.”
Staples, a third alum of Scorsese’s movie, led an appealingly shaggy take on “The Weight” that featured a pair of jam-band icons in the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir and Phish’s Trey Anastasio. Other highlights included Weir’s spectral solo performance of Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” Church’s funky “Up on Cripple Creek” and a stately version of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by the fearsomely bearded country singer Jamey Johnson, who also spent the evening in the concert’s crack house band alongside Campbell, Tench, Don Was, Ryan Bingham and an assortment drummers, backing singers and horn players. (Elvis Costello and Noah Kahan had been advertised as taking part but were no-shows.)
Did anybody onstage Thursday rearrange your thinking about Robertson and his music — the way he thought about the past and about systems of injustice or the way he balanced a devotion to texture with a belief in a pop song’s crucial economy? Nah. As with any tribute concert along these lines, the program was ultimately too long, too midtempo, too full of warmly respectful performances by the warmly respectful likes of Jim James, Allison Russell, Nathaniel Rateliff and Robert Randolph.
It needed a true A-lister as well — someone to bring forth a burst of excitement as Paul McCartney did at April’s Jimmy Buffett memorial at the Bowl. (Bono, who wrote and recorded “Sweet Fire of Love” with Robertson, would’ve been a great get.) And yet, late as it was, you couldn’t help but be moved by the show’s grand finale: an all-hands “I Shall Be Released” that inevitably called to mind the night’s honoree all those decades ago at the Winterland — surrounded by friends, sweating through his dress shirt, making history of a moment.
