Review by Booklist Review
Robertson's bestselling first memoir, Testimony (2016), covered the songwriter and guitarist's early years and groundbreaking collaborations with Ronnie Hawkins, the Band, and Bob Dylan. Insomnia picks up in 1976, following the Band's farewell concert, immortalized in The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese. With both his band and marriage collapsing, Robertson moves into Scorsese's Hollywood home. Two dizzying years ensue as the pair install blackout shades, watch classic Hollywood films, edit The Last Waltz, attend glittering premieres, and court glamorous women. Long nights are fueled by cocaine and cases of wine sent by Francis Ford Coppola, who also, alarmed by their gaunt appearances, hires a private chef for them. Eventually, exhaustion and excess land Scorsese in the hospital, which ends the friends' epic bender. He emerges in time to make Raging Bull, while Robertson discovers a new career as an esteemed music supervisor and songwriter for film. A vivid portrait of two artists burning bright and, against the odds, not burning out.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Robertson, the late guitarist and primary songwriter for the Band, follows up Testimony with a rollicking account of the pedal-to-the-metal years that followed the group's dissolution. Opening the account in 1978 New Orleans--where he'd been invited by Robert DeNiro--Robertson describes in vivid detail frequenting voodoo shops, hanging with retired boxer Jake LaMotta, and watching the Muhammad Ali vs. Jake Spinks prize fight ringside, then cuts back to Los Angeles in 1977, where he was staying in Martin Scorsese's house, separated from his wife and children, and binging on movies, drugs, and women. The book's loose narrative arc tracks Scorsese's and Robertson's marathon efforts to wrangle into shape The Last Waltz, the epochal film of the Band's final concert. Robertson's speedy narrative eschews the maudlin self-analysis common in books of this stripe, delivering a magpie assemblage of impressions and anecdotes--late-night sound mixing sessions with Scorsese, cocaine-fueled gallivanting, and hobnobbing with famous faces (including Francis Ford Coppola, George Harrison, Liza Minnelli, and Jack Nicholson). At the same time, Robertson's sensitive portrait of his friendship with Scorsese--particularly during his addiction-induced hospitalization--provides a potent emotional ballast to the otherwise careening narrative. For rock fans, this is a must. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A pensive, clear-eyed vision of a collapsing world as seen through grimy, rain-streaked windows. Early in this memoir, Robertson, leader of the iconic rock group the Band, recalls a backstage conversation with Roebuck "Pops" Staples, who'd performed "The Weight" at the group's so-called Last Waltz. "'That song "The Weight,"' he asked under his breath, 'what's it really about?'" Pops asks. Robertson replies that when he figures it out, "you'll be the first one I'm gonna call." The setting is largely Los Angeles, the occasion Robertson's two-year-long version of John Lennon's "lost weekend," ordered out of his home by his wife: "She said her needs were being overshadowed by my work and my fame." Shelter comes from director Martin Scorsese, who invites Robertson to move in with him and a gun-nut Man Friday. It's a kind gesture, but it comes at a toll: vampire hours even for a rock-and-roller, for both Scorsese and Robertson suffer from the title condition, which a steady diet of cocaine doesn't do much to alleviate, snorted pile after pile while screening movies such asThe Searchers andTouch of Evil until the sun is well up. Improbably, perhaps, Scorsese turns Robertson on to the Sex Pistols, even as Robertson tries to improve Scorsese's sex life. It doesn't work, apart from a dalliance or two, even as Robertson embarks on a string of affairs with numerous A-list actresses. Along the way Robertson turns in sage notes on musical partners such as Bob Dylan ("He always seemed to be there but not there. He seemed to be telling you only a little piece of anything") and Keith Moon ("Rick Danko and I had saved Keith's life by pulling him out of the ocean and on to the shore in Malibu. We'd found him there, out cold, dressed in a Nazi uniform, with the tide rolling in"). A pleasure for golden-age rock fans, who'll be amazed that the author lived as long as he did. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
