Insomnia
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The rock legend tells the story of his wild ride with Martin Scorsese—as friends, adventure-seekers, and boundary-pushing collaborators—with all the heart of his New York Times bestselling memoir Testimony.
For four decades, Robbie Robertson produced music for Martin Scorsese's films, a relationship that began when Robertson convinced Scorsese to direct The Last Waltz, the iconic film of the Band's farewell performance at the Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving 1976.
The closing of the Band's story with that landmark concert thrust Robertson into a new and uncertain world. With his relationship with his bandmates deteriorating and his marriage collapsing, Robertson arrived on Scorsese’s Beverly Hills doorstep only to find his friend in similar straits. Before the night was out, Scorsese had invited him to move in. Both men, already culture-transforming stars before the age of thirty-five, stood at a creative precipice, searching for the beginning of a new phase of life and work. As their friendship deepened into a career-altering collaboration, their shared journey would take them around the world and down the rabbit hole of American culture in the long hangover of the seventies. Buffeted on either side by temptation and paranoia, veering closer to self-destruction than either wanted to admit, together they had devoted themselves to a partnership defined by equal parts admiration and ambition.
With a cast of characters featuring Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Sam Fuller, Liza Minelli, Tuesday Weld, and many more, Insomnia is an intimate portrait of a remarkable creative friendship between two titans of American arts, one that would explore the outer limits of excess and experience before returning to tell the tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
