As the late Robbie Robertson<\/a> told Rolling Stone in February 2023, the Band guitarist and songwriter was finally getting around to completing one of two planned sequels to his 2016 memoir, Testimony. The second book, he said, would chronicle his life and work immediately after the Band\u2019s final concert and movie, The Last Waltz. \u201cI\u2019m deep in on that,\u201d he said of the project at the time. \u201cI\u2019m now going to be able to focus more clearly on making headway with that.\u201d<\/p>\n Six months later, Robertson unexpectedly died<\/a>, but the book he was working on, Insomnia, is being readied for publication on Nov. 11. As promised, the memoir focuses on the years 1977 to 1980, when Robertson became close pals and housemates with director Martin Scorsese, more entrenched in the Hollywood community and less with his former mates in the Band. The book chronicles a wild ride of drugs, hookups, and many movie viewing sessions, often over pasta or fine food. Here are some things we learned along the way, including a few scores Robertson apparently wanted to settle.<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n While the two were working on the completion of The Last Waltz, which Scorsese directed, Robertson\u2019s wife Dominique asked him to leave their home and family: \u201cShe said her needs were being overshadowed by my work and my fame.\u201d Robertson eventually moved into Scorsese\u2019s Malibu home, securing a room of his own, and the two newly single dudes became as enmeshed in excess as in moviemaking.<\/p>\n Robertson writes about the time he had to make a drug run in the midst of movie-watching night with Francis Ford Coppola to buy a few grams of coke from a clean-cut dealer who \u201cstripped off his shirt and pants to avoid getting powder on them.\u201d (When he returned, Coppola was pissed that Robertson hadn\u2019t kept his eye on stirring the sauce, which sounds like the inspiration for a scene in GoodFellas.) One day, Scorsese\u2019s assistant panicked after taking too many hardcore sleeping bills, freezing up the assistant\u2019s mouth in the process. Grabbing a $20 bill, Robertson had the assistant snort three lines of coke \u2014 which eventually did the trick. As Robertson remembers telling Scorsese, \u201cMedicine is medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n When the movie was being wrapped up, Robertson claims Helm wasn\u2019t keen on shooting the additional soundstage footage that featured the Staple Singers and Emmylou Harris, and would have preferred to keep the extra cash for themselves. \u201cMy God, I thought, he doesn\u2019t get this at all,\u201d Robertson writes. He also claims Helm was unhappy with the interview footage with Richard Manuel, who was pretty much in the bag, but that everyone else was fine with it. As Robertson writes early in the book, \u201cI was tired of Levon, who was becoming more and more difficult to deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Insomnia, Van Morrison was the first to give his permission to use the footage of him (and his onstage kicks), followed by Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, and others. But Neil Diamond, perhaps the least likely artist on that stage despite having just worked with Robertson on his Beautiful Noise album, \u201cwas concerned about one of his camera angles, where he thought his profile wasn\u2019t flattering,\u201d Robertson says. (In the end, color correction smoothed over that issue.)<\/p>\n According to Robertson, Bob Dylan was initially hesitant to include his performance of \u201cBaby, Let Me Follow You Down\u201d with the Band, fearing it would conflict with the imminent rollout of his own film, Renaldo & Clara. In the book, Dylan\u2019s brother David tells Robertson about Bob, \u201cHe\u2019s right to be concerned. I don\u2019t know what he\u2019s trying to do as a filmmaker.\u201d In the end, Dylan ultimately signed off, although his concerns proved to be valid: Renaldo & Clara was panned and quickly vanished from theaters, but The Last Waltz remains a classic of its genre.<\/p>\n Robertson met and started hanging with the good-time actor (and part-time drummer) when the two starred in the ill-fated 1980 film Carney. Arriving at a New York hotel room during that period with Robertson, Busey discovered \u201ctwo single beds, extra small\u201d in his room and grew enraged. Calling the hotel manager, Busey yelled, in true rock-destructo mode, \u201cI\u2019m going to start throwing the TV and the beds out the window!\u201d Management complied, and he was given a new room.<\/p>\n Insomnia revels in how all-in Robertson was in the L.A. movie world. Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty make cameos, with Nicholson checking out the Scorsese-Robertson abode and saying, \u201cI like the setup you boys got here. Big speakers for the music, a cave for watching movies and charming the ladies.\u201d Robertson interacts frequently with a typically terse Robert DeNiro during the making of Raging Bull. The book also delves into Robertson\u2019s personal life, chronicling his flings with several actresses, including Jennifer O\u2019Neill, Canadian actress Genevi\u00e8ve Bujold, and French thespian Carole Bouquet. The latter affair reads at times less like a Robertson autobiography and more like a Harlequin romance novel: \u201cShe pushed me and pounded on my bare chest with the sides of her fist \u2026 Her face was flushed as tears flew.\u201d<\/p>\n After working together on the ill-fated screen musical New York, New York, the director and actress-singer coupled up. Stopping by their hotel room in New York, Robertson found the room \u201csomewhat in disarray\u201d with Scorsese\u2019s assistant picking up a lamp that had been knocked over and cleaning up \u201ca stain on the rug.\u201d According to the book, the couple had gotten into a shouting match, with Scorsese throwing a glass of red wine across at the room at Minnelli, which smashed on a chandelier. The couple laughed it off, and Robertson went about his business: \u201cI dialed room service and ordered a selection of pastries and more red wine,\u201d he writes, a combo he says he and Scorsese called \u201cthe diet of champions.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1978, Scorsese was rushed to a hospital after his already ravaged body gave out. \u201cMaybe the rock & roll lifestyle I had brought into Marty\u2019s life was to blame for his plight,\u201d Robertson writes, adding that the experience helped him straighten up. \u201cIt finally got through to me: I had to stop.\u201d<\/p>\n Insomnia reveals times when the musicians, now geographically divided between East and West coasts, almost reformed, but not quite. Robertson writes of Manuel (who would hang himself in 1986) missing an important recording session and later telling Robertson he had a gun, implying he might use it on himself. Robertson writes lovingly of the time he, Manuel, and Garth Hudson reconvened to cut a version of \u201cAt Last\u201d for the Raging Bull soundtrack, but it was a fleeting reunion.<\/p>\n With his Hollywood connections, Robertson says he once called Helm to tell him that director Michael Apted was interested in hiring Helm to play Loretta Lynn\u2019s father in a biopic. Helm, writes Robertson, blew it off, and Robertson realized he no longer had much in common with his former musical mate. \u201cI knew Levon was an extraordinary musician, but he was limited in his vision and ambitions, happy to go round and round playing music in the same old circuit,\u201d Robertson writes, cuttingly. After the call, Robertson says, \u201cI wanted new challenges, new quests, <\/strong>new blood, new roads. There would be no breakup, no hard words, no goodbyes. The Band would just fade away, into the twilight, naturally.\u201d But as was proven later, in conflicting accounts like the ones here, the Band didn\u2019t quite go quietly into that night.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the late Robbie Robertson told Rolling Stone in February 2023, the Band guitarist and songwriter was finally getting around to completing one of two planned sequels to his 2016 memoir, Testimony. The second book, he said, would chronicle his life and work immediately after the Band\u2019s final concert and movie, The Last Waltz. \u201cI\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2130581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[405231,305425,348275,314737],"class_list":["post-2130580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-levon-helm","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-robbie-robertson","tag-rolling-stone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/What-We-Learned-From-Robbie-Robertsons-New-Memoir.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2130580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2130582,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2130580\/revisions\/2130582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2130581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2130580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2130580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2130580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Living up to the legend of the time, Robertson and Scorsese had their raging-bulls moments.<\/h2>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
In his own memoir, This Wheel\u2019s on Fire, Levon Helm was candid about his dislike of The Last Waltz, and here, Robertson takes a belated shot at Helm on the same topic.<\/h2>\n
Most of the musicians filmed for The Last Waltz were happy with the results, except for two (and not just Helm).<\/h2>\n
Buddy Holly biopic aside, Gary Busey would have made a good rock star.<\/h2>\n
When Helm derided Robertson as \u201cMister Hollywood\u201d in his own book, he wasn\u2019t kidding.<\/h2>\n
Scorsese and Liza Minnelli were one tempestuous couple.<\/h2>\n
Robertson felt guilty when Scorsese almost died from an overdose.<\/h2>\n
Robertson had a last-straw moment with the Band.<\/h2>\n