{"id":129494,"date":"2025-11-12T17:10:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T17:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/129494\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T17:10:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T17:10:09","slug":"the-enduring-hedonistic-bromance-of-robbie-robertson-and-martin-scorsese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/129494\/","title":{"rendered":"The Enduring, Hedonistic Bromance of Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new posthumous memoir by Robertson, \u2018Insomnia,\u2019 details his relationship with the director from the late 1970s until their final collaboration on \u2018Killers of the Flower Moon\u2019A new posthumous memoir by Robertson, \u2018Insomnia,\u2019 details his relationship with the director from the late 1970s until their final collaboration on \u2018Killers of the Flower Moon\u2019<\/p>\n

There is a posthumous memoir by Robbie Robertson out this week. It focuses on a sliver of time in the late 1970s, when the guitarist and songwriter best known for fronting the Band was involved in the following activities: (1) overseeing postproduction of The Last Waltz with Martin Scorsese; (2) watching movies and listening to music every night until the break of dawn with the director, who was also his roommate; (3) drinking and drugging with Scorsese and various other celebrities at locations all over the globe; and (4) bedding scores of beautiful women, including several famous actors.<\/p>\n

It is called Insomnia. The cover features a photo of Robertson and Scorsese and a black-and-white color scheme, though it\u2019s predominantly white. Neither the title nor the design is subtle. If you chopped this book up into a million little pieces, you could snort it and get a mild high.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Does a book with such a narrow scope have much of an audience? I\u2019m not sure. Robertson, who died in 2023, already has a memoir, 2016\u2019s Testimony, that covers his life and career up until The Last Waltz, still his most famous and definitive project. I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s a big market for a second Robertson autobiography. What I do know is that the audience for Insomnia is me. I am a fan of Robbie Robertson, and I am a fan of Martin Scorsese. More importantly, I am a fan of Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese as pals, back when they lived together during tumultuous times in their marriages. They subsequently indulged in bad (and fun!) behavior for a few years while managing their respective personal and professional crises. \u201cWe became housemates, an odd couple, blood brothers, James brothers, and Marx Brothers all in one,\u201d Robertson writes, with the same flair for elegant grandiosity that distinguishes his songs. \u201cA blessed intervention against the banality of the ordinary and the obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why do I, to a near-obsessive degree, care about this? It\u2019s not like the period detailed in Insomnia corresponds with either man\u2019s creative peak. Many of their greatest accomplishments occurred around the events of this book. Before he moved in with Scorsese, Robertson performed with Bob Dylan on one of the most historically important rock tours ever, participated in the informal sessions that birthed The Basement Tapes, and wrote and recorded \u201cThe Weight,\u201d \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,\u201d \u201cUp on Cripple Creek,\u201d \u201cIt Makes No Difference,\u201d and many other rock classics. Before he bunked with Robertson, Scorsese directed three of the greatest films of the greatest decade for American film\u2014Mean Streets, Alice Doesn\u2019t Live Here Anymore, and Taxi Driver\u2014all before the age of 35. And after Robertson moved out\u2014a decision prompted, in part, by his hospitalization from too much partying\u2014Scorsese made Raging Bull, possibly the best movie of the \u201980s, while Robertson transitioned to work in Hollywood and, later, a solo recording career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So why does this relatively aimless period in the middle of all that matter? Let\u2019s start with this video, which you might have seen during one of its occasional rounds of virality. I don\u2019t know how many times I have watched this, but I doubt any viewing has ever occurred before 10 p.m.<\/p>\n

Here we have Robbie and Marty in a London hotel room. It\u2019s 1978, and they\u2019re on a promotional tour for The Last Waltz. Seated between them is Peter Hayden, an English director making a documentary about Scorsese for the BBC. It\u2019s late, real late. So late that it\u2019s almost morning, right before dawn. Robbie (tall, cool, handsome) is standing with a glass of what looks like white wine, and judging by his demeanor, it\u2019s somewhere between his fifth and 15th helping.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMaestro,\u201d he says, referencing an affectionate nickname for his friend, \u201cI want to play you a song before we knock off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marty (short, jittery, also handsome) smiles. \u201cCertainly,\u201d he replies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is by Van the Man,\u201d says Robbie, who, upon pressing play on Van Morrison\u2019s \u201cTupelo Honey,\u201d immediately enters the kind of reverie that\u2019s only possible when the human mind achieves the perfect balance of exhaustion, inebriation, and musical stimulation. He closes his eyes during the first verse, and when Van the Man hits the chorus, he takes a drag on his cigarette and smiles the sweetest smile. To his right, Marty also smiles while shaking his head and compulsively chewing on his pinky finger. Meanwhile, a gorgeous model, Lori Gleason, takes in the scene and yawns, a reasonable reaction given the hour. No matter. The universe at this very moment is composed only of Robbie, Marty, and \u201cTupelo Honey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I received my promotional copy of Insomnia, I did a quick search for the \u201cTupelo Honey\u201d incident. And here\u2019s what Robbie wrote about it:<\/p>\n

In this time that Marty and I had been hanging out, living together, working together, there were moments when we would be listening to something and we would look at each other to acknowledge: This is very special, this moment right now, listening to this music. The feeling sent a chill right through you. Here in our hotel, listening to \u201cTupelo Honey\u201d\u2014this was one of those moments. We were, as the Indians say, walking in the \u201cbeauty way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reading this makes me understand why some people love Nancy Meyers rom-coms so much. For that audience, a love affair unfolding against a backdrop of immaculate kitchens and exquisite flower arrangements represents the pinnacle of romantic fantasy. For me, however, the ultimate bromantic fantasy is hanging out with Robbie and Marty in the late \u201970s while vibing out to Van the Man. Walking in that \u201cbeauty way,\u201d if you will. Can you imagine what that must have been like? The spell that video casts is more intoxicating than any drug.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then, just like that, no matter how many times I watch it, the spell is inevitably broken.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDawn!\u201d Robbie declares as Van the Man fades into the background and the video concludes. \u201cWe gotta pack! We gotta go!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Getty Images<\/p>\n

For a certain kind of person\u2014a classic-rock partisan, a devotee of \u201cNew Hollywood\u201d cinema, a reader of this very website, perhaps\u2014Insomnia offers plenty of other vicarious, \u201changout\u201d-style pleasures. It opens with a vignette about Robertson attending a Muhammad Ali fight in New Orleans with Robert De Niro\u2014sorry, I mean Bobby\u2014Harvey Keitel, and Jake LaMotta. Later, the reader is whisked to London for a visit with Jack Nicholson during the making of The Shining, followed by a drop-in at George Harrison\u2019s pad. Back home, Robbie and Marty encounter so many legendary filmmakers that their social calendar resembles a cinephile\u2019s Letterboxd account: Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Powell, Gillo Pontecorvo, Milos Forman, Wim Wenders, and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If I weren\u2019t a sucker for this sort of thing, I might accuse Robertson of being an inveterate name-dropper. But the bulk of Insomnia is centered on his relationship with Scorsese, which started with a meeting in 1973 at a screening of Mean Streets but didn\u2019t begin in earnest until Robbie tapped Marty to direct The Last Waltz three years later. Robbie sensed, correctly, that Marty had an intense connection with music from the inventive ways he used songs of every genre in his previous films.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The filming of The Last Waltz was covered by Robertson in Testimony, so Insomnia picks up during the editing process, when Robbie suddenly needed a place to stay after an impasse in his marriage to his then-wife, Dominique Bourgeois. Scorsese, similarly, was having problems with Julia Cameron, his second spouse, whom he had just married in 1976. (They eventually divorced, while Robertson later reconciled with Dominique until their union ended in 2003.)<\/p>\n

As Robertson recalls, Scorsese was quick to invite him to move in, even though they were more like professional collaborators than personal friends at that point. \u201cAs I registered the news, I thought, Wow, he\u2019s kind of in the same sinking boat as me,\u201d he writes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

They put their minds off this slow-motion drowning with nightly routines of movie watching and music listening. Marty would pick the films (Visconti or Bu\u00f1uel, one of Robertson\u2019s faves) and Robertson the tunes (Ray Charles or George Jones, even though Mean Streets cowriter Mardik Martin made fun of the latter). In each other, they saw what the other guy wanted to be. \u201cHe had a quiet yearning to be a great musician,\u201d Robertson says. \u201cAnd the magic of making movies had lived inside me for as far back as I could remember.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

More on Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese <\/p>\n

More on Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese <\/p>\n

Insomnia gets a lot of mileage out of exploring their so-called \u201codd couple\u201d dynamic. Robertson describes Scorsese as \u201ca cross between Che Guevara and George Patton\u2014relaxed, but in control of the battlefield.\u201d Marty, actually, doesn\u2019t come off all that relaxed. Hints of his volatility linger throughout the book, though it\u2019s not Robertson\u2019s style to spell out the darkness in either man\u2019s life with too much specificity. (Like how he refers to cocaine euphemistically as a \u201clittle pick me up.\u201d) As Robertson tells it, Scorsese\u2019s inner turmoil was rarely unleashed at his roommate\u2019s expense, except when he turned up late for their evening screening and his dinner turned cold. (\u201cI appreciated Marty\u2019s concern about my nutritional well-being,\u201d Robertson offers, dryly.) This slow-burning anger did, however, sometimes manifest in Scorsese\u2019s relationships with women; Robertson recalls one busted-up hotel room in the aftermath of a spat with Liza Minnelli, Marty\u2019s lover during the production of 1977\u2019s New York New York. Elsewhere, Robbie spies his friend chasing \u201ca nice-looking brunette I didn\u2019t know\u201d down the driveway in only his pajama top. \u201cHis white legs were just a blur going by,\u201d he remembers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If women could be a problem for Scorsese, they were a balm for Robertson. The topic he is most candid about in Insomnia is his way with the ladies. He names the famous actors he romanced while estranged from his first wife, including Genevi\u00e8ve Bujold, Tuesday Weld, and Summer of \u201942 star Jennifer O\u2019Neill. (He also attempted to hook up with Sophia Loren, who was married at the time, but was gently rebuffed.) No less an authority than Warren Beatty acknowledged Robertson\u2019s long list of trysts, inviting him to stay at his new Mulholland Drive mansion. But Scorsese swiftly intervened. \u201cJust then,\u201d Robertson recalls, \u201cMarty turned and said, \u2018We\u2019ve got a screening room. We\u2019re all set up. Our own chef, incredible sound system …\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The bedroom tales speak to Robertson\u2019s well-established egotism, which fans and detractors alike have recognized since (at least) witnessing all those worshipful glamour shots in The Last Waltz. (That was a particular topic of derision for Robbie\u2019s onetime best friend and bandmate Levon Helm, who hated the movie for its focus on Robertson and referred to Scorsese in his own memoir<\/a> as \u201cthe dummy.\u201d) But the casual sexual escapades also underscore that the real love affair at the heart of Insomnia is, in fact, between Robertson and Scorsese.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To Marty, Robbie must have seemed like a figure out of the Westerns and film noir pictures he grew up on. With his smoky voice and dark hair, Robertson resembled the sexy, guitar-playing outlaw portrayed by Gregory Peck in 1946\u2019s Duel in the Sun, a formative film of Scorsese\u2019s youth. And then there\u2019s the matter of Marty\u2019s famous fanaticism for music, particularly guitar-heavy, bluesy rock. Robertson put this former asthmatic kid, forever the outsider aesthete who could listen to records but never live inside them, directly into the heart of the rock world in a way precious few non-musicians ever experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for Robertson, Scorsese was his ticket out of that world. In the book, he alludes to potential reunions with his old partners in the Band that never materialized, culminating with a phone call to Helm, where the irascible drummer is dismissive about a possible role in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner\u2019s Daughter. While Helm was later cast in the movie, Robertson identifies this moment as the catalyst for deciding he \u201cwanted new challenges, new quests, new bloods, new roads.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Robertson doesn\u2019t say it outright, the implication is that he was joining up with a new partner. And that collaboration, unlike his involvement with the Band, lasted well beyond the \u201970s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Getty Images<\/p>\n

When I interviewed Robertson in 2018<\/a>, I was struck by how much he talked about movies, even though the purpose of our talk was a recent reissue of the Band\u2019s 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink. No matter the question, the answer always seemed to circle back to cinema. He recalled how, when he lived in New York City, he frequented a bookstore that sold screenplays, which prompted him to start collecting scripts. One day, he stopped to look for Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s The Exterminating Angel, and the clerk called out for a coworker to locate it. Her name was Fanny, a name Robertson filed away for when he later wrote \u201cThe Weight.\u201d Though, when he looked back on the story more than 50 years later, he dwelled less on the iconic song than on a potential alternate career path. \u201cIf I hadn’t gotten so caught up in music at such an early age and playing professionally by the time I was 16 years old, I would’ve probably veered into movie land,\u201d he admitted.<\/p>\n

Insomnia charts the beginning of that mid-career veer into movie land, with The Last Waltz and then Raging Bull, for which Scorsese recruited Robertson to write and record some incidental music for a nightclub scene. He also discusses 1980\u2019s Carny, a mostly forgotten character study he starred in, produced, and cowrote. A real \u201cThey don\u2019t make \u2019em like this anymore\u201d kind of movie, it follows an unlikely love triangle involving Robertson, a low-level carnival operator; a clown played by Gary Busey; and a teenage runaway portrayed by Jodie Foster. If that sounds like the opposite of \u201ccommercial cinema,\u201d it might explain the film\u2019s paltry $1.8 million gross, about a third of its budget.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Robbie had better luck sticking with Marty. Had Robertson lived longer, it\u2019s possible Insomnia would have further explored his work with Scorsese in the \u201980s and beyond. (He was, according to his final published interview<\/a>, still working on the book when he died in 2023.) They made, in all, 11 movies together. Sometimes Robbie served as a film composer, a role that began with 1986\u2019s The Color Of Money. You hear Robertson\u2019s soulful moan over the opening credits, and his guitar slashes and warbles throughout as Paul Newman and Tom Cruise hustle from one pool hall to the next. (He also cowrote the film\u2019s signature song, the Eric Clapton Michelob rock standard \u201cIt’s in the Way That You Use It.\u201d) A more personal form of songwriting occurs on the soundtrack for 1983\u2019s The King of Comedy, which Robertson produced. \u201cBetween Trains\u201d was his first lead vocal on one of his own songs, revealing the limited but expressive throaty tenor he withheld when the Band\u2019s trio of excellent vocalists was at his disposal. Lyrically, it outlines a state of transition that was more reflective of Robbie\u2019s life at the time than Rupert Pupkin\u2019s. \u201cIf I’m too young to learn \/ Or too old to change \/ I guess I’ll always be \/ Between trains.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

More often than composing music for Scorsese, however, he was curating it, either as a consultant, music supervisor, or\u2014as he was frequently billed\u2014executive music producer. As someone who often rewatches Scorsese movies just to pay attention to the music, I can\u2019t help but speculate on which tunes are \u201cRobbie\u201d songs and which ones are \u201cMarty\u201d tracks. On the Casino soundtrack\u2014you can see Robbie pictured with Marty in the liner notes\u2014you have Muddy Waters and the Staple Singers, both of whom appear in The Last Waltz. (There\u2019s also Clarence \u201cFrogman\u201d Henry\u2019s \u201cI Ain\u2019t Got No Home,\u201d a song covered by the Band on 1973\u2019s Moondog Matinee.) And then there\u2019s Roger Waters\u2019s The Wall\u2014Live in Berlin version of \u201cComfortably Numb,\u201d which was fairly obscure until it appeared in 2006\u2019s The Departed. That rendition famously features Van Morrison on the soaring chorus, though if you listen close, you can also hear Robertson\u2019s former bandmates Rick Danko and Levon Helm on the harmonies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the Marty side, as detailed in Rebecca Miller\u2019s excellent 2025 documentary, Mr. Scorsese, he literally wrote Cream\u2019s \u201cSunshine of Your Love\u201d into the screenplay for Goodfellas. He was also a fan of Phil Collins\u2019s \u201cOne More Night,\u201d which he played late into the evening while making The Color of Money, according to Ian Christie and David Thompson\u2019s book Scorsese on Scorsese. (This is<\/a>, I contend, one of the great needle drops in the Scorsese canon.) \u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2014, while promoting The Wolf of Wall Street, Robertson offered some insight into their process. \u201cI go through hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music over a period of months and build what I call Marty\u2019s Juke Box,\u201d he told Fast Company<\/a>. \u201cHe has all these songs so he can try different things in different places. Some songs are for specific scenes, and certain things are just like \u2018Marty you\u00a0gotta\u00a0hear this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

For Wolf, Robertson pushed for fire-and-brimstone blues numbers like Elmore James\u2019s \u201cDust My Broom\u201d and Howlin\u2019 Wolf\u2019s \u201cSmokestack Lightning,\u201d which play against the film\u2019s late-\u201980s\/early-\u201990s milieu while providing a sense of Old Testament\u2013style reckoning. Those songs are also in Robbie\u2019s stylistic wheelhouse, though he could pivot to different styles if the film demanded it. For 2010\u2019s Shutter Island, he stacked Marty\u2019s Juke Box with modern classical music pieces by composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and John Cage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On each movie, Scorsese took the music Robertson collected and painstakingly matched it with his images, an undertaking that could take a long time. (Wolf, for example, was in the editing room for a year.)\u00a0I wonder if this ever felt like those late-night \u201cwalking in the beauty way\u201d hangs from the late \u201970s. Was the work an excuse to be together, or vice versa?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Getty Images<\/p>\n

In Mr. Scorsese, the \u201980s are depicted as the filmmaker\u2019s most trying decade, the period when he was furthest from the mainstream. The same can be said of Robertson and his proximity to the music world at that time. For years, he rented studio space at the West Hollywood studio Village Recorder\u2014the same place where the Band backed Bob Dylan on 1974\u2019s Planet Waves\u2014for $12,000 a month. It was the start of him easing back into making a proper album again, but what was his place now?\u00a0<\/p>\n

By 1986, he was signed with Geffen, the label that would soon make a mint from Guns N\u2019 Roses\u2019 Appetite for Destruction. That\u2019s the kind of album most record executives could justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on, not a long-gestating song cycle from a 40-something-year-old boomer icon. Robertson plowed forward anyway, landing on Daniel Lanois as his producer. A French Canadian associate of Brian Eno, Lanois was newly rich and industry famous for coproducing a pair of prestige blockbusters, 1986\u2019s So for Peter Gabriel and 1987\u2019s The Joshua Tree for U2. Around the same time, Lanois clearly pulled from that work for Robbie\u2019s self-titled solo debut, which radically broke from the rustic naturalism of the Band for an elaborate sonic tableau that resembled an amalgam of So\u2019s and The Joshua Tree\u2019s impeccable, cathedral-like art rock. (Gabriel and U2 both appear on the record.)<\/p>\n

Upon its release in 1987, Robbie Robertson was greeted in some quarters as a masterpiece. (Rolling Stone named it one of the best albums of the \u201980s.) But a lot of people hated the production, which seemed to purposefully obfuscate Robertson\u2019s persona with the Band. Greil Marcus bemoaned that the album\u2019s sound\u2014so heavy on Lanois trademarks like reverb and processed effects\u2014made it \u201chard to discern an actual human being behind any of it,\u201d while Robert Christgau concluded that Robertson \u201calways took himself too seriously.\u201d Decades later, however, I would argue that Robbie Robertson not only slots next to the best of the Band but also holds up as an authentically important record in a subgenre I call \u201cfuturist Americana.\u201d This refers to albums that Lanois subsequently produced for Bob Dylan (Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind), Emmylou Harris (Wrecking Ball), and Willie Nelson (Teatro), as well as the next generation of acts inspired by those artists, like Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) and the War on Drugs (Lost in the Dream). The common denominator is using the latest technology to create music that paradoxically sounds ancient, slightly broken, and reminiscent of a distant, dusty past.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Robbie Robertson is another chapter in the Robertson-Scorsese partnership. Marty directed the video for \u201cSomewhere Down the Crazy River,\u201d Robbie\u2019s most cinematic song and the one where he flirts aggressively with self-parody, as he purrs lustily about \u201claying in the back seat listening to Little Willie John\u201d while fondling the fetching Lone Justice singer Maria McKee. I also suspect that Scorsese\u2019s decision to hire Gabriel to score The Last Temptation of Christ, which came out the following year, had something to do with that album, which has an ecstatic intensity similar to Gabriel\u2019s music for the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the most important aspect of Robbie Robertson, as it pertains to the Robbie-Marty union, is the Native American imagery. It\u2019s most evident on the best song (and one of Robertson\u2019s greatest overall compositions), a heartbreaking ballad couched in an Indigenous phrase for reconciliation: \u201cBroken Arrow.\u201d Born to a mother of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage who was raised on the Six Nations of the Grand River reservation outside of Toronto, Robertson explained to The Los Angeles Times<\/a> in 1987 that his cultural background always \u201cintrigued\u201d him but that he \u201cdidn\u2019t feel right imposing this on the Band.\u201d However, for his cinematic work with Scorsese, it would become the subject of their last big collaboration more than 35 years after first teaming up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Killers of the Flower Moon, Robertson drew on memories of hearing music at Six Nations, \u201cwhile I\u2019m sitting there and my relatives are all sitting around with their instruments and singing and breathing,\u201d he told Variety<\/a>. That said, what he wrote for the film was not, he confessed, \u201cstereotypical Indian music,\u201d but rather gnarled-up blues with stinging guitar licks, like the tunes he stumped for during The Wolf of Wall Street. \u201cA swarm of guitars,\u201d was how he put it,\u00a0\u201cthe sounds and textures and rhythmic feels, all just kind of swamping around one another.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knew, after all, that Marty likes guitars. But Scorsese also needed Robertson\u2019s music to convey a constant feeling of underlying menace. \u201cGive me something dangerous and fleshy\u201d was Marty\u2019s command, so that\u2019s what Robbie gave him. That swarm of guitars constantly lurks in the sound mix, steadily pulsing and pounding, like a tiger hiding in the bushes. It\u2019s the spine of a movie that has the feel and scope of a mythic Robbie Robertson song about the underbelly of America. Like \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,\u201d where he writes, without judgment or excuse, about a racist Southerner who is humiliated by the Confederacy\u2019s defeat. In Killers, there\u2019s a similar tension in how Scorsese treats his protagonist, the oafish serial murderer played by Leonardo DiCaprio who victimizes his wife in the worst possible ways but also sincerely loves her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Killers of the Flower Moon is Robertson\u2019s finest work as a film composer and eventually garnered an Oscar nomination. (He lost to Ludwig Goransson for Oppenheimer.) But Robbie didn\u2019t live to see the film\u2019s release. Robertson had been in remission from prostate cancer for 25 years, but the disease came back in 2022 and spread to his spine and brain. He died on August 9, 2023, two months before the film\u2019s opening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Scorsese dedicated it to him. Scorsese also offered a different kind of tribute to Rolling Stone<\/a>, writing a stream-of-consciousness remembrance that unfolds more like a screenplay operating on dream logic than a normal eulogy. He calls himself the Bob Hope to Robbie\u2019s Bing Crosby, an old movie geek reference his friend would have appreciated. He speaks of the art they experienced together\u2014Visconti\u2019s Senso, Samuel Fuller, Willie Dixon, even the Sex Pistols, which Marty used to blast around the house to Robbie\u2019s annoyance. (\u201cThey have no musicianship!\u201d he complained.) And he talks about how every Thanksgiving they would get on the phone to reminisce about The Last Waltz.<\/p>\n

At one point, Marty puts himself back in that hotel room from 1978. \u201cThe sun is coming up. The only thing left to do was to put on \u2018Tupelo Honey,\u2019\u201d he writes. \u201cThat\u2019s what always happened. Van and \u2018Tupelo Honey.\u2019 It was sort of our sign off.\u201d For his 80th birthday, Marty adds, Robbie even brought out Van the Man himself to sing as a surprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What a friend. What a love affair. But now it\u2019s over. Marty concludes with this: \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m going to listen to \u2018Tupelo Honey\u2019 anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Steven Hyden<\/p>\n

<\/a>Steven Hyden is a writer, podcaster, and author of six books, including \u2018There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen\u2019s \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.\u201d and the End of the Heartland.\u2019 You can find his work at Uproxx.com and his Substack, Evil Speakers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new posthumous memoir by Robertson, \u2018Insomnia,\u2019 details his relationship with the director from the late 1970s until…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129495,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-129494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}