INSOMNIA

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 as The Searchers and Touch 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.