Dear Robbie Robertson,
I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. On the day I turned ten, the magician called me onstage, said he was going to make me levitate, and played a song that cast a spell so deep I believed I was floating. Later that day, while driving back home to New York, my parents asked me to reveal the magician’s secrets. I said there were no secrets. I was floating. It was magic.
I promise this isn’t another angry letter about how you didn’t write the songs. I try to believe what you said, Robbie, I really do, that Levon, Rick, and Richard contributed more to the spirit of the thing, which can’t be accounted for by way of bookkeeping. You drew up contracts. You did the paperwork. I’ve never been much of a paperwork guy myself. I’m not sure how to do much of anything at all.
Confused,
Owen Mahoney
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Hey Robbie,
I’m sorry to hear about your passing. I wish I’d written earlier. I’ve never had great timing. I know that at the end of your life you were out in LA, doing the whole guru thing, but I wonder if you remember how it used to snow up in Woodstock, or West Saugerties, right there at the foot of the Catskills, not too far from where good old Rip Van Winkle took one too many trips to the flagon and fell asleep for twenty years.
I first watched The Last Waltz twenty years ago, at Nixon’s house, which was the kind of place you wanted to be when it snowed. His family had this den that was like a portal into a better time. Built-in bookshelves, old hearth filled with orange fire, grand bay window looking out to the forest. We couldn’t understand how you made the concert look like the den we were in. All we’d ever wanted was on the stage: soft, dim lights; heavy, red drapes; antique wooden furniture; brass chandeliers and candelabras. It was the first time my insides felt coeval with the outside world. I had Scarlett, the one true love of my life, on my lap and my best friend Roland beside me. It was all coming together as the spotlight shined on Levon, who was drumming and getting ready to sing, but all I could make out was your guitar, Robbie, those same chords I’d heard all those years ago at the Houdini Museum.
Even though Levon carries Up on Cripple Creek, you’re in the foreground, obscuring his face with your guitar. Scarlett turned to me and asked how they made the guitar sound like drums. We laughed about that one for years. I’m wondering now if she knew what you were up to.
Same as ever,
Owen Mahoney
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Robbie, old buddy old pal,
What does it mean to dip your donut in someone’s tea? Roland and I used to get out of our minds and scream that line as loud as possible. We’d be out at some party, no idea how we got there, and Roland would force them to play that song. We used to love doing things we couldn’t understand but nowadays I wouldn’t mind some clarity.
I stole the whole screaming thing from Scarlett. Her friends used to play Ophelia and shout the words until their voices were hoarse. I hate Ophelia because it dead-on predicted what would happen to Scarlett and me. They had the whole thing mapped out.
Scarlett’s parents never liked me, either. They’d tell me the same story about Scarlett’s aunt, who was all set to marry her high school sweetheart until he vanished and she spent the rest of her life waiting for him. It must have been much easier to disappear back then.
Sincerely,
Your “Friend” Owen
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Is it true that Neil Young thought his performance of Helpless so bad that he tried to go backstage and kill himself? I mean yeah, he looks like a caveman, totally deranged, and I know he started with the wrong song they got it now Robbie but when the voice emerges it lifts me out of this world and there’s no way you make something that beautiful then think suicide, right?
Is it true that they had to edit cocaine out of Neil’s nose in postproduction? Did he really have a whole half-a-gram up there?
Is it true that Neil didn’t know you’d have Joni Mitchell behind that sheer curtain there, harmonizing with him? Roland said this made Neil all upset because he and Joni were former lovers. Used to be that you couldn’t look that sort of information up. Had to trust the source. But Roland got that one wrong because Joni didn’t date Neil, she dated David Crosby, and I didn’t know, as we sat there on the couch in Nixon’s den with the fire burning and snow falling outside, that after Scarlett left me, she’d go on sleeping with Roland for a long while. Maybe Roland knew more than he let on. We don’t talk much anymore. Most of our messages are just, like, big birds flying across the skies and then he goes dark for months at a time.
Here's the thing about Roland. One night we invited a bunch of friends who hadn’t seen the concert over to Nixon’s and afterwards Roland was like “that was insane, right?” and we waited for a response but it was totally silent and then we realized there was no one else in the room with us and couldn’t remember if anyone had ever been there. We used to think that sort of thing was pretty funny.
Roland said you guys had a white room instead of a green room and glued tons of those Groucho Marx glasses with the big noses to the walls then left razor blades on glass tables and had a cassette tape play sniffing and snorting noises. He said you and Scorsese did a ton of coke together in the sixties while he was in film school at NYU and later you moved into Scorsese’s house in LA. Roland knew that the Denver Airport was evil at least five years before I heard anyone else talk about it. He told us Clapton disbanded Cream after hearing Music from Big Pink and The Band cut your mic because you couldn’t sing but everyone knew you’d try to hog every song. Still, Marty has the camera trained on you the whole time like you’re the best signer of the bunch. I guess it just hurts to realize the whole thing wasn’t even real. It was all set design and camera tricks.
•
Dear Mr. Robertson,
I never did cocaine. The comedown scared me. I didn’t have the happiness to spare. Most fears don’t work at all, but that fear worked for me. Not that it did me any good. Had to quit everything else. And right when I was trying to get it together, Scarlett took to the powder. I’d be curled up in bed, praying for an hour of sleep, and she’d call me, laughing, mocking me with her friends. I wished she’d leave me alone but when she did, when she stopped pestering me, I stopped eating. I was certain that a single noodle could make me choke and die. I was too afraid to leave the house but terrified of staying inside. My mom said Owen you can’t throw your whole life away over one relationship. I watched The Last Waltz 100 times like everything would click into place and I’d drop back into Nixon’s den. I played Caravan again and again and rewound the part where Van Morrison says switch on your electric light like it could break me back to normal because that line used to be a sort of code. You know the way Van says ra-dee-oh for radio then keeps grumbling really wrong really wrong really wrong? We weren’t sure why he did it all garbled like that but it made a lot of sense to us.
Sincerely,
Mr. Mahoney
•
Do you have a theory on how Houdini died? Do you think J. Gordon Whitehead did it with those punches to the gut? All that poison spreading through Houdini’s stomach but he wanted to perform one last time before heading to the hospital. Your bandmates kept trying to tour, even after you declared that they were finished, and then Richard Manuel hanged himself and Rick Danko’s heart failed. I used to have these nightmares that I was hanging on to the edge of a well and dear old dad was removing my fingers one at a time until I fell down the hole and woke up on the floor of my bedroom. When I was twelve, and my appendix burst, my dad left me in bed. I woke up in the hospital with poison draining out of a tube in my stomach. The doctor said I would have died if my mom hadn’t showed up and driven me straight to the emergency room. I began to dream about falling again, tumbling through space until I landed on the sidewalk, and I’d wake, this time in bed, with pain shooting through my abdomen.
Your old BUDDY your PAL
OWEN
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Mr. Jamie Royal Robert Robbie Robertson,
Why is it when I search your name the first photo that comes up doesn’t even look like you? You’re all big and bloated. I’ve been thin three times in my life. Twice by accident. I weighed 204 pounds when I first watched the concert. Yesterday, I weighed in at 307. They only ever give me Seroquel here, which makes it impossible to do anything aside from sit around and eat junk. One guy keeps five different kinds of candy bars in his bedside table, and he just tears right into them when he wakes up in the middle of the night to keep the cravings at bay.
I read that after Danko kicked heroin he couldn’t stop eating and at the end of his life he weighed 350 pounds. Guy couldn’t have weighed more than 160 in The Last Waltz. Hollowed out, voice trembling, rest of the stage all dark and he’s up there grinding his jaw so hard it locks out of place on every high note.
Sincere as I can be,
Owen M.
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Hey Robbie,
You know those moments where you’d all nod to each other like, yeah, we’re somewhere else now? That’s where we wanted to go. By the time the train arrived at the station and I wished I’d never left. Chocolate subway, marshmallow overcoat. I loved Richard because I could tell he had the brain fever and I was pretty sure I had the brain fever too, except I didn’t have any musical talent, so it was fun for a while until I got older and it just looked like brain fever to everyone else.
One day I closed my eyes and this awful other world opened on my eyelids and ever since then I’ve lived in fear of what I saw. There’s a brightness lodged inside my eyes that sunglasses can’t solve. My vision goes all blurry like a snow globe. I wake up and hear this ringing like an infinite dial tone. I try to sleep but when I close my eyes all I see is the side you’re not supposed to see.
?
•
Took me a while to learn that the interviews were all recorded after the show. You make a good point though, Robbie. Sixteen years on the road does seem excessive. I can relate to being so scared of something you can’t even think about it. I still have this dumb idea that if I hadn’t screwed up then things could have stayed the way they were forever. It’s an idea that’s destroyed me.
Always thought it funny that you start out in the spotlight since The Shape I’m In is Richard’s song, and by the time the camera pans there’s a shadow cast across the piano, and when the spotlight finally shifts to Richard it’s like everyone knows except for Richard. We’ve all been there before.
He has that big bushy beard and curly hair, his face ghost white. In his plaid blazer he looks damn near identical to my dad, who wore his hair and beard the same way. Dad’s jaundiced face was the same shade of yellow as he laid in the hospital bed at the end there.
While Richard Manuel stabs at those clavinet keys and sings, the camera is trained back on you, Robbie, and you’re really performing for the camera, calling out stage directions—all of this choreographed with your buddy Scorsese.
Over and out,
OM
•
You ever see that one video where a camera crew follows Gath Hudson to visit the house in West Saugerties? Garth said that he hadn’t been back in forty-seven years even though he’d been living ten minutes down the road. Then he said that everything at Big Pink was much bigger than he remembered it, and that made me feel pretty good. I really hope Garth wasn’t joking. I don’t want to wait forty-seven years.
•
Hey Robbie,
Neil Diamond? Did you really think we weren’t going to catch that one? The moment he came on screen we’d all scramble to find the remote and skip to the next performance. If the remote was missing, we just screamed loud as possible, so we never had to hear him sing. You’re the only one who talks about him in the introductory interview. You’ve got Muddy Waters, Neil Young, and Van Morrison there but you’re praising Neil fucking Diamond while the rest of The Band sits quiet and confused, looking like sick dogs waiting to be put down. Of course, after it was all over, while they were trying to figure out how they’d go on without The Band because you decided The Band was over, you were producing an album for Neil Diamond.
You didn’t show to Richard’s funeral even though you were in town and scheduled to give the eulogy. I don’t know where I read that. Maybe Roland told it to me. It’s sad, Robbie, but I get it. After my dad died, my mom moved down to Florida and I had this idea that I’d visit her and go stay at the Quality Inn where Richard Manuel hanged himself, but the Quality Inn isn’t where it used to be in 1986. I think it’s a Hilton now. And the Cheek-to-Cheek Lounge, where he played his final show, is a Wawa. There’s a new Quality Inn down the street, next to a RaceTrac gas station, but it’s not even in Winter Park Village. And you know what else is weird? All this time I’m walking around Winter Park Village, thinking it looks just like home, thinking I’m at the end, that I’ve finally put it all together, and I come to find out that Winter Park Village was designed by the same guy as my hometown’s downtown. Well, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I try not to think about and before long I was back in front of those big mechanical doors because I’m not quite ready to give in. I walked up to the reception desk and the lady there had a poster tacked to the back wall of her workstation. It was the poster of you guys at Woodstock, so I asked her if she liked The Band.
“The Beatles?” She asked. “Well certainly, honey. I’m their biggest fan. At least around here I am.”
I was pretty confused because I hadn’t said anything about The Beatles.
“No,” I said, pointing to the poster, “The Band.”
“That there is The Beatles, darling. The Beatles are the band in that picture.”
You know when you see something far off the distance, and you’re so sure about what you’re seeing? Like you’re driving down some road and you say, “oh yeah, that’s an elephant,” but then you realize it’s a horse, and it had to be a horse the whole time because there aren’t wild elephants in New York. Well, the lady at the desk was right. Upon further inspection, The Beatles were the band in the picture.
Talk Soon,
Owen M.
•
Thought of something funny last night. After Levon passed, Roland emailed me this whole screenplay he’d written in which we dig up your bandmates’ graves, bring them back to life, and . . . well, he didn’t ever finish it, because Roland never finishes anything. It’s a nice idea, bringing people back to life. Communing with the dead. The Band Beyond the Grave. People still believe there must be all sorts of secret compartments in and around Houdini’s gravesite in Queens. One hundred years and no one has found a thing, but they’re still certain that the secrets are in there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Levon, Robbie, and how he died so angry. I don’t want to die angry, but I’m beginning to worry. I don’t know if a birthday means anything, but sometimes you find out someone was born the same day as you and you feel like you might be the same sort of person. You can’t help but wonder why your dad looks like Richard Manuel. See, Roland had this book that listed all the qualities of a person depending on the day they were born. Mine was dead on, all about how I’d meet an untimely demise if I failed to moderate. Makes me wonder how much say I ever had in this whole thing. You know the saying “you can’t put a jackass on a plane in New York and expect a thoroughbred to land in Florida”? Yeah, I’m in Florida now, but nothing has really changed. They don’t have wild elephants down here, either.
Eternally,
Owen Mahoney