No. 564 – The Main Title

Performer: Robbie Robertson

Songwriter: Robbie Robertson

Original Release: The Color of Money

Year: 1986

Definitive Version: None

OK, today’s post is neither long nor too heavy, I promise.

The first time I saw The Color of Money, I was McKayla Maroney—not impressed. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe more pool trickery, maybe a happier ending. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to absorb what Scorsese was trying to tell me, I don’t know.

Whatever, after Debbie and I broke up, The Color of Money was on HBO, and I wanted to see it again, because I had forgotten so much about it in the 16 years hence. This time, it hit me like a sledgehammer break, and it became regular—almost essential—late-night viewing in 2001-2002.

I did a lot of late-night TV viewing in those days. It fit my post-breakup depression. Besides, I knew I couldn’t listen to music in my room, because my next-door neighbor would hear it and come over in his bathrobe and bang on my door—or just call the cops, like he threatened. I had to confine my music listening to the day unless I wanted to wear headphones.

So my routine became coming home from work and putting on The Color of Money or Fight Club, or both, and having a glass of wine or two, or a whole bottle, and sit in my otherwise stark apartment feeling sorry for myself.

Actually, the living room was about the only room, aside from my bedroom, I guess, where I got it together enough to put up decorations or even arrange the furniture so you’d want to spend any time there.

I had a four-room apartment with a basement, and the only rooms I ever spent any time in aside from the kitchen were my bedroom and the living room. I had boxes piled in and around my unused dining table and chairs for months before I at least decided to make that room at least presentable.

And I never did reopen my baseball room. The whole point of getting a two-bedroom apartment when I moved out was so I could rebuild to some degree what I had at the house, but in the nearly two years I lived in my Clintonville apartment, the second bedroom was nothing more than storage for dozens of boxes of pennants, books, posters, baseballs and caps all waiting for a day when they’d again see the light of it.

To a certain extent, during this time, I was, too.