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\Ray Charles was not a man who spoke about other artists with easy admiration. He had earned the right to be selective — a man who had survived poverty, the death of his brother, the loss of his sight at seven, heroin addiction, and decades of an industry that tried repeatedly to tell him what … Read more

On the evening of December 7, 1980, Paul McCartney attempted to reach John Lennon by telephone. The details of this call — whether it connected, what was said, whether McCartney reached Lennon directly or left a message with someone at the Dakota building — have been reported with slight variations across different accounts and McCartney … Read more

By 1973, Keith Richards was dying. Not in the rock and roll metaphorical sense — not in the sense of self-destruction as performance or excess as artistic statement — but in the plain medical sense of a man whose body was being systematically destroyed by heroin addiction and whose circle of enablers had grown so … Read more

The mythology of Elvis Presley’s decline has been told from the outside — through tabloid photographs, through concert footage that showed a man struggling inside a costume that had become a cage, through the clinical facts of the autopsy report and the pharmaceutical inventory that accompanied it. What has been told less thoroughly is the … Read more

Bob Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower in 1967, during the reclusive Woodstock period following his motorcycle accident — a period of withdrawal so complete that the public genuinely did not know whether he was alive, permanently damaged, or simply finished. He recorded it on John Wesley Harding in a style consistent with the album’s … Read more

The song that predicted the end of Simon and Garfunkel was recorded at the height of their partnership, in 1966, and was received as one of the most beautiful pieces of music either man had ever made. It was called The Sound of Silence. And buried inside its imagery of people talking without speaking and … Read more

In the spring of 1966, inside a London recording studio that smelled of cigarette smoke and tape oxide, a fifteen-year-old boy sat down at a piano and played something that stopped four of the most famous musicians in the world from speaking. The boy was Stevie Wonder. The four men were the Beatles. And what … Read more

There are songs that are written and there are songs that are survived. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me sits somewhere between those two categories — a piece of music that Elton John produced with the mechanical speed of a man for whom melody arrives like weather, and that contains inside it a … Read more