Forty-one of us had just finished the toy run when Deacon’s phone started buzzing like a live wire. We were still in the hospital parking lot, cold breath hanging in the December air, when he answered. His sister’s girl, barely twenty, was crying so hard the words came out in pieces. The little storefront church … Read more
Silas Pendleton had spent most of his life standing between other people and the dark. At seventy-two he had decided the dark could find someone else. He had been a combat medic in the Central Highlands when he was barely more than a boy, then a trauma nurse in a city hospital that never slept, … Read more
The porch light was already on when I left. My wife didn’t ask where I was going. Twenty-six years married to a man who wears a patch, she already knew. Deacon Harlow got jumped at 6:41 p.m. behind the QuikStop on County Road 14. Not a bar fight. Not a parking-lot shove. Three men in … Read more
It was supposed to be an ordinary evening at home. A teenager was playing video games. His mother was frustrated. The internet was disconnected. And within minutes, a family argument would become a tragedy that no one in the house could ever undo. February 2, 2018. Macon, Georgia. Sixteen-year-old Kevon Watkins was reportedly playing video … Read more
I am Mara. I have poured coffee at Lila’s off Highway 19 since I was twenty. I know the regulars by what they leave on the saucer. His was black. No cream. Same corner stool by the glass. Same quiet face. He came in near dusk, ate two eggs over easy, left a three-dollar tip. … Read more
The origin story of ZZ Top’s recording process in the early 1970s is one of the most specifically American narratives in rock history — three musicians from Texas who understood that the music they were making had a specific relationship with the physical geography of where they came from, and who made the deliberate decision … Read more
Warren Zevon was diagnosed with mesothelioma — an inoperable lung cancer — in August 2002. He was 55 years old. The doctors who delivered the diagnosis told him he had three to six months to live. He lived for thirteen months — thirteen months during which he made an album, gave the last major interview … Read more
Rod Stewart’s career is one of the most dramatically bifurcated in rock history — a division so complete that the two halves of it seem to have been lived by different people who happen to share a voice and a haircut. The early Rod Stewart — the one who made Every Picture Tells a Story … Read more
Mark Knopfler is the most literate songwriter in rock — not in the sense of writing about books, though he has done that too, but in the sense of understanding that a lyric is a compressed narrative, that what is not said in a song is as important as what is said, and that the … Read more
Muddy Waters is the man from whom the most important music of the twentieth century flows — not metaphorically, but in the specific documented sense of a traceable line from his recordings at Stovall’s Plantation in Mississippi in 1941 and his Chicago recordings of the late 1940s and early 1950s to the Rolling Stones, Led … Read more