In 1969, American radio played Proud Mary more times than any other song. This is a statement about commercial success that is unremarkable — what is remarkable is the context of its creation, the speed at which it went from nothing to the most played song in the country, and what that speed reveals about … Read more
The story of how Crosby, Stills and Nash first sang together has been told many times — at Joni Mitchell’s house in Laurel Canyon in 1968, the three of them harmonizing for the first time and producing a sound that has been described by all three participants and by the people who were present with … Read more
Eddie Van Halen is the guitarist who most completely changed what rock guitar was understood to be between 1978 and 1984 — not by discovering something new about the instrument, because the techniques he used had existed in various forms before him, but by combining those techniques with a melodic sensibility, a sense of humor, … Read more
On October 20, 1977, a chartered Convair CV-240 aircraft carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana ran out of fuel over the Mississippi forest and crashed into a swamp near Gillsburg, Mississippi. The crash killed lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, the … Read more
Ted Nugent has spent fifty years being one of the most controversial figures in American rock — not primarily because of his music, which is the thing that controversies about musicians are usually about, but because of his political positions, his hunting advocacy, his public persona of aggressive confrontation with anyone who disagrees with him … Read more
There are specific moments in the history of music when someone walks into a professional environment — a room full of experienced musicians, seasoned engineers, producers who have heard everything — and within minutes changes the atmosphere of that room from professional to reverent. Not through any deliberate performance of greatness, not through any conscious … Read more
The creative relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop during the Berlin period — 1976 through 1979, the years that produced The Idiot, Lust for Life, Low, Heroes, and Lodger — is the most productive creative friendship in rock history, measured not by commercial output but by the quality of what the two men produced … Read more
The dissolution of the classic Guns N’ Roses lineup — the five musicians who made Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion and who constituted, by the assessment of their commercial peak, the most dangerous and most exciting band in the world — happened not in a single dramatic confrontation but in the specific way … Read more
The specific window of creative output that Stevie Wonder produced between 1972 and 1976 — the four years that yielded Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life — is the most concentrated period of musical achievement in the history of popular music, and the statement … Read more
There are moments of grief that arrive not at the expected times — not at the funeral, not in the first hours after the news, not in the formal contexts that society constructs for the purpose of containing loss — but in ordinary situations, ambushed by something specific and small that the general fact of … Read more