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Geddy Lee is one of the most technically accomplished musicians in rock history — a bassist, vocalist, and keyboardist whose combination of skills on a single stage has been described by musicians across genres as among the most remarkable in live performance. He has spent fifty years inside Rush’s catalog with the specific intimacy of … Read more

There is a specific kind of discomfort that the greatest artists experience about their most celebrated work — not the discomfort of failure, which is understandable and universal, but the discomfort of success that arrives at a cost, of songs that became so large and so permanent in the public consciousness that the person who … Read more

The romantic history between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham is the most extensively documented relationship in rock and roll — documented not through tabloid reporting or unauthorized biography but through the songs themselves, which constitute a running public account of two people who fell in love as teenagers in California, built one of the most … Read more

In the summer of 1969, two of the most significant and most self-destructive figures in American rock music were living parallel lives in Los Angeles — not parallel in the sense of similar circumstances, because Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison had genuinely different relationships with their own pain and their own talent and their own … Read more

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have been not speaking to each other, then speaking to each other, then not speaking to each other, in a cycle that has repeated across fifty years with a regularity that suggests neither man has found a way to be in the other’s presence for extended periods without something eventually … Read more

David Bowie’s cultural significance extends well beyond his music in a way that few artists’ significance does — not because the music is insufficient, which it demonstrably is not, but because what he communicated through the music and through his public persona spoke to something in the people who heard it that was not primarily … Read more

The recording of Hotel California in 1976 and 1977 has been described in the official accounts of the Eagles’ history with the standard narrative of creative triumph — the band at their peak, the material coming together, the production achieving the specific sound that the recording has become iconic for. The unofficial account, assembled from … Read more

In the summer of 1969, the two greatest live acts in British rock were Led Zeppelin and The Who — and the specific quality of their greatness was different enough that the comparison between them functioned not as a ranking but as an argument about what live performance was fundamentally for. The Who represented the … Read more

There are performances that exist in two dimensions simultaneously — the one the audience experiences in the moment, which is a concert, and the one that becomes visible only afterward, which is something else entirely. The audience at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh on September 23, 1980 attended a Bob Marley and the Wailers concert. … Read more