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In 1970, Neil Young released Southern Man, a song that condemned the racism and violent history of the American South with an unflinching directness — slavery, lynching, the specific moral rot Young identified in Southern culture, delivered over one of his most aggressive and extended guitar workouts. Two years later he released Alabama, which extended … Read more
When Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 — a dismissal driven primarily by his escalating substance abuse and the band’s exhaustion with managing it — he was, by his own account, finished. Not metaphorically. He has described the months following his firing as among the darkest of his life, a period of … Read more
Queen’s reputation as a band of total creative democracy — four songwriters, four distinct voices, songs credited individually rather than as a collective — is largely accurate and is also a slight smoothing-over of a creative process that involved real friction, particularly between Mercury’s increasingly theatrical and genre-defying instincts and Brian May’s more rock-oriented sensibilities. … Read more
Creedence Clearwater Revival released seven studio albums in four years between 1968 and 1972, a pace of productivity that produced some of the most enduring American rock music of the era and that simultaneously destroyed the band from the inside. The mythology of CCR’s collapse is usually told as a story of John Fogerty’s controlling … Read more
In 1969, a group of working-class musicians from Birmingham, England walked into a recording studio with a sound that record executives, radio programmers, and most of the established music press considered unmarketable, unmusical, and frankly upsetting. They were told, repeatedly and by people whose job it was to know better, that what they were making … Read more
The breakup of Pink Floyd’s central creative partnership is the longest-running unresolved conflict in British rock history, and Roger Waters has spent the years since explaining it in pieces — in interviews scattered across decades, in documentaries, in the occasional unguarded moment when a journalist asked the right question at the right time. What emerges … Read more
The first time I truly understood what forty-seven days could do to a man, I was sitting on the edge of Caleb’s empty bed at 3:47 a.m., staring at the blue fleece blanket still dented from where his head had last rested. My fourteen-year-old son had vanished between our front door and the school-bus stop—four … Read more
Bikers don’t go looking for trouble. But when Elena missed her third straight shift at Rosie’s, trouble came looking for us with its teeth bared. Saturday morning the bell over the door chimed like it always did, but the stool at the end of the counter stayed empty. Rosie kept glancing at it while she … Read more
The fluorescent lights buzzed like trapped wasps above Aisle 7 of Miller’s Grocery on that bitter Ohio evening. I rolled my shoulders under my cut, the Steel Vultures MC patches stiff with road dust, and joined the checkout line with nothing but a quart of milk and a craving for silence. At sixty-eight, with forty-four … Read more
The October wind cut like a scalpel across the empty parking lot of the old Piggly Wiggly on the outskirts of Birmingham. It was 7:47 p.m., the kind of raw, wet cold that seeps into eighty-two-year-old joints and makes every breath feel like broken glass. I sat on the metal bench outside the automatic doors, … Read more