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The Eagles broke up on July 31, 1980, in the middle of a concert in Long Beach, California, in a manner so abrupt and so definitively final that the people present — the audience, the road crew, the management — took several minutes to fully understand that what they were witnessing was not a technical … Read more

James Hetfield has spent his public life presenting an image of invulnerability — the metal frontman as fortress, physically imposing, vocally aggressive, a man whose relationship with weakness appeared to be one of sustained contempt. This image is not false exactly. It is incomplete in the way that all performed identities are incomplete, and the … Read more

On August 14, 1995, two singles were released simultaneously in Britain: Country House by Blur and Roll With It by Oasis. The music press had manufactured the release date collision into a national event — Britpop’s Battle of the Bands, North versus South, art school versus council estate, Damon Albarn’s Chelsea sophistication against Noel Gallagher’s … Read more

On March 20, 1991, Conor Clapton — Eric Clapton’s four-year-old son — fell from an open window on the 53rd floor of a New York City apartment building. He died instantly. Clapton was not present at the moment of the accident. He arrived at the hospital afterward. He has described, in interviews and in his … Read more

There is a specific kind of terror that precedes greatness when the person experiencing the greatness has enough self-awareness to understand what is happening before it fully arrives. Most musicians discover their success retrospectively — they look back and identify the moment the trajectory changed. Bono, who has never been accused of insufficient self-awareness, experienced … Read more

On September 23, 1977, Yusuf Islam — known to the world as Cat Stevens — threw his gold records into the sea. This is the version of the story that has been told and retold, the symbolic gesture that stands in for a more complicated and more gradual process of spiritual transformation that had been … Read more

David Bowie’s live performances occupy a category separate from his recordings in the assessment of musicians who shared stages with him or watched from the wings. The recordings are extraordinary — documented, available, analyzable. The live performances were something that recordings of them only partially capture, because what Bowie brought to a stage was not … Read more

There is a moment in every great performer’s life when they encounter someone on a stage who makes them understand, with uncomfortable clarity, that the thing they thought they had mastered has a level above it they had not previously seen. For Mick Jagger — a man who had been performing since 1962, who had … Read more

On December 3, 1976, two days before a free concert in Kingston, Jamaica intended to promote peace in a country consumed by political violence, gunmen entered Bob Marley’s home at 56 Hope Road and opened fire. Marley was hit in the chest and arm. His wife Rita was shot. His manager Don Taylor was seriously … Read more