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Five Queen Songs Freddie Mercury Wrote That Brian May Initially Refused to Play

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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

The Betrayal That Broke Up Creedence Clearwater Revival — And the Song John Fogerty Refuses to Play Live Because of It

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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

Five Black Sabbath Songs Ozzy Osbourne Was Told Would Never Work — And Became Heavy Metal’s Foundation

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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

Roger Waters Has Finally Explained Why He Hasn’t Spoken to David Gilmour in Over a Decade

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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

A cashier laughed at a crying 83-year-old widow who was 23 cents short for bread, so a 240-pound biker stepped in and taught the entire grocery store an unforgettable lesson

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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

Barefoot And Desperate, The Little Girl Trusted Bikers More Than Police To Save Her Dying Mom

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At midnight, a seven-year-old girl walked into our biker bar barefoot, wearing pink pajamas. Her feet were bleeding. Rainwater dripped from her hair onto the floor. And when she spoke, every conversation in the room stopped. “He’s hurting Mommy again.” Thirty grown men froze. The football game playing on the television suddenly didn’t matter. The … Read more