hitwheelsnep 
By 1973, Keith Richards was dying. Not in the rock and roll metaphorical sense — not in the sense of self-destruction as performance or excess as artistic statement — but in the plain medical sense of a man whose body was being systematically destroyed by heroin addiction and whose circle of enablers had grown so … Read more
The mythology of Elvis Presley’s decline has been told from the outside — through tabloid photographs, through concert footage that showed a man struggling inside a costume that had become a cage, through the clinical facts of the autopsy report and the pharmaceutical inventory that accompanied it. What has been told less thoroughly is the … Read more
Bob Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower in 1967, during the reclusive Woodstock period following his motorcycle accident — a period of withdrawal so complete that the public genuinely did not know whether he was alive, permanently damaged, or simply finished. He recorded it on John Wesley Harding in a style consistent with the album’s … Read more
The song that predicted the end of Simon and Garfunkel was recorded at the height of their partnership, in 1966, and was received as one of the most beautiful pieces of music either man had ever made. It was called The Sound of Silence. And buried inside its imagery of people talking without speaking and … Read more
In the spring of 1966, inside a London recording studio that smelled of cigarette smoke and tape oxide, a fifteen-year-old boy sat down at a piano and played something that stopped four of the most famous musicians in the world from speaking. The boy was Stevie Wonder. The four men were the Beatles. And what … Read more
There are songs that are written and there are songs that are survived. Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me sits somewhere between those two categories — a piece of music that Elton John produced with the mechanical speed of a man for whom melody arrives like weather, and that contains inside it a … Read more
The landfill on the outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, was a forgotten wasteland most people went out of their way to avoid. Thick smoke curled from smoldering trash heaps, broken furniture and rusted appliances lay half-sunk in the mud, and the heavy stench of decay and rust clung to everything like a second skin. Every morning … Read more
The Last Twenty Dollars on Willow Creek Avenue The late-November wind in Brookdale, Pennsylvania, cut through the narrow streets like a blade that had forgotten how to dull. It hissed between the bricks of the old row houses on Willow Creek Avenue, pried open the seams of threadbare coats, and settled into the marrow of … Read more
By the summer of 2003, Johnny Cash was a man recording against time and he knew it. June Carter Cash, his wife of thirty-five years and by most accounts the central organizing fact of his life, had died in May. Cash had been devastated in a way that went beyond grief into something closer to … Read more
In 1966, two bands on opposite sides of the world entered a creative competition so intense and so productive that it generated, within the same twelve-month period, two albums that music critics have argued about ever since — not about whether they are great, but about which of them is the greatest. The albums were … Read more