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It was 11:07 p.m. on a cold October night when thirteen-year-old Tessa Galloway stepped out the bedroom window of her parents’ single-wide trailer on County Road 318. She had been hiding under her bed for two hours while the screaming in the kitchen grew louder, sharper, until something heavy shattered and her mother’s scream split … Read more
On November 15, 1976, in Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, a group called The Band played what they had announced would be their final concert. They had been together, in various forms, since the early 1960s — first as Ronnie Hawkins’s backing band, then as Bob Dylan’s touring band during his most controversial electric period, … Read more
Eric Clapton has a complicated relationship with admiration. He is, by any measure, one of the most gifted guitarists in rock history — a man who was literally called “God” in London graffiti in the mid-1960s, who played in the Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos, and a solo career that produced “Layla,” … Read more
Rock and roll mythology is full of hotel destruction stories, but most of them are exactly that — mythology, inflated and polished by decades of retelling until the truth is somewhere underneath all the entertaining nonsense. Led Zeppelin’s hotel stories are different. They are extensively documented, corroborated by multiple witnesses, and in some cases, accompanied … Read more
In the early 1960s, before the Rolling Stones were the Rolling Stones in any meaningful commercial sense, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were living in a squalid London flat, barely eating, surviving on the belief that their music was worth something. The Beatles were already famous. Already on television. Already producing the hysteria that would … Read more
The most persistent myth about greatness is that it requires enormous effort. That the best things are the hardest won. In rock and roll, this myth collapses regularly and dramatically — because some of the most indelible guitar riffs in history were not labored over, not constructed methodically, not the product of months of revision. … Read more
There are songs, and then there are final statements. There are performances captured on tape, and then there are moments where a human being walks into a room knowing what is happening to their body and decides, against all reasonable expectation, to give everything that remains. “The Show Must Go On,” recorded by Queen in … Read more
It was a quiet Thursday evening in mid-October, the kind where the grocery store’s fluorescent glare still clung to your eyes long after you’d loaded the bags into the trunk and pointed the car toward home. I was on the usual route—a two-lane county road that wound through a sleepy residential neighborhood just outside of … Read more
It was an overcast Tuesday in mid-March. The sky hung low and gray over Maple Grove Memorial Park like a sheet of damp slate, the kind of Oregon afternoon where the air tasted of rain that hadn’t quite decided to fall yet. I was edging the grass along Section C when I spotted the motorcycle … Read more
It was a bright, ordinary noon in mid-October. The parking lot outside the big-box store was packed with weekend shoppers pushing carts, kids tugging at sleeves, and engines idling in the search for empty spots. No one expected the scene that unfolded right in the middle of it all. A man whose face and neck … Read more