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In the summer of 1969, two of the most significant and most self-destructive figures in American rock music were living parallel lives in Los Angeles — not parallel in the sense of similar circumstances, because Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison had genuinely different relationships with their own pain and their own talent and their own … Read more

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have been not speaking to each other, then speaking to each other, then not speaking to each other, in a cycle that has repeated across fifty years with a regularity that suggests neither man has found a way to be in the other’s presence for extended periods without something eventually … Read more

David Bowie’s cultural significance extends well beyond his music in a way that few artists’ significance does — not because the music is insufficient, which it demonstrably is not, but because what he communicated through the music and through his public persona spoke to something in the people who heard it that was not primarily … Read more

The recording of Hotel California in 1976 and 1977 has been described in the official accounts of the Eagles’ history with the standard narrative of creative triumph — the band at their peak, the material coming together, the production achieving the specific sound that the recording has become iconic for. The unofficial account, assembled from … Read more

In the summer of 1969, the two greatest live acts in British rock were Led Zeppelin and The Who — and the specific quality of their greatness was different enough that the comparison between them functioned not as a ranking but as an argument about what live performance was fundamentally for. The Who represented the … Read more

There are performances that exist in two dimensions simultaneously — the one the audience experiences in the moment, which is a concert, and the one that becomes visible only afterward, which is something else entirely. The audience at the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh on September 23, 1980 attended a Bob Marley and the Wailers concert. … Read more

The history of Led Zeppelin’s relationship with other people’s music is the most documented and most vigorously debated plagiarism story in rock history, and it is complicated by a fact that the straightforward plagiarism narrative does not fully accommodate: that what Zeppelin did with the material they took was, in almost every case, something that … Read more

In 1987, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney began a songwriting collaboration that produced Flowers in the Dirt — the McCartney album that many critics consider his strongest post-Beatles work and that represented a creative reinvigoration that the preceding decade of McCartney’s solo career had not consistently demonstrated. The collaboration was professional in its origin — … Read more

Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen occupy positions in American music that are adjacent in their geography — both drew from the specific tradition of the American outsider, the person living at the margins of the prosperity that the country’s mythology promises, the man in the bar at last call or the woman in the factory … Read more