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Leonard Cohen was not a man easily impressed by other songwriters. He was too precise in his own craft — too aware of how much work a great line required, how many revisions stood behind a lyric that appeared effortless — to offer admiration casually. He wrote Hallelujah across eighty drafts over years. He reportedly … Read more
In the 1980s, American popular music had two undisputed emperors, and they could not have been more different in temperament, method, and self-presentation. Michael Jackson was global, accessible, the most famous person on earth — a man who had spent his entire life performing and had turned that lifetime of practice into something that transcended … Read more
Fame has a cruel sense of humor. It takes the thing you made almost without thinking — the track you finished in an afternoon, the song you considered a throwaway, the one you liked least on the album — and turns it into the thing everyone wants. And then it makes you play it, night … Read more
There is a version of Elvis Presley that the world accepted and repeated for decades — the King, the icon, the rhinestone-suited performer who owned every stage he ever walked onto with a confidence so complete it bordered on supernatural. That version is real. It is also incomplete. Because behind the mythology, behind the management … Read more
80 Bikers Formed a Human Wall Around My Daughter’s Funeral 80 bikers rolled into Crestwood, Colorado, before the sun even crested the snow-dusted peaks of the Rockies. Their engines were throttled low, a deep, respectful growl that still rattled the frosted windows of my second-story apartment across from the old wooden church on Maple Ridge … Read more
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