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Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe arrived in New York together in 1967 — two young people from New Jersey with no money, no connections, and no clear plan beyond the shared conviction that wherever they needed to be was New York and that what they needed to do was make things. They were 20 years … Read more
Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002, of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect, alone at his home in Somerset, England, at the age of 50. He was found by his wife Lucinda, who has described the specific quality of the loss — the suddenness of it, the absence of warning, the fact that he had … Read more
The East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry of the mid-1990s is the most documented conflict in popular music history and the one whose consequences were the most permanent and the most irreversible. It ended with two people dead. It began, by most serious accounts, not as a genuine personal conflict between two artists who hated … Read more
There is a paradox at the center of Bruce Springsteen’s career that has been noted by critics and by Springsteen himself and that has never been fully resolved because it is not the kind of paradox that resolves — it simply persists, productively and mysteriously, as one of the most interesting facts about how music … Read more
There are moments in music that exist only in the memory of the people who were present — that were never recorded, never filmed, never documented in any way that allows subsequent access, and that survive only as testimony from witnesses whose accounts converge with a consistency that makes the testimony credible even without the … Read more
Johnny Winter arrived in New York in 1968 from Beaumont, Texas with an albino appearance that made him impossible to ignore and a guitar technique that made everything else about him irrelevant once he started playing. He was 24 years old and had spent his adolescence and early twenties absorbing the Texas blues tradition with … Read more
Leonard Cohen published his first book of poetry in 1956. He began recording music in 1967, at the age of 32 — late, by the standards of popular music, which tends to reward youth and treat age as a liability rather than an asset. He spent the following fifty years making records that sold modestly … Read more
The 2003 Old Friends tour — the final Simon and Garfunkel reunion — was, by the commercial measurements that the music industry uses to assess such things, an enormous success. The tour grossed over a hundred million dollars. It sold out arenas across North America and Europe. The audiences that filled those arenas were not … Read more
Tom Waits occupies a position in American music that is almost impossible to map onto the conventional coordinates of the industry — not famous in the way that commercially successful musicians are famous, not obscure in the way that cult figures are obscure, but something in between that has no clean name. He has sold … Read more
In the mid-1950s, American popular music had two figures who were, simultaneously and independently, inventing something that did not yet have a name but that would shortly be called rock and roll. Chuck Berry was doing it from St. Louis with a guitar and a lyrical precision that documented teenage American life with the specificity … Read more