Music

On December 17, 1977, Elvis Costello and the Attractions were booked to appear on Saturday Night Live as a last-minute replacement for the Sex Pistols, who could not obtain US visas. The booking was itself a statement — Costello was young, abrasive, and operating in the punk-adjacent new wave space that was making American television … Read more

The creative dynamic between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant has been described, across fifty years of interviews and retrospective accounts, with the comfortable shorthand of pure partnership — two men who built something together that neither could have built alone, whose complementary gifts produced a body of work that defines the outer limit of what … Read more

Tom Petty spent a significant portion of the late 1970s and early 1980s in legal and financial battles with his own record labels that would have ended most artists’ careers before they properly began. The specific dispute that produced the most celebrated music of his early career involved MCA Records, which acquired the Shelter Records … Read more

Eric Clapton has spent sixty years being called the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and sixty years being more honest about his own limitations than the people making that claim. The specific quality that distinguishes Clapton’s self-assessment from false modesty is its precision — he does not make general gestures of humility toward the guitar-playing … Read more

Ray Manzarek spent fifty years as the keeper of the Doors flame — the surviving member most willing to discuss the band’s history in specific detail, most committed to ensuring that the full scope of what the band had attempted was understood by an audience that sometimes reduced them to Light My Fire and Morrison’s … Read more

There is a version of greatness that requires a stadium and a lighting rig and a hundred thousand people singing the words back at you. Bruce Springsteen has that version. He has sold out Giants Stadium multiple nights in a row, has performed to crowds so large that the back rows could not see the … Read more

The fluorescent lights in Room 714 had a way of making everything look slightly unreal, like a stage set someone had forgotten to finish. Outside the door I stood with my phone raised, the screen already misted by tears I could not blink away. Inside, a mountain of a man in an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket … Read more

By the early 1980s, Aerosmith was, by most reasonable industry assessments, finished. Joe Perry and Brad Whitford had both left the band, driven out by a toxic combination of drug addiction, internal resentment, and the specific exhaustion of a band that had achieved enormous success in the 1970s and then nearly destroyed itself trying to … Read more

Legendary rock icon Rod Stewart experienced a frightening health scare during a recent concert in Utah but demonstrated his trademark determination by finishing the performance despite the incident. During his June 19 show at Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre in West Valley City, the 81-year-old singer appeared noticeably less energetic than usual. According to reports … Read more

The long-running debate over who deserves a place among rock’s greatest guitarists has flared up once again, this time with Joan Jett delivering a blistering response to Ted Nugent’s criticism of her inclusion on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. The feud began late last year when Nugent took aim … Read more