Music

The official story is clean enough. Brian Jones had become unreliable. The drug use had progressed beyond the point where he could function in a recording studio or on a stage with any consistency. His criminal convictions made touring in America legally complicated. The band had outgrown him creatively — Jagger and Richards had become … Read more

The Beatles were four very different kinds of intelligence sharing one very small stage. John Lennon had the razor — the cutting wit, the political fury, the ability to say the true and dangerous thing with a precision that left no room for comfortable misunderstanding. Paul McCartney had the gift — the melodic instinct so … Read more

There is a version of Jim Morrison that the mythology has constructed — the leather-pants poet, the Dionysian shaman, the beautiful self-destructive face of a generation’s excess — and it is not entirely false. But it is incomplete in the specific way that mythologies are always incomplete: it sacrifices the complexity of the actual person … Read more

There are conversations that change the direction of a life. Not because they contain revelations exactly — not because something entirely new arrives — but because they confirm something a person has been half-believing in private and was not yet sure they had permission to fully commit to. Someone you respect looks at you and … Read more

There is a sound that exists in popular music unlike any other sound. It arrives at the beginning of a recording and before the first beat has finished landing, something in the human body responds. Not in the mind — not first, anyway. In the chest. In the stomach. In some pre-verbal place where the … Read more

The problem with being a decade ahead of your time is that people experience it as being wrong. The audience is not yet equipped. The critical framework does not yet exist. The technology that would eventually allow other musicians to approximate what you are doing has not yet been invented. And so the work arrives … Read more

There are musicians who are technically excellent. Who have developed, through thousands of hours of practice and study, a mastery of their instrument that allows them to perform at a consistently high level across a wide range of material. This is admirable. This is the product of dedication and discipline and the specific kind of … Read more

The creative relationship between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant is one of the most productive and most volatile partnerships in the history of rock music. They were not always in agreement. They did not always see the same thing when they looked at a piece of music. Page came from a session musician background — … Read more

The year was 1956 and America was having an argument with itself about what it was allowed to enjoy. The argument had been building for years — since the first Black radio stations started crossing into white listening frequencies, since the first rhythm and blues records started appearing in the wrong neighborhoods, since the first … Read more

The Beatles were four people trapped inside the most intense professional and personal relationship that popular music has ever produced. They spent years together at such close quarters — touring, recording, living, traveling — that the boundaries between professional collaboration and personal entanglement became impossible to locate. They knew each other with the suffocating thoroughness … Read more