Music

George Harrison was a man who processed things slowly and privately. Where Lennon was immediate — combustible, impulsive, the kind of person whose first reaction was usually also his public reaction — Harrison sat with things. He thought them through. He turned them over in the quiet of his enormous garden at Friar Park, in … Read more

The public image of Elton John is feathers and platforms and oversized glasses and a theatrical extravagance so complete that it has become, over fifty years, one of the most recognizable personal brands in entertainment history. The costumes are real. The showmanship is real. The extraordinary capacity for spectacle is genuine and has been sustained … Read more

London in 1967 was a small world. The musicians who would go on to define rock guitar for the following half-century were moving through the same clubs, the same studios, the same late-night sessions in the same compressed geography of a city that was in the middle of reinventing what popular music could be. They … Read more

Abbey Road was recorded in the summer of 1969 by four men who were, in any meaningful personal sense, no longer a band. The legal machinery of the breakup was already in motion. The financial disputes were already poisoning every room they shared. John Lennon had privately told the others he was leaving — had … Read more

Fame has a way of arriving at people who did not request it and did not prepare for it and would not have chosen it if the choice had been presented clearly and honestly in advance. It comes attached to someone else’s story — to a song or a film or a book that uses … Read more

There is a specific kind of pain that arrives not as an explosion but as a slow, cold recognition. The moment when something you had been half-knowing finally becomes fully known. When the thing you had been protecting yourself from understanding arrives with complete clarity and there is nowhere left to hide from it and … Read more

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