By 1996, Johnny Cash had been famous for forty years and was, by the music industry’s cold actuarial assessment, finished. His record label had dropped him. Radio would not play him. The country music establishment that he had helped to build had moved on to younger, smoother, more commercially manageable artists. He was 64 years … Read more
There is a version of Frank Sinatra that the public consumed happily for fifty years — the Rat Pack version, the tuxedo and cigarette version, the Chairman of the Board who owned every room he walked into and knew it and wanted you to know it too. That version was real. It was also a … Read more
For twenty years, the world accepted a comfortable lie about The Beatles. The lie went like this: Lennon and McCartney were the geniuses, Harrison was the quiet one, Starr was the lucky one, and the hierarchy was fixed and permanent and not worth questioning. It was a lie maintained partly by the sheer commercial dominance … Read more
Frank Sinatra performed in public for the first time at age eight, singing along to records in his parents’ saloon in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the amusement of the adults around him. He performed, in some capacity, nearly every year for the next seventy years. He sold out Madison Square Garden. He performed for presidents. … Read more
Jimi Hendrix is the answer most serious musicians give when asked who the greatest guitarist in history was. This is not casual agreement — it is the considered verdict of people who understand what the guitar is capable of and have spent their careers pushing against its limits. Eric Clapton was reportedly so devastated after … Read more
David Bowie did not follow culture. He arrived somewhere, stayed long enough to be identified with it, and left before it became fashionable — moving on to the next thing, the next identity, the next musical territory that nobody else had mapped yet. This is not a myth constructed in retrospect. It is documented in … Read more
By the mid-1980s, the Rolling Stones were not a functioning band. They were a brand — an enormously successful brand — held together by contractual obligation, financial self-interest, and the stubborn refusal of both primary parties to be the one who ended it. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had reached a point in their relationship … Read more
For most of the Beatles’ career, George Harrison existed in a specific and uncomfortable position. He was a member of the greatest band in the world, and he was treated by that band’s two primary creative forces as a junior partner — talented, valued for his guitar playing, occasionally humored as a songwriter, but not … Read more
Everyone gave Lennon the credit for depth. And Lennon deserved it — nobody is arguing otherwise. But somewhere in the decades of Lennon being canonized as the intellectual, the provocateur, the serious one, Paul McCartney got quietly filed under “melodist” — the tuneful one, the commercial one, the Beatle who wrote love songs and kept … Read more
13 bikers thundered into my quiet cul-de-sac like a storm front rolling off the horizon, and for one heart-stopping minute, I was sure I’d just signed my neighbor’s death warrant by reaching for the phone. I live at 16 Maple Drive, a sleepy pocket of Dayton where the biggest excitement is usually the mailman’s late … Read more