Stevie Wonder lost his sight as an infant — an excess of oxygen in the incubator he was placed in after premature birth damaged his retinas permanently. He has been blind his entire conscious life. He has also, by the consistent assessment of virtually every musician who has worked alongside him for sixty years, possessed … Read more
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page built one of the great creative partnerships in rock history. Page was the architect — the guitarist, producer, and sonic visionary who constructed the world in which the band existed. Plant was the voice and the myth — the golden god figure who inhabited that world with a physical charisma … Read more
On June 25, 2004, David Bowie walked offstage at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, after a set that had been cut short when he complained of shoulder pain. He was 57 years old and in the middle of a world tour — the Reality Tour, one of the most successful of his career, playing … Read more
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