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
The people who decide what talent looks like are usually the least reliable judges of what talent is. They recognize the familiar and mistake it for the good. They hear something genuinely new — something that doesn’t fit the template, that breaks the expected rules, that sounds wrong in a way that has not yet … Read more
In the summer of 1966, the most famous band in the world walked into Abbey Road Studios in London and began recording an album that none of them were sure they could finish — because the relationships inside the group had deteriorated to a point where direct communication had become almost impossible. The album was … Read more
There is a specific kind of terror that arrives not with failure but with success beyond any manageable scale — the moment when the thing you built becomes something you can no longer recognize or control. Kurt Cobain experienced this in the autumn of 1991, within weeks of Nevermind being released, and he spent the … Read more
Leonard Cohen was not a man easily impressed by other songwriters. He was too precise in his own craft — too aware of how much work a great line required, how many revisions stood behind a lyric that appeared effortless — to offer admiration casually. He wrote Hallelujah across eighty drafts over years. He reportedly … Read more
In the 1980s, American popular music had two undisputed emperors, and they could not have been more different in temperament, method, and self-presentation. Michael Jackson was global, accessible, the most famous person on earth — a man who had spent his entire life performing and had turned that lifetime of practice into something that transcended … Read more
Fame has a cruel sense of humor. It takes the thing you made almost without thinking — the track you finished in an afternoon, the song you considered a throwaway, the one you liked least on the album — and turns it into the thing everyone wants. And then it makes you play it, night … Read more