The sun hammered the blacktop outside Maple Crest Elementary in Wichita, Kansas, turning every hopscotch square and four-square court into a shimmering mirage. It was late September, a Thursday afternoon that still carried the heavy breath of summer. The air smelled of sun-baked asphalt, dry grass from the soccer field, and the faint sweetness of … Read more
In the summer of 1974, Mick Fleetwood flew to Los Angeles on a mission that would transform his band’s commercial trajectory and simultaneously plant the seeds of a personal and professional drama that would consume the following three years. He was looking for a recording studio. What he found, in a record store on Sunset … Read more
Dave Grohl has spent thirty years building one of the most successful post-grunge careers in rock history — Foo Fighters, multiple Grammy wins, a reputation as the most likable man in rock, a public persona of such consistent warmth and humor that it is easy to forget that he was the drummer in the band … Read more
On December 17, 1977, Elvis Costello and the Attractions were booked to appear on Saturday Night Live as a last-minute replacement for the Sex Pistols, who could not obtain US visas. The booking was itself a statement — Costello was young, abrasive, and operating in the punk-adjacent new wave space that was making American television … Read more
The creative dynamic between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant has been described, across fifty years of interviews and retrospective accounts, with the comfortable shorthand of pure partnership — two men who built something together that neither could have built alone, whose complementary gifts produced a body of work that defines the outer limit of what … Read more
Tom Petty spent a significant portion of the late 1970s and early 1980s in legal and financial battles with his own record labels that would have ended most artists’ careers before they properly began. The specific dispute that produced the most celebrated music of his early career involved MCA Records, which acquired the Shelter Records … Read more
Eric Clapton has spent sixty years being called the greatest guitarist who ever lived, and sixty years being more honest about his own limitations than the people making that claim. The specific quality that distinguishes Clapton’s self-assessment from false modesty is its precision — he does not make general gestures of humility toward the guitar-playing … Read more
Ray Manzarek spent fifty years as the keeper of the Doors flame — the surviving member most willing to discuss the band’s history in specific detail, most committed to ensuring that the full scope of what the band had attempted was understood by an audience that sometimes reduced them to Light My Fire and Morrison’s … Read more
There is a version of greatness that requires a stadium and a lighting rig and a hundred thousand people singing the words back at you. Bruce Springsteen has that version. He has sold out Giants Stadium multiple nights in a row, has performed to crowds so large that the back rows could not see the … Read more
The fluorescent lights in Room 714 had a way of making everything look slightly unreal, like a stage set someone had forgotten to finish. Outside the door I stood with my phone raised, the screen already misted by tears I could not blink away. Inside, a mountain of a man in an ill-fitting tuxedo jacket … Read more