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
There are conversations that change the direction of a life. Not because they contain revelations exactly — not because something entirely new arrives — but because they confirm something a person has been half-believing in private and was not yet sure they had permission to fully commit to. Someone you respect looks at you and … Read more
There is a sound that exists in popular music unlike any other sound. It arrives at the beginning of a recording and before the first beat has finished landing, something in the human body responds. Not in the mind — not first, anyway. In the chest. In the stomach. In some pre-verbal place where the … Read more
The problem with being a decade ahead of your time is that people experience it as being wrong. The audience is not yet equipped. The critical framework does not yet exist. The technology that would eventually allow other musicians to approximate what you are doing has not yet been invented. And so the work arrives … Read more
The rain came down in sheets, turning the interstate into a black mirror that reflected the thunder of fifty Harley engines slicing through the night. I was leading the pack—Jax “Reaper” Malone, President of the Black Vipers MC—my Fat Boy rumbling beneath me like an angry beast. We’d just finished a long memorial run for … Read more
There are musicians who are technically excellent. Who have developed, through thousands of hours of practice and study, a mastery of their instrument that allows them to perform at a consistently high level across a wide range of material. This is admirable. This is the product of dedication and discipline and the specific kind of … Read more
The creative relationship between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant is one of the most productive and most volatile partnerships in the history of rock music. They were not always in agreement. They did not always see the same thing when they looked at a piece of music. Page came from a session musician background — … Read more
The year was 1956 and America was having an argument with itself about what it was allowed to enjoy. The argument had been building for years — since the first Black radio stations started crossing into white listening frequencies, since the first rhythm and blues records started appearing in the wrong neighborhoods, since the first … Read more