Smokey Robinson has been writing songs since he was a teenager in Detroit. He is now in his eighties. The catalog that spans those decades is one of the most extraordinary in American music — not simply in its commercial achievement but in its emotional range, its lyrical sophistication, its consistent ability to find the … Read more
The Rolling Stones have always had a relationship with the darker and stranger dimensions of their mythology that they have managed with deliberate ambiguity. They have not discouraged the associations — the satanic imagery, the occult references in song titles and album artwork, the specific atmosphere of menace that certain of their recordings carry. They … Read more
Joni Mitchell’s withdrawal from performing across the late 1990s and the two decades that followed was understood publicly as primarily a health matter. The Morgellons disease — a condition whose existence and nature was contested in the medical community, adding a layer of public skepticism to her private suffering — was the reported explanation. It … Read more
Tom Petty was, by the consistent testimony of everyone who worked with him and knew him across his forty-year career, the least pretentious major rock star who ever lived. This is not a small distinction. The music industry is structured around pretension — around the performance of importance, the maintenance of status, the specific social … Read more
Keith Richards and Chuck Berry had one of the most complicated relationships in rock history. Complicated because the love was total and the professional reality was often difficult. Berry was famously demanding in performance situations — insisted on being paid in cash before he played, refused to rehearse with backing bands, arrived at venues with … Read more
The pressure of being Michael Jackson in a recording studio during the peak of his commercial career was a pressure that very few people in the history of popular music have been required to carry. After Thriller — after the most commercially successful album ever released transformed every expectation that surrounded him — every subsequent … Read more
The architecture of Led Zeppelin’s mythology has always distributed its attention unevenly. Jimmy Page is the guitarist-magician, the occultist-producer, the man behind the curtain and simultaneously the man at the center of the stage. Robert Plant is the voice and the hair and the mythological presence — the golden god, as Cameron Crowe famously and … Read more
My grandfather Walter Emmett Briggs was, to my understanding for the first thirty-four years of my life, three things: a veteran, a quiet man, and a biker. The order in which I understood these things was reversed from the order in which they actually mattered, which is something I think about now when I think … Read more
The Sunday my congregation left me was the second Sunday in April, which I remember because the dogwoods were flowering outside the windows of Calvary Road Community Church and I had taken that as a hopeful sign that morning, which teaches you something about the reliability of dogwoods as omens. I had been the pastor … Read more
I spent twenty-six years as a law enforcement officer in a county that had, during most of those years, a significant and complicated relationship with the Copper Saints Motorcycle Club. I made a lot of arrests in those twenty-six years. I made one arrest that I think about more than most. His name was Eddie … Read more