There are songs that function as entertainment and songs that function as life support — pieces of music that arrive at a specific moment in a specific person’s circumstances and perform a function that the people who wrote them did not intend and could not have predicted. James Taylor has spent fifty years acknowledging his … Read more
The consistent pattern in accounts of encountering Jimi Hendrix — in concert, in a recording studio, in a rehearsal room, in a small club in the mid-1960s before anyone outside a specific London circle knew who he was — is the response of people who have dedicated their lives to an instrument encountering someone for … Read more
Ray Manzarek spent fifty years as the keeper and interpreter of the Doors’ legacy — the surviving member most willing to examine, in specific detail, what the band had actually attempted and what Morrison had actually been doing in the moments when the music exceeded anything that rehearsal or intention could account for. His interviews, … Read more
I didn’t beg. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to just crawl away into the South Dakota brush to die like a beaten dog. Instead, I reached into my tool roll, pulled out a heavy chrome wrench, and did the unthinkable. In broad daylight, with hundreds of eyes watching from neighboring club camps, I … Read more
There are nights in a performer’s life when everything that can go wrong does go wrong and the performance happens anyway — not despite the circumstances but somehow because of them, the limitation stripping away everything that is practiced and polished and leaving only what is real. Elton John has performed over four thousand concerts … Read more
Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen maintained across their parallel careers a relationship of mutual assessment that was expressed rarely, carefully, and with the precision of two people who understood each other’s craft at a level that most critics can only approximate from the outside. They occupied adjacent territories — poetry-adjacent songwriting, the tradition of the … Read more
The old man was lying against the cold concrete foundation of the building, wedged between a industrial HVAC unit and the locked emergency exit door. He was wearing a faded grey suit that was now completely waterlogged, clinging heavily to his frail, ninety-year-old frame. His hands—gnarled by time and shaking uncontrollably from the onset of … Read more
The Eagles broke up on July 31, 1980, in the middle of a concert in Long Beach, California, in a manner so abrupt and so definitively final that the people present — the audience, the road crew, the management — took several minutes to fully understand that what they were witnessing was not a technical … Read more
James Hetfield has spent his public life presenting an image of invulnerability — the metal frontman as fortress, physically imposing, vocally aggressive, a man whose relationship with weakness appeared to be one of sustained contempt. This image is not false exactly. It is incomplete in the way that all performed identities are incomplete, and the … Read more
On August 14, 1995, two singles were released simultaneously in Britain: Country House by Blur and Roll With It by Oasis. The music press had manufactured the release date collision into a national event — Britpop’s Battle of the Bands, North versus South, art school versus council estate, Damon Albarn’s Chelsea sophistication against Noel Gallagher’s … Read more