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On October 20, 1977, a chartered Convair CV-240 aircraft carrying Lynyrd Skynyrd from Greenville, South Carolina to Baton Rouge, Louisiana ran out of fuel over the Mississippi forest and crashed into a swamp near Gillsburg, Mississippi. The crash killed lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, his sister and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, the … Read more

Ted Nugent has spent fifty years being one of the most controversial figures in American rock — not primarily because of his music, which is the thing that controversies about musicians are usually about, but because of his political positions, his hunting advocacy, his public persona of aggressive confrontation with anyone who disagrees with him … Read more

There are specific moments in the history of music when someone walks into a professional environment — a room full of experienced musicians, seasoned engineers, producers who have heard everything — and within minutes changes the atmosphere of that room from professional to reverent. Not through any deliberate performance of greatness, not through any conscious … Read more

The creative relationship between David Bowie and Iggy Pop during the Berlin period — 1976 through 1979, the years that produced The Idiot, Lust for Life, Low, Heroes, and Lodger — is the most productive creative friendship in rock history, measured not by commercial output but by the quality of what the two men produced … Read more

The dissolution of the classic Guns N’ Roses lineup — the five musicians who made Appetite for Destruction and Use Your Illusion and who constituted, by the assessment of their commercial peak, the most dangerous and most exciting band in the world — happened not in a single dramatic confrontation but in the specific way … Read more

The specific window of creative output that Stevie Wonder produced between 1972 and 1976 — the four years that yielded Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life — is the most concentrated period of musical achievement in the history of popular music, and the statement … Read more

There are moments of grief that arrive not at the expected times — not at the funeral, not in the first hours after the news, not in the formal contexts that society constructs for the purpose of containing loss — but in ordinary situations, ambushed by something specific and small that the general fact of … Read more

On July 3, 1973, David Bowie did something almost unheard of in rock music: he killed off one of the most successful characters in music history, live on stage, with no advance warning to anyone — including his own backing band, the Spiders from Mars. By 1973, Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous alien … Read more

Few albums in rock history carry as much behind-the-scenes drama as Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” released in February 1977. The album’s success is often discussed alongside the extraordinary personal turmoil the band was experiencing during its creation, turmoil that arguably fueled some of the album’s most powerful songwriting. By the time recording began, the band was … Read more

Pink Floyd’s 1975 album “Wish You Were Here” stands as one of the band’s most emotionally resonant works, largely because of its central focus: founding member Syd Barrett, who had left the band years earlier due to worsening mental health struggles widely attributed to heavy drug use during the band’s early psychedelic years. Barrett had … Read more