The glass shattered with a crash that seemed to echo throughout the street. The car alarms began to blare with a deafening, rhythmic scream, but Patricia didn’t hear them. Ignoring the sharp bite of the glass cutting into her hands, she reached through the jagged frame to unlock the door, yanked it open, and unbuckled … Read more
In the early hours of August 27, 1990, blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan climbed aboard a helicopter leaving Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley Music Theatre after one of the best performances of his career. Minutes later, the helicopter slammed into a hillside in thick fog, killing Vaughan and everyone else aboard. He had only secured his place … Read more
On October 1, 1970, Janis Joplin walked into a Los Angeles recording studio and laid down vocals for a song that wasn’t even originally written for her, a tender, road-worn tune called “Me and Bobby McGee.” Three days later, she was found dead in her hotel room, and the recording she’d just finished would become … Read more
**The Little Girl Who Grabbed My Tattooed Arm** I was sixty-three years old, every inch of me a walking roadmap of hard miles. Vietnam still lived in my bones on rainy nights. The club had buried too many brothers on blacktop. My knuckles carried forty years of scars from bar fights I didn’t start but … Read more
In December 1974, Mick Taylor, the guitarist many critics still consider the most technically gifted player ever to join the Rolling Stones, walked up to Mick Jagger at a party in London and quietly told him he was done. After five years and three of the band’s most celebrated albums, Taylor was leaving the biggest … Read more
n the morning of March 19, 1982, a small prop plane crashed into a mansion in Leesburg, Florida, killing guitarist Randy Rhoads, just 25 years old, along with the band’s hairdresser and an unlicensed pilot. The crash happened only a few yards from the tour bus where Ozzy Osbourne, Rhoads’s bandmate and close friend, was … Read more
On April Fool’s Day, 1985, Van Halen announced that David Lee Roth, the swaggering, high-kicking frontman who had defined the band’s image for over a decade, was no longer a member of the group. To the rock world, it felt like a joke, except it wasn’t. Roth’s departure had been building quietly for months. He’d … Read more
On July 31, 1980, the Eagles played a benefit concert in Long Beach, California, for Senator Alan Cranston, a show that would turn out to be their last for the next fourteen years. By the time the curtain came down, two of the band’s own members had come close to a physical fight in front … Read more
For two decades, asking Slash and Axl Rose to share a stage again felt like asking for the impossible. Guns N’ Roses had been one of the biggest rock bands on the planet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the time guitarist Slash walked away in 1996, the relationship between him and … Read more
In the summer of 1977, members of Aerosmith were shopping for a plane to charter for an upcoming tour and took a look at an aging Convair CV-240, a twin-engine prop plane already decades old. Something about the flight crew or the condition of the aircraft put them off, and Aerosmith passed, choosing a different … Read more