The origin story of ZZ Top’s recording process in the early 1970s is one of the most specifically American narratives in rock history — three musicians from Texas who understood that the music they were making had a specific relationship with the physical geography of where they came from, and who made the deliberate decision … Read more
Warren Zevon was diagnosed with mesothelioma — an inoperable lung cancer — in August 2002. He was 55 years old. The doctors who delivered the diagnosis told him he had three to six months to live. He lived for thirteen months — thirteen months during which he made an album, gave the last major interview … Read more
Rod Stewart’s career is one of the most dramatically bifurcated in rock history — a division so complete that the two halves of it seem to have been lived by different people who happen to share a voice and a haircut. The early Rod Stewart — the one who made Every Picture Tells a Story … Read more
Mark Knopfler is the most literate songwriter in rock — not in the sense of writing about books, though he has done that too, but in the sense of understanding that a lyric is a compressed narrative, that what is not said in a song is as important as what is said, and that the … Read more
Muddy Waters is the man from whom the most important music of the twentieth century flows — not metaphorically, but in the specific documented sense of a traceable line from his recordings at Stovall’s Plantation in Mississippi in 1941 and his Chicago recordings of the late 1940s and early 1950s to the Rolling Stones, Led … Read more
The Allman Brothers Band’s relationship with extended live performance was not a commercial calculation or a theatrical choice — it was an expression of a specific philosophy about what music was for and what a concert was supposed to do, a philosophy that Duane Allman articulated in interviews with the precision of a man who … Read more
The period of Aerosmith’s history that the band’s own members have described most consistently as the least fully documented in their own memories is not a period of creative decline — it is the period of their greatest commercial achievement and some of their most significant musical output. The years between approximately 1975 and 1980, … Read more
In 1969, American radio played Proud Mary more times than any other song. This is a statement about commercial success that is unremarkable — what is remarkable is the context of its creation, the speed at which it went from nothing to the most played song in the country, and what that speed reveals about … Read more
The story of how Crosby, Stills and Nash first sang together has been told many times — at Joni Mitchell’s house in Laurel Canyon in 1968, the three of them harmonizing for the first time and producing a sound that has been described by all three participants and by the people who were present with … Read more
Eddie Van Halen is the guitarist who most completely changed what rock guitar was understood to be between 1978 and 1984 — not by discovering something new about the instrument, because the techniques he used had existed in various forms before him, but by combining those techniques with a melodic sensibility, a sense of humor, … Read more