They were the daughters of the great Hollywood film noir director John Farrow, a devout Catholic as well as a boozing, brawling, womanizing piece of work. Robert Mitchum (who starred in Farrow’s nasti...
The other songs they recorded that May were silly ones—All Together Now, Baby You’re a Rich Man, You Know My Name (Look Up the Number). It’s All Too Much might seem silly too, but it rocks, which the...
That’s another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul...
Rod exemplifies the attitude that Losing It is no big deal. He saw that fate coming, and he was already planning to get over it.
Neither of us ever threw anything away. We madea lot of mix tapes while we were together. Tapes for making out, tapes for dancing, tapes for falling asleep. Tapes for doing the dishes, for walkingthe...
John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, with a big assist from E...
I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, ‘The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.’ My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It’s like he’s reading my mind. B...
I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.
I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.
Hours, packaged as Bowie’s R&B album, went equally deep. Seven, Survive, and Thursday’s Child felt like Babyface and Toni Braxton doing Young Americans. The major flaw of these records, one that many...
He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't se...
Give Me Love was a hit around the same time as Cat Stevens’s Morning Has Broken, a superficially similar hippie-dad prayer, yet I violently hated Morning Has Broken, just hated it, despised the choked...
Gaye released Got to Give It Up a year after Bowie released Station to Station—two long grooves stretching into double-digit minutes, blatantly unconventional, with quizzical vocals and rubberband-man...
Everything was changing, that was obvious. The world was so full of music, it seemed we could never run out. ’Twas bliss in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and overworked and underexposed and s...
But the best cover has to be D’Angelo, on his long-awaited 2012 comeback tour—within minutes of the first gig in Paris, the whole world was YouTubing his Space Oddity with our jaws hanging open. After...
But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job...
Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatt...
13. The Chemical Brothers, Setting Sun (1996) Everybody’s favorite song in the fall of 1996, uniting rockers, ravers, clubbers, druggers, all factions of the pop massive. The Chemical Brothers turn To...
Is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minu...
Ziggy was a requiem: Bowie came to bury the sixties, not praise them. He hit the road and toured like a madman, spreading the glitter gospel in a rock scene full of interchangeable flannel-and-denim s...
