Music Features

A few years before his death last September, longtime Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter partook of one of his usual traditions. He emailed a bunch of fresh lyrics to one of his post–Jerry Garcia songwriting collaborators and asked if that artist wanted to set the words to music. That year, …

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Clash‘s London Calling. Well, sort of. The album came out in England on December 14th, 1979, but didn’t cross the Atlantic to America until January 1980. That’s just a matter of weeks, but it’s the reason that NME has called it one …

When Michael Nesmth took the stage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California, on August 18th, 1973, his life and his career were in a state of free fall. “I had just bought my way out of the Monkees,” he says. “I didn’t have a dime. I had a …

When audio engineer Peggy McCreary was recording Prince for his 1999 album, she didn’t immediately recognize his genius. “I had no idea who he was when I first started working with him,” she recalls. She had met him around the time he made his third LP, Controversy, and unlike Prince, …

Jason White — the former Music Director of the massive West Angeles Church, who now oversees the choir at Kanye West‘s Sunday Service events — was nudged towards a career as musician when he was just four years old. “Every day I would rush home to play on the piano, …

Our phones were locked in little mesh pouches so we communicated the way people did in the Dark Ages: we reenacted Vines. Last night, deep inside The Forum in Los Angeles, a group of young men formed a circle around their friend who was wearing a Florida Marlins hat ––one …

A recent episode of our Rolling Stone Music Now podcast tells the story of the Cars‘ Ric Ocasek, who went from struggling folk musician to MTV hit-maker to go-to alt-rock producer. David Browne joins host Brian Hiatt to share details from his reporting on Ocasek, who died in September at …

“Hey, cowboy!” Even in a city where everyone’s seen it all, the sight of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott is still enough to turn a few heads, including one of a guy plopped down outside a bodega. On a recent summer morning, Elliott has returned to his former stomping, singing, and drinking …

In 1961, a young Jerry Garcia met another struggling artist: writer and musician Robert Hunter. For more than 30 years until Garcia’s death in 1995, the two were friends and songwriting partners; with Garcia supplying the music and Hunter the lyrics, out came most of the Grateful Dead’s most enduring …

A recent tribute concert dubbed The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa in Huntington, New York had all the markings of a concert by the rock iconoclast from nerdy fans geeking out about the night’s guitar players before the show to doo-wop intro music but with one marked problem: Frank Zappa …