In 2014, attendance had fallen sharply at Trópico, a Mexican music festival held in the resort city of Acapulco. The festival was only in its second year, and after 43 students disappeared in the nearby city of Iguala a few months prior, a large number of festivalgoers had the same …
Read More »Rob Sheffield Looks Back at the Beatles' Intimate White Album Demos
Rob Sheffield’s book Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World is a celebration of the band, from the longtime Rolling Stone columnist. It tells the weird saga of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up – yet …
Read More »Illness Almost Killed Doom Metal Titans Yob – But Gave Their Work Life
In January 2017, Mike Scheidt missed an early appointment with death by only a few hours. Scheidt’s immersive doom metal trio, Yob, had been at home in Eugene, Oregon, for about a month, resting after a brief tour with their spiritual antecedents, Neurosis. The time off was good for Scheidt: …
Read More »Nathaniel Rateliff's Long, Hard Road to Becoming a Rock-Soul Star
One day in the summer of 2015, Jimmy Fallon, the host of The Tonight Show, received an e-mail from a close friend, Corbin Day. “Check out this video,” Day wrote. “He should be on the show.” There was a link to a YouTube clip by Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night …
Read More »'Escape to Margaritaville': Inside Jimmy Buffett's Big Broadway Debut
More than 40 years later, Jimmy Buffett can still recall the moment he wrote “Margaritaville.” Buffett had played a show in Austin and was on his way back home to Key West. “It was a hot day and I had a couple of margaritas,” he recalls. “I was a bit …
Read More »Inside Music's New Merch Boom
Three years ago, Fall Out Boy opened a pop-up store in New York, selling T-shirts in a space that resembled a punk-rock club. When the band revisited the idea at stores in New York and L.A. this past fall, the vibe and decor were noticeably upgraded. Purple-tinted windows made fans …
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