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 …
Read More »Dire Straits Bassist John Illsley Talks Hall of Fame, Possible Reunion
Dire Straits went through a lot of lineup changes over their relatively brief time as an active band. Nine musicians joined frontman Mark Knopfler during the run, some lasting for little over two years. The only person to make it all the way from the first album in 1977 to …
Read More »Inside Egypt's LGBT Crackdown: One Band's Story
It was a beautiful night for Mashrou’ Leila. Over 35,000 concertgoers showed up to see the Lebanese band and two other Arab rock groups perform at the daylong Music Park Festival in an upscale suburb of Cairo, Egypt, late last September. During their set, spotlights glittered in carnivalesque colors and …
Read More »Walk the Moon Get Back to Their Rock Roots On New LP, 'What If Nothing"
Walk the Moon lit up the pop world in 2014 with “Shut Up and Dance,” a giddy love song that’s become a staple of baseball-stadium dance-cam breaks and sweaty parties thanks to its anthemic, commanding chorus and jittery, Eighties-inflected feel. With their new record What If Nothing, the Cincinnati-based band …
Read More »Joe Scarborough: The Soundtrack of My Life, From Beatles to Replacements
Fans of Morning Joealready know co-host Joe Scarborough is a music nut, from the show’s music – Stones and Beatles songs regularly play the MSNBC show into commercial – to Scarborough’s frequent plugs for his gigs at New York City’s Cutting Room. The veteran commentator has been on a recording …
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