Table of contents for Aug-09 in Rolling Stone

The godfather of shock rock is touring America with Hollywood Vampires and his solo group throughout this year. Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Had I been born later, I could have written this. But when you’re my age, you can’t write for teens. When I first heard it, I was like, “Oh, yeah!” Aerosmith “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” They wrote this about Vince Neil. Mötley Crüe were a bunch of goodlooking girls then. They aren’t so cute anymore. My Chemical Romance “Teenagers” I looked at this band as the next Def Leppard. This song has a great message: “Teenagers are dangerous!” Billy Talent “Red Flag” These guys were Canada’s Green Day. This song reminds me of “My Sharona.” It’s one of those hooks you can’t explain. Twisted Sister “We’re…

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, Wyclef Jean found himself in the studio with one of his heroes, Earth, Wind & Fire founder and mastermind Maurice White. At that time, White, who died February 4th at his home in Los Angeles at age 74, after years of battling Parkinson’s disease, was showing early signs of the debilitating nervoussystem disorder. “He was moving slow, and you could see it was taking a toll on him,” Wyclef recalls. “But his brain was very sharp, and I got so many stories out of him. He told me, ‘Give the audience an experience. If you give them an experience, you got them for the rest of their life.’ ” During their heyday, Earth, Wind & Fire were a commercial juggernaut, releasing nine platinum albums, scoring 15 Top…

Juan Thompson spent his earliest years playing under the table while his legendary father, Hunter, held court at the Hotel Jerome Bar in Aspen, Colorado. After Hunter committed suicide in 2005, his outlaw myth only grew. But the idolization didn’t sit well with his only child. “I love my dad, but that doesn’t mean I was blind to his shortcomings,” says Juan. Now, at 51, he’s written Stories I Tell Myself, a book that sheds light on Hunter’s life from a fresh, intimate perspective. Juan, who lives in Denver and has a successful career in IT, follows Hunter from upstart Louisville bad boy to fame at ROLLING STONE to later years as his mind and body began to fail him. “Hunter would have appreciated the book,” says Paul Scanlon,…

‘ LOVE THAT DOUBLE-TIME shit!” says Bonnie Raitt, grinning behind a piano. The singer-guitarist has just led her longtime band through a furious impromptu take on Ray Charles’ “Mess Around.” Raitt, 66, has a reputation as a tenacious perfectionist, but today at her rehearsal studio in North Hollywood, she’s loose and mischievous. At one point, she sets aside a sheet of lyrics for a new ballad to prove she doesn’t need them – but then breaks up laughing when she can’t remember the first line. “So much for losing the training wheels!” she says. After practice, Raitt heads down a hallway deeper into the studio; there’s a chore she’s been meaning to get around to. Her guitar tech opens a big, musty locker packed with old instruments. “This is over…

WHEN FALL OUT BOY RE-united in 2013 after a four-year hiatus, they called their comeback album Save Rock and Roll. Tongue-incheek as that title may have been, the Chicago foursome are doing their part, bringing a radically revamped, sample-laden version of their pop-punk sound to radio (most recently with the Munsters-sampling “Uma Thurman” and the Demi Lovato duet “Irresistible”) – and, in March, to U.S. arenas. “I definitely don’t want rock to be a diorama in a museum,” says bassistlyricist Pete Wentz, now a father of two. “Like, ‘These cavemen used to be cool.’ So thank god we’re sonically different from 10 years ago.” You attended Kanye West’s albumdebut event. What did you think? It’s awesome that he was like, “I’m going to introduce my fashion line and do a…

TOGETHERNESS SUNDAYS, 10:30 P.M., HBO Togetherness manages to make comedy gold out of some extremely unpromising materials – namely, a foursome of pale neurotics pushing 40 in L.A., trying to figure out where their lives went so horribly wrong. Besides everywhere. Mumble core pioneers Mark and Jay Duplass make Togetherness a slow-burning comic delicacy, with film sound designer Brett (Mark) and Michelle (Melanie Lynskey) as a miserable married couple who have to face the single slobs in their lives: his moronic pal Alex (Steve Zissis) and her wild sister Tina (Amanda Peet), who realizes she might be running out of dudes to bang on Tinder. This season brings new heartbreaks – even for Alex, who’s finally making it as an actor but has a new girlfriend who says things like,…

ELTON JOHN SITS AT A giant red piano left over from his Vegas days, wearing the same brownish Adidas tracksuit I saw him in two days earlier. Today is a Sunday rehearsal at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles for the debut show behind his 32nd album, Wonderful Crazy Night, and he is jawing with his crew about his vocals. They don’t seem to be getting the sound to his liking, so he sings to them in an unrhymed couplet: “You’ll know when my tits/Goes up your ass.” Everyone laughs, and then Elton breaks into a few bars from Oklahoma! before dropping down to his bass range and crooning lines not from the Rodgers and Hammerstein original: “Why do all the queers come from Tulsa?/Why do all the fairies live…

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis This Unruly Mess I’ve Made Macklemore Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ 2012 breakout, The Heist, was a heartwarming underdog success story. A true son of Seattle, Macklemore does a fair amount of hand-wringing over his fame on this long-awaited follow-up: The album opens with “Light Tunnels,” which makes winning at the Grammys sound like a winter shoveling snow in a Soviet gulag, and songs like “Brad Pitt’s Cousin” and “The Train” work the same self-pitying theme. “Make better music,” he wills himself on “Bolo Tie.” And sometimes he does, especially when the beats turn soulful and artists like Leon Bridges and Chance the Rapper swing by for assists. With the exception of the exuberant “Downtown,” coming up with “Thrift Shop”-style catchiness is rarely the goal…

Glenn Frey, 1948-2016 In RS 1254, contributors Cameron Crowe and David Browne remembered legendary Eagles founder Glenn Frey, who died on January 18th [“The Heart of an Eagle” and “The Long Run”]. ROLLING STONE readers responded. HAVING JUST FINISHED the two memorial pieces on Glenn Frey, I was reminded of the terrific performer and songwriter he was. Generous, funny, his own man and the driving force behind the Eagles – it’s way too soon for him to be gone. Jim Kunkler San Luis Obispo, CA HEARTBREAKING TO read about Frey’s lifelong health issues. That he continued to write and perform while suffering made me admire him even more. They make ’em tough in Detroit. Bob Stewart Via the Internet THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR the wonderful Glenn Frey piece by…

AS RIVERS CUOMO began writing his latest batch of Weezer songs, his producer, Jake Sinclair, asked what it would take to get back into the mindset that produced the band’s classic first two albums. “I need to get out of the house,” Cuomo replied. He ended up doing way more. He grew back the beard he wore when the band recorded 1996’s Pinkerton. He started watching young surfers at Venice Beach in hopes of finding lyrical inspiration. He even signed up for Tinder – for purely platonic purposes. “My wife’s cool with it,” Cuomo says with a shrug. The result is the band’s fourth self-titled LP, destined to be known as the White Album, thanks to a cover image that shows the band near a lifeguard tower on a white…

DAN HICKS WAS PRESENT FOR THE creation of San Francisco rock & roll – and then pushed beyond it, into an idiosyncratic cabaret-folk style all his own. Hicks, who died February 6th in Mill Valley, California, from throat and liver cancer at age 74, started his career playing drums in the Charlatans, a Bay Area band that predated the Grateful Dead. But his next group, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, was his quirkiest and most influential. Hicks’ songs and the Hot Licks’ melding of jazz, Western swing and Andrews Sisters harmonies, rejected psychedelia in favor of pre-rock nostalgia. “It just sounds better to me,” Hicks said. “It’s not about retro or modern.” In 1973, the same year Hicks made the cover of Rolling Stone, he broke up the band.…

11.22.63, HULU WHEN STEPHEN KING FIRST got the idea for a story about a teacher who goes back in time to save John F. Kennedy’s life, it was 1971 and he was a high school teacher unable to get published outside of softcore-porn magazines like Cavalier and Gent. “I was teaching school, and one day in the teachers room I thought, ‘Jeez, wouldn’t it be cool if somebody could go back and stop the assassination?’ ” King says. “But I decided the history research would be too much for a high school teacher, so I shelved it.” It would take 40 years for King to publish the book, 11/22/63, but it was worth the wait. The New York Times named it one of the five best fiction books of 2011,…

Taylor: Watch the Throne The last time Taylor Swift was up for a Grammy, her album Red lost Album of the Year to Daft Punk. “I remember not going to the afterparties and went home, and I cried a little bit,” she said, “and I got In-N-Out Burger and ate a lot.” This year went better: Swift took home the night’s biggest honor (beating out buddy Kendrick Lamar, above), threw shade at Kanye West in her acceptance speech, then went dancing with her squad (including Lorde and Haim) at Republic Records’ afterparty until 2 a.m. “Oh, what a night!” Swift said. LET ’EM IN! After some confusion when he was turned away from Tyga’s afterparty, Paul McCartney and wife Nancy Shevell went to Republic Records’ bash, dancing to “FourFiveSeconds” and…

‘ELCOME TO ROBOT NURSERY SCHOOL,” PIETER ABBEEL SAYS as he opens the door to the Robot Learning Lab on the seventh floor of a sleek new building on the northern edge of the UC-Berkeley campus. The lab is chaotic: bikes leaning against the wall, a dozen or so grad students in disorganized cubicles, whiteboards covered with indecipherable equations. Abbeel, 38, is a thin, wiry guy, dressed in jeans and a stretched-out T-shirt. He moved to the U.S. from Belgium in 2000 to get a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford and is now one of the world’s foremost experts in understanding the challenge of teaching robots to think intelligently. But first, he has to teach them to “think” at all. “That’s why we call this nursery school,” he jokes. He…

NOT SINCE HERBIE HANCOCK robo-rocked the Grammys in 1984 have jazz and pop felt as closely intertwined as they do this year. Kendrick Lamar made a bold case for fusion on To Pimp a Butterfly , David Bowie echoed it on his parting shot, Blackstar – and on Emily’s D+Evolution, co-produced with Bowie wingman Tony Visconti, Esperanza Spalding restates the point. After snatching the Best New Artist Grammy from Justin Bieber in 2011 and tilting mainstream in 2012, jazz’s most intriguing genre outlaw returns to category-busting. She straddles Hendrix and King Crimson on “Good Lava,” then declares “no more acting these predictable roles” on the swirling souljazz ballad “Unconditional Love.” Spalding makes good on that promise. She’s a formidable melodist on bass and a fascinating vocal harmonist – on “Judas”…

The Witch Anya Taylor-Joy Directed by Robert Eggers REMEMBER THE NAME ROBERT Eggers. His debut film, The Witch, is a crafty calling card brimming with beauty and terror. Eggers pulls us into the supernatural with subtle cunning and meticulous attention to detail. The setting, an isolated New England farm, circa 1630, seems to rise out of the mist. Farmer William (Ralph Ineson) and his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), face a crisis when their unbaptized baby, Samuel, the youngest of their five children, goes missing while in the care of his sister Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). Is Samuel the victim of cultish ritual? Is Thomasin a witch? Taylor-Joy, a genuine acting find, keeps us guessing while she shatters our nerves. Eggers astutely mixes the rational and its opposite, putting everyone under…

OUT OF THE DORM ROOM, INTO THE STUDIO Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo wrote most of the 2015 LP Teens of Style as an angsty college kid. The follow-up, Teens of Denial (out late spring), takes his psych-pop vision to new heights, with a sharp-edged sound abetted by Seattle producer Steve Fisk. “My viewpoint has changed a lot since the songs started,” Toledo says. “I was feeling much bleaker about life at the time.” DE LA SOUL’S BIG, GUEST-PACKED BLOWOUT For their first LP in 12 years, the Kickstarter-funded And the Anonymous Nobody, the rap trio went all in, recording with a live band, L.A.’s Rhythm Roots Allstars, and getting assists from Damon Albarn, Usher, Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Pete Rock, Estelle and even David Byrne. “He’s asking me…

FOR A LONG TIME, Phil Collins was everybody’s punching bag. Old-school Genesis fans blamed him for turning the group away from its prog-rock roots. Critics dismissed his 1980s hits as derivative schlock, and the fans he won that decade largely turned away from him in the 1990s. “People assess you by your hits,” he says, lounging in the master bedroom of his Miami Beach mansion. “So when the radio plays ‘Against All Odds’ or fuckin’ ‘Separate Lives’ again and again, they become your flagship.” But now, Collins, 65, is having the last laugh: A new generation is discovering his music, and artists from Lorde to Pharrell Williams have cited him as a major influence. (Adele even reached out to him about co-writing songs for 25.) “They don’t have the bias…

THE FIRST THING YOU NOtice at Donald Trump’s rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd. Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such problems. At the Verizon Giganto-Center in Manchester the night before the New Hampshire primary, Trump bounds onstage to raucous applause and the booming riffs of the Lennon-McCartney anthem “Revolution.” The song is, hilariously, a cautionary tale about the perils of false prophets peddling mindless revolts, but Trump floats in on its grooves like it means the opposite. When you win as much as he does, who the hell cares what anything means? He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he’s perfected over the past months. It’s a nodding wave,…

“See, I invented Kanye. It wasn’t any Kanyes. Now I look and look around and There’s so many Kanyes!” —KANYE WEST, “I Love Kanye” Kanye West The Life of Pablo Def Jam/G.O.O.D. Music The world has distracted from Kanye West’s creative process – except, as he shows on The Life of Pablo, distraction is his creative process. This is a chaotic album that feels like it was made that way on purpose after the laser-sharp intensity of 2013’s Yeezus. It’s a labored-over opus that tries hard to sound like a sprawling mess, because it’s made by an artist who knows he’s a mess and doesn’t care to hide it. “My psychiatrist got kids that I inspired” is the most brilliant line on the album – Ye can’t even…

Who are your heroes? That’s easy – my husband, John Lennon. He was the only person who put up with me. It’s difficult for a guy to understand what women are thinking. Most guys don’t even listen. He was very forward-thinking in that sense. He really jumped into feminism, no argument. He would ask me, “Could you find feminist groups for me?” Even now, I don’t think men get together and say, “Let’s be feminists.” Do you have a favorite city? I love every city I’ve been to, but Liverpool is great. John and I would pass through and say hello to relatives. People there are really strong in spirit, especially the women. I wouldn’t say they’re working-class – I don’t think they’d like for me to label them that…