Table of contents for October 2018 in Rolling Stone

MIKE CAMPBELL doesn’t cry when he talks about the early-morning phone call that told him Tom Petty, his bandleader and best friend of nearly 50 years, had just been rushed to the hospital. The Heartbreakers guitarist doesn’t cry when he remembers playing to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl with Petty one week before that horrible October morning either, or even when he remembers seeing Petty’s body in a hospital bed just hours before his heart stopped beating. “They had his hair straight,” Campbell says. “He was medicated and very still, but he looked like an angel.” It’s not until he thinks back to a brief encounter on a plane after that Hollywood Bowl show — the final time he spoke with Petty — that the eyes behind Campbell’s purple Lennon…

IT HAS BEEN a year since Hurricane Maria wiped out Puerto Rico. If you drop onto the island for a visit, the recovery looks almost complete. The San Juan airport is crowded, the cruise ships are docking on schedule, and the piña coladas are flowing in Old San Juan. The lights work and your cellphone gets pretty good reception. If you ignore a few dead traffic signals and bent road signs, you might even be able to fool yourself into thinking nothing ever happened. But Puerto Rico has not recovered. In fact, it’s arguably as close to collapse as it has ever been. The power is on and the roads are open, but if you look closely, the entire island is held together with duct tape and baling wire.…

Petty’s UnearthedTreasures Diving into an incredible box of unreleased music Arriving just a year after Tom Petty’s death, the four-disc An American Treasure is the kind of memorial box set that usually appears later in an artist’s wake, when the missing eases and hunger mounts for alternate takes and abandoned songs. Opening with one of the first and best of those orphans, “Surrender,” from his 1976 first-album sessions with the Heartbreakers, here is Petty’s life in relentlessly high standards — the jangling optimism of “Keep a Little Soul,” ditched in 1982; the bar-band boot-camp memoir “Gainesville,” left off 1999’s Echo — and experimental verve. “Wake Up Time” is a sublime electric-country waltz from the early work on 1994’s Wildflowers; a campfire-folk take on that album’s “Don’t Fade on Me”…

Beautiful Boy DIRECTOR Felix Van Groeningen STARRING Steve Carell DO “BASED on a true story” addiction dramas bum you out? You’ll still love Beautiful Boy — it’s an emotional powerhouse too powerful to resist. Steve Carell digs deep as David Sheff, a journalist trying to cope with the meth addiction of his teenage boy, Nic (Timothée Chalamet). The script draws on memoirs from both father and son, and the dual perspective gives the film its devastating impact. Sure, Nic is addicted — but David is just as addicted to saving him. And the cycle of recovery to relapse and back again is rendered with startling immediacy; Belgian director Felix Van Groeningen knows how to work an audience over and put folks through the wringer. But it’s the two leads…

FORCE OF NATURE If you didn’t know Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s Camping started as a British comedy, you might assume someone simply dared the Girls duo to create a character even more narcissistic and off-putting than Hannah Horvath. In Kathryn McSorley-Jodell, a scheduling-obsessed helicopter mom who corrals misbehaving friends and family for an outdoor weekend celebrating pushover husband Walt’s birthday, they’ve succeeded. But Kathryn is played by the spectacularly likable Jennifer Garner (and Walt by David Tennant, in full Jimmy Stewart mode), whose innate sweetness forgives a lot of Kathryn’s more insufferable behavior. Throw in sharp supporting turns from Juliette Lewis, Chris Sullivan and a back-from-the-dead Ione Skye, and you have a series that can be mortifying to sit through, but has more empathy for its characters than…

The former Journey frontman is about to release Traces, his first album in 22 years. It was inspired by the loss of his girlfriend to cancer. THE FLAMINGOS “I Only Have Eyes for You” At the time this came out, when I was just a kid, it was like another landscape of sound to me. As old-school as it is today, it still evokes magic. SAM COOKE ”Cupid” I was in a ’56 Thunderbird with my mom when this came on the radio. I was captivated by every single thing I was hearing. The world got really small. THE DRIFTERS “Under the Boardwalk” Lyrics like “you can almost taste the hot dogs” aren’t the best, but the way he says it just kills me. THE BEACH BOYS “In My…

NOT LONG AFTER losing its second presidential election to Barack Obama, the GOP, so the story goes, operated on itself. Like a lung-cancer patient declaring that it’s time to quit smoking, the Republican National Committee declared in a 2013 “autopsy” report that “the Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African-American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.” A few months later, Republicans cheered a Supreme Court decision that maimed the Voting Rights Act. Three years after that — in the wake of more than a dozen states pushing through fresh new laws to make it more difficult for African-American and Hispanic people to vote — the party crossed another Rubicon by nominating Donald Trump for president, a birther…

“My G-Wagon big. And it’s got some bass. So if I want to hear trap shit, I’ll go in the G-Wagon.” TEST DRIVE QUAVO OF MIGOS The Luxe Off-Roader THE 2019 AMG G63 is a tank of a Mercedes, especially imposing in matte black, but Migos ringleader Quavo isn’t intimidated. After all, he pulled up to his nephew Takeoff’s video shoot here in the Atlanta suburb of Doraville in his own G-Class 4x4, painted an electric hue he calls “slime” green. Compared with his other cars — McLaren 720S, Lamborghini Aventador, Dodge Challenger Hellcat — Quavo considers the G-Class a necessary expense. Last winter, he drove it to stock up on pantry staples during a rare snow day down South. “I wanted something big, like a truck,” he says,…

Rolling Stone GUIDE BORN IN Jamaica, reggae grew from local styles (mento, ska, rocksteady, Rastafari drum chants) and American R&B to become a musical movement as rich as any in the past century. Over the decades, its bedrock sound has mutated into dub and digital dancehall, influencing hip-hop and shaping pop to this day. But the genre’s classic era was in the Seventies and early Eighties, when its greatest voices made their definitive statements. Must-Haves The Wailers Catch a Fire 1973 Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer would soon split their iconic trio, but this breakout LP is a harmony-rich masterpiece of activist soul. Tosh’s “400 Years” laments generations of slavery, and “Stir It Up” advocates action in the dance hall and bedroom. Island Records’ Chris Blackwell added…

ONE OF the key characteristics that distinguished Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men from its prestige-drama peers was that it was serialized, but focused first and foremost on making each episode its own beautiful, handcrafted work of art. Instead of a novel-for-television, it was a short-story collection set in the same TV universe. The best stories, like “The Suitcase” (Don and Peggy bond during a long night at work), benefited from our collective knowledge of the characters, but many installments could function as gorgeous stand-alones for the sake of someone who’d never seen the show before. Now, three years after Don Draper bought the world a Coke — and 11 months after Mad Men writer Kater Gordon accused Weiner of sexual harassment — Weiner returns to TV with The Romanoffs, which…

When Jason Isbell met his wife, Amanda Shires, she was playing fiddle at a club in Athens, Georgia. At the time, he was a local hero in the boozy country-rock group Drive-By Truckers. “I made him sign a Polaroid,” says Shires. Now, that photo hangs in their home outside Nashville. They haven’t had much downtime here lately; Shires just released an excellent new LP, To the Sunset, and Isbell has carved out a place as one of rock and country’s most vivid storytellers since leaving the Truckers in 2007. Though the first couple of Americana rarely write songs together, they aren’t afraid to critique each other’s work. “We ask each other a lot, ‘Is this too much?’“ says Isbell. “Trust me, you don’t want to hear the lines of…

While planning live shows, artists have a new audience to keep in mind: fans at home. Tours by Taylor Swift, Travis Scott and Drake have huge visual moments that photograph well for Instagram, a big promotional tool that designers are increasingly thinking about. “A show no longer starts when the curtain rises,” says Ray Winkler, who designed the On the Run II tour. “It starts when the first person takes a picture.”…

The filmmakers behind fall’s big reboots on how they left their mark on two horror franchises — from a creepier mask to a bigger, sleeker, ‘upgraded’ alien DAVID FEAR INTRODUCING … Tierra Whack’s 15 Minutes of Fame THIS YEAR has seen marquee albums from hip-hop’s biggest stars, from Nicki to Drake, Kanye to the Carters. It takes a special project to cut through the noise, and 15 minutes of music from a little-known 23-year-old from Philly did the trick. Tierra Whack’s Whack World is a cleverly executed calling card: 15 songs, one minute each, all supercatchy. Some are whimsical, like the opener, “Black Nails” (“Best believe I’m gon’ sell/If I just be myself”). Others are heavier: “Pet Cemetery” is about a friend who was murdered. “It’s the saddest shit,” she…

‘I THINK OF ARETHA as Our Lady of Mysterious Sorrows,” Jerry Wexler once said of Aretha Franklin. Wexler was the Atlantic Records producer who, in 1967, helped raise the singer to her sudden and incomparable soul heights. “Her eyes are incredible, luminous eyes covering inexplicable pain. Her depressions could be as deep as the dark sea. I don’t pretend to know the sources of her anguish, but anguish surrounds Aretha as surely as the glory of her musical aura.” Those doleful eyes were sometimes mistaken for shyness. That was how a group of white musicians viewed her in a first meeting at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on January 24th, 1967. Wexler thought the exploding Southern style of soul would bring out the best in the 24-year-old Aretha’s…

The Working-Class Hero ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ Running for U.S. Congress, New York’s 14th District IT WAS DECEMBER 2016, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just left Standing Rock — the Native American-led protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline — when she got a call from a newly formed organization called Justice Democrats. They wanted to know if she’d be willing to run for Congress in New York’s 14th District. The 28-year-old former bartender had been a field organizer for Bernie Sanders, phone-banked for Barack Obama and worked in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s office as a college student, but Ocasio-Cortez was jaded. “I wasn’t sure if our democracy and its electoral politics were really salvageable in the interests of working-class people,” she says. Even if it was, she wasn’t sure she was the person…

A Star Is Born DIRECTORBradley Cooper STARRINGBradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle, Andrew Dice Clay ONE STAR Soars; the other crashes and burns. It’s a tale as old as time, flattened and fatigued by constant repetition. So why in hell did Bradley Cooper choose to make his debut as director with the third remake of A Star Is Born? What could he bring to the role of the self-destructive headliner living in the shadow of the protégée he loves? And why did he have Lady Gaga, going out on a limb in her first starring role, to follow in the footsteps of the legends who previously aced the role of the newbie: Barbra Streisand (1976), Judy Garland (1954) and Janet Gaynor (1937)? Talk about walking a tightrope…