Table of contents for November 30, 2017 in Rolling Stone

Fifty Years of Rolling Stone Photos RS 1299 ROCKS! ALL THE PICS from the past 50 years were amazing to view, and I gained some insights as well into their origins. Jonathan Roberts, Myrtle Beach, SC ALL THE GREAT PHOTOS brought back so many memories. One photo I really wish you would publish again is the 1974 cover photo of Karen and Richard Carpenter by the phenomenal Annie Leibovitz – it truly captured Karen’s joy of life. Pam Quiggle, Tempe, AZ IF “A PICTURE IS WORTH A thousand words” (and each word was worth $100), then the net worth of the Photo Issue is $6.5 million. Joe Braun, Carmel, CA WHILE THERE WERE MANY true icons in your photo selections, I was disgusted to see Kid Rock among them. He is to…

IN OCTOBER 2015, DAVID BOWIE decided to end his cancer treatments after learning the disease had spread too far to recover from. The very same week, he traveled to a Brooklyn soundstage to shoot a video for his new song “Lazarus,” the name of a biblical figure that Jesus brought back from the dead. Bowie spent the day in a hospital bed as cameras captured him with a bandage around his head. “Look up here, I’m in heaven,” he howled. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen.” Footage from that day and recollections from those who were there make up one of the pivotal scenes in David Bowie: The Last Five Years, a revelatory new documentary directed by Francis Whately – who chronicled Bowie’s golden Seventies period in his 2013…

  IT’S MID-AFTERNOON ON A Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk’s children are gathered around him – one of his triplets, both of his twins. Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies. Most tellingly, there’s a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, “When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it’s really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you’re pretty much hosed, no matter…

Mudbound Mary J. Blige, Jason Mitchell Directed by Dee Rees HHH½ SET IN HARD-TIMES mississippi just before and after World War II, Mudbound, based on a 2008 novel by Hillary Jordan, is a fiercely intimate epic about two poor families, one white farmers (the McAllans), the other black sharecroppers (the Jacksons) who work the McAllan land. Mudbound reps a new career high for director Dee Rees (Pariah, HBO’s Bessie), a gay black woman with a charged affinity for life on the fringes. Hap Jackson (Rob Morgan) and his wife, Florence (Mary J. Blige), watch a son, Ronsel (Jason Mitchell), go off to war. Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke) and his wife, Laura (Carey Mulligan), cope with Henry’s brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund) enlisting as a pilot. Ronsel and Jamie return home with…

WHEN HARRY STYLES SAT down for an October 15th segment on CBS This Morning, the normally press-shy singer’s solo debut was already five months old and he had no new tour dates to promote. But to experts, his timing was perfect – the Recording Academy had just mailed ballots to 12,000 Grammy voters to decide the nominees for the January ceremony. “Harry Styles is in the conversation for Album of the Year, so that gives him visibility during the voting period,” says a record-label source. Adds another, “Harry doing something for an older demographic like CBS This Morning is just what a good PR manager would advise: ‘We want voters to know you’re not one-fifth of a teen-pop band, you’re a serious artist.’ ” In recent years, Grammy contenders have been…

LEANING FORWARD ON A COUCH in his home on the west coast of Florida, two cans of Budweiser in front of him and Duane Allman’s Dobro on a stand nearby, Dickey Betts hesitates. “I don’t know if you want to write this or not,” he says. “But, shit, my career is over, so I don’t give a shit.” He starts talking about an incident in 1993, when Betts, along with Bob Dylan, the Band, Stephen Stills and others, had been invited to play at a Bill Clinton inauguration event. Betts’ performance was shaky – the house band was so inept, he says, it could barely get through “Southbound,” a song from his years with the Allman Brothers Band. Backstage, Betts recalls, he met “a real smartass in a three-piece suit”…

The Obamas Take a Chance As president, Barack Obama knew the power of music – he partnered up with everyone from Jay-Z to Bruce Springsteen to get his message out. That hasn’t changed: Chance the Rapper headlined the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit, which brought community leaders to Chicago. Chance’s set included “First World Problems,” which touches on economic injustice and the Flint water crisis. Michelle Obama praised the rapper, saying she considers him a “baby brother.”             Harry-mania Hits London Need more evidence that Harry Styles’ solo tour is one of the hottest tickets of 2017? Just ask the fans (below) who spent days camping out to score prime spots for a recent show in London.  …

LAST NIGHT, THE new Call of Duty came out, and Post Malone was so stoked about it that he parked himself in front of his Xbox until 6 a.m. Right now it’s 4 p.m. and he’s back at it. It’s a sunny Friday in the affluent L.A. suburb of Tarzana, but the shades are drawn in Malone’s den to block the light – his wall-size projecting screen is particularly susceptible, he says, to glare. Malone is only 22, but he’s one of the most popular musicians in the country. His single “Rockstar” has been America’s Number One hit for four weeks and counting. The track, which features 21 Savage, celebrates a raw brand of hedonism – “I’ve been fucking ho’s and popping pillies, man/I feel just like a rock star-ar-ar”…

THE REVELATIONS OVERCAME Edgar Maddison Welch like a hallucinatory fever. On December 1st, 2016, the father of two from Salisbury, North Carolina, a man whose pastimes included playing Pictionary with his family, tried to persuade two friends to join a rescue mission. Alex Jones, the InfoWars host, was reporting that Hillary Clinton was sexually abusing children in satanic rituals a few hundred miles north, in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant. Welch told his friends the “raid” on a “pedo ring” might require them to “sacrifice the lives of a few for the lives of many.” A friend texted, “Sounds like we r freeing some oppressed pizza from the hands of an evil pizza joint.” Welch was undeterred. Three days later, armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a…

Call Me by Your Name Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg Directed by Luca Guadagnino HHHH   HERE’S THE MOVIE OF THE year for incurable romantics. It’ll sweep you up on waves of dizzying eroticism and then sweetly and emphatically leave you shattered. Director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), an ardent sensualist, sets the film in northern Italy in the summer of 1983, when even the air is perfumed with wanton possibility. Elio Perlman (a flawless Timothée Chalamet) is 17, multilingual, musically gifted and skilled at flirting with the local girls near the villa of his parents, an American professor (a superb Michael Stuhlbarg) and his translator wife (Amira Casar). Then an intern arrives from the U.S. to assist Elio’s father with research into Greco-Roman culture. He’s…

Darkest Hour Gary Oldman Directed by Joe Wright HHH½ GARY OLDMAN IS ONE OF THE best actors on the planet. And he proves it for keeps as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, director Joe Wright’s rip-roaring take on the prime minister’s first tumultuous month in office, in May 1940, when Great Britain is a whisper away from surrendering to Hitler. Oldman is barely recognizable in his Churchill fat suit. But thanks to the makeup artistry of Kazuhiro Tsuji, the flashing mischief in Oldman’s eyes pokes through the latex, and his voice catches Churchill’s eloquent call to arms against the Nazis. Academy, get busy engraving Oldman’s name on an Oscar for a performance that belongs in the Hall of Fame. Wright’s pulsating, provocative drama runs on Oldman’s genius as the brawling,…