Table of contents for 25-Feb-16 in Rolling Stone

MUSIC RICK RUBIN: MY LIFE IN 20 SONGS The Def Jam co-founder reflects on more than 30 years of producing classic records, from the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and LL Cool J’s Radio to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik to the Dixie Chicks’ Take the Long Way to Kanye West’s Yeezus. “There’s a time to strip back an artist’s sound,” Rubin says, “but sometimes it makes sense to do the exact opposite.” EXCLUSIVE STORY OF THE REPLACEMENTS Read an exclusive excerpt from Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, about the group’s notoriously drunken appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1986. FILM INDIE HORROR: ‘THE WITCH’ How a Brooklyn theater director took a story about 17th-century Puritans and turned it into the scariest movie…

Penn and the Kingpin In RS 1253, actor and director Sean Penn wrote about his secret trip to Mexico to interview notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – then on the lam from Mexican authorities – about the drug war [“El Chapo Speaks”]. As we were going to press, Mexican military recaptured Guzman in his home state of Sinaloa. ROLLING STONE readers wrote in. I JUST FINISHED READING Sean Penn’s article on El Chapo, and I have a newfound respect for him. I can’t imagine the guts it took to get this story. My hat’s off to Penn and ROLLING STONE for bringing us this piece. David Lambing Henderson, NV PENN’S SELF-IMPORTANT and overly adjectived story about meeting El Chapo was akin to an adolescent’s longawaited, top-secret encounter with…

MIKE LOVE BOUNDS UP THE STAIRS INSIDE HIS MASSIVE LAKE TAHOE home (10 bedrooms in all, 12 bathrooms, two elevators, not to be believed) and into a large walk-in closet stuffed to overflowing with garish, multicolored shirts and a gazillion baseball caps, many of them emblazoned with the name of his band, the Beach Boys. A suitcase rests on the floor. Love nods at it, prods it with his foot. “A lot more shirts are in there,” he says, “because, if you must know, I haven’t unpacked.” ¶ And why should he unpack? For the past 54 years, he and various versions of the Beach Boys, which these days include only him as an original member, have toured almost constantly. On his current outing, he has 172 dates lined up,…

Animal Collective Painting With Domino Avant-pop institution Animal Collective have specialized in ecstatic noise explorations for more than a decade. But their 10th album skips the signature escape-pod reverb washes, speeding up the tempos and shortening the song lengths to come up with the zippiest music they’ve ever made. Animal Collective’s core trio recorded Painting With at an L.A. studio once frequented by the likes of Michael Jackson and the Beach Boys, and in a sense the music splits the difference between those poles. The intersecting harmonies of “FloriDada” suggest Pet Sounds sped up to Ramones velocity, and “Natural Selection” features electric viola from John Cale. The music is as transporting as ever – AnCo’s spastic group vocals remain a thing of nutrageous beauty. The songs just hit liftoff…

You recently became a grandfather, at the age of 43. How did you feel about that milestone? Well, it keeps my redneck street cred in good standing, right? Maybe even my hip-hop street cred, if I have any of that left. I’m enjoying it. Listen, my son graduated college and he has a job. That alone, as a parent, is such a relief. I can’t imagine what the fuck I put my parents through. Now I have a beautiful granddaughter, on top of it? It’s pretty crazy. My friends say, “How lucky are you, to be able to see your granddaughter do so much stuff? You’ll be at her wedding.” So many things you might not see if you have kids later in life, which seems to be the trend…

1. Elliott Smith “True Love” Twelve-plus years after Smith’s death, there are still some serious gems in his catalog that most fans have never heard. This ballad about the tragic allure of addiction – recorded in 2001 with producer Jon Brion but unreleased until now, on the soundtrack of the new documentary Heaven Adores You – is one of the best. 2. Rostam “Wood” We were sorry to see Vampire Weekend co-founder Rostam Batmanglij leave the group in late January – but this lush, dreamy love song, which he reposted immediately after the announcement, has us excited for the music he’ll make from here. 3. Drake “Summer Sixteen” Drake side-eyes Kanye’s pool (“Mine is just bigger”) and snaps back at President Obama for saying he prefers Kendrick’s music. Please, Drizzy,…

‘WELCOME TO THE END,” OZZY OSbourne says to 20,000 fans at Chicago’s United Center. He’s dressed head-to-toe in black, and his band has just wrung every ounce of Gothic gloom from its opening dirge, “Black Sabbath, ” but now Ozzy sounds more wistful than scary. “Can you believe it, man? From 1968 till now.” Nearly half a century after they first scared the bejesus out of rock fans, Black Sabbath have begun their victory lap. The End, a big, fiery farewell tour for some of rock’s most primal visionaries, includes two North American legs – the current one runs through late February, and another kicks off in August – and could stretch at least into next year, band members say. Osbourne says the idea to call it quits “just kind…

AT LEAST HALF A DOZEN PEOple have tried to kill Michael Moore. But the attempt that really stands out in his mind is the guy with the fertilizer bomb in 2004. “He was going to plant it under my house in Michigan,” says Moore. “But one night he was cleaning his AK-47 and it went off. Neighbors called the cops, and when they showed up he had all this ammo, bombmaking stuff and a hit list, with me at the top. He went to the federal penitentiary.” Few liberal activists have a stronger track record of infuriating conservatives than Moore, whose new film, Where to Invade Next, hits theaters nationwide on February 12th. In recent years, though, the death threats and murder attempts have subsided – as has Moore’s once-ubiquitous…

A COUPLE OF YEARS BACK, Bobby Cannavale went to see Mick Jagger about a job. The Emmy-winning actor had been tapped by Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter to play the lead in a show that was being kicked around at HBO, but the project was really Jagger’s idea – conceived two decades ago as a film that pulled the curtain back on the music industry of the 1970s – so Jagger was the man to please. And thus far, he hadn’t been. “I remember being really freaked out about what the lighting should look like in my living room,” Cannavale says now of a Skype call gone wrong. “I was like, ‘I want him to think I’m cool.’ So I wore black, you know? Black’s rock & roll.” The feedback…

On a January morning in Phoenix, Willie Jessop enters the courtroom through a side door, nods at the lawyers and saunters up to the witness stand. He’s a big man – six feet three, well over 200 pounds – and, as usual, is dressed in black. He glances at the jury, a faint smile crossing his lips. In the past, Jessop has been the staunchest defender of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, a polygamist offshoot of Mormonism. When he used to take the stand to explain their way of life, a few sister wives in pastel prairie dresses would always be on hand to show support. But today, they’re gone. That’s because Jessop, the former spokesman for the FLDS and one-time bodyguard to its jailed prophet,…

Mavis Staples Livin’ on a High Note Anti- Pairing a veteran singer with next-generation material is a crapshoot. But after two Jeff Tweedy-produced LPs, Mavis Staples takes her comeback higher still here, using an A list of songwriters informed, not bound, by roots music. Valerie June, Ben Harper, Justin Vernon and Nick Cave all rise powerfully to the occasion. Credit the challenge of writing for an icon who addresses spiritual and political matters with scant abstraction: You step up, or step off . Benjamin Booker’s “Take Us Back” celebrates self via community, with Staples’ startling flow somewhere between Millie Jackson and Kanye. Songs speak to #BlackLives Matter in language echoing civil-rights-era anthems; Neko Case’s “History, Now” asks pointedly, “Do we go in like a surgeon? Do we go in…

“Dwelling in the world of sad songs is my antidote for loneliness,” says Wolf, whose new solo album, A Cure for Loneliness, will be released on April 8th. Nolan Strong and the Diablos “The Wind” This song has a great cult following, especially with doo-wop fans. Even just the intro has the power to bring you back to the sadness of a lost love. Dorothy Moore “Misty Blue” This started out as a country song but became an R&B tour de force. Every time I hear it, it transports me into a state of misty blue. The Platters “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” This came from the 1933 production of Roberta, starring Bob Hope. When the Platters recorded it, they ended up owning it. Little Walter “Blue and Lonesome” Little…

AT THE HEIGHT OF SAN Francisco’s mid-Sixties psychedelic renaissance, Jefferson Airplane, the scene’s reigning band, often played free shows for the faithful – on flatbed trucks in the Panhandle and at be-ins in Golden Gate Park. That is where bassist Jack Casady saw his bandmate, singer-guitarist Paul Kantner, “at his best. He’d take his 12-string Rickenbacker,” Casady says, “and raise it above his head in a great, revolutionary stance. He loved that phenomenon of a huge number of people coming together with music as the foundation and the catalyst.” Kantner – who died at 74 on January 28th in San Francisco of multiple organ failure following a heart attack earlier in the week – pursued that ideal for more than 50 years: first with the Airplane, which he co-founded with…

HALSEY READS THE COMments, all of them. She knows what every random kid online thinks of her, and unwise as it may be to take on that psychic burden, it’s hard to blame her: The 21-year-old, Jerseybred alt-pop singer-songwriter had an online fan base built on pure charisma well before she signed a record deal. But in the six months since the release of her gold-certified debut, Badlands, and the muchhyped, divisive single “New Americana” (about being in a generation “raised on Biggie and Nirvana”), she’s become an old-fashioned rising star, complete with an upcoming sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. “I have to remember for every kid saying something awful, there’s a kid saying something great,” says Halsey, who couldn’t even mourn David Bowie on Twitter without haters accusing…

LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN NOVEMBER, only two days after wrapping up final post-production tweaks on his sixth film, The Revenant, the director Alejandro González Iñárritu walked into a screening room at the corner of Alfred Hitchcock Drive on the Universal Studios lot in Universal City, California. He was dressed entirely in black, his typical uniform – today, a couturelooking hoodie with extraneous silver zippers, worn over black jeans – and he greeted the assembled audio crew with fist bumps and apologies for his tardiness. He’d driven up from his production office in Santa Monica, where he also lives, and hit traffic, which he normally avoids by zipping around town on a Vespa. Somebody got him a Coke. Iñárritu, 52, moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City, his hometown, after the…

“I come fluttering in from Neverland, Time can never stop me, no, no, no, no. I know you’ve tried to, I come riding in on a pale white horse.” —RIHANNA, “Consideration” Rihanna Anti Westbury Road/Roc Nation For much of 2015, repeated delays and a lack of solid information made Rihanna’s Anti feel like pop’s mythical creature. Now that we know it’s real, we can hear the singer’s eighth LP for what it is: her rawest release ever, and something like a rejection of her Top 40 past. After years of consistently hitdriven LPs – from her 2005 debut up through 2012’s Unapologetic – Rihanna has become an album artist with noticeable anti-pop leanings. Where previous albums were built around the peaks of a few clear singles, Anti’s songs flow…