Table of contents for Nov-05-15 in Rolling Stone

EXCLUSIVE THE ZOMBIES RETURN Watch a three-part episode of our video series “The Encore,” chronicling the rise, fall and resurgence of one of the best psychedelic acts of the Sixties – including interviews with founders Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone about their new album. LIST THE HISTORY OF HAIR METAL Our experts rank and tell the stories behind the 50 best LPs from the hair-metal craze of the Eighties – from Def Leppard to Mötley Crüe, Stryper to Dokken. VIDEO THE ART OF BOB DYLAN Go behind the scenes with rock scholar Bob Egan and get the real stories of classic Dylan album covers like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Q&A DAVE GAHAN STRETCHES OUT The Depeche Mode frontman discusses Angels & Ghosts, his moody new LP with…

Cage the elephant guitarist brad shultz still sounds embarrassed about the night he asked Dan Auerbach to work with his band, which opened for the Black Keys last year. “I was like, ‘Let me show you some songs, dude! We gotta do some tracks together!’ ” Shultz says. “Typical stuff – I was really wasted.” The Kentucky group endured a traumatic period surrounding 2013’s Grammy-nominated Melophobia, with intraband beefs resulting in the exit of lead guitarist Lincoln Parish. “The last record was a living hell,” Shultz says. “We were going through so much turmoil.” Auerbach agreed to produce Cage’s fourth album, Tell Me I’m Pretty (due December 18th), in Nashville. He ended up giving the band a fresh start and a fresh sound. In the studio, he would often play…

BY 1997, TOM PETTY’S LIFE WAS in shambles. His latest album, She’s the One, had bombed commercially, and he’d just fired his longtime drummer, Stan Lynch of the Heartbreakers, after years of acrimony. Even worse, his 20-year marriage had just come to a bitter end. Living in a tiny house he calls a “chicken shack,” he found a new way to deal with his pain: heroin. Before long, he was hooked. “Tried to go cold turkey, and that wouldn’t work,” he says in the new book Petty: The Biography. “It’s an ugly fucking thing.” The book, by author and former Del Fuegos guitarist Warren Zanes, marks the first time Petty has ever talked about his heroin abuse publicly, but it’s far from the only dark moment in the book. Petty…

ON NOVEMBER 3RD, VOTERS IN OHIO WILL DECIDE the fate of legal weed – making the Buckeye State an unlikely ground zero in the national divide of the legalization movement. The fight pits the movement’s ponytailed old guard against its rising carpetbaggers, a cadre of Rolex-wearing, politically connected businessmen intent on controlling the growth, sale and subsequent $100 million profits of legal weed. Unlike Ohio’s longtime activists, the new weed elite has a $23.5 million war chest to campaign for dispensaries on every block. But while victory in heartland America would instantly notch the single greatest electoral achievement in marijuana reform, many see the movement’s corporate takeover as the death knell of what has long been a grassroots reform campaign – destroying the last vestiges of the drug’s counterculture relevance.…

‘SO IS THIS SWEARing or no swearing?” In a darkened soundstage on the outskirts of London, Abel Tesfaye is wondering if he can say “fuck” or not. Tesfaye, better known as breakout pop sensation the Weeknd, is at a rehearsal for Later . . . With Jools Holland, the BBC music show, about to soundcheck his smash hit “The Hills,” a fourminute horror -movie booty call featuring more than a dozen f-bombs. For Tesfaye, that’s relatively clean, but he knows the pensioners in Twickenham might disagree. So when the verdict comes back “no swearing,” he nods and smoothly pivots to a censored version – a small gesture that says a lot about the kind of professional he has become. “The Hills” is currently enjoying its fourth straight week at Number…

Truth Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford Directed by James Vanderbilt THIS PROBING LOOK AT TV news is, unlike Spotlight, a trip into the dark side of journalism. CBS producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) climbs a slippery slope when she organizes a segment for 60 Minutes II, with CBS News anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) at the helm, suggesting that a young George W. Bush pulled strings in 1968 to dodge Vietnam by taking Texas Air National Guard pilot training. Juicy stuff, especially in light of the Swift-boat scandal that tainted John Kerry’s campaign. Bush-bashing could shift the election. Mapes feels confident thanks to her research team, including Lt. Col. Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid), journalism prof Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss) and freelancer Mike Smith (Topher Grace). But the team relies heavily on…

IT’S MID-OCTOBER, AND FOR THE past three weeks, members of the Grateful Dead and John Mayer have been rehearsing together at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios in San Rafael, California. They’ve worked through more than 50 songs, which they keep track of on a whiteboard. “We know the songs we’ve been over about 75 percent now,” says Weir. “Which is about as good as the Dead ever got, anyway.” Dead & Company – Weir, Mayer, and Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart – are feeling good about their first tour, starting October 29th in Albany, New York. “It’s the most incredible thing we got,” says Hart. “We don’t need to practice. We just need to stand in a small circle and look at each other.” “It’s telepathy,” adds Weir. “We’re…

GARTH RISK HALLBERG’S City on Fire – a wild plunge into the bleak haze of late-1970s New York – is being touted as the best and biggest debut of the year. The most amazing part is that the guy behind it wasn’t even born until 1978 – and grew up, of all places, on North Carolina’s coastal plains. Hallberg, already a respected book critic, was raised in Greenville, “a small college town on Playboy’s top-20 list of best party schools,” he says. “I never really felt at home there.” Hallberg escaped into Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the cultural “supernova” of Koch-era New York. “I was my town’s resident beatnik at 14,” he says. “That downtown [New York] scene seemed like this fantastical landscape. I loved the idea that all…

IT’S A SCORCHING TEXAS NIGHT IN EARLY OCTOBER, AND Florence and the Machine are wrapping a headlining set at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. “It’s fucking hot, so take off something you don’t need and wave it above your head like a flag,” Florence Welch commands the crowd. Then she strips down to white bell-bottoms and a bra, leaps offstage and disappears into a sea of outstretched hands. The next day, she explains that shucking her clothes wasn’t about being titillating, but rather “about jumping off the cliff because you want people to feel free from judgment.” Earlier this year, Welch issued her own declaration of individuality, How Big How Blue How Beautiful. Full of tales of bad romance and redemption inspired by a recent breakup, it became her…

MAYBE NEVER IN YOUR LIFE do you meet an individual like Joe Rogan. He’s that singular, in a multivariate kind of way. For instance, most folks think of him only as the flapping-jawed, bug-eyed, hyperexcitable blow-by-blow commentator for all the Ultimate Fighting Championships’ fights since 2002, given to innumerable “wows!” and “unbelieeeeveables!,” all the while displaying a depth of mixed-martial-arts knowledge second to none and a totally side-splitting yet insightful way with words, as in the time he called a fighter’s cut as deep as “a goat’s vagina.” In this regard, he’s entirely sensational. “He’s educated more people in mixed martial arts than anybody ever,” says UFC president Dana White. “He’s the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting.” And you’ve got to…

Rock the Kasbah Bill Murray, Bruce Willis Directed by Barry Levinson IF YOU HAVE A COMEDYdrama about a rock manager at the last stages of a dismal career – he says he discovered Madonna (he didn’t) and books his last client (a game Zooey Des chanel) on a USO tour of Afghanistan – you need to find exactly the right actor to play him. Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Mitch Glazer lucked out getting Bill Murray to play Richie Lanz, a loser who makes losing hilarious. Murray just kills it. Rock the Kasbah goes fierce to quietly touching and back to funny again. Bruce Willis shows up as a gun-toting mercenary. And there’s Kate Hudson as a hooker working the Kabul circuit. And how about Leem Lubany as a Pashtun…

‘The Happy Guitar’ A young, cheerful Cobain plays a jaunty folk-blues number on acoustic guitar like he’s holding down the stage in a mid-Sixties Greenwich Village coffeehouse. When Morgen says you can hear Cobain smiling on the early tapes, this is what he means. ‘Rehash’ Cobain revs up the distortion for an upstairs-downstairs riff that suggests Black Sabbath in their prime and pushes his voice up to a manic, shredded falsetto. But there is a genuine song – clearly indebted to Cobain’s Northwest-punk idols the Melvins – coming through the turbulence. At points, Cobain shouts “Solo!” and “Chorus!” where he plans to put more noise and ideas later. ‘And I Love Her’ The grunge-rock avenger often cited as the John Lennon of his generation covers this Paul McCartney ballad –…

THREE WEEKS AFTER HE RELEASED The River, Bruce Springsteen took the stage in Tempe, Arizona. It was November 5th, 1980, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Springsteen and the E Street Band tore through their set with extra ferocity. “I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night,” Springsteen told the crowd before “Badlands.” “I think it’s pretty frightening. You guys are young, there’s gonna be a lot of people depending on you coming up, so this is for you.” A pristine video of the show is one of the highlights of The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, a four-CD/three-DVD box set (due December 4th) of material from Springsteen’s fifth album. As his onstage speech indicates, it was a time of growing social…

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO STOP paying for cable television: Inexpensive streaming devices and an array of Internet TV services mean that practically all of the shows you care most about can be watched for less than the average U.S. cable bill of roughly $100 a month, without the annual contract and headaches. You won’t get every channel, though, so it’s worth doing a little research o on the different cordcutting options. Here are three possible configurations. THE BINGE WATCHER BUY THIS Amazon Fire TV ($99, amazon.com) STREAM THESE Amazon Prime Instant Video, Netflix, HBO Now, Showtime Anytime, Hulu Plus The Amazon Fire has a simple-to-use remote with voice control that even responds to general questions about traffic and weather, and it now supports 4K – which…

AT ABOUT 1:30 A.M. ON OCTOBER 29th, 2014, at New York’s Beacon Theatre, the Allman Brothers Band ended their final concert with the first song they ever played, 45 years earlier: Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More.” Guitarists Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks – who simultaneously had announced they were leaving the Southern-rock institution the previous January – then returned to their own longrunning gigs. Trucks, the nephew of Allmans drummer Butch Trucks and a member since 1999, was onstage three nights later with Tedeschi Trucks Band, the group he leads with his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. The day after that Beacon show, Haynes – who played with the Allmans for more than 20 years – flew to Cincinnati and into a 10-hour practice for a Halloween concert with his band…

Eddie’s Field of Dreams Eddie Vedder has been a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan since childhood, so he was overjoyed to watch his team come out on top in its playoff series against the St. Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field. “They’re really effing good,” Vedder said. “It’s a brand-new day!” Vedder will have to take a break from attending games as Pearl Jam head to South America: “I have to leave before the World Series. All I’m saying is, the next few years, we’re not gonna play in October!” Lena and Jack: Back at Work In L.A., Lena Dunham and boyfriend Jack Antonoff attended a charity brunch where Dunham gave a speech honoring Judd Apatow for his advocacy on behalf of rape survivors. Dunham just signed a deal to direct a…

ON OCTOBER 6TH, NEWS reports heralded a historic development: The world’s largest incarcerator, the United States of America, was about to make the largest one-time release of prisoners in its history. The U.S. Justice Department announced that it would be releasing some 6,000 inmates from federal prisons before the end of their original sentences. It’s the first wave of an even larger number of early releases – more than 13,000 in total. The news was trumpeted as further evidence that after decades of mandatory-minimum sentences, the pendulum of public policy has finally begun to swing back the other way. But though the news was much hyped in the press, a close look shows just how difficult substantial change in sentencing policy continues to be. For one thing, the announced releases…

Spotlight Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams Directed by Tom McCarthy THERE’S NO HIGHER COMpliment to pay this steadily riveting, quietly devastating take on investigative journalism than to say Spotlight gets it right. So did the Spotlight team on The Boston Globe when, in 2002, it published nearly 600 articles on child sex-abuse allegations against Catholic priests and the church cover-ups that followed. The team won a Pulitzer for its scalding exposé. And right now the film is the predictive favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar. But awards are merely icing on a cake whose candles glow in tribute to longform print journalism, now fading in the digital fog of budget cuts, reduced resources and click-bait news cycles. Bravo to director Tom Mc-Carthy (The Station Agent, Win Win, The…