Table of contents for May 5, 2016 in Rolling Stone

TO EXPLORE OUR ARCHIVES, VISIT  ROLLINGSTONE.COM/COVERWALL  FOLLOW US ON MUSIC 2016 ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME LIST 100 GREATEST DRUMMERS TV SEASON TWO: KIMMY SCHMIDT FEATURE WRONGFUL CONVICTION WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO  ALL THIS AND MORE AT  ROLLINGSTONE.COM/PODCAST Rolling Stone POLITICS MATT TAIBBI CULTURE ROB SHEFFIELD MOVIES PETER TRAVERS ROCK & ROLL DAVID FRICKE…

“I usually wake up at about three in the afternoon,” says the Aerosmith guitarist, who is touring this spring with the Hollywood Vampires. “The first thing I do is put a record on the turntable.” Deep Purple “Highway Star” This was constructed back when real players knew how to hold your attention with a solo for three minutes. J. Geils Band “Love Stinks” I don’t know if there is a better frontman than Peter Wolf. They were one of the first bands to understand the value of videos and MTV. Jimi Hendrix “Driving South” There’s a version from the BBC with the original Experience where he just cuts loose for six minutes. It really gives you an idea of his blues roots. Rolling Stones “Honky Tonk Women” This has all…

Alex turner is finishing his second martini at a stuffy bar in Manhattan when he starts reminiscing about his earliest visits to New York, a decade ago. The English singer-guitarist was 20 when his band Arctic Monkeys performed on Saturday Night Live and played a very hyped show at the Bowery Ballroom. “David Bowie came backstage,” he says in his thick Yorkshire accent. “We didn’t know what to say to him, you know. We were just overwhelmed. It was like a fucking runaway train in those days.” At the time, the Monkeys had just topped the U.K. charts with a debut album that became the fastest-selling LP in British history. But Turner, who just turned 30, had trouble adjusting to fame and wasn’t happy with his band’s 2007 followup. To…

Rivers cuomo is ambling through the shadows and light near the Hot Dog on a Stick stand close by the Santa Monica Pier, hands shoved into black skinny-type jeans, dark hoody covering a dark T-shirt, baseball cap worn brim forward, slender, on the very shortish side, and, unless you are an avid fan, hardly recognizable as the frontman for Weezer, Nineties nerd-rock giants, emo legends and purveyors of hook-filled whimsicalities such as “Undone – The Sweater Song,” “Buddy Holly” and “The Good Life” on the group’s first two records, the Blue Album and 1996’s more confessional Pinkerton. Thereafter, for the past two decades, the band has alternately hoped against hope to recapture that early magic and not given a hoot, all depending on the vagaries of the man in charge.…

PJ Harvey The Hope Six Demolition Project Island PJ Harvey’s ninth solo album is a set of folk and blues op-ed journalism – following an activist impulse for this usually inward-looking artist that began on her last album, 2011’s Let England Shake. “Now you see them, now you don’t/Faces, limbs, a bouncing skull,” she sings against rushing acoustic guitars, braying sax and circular hand claps on “The Wheel,” a survey of the cyclical nature of war. Harvey traveled to Afghanistan and Kosovo, and spent time in Washington, D.C., witnessing the many costs of imperialist aggression. But anyone expecting a traditional protest record hasn’t paid much attention to her long career. This music is impressionistically pointed. “Ministry of Defence” is apocalyptic metal, with English dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson…

The Dems Debate mark binelli’s cover story on the Democratic candidates was welcome in a campaign season that looks like the WWE [“The Good Fight,” RS 1257]. Amazing that in 2016, a couple of policy wonks with deep commitments to social issues could seem so radical. Terrence Washington, via the Internet your piece on sanders and Clinton reinforced my belief that the senator from Vermont represents our best chance at wresting American democracy from the oligarchs and Super PACS. Jack Walsh, via the Internet bernie sanders has rallied the progressive left in ways no other politician has in decades. Still, I think Clinton’s background in international politics makes her the stronger candidate. Thanks for a fascinating piece. Elizabeth MacDonald, via the Internet binelli writes of clinton’s “willingness to absorb…

It comes halfway through Iggy Pop’s show at SXSW in Austin – during “Funtime,” his invitation to ecstasy on the 1977 album The Idiot. Stripped to the waist, showing off a chestnut-tan chest, the singer leaps headfirst from the stage of the Moody Theater, f lipping onto his back in a crucifixion pose as he lands on a sea of hands. It is three gigs into his new tour – promoting what he claims is his last album, the dark, compelling Post Pop Depression – and Pop, who turns 69 on April 21st, has taken his first stage dive. “I needed to connect, and I’ll do whatever it takes,” he declares in a slow-rolling baritone in his dressing room after a searing two-hour set featuring that record and more than…

Brian Eno discovered a new tool while making his first album in nearly four years: “As you get older, your voice drops. I realized I could now hit a low C.” That lower register helped Eno, 67, write The Ship, which mixes the art-rock vocals of LPs like 1975’s Another Green World with the free-flowing drifts of his pioneering ambient work. For the 21-minute title track, Eno fed paragraphs into an algorithmic text generator – including a lifeboat passenger’s description of the Titanic sinking, filthy soldiers’ songs from World War I, and his own scrapped lyrics – and pored through the tangled results. The album includes a gorgeous cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free,” a tribute to Eno’s friend Lou Reed. “I struggled for a long time about…

CLAIRE BOUCHER, A.K.A. Grimes, prides herself on being a one-woman show. She writes, produces, engineers and performs some of her generation’s most inventive indie pop – most recently Art Angels, which hit Number One on the Alternative album charts and shifted her from hazy synth-pop toward an off-kilter guitars-and-beats sound. The Vancouver native, 28, takes charge of the videos too: At the moment, she’s lounging in bed at her Los Angeles apartment, editing the clip to her next single, “California” (which sounds like mutated Dixie Chicks). In May, she’ll join Florence and the Machine on tour, and this month will play Coachella – where her set might coincide with a certain hard-rock band’s reunion. “They’re onstage for so long,” she says cheerfully, “so you can still catch Grimes and Guns…

ONE FRIGID NIGHT THIS PAST February, I flew to Ohio to watch democracy in action. The next day, the Ohio state Legislature was voting on whether to defund Planned Parenthood, a fallout of the by then entirely discredited videos that purported to show that the organization sold fetal tissue for profit. I didn’t want to go. With a Republican supermajority in both the state’s House and Senate, it seemed a fait accompli that House Bill 294 would pass, pulling $1.3 million from the Ohio branch of the country’s largest provider of reproductive health care. I watched the blinking lights of Columbus approach through a tiny airplane window bleary with ice. The city looked cold, unwelcoming, though maybe that had more to do with what was going on inside my head…

IN 2016, THE BORDERS BETWEEN musical genres are disappearing like lines of coke on HBO’s Vinyl. And the cross-pollination isn’t just happening in hip-hop or EDM, but in vintage styles with hybrid roots. Take Nashville, country music’s presumably hidebound headquarters. The liner notes to the all-star concept album Southern Family – helmed by tradition-minded A-list producer Dave Cobb – call its heritage-themed songs “folk art,” which sounds right if your definition includes Otis Redding-style R&B (Anderson East’s “Learning”), Southern goth strings (Civil Wars vet John Paul White’s “Simple Song”) and foot-stomping gospel (Black Crowes brother Rich Robinson’s “The Way Home”). The most surprising cut is a bluesy cover of “You Are My Sunshine,” by Morgane Stapleton and her husband, Chris Stapleton; the most theologically pointed, Jason Isbell’s “God Is a…

You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you? I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone’s eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, “God’s always been.” For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque. Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There’s something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem. What’s the first song you ever connected to? I…

1. The National “Morning Dew” Brooklyn indie rockers the National have spent years curating Day of the Dead, a five-plus-hour tribute to the Grateful Dead, featuring Jenny Lewis, Courtney Barnett and the War on Drugs, among others – many of whom might not seem like Dead fans at first glance. The National’s version of “Morning Dew” adds a dose of wine-sodden doom to what’s always been a deceptively pretty song about the end of the world. 2. Mark Pritchard feat. Thom Yorke “Beautiful People” We’re all so jacked for a new Radiohead record, we’ll take anything – anything! – they off er up. This U.K. producer’s gauzy electro-zone-out turns Yorke’s cellar-soul falsetto into sweet sandpaper. 3. Zayn Malik “BeFoUr” In One Direction, he was the R&B guy hiding his talent…

NEW YORK SERENADE Bridges backstage at the Beacon Theatre in March PHOTOGRAPH BY DANNY CLINCH Minutes before stepping onstage at New York’s Beacon Theatre, Leon Bridges is feeling good. He’s just taken his usual preshow shot of Laphroaig whiskey (“Well, a couple of them,” he says), and he’s pacing backstage in a new custom suit, belting out a freshly written New Orleans-style shuffle about cruising home into the arms of a Mexican girl. “Being from Texas, I love my Mexican women,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just about, like, being home and excited about life.” Bridges has a lot to be excited about. His debut, Coming Home, just climbed more than 100 spots to the Top 20 on the iTunes chart after he appeared on the Today show, and…

MARGO PRICE’S TATTOOS tell her story. She has nine, some of which you can’t see, like the words gypsy wanderer of the world emblazoned on her left foot. There’s a buffalo on her left thigh, memorializing Buffalo Clover, her old country-soul band. Her biggest tattoo, on her left shoulder, depicts a huge tree circled by three birds, representing herself and her twin sons, Judah, who’s now five, and Ezra, who died in 2010 from a rare heart condition two weeks after he was born. His death began a long, painful, self-destructive period for Price. “That took me out of the game for a while,” says Price, sipping a frozen Irish coffee in a booth at a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar. “All I wanted to do was drink to forget.” Price’s debut…

Jesse Jarnow’s fascinating new book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, explores what he calls “a vast and learned psychonautical diaspora” – the social and physical world shaped by drugs like LSD, DMT, peyote, MDMA and mushrooms. At the center of the story is the freewheeling economy that grew up around the Grateful Dead and quickly trickled down to the “hip capitalism” of Phish, Dave Matthews and jamfests across the country. Jarnow describes how echoes of head culture have touched various corners of America’s past and present, from New York’s graff ti scene to frat boys to the founders of Google. Jarnow, who published a book about Yo La Tengo in 2012, touches on pop-culture off shoots from Freaks and Geeks to Miley Cyrus, while perspectively probing “the apolitical…

“Dump-truck man Drops the beat with trash cans. Call 911! We got therapy demands.” —PARQUET COURTS, “Captive of the Sun” Parquet Courts Human Performance Rough Trade BY ROB SHEFFIELD Even in an absurdly abundant time for brilliant young indie bands, Parquet Courts approach their jittery art-punk guitar buzz with a playful sense of adventure that sets them way ahead of the pack. The Brooklyn-via-Texas dudes have built a fervent following in the past few years by indulging their whims. Sometimes that means wildly funny hardcore rants complaining about social ills like the military-industrial complex, or comments sections. Other times, that means psychedelic drones about mystery girls. On their excellent new Human Performance, they even bust out a vibraphone solo – the kind that makes you hope the rental…