Table of contents for Oct-22-15 in Rolling Stone

“These are the artists I listen to when I get up in the morning,” says Love, who’s got a great new LP out now, produced by Steve Van Zandt. Barbra Streisand “People” Barbra’s voice is just so strong and so pure. The sound that came out of her mouth amazed me when I first saw her. It was almost like it was coming from her toes – like it wasn’t real. Dionne Warwick “Don’t Make Me Over” I love her so much. I worked for Dionne as a backup singer for 10 years, and I drew a lot of strength from her. Aretha Franklin “Ain’t No Way” Aretha and I are kindred spirits. I love all of her songs, especially this one. It really moves you and touches your heart.…

FOR CREEDENCE CLEARWATER Revival, the beginning of the end came during a group meeting in October 1970, when John Fogerty’s bandmates dropped a bombshell on him: After nine Top 10 hits in three years – all written by Fogerty – they wanted Creedence to become a democracy, with everyone contributing equally to the songwriting. “They just wanted to go into the studio and come up with songs by osmosis,” Fogerty writes in his new memoir, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music. “These guys had no clue about what was necessary. A vision. That’s just the truth. . . . To me that was scary . . . a disaster. . . . Can I go so far as to say catastrophic?” Creedence lasted just two more years, dissolving after…

WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED, in 1981, director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead opened in only 15 theaters. But thanks to word of mouth, the gory low-budget horror film about five twentysomethings visiting a cabin, where some of them are possessed by demons, became a cult hit (Stephen King called it “ferociously original”). ASH VS EVIL DEAD SATURDAYS, 9 P.M., STARZ Raimi eventually made two sequels, and he produced a reboot of the original film. He would go on to helm three Spider-Man movies. But people kept hounding him about his most beloved work. “Reporters would feign interest in whatever picture I was working on and then they’d say to me, ‘When is the next Evil Dead coming out?’ ” he says. Now Evil Dead is getting a fifth life as…

Taylor & Mick Get Ya-Ya’s Out Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour has featured huge guest stars, from Steven Tyler to Justin Timberlake, but no one at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena was prepared when she welcomed “one of the greatest entertainers of all time – my friend Mick Jagger.” Mick and Taylor powered through “Satisfaction,” with Taylor showing off some wild new stage moves. Later, she simply tweeted, “Drops mic.” Gravy’s Bayou Bud “I feel so delightfully connected to this amazing man,” says Wavy Gravy of old friend Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John. The funky twosome got together for the Sound Summit, a benefit concert for picturesque Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County, California. As part of the “good rockin’ fun,” Gravy also welcomed the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Beyoncé & Friends Save…

IT’S A MONDAY AFTERNOON IN LOS ANGELES, AND JOANNA Newsom – a 33-year-old with the unlikely distinction of being American pop music’s premier harp-playing auteur – is about to do some birdwatching. It’s about 4 p.m., but Newsom, a night owl and insomniac, just ate breakfast at an old-timey restaurant in Los Feliz. With Miu Miu shades covering her eyes, she walks to her Audi hybrid SUV, which she parked in a comically tight space, and climbs aboard. “I haven’t had a car since I was 16 that couldn’t fit a harp,” she says, as we head off toward Griffith Park. Newsom, who lives in L.A. with her husband, Saturday Night Live alum and Brooklyn Nine-Nine star Andy Samberg, has sold hundreds of thousands of records and earned champions like…

Drake and Future What a Time to Be Alive Cash Money/Epic/A1 What a time to be alive – and being “alive,” as Future and Drake define it, involves having way too many feelings about way too many strippers for way too many sleepless nights. Their surprise mixtape is shrewdly timed, since both MCs are on a creative roll after dropping two of the year’s biggest and best albums. It’s a quickie, and it sounds that way: a six-day digital dash in the studio. Yet that’s why it feels fresh and spontaneous. This is the sound of Future’s Dirty South meeting Drake’s Great White North, both artists playing off their louder-than-life personalities without overthinking the details. Future dominates the chemistry, with his producer Metro Boomin behind most of the tracks.…

In February 1980, AC/DC’s Malcolm and Angus Young received devastating news: Their frontman, Bon Scott, had died after a night of debauchery. It could have meant the end of the band, but the Youngs had other ideas. “I thought, ‘Well, fuck this, I’m not gonna sit around mopin’ all fucking year,’” Malcolm told ROLLING STONE’S David Fricke. “So I just rang up Angus and said, ‘Do you want to come back and rehearse?’” Within weeks, the restless band recruited a new singer, 32-year-old Brian Johnson, and headed to the Bahamas to record Back in Black. The blockbuster album went on to sell 50 million copies, making AC/DC even more popular, and cockier than ever. “I’d like to lock [our critics] up in a cell with AC/DC music for a week,”…

Trump, Pumped A GOOD AND FAIR PORTRAYAL of Donald Trump [“Trump Seriously,” RS 1244]. It’s also interesting that when you look past his bombast and rhetoric and immigration shtick, Trump is basically addressing, however crudely, the massive outsourcing of millions of jobs from the economy. Except for maybe Bernie Sanders, what other candidate is even discussing this? Kathy Lowen, via the Internet THE TRUMP FEATURE REMINDED me of the movie Almost Famous, in which reporter William Miller tirelessly pursues rock star Russell Hammond for his story of the band and its music. Each time Miller is promised an interview, something else comes up to distract Hammond. The Donald is a whirling dervish of bluster, bravado, self-importance and clichés. At his next rally, I fully expect to hear him utter the…

IT’S THREE DAYS BEFORE the pope leads hundreds of thousands of people in a mass at Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and four miles away at the Wells Fargo Center, one of America’s most famous former Catholics is already getting into the spirit of the occasion. Madonna uses a giant cross as a stripper’s pole and writhes around on a re-creation of the Last Supper table. “Popeywopey is on his way over,” she says later in the show. “I think he’s stalking me.” The gleefully blasphemous moment is one of 21 elaborately choreographed numbers on Madonna’s Rebel Heart tour, which has been packing North American arenas since it kicked off September 9th. It’s her most extravagant stage show ever – a two-hour set that features samurai warriors, matadors, gypsies, rockabilly kids…

PATTI SMITH BEGAN HER CAREER writing poetry books (Seventh Heaven) and for rock magazines (including this one), and her songs have always been steeped in literary tradition. So it’s no surprise that the successor to her National Book Award-winning memoir is, once again, no boilerplate rock-star flashback. But where Just Kids follows a line through Smith’s coming of age with late soulmate Robert Mapplethorpe, M Train is an impressionistic weave of dreams, disasters, space-outs and epiphanies, a meditation on life and art by a woman who sees them as one. As on Horses (“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”), Smith slings a great lead. “It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” she begins here. In fact, she processes everything from outlandish encounters (a wee-hour singalong with chess master…

As the chipmunk-cheeked star of The Wonder Years, Fred Savage grew up Truman Show-style: That Joe Cocker-ized kiss with Winnie was his first, too. But for the past decade, Savage, now 39, has been on the other side of the camera, directing and producing for the likes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Party Down. So he’s as surprised as anyone to find himself the co-star, opposite Rob Lowe, in Fox’s new sitcom The Grinder – producers recruited him after watching other actors get “trampled” by Lowe’s presence. “I didn’t think I missed acting,” says Savage. “But once I started to make people laugh, I enjoyed it.” After The Wonder Years ended, in 1993, Savage eschewed a meltdown in favor of majoring in English at Stanford. His own kids…

Various Artists Hamilton: Original Broadway Cast Recording Atlantic “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Anyone would be lucky to have Broadway innovator Lin-Manuel Miranda tell his or her story, and this time Founding Father Alexander Hamilton is the fortunate son. Miranda has created an exemplary piece of musical theater in his smash hit Hamilton. This album, created with help from the Roots, pulls off something even more impressive: It proves that a cast soundtrack LP can work as a powerful, cohesive, exhilarating pop experience in the 21st century. This presentation of Hamilton is a textured labor of love, showing and not simply telling how its title character went from “young, scrappy and hungry” to “an Icarus [who’s] flown too close to the sun.” Miranda’s music and lyrics…

1. Thunderbitch “Closer” Brittany Howard already put out one great album this year with Alabama Shakes – and her downand-dirty new side project, Thunderbitch, is a sweet bonus. This garage-blues howler is the highlight. 2. Chvrches “Empty Threat” The Scottish dance-pop trio don’t leave you time to think on this tune from their latest LP, Every Open Eye – from the second that singer Lauren Mayberry’s sparkling hook hits, you’ll be swept up. It’s a fourminute blast of ice-cold attitude and synths. 3. Sophie “MSMSMSM” Ever danced so long at the club you thought you might actually be losing your mind? This exhilarating, hard-edged cut from the EDM iconoclast nails that feeling. 4. Thomas Rhett “Crash and Burn” Country’s next crossover star comes through with a breakup tune (“I think…

“These songs mattered to me as much as any of my own songs.” Adams in New York AS RYAN ADAMS TOURED THE COUNTRY last year, his bus was filled with the sound of a surprising obsession: Taylor Swift’s 1989. “I’ve been a fan of hers since [2008’s] ‘White Horse,’ ” says Adams. “Her songs are very solid – there’s not a lot of bullshit.” Playing the album nonstop, Adams was struck with “this weird idea”: to record unplugged versions of the songs along the lines of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. His idea finally became a reality in August, when he knocked out a complete (and as it turned out, mostly plugged-in) remake of Swift’s album in three weeks. A few weeks after that, his version of 1989 became 2015’s most surprising…

BLUR WERE ONE OF THE most popular bands of the Nineties – everywhere except here in America, where most mainstream listeners know them as the “woo-hoo!” guys thanks to their lone U.S. hit, 1997’s “Song 2.” But their stateside reputation has grown over the years since their 2003 split, and this fall Blur (who returned with a strong new album, The Magic Whip, last spring) will play their biggest American non-festival gigs ever, at L.A.’s Hollywood Bowl and New York’s Madison Square Garden. Frontman Damon Albarn called from his London home to talk about why he both loves and hates getting back together with his old bandmates; his plans for a new album with his most successful non-Blur project, Gorillaz; and more. “I’m on my sofa, and I’ve just put…

The Dead Weather Dodge and Burn Third Man BY JON DOLAN Robert Plant once described Led Zeppelin’s 1971 classic “Black Dog” as a “blatant, let’s do-it-in-the-bath type thing.” This would also be an accurate appraisal of the third album by Jack White’s side project the Dead Weather – assuming that the only time you ever use the bath is for doing it in the bath. The band features White on drums, fire-breathing singer Alison Mosshart of the Kills on vocals, Dean Fertita of Queens of the Stone Age on guitars and keyboards, and longtime White associate Jack Lawrence on bass. Together, they uncork the dirtiest, ickiest thump our man Jack has been part of in some time. It’s a fine reminder that he always works best when there’s a…