A profile of Bill Withers, “one of the few stars in pop-music history to truly walk away from a lucrative career, entirely of his own volition, and never look back.”

The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:

“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”

Cradling a cosmopolitan in his plump right hand, Don Kirshner is reminiscing about his former life as a pop-music mogul and getting a little wistful. All the hits, all the bands, all the favors he did for up-and-comers. But here he sits, at the best table in this swanky restaurant, pretty much forgotten. Slighted is a better word for it, or that’s the way he feels, anyway. Yes, the maitre d’ and the waiters here know who he is. And the other retirees in the nearby plush gated community where he lives will pat him on the back and say things like, “This guy is spectacular. Spectacular!” But the rest of the world? “I’m a military secret,” he rasps in a blustery Bronx accent.