Stevie Nicks: The legend from Fleetwood Mac is a rock star, because she’s always been ruthlessly honest and fearless. The first time she picked up a guitar and wrote a song, it was about heartbreak, and when she wrote for Fleetwood Mac, many of those songs were about her doomed relationship with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. But through all […]
music
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Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is’ Was Inspired by a Thomas Mann Story
Peggy Lee’s haunting 1969 hit “Is That All There Is”—if you watch Mad Men, you’d recognize it from both the opening and closing of the midseason premiere—was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller during the 1960s, but its roots date back to an 1896 Thomas Mann novella. In a 2011 Los Angeles Times story on Jerry Leiber, Randall Roberts expanded on […]
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Bill Withers Has Been Out of the Spotlight for So Long That Some People Think He Died
Withers has been out of the spotlight for so many years that some people think he passed away. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder myself,” he says with a hearty chuckle. “A very famous minister actually called me to find out whether I was dead or not. I said to him, ‘Let me check.’ ” […]
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People, Let Me Tell You ‘Bout My Best Friend
Ringo first met [Harry] Nilsson after the singer did a gonzo version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High.” “It was bordering on madness, and so we thought, ‘We gotta meet this guy,’ ” says Ringo. While Nilsson’s destructive friendship with Lennon got the ink — they drunkenly heckled the Smothers Brothers at L.A.’s Troubadour, and […]
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Who Wrote ‘Happy Birthday’?
Most musicologists who’ve traced the origins of “Happy Birthday” agree that its musical score dates back to the work of two Kentucky sisters in the late 19th century: Mildred Jane Hill (b.1859), and Patty Smith Hill (b.1868). After graduating as valedictorian of Louisville Collegiate Institute, Patty went on to be a central figure in the progressive […]
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Gillian Welch on How April 14th Came to Be ‘Ruination Day’
April 15 may be Tax Day, but for some—especially singer Gillian Welch—it’s the 14th of April that’s notorious. April 14 marks the anniversary of three awful, fabled events: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (it sunk in the wee hours of the 15th); and the Black Sunday dust storm of […]
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How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin
Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group […]
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The Origins of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin”
TERRY GROSS: So were you writing the song on assignment? Were you writing it for The Righteous Brothers? BARRY MANN: Yes. CYNTHIA WEIL: When we wrote the song, they weren’t that crazy about it (laughter). GROSS: Really? MANN: Well, when I sang it – I loved The Everly Brothers at the time, and I sounded […]
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The Maestro as Detective
At a mere 31 years old—practically an infant in classical music years—British conductor Robin Ticciati is already a major maestro. He made his La Scala debut at 22, making him the youngest conductor ever to grace the podium at the world’s most famous opera house. Two years later he was named principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, […]
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How the Hand Painted Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip Came to Be
Collectors Weekly: Who started the music industry’s billboard trend?
Landau: As far as I can tell, it was the Doors in 1967 for their debut album. I talked with Jac Holzman—the head of Elektra Records who signed the Doors—while writing my book. In 1967, he had just come out here from the East Coast and opened an office on La Cienega Boulevard, not far from Sunset Boulevard, and it occurred to him that billboards were being used for everything except promoting records and music. A lot of radio stations where popular disc jockeys worked were farther east on Sunset, and he knew they drove on the Strip, and that the entertainment industry in general was based there.