On Yoko Ono’s 1974 album “A Story,” and stepping out from behind the ever-present shadow of John Lennon.
The Beatles
Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible
How a band seemingly out of step with its times outlasted so many of its indulgent, in-step contemporaries.
William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n’ Roll
From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer’s influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways.
Remembering Pioneering Studio Engineer Geoff Emerick
Emerick engineered more than The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He helped re-engineer the way music got made.
Do You Want to Know a Secret: The Untold Stories of Paul McCartney
“Imagine realizing one day that you’re a Beatle. Think about how you might decide to handle that for the next 50, 60, 70 years.”
The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs
What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?
The Business of Merchandising Pop Music
Brian Epstein was the manager of a family-owned business called North End Music Stores in Liverpool, England. He began hearing a lot about a new group called The Beatles, who were playing at the Cavern Club. So he went to hear them, and one day, proposed a management contract. The four lads, which included drummer […]
Well into his forties he kept swinging between the poles of his double life as only a true Manichean can, a rock star buried in a pile of cocaine one minute and a sadhu renunciant fingering his beads the next. But by his fifties he had abandoned the pretensions of stardom altogether. He had married […]