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How KISS Created “Alive!”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
In the summer of 1975, KISS was running out of road. Three studio albums in, the most spectacular live band in America still hadn’t cracked the Top 30. Their label, Casablanca Records, was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The band was, by some accounts, living off their manager’s credit card, playing to half-empty theaters…
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Aerosmith: The Hearts Behind the Bad Boys
For fifty years, Aerosmith sold the world an unforgettable image: the Toxic Twins, the Bad Boys from Boston, a band that partied harder, played louder, and burned brighter than anyone else in rock. And for a long time, the image was true enough — the seventies were a blur of sold-out arenas, trashed hotel rooms,…
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How Aerosmith Created “Toys in the Attic”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
In January 1975, five hungry kids from Boston walked into the Record Plant in New York City with something to prove. They had two albums under their belts, a fearsome live reputation, and almost nothing to show for it on the charts. Their label was losing patience. Their rivals were passing them by. The drugs…
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Elvis Presley: The Heart Behind the King
The world knew Elvis Presley as the King — the hips, the sneer, the voice that changed everything. But those who knew him best talk about something else entirely: a man of almost overwhelming tenderness, whose generosity was as legendary as his music, and whose deepest wounds never fully healed. Behind the rhinestones and the…
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How Elvis Created “Suspicious Minds”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
By the end of 1968, Elvis Presley had done the impossible: he had come back. The leather-clad warrior of his NBC television special had reminded the world — and himself — that the fire was still there. But a television triumph is not a record, and Elvis knew the difference. To truly reclaim his throne,…
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Bob Dylan: The Tender Heart Behind the Enigma
For more than sixty years, Bob Dylan has been the most famously unreadable man in popular music — a shape-shifter who answered questions with riddles, accepted a Nobel Prize with a shrug, and turned his own life into a hall of mirrors. But behind the masks, the disguises, and the deliberate mystery, there has always…
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How Bob Dylan Created “Blood on the Tracks”: The Story Behind the Masterpiece
In the winter of 1974, Bob Dylan did something no one expected of him: he told the truth. Not in an interview, not in a press conference — Dylan never did that sort of thing — but in song after song, poured out in a feverish burst of writing at his farm in Minnesota and…
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The Who: The Heart Behind the Noise
They were the loudest band in the world, the smashers of guitars, the singers of “I hope I die before I get old.” For sixty years they toured the planet, buried two of their own, survived stampedes and lawsuits and their own legendary excess. But the most extraordinary thing Roger Daltrey ever did had nothing…
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How The Who Built “Quadrophenia”: A Mod’s Four Minds and the Album That Nearly Broke the Band
Pete Townshend had already written one rock opera. “Tommy” had made The Who the most ambitious band in rock. So naturally, for the follow-up to “Who’s Next,” he decided to write another one, even bigger, even more personal, and even more impossible to perform. The result was “Quadrophenia,” released on October 26, 1973: a double…
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David Bowie: The Heart Behind the Masks
He was Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Major Tom and the goblin king, a man who treated identity the way other musicians treated instruments. He reinvented himself so often that reinvention became his identity. But underneath every mask David Bowie ever wore was a man who wanted, more than anything, what the masks…