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How Tom Petty Made “Wildflowers”: The Album He Called His Own Masterpiece
In the summer of 1992, Tom Petty was one of the most successful rock stars on the planet — and one of the loneliest. His 22-year marriage was quietly collapsing. He had just left MCA Records after more than a decade of battles. He had fired the only drummer the Heartbreakers had ever known. And…
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The Untold Story of Willie Nelson: The $50 Song, the Burning House, and the Outlaw Who Outlasted Everyone
Willie Nelson has been famous for so long that it’s easy to forget how strange his journey was. He sold his first hit song for $50 and never saw a dime of royalties. He ran into a burning house to save his guitar and a bag of marijuana. He owed the IRS more money than…
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The Untold Story of the Commodores: The Dictionary, the Ballads, and the Funkiest Band in Tuskegee
They were the funkiest band to ever wear tuxedos — and the smoothest band to ever play funk. The Commodores could shake a stadium with “Brick House” and melt it with “Three Times a Lady,” sometimes in the same set. But behind the silk and the swagger was one of the great do-it-yourself stories in…
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The Untold Story of Steely Dan: The Perfectionists Who Named Their Band After a Sex Toy
They were the unlikeliest rock stars of the 1970s: two sardonic, chain-smoking studio rats who hated touring, fired their own band, and treated hit records like math problems. Steely Dan made some of the slickest, most sophisticated music ever to reach the Top 10 — songs full of drug dealers, losers, and showbiz casualties, delivered…
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The Untold Story of The Clash: The Chaos, the Genius, and the Band That Refused to Play It Safe
They were billed as “The Only Band That Matters,” and for a furious, brilliant stretch of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was hard to argue. The Clash took the raw snarl of punk and stretched it until it held reggae, rockabilly, funk, jazz, and hip-hop. But behind the anthems was a band held…
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The Untold Story of AC/DC: Thunder From Down Under, Forged in Loss
For fifty years, AC/DC has done essentially one thing — played thunderous, three-chord rock and roll at maximum voltage — and done it better than anyone on earth. Behind the schoolboy uniform, the cannons, and the giant bells lies a family saga worthy of a novel: Scottish immigrant brothers, a sister whose sewing machine named…
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The Untold Story of Talking Heads: Art School, Big Suits, and an Ugly Goodbye
No band ever looked less like rock stars and changed rock more. Talking Heads were four art students who treated the stage as a canvas, the recording studio as a laboratory, and the music video as a short film — and who fell apart so completely that the singer announced the breakup in a newspaper…
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The Untold Story of Dire Straits: The Reluctant Superstars Who Walked Away
Dire Straits never wanted to be the biggest band in the world. That was rather the point of the name: when Mark Knopfler, his younger brother David, bassist John Illsley, and drummer Pick Withers started playing together in 1977, they were, quite literally, in dire straits — sharing a Deptford flat and struggling to pay…
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The Untold Story of The Police: Three Alphas, One Legendary Implosion
They were the biggest band on the planet for about five minutes in 1983, and they spent those five minutes barely able to stand being in the same room. The Police — a bass-playing schoolteacher from Newcastle, a jazz-schooled guitarist ten years his senior, and an American drummer raised on CIA stations in the Middle…
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The Untold Story of Bob Marley & The Wailers: From Trenchtown to Immortality
By the summer of 1980, Bob Marley was the most famous Jamaican who had ever lived, and arguably the most beloved musical prophet of the twentieth century. He had filled a stadium in Milan with one hundred thousand people, sung a new African nation into being, and survived an assassination attempt that would have ended…