-
The Untold Story of Kenny Rogers: The Gambler Who Played Every Hand — Jazz, Psychedelia, and Country
Kenny Rogers didn’t just cross musical boundaries — he barely seemed to notice they existed. Before he became country’s silver-bearded storyteller, he was a jazz bassist, a doo-wop singer, a folk-group member, and the frontman of a psychedelic rock band with a Top 5 hit about an altered state of mind. His six-decade career was…
-
The Untold Story of Hall & Oates: The Duo Born in a Riot That Ended in a Courtroom
They met while fleeing gunfire. They became the most successful duo in rock history. And they ended up suing each other. Daryl Hall and John Oates made some of the smoothest music of the seventies and eighties — blue-eyed soul so polished it gleamed — but the story behind the harmony is anything but smooth.…
-
The Untold Story of Chicago: The Horn Band That Lost Its Soul — and Found a Second Life
They started as a scrappy jazz-rock experiment with an unwieldy name and a sound nobody could categorize. They became one of the best-selling American bands of all time, survived the shocking death of their leader, reinvented themselves as ballad kings, and outlasted almost everyone who ever doubted them. Chicago’s story is really two stories: the…
-
The Untold Story of Fleetwood Mac: Breakups, Betrayals, and the Album That Turned Heartbreak Into Gold
No band in rock history has survived as much chaos as Fleetwood Mac — and no band has turned that chaos into art quite so profitably. They began as a British blues outfit, lost their founder to mental illness, lost a guitarist to a religious cult, and then, at the exact moment everything fell apart,…
-
The Untold Story of Carly Simon: The Vain Mystery, the Stage Fright, and the Voice That Outlasted Them All
She was born into publishing royalty, raised on classical music and civil rights marches, and she grew up to write one of the most dissected songs in pop history. Carly Simon spent five decades turning her private life into public art — her romances, her anxieties, her triumphs — and she did it all while…
-
The Untold Story of James Taylor: The Gentle Voice That Survived the Fire
He sings like a man who has never raised his voice in his life — warm, unhurried, each note landing like sunlight through leaves. James Taylor built a fifty-year career on sounding like the calmest person in the room. But the life behind that voice is one of the darkest, strangest survival stories in rock…
-
The Untold Story of Barbra Streisand: The Girl Who Wouldn’t Change a Thing
She is the only artist in history to have number one albums in six consecutive decades. She has won the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy, and the Tony — the coveted EGOT. She directed films when Hollywood insisted women couldn’t, and she did it all without changing the one thing everyone told her she had…
-
The Untold Story of John Denver: The Sunshine Boy with Shadows
He was the clean-cut troubadour of the 1970s, the blond grinning kid with the wire-rimmed glasses singing about mountains and country roads. John Denver sold the world a vision of pure, sunlit innocence — and for a while, America bought it completely. He was the best-selling performer in the country in the mid-seventies, with four…
-
The Untold Story of Neil Diamond: The Brooklyn Kid Who Gave Away a Fortune in Hits
Before Neil Diamond was the sequined showman of the Greek Theatre, before “Sweet Caroline” became the most joyful singalong in sports stadiums around the world, he was a pre-med student at NYU who could barely afford to eat. The road from a fencing scholarship to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ran through some…
-
The Untold Story of Barry Manilow: The Jingle King Who Conquered the World
Long before the sequined jackets and the sold-out arenas, before the Las Vegas marquees and the millions of devoted “Fanilows,” Barry Manilow was a starving kid from Brooklyn with a piano, a stack of other people’s lyrics, and fifteen seconds to make America remember a melody forever. The story of how he got from a…