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The Untold Story of Supertramp: The Dutch Millionaire, the Breakfast-Table Manhattan, and the Handshake That Broke
They were the unlikeliest hitmakers of the seventies: a band with two singers, two songwriters, and two completely different personalities, making progressive rock you could hum. Supertramp sold more than sixty million albums on the strength of a Wurlitzer electric piano, a saxophone, and songs about school, sanity, and the American dream. But behind the…
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The Untold Story of George Harrison: The Hit He Copied Without Knowing, the House He Mortgaged for a Laugh, and the Night His Wife Saved His Life
They called him the quiet Beatle, and for years that was a convenient way to overlook him. But George Harrison lived one of the most dramatic lives in rock history: the first Beatle to walk out, the author of a prayer that became a plagiarism landmark, the man who invented the modern benefit concert, a…
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The Untold Story of Jim Croce: The Letter That Arrived Too Late, the Dear John Letters, and Thirty Years That Counted
He had eighteen months of fame. That is all the world gave Jim Croce — a year and a half between obscurity and a pecan tree in Louisiana — and in that sliver of time he wrote some of the most beloved songs of the seventies. He was thirty years old when he died, one…
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The Untold Story of Gordon Lightfoot: The Jealous Night That Became “Sundown,” the Shipwreck He Sang Into Legend, and Six Weeks in a Coma
He was Canada’s bard, the plainspoken troubadour Bob Dylan once called a mentor, the man who turned a Great Lakes shipwreck into one of the most haunting hit singles ever released. But Gordon Lightfoot’s life was anything but the gentle folk idyll his songs suggested. Behind the twelve-string guitar lay a volatile love affair with…
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The Untold Story of Dan Fogelberg: The Christmas Eve Encounter, the Bandleader Father, and the Song That Wrote Itself in a Hammock
He was the soft-rock poet of the seventies and eighties, the voice behind “Longer,” “Leader of the Band,” and “Same Old Lang Syne.” But Dan Fogelberg was never quite the gentle, simple troubadour his ballads suggested. He was a restless multi-instrumentalist who could play nearly everything on his records, a pilot, a painter, a man…
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The Untold Story of Kansas: The 15-Minute Song That Took a Lifetime to Write
They were a progressive rock band from a state with, in their own words, “absolutely no musical tradition” — six guys from Topeka who played biker bars and rodeos and somehow became one of the biggest American rock bands of the seventies. Their most famous song began as a finger exercise their guitarist didn’t even…
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The Untold Story of Styx: How a Robot Destroyed Rock’s Biggest Theatrical Band
They were the first band in history to score four consecutive multi-platinum albums. They sold out arenas across America with a sound that stitched prog-rock ambition to power-ballad heart. And then their leader had an idea: a rock opera about a future where music is illegal, starring a robot, a fascist evangelist, and a hero…
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The Untold Story of REO Speedwagon: Fistfights, Firings, and the Ballad Nobody Wanted
They named themselves after a fire truck. Their first singer quit by climbing out of a moving car and vanishing into the night. Their second singer was fired mid-album, rehired years later, and then mocked by his own bandmates for writing the power ballad that made them superstars. REO Speedwagon sold forty million records on…
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The Untold Story of America: The Band Named After a Country They Barely Knew
They were three teenagers living in England, children of American airmen, so homesick for a country most of them barely remembered that they named their band after it. Then a 19-year-old among them wrote a song on a cheap guitar about a desert he’d mostly imagined — a song he thought was a throwaway novelty…
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The Untold Story of Christopher Cross: The Grammy King Who Conquered the World, Then Vanished
In February 1981, a soft-spoken Texan with the look of a high school chemistry teacher walked onto the Grammy stage and did something no artist in history had ever done. He beat Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. He beat Frank Sinatra. He swept the four biggest awards in music in a single night — and then…