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Silk Degrees: How Boz Scaggs and a Band of Unknown Kids Made the Smoothest Album of 1976
In the fall of 1975, Boz Scaggs was a 31-year-old singer with a beautiful voice, a Texas drawl, and a career going nowhere. He had been in the Steve Miller Band. He had made a series of critically admired solo albums that hardly anyone bought. His label, Columbia, was losing patience. One more flop and…
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Nile Rodgers: The Heart Behind the Hits — Addiction, Cancer, and the Will to Keep Playing
If you only know Nile Rodgers as the smiling man with the white Stratocaster — the hitmaker behind “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “Let’s Dance,” and “Get Lucky” — you know the least interesting part of his story. Behind the most successful second act in pop music stands a man who survived a childhood of chaos,…
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Good Times at the Edge of the World: How Chic Made *Risqué*, Their Boldest Masterpiece
It was the winter of 1979, and the two skinniest men in music could do no wrong. Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards had given the world “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” “Everybody Dance,” and “Le Freak” — a song so ubiquitous that Atlantic Records executives once claimed it was the best-selling single in the…
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The Isleys: A Family That Sang Through the Sorrow
Sixty years, three generations, six consecutive decades of hits — the Isley Brothers’ career is unmatched in popular music. But behind the chart records lies a family saga worthy of a novel: a brother lost in childhood, marriages made and unmade, a frontman reborn as a gangster-smooth alter ego, and siblings claimed by illness and…
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How the Isley Brothers Turned a Phil Spector Reject into “Twist and Shout”
It’s one of the great resurrection stories in pop history. In 1961, a song called “Twist and Shout” was recorded by a forgotten vocal group, produced by a 21-year-old Phil Spector — and it flopped so completely that its own co-writer disowned the recording. A year later, three brothers from Cincinnati took the same song…
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Deep Purple: The Heart Behind the Thunder — Loss, Loyalty, and an Unlikely Act of Love
Deep Purple’s history reads like a saga of thunder: the riffs, the feuds, the nine lineups, the breakups and reunions. But behind the volume there has always been something quieter — a story of loyalty, grief, unlikely friendships, and one of the most touching charitable commitments in rock history. This is the Deep Purple you…
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How Deep Purple Made “Made in Japan”: The $3,000 Live Album That Conquered the World
In August 1972, Deep Purple flew to Japan for the first time, played three concerts, and recorded them — mostly as a favor, mostly for the Japanese market, on equipment that cost about $3,000. The band didn’t even want the tapes released outside Japan. What happened next is one of rock’s great accidents: “Made in…
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Lynyrd Skynyrd: The Heart Behind the Hits — Heartbreak, Survival, and the Long Road Home
Everyone knows the plane crash. October 20, 1977, is one of the darkest dates in rock history — the day Lynyrd Skynyrd’s chartered plane fell out of the sky over Mississippi, killing Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, and Cassie Gaines. But the crash, as devastating as it was, wasn’t the end of the band’s story…
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Three Nights at the Fox: How Lynyrd Skynyrd Made “One More from the Road” at Their Peak
In July 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd was the hottest live band in America. They had four studio albums behind them, a triple-guitar attack nobody could touch, and a frontman in Ronnie Van Zant who could hold a stadium in the palm of his hand. They were also, as it turned out, fifteen months away from a…
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ZZ Top: The Heart Behind the Hits — The Quiet Brotherhood Behind the Beards
For nearly five decades, ZZ Top held a record no other major rock band could touch: the same three men, playing together without a single lineup change, from a Knights of Columbus hall in Beaumont, Texas, in 1970 until fate finally intervened in 2021. In an industry famous for feuds, firings, and spectacular breakups, Billy…