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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…
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The Untold Story of the Bee Gees: The Brothers Who Survived Everything (Except Disco)
They were supposed to be a footnote. Three brothers from the Isle of Man who sang themselves hoarse at an Australian speedway, got mistaken for the Beatles, broke up, made up, invented disco, were destroyed by disco, and then quietly wrote half the hits of the eighties for other people. The Bee Gees survived every…
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The Untold Story of Paul Simon: The Perfectionist Who Rewrote the Rules
Paul Simon is the rare songwriter whose throwaway lines became other people’s tattoos. He built a career out of accidents that turned into landmarks: a placeholder chorus he was too embarrassed to sing, a song title stolen from a Chinese menu, a drum beat invented between takes, and an album recorded in defiance of a…
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The Untold Story of Anita Baker: The Voice That Refused to Be Tamed
Anita Baker sang like she had all the time in the world — and then, at the height of her fame, she took it. At the peak of the quiet-storm era, with eight Grammy Awards and millions of records sold, she walked away from the spotlight to raise her children, turned down the machinery of…
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The Untold Story of Luther Vandross: From Sesame Street to the Velvet Voice of a Generation
Before he was the velvet voice of romance, before the eight Grammys and the eleven straight platinum albums, Luther Vandross was a teenager from the Alfred E. Smith housing projects teaching children how to count to twenty on television. His road to stardom ran through church basements, commercial jingles, David Bowie’s touring band, and a…
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The Untold Story of Kenny Loggins: The Soundtrack King Who Almost Said No to the Danger Zone
He is the voice that taught a generation to cut loose on the dance floor, to feel all right on the golf course, and to fly straight into the danger zone. Yet for all his ubiquity in the 1980s, Kenny Loggins nearly walked away from the very songs that made him immortal. Behind the easy…
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The Untold Story of the Doobie Brothers: The Joke Name That Sold 40 Million Records
No band in rock history has done more with a worse name. The Doobie Brothers weren’t brothers, and nobody in the original lineup was named Doobie. The name was a stoned joke, meant to last one gig, suggested by a housemate who thought they smoked too much pot. Half a century later, it is stitched…
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The Untold Story of Toto: The Session Wizards Who Accidentally Became Rock Stars
Toto is the great paradox of rock history: a band of studio musicians so talented that half the records you love from the 1970s already had their fingerprints on them — who then became superstars almost by accident, won six Grammys in a single night, lost their drummer in one of the strangest deaths in…
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The Untold Story of Foreigner: Six Strangers, a Midnight Sax Solo, and the Ballad That Wouldn’t Die
Foreigner sold more than 80 million records with a formula that should not have worked: three Brits and three Americans who could barely agree on anything except the hooks. Behind the gleaming arena-rock anthems lay a band nearly destroyed by ego, illness, and one singer’s 19-hour brain surgery — a band whose biggest ballad was…