RS784 “All the News That Fits” F E AT UR E S
Will We Miss Our Last Chance? Climate scientist James Hansen on the stakes we face in the battle to save the planet. By Jeff Goodel ............................36
The Future Is Now Ten of the hottest artists who are climbing the charts, breaking the Internet or just dominating our oice stereo .........42
Suze DeMarchi The Baby Animals singer rocketed to fame in the early Nineties, and her passion remains undimmed. By Rod Yates ....................50
Emma Stone How the star left behind an anxious childhood and found her Hollywood ending. By Jonah Weiner .........................52
John Prine The wild past and happily lazy present of American songwriting’s Mark Twain. By Patrick Doyle ..........................58
Words of Wisdom Some of the world’s biggest stars tell us about the rules they live by, what their favourite book reveals about them and more .......62
Puppy Mills An investigation into the pet industry’s greatest shame. By Paul Solotaroff .............................................................................74
RO CK & ROL L
Tom Petty
Tributes
Inside the Heartbreakers’ upcoming tour – and why it might be their last big run .... 11
George Michael, Rick Parfitt and Carrie Fisher remembered ..........................24
Q&A John Legend
The Birth of RS
The singer-songwriter on his new album, the benefits of celebrity and more .................18
In 1967, Jann Wenner and a group of rock & roll believers created Rolling Stone......30
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
DEPA R T MEN TS Letters ..................................... 4 Random Notes........................7
Records ..................................81 The Last Page.......................90
ON THE COVER Emma Stone photographed in Thousand Oaks, California, on October 31st, 2016, by Mark Seliger. Styling by Petra Flannery at Two Management. Hair by Mara Roszak at Starworks Artists. Makeup by Rachel Goodwin at Starworks Artists. Set design by Jesse Nemeth. Dress by the Row. Jewelry by Jennifer Meyer.
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Correspondence grossing and enjoyable reading. Topped off with the Monkees scoring a single in the 2016 Top 25. Well, does that bring back memories to this subscriber in the older demographic grouping. L. Flanagan Beaconsfield, WA
The Voice
Rockin’ Ryan w e l l , i f t h at is n’ t t h e sexiest goddamn cover of Rolling Stone I’ve seen in a long time! As a diehard fan of Ryan Adams, thanks for giving the man the attention he deserves. Love him or hate him, at least Ryan is always pushing the boundaries: long may it continue. Carissa Williams Killara, NSW
Monkees Magic it h as been a n absolute pleasure reading RS 783 from front to back. I can honestly say it has been a long time since I have achieved this. Truly en-
fi na lly austr a li a is slowly but surely recognising its unique world class talent: Jeff St John, what a great Aussie survivor. Putting aside his disability for a minute, here you have a guy with amazing vocals and performing abilities. The Seventies hit single “Teach Me How To Fly” is a classic song. Can you imagine if we paid homage to guys like Jeff at Byron Bay Bluesfest? Mark Robinson Bar Beach, NSW
Style Advice joe jonas’ low k ey chic? [RS 783] Are you fucking kidding me? If I wanted style tips from one of the Jonas brothers I’d buy some bullshit rag like Woman’s Day. Leave it out, RS, or you’ll lose me for good.
ROLLING STONE AUSTRALIA EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & PUBLISHER: Mathew Coyte ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Emma Vidgen EDITOR: Rod Yates ART DIRECTOR: Cameron Emerson-Elliott ONLINE EDITOR: Jonny Nail CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Adams, Luke Anisimoff, Jaymz Clements, Toby Creswell, Barry Divola, Robyn Doreian, Michael Dwyer, Samuel J. Fell, Dan Findlay, James Jennings, Dan Lander, Darren Levin, Matt Reekie, Henry Rollins, Barnaby Smith, Marcus Teague, Jenny Valentish, Doug Wallen, Ian Winwood ADVERTISING, SPONSORSHIP & EVENTS MANAGER: Amy Gates: agates@rollingstoneaus.com PRODUCTION CONTROLLER: Christopher Clear AD PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATOR: Roy, Dominic (02) 9282 8691 BRAND MANAGER: Thea Mahony CIRCULATION MANAGER: Charlotte Gray PAPER RIOT PTY LTD CEO: Mathew Coyte GENERAL ENQUIRIES: (02) 8006 9663
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Kevin Chillen, Carlton, VIC
Simon Says long time re a der, first time writer. What could have convinced me to write after 21 years’ of reading? Your Essential Paul Simon piece [RS 783], that’s what. What exactly was David Fricke smoking when he decided So Beautiful or So What was a better album than Bridge Over Troubled Water? The title-track alone makes it one of the greatest records of all time! Fricke is one of the best writers around, so I’ll forgive him this time.
Love Letters & Advice
Write to us and win Every letter published will win a copy of Kasey Chambers’ new double album, Dragonfly. Write to us and tell us your thoughts on the magazine or life in general. But please, keep it brief!
Terry Epstein Caloundra, QLD
It’s the End p ro of t h a t t h e e n d i s nigh: a musical, La La Land, is your Movie of the Year. Now it’s the Oscar favourite too? Has the world lost its mind? Eugene Munk, Lyneham, ACT
Gun Concerns your story on the a r-15 assault rif le made for truly f r ig ht en i ng r e a d i ng. God help us if the gun laws get relaxed in Australia. Mary Kilstein, Bunbury, WA
Rolling Stone is published in Australia monthly by Paper Riot Pty Ltd, Suite 4, 5 Wilson St, Newtown, NSW 2042. ABN 9216 6626 526. Enquiries: (02) 8006 9663. Copyright © 2014 by ROLLING STONE LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. The name ROLLING STONE and the logo thereof are registered trademarks of ROLLING STONE LLC, which trademarks have been licensed to Paper Riot Pty Ltd. For subscription inquiries visit www.magshop.com.au, email magshop@magshop.com.au or telephone 136 116 between 8am and 6pm (EST) Monday to Friday. Alternatively, post requests to Magshop, GPO Box 5252, Sydney, NSW 2000. Printed by Offset Alpine Printing, 42 Boorea St, Lidcombe NSW 2141. Distributed in Australia by Gordon & Gotch Australia Pty Ltd. Distributed in New Zealand by Gordon & Gotch (NZ) Ltd, 2 Carr Road, Mt Roskill, Auckland. Phone (09) 625 3000. Rolling Stone does not assume responsibility for unsolicited materials and will return only those accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. ISSN 1320-0615
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ROLLINGSTONEAUS.COM LISTS
BIG IN 2017? THE MOST ANTICIPATED ALBUMS From Springsteen to Kingswood, Drake to LCD Soundsystem, we list what we’re looking forward to hearing most this year.
MOVIES
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OSCARS 2017 Complete coverage of all the best, worst and what-were-they-thinking moments
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TRUMP’S TIME
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Following his inauguration, we examine the 45th U.S. President’s first few weeks uding analysis of his cabinet
This month we host stripped-back performances from Jimmy Eat World, letlive., Ayla, Cloves, Twelve Foot Ninja and Frank Carter.
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Beck
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Cloves
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Drake
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omNotes
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Guitar Hero Jam Tom Morello, Richie Kotzen, Nuno Bettencourt and Steve Vai performed together for the first time at a live event in Hollywood on January 11th. Fretboards may or may not have caught on fire.
SOHO BOY Jon Bon Jovi is finally looking his age as he takes a walk in New York’s Soho
SEX-TALK Legendary Sex Pistol Steve Jones held court at the launch of his book Lonely Boy: Tales of a Sex Pistol with Scott Goldman at The GRAMMY Museum on January 10th in Los Angeles, California
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Siamese Dream
HARD-ROCK LIFE Chris Rock took in a Lakers game in L.A. with Jay Z, whom he’s called the greatest rapper of all time. Rock embarks on his first stand-up tour in nine years, called Total Blackout, this month.
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CURIOUS GEORGE George Maple tore up the stage at FOMO festival at Sydney’s Parramatta Park.
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Cyndi Lauper and Billy Corgan played an unlikely cover of the Crystals’ “There’s No Other (Like My Baby)” in New York. “I’ve been a fan for years,” says Lauper. “He’s such a good guy!”
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SEOUL BROTHERS Metallica played to a packed-out Gocheok Sky Dome in South Korea in January.
POP CULTURE Iggy Pop scrubbed up well in a tux at the Golden Globes.
WEEZY KNOWS BEST Lil Wayne helped celebrate daughter Reginae’s 18th birthday with a Fresh Princethemed party in Atlanta – and gifted her $20,000 cash.
People Power Eddie Vedder and the Chicago Children’s Choir saw of President Barack Obama at his farewell speech with a rousing cover of Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power”.
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COMEBACK JET REFUEL FOR SPRINGSTEEN TOUR
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| Q&A JOHN LEGEND
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Roll Petty’s ‘Last Big One’? Inside the Heartbreakers’ upcoming tour – and why it might be their final major run BY ANDY G R EEN E
STEVE JENNINGS/WIREIMAGE
I TORPEDOES DAMNED Petty onstage in 2014
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n l ate nov ember, 40 years to the month after their debut album was released, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got together to jam at their rehearsal space in L.A. “We mainly did cover songs,” says keyboardist Benmont Tench. “When we get together, we tend to do a lot of Chicago-style blues songs, but Tom was also making up songs on the spot. We were shaking off the rust.” The rust had built after a three-year hiatus from touring, the band’s longest break in 25 years. But the [Cont. on 12]
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TOM PETTY [Cont. from 11] Heartbreakers are making up for lost time in a big way, with a 40th-anniversary U.S. tour that begins in April and runs through August. Besides the anniversary, there’s another reason the tour could stand out: It might be, Petty says, “the last big one. I’m thinking it may be the last trip around the country. It’s very likely we’ll keep playing, but will we take on 50 shows in one tour? I don’t think so. We’re all on the backside of our sixties. I have a granddaughter I’d like to see as much as I can.” The band plans to dig deep into its catalogue for the tour. In 2013, the Heartbreakers did a run of theatre shows that focused on more obscure songs, rather than the hit-oriented sets of previous tours. “If I was a fan and they didn’t play ‘A merican Girl’ or ‘Free Fallin’’, I’d be disappointed,” says Petty, 66. “But I want to continue with the vibe we had at the theatre shows where we represented plenty of popular songs, but also give the longtime fans some really deep stuf. We can change the show as much as we want from night to night.” While nothing is definite, the band members have ideas of which rarities they’d like to pull out: Petty likes 1978’s “You’re Gonna Get It” (unplayed live since New Year’s Eve 1978) and the mournful “Room at the Top”; Tench wants to play the title track to Echo and “Louisiana Rain”; and guitarist
Mike Campbell hopes to break out “Fooled Again”, “Luna” and “Hurt”, all of which come from their first two albums. Petty had been planning to release a deluxe version of his 1994 solo LP, Wildflowers, in 2017, with a bonus disc of unreleased material, then play it all on a special tour. “The 40th anniversary kind of got in the way,” he says. “I looked at the tour they booked and it was all big places. The Wild-
“I’ve heard Tom say [no more major tours] for years,” says Campbell. “It’d be a shame to stop at the peak of our abilities.” flowers tour will have to be in smaller places because a lot of it is quiet and acoustic.” Other than drummer Stan Lynch, who left the Heartbreakers in 1994, everyone on the debut record remains in the group. “I don’t want to name names, but a lot of bands go out together and just don’t like each other,” says Tench. “They’re making a lot of money and just clocking in. We’ve never been like that. We have a chemistry and a telepathy that are really rare.” Tom Petty Radio, the singer’s SiriusXM channel, has occupied much of Petty’s time since the end of the last Heartbreakers tour,
in 2014. Unlike other rockers who have their own Sirius channels, Petty personally oversees his. He even hosts his own show, Tom Talks to Cool People, where he’s interviewed everyone from Micky Dolenz of the Monkees to Doors drummer John Densmore. “I’m in hog heaven with the radio thing,” Petty says. “I want to have the best rock & roll station in the world.” Petty has another project he plans to finish before the tour: producing an album for Chris Hillman, who played bass in the Byrds, one of Petty’s favourite bands. Petty’s proclamation that this may be the last major tour is likely to generate a lot of attention among fans, but his bandmates are dubious. “I’ve been hearing him say that for the past 10 years,” says Campbell. “It would be a shame to stop playing while we’re at the peak of our abilities.” Tench feels the same way. “I don’t know what’s on Tom’s mind,” he says, “because he certainly hasn’t said that to me.” Petty is already thinking about bringing Wildflowers on the road after the 40thanniversary tour winds up. “I started talking about that the other day and got a loud ‘Shut up!’ ” he says. “Every time I bring it up, it hits a wall. But we’re done in August. After that, it’s not out of the question. I’d get the box set together and take it on the road before the end of the year. At the end of the year, we’ll say, ‘What do you feel like doing?’ Then we’ll figure out where to go next.”
The Biggest Tours of 2017, From GNR to Bieber In 2016, stadium tours by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Coldplay, Beyoncé and a reunited Guns N’ Roses helped raise worldwide ticket sales 3.1 per cent. Next year could be even bigger. “2017 has gotten off to a great start,” says David Zedeck, Live Nation’s president of global talent. “And we expect it to continue.” Here are five big ones already in the works.
Guns N’ Roses
Red Hot Chili Peppers
JAN. 21-SEPT. 8
Against all odds, GNR’s “Not in This Lifetime” reunion tour went smoothly, with no late starts or signs of onstage tension from a band that fought famously. “Every day we do at least an hour soundcheck,” guitarist Richard Fortus recently said, “and we’ll play through diferent ideas, put stuf down on tape. It’s really organic.”
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JAN. 5-SEPT. 24
Coming of a European tour that produced their best ticket sales in more than a decade, the Chili Peppers return January 5th for a sweeping North American run. They’ve been playing all the hits, plus deeper tracks like “Aeroplane” and a cover of John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels”.
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Bruno Mars
Roger Waters
Justin Bieber
MARCH 28-NOV. 11
MAY 26-OCT. 28
FEB. 15-SEPT. 6
After hitting Number One with 24K Magic, Mars sold 1 million-plus tickets for his 2017 tour in a single day. More than 100 shows are on the books. “At the end of the day, I want people to hear my music and be like, ‘Man, I gotta see this shit live’,” he told ROLLING STONE. “To me, that’s what takes it above and beyond radio hits.”
Waters’ last tour featured nothing but songs from The Wall, but the Pink Floyd bassist and cofounder has a diferent plan for his massive “Us + Them” tour, named after the 1973 Dark Side of the Moon classic. It’ll be mostly Floyd tunes and “the odd thing I’ve done since then”, Waters told ROLLING STONE.
It was everybody else who had a terrible 2016 – Bieber had “Sorry” and “Love Yourself”, his biggest-selling album ever, and a tour that grossed nearly $70 million by midyear, eventually selling 1 million tickets. He graduates from arenas to stadiums on July 29th, beginning at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. STEVE KNOPPER
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Kasey Chambers
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Kasey Chambers
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Kasey’s new album features two separate sessions in a special 2CD - The Sing Sing Sessions produced by Australian music legend Paul Kelly, and The Foggy Mountain Sessions produced by Kasey’s brother and long-time producer, Nash Chambers. ALBUM PORTRAIT BY DAVID BROMLEY
R&R
Neil Young: Restless as Ever He’s pondering an extended break from touring, but from a new LP to the Pipeline protest, he’s not slowing down at all BY B R I A N H I AT T eil young has a near-religious faith in the power of spontaneity, from the first-draft, onetake brilliance of his best songs to the jagged path of his career as a whole. His urgent, political, occasionally jarring (there are some heavily Auto-Tuned vocals and computer voices) new album, Peace Trail, pushes that ethos to the max. “I would just get up in the morning,” says Young, who spent about a week recording the album with veteran drummer Jim Keltner and session bassist Paul Bushnell, “and pick up my guitar, and whatever I did, that was it. I built a song right on that and just wrote about what was on my mind. I’ve done a lot of records, made a lot of songs, played a lot of guitars, so I just trust myself, you know. I figure if I can’t do it by now, why am I even bothering to try?” The album is full of references to the battle he joined over the Dakota Access Pipeline – he shouts out Dale “Happy” American Horse Jr., who was arrested for chaining himself to construction equipment – as well as to Young’s suspicion of lives lived through phones. “I look at it like, ‘What if I just dropped in here from outer space?’” he says. “What would I think? Remember Hula-Hoops? Everybody had a Hula-Hoop. It reminds me of that with phones. Can you imagine that’s gonna last a long time? I don’t see it.”
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Young was set to tour early in 2017, but he scrapped those plans and says he may end up taking the year of from the road. “I’ve got a lot to do without touring,” says Young, who’s working on a TV show about the cross-country journey of his electric car and writing a new book (this one may be fiction). But primarily, he says, “I’m actually just focusing now on recordings for a while.” Since giving up his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Young lives in Los A ngeles, not far from Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, where Young is welcome to pop in whenever. He’s already at work (“halfway done!”) on his second studio album with his young backing band Promise of the Real. “When the record is finished, we’re gonna put it out,” he says, dismissing the more typical approach of waiting a year or more
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between albums: “I don’t have time to wait that long.”
The Future of Pono Young is hoping to pivot his high-res-music company – which had been focused on its Toblerone-shape player and a download store – toward a streaming service. “We’re pushing toward a presence in phones,” says Young (though iPhones’ internal chips can’t currently handle higher-than-CD-quality sound). He’s working with a Singapore company on how to “maintain our quality level when we go to streaming”.
Crazy Horse and CSNY Young hasn’t toured with Crazy Horse since 2014, but he insists the band “has a huge future”, and that bassist Billy Talbot has fully recovered from a 2014 stroke that forced him of the road. “Billy’s in great shape, he’s fine,” says Young, saying that he will work his way back to the band. “Crazy Horse has a cycle. If you look at Crazy Horse’s history and when Crazy Horse played and when they didn’t play, you can see that we’re still in the pocket.”
When he’s reminded that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have a 50th anniversary coming up, he responds with savage sarcasm: “Oh, yeah, there’s a huge anniversary coming up. Huge. It’s terrific! I love it!” At the same time, he won’t rule out a reunion with CSNY, who last played together in 2013. “Anything is possible,” he says.
Donald Trump “Trump has a refreshing viewpoint for the downtrodden, for the people who have suffered under politics as usual,” says Young. “It’s up to him to show if he can satisfy all of the hopes that he’s created in these people. I wish him absolutely the best with that, and on the other side of the coin, I hope he fails miserably with all of his bad ideas” – Young cites a proposed ban on Muslim immigration as one of them. Trump is also a fan – he’s attended Young’s concerts, and Young once met with him about possible funding for Pono. “I said, ‘Don, let’s make music great again’,” Young jokes. “I’m not suing him or anything. I won’t sue Don Trump. I won’t sue him for taking that.”
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GETTY IMAGES
Off the Road
FREE WORLD Young onstage in July
IN THE STUDIO ST U DIO NOT E S
HONKYTONK MEN Auerbach, Eddy and Prine (front, from left) at Easy Eye Sound
AFTER COUNTRY LP, SHERYL CROW PLOTS POP RETURN Sheryl Crow moved to Nashville in 2012 and released a country album, Feels Like Home. But it didn’t take Crow long to realise the genre isn’t for her: “Country music is commerce at its most fully realised,” she says. “I want an experience completely detached from that.” For Be Myself, out in Crow April, Crow reunited with 1990s collaborators like Jef Trott, who co-wrote hits including “If It Makes You Happy”. She cut 17 songs in three weeks: “I wanted the feeling I had when I first made records – like a kid just playing with my friends.” ANDY GREENE
REZNOR PLANS NINE INCH NAILS REBOOT, FILM WORK
Dan Auerbach’s Nashville Love Letter The Black Keys guitarist recruits legendary sidemen for an album saluting Music Row’s raw heyday t’s not often you see dan auerbach dancing. Yet he can’t help but snap his fingers and shule across the checkerboard f loor of his Nashville studio, Easy Eye Sound, as he blasts “Waiting on a Song”, a three-chord singalong featuring female backing vocals and a frenetic solo by 78-year-old guitar legend Duane Eddy. Eddy, sitting nearby, says it sounds even better than it did when he recorded it. “That’s not how I remember it,” he cracks. Auerbach is holding a listening party for the musicians who played on his first solo album since 2009 (due in autumn). They include bassist Dave Roe (who for 22 years backed Johnny Cash), plus drummer Gene Christman and pianist Bobby Wood, both of whom played on hits by Dusty Springfield and Elvis Presley as part of Memphis’ American Sound Studios house band. “I learned so much from these guys,” Auerbach says, calling the album “a whole history of everything I love about music”. Auerbach moved to Nashville in 2010, producing acts like Ray LaMontagne and Lana Del Rey at Easy Eye. But as he became familiar with the town’s history, he found many of
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its veterans still had a lot to ofer. Last summer he spent Mondays through Wednesdays co-writing with John Prine (see feature story on page 58) and David “Fergie” Ferguson (who engineered Cash’s American Recordings releases). Then, from Thursday through Sunday, he’d hit the studio. He emerged with about 60 songs, including “Malibu Man”, a tribute to friend Rick Rubin, and “Shine on Me”, featuring rhythm Knopfler. Though Knopfl from England, the rest o live: “These guys tell m ly thrilled to be here bec records like they used to The process re-ener Auerbach after years of h touring with the Bla Keys. The Keys are still break. “It’s hard to tur away money, but you hav to recharge,” he says. Bu he doesn’t hesitate when asked if he’ll tour his new record: “How can you not?” he says with a smile. JOSEPH HUDAK
Since finishing Nine Inch Nails’ 2014 tour, Trent Reznor has been working on several projects, including scoring Patriots Day, Peter Berg’s film about the Boston Marathon bombings (out February 2nd). Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote an hourplus of music after Reznor watching FBI footage of the attack. “We wanted to [avoid] the lazy Hollywood soundtrack trope,” says Reznor, who is also working on Nine Inch Nails music: “I don’t wanna spoil it. We live in overstimulated times. If I’m interested in a film, I prefer not to watch the trailer.” KORY GROW
CHARLI XCX TURNS UP THE BASS ON DANCE POP LP
Charli XCX
ne shower of harli XCX says of o Sucker, her 2014 h with the Top Boom Clap”. The says she’s taking m the dark dance f Britney Spears’ out for her next e in May, a sound arted dabbling n last February’s Vroom EP: “I made an album I’d to hear at a club. anted to make an um that I could et fucked up to.” BRITTANY SPANOS
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Jet onstage in Melbourne in 2009.
Jet Fly Again With reissues of their first two LPs and a summer tour with Bruce Springsteen, the rockers make an unexpected return ow far would you go to escape the time of your life? For Jet frontman Nic Cester, the answer is “as far away as possible”. When he unplugged his guitar and walked of Brisbane’s Riverstage on November 13th, 2010 – Jet’s final opening slot on Powderfinger’s Sunsets Farewell Tour – he wasn’t looking back. “Literally 48 hours after that last show, I was in the middle of the Jordanian desert with a Bedouin guide and a bunch of camels,” the singer-guitarist recalls, fielding his first interview in six years from his home in Lake Como, Italy. “I stayed there for months: me and my wife in a four-wheel drive. That’s where I was physically, mentally and emotionally.” He’s laughing about it now. But by the end of his world-conquering rock band’s mad sprint to Madison Square Garden and back, relations with his comrades were so strained that it took another 18
H
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months for the official “Thank you and goodnight” press release. So the fact that Jet will reform for this summer’s Bruce Springsteen dates around Australia – and remastered reissues of their first two albums, Get Born and Shine On – surprises nobody more than Nic’s younger brother, Chris. “Ofers have come in for years; good offers that I definitely would’ve taken,” the drummer says from his recording studio in Los Angeles. “But never anything Nic’s been ready for. And the only reason I don’t talk about the other guys [guitarist Cameron Muncey and bassist Mark Wilson] is that Nic’s the guy who decided he didn’t wanna do it anymore.” It’s not hard to understand the burnout that led to that decision, shortly after Jet’s gold-selling third album, Shaka Rock. After primary ignition with their U.S. Top 10 single of 2003, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”, the garage rock poster boys from Melbourne had endured perhaps the most
dizzying ride of any act in Australian pop history. With Get Born, they hit platinum sales in the U.S. and UK within three years of their first gigs. Highly publicised personal problems – the sudden passing of the Cesters’ father; Nic’s diiculties with cocaine – conspired with the inevitable critical backlash and second album blues to exert unsustainable pressure. Chris has spent most of the past six years producing in L.A., not least the Mystic Knights of Amnesia, his electro duo with Jet keyboard player Louis Macklin. Wilson was last seen playing bass with Peter Garrett. Muncey has kept the lowest profile. “I heard he’s really into flying,” Nic ofers. For his part, the singer has occupied himself studying languages in Berlin and Milan while slowly working towards a debut solo album. Recorded with Italian funk band Calibro 35, that “probably selftitled” return has played an ironic part in his decision to rejoin Jet.
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BY M ICH A EL DW Y ER
From the exhilarated vantage point of that “incredibly satisfying” endeavour, he addresses his former band’s collapse from a personal position of creative necessity. “Part of the reason why Jet became a place from which I needed to escape is that it had stopped being a creative, fun, interesting place,” he says. “Unfortunately it had become a place that was a bit stagnant and I wasn’t able to contribute to the best of my abilities anymore. I needed to break free and do something completely diferent.” He stresses that good times “far outweighed the negative” on the rollercoaster that seemed to catch Jet opening for the Rolling Stones one minute and recording with Iggy Pop the next. “But it was an extremely full-on experience. It left me feeling a bit thin at the end of it – like Dorian Gray after 10 years of extended adolescence.” Something of a Liam to Nic’s Noel, if you will, Chris paints a more carefree picture of the eternal teens at play. “We really were the best of friends, constantly taking the piss out of each other. It was not for the faint of heart. On the tour bus, by the middle of the tour, you’d better be wearing armour and a sword. If we weren’t drunk we were hungover. It was just a daily riot.” Small wonder that memories were sometimes hard to come by when it fell to the drummer to sift through bonus Bsides and pen liner notes for the remastered albums. His default position while revising material, he says, was “crying laughter”. “Making the B-sides was hilarious. Our popularity grew faster than our base of material so we found ourselves in the weirdest places, like a blizzard in Colorado, and you’d get woken up on a day of be-
cause you’d forgotten you have to record a song that day. “It would be, ‘Right, has anyone got anything?’ ‘Well, I’ve got this rif . . .’ and you’d build the song in an afternoon, put it down, get back on the bus and forget about it. So for a guy like me to be sitting on a couch 10 years later, trying to remember how it all happened . . .”
IN THE THICK OF IT At the Virgin Megastore in London in 2004. “It was not for the faint of heart,” says Chris Cester (left) of life on the road with Jet.
Both brothers stand proudly by the songs that defined the commercial face of the Noughties’ “back-to-rock” revolution, providing soundtracks to every product from iPod to Spiderman and World Wrestling Entertainment’s Summerslam. But Chris makes it clear that there’s no harsher critic of Jet’s legacy than the band itself. “We like to make each other laugh about all the dumb shit that happened,” he says. “I get texts every day from Mark, who’s super-pumped. Photos and set lists and funny messages about songs we hate and
we’re never gonna play again. For example, I hope nobody’s holding their breath for ‘Rollover DJ’ because there’s no fucking way that’s happening! It feels nice to be in the situation where we’re not beholden to just playing Get Born songs or whatever. Particularly in Australia, where we always did pretty well, that’s a really liberating thing.” The band is already batting away questions about U.S. and European dates in the wake of the reissued albums. The short answer is that nobody knows what lies ahead, though both Cesters are palpably relieved that their relationship is no longer defined by what lies behind them. “In Jet world, I have learnt to not get excited about anything anymore because you just never know what’s gonna happen,” says Chris. “I might get a phone call from our management saying, ‘Check out this song that Nic’s written’, and go, ‘Fuck, that’s the best thing I’ve heard in 15 years.’ And then I might get another phone call saying, ‘Yeah, but he hates it’.” The chance of hearing that song or anything like it on Jet’s looming Springsteen run is slim to non-existent, Nic says. “You never know, but between now and then, I think it’s gonna be hard enough to just remember all the words.” Far more certain in the short term is the solo album that’s reignited the passion he thought he’d spent. How that plays into Jet’s future is anyone’s guess. “It’s mostly curiosity, at this point,” the frontman says of the reunion. “I’m openminded and curious. And hopeful. I really want this just to be fun. If it did end up being the last thing we ever did, it would be a nicer note to end on than we had. And if it did go exceedingly well, then we’ll let you know.”
FROM TOP: BRIAN RASIC/GETTY IMAGES; LYNDAL IRONS
NEW ALBUM
Toby Martin’s Western Sydney Opus Youth Group singer seeks inspiration in ethnic diversity on second solo LP Toby Martin’s second solo outing since longtime band Youth Group announced a hiatus in 2009, Songs from Northam Avenue, was conceived during back-to-back artist’s residencies in the Western Sydney suburb of Bankstown in 2013. The suburb’s celebrated ethnic diversity provided Martin with both ample inspiration for the character studies that ground the album,
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and an opportunity to collaborate with several talented local musicians born in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond – including Dang Lan on Đàn tranh (Vietnamese zither), Mohammed Lelo on Qanun (Arabic zither), and Maroun Azar on Mijwiz (Arabic reed pipes). “It’s a part of Sydney’s music scene I didn’t really know about when I was growing up and in my 20s, playing indie rock,” Martin says. A cautionary study in the radicalising influence of senseless hate, “Olive Tree” is a timely meditation on the importance of tolerance, empathy and inclusion in contemporary Australia. Yet hope and gratitude still chime: ‘I’m glad that I’m not dead yet,’ sings the Annandale North Public School Choir, gleefully, on lead single “Spring Feeling”. “It’s such a world-weary line for such small, innocent voices!” Martin laughs. GARETH HIPWELL
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fter scoring his firstever Number One song with his last album, John Legend was confident enough to take a huge risk on his new one, Darkness and Light: He sought out indie-leaning producer-guitarist Blake Mills, whom he admired for his work with Alabama Shakes. Mills is more of a critics’ fave than a hitmaker, so “there was scepticism from the label”, says Legend, who brought in an eclectic crew of guest vocalists (Shakes lead singer Brittany Howard, Chance the Rapper, Miguel), backing musicians (Kamasi Washington, Pino Palladino) and unlikely songwriting partners (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Tobias Jesso Jr.). “People in the industry get bound by genre more than artists,” says Legend, who also plays a bandleader in the film La La Land and exec-produces the Underground Railroad TV drama Underground. “A song is a song.”
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In La La Land, your character asks, “How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you’re such a traditionalist?” Is that something you’ve ever asked yourself? Some of us lean more heavily on the past than others. I’ve always been a bit of an old soul and always loved old soul music, and there’s always been that push and pull of “how much do you honour the gospel and the soul you grew up listening to, and then how much do you try to do something that’s completely new?” On this album there’s some serious soul and gospel overtones, but there’s more modernsounding tracks as well. The opening line of this record is “They say sing what you know/But I’ve sung what they want.” We talked back and forth about that line, because I didn’t write it! Part of me disagreed with it because I was like, “I don’t feel like I’ve been some kind of sellout before, or that I was doing music I didn’t believe in.” But this album does more fully encompass my personae. You were outspoken in your opposition to Trump. What are your thoughts in the wake of his victory? It’s a bit of a challenge ’cause we don’t know who he is all the time. He’s been consistent about being a racist and about a couple of other things, but he’s also been wildly inconsistent and lied a lot. So we truly don’t know how he’s gonna govern. We haven’t seen anyone like him before. It’s a very kind of diferent world now, knowing that someone’s going to possibly dismantle a lot of what Obama accomplished. I don’t know where we’re going to go.
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John Legend The singer-songwriter on his new album, the benefits of celebrity, his friend Kanye, and how artists should respond to Trump BY BR I A N H I AT T
To war, maybe? Possibly. He’s truly reckless, so who knows. On The Hamilton Mixtape, you sing one of George Washington’s songs, “History Has Its Eyes on You”. How did you end up with that one? [Lin-Manuel Miranda] asked me to do that one, and if you read the casting notice when they originally cast George Washington, they said they wanted a John Legend type for it [laughs]. So I think he already saw that was the right song for me. But I decided I wanted to change the melody, change the chord progression, and make it feel like I wanted it to feel. I did kind of like a gospel version – and I sent it of and didn’t even hear back from them! They didn’t really say if they liked it. But they sent me a mix to approve and put it on their album, so they must have liked it enough. Kanye West is a longtime friend and collaborator of yours. What do you make of his hospitalisation? This is a very diicult life and a difficult business. I don’t want to try to play pop psychologist, so I’m not gonna try to analyse what’s happening with him. I just want him to do whatever he needs to do to feel better and to feel like he’s ready to go again, because music needs him. The world needs him. I think he’s such an important talent. We need him at full strength. How do you balance everything you do – acting, producing, music, fatherhood? You start with knowing what’s most important to you. My family is most important and then second is music. My music career is the reason I have the power to do everything else. There’s a lot of power in celebrity. I obviously use it to sell my own projects and produce TV, and, you know, I use it to get reservations at restaurants too [laughs]. But you try to use it for something that’ll benefit the world too. What do you think the role of artists, specifically, needs to be in the Trump era? Paul Robeson said that artists are the gatekeepers of truth. And Nina Simone said we’re supposed to reflect the times. So we have to be ready to tell the truth and reflect what’s going on. We’ve gone through some really dark periods in [America]. You can’t trivialise them, because they cost people their lives, but we have made progress since those times, and even when we go backward, there’s definitely an opportunity for us to go forward again. We just have to be vigilant and get through this, and then hopefully it’ll be over soon.
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MY STYLE
Gary Clark Jr.’s Juke-Joint Couture
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a ry cl a r k jr. is on a high the day after playing Carnegie Hall, with one regret: “I wanted to re-create Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Live at Carnegie Hall album cover!” he says in his New York hotel room. Clark has been getting deep into photography on the road, mostly taking photos of his two-year-old son, Zion, “because I’m obsessed”. Clark’s Fuji camera is one of his many must-have items on tour. He also brings plenty of John Varvatos clothing, prized watches, and a portable studio for use after he and his wife, Nicole Trunfio, put Zion to bed. “I’ll make a beat and send it to the band,” Clark says, “then I might play a game of NBA 2K.” He’s looking forward to downtime at his new 50-acre ranch outside his native Austin, where he plans to fill a horse stable and build an “artists’ compound”. Lately, he’s been making music with Leon Bridges and rapper Big K.R.I.T. Says Clark “2017 is go time.” PATRICK DOYLE
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1. Clark with his trusted 1953 Gibson ES-125, which he calls “Old Faithful”. 2. Fuji X100T camera. 3. Ray-Ban sunglasses. 4. Road studio: Akai MPC controller, hard drive and MIDI keyboard. 5. Raw rolling papers. 6. A Clipper lighter that doesn’t work: “I’m a hoarder.” 7. John Varvatos boots, custom-made for Clark’s wedding. 8. Fingerless glove. 9. Cartier watch (left) and Gold Daytona Rolex: “That’s the big boy. I’ve always loved a good timepiece.” 10. Custom Worth & Worth hat. 11. Varvatos blazer. 11
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R&R Since forming in 2013, Sremmurd – brothers Khalif “Swae Lee” and Aaquil “Slim Jxmmi” Brown – have been aiming to make music that’s, as Lee has said, “acceptable, but weird as fuck”. The Brown brothers grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, before moving out as teenagers and into a duplex, hosting huge parties where they showed of their music. In 2011, they became Dem Outta St8 Boyz, making it as far as a talent competition on BET. Later they moved to Atlanta and caught the attention of Mike Will Made It, who’d recently produced much of Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz. He signed them to his label, EarDrummers, which the brothers renamed themselves after (read their name backward). Will produced 2015’s SremmLife, whose title doubled as a philosophy: “the good life, the family, safe sex and paycheques”, Lee has said. Will told Rolling Stone at the time, “I look at them like a hood ’NSync.” “It’s rare that you get double acts anymore,” says Lowe. “I really liked their chemistry. It was youthful, but had a musical maturity.” While producing “Black Beatles”, Will recruited friend Gucci Mane, who recorded a
Meet the Black Beatles How Rae Sremmurd accidentally crafted one of pop’s biggest (and weirdest) hits ast june, r ae sremmurd had only two days left to hand in their second album, which the hip-hop duo hoped would build on the success of their exuberant 2015 debut, SremmLife. But they needed a hit – the two singles they released early in 2016 failed to catch fire. That’s when their producer Mike Will Made It called a last-minute meeting to play them some new beats. One stuck out: a mellow, mechanical bass stutter that inspired the duo’s main creative force, 23-year-old Swae Lee, to write about “living the rock-star lifestyle”. That night, he hit on a theme: “Black Beatles”. “It was a dope phrase,” says Lee. “I’ve always loved John Lennon’s swag – I like his glasses.” ★ It worked. At press time, “Black Beatles” had been a U.S. Number One hit for seven weeks, while its rowdy video (in which Sremmurd play guitars on a roof, suggesting the Beatles’ ’69 farewell concert) has earned almost 300 million YouTube streams. “I’m not sick of it yet,” says Zane Lowe, who plays the song often on Beats 1. “There’s a hook every five seconds. One of the craziest things about that record is how strange it is. It’s really inclusive, it references old geezers and all sorts of mad reference points. It’s quite psychedelic. It’s a really odd record.”
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verse after he was released from prison following a stint on a gun charge. “Gucci said, ‘Man, this shit a banger. I’m gonna hop on it’,” Will has said. The song took of after Florida high school students invented a viral phenomenon, the Mannequin Challenge, when they posed, frozen, for a YouTube video. “Black Beatles” would become the challenge’s unoicial soundtrack – even Paul McCartney released a video of himself standing motionless as the song played. “When you’ve reached a Beatle, it’s the ultimate co-sign,” says Lee. Though Sremmurd don’t claim to be Beatlemaniacs, they had an encouraging meeting with McCartney at Coachella in 2014. “He didn’t even know us, but he was just talking to us,” says Lee. “I guess it was our aura.” Lee says Sremmurd are already in the studio working on “new bangers”: “We broke into the pop world, out of the hip-hop world. I think all those hits before this built our fans up for this bomb to drop.” BRITTANY SPANOS
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“One of the craziest things about the record is how strange it is,” says Zane Lowe. “It’s really odd.”
New Album Available Now Features ‘Bullshit’ and ‘Scott Green’ On with Skegss n Tour our Thiss March a ss and The Gooch Palms a o a ms www.dunerats.tv d r .tv
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Thundamentals Make a Connection Experiences with fans played a big role in the Aussie hip-hoppers’ fourth album BY JA M E S J E N N I NGS t’s a blazing summer’s day at an Remember, happened organically. “The outdoor cafe in Sydney’s Inner West, concept just builds as we go along – we and MC Brendan ‘Tuka’ Tuckerman don’t start with a preconceived concept, and DJ/producer Morgan ‘Morgs’ like ‘this album is going to be about the varJones – half of Australian hip-hop group ious sizes of paper’ or whatever,” says Jones. Thundamentals – look happy to be see- “It just kind of evolves.” “We all had a pretty rough couple of ing sunlight. Having spent the past eight months holed up with other members Jesse years – lots of amazing stuf career-wise, ‘Jeswon’ Ferris (MC) and Kevin ‘Poncho’ but a lot of shifts in our personal lives,” Kerr (DJ/producer) in the Sydney record- Tuckerman continues. “So we ended up ing studio of fellow Blue Mountains-bred rapping specifically about a lot of people hip-hop group Hermitude, Thundamen- that we knew or experiences we’d had . . . tals decided upon a refreshingly direct everything’s about real people.” One of the album’s highlights, the emomethod to reconnect with fans when announcing their impending fourth album, tive “Blue Balloons”, is a prime example of the group mining personal experience. Everyone We Know. “Jesse and I put our phone number on “After our last album came out, a guy called the internet, and three weeks before we BB from the Blue Mountains passed away, launched the name of the album we asked and he was a big fan of ours,” says Tuckerman. “We never met him, people to text us,” says but the day that he died Tuckerman. “We got about we were flooded on our soa thousand text messages “Our real boss is cials because he liked our – Jesse and I were doing the people who music and was from where 10-hour shifts calling evwe were from. We went to erybody, telling them, ‘Yo, are gonna buy his funeral service, and to what’s up, we’re releasing the record,” says commemorate him everythis record called EveryTuckerman. one was given a blue balone We Know, we thought loon. After his mum delivwe’d introduce ourselves ered this heart-wrenching to you.’ Because really, the music industry doesn’t provide employment speech, everyone released their balloons, – our real boss is the people who are gonna so we were just watching these hundred buy the record, so we’re just getting to know blue balloons float away. The song just flew them, and they become ‘everyone we know’. out of Jesse, and it was an experience that It was about making a real, personal con- fit the rough theme we had for the record.” With an ever-growing fan base and a nection with them . . . it was humbling.” The unorthodox approach yielded no string of sold-out headline shows to their shortage of memorable exchanges, from name, childhood friends Tuckerman and Tuckerman speaking with a woman whose Jones seem unperturbed about the expecboyfriend proposed to her onstage at a tations placed upon Everyone We Know. Thundamentals show (“That’s happened “It’s mad fun, man, you can’t front,” says about six times now,” says the MC), to Tuckerman. “Let’s say we fail – we’re albeing placed in the middle of a police pur- ready up to album four, so everything from suit. “I was talking to one dude who’d just here on is just a bonus.” “There was maybe broken out of a mental asylum, and he was a bit more pressure with this one because getting chased by the police in his car and you grow up and start looking at this being he’s like, ‘Yo! Tuka! I wanna fuckin’ talk to your career – or are you gonna work at the ya mate, but I’m gonna have to let you go, cafe next month again?” adds Jones. “Some of those pressures were lingering, but I ay!’,” Tuckerman laughs. An unintentional concept album (“Con- don’t think it changed anything. Basicalcept albums are usually pretty wack,” says ly I had the same approach to everything Tuckerman), the genesis of Everyone We – smoke weed and make beats,” he laughs. Know, the follow-up to 2014’s So We Can “But just do it more.”
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PERSONAL EXPERIENCE Thundamentals (from left): Jeswon, Morgs, Tuka and Poncho
The Menzingers Carve Out Their Own Future And the Scranton punkers have a bloody good time while doing it When the Menzingers toured Australia in 2014, the band were eager to maintain the momentum garnered by the runaway success of 2012’s On the Impossible Past. Maintain they did. This month Philadelphia’s favourite melodic punks return to our shores, kickstarting yet another album cycle for their fifth release, After the Party. And they’re having the time of their lives. “We wanted it to be this ultimate bar jukebox record,” laughs co-frontman Greg Barnett over the phone. “We wanted every song to be fun as hell.” After the Party is an optimistic callto-arms, inspiring listeners to take the future by the horns. “We’re told that we need to have all these things – own a house, have a car, a great career by a certain age, but it’s all just bullshit,” explains Barnett. “This whole album is just an ode to creating a life that you want and just not what other people have designed for you.” The band (filled out by Tom May on guitar and vocals, Eric Keen on bass and Joe Godino on drums) spent six weeks in the studio, where producer Will Yip (Title Fight, Balance & Composure) “flipped the script” on their songwriting. “He took on that role as fifth member of the band,” says Barnett. “It just wouldn’t be the same without him.” OLIVER PELLING
PARTY ON The Menzingers’ Greg Barnett in San Francisco, 2015
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George Michael, 1963-2016 Rob Sheield on why the former Wham! singer was a pop visionary amn it, george michael – another beloved pop legend gone in 2016, dying on Christmas at the fartoo-young age of 53. This one really hurts, because George Michael was a true pop visionary, one of the great Eighties glam eccentrics. No one else could have scored a classic like “Faith”, his biggest, best and weirdest hit. It’s one of the briefest Number One smashes of recent decades – under three minutes. Yet every moment is coded with sexual and stylistic provocations – the stubble, the black leather jacket, the acoustic guitar and handclaps, the breathy gasps and careless whispers, the paranoid lyrics, the way he sabotages his own straight-boy makeover by tricking out that leather jacket with a string of pearls. Even when George was draping himself with scantily clad supermodels, he made it seem like a statement of principle. George always took his pop devotion seriously, which is why he redefined the art of pop stardom in the Eighties. For him, every hit meant a radical revision of who he was and what he stood for. So when he rocked that leather jacket in “Faith”, it was a renunciation of his frivolous past, just as setting that jacket on fire in his “Freedom ’90” video meant no, really, this time he was renouncing his past. But whatever his next disguise was, he made it witty and seductive. This guy got how the erotics of fandom worked. As he sang, “I know all the games you play, because I play them too.” He first arrived with Wham!, the ultimate boy-boy duo – “every little hungry schoolgirl’s pride and joy”. Of all the 1980s British Invasion upstarts, Wham! paid zero lip service to postpunk artiness – they came on as just two shamelessly ambitious teenage boys in tight shorts performing “Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do)”. George was schooled in Motown tunecraft – especially Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. But nobody could guess exactly what Andrew Ridgeley did. In their first big Rolling Stone interview in 1985, they got testy about it. Andrew: “My role is everything people don’t see because they’re not in pop bands.” George: “He just plays the guitar and has a good time.”
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Either way, Wham! made themselves an easy target. As Dead or Alive’s late, great Pete Burns said, “They’re just two toothpaste ads with a microphone, aren’t they?” (And he meant that as a compliment.) Eighties kids argued over whether Wham! even counted as New Wave; the exclamation point was seen as evidence for both sides. Make It Big cracked America with “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, “Careless Whisper”, “Freedom” and “Everything
She Wants”, where George bitchily arches an eyebrow at his pregnant bride: “You’ve shown me you can take – you’ve got some giving to do.” Wham! signed of with two killer farewell hits, “I’m Your Man” and “The Edge of Heaven”. But George’s solo blockbuster Faith was the apex of everything he wanted and everything he was, from dance-pop glitz to obsessive late-night ballads like “Father Figure”. In the infamous “I Want
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Michael in 1988
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Your Sex” video, George provided MTV with an intro telling the kids at home “This song is not about casual sex” while scrawling “explore monogamy” in lipstick on the bare flesh of his make-up artist. George blasted into the music game at a time when pop stardom practically required boys to pose as gay, but forbade them from coming out in real life. It’s insane how the Eighties, now cherished as the queerest of pop decades, was so closeted at the time. Freddie Mercury didn’t just deny being gay – he threatened to sue press outlets who dared to suggest otherwise. So Faith was a pop starlet struggling to figure it out for himself in public but spinning of more questions than answers. For him it was complicated by his own inner denial – and then there was teaming up with Elton John for the ridiculous MTV smash “Wrap Her Up”, with both men drooling over Marilyn Monroe, Joan Collins and Grace Jones. Last week I was karaoke-ing (“Last Christmas”, of course) with a couple of women who grew up in the Eighties – they interrupted the song to give heartfelt speeches about how their whole ideal of teen romance was shaped by the dream that George Michael might be straight. That’s part of the role he played in his fans’ lives. But George tired of the hustle faster than anyone would have guessed. Listen Without Prejudice was where he abdicated, despite muted beauties like “Praying for Time”. In “Freedom ’90”, he could only express his quest for artistic authenticity by bringing in Christy Turlington to do his lip-synching for him. His summer-’92 hit “Too Funky” was a slight but welcome comeback in disco-supermodel mode; Older had low-key ballads inspired by a dead lover. It took a 1998 bust in an L.A. park men’s room to motivate him to come out, but with typical wit he turned the episode into his “Outside” video, complete with beefcake cops. For his final album in 2014, Symphonica, he teamed up with an orchestra to do a set of lounge songs, some his own and others identified with torch singers like Nina Simone. I once saw a Patti Smith show in October 2004 where she announced she had a song stuck in her head all day, so she wanted to give it a try onstage. Then she wailed “Father Figure”, a ballad so perfect for her stern voice it was truly frightening. When Patti moaned the words, “If you ever hunger, hunger for me”, you could hear this was a song she was always meant to sing. The moment was a glorious tribute from one cracked pop devotee to another. And only a moment like that could do justice to the strange, beautiful, timeless spirit of George Michael.
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Parfitt (centre) onstage with Francis Rossi (left) and Alan Lancaster in 1977.
Rick Parfitt Guitarist dies from severe infection stemming from shoulder injury ick parfitt, guitarist and singer in the long-running British rock group Status Quo, died on December 24th following complications from a shoulder injury he sustained in a fall. He was 68. Parfitt was a member of Status Quo for nearly 50 years, spanning from 1967 until last October, when the guitarist announced his retirement from performing live after sufering a heart attack earlier in 2016. “This tragic news comes at a time when Rick was hugely looking forward to launching a solo career with an album and autobiography planned for 2017 following his departure from Status Quo’s touring activities on medical advice,” Parfitt’s family and Status Quo manager Simon Porter said in a joint statement. Formed as the Scorpions and then the Spectres by guitarist Francis Rossi and bassist Alan Lancaster in 1962, the band changed their name to the Status Quo in 1967 with the addition of Parfitt. The band released their debut LP Picturesque Matchstickable Messages From the Status Quo in 1968; the album featured the psychedelic anthem and hit single “Pictures of Matchstick Men”.
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Parfitt recorded over 30 albums with Status Quo during his tenure in the band, including co-writing some of their biggest hits like “Whatever You Want”, “Again and Again”, “Rain” and “Living on an Island”. Status Quo also served as the opening band at the monumental Live Aid concert in 1985, performing three songs at London’s Wembley Stadium. In October, after nearly a half-century alongside Rossi, Parfitt revealed that he would quit performing live with Status Quo after sufering a heart attack in June; the guitarist previously underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1997, the BBC reported. Following that health scare, Parfitt admitted he quit doing drugs and significantly cut down on his drinking. “I haven’t smoked a joint for 27 years and I haven’t done any cocaine for 10 years. I just do normal stuf – the kids keep me busy and I go shopping with the missus,” Parfitt said in 2014. Manager Simon Porter said that Parfitt “died” for several minutes following the June heart attack, which left the guitarist with “mild cognitive impairments”. Although Parfitt said he made a full recovery, his role in Status Quo was filled by Richie Malone. DANIEL KREPS
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Fisher on the set of Star Wars in 1977
TRIBUTES
1956-2016
Carrie Fisher SOME FINAL WORDS FROM THE ACTRESS AND WRITER, WHO PASSED AWAY IN DECEMBER, AGED 60
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n december 27th, carrie fisher passed away after sufering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles four days earlier. Late last year, she sat down with Andy Greene for an interview in support of her most recent book, The Princess Diarist. The interview never ran in Rolling Stone Australia, and portions of it are presented here for the first time. What’s the best part of success and the worst part of success? The best part is money, travelling and the people you meet. The worst part is money, travelling and the people you meet. That’s something Dorothy Parker would say. But I’ll answer it straight: The worst part is being criticised. Things are taken out of context. Now, with the Internet, you’re your own worst enemy. I’m not someone that can just not look. You’re lucky you got famous before Twitter and TMZ. I’m so happy about that. Even though I was never a private person, I always controlled what was out there. Compared to now, I had a lot more secrets. How do you relax? Badly. I watch old movies, but I’m too high-strung and agitated. I really have to concentrate to relax. I literally have to do things like watch my breathing and tell myself what I’m looking at. You were married to Paul Simon. Are you able to enjoy his music and dissociate it from your relationship with him? Absolutely, though I do like the songs he wrote about our relationship. Even when he’s insulting me, I like it very much. If you’re gonna be insulted, that’s the way to go. “Graceland” has part of us in it. What’s the most important lesson you got out of that marriage? I’m not good at relationships. I’m not cooperative enough. I couldn’t give him the peace that he needed. Also, it’s interesting when you’re with another celebrity. The issue of celebrity becomes neutralised and you can get on to your bigger problems. We had very interesting fights. It’s a shame, because he and I were very good together in the ways that we were good.
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Do you ever speak with him? No, I don’t talk to him now. I miss him, but I have the best of him in his music. What advice do you wish you’d gotten when you were younger? Don’t get loaded your whole fucking life. And I did get loaded my whole fucking life. You have to learn, and unfortunately it takes a lot of lessons for some of us to get it right. Are there any upsides to doing drugs? Absolutely. I don’t think I was ever suicidal, and that’s probably because of drugs. I have this mood disorder, so [drugs] probably saved me from the most intense feelings. And I loved LSD. Describe your best trip. I had lots of good ones. I had one where I was with Paul and my coat caught fire. We laughed at the flames. Are there drugs you wish you’d never touched? The stronger of the opiate class. I snorted heroin. I never did it the full-on way, which is basically what you do when you’re trying to kill yourself. How different do you think your life would have turned out had you never been cast in Star Wars? Utterly. It’s sort of the engine that pushed everything else through. I would have been a writer, though. I didn’t really mean to be an actress. You’ve undergone electroshock therapy for years. What are the biggest misconceptions about that? Probably that you have convulsions, or that it’s used as punishment in a mental hospital, which is how it’s depicted in every movie. It’s very easy and efective. At the time I did it, I was depressed, and it ended the depression. Medication couldn’t fix it. Therapy couldn’t fix it. That did. Do you fear death? No. I fear dying. Anything with pain associated with it, I don’t like. And I’ve been there for a couple of people when they were dying, and it didn’t look like fun. But if I was gonna do it, I’d want someone like me around. And I will be there! INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE
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R&R
Japandroids Freshen Up Some time apart may have proved the best remedy of all for the Canadian rockers BY JON N Y NA I L
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WILD HEARTS Prowse (left) and King
“The template got thrown out the window on this record.” ronto, forcing the duo to spend the first half of the following year apart. Re-grouping in mid-2014, they decided to retreat to a rented house in New Orleans. The isolation and the license from their landlord to “make as much noise as they wanted” forged a “new path”, dramatically diferent from their previous frenetic focus. “We realised it doesn’t always have to be us playing as fast as possible, screaming our lungs out,” Prowse explains. “There’s always been this template on how to write a Japandroids song, and that template got thrown out the window on this record.”
The sonic shift on Near To the Wild Heart of Life is drastic, both lyrically – with the emergence of a new tact of tightly-packed, often-alliterated sentences – and compositionally, with the album incorporating elements as far-reaching as folk and prog, accompanied by female choirs and looped synth-like guitar efects. It’s topped of with a pop-leaning polish courtesy of mixer Peter Katis (the National, Interpol). But while the shift is radical, the band are also quick to point out that they “didn’t make Kid A”, saying the “stepping stone” album is simply the start of a new era for the duo. “This is the first time when the recording isn’t just basically a document of the live version of the song, and that’s pretty exciting,” says Prowse, adding with a wry smile, “It’s fun to scare yourself a little bit.”
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CAMILO CHRISTEN
t’s the hottest sydney night in over a century, and the Red Rattler – ostensibly a small warehouse located in the inner west – isn’t quite equipped to cope, with the large metal fans attached to the wings of the stage ofering little respite for the capacity crowd. Canadian indie-rock duo Japandroids are, however, as prepared as possible. Their usual skinny jeans have been swapped for jagged-edged shorts, exposing the pair’s sun-starved pins as they part the backstage curtain and walk onstage. “That’s a very diferent show to when you come back six months later and play a room that holds two thousand people,” says frontman/guitarist Brian King. “It’s a diferent vibe.” It’s the morning after the Red Rattler sweat-fest, and Japandroids’ fast-talking frontman is sitting on a couch in the Rolling Stone oice, recapping the chaos of what was the final show of the band’s whistle-stop December promo tour for new album Near To the Wild Heart of Life. King, who closed the set horizontal, attempting to play AC/DC’s “Back in Black” while crowd-surfing, says that aside from being just a “fun excuse to play these small places that we played in the old days”, the short tour also served as a training exercise. After an extended break, he confesses, it’s going to “take a while to physically and mentally get back into it”. “We hadn’t played a single show in almost three years,” he explains. It’s a scenario the guitarist admits felt fairly foreign, given that the band had largely built their fanbase of the back of continuous touring. “There really was,” he ofers, “no break whatsoever” from the release of their debut, Post-Nothing, in early 2009 to the completion of a 200-plus show, 19-month tour following 2012’s Celebration Rock: “We were just Japandroids all the time.” The full-time role began to take its toll on the two. “Fortunately, I don’t think the shows suffered,” pipes up drummer David Prowse, the quieter and more measured of the pair. “But everything else was starting to sufer.” Prowse adds that the “bipolar” nature of touring (“your highs and lows just get more extreme”) strained the band’s relationship, and in late-2013 his bandmate moved across the country from Vancouver to To-
MY LIST
Dave Stewart Five Songs That Influenced Me The Eurythmics cofounder just teamed up with Louisiana blues singer Thomas Lindsey for the collaborative album Spitballin’.
Oliver! “Consider Yourself” My dad used to play the Oliver! soundtrack on his gramophone record player, and the whole house came alive. This song always cheered me up.
A Fan’s Notes HENRY ROLLINS GETS TRUMPED
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL WELDON; SHUTTERSTOCK
Bob Dylan t he entire world watched in differ- U.S. and, in many ways, the rest of the world, is ent shades of hilarity and horror as Donald in for a rough ride. You might wonder how the country that gave Trump became the 45th President of the United States. With this extraordinarily less-than- you Jimi Hendrix and the Stooges could possicapable man as leader, America is now a cari- bly elect such a one man disaster. This is my theory. At least since the Reagan administration, cature in the grotesque. Last month, Trump was the President-elect. there has been a concentrated efort to dumb He did his first press conference. I knew it was down the citizenry of America. When your main sources of income are warfare going to be bad but I had no and incarceration, you need an idea it was going to devolve so quickly and complete“I have tried but can electorate that is perpetually hostile, undereducated and ly. Through the cacophony of find nothing ready to engage. questions shouted by memredeeming about Trump, or someone like bers of the media, Trump talked about himself in the third the new president.” him, becoming president was as inevitable as it was unavoidperson, trashed Hillary Clinable. He is the proof that the ton, and never answered any question completely. He dodged, changed the country has not changed all that much since its subject and generally made a bufoon of him- earliest days. America has always been steeped self. He even brought in members of his staf to in brutality, elitism and inequality, yet, by turns, cheer for him. At one point, Trump took a break great generosity, heroism and decency. As in any and a lawyer read a statement about how the country, the citizens must take the good along President-elect was not in conflict of interest with the bad, but beyond that they must activewith all of his companies. It was without ques- ly seek to better themselves and by doing so, tion the most bizarre press/president experi- better those around them. This will be the test of the United States as it enters into one of its ence I’ve ever seen. I have tried but can find nothing redeeming strangest chapters. America is now one of those bad reality about the new President of the United States besides that he is now the lowest hanging fruit on shows. This can happen to any country that the tree of comedy. Humorists all over the world puts profits ahead of all else. Don’t let this hapwill have such a great time. In the real world, the pen to Australia.
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“Tangled Up in Blue” The bit about abandoning the car out West feels like it comes from a Raymond Chandler novel. And the melody is fantastic.
R.L. Burnside “Jumper on the Line” This just stays on the same blues rif over and over. It shows you don’t need complicated lyrics and epic chord changes.
Tyrannosaurus Rex “Debora” I saw Marc Bolan in my hometown of Sunderland when he first started out. About 800 girls were spellbound, and you couldn’t get this song out of your head.
The Rolling Stones “Love in Vain” If any other band tried to tackle this sort of blues song, it would lose that voodoo mystery, but the Stones captured it.
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Flashback 50th ANNIVERSARY
Making the First Issue In 1967, Jann Wenner and a small group of rock & roll believers came together in a San Francisco loft with big ideas and little funding. Inside the birth of ‘Rolling Stone’ n e a r l y 1 9 6 7, a young law-firm employee named Angie Kucherenko came home to her apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and found her roommate’s boyfriend, a 21-year-old Berkeley dropout named Jann Wenner, sprawled on the couch and strumming an acoustic guitar. He had a big idea he couldn’t wait to share. “He sat up, put the guitar aside and said, ‘I want to start a rock & roll magazine’,” Kucherenko remembers. “I said, ‘Rock & roll? Isn’t that a passing phase?’ ” Not to Wenner. For him, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and local bands like the Grateful Dead were hugely important cultural figures who deserved an outlet that took them seriously. “There was nothing called rock journalism as a profession,” Wenner says. “If you picked up Billboard, you might get a sense of the music business, but you wouldn’t keep it as part of your regular diet if you were interested in rock & roll.” A well-established local newspaper columnist happened to share Wenner’s passion: Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle. The pipe-smoking 48-year-old had been writing about jazz for decades, but he’d begun devoting space to artists like Dylan and the Dead. In October 1965, Wenner was taking in a concert at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, put on by local promoters the Family Dog, when he approached Gleason. “He said, ‘I know who you are’,” says Wenner. “He’d been reading what I was writing in [Berkeley’s student newspaper] The Daily Cal. We really hit it of, and I became a regular visitor to his house. His whole family took me in.” Despite the nearly 30-year age gap, Gleason and Wenner grew close. “Unlike every other jazz critic, he had this great sense
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of humour,” says Wenner. “He was the original pothead. He loved Lenny Bruce and politics. He had an open mind and an open ear. He revered the rock poets, but he always had perspective, which was the name of his column: ‘Perspectives’. I’d be like, ‘Jerry Garcia is the greatest guitarist in the world!’ He’d say, ‘But, Jann, have you heard of Wes Montgomery?’ ” By early 1967, San Francisco had become the hot centre of the counterculture. At the Human Be-In on January 14th, tens of thousands descended on Golden Gate Park to drop acid and dance to the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. “Bands were f looding the area,” says Kucherenko. “Jann was very, very enthusiastic. None of us could put our fingers on it, but there was a pulsing energy.” Wenner began envisioning a magazine to chronicle the rapidly growing rock scene, and he enlisted Gleason as his partner. The pair tossed around names like the Electric Typewriter and New Times before settling on Rolling Stone. The inspiration came from an essay Gleason wrote in The American Scholar titled “Like a Rolling Stone”, after the Dylan song. His subject: the significance of rock and the wisdom of youth. Despite having a great title, a smart concept and a partner with a huge Rolodex, Wenner didn’t have a cent to get his magazine of the ground. “When he approached me about being the staf photographer, I said, ‘That sounds like fun, tell me more’,” recalls Baron Wolman. “He said, ‘Well, first of all, do you have $10,000 you’d like to invest?’ ” Wolman did not. But he came up with an idea that he’d work in exchange for stock in the company and the rights to his photographs, a deal that paid dividends in the years and decades to come.
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Wenner put together a small 1 group of investors, including the parents of his soon-to-be wife, Jane Schindelheim; his own parents; Gleason; and Joan Roos, a college buddy (who happened to be a first cousin of a young actor named Robert De Niro). Together they gave Wenner $7,500. He and his staf moved into a loft at 746 Brannan Street that would give them free loft space if they used the owner’s printing services. It was time to start 2 work on the first issue. In September 1967, Wenner walked up the wooden stairs of the printing press into a loft with a tiny staf of mostly volunteers that included Kucherenko, Schindelheim, art director John Williams and Michael Lydon, a former Newsweek and Esquire writer. “It was In the dusty, and there was hardly Beginning anything up there at all,” says Lydon. “I had a feeling that (1) Wenner in this was a tabula rasa, a clean the ROLLING STONE office. slate. This wasn’t a bunch of (2) Ralph J. kids that started a newspaper. Gleason. (3) It was Jann Wenner getting the The first issue people around him to realise featured a his dream.” story about a “I remember walking in bust at the there with Jann early on,” says Dead’s house. Kucherenko. “There was a wood floor and beams of light coming in through the arched windows. Everybody helped move in furniture. We found old couches, and everybody trucked in whatever they could. It was like how any other startup would begin now without any venture capitalists.” Wenner had broad ambitions for his new magazine. One of the first assignments he gave Lydon – which wound up becoming the main story on page one – concerned money missing from the Monterey Pop Festival. “Jann didn’t want a fanzine,” says Lydon. “He wanted investigative reportage.” Many articles – including pieces on David Crosby getting fired from the Byrds and the Dead’s big drug bust – didn’t have bylines. “We didn’t put our names on everything,” says Lydon, “because that would have showed how few people were working for the paper.” Newsstands were flooded with alternative newspapers at the time, but they were largely slipshod afairs that disappeared after a few issues. “Jann kept saying what we’re doing and what they’re doing are two diferent things,” says Wolman. “ ‘Ours is totally professional. I want it to have integrity of the highest calibre. We are serious and we take ourselves seriously.’ ” In his inaugural Rolling Stone “Perspectives” column, Gleason lambasted the TV networks for not devoting more airtime to soul singers like Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Jackie Wilson. “They are black,” he wrote. “And in America in the echelons of power, which control these things, colour is a hand-
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icap.” Twenty-year-old Boston writer Jon Landau submitted a long review that compared Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced with Cream’s debut, Fresh Cream (“Despite Jimi’s musical brilliance and the group’s total precision, the poor quality of the songs and the inanity of the lyrics too often get in the way”). At the centre was a twopage Rolling Stone interview with Donovan in which he talked about folk singer Bert Jansch, the hippie movement, and George Harrison’s recent trip to Haight-Ashbury. “As kind of amateurish as it was,” says Wenner, “the fundamental bones of the magazines were there.” Nearly 50 years later, everyone involved in the first issue can recall Wenner’s boundless energy. “He was always pacing across the floor,” says Kucherenko. “He was so wired that he could be talking on the phone, talking to somebody else and greeting somebody else all at the same time. It was extraordinary to see. He would bounce up and over desks and chairs to talk to someone and then bounce back over something else, like a ball colliding around that loft.” To find a cover image, Wen3 ner sorted through a pile of publicity stills until he came across John Lennon posing in his World War II serviceman outfit for Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War. “It was two days before press and we didn’t know what to put on the front page,” Wenner says. “It was the best thing we had. But it’s defining, since it encompasses music, movies and politics. That was a fortuitous accident. But it began our lifelong association with John.” On page two, Wenner wrote a letter to his new readers: “You’re probably wondering what we are trying to do. It’s hard to say: sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper. The trade papers have become so inaccurate and irrelevant, and the fan magazines are an anachronism. Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces. We’ve been working quite hard on it and we hope you can dig it. To describe it any further would be diicult without sounding like bullshit, and bullshit is like gathering moss.” In October ’67, it was ready for print, and the staf went downstairs to see it roll of the line. “The machine started to go kabunk, ka-bunk, ka-bunk,” says Lydon. “With each ka-bunk, there was a Rolling Stone, still wet. We popped champagne and toasted.” But as Wenner watched his dream finally become a reality, he couldn’t help but feel a little overwhelmed: “I remember thinking, ‘Jeez, we’ll never be able to top this. Where do we go from here?’ ” ANDY GREENE
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R&R MY SOUNDTRACK
Keith Urban The country-rock superstar on his high school days as a DJ, driving too fast and his pre-show routine BY ROD YAT E S The Song That Reminds Me of School U2 “Gloria” 1981 “I quit school when I was 15, that was 1982, and in my last year the school wanted to set up a little radio station, and I volunteered to be the DJ. I think this is the first song I played on air. I just loved the song, I loved the energy, the rawness, the ferocity of Edge’s guitar sound, everything. It had so much of that early U2 punk spirit that really captivated me.”
she sang that song, it’s just bristling with so much joy, and to know how her life ended, I almost start weeping thinking about it. And partly also the representation of that Eighties’ innocence and joy that isn’t here anymore. There’s a lot of edginess and bitterness and fear [these days], and I didn’t sense a lot of that when that song was recorded. So it represents a lot of things, but there’s a sadness to it for me.”
The Song That Makes Me Homesick Various “The Christmas Song” 1945
The Song I Fall Asleep To Brian Eno “The Ship” 2016 “It’s not a song, it’s one of his ambient records, and it’s the album I play whenever I get on a plane and it’s time to zone out. I put my headphones on and I put my eye mask on and I will just drift of, and I always have the best sleep listening to this record. And I think that’s a compliment to Brian; I think that’s the intent of the record, ’cause it’s extremely celestial and calming. It’s a really beautiful album.”
The Last Song I Heard and Loved The Weeknd “Starboy” 2016 “I’ve become obsessed with that song. First of all I’m a mad car guy and it namechecks more cars than any song I can think of right now. And it’s a real social commentary on celebrity in the best way, and for me, having gone through addiction especially, the song resonates really powerfully on the shallowness of all of it. I love the way they’ve handled it in that song, it’s riveting.”
“Any Christmas song, pretty much. [But especially] ‘The Christmas Song’: ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire’. That one will get me every time. It even makes you homesick when you’re home! Where’s home for me? Wherever Nic [Kidman] and the girls are. I’ve lived in Nashville 25 years, so Nashville’s very home, but in the centre of my heart it’s Australia.”
The Song That Makes Me Drive Fast Ricky Skaggs “Country Boy” 1985 “It’s a pretty flat out, flat pickin’ bluegrass thing. Bluegrass music will always make you speed. [Laughs] And I’ve always been baled by the fact that every bluegrass guy I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them, they play at a million miles an hour and they talk at about a mile an hour. It’s this phenomena. They’re usually the most relaxed, chilled [people], and then they’ll play faster than you can blink. It’s insane.”
The Song I Wish I Wrote The Beach Boys “God Only Knows”
The Song That Makes Me Sad Whitney Houston “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” 1987
“I can’t [listen to] this song. There was such a beautiful, gorgeous, feminine joy and innocence in her as a person when
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1966
“A really gorgeous marriage of melody and lyric. You get Dylan songs that are lyrically magnificent but they’re not a song, they’re sort of poetry over music. But ‘God Only Knows’ is a very specific melody, a gorgeous, celestial melody, with extraordi-
nary lyrics. Any love song that opens with ‘I may not always love you’ is going to get my attention. And I especially love the last verse, because I’ve always disagreed with songs that say if you left me the world would end. No it wouldn’t, it would go on, I’d just feel like crap. I love that the last verse says the world would still go on, absolutely, but what good would living do me? That’s the most incredible way to paint that picture of reality when someone leaves you.”
The Song I Listen To Before Going Onstage Zach Galifianakis Between Two Ferns “I don’t often listen to music before I go onstage. I tend to watch more comedy. Like last night I was in the band room and we were watching Between Two Ferns, and that’s an exceptional way to get in the zone. It puts you in a good mood. I find there’s a balance between going onstage too amped up, where the audience are a little afronted by that ’cause they haven’t got there yet. But I just want to be centred and grounded and present and in a really good mood, and Between Two Ferns will do that for me.”
The Song I’m Proudest Of Keith Urban “Gone Tomorrow Here Today” 2016
“I had the idea for a song to really capture the way I feel about life, which is be in the moment. It’s very much a strong theme in my music over the years The song falls into that lyrically. And the very last verse I wrote when I was in a plane flying back to Nashville. My father had just passed away, and I was thinking not only about Nic’s dad who passed away, but also my own dad, and some friends of mine who’d died way too early as well, and I rapid-fired this last verse in one pen-to-paper stream of consciousness. It captured my spiritualism, my ideology, in a very short burst of a verse. So if anyone is curious about my religiosity, or my ideology, the last verse in that song pretty much says it.”
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Bluegrass music will always make you speed
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CLASSIC SHOT
Violent Femmes Go Busking in NYC, 1983 Photographed by Laura Levine
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can’t recall offhand if I was assigned to photograph the Violent Femmes or if I requested the shoot. They arrived at my fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side/Chinatown lugging all their gear, as requested. It’s a toss-up as to what I enjoyed more over the next few hours: photographing and hanging out with them, or listening to my own private concert. They were as good-natured and fun and friendly as you’d imagine. After we did the interior shots, I took them to my favourite street corner a block away. They set up as buskers and played for the mystified passers-by. At some point a young girl eating an apple walked over and was entranced by them. Snap. I also dig the mysterious man in the background with the fedora and the flowing cape, something I hadn’t noticed until I made the prints in my darkroom later that night. To cap it off, we traded musical favours. Upon request, they happily performed and sang a little ditty for my answering machine, which I still have saved on a cassette tape: “Laura Levine is not hoome, please leave a message on the pho-one…”. And here’s something that very few people know about me: a few years later, to my surprise, they called and asked me to sing back-up on their song “It’s Gonna Rain”. I suspect they needed a couple of background voices and remembered that I lived nearby the recording studio, because, as they soon found out, I can’t really sing.”
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WILL WE MISS OUR LASTCHANCE? An interview with the world’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen: ‘We have not hit the disastrous level, which would knock down global economies and leave us with an ungovernable planet. But we are close’
By Jeff Goodell n the l ate 1980s, james hansen became the first scientist to offer unassailable evidence that burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. In the decades since, as the world has warmed, the ice has melted and the wildfires have spread, he has published papers on everything from the risks of rapid sea-level rise to the role of soot in global temperature changes – all of it highlighting, methodically and verifiably, that our fossil-fuelpowered civilisation is a suicide machine. And unlike some scientists, Hansen was never content to hide in his oice at NASA, where he was head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York for nearly 35 years. He has testified before Congress, marched in rallies and participated in protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline and Big Coal (he went so far as to call coal trains “death trains”). The enormity of Hansen’s insights, and the need to take immediate action, have never been clearer. In November, temperatures in the Arctic, where ice coverage is already at historic lows, hit 36 degrees [Fahrenheit] above average – a spike that freaked out even the most jaded climate scientists. At the same time, alarming new evidence suggests the giant ice sheets of West Antarctica are growing increasingly unstable, elevating the risk of rapid sea-level rise that could have catastrophic consequences for cities around the world. Not to mention that in September, average measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit a record 400 parts per million. And of course, at precisely this crucial moment – a moment when the leaders of the world’s biggest economies had just signed a new treaty to cut carbon pollution in the com-
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ing decades – the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet elected a president who thinks climate change is a hoax cooked up by the Chinese. Hansen, 75, retired from NASA in 2013, but he remains as active and outspoken as ever. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, he argues, sweeping changes in energy and politics are needed, including investments in new nuclear technology, a carbon tax on fossil fuels, and perhaps a new political party that is free of corporate interests. He is also deeply involved in a lawsuit against the [U.S] government, brought by 21 kids under the age of 21 (including Hansen’s granddaughter), which argues that politicians knowingly allowed big polluters to wreck the Earth’s atmosphere and imperil the future well-being of young people in America. A few weeks ago, a federal district judge in Oregon delivered an opinion that found a stable climate is indeed a fundamental right, clearing the way for the case to go to trial in 2017. Hansen, who believes that the American political system is too corrupt to deal with climate change through traditional legislation, was hopeful. “It could be as important for climate as the Civil Rights Act was for discrimination,” he told me. Late last year, I visited Hansen at his old stone farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It sits on 10 acres, with a tennis court and a row of carefully trimmed apple trees lining the walk to the front door. We talked in his oice, a big room connected to a stone barn outfitted with solar panels. He had the cool, cerebral manner of a man whose mind is always processing complex algorithms. But at times he seemed downright cranky, as if he were losing patience
with the world’s collective failure to deal with the looming catastrophe that he has articulated for the past 30 years. “It’s getting really more and more urgent,” Hansen told me. You’ve arguably done more than anyone to raise awareness of the risks of climate change – what does Trump’s election say about the progress of the climate fight? Well, this is not a whole lot different than it was during the second Bush administration, where we had basically two oil men running the country. And President Bush largely delegated the energy and climate issue to Vice President Cheney, who was particularly in favour of expanding by hundreds the number of coal-fired power plants. Over the course of that administration, the reaction to their proposals was so strong, and from so many diferent angles – even the vice president’s own energy and climate task force – that the direction did not go as badly as it could have. In fact, if you make a graph of emissions, including a graph of how the GDP has changed, there’s really not much diference between Democratic and Republican administrations. The curve has stayed the same, and now under Obama it has started down modestly. In fact, if we can put pressure on this government via the courts and otherwise, it’s plausible that Trump would be receptive to a rising carbon fee or carbon tax. In some ways it’s more plausible under a conservative government [when Republicans might be less intent on obstructing legislation] than under a liberal government. Trump’s Cabinet nominees are virtually all climate deniers, including the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, M a r c h , 2 017
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TOO BIG TO FAIL “The energy system and the tax system have got to be simplified in a way that everybody understands and doesn’t allow the wealthy few to completely rig the system,” says Hansen.
Scott Pruitt. Are Trump’s appointments a sign that climate denialism has gone mainstream? Climate denialism never died. My climate program at NASA was zeroed out in 1981 when the administration appointed a hatchet man to manage the program at Department of Energy. Denialism was still very strong in 2005-2006 when the White House ordered NASA to curtail my speaking. When I objected to this censorship, using the first line of the NASA Mission Statement [“to understand and protect our home planet”], the NASA administrator, who was an adamant climate denier, eliminated that line from the NASA Mission Statement. Denialism is no more mainstream today than it was in those years. If President Trump called you and asked for advice on climate policy, what would you tell him? What we need is a policy that honestly addresses the fundamentals. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest by including a carbon fee – that is, a straightforward tax on fossil fuels when they come out M a r c h , 2 017
of the ground, and which is returned directly to people as a kind of yearly dividend or payment. Perhaps someone will explain to President Trump that a carbon fee brings back jobs to the U.S. much more effectively than jawboning manufacturers – it will also drive the U.S. to become a leader in clean-energy technology, which also helps our exports. The rest of the world believes in climate change, even if the Trump administration doesn’t. He said exactly what was necessary to get the support of the people that he needed to win the election. But that doesn’t mean he necessarily will adopt the implied policies. So he wants to save the jobs of coal miners and fossil-fuel workers and make the U.S. energy-independent, but he also wants to invest in infrastructure, which will make the U.S. economically strong in the long run, and you can easily prove that investing in coal and tar-sands pipelines is exactly the wrong thing to do. I would also tell him to think of what the energy sources of the future are going to be and to consider nuclear power. China
and India, most of their energy is coming from coal-burning. And you’re not going to replace that with solar panels. As you can see from the panels on my barn, I’m all for solar power. Here on the farm, we generate more energy than we use. Because we have a lot of solar panels. It cost me $75,000. That’s good, but it’s not enough. The world needs energy. We’ve got to develop a new generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fuelled molten salt reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot have a meltdown. These types of reactors also reduce nuclear waste to a very small fraction of what it is now. If we don’t think about nuclear power, then we will leave a more dangerous world for young people. If the Trump administration pushes fossil fuels for the next four years, what are the climate implications? Well, it has enormous implications, especially if it results in the building of infrastructure like the Keystone Pipeline, which then opens up more unconventional fossil fuels, which are particularly heavy in their RollingStoneAus.com
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carbon footprint because of the energy that it takes to get them out of the ground and process them. But I don’t think that could happen quickly, and there’s going to be tremendous resistance by environmentalists, both on the ground and through the courts. Also, the fossil-fuel industry has made a huge investment in fracking over the past 20 years or so, and they now have created enough of a bubble in gas that it really makes no economic sense to reopen coal-fired power plants when gas is so much cheaper. So I don’t think Trump can easily reverse the trend away from coal on the time scale of four years. How would you judge President Obama’s legacy on climate change? I would give him a D. You know, he’s saying the right words, but he had a golden opportunity. When he had control of both houses of Congress and a 70 per cent approval rating, he could have done something strong on climate in the first term – but he would have had to be a diferent personality than he is. He would have to have taken the FDR approach of explaining things to the American public with his “fireside chats”, and he would have had to work with Congress, which he didn’t do.
ance, which increases the threat that some things will go unstable, like ice sheets. You’ve described the impacts of climate change as “young people’s burden”. What do you mean by that? Well, we know from the Earth’s history that the climate system’s response to today’s CO2 levels will include changes that are really unacceptable. Several metres of sea-level rise would mean most coastal cities – including Miami and Norfolk and Boston – would be dysfunctional, even if parts of them were still sticking out of the water. It’s just an issue of how long that would take. Right now, the Earth’s temperature is already well into the range that existed during the Eemian period, 120,000 years ago, which was the last time the Earth was warmer than it is now. And that was a time when sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than it is now. So that’s what we could expect if we just leave things the way they are. And we’ve got more warming in the pipeline, so we’re going to the top of and even outside of the Eemian range if we don’t do something. And that something is that we have to move to clean energy as quickly as possible. If we burn all the fossil fuels,
Let’s talk more about policy. You’re a big believer in a revenue-neutral carbon fee. Explain how that would work, and why you’re such a big supporter of it. It’s very simple. You collect it at the small number of sources, the domestic mines and the ports of entry and from fossil-fuel companies. And you can distribute it back to people. The simplest way to distribute it and encourage the actions that are needed to move us to clean energy is to just give an equal amount to all legal residents. So the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money. And it doesn’t really require you to calculate carbon footprint – for instance, the price of food will change as sources that use more fossil fuel, like food imported from New Zealand, become more expensive. And so you attempt to buy something from the nearby farm. So this would provide the incentive for entrepreneurs and businesses to develop carbon-free products and carbon-free energies. And those countries that are early adopters would benefit because they would tend to develop the products that the rest of the world would need also, so it makes sense to do it. But it’s just not the
YOUNG PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET CARBON DIOXIDE OUT OF THE ATMOSPHERE, OR FIGURE OUT HOW TO LIVE ON A RADICALLY DIFFERENT PLANET. You know, the liberal approach of subsidising solar panels and windmills gets you a few per cent of the energy, but it doesn’t phase you of fossil fuels, and it never will. No matter how much you subsidise them, intermittent renewables are not suicient to replace fossil fuels. So he did a few things that were useful, but it’s not the fundamental approach that’s needed. Climate change hardly came up during the election, except when Al Gore campaigned with Hillary Clinton. Do you think Gore has been an effective climate advocate? I’m sorely distressed by his most recent TED talk [which was optimistic in outlook], where Gore made it sound like we solved the climate problem. Bullshit. We are at the point now where if you want to stabilise the Earth’s energy balance, which is nominally what you would need to do to stabilise climate, you would need to reduce emissions several per cent a year, and you would need to suck 170 gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, which is more than you could get from reforestation and improved agricultural practices. So either you have to suck CO2 out of the air with some method that is more efective than the quasinatural improved forestry and agricultural practices, or you leave the planet out of bal38 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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then we will melt all the ice on the planet eventually, and that would raise the seas by about 250 feet. So we can’t do that. But if we just stay on this path, then it’s the CO2 that we’re putting up there that is a burden for young people because they’re going to have to figure out how to get it out of the atmosphere. Or figure out how to live on a radically diferent planet. Is the target of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, which is the centrepiece of the Paris Agreement, still achievable? It’s possible, but barely. If global emissions rates fell at a rate of even two or three per cent a year, you could achieve the twodegree target. People say we’re already past that, because they’re just assuming we won’t be able to reduce emissions that quickly. What I argue, however, is that two degrees is dangerous. Two degrees is a little warmer than the period when sea levels were 20 to 30 feet higher. So it’s not a good target. It never had a good scientific basis. In Paris, negotiators settled on an “aspirational” target of 1.5C. Yes. But that would require a six-per cent-a-year reduction in emissions, which may be implausible without a large amount of negative emissions – that is, developing some technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
way our politics tend to work; they tend to favour special interests. And even the environmentalists will decide what they want to favour and say, “Oh, we should subsidise this.” I don’t think we should subsidise anything. We should let the market decide. Of course, the problem with getting carbon-fee legislation passed is that Congress is run by people who don’t even acknowledge that climate change is a problem. Yeah, although behind the scenes a lot of them do. And many of them would support a revenue-neutral carbon fee. And, you know, I am equally critical of the liberals and the conservatives, because the liberals are using climate policy as a basis for getting some support from people who are concerned about the environment and recognise the reality of the climate threat. But they’re not addressing the fundamental problem. The public understands that, and that leads to all the other things that people are concerned about, like the fact that you’re answering to lobbyists while you’re in Congress, then you become a lobbyist when you retire. [Former House Democratic Majority Leader] Dick Gephardt retired after he couldn’t get the nomination for president, and in the first year out of office he got $120,000 per quarter from PeaM a r c h , 2 017
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THE FINAL FIGHT Hansen devoted his career at NASA to researching climate change (above). “We have to move to clean energy,” he says. “If we burn all the fossil fuels, then we will melt all the ice on the planet, and that would raise the seas by about 250 feet.”
body Coal, almost half a million dollars a year from a single source. It’s like when Hillary Clinton is asked, “Why did you take $250,000 from the banks to give a talk?” and she said, “Well, that’s what they offered.” That’s the way it works. We need a revolutionary third party that takes no money from lobbyists. Look at Obama and Bernie Sanders: Their campaigns initially were funded by small donors. They didn’t have to take lobbyist money. The public is not into the details of what’s going on, but it knows that it’s become a rotten system. I agree that a carbon fee could be an effective tool to cut emissions, but how do you get the politics right to get it done? I mean, it’s one thing to . . . Well, you have to make it simple. You can’t do this 3,000-page crap, like they did with cap-and-trade in 2009. You gotta simplify it down to the absolute basics, and you do it in a way that the public will not let you change it. If the public is getting this dividend, they won’t let you change it. That’s the same argument people use for a flat tax, which will never happen because all the loopholes in the tax system are deliberate. And political. That’s why we need a new party, which is gonna be based on these principles. These are the most fundamental things. The energy system and the tax system have got to be simplified in a way that everybody understands and doesn’t allow the wealthy few to completely rig the system. M a r c h , 2 017
Sounds like you think we need a Boston Carbon Party. [Laughs] Something like that. A lot of people say you are a great scientist, but when it comes to policy, that’s a whole other thing – and something you should leave to politicians. Bullshit. What scientists do is analyse problems, including energy aspects of the problem. I got started thinking about energy way back in 1981, when I published a paper that concluded that you can’t burn all the coal, otherwise you end up with a different planet. There’s nothing wrong with scientists thinking about energy policy, in my opinion. In fact, if you have some scientific insights into the implications of diferent policies, you should say them. It’s the politicians who try to stop you. And that includes people who ran NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where I worked for 33 years. Before I would go to Washington to testify, I’d sometimes get a call from the director of the center – somebody who I respect a lot and is a very good scientist and engineer. But he would tell me, “Just be sure to only talk about science, not policy.” Well, I don’t agree with that. Here’s another example – at NASA headquarters, we would have a trial run on press conferences. And at one of them, which was about declining sea ice in the Arctic, one of the trial questions was, “What can we do about it?” The scientist who responded said, “Well, we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.” And some of the more
political types in the agency said, “No, you can’t say that. That’s policy!” [Laughs] When I was working at NASA, I always felt I was working for the taxpayer. I was not working for the administration. When a new administration comes in, they think they can control public-information oices and science agencies and influence what they’re saying so they become, in efect, oices of propaganda. But that’s just wrong. When we have knowledge about something, we should not be prohibited from saying it as clearly as we can. You were among the first to alert the world to the dangers of climate change back in the 1980s. Since that time, carbon pollution has just gone up. What does that tell you about humanity? Well, that’s always been the way we do things. In the U.S., we didn’t face up to the dangers of World War II until we were forced to. And then we did a lot. But in this case, it’s particularly diicult and crucial because of the inertia of the climate system and the fact that the climate system gains momentum, and you’ve gotta stop that. It is a very powerful system. We’re close to that point of no return. Whether we’ve passed it or not, I don’t know. . . . We’ve passed it in the sense that some climate impacts are going to occur and some sea-level rise is going to occur, but we have not necessarily hit the disastrous level, which would knock down global economies and leave us with an ungovernable planet. But we are close. So this is why it’s really crucial what happens in the near term. But it will take a strong leader who is willing to take on special interests. Whether that can be done without a new party that’s founded on just that principle, I’m not sure. So we’ll have to see. Do you ever feel a sense of futility about the situation we’re in – the essential insanity of continuing to emit carbon pollution, given what we know about the future consequences? It’s not at all surprising, because it’s related to the desire of people to raise their standard of living out of poverty levels. That’s what we did in the West. We discovered fossil fuels, which allowed us to replace slavery with fossil fuels. That’s what China and India and other countries want to do now. But if they do it the way we did, then we’re all going down together. If we go over there and say, “You guys do it differently. Use solar panels” [laughs], that’s stupid. We have to work together in a way that will actually work. And they understand the risks, too. RollingStoneAus.com
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The Future Is Now
We proile 10 of the hottest artists who are climbing the charts, breaking the Internet or just dominating our office stereos . . .
Alex the Astronaut SOUNDS LIKE: Slice-of-life storytelling with one foot in the folk past and another in the sonic future FOR FANS OF: Woodwater-era the Promise Ring, Courtney Barnett’s lyrics, Paul Kelly WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Currently splitting her time between her hometown of Sydney and Long Island University, where she’s studying maths and physics on a soccer scholarship, Alex Lynn – the Astronaut monicker was her private Soundcloud name, which she ended up adopting – grew up obsessing over artists such as Paul Kelly, Cat Stevens and David Bowie. Kelly’s storytelling in particular struck a chord, as she recounts in the lyrics to “i believe in music”: “For my 7th birthday, I was given a CD player, and I played Paul Kelly again and again and again.” Now Lynn’s own music is capturing people’s imagination, with swoonsome first single “Already Home” receiving high rotation on Triple J, and music goers in the clubs and cafes of New York falling under her spell. A gig at legendary Greenwich Village venue The Bitter End is the subject of the song “Rock Star City”. “It was really exciting but I realised I was playing in New York and it was all a bit overwhelming,” smiles the 22-year-old. SHE SAYS: “I guess I chose [the name] ’cause I’m interested in physics, and I’m a bit of an explorer-type person, I like learning new things, so that suits the whole astronaut thing.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: The earworm melodies and vibrant storytelling of “Rock Star City”, from her self-titled debut EP, due in March. ROD YATES
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“To see someone like [Trump] become president is just a testimony to where we are at culturally in America.”
Aminé SOUNDS LIKE: Swag surfin’ with a rap prodigy from the ’burbs FOR FANS OF: Chance the Rapper circa Acid Rap, GoldLink, André 3000 WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Adam Aminé Daniel has scored an unlikely hit with the wavy love rap “Caroline” – currently at 74 million YouTube views and counting. The Portland rapper is inspired by Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak and Outkast’s The Love Below, and taught himself to make beats with YouTube tutorials. He also studied business, advertising and marketing at Portland State
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University (he recently dropped out with 15 credits left towards his degree), and creates his own cover artwork. In 2015, he piqued interest among some influential blogs and websites with that year’s mixtape Calling Brio, a diverse blend of house, bass drops, African pop and smooth-but-steady flows. When he posted “Caroline” to SoundCloud in June, he generated a fierce bidding war that resulted in a deal with Republic Records. By September, Republic pushed the track onto streaming services, and it soared into the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100.
He’s recorded over 60 songs for his next project, but he’s unsure if that will be an album or a mixtape. However, he knows that he wants to continue to make feel-good music that’s colourful and bright. HE SAYS: Aminé has no shortage of opinions on the anti-immigration policy that Donald Trump used in his recent campaign. “My parents are immigrants to [the United States],” says the Ethiopian-American artist. “They came to this country for a better opportunity just like everyone else. So if anyone else, whether they’re running for president or whatever
they’re trying to do, if they’re bashing the people who are just working hard and just trying to make a better life for themselves by coming to America, I believe that’s completely wrong. To see someone like that do something like that and become president is just a testimony to where we are at culturally in America right now.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: On “Caroline”, Aminé spits game to a “mighty fine” girl with the same name as Outkast’s “Roses” nemesis. “Let’s get gory like a Tarantino movie,” he sings.
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MOSI REEVES
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Sampha
SOUNDS LIKE: A detail-anchored, cyborg scatterbrain sliced open by soulful compassion. FOR FANS OF: James Blake, Ngaiire, Dan Bodan WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: From the age of 12, Sampha Sisay was creating “ambient and jazzy” beats, before meeting his mentor, fellow South-Londoner SBTRKT, and featuring prominently on the mysterious producer’s selftitled 2011 debut. While working on his 2014 EP Dual, Sampha also spent studio time with heavyhitters Drake, Beyoncé and Solange, but for the past two years has fought against his urges (“I’m a collaborative person by nature”) to focus the majority of his attention on his debut LP, Process, due February 3rd. HE SAYS: Decamping to “the middle of nowhere” – Giske, an island of the coast of Norway – to record portions of Process, Sampha says these formative sessions outside of his usual habitat was needed “because I had a lot going on in my life at the time” – a reference to his mother who, following a long battle with cancer, passed away midway through the recording of the album. “It was all quite cathartic,” the 27-year-old says. “Part of the reason I called the album Process was because it was me processing what I was going through. It was important that I had that avenue and I had that space to do that in. It was like a documentation really of that time.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: Process’ lead single, “Blood On Me”, amplifies his skittish electro minimalism to an anthemic level. JONNY NAIL
SOUNDS LIKE: Trent Reznor’s workout mix: a lean, murderous blend of synths, samples, pained vocals and industrial rhythms. FOR FANS OF: Big Black, Youth Code, Agoraphobic Nosebleed WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Street Sects vocalist Leo Ashline has turned a lifetime of distress, addiction and violence into an extreme-music triumph. Since 2013, he has collaborated with multi-instrumentalist Shaun Ringsmuth to create nightmarish noise, punk and industrial punchouts, playing strobing, molten shows around Austin. On their debut LP End Position – a title inspired by a lyric from Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See a Darkness” – more subtle layers reveal themselves. Amid the anarchy are moments of noir storytelling, black humour and satisfying breakdowns between pummellings. “[Shaun] and I have been through hell and worse together,”
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Ashline says. “And although we have our diferences at times, we have always supported and respected one another, as artists, and as human beings. I believe in him, and he believes in me. As corny as that sounds, it’s a fucking rare thing to find, in any kind of partnership.” THEY SAY: “I’ve always admired [Will Oldham’s] ability to capture these seemingly grand and complex statements within a style that is very stark and spare,” says Ashline. “He also blends humour, absurdity and even a sort of juvenile vulgarity into mature and poignant subject matter in a way that seems efortless. He’s the rare kind of writer who can be hyper-specific while still giving his audience room to attach their own feelings and interpretations to his writing. He knows how to
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build myth and mystery around himself and his body of work.” “Before [Leo] and I started writing music together he had done vocals in a few hardcore bands,” says Ringsmuth. “Not to say that the aim of Street Sects is to be hardcore, but there is a manic intensity to the music and
lyrics that requires directness, and as a performer he’s able to externalise an internal argument like few I’ve ever seen.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Feigning Familiarity” is a fatalist anthem that gradually increases in intensity to a final movement of blister-busting excess. REED FISCHER
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TOP: BEN WALKER
Street Sects
Ocean Grove SOUNDS LIKE: A hyperactive insurgence against the heavy music status quo FOR FANS OF: Hellions, the Ghost Inside, trying new things WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: In the crowded and sometimes unimaginative world of heavy music, Melbourne’s Ocean Grove are dead set on dancing to the beat of their own eccentricities. Out this month, the sextuplet’s debut LP, The Rhapsody Tapes, is laden with themes inspired by the idea of hyperreality (thanks in part to TV shows such as Westworld and Stranger
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Things) and pulls no punches in its desire to be diferent. But it’s not, explains frontman Luke Holmes, just about being weird for the sake of it. “People ask us what the record sounds like or who we want to be . . . but we don’t want to follow anyone’s footsteps,” says the 22-year-old. The group of friends – rounded out by guitarists Jimmy Hall and Matt Henley, bassist Dale Tanner and studio member Matthew Kopp – took to drummer and producer Sam Bassal’s bedroom in Melton, Victoria, where the 19-year-old recorded,
produced, mixed and mastered the record from start to finish (“He’s a freak,” laughs Holmes). The momentum from 2015’s Black Label EP saw the group sign to UNFD for their full-length debut, and the band have just spent January supporting the Amity Affliction on an Australia-wide tour that saw them peddle their wares to 800-2000 people a night. And, yes, they’re from Ocean Grove. THEY SAY: “If there’s any type of music where you should be able to do something diferent and not have people look at you in a strange way . . . shouldn’t it be
the one that’s supposed to be for the outcasts?” rifs Holmes on the band’s left-of-centre approach. “Either way, I’m not anxious about it – we’ve written music we really enjoy. I think this record coming out is going to give us a good kick up the arse. Now it’s the exciting bit.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Thunderdome”, the third track of The Rhapsody Tapes, lights the fuse on a loop of atmospheric electronic drums and sees it explode into a rif-heavy hook that’ll stay stuck in your head well into the latter half of 2017. OLIVER PELLING
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THE FUTURE IS NOW
Old Blood
Cloves Lashes, Ellie Goulding), Dunstan promises an LP SOUNDS LIKE: Sweet, soulful folk inviting you that’s “a lot blunter” than 2015 EP XIII: “The EP in closer before some stomping blues pays a was acoustic and bittersweet, and the chorus of surprise visit to smack you upside the head FOR FANS OF: Sarah Blasko, Lucy Rose, Alabama [latest single] ‘Better Now’ moves in a harsher direction, and there’s a lot of new songs that fall Shakes into that zone,” she explains. “The album has WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Melgotten a lot sassier – I’m not giving as much of a bourne-born Kaity Dunstan honed her craft playing acoustic folk sets in cafes and rock shows fuck anymore!” SHE SAYS: “As a person I’m very at pubs as a teenager alongside insular. I’m one of these people her older sister. “Dad was our “The album has who puts a wall up against emoroadie,” she smiles. “He’d drive us gotten a lot tions, and writing is the only time around with our gear and book sassier – I’m not I tap into that. If you sat around all our gigs, it was cool.” Before long giving as much day feeling [emotionally tumultushe started stepping out on her ous] you’d be a disaster! Aside own as Cloves. “The word had a of a fuck from that I’m not a dweller, I just nice ring to it . . . it was probably anymore.” get on with things. Otherwise it’d the least thought through thing of just be mopey Kaity, wouldn’t it? the whole process, which is funny ‘She’s a fucking nightmare!’” [Laughs] ’cause I’m stuck with it forever!” Now based in HEAR FOR YOURSELF: Single “Better Now” – the UK, where she’s been working on her debut soulful folk delivered with a blues uppercut. album for the past few years with songwriting partner Justin Parker (Lana Del Ray, Bat For JAMES JENNINGS
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SOUNDS LIKE: Amy Winehouse jamming with Kyuss at a desert LSD party FOR FANS OF: Black Sabbath, Blood Ceremony, Windhand WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: This Southern California-based doom-psych quintet have been garnering major raves from the metal blogosphere thanks to their self-titled debut. The primal punch and serpentine swirl of the band’s guitar-bass-organdrum attack mesh beautifully with the commanding clean vocals of vocalist Feathers, whose jazz- and blues-influenced stylings soar above the crunch. And this is all before you attend their theatrical live show that includes smoke machines, psychedelic projections and a pair of corpse-painted dancers – the Rigormortettes – who perform ribbon and hula-hoop routines before ritually “killing” Feathers at the end of it. THEY SAY: “People have said our live shows are like being on a drug trip without any drugs actually being involved,” laughs bassist and co-founder Octopus. “Audiences don’t know what to expect, but they love it. But it’s been kind of interesting trying to book the band, because we’re so diferent. “We wanted to have that sense of theatre and mystery. There’s no mystery with so many doom and stoner bands . . . we feel like some of the genre has become derivative, and we wanted to stake out some new territory. We absolutely are part of the stoner/ doom world – but when you’re stoned, sometimes you see things diferently!” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Glowplug”, from the band’s self-titled debut, showcases Old Blood’s power and dexterity. DAN EPSTEIN
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Loyle Carner SOUNDS LIKE: A young man channelling his old soul into erudite, incisive lyrics that weave through Nineties NYC boom bap beats given a modern British makeover. FOR FANS OF: Mos Def, Skepta, Kanye West, Homeboy Sandman WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Twenty-two-yearold UK rapper Loyle Carner (a spoonerism on birth name Ben Coyle-Larner) was raised in South London with his tight-knit family (his mother and younger brother feature in most of his striking music videos). Born with
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dyslexia and ADHD (“The more I’ve come to understand it, the more I’ve learned to use it almost as a superpower, as opposed to a hindrance”), Carner was taken by poetry at an early age – he cites his biggest influences as poet Langston Hughes alongside rappers Mos Def and Common. His love of wordplay led to an interest in hip-hop and battle rapping while in primary school. Debut LP Yesterday’s Gone was recorded over three years in various bedrooms. Says Carner: “I don’t see the need to re-record songs in a proper studio . . . if you record
tune on it called “Yesterday’s something it should be happenGone”, and it’s my favourite tune ing then and there, capturing of his. He was a fantastic musithat emotional truth.” The MC cian and never isn’t one to rest on his laurels: “I “I don’t see the need got a chance to release his shit, can’t wait to get to re-record songs so I figured I’d started on the in a proper studio,” call my album next record. I just says Carner. Yesterday’s Gone want to make and put that some more tunes song [as a hidden – see if I can bettrack] on it, as a thank you for his ter myself, that’s the hope.” inspiration, because I wouldn’t be HE SAYS: “My Dad made an here if it wasn’t for him.” album that no-one knew about, HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “The and he sadly died a couple of Isle of Arran” is a showcase for years ago, and after he passed Carner’s poetic lyricism. we found this album. There’s a J.J.
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Survive SOUNDS LIKE: The throbbing, synth-heavy soundtracks to imaginary Seventies and Eighties flicks – most likely found in VHS shell cases FOR FANS OF: Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, John Carpenter WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: You may have heard Survive’s Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein providing the soundtrack to Netflix series Stranger Things, 2016’s most celebrated nostalgia trip. But together with fellow Austinites Adam Jones and Mark Donica, they make up this warm, goosebump-centric band that
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explores a darker, more grandiose breed of cinematic menace. After issuing a handful of cassette and vinyl releases since 2010 (earning the attention of Stranger Things creators the Dufer Brothers in the process), Relapse released Survive’s most high-profile album yet, RR7349, a moody giallo full of vocoders, zombie-stepping drum machines and swooning melodies. THEY SAY: Dixon credits I Luv Video, Austin’s self-proclaimed “oldest and largest video store in the world”, for helping him expand his horizons. “I Luv Video is literally one block from my house. I try to rent
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Stein, “and the stuf that he did from them as often as possible with Harold Faltermeyer. They . . . They have a huge horror have, like, a weird romance vibe. section, so a lot of times I’ll I don’t know if it’s just get stuf if it’s some modal-style got a Goblin or a “There’s a of playing, but it’s Tangerine Dream Tangerine really ingenious. score and just see Dream score Obviously John what it sounds like. for ‘Sorcerer’ Carpenter’s films. They have a huge that’s great.” That brooding kind Argento collection, of . . . awesome so we get to see use of dissonance all that. And then and just propelling scenes.” there’s a Tangerine Dream score HEAR FOR YOURSELF: for Sorcerer that’s great. I’ve Album opener “A.H.B.” stomps rented that one a few times. through gritty horror-flick atThe Keep. I think you can only mosphere and sweeping bloody get The Keep on VHS.” valentines. “I’m a huge fan of Giorgio Moroder’s soundtracks,” says CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
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Miya Folick
“I met my bass player through Tinder, and then he basically put the rest of my band together.”
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SOUNDS LIKE: Indie-rock spring fever. FOR FANS OF: Angel Olsen, Florence Welch, St. Vincent WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Los Angelesbased wunderkind Miya Folick recently opened for noise-pop duo Sleigh Bells on a slew of sold-out dates. She started out studying acting at NYU and at the immersive musical theatre education CAP21 program before pursuing music: The intensive education inevitably influenced her unorthodox performance style, as did playing the taiko drums in her Buddhist church group growing up. “I had left NYU, was taking a semester of and really did not have much to do,” she says. “And I was going through a really hard time, and so was this friend of mine from high school. He started teaching me guitar, and mostly I liked to make up my own songs. I just liked to explore diferent shapes I could make with my hands to make diferent sounds. I didn’t even learn chords.” SHE SAYS: “I put up a profile on Tinder that said ‘looking for a band’, and then I put my Instagram handle and figured people could find me. I think I did swipe for a little while but eventually gave up because I wasn’t really finding anybody. And my bass player, Bryant [Fox], saw my profile. We didn’t get matched because I guess I didn’t swipe right. He saw my Instagram, messaged me and came to a show I was playing solo. So, I met my bass player through Tinder, and then he basically put the rest of my band together.” HEAR FOR YOURSELF: “Pet Body” is a barrelling ode that tackles the idea of feelings being disassociated from brain and body. PAULA MEJIA
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END LIVING LEG
SUZE DEMARCHI The Baby Animals singer-guitarist rocketed to fame in the early Nineties, but not before she’d survived a tour with the Angels. ✦ By Rod Yates ✦ PHOTOGR A PH BY JOSHUA MOR R IS fter slogging it out in the pubs of Perth with her first band, Photoplay, and a stint in London in the Eighties as an aspiring solo pop star, when fame finally came for Suze DeMarchi it did so quickly – within two years of forming in 1989, the Baby Animals had a Number One album with their self-titled debut. This month the band embark on a tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of the single “One Word”, a song DeMarchi wasn’t initially a fan of. “[The demo] was a bad country song,” she chuckles, sitting in the Rolling Stone offices. “It really came into its own when we were doing pre-production in New York. But I still didn’t love it.” And now? “It’s such a crowd pleaser. It’s always a good feeling.”
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Given you weren’t a big fan of “One Word”, were you surprised when it was a hit? I was surprised with everything. When everything was going on then I was like, this is mad. All of it was crazy. As your debut LP was on its way to selling eight times platinum and you were touring with Van Halen and Bryan Adams, was there part of you that thought, we’re invincible? I didn’t think I was invincible. I thought it was a bit bigger than I was comfortable with. It’s not so much the success of it, it’s just the amount of time it consumes, ’cause everyone wants you to play somewhere or they want you to do something. Which is great, but at some point you’ve got to tell people around you, “I can’t do that.” I didn’t realise at that age when something is successful how exhausting it is, and it does take a bit of a toll. If you could give the Suze of that period any advice, what would you say? I would just say, take your time a bit. Put your foot down. Believe in yourself enough to know you have got more control than you think you have, and you can manage it a bit better than you think you can. Is there one thing in particular you’d have done differently? The second album [1993’s Shaved and Dangerous], I would have taken a bit more M a r c h , 2 017
time before we went in to do that. It was too much too soon. And also, my mind was elsewhere. I’d just met Nuno [Bettencourt, whom she married in the mid-Nineties], we were in the Bahamas [recording], spending all this money. I just wanted to stop and spend time writing, live my life a little bit. Describe the feeling in the room during the first Baby Animals rehearsal. I remember it being fireworks. I just remember being super happy, really optimistic and really excited. And it was really fun. We just laughed the whole day. The Angels gave you a break when they took the band on tour before your album came
It was a single: “Hurricane”, Bob Dylan. I was probably 13. The song was so long you had to flip it over halfway through. I still know every lyric to that song. You’ve said being in Photoplay taught you everything you needed to know about being in a band. What was the most important lesson? The show must go on. You don’t ever let people down. You show up. You show up at rehearsals. You make it a priority. And I’ve always felt that. I hate blowing shows out. It’s a big deal. Photoplay did a tour with INXS around the time they released Shabooh Shoobah. What do you recall? I remember everyone piling into a hotel room after the show just getting wasted. Just having a laugh. And going, “Oh wow, you guys are doing really well!” [Laughs] Were it not for INXS doing the reality show to find a replacement for Michael Hutchence, for a while there it looked like you might end up fronting the band. Do you ever wonder, what if? No. I just don’t think anyone could take Michael’s shoes. I love the band, they’re great players, and they’re musicians, they should be able to keep playing as long as they want. But Michael was such an integral part of that group. Last year you marked the 25th anniversary of the Baby Animals’ debut album by playing it in full with the original line-up. In the past there had been some acrimony around your split with the rhythm section, Eddie Parise and Frank Celenza. Did those shows help heal old wounds? Yeah, it was really good for us. It was on from the day we went into the rehearsal room in Perth, big smiles, it was all great, everything was water under the bridge. If we were going to do that first album it needed to be with those guys. We’re all still alive and they played on it and we have a massive history with them and I think we couldn’t have done it any other way.
IT WAS A BIT BIGGER THAN I WAS COMFORTABLE WITH. IT TAKES A TOLL.” out. That must have been a trial by fire . . . Fucking intense. But you learn so much from those shows ’cause you have to kick everyone’s arse, you have to play to an Angels crowd, which in those days was a bit heavy. Does any crowd still stick in your memory? Revesby Workers. They used to have chicken wire [in front of the stage]. Did we need it? Yeah. There were some things thrown. [Laughs] But I always held my own, I’d always call people out if they did that. We just shoved it in their face with music. In the time between your first album and Shaved, grunge and the alternative revolution hit. Did that cause any creative turmoil? Everyone started wearing shorts. [Laughs] A little bit. How do we keep up with this? I was a huge Pixies fan, I always liked dirty guitars. I liked mistakes, [but the] guys were diferent, everything had to be precise, and I’d always fight against that. So when grunge happened, we were too polished. Do you remember the first album you bought with your own money?
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SHINING STAR Stone north of Los Angeles in October
How the ‘La La Land’ star left an anxious childhood in Arizona behind to become America’s most freewheeling leading lady By Jonah Weiner
Emma Stone’s Hollywood Ending PHO OGR APH B
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m m a s t on e ’ s favourite place for sushi in Los Angeles is a nofrills spot in a Sunset Boulevard strip mall, tucked a longside a laser hairremoval clinic a nd a Fe d E x store. It’s here, hav ing barely t a ken a seat , that she starts telling me about her hiatal hernia. “I can’t have spicy foods,” Stone says. The issue, it turns out, is that part of her stomach protrudes “into my esophagus”, which sounds gnarly but is actually pretty manageable, increased chances of acid reflux notwithstanding. “I was born with it,” Stone notes cheerfully. She snaps apart her chopsticks. “I was like a little old man as a young lady.” I first met Stone approximately 11 minutes ago, but it feels like I’m hanging with an old buddy. She huddles over the table mock-conspiratorially; drops callbacks to small talk we only just made like she’s citing long-cherished in-jokes; tilts her head back and asks me to examine her nostrils because she’s sure she detects an embarrassing particle in there. Halfway through dinner, two dudes take a table nearby. Stone, clocking them, falls into a whisper: “Oh, shit, I think Paris Hilton’s ex-boyfriend just sat down – the one who looks like an Elvis Presley impersonator.” She jabs her thumb leftward, totally unsubtle as she directs my gaze toward a handsome, squarejawed guy. He might be Hilton’s onetime beau Paris Latsis, or someone else entirely. I look back at Stone, who, despite the fact that she is Emma Stone – by far the most famous person in this restaurant, and quite plausibly the most famous person on all of Sunset right now – is grinning at this maybe-possibly sub-TMZ sighting. “That’s him, right?” she asks. That Stone is preposterously affable should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen her act. She’s a resolutely human-scale movie star – the type that somehow tricks you, onscreen, into forgetting that she’s a movie star at all. “She’s not full of shit, she’s not pretentious, and she’s
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electrically smart,” says Jonah Hill, who acted alongside Stone in her first movie, Superbad. Stone is often likened to her hero Diane Keaton, and the comparison tracks in a few ways: Both are beautiful, funny, repeat Woody Allen muses. But in Stone’s combination of gameness, wry wit and ability to make an overriding aura of good-heartedness come of as magnetic rather than dull, she’s got a lot in common with another hero of hers: Tom Hanks. She auditioned to act alongside him in Larry Crowne, back in 2011, not because of the script so much as the fact that she adores Hanks. She didn’t get the part, she tells me with slumped shoulders, but that same year, Stone got top billing in The Help and stole scenes in Friends With Benefits and Crazy, Stupid, Love, so, you know, things could have been worse. Watching those movies and the others that Stone has elevated over the years – Superbad, Easy A, Zombieland and reboots of The Amazing Spider-Man among them – you routinely get the impression that she’s operating an amused half-beat ahead of everyone else; that she’s having a blast on her own terms, unconcerned with whether anyone is even watching. Stone lives in New York. Her feelings toward L.A., which she once called home, have softened recently, but for a while she couldn’t stand it. “It’s what I imagine D.C. is like,” she says, “where you’re surrounded by all these people who are constantly rising and falling in the local power rankings, and it’s the only thing they can think and talk about.” In New York, she drops in on theatre performances or stays in to watch movies with friends – a circle that includes fellow actors Martha MacIsaac, Sugar Lyn Beard and Jennifer Lawrence. “We go on trips together, we hang out at each other’s houses, watch shit,” Stone says. “I was over at Jen’s place last month – we watched Hocus Pocus.” (Stone dated her SpiderMan co-star Andrew Garfield for several years, but tells me she’s single these days.) On this November evening she’s in Los Angeles promoting her excellent movie, La La Land. It’s a musical, captivating in its sweetness, about two broke-and-scrappy Hollywood dreamers – Stone as a struggling would-be actor at her wits’ end, Ryan Gosling as a stubbornly dedicated jazz head with fantasies of opening his own club – who fall in love while dancing and singing their way in spectator shoes across L.A. The film’s unabashedly romantic view
“That’s what life is, right? There are still weird, funny things that happen even when life is really dark.”
Contributing editor Jonah Weiner wrote about the Chainsmokers in RS 781. 54 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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of the city is pure throwback – the opening sequence, staged on a freeway, sets the tone, transforming textbook abysmal Angeleno gridlock into a euphorically choreographed fantasia. Like Stone herself – who sometimes seems like a screwball comedienne beamed into the present – the movie bridges classic and contemporary eras. “I needed someone who’d make the traditional musical feel relevant and accessible to people who think they don’t like musicals,” says La La Land writer and director Damien Chazelle. “Emma’s very modern, but there’s a timelessness to her, too.” La La Land emerged as a hotly tipped Oscar contender early. (Those odds firmed when, several months after this interview, it snatched seven Golden Globes, including a Best Actress gong for Stone.) And, this being mid-November, Stone’s awardscampaign blitz is well underway. The other night she attended the Academy’s annual Governors Awards dinner; tonight she’s got an Academy-organised Q&A; tomorrow she’s got a red-carpet premiere for La La Land’s umpteenth film-festival screening, and on and on, into 2017. “I feel like I started promoting the movie back in August,” she says, “and it hasn’t stopped since.” Not that she’s complaining. La La Land features Stone’s most bravado, Oscarbound performance yet. When I mention this, she says, “I’m trying not to think about that” – her default mode being selfdeprecation, not self-promotion; jokes, not bluster. “I just focus on what I’ve got to do at any one moment, and don’t necessarily think about where it’s all leading.” There’s something else she’s been trying, and failing, not to think about: It’s mere days after the presidential election, and Stone was a pin-wearing Hillary Clinton supporter. Donald Trump’s win has her vexed. “It’s still so hard to process what happens next, or what to do,” she says. “It’s terrifying, the not-knowing. But I can’t stop thinking about vulnerable people being ignored and tossed aside – marginalised more than they’ve already been for hundreds of years – and how the planet will die without our help. It comes in waves.” Drinking helps. “Do you want sake?” she asks. We get a bottle and Stone pours me a glass, per Japanese custom. I return the favour, mentioning that I once discussed this bit of etiquette with a chef in Tokyo, who likened filling one’s own sake glass to public masturbation. “Masturbation? I’ve only heard it’s bad luck!” Stone says, laughing. When I finish my glass a few courses later, I space out and absentmindedly refill it myself. She gasps: “You just jerked of on the table.” I apologise and pour her some more. “Go ahead, please,” she says. “Jerk me of on the table.” M a r c h , 2 017
PREVIOUS SPREAD: PRODUCED BY TINA PRESCHITZ. DRESS BY ZIMMERMANN.
Emma Stone
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From ‘Superbad’ to ‘La La Land’ (1) Stone is getting Oscar buzz for La La Land, starring alongside Ryan Gosling. (2) Age nine, posing for an early performance. (3) Her breakout came as Jonah Hill’s love interest in Superbad.
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FROM TOP: DALE ROBINETTE/LIONSGATE; COURTESY OF EMMA STONE
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emma stone recently turned 28, but she gave her first performance at age six, in a Thanksgiving-themed school musical called No Turkey for Perky. She grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, the daughter of a homemaker mum and a contractor dad, with a younger brother. “My dad started his own company,” Stone says, “so we had no money until I was probably eight – not no money, but living on credit, not a free-for-all. Then his company got successful.” The Stones raised their kids Lutheran (“Diet Catholic,” Emma says) and were supportive, permissive parents – “reins out”, as she puts it, when it came to discipline. “Like, ‘If you’re gonna drink at a party, call us and we’ll pick you up.’ ” They named her Emily, Emma being the name she chose M a r c h , 2 017
later upon joining the Screen Actors Guild and discovering another Emily Stone in its ranks. Her childhood was comfortable in some ways, turbulent in others. She was a deeply nervous kid, ill-at-ease and prone to debilitating panic attacks – “My brain naturally zooming 30 steps ahead to the worstcase scenario,” as she puts it. “When I was about seven, I was convinced the house was burning down. I could sense it. Not a hallucination, just a tightening in my chest, feeling I couldn’t breathe, like the world was going to end. There were some f lare-ups like that, but my anxiety was constant. I would ask my mum a hundred
times how the day was gonna lay out. What time was she gonna drop me of ? Where was she gonna be? What would happen at lunch? Feeling nauseous. At a certain point, I couldn’t go to friends’ houses anymore – I could barely get out the door to school.” Gravely concerned, her parents arranged for Stone to see a therapist. “It helped so much,” she says. “I wrote this book called I Am Bigger Than My Anxiety that I still have: I drew a little green monster on my shoulder that speaks to me in my ear and tells me all these things that aren’t true. And every time I listen to it, it grows bigger. If I listen to it enough, it crushes me. But if I turn my head and keep doing what I’m doing – let it speak to me, but don’t give it the credit it needs – then it shrinks down and fades away.” Another way to shrink the monster, she discovered, was performing – devoting herself to a made-up world in order to take her mind of the real one. “I started acting at this youth theatre, doing improv and sketch comedy,” she says. “You have to be present in improv, and that’s the antithesis of anxiety.” She was a comedy geek who loved The Jerk and saw something of herself in Gilda Radner’s Judy Miller – a misfit Girl Scout who is most comfortable when putting on an imaginary television show in her living room. Stone also adored John Candy, whose work as a grieving but optimistic showercurtain-ring salesman in Planes, Trains and Automobiles she calls “one of my favourite performances of all time. He does that incredible thing that Shirley MacLaine does in The Apartment, and that Gene Wilder did so beautifully, too, which is combining heartbreak and comedy. That’s what life is, right? There’s still weird, funny shit that happens even when life is really dark.” She kept doing plays and improv, and started training with a local acting coach who “had been with William Morris or something in the Seventies”, Stone says, and who tapped some old Hollywood connections to set up Stone with an agent. So it was not outright delusion when Stone, at age 14, notified her parents that she wanted to drop out of high school, move to L.A. and try her best to go pro. She made her pitch in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, which she titled “Project Hollywood”. Other parents may have been taken aback, but hers had come to know this hyperlogical side of Emma: When she was 12, she’d made a diferent PowerPoint presentation, successfully campaigning for them to home-school her. They decided to let her give acting a shot, too, and in January 2004, Stone moved with her mother into a unit at the Park LaBrea apartment complex, just south of Hollywood. The move was ostensibly temRollingStoneAus.com
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Emma Stone porary, Stone says, “Like, ‘We’re going to be there through pilot season, not forever.’ I auditioned for three months pretty steadily, got absolutely nothing, and then they stopped sending me out.” Not ready to give up, she got hired making treats at a bakery for dogs – a ridiculous gig that she clung to “because I was like, ‘Now I’m working, see? I’m not getting auditions, but I gotta stay here.’ ” She booked just enough work to keep hope alive. “I did an episode of Malcolm in the Middle,” she says. “And an episode of Medium.” Somewhat less glamorously: “I was the voice of a dog on The Suite Life of Zach and Cody.” Stone also landed a oneepisode part on Louis C.K.’s fantastic, little-seen HBO sitcom Lucky Louie, playing a troubled kid. “He was incredibly sweet to me,” she recalls. “And very protective, because I was 16 and my character was, like, offering to blow him. I’ve bumped into Louis since and we’re always like, ‘Heyyy, sooo, remember that?’ ” Stone got crucial encouragement from casting director Allison Jones, a veteran comedy talent-spotter who helped launch the careers of James Franco, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen. “I auditioned for Allison for three years,” Stone says. “She would bring me in for things and they’d never work, but then one Friday evening she called me and said, ‘Hey, my oice isn’t even open tomorrow, but I want to put you on tape for something.’ It was Superbad.” Stone got the part, playing Hill’s highschool crush Jules, a popular beauty who slings orgasm jokes with the best of them. Ever since, Stone has steadily broadened her range, pushing, like Hill, into serious dramas. The unifying trait across her portrayals is a core decency – on display from The Help, where she played a privileged white woman in the Sixties-era South, to the Best Picture winner Birdman, where she got a Best Supporting Actress nomination playing Michael Keaton’s daughter, fresh out of rehab. This part is one of the very few times that Stone has portrayed a fuck-up (since ofering to blow Louis C.K., anyway). She describes herself as having an eager-toplease side, and she concedes that it’s hard to imagine her getting cast as a villain anytime soon. “If part of what you’ve craved in your life is to not upset anybody,” Stone says, “it’s easy to be drawn to characters that aren’t gonna upset anybody.”
One night in 2013, though, while shooting Birdman, Stone lost her shit – and it felt fantastic. The film, which director Alejandro González Iñárritu wove together from a series of extremely long takes, demanded not just emotional rawness from Stone but technical exactitude. “I had to come in at the very end of this one scene, and it was so scary, because everything was timed out.” She botched a take. “Alejandro told me, ‘Emma, you have to go faster around the corner or it’s going to ruin the movie!’ And I was like, ‘This is a horror, this is so hard, it’s actually insane.’ Later that night, Edward Norton and I were shooting on a rooftop at, like, 2 a.m. We’d done this scene 30 times, and Alejandro wasn’t getting what he wanted. He said, ‘Maybe it’s not going to work.’ I went to my dressing room, pacing, like, ‘I can’t do it. I’m losing my fucking mind.’ This thing came over me. I’m usually a people-pleaser, but I felt like, ‘Fuck it. I don’t even care anymore.’ So when we went back to do the scene, I was crazy, spitting. And Alejandro goes, ‘Beautiful – there it is!’ ” Stone shakes her head at the memory. “I wasn’t trying to make it perfect anymore.” La La Land, like Birdman, depended not only on an emotionally authentic performance from Stone, who is onscreen for almost the entire movie, but precise choreography, too, which she had to nail over a daunting series of uninterrupted takes. When she was first considering the role, Chazelle recalls, “She said, ‘How much prep time do you have? Because I don’t wanna half-ass this – if I’m gonna tap- dance, I wanna learn how to tap-dance. I don’t want to cheat it’ [with forgiving camera angles and misleading close-ups]. That’s not normal for actors, or for people, period: wanting to make something harder for yourself.” Stone describes the film as a breakthrough in another way. “There are times in the past, making a movie, when I’ve been told that I’m hindering the process by bringing up an opinion or an idea,” Stone says. “I hesitate to make it about being a woman, but there have been times when I’ve improvised, they’ve laughed at my joke and then given it to my male co-star. Given my joke away. Or it’s been me saying, ‘I really don’t think this line is gonna work’, and being told, ‘Just say it, just say it, if it doesn’t work we’ll cut it out’ – and they didn’t cut it out, and it really didn’t work!” (Stone goes of the record before elaborating further.)
“There are times in the past, making a movie, when I’ve been told I’m hindering the process by bringing up an opinion.”
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When I ask if she’s considered writing a script herself, or directing one, Stone’s eyes widen. “Writing’s interesting, but I’ve never done it in any way,” she says. “And directing, God, that’s a hard job. It’s all the things you don’t think about as an actor. ‘We lost a location.’ ‘That costume is wrong.’ ‘That actor won’t leave their trailer.’ “Coming out of improv,” she continues, “where everything’s so reliant on the team, it’s still hard for me to be out front – even when it’s a big role. I like being a cog in the machine.” tone is riding shotgun in my rental Nissan compact, cruising through Holly wood. The valet at her hotel raised his eyebrows an extremely dignified millimetre when Stone came through the front doors and hopped aboard. “This is definitely the first interview I’ve done in a Sentra,” she says as we head east. It’s a couple of days after our dinner, and we’ve decided to go for a morning hike at Griith Park. She’s not dressed for the trails, exactly, wearing a felted-wool riding cap with its brim pulled low over dark-tinted shades, a thin-gauge sweater with a small hole in the back, skinny jeans and a pair of Velcro-strapped Acne sneakers. “All black,” I observe. “Incognito,” she replies, nodding. The fact that her red hair is almost entirely tucked into the hat does wonders for her, stealthiness-wise. At the park, the only guy who stops Stone seemingly has no idea who she is – he just wants directions to the Griith Observatory. We duck into public bathrooms. “There was so much piss on the floor,” Stone says when she emerges from the women’s side, shuddering, then deadpans, “and not all of it was mine.” We amble up a dusty hill and are breathing hard embarrassingly soon. Barely 400 metres in, Stone doubles over at a switchback as though she’s about to barf on the trail. She points at a ridge above us, shoulders heaving for comic efect: “Are we going up there? Are you fucking kidding me?” She was in good shape for La La Land, she says, and got straight-up buf for her next gig, the Billie Jean King biopic Battle of the Sexes, in which she “put on 15 pounds of muscle” thanks to hardcore weight training. “But,” Stone adds, holding up a nonexistent bicep, “I lost it so fast.” We find a spot to sit. Fitter hikers pass us. Ants march across our legs. Far out in front of us is the Pacific, waves shimmering; to our right is the hollywood sign; the observatory juts out from a clif behind our heads. If it weren’t for the dust-caked piss on our sneakers, it could almost be a scene in an old-time musical. “Does anyone ever get sick of this?” Stone asks, catching her breath and taking in the view. “I mean, who could ever get sick of this?”
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THE QUIET MAN Prine at home in Nashville
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The Legend Next Door INSIDE THE WILD PAST AND GRAVY-STAINED PRESENT OF JOHN PRINE, THE MARK TWAIN OF AMERICAN SONGWRITING
By Patrick Doyle P H O T O G R A P H B Y D AV I D M C C L I S T E R
ohn prine sits behind the wheel of his cadillac DeVille on a sunny Nashville afternoon, humming along to a cassette of Jerry Lee Lewis’ country hits. He slows down as he approaches a series of televisionproduction trucks parked near his house. They’re probably here because his neighbour, country singer Kellie Pickler, is filming a reality show for CMT. Prine’s 21-year-old son, Tommy – home from college for the weekend and riding shotgun – says he’s gotten to know Pickler while out walking his dog. “Never met her,” Prine rasps. “All I know is she has three garbage cans and I have one.” The singer’s presence, Prine adds, has invited “Homes of the Stars” tour vans to his neighbourhood, which stop outside his house twice a day. Tommy recently caught his dad spacing out as he stood near his mailbox – “bright-red sweatpants, gravystained T-shirt” – oblivious to the tourists taking photos of him. “God knows what they say about our place,” Prine says. Prine, 70, has never been the kind of artist to draw much attention to himself. But in his own unassuming way, he’s built one of the most impressive catalogues of any songwriter of his gen-
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John Prine eration. He emerged on the Chicago folk scene in the late Sixties, singing about the characters he encountered in the Midwest – heroin-addicted veterans, lonely housewives, the elderly – in songs that combined heavy realism and deceptive wit and often took surreal and unexpected turns. Bob Dylan’s favourite Prine song is “Lake Marie”, in which three radically different storylines – an Indian legend, a troubled couple on a camping trip, and a brutal murder – converge at Prine’s childhood vacation spot. “Prine’s stuf is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan said in 2009. “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.” Today, Prine is giving his own version of a “Homes of the Stars” tour. “There’s Waylon’s old place,” Prine says, gesturing at a big Victorian brick house on Music Row. “Used to be outlaw central for a while.” He points out the house that once belonged to Cowboy Jack Clement, the former Sun Records house engineer who wrote several rock & roll classics, including Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”. Cowboy, as
dependent record label, Oh Boy, out of a home they converted into an oice. His live shows are a similarly do-it-yourself enterprise. Mitchell Drosin, Prine’s longtime road manager, books shows directly with promoters, and Prine drives himself between gigs. Overhead is low: Venues’ $3,000 catering options are turned down in favour of a $12 deli tray and a few six-packs. Lately, Prine’s audiences have been growing. His songs have become a key reference point for young Americana stars like Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell and Margo Price, all of whom open for Prine. “We hold him up as our Hank Williams,” says Todd Snider, who has released music on Oh Boy. “His music is like Huckleberry Finn. You get it, then you listen to it five years later and you really get it. And you listen to it five years later and you go, ‘I get it!’ And then 10 years later you go, ‘Now I get it.’ ” At Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library last year, Prine was honoured
“I LOOK BUSY FOR A LIVING,” Prine deadpans. “My wife knows better than to ask what I did today. She knows it’s absolutely nothing.” Prine calls him, is the reason Prine came to Nashville. In 1977, after Prine’s contract with Atlantic Records expired, Cowboy invited him out here to make a rockabilly album. “Cowboy’s motto was, ‘If we’re not having fun, we’re in the wrong business’,” Prine says. Backed by Nashville’s best session players, they recorded in Cowboy’s attic six days a week, around the clock. “We were high as dogs and playing some really good stuf,” adds Prine. They had so much fun that they never finished the album, but Prine fell in love with Nashville anyway. Prine lives a quieter life these days. Usually he wakes up late, eats lunch at one of his favourite greasy meat-and-threes, then maybe washes his car, shoots pool or takes a nap before browsing eBay for old cars late into the night. “I look busy for a living,” Prine deadpans. “I leave the house so it appears I did something. Fiona knows to never ask me what I did today. She knows it’s absolutely nothing.” Fiona is Prine’s third wife; together with their son Jody, they run Prine’s inSenior editor Patrick Doyle wrote about Tom DeLonge in RS 776. 60 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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with PEN New England’s Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence Award, which had previously been given to Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen. Simpson, Rosanne Cash and John Mellencamp showed up to pay tribute. “I can’t help but think about a couple of my high school English teachers that are rolling in their graves,” Prine said in his short acceptance speech. To capitalise on all the recent attention, Fiona convinced Prine to record For Better or Worse, a country covers album on which he sings with fans like Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves and Amanda Shires. Prine says he’s received three book-deal ofers in the past year alone. “We’ve heard from all the big publishers,” he says. “I think I’ll wait a little bit. Till I make my big comeback.” rine’s office feels like a clubhouse: There’s a pool table, black-and-white family photos, a pinball machine and Christmas lights all over. Prine loves Christmas; back when he was single, he kept a tree in his house year-round. It’s one in a long series of Prine’s endearingly eccentric qualities. He’ll also pack at least
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four bags of luggage for his weekend tours – everything from framed family photos to Heinz ketchup to Archie comic books. “I never gave up on Archie,” Prine tells me. “I started picking up Archie comics when I was in my thirties, and then I started subscribing to them. I like that they put your age on there: ‘To Johnny Prine, age 43.’ I like Jughead mainly. He had this persona that he was shifty and lazy, but he always kinda knew what was going on.” “John’s mind don’t work like everybody else’s mind,” says Prine’s friend and engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson. “He really thinks outside the box, you know. And when he comes up with something, it might strike you as being really of-thewall, but then after you think about it for a minute, it’s like, ‘OK, now it’s obvious.’ ” In one corner of Prine’s oice is a pristine 1942 Wurlitzer jukebox, stacked with old country 78s. It was a gift from his late friend and music partner Steve Goodman after they wrote “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”, a goofy satire of country music. “I thought it was a joke,” says Prine, explaining why he declined to list himself as a writer on the song. “Next thing I know, David Allan Coe does it, and it goes to Number One.” (The song actually went to Number Eight – Prine admits he tends to exaggerate.) He likes the Wurlitzer because it reminds him of his dad. Bill Prine, a factory worker in Maywood, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, would take John and his brothers out to the honky-tonks and play the jukebox. “He was a big guy – sixtwo, 250 pounds,” Prine says. “He would more or less go into bars and announce that if anybody thought about doing anything like fighting, that they should get it over with, so he could have a good time.” Though the Prine family grew up in Maywood, Bill Prine drilled into the kids that they were also from somewhere else: Paradise, Kentucky, a small coal-mining town where Bill grew up before moving north to find work. “One time I went to school and they asked us all to find out where our roots were,” Prine says. “It’s goin’ around the class, and the kids were going, ‘I’m Swedish-German’ or ‘I’m English-Irish’. They got to me and I said, ‘Pure Kentuckian.’ ” (In 1971, Prine would release “Paradise”, a song that became a country classic, covered by everyone from Roy Acuf to the Everly Brothers.) The family spent its summers in Paradise, where bluegrass was big, leading John to study Doc Watson-style fingerpicking with his older brother, Dave. It wasn’t until John heard Dylan that he saw a future for himself as a songwriter. “By the time Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash hooked up [for Nashville Skyline], that’s when I thought, ‘Man, there’s something M a r c h , 2 017
FROM TOP: MICHAEL DOBO/CACHE AGENCY; COURTESY OF JOHN PRINE
there where their t wo paths crossed. My stuf belongs right in the middle.’ ” Before he could pursue songwriting, Prine was drafted into the Army in January 1966. He lucked out when he was sent to West Germany instead of Vietnam, working as a mechanical engineer, “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks”. He often reminds himself that other draftees weren’t so fortunate: On his oice table he spreads out a stack of small black-and-white photos of various boot-camp buddies who went to Vietnam and came home in a box. “Look how many of them are African-Americans,” he says. “And they tell me that that’s the lottery system?” After coming back from Germany, Prine returned to his job as a mailman in Maywood. On his postal route, he worked out songs like “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” – a hilarious indictment of misguided patriotism – and “Sam Stone”, about a vet who gets hooked on morphine during his service and comes home a diferent person. The chorus: “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes/Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.” When Prine played “Sam Stone” at his first-ever performance, an open-mic night at Chicago’s Fifth Peg in 1969, he was greeted with icy silence. The “Jesus” line made many audiences angry. “They’d start to have an argument with me when I was onstage,” says Prine. (Johnny Cash had Prine rewrite the “Jesus” line when he covered “Sam Stone” in the Eighties, to “Daddy must have hurt a lot back then, I suppose.” “If it hadn’t have been Johnny Cash,” Prine says, “I would’ve said, ‘A re you nuts?’ ”) Prine’s career took of fast: A couple of open-mic appearances got him a residency at the Fifth Peg, and then a $1,000-a-week regular gig at Earl of Old Town, the centre of the Chicago folk scene. The club was across the street from the Second City theatre, and Bill Murray and John Belushi (who later helped Prine secure a slot as a musical guest during the second season of Saturday Night Live) frequented his sets. Roger Ebert, then a young Chicago SunTimes staf writer, stopped by one night and wrote an article titled “Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in Few Words”. On another occasion, Steve Goodman brought Kris Kristoferson to M a r c h , 2 017
Great Days Top: In Canada, November 30, 1973. Prine “was incredibly endearing and witty”, says Bonnie Raitt, who covered “Angel From Montgomery”, one of Prine’s most famous songs. Above: With his wife, Fiona, circa 1991.
the Earl. “By the end of the first line, we knew we were hearing something else,” Kristofferson recalled later. “It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene.” Kristofferson soon invited Prine onstage in front of an industry-heavy audience at New York’s Bitter End. The next morning, Atlantic Records president Jerry Wexler ofered Prine a $25,000 contract. “This is my first night in New York, so it was like Oz to me,” Prine says. Kristofferson would also introduce Prine to Dylan. One night Prine wound up
at Carly Simon’s apartment, where Dylan – largely of the grid after his 1966 motorcycle accident – shocked Prine by singing along with several songs from Prine’s notyet-released debut album. “The album wasn’t even out and he knew the words because he had an early copy,” Prine says. “I’m thinking, ‘This is like a dream.’ ” Prine became a fixture of the Seventies folk scene, smoking and drinking beer while spinning yarns between songs. “He was incredibly endearing and witty,” says Bonnie Raitt, who would cover one of Prine’s most famous songs, “Angel From Montgomery”, in 1974. “The combination of being that tender and that wise and that astute mixed with his homespun sense of humour – it was probably the closest thing for those of us that didn’t get the blessing of seeing Mark Twain in person.” Though his record sales slowed down, Prine’s writing grew more adventurous and profound. “Jesus the Missing Years” theorises what Christ might have done during the 18 years of his life unaccounted for in the Bible, while “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone” uses the sad story of Sabu Dastagir – the Indian actor from 1937’s Elephant Boy – as a meditation on loneliess. “Who writes songs like hat?” Mellencamp asked nstage at Prine’s PEN ward ceremony. “Two people come to mind: God and ohn Prine. . . . John taught e a lot, whether he knew t or not. He was a naturalorn earthshaker. I know he record companies had o idea what to do with John rine. ‘He’s not country, he’s ot rock – what are we gonna o?’ And he said, ‘To hell ith it. I’m gonna do what ’m gonna do.’ And he did.” Prine calls the Eighties his “bachelor years”. “I was also married to my bass player in that time,” he clarifies, referring to his second marriage, which lasted from 1984 to 1988. “But I think our marriage was doomed from the get-go.” Back then, Prine would wake up around 3:30 in the afternoon and head to Brown’s Diner for fried eggs and his first beer of the day, then chat with fellow regulars Townes Van Zandt and Don Everly and play the poker machine. Brown’s didn’t serve liquor, so he’d go to Melrose Billiards (which he calls Chandler’s), one of many Nashville bars that still serve a Handsome Johnny – vodka and ginger ale. Then he’d hit the grocery store. “All my buddies knew that my dinner would be ready about one in the morning,” he says. “So when they were on their way home from the clubs, they’d all stop at my house and stay until about the time the sun came up.” [Cont. on 88] RollingStoneAus.com
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Iggy Pop The singer on the importance of not growing up, all the drugs he did, and what’s ahead in his seventies What’s the most important rule you live by? Don’t lose yourself. If you take enough dope, you lose your body, your mind or your life. Conversely, if you do everything everybody else tells you to do, you’ll be miserable and lose your self-identity. At some point you gotta figure out the balance. “Am I the guy who’s gonna relive the life of King Farouk, or am I more like a steelworker who got lucky?” Who are your heroes? Keith Richards and Bo Diddley. The primary thing is how they play. Each of them keeps it straight and plain, and they don’t gild the lily. It feels like the real thing to me. You and Keith have been called indestructible. He’s way more indestructible than me! I can’t keep up with that guy anymore. I definitely can’t smoke cigarettes anymore. What’s your favourite city in the world? Miami, where I live now. That’s for the water, but also a lot of the people are really sweet. It’s not a pushy town. You lived in New York for a long time. Do you miss it? No. But I had a good 20 years. In Miami, I found a place near the water and it was much cheaper, in beauty, space and convenience, than what I could have gotten in New York, where I had a bedroom view of a dogshit window-well on Avenue B. Of course, that place is now worth many millions of dollars. Go figure. Tell me about your fitness regimen. The root of it is a series of exercises called qigong, which form the basis of tai chi. I learned it from a Korean tai chi master named Don Ahn, who had a place in Soho. You don’t need a funny suit. You don’t need to go to a gym. You don’t build no muscle. It just gives you a good energy, good flexibility and good circulation. What advice do you wish you could tell your younger self? Don’t grow up. Really, don’t do that. At certain points in my life I said, “You know what? I need to grow up and do X or be Y or whatever.” Most of the time, it was a mistake, though fortunately not all the time. What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made? In the 1990s, I bought a small but sporty car for a poor and beautiful immigrant who I barely knew. It was mostly because she was moaning about how she didn’t have a car to get to work. The relationship didn’t go anywhere. Until the Stooges re-formed in 2003 and started headlining festivals, you never made much money. What’s it like to become rich late in life? I became barely solvent in the late 1980s and owned my first place, in the East Village.
I didn’t have much in the 1990s. I remember spending the winter of 1990 freezing because there wasn’t much heat. But everything changed in the 21st century. It’s a nice story arc. What was your favourite book as a child, and what does it say about you? Jack and the Beanstalk. It says I wanted to go for it, because Jack was going for it. It had everything: threats of violence, drama and ambition. You did lots of drugs back in the day. Are there any you miss? Oh, God, no. No no no no no. I’ve had a wonderful relationship with my body late in life. Even the thought of smoking weed gives me the creeps. Going back, I had a binge on MDMA in the 1970s. And at a festival called Goose Lake in Michigan, I was snorting something they said was coke but I learned later was ketamine. I couldn’t remember who I was for about 12 hours. I remember smoking crack before it was called crack. It was frightening. Do you think drugs should be legal? I’m not well-informed enough to answer that question, but I am curious about the idea that use and abuse might decline if they were legal. Some Scottish comedian was talking about Brexit and he said, “Asking a celebrity about Brexit is like asking Iggy Pop about a particle accelerator.” I’m not your guy. You turn 70 in April. How do you feel about that? I’m excited. I hope I make it. How are you going to celebrate? I’ll probably have dinner with my wife somewhere with low lighting where we can sit close to each other. And if I’m lucky, I’ll go to the beach that day. That’s my idea of a wild time. What do you hope to accomplish in your seventies? I don’t expect to use the album form anytime soon, but I hope I can do some singing or talking or writing that appeals to me. I just want to continue working and reacting to the world around me and enjoying bearing witness to this beautiful Earth. I like the outdoors very much. And I hope to be of use to the people that depend on me. Do you fear extreme old age and death? That’s the creepiest question of this whole interview! But yes, I fear extreme old age. There is the possibility of being overreliant on others. Also, the worst would be the inability to enjoy life. I don’t mind a little shit in my day, but I need some sugar on that. How old is too old to be shirtless in public? There’s no age, and the public can kiss my sweet ass, bare. INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE
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Words of Wisdom
Phil Collins The singer on getting sober, his biggest regrets, and why he admires Davy Crockett Who are your heroes? I’m fascinated with the Alamo, so I go back to Davy Crockett. There was a lot of bravery on both sides of the walls. Crockett was an example of someone who could have left the fort, but he did the right thing and stayed, and he was killed for it. Also, and I know this sounds random, but I admire Jack Nicholson. He’s so honest as an actor, down to his hair. It’s always out of place. What book has left the most lasting impression on you? Romeo and Juliet touched me very much. It’s a bit like the Alamo in its two factions. When the Franco Zeffirelli movie came out, I saw it many times. I was drawn to the romance – total romance. I do believe that childhood loves stick with you. What’s the best part of success, and the worst part? The best part is other people saying that they like what you do. The worst part is that it drags you onto the conveyor belt of working all the time, to maximise the success. I just walked out of CBS and there were people outside that wanted me to sign something. In the old days, it would be fans. Now it’s people selling something on eBay. I wish there was a chip in someone’s neck saying “real fan”, because it’s not my style to diss people that have been waiting in the cold. What music still moves you the most? Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. I listen to that on my computer. Songs like “Maria”, “Somewhere” and “America” were so far ahead of their time. In your memoir, you write about the guilt you felt from not being around much when your older kids were younger. How do you get over that? You don’t. When I take my younger kids to football practice or give them advice, I’m reminded I didn’t do that with my older kids. You recently got sober. What did you learn from the experience? I didn’t know I was close to dying. If I had carried on drinking, my organs would have started shutting down. I also didn’t know the efect it was having on my kids. I was falling down because I was mixing alcohol with [pain] medication. One time I was watching TV and I got up to give my sons a hug. I fell down and my teeth made two marks in the tiles. There was lots of blood. I remember Matthew saying to their nanny, “Daddy’s fallen over!” Putting an eight-year-old
through that, it gives me chills. By the time I stopped, my family disintegrated. Within six months, they’d moved away. Did you emerge a stronger person? Wiser, yeah. I got a sense of mortality, and then I didn’t drink for three years. Then, when we had our first Christmas in our new home, I had a couple of glasses of wine, but now it doesn’t go anywhere. An alcoholic is someone that wants to see the bottom of the bottle. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. I made some mistakes, for sure. After injuring your back, you were unable to play drums anymore. How did you come to terms with that? It happened gradually on the Genesis reunion tour in 2007. Then I played with Clapton at Albert Hall for one song, and I had that feeling of “This isn’t happening”. That kind of scared me. The one thing I could rely on in life was that I could sit down at the drums and it would sound good, and suddenly I couldn’t pull it together. Now, I’ve got a drum kit in my garage and I’ve got into a routine of practicing. I’m trying to get my hands to feel natural again when I hold a pair of sticks. I’ve got some comeback shows booked for [2017], and we’ll see what happens. Any chance you’ll do more Genesis shows in the future? Writing the book reminded me how close we were. Tony [Banks], Mike [Rutherford] and I went out on my birthday in London. We’re still great pals. Anything can happen, really. I just don’t want to suddenly take the brakes of and start flying of and doing things. I want to do things carefully and think about the consequences. When you divorced your wife Orianne eight years ago, you had to give her £25 million, one of the costliest divorces in history. But you actually got back together in 2015. Did that teach you something about forgiveness? Usually when there’s divorce, you fall into “I don’t ever want to see you again”, that kind of thing. Orianne and I stayed in touch, very closely. I called the boys pretty much every day. It can be very diicult to forgive. But in our situation, we both felt we made a mistake. Our kids are obviously over the moon. You’ve been divorced three times. Have you ever thought about a prenup? I think they’re unethical. They say, “Oh, darling, I love you forever, but just in case. . . .” It cost me a lot of money, but that’s lawyers for you. Anyway, I don’t envision getting married again. But if you did? I may. I’m just not considering that yet. INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE 64
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Yoko Ono The 83-year-old artist talks about childhood fables, ephemeral success and why it’s important to get outside Who are your heroes? That’s easy – my husband, John Lennon. He was the only person who put up with me. It’s diicult for a guy to understand what women are thinking. Most guys don’t even listen. He was very forward-thinking in that sense. He really jumped into feminism, no argument. He would ask me, “Could you find feminist groups for me?” Even now, I don’t think men get together and say, “Let’s be feminists.” Do you have a favourite city? I love every city I’ve been to, but Liverpool is great. John and I would pass through and say hello to relatives. People there are really strong in spirit, especially the women. I wouldn’t say they’re working-class – I don’t think they’d like for me to label them that way – but they have a working-class mentality, a strength and wisdom. What music still moves you? Indian music is incredible. Gypsy music is fantastic. All the Middle Eastern music is very strong. John and I loved folk songs from diferent countries – the rhythm and the harmonies are very, very diferent. I can’t say, you know, “Be-Bop-a-Lula”. What do you think John would have made of social media? John felt that something like social media would come out. He was doing that anyway. When somebody said something he didn’t like, he would send a letter: “It’s not true!” He would never ignore those communications. Do you have a fitness regimen? I walk around. Walking is such a great way to relax. I know it might be dangerous, but that’s only in the corner of my mind. Maybe I’m the only one now. Very few famous people are walking around now. They disappeared. It’s that kind of world. It’s sad, isn’t it? What’s the best advice you’ve gotten? I don’t take advice. My background is very diferent, so it’s very diicult for a person to advise me. My parents were very liberal and cherished that I had my own opinions. Other people’s thinking is theirs, and my thinking is mine. There’s no point in listening. And, so far, it’s gone well. Did you get advice about how to make records a certain way? I make records my certain way. What was your favourite book growing up? There were two, and both are Chinese. One, Sangokushi,
tells you how to battle very carefully and logically. The other, Saiyuki, has more to do with spiritual travelling. One monk decides how to solve a situation, not in a battle. One guy is very cocky. He says, “I know everything, and I can fly to the end of the world in 10 seconds.” The monk says, “Show me how you do it.” The guy goes zoom, zoom to the end of the world, and at the end are five huge poles. He says, “I’ll put my name on that.” He writes his name and goes back to the monk and says, “I just went to the end of the world.” And he says, “Oh, really?” The monk opens up his hand and says, “Are these the poles?” Meaning the guy never went anywhere. He never went outside of the monk’s five fingers. What’s your favourite memory of your friend David Bowie? He was one of the very few people who liked my work. I think he said something about my music in [the 1992 compilation] Onobox that was very nice. At the time, nobody cared about it, and he was courageous to say something. What books are you reading right now? I usually read three books at once. One right now is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success [by Deepak Chopra]. It pretends to be about success so people will say, “I want to read that!” But actually, he’s making a very good statement about how you can be spiritually successful. I love actual printed books. I can’t get out of that yet. Have you thought about writing a memoir? No. That would be a very tricky thing to do. I care about writing something that would make some people feel bad, even though they maybe were bad. I think about their children and wives, and I don’t want to hurt anybody. So the book would be rather . . . boring [laughs]. What’s the best part of success? Well, I don’t know, because I’m not successful yet. We’re not getting world peace. Is that your gauge for success? Well, I wouldn’t say, “Until then”, but it’s one of the big things for me. What do you do to relax? Relax? I don’t relax too much. I’m always thinking about the next project. Last November marked the 50th anniversary of you meeting John for the first time, when he attended your gallery show in London. You had a spyglass he looked into that said, “Yes”. What does that work mean to you now? At the time I had a very diicult life. I said, “Well, I want to change it”, and this was a sign that said “yes” instead of “no”. It saved me. INTERVIEW BY DAVID BROWNE
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Words of Wisdom
Noel Gallagher The singer-guitarist on keeping his kids humble, why his mum is his hero, and being unafraid to piss off fans What’s the most indulgent purchase you’ve ever made? I had a car made once, a custom 1967 Jaguar convertible. It cost me £110,000. I got it built to my specifications. The fucking driver’s seat only fits me. At the time, I couldn’t drive, but I thought, “By the time they finish this fucking car, I will easily have learned to drive. It’s going to take two years.” Two years after I paid for it, the car turns up at my house and I had completely forgotten about the driving lessons, and to this day I cannot drive. If anybody would like to buy it, I will gladly sell it to them. What are your favourite books? On the Road. The speed and the rhythm of the writing is unbelievable. It’s got that slightly hipster, rappy thing Bob Dylan did on “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. I first read it because Dylan was going on about it. The last book I read was about the British spy Kim Philby, who defected to the Russians during the Cold War. I love all the Second World War and Cold War stuf. I find that period of the then-superpowers manoeuvring for world domination fascinating – and how close the world came to somebody pushing the button. Who are your heroes? Musically, the Beatles. You can still be in the bathroom and “Strawberry Fields” will come on, and something will hit you like you’re listening to it for the first time. There’s Paul Weller [of the Jam], who’s become a really good friend and a neighbour. U2 have also become friends and neighbours of mine. Growing up, The Joshua Tree was really inspiring because it was such simple songwriting. My personal heroes are my wife, because she’s fucking gorgeous. Through some mad trick of fate I ended up marrying her after meeting in a nightclub, and we have two kids. My teenage daughter is a hero because she’s overcome adversity and she’s cool as fuck. My mum, because she brought Liam Gallagher up. I mean, fuck me. How often do you get asked about an Oasis reunion? Every day of the week. People say, “You’ll definitely re-form – you will”, and I’m just like, “That’s so fucking rude.” They try to Jedi-mind-trick me. There are rumours that Liam is trying to re-form the band without you. I’d fucking pay to see that. That’d be fucking interesting. We should start a rumour that I’m going to do it without Liam and I’m gonna use a hologram like they did with Tupac at Coachella. Look, to be honest, I don’t need the money. Let’s say they come to you in 10 years and offer you $50 million. Oh, I’m in. I’m fucking in.
What’s your favourite city? I have four. London, because I’ve lived there for 23 years. Then New York. I think the terrorist attacks in 2001 shook the world so much because everybody who’s been there falls in love with it. Buenos Aires, because the people are unbelievable, and my best shows have happened there. And then Manchester, because it’s where I’m from, and it still feels like home – plus, I’ll get my throat cut next time I’m back there if I don’t mention it. What’s the most Manchester thing about you? My accent. It was the first thing that Americans ever noticed about me when I came to the U.S. I was subtitled on MTV, which I found highly amusing. I’m so proud to be a Mancunian. If I was from Buckinghamshire, I don’t even think I’d be in a band. Manchester gave me a great musical education: New Order, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, Joy Division and the Stone Roses were all from there – great bands that gave me something to aspire to. What are the most important rules that you live by? Know who you are. Be proud of who you are and fucking own it. A happy wife is a happy house, and a happy house equals a happy life. Always tell your children, and I do this regularly, “You know you’re a fucking young guy, you’re great and handsome, but you’ll never be as fucking cool as me, ever. So get out on your fucking skateboard or go play fucking football with your brother.” What do they say when you say that? They go, “We fucking know, Oasis, blah-blah whatever.” So just be yourself, never take any of the good parts about what you do for granted, and stay focused on your work. If your work is good, then you don’t have to be. I don’t have to be nice to people because they dig my music – that’s where the relationship ends. So what do you tell people when they ask you for selfies? I just tell them to go fuck themselves. I’m not beholden to anybody with a camera phone. I don’t give a fuck if they think I’m an asshole, either. I say, “I’m fucking busy here buying underwear.” Some people get ofended, but I don’t live my life to have my picture taken by fans. I’m not asking them to buy records. They buy them because they like them. What do you do to relax? My life is wrapped up in touring, writing, watching football and my family. To relax, I play guitar. But the older I’ve got, I’ve realised it’s great to go away on a holiday with my family to some far-flung place and not bring a guitar, and lie on a beach and just listen to the fucking waves crashing.
INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE
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Lars Ulrich The Metallica drummer on loving his bandmates, reading Springsteen, and why it’s a good idea to stop whining What’s the best part of success? On the personal side, giving back to your family. On the musical side, it’s having the freedom to go in whichever direction you want to. A case in point would be that we don’t go on tour for longer than two weeks at a time. We did almost 200 shows in twoweek increments for [2008’s] Death Magnetic. We don’t want to miss out on seeing our kids. What’s the worst part of success? I don’t think there is a “worst part” [laughs]. I think you should stop whining and be happy that somebody gives a shit. Who are your heroes? People who challenge the status quo. In no particular order: my dad, Steve Jobs, James Hetfield, [painter] Mark Rothko. People who encourage you to be selfless, like [Salesforce CEO] Marc Beniof. People like Ritchie Blackmore who are completely impulsive – you have no idea what’s gonna come out of his mouth or his guitar three minutes from now. [Metallica comanager] Clif Burnstein always taught me to think diferently and independently and outside the box. Why is James one of your heroes? He is just the coolest musician. He’s put up with my shit for 35 years, so there’s gotta be appreciation in there for that. Sometimes I think he may be underappreciated in terms of just how vast his talent is. You guys clashed in the movie Some Kind of Monster. What have you learned about settling band disagreements? I’ve learned that there’s nothing more important than the health of the band. Rather than force people to do something they don’t want to do, there’s always going to be another opportunity to create something cool. What did you learn about yourself from watching that movie? It was pretty painful to watch some of the stuf unfold. But I was proud of the fact that we were completely transparent and let people in. I have an ability to compartmentalise stuf that scares me; the only thing that scares me about myself is that I have the ability to not be scared. Sometimes I can just be so thick-skinned that it actually freaks me out. In the wake of my Napster [lawsuit], I took some pretty heavy hits. I just learned to kind of put the turtle shell on and not be afected by any of it. You grew up in Denmark. What’s the most Danish thing about you? My big forehead? [Laughs] My wife says I’m a cosy guy. There’s a Danish word, hygge, which translates loosely to “cosy”. There’s a kind of Danish hygge thing where you invite
people over, you light candles, you have some wine and hang out. The other thing is I’m sort of self-deprecating. I also have a little bit of contrariness to the status quo about pushing the envelope. It’s poking fun. It’s something you have to be Danish to understand. What music moves you the most? The stuf that’s embedded in you from your life experiences. Bob Marley’s Babylon by Bus will probably always be a record that has some sort of significance in my life. Some of it was recorded in Denmark at the Roskilde Festival, and I started listening to it a lot when it came out, in ’78. Then there’s [Miles Davis’] Kind of Blue. When I hear [Black Sabbath’s] Master of Reality, in some perverse way it still reminds me of being 13 and smoking black Afghan hash for the first time with my friends in my room. What did you read as a kid, and what does it say about you? I was introduced to Mad magazine in ’76 when I was travelling with my dad in America. It introduced me to a lot of American culture. It’s always been my thing being an outsider, being autonomous, slightly cynical of the mainstream – Mad brought that. What are you reading now? I downloaded the Springsteen book two weeks ago. I read the stories in Rol li ng Stone and Vanity Fair and thought I should check it out. I love the way he writes; it’s like his lyrics. It’s incredibly poetic. I love how open he is about depression and his issues. What was your most indulgent purchase? There have been periods in my life, not so much recently, where I would spend a lot of money on clothes. I’d spend, like, three grand on a suit, and two years later you’re looking through your closet, like, “Fuck, there’s that suit I bought. I never even wore it. It’s still got fucking tags on it.” Thankfully, it’s not something that happens much anymore. What advice would you give your younger self? “Slow down. Take it all in. Appreciate what’s going on instead of being in such a hurry.” The opposite of when Dave Grohl says, “Done, done and on to the next one.” There were a lot of experiences in the Eighties and Nineties that I just never fully took in. We were in Russia in ’91, in the thick of the fall of the Soviet Union. I just wish I had opened my eyes a little more because I don’t have a recollection of what was going on around me. I don’t regret it, but nowadays you just pause a little longer to take it all in, like, “Wow, this is pretty crazy.” INTERVIEW BY KORY GROW
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Lucinda Williams The singer-songwriter on her Southern roots, her poet father, meeting Dylan, and hunting for bargains You live in Los Angeles, but you grew up in Louisiana and Mississippi. What’s the most Southern thing about you? I was raised to be proud of where I was from. When I first came to New York, I met a Southerner who got rid of her accent so she could be in radio or film. I said, “That’s fucked up. Don’t you want to have an identity?” I have a certain Southern Gothic sensibility. I related to Flannery O’Connor at a young age. My mother’s father was a fireand-brimstone Methodist preacher. I saw a lot of that kind of thing growing up, and I read about it in O’Connor. Her writing was really dark but also ironic and humorous. It informs a lot of my songs. Who are your heroes – musical, literary or otherwise? I always looked up to my father [the poet Miller Williams]. He taught creative writing, and it was almost like an apprenticeship growing up with him. I got some of the lines for [the 2014 song] “Temporary Nature (Of Any Precious Thing)” from a conversation with him. A friend had died, and I was real sad about it, and he said, “Honey, the saddest joys are the richest ones”, and I immediately wrote it down. He would just come out with these profound statements. He died [in 2015] – on January 1st, just like Hank Williams. What advice would you give your younger self? There are good people in the music business, but there are a lot of horrible, stupid people, too. In 1984, I had just moved to L.A. I had a meeting with this guy at, I think, Columbia Records. He said, “You have a lot of potential, but you need to work on your songs. None of them have bridges.” After the meeting, I got out my Bob Dylan and Neil Young albums. I said, “These songs don’t have bridges either. So fuck that guy.” What misperceptions did you have about the business? I used to think talent was all it took. But now I think it’s 50 per cent talent and 50 per cent drive. I’ve seen people who were brilliant but don’t want to tour or do whatever it takes. How many times do you read about an artist who had a record deal in the Seventies, and now they’re working as a carpenter somewhere? They’re all bitter and cynical: “Nobody understands my music anymore.” No, it’s because you fucked up your career! What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made? I was in New York about 15 years ago and I went on this
shopping spree with a friend who was vicariously shopping through me. I think I ended up spending around $12,000. I bought these Dolce and Gabbana shoes – white patent leather with silver metal studs. Now, though, I just shop online. That doesn’t sound very rock & roll, but it’s safer that way. I get really good bargains. What do you wish you could do that you can’t? Sometimes I want to wear sunglasses when I go on TV and [husband-manager] Tom says, “You can’t.” I want to be like Dylan in Don’t Look Back; when he did press, he would just be fucking with them all the time. Tom says I shouldn’t try to be cool. What music moves you the most? My dad was into Coltrane and Chet Baker, so it’s got to be Coltrane’s Ballads and Baker’s Holiday, where he does Billie Holiday songs. I never get tired of Nick Drake. I love the Gregg Allman album Laid Back. His version of Jackson Browne’s “These Days” knocks me out. Dylan made such an impression on me. In 1965, one of my dad’s students came over to the house and walked in with a copy of Highway 61 Revisited. While he met with my dad, I put the album on, and it blew my 12-year-old mind. In the Seventies, Dylan came into [New York club] Folk City, and I got up to sing a few songs with the band that was playing. The owner of the club introduced me to Bob. He said, “Keep in touch – we’re gonna go on the road soon.” It was like somebody back in the day meeting James Dean. It was so riveting. What are you reading right now? While I was touring Europe, I discovered the joy of reading a book on my iPad, and I finally read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I couldn’t put it down. It does a good job of expressing that period of time. I really like [books] like that. What rule do you live by? Keep going and don’t quit just because one or two things don’t work out. I’m kind of an anomaly. I got discovered late. And here I am, at my age [64]. My writing is better than ever, and my voice is better than ever. There aren’t many people doing this at this age, especially women. I have to do this. What else are you going to do, work at Walmart? INTERVIEW BY DAVID BROWNE
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Louis C.K. The comedian on fatherhood, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, loving (and hating) Boston, and Donald Trump What do you wish someone had told you about show business before you entered it? I’m not sure anything anyone said would’ve made life easier. It’s like asking, “Do you wish somebody had told you about that scene in Poltergeist before you watched it?” [Laughs] There are a lot of moments in show business – and I’m sure in everyone else’s life – where you’re skipping along with a huge confidence, and then you step into a manhole and crack all your teeth on the pavement on the way down into the sewer. The idea of somebody telling me where all those holes were makes me sad. If I had avoided them, I don’t think I’d be as good at what I do. What were the manholes in your career? You know, when I made Pootie Tang, when I made Lucky Louie. But I also have a lot of wonderful memories of those. What have you learned about yourself from being a father? I’ve learned I have more value as a human being than I thought I did, that I can be of use to other people. That’s a very powerful thing. What are the most important rules you live by? Don’t try to perfect everything. When you make your choices in life, just make the choice and then make it work after. Sleep as much as possible. Don’t ever hit or kill anyone. And keep your mouth shut unless you really have to say the thing – although I don’t usually go by that one. What was your favourite book as a kid, and what does that say about you? I read The Catcher in the Rye in sixth grade, and it depressed the hell out of me. But I loved the way it was written. It was this young guy talking about the panic that you might be left out of life and that you’re not sure who you are. At that age you get used to feeling a little shitty. But I think it’s very healthy to consider beautifully, artistically expressed versions of your bad feelings. It helps you see there’s value to even the worst things in your life. You’re known for having creative freedom with your projects. Why is that so important? It isn’t about some arrogant need to not be told what to do. It’s the only way to make the show as good as possible. If you were flying an airplane and you kept asking the passengers, “How do you want me to do this?” the plane is gonna go down. Ultimately, you wanna make things that someone’s gonna find worth watching. So whether or not you have creative freedom, you have the same gun to your head, which is, “This better not stink.” You spent much of your childhood in a Boston suburb. What’s the most Boston thing about you?
That I hate Boston [laughs]. I really do – and I love it too. I always think any situation could break out into a fight; that’s pretty Boston. I could be at a state dinner at the White House and I’d be like, “Somebody might start throwing some shit. It could get ugly.” What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made? I bought a stupid fucking fancy watch. You’re supposed to look at a watch for information, but I look at this watch and I go, “Jesus, why did I do that?” What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten? Chris Rock told me recently, “You have a disease, and that disease is that you can’t do nothing for one month.” I had just finished [self-released web series] Horace and Pete, and then I had something I wanted to do that was a big deal – I won’t tell you what it was – and he said to give it a month and try not to do anything drastic. So I waited, and I’m glad I waited. He was right. Given your feelings about the state of our culture, how do you avoid despair? You can’t get despair from culture. You can only get it from your own shitty life. I’ve been alive for 49 years, so the things that are shitty about our culture have come and gone already a couple of times. When my kids are having a hard time, I say, “Nothing ever stays the same.” Whatever you’re going through, it’s gonna get better. It’s also gonna get worse – and then better again. How do you make sense of the Donald Trump phenomenon? I’m not gonna tell Americans how to feel – I think you gotta get out of the way of people’s feelings. It’s a self-cleaning system. Whenever anybody says, “The voters are stupid” – well, the voters elected Obama against a war hero and a multimillionaire, which are classic choices for the other side. I have faith in the American people because of that. I feel like we will figure it out. Do you think you’ll ever retire? From being on camera, maybe, but I think I’ll always be onstage. Stand-up is the thing I really feel is what I do and who I am. So can you see yourself onstage doing stand-up in your seventies and eighties? To make decisions about your 78-year-old self at 49 is a stupid exercise. It’s like saying, “What am I gonna do when I’m a fish in my next life?” I don’t fucking know! I’m not that guy yet. I mean, I have days now where if I sleep weirdly and my neck hurts the next morning, I’m ready to quit everything. INTERVIEW BY BRIAN HIATT
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Words of Wisdom
Jeff Bridges
The actor on what he learned from his dad, admiring Buckminster Fuller and jamming with Dylan You’ve worked steadily for 50 years, but you’ve never been a superstar. Do you think you’ve benefited from not having one huge period of success? My father, Lloyd Bridges, had a big TV series in the late Fifties and early Sixties called Sea Hunt. He was so good at playing a skin diver that people thought he actually was that character. That’s as great a compliment as an actor can get, but it was also frustrating, because he kept getting ofered skin-diving scripts. In my career, I really set out not to develop too strong a persona, so that you wouldn’t have a hard time imagining me in any given role. I wanted to pleasantly confuse the audience on who I was. When you’re not making movies, you lead a band called the Abiders. What music still moves you the most? Bob Dylan. I love all the diferent incarnations of his music. What’s your favourite Dylan song? The first thing that popped into my head is “The Man in Me”, because it was in The Big Lebowski. I do a version of that with the Abiders. We worked together on [the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous]. He’d knock on my trailer door and go, “Hey, you wanna pick?” We would play the version of “You Belong to Me” that he did on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Who is your hero? [Architect and inventor] Bucky Fuller. He had an analogy about ocean tankers. They use tiny rudders, called trim tabs, to turn the big rudder, and the big rudder turns the ship. Bucky said, “That’s a metaphor for how the individual afects society. We’re all trim tabs, because we’re connected to so-called more powerful people, and those people can turn society in a particular direction.” As a matter of fact, that’s what Bucky has on his tombstone: “Call me trim tab.” What’s the most indulgent purchase you’ve ever made? About 25 years ago, my wife and I bought Kenny Loggins’ house in Santa Barbara. It was way out of our price range, but we said, “Screw it, let’s go for it.” We’ve raised our family there. We overextended ourselves at the perfect time in our lives, and it worked out for the best. You’ve been married to your wife for nearly 40 years. That’s longer than basically any marriage in Hollywood. What’s your secret? I’m just crazy about the girl. If you’re married, you gotta work on it. We’ve hit some bumps, but we didn’t deal with them in a cynical way. Those bumps are great opportunities
to get to know each other better. It’s all about intimacy. That’s the main high in life. Do you have a fitness regimen? I could be kinder to my body. As an actor, a role can be a great excuse not to be in shape. I mean, you wouldn’t want to see the Dude with a six-pack, so you eat that Häagen-Dazs. My weight goes up and down. I’m curious about this cryo thing, where they take you down to 250 degrees below zero for three minutes. It’s supposed to help with inflammation. If you star in a big-budget movie like R.I.P.D. and it bombs, do you take it personally? Not really. When a movie comes out, I’m working on something else and my attention is there. Also, I’ve already been paid [laughs]. [Last year’s] Hell or High Water is such a cool movie. That doesn’t happen all the time, so when it does, you go, “Yee-haw!” What advice do you wish you’d received at age 20? I got the advice – I just didn’t take it! My dad would say, “It’s all about habit, Jef. You gotta get into good habits.” And I said, “No, Dad, you gotta live each moment. Live it as the first one and be fresh.” And he says, “That’s a wonderful thought, but that’s not what we are. We are habitual creatures. It’s about developing these grooves.” As I age, I can see his point. What you practice, that’s what you become. What did you learn as a young actor that helped your career? We recently lost a wonderful director, Mike Cimino. When I was doing his first movie, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, I was in my early twenties and I was very insecure and anxious. I didn’t feel like the guy I was supposed to be playing; I just couldn’t relate to the character. The day before shooting started, I told Mike, “If you wanna fire me, I won’t blame you.” He looked at me and said, “You know the game of tag? Well, you’re it.” It ended up being a great vote of confidence. Now, whenever I’m in a situation I don’t think I’m up for, I think, “Tag, I’m it.” You’ve just gotta do the thing, man. If the first sentence of your obituary refers to you as the Dude, would that bother you? Oh, no. That would be great. I’m proud of that movie. God, it’s a wonderful film. How many times a day are you asked about it? Just a couple of minutes ago I signed a couple of bowling pins for some people. That’s a normal thing. Somebody will hand me something and say, “Draw a picture! Draw the Dude!” They’re probably selling them on eBay or something. INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE 70
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Florence Welch The singer on loving Green Day, learning to be vulnerable, and how to handle a panic attack What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? When I got of tour a few years ago, I tried to keep living as I had been. You want to keep the party going, but you’re just in your own house. I was like, “Oh, my life is in chaos, and my relationships are so messed up. What am I doing?” A friend said, “Why don’t you try not drinking for a while – see what happens?” [Laughs] I was willing to try anything at that point. It definitely helped me write my last record. How do you relax when you’re not on tour? When you’re on the road, you’re like, “Oh, my God, touring is so stressful.” Then you come back and struggle to fit in all these things that you miss from normal life – seeing friends, seeing my mum. You’ve got to do your own laundry, too, and I can even stress myself out about getting enough rest. By the time I have to leave again, I kind of want to get back on tour, because I can finally relax. You and Adele sang in the same club early in your careers. What do you remember from that night? I think it was in the Lock Tavern in Camden – tiny room, lots of people crowding around. I did my yelling kind of singing, and then she came on and sang and just played her guitar. I couldn’t really see her, but this voice just lifted up over the people, and I was like, “That is an extremely special voice.” I went home and wrote a song immediately, though it wasn’t up to the level of “Rolling in the Deep”. What’s an important rule to live by? If something feels diferent, or uncomfortable, it means you’re growing. My last album was quite exposing. Not having efects on my vocals was terrifying. I would ask my producer, “Please, can you just put some reverb on?” I was nearly crying. He was like, “No, you have to just let your voice be the way it is. You have to be vulnerable.” What advice would you give your younger self? There are certain sartorial choices I would not make, in hindsight. I had black lipstick. I was wearing capes stapled to me. I got famous when I was about 21. It was totally thrilling and also completely terrifying. You’re scared and want something to shield you, so you think you’ve got to have more hair, more makeup. To live in this creation, in this kind of magical alternate universe, kept me safe. But I wouldn’t take any of that back. I would just say to that person, “It’s going to be OK.” INTERVIEW BY DAVID BROWNE
What’s the most British thing about you? I’m attracted to things that aren’t simply pretty – there has to be an element of darkness to it, like the beauty of the smog. That comes from growing up in London. I also find it very hard to say something intimate without following it with a joke. “Quickly, make it sarcastic! Pull it back!” I don’t know if that’s a British thing or just a Welch family thing. What was your favourite book as a child? Little House on the Prairie. For Christmas, my aunt gave me and my sister little custom smock prairie dresses, and we would make a prairie in our house, with a lake made out of towels. I may have sensed something unsettled in my parents’ marriage; they eventually divorced. The book might have symbolised some kind of domesticity or stability to me. What’s the most recent book you’ve read? I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s M Train. She’s given us some really beautiful parts of herself with her [two memoirs]. It’s incredibly inspiring the way she can truly be herself in the public eye. What are your earliest musical memories? My dad has great taste; he used to play me the Velvet Underground, the Smiths and the Stones. He was excited when I got to sing “Gimme Shelter” with Mick Jagger. He said, “You know, I always thought that was the song you were supposed to sing.” It’s hard to imagine, but you were really into skate punk. The first CD I ever bought was Green Day’s Dookie. It was my first clue that there could be a whole identity around the music you liked. I had the shoes and the world’s baggiest cords. The only thing I didn’t have was a skateboard. You even recorded a complete cover of Green Day’s Nimrod a few years ago. I was going to see punk bands, and [producer-artist] Dev Hynes and I bonded. We were talking about how we loved Nimrod, and we recorded it in his kitchen with just his guitar. It’s out there on the Internet! Later, I met Billie Joe Armstrong, and he told me he liked it. My 13-year-old self’s head was exploding somewhere in the past. What is the best part of success? I love to experiment, to create a world to get lost in. I can do that as a job, down to the outfits and the staging. Do you ever go too far into that world? I can go off into flights of fancy, and they’re not always positive. I can panic quite easily. Sometimes, I have to breathe and be like, “Actually, what’s happening right now? Is that real? You’re in your house, nothing is actually happening. Oh, OK.” 71
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Father John Misty The singer-songwriter on religion, marriage, the usefulness of LSD, and the joy of doing nothing You were raised in an evangelical Christian household. How did that affect you? I remember asking my Sunday-school teacher who made God. It was the first time I ever saw someone’s eyes glaze over and robotically recite something. She said, “God’s always been.” For the Western world, enlightenment is having an airtight answer to a question. That to me is the quickest way to make yourself absurd. I think certainty is completely grotesque. Was there anything valuable about your evangelical upbringing? I was promised redemption and forgiveness and salvation over and over, but it never manifested in any meaningful way. It was like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. There’s something about my writing that keeps looking to that problem. What’s the first song you ever connected to? I had a Fisher-Price record player, and my parents gave me a personalised seven-inch, which said, “Dear Joshua, it’s your birthday. Happy birthday, Joshua” over and over. Having this alien object sing to me was probably my first glimpse into narcissistic cool. I also had a seven-inch of the Who’s “My Generation”, but I never liked branded rock. I also heard a Keith Moon track called “Dogs Part Two”, which is just a drum solo with dogs barking. I preferred that. What do you do to relax? Going to Costa Rica, jet skiing and whatever else makes me want to kill myself. I like to do nothing. When I worked jobs, I took the ones that were closest to doing nothing. Washing dishes, selling shoes, donating plasma – I liked jobs with zero opportunity for upward mobility. I’m always biding my time between ideas that excite me. Home, to me, is about making a space where you can do nothing beautifully. Who’s your biggest hero you’ve met? Half the time when I listen to music, I’m listening to soundtracks by Jon Brion. We had this party at the Chateau Marmont for my wife’s 30th, and he showed up. I dosed all my friends with 20-to-1 diluted LSD. Everyone is peaking, and Jon gets on the piano, and everyone sings “Over the Rainbow”. It was like meeting someone in a dream. You’ve said before that LSD can be a tool. Certain ideas that you’d be quick to dismiss can be viewed with the significance that they deserve. The last time I took a hero’s dose of LSD was at a Taylor Swift concert in Austra-
lia. She was playing in Melbourne, and I met a bunch of people from her crew at a bar, and they invited me to the show. I got my tour manager to get me some acid: “This is written in the stars. I’m supposed to go take acid at this Taylor Swift concert.” So what’s it like seeing Taylor Swift on acid? I experienced the show like an eight-year-old girl – as much as that’s possible for a 35-year-old man. It was holy. It was psychedelic. She fully impregnated my dilated soul with her ideology. I remember laughing uncontrollably. I remember going outside for a smoke and thinking, “I need to get back in there.” But there was a disturbing aspect – this insistence on telling girls, “I’m normal, don’t let anyone tell you what you should be.” Meanwhile, there are 60-foot-high images of her on screens. If you wanted to curate an evening with the Grand Leader, this is what you would do. It’s a very, very false normal. And that’s dangerous. But you also released several Taylor Swift covers online, right after Ryan Adams did, where you sang her songs in the style of Lou Reed. I was taking this dude to task for what I saw as a grotesque stunt and matching it with another grotesque stunt. It ironically became the biggest publicity that I’ve ever received, and that grossed me out. I had to take them down. Which then, of course, made it even bigger. It was such a comedy of errors. How did getting married change you? I consider myself a progressive person. But my progressive ideas were untested when I got married. My wife and I fell in love over talking about how love was bullshit and relationships were bullshit. But now we’re having those conversations again. That’s why love is so radical. You grew up in Maryland but have lived off and on in L.A. What’ve you learned about the city? I love it here, but I have noticed that Los Angeles is the white-hot centre of hypnotic positivity. You see the word “gratitude” flying around a lot. It’s this sort of mental narcotic – this way of f lattening or numbing every experience and suspending your ability to think critically. When you think critically, you open the door to madness. The people who talk about spirituality and energy and crystals are actually some of the least-spiritual people I’ve ever met. INTERVIEW BY PATRICK DOYLE
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James Taylor The singer-songwriter on raising a family, his favourite sci-fi books, and how his shows are like the Grateful Dead’s You spent part of your childhood in North Carolina. What’s the most Southern thing about you? I remember waiting for the school bus and seeing a chain gang across the road. There were a dozen black prisoners bound together at the ankles and guards with 12-gauge shotguns. It was scary. I don’t know when I began to think about Jim Crow, but we grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong. Who are your heroes? Musically, Ray Charles. The first time I heard Yes Indeed!, that really took the roof of. I have a strange story, actually: When I was a teenager, I went to a [psychiatric] hospital called McLean, and while I was there, Ray was incarcerated for four or five days. It must have been part of a drug bust or parole. He was in the ward above mine and I saw him during meals for a couple of days. He didn’t talk much. He was not happy to be there – no one was. I just said hello at the dinner hour. I couldn’t believe he was there. What do you do to relax? Unless I’m asleep, I have to be doing something. I like to read. Right now it’s Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. In Annie Hall, when Woody Allen takes her to a bookstore and says, “I think you should read this” – that’s one of the books he gives her. It struck a chord. What was your favourite book as a kid? I like science fiction, so I’d say the Foundation trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. It was a series of books about a galactic empire and the future. The empire is falling apart, and a brilliant statistician predicts what’s going to happen. I loved the way it made a new sort of alternate world. I was and am a science nerd. You’ve been married three times. What have you learned about raising a family? I don’t think you should get married and have children before you’re ready to settle down. I think it would be best if people could get married in their twenties, freeze their embryos and then, if they feel like raising a family at 40, go ahead. I wasn’t a suitable partner for anyone until I got sober at 35 – and probably not for another five or six years after that. Your twin sons are now 15. Do they introduce you to new music? I don’t know what artist does “Marry that girl/Marry her any-
way” [Magic!’s “Rude”]. They like that song, and I like it too. I don’t think people get into artists and exhaustively listen to everything they’ve done like they used to. What’s the most self-indulgent purchase you ever made? I have a few classic cars. I’ve got a Morris Minor from 1965. A 1950 Ford panel truck, the car I drove across the country in 1965. I lusted in my heart for it when I saw it. I’ve never had a Porsche or a Ferrari. We have a minivan for the kids. What’s the best part of success? Just being able to make music for a living. I have an audience that supports me and my band, and they like to be in each other’s company. It’s the totality of the experience. It’s like the Grateful Dead. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone connect you to the Dead. It’s just an example of the tribe that coalesces around those events. And what’s the worst part of success? I express things in my lyrics that come from a private place. And when you take that public, that can be a shock. People are killed by success, like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. John Lennon is a pure example. I never got to that level. I was never tabloid fodder. What are the most important rules you live by? Basically, the Golden Rule. Try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and assume that they have as deep, meaningful and compelling a life as you do, and you feel compassion for that. How do you look back on your brief period on the Beatles’ Apple label? To be in London and recording for the Beatles in 1968, I felt like I was riding a wave. I was invited to the premiere of Yellow Submarine. They sent me to a mod tailor on King’s Road in London, who built me a skintight bell-bottom suit made of green and blue velvet, with a big wide collar. It looked great. Later my girlfriend jumped off a stairwell to give me an embrace and I had to catch her. I had the suit on and it split right down the back of the right leg. What do you wish someone had told you about the music business? I wish I had a lawyer the first three or four times I signed a piece of paper. In 1966, I was 18 and strung out in New York City. Some guys said they were going to sign my band the Flying Machine, and I agreed to a publishing deal. I signed away the publishing on my first four albums, from the Apple album to One Man Dog, “Fire and Rain” included. It was a fortune. What advice would you give to your younger self? Stay out of debt. Stay away from a major drug habit. INTERVIEW BY DAVID BROWNE 73
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DEADLY CONDITIONS A puppy mill raided in Cabarrus County, North Carolina; similar abuse has been uncovered in Mississippi, Tennessee and elsewhere.
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An investigation into the underworld of America’s puppy mills, the secret shame of the pet industry. By Paul Solotaroff
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The Dog Factory
The house on Hilton Lake Road was unremarkable, a brick one-storey with an under-watered lawn and a scrim of patchy shrubs. It was flanked by bigger and smarter homes on a two-lane strip in Cabarrus County, 40 kilometres north of Charlotte, North Carolina, but nothing about it suggested to passersby that inconceivable cruelty lived at this address. It wasn’t till we opened the side-yard entrance that the horror inside announced itself. A stench of complex poisons pushed out: cat piss and dog shit and mould and bleach commingled into a cloud of raw ammonia. Twenty of us – blue-shirted stafers from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS); several members of their forensic camera crew; the sheriff of Cabarrus County and his deputies; and a contingent of veterinarians from a local animal hospital – tiptoed around the filth underfoot into a house caked in pet fur and waste. Damp laundry draped across every flat surface; the f loor was a maze of cat crates and garbage. From some wher e i n the house, we heard the howling of dogs, but they weren’t in the bedrooms or the tumbledown toilet or the kitchen piled high with dishes. Then we found the door that led to the basement. Down there, dozens of puppies in wire cages stood on their hind legs and bawled. There were Yorkies and poo-
dles and Maltese mixes, but their fur was so matted and excrement-mottled it was hard to tell one breed from another. Bred for profit, most of them would have been sold in pet stores or on websites by their third or fourth month of life. HSUS had collected evidence that the breeder, Patricia Yates, was selling pups on several websites and had a stack of complaints against her. But the Cabarrus Sherif’s Oice only became aware of the size of her operation through an anonymous tip. “We had no idea it was this severe,” says Lt. David Taylor, an animalcontrol cop. Taylor had gotten the go-ahead to launch an investigation, but obtaining an arrest warrant was the least of it: When you bust an illegal kennel, you’re suddenly swamped with sick dogs, often many more than had been reported. It took Taylor a month to coordinate with HSUS, one of very few nonprofits with the money and equipment to house and treat puppy-mill rescues, before launching the raid. Back up the stairs, we followed more barking to a bricked-in porch. It was pitch-black inside, and the smell was a hammer. Here were the parent dogs in desperate shape: blinded by cataracts and corneal ulcers; their jaws half-gone or missing entirely after their teeth had rotted away. Some were so feeble they couldn’t stand erect; their paws were urine-scalded and their wrists were deformed from squatting on wire their entire lives.
“Most every pup sold comes from this kind of suffering – you’re paying for a dog raised in evil.”
Contributing editor Paul Solotaroff wrote about autism in RS 781. 76 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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Out the back door and up a dirt trail, the worst was yet to come. A cinder-block kennel, hidden from the street, housed the bulk of this puppy-mill stock: 50 or 60 more parent dogs who’d likely never seen sunlight or spent a day outside this toxic room. They wept and bayed and spun in crazed circles as we toured the maze of cages. Some went limp as the rescuers knelt to scoop them. Each was photographed, then carried downhill to the giant rig at the curb. There, teams of vets from the Cabarrus Animal Hospital worked briskly to assess each rescue. Once triaged and tagged, they were loaded into crates on the Humane Society’s mammoth truck, a 25-metre land-ship with cleanroom conditions, and taken to a staging shelter. One hundred and five dogs came out of that house, many of them pregnant or in heat. I turned to John Goodwin, the director of the puppy-mills campaign for HSUS, and asked him how many puppies sold in this country – at Petland and Citipups and a thousand other pet stores – come from puppy mills as dire as this one. “Most every pup sold in stores in America comes from this kind of sufering – or worse,” he insists. “If you buy a puppy from a pet store, this is what you’re paying for and nothing else: a dog raised in puppymill evil.” The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals posts a database of pet shops for consumers to check before they buy. Input any ZIP code and you’ll see the list of stores that sell dogs rather than ofering them for adoption, increasing the likelihood that their stock are from mills. Another click shows you ghastly shots of breeding kennels where many stores buy their dogs. Those pictures weren’t taken by animal-rights zealots, but by United States Department of Agriculture agents who inspect breeding M a r c h , 2 017
PREVIOUS PAGE: MEREDITH LEE/THE HSUS, 9. THIS PAGE: KATHY MILANI/THE HSUS
DOG FIGHT Top: Animal-welfare you raise your beautiful bakennels. Pet stores usually advocates and local bies?” buy their dogs from federallaw enforcement ly licensed breeders, meanrescue dogs at a ing kennels with five or more puppy mill in Since dogs first breeding females that breed Pender County, N.C. a lot of pups. “Puppy mills crossed the Siberian land house breeding dogs in small, bridge and set foot in human wire-floored cages, separate puppies from encampments in North America, they their mothers at a very young age, and have been much more than pets and comship them hundreds of miles to pet stores panions – they made life tenable in this around the country,” says Matt Bershadprimal place. They chased of wolves and ker, president and CEO of the ASPCA. bears while we slept, caught and retrieved (Both Petland and Citipups deny they sell the game we ate, and dined on the garbage mill dogs.) we left behind. Over the course of 10 milYates was arrested and charged with lennia, a bond was forged between speanimal cruelty. (Twelve counts were filed cies that hunkered together for survivagainst her; a hearing is scheduled for al. (Early tribes survived subzero cold by February.) Yates was outraged; I heard her sleeping beneath their dogs – hence the exclaim that “these dogs are the love of my term “three-dog night”.) It took most of life!” That evening, I caught up with Sára those millennia to truly domesticate dogs Varsa, the senior director of operations for – they lived largely outdoors till the 1970s, animal rescue at HSUS. Varsa, a veteran in those quaint addenda called doghouses. of 50 animal-welfare raids, was organisOnce inside the door, though, they were in ing the care of those hundred-plus dogs at for good, to be loved and spoiled like toda temporary shelter in a warehouse. When dlers. The number of pet dogs in America told what Yates had said, Varsa pointed boomed between 1970 and today, tripling to two poodles, both of them desperately to almost 80 million. Pet-shop commerce underfed. Delicately, she lifted the male boomed in tandem, from practically nothfrom the crate and put him, trembling, in ing in the Fifties to nearly $65 billion last my arms. He was blind in both eyes and year. Where once you adopted your pup had thumb-size infections where his mofrom the neighbours, now there is a Furry lars used to be. “Is this how you treat the Paws down the block with dozens of dedogs you love?” said Varsa. “Is this how signer puppies in the window. M a r c h , 2 017
Of course, in America, anything that turns a profit is industrialised. Beginning in the 1950s, struggling pig and poultry farmers began breeding puppies for extra income. “It was a cheap and easy fix: You just converted your coops into indoor-outdoor kennels,” says Bob Baker, the executive director of the Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation. Baker, an animal activist for 40 years and a walking encyclopedia on the commercial dog business – he’s been a senior investigator for the ASPCA and the HSUS – watched the trade evolve from a mum-and-pop sideline into a multinational behemoth. “Pups cost nothing to raise, you’d sell them for $50 a head in town, and every five months you had a whole new litter – then dozens, as the puppies began breeding,” he says. What followed was a 40-year explosion of puppy mills, which are defined by HSUS as commercial kennels where profit counts more than the dogs’ well-being. There are, by HSUS’s estimate, about 10,000 puppy mills in America, though the organisation concedes that no one knows the real number: It’s an industry born and raised in shadows. The USDA only licenses a fraction of all kennels, about 2,500 of various sizes, which can range from five adult breed dogs to more than a thousand. States also license and inspect kennels, accounting for another 2,500 breed sites that aren’t registered with the feds, says Kathleen Summers, the director of outreach and research for HSUS’s puppy-mills campaign. “But in rural communities, there are thousands of backyard kennels selling online and evading government regulation.” A breeder only needs a federal license if he or she sells the dogs sight unseen, i.e., through a middleman like a pet store or a puppy broker. But if the seller deals directly with the puppy’s buyer, either selling face to face, through classified ads or, increasingly, via pop-up websites, there is little or no oversight of their business. Three years ago, the USDA passed an amendment requiring online sellers to get federally licensed, which would submit them to annual inspections and standardof-care rules. At the time, the department expected thousands of breeders to step forward and comply with the law; to date, less than 300 have. When asked about sellers who disregard the law, Tanya Espinosa, a USDA spokeswoman, says, “It is virtually impossible for us to monitor the Internet for breeders. . . . [We] rely heavily on the public and their complaints.” Good luck with that: Open your browser, type a breed in your state, and thousands of websites appear. All claim to be local, loving RollingStoneAus.com
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The Dog Factory and humane. All too often, they are none of the above. “If you ask to see their property and they say, ‘Let’s meet in a parking lot’, you’re likely dealing with a puppy-miller,” says Kathy McGrif, a reputable ex-breeder of clumber spaniels who kept a close eye on her trade while she was breeding. “And if you want to write a cheque but they only take PayPal, you’re dealing with a puppy-miller.” As a rule, she says, breeders who are even the least bit evasive are millers raising dogs in deplorable places. “Reputable breeders don’t deal in volume, and we only sell to people we’ve checked out. It’s the most basic rule in our code of ethics: Never sell a puppy sight unseen.” With dog sales, as with any commodity of late, the Internet has been the great disrupter. The HSUS estimates that roughly half of the 2 million pups bred in mills are sold in stores these days; the rest are trafficked online. The number of stores that still sell puppies has cratered over the course of the past decade, as groups like HSUS, the ASPCA and CAPS (Companion Animal Protection Society) have conducted stings of high-priced stores across the country and found them packed with sick puppies from Midwest mills. “We filmed undercover, got endless tape of purebreds in terrible shape, and followed up on buyer complaints,” says Deborah Howard, the founder and president of CAPS. Howard sends investigators out to infiltrate mills, exposes the stores that do business with those breeders, and coordinates with advocates across the country to ban the retail sale of puppies in big cities. “We’ve got reams of complaints from people with sick puppies, and they all say it was an impulse buy,” says Howard. “I mean, a dog is a commitment for 15 years – at least Googlesearch the seller for complaints.”
of those dogs for the one- or two-day drive to distant states – it’s remarkable that any of them survive the gantlet, let alone turn up well. Puppy brokers are wholesalers who buy from breeders, keep a running stock of dozens of breeds, then sell and ship the pups for a hefty markup. The biggest of those brokers, the nowdefunct Hunte Corporation, professionalised the trade in the Nineties. They bought up other brokers, made large investments in equipment, trucks and drivers, and moved thousands of dogs a month from their facility in Goodman, Missouri. “I saw tons of sick puppies – vomiting blood, blowing diarrhea – that Hunte bought in that condition from breeders,” says “Pete”, an undercover investigator for CAPS who worked at Hunte in 2004. “Of the 2,000 pups they’d have on-site, hundreds were in their ‘hospital’ getting antibiotics. A day or two later, they’d load ’em on 18-wheelers and send them, still sick, to the stores.” According to a CAPS report, the dogs who proved too sick to sell went back on a truck to Missouri; Hunte buried the dead ones out behind its plant. In 2003, state inspectors in Missouri cited Hunte for dumping more than 450 kilograms of dead puppies per year – the maximum allowed under Missouri law – in its back yard. Laws for the euthanisation and disposal of dead dogs are similarly lax elsewhere. In Pennsylvania , two breeders shot 80 Shih Tzus and cocker spaniels rather than provide veterinary care. (Many millers prefer small breeds now; they’re popular in cities, sell for top dollar, and are cheaper to feed, house and ship.) In Kansas, a breeder had to put down 1,200 dogs after failing to inoculate them for distemper. The USDA has exactly one law to govern the care and housing of commercial dogs. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA), enacted in 1966, sets down the barest standards for breeders. Dogs, per the AWA, can be kept their entire lives in crates inches bigger than their bodies. They can be denied social contact with other dogs, bred as many times as they enter heat, then killed and dumped in a ditch whenever their uterus shrivels. With millions of dogs on U.S. streets, and 2 million that are put down each year, there are no limits on the number of dogs millers can breed – “where in England, you need
“There’s this disconnect between our feelings for dogs and the way we guard them from abuse.”
Given the duress in which mill pups enter the world and make their way to the stores – birthed by sick and stressed-out mums; snatched from their litters at eight weeks of age and loaded onto trucks for the hours-long drive to the next stop in the supply chain, puppy brokers; kept in a warehouse with hundreds of other pups, many of them sick with respiratory problems or infections of the eyes and ears; then again trucked with dozens 78 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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a license to breed one dog”, says HSUS’s Summers. “There’s this gross disconnect between our feelings for dogs and the way we guard them from abuse,” says Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of HSUS. “The USDA has a total of 100 inspectors to inspect thousands of breeders in 50 states.” And they also have to inspect every zoo, circus and lab that uses animals for research testing. “We’ve been petitioning them for decades to improve the law – impose regulations for Internet sales and imports, require bigger crates for breed dogs, give them access to outdoor dog runs and much prompter vet care when they’re sick – but they can’t even enforce the bad law on their books,” says Pacelle. An internal audit in the USDA indicated as much. Per a scathing report in 2010 by its Oice of Inspector General, the department chose to prioritise “education”, “took little or no enforcement action against most violators”, failed to respond to “repeat violations”, and collected insuicient evidence in the few prosecutions it brought against criminal breeders. The USDA oversees thousands of licensees nationwide with a yearly budget of about $28 million. “For perspective, the Defense Department spends the equivalent of our budget every 25 minutes,” says Espinosa, the USDA spokeswoman. “Our dedicated personnel conduct roughly 10,000 unannounced inspections annually and work diligently to enforce the AWA.” And what has that enforcement produced by way of penalties? Less than $4 million in fines over the past two years, a dozen or so breeders forced to turn in their licenses – and exactly none handed over for prosecution. Not the miller in Iowa who threatened to stab an inspector with a syringe and confessed that he shot a dog in the head while his girlfriend held it down. Not a fellow Iowan who threw a bag of dead puppies at an inspector. In fact, just a few breeders on HSUS’s Horrible Hundred list – compiled every year from public records of chronic ofenders – have been put out of business by the feds. And none of them have been made to answer in court for their mistreatment of dogs.
For weeks after the raid, I kept in touch with Sára Varsa, HSUS’s rescue team director, for updates on the poodle she’d let me hold. Pollo, as the staf called him (he high-stepped like a chicken), had somehow pulled through after multiple surgeries at the Cabarrus Animal Clinic. The vet removed his right eye, which was all but useless after a long-untreated rupture; pulled his few remaining teeth; and sealed a gaping fissure in what was left of his upper jaw. Even after M a r c h , 2 017
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were stacked in an uncooled space in the all that, though, Pollo bounced right up, walled-of half of the warehouse. It was relieved to suddenly be in less pain. “The stifling back there, and the air unbreathonly time he cried was when we took his able from the waste of unwell dogs. “I saw little girlfriend to be seen by the vet,” says dogs with stomach hernias and bleeding Varsa, referring to the toy poodle who’d rectums and ears rotted of from hematoshared his cage. “They’d been together mas,” says Eden. From a dais, two auctionso long, they were like an old couple. He eers called out bids while touting the dogs’ sobbed and shook while she was gone.” untapped value. “She’s a 2012 model and Heather Seifel, the clinic administrashowin’ a belly; she’ll work hard for you!” tor, brought him home till she could match him w ith an adopter. She took him outside and set him down in her yard; he’d no clue what to do with himself on grass. That trepidation is common to mill survivors, she says, the “weirdness of ‘What do I do now, now that I can finally be a dog?’ ” Week s before, I’d heard essentially the same words from a man named Wes Eden, whose family runs a boarding barn, the Lone Star Dog Ranch, near McKinney, Texas. Eden is a fiercely devoted – and controversial – rescuer of dogs. Each year, he saves dozens of breeding dogs by buying them, for HELD CAPTIVE (One of those auctioneers – top dollar, at puppy auctions, Kip, a breed dog Southwest’s owner, Bob Hughes where millers “sell each other rescued during the raid in – defended the dogs’ health over their trash”, says Eden. There Cabarrus County, the phone to me, saying they used to be dozens of places to N.C., has since had “imperfections like all of us get unwanted dogs for a price. died. do”, but had been cross-checked But after HSUS staged raids in by Hughes’ vet before he sold several states, the ranks of the them. “If [the vet] thinks they’re at risk of auction sites shrank to just a handful – two sufering, we return them to their breedof them in the state of Missouri. It was at er or give them to rescue groups, free of the bigger of the two, Southwest Auction charge,” he said.) Services, that I observed Eden in action in On that day, at least, all 300 dogs were early September. A tall young man with a sold. “I spent everything I brought there crown of kohl-black hair and a beard, he – $60,000 – and cleared three tables of was bidding aggressively on French bulldogs,” says Eden, who raises all his buy dogs that were battered and sick after eight money from small donations online. Twenor nine years of being bred. Not that they ty-one dogs went of in his van for the sixcame cheap: Bulldogs are prized these hour ride back to Texas. Once back at his days, and as long as “they’ve still got a couboarding barn, they were swiftly seen by ple of litters left”, someone was going to bid vets; many required costly operations. All them up, Eden says. the money for those surgeries – $1,000 The auction was held in a hangarto fix a hernia; a couple of thousand dolsize warehouse in the blink-and-you’velars for sedation and an MRI – came from missed-it town of Wheaton, Missouri. Lone Star’s donors. Eden has a waiting list HSUS’s Goodwin and I had flown in that for every rescue, a pool of people ready to weekend to watch several hundred peoroll up their sleeves for the complex needs ple buy and sell breed stock to one anoththese dogs present. “Some of ’em have to be er. Everyone was white, and almost everytaught to walk and climb stairs – they’ve one middle-aged. The mood in the room never taken a full stride in those cages,” was church-fair festive; the breeders chatsays Eden. Asked why he seeks out the oldted convivially when not engaged in the est, saddest dogs, he says, “If they don’t debidding. One by one, some 300 dogs were serve happy endings, who does?” placed on a table and sold. Their crates M a r c h , 2 017
Eden is regarded with some derision by animal-welfare groups. They accuse outfits like his – I counted at least three at the auction – of putting blood money into the pockets of the breeders. “That 60 grand he spent will buy a lot of new breed stock – for every dog he saved, dozens will suffer,” groused Goodwin. Eden concedes the point, but won’t back up an inch. “Look at the faces of these dogs,” he says. “How can you deny them?” Eden isn’t the only grassroots advocate fighting the mills. Other groups are on social media, building Facebook pages around graphic photos and pleas to spread the word. Then there are street warriors who picket pet stores, some with stunning results. Mindi Callison, a young schoolteacher in Ames, Iowa, formed Bailing Out Benji six years ago, and has recruited countless students from Iowa State to protest with her. Callison tells me about a local pet-shop owner who “used to have dozens of pups in his window; now he sells two or three a month”. At first, she got flamed by furious millers. Then, to her shock, a few quietly reached out, asking if she’d take their used-up dogs. “This year alone, they’ve given up almost 100, and we don’t pay a cent,” says Callison. They call her, she says, to avoid the cost of euthanising them.
For better than 50 years, the state of Missouri has been the Bermuda Triangle of dogs. The perfect landscape for breeders – small farms that weren’t bought by agri-giants; vast swaths of plains between its two major cities; and a liveand-let-live ethos in flyspeck towns – it has long been the number-one state in the nation for licensed operators. It also has one of America’s strictest dog laws: the Canine Cruelty Prevention Act of 2011. Enacted after a bitter, and expensive, battle over a ballot measure called Prop B, the law shines a light on the intractable problem of policing puppy-millers. When the act came in, it improved the lot of breed dogs – tripling their crate size, granting them annual vet checks, and providing money for stricter enforcement by state agents. Its rules have driven hundreds of commercial breeders out of business. There were 1,414 in 2010; now, there are 844. [Cont. on 89] RollingStoneAus.com
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Reviews
“If I was born to be the loner, okay, but I’m not made of stone and I’m so blown away. Don’t know what’s the rubble and the parts I want to save.” —Rya n A da ms, “We Disappear”
Ryan Adams: Love is Still Hell
Rock’s enduring romantic in entrancing return to form on 15th LP
Ryan Adams Prisoner EMI
★★★★ BY BARNABY SMITH
It would be unfair to regard Ryan Adams’ excursions into emotive 1980s-inspired rock on 2014’s self-titled LP as anything but sincere. After all, he was aged six to 16 during that decade, and it’s only natural that the likes of Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and his beloved Bruce Hornsby made a meaningful impact on this now 42-year-old songwriting phenomenon. Yet Ryan Adams, while highly listenable, lacked a certain intangible quality – that impassioned, mournful urgency with which his more unpolished, troubadour-ish albums brim. Prisoner sees the savage romantic heart of this unpredictable artist return, whilst maintaining that MOR sheen in its production. This is, in short, his most original album in years, and on songs like the exquisite “To Be Without You” and “Breakdown”, the unmistakable melodic warmth that was
Illustration by A ndrew Fairclough
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Reviews
82
Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness Zombies on Broadway Vanguard/Caroline
★★
Singer-songwriter loses himself on second album
Japandroids’ New Start
It’s ironic that Andrew McMahon first made his name in a band called Something Corporate, because their brand of emo-pop felt nowhere near as calculated and tailormade for radio play as this, his second album under the In the Wilderness monicker. McMahon has a pleasant voice, and knows his way around a good alternative pop song – see the pulsing “So Close” for proof. Ultimately, though, Zombies on Broadway feels interchangeable with much of what’s currently on pop radio, with McMahon’s personality and soul smothered under a mass of shiny production techniques. ROD YATES
Canadian pair re-invent their sound with lyrically focused third LP Japandroids Near to the Wild Heart of Life Inertia
★★★★
While on the surface album number three might seem to comply to Japandroids’ strict motif – a tracklist of eight songs, black-andwhite portrait artwork and a hook-leading single ready for fist-pumping crowd revelry – appearances can be misleading. This is Japandroids 2.0. And this new model comes with a notable upgrade: lyrical density. While previously satisfied with shouting single-line sentences, Near to the Wild Heart of Life takes the opposite tact, primary vocalist Brian King often tangling himself amongst alliteration and punchy, poetic lines (“passport, past life, a drifter’s demons”). The complexity is complimented by the music itself, with formerly frantic drums/guitar punk minimalism and heartland hedonism now funnelled by both variety (the folk-rock skew of “Midnight to Morning”) and sheer experimentation. The latter is most notable on centrepiece “Arc of Bar”, a sprawling seven-plus minute opus that inflates from efects loops to female choir crescendo and cluttered prog extravagance. Old habits die hard, however, and the pair keep one eye on the preservation of their live reputation throughout. “In a Body Like a Grave” aims for a “Continuous Thunder”-like show-closing sing-a-long, while “No Known Drink or Drug” slowly builds to a climatic peak, aligned with moshpit resets. All up it proves that while the band are now looking beyond the morning after, the night before ain’t done with them yet. JONNY NAIL
The Menzingers After the Party Epitaph
★★★★
Philadelphia-based punkers reach new heights on fifth album
What happens when your twenties are over? It’s time to settle down, get a good job and have a family, right? On their fifth album, Philadelphia punks the Menzingers are calling bullshit on society’s expectations of a traditional life path, pairing it with their boisterous brand of gritty, ballsy, blue-collar punk, which recalls everyone from Social Distortion to Polar Bear Club. In what might well be their most consistent collection of songs to date, the likes of “Tellin’ Lies”, “Charlie’s Army” and “Midwestern States” are rife with muscular hooks that are immediate without being throwaway. Here’s to growing old disgracefully. R.Y.
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE .
ERIC RYAN ANDERSON
in short supply on the more clinical Ryan Adams is back. Adams says that this record “saved his life”. Looking past the cliché, this is perhaps an indirect reference to his divorce from Mandy Moore, an ordeal that brings a certain context to many of these songs. “Every night is longer than before/ Nothing really matters anymore” he sings on “To Be Without You”, undoubtedly the album’s conceptual centrepiece as well as its musical highpoint, evoking Sweet Baby James-era James Taylor. That’s about as far as it goes in terms of any acoustic feel, while he lurches towards a more muscular Replacements-like sound on “Anything I Say To You Now” and “We Disappear”. Most songs, however, manage the significant trick of tastefully combining the solemn balladry with the soaring alt-rock, arriving at a tuneful, melancholic jangle that recalls Adams’ brilliant Love Is Hell of 2004 – most successfully on the title track. That is not to say there aren’t songs that seem somewhat adrift. Both “Outbound Train” and “Doomsday” meander without any robustness of arrangement or prettiness of melody, while occasionally Adams’ singing takes on a certain throatiness, a rasp, that compared to the gorgeously rich vocal timbre of earlier records, is a little lifeless. Despite those minor shortcomings, there is a compelling atmosphere of crisis throughout, balanced by a cathartic sense of resignation, which suggests Adams is not being flippant in claiming that making Prisoner saved his life. Lyrically, it even rivals his other great break-up record, Heartbreaker (2000), for emotional rawness. Indeed, he has not been as direct as this in the expression of his own heartache since that seminal album, yet his vague imagery and the expression of a relatable sadness ensure ambiguity and a universality of sentiment. It is to his endless credit that he can, more than 20 years into his mercurial career, still make the brutality of lost love a fruitful source of art.
Toby Martin
PVT
Busby Marou
Jesca Hoop
Songs from Northam Avenue Ivy League ★★★★½
New Spirit Create/Control
Postcards from the Shell House Warner ★★★
Memories Are Now Inertia ★★★½
Rockhampton roots-pop duo return to the sea with third LP
Album four from sparkling Manchester-based American
Shell House picks up where the island sway of Farewell Fitzroy (2013) closer “Waterlogged” left of. At once a homecoming (“Living in a Town”) and a departure from the country leanings of preceding oferings, it’s an album steeped in the gentle rhythms of the coast. Opener “Best Part of Me” champions Busby’s breezy croon and Marou’s earthy guitar, recalling Josh Pyke and laidback moments from Bernard Fanning. Reconciliation anthem “Paint This Land” bears the sonic stamp of producer-collaborator Jon Hume, while folk-rock anthem “Getaway Car” is piloted by the pair’s sparkling harmony. GARETH HIPWELL
For an artist of Jesca Hoop’s skittish brilliance, the 2016 album with Sam Beam, Love Letter For Fire, was disappointingly vanilla. This is a return to the oddly structured songs and daring rhythmic turns that made 2009’s Hunting My Dress so magical. Hoop is wistfully childlike on some songs (“Simon Says”) and mildly political on others (“Animal Kingdom Chaotic”). Her vocals, meanwhile, are more graceful than ever, yet become devastatingly powerful when she occasionally rises to anger. Despite lacking the dazzling originality of early albums, Hoop has recaptured her quixotic Romanticism, and it is swooningly lovely. B.S.
★★★★
Youth Group frontman channels Western Sydney stunningly
Compelling trio return after four-year absence
Ma r tin’s second solo L P emerged from an artist’s residency in Bankstown in October 2013. His penchant for character studies and preternatural eye for detail make for nine entrancing, deeply evocative tales of suburbia and the singular lives that combine to shape it. Deploying the manifold talents of his “folk-rock-ArabicVietnamese-jam-band”, Martin draws zithers – Ðàn tranh and Qanun – into the mix, along with oud, Mijwiz (reed pipes), and monochord. The sinuous “Olive Tree” is a timely meditation on alienation, before lead single “Spring Feeling” arrives as a shot of pure pop joy stippled with sunlight. G.H.
After nearly 20 years and five albums of innovative electronica, PVT must come close to qualifying as a Great Australian Band. Longevity has not dulled them, with New Spirit a restrained, economical, mournful triumph. Though they don’t make the same racket as in early days, a pleasing melodic sensibility has emerged, exemplified by the haunting changes of “Salt Lake Heart”. The centrepiece, however, is “Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend”, a nine-minute opus driven by brooding synth lines that escalate and intertwine. It all amounts to a futuristic kind of Australian gothic, an idea that sums up the whole of this hypnotic record. BARNABY SMITH
Ty Segall Ty Segall Spunk ★★★★ Ninth solo LP strums its way across the history of rock
Holly Throsby’s Timely Return Quiet Sydney folkie feeling more lover/keeper than seeker
GUTTER PHOTO CREDIT
Holly Throsby After a Time Spunk It’s no mistake Ty Segall’s ninth LP, and second self-titled LP after his 2008 debut, bears the prolific singer’s name. An amalgamation of the guitar-shredding savant’s many musical selves thus far, Segall throws up Sabbath-fighting-the-Stooges face-melters (“Break a Guitar”), Bowie-vs-T.Rex glamofs (“Freedom”), Beatles-esque psychedelia (“Orange Color Queen”) and sometimes all of the above at once (the epic, 10-minute “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)”). An album that knows when to pummel and when to pause for breath, this is one of Segall’s most satisfying records to date. J.J
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★★★★ The tranquillity of the cover image says a lot about where Holly Throsby is coming from after all this titular time. OK, her recent novel probably didn’t appear while she was lying down contemplating the quiet beauty of her garden, but her first songs since 2011 exude the deep, efortless bliss of exactly that kind of daydreaming afternoon. “Where I go, only I know,” she whispers over the lazy fingerpicked waltz of “Evening Stroll”. “I’m pulling out the weeds/with my whole being,” she sighs in the simple ecstasy of “Gardening”. Mick Turner’s guitar makes like wind chimes in the gentlest breeze: one rich element in a meandering stream of textures that conjure their own world of dappled light and boundless hope. The centrepiece is “What Do You Say?”, a day’s-end duet with Mark Kozelek
(Sun Kil Moon) which draws the most contended sketch of domestic respect imaginable from words of few syllables, culminating in the repeated airmation, “Yes. Yes.” There’s a slightly sad air of might-have-been in “Seeing You Now”, but even the wanderlust of “Aeroplane” sounds less frustrated than thrilled by possibility. “I’ll be mountain, I’m as tall as anything,” she sings in another updraft of joy, but for the exhilaration of life itself in all its baling beauty, it’s hard to go past “Being Born”. It’s the little things, after all. M.D.
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Reviews
Pissed Jeans
Tobin Sprout
Why Love Now Sub-Pop ★★★★
The Universe and Me
Pennsylvania gutter-dwellers team up with Lydia Lunch
Burger Records
Fittingly for a band named after soiled pants, Pissed Jeans have never made music for the masses, and on album number five their apocalyptic dirge is just as dense and impenetrable, thanks to input from producer and nowave queen Lydia Lunch. Why Love Now is menacing and plodding with driving bass and spazzy vocals reminiscent of the Jesus Lizard or Killdozer. PJ are still dealing with the same themes of flawed masculinity as they were on earlier LPs like Hope For Men, but songs like “Ignorecam” show them moving on to themes of technophobia. Pissed Jeans are one of the only bands still making music like this, and it’s an ugly, exhilarating thrill. MATT COYTE
Thundamentals Everyone We Know
Notes Of Blue Thirty Tigers/Cooking Vinyl
Thundamentals Bring It On Home Hip-hop crew keep moving forward on inspired fourth album
Son Volt ★★½
Jay Farrar and Co. plough a familiar musical field
No wonder Uncle Tupelo broke up in 1994 – while restless Jef Tweedy ventured further and further away from his country roots, Jay Farrar seems to have drawn closer to his, reploughing the Americana field to see if he could grow more fruit in the same soil. His eighth album under the Son Volt moniker finds him back on the tractor. Apart from the electric rock swirl of “Static” and the chunky riing of “Lost Souls”, Farrar is content to stick with crying pedal steel, strummed acoustics and vocals full of woodsmoke and heartland sentiments. It’s easy on the ears, but a lack of adventure stops it fully flowering. BARRY DIVOLA
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★★★
Guided By Voices man exhibits shaggy charm on lo-fi solo album
Universal/High Depth
★★★★
It’s been over two years since Thundamentals dropped their last album, 2014’s So We Can Remember, and from the first notes of this follow-up it’s clear the time has been spent pushing their sound even further than their last genre-defying efort. A mellow trumpet, piano and choral intro announces that Thundamentals won’t be constrained by a hip-hop template, but one track later the De La Soul-vibing “Sally” is a reassuring blast of funk, letting you know they haven’t forgotten how to bounce, either. Lead single “Never Say Never” is a party jam with heart and showcases some of the best flows MCs Tuka and Jeswon have produced, while “Wolves” heads in a diferent direction altogether, all autotuned vocals and a haunting synth line that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Cudi joint. The disparate influences had the potential to sound scatty, but producers Morgs and Poncho don’t slip up. Jeswon and Tuka, meanwhile, deliver their finest work as writers; from addressing white privilege to penning a love letter to Reebok Pumps. It’s a new level for Thundamentals, and with Everyone We Know also the first record released on their own label, it cements them as a creative force to be reckoned with. DAN FINDLAY
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In the market for a lo-fi album loosely based around the concept of the innocence of boyhood and the reality of middle age? Here you go. Opener “Future Boy Today/Man Of Tomorrow” not only encapsulates the album’s theme, but its saturated mix of fuzzy and ringing guitars could have easily fitted onto a Guided By Voices record. Sprout pinballs between this brand of gnarly, tuneful rock and plaintive piano-led ballads such as “The Universe and Me” and “When I Was a Boy” that nod to both John Lennon and Daniel Johnston. His wavering vocals and the homemade sound have a shaggy charm. BARRY DIVOLA
Cloud Nothings Life Without Sound Stop Start ★★★½ Indie-punk outfit redefine their sound with album number four
Save for room-trashing climax “Realize My Fate” – reminiscent of the gritted-teeth snarl of 2012’s Attack On Memory – Dylan Baldi’s fourth full-length as Cloud Nothings sidelines scrappy spontaneity in favour of a more measured and melodic approach. The edges of postteenage angst are bufed out, by both a notable increase in production quality and a cemented bond between Baldi’s mainstay subject focus – personal weights of mid-west suburban mundanity – and the uncluttered, popskewed guitar rock route of his unconcealed influences (Built To Spill et al). This isn’t exactly growing up, but it’s definitely a step in that direction. J.N.
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The Party Never Ends
Sampha Process Remote Control ★★★★ Perfect imperfection explored on Londoner’s long-awaited debut
On the profound, emotive Process, Kanye/Drake/Solange/ SBTRKT collaborator Sampha Sisay bares his utterly unique voice atop futuristic R&B, tender piano ballads and electronic subtleties. He examines life (“Plastic 100°C”), loss (“Timmy’s Prayer”) and modern relationships (“Under”) with a velvety rasp and delicate yet fully realised melodies. From the dancey grooves of “Blood On Me” to the crushing intimacy of “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano”, Process is pristinely assembled; sagacious yet vulnerable, it neither conceals nor avoids what lies at its core: real, imperfect, uncertain humanity. LAUREN ZIEGLER
Dune Rats create a record that your parents will hate Dune Rats The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit Ratbag Records
★★★½ Dune Rats know well that their charm lies in their ability to distil punk and pop down to its most elemental. Their 2014 debut was a heady mix of surf-rock and garage-punk, but it also had some interesting melodic tinges, lending otherwise stupid songs like “Dalai Lama, Big Banana, Marijuana” a sense of self-aware piss-takery. On The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit, that playfulness has been mostly replaced with rebellion so nihilistic that it seems irresponsible. By the time you get through the punny first single “Scott Green” and the bogan anthems “Bullshit” and “6 Pack”, it becomes clear that The Kids Will Know . . . is the Dune Rats’ party manifesto taken to the extreme. Early singles like “Funny Guy” had a sweetness and honesty
that made them easy to like, but their sneering bongs-and-beer-obsessed follow-up feels like the party has gotten well out of hand. It’s a fun record, but in the same way that drinking till you throw up is fun. Like the Cosmic Psychos, Dune Rats have created their own brand of Aussie irreverence by stripping everything back to its bare bones and turning it up to 11. It’s the sort of album that will shock even the coolest of parents, which in this day and age is no small feat. M.C.
Ocean Grove
Crystal Fairy
Rag ’N’ Bone Man
Adam Brand
The Rhapsody Tapes
Crystal Fairy Ipecac Recordings ★★★½
Human Sony ★★★
Get On Your Feet ABC/Universal ★★½
UNFD
★★★★
Badass full-length debut for ‘Odd World Music’ punk collective
It might be self-described ‘Odd World Music’ (which sounds like a suburban-white-boy hardcore version of Odd Future), but Ocean Grove’s AD/HDcore possesses a nimble and unpredictable vitality. “These Boys Light Fires”, “Thunderdome” and “Beers” mix a deft melodicism with scattered hardcore brutality, but their willingness to slow down (“The Wrong Way”) or get weird (“Intimate Alien”, “From Dalight” channelling Atari Teenage Riot) makes for a thrilling experience. In a world crowded with pissant white guy hardcore, the energy and restlessness of The Rhapsody Tapes stands out like Donald Trump at a YG show. JAYMZ CLEMENTS
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A solid debut from an inspired heavy collaboration
Members of the Melvins and At the Drive-In felt so enamoured with the vocal stylings of Teri Gender Bender, frontwoman of Mexican band Le Butcherettes, that they formed this supergroup just so they could work together. It’s no surprise, then, that Gender Bender’s vocals are the focus on this rif-heavy album. TGB is a force of nature, an ungodly blend of Courtney Love, Kate Bush and Joan Jett, and her prickly girl-power anthems sound even more powerful with the masculine sludge of the Melvins backing her. Crystal Fairy aren’t as groundbreaking as Le Butcherettes, but neither are they standard punk-fare. A solid intro to what could be a great band. M.C.
Blues meets singer-songwriter on diverse, sentimental debut
The rugged blues that defines Rory Graham’s Rag’n’Bone Man spreads its wings on Human, showcasing far greater stylistic and emotive diversity than previous EPs. Between mining his signature sound on tracks “Human” and “Bitter End”, his softer side seeps through on the mellifluous “Odetta”, while “Ego”, one of the album’s best, not only propels trumpets and a gospel sound to the fore, but sees the UK artist flexing lyrical dexterity via a short but impressive rap verse, harking back to his career beginnings as a drum & bass MC. While the odd lacklustre moment admittedly fragments the energy, Human is a sincere, compelling, accomplished debut. L .Z.
Brand tweaks the country pop formula ever so slightly
Tamworth favourite Adam Brand isn’t one for getting too deep. What you can gather from his latest is that this good ole boy loves singing about cars and booze and broken hearts; the usual fare, in short. To his credit, Brand has added a few beats and digital-age tricks to his straight-ahead country pop; close your eyes and you’d swear that “Every Time She Walks By” and the title track were lifts from Keith Urban’s album of last year, Ripcord. “Leave It On”, meanwhile, is the obligatory late night ballad, and not a bad one at that. But still, after all that you come away none the wiser as to the real Adam Brand. JEFF APTER
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Reviews
Elbow
Loyle Carner
Little Fictions Polydor ★★★★
Yesterday’s Gone
UK art-rockers regroup and lighten up on album seven
AMF Records/Caroline
The departure of drummer R ichard Jupp might have thrown Elbow for a loop but they’ve embraced crisis as opportunity. Through a labyrinth of limb-twisting time-signatures, treated tones and weird choral counterpoints, the Mercury-winning band’s elaborate scaffolds of rhythm and harmony have rarely sounded more driven by the joy of creation. Guy Garvey’s jazz-inflected word pictures are dizzying in the eight-minute-plus title track, which finds the ominous “Little Fictions” seeming, after all, like trifles in the big picture of humanity. “What does it prove if you die for a tune?” he smirks elsewhere. “It’s really all disco. Everything.” M.D.
★★★★
Young UK rapper finds his voice on poetic, soulful debut
Gizzard Explore the Sound Between Spaces Melbourne mentalists unveil the first of their five albums due in 2017 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
Covering well worn ground – the woes of being young and laden with money/girl troubles – and making it sound fresh again requires a special kind of talent. Say hello to 22-year-old South London rapper Loyle Carner (real name Benjamin CoyleLarner). Blessed with a poet’s way with words and a weary, wise-beyond-his-years voice that sounds like it could break down at any second, Carner’s emotive raps are coupled with crisp jazz and soul-inflected production (check the early Kanyeish “The Isle of Arran”), marking the young wordsmith out as an erudite and compelling new voice to be reckoned with. JAMES JENNINGS
Flying Microtonal Banana Remote Control ★★★
Delicate Steve This Is Steve ANTI- ★★★½ Genre-defying instrumental gymnastics from New Jersey
The music of in-demand multiinstrumentalist Steve Marion is defined by its almost complete absence of vocals, yet such is the sharpness and tunefulness of his textured instrumental explorations that they’re highly accessible, even hummable. There is a good-humouredness that recalls Todd Rundgren, while Rundgren’s influence as a guitarist looms over Glamish tracks like “Cartoon Rock”. Elsewhere, the slide work of George Harrison is hinted at on the particularly satisfying “Tomorrow”. Those touchstones aside, Marion’s idiosyncratic noise sounds like very little else, and it’s an intoxicating concoction. BARNABY SMITH
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There’s a fine line, they say, between fear and excitement. The unsettling existence of infinite so-called microtones in between the 12 legal notes of the western scale has been freaking out rock kids since George Harrison tripped over a sitar in 1965. It was only a matter of time before some tricksy lizard magicians smuggled the spooky little critters into a metaphorical piece of airborne fruit and here it is, in nine hyperventilating slices of psychedelic terror conceived on cunningly modified instruments and no shortage of red cordial. From whooshing segues to bad-acid imagery, the Melbourne jam freaks’ ninth album feels like a sister to last year’s Nonagon Infinity: a frantic nightmare of rattlesnakes, rising seas, oxygen deprivation, bloodthirsty bushrangers and nuclear fusion set to a bone-rattling pace for whipping festivals into a lather. The furious tumble of drums, parrying and noodling electrics and volleys of staccato vocals are woven with some squawking cobra-taming pipe instrument making like an evil Pied Piper from “Open Water” and “Billabong Valley” to “Doom City”. The overall efect is plenty immersive without being all that progressive: a vaguely exotic continuation of an established sonic landscape that will spawn another four albums, they’re warning, before the year is out. Whether all of them are strictly necessary is a question maybe only Lizard cultists, like Grateful Deadheads before them, can answer. MICHAEL DW YER
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Dirty Projectors Dirty Projectors Domino ★★★★½ Experimental pop maverick pushes boundaries
David Longstreth has always been experimental, but this is a quantum leap from indie pop. Opener “Keep Your Name” serves notice – puttering beat, sparse piano and downtuned vocals that sound like a soul singer slipping down a rabbit hole of regret. Longstreth digs deep into his personal relationships, from initial attraction (“Up In Hudson”) to bliss (“Little Bubble”) to breakdown (“Death Spiral”). Fluttering woodwinds, shivering strings and parping brass wrap around glitchy beats, and although Longstreth bends and stretches his voice into weird and wonderful shapes, he reveals more soul than ever before. B.D.
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Movies By Peter Travers
Denzel’s Master Class
Parker leads a race riot.
Fences Denzel Washington Directed by Denzel Washington
★★★★
Racial Fury Unleashed The Birth of a Nation Nate Parker, Armie Hammer Directed by Nate Parker
FROM LEFT: FOX SEARCHLIGHT; DAVID LEE/PARAMOUNT PICTURES
★★★★ here’s a tough question: Do you judge Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation as a film, or put Parker on trial as a man, a student at Penn State in 1999 who was accused of raping an 18-year-old woman, a crime for which he was acquitted? I’ll leave the playing-God stuff to social media, where it thrives, and stick to what’s onscreen, which, by any standard, is a monumental achievement. Parker gives a great elemental performance as Nat Turner, the Virginia-born slave and Baptist preacher who led an 1831 slave rebellion – the bloodiest in U.S. history – that left 60 slave-owners and family members slaughtered, mostly with axes and knives. In retaliation, 200 blacks were butchered. Violence hits like a gut punch in The Birth of a Nation, a title Parker boldly reclaims from D.W. Griith’s 1915 silent-screen Civil War epic that made heroes of Ku Klux Klansmen. It’s a stupendous directing debut for
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Parker, who is unflinching in his portrait of a black America pushed to the limit. Parker, who laboured for seven years to get The Birth of a Nation onscreen, builds his film slowly, like a gathering storm. Nat grows up on a Virginia cotton plantation, playing games with the white boy, Samuel Turner, who will become his master. Samuel’s mother, Elizabeth (a striking Penelope Ann Miller), even teaches Nat to read. Just the Bible; nothing to put incendiary ideas in his head. Or so she thinks. As adults, Nat and Samuel, played with sharp glints of moral complexity by Armie Hammer, share confidences, but nothing that questions Samuel’s rule. Still, it’s Nat who persuades his owner to buy Cherry (the excellent Aja Naomi King), a young slave stripped down by an auctioneer to up her price. Cherry will later become Nat’s wife and the mother of their daughter. The shift of balance comes when Samuel hires Nat out to preach to slaves on neighbouring plantations, using the Bible to teach black subservience. Parker shows the
dawning realisation of horror in Nat’s eyes as he witnesses unspeakable torture and sexual abuse. One slave (Colman Domingo) watches his bride (Gabrielle Union) handed of to a white man for sex. When Cherry sufers a similar fate, Nat snaps. Ironically, Nat justifies mutiny with the same Bible he used to push compliance. Slavery has been tackled on film, most recently in 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained. But Parker throws the knockout punch as people are killed “for no reason but being black”, a statement that gives Parker’s landmark film the heat of a history still being written. Parker, like the first-time filmmaker he is, throws everything at the screen. Nat’s religious visions are crudely visualised. Henry Jackman’s score pushes when it needs to subtly persuade. And too many characters come and go without being fully developed. But Parker’s overreaching pales next to what he has thrillingly accomplished: a movie of potent provocation and passionate heart that will rank with the year’s best.
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor
lik e being hit by lightning. That’s how you feel watching Fences, the Pulitzerwinning play by August Wilson that director-star Denzel Washington brings to the screen with all its f lamethrowing ferocity and feeling. The year is 1957. The place is Pittsburgh, where Wilson wanted to illuminate “the poetry in the everyday language of black America”. Washington plays Troy Maxson, a garbage collector with the chip
Washington, Davis
of broken dreams on his shoulder. Troy made it into baseball’s Negro Leagues, but no further. His bitterness touches his two sons, Cory (Jovan Adepo) and Lyons (Russell Hornsby), and his mentally challenged brother, Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson). Troy can swill gin and play king while jawing with his pal Bono (the outstanding Stephen Henderson). But the only one who can temper Troy’s rage is his wife, Rose (Viola Davis). Washington and Davis both won Tonys for these roles on Broadway and should soon have Oscar voters in equal thrall. In bringing Wilson’s work to film for the first time, Washington does the late playwright proud by not going for Hollywood flash. Wilson’s language coupled with the dazzling acting duet of Washington and Davis are all you need for a movie experience you won’t forget.
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JOHN PRINE “He was on the night [Cont. from 61] shift for a long time,” says Ferguson, who remembers sitting at Prine’s Fifties Formica table and playing Hank Williams and Merle Haggard records as friends like Van Zandt and Guy Clark dropped by to play cards. Cocaine and quaaludes were rampant. Prine wasn’t much of a weed guy: “If you smoke hash, it was kinda like buying a train ticket. You just run a straight train ride and you know what town you were getting of at. With some of the weed going around, you don’t know where you’re goin’.” Today, Chandler’s is empty, apart from a smoking bartender and a few grizzled locals here to gamble on a horse race. One of them is Hooter, a friendly, pony tailed character who worked for decades as the Everly Brothers’ tour manager. “Hooter was there in my wild years,” Prine says. “I was totally involved in his wild years,” Hooter corroborates. Hooter shares a few stories, like the one about Prine’s tropicalfish tank. One night, while they were out barhopping, Prine’s heater shorted out and killed all of his fish. Prine was distraught. He had become attached to a goldfish that had grown to 700 grams. After storing it in the freezer for months, Prine took the fish to a taxidermist and had it mounted, explaining it was the family’s favourite pet. “I said, ‘The kids miss it’,” says Prine, who had no children at the time. Prine admits he was basically a child himself back then. All that changed when he met Fiona in 1988 at an afterparty in Dublin, where she was working as a recording-studio business manager. They kept in touch for years before she left Ireland for Nashville in 1993. (The Prines still keep a summer home near Galway.) “There were a lot of things stacked against us,” Fiona says later. “He was on the road and had been through two marriages.” “I was a high risk,” Prine says. At 48, Prine became a father for the first time when their son Jack was born. Tommy followed the next year, and Prine also adopted another son, Jody, from Fiona’s previous relationship. “It put my feet right on the ground,” he says. “I didn’t know that I was missing that until I found it. All of a sudden I felt normal with a capital N. I didn’t realise it, but it was something that I was striving for after years and years of being a total daydreamer.” The honeymoon ended in 1996, when Prine visited a doctor about a lump on his neck. He’d been shaving around it for a while, thinking it was a blood vessel; it was actually stage-three neck cancer. Prine was dumbfounded. “I felt fine,” he says. “It doesn’t hit you until you pull up to the hospital and you see ‘cancer’ in big letters,
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and you’re the patient. Then it all kind of comes home.” Surgeons removed the tumour, taking a chunk of Prine’s neck with it. The surgery left his head permanently slumped, which means he spends a lot of time staring at his shoes when he walks. It also makes him stick out in public – he’s used to getting stared at, especially by curious children. “I didn’t think there was any use in me wearing a turtleneck sweater,” he says. In the wake of the surgery, he felt weak and his voice lost a lot of its power. He took a year and a half of before booking a small theatre show in Bristol, Tennessee, as a test. He was nervous. “The crowd was with me. Boy, were they with me,” he says, his eyes tearing up. “And I think I shook everybody’s hand afterward. I knew right then and there that I could do it.” “It sounds a little cliché, or Pollyannaish,” says Fiona. “But John and I don’t laugh at this: That neck is proof there is a God. That neck is the hand of God, because it gave him more than was taken away. Not to say it wasn’t hard. It was very hard for him.” It could be hard for his kids, too. According to Fiona, Prine’s physical ailments made it diicult for him to keep up with the boys. They also struggled with the fact that he was on the road a lot. “He wasn’t a PTA dad, but he did what he could,” she says. But lately, their relationship has improved, especially with Jack starting to write songs and Tommy studying music management and hoping to work at Oh Boy. When Fiona recently asked Tommy how he felt about his father’s absence when he was younger, his response was definitive. “Mum,” he said, “my dad’s a freakin’ legend.” rine says there’s one dow nside to finding happiness late in life: His writing has slowed down. “The one thing I can’t remember about writing songs is just how fucking simple it is,” he says. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who’s been co-writing with Prine, says Prine can write when he wants to: “These phrases you’re looking for – they just pop out of his mouth,” Auerbach says. “Like it’s magic or something.” This year, Prine is hoping to release his first album of new songs since 2005, but he’s finding it to be a torturous process. “I don’t wanna just sit down and write a little couplet that’s kind of witty, or something. I’ve done that,” he says. Occasionally, he stumbles upon an idea he can hang onto. At Chandler’s, we end up discussing religion. Prine believes in God, but he’s sick of the way evangelical Christians use the Bible as a political weapon against gays and transgender people. “I think of the Bible as an unauthorised biography,” says Prine. “I think that the disciples were all trying to
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vie for their personal time that they spent around Jesus. If I wrote anything, I would go toward that. I think I would make the centre of it like, ‘Kitty Kelley Wrote the Bible’. That’s a little marble that’s rolling around in my head right now. And that marble gets bigger every day.” f t e r a c ou pl e of be e r s a t Chandler’s, we head to Prine’s house and sit on a porch overlooking his pool and Fiona’s large garden. Fiona comes by to ask if salmon is OK for dinner. Prine yawns – he’s not used to drinking beer during the day anymore, and it’s made him a little tired. “I can tell,” Fiona says. At dinner, Prine sits at the head of the table, next to Tommy and his college friends, chiming in on matters from college hockey to whether Tommy should get his real-estate license. “Not a bad idea,” Prine says. “You’d make a killing in one summer. You just smile a lot. When the doorknob breaks, or the plumbing, you just go, ‘It’s very fixable.’ ” After dinner, Tommy and his friends make their escape, promising Fiona on their way out that they won’t be drinking. She’s sceptical. “Youth,” Prine grumbles when they leave. He and Fiona look over a proof of a coffee-table book that includes guitar chords, lyrics and photos from throughout Prine’s life. She points out lyrics to various songs, like “Space Monkey” – written about one of the monkeys the Soviet Union sent into space in the Fifties – and 1972’s amiably apocalyptic “The Late John Garfield Blues”. “Your handwriting was a lot better then,” says Fiona. “I was a lot more together,” he replies. “You should’ve known me back then.” Next is a picture from around the time of Prine’s 1978 album Bruised Orange. As part of the promotional campaign, three twentysomething girls in a record store dressed in big round costumes meant to look like oranges, though they ended up looking like pumpkins. “We invited them back to the hotel, actually,” Prine says. “And it turns out they were stufed with old pages of Rolling Stone inside their costumes.” “We won’t ask how you found that out,” Fiona says with an eye roll. As I prepare to leave, Prine disappears and comes back with two more items to show of. One is a gift Jody got him for Christmas last year, a custom painting of Prine with the characters from Archie, titled “John Prine Plays Riverdale”. He looks at it and lets out a big, whooping laugh, despite having seen it countless times. The second is the mounted goldfish, which he displays outside, overlooking the pool. “I like hanging it somewhere prominent,” Prine says. “So people go, ‘What’s this?’ Then I get to tell the story.”
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DOG FACTORY [Cont. from 79] With no movement in Washington to toughen federal rules, the law suggested a possible path forward: to mount ballot drives in farm states. But just five years after it took efect, Missouri’s dog law seems to have lost its teeth. Prosecutions have fallen, the number of licenses pulled has tanked, and egregious breeders are breaking the rules and paying little or nothing in fines. Although a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Agriculture insists that “the number of [disciplinary] referrals has decreased because the majority of breeders have fallen under compliance”, the state predominates the HSUS Horrible Hundred list; this year, almost a third of the kennels that made the list were located in Missouri. Six months ago, Kristin Akin bought a goldendoodle that came from a notorious puppy mill called Cornerstone Farms. Akin is a St. Louis mum who’d lost two small children to a rare immune disorder eight months apart. Last June, she went online to find a puppy companion for her young dog. She found a website that sold puppies from Cornerstone; it purported to be a local and loving kennel that bred show dogs and kept high standards. Akin asked about a puppy depicted wearing a pink bow. She was told, via text, to make a deposit. “It was a total impulse buy – I ofered to drive right over,” says Akin. “They texted, ‘No, we’re coming up your way tomorrow.’” The next morning, she sat in a mall parking lot; a brown conversion van pulled up alongside her. A door slid open, but instead of a four-month pup, out came a cowering, full-grown dog that wouldn’t look up when Akin stroked her. Stunned, Akin took the dog home for a bath. Her legs were covered with scabs and both ears were badly infected; she had explosive diarrhea for a week. Akin kept the dog, filed a complaint with the state, and went public with her story about the breeder, Debra Ritter. “We found 11 straight years of state violations, including a bunch that were issued just before we drove out there – but zero fines paid to the [Missouri] Department of Ag,” says Chris Hayes, a Fox reporter who interviewed Ritter and aired two stories in St. Louis. Ritter, in a rambling phone conversation in which she praises the Lord for calling on her to adopt 26 foster kids, some with special needs, denies to me that she sold sick dogs, just the “occasional” puppy with worms. She explains that she and her husband had quit jobs to become breeders so they could stay home with their kids who were chronically ill. “These animal-rights crazies say we abuse our dogs – but I don’t see them adopting kids,” she says. As for the violations, those were “nuisance charges” that she resolved before the
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inspector drove away, she says. “We Ritters aren’t perfect, but I have a great reputation for never cheating customers or causing vet bills.” Not according to Yelp, which is littered with posts from people who bought her sick pups, or the Horrible Hundred list, where Cornerstone Farms made the 2015 edition. Meanwhile, the website is still posting photos of the “puppy” Ritter sold to Akin. “I had two friends contact her by text,” says Akin. “They were told she was available.” What sets Ritter apart isn’t her brazen conduct or a trail of heartsick buyers; the diference between her and most online sellers is you can actually find her on a map. “Websites give no clue about where a breeder’s based – a lot of the time, you can’t even get their name,” says the HSUS’s Summers. They hide behind sites like puppyspot .com, a huge Web broker that sells many breeders’ dogs out of its call-centre oice in Florida. In 2011, a lawsuit filed in part by HSUS claimed that the company (which was then called purebredbreeders.com) used roughly 800 domain names to lure buyers into thinking they were purchasing puppies “from quality, responsible breed-
weighing “a plea deal that involves no jail time for my client”.) “But our target,” Taylor says, “is that she never has animals again, and pays back every dime the Humane Society spent to treat those dogs and find them homes.” The HSUS expects to spend at least $100,000 on the raid – most of it for medical care – which is actually on the low side. Yates yielded custody of her stock to HSUS, which allowed it to quickly disperse the dogs to animal-adoption groups around the state. “There are cases where we have to hold the dogs for months because they’re bargaining chips for the miller – they trade them in exchange for dropped charges,” says Goodwin. There’s the occasional fine and suspended sentence; in rare cases, someone goes to jail. “These people should be in prison, but that won’t end the problem,” he says. “The only way you end it is choke its blood supply: Stop buying purebred dogs, and adopt one instead.” Due to the efects of animal-welfare advocates, Petco and Petsmart – the twin behemoths of the trade, with roughly half its total income – have stopped doing in-store sales of dogs, and feature rescue adoptions instead.
Online dog sales is the perfect crime. Courts don’t care about out-of-state victims, and the feds don’t even fine breeders. ers”. Instead, “we found puppy-millers with USDA violations”, says Kimberly Ockene, an attorney for HSUS. A Florida judge dismissed it as a jointly filed suit. A subsequent ruling held that the buyers of sick puppies could re-file individually or let the matter drop. But, says Ockene, “we’ve had success in some cases. Litigation can be [an] efective tool for combating the puppy-mill problem.” (Calls to puppyspot.com for comment were not returned.) In short, online dog sales is the perfect crime. Courts don’t care about out-of-state victims, and the feds don’t even fine breeders, much less arrest them, for selling sick pups on bogus sites. Any amateur can do this out of his or her basement and make good, steady money for years. A prime example: Patricia Yates, the miller in North Carolina whose dogs were seized in the Cabarrus County raid. With no license or bona fides from a purebred club, she’d supported herself for years on the profits from her kennel. She might have gone on indefinitely were it not for Lt. Taylor, the Cabarrus County cop who brought her down. “Unfortunately, the laws aren’t what they could be in this state, so all we could charge were misdemeanors,” says Taylor. (Yates’ attorney, Benjamin Gof, says he is
The website Petfinder.com ofers thousands of rescue dogs up for adoption. You can find any breed there you would in a pet store. The diference, says Goodwin, is “these dogs are healthy”. f the 105 dogs relinquished by Yates, all but two survived. Pollo, the tiny poodle, succumbed to a stroke just a month into his new lease on life. “I hand-fed him meals and wrapped him in a blanket, but he’d been through too much,” says Brenda Tortoreo, a receptionist at the Cabarrus Animal Hospital, who’d adopted him and renamed him Kip. Tortoreo, who has a pair of older dogs, adopted a second poodle from the raid. Bebe is a couple of years younger than Kip, but no less hungry for afection. For the first two weeks, she wouldn’t leave the bedroom except in her owner’s arms. Now, she gobbles up the other dogs’ breakfasts and steals their small stufed toys. Dragging them to her daybed, she nuzzles and turns them like the puppies she’s birthed and nursed. “We love her to pieces, but cry for Kip a lot,” says Tortoreo. “I’m so sad I didn’t save him years ago. He got to feel some kindness for those few short weeks. I just hope, wherever he is now, he’ll forgive us.”
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Bernard Fanning The singer on changing a tyre, passing time on the road and wearing mullet wigs The last time I did something for the first time The last word I looked up in the dictionary About five minutes ago. I recorded over a bass line that was way I do it constantly, because a lot of the time when I’m writing better than the one I ended up recording. I was working on a demo lyrics I might use a word, and then when I’m going back over it to of something and it was sounding pretty good, and I thought, “Oh have a look at what I’m saying I sometimes like to check what all yeah, I’m gonna try this”, and I did and it completely killed the vibe the connotations of the word can be. I looked up ‘defences’; I just of what the song is doing. [Laughs] never have been able to get into So I think I might have to learn my brain that grammatical rule from that in the future. Step away where the ‘s’ gets used or the ‘c’ from the bass guitar, dickhead. gets used. Did this solve it? Nah, The last time someone quoted my I still can’t remember. lyrics back at me The last time I changed a tyre This is not quite a quote, but Probably in the Nineties. It someone sent me a photo of a tatwould have been a canary yeltoo that somebody had of the lyrics low Nissan Vector, which got a to “Sunsets” on their entire back. nail in the tyre. I think I was on I was like, man, if you’re going to the side of the highway, and I get a tattoo of some Powderfinger was shitting my pants. [Laughs] lyrics you could probably do betAnd someone actually stopped, ter than “Sunsets”. [Laughs] It’s like I guess I just looked like a probably less depressing than havhopeless long hair on the side ing “These Days” written on your of the road, and a guy in a ute back, though. But I don’t expose stopped and ofered me help. I myself to those situations very refused, and regretted it immeoften to be honest, where somediately, ’cause the jack I had was one’s going to start going in depth absolutely rubbish. with me about my work, unless I’m The last time I was embarrassed talking to a journalist where it has After we played at the Falls a bit more context. Festival recently I was backThe last time I was starstruck stage, and one of the guys from I saw [Seventies cricketing legthe DMA’s came up to talk to me end] Jef Thomson when I was at and told me about how he realthe cricket. I went to the Test [in ly liked my songwriting and all Brisbane], and I saw him there, that stuf. And it was in front but I don’t really know anything of a few people I didn’t know about fishing or Valiants so I didn’t very well, and he was being very really have anything to talk to him complimentary, but like I said, about. [Laughs] I just saw him in a I don’t really seek out those sitbar. He had quite a deal of admiruations, so I was pretty keen for ers around him so it wasn’t really the conversation to move on. my place to go and interrupt. He’s a really nice dude actually, The last time I asked for someone’s and I didn’t know much about autograph the DMA’s, but I’ve subsequentAndrew Morris, who’s in my ly gone and looked into their “If you’re going to get a tattoo of some band, I got an autograph from him music, and they’re a pretty good Powderfinger lyrics, you could recently, and I gave him one of my band, good songwriters. probably do better than ‘Sunsets’.” own back. [Laughs] Touring can The last time I had a tantrum be pretty boring sometimes, and I’m witness to so many tanthere’s all sorts of ways to pass the trums these days ’cause I have a time. That’s a novel one. five- and seven-year-old that I lose track of when my last one was. The last record I bought The last time I wore fancy dress Julia Jacklin [Don’t Let the Kids Win]. I love that record, I There’s been plenty of occasions where what I thought I was think it’s amazing. It sounds to me like if Gillian Welch and Deb- wearing wasn’t fancy dress, but other people decided that it was. orah Harry and Doris Day had a love child, that’s what it would [Laughs] But it would have been two New Years Eve’s ago, when be like. But I love it. I was in Spain. They quite like to wear wigs and stuf like that around the Christmas period. [Mine] was actually gold strips, like [New Zealand singer] Sharon O’Neill hair; kind of like a mullet Bernard Fanning is currently touring Australia with Kasey from the Seventies. Chambers. His next album, Brutal Dawn, is due this year.
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