MAY 2020 ISSUE 1339
CRISIS IN AMERICA
Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge The New York Governor on Leadership, Hard Truths, and What Comes Next
The President and the Plague Trump’s Failed Response INSIDE THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONCERT BUSINESS
John Prine 1946-2020
CR A FTED FOR YEAR S
TO BE SHARED FOR YEARS TO COME
Jim Beam Black® Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2020 James B. Beam Distilling Co., Clermont, KY.
Contents T H E COV I D - 1 9 C R I S I S
44
ISSUE 1339 ‘ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS’
Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge In the early months of 2020, the governor of New York found himself at the center of a deadly crisis. His response has helped guide the nation. By Mark Binelli
50
The President and the Plague How Donald Trump failed at the single most important task of his office: keeping the American people safe from harm. By Jeff Goodell
58
Denials and Dysfunction: Inside Trump’s Task Force When the White House finally reacted to the coronavirus, its response was marred by infighting and confusion. By Andy Kroll P H OTO E SSAY
60
48 Hours in America From Anchorage to Miami Beach, 13 photographers document two days of life in a time of fear and isolation.
PLUS 75
Artists to Watch Ten new musicians who are breaking through the noise, making hits, and reshaping pop, hip-hop, Latin, country, and more in 2020.
Ninety-five percent of Americans were under stay-athome orders as of April 9th. Pictured: Weaverville, North Carolina
60 PHOTOGRAPH BY Mike Belleme
Contents The Mix 15
The Killers Start Over Again After two key members stepped away, they had to reinvent themselves. BY ANDY GREENE
16
Going Back to Laurel Canyon Photos from the creative paradise of the late Sixties and early Seventies. BY ANGIE MARTOCCIO
24
Bob Dylan’s New Masterpiece Unpacking the historical and pop-culture references of “Murder Most Foul.” BY ANDY GREENE
Q&A
26
Alicia Keys The singer on hosting the Grammys after Kobe died and what happens when Bono misses a deadline. BY BRITTANY SPANOS
RS REPORTS
36
The Week the Music Stopped In March, COVID-19 wiped concerts and festivals off the calendar — and that was just the beginning. BY SAMANTHA HISSONG, ETHAN MILLMAN, AND AMY X. WANG
Tributes 28 Bill Withers One of Withers’ biggest fans remembers an everyman who stayed true to himself to the end. BY AHMIR “QUESTLOVE” THOMPSON
John Prine The down-to-earth genius wrote with humor and kindness. Inside the life of an American original. BY PATRICK DOYLE
34
Adam Schlesinger From Fountains of Wayne to ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ he wrote songs with wry humor and lots of heart. BY SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
Departments Letter From the Editor Correspondence RS Recommends Random Notes The Last Word
4 |
Rolling Stone
|
6 7 20 42 98
May 2020
30 Reviews
88
Hayley Williams’ Flower Power
Homegrown is released after 45 years — and it feels perfect right now.
Paramore’s lead singer makes a bold feminist statement on her solo debut, Petals for Armor — a journey through seething rage, revelation, and, eventually, new romance.
BY ANGIE MARTOCCIO
BY CLAIRE SHAFFER
Music 87 Neil Young’s Great Lost Album
TV 90 Old ‘Hollywood’ Made New Ryan Murphy’s latest polished series, starring Darren Criss, revisits the golden age of Tinseltown — but with a modern, inclusive twist. BY ALAN SEPINWALL
On the Cover
Andrew Cuomo, photographed in Albany, New York, on April 3rd, 2020, by George Etheredge.
TOM HILL/WIREIMAGE
30
“packed with craZy fun action.” – Sean O’Connell, CINEMABLEND
LOOK FOR IT ON DIGITAL, ™ ™ BLU-RAY AND 4K ULTRA HD BLU-RAY™ AND 4K ULTRA HD™ INCLUDE DIGITAL MOV IE CODE
SCAN HERE FOR #BirdsOfPrey facebook.com/BirdsOfPreyMovie Special Features Are Not MPAA-Rated and May Not Be Hi-Def or SDH. BIRDS OF PREY TM & © DC. © 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.
TM & © DC Comics Soundtrack Album on Atlantic Records/WaterTower Music
ACTION-PACKED FUN!
Editor’s Letter
“When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand/Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand/Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock & roll band.” —JOH N PR I N E , “When I Get to Heaven”
Life During Lockdown
JA S ON F I N E EDITOR
6|
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
NATALIE KEYSSAR
This is The first issue of R olling STone we have ever produced without being in the same room together. Magazine making is an intensely collaborative effort among writers, editors, researchers, designers, and photographers — yet in March, and now into April, we, like many Americans, are forced to work in isolation, communicating over phone, email, Slack and Zoom, as we adapt to this terrifying, temporary new global reality. As I write this, many staffers have been working for weeks alone in a hushed and fearful New York City, with ambulance sirens as the sonic backdrop. Others are scattered: Staff writer Suzy Exposito was grounded in Miami en route to Puerto Rico to interview Bad Bunny for what was supposed to be this issue’s cover story. Senior writer Alex Morris drove 15 hours from New York to Alabama to be with her parents, reporting stories along the way. Many are juggling work with home-schooling their kids or taking care of sick friends and loved ones. Staff Times Square, New York City, on March 29th, one week after the state issued social-distancing orders writer Tessa Stuart interviewed Stacey Abrams over video chat from her Brooklyn apartment, where her boyfriend was recovering from a presumed case of COVID-19. This issue’s cover story on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has emerged Daily meetings have taken on a surreal quality as the news outpaces us: Last as a national beacon of truth and reason, came together just days before we week, during a meeting to discuss plans for a tribute to Fountains of Wayne closed our pages. Contributing editor Jeff Goodell offers a devastating look at co-founder Adam Schlesinger, who died from COVID-19 complications on April the Trump administration’s failure to prepare or adequately respond to the 1st, news broke that the soul giant Bill Withers had passed away from heart pandemic. D.C. bureau chief Andy Kroll sheds light on dysfunction inside the disease. Days later, we lost one of America’s greatest, funniest, and kindest crisis task force. Our music team reports on the collapse of the live-music busisongwriters, John Prine, who’d been struggling to fight the virus for more than ness. And on Sunday, March 29th, we sent 13 photographers across the countwo weeks. These deaths hit hard; we are losing heroes and friends. try for 48 hours to document life in America during the crisis. Over the past month we’ve improvised new ways of working and tried new We hope this issue provides valuable insights into these perilous times, as things. We launched a video series, In My Room, featuring performances at well as some comfort and entertainment to help get you through. As we go home by artists including Brian Wilson, John Fogerty, and Yola, that has beto press, small signs of hope are emerging, with new cases of the coronavirus come a destination for artists to share live music. We started a weekly video slowing in Seattle and New York, and testing becoming more widely available. version of the Rolling STone interview, with guests including Pete Buttigieg, Samantha Bee, Roger Waters, and chef Samin Nosrat, weighing in from difWith some luck, we’ll be back together soon. Until then, we’ll be sharing the ferent corners of the culture. most important stories of this time every way we can.
Correspondence
+ L OV E L E T T E R S & A DV IC E
“Thank you, Greta, for leading by example. Each of us who feels weak and small will stand by you, and together we will be large and heard.”
The Climate Fight Our minds are squarely fixed on weathering a pandemic, but we can’t lose sight of the other existential threat our society faces. [“The Zero Hour,” RS 1338] is a good, and frank, deep dive from Jeff Goodell.
—Society for Conservation Biology, via Twitter Since some of our governments are now pretty adamant about listening to the science in the context of COVID-19, can we please expect the same when it comes to the climate crisis, and act accordingly?
—Jens Wieting, via Twitter
—Judy Faint Christopher, via Facebook
Greta’s Crusade Activist Greta Thunberg appeared on the cover of the special Climate Crisis issue of Rolling Stone [“Greta’s World,” RS 1338] in April. Senior writer Stephen Rodrick traveled to Stockholm to see where her movement started and witness the teenager in action. At one of her signature school strikes, Thunberg opened up about her life and what drives her. Thunberg’s vulnerability and steely resolve inspired thoughtful reflections from readers. “As a woman, I am incredibly excited to hear the word ‘emotional’ being described as a strength,” wrote Olivia Binette. “Greta is an inspiration to girls and women around the world, as it takes true emotion and empathy to feel deeply enough to create this kind of global movement.” Mary Grace Duncan wrote, “What a
nice story for kids with Asperger’s. She found a way to turn its traits into superpowers. I never knew she had it until I read this profile.” Diane Renaud was also moved by the piece: “We need more and more people like Greta, who have the capacity to look at everything differently and understand the importance of action.” World-famous street artist Shepard Fairey’s striking cover illustration also drew attention. “I may have to print this and hang it on the fridge,” wrote Karen Kroll. For those out there still doubting the reality of the climate crisis and the danger we face, Kay Morgia wrote in, “After reading this issue, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could still be in denial of global warming. Thankfully, more political awareness seems to be on the horizon.”
@vrajadev: Why are so many so cynical about a young girl wanting to save the world?
The Passion of AOC This article [“Building a Green New Deal,” RS 1338] shows more of Alexandria OcasioCortez’s policies while still revealing her fire and passion. Some critics think that the Green New Deal is unattainable and too expensive, but this narrative says more about the state of the Democratic Party than anything else.
—Morgan C., via letter
REACTION
How Chase Funds the Climate Crisis In the years since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, JPMorgan Chase has loaned $196 billion to the fossil-fuel industry — more than any other bank in the world, wrote author and environmental activist Bill McKibben in “The Doomsday Bank” [RS 1338]. The response to his special report in the Climate Crisis issue helped rally an onslaught of Chase protests around the country. “The oil-and-gas industries disregard the rights of indigenous peoples, farmers, and homeowners,” wrote Rolling Stone reader Rena Neighbors. “Maybe you feel climate change won’t affect you, but you should consider the generations to come.”
I’m glad AOC is so outspoken about this. When there’s always evidence for us to think that the people on Capitol Hill aren’t looking out for us, it’s nice that America finally has someone we don’t need to feel cynical about. Her policies are for the people.
—Abigail Snelling, via letter
CONTACT US
Letters to ROLLING STONE, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017-0298. Letters become the property of ROLLING STONE and may be edited for publication. Email: letters@rollingstone.com Subscriber Services: Call 800-283-1549. May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
|7
What’s new and what you might have missed — from the latest original podcasts and videos to reviews of music, movies, and more VIDEO
Mayor Pete on the Challenges Ahead
‘In My Room’ With John Fogerty
Our new series, “RS Interview: Special Edition,” features in-depth conversations with notable people in entertainment, politics, and other fields. The first episode features Pete Buttigieg in conversation with Rolling Stone senior writer Stephen Rodrick.
Our new IGTV series features iconic musicians performing at their homes. Watch John Fogerty play “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and two other Creedence Clearwater Revival classics as a message of hope to the world. IN MY ROOM
The Rise of Lewis Capaldi Lewis Capaldi, the soulful Scottish singer-songwriter behind the smash hit “Someone You Loved,” is one of the Artists to Watch featured in this issue of Rolling Stone (see page 79). We’ve got even more on Capaldi on RollingStone.com, including an expanded interview about his rise to fame — plus bonus content from all our Artists to Watch.
MOVIES
Tom Hanks’ Greatest Performances We tip our hat to one of American cinema’s most beloved stars by ranking every single one of his big-screen performances — from Big, Splash, and A League of Their Own (right) to Captain Phillips, Sully, Toy Story 4, and beyond.
POLITICS
The Wisdom of Sherrod Brown The populist Ohio senator passed on running for president, but he has a few ideas on how to defeat Trump and elect Joe Biden in November. “Voters don’t see politics as left or right,” he says. “And people see politicians as ‘Whose side are you on?’ ” LIST
The 50 Greatest Rock Memoirs Our Best New Lists John Prine’s 25 Essential Songs Best Streamed Performances of the Stay-at-Home Era
Visit RollingStone.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
8 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
Best CBD Products to Help With Your Anxiety
Rob Sheffield writes about the wildest and most revealing rock & roll life stories of all time — including David Bowie’s Moonage Daydream (2002), Slash’s Slash (2008), and classics by everyone from Jay-Z to Donald Fagen to Keith Richards.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF PETE BUTTIGIEG; COURTESY OF JOHN FOGERTY; ANDRE CSILLAG/ SHUTTERSTOCK; ILPO MUSTO/SHUTTERSTOCK; GABRIELLA DEMCZUK; HOLLIE FERNANDO; COLUMBIA PICTURES
ARTIST TO WATCH
©2017 Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company. SKITTLES and all affiliated designs are trademarks of Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company or its affiliates.
®
Margo’s Family Band M A RG O P R I C E was planning on a busy spring promoting That’s How Rumors Get Started — her third and hardest-rocking album, co-produced by Sturgill Simpson. But now, the release date is pushed back until the summer, and she is spending her days at home in Nashville, “raising babies, painting, reading, drinking an entire pot of coffee a day,” says Price, pictured here this past winter with her husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey, and their daughter, Ramona, who was born last June. “It has definitely come with its challenges, but it’s bringing us closer as a family,” says Price. ”Hard times have always made my and Jeremy’s relationship stronger.” Price had been on tour non-stop since 2016, releasing two excellent country-rock albums. Ivey had just stepped out on his own, releasing his first LP, The Dream and the Dreamer, full of adventurous folk rock. “I miss performing so much,” Price says. The couple have been staging livestreams from their home, including an appearance at Willie Nelson’s virtual Luck Reunion. The event raised more than $200,000 for artists and their charities. If the world learns a lesson this year, she says, “I hope humans start to take care of the Earth. We are only visitors here. I also hope everyone can learn to be grateful for real life and learn to live in the moment. We’ve all been spending so much time on our phones, and the irony of that is now it’s become one of our only windows to the outside world.” JOSEPH HUDAK
Price and Ivey, with daughter Ramona, at their Nashville home PHOTOGRAPH BY Alysse Gafkjen
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 11
Jason Fine EDITOR
DEPUTY EDITOR MUSIC EDITOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE CONTENT DIGITAL DIRECTOR MANAGING EDITOR DEPUTY MUSIC EDITOR ENTERTAINMENT EDITORS NEWS DIRECTOR POLITICS EDITOR SENIOR EDITOR CULTURE EDITOR SENIOR MUSIC EDITORS
REVIEWS EDITOR SENIOR MUSIC BUSINESS EDITOR NEWS EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITOR SENIOR WRITERS
CHIEF FILM CRITIC CHIEF TV CRITIC STAFF WRITERS
WASHINGTON, D.C., BUREAU CHIEF RS COUNTRY EDITOR RS COUNTRY DEPUTY EDITOR DIRECTOR OF CHARTS PRODUCTS EDITOR ART DIRECTOR DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR DESIGNER DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT CHIEF RESEARCH EDITOR RESEARCH EDITORS
COPY EDITORS
DIRECTOR OF VIDEO PRODUCTION PRODUCERS
VIDEO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PRODUCER SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR ASSOCIATE SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR ASSISTANT TO JANN S. WENNER
Sean Woods Christian Hoard Joseph Hutchinson Catriona Ni Aolain Jerry Portwood Alison Weinflash Simon Vozick-Levinson David Fear Maria Fontoura Jason Newman Patrick Reis Phoebe Neidl Elisabeth Garber-Paul Patrick Doyle Brendan Klinkenberg Hank Shteamer Jon Dolan Amy X. Wang Brenna Ehrlich Suzy Exposito David Browne Tim Dickinson David Fricke Andy Greene Kory Grow Brian Hiatt Alex Morris Stephen Rodrick Jamil Smith Brittany Spanos Matt Taibbi Peter Travers Alan Sepinwall Jon Blistein Ryan Bort EJ Dickson Samantha Hissong Charles Holmes Daniel Kreps Elias Leight Angie Martoccio Ethan Millman Brandt Ranj Claire Shaffer Tessa Stuart Peter Wade Andy Kroll Joseph Hudak Jon Freeman Emily Blake Tim Chan Matthew Cooley Toby Fox Kyle Rice Sacha Lecca Griffin Lotz Joe Rodriguez Maria Wurtz Hannah Murphy Jonathan Bernstein Rick Carp Andrea Marks Chris Kobiella Jason Maxey Steven Pearl Megan McBride Christopher Cruz Reed Dunlea Daniel Halperin Kimberly Aleah Adisa Duke Elvis Metcalf Alexa Pipia Dewayne Gage Natalli Amato Susan Ward
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Matthieu Aikins, Mark Binelli, Jonathan Cott, Cameron Crowe, Anthony DeCurtis, Raoul Duke (Sports), Josh Eells, Mikal Gilmore, Jeff Goodell, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Seth Harp, Erik Hedegaard, Will Hermes, David Kushner, Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, Janet Reitman, Rob Sheffield, Paul Solotaroff, Ralph Steadman (Gardening), Neil Strauss, Touré, Jonah Weiner
Ralph J. Gleason Hunter S. Thompson
12 |
Rolling Stone
|
Gus Wenner
PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
PUBLISHER DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS OPERATIONS EAST COAST SALES
WEST COAST SALES MIDWEST SALES MARKETING
ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
LIVE EVENTS PUBLIC RELATIONS DIRECTOR PRODUCTION DIRECTOR DIRECTOR, DISTRIBUTION IMAGING SPECIALIST
Brian Szejka Jessica Grill Edward Stepankovsky Nicholas Urkonis Brendan Hoey Mitch Herskowitz Sam Forrest Kathryn Nachreiner Sabrina Phillips Sara Katzki Christopher Santorella Bridget Schelzi Hannah Lezak Liana Cervantes (Design) Annie Quinn Anna Viserto Kathleen Garcia Kelly Schwantner Kacie Collins Rebecca Bernhard Kevin Hurley Mike Petre Germany Feng
Jay Penske CHAIRMAN AND CEO
ROLLING STONE is owned and published by Penske Media Corporation.
George Grobar
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Gerry Byrne
VICE CHAIRMAN
Sarlina See
CHIEF ACCOUNTING OFFICER
Craig Perreault
EVP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Todd Greene
EVP, BUSINESS AFFAIRS AND GENERAL COUNSEL
Debashish Ghosh MANAGING DIRECTOR
Jenny Connelly
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT
Ken DelAlcazar
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE
Tom Finn
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS
Nelson Anderson
VICE PRESIDENT, CREATIVE
Joni Antonacci
VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTION OPERATIONS
Rebecca Bienstock
VICE PRESIDENT, TALENT RELATIONS
Stephen Blackwell
HEAD OF PORTFOLIO SALES
Jann S. Wenner
FOUNDER AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Gerard Brancato
VICE PRESIDENT, PMC DIGITAL ACQUISITION
Anne Doyle
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES
Mara Ginsberg
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES
Noemi Lazo
VICE PRESIDENT, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND MARKETING OPERATIONS
LOS ANGELES OFFICE
11175 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90025 310.321.5000
NEW YORK OFFICE 475 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017 212.213.1900
Young Ko
VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE
Gabriel Koen
VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY
Kevin LaBonge
VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS AND LICENSING
Brian Levine
VICE PRESIDENT, REVENUE OPERATIONS
Judith R. Margolin
VICE PRESIDENT, DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL
ROLLING STONE (ISSN 0035-791x) is published 12 times per year, which is subject to change at any time, by Penske Business Media, LLC, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to ROLLING STONE Customer Service, P.O. Box 37505, Boone, IA 50037-0505. Canadian Postmaster: Send address changes and returns to P.O. Box 63, Malton CFC, Mississauga, Ontario L4T3B5. Canada Poste publication agreement #40683192. International Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 450553. The entire contents of ROLLING STONE are copyright © 2020 by ROLLING STONE LLC, and may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission. All rights are reserved.
Julie Trinh
VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL TAX
Lauren Utecht
VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES AND CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS
Mike Ye
VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ACQUISITIONS
Christina Yeoh
VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNICAL OPERATIONS
Julie Zhu
VICE PRESIDENT, AUDIENCE MARKETING AND SUBSCRIPTIONS
Nici Catton
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT DELIVERY
Karl Walter
ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT
Gurjeet Chima
SENIOR DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL MARKETS
Eddie Ko
SENIOR DIRECTOR, ADVERTISING OPERATIONS
Andy Limpus
SENIOR DIRECTOR, TALENT ACQUISITION
Amit Sannad
SENIOR DIRECTOR, DEVELOPMENT
Constance Ejuma DIRECTOR, SEO
Laura Ongaro
EDITORIAL AND BRAND DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL
Katie Passantino
DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT 1917-1975 1937-2005
May 2020
Derek Ramsay
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER
The Killers Start Over Again After two key members stepped away, they had to reinvent themselves PHOTOGRAPH BY Chad Kirkland
| 15
The Mix
Back to Laurel Canyon ‘laurel canyon,’ a two-hour docuseries, features new interviews with everyone from David Crosby to Linda Ronstadt — but the only images of them you’ll see are vintage ones from the late Sixties and early Seventies. “It feels much more immersive,” Watch it says director Alison Ellwood, who also on EPIX made 2013’s History of the Eagles. Pho- May 31stJune 7th tographers Henry Diltz and Nurit Wilde took most of the snapshots, the best of which are shown here. “I was so lucky to be smack in the middle of all that, with a camera in my hand,” Diltz says. “It’s become a mythical place, almost like Camelot.” ANGIE MARTOCCIO
▲ OUR HOUSE Nash took this photo of Mitchell at the home they shared in 1969. “She was in the middle of recording an album,” Nash recalls. “I normally would have left her alone, [but] there’s no way I couldn’t shoot that. She looked incredibly beautiful.” ◀ NEW KID IN TOWN ▲ MY OLD MAN Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash in a limo, on their way to Big Bear Lake for a CSN photo shoot circa 1969. “After a couple of hours, they forgot I was there,” Diltz says. “That was a real moment.”
THE KILLERS
W
hen the Killers began work on their new album, Imploding the Mirage, they had virtually everything they needed: a batch of new songs, a seven-month break from the road, and a large home studio nestled away in Park City, Utah, where they could work and live without distraction. The only thing missing was their guitarist, Dave Keuning. Keuning started the band back in 2001, when he took out an ad in a Las Vegas newspaper looking for local musicians to play with. The
16 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
first song he wrote with future Killers frontman Brandon Flowers after they met up was “Mr. Brightside.” But Keuning stepped away from the road shortly after the recording of 2017’s Wonderful Wonderful, citing factors including creative frustration, and he hasn’t played with the Killers in the three years since, though they say he technically remains an official member. (Founding bassist Mark Stoermer also scaled back his involvement in the band in 2016 but continues to play some shows and studio parts.) On the road, the Killers were able to soldier on, but recording new songs turned out to be a different story. “We were trying to make it sound like the band wasn’t fractured,” says
FAST FACTS FLASHBACK
Flowers says making this album reminded him of their 2004 debut: “I felt like that 20-year-old kid.” TURN THE PAGE
”All I ever wanted was to play guitar in a successful band, but it took its toll,” Keuning said last year.
Flowers. “And trying to sound like the Killers. It was almost like we were doing this dumbeddown, mannequin version of the band.” The more collaborators they brought in to fill that void, the worse it got. They don’t want to name everyone they tried during this selfdescribed “speed dating” process, but producer Jacknife Lee was one of them. “He was trying to make it sound like there was a Dave there,” says Killers drummer Ronnie Vannucci Jr. “It felt a little dishonest.” After six months of recording, they didn’t have anything they were happy with. Then producer Shawn Everett and Jonathan Rado of psychedelic-rock duo Foxygen entered the pic-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HENRY DILTZ, 2; GRAHAM NASH
Diltz shot this photo of Steve Martin playing guitar in 1969. “He lived right up the road,” the photographer recalls. “He’s one of the first guys I saw who had actual oil paintings. That really impressed me.”
HOLD ‘EM The Byrds’ Gram Parsons (left) and Chris Hillman playing cards in Peter Tork’s kitchen. “They were in their own little bubble,” says Wilde.
▲ MONKEE BUSINESS Eric Clapton (left) and Mickey Dolenz in Cass Elliot’s backyard in 1968, in a photograph captured by Diltz. “That’s me filming Eric’s french fries,” says Dolenz, who was on the cusp of completing the second and final season of The Monkees for NBC at the time. “I was saying to Eric, ‘Move out of the way.’ ”
SUNNY SKIES James Taylor playing “Oh, Susanna” in 1969. “That’s the first moment I laid eyes on him,” Diltz says.
▲ MIDNIGHT FLYER Former Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon in 1979. “I was going to use [this shot] for an album that never got made,” Leadon says. ◀ DREAM A LITTLE DREAM
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: NURIT WILDE; HENRY DILTZ, 5
Nash hanging out with Elliot in 1966, at the peak of their respective success with the Hollies and the Mamas and the Papas. “Mama Cass loved introducing people,” says Diltz. “She was a social catalyst — the Gertrude Stein of Laurel Canyon.”
ture. “That was a big awakening for us,” says Flowers. “It made us want to course-correct.” Around the same time, producer Ariel Rechtshaid played Flowers some of the new Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride. “I realized I couldn’t continue on the path that I was on,” says Flowers. “It reminded me of the way I felt when I heard Is This It [by the Strokes]. I was inspired and jealous. For me, those two emotions combined really light a fire under me.” The Killers decided to throw out nearly everything they had done in Utah and start over in Los Angeles and in their own studio in Las Vegas. Everett and Rado joined the effort full time, and songs started coming quickly, with the
“We were trying to make it sound like the band wasn’t fractured. And trying to sound like the Killers.”
BEFORE THE GOLD RUSH Neil Young (left) and CSNY drummer Dallas Taylor. “They would hang out all day,” Diltz remembers. “Swimming in the pool, playing music, smoking doobies.”
kind of roaring energy and catchy hooks that recall the band’s early classics. Other key assists came from Lindsey Buckingham (“He brought [lead single ‘Caution’] from 2D to 3D with his guitar playing,” says Vannucci), Weyes Blood, K.D. Lang, the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, and others. “The charm about being in L.A. is that you’re so close to everybody,” adds Vannucci. “They’re just a phone call away.” While the Killers haven’t landed a major radio hit since 2008’s “Human,” they’ve spent the intervening years becoming one of the most popular touring rock bands in the world, headlining stadiums in Europe and packing arenas across America. This year, venue closures will
make that difficult, but they’re looking forward to getting back on the road whenever they can. “It’s frustrating,” says Flowers. “But there’s just more important stuff going on right now. Those stadiums are going to still be there in 2021.” As for Keuning, who released a solo album last year, both Flowers and Vanucci say the door is open if he ever feels like getting back to work with them. “I don’t want to spill too much dirty laundry, but it’s been years since he’s really been a productive part of this band,” says the drummer. “And it sucks. We have to get used to it, and hopefully we’ll figure out a way forward. He can come back if that’s what he wants. This is all his decision.” ANDY GREENE May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 17
©2020 Vans, Inc.
The Mix
RECOMMENDS
4
OUR TOP POPCULTURE PICKS OF THE MONTH
3
ASK
CROZ Real-life advice from a guy who’s seen, done, and survived just about everything
8
How do you manage to keep such a positive and upbeat attitude in the face of illnesses over the years? I have had several serious health diagnoses, and there are days I just feel so less than I did five years ago, mentally and physically. How do you address these feelings? — Toni Leedy, NC
1. ‘If It Bleeds’ Steven King’s latest novella collection includes a take on his classic theme of technology as nightmare, while the title story reprises a fan favorite, Mr. Mercedes’ Holly Gibney.
4. @diplo
PODCAST SERIES
2. ‘Son of a Hitman’
Woody Harrelson has never said much publicly about his dad, convicted hitman Charles Harrelson. But in this new podcast, Harrelson’s brother Brett helps journalist Jason Cavanagh investigate Charles’ life — including a possible connection to the JFK assassination. BIOGRAPHY
3. ‘Warhol’ In his brilliantly granular, 1,000-page hagiography, art critic Blake Gopnik traces how Andy Warhol established the hydrantflow of pop brandbuilding. Social media blitzing, cross-platform cameos, media empires — he created the blueprint.
20 |
Rolling Stone
INSTAGRAM LIVE CHANNEL
|
The DJ-producer offers a balm for anyone missing the club: regularly scheduled sets livestreamed from his home. TV SHOW
5. ‘Homecoming’
Director Sam Esmail and star Julia Roberts aren’t in for Season Two, but the tension and spookiness remain. Janelle Monáe is Roberts’ unimpeachable replacement, playing a woman who wakes up with no memory. MOVIE
6. ‘Bull’ A white Texas teen breaks into the home of her neighbor, a black middleaged former bull rider, and an unlikely friendship develops. Understated
May 2020
7
and unsentimental, writerdirector Annie Silverstein’s feature debut is full of empathy, authenticity, and bruised humanity.
PODCAST EPISODE
9. “The Case of the Missing Hit”
DOCUMENTARY
7. ‘Beastie Boys Story’
When a filmmaker’s quest to track down a halfremembered Nineties hit turned into an obsession, the hosts of the Reply All podcast went to extreme lengths to help — from trying to record it from memory to grilling the editors of Rolling Stone. It’s a fascinating popculture mystery.
For those who couldn’t catch Mike D and Ad Rock’s multimedia book tour last year, Spike Jonze has your back. Their longtime collaborator directs this reflective doc, in which they look back on their early bad-boy era and pay tribute to the late Adam Yauch.
WORKOUT VIDEO
10. ‘Physical’
ALBUM
8. ‘Saint Cloud’ On the fourth Waxahatchee album, Katie Crutchfield trades indie-rock neurosis for rootsy revelations. Her sun-kissed observations on tough subjects like mortality and sobriety have never been sharper.
For reviews, premieres, and more, go to Rolling Stone.com/ music
Leaning fully into the disco vibe of her new LP, Future Nostalgia, Dua Lipa dropped a Jane Fondaesque Eighties workout video for the Olivia Newton-John homage “Physical.” Come for the twerkography, stay for the neon bodysuits.
I was overseas a few months back, on business, and went into a massage parlor on my final night. Hand to heart, I just wanted a standard massage, but the woman grabbed me down below at the end, and shamefully I didn’t stop her. Should I tell my wife? What’s the right thing to do here? Can’t there be some secrets in a marriage? —Richie, WI No. Zero. Doesn’t work like that. Look, you can’t love somebody if you don’t trust them. Also, I’m not really buying that it was an accident and you didn’t really want that because you could’ve stopped any time you wanted. But you have to talk about it. It’ll bug you, and your partner will know you’re holding something back. They always do. GOT A QUESTION FOR CROZ? Email AskCroz@ Rollingstone.com
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: @KURSZA; MOLLY MATALON; JEIROH; MICHAEL CHILDERS; APPLE
10
BOOK
Physical stuff is really tough. You have to find some core of strength within yourself to hold on to when you’re dealing with it. You have to believe that you can survive it. I did 72 days in UCLA hospital. I was dying. It was insanely difficult. You’ve got to find a positive core in yourself, otherwise you’re just going to be adrift.
On Newsstands Now Wherever Magazines Are Sold
The Mix
The Birdman of Alcatraz
“Three Bums Comin’ All Dressed in Rags”
Convicted murderer Robert Stroud became known as the Birdman of Alcatraz after raising and selling birds in prison. He died November 21st, 1963 — a day before JFK’s assassination. Dylan may have seen fellow March on Washington attendee Burt Lancaster play Stroud in a 1962 movie.
For decades, conspiracy buffs have fixated on three supposedly homeless men arrested near the JFK assassination. Photographs show them in ragged clothes, but they are wearing fancy, polished shoes, leaving some to think they weren’t quite what they seemed.
BEHIND THE SONG
After he was apprehended by the police, Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he was an innocent “patsy.” Patsy Cline (whose repertoire includes two songs Dylan has covered) died earlier in 1963, leading Dylan to spin the phrase “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline” in “Murder Most Foul.”
By ANDY GREENE in late March with “Murder Most Foul,” his first original song in eight years. Centering on the assassination of JFK, the 17-minute epic is a “We Didn’t Start the Fire”–style journey through American history, as well as a meditation on the power of music to get us through tragedy, starting with the Beatles in 1964. Few, if any, songs have ever packed in so many specific historical references. Here’s a look at some of the most surprising ones. BOB DYLAN SURPRISED THE WORLD
Warren Zevon’s “Desperados” “Play it for Carl Wilson, too,” Dylan sings. “Looking far, far away down Gower Avenue.” He’s referring to Zevon’s 1976 classic “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which features Beach Boy Carl Wilson on harmony vocals. Dylan is a huge Zevon fan, covering many of his songs live.
The Animals’ 1965 Hit
Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young’’
Gerry and the Pacemakers
“Down in the Boondocks”
Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’
One of the many songs Dylan name-checks is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” a 1964 Nina Simone tune that the Animals turned into a rock classic the following year. Shortly after, Animals keyboardist Alan Price palled around with Dylan during his Dont Look Back U.K. tour.
At one point in “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan asks to hear this 1977 hit. Kennedy was not just the youngest person ever elected president, at age 43, but he also died at a younger age, 46, than any president before or since. Joel covered Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” in 1997.
“Ferry ’cross the Mersey and go for the throat,” Dylan sings, calling out a 1965 hit by Gerry and the Pacemakers, a Liverpool band who were early rivals of the Beatles. Dylan played “Ferry Cross the Mersey” on his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, in 2008.
“Play ‘Down in the Boondocks’ for Terry Malloy,” Dylan sings. He’s referencing both Marlon Brando’s dockworker character in On the Waterfront and “Down in the Boondocks,” a 1965 hit by Billy Joe Royal (above). It was written by Joe South, who played guitar and bass on Blonde on Blonde.
The title “Murder Most Foul” comes straight from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, when he lets the Danish prince know that his death was not an accident. Shakespeare references in Dylan songs go back to “Desolation Row” (“Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window”).
24 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTYIMAGES; BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES, 2; “DALLAS MORNING NEWS”; © CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES; “THE NEW YORK TIMES”; GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; RICHARD E. AARON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES; “SUNDAY MIRROR”/MIRRORPIX/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; MOVIESTORE/SHUTTERSTOCK
“Just a Patsy Like Patsy Cline”
Unpacking Dylan’s Epic Murder Ballad
CHARTS THE BIGGEST ARTISTS, ALBUMS, AND SONGS OF TODAY
Streaming Plummets Amid Lockdown In March, as the music business began to face down a bleak and uncertain future, many looked to streaming as a lifeline — assuming it would grow as people spent more time at home. By April, that hadn’t happened; in fact, the opposite was true. Streams fell 8.7 percent from March 12th through April 2nd. (Physical album sales were down more than 30 percent.) Aurélien Hérault, chief data and research officer for the French streaming service Deezer, chalks it up to a disruption of routine. “Prior to a lockdown, many of us were used
Total streams in the U.S. 25B
20B 3/13/20
Streams drop nearly 8 percent as social distancing begins. 15B 1/3/20
1/24/20
2/14/20
3/6/20
3/27/20
to streaming music on the go during our morning commute,” he says. Latin, hip-hop, and pop tumbled the furthest, according to Alpha Data. But there is reason to think streaming will rise, even as people stay home. “The initial shock made people listen to live radio in the first days of the lockdown, and music was deprioritized,” Hérault says. “After a week and a half, users started to stream more music and podcasts. . . . It’s encouraging to see people adapting to life at home and adopting new listening behaviors.” EMILY BLAKE
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: EARL GIBSON III/WIREIMAGE; RMV/SHUTTERSTOCK; MATT BARON/ SHUTTERSTOCK, 2; COOPER NEILL/GETTY IMAGES; CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES; GREGORY PACE/ SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN SALANGSANG/SHUTTERSTOCK; EARL GIBSON III/SHUTTERSTOCK; RICHARD SHOTWELL/INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
March’s Top Artists STREAMS
1
Lil Uzi Vert
1.03B
2
The Weeknd
507.M
3
Post Malone
327.9M
4
YoungBoy Never Broke Again
5
Lil Baby
6
Jhené Aiko
7
Drake
323.8M
317.7M
308.1M
Uzi’s Big Comeback Lil Uzi Vert fans have been waiting for the Philadelphia rapper’s second album for nearly three years. And on March 6th, Eternal Atake arrived with the velocity of a NASA launch, topping the RS 100. Thanks to a deluxe version featuring an additional 14 tracks, the album has racked up nearly 1 billion on-demand streams to date.
Weeknd’s Solitary Soundtrack If there was a pop album meant to be released during social distancing, it might be After Hours. The Weeknd’s fourth studio album, which starts with “Alone Again” and gets more solitary from there, is his most successful debut yet, moving almost 200,000 more units in its first week than its predecessor, 2016’s Starboy. AUDIO STREAMS 36%
SONG SALES 1%
460K
ALBUM SALES 63%
300.3M Jhené Aiko Leans On Friends
LIL UZI
has a big lead on this month’s chart.
8
Roddy Ricch
268.1M
9
Billie Eilish
235.5M
10
Eminem
233.9M
Aiko’s Chilombo is proof that there’s strength in numbers. The pop star’s third studio album is stacked with features from Nas, Future, Big Sean, and others. It debuted at Number Two on the RS 200 with nearly 150,000 units. “B.S.,” a team-up with H.E.R., has been the album’s runaway hit, peaking at Number 10 on the RS 100.
This list ranks the top artists from March 6th through April 2nd, 2020. The Rolling Stone Artists 500 chart ranks artists by on-demand audio streams. For more on RS Charts, head to rollingstone.com/charts.
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 25
A
licia Keys’ new book, More Myself, isn’t your typical celebrity autobiography. Keys charts her path from growing up in Hell’s Kitchen to winning 15 Grammys (and hosting the show twice), but she also calls in famous friends for help: Bono, Oprah, Jay-Z, and husband Swizz Beats each open up chapters with their favorite memories of the singer. Keys says the book is a testament to years of working to take down the “armor” she’s spent a lifetime keeping up. “I’m more open than I’ve ever been,” she says. “Allowing yourself to be who you are is a much more comfortable place to exist in.” Keys, whose next album, Alicia, is due out later this year, talked to us as she quarantined with her family at home in New York. How have you and your family been handling being stuck at home? We actually are pleasantly surprised that we’re doing all right with each other. We love a good Monopoly game. We’ve been cooking together. We also do a little run or a little workout together in some capacity. We’re trying to create a schedule so we can keep up a normal energy to some degree. But it is definitely strange. What music has been comforting for you these days? I love classics: Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill. There’s one artist that I’m super loving named Chika. DJ Tony Touch is somebody that I’ll play a lot if he’ll do a radio show, and just the energy feels really good. I also love meditative music if I’m feeling a little more down or just a little bit more anxious. My husband and Timbaland have been putting on these “Verzuz” battles on Instagram [where each producer plays snippets of their hits and an online audience decides the winner] that I think have been getting a lot of people through. Do you think you’re going to get in on the “Verzuz” action? You never know. I might be up in there. I’ve heard
26 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
Q&A
Alicia Keys On staying at home with family, hosting the Grammys after Kobe died, and what happens when Bono misses a deadline By BRITTANY SPANOS people are requesting me and John Legend, piano to piano. What made you want to have friends like Michelle Obama and Jay-Z contribute to your book? There’s just something really powerful about seeing it from other different vantage points. Those are pretty busy people. Who had the most trouble making deadline? Maybe Bono. He wrote to me one day: He’s like, “Alicia,
I forgot to tell an adult that I had to turn this in, and now no one’s been able to hold me to task. I forgot.” He’s so amazing, and he’s such a brother. You have so many of these wonderful stories in the book about encountering your heroes. I love the one about Prince. I had to get his permission to [cover] “How Come You Don’t Call Me Anymore” on Songs in A Minor. I had to call him, which is literally one of
the scariest things I ever did in my life, trying to pick up the phone knowing that you had to convince your favorite person on the planet, who often says no to his compositions being redone. But he was so gracious. He invited me to Paisley Park. He said, “Why don’t you come play the song for me?” So I went to freezingcold Minneapolis. Walking those halls and seeing all those beautiful memorabilia, just all of these incredi-
ble moments in his life, and these pianos that were engraved, and he had candles and doves and the outfits from Purple Rain. My jaw was on the floor the entire time. And then he told me that I couldn’t curse, which is really hard for me because I love to curse. There’s a great story about how “Empire State of Mind” almost didn’t happen because Jay-Z couldn’t get ahold of you. How different would your career have been if that song hadn’t happened? Oh, my gosh. It was such a pivotal point in my musical career, and his too. To this day he talks about how in awe he is that the biggest song that he’s ever had is about our hometown. It would have been a shame if that didn’t happen. In January, you hosted the Grammy Awards for the second time. Do you think that you’ll host again, next year? I don’t know how the whole Grammy thing is going to pan out. It’s definitely been a great two years, I have to say, even with the deep shadow of Kobe and Gigi Bryant and all the other people that were on the helicopter with them passing away [just before this year’s ceremony]. I was grateful that I could be a part of creating some type of calm for all of us because that was such a shock, and it was literally just hours before the show. We are so close to our mortality. Anybody at any moment — you don’t know when the time will come. Your single “Underdog” has been getting a lot of attention lately, especially after you dedicated it to medical professionals on the livestreamed Concert for America in March. What inspired you to do that? Seeing the first responders and the medical professionals and the unsung heroes who are out there trying to care for people who are suffering is just incredible. I actually feel a great sense of hope from everybody connecting and feeling an empathy for each other right now.
COURTESY OF ALICIA KEYS
The Mix
The Mix
[
B I L L W I T H E R S , 1 9 3 8 -2 0 2 0
]
The People’s Soul Man One of Withers’ biggest fans pays tribute to the fearlessly honest singer, who died of heart failure on March 30th By AHMIR “QUESTLOVE” THOMPSON
B
ill Withers was my first true idol. His debut album, Just As I Am, came out in May 1971, four months after I was born. When I first heard his songs, either on the radio or on my dad’s records, I knew that I was hearing something different. His music and his vocals were as down-to-earth as the earth itself. Too often, black artists get classified as otherworldly talents (Michael Jackson, Prince) or gritty, up-fromthe-streets hustlers who are barely overcoming animal instincts (too many to name). Withers was something else: a black everyman, a superb, sensitive, soulful singer-songwriter who understood, and was able to communicate, the life that most of us live. He wrote about love, about loneliness, about anger, about sadness, about humor — all with fearless emotional directness. That deep authenticity felt real to me because it was. Withers had been born poor in a coal-mining town in West Virginia, suffered from a severe stutter, lost his father at 13, enlisted in the Navy at 17, and then worked as an airplane mechanic as he tried to break into the music business. He eventually got a demo to Clarence Avant at Sussex Records in Los Angeles, but even after he was signed — even after he was recording — Withers kept his day job. The cover of his first album had a picture of him holding his actual lunch pail. That was everything to me. He went on to record three more albums for Sussex, and five more after switching to Columbia Records. When people talk about the singer-songwriter era, they usually mean white acts, but that’s exactly what Withers was doing: singing and songwriting. So, by all means, go for the big hits — early songs like “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean On Me,” and “Use Me,” and the massive late-period hit “Just the Two of Us,” a 1980 duet with Grover Washington Jr. But don’t sleep on the rest of the songs: “Grandma’s Hands,” “Who Is He (And What Is He to You)?,” “I Wish You Well,” “The Same Love That Made Me Laugh.” For that matter, don’t stop at the songs. The live version of “Grandma’s Hands” has a two-and-a-half-minute spoken intro about his own grandmother and church music. I memorized it word for word. The book on Bill is that his first four albums are the canon, and that the jump to Columbia did him no favors. It’s true that the Sussex albums are where Withers made his reputation and why he’s kept it. +’Justments is especially amazing, a breakup record from the end of his brief marriage to the actress Denise Nicholas that precedes Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear by four years. At Columbia, many believed, the down-to-earth presentation of his trademark sound was compromised. Bill never used any background vocals or horns, and most sadly, his acoustic guitar was traded in for L.A. sheen (now, mind you, he got the best supporting cast around, cats like Ray Parker Jr., Harvey Mason, Wah Wah Watson). It took some ’justments to get used to this sonic sheen. But I love the Columbia records too. I love Naked & Warm, from 1976, which Columbia hated. The opening track, “Close to Me,” still makes all of my playlist mixtapes. I love Menagerie, from 1977, which has “Lovely Day,” an anthem of uplift where Withers takes off, holding a note for more than 18 seconds (quite possibly the longest ever for a Top 40 song). Even while performing a superhuman feat, he somehow still comes off as an everyman. The only album I wasn’t fully
28 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
sold on at the time was Watching You Watching Me, from 1985, although there’s still something about it. The Eighties, yacht-rock feel of the record, with all its Yamaha-synth trappings, reminds me of my dad, who was also a massive Withers fan. It was probably the last album he and I could bond over, since hip-hop was luring me away from the music he had led me to discover. (That’s an irony, since hip-hop kept extracting the DNA of songs like “Use Me” and “Kissing My Love” to give life to its culture.) For his part, Withers didn’t seem too enamored with that record. In the wake of it, he walked away from the business — for good. Nearly every other artist kept working, or took time off but staged a comeback. Not Bill. When J Dilla died in 2006, I wasn’t interested in producing anymore, except for the Roots, but to keep my chops, I started bucket-listing projects that I would still want to take on. Bill Withers was my first choice. Word came back that Withers was reluctant. I figured he might be. I decided to start with Al Green, who had won Grammys in gospel and pop, but never in soul. If I got Al a soul Grammy, Bill would follow, right? When Al got two soul Grammys for the record we worked on, Lay It Down, I reached out to Bill. “Nah,” he said. “I’m good.” Next, I went for Booker T. Jones, who had produced Bill’s debut in 1971. If I get Booker a Grammy, I thought, how could Bill possibly say no? The record we made with Booker, The Road From Memphis, won a Grammy. “Nah,” Bill said. “I’m good.” My last-ditch attempt was to cover Bill’s “I Can’t Write Left-Handed,” a gripping Vietnam-era protest song from the Carnegie Hall album. The Roots recorded it with John Legend for Wake Up! in 2010, replacing Bill’s original spoken-word intro with a new one by John that reminded people that since war was always with us, songs like “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” should always be with us too. That brought Bill to us, finally. The basketball legend Bill Russell, who was one of Withers’ close friends, was in a Starbucks and heard our song. “Who is this?” he said. They told him. Then Bill Russell called Bill Withers and said, “You have to hear this version. It’s ferocious.” Bill’s daughter got him a copy, and he wrote one of the most LEAN ON HIM Withers in beautiful emails I have ever read, saying how ap1974. The singer-songwriter preciative he was that we had revisited the song. had a handful of huge hits, John mentioned that we were playing in Los Anincluding “Lean On Me,” geles and asked him if he would come see our but his catalog runs deep. show. He did. He came backstage afterward. At the time, he was 71 years old, but he looked late-fifties, 60 at most. There was no way you could have convinced me that he wasn’t going to live to be 100. He warmed up to us, and then warmed us up with stories. When the moment was right, I eased my pitch to him. I told him how long he had been important to me, and how I could be his new James Gadson (the legendary session drummer who worked with him through the early Seventies). I wrapped up. Withers looked at me. I thought I saw a “yes” in his eyes. He was silent for a good 17 seconds, almost as long as that note in “Lovely Day.” “No,” he said. In a strange way, getting turned down by Bill Withers was almost as rewarding as any other experience. He was true to himself to the end, a hero and an inspiration. I will miss him, and I know that his music will keep me company when I do.
ED CARAEFF/GETTY IMAGES
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 29
The Mix
[
J O H N P R I N E , 1 9 4 6 -2 0 2 0
]
Poet of Real Life He was a down-to-earth genius who wrote with humor and kindness, and inspired everyone from Dylan to Kacey Musgraves By PATRICK DOYLE
O
n John Prine’s final tour, he played everywhere from Radio City Music Hall to Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where his parents are from. But as he planned the itinerary for the last leg, there was one place he knew he still needed to hit: Paris. The city had never seemed to care for Prine. His down-toearth folk songs had spread to Ireland, England, and even Scandinavia, but a promoter told his touring manager Mitchell Drosin that there was no point in booking France; he’d lose money if he brought his band. “John said, ‘I don’t give a shit. I want to play Paris and stay at the George V,’ which is one of the most expensive hotels in the world,” says Drosin. Drosin booked a show for February 13th at Paris’ 500-person Café de La Danse, much smaller than other venues on the tour. Prine cared about Paris in ways that even Fiona, his wife and manager, couldn’t fully explain. “He always loved that [Parisians] treated him with disdain, you know?” she says. “He just loved the people and the food and the idea he couldn’t understand a word they were saying. He didn’t have much of an ego.” At the show, Prine was in serious pain due to a collapsed hip, forcing him to sit in a chair onstage, something he never did. But he delivered. Fiona had seen hundreds of John’s shows since they met in 1988, but this one was special. The energy from the sold-out crowd overwhelmed him. He raised his hands at one point: “Viva la France!” he said. “He was so proud that he did that show, and it was sold out and they loved him,” Fiona says. “It felt like a victory lap.” The entire tour had felt like a victory lap, in fact. His most recent album, 2018’s The Tree of Forgiveness, was Prine’s first LP of new material in 13 years, proving that even in his seventies he could write just as deeply as ever. For a half-century, Prine had covered subjects few others touched — the loneliness of the elderly, serial murders, a monkey lost in space — in songs that mixed folksy simplicity with sharp storytelling and a touch of the surreal. Artists like Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt
30 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
had long been huge fans. But in the 2010s, Prine had become something of a national treasure. His songs had become a key reference point for a new generation of songwriters. Dan Auerbach, Jason Isbell, and Amanda Shires lost money on the road so they could open for him. Kacey Musgraves wrote a song where she fantasized about smoking a joint with him. Prine won lifetime achievement awards from the Grammys and the Americana Music Association. (“I’m getting Americana life achievement awards, and I never knew what Americana was,” he said. “But let ’em call me what they want, as long as they call me.”) He was excited to keep it going. By the time he went to Europe this year, he had written a half-dozen songs for his next album, and started work on an autobiography. After the Paris show, Prine splurged on a French cheese platter (he usually opted for $12 deli trays). His hip pain was so bad that he decided to cancel the rest of the tour, but before returning home, he and Fiona hung out in Paris for a AMERICAN TREASURE few more days. They ordered John Prine in 2016. “Let ‘em room service every day, drank call me what they want,” expensive wine, watched he said around that time, movies like Joker. “I just felt “as long as they call me.” really tender towards him,” Fiona says. Prine had had a series of health problems, dating back to the cancer he beat in the late Nineties. “Part of me knew that maybe I wasn’t going to have a whole lot of time left,” Fiona says. “But I believed we’d have a couple of more years.” Prine and Fiona flew back to their home in Nashville, where he had successful emergency surgery on his hip. But in the days that followed, he developed a cough, which he assumed was related to his COPD. A doctor tested him and Fiona for COVID-19. A couple of days later, they stood in their home, the doctor on speakerphone, listening to the results. John’s result was “indeterminate”; Fiona’s was positive. Shocked, she self-quarantined, leaving the house for a few days and enduring a fairly mild case, all the time worrying about John.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY David McClister
The Mix
Fiona returned home after getting cleared by the Health Department. Prine was subdued. He stayed glued to the news; he had a habit of taping all three network broadcasts each night. “He felt sorry for America,” Fiona says. “He’d tell me about how when he was a kid, nobody cared whether you’re a Democrat or Republican. It broke his heart when the country became this divided, and now, the political distancing was a physical distancing.” Fiona and John needed to stay separated, so she would talk to him from the top of the stairs. “He would tell me, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fine.’ Then one day when I asked him how he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just exhausted. I can’t stay awake.’” She took him to a hospital, where his condition worsened. He died 12 days later due to complications from the virus. The outpouring of love and grief around the world was huge and effusive. “John and I were ‘New Dylans’ together in the early Seventies,” said Bruce Springsteen. “He was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. He wrote music of towering compassion with an almost unheard-of precision and creativity when it came to observing the fine details of ordinary lives. He was a writer of great humor, funny, with wry sensitivity. It has marked him as a complete original.”
32 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
I
n interviews, Prine gave the impression that his success was dumb luck — bringing it all back to the moment when Paul Anka and Kris Kristofferson walked into an empty Chicago club in 1971 and saw him play, which led quickly to a record deal. But deep down, Fiona says, “He knew that all his songs were good songs, because they came from a place of sincerity. You know, divinely inspired. He had no doubt that he had a gift. And he respected it — even though he spent so many years, and so much of his career in the shadows.” Prine was born in 1946, in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. His father, Bill, was a tool and die maker, an ardent Roosevelt Democrat and president of the local steelworkers union. Bill considered the family’s true home Muhlenberg County, the coal-mining town where Prine’s parents grew up before moving north so that Bill could find work. Every summer, they would drive there for huge family reunions. The region gave birth to bluegrass heroes like Bill and Charlie Monroe and the Everly Brothers. When his parents’ hometown was strip-mined, he wrote a classic song about it: “Paradise,” which ended up on his first album. Prine was a poor student with a restless imagination. He said his grades were “too ugly” for college. After graduating high
school in 1964, he took the advice of his oldest brother, Dave, and became a mailman. The pay was good, and so were the benefits. That life was upended when he was drafted into the Army in late 1966, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. But instead of being sent to Vietnam, Prine ended up in Stuttgart, West Germany, where he worked as a mechanical engineer. Prine played down his military service, describing his contribution as “drinking beer and pretending to fix trucks.” After the war, Prine returned to his mail route, which, it turned out, was great for writing songs. Wandering the Chicago suburbs, he wrote classics like “Donald and Lydia,” about two people who “made love from 10 miles away,” and “Sam Stone,” about a veteran who comes home from war and gets addicted to morphine. “A lot of stuff I was writing about were things I saw and felt and didn’t hear them in songs,” he said. “It was about certain silent things that people didn’t talk about.” Prine became an immediate sensation on the Chicago folk scene. Two days before his 24th birthday, he was performing at Chicago’s Fifth Peg when the Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert walked in. Ebert’s headline, “Singing Mailman Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words” led to sold-out rooms. Soon after that, the unlikely duo of
KEN REGAN/CAMERA 5
DYLAN AND THE NEW DYLANS Springsteen, his girlfriend Karen Darvin, Prine, and Dylan (from left) backstage during Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan said in 2009. “Midwestern mind-trips to the Nth degree.”
CLARENCE WILLIAMS/”LOS ANGELES TIMES”/GETTY IMAGES
Kris Kristofferson and Paul Anka dropped by to see Prine play at Chicago’s Earl of Old Town. Kristofferson would compare it to “stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene.” Kristofferson invited Prine onstage at New York’s Bitter End. The next day, Atlantic Records President Jerry Wexler offered Prine a $25,000 deal with the label. “It was like a Cinderella sort of thing,” Prine said. With Anka serving as his manager, Prine cut the majority of his self-titled album at American Sound in Memphis, with the studio’s house band, the Memphis Boys, famed for their work with Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, and others. (Prine was nervous: “As soon as I finished the last note of every song I wanted to run out the door.”) The album barely dented the charts, but it’s now a touchstone for everyone from Bonnie Raitt to Steve Earle. Raitt remembers first hearing “Angel From Montgomery,” about a housewife trapped in a dreary marriage. Raitt’s version in 1974 made it a hit. “The fact this very young man could inhabit this middle-aged woman,” she says, “and make it so real and so cinematic, it just touched me so deeply.” Prine found a home in Nashville in 1977, when Cowboy Jack Clement invited him there to make a rockabilly album. “Cowboy’s motto was, ‘If we’re not having fun, we’re in the wrong business,’ ” Prine said. “We were high as dogs and playing some really good stuff.” They had so much fun that they never finished the album, but Prine fell in love with Nashville anyway. In 1981, Prine decided to start his own label, Oh Boy Records, with his manager Al Bunetta. They sold his 1984 album, Aimless Love, via mail-order, with fans sending in checks. “He created the job I have,” said Americana songwriter Todd Snider, who released his early albums on Oh Boy. “Especially when he went to his own label, and started doing it with his own family and team. Before him, there was nothing for someone like Jason Isbell to aspire to, besides maybe Springsteen.” Sony offered to buy Oh Boy, but Prine turned them down. He was comfortable with obscurity: “People thought I was their private family thing. They’d play me on car trips, and the kids, they’d learn my songs and they’d sing along in the car. It’s kind of like the way that original folk music was learned and passed on.” In 1988, Prine was playing a show in Dublin, when he met Fiona. “There was a little bit of a danger about him, but he was gentle,” she says. “That was my first impression of John, just how gentle he was.” Fiona and her son Jody soon moved to Nashville. At 48, Prine had been married twice. “I was a high risk,” he later said. He became a father for the first time when their son Jack was born. Tommy followed the next year, and Prine adopted Jody. “All of a sudden I felt normal with a capital ‘N,’ ” he said. “I didn’t
realize it, but it was something I was striving for after years and years of being a total daydreamer.” In 1996, Prine noticed a lump on his neck. He’d thought it was a blood vessel; it was actually stage-4 neck cancer. He would recover, but when surgeons removed a tumor, they took a chunk of Prine’s neck with it. When a doctor told Prine he may never be able to sing again, Prine replied, “Have you ever heard me sing?” Fiona got used to Prine’s rhythms. He’d get going around noon, then go eat at a meat-and-three, like Arnold’s, which was a favorite. When she was working around the house, she’d hear him in his den, reciting dialogue to old movies in real time. “John’s biggest thrill every day was when we figured out what we were having for dinner,” she says. Tom Hanks, a huge fan, heard that Prine wrote his songs on a typewriter, so the actor sent him one. “He was excited like a little kid, that his favorite movie star had sent him a gift in the mail,” Fiona says. “He was blown away.” While their marriage “was by no means perfect, we really knew each other on a really deep, cellular level,” she says. “There were things he found hard to articulate in conversations, things that scared him, maybe things he regretted. But he found a way to say it in his songs.” Fiona took over Oh Boy after the death of Prine’s manager and convinced John to write new songs. He came up with Tree of Forgiveness, stringing together the songs in a week. Because Fiona had had coronavirus and was likely immune, doctors allowed her to sit with John in the ICU at Vanderbilt hospital. “I talked to him for 14, 15 hours a day and played music, played him other people doing his songs, played messages from all the kids and from his brothers and my family. I told him things that I wanted to tell him. He couldn’t communicate with me, but I just assumed that he could hear me.” Half of Prine’s ashes will be buried in Chicago; the other half will be spread in the Green River in Paradise, Kentucky, just like he asked for in “Paradise.” Because of the COVID-19 crisis, the family can’t have a public funeral. “This weekend,” Fiona says, “I’m going to wash all of his Cadillacs, park them all in the driveway. I would never let him do that.” The last song on Prine’s last album is “When I Get to Heaven.” He sings about checking into a “swell hotel” and opening a bar called the Tree of Forgiveness, where he’ll hang out with his family, drink and smoke, and even invite “a few choice critics.” “It came as the biggest surprise when I learned about how deep and yet uncomplicated John’s faith was in God and the afterlife,” Fiona says. “We always talked about how God pops up in so many of his songs. But he really did believe with no doubt that he would die and he would be in heaven.”
[ HAL WILLNER, 1956–2020 ]
Pop Music’s Visionary Matchmaker
I
n the mid-2000s, Lucinda Williams arrived at an L.A. studio to work with Hal Willner on one of the veteran music producer’s eccentric projects — in this case, a collection of pirate songs and sea chanteys. To her surprise, in walked another contributor, Sting. “Hal had this black book of contact information for everyone — musicians, actors, comedians,” Williams says. “All he had to do was call somebody, and they’d say, ‘No problem.’ People loved Hal — they were drawn to him. It was about the joy he found in what he did.” Willner — who died on April 7th at age 64 of symptoms consistent with the coronavirus — was a champion of the odd, experimental, and obscure. After working his way into the music business in the Seventies, he produced albums by Marianne Faithfull and his close friend Lou Reed. (Metallica, who worked with Willner and Reed on the 2011 album Lulu, call him “a truly inspirational collaborator.”) In 1980, Willner was hired to select the background music for sketches on Saturday Night Live, a job he held for decades. He will probably be best remembered for a series of lovably offbeat tribute albums that showcased his mix-and-match creativity: The 1988 Disney-themed LP Stay Awake included Tom Waits, Aaron Neville, Bonnie Raitt, the Replacements, and Sun Ra; a 1992 collection honoring Charles Mingus featured Keith Richards, Chuck D, and Dr. John. At the time of his death, Willner was wrapping up a set of Marc Bolan and T. Rex covers by Williams, Joan Jett, Nick Cave, Kesha, and others. “I always looked forward to hearing the latest flight of his unbounded imagination,” says Sting, who worked on several Willner projects, “to marvel at his courage, his eclectic bravado, and his ability not to care about what is or isn’t ‘hip.’ And of course, that’s the essence of ‘hip.’ ” DAVID BROWNE
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 33
The Mix
Schlesinger in 1997
[
A DA M S C H L E S I N G E R , 1 9 6 7-2 0 2 0
]
A Life of Melody and Mischief From Fountains of Wayne to ‘That Thing You Do’ and ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ Schlesinger wrote songs with wry humor and lots of heart
W
hen adam schlesinger developed symptoms of the coronavirus in midMarch, his friends thought he would pull through. A healthy 52-yearold, he’d been blessed all his life with both talent and luck. He was the most boundlessly energetic person any of them knew, with a career unlike any other indie songwriter’s — playing in multiple acclaimed bands and writing songs for movies, TV, and Broadway, among countless other projects. “Like a lot of workaholics, he kept a million things going at once, and was incredibly restless just sitting around,” says Chris Collingwood, the lead singer of Schlesinger’s best-known band, Fountains of Wayne. “He couldn’t really sit in the sun doing nothing, or read a book, or go to a movie theater, because it felt like wasted time.” In the rare moments when he wasn’t working, Schlesinger was the funniest person at any party he walked into. “He was a
34 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
best friend to everybody,” says Steven M. Gold, who helped produce the more than 150 songs that Schlesinger wrote for the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, in styles from show tunes to hip-hop. “People felt flattered when they got a text from Adam saying, ‘Let’s go to dinner.’ ” But on April 1st, the songwriter, producer, and musician behind some of the most heartfelt, hilarious songs of the past 25 years died of complications from COVID19 at a hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. “He was a One-der,” Tom Hanks wrote, referencing the fictional band that Schlesinger’s songwriting made so real in 1996’s That Thing You Do! “Terribly sad today.” adam lyons schlesinger was born on Halloween 1967 into a family of classical and jazz lovers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His mother, Bobbi Schlesinger, recalls learning about the Beatles from her young son: “He used to walk around our apart-
ment when he was three, singing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.’ That was Adam.” When he was five, the family moved to Montclair, New Jersey. Adam thrived there, taking a class on the Poetry of Rock in middle school and soaking up everything from Billy Joel and the Police to Run-DMC. “There was always some kind of garage band in our cellar,” his mother says. In the fall of 1985, Schlesinger arrived in western Massachusetts to start his freshman year at Williams College. He found his place in campus life quickly, pursuing a double major in English and philosophy while also playing pop covers from Prince to A-ha in a party band called the Rhythm Method. The closest kindred spirit he found there was Collingwood. “A lot of our time was spent listening to records and saying to each other, ‘How hard could it be?’ ” Collingwood recalls. “Neither one of us had written a good song. But he was always so confident, even then.”
KIMBERLY BUTLER/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
By SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN/GETTY IMAGES
By the early Nineties, Schlesinger was living in New York, taking any gigs he could. Jody Porter, who would later become Fountains of Wayne’s lead guitarist, hired Schlesinger to play bass in a shoegaze band after he responded to an ad in The Village Voice. “That guy was fucking good,” Porter says. “He cut through those songs with some vitality that your average Guitar Center musician ain’t gonna know how to do.” Another bassist-wanted ad in the Voice led Schlesinger to a Parisian singer named Dominique Durand and her boyfriend, Andy Chase, who became his bandmates in the cool, sophisticated indie-pop trio Ivy, which released six albums between 1995 and 2011. “He was a total charmer,” Durand remembers. “Very witty, very worldly. And he had an absolutely insatiable passion for music. We would talk all night, just the three of us, about lyrics and melodies and guitar licks.” Most important, he reconnected with Collingwood. The two songwriters spent about a week bashing out the first Fountains of Wayne album, released in 1996. “Radiation Vibe,” written by Collingwood, became one of the catchiest hits of the post-Nirvana era. In malls across the country, it was possible to buy a CD or tape of Fountains of Wayne before walking into a multiplex to watch Schlesinger’s note-perfect early-Sixties rock song steal half the scenes in That Thing You Do! “Who wouldn’t want to be in a band with their best friend?” Collingwood says. “The idea that some giant company was going to give us more money than we’d ever seen to go around the world playing music seemed too good to be true.” Schlesinger rang in 1999 by marrying Katie Michel, an art-book designer he’d met at a downtown bar. A few months later, Fountains of Wayne returned with Utopia Parkway, whose songs about long-suffering losers and hopeless romantics recalled the Kinks and Bruce Springsteen. “I was so impressed by their style and sound,” says Elton John, who became a fan after hearing the album. “Uniquely American, and conjuring up vivid images of suburbia.” Porter and the Posies’ drummer Brian Young had joined them as full-time members in 1996. Now, onstage and in the studio, Fountains of Wayne took their place as a great power-pop quartet. “All four of us could play pretty much any song just by hearing it,” Collingwood says. “We would play whole songs we hated just because we could and it was funny.” Still, some in the music industry had never quite figured out Fountains of Wayne. Michael Krumper, who worked in Atlantic’s marketing department, recalls frequent comparisons to Matchbox 20, who had signed to the label at about the same time and followed through with two multiplatinum smash albums. Tensions peaked, he says, when Fountains’ modern-rock
cover of Britney Spears’ “. . . Baby One More Time” began to get some airplay. “The promotion department at the time went, ‘Oh my God, we have a single!’ And the guys in Fountains were just like, ‘No fucking way,’ ” Krumper says. “Matchbox 20 said yes to everything.” By 2001, Fountains had been dropped by Atlantic. But Schlesinger wasn’t done with the band he loved most. Fountains of Wayne resurfaced two years later with the slick, ultracatchy homage to hot moms and the Cars that became their biggest hit. “I tried to talk him out of ‘Stacy’s Mom,’ ” says Collingwood. “He was too good a writer to have that be his calling card, and the success of a novelty song means that’s just what you are to the public, from that moment on, forever.”
ALL KINDS OF TIME Schlesinger performing with Fountains of Wayne in 2004, the year after “Stacy’s Mom”
The album Fountains of Wayne released in 2003, Welcome Interstate Managers, featured some of their most vividly written songs, presented in a poppy, polished shell. But “Stacy’s Mom” was a success like they’d never seen, netting a pair of Grammy nominations (including, absurdly, one for Best New Artist). “ ‘Stacy’s Mom’ took the whole audience and made it younger and screamier,” says Gold, who joined Fountains as a touring keyboardist around this time. Life on the road got wild at times, in a fashion not typically associated with Fountains of Wayne. “Bigger tours and venues meant more time to act like idiots,” Collingwood says. “We drank a lot.” Porter, for his part, recalls destroying a hotel room in Tokyo, only to be saved by Schlesinger. “He’s the kind of guy that’ll bail you out of jail,” the guitarist says, laughing. “At least two or three times.” Collingwood played a less active role in making 2007’s Traffic and Weather; Schlesinger continued to refine his songcraft, turning in a set of sweetly detailed narratives about everyday people (“I-95,”
“Yolanda Hayes”). The bandmates reunited for one final album, 2011’s acoustic-leaning Sky Full of Holes, before going their separate ways. “We kind of knew it was our Abbey Road,” Porter says. “It wasn’t like 1997, when we still thought the tour bus was cool. It was over.” after fountains of wayne ended, Schlesinger took on his biggest showbusiness assignment yet, working with the comedy team of Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgen for four seasons of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Some might Adam have found the workload Schlesinger: daunting, but for SchlesingFive Essential er, each song was an excitSongs ing challenge. Gold remembers a moment when he felt 1. “Sick Day” tired. “Adam said, ‘What are A beautifully you talking about? This is the melancholic ode to greatest job in music.’ ” a girl taking the PATH One of the last major projtrain into Manhattan, ects Schlesinger completed from Fountains of Wayne’s 1996 debut. was an off-Broadway adaptation of Sarah Silverman’s 2. “That Thing memoir, The Bedwetter, which You Do!” was set to premiere this spring The hardest assignment conceivable: “Write before the coronavirus shut a hit in the precise down all New York theater. idiom of an American He’d found happiness with life garage band in 1964.” partner Alexis Morley after Schlesinger aced it. his marriage to Michel ended, 3. “Utopia Parkway” and he was a devoted father The title song to to his teenage daughters, Fountains’ 1999 LP is a Sadie and Claire Schlesinger. bittersweet pop nugget In late February, Schlesung by an aimless singer, Durand, and Chase all dude in a cover band. found themselves in Los An4. “Hackensack” geles, visiting colleges. The This 2003 tale of a former Ivy bandmates and deluded Jersey nobody their kids met for dinner, and is so poignant you can feel it in the base of the wine, oysters, and laughyour spine. ter flowed for hours. “Adam was cracking jokes the whole 5. “I-95” time,” Durand says. “He was A slo-mo ballad full of literary detail, this 2007 in top form.” Back in New album cut is one of the York, Schlesinger and Morsweetest love songs in ley headed upstate. Around all of alt-rock. March 15th, he developed a fever and a dry cough; about a week later, when symptoms hadn’t gone away, he went to a hospital. It seemed like his condition was improving. “Then, the night of the 31st of March, it went to hell in a handbasket,” Bobbi Schlesinger says. The next morning, Gold was feeling optimistic. “I was playing Fountains of Wayne really loud,” he recalls. “I was saying, ‘This is Adam. He can fucking get through anything.’ ” That’s when the awful news came. In the days since his death, Schlesinger’s friends have all been thinking about how lucky they were to know him. “He chose his life in a way that was free of compromise and boredom,” Durand says. “Sometimes that made it difficult for people who worked with him. But it’s also why we loved him so much.”
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 35
The Mix
36 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
RS REPORTS
The Week the Music Stopped In March, COVID-19 wiped concerts and festivals off the calendar — and that was just the beginning By SAMANTHA HISSONG, ETHAN MILLMAN, and AMY X. WANG
I
t was the beginning of March when Don Smiley started planning for the worst. As the chief executive of Milwaukee’s Summerfest — which calls itself “the world’s largest music festival,” attracting 900,000 people over 11 days each year — Smiley was confronting a tidal wave of reports about the outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S. With the news darkening, he began to seriously consider dismantling the event’s entire meticulous plan. In its 52-year history, Summerfest — which was set to include performances by artists from Justin Bieber to Guns N’ Roses this year — had never been canceled or postponed. “The vibe was [like] walking on eggshells,” Smiley says. “I had my eye on it early, trying to convince friends of mine to keep their eye on it. Everyone’s phone was blowing up every five seconds with breaking news, breaking news, breaking news. Our entire company wasn’t sleeping well because of the uncertainty.” In the first week of March, the novel coronavirus was not yet a pandemic halting the entire world in its tracks, but concerts across Europe and Asia had all but ceased, a number of upcoming festivals outside the U.S. had been canceled, and nearly 100 cases of the virus had been confirmed in the U.S., including in California. Then came a rash of new reported cases and revelations that the virus had al-
WORLD ON HOLD The Wiltern in Los Angeles PHOTOGRAPH BY Pooneh Ghana
| 37
The Mix ready been spreading through American communities, undetected by nearly nonexistent testing, for weeks. On March 5th, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez shut down the Ultra Music Festival out of “an abundance of caution,” while emphasizing that it shouldn’t be a “cause for alarm.” The next day, the city of Austin shuttered South by Southwest, one of the largest annual conferences in the world. The cancellation of SXSW, which brings in some $356 million for the city each year, was the first huge shockwave, triggering new urgency in conversations about other music events. Seeing SXSW go down, Smiley knew things would only worsen. “We could’ve sat on those dates and hoped for the best, but hope wasn’t really a plan for us,” he says. The Summerfest
gram shots each year — were calling their headlining artists to ask about rescheduling the festival for the fall. By March 10th, Coachella was wiped off of the spring calendar and moved to October, and the nightmare kicked off in earnest.
S
uddenly, every giant tour — from Madonna’s to Harry Styles’ to Billie Eilish’s — was in limbo. “None of this was really taken seriously in the U.S. until the week of the 9th, where the words ‘cancel’ and ‘reschedule’ started to get thrown around,” says Trevor Albair, tour manager for King Princess. Two days after Coachella rescheduled, North America’s two biggest concert promoters, Live Nation and AEG, made an unprecedented joint
bair. “On March 11th, there was still no word of cancellations, so our crew hopped on flights from New York to L.A. to make rehearsals. Of course, I received the call that morning that our show with the Strokes was canceled — so I had to put the guys right back on flights home.” Britton Billik, a tour manager for Josh Groban, says Groban’s tour was pulled later than most others because the team was assessing the situation regionally. “We were down in Florida, and it had not impacted Florida yet,” Billik says. “As soon as it began to work its way in that direction, we canceled everything and went home. [Groban’s] demographic is an older audience, so we were monitoring it very closely. Not only are the cast and crew at risk, it’s tough to ask a room full of 60-plus-
Browne and guitarist Larry Campbell, tested positive for COVID-19 in the weeks afterward.) While some festivals, including Firefly, Governors Ball, and the U.K.’s Glastonbury, had to outright cancel, others decided to push everything to later in the year — which is the option Summerfest chose. “If you have to shut down a festival completely and lay off all your people, that’s pretty traumatic,” says Smiley, who hires 2,000 people to work the grounds each year. Summerfest is now slated for September, after the team persuaded artists, sponsors, food vendors, and merchandise partners to agree to new dates. Smiley declined to comment on how much of the original lineup is still set to appear at the rescheduled festival.
SILENT AUSTIN A skateboarder passes the Scoot Inn; inside the Continental Club, the barroom is empty. These once-lively legendary venues are closed until further notice.
team was faced with a $186 million question. Across the country, other concert promoters, including industrydominating giants Live Nation and AEG, were scrambling as well. Artists, managers, tour crews, and others in the concert business sat nervously on the sidelines, waiting. “It was still changing literally every day,” says Christian Coffey, tour director for Childish Gambino, A$AP Rocky, and Run the Jewels, the last of whom had planned to kick off a tour in March. “We were having calls every day with agents, managers, with tour managers out on the road. People were pulling information from every resource they had, taking 10 parts of a story to piece it together. No one had more information than another.” On March 9th, rumors spread that the organizers of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival — a stalwart of the annual festival scene, drawing nearly 100,000 daily attendees, more than $100 million, and endless Insta-
38 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
decision to suspend all artist tours under their purview until at least April, leaving everyone from executives to artists to independent lighting contractors quaking. The joint AEG/Live Nation statement “woke the industry up,” says longtime brandpartnerships executive Marcie Allen, who worked with artists such as Billy Joel to untangle the sponsorships for their canceled shows. “I remember 9/11, the financial crisis’ tremendous impact — but in 25 years in the industry, I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Allen says. “The industry is hitting the reset button. It will be forever changed.” Before the two promoters nixed shows en masse, artists’ teams were running around without any clear communication from record companies, organizers, industry bodies, or local authorities. “With our show coming up on the 14th, we were going to have rehearsals on the 13th, and crew flying in on the 12th,” says Al-
year-olds to sit in a theater six inches away from each other.”
T
he allMan brothers tribute at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 10th was one of the last major arena shows to occur in the U.S. “The demographic of the Allman Brothers is kind of a prime candidate [for the virus], so that felt a little weird,” guitarist Derek Trucks told Rolling Stone shortly after. “But information was rolling out at such a trickle that it was hard to make sense of anything.” By the time Trucks was expected to participate in the star-studded Love Rocks NYC benefit at the Beacon Theatre — just two days later — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had announced that all events and gatherings of more than 500 people would be banned in the state. (The show proceeded as a livestream, with only select venue and artist personnel and media in attendance — at least three performers, including Jackson
Some artists, including Lady Gaga, delayed their album releases or announced suspensions of upcoming tour plans. Many sent personal apologies to fans. Even when Dave Grohl broke his leg onstage in 2015, Foo Fighters barely changed their tour schedule — but they didn’t have a choice this time. “Playing a gig with a sock full of broken bones is one thing, but playing a show when your health and safety is in jeopardy is another,” Grohl told fans. “We fuckin’ love you guys. So let’s do this right and raincheck shit.” Meanwhile, the virus’ spread continued to worsen, leading to the first shelter-in-place order, in San Francisco, on March 17th, with entire states like California and New York following suit soon after. As cities quieted, the music did too, with even the smallest of venues forced to shut their doors. The Bowery Ballroom in New York, for instance, had five to seven shows a week booked through the end of the
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Charles Reagan Hackleman
year; now, multiple employees are left without work. “We’ve got six to eight security guards on a night, who are all on an hourly [wage], who will not be getting paid without these shows,” says Kieran Blake, the general man ager of the venue. “Coat checkers, box office, and merch sellers are all people who rely on these — some of the younger kids work multiple ven ues, and all these jobs are gone for the foreseeable future.” Behindthescenes workers and venue employees have been deeply affected, and times are particularly tough for touring crew members. Their work already occurs in spurts, and winter is generally considered the slower time for touring. With the start of the festival season, which gets going in spring, many were eager for gigs.
go and get unemployment from [the original act].” Crew members are usually indepen dent contractors, as opposed to sala ried employees, which means they lack health benefits. Their life part ners might not have insurance to cover them either, considering that plenty of roadies end up marrying other road ies. In those cases, entire household incomes rely on touring money. For some tour directors, roadies, and independent artists, tens of thou sands of dollars disappeared in an in stant, leaving them suddenly wor ried about being able to make rent. It “went from manic to not a single email or phone call in the course of five days,” says Madison House trav el agent Lisa Pomerantz, whose com pany handles tour planning.
“I don’t know where [September] came from,” says Dennis Brennan, head of touring at Q Prime, which rep resents artists such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, and the Black Keys. He is nevertheless hoping that the tour business can kick back into action as early as midJuly: “I think there’s a degree of everyone think ing we’ll figure it out by [September]. If the experts are right, and this does dissipate some time in the summer, it gives America and the world some time to catch up. . . . None of our artists are going to want to do anything until we know it’s safe. I’ve already had that question, ‘Do we think it’s going to be safe?’ Right now, we say we don’t know, but by the time it happens we will know. And if it isn’t safe, we’re not going to do it.”
by the American Enterprise Institute suggest a large gap of time between government officials allowing, say, restaurant dining and the resumption of concerts and other large events. Even when governments give their ap proval, some fans could be reluctant. “No one really knows how this is going to impact the overall business, even if it is safe to host a live event of any size,” adds Billik. “I think, especially for an older audience, there’s gonna be more hesitation going into one of these buildings with a large group of people versus a Billie Eilish crowd. That’s a younger demographic, and that’s something to take into account.” For promoters, outright cancella tions of festivals like Coachella repre sent revenue losses in the hundreds of millions, and pushing to October
COAST TO COAST Historic venues — from the Roxy in Los Angeles (left) to the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York (right) — shut down, leaving staff and crew without work.
“You might make a bunch of money at one point, but then you disperse that money over a certain period of time until you’re gonna start work ing again,” says Run the Jewels tour director Coffey. “I know a lot of crew guys that had a great 2019, then they stopped working in October or No vember, and they weren’t gonna be working again until March or April. They made over the $75,000 thresh old for these government checks, even though they’re technically un employed and haven’t made money in three months.” Making matters worse, the people who are eligible for unemployment don’t always have a way to collect. “I have people who’ve worked for a pretty big act for the past year and a half to two years,” says Coffey. “A new act they were supposed to work with has now canceled. These peo ple can’t apply for unemployment be cause they haven’t started working for [the new act] yet, but they also can’t FROM LEFT, PHOTOGRAPHS BY
U
ntil the crisis hit, the live music business was on track to generate $12.2 billion in boxoffice revenue in 2020, according to Pollstar. If concerts manage to start up in late August, Pollstar estimates that the industry will lose about $5.2 billion in potential revenue for the year — but if venues end up shuttered through December, losses could spiral up to $8.9 billion. One impending challenge is the mass rebooking of concert venues for the fall and winter of 2020, with too many artists vying for limited dates, especially as America’s coronavirus rescheduled sports leagues likely clamor for the same arena venues as well. At the same time, the music in dustry has no way of knowing exactly when the pandemic will actually slow down. Some festivals and individual tours have pushed their dates to as early as September, despite no real certainty that performances will be possible by then.
Pooneh Ghana AND Victor Llorente
As the industry waits, concerns are building. “It feels like the fall is just going to be a train wreck of months and months of pentup artists re scheduling dates, which will then trig ger some bizarre issues,” says music manager and liveevent producer Mike Luba. “Will people have their jobs back? Will they be comfortable gathering in large groups? Will they have enough money to go out to see the six shows that they had planned to see over the course of the year, but condensed into a twomonth period?” Scheduling overlaps are likely to hurt festival attendance, too. “Bon naroo moved, and that’s now sudden ly stomping on Lost Lands,” Luba says, adding that the very next weekend is ACL. “The people who would’ve gone to all three are like, ‘What do I do? Where do I go?’ ” Again, though, that dilemma will only arrive when mass gatherings are deemed safe again. Widely praised plans such as the road map released
largely serves as a place holder while more data becomes available. “The re lease of information will prove wheth er the decision to have Coachella in October is practical or not,” says Kevin Kennedy, an industry analyst at the re search firm IBIS World. Promoters are highly aware of the potential dangers of relaunching too early, according to Kennedy. “There’s going to be a cultural and mental change in how people look at festi vals,” he says. “Hygiene isn’t at its peak [there] is the most polite way to put it. If they jump the gun and there’s some sort of resurgence, it could come out of events like this, and that could be a huge liability down the road.” As a whole, the concert industry may be particularly vulnerable to rev enue losses, Kennedy adds, pointing out that even Live Nation operates at a two to three percent profit margin. “Anything disruptive,” he says, “is a lot more impactful compared to other industries.” [Cont. on 96] May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 39
The Mix SPOTLIGHT
Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright’s new book imagines a global plague worse than what we are facing now By ALEX MORRIS
T
en years ago, Lawrence Wright was sitting at his desk thinking about the end of the world. The Looming Tower, his book about the rise of Al Qaeda and the events that led to 9/11, had won a Pulitzer, making him the go-to guy for penning tales about catastrophes of epic proportions. So it was no surprise when director Ridley Scott called him up one day to talk about The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic literary masterpiece. “Ridley’s question was, ‘Well, what the fuck happened?’ ” Wright, 72, tells me over the phone from his home in Austin. “I thought that was The End an interesting quesof October tion: ‘What would Lawrence Wright have caused civiliKNOPF zation to crack and crumble?’ ” Wright set to work creating a screenplay to answer that very question. Nuclear war was a bit too obvious. Climate change wasn’t as obvious as it is today. But as a young reporter (before his days at Rolling Stone and The New Yorker), Wright had lived in Atlanta and had covered the CDC. “I did swine flu and Legionnaires’ disease — both in 1976,” he says. “I was attuned to the idea that a pandemic could have that effect.” Wright wrote the screenplay’s first two acts but got mired in the third, not knowing quite how to end the end of the world. “And Ridley went off and made Robin Hood instead,” he says with a laugh. Then, a few years ago, Scott called back: “He was like, ‘I don’t know why the fuck we never made that picture.’ He wanted to know if I would be interested in looking at it again.” When Wright did, he realized that he wanted to write it as a novel, which would follow a microbe hunter named Henry Parsons as he attempts to track down the source of — and find the cure for
40 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
— a novel virus that’s wiping out humanity. Panic proliferates. Disruption abounds. With very good reason, civilizations freak the fuck out. Which means that imagined events of The End of October, out April 28th, are uncomfortably close to the reality of today. So much of what happens in The End of October is happening to us now, like sheltering in place, the stock market crashing, schools closing, systems breaking down — even how the government responds. If I’d read it a few weeks ago, it would have almost seemed like science fiction. Now, it doesn’t at all. There were things that I did in the novel that I thought were probably too
extreme, like quarantining 3 million people in Mecca. It never occurred to me that China would quarantine 100 million people. The dimensions of the reaction were something that I would have thought were unbelievable. But it’s remarkable how much you got right. Well, there are things that I’m getting credited for that I don’t deserve. For instance, the feeling that we were due for a pandemic of great proportions is something that, when I was interviewing all these experts, they all felt that way. And so I was reflecting their anxiety in the novel. That’s not prophecy. I just wrote a story about anxiety and climate change. Scientists know what’s going to happen and yet peo-
ple just aren’t paying attention. Is that the same sort of feeling you got from these epidemiologists? Absolutely. When I started working on [the book], I realized that my imagination as a novelist was not equivalent to the anxiety these people had. It was not an “if this happens.” They all, for the most part, felt that, “This is going to happen. We just have to be prepared for it, and we’re not.” And there was a fair degree of anger on their part. In many respects, the novel is based on the progression of the 1918 flu and what would happen if it returned in an era where millions and millions of people are traveling every day, cities are denser, people are far more in contact, and the world has many more people in it. If you set loose a virus in that context, what would happen today? COVID-19 is not nearly as mortal as the 1918 flu, but you can see what would have happened if it were the 1918 flu, because of the lack of preparedness and the fact that it takes so long to create a vaccine or treatment. That struck me as a true threat to civilization. When did you pull the script out of the drawer? It was three years ago. I decided I would force myself to do the research. I am a journalist by training, and so I always think that what’s real is more powerful and more surprising than what I imagine. So I set out to talk to the experts, and I went around to the National Institutes of Health and Fort Detrick, I went down to the Kings Bay sub base in Georgia. There’s a lot of stuff about animals, because the influenza originates in birds typically, and so I interviewed veterinarians, and I learned things that I could not have imagined. Going back to the 1918 flu, one thing that struck me in the book was how you talk about how people tend to remember historical events and commemorate them, but when it came to the 1918 pandemic, there’s almost this willful forgetfulness. Well, I was fascinated by that, because that flu killed more Americans than have died in all of our wars of the 20th century: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — 675,000 Americans. My dad was three years old, and he and his parents all got it in central Kansas. The average lifespan of an American in 1917 was something like 55 years. In 1918, it had dropped to 39. It’s a scar on history
JAY L. CLENDENIN/”LOS ANGELES TIMES”/CONTOUR RA/GETTY IMAGES
Predicting the Pandemic
that has left a deep mark, but immediately afterward, nobody talked about it. Why was that? Part of it was the flu was overshadowed by the war, which was very preoccupying. But also one reason people avoided the subject is they didn’t know what to do about it — and it wasn’t a matter of being heroic except for the health care workers. One simply got the flu, and either you survived or you died. There was no human action involved, unlike war, which is full of drama. The flu is silent, it kills people indiscriminately, and there’s little heroics in trying to fight off the infection. And so those things all contributed to the fact that this was just buried in the universal memory. There’s a lot of heroism in your book though. I was impressed by the courage and commitment of the people I’ve met in public health. In some ways it’s a kind of scientific priesthood. They subject themselves to tremendous danger. Because the viruses can easily escape? Yeah. It happens all the time and with alarming frequency. To go into a foreign environment by yourself, to investigate a disease that nobody’s ever seen before, and you have no idea, as the epidemiologist, what you’re facing? You’re placing yourself in harm’s way. Do you think it’s good for us to be reminded how fragile our species is, how fragile our civilizations are? Yes. It’s important to understand that we are subject to the whims of nature, and we have to respect that. Part of what makes us so poorly prepared for a pandemic of the sort that we’re enduring now is the sort of hubris that people have, that our civilization has conquered nature and subjugated it. That’s just not the case. Nature is more clever than we are. Even since the turn of the millennium, we had the resurgence of H1N1, which was a 1918 flu. We’ve had Zika, Ebola, SARS, MERS. In the space of 20 years, we’ve had a number of brand-new, extremely dangerous diseases appear, and we will see many more. In some ways, we can look at this as a wake-up call. Knowing what you knew, how concerned were you when news of COVID-19 first started to circulate? I was telling my friends, “Get your groceries.” If I’d been such a great prophet as everybody says, I would have sold my stocks — that didn’t occur to me. But I could see the peril that we faced; it was easy to read about what was happening in China. And there was this smug attitude in the West that that was China and it wouldn’t spread to our countries. That’s one of the reasons that, despite the warning, people weren’t prepared.
Are you personally frustrated by how the pandemic has been handled in America? It’s just shameful. As someone who had spent some time working on stories out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, it’s heartbreaking to see how that great institution has fumbled in this challenge. And it’s not just the CDC. Our Food and Drug Administration and our Health and Human Services departments, they’ve all failed in the face of this test. You look back at decisions that were made to cut the budgets of our health departments and to eliminate that pandemicresponsiveness team in the National Security Council, which would have been in charge of this right now. Admiral Timothy Ziemer, who was the head of that organization, he was the guy that handled the malaria outbreaks in Africa and is credited with saving 6 million lives. He and his entire team were let go. There was an act of hubris that is hard to forgive. A lot of your work — especially this book and The Looming Tower — explores the way that humanity continually undermines itself. Since the beginning of civilization, we’ve been struggling with this. We’re constantly finding that people are acting against their own interests, and there’s a struggle between savagery and civilization. That’s certainly something I studied when I was working on terrorism. There are these strong urges that are competing all the time for control of our civilization. Does that give you more or less empathy toward us as a species? Well, I think that we always have the possibility of renewal, and moments of great tragedy are opportunities to reset. Like, 9/11 was a such an opportunity. Then we bungled it. But I remember so distinctly the sense immediately after the attacks that, ‘Oh, we’re going to have to stand for something now. We’re going to have to become the people that our parents were when they faced World War II and the march of Nazism and then communism.’ Instead, we invaded Iraq. And it eviscerated that sense that we are a people who want to do the right thing and are the hope of the world. Instead, we made a catastrophic mistake. And if we’re going to make a big mistake on this one, it’ll have to do with sacrificing our democracy in some profound way. You see the exercise of extraordinary powers — which are, in many cases, absolutely needed — but the loss of privacy, the increasing concentration of control in government, those are going to be powers that are going to make it more and more difficult for our democracy to flourish.
The Wright Stuff Lawrence Wright has spent the past five decades pinpointing humanity’s weaknesses and then exploring them in fascinating and terrifying detail on the page. Here’s a short list of some of his best work.
The Looming Tower 2006
To achieve his sweeping history of the events leading to 9/11, Wright did over 500 interviews. He paints the horror of 9/11 as far from inevitable, casting it instead as the result of very human foibles, particularly on the part of the CIA and FBI.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief 2013 “When good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that,” says a character in The End of October. Wright’s deep dive on Scientology delves into just that.
God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State 2018 “It sometimes seems that every living thing can bite or poke or sting or shoot you,” Wright writes in his loving but cleareyed ode to his home state.
But it is a moment of reset, and good things will come out of it. There’s a medical historian in Bologna that I’m writing about, and she was talking about how the Black Death ended the Middle Ages and opened the door to the Renaissance. Well, we have that opportunity now. It’s a time that we can rethink, for instance, climate change. It reminds us that it’s in our hands. Another topic in the book that was interesting was the topic of religion and faith, this idea of humans playing God. Do you feel like humans are too godlike or not godlike enough in how we relate to the world? Religion has been a theme in my work almost since the very beginning. I’ve always been intrigued by why people are drawn to belief. If you hold strong political beliefs, they might not affect your behavior at all — in fact, they rarely do. But if you have powerful religious feeling, then it dictates every moment of your life. It’s a mistake not to address the potency of religion. In writing about radical Islam, for instance, I’ve certainly seen how religion has a dark side. On the other hand, I’ve been in prisons and seen men whose lives have been turned around by faith. And so I stand as a respectful observer in the face of religious beliefs. In the 20th century, humanity acquired godlike powers, powers that are capable of destroying creation, but did not acquire the wisdom to control the impulses that are always a threat to civilization. We were always in danger of ourselves, far more than anything else. And when we speak of godlike, it depends on your understanding of what God is. If there is a deity, is it a benevolent one? If you want to believe in a just God, then behave like one. We have a lot of people who say they believe in a just God, but their own actions suggest that’s not the deity that they pay allegiance to. Has the experience of the past few weeks changed your perspective of The End of October? Well, the virus that I created is not COVID-19 — and I hope the virus I created never appears. But it has appeared in the past, and it might again in the future. COVID-19 is a precursor to a disease that we will have to face one day, and I hope that the lesson of COVID-19 is that we had better be ready . What’s up next for you? Or I guess another way to ask is, what’s the next scourge on humanity? [Laughs] Everybody wants me to get off of scourging humanity. I’ve been besieged by requests to write a novel about a woman president or solving climate change. I’m grateful for the suggestions, but a reporter’s job is to face the crisis of the day. Rolling Stone
| 41
Random Notes SELFIE EDITION
Bringing It All Back Home Across the globe, artists used self-isolation as a chance to work on new music, connect with fans via intimate livestreams, and donate time, money, and energy to coronavirus relief efforts — turning a tragic situation into a healing communal experience.
BLAZE ON Trey Anastasio has stayed busy self-isolating: He’s released several new songs on Instagram, and surprisereleased a new Phish LP, Sigma Oasis. “Be safe everyone,” he said.
42 |
Rolling Stone
SAFE SOLITUDE Ozzy Osbourne urged fans to social distance with a playlist that included “Stay Away,” by Nirvana, and John Lennon’s “Isolation.”
ALONE TOGETHER Steve Aoki got some work done at his Las Vegas home while perched comfortably in his “Aoki chair,” a perfect life-size replica of the DJ-producer.
|
May 2020
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ALEX EBERT; OZZY OSBOURNE/INSTAGRAM; JAIME OLAEZ; SUE ANASTASIO
▲ NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO PROBLEM Alex Ebert of Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes was hoping he would have time to record some solo tracks in his New Orleans studio. “But it turns out I desperately needed to do absolutely nothing but meditate, lay in the sun, and take ice baths,” he says. “I feel like an accidental monk.”
▲ RATELIFF’S ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH Folk-soul singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff was forced to cut short a tour this spring in support of his debut solo album, And It’s Still Alright. Instead, the Colorado native returned home and used his newly found free time to get some work done on the house. “It’s totally under construction,” he says. “This is my life right now.”
▲ KEYS TO HAPPINESS Patrick Carney got acquainted with his new 1963 Jazzmaster guitar: “My 40th-birthday present to myself,” says the Black Keys drummer. “I’ve been taking my son Rhys on walks and watching Tiger King like the rest of America.” The band has postponed a tour that was supposed to begin this month.
CONNIE CUT IT UP Adam Weiner of Philly rockers Low Cut Connie livestreamed a rousing solo set from his apartment, with help from his wife, Adriana. “I was mostly naked and essentially crying by the end,” he said.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MICHELLE BRANCH; TAYLOR MCFADDEN; MICHELLE GUSTAFSON; J BALVIN/INSTAGRAM; QUAVO/INSTAGRAM
◀ BALVIN’S
TOP DOG Chart-topping Colombian reggaeton ambassador J Balvin introduced the world to his new buddy Felicidad (“Happy,” in Spanish), captioning a selfie, “Over here, attempting to uplift your spirits with some tenderness.” Balvin just released his fifth LP, Colores, and hopes to be out on tour later this year.
▲ QUAVO’S NEW STYLE: MASK ON While Atlanta hip-hop superstar Quavo may be a little light on essential goods at the moment (”Damn, I”m late,” he joked on Instagram), the rapper is doing what he can to help the rest of us. “For my birthday, my foundation, Quavo Cares, is donating and raising money . . . for front-line health care professionals in Los Angeles and Atlanta hospitals,” he announced.
May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 43
T H E
C OV I D - 1 9
C R I S I S
Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge O
n march 1st, New York reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, after a Manhattan health care worker in her late thirties, who had visited Iran, tested positive at a hospital in the city. Six days later, that number had jumped to 89, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency. ✪ Two days later, Donald Trump tweeted, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” As the country faces a national emergency that is graver, for most of us, than any in living memory, a surreal split-screen response has been unfolding in Washington and Albany, via Queens. The daily public briefings held by Cuomo, 62, the governor of the hardest-hit state, have become appointment viewing, not just for New Yorkers, but for all Americans feeling terrified, unmoored, and hungry for something resembling competent national leadership. For a politician never especially renowned for his bedside manner, Cuomo has emerged as an unlikely source of comfort in these supremely unsettling times, the blunt-talking adult in the room. ✪ The debasement of standards in the Trump era has made
44
The governor of New York found himself at the center of a deadly crisis. His response has helped guide the nation
By Mark Binelli Photograph by
GEORGE ETHEREDGE
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
even minimal gestures of statesmanship appear positively Churchillian, of course, and so the mere fact that Cuomo relies on data and scientific opinion and has the ability to display human empathy can feel disproportionately soothing. Though New York is unique among American cities in terms of population density and its status as an international travel hub — that, combined with a shambolic federal response, even after Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency, would have made any state- and city-level attempts at containment difficult — Cuomo’s decisions to close schools and issue a stay-at-home order came later than other states with lesssignificant outbreaks. Ohio, for example, closed its public schools three days before New York, despite having only five confirmed cases, and California’s shelter-in-place order came three days before New York’s, though New York had six times the number of confirmed cases. But as a communicator, in particular, Cuomo has risen to the occasion, proving especially adept at walking viewers through the nuances of the daily barrage of bad news, offering realistic glimmers of hope but never magical thinking. He’s shared personal anecdotes about his family, including his younger brother, Chris, the CNN anchor, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, and displayed a surprising degree of warmth and humor for someone who acknowledged in his own memoir that the Albany media referred to him, alternately, as the Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader. “Andrew has always had these two sides,” says Michael Shnayerson, author of The Contender, a 2015 biography of Cuomo. “One is charming and comes out in a time of crisis — he was brilliant during Superstorm Sandy, racing around the city late at night, checking each hot spot and earning the acclaim of people on either side of the aisle — but this is also a governor known for being brutal with underlings and ruthless with his rivals.” His father, Mario Cuomo, the late three-term governor of New York, was considered one of the great political orators of his generation, an intellectual whose bookshelves contained works by Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and Teilhard de Chardin. Andrew, on the other hand, “favors short, declarative sentences and unvarnished imagery,” Jonathan Mahler wrote in a 2010 profile for The New York Times Magazine, when the younger Cuomo was on the verge of winning his own first gubernatorial race. “In contrast with his father, he doesn’t articulate values, summon ideals, or transmit visions. Like a mechanic pok-
ing his head out from under the hood of your broken-down car, he tells you what’s wrong with your engine and how he’s going to fix it.” The second of five children, Andrew Cuomo grew up in Hollis, Queens, a middle-class neighborhood where his grandparents, immigrants from the Campania region of southern Italy, settled and owned a grocery store. Like Trump, Andrew went into the family business, managing his father’s first campaign for governor and, once Mario was elected, serving as his top adviser at a salary of $1 per year. He was 21. Shnayerson says they had an “almost Shakespearean” father-son relationship: “Andrew was, from the beginning, trying to earn his father’s approval, and his father didn’t really give it to him.” In 1990, Cuomo married Kerry Kennedy, one of Robert F. Kennedy’s daughters. (They had three daughters and divorced in 2005; again, in shades of Trump, the messy split played out in the New York tabloids.) He became the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton. As governor, Cuomo embraced Clintonism, eschewing his father’s big-government, New Deal-informed liberal philosophy for a more transactional, triangulated Third Way. Critics on the progressive left loathe his austere budgets and aversion to raising taxes, pointing to the troubled New York subway system, which Cuomo effectively controls, and cuts in hospital reimbursements that have contributed to closures. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out the governor for responding to the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic with a threemonth freeze on mortgage payments, but no similar cancellation of rents. (The governor did enact a three-month moratorium on evictions.) Still, Cuomo’s approach to governance — micromanaging, single-minded, ruthless — has resulted in a number of substantial wins, including pushing a marriage-equality bill through the GOP-controlled state senate in 2011, as well as a fracking ban, tighter gun laws, raising the minimum wage, and making tuition for state colleges free for families making less than $125,000 a year. Rebecca Katz, a political consultant who worked closely with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a longtime punching bag of Cuomo’s, and who later served as a top strategist for the actress Cynthia Nixon when she challenged Cuomo in the 2018 primary, has never been a fan of the governor. Still, Katz acknowledges, “Cuomo benefits from understanding how communication
“It’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You work until you can’t work anymore. I can’t save everybody’s life. But I’ll do what I can to save as many as I can.”
ROLLING STONE
46
works in a way that frankly no other elected official does right now. Trump understands why it’s important to be on TV. Cuomo understands how to tell people what’s actually going on in a way that’s both sobering and soothing.” Shnayerson sees political calculus: “Cuomo saw right from the beginning that Trump is incapable of empathy,” he says. “And instinctively or deliberately — I’d suggest deliberately — he set out to carve out this turf, where on a daily basis he’d show how incompetent and downright dangerous Trump is. And Trump can’t really do anything about it. He can’t fire him! All he can do is grumble about how Andrew isn’t grateful enough about what he’s getting.” For all of his manifest ambition, the governor had surprised political observers by not entering the 2020 Democratic primary, instead all but officially endorsing Joe Biden quite early in the process. Now that the pandemic has positioned Cuomo as the perfect foil to Trump, and at the same time left Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, struggling to break into the news cycle, some are indulging in “Draft Cuomo” fan fiction, picturing how an abrasive New Yorker of their very own might work on a debate stage against the abrasive New Yorker-in-chief. Whatever his political future, Cuomo has become a trusted voice in a world of uncertainty. His homely PowerPoint slides are routinely memed. The slow, booming cadence of his sentences, once grating, could probably be marketed as a meditation app if we end up surviving this thing. Somehow, he’s connecting with millions of people at this time of extraordinary crisis and unimaginable loss. Cuomo spoke with Rolling Stone by phone from his office in Albany on Saturday, April 4th. The country has gotten to know you through your daily briefings, but can you walk us through what the rest of your days have been like during the crisis? Are you getting briefed at all hours of the day and night? Yeah. A situation like this is pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if you’re going to do it right. Because it’s evolving all the time. So, you work until you can’t work anymore, and then you close your eyes for 20 minutes and then you work again. Who have you been consulting with? You talk to everyone. Obviously, I have my state team, which manages things on a day-to-day basis. But then the federal government relationship is important, so the president and the vice president. And the health experts, so the World Health Organization, NIH, international health experts. And then you talk to the local officials, because you want to keep them calm and coordinated. The business community. You know, you’re doing two basic things, right? You’re managing the operation, which is a health op-
FAMILY MATTERS
FROM TOP: LUIZ C. RIBEIRO/”NEW YORK POST” ARCHIVES /© NYP HOLDINGS INC./GETTY IMAGES; JASON DECROW/INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK
RIGHT : Cuomo with his late father, Mario, in 1994. Andrew served as an adviser to his dad when Mario was governor of New York in the 1980s. “If you have to make a tough decision and you believe it’s right, make it,” says Andrew about his dad’s lesson in a time of crisis. “And if people resent you for it, so be it, because you have to act in a way that fits your conscience and your heart. Yeah, that’s all my father.” BELOW: With his brother Chris in 2015. The CNN anchor, who is 13 years younger, came down with COVID-19 and has been recovering at home.
eration. There are operational decisions like closing schools, closing businesses. And then the second dimension is a communication dimension. People need information. They need correct information. Everyone is out of control, right? Your life is out of control. You’re at a place you’ve never been before. You’re worried, you’re anxious, you’re out of work. You’re literally afraid of going out of doors. You’re afraid of contact with other human beings, which is probably the most isolating experience you’ve ever had. A hug now becomes a dangerous act. Right? You’re at a place you’ve never been. Who’s going to help me? Who’s managing this? Who’s in control when I’m out of control? With the briefings, was there a point where your team realized, “We have the responsibility to get the facts out and provide some reassurance, not only to New Yorkers but to Americans, period,” and a realization that you were filling a certain — you might not put it this way — leadership void at the national level? No. No. There never — No, Mark. I did the briefings the way I would always do the briefings. I
understand your question. But I have done nothing different than I have always done. Forget the whole national perspective. The death toll in New York has been soaring. Even in terms of best-case scenarios, we’re talking about unfathomable tragedy. And your primary role is to keep the number of deaths as low as possible. But have you thought about how your job is also to comfort people — but in this case, you can’t do things you would normally do as a leader, like go to funerals or hug the families of the deceased? Well, look, nobody’s been here before, right? These are all uncharted waters. So you use your experience, you use your knowledge, you use your instincts, and you feel your way through the situation. Nobody can give you a chart. They can’t tell you the depths of the water. They can’t tell you where the rocks are. But if you’ve navigated for years, you develop an instinct that helps. But also keep it simple. Tell the truth. Give people facts. Explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. I don’t go out to impart confidence. You can appear confident, but you’re not going to fool New Yorkers, right? They’re going to hear what you’re saying and watch what you’re doing. They’ll make their own decision whether or not it makes sense. Here’s where we are, here’s what I’m doing, here’s what I’ve
done, here’s what I plan to do, this is why I’m doing it. These are dramatic actions. I’m going to close the schools. “What? Why are you closing the schools? I want my kid to go to school.” I mean, that’s a normal reaction. “Well, this is why I’m doing it.” “OK, that makes sense.” Or they think it doesn’t make sense. But it’s the actions and the facts that ultimately win or lose here, right? They’ve been watching what I’m doing for five, six weeks. So far, I think people think the actions we’ve taken make sense and are logical. But I think it’s a function of the merits and the substance in the actions more than anything else. I don’t care how many times you go out and brief. If what you’re doing doesn’t make sense to them, they will lose confidence very quickly. You know, confidence is earned. It’s not declared. The pandemic reminds me of the response to climate change, in that it seems difficult to get people to change their behavior for a threat that’s looming but still largely invisible. Was there a tension between scaring the hell out of people so they would stay inside versus not wanting to create a mass panic? Well, look, there’s no doubt that government is only as effective as people allow it to be, unless you criminalize behavior. This is a democracy, and people have free will. And they’ll hear what the government says. And if they agree, they’ll follow it. If they don’t agree, they don’t follow it. What could counterbalance it? Criminalization could counterbalance it [laughs]. If you do it, you’re going to go to jail. But short of that, they make their own decision. But you’re right, this virus, it was hard to communicate, hard to accept, the reality. Because we’ve never seen it before. “Well, it’s like the Spanish flu of 1918.” OK, but I wasn’t there, really. And they have different medications now than they had in 1918. I can’t believe that what happened in 1918 is going to happen again. “Well, remember Ebola!” Yeah, but Ebola turned out to be nothing. “Well, remember H1N1.” Well, that turned out to be nothing. “Nah, I think I’m a little cynical and skeptical, and I think this is going to be overblown.” And, by the way, there were voices out there saying this is all overblown, that it was a political conspiracy. In hindsight, do you second-guess yourself as far as the speed of your response to the crisis? You and Mayor De Blasio initially resisted the calls to close the schools. And when the mayor began calling for New Yorkers to stay home, you held out a couple of days longer. What are your thoughts looking back now? No, every action, Mark, that I took, I was criticized for being hypercautious and premature. I decided to close the schools. It was very controversial at the time. And people criticized me. I did the containment zone in Westchester, which had a bad name. Containment was supposed to mean containment of the virus. It was inter-
ROLLING STONE
47
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
preted to mean containment of people. They thought that they were being imprisoned in the geographic area. It was the number-one cluster in the country, and people criticized me. I closed the playgrounds last week in New York City, and people criticized me. So my way has always been to err on the side of safety. I would always rather be accused of having an unnecessary economic loss than an unnecessary death. So even in all the past situations, past storms — I’ve closed roads, I’ve closed subways, I’ve closed businesses. And sometimes the storm happens, and a lot of times the storm didn’t happen. And I was criticized. But I can live with that. I’d much rather live with that than “Had I moved sooner, we could have saved lives.” What would you say about the federal response so far? Yesterday, the president was asked if he could assure New Yorkers that they would have the ventilators they need, and he said, “No, they should have had more ventilators.” What’s your reaction when you hear things like that? Unless I can talk to you off the record, I can’t talk about this now. Understood. Well, on the record, what can you say? Trump is somebody you’ve known for 30 years. Do you have a personal rapport with him, when it’s just the two of you talking, that has helped you in terms of getting New York the help it needs? Look, there’s no governor in the United States who’s been more critical of this president than I have. There’s no governor in the United States who’s been more criticized by this president than I have been. What I said to him in this situation is, this is a bigger situation than politics, it’s bigger than partisanship. It’s going to take the state doing everything it can, and it’s going take the federal government doing everything it can. Because, he’s right, when he says, we only have 10,000 ventilators. He doesn’t have the capacity. So it’s going to take federal efforts and state efforts. I said if he’s a good federal partner, I will say that. And if he doesn’t fulfill the federal partnership role, I will say that, Mark. And I have said both. And depending on the action of the day, I will say both, or either. And that’s the relationship. It’s transparent, open, and honest. Have you, as governor, done enough to stop the closing of hospitals? Sixteen hospitals in the past two decades have closed in New York City, and the state has lost something like 20,000 hospital beds. You’ve been
criticized from the left for cuts you’ve made to Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals. What would you say to that? More people have health insurance in this state than almost any state in the United States. We’re at 95 percent covered. We had too many hospital beds in the health system. We still do. The health system has transitioned to more of a holistic system that focuses on wellness, community-based care, as opposed to hospital beds that are only intensive care. That’s where the health system is going. Now, to close a hospital is very hard. It employs a lot of people, it becomes an institution within the community. So it’s hard to make that transition. But it’s inarguable that you have too many beds in hospitals, and you need more ambulatory programs, community-based programs, et cetera. In Brooklyn, we started a national demonstration program, where we were closing hospital beds, opening community-based clinics focused more on wellness and on continuing health care. In other words, health care is not supposed to be that you get so sick that you need a hospital bed. Health care should be, “I’m going to keep you healthy so you don’t go into a hospital.” And that is a nationwide reorientation that we’re doing here in New York, and it’s the current thinking across the country. That’s inarguable. It’s very hard to do. Medicaid — we have more people on Medicaid now than ever before. Supporters of Medicare for All would argue that the way Obamacare depends on employee health plans doesn’t look good when millions of jobs have disappeared overnight. Look, people can use the crisis to make whatever point they want. But these facts don’t show anything other than the number of people who are now infected in this pandemic exceeds the capacity of the health care system, not the design of the health care system, or the funding of the health care system. The very capacity. We have 50,000 beds statewide. This is a multiple of that. Now you can argue, well, the 50,000 beds should have been paid for by Medicaid-for-All. The problem is the 50,000 beds in this crisis. Well, why didn’t you have 100,000 beds? Because you never should have needed 100,000 beds. And you probably will never need 100,000 beds again. I hope. And it’s not even the beds. The beds, we found. It’s these damn ventilators. Which, you normally never needed anywhere near this volume, until you have a pandemic that happens to hit the respiratory system,
“This virus is an expert killer. I fight for people who need justice, and they are being attacked. I just spend every minute of every day saying, ‘What else can I do?’ ”
ROLLING STONE
48
and if you don’t have a ventilator, you can’t really provide adequate care. But this is five times the number of ventilators the health care system has ever needed. How do you prepare for that, Mark? As governor, your father never had to deal with a crisis at this level. Are there things you learned from him that have been useful over these past weeks? Let me do it the other way. There is nothing that I learned from him that wasn’t useful [pauses]. No challenge is too great. Believe in the inherent goodness of people. Believe government done well is an art form. Believe government is the mobilizing vehicle for our better angels. Find support in family. I have my daughter here working with me the way I worked with my father. Speak honestly. Tell people the truth. They will respond to the truth, and logic, even if they don’t like it. The trust between an elected official and the people they serve is everything. Trust and respect is everything. If you have to make a tough decision and you believe it’s right, make it, and if people resent you for it, so be it, because you have to act in a way that fits your conscience and your heart. Yeah, that’s all my father. That’s everything I’m doing. And when you’re tired and you can’t work anymore, work harder. He famously said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, and it’s fair to say you’ve generally landed on the prose side of things. Have the briefings shown a more personal side? Were you thinking about your father’s ability to communicate? No, my father did not communicate that way, Mark. My father communicated aspiration, but he did it in a formal sense. He did not speak personally, in terms of himself or his family or his life or his experiences. He was a formal speaker. The expression I used to use was: He’s a bigroom speaker. He’s a podium speaker. He spoke to large audiences, right? That was his art form. He would not talk about family experiences the way I’ve spoken about them here. You understand the distinction I’m trying to make? Definitely. The way you’ve spoken about family experiences in the briefings, for instance, talking about what your brother has been going through, there’s less mystery when you have a face attached to these things. Yes. All I’m saying is, my father did not do that. He’s not comfortable with that. That’s not the way he communicated. You started by saying poetry-prose — he was a great speaker. Yes. The best. But not in what you’re talking about. Right. The reason I did that is, this is stressful and disorienting in a lot of ways. But it’s probably most impactful on a human level. Yeah, you’re afraid about your job and your paycheck. But it’s the human level that is shocking here. The social
CRISIS LEADERSHIP
DARREN MCGEE/OFFICE OF GOVERNOR ANDREW M. CUOMO
Cuomo welcomes the Navy hospital ship the USNS Comfort to New York. The city’s death toll has passed that of 9/11, with 799 dying in a single day in April.
level. And I want you to know you’re not alone in that. It’s not you. Don’t blame yourself. Don’t think that you are misperceiving the situation, or you’re hypersensitive, or you’re deficient in not being able to handle the situation. You’re not alone. Everybody feels what you’re feeling. I feel what you feel. I’m afraid. I’m hurt. I’m having trouble with the situation. It’s not just you. I believe that, and it’s important and helpful to communicate it. And by my relaying my feelings, I think it may have helped you to understand that your feelings are not unique in this situation. What’s been personally hardest for you? Outside of obviously the incredibly difficult job you have. But on the personal side, are there people you haven’t been able to see? I haven’t been able to see my mother. I’m not with one of my daughters. That on a personal level is very taxing. And I constantly say to myself, what else should I be doing? What else could I be doing? People are dying every day, and I don’t know what else to do. And I know that tomorrow more people will die. And I don’t know what else to do. And that is a terrible weight, and just an oppressive burden. Another thing about this tragedy that’s been very surreal is that, with disasters like a plane crash or an earthquake, you see faces and names. But here, because of medical privacy issues and because of the scale, so many of the people dying are somewhat invisible. It’s very haunting. How have you been pro-
cessing this level of death? Have you reached out to families of those who have died? Yes, I have. Yes, I have. All of the above. And look, my daughter says to me the other night, “Why don’t you go to sleep? Why don’t you close your eyes? You look tired.” And I said to her, “Because there’s more to do. There’s more to do.” I’m just doing my best to fight to save as many lives as possible. I’ve accepted that people are going to die. This virus is very effective at what it does. It’s an expert killer, and it’s a killer of the vulnerable. That’s why it’s a coward in some ways. It doesn’t attack the strong. It attacks the vulnerable. And I’m here to protect the vulnerable. That’s my job. I fight for the vulnerable. I fight for people who need a voice. I fight for people who need justice. And they are being attacked by this virus. And I just spend every minute of every day saying, “What else can I do? What else can I do?” You endorsed Joe Biden very early in the Democratic primary. Have you been in contact with him during the crisis? Yeah, I never endorsed Joe Biden. I never endorsed anybody. I said what I thought about him, which is that he’s an extraordinary man, he’s an extraordinary leader. I speak to him quite frequently. He gives me advice. I bounce ideas off him. This is not the time for politics. I’m sure he’s talking to other governors and other mayors. Just be helpful. Just be helpful. This isn’t the time for anything else. Just be helpful.
You’ve rejected any talk of national political ambition right now. But the discussion has been thrust upon you by the moment. Have you been hearing from Democrats trying to draft you for a role in the November election? I have real things to do, and real things to talk about. And that is not a real thing. I am governor of New York. It’s a job that I asked for. It’s a job that I believe I am prepared for. I believe I can make a difference in it. And everyone assumes, well, a politician just wants to take the next step on the ladder. Well, politicians always aren’t in it for themselves. Maybe, just maybe, sometimes there’s an elected official who actually means what he says. Or is going to do what he says he’s going to do. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? I said if elected, I will serve four years as governor of the state of New York. Period. And that’s what I’m going to do. Period. It’s all simpler than we make it. Say what you’re going to do. Do what you say. Do it with honor. Do it with integrity. Do it with skill. And that’s it. And you’ll sleep well at the end of the day, even if it is a very long day. Do you worry about politicians in this country taking advantage of this crisis in a dangerous or unconstitutional way? It’s happening in Hungary with Viktor Orbán. I worry about politicians taking advantage of people, manipulating people, manipulating opinion, manipulating feelings. I worry about that all the time. You mentioned my father [chuckles]. My father used to say, “As a class, I don’t like politicians.” And I know what he means. Some politicians I respect, and others I don’t respect. But am I wary of political power? Yeah. It can be abused, and manipulated. But it can also be used to do good. So we do what we can, and we give it our all, and that’s all we can do, Mark. I can’t save everybody’s life. But I can do everything that I can to save as many lives as I can. What could a return to normalcy look like? What do you see happening once we get past the apex and head into the summer? I think the economy reopens. The economic re-entry strategy is tied to a public-health strategy. So there’s a public-health strategy that has rapid testing, where people who are negative or had the virus and are immune start to go back to work. Younger people start to go back to work. We protect the vulnerable population. So it’s a public-health strategy and an economic strategy. And they both dovetail. I don’t think it’s a question of saving lives or making money. I reject that as a false choice. You have to do both.
ROLLING STONE
49
T H E
C OV I D - 1 9
C R I S I S
The President and the Plague W
hile americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” ✪ This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.
Illustration by
V I C T O R
50
J U H A S Z
How Donald Trump failed at the single most important task of the Oval Office: keeping the American people safe from harm
By Jeff Goodell
Safety measures brushed off, testing bungled, scientists ignored. How we stumbled into a disaster that every expert saw coming. By Tim Dickinson
ROLLING STONE
52
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) blocks $870 million in flupandemic-preparedness funding from the Recovery Act.
A Centers for Disease Control study warns of a deficit of up to 60,500 ventilators in case of a flu pandemic.
2 020
2 018
2015
2009
A TIMELINE OF THE PANDEMIC
2017
as i write this, the coronavirus is raging around the planet. Globally, the number of people infected with it has risen to more than 1.6 mil-
Contributing editor Jeff Goodell wrote about oceans and the climate crisis in the last issue.
lion, with 95,000 deaths. We are riding the terrible curve of exponential growth — in New York right now, which is a hot spot for the spread of the virus, the number of cases is doubling every three days. As of April 9th, nearly 800 people in the city were dying each day. A report by top disease-modeling experts in London suggested that left unchecked, 7 billion people on the planet would be infected with the virus, leading to as many as 40 million deaths. The pandemic has already fundamentally changed virtually everything about modern life. The streets are eerily empty, we keep our distance from strangers, we worry that every cough is a harbinger of disease. How bad this will get, and how we will weather the dark days ahead, is impossible to say. But we are deep enough into this pandemic now to see a few things clearly. The first is that President Trump has profoundly failed in his primary role: to keep America safe. The pandemic is not his creation, but as president of the United States, it was his job to make sure that we were prepared to deal with this before it happened, and then to react quickly when it did happen. After all, getting hit with a bad pandemic is not exactly a black-swan event. Virtually every public-health official in the world was openly warning of an outbreak for more than a decade. In 2005, President George W. Bush cautioned, “If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.” During the presidential transition in early 2017, Obama’s national security team spent a full day with the Trump team, briefing them on the most pressing national security issues — including the threat of a pandemic. They even left the Trump team a 69-page book detailing what they had learned in viral outbreaks. In January 2019, the director of U.S. National Intelligence warned that the United States was vulnerable to the next flu pandemic and that it “could lead to massive rates of death” and “severely affect the world economy.”
2019
world who can challenge Trump as the king of coronavirus denial. (Bolsonaro dismissed the illness as “a little flu.”) In what you might call God’s cruel little joke, three of Bolsonaro’s aides who attended the dinner would later test positive for the coronavirus. At least one other person who was at Mar-a-Lago also tested positive, as did Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who met with Bolsonaro at a different event in Miami. It was a Trump-branded petri dish that night. Guests danced in a “Trump Train” conga line to Gloria Estefan’s “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You.” They mingled and shook hands and hugged. There was no social distancing — according to one guest, there was not even any hand sanitizer around. So the coronavirus was there all night too, lingering on doorknobs, glasses, silverware, and seeking a meaty new host to infect with every hug and handshake. Epidemiologists may never know how many people got sick as a result of spending those few hours at Mar-a-Lago, or how many of them took the virus home to their friends and families, or passed it on to strangers they bumped into at airports. What’s stunning about this is not the degree to which Trump — a self-confessed germophobe who often douses himself with hand sanitizer after a handshake — put himself at risk. By hosting this party, he also put his friends and his family at risk. It’s a chilling glimpse into the psyche of the president of the United States, a man who has demonstrated, over and over, that he thinks science is a church for losers and that there isn’t any predicament he can’t bully or con his way out of. When the full story of this pandemic is written, it will be clear that Trump not only failed in protecting 329 million Americans from a deadly virus but that he even failed to protect his own sons and daughters.
There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall. Trump knew all this. In fact, he knew a lot more. He had been getting daily intelligence briefings for two months, warning him about the risk of a pandemic. It’s impossible to believe he had not been told that COVID-19 was as much as 30 times more deadly than the flu, or that it was passed human to human with a just touch or a cough. A top White House adviser had already warned that a full-blown pandemic could imperil the lives of millions of Americans. Virtually every public-health expert in the world was speaking out, warning politicians and community leaders what was about to hit us. Nevertheless, since the moment the outbreak was first publicized in January, Trump had been doing nothing but downplaying it. To him, the pandemic was merely another plot to destroy him. “They’re trying to scare everybody . . . cancel the meetings, close the schools — you know, destroy the country,” he told his guests that weekend. “And that’s OK, as long as we can win the election.” Before the party, Trump had dinner at Mara-Lago with populist, right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, one of the few people in the
FROM LEFT: MELINA MARA/“THE WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES; CLEMENS BILAN/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP IMAGES/ SHUTTERSTOCK; CAROLYN KASTER/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ROMAN PILIPEY/ EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; CDC
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
JA N UA RY
M AY
D EC E M B E R 1 0
JA N UA RY 8
Obama officials conduct a disaster exercise called “worst influenza pandemic since 1918” with incoming Trumpers.
The Trump administration disbands the National Security Council’s pandemic response team.
Market vendor falls ill in Wuhan, China, with one of the first suspected cases of coronavirus.
China announces discovery of a novel coronavirus; a gene sequence is soon mapped, enabling diagnostic testing.
The novel coronavirus outbreak started at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, in Wuhan, China (above). The Chinese government soon locked down the country, quarantining 760 million people (right), but the virus had already spread.
“This is the worst pandemic of our lifetimes, and everyone saw it coming,” says renowned epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, one of the key figures in eradicating smallpox in the 1970s and senior technical adviser on the movie Contagion. “And I mean everybody in this field saw it coming.” Trump ignored it all. After he took office, he gutted the National Security Council of anyone with expertise in pandemics. Public-health budgets were slashed. International groups focused on disease and medicine, such as the World Health Organization, were shunned. “This is a global pandemic, and it requires a commitment
to global cooperation and science,” says Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who was a central figure in stopping the Ebola outbreak in Africa in 2014. “And it requires the president of the United States to lead.” After the virus emerged from China, Trump spent nearly three months denying the threat it posed, playing it down, ignoring it, clearly worried that if he acknowledged it, it might tank Wall Street, which he believed was key to his reelection efforts. In January, he said, “We have it totally under control.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,”
con t .
2 020
TOP, FROM LEFT: NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; XIAO YIJIU XINHUA/EYEVINE/ REDUX. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: CARLA K JOHNSON/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; CNBC; PETE MAROVICH-POOL/GETTY IMAGES; ALESSANDRO DELLA VALLE/EPAEFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; ALEX PLAVEVSKI/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; CDC; STATE OF CALIFORNIA
THE POINT OF ORIGIN
and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he said, “It will go away. Just stay calm.” (Trump reportedly believed a widely circulated but scientifically unproven view that the virus would disappear as soon the weather warmed up.) He hyped the effectiveness of unproven drugs and all but promised to roll back social-distancing guidelines and have “the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” “No president has accomplished more in his first term than Donald J. Trump,” a senior administration official emailed me when asked for a comment on this article. “His unprecedented actions to protect the health and safety of the American people will ensure we emerge from this pandemic stronger and with a prosperous, growing economy.” In fact, Trump mishandled virtually everything. As I write this, the United States has the highest caseload in the world, with many urban hospitals overrun, more than 16 million people out of work, and fights breaking out between Trump and governors such as New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer over scarce equipment, including ventilators and medical masks. “Trump’s pre-existing flaws as a leader have all come home to roost,” says Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter and deputy national security adviser to President Obama. “His disdain for expertise led him to disregard the many public-health experts he had in his own government. His disdain for international cooperation has led to a failure to work with other countries. His adversarial posture toward China made it harder to get cooperation out of the gate. Obviously his very tortured relationship with the truth has led
JA N UA RY 1 5
Washington state man returns from Wuhan with virus, appears to set off spread that goes undetected for weeks.
JA N UA RY 2 2
Trump: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. . . . It’s going to be just fine.”
JA N UA RY 30
The World Health Organization declares a world health emergency.
JA N UA RY 30
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross’ rosy outlook: Outbreak could “accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”
JA N UA RY 31
Trump shuts down travel from foreign nationals who have been in China, weeks after virus has been spreading in U.S.
F E B RUA RY 4
FDA approves CDC coronavirus test, but only CDC is authorized to run tests, resulting in rationing and delays.
F E B RUA RY 26
U.S.’ first confirmed case of community spread: Californian with no travel history or contact with patients tests positive.
ROLLING STONE
53
him to repeatedly provide misinformation about what we’re facing. President Trump’s response [to the virus] encapsulates his own unfitness to handle the responsibilities of the office.” A recent story in Foreign Policy — hardly a haven for partisan Democrats — called Trump’s response “the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history.” But Jeremi Suri, a presidential historian at the University of Texas, Austin, disagrees: “An intelligence failure is when you have the pieces but you haven’t put the pieces together,” Suri explains. “9/11 was a classic intelligence failure. We had all these signals, all these pieces of the story, but no one really put it together to think that they were actually going to be getting on planes and doing the things they did on planes.” To Suri, Trump’s response to the pandemic is analogous to Joseph Stalin’s response in June 1941, when all his generals were telling him that Germany was about to attack the Soviet Union. “Every public-health expert in public as well as in private for the last five years has been predicting a pandemic exactly like this,” Suri says. “It is like Stalin being told by his generals, ‘Look, the Nazis are mobilizing. Look what Hitler’s saying. He’s going to attack.’ And Stalin saying, ‘No, it’s all phony. I don’t believe it.’ Well, you know what happened. Hitler invaded, as everyone predicted, killing more than 20 million of Stalin’s people.” Former Secretary of State John Kerry tells me he considers Trump’s handling of the pandemic “a colossal failure. The entire national security process has broken down under Trump.” Suri goes further: “This is the greatest leadership failure in recent American history.”
Wholesale Market. Wuhan is a city of 11 million people in central China, a concrete megacity with the Huanan market at its epicenter. The market is a dense stew of humans and animals. In dark corners, you can often find live wolf pups, golden cicadas, scorpions, bamboo rats, squirrels, foxes, civets, turtles, and crocodile tails and intestines. Such markets are known as “wet markets” because of all the water and blood and guts that splash around in a way that is guaranteed to cause trouble. As Christian Walzer, executive health director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, put it, “Each animal is a package of pathogens.” Viruses are a peculiar kind of pathogen — not quite alive, not quite dead. One Nobel Prize-winning scientist called them “bad news wrapped up in a protein.” They are so small they are impossible to see with a conventional microscope (if one were the size of a tennis ball, a human would stand 500 miles tall). There are many billions of them loose in the world, most of which we haven’t identified. For humans, much of the risk comes from viruses that have jumped from animals to humans (a.k.a. zoonotic viruses), often through contact with feces or blood. Ebola likely originated in bats, jumped to gorillas and chimpanzees, then was passed on to poor African villagers who came in contact with infected meat. But in China, the taste for wild-animal meat is often about status. Several years ago, when I visited a market on the outskirts of Beijing that was crowded with caged snakes and pangolins and many other creatures I couldn’t recognize, I was surprised by the number of middle-class people in the market. “For some people,” a Chinese colleague explained, “eating exotic wildlife is a culinary adventure. The French eat snails. You eat buffalo. To us, it’s not so different.” Epidemiologists have long warned that as more and more people live on the planet, in closer proximity to animals and wildlife, the
T cont .
2020
he first warning came in the third week of December 2019, when Ai Fen, the director of the emergency room at Central Hospital in Wuhan, China, found an unusual chest infection — “multiple patchy blurry shadows scattered in lungs” — of a delivery person of the Huanan Seafood
more risk there is of viruses making the jump to humans. “We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbor so many species of animals and plants — and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses,” David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, wrote. “We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.” On December 27th, a second person turned up at the Wuhan hospital with an unusual lung infection. Three days later, Ai noticed the phrase “SARS coronavirus” on the test sheet. For a doctor with Ai’s experience, the presence of a coronavirus in the patient’s blood was alarming. Millions of coronaviruses (so named because they have a halo of protein around them that looks like a crown) exist in nature. Only six infect human beings. Four are not much trouble. But two are dangerous — one, which was identified in 2003, caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The SARS virus was highly contagious. It spread to 37 countries, infected 8,000 people, and caused 774 deaths. Another coronavirus, which caused a disease known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), was identified in 2012. MERS was not highly contagious (it spread only from camels to humans). But it was deadly, killing about 35 percent of the 2,000 people who suffered from the disease. On December 30th, Ai reported the virus to the hospital’s public-health department. She also circled the word “SARS” in the lab report, then took a picture of it and emailed it to other doctors. When Li Wenliang, a 33-year-old ophthalmologist, heard about the virus, he posted in a WeChat group that a coronavirus had been discovered in Wuhan. Within hours, the news had spread widely among doctors and public-health officials in the city.
FROM LEFT: SHAWN THEW/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; KEVIN DIETSCH/POOL/EPA-EFE/ SHUTTERSTOCK; MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; PATRICK SEMANSKY/ AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ELAINE THOMPSON/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ALEX BRANDON/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; BEN MARGOT/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
F E B RUA RY 26
F E B RUA RY 27
CDC doctor Nancy Messonnier attempts to level with public, warns “disruption to everyday life may be severe.”
CDC director calls Messonnier inarticulate, saying: “I want the American public to know at this point that the risk is low.”
ROLLING STONE
54
F E B RUA RY 27
Trump: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”
F E B RUA RY 28
F E B RUA RY 2 9
M A RC H 4
M A RC H 6
Trump says criticism of his coronavirus response is more nonsense from Democrats: “This is their new hoax.”
First confirmed COVID-19 death in the U.S., from a nursing home in Washington state.
Mike Pence makes false promise of testing availability: “We’ll have over a million tests in the field today.”
Trump argues cruise ship with outbreak should stay offshore.
FAILED RESPONSE
TOP, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ALAN SANTOS/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK; AL DRAGO/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX; JUSTIN LANE/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: SHUTTERSTOCK; EMILIO MORENATTI/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; PAUL SANCYA/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ROBERT NICKELSBERG/GETTY IMAGES; ALEX EDELMAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN DIETSCH/POOL/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHRIS KLEPONIS/POOL/EPA-EFE/ SHUTTERSTOCK
Trump (far left) tried to downplay the disease and spread misinformation. Brazil’s Bolsonaro (above) at a party in Mar-a-Lago, where guests got sick. In New York, the death toll mounts (left).
President Trump and China bashers in Congress would later argue that the pandemic is the fault of the Chinese, that had they acted with more transparency during the early days of the outbreak, the trajectory of the pandemic might have been very different. Just to underscore that point, Trump started calling the SARS-CoV-2 virus “the Chinese virus.” In fact, Trumpland conspiracists, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sen. Tom Cotton, even suggested that the virus could have been an engineered bioweapon that escaped from a research lab in Wuhan. The origins of the virus are still not clear. But Kristian Andersen, director of infectious disease genomics at Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, says it likely came from a bat (96 percent of the virus’s genome is identical to one found in horseshoe bats), then made the jump, perhaps through another animal, to humans. “The chances that a lab engineered this virus are essentially zero,” Andersen tells me.
M A RC H 11
World Health Organization declares a global pandemic.
M A RC H 1 2
Anthony Fauci testifies, “The system is not really geared to what we need right now. . . . It is a failing, let’s admit it.”
However the plague was unleashed, it is certainly true that for the next few weeks, local Chinese officials tried to suppress or deny news of the discovery of the coronavirus. Li was summoned by police and censured for “making false comments on the internet.” After going back to work, Li became infected with the virus and died on February 7th, sparking widespread outrage in China over the government’s attempts to squelch whistleblowers. Other news sources alerting citizens of Wuhan to the virus were censored or shut down. Moreover, Bloomberg recently reported that U.S. intelligence officials suspected that China downplayed the scale and deadliness of the disease to the international community. Still, in other important ways, the Chinese moved quickly. On December 31st — the day after Ai reported the virus to the Wuhan hospital’s public-health department — Chinese authorities alerted the local offices of the World Health Organization about a possible viral outbreak. On
M A RC H 26
3.3 million Americans file for unemployment claims; 160 million Americans are under stayat-home orders.
M A RC H 26
U.S. surges to lead the world in confirmed coronavirus cases.
M A RC H 27
Congress passes $2.2 trillion rescue package.
January 1st, they closed down the Huanan seafood market. Six days later, they identified the pathogen as a novel coronavirus (“novel” meaning new, which is always alarming because it means no one has immunity to it). Finally, on January 10th, Chinese authorities reported the genetic sequence of the virus, which the World Health Organization named SARS-CoV-2, to scientists around the world. Less than a week later, a German lab announced it had used the genetic data to create the first test for the virus, which was quickly adapted by WHO and made available to anyone who wanted it. “In scientific terms, this is lightning speed,” says Andersen. “This is difficult stuff. We have to remember that all of this happened during flu season, so a lot of people would have had symptoms that looked like COVID-19. But because of flu, discovering a novel coronavirus this fast against that backdrop is simply unprecedented.” Andersen points out that Zika circulated in Brazil
M A RC H 2 9
After proposing the U.S. reopen at Easter, Trump reverses himself and extends shutdown measures to end of April.
M A RC H 30
Dr. Deborah Birx: “If we do things . . . almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities.”
ROLLING STONE
55
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
for a year and a half before anyone realized they had an epidemic. Ebola took three months to diagnose. Importantly, these are known pathogens and not a novel pathogen like SARS-CoV-2. To anyone schooled in the science of pandemics, when the Chinese disclosed that they had identified a novel coronavirus on January 7th, it was cause for alarm. And certainly, by then it was no secret to the Trump administration. Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, said that his agency learned of the coronavirus in early January, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield’s conversations with Chinese colleagues. Azar told CNN that he and Redfield officially offered to send a CDC team into China on January 6th but did not receive permission for them to enter the country. According to former government officials, U.S. intelligence agencies would have been alerted in real time about the outbreak in China. “The U.S. intelligence community would have been well positioned to not only detect the emergence of a novel virus like this,” says Ben Rhodes, “but also to understand the extent to which the Chinese might have been suppressing some information about it in those early days.” John Kerry agrees: “I’m told [intelligence] had all this in late December, early January.” Whatever Trump officials knew, they still refused to act. On January 6th, the CDC issued a level-one travel alert to Wuhan, advising travelers to avoid sick people and animal markets. On January 17th, the CDC and Department of Homeland Security announced that travelers from Wuhan to the U.S. would undergo entry screening for symptoms associated with COVID-19 at San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles airports. According to The Washington Post, Azar had his first discussion about the virus with President Trump on January 18th, a full week after the Chinese had disclosed the genetic structure of the virus. According to the Post, “the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market.” Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security director, says the lack of urgency in the Trump administration was extraordinary. “If we had been in office when this hit and we were informed at the White House that a dangerous, unfamiliar virus had broken out in China, we would have been all over that from Day One,” Rice told me. “We would have been figuring out how to ramp up testing quickly. We would have figured out how to prepare our health-system infrastructure in the states
where we know they don’t have the equipment that is necessary to deal with a wide-scale health emergency or pandemic.” After that, the speed of the virus increased exponentially. On January 20th, the coronavirus was found to have infected a man in Snohomish County, Washington, who had returned from China five days earlier. The next day, WHO put out its first situation report about the outbreak, which said there were 278 cases of COVID19 in China, with 51 people severely ill, and six deaths. More ominously, it had spread to Thailand, Japan, and Korea. Trump, of course, shrugged it off. “We have it totally under control,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, referring to the case in Washington state. “It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.” In China, authorities had exactly the opposite reaction. Two days later, on January 23rd, they locked down the entire city of Wuhan — overnight, 11 million people couldn’t leave their homes. Travel across China nearly stopped. “The number of deaths is rising quickly,” Chinese researchers wrote in a report about the disease published in The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, on January 24th. They urged careful surveillance of this new virus in view of its “pandemic potential.” “China definitely botched and suppressed and covered up some of the early information on this,” says Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he focuses on global-outbreak preparedness. “But by mid-January, certainly by the time they started locking down Wuhan, it was clear that this virus was human-to-human transmissible, that it was very aggressively contagious, that it could spread from human to human very easily, and that it had at least a concerning fatality rate. It was clear that it was highly dangerous, and that it had the potential to really overwhelm our modern health system. By late January, everyone in the pandemic research community around the world was in red-flag mode.” By that time, other nations had swung into action to prepare for what was to come. South Korea, in particular, went into high gear. Within days of the country’s first case and upon seeing the same exact set of facts that U.S. authorities were seeing, officials brought together private-sector labs from around their country and began ramping up high-volume testing with great urgency. Inside the White House, some people were finally getting the message. On January 29th,
“If we had been on top of this in early January, we would be living in a different world,” says Susan Rice. “Trump’s lies are killing us.”
ROLLING STONE
56
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, circulated a bluntly worded memo in the West Wing. “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Navarro’s memo said. He warned that an outbreak could evolve “into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” But Trump continued to dismiss the risks. “We think we have it very well under control,” he said during a speech in Michigan on January 30th. “We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.” Instead of pushing for testing or to prepare hospitals for what was to come, Trump’s only move was to ban Chinese foreign nationals from entering the U.S. In the coming weeks, as the pandemic spun out of control and the death toll mounted, he would tout the travel ban as a brave, bold move that saved thousands of lives. As he told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We pretty much shut [the coronavirus] down coming in from China.” In fact, the travel ban was a failure before it began. “You can’t hermetically seal the United States off from the rest of the world,” Rice says. For one thing, the ban only applied to Chinese citizens, not to Americans coming home from China or other international travelers, or to cargo that was coming into the U.S. from China. (Rice calls it “a Swiss-cheese travel ban.”) But more important, by the time the ban went into effect on February 2nd, COVID-19 outbreaks were already growing in more than 30 cities in 26 countries — including the U.S. And that is just the place where the outbreaks were known to be — it was likely the virus was already spreading in many more places, silently moving from person to person with each touch, each handshake, grabbing doorknobs and glasses, in line in airports. Epidemiologists call this kind of transmission “community spread.” “Once community spread is underway, then introductions through travel are not the main threat,” says Konyndyk. “The volume of cases that will emerge locally is always dramatically higher than the volume that will arrive from overseas. Putting up a travel ban is like locking the door after the robber is already inside.” Regardless, any opportunities for early action gained by the travel ban were botched. “If the travel ban did anything, it potentially bought us a few weeks to get ahead of the curve,” Rice argues. “We did not use those weeks to any good effect. And for Trump to say how brilliant that was is belied by the obvious reality that we are now the world’s hot spot. So it’s a load of bullshit. Trump’s lies are killing us.”
A PAST OUTBREAK, DEFEATED Obama with Dr. Fauci amid the Ebola outbreak of 2014. The president acted quickly, sending 3,000 troops to Africa. “I’ve got chronic concerns about pandemics,” he told RS.
PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE
I
n september 2015, I traveled to Alaska with President Obama, where we spent a day together talking about the science and politics of climate change. As we walked along the waterfront in Kotzebue, a city 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, I asked him if reports about the catastrophic future impacts of climate change ever scared him. He replied, “Part of my job is to read stuff that terrifies me all the time.” “I’ve got a chronic concern about pandemics, for example. And the odds are that sometime in our lifetime there’s going to be something like the Spanish flu that wipes out a lot of people . . . if we’re not taking care.” It was not a surprise to me that Obama had pandemics on his mind. The year before, he had put a lot of muscle, as well as political capital, into fighting an Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. The Ebola outbreak showed how powerful a role America could play in a pandemic if it chose to, as well as shaping the views of a generation of epidemiologists and virus hunters. Ebola virus is far more deadly than SARS or COVID-19. It kills about half the people who are infected. “The virus makes people fatally leaky,” science writer Carl Zimmer explained. “They release huge quantities of diarrhea, vomit, and sometimes blood.” Unlike the coronavirus, which transmits easily from human to human, Ebola is only transmitted through bodily fluid — blood, vomit, semen, saliva, sweat. In a hospital setting or when burying a body, it’s highly transmissible. The outbreak began in March 2014 and escalated quickly. People were dying horrible deaths in the streets of Monrovia. “We sat in the situation room in September,” John Kerry recalls. “We were told, ‘Look, a million people are going
to die between now and Christmas if something isn’t done to prevent the spread here.’ ” Obama acted decisively. He arranged an emergency meeting at the United Nations. Among other things, he sent 3,000 U.S. troops to West Africa to help build hospitals. “In order to recruit health care workers to go serve there, we wanted to make sure that they knew that they would be treated if they got infected,” says Ariana Berengaut, who worked in Africa with USAID. “So we built a special hospital for international and local health care workers, which was a way of saying, ‘We have your backs.’ Which is an important message that President Trump should be sending to first responders and health care workers.” Obama also allowed a handful of medical evacuees to be brought into the country for treatment, which was hugely controversial, given the risks of importing a deadly virus into the U.S. Trump, whose hatred of Obama was never a secret, played a major role in hyping the possibility of a mass Ebola outbreak in the U.S. “I am starting to think that there is something seriously wrong with President Obama’s mental health,” Trump tweeted. “Why won’t he stop the flights. Psycho!” And then again later: “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days — now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. Keep them out of here!” Two of those patients who were brought to the U.S. died; nine were saved. Globally, the outbreak killed 11,300, mostly in Africa. But it was widely viewed as a public-health triumph. “America has been the nation that offers the world this type of leadership, especially when that urgency is necessary,” says Rajiv Shah. “We are the trusted leader at bringing people together to solve big global challenges.”
In the aftermath, Rice organized the Global Health Security Agenda, which was an attempt to build cooperation and share knowledge about pandemics between nations. Its role was explicit: “to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats.” They also set up the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was essentially a new department within the NSC, headed by Beth Cameron, an administrator with decades of experience with pandemics. After the 2016 election, the outgoing Obama cabinet members and staff and incoming Trump cabinet members and staff gathered for three hours in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. The gathering was held to satisfy a 2015 law that required that the outgoing administration “prepare and host interagency emergency preparedness and response exercises.” All of Obama’s top advisers, including Susan Rice and Lisa Monaco, Obama’s Homeland Security adviser, were there. Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (who later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now awaiting sentencing) was also present, as was Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert. The purpose of the exercise, according to documents for the meeting published by Politico, was to “familiarize” the incoming team with “domestic incident management policy and practices and continuity of government programs” in case it faced a major crisis. They spent several hours discussing the risks of a pandemic. “Although the exercise was required, the specific scenarios we chose were not,” Monaco later wrote. “We included a pandemic scenario because I believed then, and I have warned since, that emerging infectious disease was likely to pose one of the gravest risks for the new administration.” The Trump folks just sat there, according to sources present, eyes glazed. Rice says she talked with Flynn about pandemics during 12 hours of briefings. Did she get any feedback from him? “I’m not going to say there was no feedback,” says Rice. “But there were very few issues beside China that he got energized about. China and Turkey.” And if the briefing wasn’t enough, there was also a book. In the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic, the National Security Council staff assembled a 69-page playbook about how to respond to a pandemic, even down to key issues like what the political response might be to military involvement. The playbook [Cont. on 94]
ROLLING STONE
57
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
Denials and Dysfunction: Inside Trump’s Task Force When the White House finally reacted to the coronavirus, the response was immediately marred by infighting and confusion
O
n February 24th, Dr. Duane Caneva, the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, sent an urgent email with the subject line “Red Dawn Breaking Bad” to a small group of doctors, epidemiologists, public-health officials, and pandemic experts. For more than a month, the scientists on the email chain had been tracking a deadly new virus that was ripping its way through Southeast Asia. The people on the Red Dawn email chain ranged from local health officials in Texas and California to senior-level doctors at the U.S. Army, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department. Some of them had worked together in the White House in the mid-2000s. They had helped write President Bush’s 2007 national strategic plan for a flu pandemic and had advised President Obama on his response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. (The Red Dawn title was an inside joke referring to the 1984 B movie in which the Soviet Union invades America.) By late February, the sense of alarm in the emails was palpable, as new coronavirus cases were reported in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Italy. One of the White House veterans on the chain was a pandemic expert named Carter Mecher, who is now a senior adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Mecher got into the habit of waking up at 4:30 a.m. and Washington, D.C., bureau chief Andy Kroll wrote about the Democratic primary in February.
ROLLING STONE
58
By Andy Kroll
combing the internet for data to help him understand this new virus and what might happen if it made it to America. One day, he discovered a field report by Japan’s National Institute of Infectious Diseases about the Diamond Princess cruise ship, docked in Yokohama, which had suffered one of the first major coronavirus outbreaks. Mecher used the field report’s numbers to make a rough projection about how a severe pandemic might play out in the U.S., and he immediately shared it with his colleagues on the Red Dawn chain: By his calculation, if 30 percent of the American population were to get the new coronavirus, more than 1.7 million would die from it. If those projections were even in the ballpark, a crisis of unimaginable proportions was fast approaching. Dr. Eva Lee, a health care operations expert at Georgia Tech, warned that there would likely be a critical shortage of personal protective equipment for nurses and doctors. Lee wrote, “I do not know if we have enough resources to protect all front-line providers.” The experts immediately took their warnings to policymakers and officials in Washington, D.C. One public-health specialist, who asked to remain anonymous, says that when he briefed government officials in February, they were stunned to learn how grim the situation was — that it was too late to contain the virus, that mitigation was the only option, and that as many as half of all Americans could become infected from COVID-19. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” the specialist says. “Because no one had told them before.”
By February 28th, the group’s warnings had reached the highest rungs of the Trump administration. One day after he was appointed to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general and chief medical officer for the United States, was added to the Red Dawn chain. A representative for Adams says the surgeon general didn’t see these emails, but if he had, he would have read Mecher’s most dire warning yet. Widespread testing problems had prevented experts from seeing the full scope of the crisis, but there was enough data by the end of February, Mecher wrote, to “convince people that this is going to be bad.” National leaders needed to use every tool available — social distancing, school closures, public-gathering bans, and so on — to mitigate the virus’s spread. Cities and states had already begun to prepare, but an outbreak of this magnitude called for nothing less than a nationwide response if we had any hope of stopping a full-blown pandemic. “We have a relatively narrow window,” Mecher wrote, “and we are flying blind.”
I
F you were to write a playbook for how not to prevent a public-health crisis, you would study the work of the Trump administration in the first three months of 2020. The Trump White House, through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts. It failed to listen to the projections of one of its own economic advisers. It failed to take seriously what has become the worst pandemic since the 1918
THE BEST PEOPLE
DAVID BUTOW/REDUX
President Trump put Vice President Pence in charge of the Coronavirus Task Force in February; soon after, Kushner launched his own “shadow” task force.
flu and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And when the White House finally awoke to the seriousness of COVID-19, the response it mustered managed to contain all the worst traits of this presidency. Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies. There was confusion in the response from the start. In January, Trump picked HHS Secretary Alex Azar II, the former president of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, to lead his new Coronavirus Task Force. The problem was, there was already a senior official at HHS whose job was coordinating the federal government’s response to a nationwide pandemic, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec. In late February, after it was clear that the virus had spread widely throughout the U.S., Trump reshuffled his task force. He replaced Azar with Vice President Mike Pence as the leader of the task force, and added Dr. Deborah Birx, the State Department’s global AIDS director and an infectious-disease expert, who joined Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as the group’s scientific experts. But Trump also appointed administration loyalists like right-wing extremist Ken Cuccinelli and Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act. Like so many things in Trumpland, the work of the task force has gotten mired in petty pol-
itics and internal turf wars. A “shadow” task force emerged, led by Jared Kushner. Officially, Kushner’s team of McKinsey consultants, financiers, and old buddies from his New York business days was meant to coordinate collaboration between the government and the private sector. But it soon devolved into a typical Trump boondoggle. A company Kushner had once invested in, Oscar Health, was tapped to build a government website that would speed up testing (the site was later scrapped). Kushner turned to his brother Josh’s father-in-law, Kurt Kloss, who was a doctor, for recommendations on how to deal with the crisis. That led to Kloss — the father of supermodel Karlie Kloss, Josh’s wife — posting on a Facebook group for emergencyroom doctors that he was looking for smart ideas and had a “direct channel to [the] person now in charge at [the] White House.” Federal agencies that normally play a central role in disaster-response efforts have found themselves left out of the action. Pete Gaynor, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress that his agency wasn’t invited to join the president’s Coronavirus Task Force until the week of March 16th — six weeks after the task force was created. Other federal employees involved in the response effort have had to respond to different
and sometimes competing requests and directives from Pence’s task force and Kushner’s task force. “All of those roles and responsibilities should be relatively well-established,” says one public-health official who’s dealt with the White House. “I’ve heard that people in HHS will get direction from Kushner’s team that directly contradicts what they’re getting from the White House task force, and then trying to deconflict those becomes a huge problem.” When Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked the White House for a call with the federal agency leading the effort to get private companies to manufacture and distribute medical supplies, he expected to be connected with FEMA, which typically handles this kind of work in a crisis, or Peter Navarro, the newly appointed national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. Instead, he was told to call the Department of Defense. “I walked away from that conversation scratching my head, like, ‘Who’s in charge?’ ” Murphy tells Rolling Stone. “DOD clearly has expertise, but it seems completely unclear whether the White House is in charge, DOD is in charge, FEMA is in charge, or HHS is in charge.” The Trump administration’s reflexive bias against science and facts expertise couldn’t be more clearer than in the sidelining of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crown jewel of the country’s publichealth system. Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director, sits on the Coronavirus Task Force and has participated in closed-door meetings, but he has appeared at only a few of the dozens of press briefings held by the task force. Trump trashed the agency on Twitter in mid-March (“inadequate and slow”), and the CDC has since taken a back seat to other federal agencies in communicating with the public. “I’m worried that the CDC is not front and center now,” Dr. Tom Frieden, who served as CDC director from 2009 to 2017, tells Rolling Stone. “In every other public-health emergency in this country since the CDC was founded nearly 75 years ago, it has had a leading role. The CDC is the best source of information on COVID-19.” Frieden adds, “Fighting coronavirus without CDC is like fighting with one hand behind your back.” [Cont. on 96]
“People in HHS will get direction from Kushner’s team that directly contradicts what they’re getting from the White House task force.”
ROLLING STONE
59
T H E
C OV I D - 1 9
C R I S I S
48 Hours in America From Anchorage to Miami Beach, 13 photographers document fear and isolation as the crisis explodes across the country
W
Senate sergeants-at-arms canceled tours of the Capitol. And in hen march began we could leave remote Wyoming, where there was still not yet a single recorded our houses. We could go to work, fatality, things proceeded almost as normal. “It doesn’t feel like vote, attend church, or buy grocera cultural shift in our little world of Chugwater,” rancher Jeremy ies without thinking much about Westerman told photographer Benjamin Rasmussen. any of it. But by March 30th, more In New Orleans, a pastor was arrested for continuing to hold than 2,400 people were dead, some services. In Seattle, a nurse told photographer Grant Hindley that 150,000 were known to be infected, roughly 10 million had lost part of her job these days was improvising family visits through their jobs, and about 80 percent of the population was restrictpatients’ phones: “A patient is not necessarily alert, but the famed to their homes. That same day, Rolling Stone photograily member can at least see them. I’d like to think that’s comfortphers were fanned out across the U.S., from Miami to Detroit, ing, but it’s emotional.” In New York, “the city has ground to a L.A. to Anchorage, Alaska, capturing a snapshot of the country halt,” says photographer Natalie Keyssar, who captured Amazon over the course of 48 hours, from a Sunday morning to a Mondelivery drivers still on the job. “We’re able to be sequestered in day night, as more and more communities were pulled into the our comfortable apartments thanks to these workers.” virus’s riptide. For photographer Brittany Greeson, who Even that was still just the beginning. “If relies on developing an intimacy with her we do things together well — almost perfectsubjects, the hardest part was staying away ly — we could get in the range of 100,000 from them. “I have to keep my distance for to 200,000 fatalities,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the their safety,” she explains. But even as GreeWhite House’s coronavirus task-force coorson chronicled the devastation the virus dinator, said on March 30th. More than 500 MANY NEW YORKERS feel they’ve been wrought on her hometown of Detroit, she people would die of complications from the forced to choose between their found hope in a conversation she had with a virus on that day alone. In New York, the financial future and their health. Bodega owner Nabil Alsaidim in teenager behind a mask. “He was just talking epicenter of the crisis, the death toll surBushwick, Brooklyn, thought he about the things he wants to go on to do. passed 1,000 as the state’s governor, Andrew had no choice but to stay open. He was into art and was asking about my Cuomo, pleaded with health care workers “He was really freaked out,” says camera,” she says. “He still has hopes and around the nation: “Please come help us.” In photographer George Etheredge. dreams. He’s not thinking of this as the end Los Angeles, farmers markets were suspend“I asked him to lift up the plastic, — he’s just waiting for it to be over so he can ed. In Texas, inmates sued for soap and hand which he was keeping down, just so that I could see him.” move on with his life.” TESSA STUART sanitizer. In Washington, D.C., the House and
NEW YORK, NY
60
PHOTOGRAPH BY
George Etheredge
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
NEW YORK, NY NEW YORKERS may never think of riding the subway the same way again. The city’s cheekby-jowl charms became its greatest liability as it soared to become the global epicenter of the pandemic in a matter of weeks. The steep growth rate indicated the virus probably arrived in the city well before the first case was reported on March 1st. By March 30th, when photographers George Etheredge and Natalie Keyssar were chronicling New York City, cases had topped 38,000, and the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort arrived that morning to help overwhelmed hospitals. Life had come to an eerie standstill, with the peel of sirens replacing the daily scrum of cabs and pedestrians. Residents, only allowed to leave the house for essential work, exercise, or groceries, stood in long, socially distanced lines at supermarkets like this one (left) in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A week later, the city passed a grim landmark when more people died from the coronavirus than had died on 9/11, and New York state registered more confirmed cases than all of Italy or Spain, the hardest-hit countries in Europe.
HUNDREDS STOOD IN LINE to be tested at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens (right), one of the first to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients. Delivering remarks in Manhattan, Mayor Bill de Blasio (above) said he asked the White House for 400 more ventilators as the city’s supply dwindled. Low-income neighborhoods like Elmhurst are shouldering a disproportionate amount of suffering as residents are more likely to have jobs that put them at risk for exposure, like delivery services. “You’re not seeing this situation in wealthy neighborhoods,” says Keyssar. “There, no one is waiting outdoors in a long line for testing.”
ROLLING STONE
62
a lot of upsetting pictures in my life, and this was definitely a disturbing moment for me,” Keyssar says of an elderly woman she saw at Union Square (above). “Because you know how high the mortality rate is with the older population.” Etheredge saw an anxious taxi driver (left) watch a hearse pull out of Bellevue Hospital, where tents and trucks, comprising a makeshift morgue, had been brought in. When the starkwhite Navy hospital ship Comfort (right) lumbered up the Hudson River to Pier 90, “it was pretty dramatic to see,” says Etheredge. “People were peering through the quarantine barricades and taking pictures, and the police started to kick them out if they were too close to each other.”
“I’VE TAKEN
ROLLING STONE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Natalie Keyssar (woman and Elmhurst Hospital) and George Etheredge
63
ROLLING STONE
64
PHOTOGRAPH BY
Ben Rasmussen
CHUGWATER, WYOMING
CANDLER, NORTH CAROLINA
SOCIAL DISTANCING is a way of life in Wyoming; locals like to mention it has the population density of outer Mongolia. “We very regularly don’t come into contact with people for days,” says Tara Westerman, who lives on a cattle ranch with her husband, Jeremy (left), and three sons. But the Westermans were exposed to the virus at a birthday party in Denver. “We were very responsible and haven’t gone anywhere,” she says. “When we told people we were sick and might have it, everyone would say, ‘No, it’s probably just a cold or flu,’ ” says Jeremy. “And I was like, ‘No, it’s probably the worldwide pandemic.’ ”
SOME DRIVERS AT a truck stop outside Asheville were “taking precautions,” but others weren’t too worried about contracting COVID-19. “I lived through Vietnam and 23 years of military service,” said Jack Carrow as he and Gerry Stanton took a break to have lunch (top). Carrow has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, making the risks associated with COVID-19 much higher for him. But many truckers take heart in the solitary nature of their work. “We are the epitome of social distancing,” says Ronnie Freeman (above). “This is a lonely lifestyle. We’re not gonna get the virus. We’re immune.”
ROLLING STONE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Mike Belleme
65
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
THE CROWN OF GLORY Church International in Decatur improvised a drive-in service. The faithful gathered in the church parking lot to worship, including Vickie Lymon and her daughter Grace (right). “For the most part, people had the idea that the distance was a good thing,” photographer Johnathon Kelso says. “But that was really, really hard to do once you started hearing the gospel music and getting encouraged by what the bishop was saying. It became less of a drive-in service and more of a parking-lot celebration.” Alma Lewis (above), the bishop’s mother, “was out there dancing the whole time.”
COLUMBUS, OHIO “MY PLACE OF WORK shut down, and my friends and I wanted to look for places that needed help,” says Cassie Blaise (right), a hairstylist and volunteer for Neighborhood Services Inc., a food bank that has moved outdoors to do curbside pickup. In the Ohio Statehouse, Gov. Mike DeWine, who has been praised for his aggressive response to COVID-19, holds a virtual press conference (above).
ROLLING STONE
66
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Johnathon Kelso (Atlanta) and Maddie McGarvey (Columbus)
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
SAN FRANCISCO’S EARLY ACTION may have saved it from becoming an epicenter of the virus: Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in late February, and on March 16th, the Bay Area was the first in the nation to issue a shelter-in-place order. The Hwangs — Liam, 7, with sister Loghan, 10, mother Kim Ng, and father Brian (not pictured) — are learning how to juggle home-schooling and conference calls. “Sometimes we can be in the midst of an important meeting, but we need to resolve a conflict or steer the children in the right direction,” says Ng. “Although we’re in this new reality, we feel fortunate that we can be safe in our home.” Liam says he misses his friends and teachers, but is enjoying the time away. “My favorite part is that I can cuddle my family whenever I want,” he says.
ROLLING STONE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
Cayce Clifford
67
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
GULF AND CENTRAL FLORIDA MANY RESIDENTS weren’t taking the pandemic seriously when photographer Zack Wittman traveled around Florida. “People who were willing to break the rules to go to the beach (right) were also not very concerned with maintaining social distancing,” he says of Pass-a-Grille, near Tampa. “I would take a step back and they would take a step clos-
er.” Hundreds of activities in the Villages, a retirement community north of Orlando, were suspended, but a country club was still open for golf (bottom left). “I’ve been wearing a mask and gloves since last week,” says Sylvia Stead, a 75-year-old living in the Villages. “People laugh at me for it, but I laugh at them, too. I tell them I’ll visit them in the hospital.”
MIAMI, FLORIDA DESPITE A BALLOONING number of cases — and over 20 percent of the state’s population being over 65 — Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t issue stay-athome orders until April 1st. Miami (above and top left) has been hardest hit, with
1,632 cases the day photographer Rose Marie Cromwell shot there, and 5,745 just over a week later. “I definitely think that people are still kind of living naively in Miami,” she says. “It’s a city where nobody likes to follow the rules.”
ROLLING STONE
68
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Rose Marie Cromwell (Miami) and Zack Wittman (Gulf and Central Florida)
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA WHEN FOURTH-GRADE TEACHER Kelly Shrein said goodbye to her students at Northwood ABC Elementary School in Anchorage before spring break, she assumed she would see them in a week. Then schools were shut down until May 1st to help stop the spread of the virus. “I felt like I didn’t get to say goodbye,” Shrein says. So she drove to her students’ houses to do it from afar, sending air hugs and hollering from her SUV that they should keep reading. Student Baeli Romer-Symbol (above) greeted her with a sign saying, “I Miss You.” Alaska had the country’s lowest COVID-19 case count in March, but nearly half of them were in Anchorage, the glacier-surrounded city home to more than 250,000 people.
To help keep their numbers low, several regional hospitals joined together to start a drive-through testing site (right), where nurses huddled around space heaters to keep warm when they weren’t busy, which wasn’t often. “It was a real steady stream the entire time I was there,” says photographer Ash Adams. “I had to be in the full hazmat suit; all my gear was scrubbed. And I maintained a six-foot distance. There were a lot of people making sure I was safe.” Anchorage also converted the state’s largest entertainment venue, the Sullivan Arena, into a homeless shelter, which had served 737 people as of March 30th. “It seems like there’s a coming together of sorts surrounding this issue,” says Adams.
ROLLING STONE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Ash Adams
69
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
DETROIT, MICHIGAN
JOHN AND JESSE DUBOIS (top right) are expecting their first child, a boy, in July. “She has to go to the doctor alone,” Sam Trotter, who photographed the couple, says. “John has to drop her off outside and FaceTime in to be there.” Tokes Smoke Shop (above) is across the street from an apartment building filled with seniors in the neighborhood of Leimert Park. Owner Tracy Lewis and her husband, Kevin, ferry items across Crenshaw Boulevard so older folks don’t have to leave their homes. “There is something different in the air, but then there is not,” says Trotter. “There were people at the Korean Bell of Friendship flying kites, groups walking around, and scores of motorcycles. But then again, for the most part, the streets were empty.”
DETROIT WATER DEPARTMENT service technician Khalifa Fleming was on the job two days after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order forcing utilities to restore running water to homes where it was cut off due to nonpayment. Michigan ranks third nationally in COVID-19-related deaths, and the majority of those cases are in Detroit, where the poverty rate is three times the national level. “No one understands we’re putting ourself at risk to help the whole city out,” Fleming says.
ROLLING STONE
70
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Samuel Trotter (Los Angeles), Brittany Greeson (Detroit), and Grant Hindley (Seattle)
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON “I CHANGE my scrubs before I leave. I walk into the house and I shower immediately,” says Gwen Angel, a nurse in Seattle, the nation’s first coronavirus hot spot. “We give everyone a brave face, but we’re concerned about our families, about finances. We also, with everyone else, are concerned about our futures.”
THE COVID-19 CRISIS
WEAVERVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA REGGIE TIDWELL and his children Veyda and Bailey at home on Sunday, March 29th. Veyda’s twin sister, Langley, has leukemia. “Since our daughter’s leukemia diagnosis in October of last year, home has been a necessary refuge for our family,” Tidwell says. “Now, because of the virus and the impact it could have on her, it has never been more important for us to be here.” The day this photo was taken, North Carolina registered more than 1,100 confirmed cases of COVID-19. Two people in the state died from the virus that day, bringing the total death count to seven. Some counties, including the one where the Tidwells live, had already ordered their residents to shelter in place, but a mandatory stay-at-home order would not go into effect statewide until 5 p.m. the following day. “Even though the parks had been shut down, people had taken down the caution tape and were just hanging out anyway,” says photographer Mike Belleme, who had barely left his own home in two weeks when he ventured out to take pictures for this assignment. “I expected it to be more empty and deserted. It was a little alarming, seeing people looking, for the most part, like they’re just going about life.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
Mike Belleme
contributors: Ryan Bort, David Browne, Tim Dickinson, Patrick Doyle, Elisabeth GarberPaul, Angie Martoccio, Alex Morris, Phoebe Neidl, Tessa Stuart
ROLLING STONE
72
NEW! SMO OT H , DE LI CIOUS & Perfectly Yours STA R B U C KS ® S I G N AT U R E C O L D B R E W, N OW E A S I LY M A D E AT H OM E .
FIND IT IN THE COFFEE AISLE. Availab le in si n gle -se rve p o ds an d m ul ti- s erve bo ttl es . Sta rbu cks ® a n d t h e Star bucks l ogo are regis te re d t rad em arks o f Sta rbu cks Co rp oratio n use d u nde r l icen se by Nestl é .
ARTISTS WATCH T0
Ten new musicians from around the world who are breaking through the noise, making hits, and reshaping pop, hip-hop, rock, Latin, country, and more in 2020 Photograph by GRIFFIN LOTZ
Rema A 19-year-old charmer from Nigeria who makes irresistible pop-rap hits
75
ARTIST TO WATCH
S.G. Goodman An untamed rock & roll truth teller from rural Kentucky
catchy “Iron Man” on his 2019 Summer Playlist. “I don’t know anybody in the White House or in the American government,” Rema says in disbelief. “How did my music walk so far to his doorstep?” when rema thinks about Rema first got into music at Benin City’s Christ the past two years of his life, Embassy church, where he was a youth leader for a a time in which he’s rocketed program that taught kids how to rap for the congregafrom Benin City, Nigeria, to tion. “If I look back, I wasn’t really that good,” he says. global stardom, he’s remindIn 2008, Rema’s father died; seven years later, so did ed of the biblical story of Rema’s brother. The financial hardship those losses David. “He took care of the placed on him, his mother, and two sisters led to a sheep,” says the 19-year-old yearlong move to Ghana. “No money was coming in,” rapper and singer, citing the he says. “We were hungry. I was the only man in the ways he’s tried to provide for the other artists in his house. I had to do something.” hometown. “On the fateful day David went to give food Once he was back in Benin City, he set about to his brothers and he saw Goliath, that was the same making music that drew on the secular influences he’d way I fought through all my struggles.” absorbed during his year in Ghana. The day after his It started in 2018, when Rema — real name Divine “Gucci Gang” freestyle hit Instagram, he received a Ikubor — recorded a viral freestyle over “Gucci Gang,” call from D’Prince, who invited him to Lagos, Nigeria, a local hit by Nigerian artist D’Prince. Sitting in a car, and signed him to a record deal. “I was like, ‘This is my wearing a maroon jacket, the self-proclaimed “modernonly chance,’ ” Rema says. “I had to prove myself.” world David” delivered a sequence of rapid bars, puncEven as his career keeps growing — his biggest hit, tuated by spurts of melody, that’s since been viewed the bubbly, melodic “Dumebi,” has been streamed nearly 500,000 times on Instagram. Soon, he had a 68 million times — Rema is still adjusting to string of hits that have made him one of the his newfound fame and wealth. “I try and most exciting acts in the ascendant Afrobeats HOMETOWN stay away from people,” Rema says. “It’s not genre, with a signature sound that combines Benin City, Nigeria because I’m proud. It’s because I’m shy. I comic-book references, teenage jealousy, SOUNDS LIKE have a lot inside me, but sometimes I can’t trap beats, and melodic avalanches. It’s a The Peter Parker actually speak.” CHARLES HOLMES blend that’s caught the attention of everyone of Afrobeats: shy from Drake’s manager, Oliver El-Khatib, to but powerful Barack Obama, who put Rema’s irresistibly Photograph by GRIFFIN LOTZ
REMA
76 |
Rolling Stone
when s.g. goodman was growing up, her farmer father would plant an annual crop of sweet corn for his three kids, which they later harvested by hand and sold for money to buy their school clothes. The farm isn’t Goodman’s home anymore: “I live in a house where the backyard is too shaded by these maple trees, so I can’t really grow anything,” she says. But the Kentucky singer-songwriter, 31, maintains a deep connection to the place that shaped her on HOMETOWN her debut album, Hickman, Old Time Feeling, Kentucky SOUNDS LIKE which she proA voice as duced with her elemental as the bandmates and Kentucky hills My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, a fellow Kentuckian. Her songs have an earthy feel, relaying her personal experiences alongside razor-sharp social commentary about the South — from the struggles of average farming families to the magical ability of the people in power to “turn the poor against the poor.” “Southerners should be telling their own stories — that’s important,” Goodman says. “And it’s the rest of the world’s responsibility to actually listen to people from these areas and what they have to say. And maybe take it upon themselves to dig a little deeper.” JON FREEMAN Photograph by ALYSSE GAFKJEN
TAINY One of the biggest producers in reggaeton is ready to go solo
if you’re looking to make a reggaeton hit in 2020, you can start by calling Marco “Tainy” Masís. Over the past 15 years, the producer has fashioned arty, chart-topping tracks for the genre’s biggest stars — from J Balvin and Bad Bunny to Wisin and Yandel — as well as spilling over to the Angloverse with Justin Bieber’s recent ambient-R&B cut “Habitual.” Now, Tainy has his sights set on solo stardom with his forward-thinking debut EP, The Kids That Grew Up on Reggaeton, featuring vocal assists from Sean Paul, Kali Uchis, and Fifth Harmony alumna Lauren Jauregui. “I’m not comfortable with normal,” says the 30-year-old producer, sitting in his Miami studio, surrounded by platinum plaques and Takashi Murakami throw
pillows. “Growing up in Puerto Rico, we had so much music coming in, so many influences. I want to keep expanding — try this, fuse it with that, and see what happens. Little by little, I’m finding [artists] who are ready to take the risk.” Tainy’s career began at age 15, when he became a protégé of Luny Tunes, the production duo who dominated reggaeton’s 2000s boom, contributing to their HOMETOWN
San Juan, Puerto Rico SOUNDS LIKE
The shape of reggaeton to come
influential 2005 compilation, Mas Flow 2. Now, he’s taking a chance on fresh new voices in Latin music. Along with music executive Lex Borrero, Tainy has co-founded a creative incubator called Neon16, functioning as a label, recording studio, and talent agency. “I want to pay it forward,” he says. SUZY EXPOSITO
Photograph by ROSE MARIE CROMWELL
Rolling Stone
| 77
070 SHAKE A mystical visionary who’s equally inspired by Pink Floyd and Kanye
every morning at 11:30, 070 Shake puts Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on the record player in the New Jersey studio where she works. “Every day, at the same time,” says the singer, 22. Shake is signed to Def Jam and Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music, which gives some producers who show up to collaborate the wrong impression; Dark Side of the Moon helps clear that up. “I’m open to stepping into every single world of music that there is,” she says. Shake turned heads with her charismatic yowl on Kanye’s 2018 song “Ghost Town.” She’s since won raves for her dizzyingly genreless debut album, Modus Vivendi. It’s been a swift rise, but she’s taking it all in stride. “I don’t think I see time the way everybody sees time,” Shake says. “Nothing really surprises me too much. Everything is moments, everything is close together.” BRENDAN KLINKENBERG
HOMETOWN
North Bergen, New Jersey SOUNDS LIKE
Spacey, experimental pop rap
Photograph by KOURY ANGELO
you’ve probably heard at least a snippet of “Dance Monkey,” Tones and I’s billion-streamed 2019 hit. But when Toni Watson found out that her song was a smash, she had one question: What is a music
78 |
Rolling Stone
Aussie busker Toni Watson goes worldwide with her unstoppable hit, ‘Dance Monkey’
chart? “I never knew there were music charts before I released my music,” says the Australian artist. “I just listened to the music that I liked.” A selftaught singer and producer, Tones began making her own songs while
working retail in Melbourne. She gradually earned a following by busking around the city and covering songs on YouTube. “Dance Monkey,” an impossibly catchy piano track, took off with help from services like
Shazam. “When you get video tags of people covering the song or dancing to it, HOMETOWN
Melbourne, Australia SOUNDS LIKE
Upbeat pianosynth pop with belting vocals
it’s just out of this world,” she says. While her tour was postponed indefinitely, Tones hopes to bring her live show to her international fans as soon as she can: “I’m going to leave no stone unturned.” CLAIRE SHAFFER
GIULIA GIANNINI MCGAURAN
Tones and I
Lewis Capaldi Pop’s billion-streaming heartbreak kid laughs through the tears
last april, Lewis Capaldi sold out an arena tour of the U.K. and Ireland in 10 minutes — and he was just getting started. The Scottish singer-songwriter, 23, specializes in the kind of lovelorn ballads that draw comparisons to Adele, as do his streaming numbers: “Someone You Loved,” his biggest smash, has more than a billion Spotify plays. “People will hear my music whether they want to or not,” Capaldi jokes. And while his debut album is largely about a difficult breakup, he’s kept a sense of humor about it all. “If you’re going to analyze your own shortcomings in a relationship,” he says, “you have to have a laugh at yourself.” JON BLISTEIN Photograph by
HOLLIE FERNANDO
HOMETOWN
Bathgate, Scotland SOUNDS LIKE
Post-breakup sorrows, delivered in a soulful rasp
THE LAST ARTFUL, DODGR Pop’s new secret weapon: a soulful voice from Los Angeles
Katie Pruitt A country-folk songwriter full of hard-won Southern optimism whose soul wasn’t saved.” But since then, she and for katie pruitt, her folks worked to find common ground. “They getting a Catholic have made strides and overcome their fear and education in her discomfort with it,” Pruitt says, “which I’m incrediconservative Johns bly fucking proud of them for. It taught me to have Creek, Georgia, some patience.” hometown wasn’t Pruitt already had discipline. As a kid, she taught a ton of fun. The herself to play guitar by locking herself away in her schools were strict; room and studying John Mayer and Dave Matthews. if she didn’t tuck in Her nimble playing is essential to her sound, but it’s the shirt of her uniher voice you notice first. At times soft and soulful, form, she’d be forced it builds to a cathartic wail in songs like “Expectato eat alone, handwriting prayers during a “silent tions” and “Loving Her.” “I wanted to be intentional lunch.” Being closeted didn’t make things easier. about my moments, and not just be big the whole “There were maybe two out people in my school. time,” she says. “But I love belting shit out.” One gay guy, one gay girl, and the gay girl got so Pruitt has earned rave reviews for Expectations, much shit. Got bullied,” Pruitt says. and she shared a stage in March with Bob Weir for She drew on experiences like these for her debut “Ramble on Rose” at the Ryman Auditorium in album, Expectations, a majestic LP that blends Nashville. After a tornado ripped through the city country and folk with indie rock. Pruitt, 26, writes that same month, she helped soothe a shellshocked piercing first-person lyrics about topics ranging crowd at a benefit show. “There is a reverence from her sexuality and mental health to family and when you are connecting with an audience in a faith. Some memories made it directly into her silent room,” Pruitt says, echoes of her songs: “Seven Hail Marys if I copped an Catholic upbringing coming into focus. attitude,” she sings on “Normal.” HOMETOWN Johns “I love the concept that there is some Pruitt came out at 20, but feared telling Creek, Georgia SOUNDS LIKE force, but I never quite thought it was a her parents. When she finally did, it A singerman floating in the sky guarding a gate. created a rift. She addresses the conflict songwriter with I think God is anything good.” JOSEPH HUDAK in the staggering “Georgia”: “My father a big voice and would scream, he’d scream out in rage,” courage to spare she sings. “He did not want a daughter Photograph by ALYSSE GAFKJEN
80 |
Rolling Stone
alana chenevert never really liked her given name, so around 2010, she started calling herself “Dodgr,” in tribute to Oliver Twist and her hometown L.A. baseball team. “I decided I was just gonna go for it,” she says, calling from Portland, Oregon, where she’s staying with her girlfriend. She started making music in 2010, when she was in her last semester as an anthropology student at Humboldt State University in Northern California. A decade later, under the full name of the Last Artful, Dodgr, the 32-year-old is one of the most promising songwriters in pop — she’s caught the ear of Mark Ronson and
Anderson .Paak, as well as a number of other names so big she’s had to sign NDAs after their sessions. “Let me just say that there’s some coolass people, and the experiences in the studios have been life-changing,” she teases. Dodgr got a big boost when her sleek, Rihannaesque single “Hot” landed a spot on HBO’s hit Euphoria, and now she’s hard at work on a debut album that’s a top priority for Interscope Records HOMETOWN
Los Angeles SOUNDS LIKE
Smooth R&B and pop hooks with a sunny West Coast vibe
this year. “I’m a superunknown artist who was given that opportunity to shine,” she says. “I feel like I’m going to be popping up in notso-low-key ways in 2020.” BRITTANY SPANOS
Photograph by CLAYTON COTTERELL
BEACH BUNNY Chicago band turns songwriter Lili Trifilio’s sad vibes into punky, poppy rock anthems
Rylo Rodriguez An Alabama rapper with a knack for flipping sweet R&B samples when mathose same songs can rarely cross over riah Carey to platforms like Spotify or Apple Music sang about for copyright reasons. everlasting On his 2019 song “Court Dates,” love on 1996’s Rodriguez sang over a simple guitar riff “Always Be about his friends’ entanglement with My Baby,” the criminal-justice system. Not long she probably after, he himself spent time behind bars couldn’t have in another state, for what he describes envisioned its rebirth as “Project Baby,” as “a gun and some pills.” “I jinxed a story of squalor and perseverance by myself,” he says. “Stupid-ass shit.” 24-year-old Mobile, Alabama, rapper His life has turned around lately, esRylo Rodriguez. “Catch a DUI, these pecially since he signed to Four Pockets bills driving us crazy,” he sings in place Full, the imprint run by Lil Baby, one of Carey’s chorus. “But they don’t feel of the biggest names in Atlanta rap. me, ’cause I’m just a project baby.” Rodriguez is working on his first album That kind of clever pop recontextu— and he says he’s trying to get away alization comes naturally to Rodriguez, from the sample-based music that’s real name Ryan Adams, who’s proud made him famous (“The Mariah Carey to have grown up in Mobile’s Roger [song], I won’t get paid for that”). Williams Housing Projects. “I wouldn’t The thing he’s happiest about is his want to be from nowhere else,” he says. ability to take care of his mother and “It’s fun growing up in the projects.” In siblings, the way his late grandfather less than a year, he’s become Alabama’s once did. “That shit crazy, because I mush-mouthed bard of samused to be the one asking pling, creating new works for money,” Rodriguez HOMETOWN out of R&B and pop songs by says. “My momma told me, Mobile, Alabama SOUNDS LIKE artists like Tamia and Leon ‘You’re Granddad now.’ That A Nineties Bridges. On YouTube, he’s a gotdamn made me smile.” R&B singer in prince, racking up 2 million CHARLES HOLMES the body of a to 8 million views on his Southern rapper most popular videos, even if Photograph by DIWANG VALDEZ
82 |
Rolling Stone
three years ago, Lili Trifilio (pictured below, at top) needed musicians to help perform some songs she’d written, for a local battle of the bands. She ended up forming Beach Bunny, one of the best indie-rock bands in America. Their debut album, Honeymoon, is full of fast-paced heartbreak songs like
“Ms. California,” in which Trifilio spills her raging jealousy over supercatchy poppunk chords. (The band also scored a hit on TikTok with 2018’s body-image commentary “Prom Queen.”) “At the time, I didn’t know my worth and I had lower self-esteem,” says Trifilio, 23. “Now, I’m trying
Chicago
to write more empowering songs.” Beach Bunny bring a carefree punk energy to their shows, where they might cover anything from Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” to a song from SpongeBob SquarePants. “It’s interesting to be singing the word ‘cry’ or a really sad lyric,” Trifilio says, “but I’m just trying to open up the mosh pit.”
SOUNDS LIKE
JONATHAN BERNSTEIN
HOMETOWN
Early-twenties heartbreak set to loud, fast grunge pop
Photograph by BRITTANY SOWACKE
VODKA INFUSED WITH NATURAL FLAVORS
please drink responsibly CÃŽROC Peach. Made With Vodka Infused With Natural Peach And Other Flavors. 35% Alc/Vol. Imported from France by Diageo, New York, NY.
©2020 STIHL 20STFP3-12-144223-2
Music
THE GREAT LOST NEIL YOUNG ALBUM Recorded in the Seventies, his most personal LP is finally being released. It feels perfect right now By ANGIE M ARTOCCIO
Neil Young Homegrown REPRISE
$
O
ne Los AngeLes evening in 1975, Neil Young gathered a few friends together at the Chateau Marmont to play them some music. He had two new albums in the can and wasn’t sure which one to release. There was Tonight’s the Night, his grueling, tequila-engorged meditation on fallen friends and the death of the Sixties. The other record, Homegrown, was harder to pin down; on the surface, it recalled the relaxed country rock that had made Young a star, but that warm exterior hid some of his most personal writing — so personal, in fact, that it was never released. “I think I’d be too embarrassed,” Young said. ILLUSTRATION BY
Jan Feindt
Reviews Music
It’s taken 45 years, but he’s finally ready to let us hear it. Of the album’s 12 songs, seven have never been released, making this the most revelatory of Young’s recent run of Archives releases. Homegrown was written during his split with Carrie Snodgress, an actress who was the mother of his first child, Zeke. Young channeled his pain into songs full of vulnerability, insecurity, and self-doubt. Musically, Homegrown returns to the country rock of his hit 1972 LP, Harvest, some of which was inspired by Snodgress, albeit in a happier time. Fitting Young’s despairing mindset, it’s ragged, frayed, and confrontational, offhandedly raw where Harvest was soft-rock soothing. “I won’t apologize,” he declares on the opener, “Separate Ways,” his caustic words melting into Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar. On “Mexico,” he laments his loss over sparse piano: “Oh, the feeling’s gone/Why is it so hard to hang on to your love?” The slow-burner “Try” is slightly more optimistic, as Young playfully sings, “I’d like to take a chance/But shit, Mary, I can’t dance,” quoting a favorite catchphrase of Snodgress’ mother. And then there’s “Vacancy,” a barnyard rocker assisted by Stan Szelest on Wurlitzer organ, where Young sings, “I look in your eyes, and I don’t know what’s there,” as if seeing an ex-lover who now appears as a phantom. Such raw feelings of loss also color the LP’s looser, throwaway moments. On the spare, acoustic “Kansas,” Young seems to imagine finding new love as an impossible escape from reality: “We can go gliding through the air/Far from the tears you’ve cried.” His aloneness also gives fun, half-baked tunes like the hazy blues oddity “We Don’t Smoke It No More” and the stoner-anthem title track an endearing quality; they’re not classics, but it’s nice to hear Young lighten up a little as he loses himself in jams with his friends, which include Robbie Robertson, a cuttingly funky Levon Helm, and Emmylou Harris, who sings beautifully on “Try.” In 1975, Homegrown evoked an organic hippie ideal. Right now, the title has more depressing overtones. But in a sense, it’s hard to think of a better time to hunker down and listen to songs of anguish, confusion, and isolation. This is an album that proves something beautiful and enduring can come from even the most dire circumstances.
HAYLEY WILLIAMS’ FLOWER POWER The emo-pop artist makes a bold feminist statement on her solo debut By CL AIR E SHA FFER
A
s the LeAd singer of emo-metal powerhouse Paramore, Hayley Williams has been delivering quirky bombast since she was a teenager — whether that has meant belting Christianity-inscribed lyrics on the Tennessee band’s early releases, wielding a carrot-shaped
Hayley Williams Petals for Armor Atlantic
4
mic onstage at the Warped Tour (with flaming-orange hair to match), or rendering the sugarcoated cynicism of Paramore’s biggest hit, “Ain’t It Fun,” as if it were a gospel reverie. All the while, she’s piloted Paramore’s evolution from emo figureheads to poprock mainstays.
Since the last Paramore LP, 2017’s After Laughter, Williams has experienced a divorce and checked herself into an intensive therapeutic retreat. Now, she’s emerged with her solo debut. Released as a trilogy of EPs over the course of this spring, Petals for Armor explores her chang-
BREAKING
Moses Sumney’s Introspective Soul A POET-TURNED-MUSICIAN who is buddies with Beck and Chance the Rapper but shies
away from the music industry by living in sleepy Asheville, North Carolina, avant-R&B artist Moses Sumney has been garnering hype, and avoiding it, for years. His new 20song opus, Græ, is the kind of vividly innovative work that may render big-time success unavoidable, showcasing his elastic voice and a musical vision that can be polymorphously Prince-like, as toweringly soulful as Nina Simone, radically political, and happily tripped out. On the stunning single “Cut Me,” it’s all of the above at once. JON DOLAN
88 |
Rolling Stone
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor
ing coping mechanisms in the midst of hardship. Her path leads through seething rage, revelation, and, eventually, new romance. “It’s cruel to tame a thing that don’t know its strength,” Williams sings, advising herself more than anyone. Though her bandmates are on hand, their presence is hardly felt. This is her journey to take. Sonically, there are hints of the disco-funk grooves Paramore explored on After Laughter, which set Williams’ musings on anxiety and depression against a twinkling Eighties pastiche. But where that album was a geyser of anthemic emotionalism, Petals for Armor keeps its moodiness just below the surface. It’s murkier, more eclectic, and much less predictable, with influences as diverse as Janet Jackson, house music, and Björk. On the album’s first track and lead single, “Simmer,” Williams surrounds herself with plucked guitar strings, jazzy bass lines, and fidgeting drums. When she does unleash, her voice cuts through the sparseness, whether during the unhinged mania of “Dead Horse,” or the Solange-esque chorus of “Over It.” Part of why the LP feels so singularly her own comes from its other main theme, femininity. Floral imagery abounds, as do other signifiers of domesticity: spices, sugar, soft animals, the occasional dance party. “I am in a garden/Tending to my own/So what do I care/ And what do you care, if I grow?” she asks on “Roses/ Lotus/Violet/Iris,” a healing balm of a song sung with all-woman indie supergroup Boygenius. Petals for Armor has a few redundant moments (there are only so many flower metaphors you can work into one record). But if growth is the object, Williams is budding toward some of her best music yet.
RATINGS ARE SUPERVISED BY THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE.
FROM TOP: LINDSEY BYRNES; ERIC GYAMFI
N E I L YO U N G
Ten new albums you need to know about now Jehnny Beth
To Love Is to Live Caroline
Perfume Genius
Set My Heart on Fire Matador
Lucinda Williams
Good Souls Better Angels Highway 20
Car Seat Headrest
Making a Door Less Open Matador
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
Reunions Southeastern
Thundercat
It Is What It Is Brainfeeder
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: MICHAL AUGUSTINI/SHUTTERSTOCK; EMG/SHUTTERSTOCK; JEFF ROSS/SHUTTERSTOCK; WINSLOW TOWNSON/INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHRIS LEVER/SHUTTERSTOCK
Sparks
A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip BMG
Magnetic Fields
Quickies Nonesuch
Lamb of God
Lamb of God Epic
Alanis Morissette
Such Pretty Forks in the Road Epiphany Music
SOLO SAVAGE For her first solo album, the frontwoman for U.K. art punks Savages drew inspiration from David Bowie’s Blackstar to make an album that transports you into a dark and alluring world.
4
STRANGE MAGIC Mike Hadreas’ fifth album is an elliptical gem, tackling romantic frustrations in songs that can be synthy or folky, lurid and sludgy, or decadently beautiful.
4
LUCINDA RULES The Americana icon rocks out, eviscerating bad exes (“Wakin’ Up”) and the current president (“Man Without a Soul”) on her best LP since 1998’s landmark Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.
GOOD WILL Will Toledo cuts his indie rock with strands of EDM, hip-hop, soul, and even folk, with surprisingly impressive results, especially on the slow-burning centerpiece “There Must Be More Than Blood.”
4
# #
FUNK TRIP With assists from pals like Flying Lotus and Ty Dolla $ign, the California funk/jazz/hip-hop adventurer’s latest is a head-spinning, often moving, tribute to his friend Mac Miller.
#
GLAM SLAM This art-rock brother duo has been at it since 1971. Their 24th LP can be madcap and zany (“Self-Effacing”), darkly hilarious (“I’m Toast”), and just plain weird (“Onomato Pia”).
3
TINY TUNES Twenty-eight short songs from arch pop savant Stephin Merritt; not his most satisfying concept, but he can do more in 72 seconds (“Favorite Bar”) than most artists can in four minutes.
3
BITTER PILL “This is the sound of me hitting bottom,” Morissette sings on “Smiling.” But these plinky, adult-contemporary piano ballads and new-age soundscapes are a flat backdrop for her blues.
The pop singer finds her voice on the dance floor
‘I
know you’re dying trying to figure me out,” Dua Lipa sings on her second LP. She’s not wrong: While her self-titled 2017 debut established her as a smoky-voiced purveyor of easily digestible Top 40 hits, it lacked the sense of identity she more than solves with Future Nostalgia, a breathtakingly fun, cohesive, and ambitious attempt to find a place for disco in 2020. Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia
DEEP ROOTS Dispatches from sober fatherhood, political inquiries, and nostalgic reflections on bohemia, from Nashville’s sharpest literary songwriter — this time with a dash of Dire Straits-inspired guitar.
MAJOR RAGE One of metal’s most consistent bands brings us 10 head-banging declarations of dissatisfaction that encapsulate what frontman Randy Blythe hoarsely calls “The American Scream.”
DUA LIPA’S RETRO-DISCO ‘FUTURE’
3
@
4 Lead single “Don’t Start Now” has become a global smash for good reason. It’s the type of big, Robyn-esque breakup dance-pop anthem that every pop star is due to attempt at least once. Lipa’s special sauce is a mix of disco strings and funk bass à la Chic and Donna Summer. “Hallucinate” is gorgeous, house-inflected euphoria, while “Physical” is a high-octane, Olivia Newton-John-referencing slice of Eighties synth-noir in the vein of “Sunglasses at Night.” At its best, this record can make you feel like you’re nuzzled away in a corner of Studio 54, ogling Bianca Jagger and Cher under the glimmering lights. BRITTANY SPANOS
Jehnny Beth
CONTRIBUTORS: JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, JONATHAN BLISTEIN, JON DOLAN, BRENNA EHRLICH, KORY GROW, JOSEPH HUDAK, CLAIRE SHAFFER
Rolling Stone
| 89
Hollywood AIR DATE
OLD ‘HOLLYWOOD’ MADE NEW
Ryan Murphy’s latest polished series revisits the golden age of Tinseltown — but with a modern, inclusive twist
ALAN SEPINWALL
‘M
ovies don’t just show us how the world is — they show us how it can be,” direc tor Raymond Ansley (Darren Criss) argues in the new mini series Hollywood. This isn’t just his mission statement, but that of Hollywood’s cre ators, Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. The sevenepisode tale is equal parts love letter to the films of the Forties and fantasy about how much more inclusive showbiz could
90 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
Netflix
NETWORK
have been back then — and how different the real world might have been as a result. We begin in postwar L.A., with Army veteran Jack Cas tello (David Corenswet) des perate to break into the mo vies by any means necessary — even working as an escort out of a gas station managed by mustachioed pimp Ernie (Dylan McDermott). “I just want to do something big, you know?” Jack insists. Big is what Hollywood aspires to as well. Jack is a straight white guy, but soon we’ve gotten to know Archie Coleman ( Jeremy Pope), a gay, black aspiring screen writer; Raymond, a half Filipino director dating black actress Camille Washington (Laura Harrier); Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), a silentmovie star who was “a little Jewy” to make it in talkies; and
an awkward, young Rock Hudson ( Jake Picking), just coming to grips with his own sexuality. These outcasts and hasbeens will come together (along with a pair of aging studio execs played with verve by Joe Mantello and Holland Taylor) to attempt to make a mainstream film with a black lead and screenwriter at a time when actors of color were still marginalized play ing white people’s servants.
STARRING
Streaming now David Corenswet Jeremy Pope Darren Criss Laura Harrier Patti LuPone Jim Parsons
#
The whole thing feels like a Douglas Sirk melodrama (the kind Hudson would become famous for a few years later) crossbred with one of those Judy GarlandMickey Rooney films where putting on a show in the barn would fix everything, with a touch of Inglourious Basterds in how it attempts to rewrite history for the better. Hollywood is lurid and frequently works its characters into tears. But the
Parsons (left) and Picking try to make it in showbiz.
★★★★★ Classic | ★★★★ Excellent | ★★★ Good | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor
FROM TOP: SAEED ADYANI/NETFLIX; NETFLIX
TV
Harrier and Criss in 1940s Los Angeles
show also wears its heart on its sleeve about how it wants the best for its own version of reality. That mashup of tones has been Murphy’s stockintrade since he arrived in the busi ness with as much optimism and ambition as a Raymond or an Archie; in some proj ects, nothing fits together, while in others, like this, the whole is greater than the mismatched parts. At times, Hollywood feels like a really lavish prequel to Murphy and Brennan’s Glee — nobody bursts into song, but the air of unapologetic sincerity is sim ilar. (And as Hudson’s cruel, closeted manager Henry, Jim Parsons could easily be Sue Sylvester’s favorite uncle.) Sincere is the key in which Murphy’s shows are most po tent. His great FX drama Pose is similarly generous toward its own marginalized heroes and heroines, while his and Brennan’s first Netflix show, the satiric The Politician, didn’t work at all because it seemed contemptuous of everyone onscreen. Hollywood can, in some scenes, come across as too arch, or like cosplay — of the younger actors, Pope and Corenswet are the two who most convincingly evoke the period. And even its revision ist version of that time skips some necessary steps. For ex ample, everyone makes a big deal about how controversial it will be for a movie like this to star an actor of color, yet no one is concerned about the interracial relationship at the center of the film’s story. But Murphy has always been better at big ideas than small details, and the sentimentality of the piece, coupled with the potency of many of the performances, in time becomes infectious, making Hollywood’s weak spots easy to forgive. There’s talk throughout the series about how movies have the power to turn dreams into re ality. (Heck, the most inspir ing speech in the whole thing is delivered by the gasstation pimp!) Ultimately, Hollywood errs on the side of dreaming, but who doesn’t like to dream about a better world than the one we have?
WATCH LIST
COMIC GENIUS
What to stream, what to skip this month
Greg Daniels, the MVP of TV Comedy
Fanning models some fashionable Russian dressing.
ROYALS WITH CHEESE The Great Hulu
NETWORK AIR DATE
May 15th
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: OLLIE UPTON/HULU; AARON EPSTEIN/ NETFLIX; MATT FROST/ITV/AMC; LOU FAULON/NETFLIX
4 In an early episode of this satire about idealistic young Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning, fantastic) plotting to overthrow her obliviously piggish husband, Emperor Peter of Russia (Nicholas Hoult, hilarious), His Royal Highness says, “You probably don’t remember this, but a week or two ago, I shot your bear and punched you.” Like our heroine, you will naturally remember — and be shocked as much at your amusement as at the acts themselves. Created by The Favourite co-writer Tony McNamara, the horrors of the show are vivid, but so are the dark laughs. (Catherine’s handmaiden brags she avoided rape that evening. Catherine: “Same. If anyone ever invents something easier than buttons, we are all in trouble.”) At times, The Great feels like a collection of comedy sketches spread out over a 10-hour story, but many of those sketches live up to the show’s title. Huzzah!
ALL THAT JAZZ The Eddy NETWORK AIR DATE
Netflix May 8th
3 Of course Damien Chazelle, Oscar-nominated director of La La Land, would make his first TV
show (developed by him, Alan Poul, His Dark Materials showrunner Jack Thorne, and songwriter Glen Ballard) take place in and around a Parisian jazz club. And of course it would share a similar tortured-artist philosophy with his breakout film, Whiplash, along with some of the stoic grief of his Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. “Music’s supposed to be fun!” argues a member of the club’s resident band, which prompts bandleader Elliot (Andre Holland)
Holland and Joanna Kulig — a former star pianist unable to play in the wake of tragedy and struggling to reconnect with teen daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg) — to retort, “It’s not fun for me. This is all I got!” The Eddy is set in the City of Light’s less celebrated, more multicultural neighborhoods, and scenes unfold in English, French, and Arabic, among other languages. The atmosphere and sense of place are strong, but the story is clichéd antihero-drama nonsense about local organized crime, as if the creative team felt they had to add in more populist riffs to get people to sit through the loose, rambling sections (including extended performance scenes) that feel more like Elliot’s style of music. When the show captures what the pianist and his collaborators love about jazz, The Eddy cooks; when it’s a warmedover Ozark, it seriously drags.
GAME OVER Quiz NETWORK AIR DATE
AMC May 31st, 10 p.m.
@ On September 9th, 2001, British army officer Charles Ingram made an improbable run for the grand prize of his country’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? It was, in the eyes of Millionaire‘s producers, too improbable, even as they wondered, “Is it a crime to cheat on a game show?” This three-part miniseries — starring Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen as Ingram, Fleabag’s Sian Clifford as his wife, Diana, and Michael Sheen as Millionaire host Chris Tarrant — treats Ingram’s stint in the big chair as a heist of sorts, and the early parts are lively, as we witness the rise of the series and of Diana’s obsession with it. But part of the fun of the caper genre is seeing how the crooks pull it off. Macfadyen and Clifford
Quiz provides little satisfaction in that area, opting for a more philosophical look at the Ingram marriage. “There are some questions you should just know the answer to,” Diana says, but Quiz is shorter on final answers than it should be. A.S.
HARVARD CLASSMATES Greg Daniels and Conan O’Brien went out to Hollywood together to break into showbiz. O’Brien became the more famous of the two, but Daniels — who has two new streaming series debuting this month, the military comedy Space Force (Netflix, May 29th) and the sci-fi afterlife tale Upload (Amazon, May 1st) — has arguably had just as big an impact on TV comedy. Like O’Brien, Daniels joined The Simpsons for its golden era, penning several of the best episodes of the fifth and sixth seasons, including the poignant “Bart Sells His Soul” and “Lisa’s Wedding,” the media takedown “Homer Badman,” and “Homer and Apu,” which gave the world “Who Needs the KwikCarell in Space Force
E-Mart?” He then teamed up with Beavis & Butt-Head creator Mike Judge to craft King of the Hill, the long-running gentle and wise animated comedy about uptight Texas propane salesman Hank Hill, big-footed wife Peggy, and eccentric son Bobby. For 13 years, it felt like a mashup of the best parts of The Simpsons and The Andy Griffith Show. Daniels then achieved the impossible in turning acclaimed, blackly comic Britcom The Office into an American success, figuring out that what separated Steve Carell’s Michael Scott from Ricky Gervais’ David Brent was a desperate need for love rather than fame. And when asked to cash in with an Office spinoff, Daniels and Mike Schur instead wrote something much warmer and wilder with Parks and Recreation. As we followed Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope from overlooked civil servant to national political powerhouse, it became the defining comedy of the Obama era, and yet another example of how well Daniels balances satire with something sweeter — a perfect recipe for the type of humor we need right now. A.S. Rolling Stone
| 91
Reviews TV
WHAT TO BINGE NOW
Has the extended time at home exhausted your Peak TV to-do list? Here are some other binge-worthy shows for this strange moment Hulu/IFC
The sports world got delayed indefinitely by the pandemic. But this explosively funny, shockingly poignant baseball comedy, about an infamous announcer (Hank Azaria in a career-best performance) who does play-by-play for his own debauched and pathetic life, can be enjoyed in its entirety. Its final season is set in a near-future where society is crumbling, but baseball (kind of ) endures.
ing lovebirds (played by comedians/co-creators Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan) in this filthy, bittersweet romantic comedy — about a transatlantic couple who get pregnant, married, and then figure out how to fall in love — shelter-in-place rules would have been particularly uncomfortable. An absolutely uproarious gem.
4. Battlestar Galactica Syfy.com
2. Justified Hulu
“You make me pull, I put you down.” That’s the eightword ethos of gun-slinging U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant, absurdly likable) in this modern-day Western set in the backwoods of Kentucky. More pure fun than other great dramas of the past decade, filled with charismatic villains played by Walton Goggins, Margo Martindale, and others who match Raylan quip for quip.
This dark, painfully smart remake of the campy Seventies space opera was designed as a parable for post-9/11 America, with the homicidal robotic Cylons recast as religious extremists. But in depicting a global calamity that forces humankind into prolonged isolation under constant threat, it feels awfully pertinent to our current mess — even if we’re in our homes rather than cramped spaceships searching desperately for a place called Earth.
5. Rectify Netflix
3. Catastrophe Amazon
Close quarters can be hard on even the healthiest marriage. For the bicker-
92 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from prison after 19 years on death row for
a murder he may not have committed. Most shows would use this as the basis for a thriller about finding the real killers. Instead, the deeply spiritual Rectify is more concerned with the psychological pain of Daniel’s long time in physical isolation, and the enormous difficulty he finds in returning to the mundane world that we (used to) take for granted. Few recent dramas have more to say about our current moment, much less the ability to do it so movingly.
with the catharsis of Damon Lindelof’s masterpiece about grief, madness, and moving on, with incredible performances from Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, and Regina King.
7. Babylon Berlin Netflix
You could use the quarantine as an opportunity to finally watch one of those great foreign shows that streaming services keep adding, like this dizzying German crime drama set in the decadent days of the Weimar Republic, as a junkie detective and a prostitute-turned-cop have to solve a murder that involves organized crime, communist agitators, and a . . . drag king cabaret performer?
6. Terriers Hulu
Scruffy buddy private eyes — Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James, with so much chemistry, you’ll feel within five minutes that you’ve been watching them for five years — try to untangle a conspiracy theory about the wealthy residents of their California beach town. A terrible title (dogs barely figure into things) helped make this hardboiled, laid-back charmer a one-and-done back in 2010, but the ending will make you feel like you got a complete, immensely satisfying 13-episode experience.
9. Cheers
Netflix/Hulu/CBS All Access
Maybe it’s time to go oldschool and marinate in all 275 episodes of the Eighties sitcom classic, which holds up remarkably well and was a huge influence on modern comedies like Parks and Recreation. If you’re still thirsty after both the Diane and Rebecca years, also see the equally timeless Frasier.
8. The Leftovers HBO
To binge or not to binge? Our current real-life nightmare might be the worst possible time to sit through an emotional meat grinder about an event that inexplicably wipes two percent of the population off the map. Or else it is the perfect time to sob along
10. Band of Brothers HBO/Amazon
Maybe you need an escape to an earlier era full of can-do American spirit, like in Tom Hanks’ rousing World War II adventure starring a young Damian Lewis as leader of an airborne infantry company. Maybe the greatest Dad TV project of all time. A.S.
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: ELIZA MORSE/IFC; PRASHANT GUPTA/FX; CAROLE SEGAL/ SYFY/NBCUPB; BETAFILM/NETFLIX; PARAMOUNT TV/SHUTTERSTOCK; ED MILLER/ AMAZON; BLAKE TYERS/SUNDANCE; EVERETT COLLECTION; VAN REDIN/HBO; DAVID JAMES/HBO/20TH CENTURY FOX/DREAMWORKS/KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK
1. Brockmire
Hank Azaria in Brockmire
C OVID -19 C RISIS [Cont. from 57] is remarkably thorough, advising officials to question the numbers on viral spread, ensure appropriate diagnostic capacity, and check on the Strategic National Stockpile, which is a collection of equipment and medicine designed for use in a national emergency. Beth Cameron calls the book “a decision-making rubric for biological threats.” At times it reads like Pandemic Response for Dummies: “Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for health care workers who are providing medical care?” the playbook asks. “If yes: What are the triggers to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If no: Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?” NSC officials compiled the guide — officially called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, but known to everyone as “the pandemic playbook” — in late 2016. The Trump administration was briefed on the playbook in 2017, and according to Cameron, it was widely distributed among departments and agencies, via email and in bound copies. But there’s no evidence it was ever read. And within a little more than a year, all the pandemic expertise was gone. Trump pushed out Homeland Security Adviser Bossert, whose portfolio included global pandemics and who was widely respected for his understanding of the risks they pose. The pandemic office on the National Security Council was gone, terminated by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton as part of a broader reorganization and cost-cutting measures. (“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false,” Bolton tweeted in March, after the pandemic was raging.) Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, an infectious-disease expert who had taken Beth Cameron’s job as the head of the pandemic office, was also fired. “Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning, and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic,” Rice wrote in an editorial. Still, outside warnings continued. In 2018, Bill Gates met with Trump, urging him to invest in new technology to help deal with a pandemic. In 2019, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence ranked a major disease outbreak among the top global threats to watch, warning: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.” And if all that wasn’t enough, there were highprofile simulations — a.k.a. “germ games” — designed to highlight the risks of pandemics. In August 2019, the Crimson Contagion simulation included participation from more than 100 federal, state, and local leaders, as well as from private-sector partners and members of the White House National Security Council. The scenario was based on a novel influenza virus that originates in China and spreads around the world. It forecast 110 million illnesses, 7.7 million hospitalizations, and 586,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. The exercise also foresaw many weaknesses in U.S. capability, making the point that the “current medical-supply chain and production capacity cannot meet the demands imposed by nations during a global influenza pandemic.”
94 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
Luciana Borio, who worked in the pandemic office at the NSC before it was cut in 2018, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. “The threat of pandemic flu is the number-one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”
I
n the early days of the outbreak, public-health officials and others were focused on the bloodred numbers on display at the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center website, which chronicled the rise of infections around the world in real time, giving anyone who cared to look a spooky sense of the global spread of the virus. But Trump was always focused — to the extent that he was focused on anything at all — on an entirely different set of numbers: the Dow Jones Industrial Average. From the moment he took office, Trump saw the Dow as a barometer of his success and re-election chances. He was willing to do anything to keep the economy on a sugar high through November. Throughout the course of the pandemic, the economy seemed to be his primary concern. Not surging supplies of ventilators to hospitals and masks and gloves to front-line responders. Not listening to experts like Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a veteran of the war against diseases during the past four decades, who was surely telling him what was headed our way. Trump seemed to have viewed this pandemic not as a great humanitarian challenge, not as an opportunity to use his power to save the lives of Americans, but as an invisible germ that would infect his re-election and color him as a loser. Thus, Trump spent the first month or so of the outbreak talking down the virus, tweeting about the impeachment “Witch Hunt!” and boasting of “record highs” of the stock market as vindication of his divine leadership skills. And that led to the single most calamitous, deadly, and unrecoverable screw-up in the entire narrative of the outbreak (so far): the failure to push the FDA and other federal agencies to get viral test kits distributed so that public-health officials could get “eyes” on the pandemic, as epidemiologists like to say. “The key to preventing or mitigating a pandemic,” Larry Brilliant tells me, “is early detection and response. It’s that simple.” The experience of South Korea proves this. The coronavirus was detected there on the same day it was detected in the U.S. By February 16th, the CDC and state public-health labs had tested only about 800 people. That’s roughly 2.4 tests per million people in the U.S. In contrast, South Korea had tested about 8,000 people, or 154.7 tests per million. By March 17th, the U.S. still had performed about only 125 tests per million people; meanwhile, South Korea was testing more than 5,000 people per million. Better testing is key because it allows public-health officials to understand how the virus is moving, how to restrict travel and implement quarantines, and where to surge medical supplies and equipment. And better testing is one big reason why, as of early April, South Korea’s per capita death rate was one-seventh that of the United States. Germany, which also implemented widespread testing early on, has a death rate that is even lower than South Korea’s. Why couldn’t the U.S. manage to develop and distribute a test in the early days of the epidemic? It’s a complex story of bureaucratic in-fighting, incompetence, and technical snafus. It starts with Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, the agency that was re-
sponsible for building the test kits, who was viewed as, as Brilliant puts it, “a political guy.” In the 1980s, Redfield worked on a vaccine for AIDS and was closely associated with W. Shepherd Smith Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/ HIV Policy, or ASAP. Smith believed that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and a loss of family values. Redfield also wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, Christians in the Age of AIDS, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults. “When you put a political guy in charge of the CDC, it demoralizes people in the agency,” Brilliant says. “It tells them their work isn’t important.” The basic problem is that while other nations used a test kit that had been developed by the World Health Organization and encouraged private companies to quickly build and distribute the kits, the U.S., out of some mix of Trump-inspired nationalism and technological arrogance, insisted on building its own kit. But that kit was flawed, and it took precious weeks for the CDC to fix the problem. There were further delays by the FDA in lifting restrictions to allow private labs and companies to manufacture and distribute their own test kits. By that time, the virus had widely spread throughout the country. In the early days of the pandemic, even a few thousand test kits could have made a big difference in understanding and limiting the spread of the virus. But the logic of exponential growth is brutal: Every six days that U.S. public-health officials did not test, the number of infected Americans doubled. By March, the virus was everywhere, and millions of kits were needed to track its spread. “We just twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus waltzed in,” William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in The Washington Post. “If we had been on top of this thing from early January, when we first got word of it,” Susan Rice says, “we would be living in a different world now.” And it’s not just that Trump failed to push for aggressive testing. He actively tried to suppress the numbers, out of fear it would tank the market. In early March, when the Grand Princess cruise ship waited off the coast of San Francisco after 21 of its passengers and crew members contracted the coronavirus, Trump didn’t want to take the infected people off the ship because he was afraid it would look bad. “I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said in a press briefing. In late February, Nancy Messonnier, a respected senior CDC official, made the mistake of being honest with reporters, telling them that the coronavirus was likely to spread within communities in the United States and that disruptions to daily life could be “severe.” According to The Washington Post, Trump called HHS chief Azar and complained to him that Messonnier was scaring the stock markets. At times, Trump’s obsession with the market was downright ghoulish. On March 13th, after the stock market spiked briefly after its weeks-long free fall, administration officials sent out a graph of the rising stock market average with Trump’s signature scrawled across it, as if he were single-handedly responsible for its rise. “The president would like to share the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: ‘From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!’ ” That same day, an NBC reporter asked him whether he took responsibility for the deadly testing delays. His reply was immediate: “No. I don’t take responsibility at all.”
T
rump’s denial, and the delay in testing, meant the administration was blind to the virus as it was spreading. It let Trump, for a moment, get away with his fantasy that the virus was no big deal, that it was just the flu, that it would go away as soon as the weather warmed up. But Trump’s denial also meant that federal agencies did nothing to prepare, and when the surge of sick people began hitting the hospitals, they were not ready. When Trump authorized the creation of a task force in late January, he didn’t put a disease or medical expert in charge. He gave the job to Vice President Mike Pence, which is like giving the wheel of a ship over to an 11-year-old in the middle of a hurricane. If nothing else, it signaled that Trump valued political loyalty over scientific expertise. But the real point man on the task force was Azar, the head of Health and Human Services, the agency that broadly oversees hospitals and health care in America. Azar is a lawyer and former pharmaceutical-industry executive better known for his partisan politics (after law school, he clerked for former conservative Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia, then worked with special prosecutor Ken Starr on the Clinton-Whitewater investigation) than for his health care expertise. Before the pandemic emerged, his main job was to figure out how to keep the cost of prescription drugs down. Once the pandemic hit, he failed to convince Trump of the seriousness of what was coming, failed to break a logjam between the CDC and the FDA over testing, and failed to figure out a system to equitable distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and gloves and other gear to health care workers overwhelmed with sick people. In theory, the U.S. was not totally unprepared for a pandemic like this. In the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton became concerned about the risks of bioterrorism, he created the Strategic National Stockpile. The goal was to be prepared for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. The reserve included everything from ventilators to nerve-agent antidotes, which were stored and maintained at 1,300 locations around the country. The stockpile was never intended to supply enough equipment for a pandemic of this scale. But for Azar, a bigger problem was the fact that he was working for a man who viewed the doling out of ventilators and masks and gloves as an exercise in political power. Getting protective gear to the people who needed it most was not Trump primary concern. It was getting it to the people he needed for re-election. So as states across the country pleaded for equipment from the national stockpile, Trump made sure his friends and wanna-be friends were taken care of first. Florida, a state that is vital to Trump’s 2020 hopes, submitted a request on March 11th for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields, and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later. And just in case it wasn’t clear how much Trump loved Floridians, the state received a second, identical shipment on March 23rd. Oklahoma, a fossil-fuel-friendly state that is home to a number of big Trump campaign donors, received 120,000 face shields despite requesting only 16,000. Meanwhile, in Obama’s home state of Illinois, officials were forced to do a $3.5 million deal in a McDonald’s parking lot to secure a supply of N95 masks. In addition, Trump has gone out of his way to publicly attack governors of blue states who challenge him and all but refuses to work with them on pandemic supplies. For example, when Washington’s
Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted that the administration’s effort to combat the coronavirus would be more successful “if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth,” Trump responded by calling him “a snake” at a press briefing and all but refusing to work with him on relief supplies. When Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, pushed for more supplies from the stockpile, Trump immediately dismissed her. At a press briefing, he said that he had instructed Vice President Pence not to call the governors of blue states who question his efforts. “I say: ‘Mike, don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan,’ ” he said, adding, “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.” “All I want them to do — very simple — I want them to be appreciative,” Trump explained. It’s hard to overstate how morally grotesque this is, but in Trumpland, it’s just how business is done. It comes down to this: Kiss the ring or the people of your state suffer. Death and disease are just leverage for Trump to hold onto power. As the pandemic grew, Trump, under the guise of some half-baked understanding of federalism, did his best to push all responsibility for the response out to the states, which not only made a mockery of his self-image as a “wartime” president, but also undermined any effective response to slow the spread of the virus. Instead of allowing top scientists like Anthony Fauci develop a clear national response to the pandemic, he touted unproven treatments like the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. Instead of pushing for a nationwide shutdown, which public-health experts argued was the best way to stop the spread of the virus and save lives, Trump vacillated, giving cover to governors in states like Georgia and Florida to keep restaurants and beaches open. By doing so, Trump only ensured those states would become a breeding ground for new outbreaks. “Having states [do] different things will not work,” Bill Gates told CNN. “Cases will be exponentially growing anywhere you don’t have a serious shutdown.” In March, as New York became overrun by the virus, Gov. Cuomo began holding daily press briefings that overshadowed Trump’s. Cuomo’s blunt, scientifically literate sessions just underscored Trump’s failings. Cuomo was particularly cutting when it came to Trump’s refusal to send enough ventilators to the state. “How can we be in a situation where you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can’t get a ventilator, but a federal agency is saying ‘I’m going to leave the ventilators in the stockpile,’ ” Cuomo said. “I mean, have we really come to that point?” Trump’s disregard for New York was evident everywhere, including the $150 billion “Coronavirus Relief Fund” that was part of the $2.2 trillion package that was passed by Congress in March. New York, which accounted for almost half of the nation’s diagnosed coronavirus cases at the time the bill passed — and more than one-third of its deaths — was due to receive just five percent of the money, or $7.5 billion (the state of Washington, governed by that “snake” Inslee, got a paltry two percent, or $2.9 billion). When mask use spiked at New York hospitals, Trump speculated that masks may be “going out the back door,” suggesting they are being stolen. Cuomo tried to take the high road. “Now is the time to gather supplies, do the preparations because it’s too late the day before,” Cuomo said, all but lecturing Trump. “Stop the politics. Listen to the scientists and plan because otherwise . . . people will die who don’t need to die. That’s the bottom line.”
Cuomo and other governors pushed Trump to use the Defense Production Act, which would allow him to compel manufacturers to produce ventilators, masks, and other protective gear. Trump dithered, preferring to rely on voluntary measures. Jared Kushner set up his own shadowy task force in the White House to try to sort things out, but of course that just added to the chaos. (“It’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said at a White House briefing, sounding like a five-year-old defending his toys. “It’s not supposed to be the states’ stockpiles that they then use.”) By early April, the national stockpile was depleted, and the U.S. was forced to fly in planeloads of supplies from (of all places) China. But instead of being distributed by the federal government, states had to bid for the equipment on the open market, often at exorbitant prices. And still, the shortage was acute. Doctors were creating makeshift ventilators out of garden hoses and lamp timers. Some front-line medical workers were forced to wear plastic garbage bags as protective gowns. And the pandemic was still growing. As Cuomo warned, “A tsunami is coming.”
F
or trump, the tsunami hit on March 31st, when he stood in the White House briefing room and acknowledged that modeling suggested between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans could die in this pandemic. Even in a best-case scenario, Trump is likely to witness the deaths of as many Americans as the country endured in World War I and more than 10 times as many as have died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Does he look back with regret at his dishonesty and inaction? On the contrary, he’s now trying to recast himself as the hero of the pandemic. “Any normal politician would be worried about saying anything wrong about a disease like this,” says Ben Rhodes. “Trump, because he has an incapacity to be shamed, clearly felt a certain freedom to just stand up there and lie or to tweet things that weren’t true, because he knew in his mind that, if this does get bad, I can just always rewrite the history of it.” This story is far from over. This pandemic is not going to end in a week, or a month. It’s going to burn through Africa and poor, vulnerable communities around the world. There will be economic chaos and lost loved ones. There is some hope that new antiviral drugs will help protect people from the virus, similar to the way Tamiflu treats flu symptoms and can stop some outbreaks. But the pandemic will not end until a vaccine is developed, which is, best-case scenario, a least a year away. Until then, the primary agenda of Trump and his allies in the Republican Party and Fox News will be to evade any responsibility for this catastrophe, just as they have evaded responsibility for everything from massive tax cuts for the rich to the climate crisis. Look for more China bashing, more conspiracy mongering, more Obama blaming, more trillion-dollar bailouts. And more under-the-radar regulatory moves, such as the EPA’s recent rollback of vehicle emissions standards, which will lead to more air pollution at the exact time when Americans are living through a pandemic that attacks their lungs. But this crisis will be transformative in ways no one can see right now. In dark times like these, when the suffering is immense and grief is overwhelming, our better angels often emerge. By the time this is over, Americans may come to new conclusions about the importance of listening to scientists, about the dangers of going it alone in the world, and most of all, about the virtues of having a president who is capable of telling us the truth. May 2020
|
Rolling Stone
| 95
THE WEEK THE MUSIC STOPPED [Cont. from 39] If its spread is not curtailed, COVID19 could further consolidate an already lopsided concert-promotion business. Independent promoters may be in peril. “The important part to realize is AEG and Live Nation own basically all the other ancillary aspects of the business,” Kennedy says. “In terms of the bargaining power they have, that’s only going to amplify. These smaller players are going to die off. If they survive, what’s the competition going to look like? It’s going to be skewed for the bigger guys. They’re going to have a lot more leverage in signing artists.” Plenty of agents and promoters are already out of work. iHeartMedia announced three-month furloughs for an unspecified number of employees, and near the end of March, major talent agency Paradigm decided to temporarily lay off more than 200 employees. The company estimated that this furlough period could last six months, with health benefits offered until June. Some affected employees are considering waiting it out, while others don’t have the luxury. “It’s been really shocking,” says one agent hit by the furlough. “We knew things were bad when festivals started coming down, but the layoffs were just not expected to be this bad in music.”
W
hile times are bleak for the industry at large, optimists are seeing the challenge as a chance to innovate. The pandemic has highlighted the industry’s reliance on touring revenue, which became more essential to artists and their handlers as revenue from sales of music evapo-
I N S I D E T R U M P ’ S TA S K F O R C E [Cont. from 59] Adding to the confusion, the White House has made crucial pledges and then failed to meet them. In early March, Pence vowed that more than a million tests would be ready within days. Azar followed that up by saying there would be “up to 4 million tests” available by the middle of March. Yet by March 31st, there had been just more than 1 million tests conducted. Nowhere is the chaos of Trump’s coronavirus response more clear than in the White House’s bungled efforts to help meet the demand for desperately needed medical supplies. On March 18th, Trump signed an executive order that invoked the Defense Production Act, the 70-year-old law that allows a president to commandeer U.S. manufacturers to produce critical materials in a time of crisis, but later that same day said he didn’t plan to use it. While doctors, first responders, mayors, and governors issue daily warnings about a dire shortage of N95 masks, scrubs, and ventilators, Trump tweeted that the act was “in full force, but haven’t had to use it” because states were asking for equipment “that I don’t think they’ll need,” a direct contradiction to the pleas of dozens of governors and mayors. By not taking greater control of the medicalsupply chain, Trump is, in effect, pitting states against one another, with wealthier states beating out poorer ones. “What we’re doing is creating a world of winners and losers rather than accounting for priorities based on timings, needs, and best use,” says Steve Schooner, a George Washington University professor and expert on government procurement.
96 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
rated in favor of much smaller — for most — payouts from Spotify and other streaming services. Hoping to fill the gap, companies specializing in livestreaming performances are seizing an opportunity to solidify their place in a post-virus music business. From bedroom-style concert streaming services like StageIT to larger streamers like LiveXLive, these companies are reporting more inquiries than they have ever seen. With festivals sidelined, LiveXLive, which partners to provide streams for major festivals, including Electric Daisy Festival and Lollapalooza, created content of its own, starting the My Home to Yours series from artists’ homes. LiveXLive aired 40 shows last year, according to CEO Robert Ellin, and with the surge of artists needing new performing options, the company expects to air at least 75 shows for the year ahead. “Livestreaming is just exploding,” Ellin says. “We’re beefing up our production team.” With few other options for live music, promoters are already embracing livestreaming. The Live From Out There digital music festival started a fiveweek-long festival circuit in mid-March. In its inaugural weekend, with no nationally known artists, the festival still managed to pull in $100,000. Ben Baruch, who organized the festival with his company, 11E1even Group, said that while he doesn’t want virtual performances to outright replace live shows, he doesn’t see why the concept won’t grow past the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s so much uncertainty, it’s hard to tell what the live-music landscape is going to look like even a year from now,” Baruch says. “But what we’re seeing is another stream of revenue that we can get for artists. If artists want to participate, I don’t see it as any reason to stop. These artists, some
Sen. Murphy says the Trump White House’s indecision and conflicting messages have created a Hunger Games-like environment with states desperately trying to outbid one another for medical supplies and relying on personal connections and word-of-mouth information to find the supplies they need. “I got an email the other day from a guy who knows an aid worker in Venezuela who’s come across a stockpile of millions of masks,” Murphy says. “I’m almost embarrassed to forward the information to [Connecticut] Governor Lamont, but it’s my obligation to do it.” Why is the administration not taking over the supply chain? “It’s because they’re getting pressure from the Chamber of Commerce to stay out of the marketplace so that the profiteering can continue,” Murphy says. The chamber, which represents some of the nation’s biggest corporations, has lobbied against the Defense Production Act because it claims it would unreasonably disrupt the supply chain during the crisis. “The administration has decided to put the profits of these companies ahead of saving lives,” he says.
O
n the last Friday in January, Trump announced a ban on foreign nationals who had recently traveled to China from entering the U.S. Any Americans who had been to China would be diverted to a small number of airports for screening and possibly to be quarantined. One of those airports was Chicago’s O’Hare, but Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says no one in the White House bothered to give her a heads-up about the new order. Lightfoot and her team spent the weekend trying to figure out what Trump’s order meant and how to implement it. If someone stepped off a plane from
are making more than they would’ve made playing some of these shows because there’s no cost.” Ellin says livestreaming had already been climbing for years, but the surge during the pandemic has been noticeable. “We’re seeing what this is doing for live shows. Live will come back and flourish, but in the interim, we’re developing a new revenue stream for artists and promoters,” Ellin says. The rise of livestreaming and other changes prompted by the pandemic are making some in the industry ponder their place in the future. “I want to believe that agents are valuable, and they are — who is gonna squabble over dumb shit like ticket comps for an artist’s grandma like an agent can?” the furloughed Paradigm agent says. “But even if a cure for COVID-19 comes tomorrow, we’re looking at smaller capacities anyway. I think people are getting used to the idea of live and virtual streaming. Right now, the idea of going to a 300-cap venue and pushing through some asshole crowd of kids to pay for an $18 beer, just to stand in a corner and nod my head to some music that is never as good as the record, seems just like hell to me. Maybe I’m the only one. Maybe I’m jaded, but I don’t think live music will be as important as it once was for a while.” The music industry — uniquely pulverized by the pandemic — may have to reconsider its entire center of gravity. “So much of it is based on travel and gathering,” Luba points out. “It’s like a double whammy. We’re not making cars or running a restaurant. Our whole industry is based on the key things that are driving this nightmare. But I think we’re gonna make it through.” Additional reporting by Patrick Doyle
China and had to go into a mandatory 14-day quarantine, what authority did Chicago have to enforce that? Where would they put that person — at the airport? In a hotel? They would also need 24-hour security to make sure they remained in quarantine for the full two weeks — who was going to pay for that? Lightfoot got on the phone with the various government agencies — HHS, Homeland Security, CDC — that should have answers to those questions. What she got instead were conflicting responses from each agency. After talking with other mayors, she realized that the agencies were not only telling Chicago different things, but the same agencies were also giving different guidance to the leaders of other cities. “That really set the tone for the nonsense that you’ve seen every day since,” Lightfoot says. “There was tremendous frustration realizing they weren’t going to help us at all.” (A task-force spokesman says the administration briefed Chicago several times about the January 31st travel restrictions and touts the task force’s “unprecedented outreach to the state, local, and tribal level.”) Lightfoot wrote letters to Trump and Pence, and waited nearly two months before getting a brief call with Pence. She’s banded together with other mayors and local leaders to devise a response to the coronavirus pandemic. Every Sunday, she joins a conference call with other mayors to share data and learn from one another’s efforts to get ahead of the pandemic. She’s mostly given up on receiving any serious help from the federal government. “We have known we can’t depend on the federal government; it would be great if they stepped up and did what needs to be done, but you see it for yourself,” Lightfoot says. “There’s no leadership there.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Finds for Spring!
Summer Essentials at JACHSNY Navy Cotton Coupe Short Sleeve Shirt $35 Red Stretch Twill Peached Short $32 Free Returns | jachsny.com/RS
Rough & Tumble Handbags Maine designer, Natasha Durham, is changing the world’s handbag game. Bag collectors become designers of custom creations using unlimited options. www.roughandtumbledesign.com 207.808.5042
PreSonus Eris HD10BT Bluetooth Headphones For 25 years, PreSonus has made studio gear for professional musicians. Bring that studio sound wherever the music takes you. presonus.com
Haymaker is your one-stop-shop headphone
Etymotic ER2XR With Etymotion™ Wireless A revolution in Bluetooth technology is upon us providing the Best Wireless Sound today from the creators of the True Reference Sound.
Designed to do it all, and do it all well! Visit www.The-Haymaker.com for more information.
www.etymotic.com
Improve your car stereo leave room for the pooch KICKER, the kings of car sound, gives you the bass your system needs, in a tough, unassuming box. Down-Firing Subwoofers from KICKER. www.kicker.com
Know Before They Knock with the Arlo Video Doorbell Arlo Video Doorbell allows for contact-free deliveries and ensures users can view packages on the ground, or visitors from head to toe. Learn More at: Arlo.com | $149.99
Volume Pedal + Tuner in One The new Ernie Ball VPJR Tuner is the perfect 2-in-1 pedal offering precise volume control plus digital tuner with a large, enhanced definition touch screen display. ernieball.com
Shop Popmarket.com today because your collection is never complete.
CaskCartel.com Buy Online • Get Delivered America’s No1 Premium Spirits Marketplace
Daily Deals on vinyl, box sets, imports and more. Free standard domestic shipping!
• Largest Selections • Whiskey • Tequila • Rum • Vodka & More!
Use ROLLINGSTONE for 10% off your first order. Exp. 6/5/20
#StartSipping
popmarket.com
Ultimate Party Gifts | Greatest Gifts Mobile Friendly CaskCartel.com
Brain Food for Kids
HIDE your HOOCH, STASH your SHINE, TUCK away your SPIRITS and LOCK up your WINE!
Brainiac® Kids yogurts and applesauce pouches were developed in partnership with Pediatricians and Nutritionists to fuel kids developing brains. Each serving is packed with Omega-3s and choline, making them a smarter choice for your kids’ breakfast or snack.
The Speakeasy Wall Vault with Biometric Fingerprint Scanning Technology features hand oiled wood with an inlaid 16 gauge steel flag, high density foam, self opening doors and a sweet flip down bar with CNC routed cup holders.
Get 30% OFF at brainiackids.com with promo BRAINPOWER
speakeasy-vault.com H2O Media inc. | h2omediainc.com | info@h2omediainc.com
Lionel Richie The legendary singer on fame’s pitfalls and the secret to eternal youth Who are your heroes? Nelson Mandela. I knew him at the end of his life when he came out of prison, and I was so taken aback that he embraced love instead of hate. When I first met him, he came to me, and his line was, “Young man, I’d like to thank you for your lyrics [and] your music because it helped me through many years of being
Richie has launched his own fragrance collection, Hello by Lionel Richie.
in prison.” And I started crying in front of him and could not stop. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? My dad used to always say, “What is the similarity between a hero and a coward? Both were scared to death. It’s just that one stepped forward and one stepped back.” Whenever I’ve been in terror with myself, I just think, “For God’s sake, step forward.” What do you wish someone would have told you when you were coming up in the music business? I came in as, “I trust everybody.” And I always use this as a motto: “There’s pimps, hustlers, whores, and thieves. And then there’s a dark side to the business.” Naiveté is great; it gets you in it. And then somewhere along the line, you got to get smart. What’s the best and worst part about success? The best part is winning. Everybody wants fame. Everybody wants the money.
98 |
Rolling Stone
|
May 2020
The bad news is that money, power, and fame only magnify you; it doesn’t change you. So if you are a little bit of a gangster, you’re gonna be a big gangster. If you are a little bit of an asshole, you’re gonna be a big asshole. If you’re gonna be a nice guy, you’re gonna be a big nice guy. So the worst of it is you will find out who you are. And a lot of people find out who they are and don’t survive themselves. You went on hiatus in 1987 at the peak of your career to spend time with your ailing father. How difficult of a decision was that? Not knowing that that break in my career [would happen] probably saved my life. I didn’t plan on stopping [or] slowing down. The rocket was flying at the fastest it could ever frickin’ go in life. I knew that [with] one more album I [wouldn’t] have the time to spend with my dad. [Richie’s dad died in 1990.] So I stopped. Three things happened: I went through my dad’s experience, I went through a divorce, and I went through voice surgery. They always say, “You can’t hit a moving target, but when you stand still, they know exactly where to shoot.” Well, everything hit me at the same time. Do you think your life would have been in peril if you kept going? Yes, yes. Remember, fame is odorless and tasteless. You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. One day you realize, “Why
is everybody not here with me?” Because you’re going too fast. I missed 20 family reunions. I missed 20 Christmases. I have 20 years of hit records. I missed birthdays. I missed weddings. I missed funerals. I didn’t know that people were dead. But meanwhile, I was flying, man. What was the most indulgent purchase you’ve ever made in your career? Probably my first divorce [laughs]. It was another one of those great life lessons. You once said you were “addicted to exhaustion.” What do you do to relax? I’m a hyper maniac. Years ago, I told a dear friend, “I’m gonna start acting more serious and calm down,” and he said, “Lionel, if you don’t act hyper, people will think something’s wrong with you.” [Laughs] You turned 70 last year. What’s the key to staying young as you age? You have to wake up every morning and have a passion for something. You gotta have something that makes you go, “Oh, man, I can’t wait.” Do you ever see a time when you would retire for good? They’re gonna have to carry me out, babe. Someone asked me years ago, “When do you plan on retiring?” And I said, “From what?” I’ve never had a job. People who work want to retire. The travel has gotten a lot better, but the fun and the adventure is still the same. The whole thing is a giant play period. JASON NEWMAN ILLUSTRATION BY Mark Summers
Surprise & excite your cat with over 100 varieties at Friskies.com
Trademarks owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A., Vevey, Switzerland.
“It’s Flavor Fill’d & Flavor Grill’d!”