Table of contents for April 20, 2017 in Rolling Stone

Sheeran Shines excellent article by Patrick Doyle on Ed Sheeran [“Hardcore Troubadour,” RS 1283]. Simple melodies and a normal life: What else do we need from the hardcore troubadour? Gilbert B. Battung, San Ramon, CA ed sheeran has really grown with each successive album. The first time I watched him performing solo – as he put down one instrumental track on top of another to do the entire song himself – gave me shivers. Johhnny T, via the Internet say what you want about Sheeran, this guy has the ability to go in front of thousands of people with just a guitar and a loop pedal and kill it. Jimmy, via the Internet DeVos’ Mission i am a retired public-school teacher, and I’m appalled by Betsy DeVos, her family and…

For mickey hart, watching the upcoming Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip was both moving and unsettling. “It’s charming and it’s heartfelt,” says the drummer. “But it’s sad in some ways. It’s not a date movie. I wouldn’t take my wife to see it.” The four-hour film (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will appear on Amazon Prime Video in June) is the first comprehensive documentary to tell the story of the Dead. Directed by Amir Bar-Lev (who previously directed The Tillman Story, about football player-turned-U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman) and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, it does not shy away from the dark forces that led to the death of frontman Jerry Garcia. At one point, the surviving members theorize what they could have done as…

Melina duterte has been performing her own music for only about a year. Before that, the 23-year-old was a formally trained jazz trumpeter with conservatory goals. She changed direction in 2015, when she released nine songs as Jay Som (a pseudonym she pulled from an online name generator). The set earned her a record deal and comparisons to Mazzy Star. Her new album, Everybody Works, recorded in her Oakland bedroom, combines low-fi rock, dream pop and R&B production. She wrote it as she struggled to balance personal relationships with what she calls her “indulgent” new career – which she’s only just getting comfortable with. “I’ve started to actually like playing live,” she says, “but if I had to choose, I wouldn’t. Recording in my bedroom, I can literally do whatever…

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Sixteen years ago, roughly on the occasion of his 75th birthday, I flew to St. Louis to talk to Chuck Berry. This was per our arrangement. Chuck said there would be none of those long confessional conversations where “the writer moves into my house and watches me brush my teeth in my pajamas.” Instead, I was to travel to Old St. Loo at one-month intervals, chat for a couple of hours at the Blueberry Hill club and then go home. This worked well, for a while, Chuck always appearing at the appointed place and time. Chuck might have developed a reputation over his matchless career for some nasty habits, but lack of punctuality was not one of them. Through thousands of gigs, no matter how remote the venue, Chuck was…

At 6:35 a.m. on the morning of March 4th, President Donald Trump did what no U.S. president has ever done: He accused his predecessor of spying on him. He did so over Twitter, providing no evidence and – lest anyone miss the point – doubling down on his accusation in tweets at 6:49, 6:52 and 7:02, the last of which referred to Obama as a “Bad (or sick) guy!” Six weeks into his presidency, these unsubstantiated tweets were just one of many times the sitting president had rashly made claims that were (as we soon learned) categorically untrue, but it was the first time since his inauguration that he had so starkly drawn America’s integrity into the fray. And he had done it not behind closed doors with a swift…

Various Artists Outlaw: Celebrating the Music of Waylon Jennings Sony/Legacy HHHH It’s fitting that Chris and Morgane Stapleton open this homage to Waylon Jennings – they’re a spiritual echo of Jennings and Jessi Colter, the duke and duchess of Seventies outlaw country, and emblematic of how the movement shaped generations of acts who chafe at Nashville conservatism but refuse to be marginalized. Recorded live in July 2015, this concert LP gathers Jennings’ family and friends with all-star acolytes for the rarest of things: a tribute album that almost never flags, with performances that approach or match the originals. Jennings was both interpreter and writer, and when he claimed a song, he owned it. But the gender flips here are illuminating: Kacey Musgraves teases the pathos from “The Wurlitzer…

1. Kendrick Lamar “The Heart Part 4” The rap god at his most gloriously pissed off, ripping into everyone from Trump to Kevin Durant: “No peers, no scars, no fear, fuck y’all, sincere.” Can’t front on that. 2. Gorillaz feat. Popcaan “Saturnz Bars” Damon Albarn’s cartoon crew is about to release its first LP in six years. Here they team up with Jamaican dancehall singer Popcaan for some awesomely spacey dub-hop swagger. 3. Craig Finn “Jester & June” The Hold Steady frontman keeps getting closer to his Springsteen ideal, but this darkly majestic tale of dive bars, religion and drug deals gone weird is more Nebraska than Born to Run. 4. Perfume Genius “Slip Away” Singer-producer Mike Hadreas (a.k.a. Perfume Genius) specializes in turning his insecurities into sly synth-pop anthems…

DAVE CHAPPELLE NETFLIX Dave chappelle’s comeback is a bit of a mess. But then, he always was – a mess is his favorite kind of place. Anyone expecting polished perfection from his new Netflix specials is remembering his Chappelle’s Show-era material as tighter than it was; he thrived on a loose, winging-it feel. The Age of Spin and Deep in the Heart of Texas were recorded a year apart – for a reported $20 million a pop. Neither is a home run – he’s testing the waters, with a third stand-up special due this year. His best riffs are about being confused by today’s world. He recalls watching the space shuttle explode in 1986 – but tells the audience, “In your generation, it’s like the space shuttle blows up every…

Maybellene, 1955 Rock & roll guitar starts here. Berry’s first single perfected his pileup of hillbilly country, urban blues and hot jazz, flipping the groove from “Ida Red,” a 1938 recording by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, into two manic minutes of car-culture vernacular, made-up hipster lingo and overdriven double-string leads. A motorvatin’ masterpiece. <div class="thin-border"></div> Wee Wee Hours, 1955 It took Berry about an hour to write “Wee Wee Hours,” the bluesy B side to “Maybellene.” He was inspired by Big Joe Turner’s smooth “Wee Baby Blues” and a woman named Margie, with whom he fell in love when he was a teenager playing USO dances.<div class="thin-border"></div> Thirty Days, 1955 Berry’s upbeat call for a lover to come home displays both his dexterous soloing and his sense of…

Father John Misty Pure Comedy Sub Pop HHHH BY WILL HERMES Under the guise of Father John Misty, Josh Tillman has been updating the singer-songwriter tradition for our post-ironic era, tapping and tweaking its melodicism and “sincerity.” After devoting his last FJM album, 2015’s to unpacking romantic love, Tillman ups the ante on his third album to take on the whole human condition. That’s the comedy in Pure Comedy’s title track: Echoing his Seventies forebears, Randy Newman above all, he discourses on the evolutionary roots of gender inequity and our insatiable appetite for painkillers and religion. “They get terribly upset/When you question their sacred texts/Written by woman-hating epileptics,” Tillman croons, in verses that will have listeners Googling furiously as they sing along. As many of us navigate between…

Maggie rogers did not know she was about to become a viral sensation when she stepped into class at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music last spring. “We knew there was going to be a guest, but we had no idea it was going to be Pharrell,” says Rogers, a freckled 22-year-old in jeans and big earrings, over coffee in New York. Pharrell Williams had come to give feedback on student music. The class would be filmed and put on his YouTube channel. Rogers played him “Alaska,” a synthy folk-pop tune about walking off a failed romance on a hiking trip (she had trained as a hiking guide in Alaska). The performance nearly moved Williams to tears. As Rogers grinned, he compared her originality to Stevie Wonder and the…

Until recently, machine Gun Kelly was semifamous for dating model Amber Rose in 2015. But the rapper – who earned his stage name on the Cleveland hip-hop scene for his rapid-fire delivery – has just scored a pop smash with “Bad Things,” an Eminem-style duet with former Fifth Harmony singer Camila Cabello. The song recently hit Number Four on the Hot 100. “It’s crazy,” says Kelly, 26. “It’s the first love song I ever wrote.” The song will likely appear on his third album, Bloom, out this summer. But music is just one of Kelly’s hustles: He had a major part on Showtime’s Roadies and has walked runways for John Varvatos. At the moment, Kelly is in Mexico, but he won’t say why. “Put me on the cover and I’ll…

Chuck berry once gave me a black eye. which I later called his greatest hit. We saw him play in New York somewhere, and afterward I was backstage in his dressing room, where his guitar was lying in its case. I wanted to look, out of professional interest, and as I’m just plucking the strings, Chuck walked in and gave me this wallop to the frickin’ left eye. But I realized I was in the wrong. If I walked into my dressing room and saw somebody fiddling with my ax, it would be perfectly all right to sock ’em, you know? I just got caught. He would do things like throw me offstage, too. I always took that as a reverse compliment, sort of as a sign of respect –…

When joan baez shared a bill with the Indigo Girls about 20 years ago, a young fan approached, asking for an autograph – for his grandmother. “Tell your grandmother to go fuck herself!” said Baez,who saw the show as a way to connect with a new generation of fans. Today, in the airy kitchen of her home near Palo Alto, California, with its view of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a painting of a nude woman above the fireplace, Baez winces at the memory. “I felt so awful and said, ‘I’m sorry – of course I’ll sign it.’” Baez, 76, loves to play against her image as the serene, hyperserious matriarch of folk music. Resting her chin on her hand, she flashes her recent metal-chick tattoo: a series of circles…

Drake More Life Young Money/Cash Money HHHH Drake calls his superb new a “playlist,” not an album or even a mixtape, yet that might be why it sounds so quintessentially Drake-ian. When you get down to it, Aubrey Graham is a playlist – a pop visionary with a raging appetite for his next favorite sound. This is a masterful tour of the grooves in his head, from U.K. grime (“No Long Talk”) to Caribbean dancehall (“Blem”) to South African house (“Get It Together”). The further he roams, the deeper he taps into the heart of Drakeness. Drake generously includes solo tracks for artists like Sampha and Skepta, providing killer showcases for London newcomers Giggs and Jorja Smith, as well as Atlanta gods 2 Chainz and Young Thug, who…

You spent nearly 30 years as a cult-favorite comedy actor and writer before getting dramatic roles in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. How surprising was that turn of events? I’m surprised at the opportunity I got. I really am. I’ll read a Better Call Saul script and think, “Are they really trusting me with this?” Breaking Bad came out of nowhere. I thought I’d show up and they’d say, “Go home. You’re not the Bob Odenkirk we’re thinking of. It’s the other one, from the Royal Shakespeare Company.” I did have a gut feeling, years ago, that in a dramatic context I could be really impactful. It’s natural for me to get earnest and honest. I have comedy friends who congenitally can’t do that, but I can. In fact,…