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‘D ear heavenly Father,” someone is saying to the silent room, “please give us the ability to touch this crowd.” All thirty-six members of D’Angelo ‘s touring band and crew are stuffed into his dressing room, hands linked, heads bowed in a large prayer circle. “And when our ability fails, Lord. Please. Take over.” The room answers with a loud “ mm-hmm. “ Prayer ends, and the entire group collapses into a giant moving hug, all yelling at once in a joyous din – “ Soultronic force! My re-deeeeem-er !” It seems they’re gearing up for some high-energy smash-mouth football. Or a musical mission. As the scrum disperses, D’Angelo turns to you and slaps you five. And nearly breaks your hand. D, as they call him, gives pounds with injurious intent – stiff-handed smacks that make a firecracker pop and then meld into a tight clamp, a finger snap, two fist bumps and another clamp, or some such combination. The more he likes you, the more he uses the strength in his bulky shoulders and … [Read more...] about D’Angelo Is Holding Your Hand

M ick Jagger , Singer of the Rolling Stones , turned forty years old on July 26th. Apart from the fact that forty is a nice, round number, it also signifies the twentieth year of the Stones’ career. Looking for a maxim suitable to open an article in which I would try hard to find some reason why these events should be of interest, I came across a Proverb (22:6) in the May issue of Awake: “Train a boy according to the way for him; even when he grows old he will not turn aside from it.” The Times is an appropriate place for me to be airing my thoughts on this moment in rock history. On June 30th, 1967, my group, the Who , took an advertisement in the Evening Standard to protest against the savage sentences meted out to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for possession of drugs. We really thought we were going out on a limb, attracting the attention of the police and the press and probably opening ourselves up for similar busts. On the following day, however, the Times … [Read more...] about Pete Townshend on Mick Jagger and the Nature of Aging in Rock & Roll

Cassandra Peterson – or Elvira , as she’s known to most – is an enduring pop culture icon who has existed in our collective consciousness for 40 years. Yet behind the costume, her story is a moving and wildly entertaining tale of navigating the unpredictability of life as a performer. From her pre-fame days as a teenage showgirl in Vegas (where she dated Elvis Presley), her stint as a singer in a rock band in Italy, to eventually finding fame where she least expected it – with her character Elvira in the 1980s – Peterson’s journey has been a long and winding road. On the cusp on the Australian release of her autobiography and her casting in the new Rob Zombie feature adaptation of The Munsters , we sat down with “The Queen of Halloween,” to talk about her autobiography, Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of The Mistress of The Dark , her life, career, and the importance of never, ever giving up. In your book you mentioned you felt like a misfit when you … [Read more...] about Cassandra Peterson, Elvira: Mistress of The Dark, Urges Us to Never Give up On Our Dreams

In 1971, the Cannes Film Festival opened with a screening of Gimme Shelter by Albert and David Maysles, an immersive, vérité depiction of two weeks in the touring life of the Rolling Stones . If that was all it did, it might have been forgotten by now. But by a terrible freak of chance, the filmmakers followed the band to the most notorious concert of their entire career — the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, CA, where the Stones, along with Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, were set to perform a free concert for 300,000 people on Dec. 6, 1969. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” Albert said later. “We just had a childish faith that having seen the Stones and getting along with them, there might be a feature film there.” At the apparent suggestion of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead (who were originally set to perform at the festival but ended up steering clear due to serious … [Read more...] about Cannes Film Festival Has Had Its Musical Moments From The Stones To The Spice Girls

D ‘Angelo is a morning person, of sorts. When he’s working in the studio, as was often the case in the 14-year interregnum between 2000’s Voodoo and 2014’s Black Messiah, he quits his all-night recording sessions just in time to greet each day’s sunrise. “I’m definitely on the night shift,” he says, drawing deep on one of a series of Newport cigarettes, not long after midnight in the midtown Manhattan studio where he recorded much of Black Messiah. He’s wearing a denim shirt unbuttoned over a white undershirt, dark jeans and leather boots. Dog tags bearing the names of his three children hang from a chain around his neck. He looks weary, though he woke up not long ago. It’s his first interview since he released one of the most universally acclaimed albums in years, an album that seemed as if it might never come out at all. D’Angelo could well be the most singular, visionary star to emerge from R&B since Prince. His music, stuffed with live instrumentation and harmonic … [Read more...] about The Second Coming of D’Angelo