OCTOBER 2018

ISSUE 1320

E L ECT I O N 2 0 1 8

Can
California
Stop
Trump?
PLUS

THE GOP’S
PLAN TO
SHUT OUT
BLACK
VOTERS

How
CLIMATE
CHANGE
& WALL
STREET
Almost Killed ARETHA
PUERTO 1942-2018
RICO

ELLA MAI
B E A S T I E B OYS
PRINCE
The complete album is here. The official video is here.

The live performance is here. Dua Lipa radio is here.

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FOR $49.95

Iconic. Provocative. Influential.

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48 ISSUE
1320
‘ALL THE
The Queen: NEWS
Aretha Franklin THAT FITS’

She channeled a world of pain

into a sound all her own, but she
remained a mystery until the end.
By Mikal Gilmore

60
Mr. Saturday Night:
Kenan Thompson
As the longest-running cast
member of SNL, Thompson
proves longevity pays of.
By Brian Hiatt

62
The ‘Rolling Stone’
Road Test
Music’s hottest stars take the hottest
new rides for a spin. Plus, a look at
the tech and trends shaping how
we’ll drive in the future.

68
The Blue Wave’s
Rising Tide ‘I had always
A record number of women are
running for ofice in 2018. Meet
thought in order
the candidates who could change
the face of American politics. to run for oice
you had to take
74 big money.’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
On running for Congress in
New York’s 14th District
Puerto Rico’s
Perfect Storm
One year after Hurricane
Maria, here’s how climate
change and Wall Street
almost killed the island.
By Jeff Goodell

PHOTOGRAPH BY Akasha Rabut

 Contents ‘R&B is not dead.
We can make
it mainstream
again. Clearly,
people love it.’
Ella Mai
On why ‘Boo’d Up’
broke through

19

The Mix National 90

MY STYLE
26 Interpol’s

19 Ella Mai’s
Paul Banks Afairs
Exploring the frontman’s
Surprise Smash vintage finds.
BY DANIELA TIJERINA 43 The Battle for
The “Boo’d Up” singer
on her newfound fame.
California
BY BRITTANY SPANOS
34 Mike Campbell The Golden State can lead
A year after losing his a Democratic takeover of
ON THE ROAD best friend, Tom Petty, the House — and
the Heartbreaker is hitting turn the tide of Trumpism.
20 Panic! Come Back the road as Fleetwood BY TIM DICKINSON
From the Dead
How Panic! at the Disco
Mac’s guitarist.
BY ANDY GREENE 44 The Long View:
Reviews Movies
90 Lady Gaga Hits All
reinvented themselves. Trump’s Racist the Right Notes
BY BRITTANY SPANOS Q&A Comments Music The singer and actor-
36 Damon Albarn A timeline of the 83 Prince’s Lost Gem director Bradley Cooper
21 How Instagram president’s harshest team up to deliver a
The Gorillaz singer on An unearthed home demo
Lit Up Live Music cartoon fame, becoming ofenses — from calling millennial take on A Star
reveals a young genius.
Why tours are designed friends with Noel Mexicans rapists to the Is Born — and end up
BY KORY GROW
with social media in mind. Gallagher, and weed. allegations from Omarosa with a modern classic.
BY AMY X. WANG BY SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON that he used the n-word. ALBUM GUIDE
BY PETER TRAVERS

JAMIL SMITH
88 Classic Reggae TV

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KOURY ANGELO; CLAY ENOS/WARNER BROS.

PICTURES; SHANE MCCAULEY; LARRY MARANO/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The LPs that defined an

20 47 Why the GOP

Suppresses Votes
How the racist Republican
island sound’s golden age.
BY WILL HERMES
92 Matthew Weiner’s
Return
With his new Amazon
policy is attempting to shut anthology series, The
out the essential minority Romanofs, the Mad Men
vote in the upcoming creator achieves scattered
primaries. moments of brilliance.
BY ALAN SEPINWALL

Departments
Letter From the Editor 12
Correspondence 14 On the Cover
Playlist
Random Notes
The Last Word
22
39
98
84 Aretha Franklin, photographed
in January 1961 by Hank Parker/
Sony Music Entertainment

8 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

Right now, 8,224 people want to quit
their job to focus on their music.

But only 76 are taking

their shot.

DRINK SMART®
Hornitos® Tequila, 40% alc./vol. ©2018 Sauza Tequila Import Company, Chicago, IL
 Jason Fine Gus Wenner Jay Penske
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Editor’s Letter
“Women not only have the right, the power and the ability,
but we can show a diferent kind of leadership that’s compassionate
and sincere.” —PAU L E T T E JOR DA N, candidate for Idaho governor

Saying Farewell Maria’s

to Aretha
aftermath

INSIDE THE STORY

The Fight to Save

WHEN THE SAD NEWS reached us that Aretha Franklin was
gravely ill, the irst person I called was Mikal Gilmore. The
ROLLING STONE veteran, who wrote his irst piece for the
magazine in 1976, is a master at crafting epic, revelatory
tributes to the most important artists of our times.
Gilmore’s writing, fueled by meticulous research and
abiding empathy for his subjects, helps us fathom the
complex, often contradictory lives of the artists he en-
counters: their hidden motivations and hard-won achieve-
ments, the diicult places they came from and the new
worlds they created.
In recent years, Gilmore has paid tribute in these pages to David Bowie, Leon-
ard Cohen and Merle Haggard, among others. None of these subjects caused as
many late nights as Aretha Franklin. “I researched Aretha harder than any of the
others,” he says. “I read about 20 books, and my ile of articles and interviews
about her was over 300,000 words. It was very intensive.”
Puerto Rico
Reporting from the front lines of climate
GOT A HOT change reveals a terrifying scenario
NEWS TIP? C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R Jef Goodell has
WE WANT been writing about global warming for more
TO HEAR IT. than a decade, but he was stunned by what he
E-mail us, uncovered working on “The Perfect Storm: How
confidentially, Climate Change and Wall Street Almost Killed
at Tips@ Puerto Rico” (page 74). “This was not a natural
RollingStone disaster, but a manufactured catastrophe,”
.com
Goodell says, “one created by poverty, cor-
ruption and climate change, which is its own
manufactured catastrophe.” Goodell, author of
The Water Will Come, spent six months working
on the feature that serves as an abject lesson
of what happens when we ignore the threat.
“Puerto Rico is a sort of morality tale for our
time,” he says, “and one that desperately needs
a happy ending.”

Gilmore’s personal history is as complicated and diicult as that of some of

his subjects. Growing up in a troubled Mormon family in Utah, he lost his father
when he was young, and watched two of his brothers become serious criminals.
Mikal’s older brother Gary was convicted of a double murder in 1976 and was
UPDATE
sentenced to death, which Mikal chronicles in his devastating 1994 memoir, Shot
in the Heart. Before Gary died, he’d received a call in prison from Johnny Cash,
his favorite musician, pleading with him to appeal the death penalty. Gary chose
Ted Cruz’s Punk-Rock
not to ight his sentence, and after he died, Mikal spoke to Cash on the phone. “I Problem Just Got Worse
was in the abyss,” says Gilmore. “Having that one person reach out in a sympa- Sen. Ted Cruz. Now,
thetic and caring way really saved me.” with the race in a dead
heat, Cruz and the
While researching and writing the Aretha story for this issue, Gilmore devel- GOP are sweating the
oped a kinship with the singer from afar. “She was indomitable,” he says. “She handsome progressive
was sick for a very long time, but I think the reason she survived for so long is from El Paso. It’s led
to some memorable
she did not intend for death to be her master.” This was especially inspiring for

FROM TOP: JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES; SUZANNE CORDEIRO/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Gilmore in the aftermath of his 2016 bout with throat cancer. (His next book is
a chronicle of his illness, co-written with his wife.) “I’ve always found some-
thing therapeutic about writing,” he says. “It takes you out of yourself and lets
you concentrate on another subject. I wrote the tribute to David Bowie when I LO N G B E FO R E R E P.
was in treatment. I credit that assignment, along with Obamacare, for keeping Beto O’Rourke’s
argument that there is
me alive.” “nothing more Amer-
ican” than peacefully
protesting during
the national anthem
went viral, staf writer
Tessa Stuart joined the
congressman on a road
JA S ON F I N E trip across Texas. It was
more than a year ago,
EDITOR
as the Senate hopeful
was gearing up his
long-shot bid to unseat
stumbles — like the
time @TexasGOP mock-
ingly tweeted a photo
of O’Rourke’s teenage
band, Foss, featuring
Cedric Bixler-Zavala
of the Mars Volta. The
tweet was ridiculed for
reminding Texans that
O’Rourke is hipper than
they had been aware.
And it reminded Stuart
to unearth an interview
where O’Rourke
rhapsodized about the
classic D.C. punk im-
print Dischord Records.
“I was into Minor Threat
in high school,” he
recalled.

12 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

 P I N K P O N Y

o e
in Pink

J O I N U S I N T H E F I G H T AG A I N S T C A N C E R
1 0 0 % o f t h e p u r c h a s e p r i c e f r o m t h e “ L i v e L o v e ” l i g h t p i n k t- s h i r t s w i l l b e d o n a t e d t o t h e P i n k P o n y F u n d
of The Polo Ralph L auren Foundation or to an international net work of c ancer charities .

G l o b a l l y, 2 5 % o f t h e p u r c h a s e p r i c e f r o m t h e s a l e o f e a c h i t e m i n t h e P i n k P o n y c o l l e c t i o n i s d i r e c t e d t o a n i n t e r n a t i o n a l n e t w o r k
of c ancer charities; within the U nited States , proceeds benefit the Pink Pony Fund of The Polo Ralph L auren Foundation .

R A LP H L AU R E N .CO M / P I N K P O N Y
Correspondence
The Confessions of Colbert
In September, the king of late-night starred in our
annual TV issue [“The Triumph of Stephen Col-
bert,” RS 1319]. The host talked about President
Donald Trump and opened up about coping with
anxiety, and in an exclusive, hilariously geeky
behind-the-scenes video, broke down Chance
the Rapper’s “Favorite Song” (featuring Childish
Gambino). In it, Colbert name-drops everyone
from author J.R.R. Tolkien to Victorian-era theatri-
cal duo Gilbert and Sullivan. The Internet loved to
watch Colbert embrace his inner nerd. “I did not
know Stephen Colbert was a super-geek,” tweet-
SPOTLIGHT
Tom Arnold’s Hot Pursuit
hopeful.” Another reader, Billy Hendoe, tweeted, “#releasethetapes.” Others like Terri Azie questioned
whether Arnold’s mission, even if successful, was ultimately worth pursuing, tweeting, “Does it matter?
What diference does it make now? There is no bottom too low for Trump’s supporters.”
14 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
“Colbert is
a beacon to
those who live
in the rational
world. No
matter what,
there is still
a place for
intellect, for
logic and for
humor. ”
—Swiss422, via the Internet
ed Will Hofman. John Panzer took to Twitter to
proclaim that he “crowns thee king of the nerds.”
Other readers related to Colbert’s struggles with
anxiety. “It’s so important for people like Colbert
to own their experience with anxiety,” tweeted
Denny Roberts. Another reader, Farsh Askari,
wrote, “Thank you for your honesty about strug-
gling. Your story helps diminish the undue stigma
around #mentalhealth and proves anxiety doesn’t
trump achieving our goals.” Reader Nikki Christi-
na summed up the reactions well in a comment:
”Stephen Colbert is a national treasure.”
Our September issue included a feature on Tom Arnold
and chronicled his hunt to take down Donald Trump
[“Who’s Afraid of Tom Arnold?” RS 1319]. ROLLING STONE
senior writer Brian Hiatt followed Arnold’s manic quest,
from Los Angeles to New York, to find the Trump tapes.
When the story was finally published last month, it
coincided with the news of Michael Cohen’s possible
plea deal — which Arnold had predicted. “I knew it!” he
tweeted. Readers went along for the ride. “This story
takes you close to what it must feel like to be around
Tom Arnold,” tweeted R. Brad. “A little frantic and a little
+ L OV E L E T T E R S & A DV IC E
Sia Fights On
I have family members who are bipolar,
and I know what a daily struggle it is
[“How Sia Saved Herself,” RS 1319]. I’m so
glad Sia continues to work on her issues
and is still with us to share her talent.
—Angie Fultz, via the Internet
Sia is such an inspiring songwriter that
even reading about her process conjured
a melody inside my brain.
—Joseph Lamour, via the Internet
@Rebecca
allen: Wow . . . 
Stephen
Colbert:
comedy, Documenting the
Tolkien,
musical Texas Border Crisis
theater, hip- Molly Crabapple is one of the most
hop — all hail important artists working today [“Scenes
the king! From an American Tragedy,” RS 1319].
These sketches she did of the humanitari-
an crisis still underway at the U.S.-Mexico
border break your heart. And make your
blood boil.
—Kevin Smokler, via the Internet
These drawings and stories are
heart-wrenching. All of America should
be ashamed of this. Trump and his admin-
istration should be held accountable for
this travesty of human decency. No one
should ever be treated like this.
—Charles Banks, via the Internet
CONTACT US
Letters to ROLLING STONE, 1290 Avenue of
the Americas, New York, NY 10104-0298.
Letters become the property of ROLLING
STONE and may be edited for publication.
E-mail: letters@rollingstone.com
Subscriber Services:
Go to RollingStone.com/customerservice
or call 800-283-1549.
 Opening Act

The New
Royal
Nashville
Couple
When Jason Isbell met his wife,
Amanda Shires, she was playing
fiddle at a club in Athens, Geor-
gia. At the time, he was a local
hero in the boozy country-rock
group Drive-By Truckers. “I made
him sign a Polaroid,” says Shires.
Now, that photo hangs in their
home outside Nashville. They
haven’t had much downtime here
lately; Shires just released an
excellent new LP, To the Sunset,
and Isbell has carved out a place
as one of rock and country’s
most vivid storytellers since leav-
ing the Truckers in 2007. Though
the first couple of Americana
rarely write songs together, they
aren’t afraid to critique each
other’s work. “We ask each other
a lot, ‘Is this too much?’ “ says
Isbell. “Trust me, you don’t want
to hear the lines of mine that
were too much.” JON FREEMAN

16 | PHOTOGRAPH BY Alysse Gafkjen

 Shires and Isbell at
their Tennessee home
in August, before
launching separate
solo tours this fall
 GRAB
CONFIDENCE
BY THE PACK
 Ella Mai’s
Surprise
Smash
How the ‘Boo’d Up’ singer
went from reality-show
also-ran to R&B star

Month 2018
PHOTOGRAPH | Rolling
BY Koury Angelo
Stone | 19
The Mix
I
T LOOKED A LOT like 2006
at Panic! at the Disco’s
headlining show at Madi-
son Square Garden in July.
Of course, the band’s lineup has
changed, and its sound has shift-
ed away from baroque emo pop
(Panic! have also cut down the
length of song titles by about 60
percent). But the crowd looked
exactly the same: teens and pre-
teens in multicolored hair sing-
ing along to every line.
“Bizarre, right?” says front-
man Brendon Urie. “Fourteen
years running, and younger kids
are coming down to the shows.”
These days, Panic! are ac-
tually bigger than they were
when they broke through as
Fall Out Boy’s protégés (Pete
Wentz signed them to his label
after hearing them on Live-
Journal). This summer, their
sixth LP, Pray for the Wicked,
packed with jubilant, dramatic
disco rock, became Panic!’s sec-
ond album in a row to debut at
Number One, accumulating half
a billion streams — unheard-of
numbers for a rock band in 2018.
Panic! were a rare bright spot
at this year’s MTV Video Music
Awards, their irst appearance at
the event since 2007. Urie, in a lowery suit,
prowled the aisles of Radio City Music Hall
backed by an orchestra, belting the band’s
new anthem “High Hopes.”
That kind of success seemed unlikely for
Panic! a decade ago, when it appeared they
were inished. Their psychedelic 2008 LP,
Pretty. Odd., failed to repeat the success of
their debut and was met with scathing re-
views. (“We were basically like, ‘Fuck the
electric guitar, let’s go to the desert and eat
mushrooms and see what comes out,’ ” said
Urie in 2016.) Guitarist-vocalist Ryan Ross
and bassist Jon Walker left the following year,
frustrated they didn’t get a creative voice.
(Drummer Spencer Smith struggled with pill
and alcohol addictions, eventually leaving
ELLA MAI
T 
HIS SUMMER, ELLA MAI answered the phone
and heard one of her heroes: Stevie Wonder
was calling to tell her how much he loves
“Boo’d Up,” the R&B sleeper hit that has made her a
star this year. He even sang a bit of its suave, catchy
hook back to her. “It was insane,” says Mai, 23.
It wasn’t the irst surreal twist in her career. Mai,
who grew up in London, made a brief appearance
in 2014 on the British edition of The X Factor — the
same reality show that introduced the world to One
Direction and Leona Lewis — as a member of a girl
group named Arize. When that didn’t pan out, she
began posting 15-second covers of pop songs on In-
stagram. Her version of Fetty Wap’s “679” was good
20 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
ON THE ROAD
How Panic!
Came Back
From the Dead
Brendon Urie’s band arose in the
shadow of Fall Out Boy. A decade later,
it has a surprise Number One album,
a big tour and a new mission
enough to get picked up by the popular gossip account
@TheShadeRoom, which is how it reached producer
DJ Mustard, known for the string of R&B and hip-hop
hits he helped make between 2014 and 2016 with YG,
2 Chainz, Big Sean, Rihanna and others.
In the fall of 2015, Mustard invited Mai to a studio
session to see what she could do. “I didn’t have any
material out — he was going based of my Instagram
covers,” she says. “It’s one thing to sing covers on so-
cial media, and a diferent thing to make your own
music.” That led to a trio of EPs in 2016 and 2017.
“Boo’d Up” was featured on the last of those EPs,
in February 2017, but it made virtually no noise until
it began getting organic spins in Bay Area clubs and
radio playlists months later. It’s since skyrocketed up
to Number Five on Billboard’s Hot 100, in part be-
for good in 2015.) Urie described
a period of anxiety about how
to move forward, and had trou-
ble getting out of bed. A conver-
sation with the band’s longtime
producer Rob Mathes (Beck, Fall
Out Boy) was a turning point.
“He said, ‘Just show up. You
have the talent, the drive,’ ” said
Urie. “And that got me out of the
house and talking with people
about music — [not just] holding
it all in and getting frustrated.”
Urie completely rethought his
band’s sound. He started work-
ing with outside songwriters and
embracing dance and hip-hop
samples, beginning with 2013’s
Janet Jackson tribute, “Miss
Jackson,” which helped Panic!’s
fourth album sell nearly half a
million copies. 2016’s Death of a
Bachelor, which doubled down
on theatrical pop, hit Number
One. Urie also found other work.
Last year, he played the lead in
the Tony Award-winning musical
Kinky Boots, and got strong re-
views: “The past couple of years
has been me trying new things
and terrifying myself into having
an amazing time at work.”
Panic! have become especial-
ly huge in the LGBTQ commu-
nity, which in recent years has embraced
the band’s 2013 song “Girls/Girls/Boys” as
a queer-love anthem. This inspired Urie to
come out as pansexual earlier this summer
in an interview with Paper. “It’s been pretty
great,” Urie says of the response. “To me, it
was never a big deal, but I knew that putting
a label on it makes people feel more com-
fortable. I wanna make sure it’s normalized.”
He’s taking that message further on the Pray
for the Wicked tour, which is raising money
with the foundation GLSEN to create gay-
straight alliances in high schools across the
country. “I wish I had that in high school —
what a cool idea,” he says. “I tell fans all the
time: ‘It’s in my initials — just ‘be you.’ It’s all
good.” BRITTANY SPANOS
cause it ills an underserved need for unabashedly
soulful vocals in pop. “I think sometimes that hap-
pens with R&B music,” Mai says. “It has to get digest-
ed properly. Even now, it’s surprising for a new art-
ist with a purely R&B song that has no huge feature.”
The slow-burn success of “Boo’d Up” nabbed
Mai a prime spot opening for Bruno Mars at stadi-
ums across America in October (illing in for new
mom Cardi B), and she’s been hard at work on her
full-length debut, due this fall — and she’s sticking
with the same retro-classic Nineties soul inluences
that made “Boo’d Up” stand out this summer. “My
mum used to play The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill re-
ligiously, and a lot of Missy Elliott,” Mai says. “R&B is
not dead. We can make it mainstream again. Clearly,
people love it.” B.S.
PHOTOGRAPH BY Cameron McCool
 ON THE ROAD

While planning live shows, artists have a new audience to keep in

How Instagram mind: fans at home. Tours by Taylor Swift, Travis Scott and Drake
have huge visual moments that photograph well for Instagram, a
big promotional tool that designers are increasingly thinking about.

Lit Up Live Music

“A show no longer starts when the curtain rises,” says Ray Winkler,
who designed the On the Run II tour. “It starts when the irst per-
son takes a picture.” AMY X. WANG

CRAZY IN LOVE FAST AND FURIOUS LOCAL COLOR

Bey and Jay are often silhouetted onstage: “A Drake’s new tour includes a floating replica Fer- The Flaming Lips crew travels with three-foot
shape against a simple background is a striking rari. “I haven’t seen the show, but the images balloon letters assembled into city-specific
picture,” says veteran designer LeRoy Bennett. look incredible online,” Kanye West tweeted. messages. It gets the night’s biggest cheers.

SPACE INVADERS FIERY FAREWELL SNAKE IT OFF

EDM duo Odesza grab eyeballs at fests with a On Slayer’s final tour, their logo symbolically Swift’s Reputation tour features a moving cobra
choreographed drum line that distracts from goes up in flames. “People will always revert with a tail 63 feet high. It’s consistently the
“buttons and knobs turning,” says the band. back to that technology,” says Winkler. most photographed moment of the night.
GARY MILLER/GETTY IMAGES; NICHOLAS HUNT/TAS18/GETTY IMAGES; MARK LA SHARK;
ASTRIDA VALIGORSKY; JIM BENNETT/WIREIMAGE; JOE PAPEO/SHUTTERSTOCK;
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: LARRY BUSACCA/PW18/GETTY IMAGES;

FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES; TAYLOR HILL/FILMMAGIC

LASER TAG TIGER BLOOD ONE TREE HILL

Justin Timberlake uses lasers as background Scott hovers above crowds in an animatronic U2 “deliberately set up vignettes that have them
dancers. “[It’s] the definition of an Instagram bird inspired by Legoland. “Name someone positioned for a shot that will proliferate on
moment,” says Fireplay designer Kelly Sticksel. that’s 25 doing that shit,” he says. Instagram,” says the tour’s designer, Ric Lipson.

October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 21

The Mix
4 9
1. Ozuna feat.
Romeo Santos
“Ibiza”
Puerto Rican singer
Ozuna should be Latin
pop’s next household
name, and this smooth
beach-partying jam from
his fine new album, Aura,
is one reason why. “Ibiza”
gets prettier every time
you hear it.
2. Thom Yorke
“Suspirium”
Yorke’s soundtrack for the
classic Italian-horror-flick
remake Suspiria centers
on this lovely, delicate
piano ballad. With its
ghostly repeating melody,
it’s peak Yorke — and
scary-good.
3. Ryan Culwell
“Can You Hear Me”
Nashville artist Culwell
channels Bruce Spring-
steen’s “Radio Nowhere”
and turns “I can’t breathe,”
the dying words of New
York police-brutality
victim Eric Garner, into a
powerful refrain. It’s the
kind of political coun-
try-rock anthem that truly
takes guts to make.
22 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
PLAYLIST
OUR FAVORITE SONGS
5 7
4. Neneh Cherry
“Kong”
Cherry has been making
innovative, genre-wreck-
ing R&B since the Eighties
(remember “Bufalo
Stance”?). Here she teams
up with producers Four
Tet and 3D (of Massive At-
tack) for a dubby missive
about Europe’s immigra-
tion crisis — the perfect
theme for an artist whose
work has always been
about crossing borders.
5. Elvis Costello
& the Imposters
“Burnt Sugar
Is So Bitter”
Costello’s latest album
has us flashing back
on Eighties greats like
Imperial Bedroom —
especially this standout
tune, steeped in Stax and
Steely Dan and co-written
with Carole King.
AND VIDEOS RIGHT
NOW
1 INSPIRED ME
6. Yella Beezy
“That’s on Me”
Dallas rapper Yella Beezy
has been building an
under-the-radar name for
himself this year, thanks
to a youthful exuberance
you can hear on ”That’s
on Me.” The result is as
crisp and bright as the
diamonds he brags about
in its lyrics.
7. Boygenius
“Me & My Dog”
Crushingly vivid
post-breakup afliction
brought to you by an indie
supergroup composed
of ace singer-songwrit-
ers Lucy Dacus, Phoebe
Bridgers and Julien Baker.
Their debut EP is pure alt-
rock splendor.
8. Kurt Vile
“Bassackwards”
No one does chill stoner
guitar bliss quite like Vile.
On this highlight from his
great new Bottle It In, he
unspools gorgeous finger-
MY
LIST
FIVE SONGS
THAT
By Steve Perry
The former Journey
frontman is about to
release Traces, his first
album in 22 years. It was
inspired by the loss of his
girlfriend to cancer.
THE FLAMINGOS
“I Only Have Eyes
for You”
At the time this came
out, when I was just a
kid, it was like another
landscape of sound to me.
As old-school as it is today,
it still evokes magic.
SAM COOKE
”Cupid”
I was in a ’56 Thunderbird
with my mom when this
came on the radio. I was
captivated by every single
picking for 10 laid-back thing I was hearing. The
minutes as he dryly muses world got really small.
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: KIM HIORTHOY; ALBERTO RODRIGUEZ/TELEMUNDO/NBCU PHOTO BANK/GETTY
on the sublime weirdness
of everyday living. THE DRIFTERS
IMAGES; TOMMASO BODDI/WIREIMAGE; NAILAH HOWZE; MARY MCCARTNEY; LENA PENTELUTE
“Under the Boardwalk”
9. Leon Thomas Lyrics like “you can almost
“Beg” taste the hot dogs” aren’t
Up-and-coming R&B the best, but the way he
songwriter and vocalist says it just kills me.
Thomas ofers a hip-
hop-soul lover’s prayer, THE BEACH BOYS
complete with swirling,
“In My Room”
graceful falsetto and
This was an anthem to my
self-deprecatingly funny
teenage isolation. I just
lyrics like “Please don’t
wanted to be left alone in
make me beg/Fuck it,
I’m-a beg.” my room, where I could
find peace of mind and
play music.
10. Swearin’
“Grow Into a Ghost”
LED ZEPPELIN
For Swearin’s Alison Crutch-
reviews, field sings about watching “Good Times
premieres a friend turn into some- Bad Times”
and more, one she doesn’t know The first time it came on
go to anymore. It should be a the radio, I nearly pulled
Rolling bummer, but the band’s my car over and pooped
Stone.com/ raging pop-punk makes my pants. Nobody had
music apathy feel explosive. ever heard anything like it.
The All-New Corolla Hatchback
The Mix

THE REBOOT

Halloween PICKS
vs. Predator: POP-FAN
What’s New PODCASTS
The filmmakers behind fall’s big reboots Great gabfests
on how they left their mark on two dedicated to music
superstars
horror franchises — from a creepier
mask to a bigger, sleeker,
‘upgraded’ alien DAVID FEAR
The Bosscast

John Murray, a veteran

HALLOWEEN PREDATOR of New York comedy
David Gordon Green and Danny McBride Shane Black crew the Upright Cit-
izens Brigade, holds
court with comedians
and journalists to
The one JOHN CARPENTER‘s 1978 slasher-movie classic, 1987’S AHNOLD-vs.-
talk about how Bruce
that started which introduced the world to a masked psycho alien movie; director
Springsteen changed
it all named Michael Myers. “What made it so scary? It Shane Black played a
their lives — from
put horror in ordinary places: your neighborhood, soldier. “I was there at
philosophy to fitness
your backyard, your living room,” says McBride. the beginning,” he says.
routines. Their discus-
sions of his music also
spawn larger debates,
Updating “IT’S THE same Michael Myers mask,” says HE STILL rocks dreadlocks and facial mandi- such as whether it’s
the look McBride — but the costume team purpose- bles, but Black notes there’s now an “upgrad- OK for an artist to
ly made it “look aged and cracked, like an ed” apex Predator. “He’s huge and sleek, re-record old vocals
old man’s face. The first time I saw the new like a cheetah. He’s not just a face on a for a box set.
mask . . . it creeped me the fuck out, honestly.” T-shirt anymore.”

Swiftcast: #1
What can GREEN AND his co-writer grew up loving the BLACK KNOWS fans think of Taylor Swift
fans expect? original and promise something that gets back “the Predator like an old friend. Podcast
to Carpenter’s “cleaner, purer, scarier” vision of The face, the chittering noise
Myers. They also dropped “some deep, deep nerd when they speak Predator — if For 250 episodes and
shit” for Easter-egg hunters and die-hard fans. it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” counting, a group of
devoted Swifties have
opined on topics like
The good “guys” JAMIE LEE CURTIS is back as Laurie BLACK CAST Olivia Munn (above) as a scientist her most underrat-
Strode. “She did most of her own who more than holds her own against the movie’s ed songs and her
stunts,” says Green. “She’d have the tough guys and interstellar monsters. “I’d give most bizarre media
stunt department stand back, and her lines and she’d come back with really clever, moments (was that re-
go, ‘Watch this.’ She’s aggressive.” funny stuf,” he says. “She’s a badass.” ally her being carried
inside a suitcase by

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: RYAN GREEN/UNIVERSAL PICTURES; KIMBERLEY FRENCH/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX, 2;
bodyguards?). Guests
have included ev-
How do you “WE TALK about that in the movie,” Green says, THE NEW movie makes reference to postwar
eryone from blogger
make these saying that a character asks why a guy with a knife PTSD, and Black wanted “marginalized people,
Perez Hilton to “I’m
movies for a is scary in a world filled with IRL horrors. “We’re not a supersoldier” as the heroes. “But in the end,
Too Sexy” group Right
2018 audience? betting on something very sharp held by someone it’s: ‘He’s on the hunt again.’ I wanted to make an
Said Fred, who share
really creepy will still scare the pants of you.” Eighties war movie with the Predator in it.”
a co-writing credit on

UNIVERSAL PICTURES; TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX; UNIVERSAL PICTURES; NATHAN BAJAR

Swift’s “Look What
You Made Me Do.”

R U Talkin’
INTRODUCING . . . R.E.M. RE: ME?
A few years back, co-
Tierra Whack’s 15 Minutes of Fame medians Adam Scott
and Scott Aukerman
THIS YEAR has seen marquee albums from hip-hop’s biggest stars, from Nicki to
broke down every
Drake, Kanye to the Carters. It takes a special project to cut through the noise,
U2 album on their
and 15 minutes of music from a little-known 23-year-old from Philly did the trick.
hilarious U Talkin’ U2
Tierra Whack’s Whack World is a cleverly executed calling card: 15 songs, one
to Me? podcast. Now,
minute each, all supercatchy. Some are whimsical, like the opener, “Black Nails”
the duo have turned
(“Best believe I’m gon’ sell/If I just be myself”). Others are heavier: “Pet Ceme-
their attention to
tery” is about a friend who was murdered. “It’s the saddest shit,” she says, “but
R.E.M.’s catalog. Be
I’m making it happy.” Whack World has millions of streams on Spotify, and she
sure to set plenty of
got to open for her childhood hero, Lauryn Hill, this summer. But she still hasn’t
time aside: Even the
left her day job as a condo doorwoman. “They can fire me whenever they want,
episode about 1998’s
but I’m not going to quit,” she says. “I’m not a quitter.” BRENDAN KLINKENBERG
forgotten Up lasts two
and a half hours.

24
 The Complete Issue.
Every Word. Every Photo.

Now Available on Mobile

The Mix

MY STYLE

1
Paul Banks’
Vintage Vibe
W
ITH THEIR post-punk look — black suits, boots and
skinny ties — Interpol were the most stylish band of the
early-2000s New York rock boom. That’s still true, but
these days frontman Paul Banks prefers more casual looks ofstage,
mixing vintage inds with high-end streetwear from brands like Y-3.
“It’s just about fun for me — it’s never about launting anything,”
says Banks. Interpol just released their sixth album, Marauder,
which adds some surprisingly musical textures to their lovably
gloomy sound, and are still on a high from a 15th-anniversary tour
celebrating their 2002 debut. “I don’t know if everyone is cut out
for this business super-long-term,” Banks says. “Fortunately, we
still get along and inspire each other.” DANIELA TIJERINA

13
Banks at his
New York
apartment in
August

3 12
7

BUSINESS CASUAL
1. Gloves from Winning
Boxing Gear. “They’re
like the Rolls-Royce of
boxing equipment,” says
Banks. 2. A bomber jack-
8 et by RZA’s clothing line,
Being onstage 36 Chambers. 3. Critter
2
and being in a rock and Guitari loop for
making samples on the 11
band: This is my real go. 4. Fred Segal leather
job. So I told myself boots. 5. Vintage type-
4
that I’m going to writer: “An ornament you
dress sharp for it. buy in hopes of inspiring
yourself.” 6. NOAH suede
boat shoes. 7. Y-3 limited-
edition sweatshirt.
8. Concealed-sword
cane he displays in his
10
house: “It’s just super-
badass.” 9. Duncan yo-
yo: “I almost quit smok-
ing. It was going to be
5 my hilarious new afect.”
6
10. Cuban link chain: “I
wanted what Michael
Jordan wore in the early
days.” 11. A classic Real 9
Tube Overdrive pedal.
12. Vintage Italian sun-
glasses: “I bought them
for Coachella.” 13. White
sunglasses.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Drew Gurian

 Timberland, and Flyroam are trademarks of TBL Licensing LLC. All other trademarks or logos are the property of their respective owners. ©TBL Licensing. All rights reserved.

THE NEW 1978 FLYROAM™ HIKER

Available at Timberland and Nordstrom
RAISED IN THE CITY.
BORN IN THE WOODS.
The Mix

SPOTLIGHT

John and
Yoko’s
Perfect
Year
Ono’s new book tells
their love story like
never before

I
N 1970, John Lennon
felt liberated. He was
free from the pressures
of the Beatles and deeply
in love with his creative
partner, Yoko Ono. They
decided to move to Titten-
hurst, a 70-acre Georgian
estate outside London,
where they could record,
make ilms and enjoy
nature. “John said, ‘Isn’t
this great?’ ” Ono says. “I
agreed, but one thing it
didn’t have was water. And
he said that was easy to ix,
so we made a small lake. I
still miss Tittenhurst.”
That period — which
included the recording
of Lennon’s 1971 classic,
Imagine — is detailed in
Imagine John Yoko, a book
that includes rare, unseen
photos from Ono’s archive,
letters, and memories from
the couple’s entourage,
fellow Beatles and others.
The book ofers revealing
insight into Lennon and
Ono’s relationship. Lennon
describes his immediate
connection with Ono, even
though they were both shy
on their irst real date. Ono
opens up about the blow-
back they encountered
for dating: “We were very
surprised that the so-called
hip society of the times, to

“We enjoyed playing

chess together,” says Ono,
pictured at Tittenhurst
with Lennon (and his
beloved Dr Pepper) in 1971.

28 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

 which we both belonged,
turned against us as soon
as we announced our
unity. . . . Their hipness
ended at the point where
John, their ringleader,
chose an Oriental woman
as his partner.”
One of their assistants
details Lennon’s whims —
he had Dr Pepper shipped
over from the U.S. and
the freezer loaded with
Häagen-Dazs. Another
stafer remembers being
concerned Lennon got too
close to fans, whom he let
camp out on his property.
Lennon’s restless mind
comes alive in his personal
letters. There’s an angry
one he wrote to Paul
McCartney, who had ap-
parently complained about
how Lennon downplayed
the Beatles in an interview:
“Dear Linda and Paul, I
was reading your letter
and wondering what mid-
dle-aged cranky Beatle fan
wrote it,” it begins. There’s
one to ROLLING STONE,
fact-checking a Random
Note about the timeline of
the Imagine sessions (“P.S.
Paul isn’t dead either”).
Ono and Lennon left
Tittenhurst in 1971 for New
York, eventually selling it
to Ringo Starr. But Ono is
still on the creative odyssey
they started together. At
85, she just released a new
LP, Warzone, which stays
true to her lifelong mis-
sion: “I would like to see
that this globe has no more
war or violence.” And she
doesn’t hesitate to imagine
how Lennon would protest
the current U.S. presiden-
cy. “He would be very
active, I’m sure,” she says.
“I wish he would be here
now.” PATRICK DOYLE

October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 29

ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
Wherever Magazines Are Sold
 The Mix

the same time, it doubles as

TkIdis enie
a tribute to their best friend
beatumet
and bandmate, Adam estio.Yauch,
Lesto
who died of cancer in 2012,
Nequati.
bringing the Beasties’ story PICKS
to a tragic, early end. If the
book resembles a Beastie
Boys LP in its wild potpourri
of styles, there’s a crucial
FALL
voice missing. “It’s difer-
ent,” Diamond says simply.
REISSUES
“Yauch’s not here.”
David Bowie,
In 2014, the grieving Loving the Alien
friends met at the Brooklyn (1983 to 1986)
apartment where Diamond
was living at the time. They WHAT’S INSIDE The
drew up a long list of memo- early and mid-1980s
are often seen as
ries, which they later wrote
the nadir of Bowie’s
about in short, individually career, but this 11-disc
signed chapters. “We’d dis- box set proves that
cuss things over the phone, beyond the dated
or send each other photo- production, he still
graphs,” Horovitz says. “I’m managed to create
some great music.
not talking about explicit
HIGHLIGHT
cellphone pictures. I mean, A previously unre-
we have sent each other a lot leased live album
of dick pics. But not then.” from Bowie’s 1983
While Diamond is a Serious Moonlight
popular DJ and Beats 1 radio Tour, packed with
classics like “Station
Yauch, Diamond host, Horovitz — who lives in
to Station” and “Mod-
and Horovitz Pasadena, California, with his ern Love.” (Oct. 12th)
(from left) on wife, punk pioneer Kathleen
the set of the Hanna — has kept a low
“Sabotage” Bob Dylan,
proile in recent years. By
BOOKS video, 1994 More Blood,
his own account, he spends
much of his time smoking More Tracks
weed, eating soup dumplings

Inside the Beasties’

WHAT’S INSIDE
and “[doing] nothing. Just Dylan’s 1975 master-
chilling. It’s fantastic.” He piece of heartbreak,
seems uninterested in keep- Blood on the Tracks,

Wild, Moving Memoir ing up with new music: “The

radio makes you hate every
song. You end up hearing the
same fucking Cardi B song 47
Six years after losing Adam Yauch to cancer, Mike D and times.” Then again, he’s not
Ad-Rock are ready to tell the story of their life in music sure he understands his own
band’s popularity: “ ‘Sabo-
By SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
tage’ — would you put that
song on? It’s a weird choice.”
gets the Bootleg
Series treatment on
this six-CD set. Every
take from his early
sessions in New York
with producer Phil
Ramone is here.
HIGHLIGHT
Never-before-heard
solo acoustic rendi-
tions of “Simple Twist

M
ICHAEL DIAMOND
was driving in
California the other
day, just a nudge past the
legal speed limit, when he
got pulled over. “So the oi-
cer goes, ‘My son is eight. He
was just listening to “Brass
Monkey” and “Intergalactic”
this morning!’ ” He pauses for
the punchline. “Still gave me
the ticket, though.”
Adam Horovitz, sitting
next to him, smirks: “Yeah,
he listened and he hated it!”
The two old friends
— known to three genera-
tions of fans as Mike D and
SPIKE JONZE
what used to be one of the
grimiest blocks in Manhat-
tan. Horovitz, 51, slouches
backward, nearly horizon-
tal, while Diamond, 53, is
upright and alert. Otherwise,
they’re similar enough to be
brothers: same lanky build,
same four o’clock scruf,
same ability to banter about
virtually any subject in the
known universe.
They’re here to talk about
Beastie Boys Book, the mem-
oir they spent the past four
years writing together. Inside
its pages you’ll ind dozens
of irst-person episodes from
Yauch’s loss is deeply felt
in the book. “The band didn’t
Beastie Boys
Book break up,” Horovitz writes
By Michael toward the end. “[2011’s Hot
Diamond
and Adam Sauce Committee Part Two]
Horovitz was our last album because
590 pp.,
Spiegel
Adam got cancer and died.
& Grau If that hadn’t happened, we
October 30th would probably be making a
new record as you read this.”
At the hotel, it’s clear that
friends like Amy Poehler and they are relishing the chance
author Luc Sante. The book to spend time together.
often evokes the Beasties at “Looking back, it’s like, ‘Oh,
their surreal, hilarious peak shit, that was crazy — how
— see the story of the time did we live through that?’ ”
they ran into Bob Dylan at Horovitz says. “And look at
Dolly Parton’s birthday party us now. We’re grown-ups. We
of Fate” and “You’re a
Big Girl Now” rival the
versions that made
the album. (Nov. 2nd)
The
Cranberries,
Everybody Else
Is Doing It, So
Why Can't We?
WHAT’S INSIDE After
the death of singer
Dolores O’Riordan in
January, her band-
mates continued work
on this look back at
their multiplatinum
1993 debut.
HIGHLIGHT A raw,

Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys their lives, mixed in with in 1988. (Horovitz claims that have to think about mortgag- early version of
— are sharing a couch in a photos, cartoons, recipes Dylan tried to enlist them in es. I gotta get dog food.” He “Linger” from 1992.
luxury hotel suite located on and guest testimonials from a “pro-smoking concert.”) At shrugs. “I’m still alive.” (Oct. 19th)

Rolling Stone | 33
The Mix
PROFILE
Life After Heartbreak
A year after losing his
best friend, Tom Petty,
Mike Campbell is
moving on with a new
band: Fleetwood Mac
By ANDY GREENE
M
IKE CAMPBELL doesn’t cry
when he talks about the
early-morning phone call
that told him Tom Petty,
his bandleader and best friend of near-
ly 50 years, had just been rushed to the
hospital. The Heartbreakers guitarist
doesn’t cry when he remembers play-
ing to a sold-out Hollywood Bowl with
Petty one week before that horrible
October morning either, or even when
he remembers seeing Petty’s body in
a hospital bed just hours before his
34 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
heart stopped beating. “They had his
hair straight,” Campbell says. “He was
medicated and very still, but he looked
like an angel.”
It’s not until he thinks back to a
brief encounter on a plane after that
Hollywood Bowl show — the final
time he spoke with Petty — that the
eyes behind Campbell’s purple Len-
non sunglasses well up with tears.
“We said that we loved each other,” he
says, wiping the moisture of his face.
“Sorry I’m crying. It’s going to take me
a while, but I’m at peace with the way
we left things.”
Ten months after Petty’s death,
Campbell is sitting in the large studio
he keeps on the grounds of the Wood-
land Hills, California, estate where he
and his wife of 44 years have lived
since 1981. “This is my sanctuary,” he
says. The control room is cluttered
Campbell
at home in
Woodland
Hills,
California
with reminders of his four-decade
tenure in the Heartbreakers — vin-
tage gear, master tapes, a poster for
the band’s 1997 residency at the Fill-
more West and a huge photograph of
the time he met one of his all-time he-
roes, Chuck Berry. Right now, these
mementos mainly serve to underscore
the fact that those days are over. “It’s
like an alternate universe to me,” he
says, speaking in a northern-Florida
drawl that’s eerily similar to Petty’s
own. “There’s the then and the now.
It’s diferent lives.”
He spent last winter at loose ends,
puttering around here or at the Camp-
bells’ second home, in Kauai, Hawaii.
“It’s a perfect spot,” he says. “Maybe
when I get older, I’ll end up there.” But
retirement will have to wait: As of this
spring, he’s the new guitarist for Fleet-
wood Mac, replacing Lindsey Bucking-
With Petty in
1977. “It was
more than
friendship,”
Campbell
says.
Campbell with his new bandmates
ham for a world tour that’s slated to
begin in October and run for at least a
year. “When [we] start playing a song,”
he says, “I think to myself, ‘Wow, how
did I get here?’ ”
A
PART FROM the odd side gig,
Fleetwood Mac is the first
band Campbell has been part
of since the day he met Petty back in
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PAMELA LITTKY; IAN DICKSON/
1970. Nearly every night of the Heart-
REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; RANDEE ST NICHOLAS
breakers’ 40th-anniversary tour last
year, the singer told the story of how it
happened. It started when Petty, then
20 years old, saw a sign at a Gaines-
ville, Florida, music shop, placed
there by a guitarist looking for a band.
He drove out to the stranger’s house
and found Campbell holding a cheap
Japanese guitar that looked like it had
been left out in the rain for a couple of
weeks. “I thought, ‘We better get out
 of here,’ ” Petty would tell the crowds.
“But pretty quick he kicked of ‘John-
ny B. Goode,’ and . . . when he got to the
end of the song, I said, ‘Man, I don’t
know who you are, but you’re going to
be in my band forever.’ ”
Campbell grew up in Jacksonville, a
few hours north of that irst encounter.
He worshipped Roger McGuinn and
George Harrison, and as soon as he left
high school in 1968, he formed a group
called Dead or Alive. That band went
nowhere. But with Petty, he became
the irst Heartbreaker among equals
— the only one to share songwriting
and production duties with Petty, the
only one allowed a signiicant role on
Petty’s classic 1989 solo LP, Full Moon
Fever, a constant presence at his side
over hundreds of shows. “It was more
than friendship,” says Campbell. “It
was almost like destiny or a divine
power that brought us together. If he
hadn’t called that day, our whole lives
would have been diferent.”
That doesn’t mean Petty and Camp-
bell shared everything. The guitarist
was aware that his old friend was ex-
periencing pain in his hip on last year’s
tour, a 56-show slog that kept them
on the road from April to September,
but he didn’t know how bad it got —
or what Petty was doing to numb the
agony. “I’d check on him and say, ‘Are
you OK?’ ” Campbell says. “He never
said, ‘I’m dying! I can’t do this!’ The
worst he would say was, ‘I can feel it,
but I can do the show.’ His face was al-
ways full of joy. After a while, I quit
worrying about him.”
Days after the tour ended, Petty
sufered massive cardiac arrest at his
Los Angeles home. The coroner’s
report blamed an accidental drug
overdose involving the deadly opioid
fentanyl, plus painkillers and anxiety
meds including OxyContin, Restoril,
Xanax and Celexa. On the day he died,
according to his family, his hip fracture
became a full-on break, likely leading
him to take the fatal drug cocktail as
a form of self-medication. “He fought
his way through that [inal] tour,” Pet-
ty’s longtime friend Stevie Nicks said
months after he died. “He should have
canceled and . . . gone home and gone
to the hospital.”
This is a delicate issue for Campbell,
and he bristles when it’s brought up.
Fairly or unfairly, Nicks’ statement im-
plies a share of responsibility for the
guitarist and everyone else who kept
INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK
the 2017 tour going despite the front-
man’s medical challenges and history
of addiction. “Stevie is coming from a
loving place,” says Campbell, who has
been close with Nicks since the early
1980s. “But she wasn’t there. Once
Tom made up his mind, nobody was
going to talk him out of anything. If
you said, ‘Oh, you should go to the hos-
pital,’ he’d be like, ‘Fuck you, I’m doing
the tour.’ Nobody forced him to do it.”
The more we discuss this subject,
the more forlorn Campbell seems.
“What’s the point of hindsight?” he
asks. “All I know is he did what he
wanted to do, and we backed him up.
We were there for him. And he was
having the time of his life. I’m not jiv-
ing you. He was loving that tour.”
Campbell alludes to unspecified
doubts about the official account of
Petty’s death, but admits he hasn’t
gone over the coroner’s report in full.
Ultimately, he seems to see it as beside
the point. "So what if the guy had a
mishap?” he adds. “Tom was a human
being. Whatever happened happened.
What’s important is the music. That’s
what they are going to remember.”
I
MAGINING A future for the Heart-
breakers without Petty was impos-
sible. “It would be too sad,” Camp-
bell says. “Where’s the other brother?
I’m not ready to face that.”
In time, he started to sketch out
ideas for the irst-ever national tour
by his side band, the Dirty Knobs. It’s
something he’d wanted to do for years,
but Petty — concerned that this ragtag
collection of Los Angeles session cats
would somehow take away from the
Heartbreakers — would never allow it.
“Tom and I had our moments [of dis-
agreement],” says Campbell. “We kept
it private. But that type of friction was
good for the music. It drove us to put a
little more juice into our songs.”
He was sitting by the pool at his
house, around his 68th birthday, when
he got a phone call from Mick Fleet-
wood. Nobody knew it at the time, but
Fleetwood Mac had just parted ways
with Buckingham and were in the mar-
ket for a new guitarist. “I’d met Mick
once or twice, but never really got to
know him,” says Campbell. “But he
goes to me, ‘I’ve been listening to your
music a lot. Would you be interested in
joining the band?’ ”
Fleetwood’s ofer to make Campbell
a full member of the storied South-
ern California band — not a hired hand
— was both exciting and daunting. “I
thought I’d never play big gigs again,”
Campbell says. “I thought I’d never be
on the G4 [private jet] again, and I’d
never again play the Forum. Then all
of a sudden, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?
How did this happen?’ ”
The afternoon after the emotional
interview at his house, Campbell is at
an enormous soundstage at Sony Pic-
tures Studios in Culver City, California.
This is where the tornado sequence for
The Wizard of Oz was ilmed in 1939;
it’s also where the guitarist will be re-
porting for work over the next eight
weeks of intense rehearsals with Fleet-
wood Mac. Campbell, dressed casually
with an oversize scarf-tie that wouldn’t
be out of place on a pirate ship, sits on
a couch in the back while technicians
scurry about and set up the full-size
arena stage with instruments.
The rigorous schedule is a change
Gems from the Heartbreakers, who used to
jam around for a week or two at most
From the before a tour. Then again, there’s a lot
Vault of ground to cover: Campbell is learn-
ing 60 new songs more or less from
scratch, as is Crowded House singer
Months after Tom Neil Finn, who’s taking over most of
Petty passed away, his
Buckingham’s vocal parts. “Mick has
wife, Dana, daughter
Adria, producer Ryan this aptitude — he snifs out these great
Ulyate and bandmates people to come join us,” Christine
Mike Campbell and McVie tells me. “I feel like I’ve known
Benmont Tench them for years, and I actually don’t
began sorting know them very well.”
through more than 40
In fact, unlike Finn, who barely
years’ worth of studio
and live recordings knew most of the members of Fleet-
to assemble the new wood Mac prior to his audition, Camp-
four-disc box set An bell has a long history with the Mac.
American Treasure, He and Buckingham became friendly
focusing on rarities, acquaintances in the 1980s, and Buck-
demos and lost tracks.
ingham sang background vocals on the
“I had my moments of
emotion working on 1996 Heartbreakers classic “Walls (Cir-
this,” Campbell says. cus).” “I had no part in him leaving,”
“But I just pretended Campbell says. “That’s between them.”
Tom was sitting next He mentions that they’ve been re-
to me and asked my- hearsing a few songs that predate
self, ‘What would he
Buckingham and Nicks’ 1974 arriv-
like?’ ” These are three
highlights of the set. al in the band, including a version of
1969’s “Oh Well” with Campbell on
lead vocals (Finn found it too bluesy).
“Gainesville” (1998) They’re also working up a rendition
This song about Petty’s of Crowded House’s 1986 hit “Don’t
Florida childhood was Dream It’s Over” — and Petty’s “Free
left of 1999’s Echo. “It’s Fallin’,” over Campbell’s objections.
Tom being nostalgic for “Stevie wanted to do that one,” he
a simpler time,” says
says. “I love that song, but I’ve just
Ulyate.
played it so much. I said to her, ‘Do
“Rebels” (1985) we have to?’ She said, ‘The crowd will
An alternate version of love it. It’ll be a moment.’ So I’m get-
this Southern Accents ting into it again.”
cut, minus the dated It’s only day four of the rehears-
1980s drum machine.
als, and Campbell is still adjusting to
“Louisiana Rain” the idea of living out of a suitcase for
(1979) the foreseeable future. In some ways,
“I think this is the it’s a relief from the grieving process.
take before the one But even as he prepares to walk onto
we used on Damn the rehearsal stage with his new band,
the Torpedoes,” says
Tom Petty is deep in his thoughts. “It
Campbell. “It’s a little
more spontaneous.” still seems unreal to me,” Campbell
says. “I’m past the point where I’m liv-
ing with grief every minute, but some-
times I’ll be driving and one of our
songs come on and it’ll hit me.”
He mentions attending a recent ELO
concert at the Forum, where songs
from Full Moon Fever came over the
preshow PA. “Hearing them in a big
room like that just shut me down,”
Campbell says, seemingly on the verge
of tears again. “We wrote those songs
together. We lived a dream together.
You can’t just snap your ingers and
get over something like that.”
October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 35
The Mix
L
AST FALL, Gorillaz
singer Damon Albarn
was feeling bored
on tour — so he did what
he knows best and started
sketching ideas for a new
album on his iPad. The result
is The Now Now, Gorillaz’s
excellent new full-length LP.
With its breezy melodies
and comparatively lean
cast of characters — Snoop
Dogg, 75-year-old smooth-
jazz guitarist George Benson
and Chicago house veteran
Jamie Principle are the only
credited guests — The Now
Now is a refreshing change of
pace from Humanz, the over-
stufed set Gorillaz released
just last year. “It’s a record
within a record, a dream
within a dream — sort of like
Inception,” says the English
singer-songwriter, 50, who’s
bringing his cartoon band
to the U.S. in October for a
string of arena dates, leading
up to his second annual
Demon Dayz L.A. festival on
October 20th.
You and cartoonist Jamie
Hewlett came up with the
idea for Gorillaz 20 years
ago. Does it surprise you
that something that started
as more or less a joke has
become such an enduring
phenomenon?
It continually surprises.
I have massive waves of
despondency, where I feel
that I can’t do any more
with it. I get very frustrated.
But it regenerates itself with
every generation. We just
played this festival called
Boomtown in England. It was
a very young crowd, 18 to 23
— they’re the only ones who
are resilient enough to throw
themselves enthusiastically
into the abyss. I can’t igure
out why it keeps inding an
audience, but it’s self-evident
that it does, and that’s an
exciting proposition.
With so few guests, The
Now Now feels very difer-
ent from most Gorillaz rec-
ords. Why not just call it a
Damon Albarn album?
Well, because it’s not. It’s
[cartoon frontman] 2-D
singing, and 2-D actually
has a slightly diferent voice
from Damon Albarn. [Sighs]
I refuse to refer to myself in
the third person.
36 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
Damon Albarn
The Gorillaz and Blur singer on cartoon fame, partying with
his former rival Noel Gallagher, and getting stoned
By SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
George Benson is an un-
expected guest on a pop
album in 2018. Are you a
big fan of his?
The sound that he created for
songs like [1980’s] “Give Me
the Night” is right up there
with all the slickest classic
Michael Jackson grooves.
It’s closely associated, for
me, with the time when I
started trying to ask girls to
dance at youth clubs. All that
horrendously awkward stuf.
I was about 14, and he was
a superstar. But [the music]
Q&A
is even more magniicent
because it was the backdrop
to that, you know?
Are there any musical
heroes you regret never
connecting with?
I would have loved to work
with John Lennon, but I was
in school when he was shot.
He was a pivotal inluence on
me when I was young — his
ideas, his attitude, every-
thing. “Imagine” was one of
the most inluential songs
on me as a songwriter. It’s
not the coolest song to cite,
probably, but it’s the most
honest for me.
On Humanz, you made a
point of editing out all ref-
erences to Donald Trump.
What about this one — do
you see a political dimen-
sion to this album?
I mean, it opens with the
words “Calling the world
from isolation.” That’s partly
about the sense you get
when you’re constantly on
the road, but it’s also one of
the most challenging issues
of our time. Climate change,
for example — isolationism
doesn’t help that cause.
You recently turned 50.
Congratulations! How did
you celebrate?
My birthday started as I got
of at the airport in Bogotá
in Colombia. It was mainly
a nocturnal experience at a
high altitude. And then I had
a much more modest family
afair when I got home.
How did it compare
with the cocaine-themed
50th birthday party you at-
tended for your friend Noel
Gallagher last year?
Oh, mine was pathetic
compared with his! His was
spectacular. No comparison.
You and Noel were
archrivals in the U.K. music
scene in the Nineties, when
you were leading Blur and
he Oasis. How does that
friendship work today?
He’s like a comrade. It’s
about that speciic moment
in time when you both
get the carpet pulled from
underneath you, and every-
thing you’ve been abstractly
dreaming about suddenly
becomes a reality. I was 22,
and I couldn’t walk down
the street without everybody
recognizing me. That’s an
exhilarating but terrifying
moment, and we went
through it together.
You reunited with Blur for
2015’s The Magic Whip. Was
that a one-of, or can you
imagine making another
album with that band?
I don’t know! Maybe. I
couldn’t give a date, but I’m
never going to close the door
on that side of my life.
You’ve been vocal about
your past drug use and its
creative benefits. Do you
still smoke pot?
Yes, yes. If I’m in the studio,
that’s when I really enjoy
smoking weed. Not so much
for performance — for some-
thing like Gorillaz, it’s best to
be a little more on the ball.
Microdosing — where
AARON RICHTER/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
people take small amounts
of psychedelic drugs
during their workday — is
growing in popularity. Does
that idea appeal to you?
What, like acid and mush-
rooms? To work? [Laughs]
No! Were I to do that, there’s
no way on Earth I’d be able
to function in an oice.
Jim Beam Black® Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 43% Alc./Vol. ©2018 James B. Beam Distilling Co., Clermont, KY. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Awarded International Wine & Spirit Competition’s 2016 Bourbon Trophy.
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 The Dead’s
High Time
Dead & Company played their last show of
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they didn't disappoint, delivering four
intense sets that included a Branford
Marsalis collaboration and an 11-minute
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Mayer, who got airborne at one point.
“You can’t get a hold of me,” he says.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: © JAY BLAKESBERG; SPLASH NEWS; ROBERT O'NEIL/SPLASH NEWS;

SCOOTER BOI
Joe Jonas
showed of his
cool wheels on
a New York date
with fiancee
Sophie Turner
for his 29th WILD PITCH
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birthday. His Billy Corgan

band DNCE took a break
NICE FOR WHAT
recently from Smashing
Drake is the biggest
released Pumpkins’
rapper in the world, but
a new EP. successful
he’s still got time for
fans like Sofia Sanchez. reunion tour to
He surprised her for stop by Wrigley
her 11th birthday with Field and sing
a visit to the Chicago “Take Me Out to
hospital where she had the Ball Game.”
heart surgery.

October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 39

 MELLO MY MIND
DJ Marshmello is
known for never
taking of his famous
mask – but did while
FOO CUTS ARE filming a music video
THE DEEPEST in Malibu. He also
Foo Fighters visited the top of New
staged a surprise York’s Empire State
rarities-packed Building. “Good thing
show in an L.A. I'm not afraid of
parking lot under heights!” he says.
the pseudonym
the Holy Shits.
“We’re gonna
give the hardcore
fans what they ON THE
always wanted!” BEACH
RANDOM QUOTE
Dave Grohl said. Halsey, who
currently

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People from singer has
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of years ago she called
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perhaps are life highlight
for me.”
old. If you’re
alive, you’re
young.”
—Kanye West, on Twitter

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ANDY KEILEN; ABILITYFILMS.COM; NICK FARRAR; SPLASH NEWS; SETH
LOOSE CHAINZ

BROWARNIK/STARTRAKS.COM; MEGA; MICHAEL TULLBERG/GETTY IMAGES; LISA KRISTOFFERSON

After tying the knot
with longtime
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CONFIDENTIAL
Ward, 2 Chainz
Kris Kristoferson
partied with his
visited his hero Jerry
frequent
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collaborator Lil
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Wayne at Miami’s
in a class by himself,”
LIV nightclub.
Kristoferson says.

BACK IN
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Exes Diplo
and M.I.A.
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dated for
five years
— reunited WATCH THE CONE Kanye West
at an L.A. wore a sharp mint-green Louis
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M.I.A.’s Virgil Abloh, to 2 Chainz’s star-
new doc. studded wedding at the Versace
mansion in Miami. Afterward, he and
Kim enjoyed some Häagen-Dazs.

40 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

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The

Katie Hill, Andrew Janz, Katie Porter

ILLUSTRATION BY Sean McCabe

By TIM DICKINSON
THE CANDIDATES Top, clockwise from
left: Ammar Campa-Najjar, Gil Cisneros,
the tide of Trumpism
Battle for

of the House — and turn

California
How the Golden State can
lead a Democratic takeover
A
NDREW JANZ DELIVERS a
stump speech like a clos-
ing argument. Blame his
day job. The trim, poker-
faced 34-year-old is deputy
district attorney in Fresno,
California. And at a meet-
and-greet, in the living room of a retired school-
teacher on the north end of this sprawling city,
he sounds less like he’s trying to win votes than
to convict his political opponent.
Republican Devin Nunes, Janz insists, should
be using his clout as chair of the House Intelli-
gence Committee to deliver for his district. “But
what does he spend that political capital on?”
Janz asks. “He spends it on protecting Donald
Trump.” Nunes served on the president’s tran-
sition team and acts like he never left it — mak-
ing a mockery of his oversight role by work-
ing to torpedo the Russia investigation. He was
caught on tape warning donors that his ability
to run interference for the White House hinges
on November’s election: “If we do not keep the
majority,” Nunes said, “all of this goes away.”
That’s Janz’s argument too. “Devin Nunes
doesn’t represent American values,” he says.
uents battled global-warming-fueled wildires
this summer. (Darrell Issa — who spearheaded
the Benghazi investigation and called Obama
“one of the most corrupt presidents in mod-
ern times” — opted to retire rather than face
re-election.)
If House Republicans are in danger national-
ly, California presents an acute threat. The tide
of Trumpism never breached California, which
rejected his presidency by more than 4 million
votes. And Trump has governed with malice to-
ward the state that denied him a popular-vote
victory. He has attacked California’s sanctuary
cities, launched a trade war that’s punishing
Central Valley farmers and deployed ICE to raid
their ields. Trump’s tax bill raised taxes on mil-
lions of California homeowners — and blocked
deductions for property lost to wildire. Evis-
cerating environmental protections, the White
House is attempting to revoke California’s na-
tion-leading fuel-economy standards.
“Trump and the administration are en-
gaged in a policy war against the state of Cal-
ifornia,” says Mike Levin, an environmental
lawyer campaigning to replace Issa. Far from
bucking Trump, California’s GOP representa-
California has been a top priority for the
DCCC this election cycle. Democrats narrow-
ly lost seven House seats in districts where Hil-
lary Clinton bested Trump. “We moved the en-
tire western region out here because there’s
so many seats that Hillary won,” says Rep. Ted
Lieu, the Santa Monica congressman and DCCC
vice chair who commands this efort.
READERS’ DCCC West is perched in a hipster-chic We-
Work oice tower, rising above palm trees, in
POLL urban Orange County. A portrait of a raccoon
in a sweater vest greets visitors from a gilded
frame near the elevator. Kombucha is free on
Are you tap at the bar. From these plush digs, the party
worried directs polling, logistics and voter mobilization
about a for favored candidates, making strategic choic-
foreign es for California from California.
govern- Local command paid of in the June prima-
ment med- ries, when the greatest risk was too many can-
dling in the didates clamoring to confront Trump. In Cal-
midterm ifornia, the two leading vote-getters advance,
elections? regardless of party, meaning a divided ield of
Democrats can propel two Republicans to the
general election. “It’s a stupid system,” says
85% Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The DCCC spent nearly $7 million on a com-

BETANCUR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; MAX BECHERER/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; DONALD

“It’s time for him to go.” tives have voted in lockstep — even backing an Yes plex strategy that kept every key seat in play —

TRUMP/TWITTER; IU MAURER SCHOOL OF LAW; MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Janz, the son of Thai and Canadian immi-
grants, has electriied donors in his district and
nationwide — transforming a long-shot race into
a serious contest. Battling for a district in the
heart of California, he also embodies the po-
tential of 2018: Golden State voters can power
a wave election — and even trigger a blue tsuna-
mi that cleanses Congress of many of its most
noxious GOP incumbents.
California is home to 10 or more swing seats
— nearly half of the 23 that Democrats need
to recapture the House in November. The
state’s endangered GOP delegation includes
not only Nunes but Dana Rohrabacher — whom
colleagues joke is on Putin’s payroll; Duncan
Hunter, indicted for enriching himself with
$250,000 in campaign funds; and Tom McClin-
tock, a climate-change denier whose constit-
Obamacare repeal that would have ended Med-
icaid expansion, threatening coverage for one
of every three state residents. Democratic can-
didates carry a potent promise: They can top-
ple Trump toadies and put Congress back to
work for California.
Levin likes to challenge Republicans with a
simple question: “Are you with Trump? Or are
you with California? Because there’s very little
middle ground.”
“ROLLING STONE” EMBARKED on an 800-mile
road trip across California this summer to
meet top Democratic challengers and visit the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Commit-
tee’s irst-ever West Coast headquarters — part
of a systematic change to decentralize deci-
sion-making away from Washington, D.C.
FROM LEFT: STATE OF HAWAII; VICTOR J. BLUE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES; KENA
and the party accomplished the most import-
15%
No
ant goal for any wave election: getting quality
surfers in the water. As one Democratic con-
sultant who has been on the losing side of two
GOP waves describes the dynamics, “All a can-
didate has to do in a wave is get their name ID
Go to Rolling
Stone.com up — and not fuck up too badly.”
for next With a slate of 10 well-funded candidates —
issue’s poll. as diverse and eclectic as the state they hope
to represent — California is poised to be a tip-
ping point in November. To seize Congress, says
Dave Wasserman, who handicaps House races
for the Cook Political Report, “Democrats prob-
ably need ive seats out of California.” With its
unique mix of rich donors, passionate activ-
ists and voter-friendly election laws, the state
could help Democrats run up the score. But a
tsunami won’t come easy: GOP representatives

TIMELINE THE LONG VIEW: TRUMP’S RACIST COMMENTS

MARCH 2011 JUNE 2015 D E C. FEB. 2016 M AY M AY FEB. 2017 JUNE

BIRTHER BUILD A WALL KLAN’S CHOICE UNDUE BIAS CASUAL RACISM HATE SPEECH
CONSPIRACY Announcing his Trump wafles when Trump complains Trump assumes Trump reportedly
“I want to see his candidacy for pres- asked to disavow Indiana-born Judge black journalist fumes that 15,000
birth certificate,” ident, Trump prom- the endorsement Gonzalo Curiel is April Ryan can con- Haitians who’d
Trump says in a TV ises to build a wall THE BAN of former KKK CINCO DE MAYO “Mexican” and nect him with the received visas “all
appearance, launch- to keep out illegal Trump calls for a grand wizard David Trump tweets, “I cannot be an Congressional Black have AIDS” and
ing his years-long Mexican immigrants “total and complete Duke. “David Duke love hispanics!” impartial judge in Caucus: “Do you Nigerians “would
efort to delegitimize and says, “They’re shutdown of Mus- endorsed me? with a picture of the class-action want to set up the never go back to
Obama, America’s rapists.” lims entering OK. All right. I himself eating a suit against Trump meeting? Are they their huts” once
first black president. the United States.” disavow. OK?” taco bowl. University. friends of yours?” they saw the U.S.

44 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

 control just 14 of California’s 53 seats, but these ers ripped of in the housing cri-
die-hard districts have long track records of sis. Walters is an always-Trump-
sending Republicans to Washington. er who’s voted repeatedly to
limit abortion rights, called gay

T
RUMP’S RISE HAS wounded the Re-
publican Party in Orange County. The
wealthy coastal sprawl south of Los
Angeles is a cradle of conservatism —
the birthplace of Richard Nixon and the spring-
board for Ronald Reagan’s political career.
But Trump’s alienation of educated suburban
women, combined with surging minority pop-
ulations, propelled Clinton to carry the OC — a
irst for a Democrat in 80 years. “The Orange
Curtain has fallen,” says Gil Cisneros, the Dem-
ocratic nominee for District 39, north of Disney-
land, one of four lippable seats in the county.
Cisneros has an implausible bio: The steady,
jug-eared Navy vet, who credits the military’s
educational incentives for his advanced de-
grees, won a $266 million lottery jackpot, using
the windfall to create two education nonproits.
He’s locked in a toss-up race against a retiring
GOP congressman’s Korean-American deputy,
NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL REAVES/GETTY IMAGES; JACQUELYN MARTIN/AP IMAGES/
SHUTTERSTOCK; WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK;
marriage “a travesty of family
values,” and touted her A rat-
ing from the NRA. “White sub-
urban women are powering the
Democratic wave,” says Wasser-
man, but he cautions that Por-
ter’s progressive pedigree is a li-
ability in Orange County. Porter
says Walters is the real misit in
a district that backed Clinton by
ive points: “Day after day, Mimi
is tying herself to Trump’s agen-
da. That’s her choice.”
Southern California’s races
are a proving ground for a new
turnout model pioneered by
THE GROUND ifornia’s most endangered incumbent. Warned Swing Left, a group that organizes grassroots
GAME
by the FBI in 2012 that he was being cultivat- political power in safe congressional districts
Grassroots
activists ed by the Kremlin, Rohrabacher was recent- and projects it into neighboring swing races.
organized by ly unmasked for having visited alleged Russian The model is tailor-made for bright-blue Los

Young Kim, who has positioned herself far to groups like agent Maria Butina in Moscow; he also feted her Angeles, where millions of Democrats live a
TOP: DAVID MAUNG/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: ZACH D ROBERTS/

the right, opposing gay marriage. “She’s going Swing Left handler, NRA enthusiast Alexander Torshin, in short drive from California’s hottest races.
have given a
to be nothing more than a rubber stamp for the Washington, calling him “conservatives’ favor- Swing Left activists are giving a powerful boost
SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; MEDIAPUNCH/SHUTTERSTOCK

Republican agenda,” says Cisneros.
Issa’s district — stretching from South Or-
ange County to the dorms of U.C. San Diego —
rates as the most likely Democratic pickup in
California. A polished candidate who once ran
the Democratic Party of Orange County, the
39-year-old Levin is a good it for the evolving
demographics of his party: half Jewish and half
Mexican-American. “My grandparents were the
Dreamers of their day,” he says. He also bene-
its from facing a tarnished opponent: Diane
Harkey was an oicer in her husband’s inan-
cial irm — “a Ponzi scheme,” according to a
court judgment, that “committed financial
elder abuse,” earning its victims a $12.5 mil-
lion jury award.
Just up the coast, where Ferraris cruise the
highway to Laguna Beach, Rohrabacher is Cal-
big boost to
candidates ite Russian.”
near L.A., Rohrabacher’s opponent is Harley Rouda,
including a 56-year-old real estate and tech entrepre-
30-year-old
neur who greets me wearing a monogrammed
Katie Hill, who
has energized dress shirt. Rohrabacher’s Russian connec-
millennials in tions, Rouda says, have become a key issue in
California’s the race. “If you use the spy-trade vernacular,
25th District.
you’re either a spy, you’re an asset, or you’re a
useful idiot,” he says. “Where Rohrabacher falls
on that spectrum, time will tell, and the Mueller
investigation will help us understand.”
The inal Orange County race is a bellwether
in the “year of the woman” — pitting law pro-
fessor Katie Porter against incumbent Mimi
Walters. An academic protégée of Elizabeth
Warren, Porter worked under Kamala Harris
when she was California’s attorney general to
pay out a $25 billion settlement to homeown-
to Katie Hill, running for oice in another one-
time bastion of Republicanism, California’s 25th
District, home to the Reagan Library.
Hill is hoarse from nonstop campaigning
when I meet her at 8 p.m., exiting a Round
Table Pizza where she’d just met with labor
leaders to seek an endorsement. The daugh-
ter of a cop, Hill grew up in the district, which
is north of the L.A. basin and home to many of
the region’s law-enforcement oicers. She is
hard to pigeonhole. Hill ran the state’s largest
homeless-services agency. She’s married. She
identiies as bisexual. She owns a gun. She rais-
es goats. Vice News covered her primary race as
the “most millennial campaign ever.”
Democrats have struggled to connect with
young voters, but Hill’s campaign says it rallied
student activists and knocked on 94,000 doors

AU G. S E P T. N OV. JAN. 2018 M AY AU G. AU G.

TAKING A KNEE CHEAP SHOT EUROCENTRIC DEHUMANIZING FAKE NEWS THE N-WORD
Trump encourages At a ceremony hon- Trump reportedly “These aren’t people, Trump tweets he’ll Ex-West Wing stafer
NFL owners to fire oring Native Amer- complains the U.S. they’re animals,” investigate white Omarosa Manigault
LOWEST OF THE LOW any “son of a bitch" ican World War II gets too many Trump says while farmers being tar- Newman says
Trump says there were ”very fine people on who takes a knee veterans, Trump immigrants from railing against geted in South Af- rumors of a video
both sides” after the Unite the Right rally in during the national calls Sen. Elizabeth “shithole coun- sanctuary-city laws rica for “large scale of Trump using the
Charlottesville, even though one of those anthem to protest Warren “Pocahon- tries” like Haiti. He that protect illegal killing,” bolstering a n-word are true. He
sides was chanting “Jews will not replace police brutality tas,” referring to prefers Norway. immigrants. white-supremacist calls her a “dog”
us” and had a white-supremacist terrorist against black her claim of being conspiracy theory and a “crazed,
who killed a counterprotester. people. part-Cherokee. of white genocide. crying lowlife.”

October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 45

to win the primary. Her advice to older Dems
about connecting to millennials is simple: “Be
honest. That means showing your laws. That’s
one of the reasons I started talking early about
things that I knew could be controversial. Just
own them. What are people going to say?”
Hill’s opponent is Steve Knight, who has
shown his laws, too — voting with Trump 99
percent of the time in a district that favored
Clinton by seven points. The son of the politi-
cian who put California’s irst gay-marriage ban
on the ballot, Knight has displayed a thin skin
and toxic masculinity. In an infamous 2015 en-
counter, Knight got locked in a power hand-
shake by a critic who thought he wasn’t tough
enough on immigration. When the constituent
turned to leave, Knight leaned into him and
snarled, “If you touch me again, I’ll drop your
ass!” As of press time, the district is a toss-up.
O
NE CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN who
looked like he would stand up to
Trump is Jef Denham, whose dis-
trict is anchored by Modesto, a city
of 212,000 surrounded by almond groves in the
north end of the Central Valley.
A world apart from the techie glitz of Silicon
Valley, the region is California’s agricultural en-
gine and a stronghold for Republicans, includ-
ing House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. But
immigrants are the lifeblood of the labor force
here, and Denham led a gang of GOP moderates
to sign a “discharge petition” that could have
forced a vote on immigration reform. But with
the petition just a handful of signatures short,
Denham abandoned it, leaving Trump’s abusive
immigration policies unchecked.
Josh Harder has forced Denham into the ight
of his political life. A 30-year-old raised in dusty
Turlock, Harder earned an Ivy League educa-
tion, becoming a venture capitalist and back-
ing the meal-delivery service Blue Apron. Hard-
er says he’s running to block the GOP assault
on Obamacare, which protects people with
pre-existing conditions, like his brother, who
was born 10 weeks premature. “He’s an amaz-
ingly hard worker,” says Lieu. “Josh can present
a very strong contrast in that district.”
The best pickup opportunity in the Central
Valley ought to be California’s 21st, stretching
from Fresno to Bakersield. Clinton trounced
Trump here by more than 15 points. “By the
numbers, you’d say, ‘How in the world does a
Republican win the seat?’ ” says Wasserman.
The answer is that incumbent David Valadao, a
dairy farmer, has built a strong personal brand
— and faced hapless Democratic opponents.
The district is 71 percent Hispanic, but a drag
on Democrats nationwide is that Latino voters
often skip midterm elections. Despite Trump’s
assaults on the community, Wasserman says,
“I’m not seeing many signs that Latino engage-
ment is much higher than it was in 2014.”
Challenging Valadao is TJ Cox, an As ian-
American engineer and philanthropist who lev-
eraged public seed money to build a new health
clinic in the district. Cox paints Valadao as a
phony who poses as a moderate but is one of
Trump’s most reliable votes in Congress. “Life
46 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
is tough enough, especially here in the Central
Valley,” Cox says, “without your congressman’s
foot on your neck.”
I meet Cox at a roadside taqueria, near lush
ields of grapes in Fowler. Cox does not speak
Spanish; he washes down al pastor tacos with
the “Mexican Coke” he orders in English. But
he’s been picking up colorful phrases from Val-
ley constituents on the campaign trail, includ-
ing from an elderly man who once voted for the
incumbent but now says Valadao “chupa la teta
de Trump.” (Literally: sucks Trump’s tit.)
T
HE SEVEN GOP districts where Clin-
ton topped Trump have made up the
core of the Democratic battleground
in California, earning their candi-
dates a spot on Red to Blue — the DCCC’s ros-
ter of most-favored 2018 races. The designation
opens access to party resources and loosens
the purse strings of top donors.
In August, the party added an eighth Red
to Blue candidate, Jessica Morse, who is cam-
paigning for California’s massive 4th District,
a sweep of the Sierra Nevada mountains in-
cluding Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. Voters here
backed Trump by 15 points in 2016, but Morse is
a gifted communicator who worked for USAID
in Iraq and later at the State Department. The
36-year-old is also a fifth-generation Califor-
nian whose pistol-packing great-grandmother
worked the telegraph booth at Donner Pass.
Incumbent McClintock doesn’t live in the
district and was a member of the reactionary
Freedom Caucus, backing austerity measures
that have left the Forest Service short of per-
sonnel to control ire risk. “He’s playing parti-
san games with our lives,” says Morse, adding
that the district is “on the front line of climate
change” that’s driving catastrophic fires, in-
cluding one that forced Yosemite’s evacuation
this summer. McClintock denies climate change
— and even praised Trump’s decision to leave
the Paris Agreement as a refusal to “sacriice
our economy on the altar of the green left.”
At the edges of the California battleield, two
candidates are making their own luck. Nunes
is oicially on DCCC target lists, but that hasn’t
translated into dollars from the party. For Janz,
that’s a point of pride. “I haven’t taken a dime
from them,” he says. “I’ve been critical of both
parties, and I think that’s in line with where a
lot of Americans are today.” Janz understands
he’s in a “David-versus-Goliath race.” But he ar-
gues he’s a long shot worth backing: “There is
no other race that is more important. Nunes is
a national-security danger. He’s undermining
our national intelligence agencies. He’s under-
mining our criminal justice system.”
The Democrats’ inal, and perhaps most in-
triguing, California contender is 28-year-old
Ammar Campa-Najjar. Endorsed by Obama,
Campa-Najjar is battling to unseat Hunter, who
was indicted with his wife in August for using
$250,000 in campaign cash as a personal slush
fund — paying for vacations, tequila-fueled
bachelor parties — and in one case covering up
the grift by lying about donating to the Wound-
ed Warrior Project. Hunter pleaded not guilty,
MONEY blaming his wife and the “deep state.” He’s also
MATTERS
been accused of carousing in D.C. and slurring
Rep. Duncan
his words in a committee hearing. Last year, he
Hunter is
among 10 called for pre-emptive war with North Korea.
candidates Campa-Najjar is half Latino and half Arab,
who are with striking good looks. When he worked at
vulnerable
the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he sat
in the state’s
Republican down with Trump, who, he says, joked Cam-
delegation. pa-Najjar was a “supermodel.” Growing up in
He was poverty, Campa-Najjar worked as a janitor at
indicted age 15 to help support his single mom. A veter-
in August
for using an of the 2012 Obama campaign, he worked in
campaign the White House, helping to select the 10 con-
money as stituent letters a day that Obama famously read.
a personal The 50th District, stretching inland from San
slush fund.
Diego, is surprisingly diverse, with huge Latino
and Christian Iraqi populations. “The district is
half me, ethnically,” Campa-Najjar says. He also
spent part of his life in a war zone in Gaza, and
says the experience gives him a point of con-
nection to the district’s veterans, whom Hunt-
er, a two-tour Iraq vet, relies on as his base.
Campa-Najjar’s campaign strategy is to show
up in lion’s dens — rowdy NASCAR bars, rode-
os and prayer meetings. “Republicans come up
to me and say, ‘I’m not going to vote for you.’ I
say, ‘Well, I’m going to be voting for you when
I’m in Congress, so just start talking.’ ”
He’s not jockeying to be the next Alexan-
dria Ocasio-Cortez. Campa-Najjar balks at the
label “progressive,” let alone socialist. He rails
against California’s new gas-tax hike and insists
healthcare reform should be “revenue-neutral.”
BEYOND And he seeks to empathize with Trump voters.
CALIFORNIA “My observation is that Trump voters aren’t ig-
Nationwide, norant — they’re ignored,” he says. “By their
about 100 party. By my party. By the country.
House seats “Liberals talk about how love is love. But
are in play in pain is pain too,” he insists, “and these people
DENIS POROY/AP IMAGES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
the midterms.
are going through something serious.” Arguing
Dem Minority
Leader Nancy
that the bell of Trumpism can’t be unrung by a
Pelosi expects single election, or even by forcing Trump out of
the party to oice, Campa-Najjar adds, “We need to start
target 70 healing the country. The day after Trump’s
districts, and gone, if we’ve done nothing but divide, it will
hopes to win
be the undoing of this country. I really believe
half of them.
It needs 23 to
that. I’m trying to start to repair the breach
take back the now. Because I think it will be too late after he’s
House. gone.”

OPINION
Why Republicans Are
Suppressing Black Votes
NOT LONG AFTER losing its
second presidential elec-
tion to Barack Obama, the
GOP, so the story goes, op-
erated on itself. Like a lung-
cancer patient declaring
that it’s time to quit smok-
ing, the Republican Nation-
al Committee declared in a
JAMIL SMITH 2013 “autopsy” report that
“the Republican Party must
be committed to building a lasting relation-
ship within the African-American community
year-round, based on mutual respect and with
a spirit of caring.”
A few months later, Republicans cheered
a Supreme Court decision that maimed the
Voting Rights Act. Three years after that — in
the wake of more than a dozen states pushing
through fresh new laws to make it more dii-
cult for African-American and Hispanic people
to vote — the party crossed another Rubicon
by nominating Donald Trump for president,
a birther with an unquestioned record of ra-
cial discrimination and bigoted rhetoric. This
was not so much hypocritical as it was suicidal.
“An aging, nearly 90 percent white GOP can-
not carry its candidates to electoral victory on
a platform that revels in the consequences of
unvarnished racism — such as Charlottesville
— or the terror of family separation and plac-
ing babies in cages,” Emory University profes-
sor Carol Anderson tells ROLLING STONE. How
does one maintain such a model for electoral
success in a browning America? For those Re-
ILLUSTRATION BY Brian Staufer
publicans who indulge in it or silently beneit
from it, voter suppression provides the leeway.
In her new book, One Person, No Vote, An-
derson argues that the Republican Party’s in-
ability, and unwillingness, to reform its poli-
cies have led inexorably to silencing those who
oppose racism as public policy. The uncon-
scionable seizure of Hispanic-Americans’ pass-
ports along the Texas-Mexico border and the
targeting of college students for invalidation
in New Hampshire and Wisconsin both work
toward the same goal. Felony disenfranchise-
ment has afected one of every 13 black adults,
according to the Washington, D.C.-based Sen-
tencing Project. The Trump administration’s
desire to add a citizenship question to the cen-
sus could dramatically cut the political power
of Hispanic communities. And in North Caro-
lina, even after a voter-ID law designed to dis-
criminate “with almost surgical precision” was
struck down in 2016, heavily gerrymandered
(and unconstitutional) congressional districts
aimed at helping Republicans were used in pri-
maries this year to nominate several candi-
dates across the state. If this all evokes the poll
taxes and literacy tests of America’s shameful
past, it should. “Voter suppression is as toxic
to democracy as old-school Jim Crow disen-
franchisement,” says Anderson.
There is fear underlying this strategy, how-
ever. Trump regularly defecates upon politi-
cal norms, but he and the party that empow-
ers him share a commonality. All too many
Republicans excuse his abuses as they com-
mit their own, suppressing votes and embrac-
ing the very last strands dangling of the white-
nationalist fringe. Much like a white person
saying the word “nigger” — with that hard “r”
— aloud in mixed company, they are free to do
so as long as they expect consequences.
Obama won re-election with only 39 per-
cent of the white vote, but this midterm elec-
tion presents a particularly distressing tipping
point for Republicans. The pool of Demo-
cratic candidates is the most diverse in the his-
tory of American politics. Three black can-
didates — Ben Jealous, Stacey Abrams and
Andrew Gillum — are nominated for gover-
nor, more than have ever been elected in
American history. The Republican urgency to
suppress our votes is so conspicuous because
it is all they have left. They can’t gerrymander
the nation.
Also, as diligently as Republicans — yes,
pretty much just them — have worked to limit
the franchise, the momentum has swung both
ways. “We’ve seen some politicians in certain
states try to make it harder for people to regis-
ter and vote,” says Myrna Pérez, director of the
left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting
Rights and Elections project. “But we’ve also
seen some reforms that would expand access
to the franchise.” Automatic voter registration
measures, for example, will be in place in 10
states by November.
Then there are the demographic realities.
“At the national level, the political parties have
been increasingly sorted and divided by race,
with more whites identifying as Republicans
PURGING than Democrats,” says Ashley Jardina, a Duke
THE ROLLS University assistant professor of political sci-
Roughly 16 ence. “Meanwhile, most blacks and Hispan-
million voters ics identify with the Democratic Party. But
have been whites still make up the majority of the nation-
removed from al electorate. As a result, Democrats increas-
state voting
ingly need people of color to vote to win na-
rolls since the
2013 Supreme
tional elections. Trump, and candidates like
Court ruling him, know it is much easier for them to win
that weakened when people of color do not turn out.”
the historic It’s a strategy that works: Roughly 16 million
Voting Rights voters were removed from state rolls in the
Act of 1965.
three years following the 2013 Supreme Court
Shelby County decision that neutered federal
pre-clearance in the Voting Rights Act — unsur-
prisingly, the efect has been discriminatory.
Another Supreme Court ruling in June allowed
Ohio to continue its practice of purging voters
who fail to respond to a mailer and to vote in
consecutive federal elections. Mostly black and
urban neighborhoods were targeted. Ohio is a
state run by Republicans, after all.
Now, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Thir-
ty-nine governorships are up for grabs. So is a
third of the Senate, and theoretically the entire
House. And only one party has told us, explic-
itly, that their only hope for maintaining power
is to cheat scores of black and Hispanic-
Americans out of their ability to make a choice
as to who governs them. They have said it with
all the conidence of a boxer who has rigged
the ight. When politicians choose the people
who choose them, they get a mistaken idea
about who works for whom. Remind them
who does the hiring here.
October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 47
 THE
QU EEN
A RETH A
FR ANKLIN
1 9 42-2018

She was a traumatized

child, a gospel prodiy
and a civil-rights icon.
She channeled a world
of pain into a sound
all her own, but until
the end, one of
America’s greatest
singers remained
a mystery

By M I K A L
G I L M OR E
The Voice
Franklin onstage
in 1970
GUTTER PHOTO CREDIT

48

48 | Rolling Stone | March 2018

 ARETHA FRANKLIN

‘ I
THINK OF ARETHA as Our Lady of
Mysterious Sorrows,” Jerry Wex-
ler once said of Aretha Franklin.
Wexler was the Atlantic Records
producer who, in 1967, helped
raise the singer to her sudden
and incomparable soul heights.
“Her eyes are incredible, lumi-
nous eyes covering inexplicable
pain. Her depressions could be
as deep as the dark sea. I don’t
pretend to know the sources of
her anguish, but anguish sur-
rounds Aretha as surely as the
glory of her musical aura.”
Those doleful eyes were some-
times mistaken for shyness. That
was how a group of white musicians viewed her in a
irst meeting at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Al-
abama, on January 24th, 1967. Wexler thought the
exploding Southern style of soul would bring out
the best in the 24-year-old Aretha’s still-under-rec-
ognized artistry, even though she’d been making re-
cords since 1956. These were experienced session
men: Most had played with Wilson Pickett at Wex-
ler’s behest. Aretha didn’t enter FAME with a repu-
tation as a soul singer, and she certainly wasn’t over-
bearing, as some thought Pickett could be. “And just
suddenly,” said FAME songwriter Dan Penn, “she
walks over to the piano, she sits down at the piano
stool, and I’m watchin’ her. She kinda looks around,
like, ‘Nobody’s watchin’ me.’ I
thought she thought for just
a second, ‘Is this not my ses-
sion?’ And with all the talent she
had, she just hit this unknown “Aretha looked
chord. Kind of kawunka-kawun-
ka-kawung! Like a bell ringing.
like a lost child.
And every musician in the room But when she
stopped what they were doing,
went to their guitars and start- got up to sing,
ed tunin’ up.” this sound came
That day and night would
end up as the most eventful in out — gospel
Aretha Franklin’s career — an
unprecedented musical tri-
illed with
umph and a near-terminal disas- frighteningly
ter. Franklin would later have
little to say about the events. strong, mature
But then, she often proved ret-
icent over the years. Yet others
blues.”
recalled Franklin as anything
but timid. Mavis Staples — who
had toured with her during their teen gospel years —
thought Franklin was in fact inclined to “devilment”
out of the public eye: “One time she hid behind the
tree with a baseball bat to knock her own sister on
the head. . . . Aretha was tough.”
Which is to say that Aretha Franklin was paradox-
ical — and learned to be at a young age. From child-
too many years, to the indiference of almost every-
body who had once applauded or empowered her.
And then she witnessed deaths — too many: irst her
mother; then her father, after lingering for years in
a coma from gunshot wounds; then three siblings,
all lost to cancer.
Aretha Franklin’s voice — bred from gospel, blues
and jazz, American traditions that reached indelible
glory because they had to overcome America itself
— made all the diference. It was how, in the words
of a gospel song she loved, she got over. “You had
a number of gospel singers who were illed with
the spirit,” said writer Peter Guralnick. “She trans-
lated that spirit into the secular ield. . . . She trans-
lated that feel and ire.” More than that, Franklin’s
voice raised and deined her. Nobody came close
to touching it, though she emboldened many oth-
ers to follow her — Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, Na-
talie Cole, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Alicia
Keys and Beyoncé among them. More than any of
them, Franklin possessed a roar that wasn’t mere-
ly technically breathtaking; it was also a natural and
self-derived instrument that testiied to her truths
in ways she otherwise refused to address. Some say
Franklin was insecure at times in her gift, but with
something so fearsome moving through their body,
mind and history, who wouldn’t be both daunted
and proud?
Upon learning of her death in August, at age 76,
from pancreatic cancer, Barack and Michelle Obama
said in a statement, “Aretha helped deine the Amer-
ican experience. In her voice,
we could feel our history, all
of it and in every shade — our
power and our pain, our dark-
ness and our light, our quest for
redemption and our hard-won
respect.”
The late keyboardist Billy
Preston — who started in gospel
and went on to play with Frank-
lin, the Beatles and the Rolling
Stones — put it in more rough-
hewn terms: “She can sing all
kinds of jive-ass songs that are
beneath her. She can go into her
diva act and turn of the world.
But on any given night, when
that lady sits down at the piano
and gets her body and soul all
over some righteous song, she’ll
scare the shit out of you. And
you’ll know — you’ll swear — vocal lair. Both were conident, ambitious, proud —
that she’s still the best fuckin’ singer this fucked-up even imperious — and both were dedicated to mark-
country has ever produced.” ing their place in history. Her father had bred her
That singer gave nerve to people when they were to be signiicant.
being beaten down and killed — she saved a lot of C.L. was born in Mississippi in 1915 to sharecrop-
lives. She probably even saved her own, for as long pers who picked cotton for white landowners. His
as possible. father abandoned his wife and child when Clar-
ence was about four, and his mother married Henry

hood on, she saw as much pain as she did glory.
Her mother left her family when the girl was six;
she had babies while still a child herself; she mar-
ried a man who dominated her career and pub-
licly battered her; she became a superstar, only to
watch her matchless and lustrous career slide for
Contributing editor MIKAL GILMORE wrote the Chuck
Berry cover story in April 2017.
T
O GET TO Aretha Franklin, you have to
go through her father. The Rev. Clar-
ence LaVaughn Franklin possessed
an almost blueslike incantatory style
that became known as “the squall”;
the bluesman Bobby “Blue” Bland credited it as a
considerable inluence on his own vocal style, and
C.L.’s mastery of the form bore deep inluence on
Aretha. But C.L. and Aretha shared more than a
Franklin, also a farm laborer. C.L. didn’t want to
be a farmer. By 18, he was a Baptist circuit preach-
er, and in 1936 he married Barbara Siggers in Mem-
phis. Barbara was a skillful pianist, and according
to Mark Bego’s Aretha Franklin: The Queen of Soul,
“[as] a gospel singer, Barbara Siggers was in the
same league with Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward.”
In 1939, C.L. secured a pulpit of his own at New
Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis,

50
ROLLING STON E
 THE QUEEN

where he began to develop his leg- The A Team — all essential to the making of Are- label Chess Records; he was called “the man with
endary sermonic style. Following In the studio with several tha Franklin. the million-dollar voice.” C.L. was adamant in his
a subsequent ministry in Bufalo, collaborators, including In Detroit, C.L. helped devel- faith, but he was also worldly. He dressed in lashy
PREVIOUS SPREAD: JAN PERSSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES.

New York, the Franklins moved members of the FAME op what became known as black suits and drove Cadillacs. Rumors attached to him;
to Detroit in mid-1946. The New Studios band, 1968 liberation theology, and became a one involved gospel singer Clara Ward, with whom
Bethel Baptist Church had issued friend and colleague to Martin Lu- C.L. had an on-and-of years-long afair. Two years
THIS SPREAD: DAVID GAHR/ESTATE OF DAVID GAHR

a calling: It wanted C.L. to become
its new pastor. By this time, he and Barbara had
four children of their own: Erma (born in Shelby,
Mississippi, 1938), Cecil (Memphis, 1940), Aretha
(Memphis, March 25th, 1942) and Carolyn (Mem-
phis, 1944). Barbara also had a son from a prior
marriage, Vaughn, and C.L. had fathered a daugh-
ter outside the marriage, Carl Ellan Kelley, with a
12-year-old parishioner in Memphis. The family set-
tled into a mansion on East Boston Boulevard. Mira-
cles would happen in Detroit, and also devastation
ther King Jr. C.L. proclaimed to his
parish, “We are black, not because we are cursed,
for blackness is not a curse. . . . [White people] con-
ditioned you that way because they used this as a
means to an end, to give you a feeling of inferiority.”
Aretha absorbed all this, and those implicit mean-
ings would underlie much of what she would sing
and how she would sing it.
Starting in the early 1950s, C.L. recorded a se-
ries of sermonic albums — more than 70 in all —
and eventually leased the masters to Chicago blues
into the grand new life in Detroit, Barbara abrupt-
ly packed up and, accompanied by her son Vaughn,
moved back to Bufalo. Erma told biographer David
Ritz in Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin, “I do
know that my parents’ relationship was stormy, and
that my father had a violent temper. I never saw him
strike her, but we were all very conscious of not in-
citing Daddy’s wrath.”
Aretha was six when Barbara left. During sum-
mer vacations, Aretha, Erma, Carolyn and Cecil vis-
ited their mother and Vaughn in Bufalo, where the

51
ROLLING STON E

two lived in what Aretha described as a pleasant,
middle-class black neighborhood. Cecil later said,
“As much as Aretha adored our father, she would
have been thrilled to live with Mother. . . . Dad made
it clear that wasn’t an option.”
All three sisters — Erma, Aretha and Carolyn —
had signiicant musical talents, but Aretha in par-
ticular developed as a prodigy. C.L. hired a piano
teacher to polish his daughter’s skills, but Aretha
hid when the teacher visited. “Playing by ear,” she
wrote, “has allowed me to develop a rather person-
al and signature style, which I treasure and would
not give up for anything or anyone.” Smokey Robin-
son, a friend of Cecil, told Ritz, “There was a grand
piano in the Franklin living room. . . . When Aretha
sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started play-
ing chords — big chords. . . . Mind you, this was De-
troit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Are-
tha came out of this world, but she also came out
of another far-of magical world none of us really
understood.”
C.L. pegged Aretha as the family’s likeliest star.
She was lattered to be performing for late-night
house guests who sometimes included famed en-
tertainers: Dinah Washington, Oscar Peterson, Nat
Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Arthur Prysock and Doro-
thy Dandridge were reportedly among visitors to
the house. So were Ella Fitzgerald and Duke El-
lington and gospel great Clara Ward. It was Ward,
more than anybody else, who
influenced Aretha to become a
singer. Aretha claimed she was
around 10 when she sang her irst
solo at New Bethel, trembling be- “One time
forehand, standing on a little
chair, singing “Jesus Be a Fence
Aretha hid
Around Me.” Afterward, parish- behind a
ioners told C.L., “Oh, that child
sure can sing!” tree with a
In Bufalo, Barbara had been baseball bat to
sick on and off. Though she
was a nurse, nobody could fig- knock her own
ure out what the problem was.
On March 7th, 1952, on his way
sister on the
home from school, Vaughn saw head,” Mavis
an ambulance speeding by. His
grandmother told him his moth- Staples said.
er had died only minutes before
— a heart attack. Back in Detroit,
“Aretha was
C.L. gathered the children into tough.”
the kitchen on East Boston and
gave them the news. “I just stood
there, stunned,” Aretha wrote in
her memoir, From These Roots. “I cannot describe
the pain. . . . Pain is sometimes a private matter, and
the pain of small children losing their mother deies
description.” The children visited Bufalo to attend
the funeral; C.L. did not.
“Let me tell you about the kind of child Aretha
was,” Ruth Bowen, who later became the singer’s
publicist, told Ritz. “She was a traumatized child.”
Seeing Aretha in her father’s church, Bowen said,
“she looked like a lost child. Her eyes were illed
with sadness. . . . Then when she got up to sing, this
sound came out. It was gospel illed with blues. I
mean, frighteningly strong blues, beautifully mature
blues. After she sang, she sat back down and with-
drew into her own little world.” Her brother Cecil
put it this way: “Insecurity invaded her spirit at an
ARETHA FRANKLIN
early age. . . . I think that basic insecurity has never
left her. In fact, I believe it deines her — that and
her soaring talent.”
C.L. Franklin gave Aretha pride, stubbornness,
faith and a kind of hubris. Barbara Siggers gave her
a lacuna in which the greatness had to pass through
to ind voice. C.L. was the gospel. Barbara was the
source of the blues, in all its haunting and transcen-
dent ways. The blues is a way of feeling hurt and de-
fying it, taking life as it is, living in the full hollow of
it, yet going on. Aretha Franklin took her pain and
transmuted it into something that moved the land
with her voice.
At age 12, Aretha became pregnant. This did not,
by all accounts, blow up into a major family drama.
“[C.L.] was not judgmental, narrow or scolding,”
she wrote. “In my ifth or sixth month, I dropped
out of school. My family supported me in every
way.” On January 28th, 1955, she gave birth to her
irst child, Clarence. Aretha always refused to di-
vulge the father’s full identity, and he didn’t stay ac-
tive long in her life anyway. Then at age 14, in Janu-
ary 1957, she gave birth to a second child, Edward.
She also declined to name this baby’s father.
At the same time, Franklin was maturing as a gos-
pel singer. In the mid-1950s her father launched a
successful gospel caravan, which toured the coun-
try — including in the Jim Crow South, where the
troupe often had to take back roads and could not
patronize segregated hotels and
diners. The traveling members
also gathered for after-show rites
in which a diferent zeal burned.
In Ritz’s Respect, Ray Charles
and Billy Preston referred to the
gospel circuit as “a sex circus.”
Charles said, “I loved the church
singers. . . . When it came to pure
heart singing, they were moth-
erfuckers. When it came to pure
sex, they were wilder than me —
and that’s saying something. . . .”
Was Aretha exposed to these
occasions? As Nick Salvatore
wrote in Singing in a Strange
Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black
Church, and the Transformation
of America, “What arrangements
C.L. made to shield her from the
tour’s nocturnal activities are
not known, but her very pres-
ence unavoidably exposed her
to experiences well beyond her
years.” But, as Salvatore wondered, “Can imperfect
people perform good deeds? Can a lawed minister
lead others to salvation? C.L. certainly thought so.”
In 1956, when Aretha was 14, she released her
irst album, Songs of Faith, with C.L. managing her.
Because the music was mostly recorded at New
Bethel with Franklin accompanying herself on
piano before an open microphone, her vocals took
on an incorporeal quality — world-weary and mys-
tical at the same time. As Aretha wailed “Precious
Lord,” a listener in the audience called out, “Listen
at her!” A great career in the gospel world was there
for the wonder child’s taking.
Aretha was also smitten with secular black
pop music. “The new rhythm & blues,” she said,
“couldn’t be turned of.” In particular, two artists
52
ROLLING STON E
had a formative impact on her, and she knew both
as visitors to her father’s home: Dinah Washington
and Sam Cooke. Neither it any single genre — both
started in gospel but proved endlessly transforma-
tive. Amalgamate the two and you pretty much have
the alchemy for Aretha Franklin.
Between 1948 and 1955, Washington had 27 R&B
Top 10 hits, and she became a pop star with 1959’s
epochal “What a Dif’rence a Day Makes.” She could
be commanding, and she liked mink coats, parties
and pills, and in December 1963 she died in her
sleep from an overdose of barbiturates. Cooke was
an even bigger star, and Aretha saw a lot of him, be-
cause his group, the Soul Stirrers, sometimes joined
C.L.’s gospel tours. On one occasion, after a show in
Atlanta, Aretha visited Cooke in his hotel room. The
two were sitting on his bed talking, “when a thun-
derous knock came at the door. It was Daddy. Sam
and I froze in our tracks. ‘Aretha, I know you’re in
there,’ ” Aretha wrote. At irst chance, she shot out
of the room, “just when the conversation between
me and Sam had taken another turn. Daddy never
knew that with his intimidating knock he changed
the course of history.”
If Cooke and Washington could cross over from
gospel to pop, Franklin reasoned, so could she.
When she told her father what she wanted to do, he
didn’t balk. “The plan was to make her a star,” said
Carolyn, “and make it happen quickly.” Motown
founder Berry Gordy and his songwriting partner
Billy Davis wanted to sign Aretha. “Everything that
she sang was with such emotion that you felt every
word,” said Davis. “She had just terriic control over
her expressions.” C.L., though, thought that Gordy
and Davis’ ambitions were too local.
To hit the big time, they decided that Aretha
should move to New York, where she initially lived
in cheap hotels. She left her children in Detroit
under the care of her grandmother Rachel — efec-
tively leaving them behind just as her mother had
surrendered her at a distance. She was 18.
She and C.L. hired a new manager, Jo King. In
early 1960, King introduced C.L. to Phil Moore, an
arranger and jazz pianist. Moore sat down with Are-
tha at the piano, and they played a few songs. Then
he turned to C.L. and made the most prescient
statement anybody ever made about Aretha Frank-
lin: “Your daughter . . . does not require my services.
Her style has already been developed. Her style is
in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional
opinion, requires no alteration.”
C.L. told Moore that he’d been thinking of try-
ing to place Aretha with Columbia Records, and
Moore knew the ideal producer: John Hammond,
who had supervised Bessie Smith’s last record-
ing sessions and had discovered 17-year-old Billie
Holiday. Hammond visited King’s studio to meet
Aretha and hear a demo she had recorded. He
didn’t need much convincing. He later said he
thought Aretha was “an untutored genius — the
best voice I’ve heard since Billie Holiday.” He signed
her on the spot. Hammond produced her first
Columbia album and had a clear idea of what he
wanted Aretha to sound like. “My vision for Aretha
had nothing to do with rhythm & blues,” he said. “I
saw her as a jazz/blues artist.”
The singer’s Columbia debut, Aretha: With the
Ray Bryant Combo, was released in late Febru-
ary 1961. She was 18. If the intent had been to cast

 You Send Me
Aretha with Sam Cooke (right) in 1961. Cooke’s gospel group, the Soul
Stirrers, appeared on C.L. Franklin’s gospel caravan, and Cooke became a
model for young Aretha. “Oh, I loved that man,” she later said.
 The Producer
With Jerry Wexler, who signed
Franklin to Atlantic Records in 1966.
After her first recording session,
Wexler was stunned: “I had to get
used to that kind of greatness!”
Franklin for an audience that appreciated Lena
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Horne, Carmen McRae and Nancy Wilson, Franklin
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: © DR. ERNEST C. WITHERS SR./THE WITHERS
FAMILY TRUST; © ED HAUN/”DETROIT FREE PRESS”/ZUMA PRESS; JIM
instead arrived with a distinctive edge. The single
“Won’t Be Long,” which peaked at Number Seven
on the R&B chart, worked as a précis for her later
TIME S”/REDUX; GAB ARCHIVE/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
resplendence. Franklin performed it in her irst na-
tional TV appearance, on The Steve Allen Show, and
there she was: all the greatness already in place,
as apparent as it would ever be. She hit the song
of with big gospel chords on piano and sang with
a witty, rousing, vocal majesty, in the last minute
roaring startlingly.
It was around this time that Aretha met the man
who, other than C.L. Franklin and Jerry Wexler,
would prove the most signiicant igure in her ca-
reer — for good and bad. Ted White would recall
meeting Franklin at a club in Detroit, the 20 Grand.
Her sister Erma had been talking to him around
that time. “She also told me,” Aretha wrote, “he
considered me among the most beautiful women
in the world.”
White dominated Franklin’s career, and schooled
her in how to present herself in public. Franklin re-
fused to discuss White much in later years, though
in From These Roots, she wrote, “I didn’t realize I
was in way over my head. . . . [Ted White] was a take-
charge kind of guy.”
Aretha’s brother Cecil said that their father
“knew Ted was something of a shady character —
and he thought the association would hurt Aretha.”
Motown producer Harvey Fuqua told Ritz, “Any-
one who didn’t see Ted White as a straight-up pimp
had to be deaf, dumb, and blind. . . . It took some-
one that slick to get a great talent like Aretha in his
53
ROLLING STON E
WThe Million-Dollar Voice
C.L. Franklin with his daughters Aretha (left) and
Carolyn in 1965. The reverend possessed an
almost blueslike preaching style described as
“whooping,” and he became famous in his own
right, recording a series of sermonic albums —
more than 70 in all.
 Aretha the Activist
Franklin with the Rev. Jesse Jackson (left) in New York,
1972, at an event for Operation Push, the Jackson-
founded social-justice and civil-rights organization. Just
behind Jackson is Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow.
 New York Groove
The marquee at the Apollo, when Franklin played in
1971. Her father sent her to live in New York as a teen,
although she later moved back to Detroit.
stable.” Within six months of their irst date, Aretha
and White married. C.L. was bitterly opposed to the
whole deal; he counted White as an enemy.
In pop criticism, it became accepted wisdom
that, with the exception of Unforgettable: A Tribute
to Dinah Washington, from February 1964, Frank-
lin’s Columbia years were miscast by both the sing-
er and the label. In truth, the Columbia recordings
were rife with songs of heartbreak and rapture,
sung in a voice that even then was untouchable. But
none of Franklin’s Columbia albums were hits, and
their mix of styles — show tunes, torch songs, blues,
standards, novelties, pop and quasi-R&B — didn’t it
any easily identiiable demographic of listeners. “It
wasn’t really me,” Franklin said later. When it was
apparent she would not renew her contract, the
label assembled unissued recordings into stopgap

albums. The label called one 1966 release Soul Sister,
but it wasn’t soul at all. The real soul sister, though,
was just months away.
Wexler was a co-owner of New York’s Atlantic
Records, along with Ahmet Ertegun, and was feeling
restless about the label he had helped build. Both
Atlantic and Wexler were well-regarded. Through
the 1960s the label helped advance a more tena-
cious form of rhythm & blues that became increas-
ingly identified as soul. Wexler produced some
of the most important artists himself. In 1966, he
was in a recording session in Muscle Shoals, trying
to stop a ight between Wilson Pickett and Percy
Sledge, when he got a phone call from a friend, a
gospel DJ, who told him, “Aretha’s ready for you.
Here’s her phone number.”
Wexler had had his eye on Franklin for a long
time. “The voice,” Wexler wrote, “was not that of
a child but rather of an ecstatic hierophant. . . . On
Aretha’s irst recording, her singing was informed
with her genius. From the congregation, a man
cried out, ‘Listen at her . . . listen at her!’ And I did.”
He called and spoke with Ted White, and in Novem-
ber 1966, she and White sat down in Wexler’s oice
and made a handshake deal. “I felt a natural ainity
with the Atlantic sound,” Franklin said. “To me, At-
lantic meant soul.”
Wexler had become enamored of FAME Record-
ing Studios in Muscle Shoals. It was owned and run
by producer Rick Hall, who used sidemen whom
Wexler admired: keyboardist Barry Beckett, bassist
David Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins and guitarist
Jimmy Johnson; they were occasionally augmented
by prominent session musicians like organist and
pianist Spooner Oldham and guitarist Dan Penn
— all of them white. FAME, Wexler decided, was
where he would record Franklin’s irst music for
Atlantic.
White wasn’t convinced. The Ku Klux Klan was
active near Muscle Shoals (and still is). But Wexler
insisted, and he met White and Franklin at FAME
on January 24th, 1967. The day that Franklin record-
ed in Muscle Shoals proved the most momentous
in her history — it blasted open her future, then fell
into a nightmare.
Wexler played the musicians a demo of “I Never
Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” a song by
White’s friend Ronnie Shannon. At
irst the band didn’t know what to
do with it. “The song didn’t have a Key
speciic meter, really,” said Oldham. In the studio, 1973.
It was Oldham who turned it around. “Playing [piano] by
ear,” Franklin wrote,
He sat down at a Wurlitzer electric
“allowed me to develop
piano and devised a new voicing — a rather personal and
an odd slant of chords and cadence signature style.”
— to open the song. “Spooner’s
got it! Spooner’s got it!” said Chips
Moman, a songwriting partner of Penn. Aretha sang
the opening line — it was the irst time some of the
musicians had heard her voice. “From there it was
like sparkles and shine,” Penn said. “After every-
body heard her sing, ‘You’re no good, heartbreak-
er,’ she had ive instant fans. I can tell you, she was
getting all the respect one person can get from those
cats.” Shortly, Penn and Moman went into a clos-
et to complete a song they had been working on:
“Do Right Woman – Do Right Man.” Wexler and the
songwriters thought it might suit Franklin’s remark-
able voice.
ARETHA FRANKLIN
C
OMPLETING “I Never Loved a Man
(The Way I Love You)” took only a
few hours. “I couldn’t believe it was
that good,” Wexler remembered. “I
had to get used to that kind of great-
ness!” Then things went wrong: More than 50 years
later there are still mysteries surrounding that day
and night — and nobody has ever been able to gath-
er the full truth. Tension had been building be-
tween Wexler and Hall: Whose session, after all,
was this? “Hall could be belligerent,” Wexler wrote.
“So could Ted White. And so, as it turned out, could
one of the trumpeters.” The musician had been a
last-minute add-on to the horn section. Also, there
had been drinking — something Hall tried to for-
bid in his studio. White was drinking too, sharing a
bottle with the trumpeter. This is where various ac-
counts start to vary. The banter between White and
the horn player resulted in animosity when, White
said, the latter began to use racist terms — “a red-
neck patronizing a black man,” Wexler put it — and
White told Wexler he wanted the musician ired on
the spot. Since this was Hall’s studio, Hall would
have to do the iring, yet he resented being dictat-
ed to on his own property. Most of the musicians
were oblivious.
Wexler and Hall went back to Wexler’s motel
to toast the session, then White called from an-
other room. He told Wexler that he and Franklin
would be leaving in the morning, heading back to
New York; he wasn’t going to stand for this. Mean-
time, said one witness, “Rick sees it going down
the tube and decides to mediate. . . . He shouldn’t
have done it tipsy.” Wexler told Hall lat-out not to
do it — he’d only make it worse — but Hall wasn’t a
man to be bossed. “That evening euphoria turned
to horror,” wrote Wexler. “It was Walpurgisnacht,
a Wagnerian shitstorm.” Only three people were
present in Franklin’s hotel room, but nobody has
ever given a uniform account. “I went to Ted and
Aretha’s room,” Hall later said. “That just led to a
bunch more yelling, with Ted telling me how he
never should have brought his wife down to Ala-
bama to play with these rednecks. ‘Who you call-
ing a redneck?’ I said. ‘Who you calling a nigger?’
‘I’d never use that word.’ ‘But you were thinking it,
weren’t you?’ ‘I was just thinking that you should go
fuck yourself.’ That led to Ted taking
a swing at me . . . and before I knew
Player it, I was in a full-blown istight with
Ted White.”
According to one account, Frank-
lin hid out in the bathroom as all this
went down. Another has it that she
got involved in the ight and helped
throw Hall out of the room. In From
These Roots, she wrote, “I vaguely
recall loud noises and voices shouting and doors
slamming. I never learned the details.” Hall report-
edly called White from the motel lobby, suggesting
he get out of town come the morning. Wexler told
one interviewer there had possibly been gunshots.
“The very thing I had worked so hard to avoid
was racial animus,” Wexler said, “and that’s exactly
what the night session had excited. . . . Ted, though,
could not be consoled. ‘You were the one who said
Muscle Shoals was soul paradise,’ he said. ‘Far as I
can see, Muscle Shoals is soul shit. These honkies
down here are some nasty motherfuckers. I will
54
ROLLING STON E
 DAVID GAHR/
THE ESTATE OF DAVID GAHR

55
ROLLING STON E
THE QUEEN

never submit my wife to circumstances like these.
We’re outta here.’ ”
The events of that night, as much as the liber-
F
ating recording session during the day, amount-
ed to breakthroughs for Franklin. She wanted out
of Muscle Shoals, no question, and — probably not
for the irst time — wanted out of her marriage as
well. There had been troubling rumors about the
couple, but for a time Franklin put up with White’s
rule. Etta James said, “Ted gave her an edge she
needed. And if things went bad for Aretha later on,
welcome to the party. That was the story of how it
went with most of us and our men. . . . They dressed
us and trotted us out to the stage. . . . though, we be-
came stars.”
The only major player on January
24th, 1967, in Muscle Shoals who did
not fuck up was Franklin. White fucked
up. Hall fucked up. Even Wexler fucked
up. Not Franklin. Yet she disappeared,
like a suffering ghost, pondering its
heart through the mists. Wexler could
not ind her. He was angry and embar-
rassed; how could such a gift get frac-
tured? He knew that he and Franklin
were on the verge of something excit-
ing, but an aborted contract would kill
off that possibility. Wexler finally re-
alized: “She had been traumatized by
this incident, and she was hiding some-
place.” Clearly, Franklin was making a
statement: She wanted due regard.
By the time Franklin showed up at
Atlantic Studios in New York, she had
insisted on the presence of the Mus-
To Barack, With Love
cle Shoals band — plus saxophonist
Franklin singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” at Barack Obama’s first inauguration,
King Curtis. She also brought in her sis-
in January 2009. Along with her voice, the big-bowed hat she wore that day
ters, Erma and Carolyn, for harmonies. famously stole the show, earning its own Facebook page.
White was not with Franklin for this oc-
casion — just as well given the drama of
the previous month. On February 8th, 1967, Frank-
lin put inishing touches on “Do Right Woman —
Do Right Man,” the song that Penn and Moman
had been working on at FAME before all hell broke
loose. Wexler now had a single — “I Never Loved
a Man (The Way I Love You)” — with a B side, and
released the pair two days later. “I Never Loved a
Man” peaked at Number One on Billboard’s R&B
Singles Chart on April 15th, and at Number Nine on
the pop chart.
Though Franklin had not written either side, the
material now identiied her. In “I Never Loved a
Man (The Way I Love You),” you can hear Franklin’s
rumination on her increasingly troubled marriage to
White. “You’re a no-good heartbreaker,” she sang.
“You’re a liar, and you’re a cheat/And I don’t know
why/I let you do these things to me. . . ./How could
ya hurt me so bad/Baby, you know that I’m the best
thing/That you ever had/Kiss me once again.” The
lyric might read like a piteous confession, but the
voice — that was something else, full of both woe
and tenacity. Few singers had brought a voice like
this to such words of hardship. Many great black fe-
male singers had emanated blues — Bessie Smith,
Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington. But gospel singer
and friend Mahalia Jackson wouldn’t grant the blues
any sway. “Anybody that sings the blues,” Jackson
said, “is in a deep pit, yelling for help.” She added
elsewhere, “With the blues, when you inish, you
ARETHA FRANKLIN
still have the blues.” But that was not what Franklin
would allow for herself.
OR MILLIONS, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band was the big cul-
tural marker of 1967 — a quintessence
of the emerging culture and its values.
Looking back, though, it’s apparent that
if the year had a cultural marker that truly changed
things, it was Franklin’s debut Atlantic album, I
Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), released
March 10th. It called to several audiences at once:
It was a bold and unanticipated claim to pride that
spoke to and for a black audience and for a nascent
women’s movement.
In 1965, when Otis Redding wrote and record-
ed “Respect,” he was already being cited as the
king of the new fervent style of R&B. Franklin had
been singing her own rendition for some time in
her nightclub shows. In Redding’s version, the song
was a man’s plaint to the woman he loved, but when
Franklin recorded “Respect” for her next single, she
gave it a twist of her own: “I’m about to give you all
of my money/And all I’m askin’ in return, honey/Is
to give me my propers.” It wasn’t a yearning plea —
it was a demand.
Franklin and her sisters served it up with style
and humor (they used the title to reiterate the sing-
er’s nickname, “Ree, Ree, Ree”), and they added
a bridge that both became legendary and gave the
song new identity: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it
means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB/Oh (Sock
it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me).”
In Franklin’s voice, “Respect” was no longer a man’s
petition; it was something of a threat that switched
gender tables. It was something wholly new. When
Wexler played the new version for Redding, he said,
“I just lost my song.”
“Respect” and “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I
Love You)” were enough to put Franklin forever on
the American stage. Author Guralnick remembered
the day the single “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I
Love You)” was released, February 10th, 1967. “I had
gone over to Skippy White’s Mass Records: Home of
56
ROLLING STON E
the Blues,” he wrote in Sweet Soul Music, “and the
little speaker over the door that was beamed to the
sidewalk trade was illed with Aretha. People were
dancing on the frosty street with themselves or with
one another and lining up at the counter to get a
purchase on that magic sound.”
Franklin’s “Respect” made plain a woman could
do more than just hope for it: She could command it
on her own terms. Poet Sherley Anne Williams said,
“Aretha was right on time. . . . When she even went
so far as to spell the word ‘respect,’ we just knew
that this sister wasn’t playing around.” Franklin her-
self, though a lifelong Democrat and civil-rights ad-
vocate, admitted she didn’t record the song with
that purpose in mind. “I don’t think I was a cata-
lyst for the women’s movement,” she
said. “Sorry. But if I were? So much
the better!”
“Respect” came to represent other
shifts underway in black culture and
politics. Franklin, like her father and
his friend Martin Luther King Jr., fa-
vored nonviolence in the struggle for
civil rights, but others were beginning
to feel their wait had gone on too long.
There were activists in the streets and
on the campuses, and then there was
Franklin on the radio every hour, pro-
claiming change in a voice that nobody
— black or white — could ignore. Frank-
lin later wrote, “I don’t make it a prac-
tice to put my politics into my music
or social commentary. But the fact
that ‘Respect’ naturally became a bat-
tle cry and anthem for a nation shows
me something.”
In 1967 and 1968, Franklin scored
four Top 10 albums (I Never Loved a
Man, Aretha Arrives, Lady Soul and Are-
tha Now) and nine Top 10 singles. All
were produced by Wexler (sometimes with Arif
Mardin). The songs were often augmented by sax-
ophonist King Curtis and Franklin’s sisters or the
Sweet Inspirations; many featured some of the same
Muscle Shoals band as on her irst single. The music
was either hard soul — “Chain of Fools,” “Baby, I
Love You,” “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been
Gone” — or deep blues (“Drown in My Own Tears,”
“Ain’t No Way”), sexy (“Dr. Feelgood”) or even, in
a way, devotional: the transcendent “(You Make Me
Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” by Gerry Goin and
Carole King.
The overnight fame came at a cost. “She’d been
using booze to numb the pain of her lousy mar-
riage,” said her publicist Ruth Bowen. At a show in
Columbus, Georgia, in May 1967, Franklin fell of the
stage and broke her arm. She later claimed she’d
been blinded by stage lights, but Bowen had been
DAMON WINTER/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX
told it was caused by alcohol.
Two incidents in 1968 changed Franklin forever.
The irst was the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr. on April 4th. C.L. Franklin and his children had
been close to King for years; they had socialized and
campaigned together. Riots erupted in more than
100 cities across America. Aretha attended King’s fu-
neral in Atlanta and visited with his widow, Coretta
Scott King. On May 2nd, she released “Think,” the
keynote of her upcoming album, Aretha Now. The
song seemed in part a response to the terrible times:

“People walking around every day/Playing games,
taking scores/Trying to make other people lose their
minds/Ah, be careful you don’t lose yours.”
The other troubling 1968 event was more per-
sonal. On June 28th, Time placed Franklin on its
cover, declaring her the face of soul music. The ar-
ticle praised her talents but also portrayed her as
despondent and described “Dr. Feelgood” as the
tale of “a woman [who] works all day cooking and
cleaning a house for white folks. . . . Sex is the only
thing she’s got to look forward to.” The implication
was that the singer was paying some dues — a plat-
itude commonly applied to blues singers. “What
one of [Franklin’s] burdens might be,” Time dis-
closed, “came out last year when Aretha’s husband,
Ted White, roughed her up in public at Atlanta’s Re-
gency Hyatt House Hotel. It was not the irst such
incident.”
Franklin resented Time’s representation of her.
As she herself noted, there was always much more
to her voice than the accommodation or even tran-
scendence of pain. There was also a lot of sass and
demand of freedom; there was moral attestation.
After both Time’s story and the troubles of her mar-
riage, Franklin gained a new reputation that she
never shook, and perhaps never wanted to: She
was now seen as aloof and unforthcoming, and that
seemed ine with her.
Franklin was a battered woman whose voice gave
a lot of other women recognition and courage. She
divorced White in 1969. Until then, he still man-
aged some of her business and tour dates and was
credited as the co-writer of a handful of her songs.
White also found “I Never Loved a Man” for Frank-
lin. She was always reticent on the subject, though
she later admitted, “Alcohol played a destructive
role.” Rod Hicks, a bassist who toured with Frank-
lin at the time, told Vanity Fair, “[White] didn’t have
no pussycat. He had a tiger on his hands when that
girl got drunk.”
What some have called Franklin’s golden era at
Atlantic ran from early 1967 to early 1972. During
that time, she was unquestionably the top solo fe-
male singing star, while also manifesting ongoing
changes in black America’s consciousness. “The
black revolution certainly forced me and the major-
ity of black people to begin taking a second look at
ourselves,” she later said. “But I must say that mine
was a very personal evolution — an evolution of the
me in myself. . . . I’ve gained a great deal of coni-
dence in myself.”
Between 1970 and 1972, Franklin released her
deepest series of recordings — three studio works
(This Girl’s in Love With You and Spirit in the Dark,
both from 1970, and Young, Gifted and Black, 1972)
and two live sets, Aretha Live at Fillmore West (1971)
and Amazing Grace (1972). But these years also
proved intense and variable for the singer. She
was still in the aftermath of her volatile marriage
to White while starting a new relationship with her
road manager, Ken Cunningham (in March 1970 she
gave birth to their son, Kecalf ). As a result, Frank-
lin’s live appearances were infrequent. “The sud-
den disappearance of Aretha was a frequent oc-
currence,” said Wexler. “No one used the words
‘nervous breakdown,’ but we knew.” But when Wex-
ler got Franklin into his Miami studio, it resulted
in what he described in his autobiography as “the
sanctiied sessions that produced Spirit in the Dark.”
THE QUEEN
The album was perhaps Franklin’s most inspired
studio work — “a motherfucker,” as Wexler put it
— and felt more personal than anything prior. Like
most clues in her life, it was made of polarities:
wounded (“Don’t Play That Song”) at the same time
it was bitter (“When the Battle Is Over”); devoted
(“You and Me,” “Honest I Do”) yet betrayed (“One
Way Ticket”); and sensual yet mystical (“Spirit in
the Dark”). On one magniicent track, “The Thrill
Is Gone (From Yesterday’s Kiss),” Franklin sang of a
disillusion that relected on both her failed marriage
and America’s ongoing mistreatment of its black
people. Yet Franklin also reairmed hope on 1972’s
Young, Gifted and Black, in a church-choir-like cover
of Nina Simone’s title song: “When you’re feeling
real low/Here’s a great truth you should remember
and know/That you’re young, gifted and black/You
got your soul intact — and that’s a fact.” Franklin ar-
rived at her worldview through the prism of gos-
pel politics. The sufering and hope in those songs
wasn’t simply a promise of freedom in heaven, but
ultimately freedom on Earth.
The same year Franklin released Young, Gifted
and Black, she also recorded her gospel tour de
force, Amazing Grace. Some had criticized her for
switching to secular music in 1959, and gospel au-
diences were notorious for shunning singers who
had taken that route. In 1961, Franklin wrote a col-
umn for New York’s black newspaper Amsterdam
News, saying, “I don’t think that in any matter I did
the Lord a disservice when I made up my mind two
years ago to switch over. . . . After all, the blues is a
music born out of the slavery-day
sufferings of my people. Every
song in the blues vein has a story
to tell of love, frustrations and
heartaches. I think that because “The sudden
true democracy hasn’t overtaken
us here that we as a people ind disappearance
the original blues songs still have
meaning for us.”
of Aretha was
Franklin recruited the Rev. a frequent
James Cleveland as pianist and
moderator for the event, as well
occurrence,”
as his Southern California Com- Wexler said.
munity Choir for the perfor-
mances at the New Temple Mis- “No one used
sionary Baptist Church in Los
Angeles, plus she brought in her
the words
core electric band — an anoma- ‘nervous
ly in a church setting. Over two
nights in mid-January 1972, Wex- breakdown,’
ler recorded the live services but we knew.”
for a double-length album. New
Temple had an ambience no
studio could ever have provid-
ed, and more important, it had a
fully involved audience who knew what true gospel
music was. (Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts attend-
ed one of the evenings, and the music inluenced
Exile on Main St.)
Franklin paired secular songs with Martin Lu-
ther King Jr.’s favorite song, “Precious Lord, Take
My Hand.” She also sang hallowed spirituals such
as “Climbing Higher Mountains,” “Amazing Grace”
(a 1779 Christian hymn by an Anglican clergyman
and slave trader who believed God would grant for-
giveness for his sins) and “Mary, Don’t You Weep.”
The latter is among Franklin’s most haunting vo-
57
ROLLING STON E
cals, delivered at New Temple as a deathly, rocking
march with the ghostly thunder of the choir press-
ing her on.
Amazing Grace was Franklin’s most ambitious ef-
fort and most meaningful creation. With it she con-
nected antebellum black history with modern-day
black existential dread and its need for hope. It
was a spiritual and political declaration, as well as
a commercial triumph: Contrary to expectations, it
became the singer’s best-selling album. It capped
what had been called “the Age of Aretha” — a spir-
it of optimism that was also informed by the knowl-
edge of sufering. It was Franklin’s own summation
of, in the words of a Clara Ward song on the album,
how she “got over,” how she made it through a won-
drous yet tumultuous period: “My soul look back
and wonder how I got over.” That had to be some
comfort, because Amazing Grace was also one of the
singer’s last great successes for a long time. The age
of Aretha was over.
A
ROUND 1972, Franklin had developed
a friendship with Quincy Jones and
wanted to work with him; he had a
wide-ranging and impeccable sensibil-
ity. “The problem,” said a mifed Wex-
ler, “was that Quincy took forever and a day to cut
the sides, well over a year, a critical period when
Aretha could ill aford to be out of the spotlight.”
The album that inally resulted in June 1973, Hey
Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky), was the most
controversial of Franklin’s career — although its
complex ambitions have weath-
ered the test of time, making it
perhaps Franklin’s lost master-
piece.
Wexler returned for three of
Franklin’s mid-1970s albums,
but while they weren’t as terri-
ble as some claimed, they were
pro forma and never reached
for new heights. In 1975, Wexler
left Atlantic and worked largely
as a freelance producer. Frank-
lin herself enjoyed a leeting re-
surgence in 1976 with Sparkle, a
soundtrack album. Written and
produced by Curtis Mayield, it
was the sort of wonderful one-
shot soul-school miracle that
made plain that Franklin could
still ind those heights with the
right material. Instead, after
Sparkle her quality bottomed
out.
Franklin, like her father, was
a complicated person, but she
didn’t want anybody to know just how much. Sev-
eral close to her — including family — described her
as depressive. Shortly after Franklin moved into a
Manhattan townhouse in 1973, she fell into night-
mares. “[Aretha] was really of-kilter,” said Caro-
lyn Franklin. “Ultimately, we had no choice but to
get her to a hospital.” Franklin was furious when
the incident was reported, and she pressured Jet
magazine to run an article portraying her positive-
ly, under the title ARETHA BURIES RUMORS ABOUT
“GOING CRAZY.” Soon after, though, according to her
brother Cecil, “Aretha fell back into depression. . . . I

couldn’t figure out how to break her out of the
blues. These blues were deep.” Said Erma, “Here’s
the thing about my sister. You think these break-
downs are a pervasive pattern. And in a sense, they
are. Ultimately, though, she doesn’t stay down. . . . It
may take her a while, but her commitment to her
career is strong as steel.”
In the winter of 1975, Franklin moved to Enci-
no, California, with her boyfriend Ken Cunning-
ham. In June 1977, Jet ran another feature: STILL ON
A THRONE, ARETHA LOSES WEIGHT, LOOKS AHEAD.
She had lost 40 pounds and was proud of it. Clear-
ly, she believed she still had a regal reputation to
uphold, and breakdowns or not, she wanted to ap-
pear happy and assured to the public. Cunningham
helped Franklin curb her drinking and bore inlu-
ence on her sense of black pride. The couple had a
son together, but never married, and came to a cor-
dial parting within a year of moving to the Los An-
geles area. In January 1977, Franklin started a new
relationship with actor Glynn Turman. The two
married in April 1978 at her father’s church in De-
troit, with C.L. oiciating. At the time she told Jet,
“I have no emotional hang-ups. No problems. Just
those of everyday nature that all people have. . . .  allegedly — discovered Glynn having an afair with
Above all, I am happy.”
Some saw this as a front. “If you read the ver-
sion of her life that Aretha gives to the magazines,”
said her younger sister, Carolyn, “you’d never think
she had a care in the world. I
know that was her heart’s de-
sire. . . . But if you think she
stopped thinking about how to
get her career back on track,
“Anytime I gave
you’re wrong. And if you the slightest
also think there weren’t ca-
reer clashes between her and comment,”
Glynn, you’re doubly wrong.”
In June 1979, Franklin
Luther Vandross
got offstage in Las Vegas and recalled, “she
learned that her father had
been near death at his home on screamed, ‘If
LaSalle in Detroit. He had con- you think you
fronted a team of robbers in-
vading the house, and one had can do it better,
shot him in the right knee and
right groin. C.L. had lain on the
you sing the
loor for some time, bleeding. damn thing.’ ”
The preacher had already been
on a decline. Though he was
still royalty in Detroit, he was
no longer formidable. “Toward the end, sickness
and drink ravaged the once-brave voice,” wrote
Anthony Heilbut in The Fan Who Knew Too Much.
“On a rare healthy Sunday, he could still manage to
whoop, holler, and shout the house.” When Frank-
lin arrived at the hospital, the reverend was in a
coma that he would never emerge from.
C.L. Franklin died at home on July 27th, 1984. For
three days, mourners stood in the city’s sweltering
heat so they could pass his coin and pay their last
respects. The funeral itself, on August 4th, at New
Bethel, was among the largest in Detroit’s history.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson — who had known the fam-
ily for years and who had campaigned that spring
for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination
— was the irst to speak. He told the gathered that
C.L. “was a prophet” and that his voice had uplifted
black Americans for decades.
ARETHA FRANKLIN
A
S SOME CLOSE TO Franklin knew well,
the singer’s grief could turn into anger.
A short time after their father’s funer-
al, her sister Carolyn told an inter-
viewer the family was worried wheth-
er Aretha could survive C.L.’s death. “My mouth
fell open,” Aretha wrote in From These Roots. “Had
she forgotten about my faith and trust in God? We
were all raised by the same father, who instilled in
us the spiritual strength to survive the most try-
ing times.” Franklin wouldn’t talk to her sister for
months after that.
Meanwhile, there had been tensions between
Franklin and Turman. He was an actor, and adjust-
ing to second place behind Franklin hadn’t been
easy for him. During her father’s years in a coma,
Franklin eventually moved back to C.L.’s house,
effectively declaring that the family and her ca-
reer were now paramount. In the summer of 1982,
Franklin suddenly and enigmatically separated from
Turman; they divorced in 1984. Some saw it coming.
Franklin would never comment on the dissolution.
In his biography of Franklin, Mark Bego wrote, “The
most widely circulated rumor stated that Aretha —
someone who was quite close to her, and that it in-
stantly marked the end of their relationship.”
In 1980, Franklin signed with Clive Davis’ label,
Arista. Whereas Wexler was respected and daunt-
ing, Davis was beguiling and
had the golden touch. If any-
body could rejuvenate Frank-
lin’s puzzlingly stuck career, it
was Davis. He brought in Arif
Mardin, who’d worked with
Franklin at Atlantic, and Chuck
Jackson (who’d helped launch
Natalie Cole’s career) to co-pro-
duce her October 1980 kick-
of for the label, Aretha. “Are-
tha and Clive were very clear in
that they wanted this record to
have a certain sheen,” said Mar-
din. Both Aretha and its 1981 fol-
low-up, Love All the Hurt Away,
were clearly transitional: She
was trying to ind her voice and
soul amid bigger and slicker ar-
rangements. However, the mu-
sical framing it the fashion of
the early 1980s, at the cost of
too often containing her vocals.
Franklin was on Arista Rec ords from 1980 to
2007: 27 years, a much longer period than with At-
lantic. Davis believed that the right production team
made all the diference — psychologically as much
as musically. Franklin wasn’t receptive to produc-
ers who told her how and when to sing. In 1981,
Davis brought in Luther Vandross, whose mellow,
silken-voiced solo debut, Never Too Much, was sail-
ing near the top of the charts. Franklin was stand-
oish at irst — “formal,” said Vandross. “Miss Frank-
lin wanted to know if Mr. Vandross had any songs
that were suitable for her. . . . Clearly, I had to audi-
tion.” It turned out that Mr. Vandross had “Jump to
It” for Miss Franklin: a song that awakened her gos-
pel sensibility but sublimated it through layers of
sound that were rich, pulsing, tuneful and savvy to
the moment. The result yielded her irst Top 40 hit
58
ROLLING STON E
in years, and an album of the same title that peaked
at Number 23. Jump to It it the times — rather than
embodying them — but that was just enough at a
crucial moment: Franklin was back.
The problem was, along with all that greatness
came Franklin’s temperament and the deep mys-
tery of her selves — one she claimed, one she con-
cealed; one self that raised her, another that sabo-
taged her. Vandross came to know them all. In 1983,
as they recorded Get It Right, the follow-up to Jump
to It, said Vandross, “Anytime I gave the slightest
comment, she screamed, ‘If you think you can do it
better, then you sing the damn thing.’ ‘Fine,’ I inally
said. ‘I’ll see you later, Miss Franklin. . . .’ ‘Just apol-
ogize,’ said Clive. ‘That’s all she wants.’ I listened to
the man and apologized.” He and Franklin had an
up-and-down relationship from then on, but after
Vandross died on July 1st, 2005, from a heart attack,
Franklin sang at his funeral.
By that time, a plane trip wasn’t a simple ef-
fort for Franklin. In 1983, eager to return home to
Detroit after some shows in Atlanta, she decided
to take the last light out — a two-engine prop. The
plane did a couple of drastic drops (and, Franklin
claimed, turned upside down at one point), pro-
voking fear in everybody aboard and opening an
everlasting anxiety for Franklin. She felt terrorized
by the incident and never lew again. To get to Van-
dross’ New York funeral, she traveled by bus.
Franklin both lourished and loundered in the
years after her fear of lying set in. In 1984, she re-
corded Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, with Narada Michael
Walden as primary producer. It would become her
irst platinum album. Walden was imaginative and
diverse: He had drummed with John McLaughlin
and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and with Jef Beck,
and had made R&B-dance-pop of his own for Atlan-
tic. He co-wrote the album’s two Top 10 hits, “Free-
way of Love” and the title song. Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
also included a third hit single, “Sisters Are Doin’ It
for Themselves,” a feminist declaration, sung with
Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox. Wexler, watching from
afar, said, “[Walden] helped Aretha move into what
became the most proitable chapter of her career.
But when I listen to their work together, I don’t hear
her voice soaring. I hear her screaming. . . . As a vo-
calist, you age gracefully. Did Aretha do this? I’m
afraid not.”
In 1987, Franklin returned to the source of her
greatest glory, gospel music, for another live dou-
ble album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, re-
corded this time at the family’s New Bethel Baptist
Church, and produced solely by the singer. But this
gospel outing disappointed. In part it was the low
— too many guest singers and sermons — and some
tracks ambled then faded unnaturally. Behind the
scenes, the album also illustrated traits that Frank-
lin had increasingly become known for: her mistrust
of others and her perplexing discourtesy. Frank-
lin had sung a live duet with Mavis Staples on “Oh
Happy Day” at New Bethel, but Franklin — worried
that Staples outperformed her — re-recorded the vo-
cals in the studio.
Sometimes Franklin’s feuds became as fabled as
her singing. Over the years she had tensions with
Martha Reeves, Diana Ross, Natalie Cole, Mavis Sta-
ples, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Dionne War-
wick and Patti LaBelle. In fact, Franklin and La-
Belle refused to be onstage together. [Cont. on 96]
 THE QUEEN

ARETHA’S
UNSTOPPABLE SPIRIT
Inside Her Final Years
By David Browne

L
ESS THAN A WEEK before her death, Aretha Franklin was on Yet the concert became a mighty testament to Franklin’s unbreak-
the phone with a friend, planning her next record. “I knew able spirit. Dressed in a white dress with a chinchilla sweater despite
she was under the weather,” says Harvey Mason Jr., an R&B the August heat, she danced gently during a 90-minute set that spanned
producer and session pro known for his work with Whitney decades of hits, from “Respect” to “Freeway of Love.” She ofered up a
Houston, Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake. “But she stirring gospel tribute to her mentor, the late Clara Ward, and dug into
said, ‘Harvey, when are we going to start recording? I want hit records! I the blues with a sultry version of B.B. King’s “Sweet Sixteen.” All night,
want stuf that’s going to be on the radio!’” Franklin ignored a plush red armchair that the venue had set up in case
The Queen of Soul had been outrunning her own mortality since De- she needed it. But when she sat down at the piano, she sounded mel-
cember 2010, when she underwent surgery for what was later revealed ancholy as she recalled playing long-gone local clubs. “Life’s been good
to be pancreatic cancer. The same illness that took the life of Steve to me,” she said. In her dressing room afterward, she seemed particu-
Jobs, it’s a slow-moving killer; Jobs larly tired.
lived with it for years, and Franklin By last November, when she
held on for eight. “Even in 2014, the sang her inal, short set at Elton’s
diagnosis was there,” says Kenny AIDS Foundation benefit in New
“Babyface” Edmonds, who worked York, the cancer had returned and
on her Sings the Great Diva Clas- spread. Franklin canceled her re-
sics album that year. “She would maining dates and began spending
say, ‘I’ve got some health issues I’m more time at her condo at Detroit’s
ighting. But I’m-a push on.’” Riverfront Towers. Frequently in
For Franklin, that meant a slew pain and sleeping during the day,
of big plans that might have over- she only rarely went out for walks.
whelmed many younger artists, When she was able, Franklin
including several possible new al- continued to call and text friends
bums and a biopic. She spoke with Franklin at and colleagues about all the work
both Mason and Edmonds about her final she still hoped to do. “She was op-
working on what she hoped would performance, timistic,” says Mason. “Maybe that
November 2017
be her irst album of new material was a disguise. But she never said,
since 2011. In her quest to remain ‘I feel like I have limited time.’ ” She
relevant, Franklin was determined and Mason were in regular contact
to make a radio-friendly set featuring new songs written for her by Ed- about the movie of her life; Franklin told him she hoped to sing on the
monds, Stevie Wonder and Elton John. “She was competitive and cre- soundtrack along with the announced star, Jennifer Hudson. She also
ative to the end,” says Tracey Jordan, Franklin’s friend and former pub- talked about making her irst gospel record since 1987, and she was in al-
licist. “She was always listening to the radio and wanting to know what most weekly touch with Clive Davis, who was planning a tribute concert
the kids were listening to. It kept her going.” for this fall at Madison Square Garden. “I’m going to be there,” she in-
According to Jordan, Franklin enjoyed Ariana Grande’s music, but was formed a close friend this summer.
particularly “feisty” on the subject of other younger singers who used In her last few days, Franklin was surrounded by family: her son
Auto-Tune. “She felt that was kind of cheating,” Jordan says. She was a Eddie, her niece Sabrina Garrett Owens, her cousin and backup singer
constant texter — “like crazy,” Edmonds says. (Friends could tell she’d Brenda Corbett, and her boyfriend, Willie Wilkerson, a retired Detroit
recently done her nails by the missing letters.) In her free time, she was ireighter. As word got out that she was near the end, friends including
also a devoted viewer of The Haves and the Have Nots, a TV series on the Wonder, Jesse Jackson and her second ex-husband, Glynn Turman, lew
OWN network about three Savannah, Georgia, families and their secrets. to Detroit to visit. With Jackson, whom she had irst met as the teenage
Franklin kept a presence on the touring circuit, playing roughly one daughter of the Rev. C.L. Franklin, she held hands and prayed. “We had
DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY IMAGES

concert a month for the irst nine months of 2017 — always at venues that
could be reached by bus, due to her fear of lying. She was forced to can-
cel a summer date in Toronto on doctor’s orders, but she made it to the
Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, where she’d last
performed in 2010. Mann CEO Catherine Cahill was struck by how much
weight she’d lost as her illness advanced: “It was a dramatic change.
There was concern that she wouldn’t make the show.”
a good talk,” says Jackson. “I thought she was ready. It was a miraculous
moment.” By then, Franklin was awake but unable to speak much, and
the calls and texts had stopped. “She lived all the way, always,” says Ed-
monds. “The only thing that was going to stop her was God. Other than
that, she was going to live.”
Additional reporting by Elias Leight

59
ROLLING STON E
 CLOSE-UP

.
ude

r
su r v ive d r
ompson

M
w K e na n T h become
Ho d ay s t o
st s a n d ro ugh early m ber
ho g ca st m e
N L’s lo n ge st-runnin
S
H I AT T
BY BR I A N

Sat u rday
Ni g h t EW YOR K , IT ’S  .  . .  w ell, it’s Thu
at 30 Rocke
rsday
- tr a
T
d
h
it
o mpson is an
io ns and its dis
institutionali

s it personall
ciplines, pa
y w h e
st. H
ss
n
in
th
e
g
e
b
th
y
e
e
li
m
e v

’re louted,
e s in the show,
on to new ca

middle of a
in its
st mem-
as in the case
sketch,
IVE FROM N n is b a c k . H e ta k e d , in th e

L
so be rs a
enan Thomp 57 loors ab
ove At a table re uy, so if his
night, and K st , h e ’s o n e h ost in 2015. . “ H e ’s a business g
In late A u g u o f ne c a ll . “That
feller Plaza. l a n d so d a in the glit-
n a ld T ru m p took a pho n e ss ,’ ” sa y s Thompson
sipping a Ke
te box Do ‘Hello, busi riter, who
Studio 8H, u il d in g , with jewel- o n e ri n gs, he’s like, t’s so u n fair for the w
e top of th e b p h
at moment.
T h a recog-
tery bar at th h o m e si n c e 2003. Just h d ie d in th ty p e th a t shit. To not
city he’s call
ed ne, sketc ht trying to
views of the ri st ina Evangeli v e b e en up all nig y shitty.”
e e k s a g o, his w if e , C h
ia n n a , a n d m ig h t’
th a t g o e s in to it is prett e of two black
cast
three w n a m e d G e e f o rt h e w a s o n
a daughter nize th ed at SNL, to bone
to th e ir se cond child, d a , su m m e r home. He’s W h e n T h o mpson start w a s su c h that he had
gave birth ri oice culture ing
b a c k in th e ir Tampa, Flo t h e n e e d s to make e rs , a n d th e a tc h th e re ferences ly
his family is
still ew York, bu memb
erd touchst
ones “to c
‘Who is Yes?
What
o f d ay s o f business in N o n w h it e -n . “ I’ m li k e ,
got a couple says.
black Yanke
es up s, laughing es song!’ ”
m o n a h all pass,” he a ti o n — e r m y h ead,” he say h e m o v ie? No, the Y
it quick. “ I’ v a c o v e r? T L co-
is d re ss e d for summer n t, c a rg o shorts — c k is a S ta rship Troop im a b it m ore,” says SN
Thompson ve button-f ro the fu as come to h e can do
ra really glad w
S e a n Jo h n short-slee . H e ’s b e e n doing it fo in c e th e n , “the show h an d I a re
cap, blac k jo b S H e and
. He likes his ive season an Tucker. “ ast members

HI LF IG ER , L GR O UP
o u t h is jo b a y N ig h t L w ri te r B ry u r b la c k c
ab 16th Saturd head we have fo rted the
and talking h o begins his n in g cast mem
-
p a rdy,’ where ta lly jump-sta
m p so n , w n g e st -r u n la ck Je o n a c c id e n ale
while. Tho the show’s lo h That?”
‘B
.” Thompso of black fem

AL
, b e c a m e h a t U p W it t a p ro b le m sh o w ’s la ck
29th with “W it’s no id, of the

LLC. SH IR T DE ZA RATE AT TH E W
September y.” All
r. H e b ro k e out in 2009 c re a te d : th e host of a c e ss in 2 0 13 when he sa r i n d o n es that are read
ber last yea haracter h e ard pro ns “neve gravitated
b ri ll ia n tly simple c e so n g . Now, it’s h e rf o rm e rs , that auditio ss e s w h o were ready
m e o my

BY TO M M Y
based o n a s th e p a c tr
o c a n ’t st op singing it e p la y e d parts rang- e a n t, h e sa ys, was that sa y s, “ I w ould never d
h h m e
talk show w ast season, er he
er jobs. (“Co
me on,” h ason audi-
e S N L w it hout him. L to a L es M iz-singing din to w a rd o th r le d to fr uitful midse I’m
to imagin g O.J. Simpso
n
ulary lim- ”) But the fu
ro
ys, smiling. “

IS SA
m b le -d a tin it h a v o c a b rs li k e th a t. Jo n e s, ” h e sa
ing from a B
u style trio w n siste for Leslie
r of a Migos- y nominatio an thank me
CP HATT ER . GR O O M IN G BY M EL
b e m m o u c
lobster to a m e m
He scored h
is i rs t E ti o n s. “ Y y buddy.” fter
“ L a m b o .” u n d h a s its rewards. fu l fo r h e r too! That’s m h is e a rl y d ays: Even a
ord thank
LE

ited to the w sticking aro share of pa

rt ying in etches —
— proof that sitcom deals d in zero sk
TY

e r in Ju ly a s ta lk o f H e d id h is a p p e a re
CS

as a perform w — ill
v e r a plan. There h e n he got a h e “d oughnuted” ik e , ‘Well, I’m st
M

y w a s n e le a v e w w h e re a rd . L
The longevit imself he’d shows shit afterw now,
JR ./B

ro le s; h e a lways told h “ I w a s li k e , ‘Yeah, I’m re w e re st ill “limos and d ’s e a rl y -r is ing schedule

and starring mpson says, the ’s on a da apping
ST YL IN G BYES BY PR IV E RE VA UX

g
“ B y S e a son 10,” Tho w h e re th is whole thin m o u s, b it ch!’ ” But he n a p m o st show days, sn
green lig h t. l se e fa w e r great
e re n e x t y e ar. And we’l N in e- N in e, Fred [Ar- tr ie s fo r a two-hour po 6 :3 0 p .m . “It’s never a
h to Brookly n so h e m around
here. I’ll be amberg] left r] and [ Jaso
n] dressing roo
M

60 n d y [S [H a d e e in h is ful.”
takes me. .  . .’ A [Wiig], B il l a w a k s very stress ello,
N

e n h at I lw a y guard says h
IA

la n d ia , K ri st jo b . T h at’ s w sa y s. “ It’s a c u ri ty
rt a e se
BR

P o h c k
misen] left to y else left to nap,” iliar 30 Ro the fall.
s. Everybod ar 13.” ad out, a fam Saturdays in
SU NG LA SS

ft to m o v ie I w a s in y e A s w e h e sh if ts o n
Sudeikis le a sudden rking late e says.
in g o n , a n d then all of m e n ti o n in g he’ll be wo ly n ig h t th at counts,” h
was wa it o n
iles. “It’s the
Thompson sm

Y Sp enc e
r Heyfron
PH B
PH OTO G R A
RS
T E ST DR I V E
Q U AV O O F M I G O S
The Luxe
Of-Roader
HE 2019 AMG
G63 IS A tank
T of a Mercedes,
especially
imposing in
matte black, but Migos ring-
leader Quavo isn’t intimidat-
ed. After all, he pulled up to
his nephew Takeof’s video
shoot here in the Atlanta
suburb of Doraville in his
own G-Class 4x4, painted an
electric hue he calls “slime”
green. Compared with his
other cars — McLaren 720S,
Lamborghini Aventador,
Dodge Challenger Hellcat —
Quavo considers the G-Class
a necessary expense. Last
winter, he drove it to stock
up on pantry staples during
a rare snow day down South.
“I wanted something big,
like a truck,” he says, noting
his car is “technically” not
a G-Wagon. “I feel like the
G-Wagon is for ladies, so I got
the four-by-four.”
Ladylike or no, the prepro-
duction G63 he’s test-driving
today is light-years from
the 1987 Toyota MR2 Quavo
drove back when he was the
star quarterback at Berkmar
High in nearby Lilburn. (“I
was getting shit [for it] every
62 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
ROAD
TEST
time I went to school,” he
says. “But I didn’t care — I
was a cool dude, you know
what I mean? So I didn’t care
if people roasted me.”) It
boasts 577 horsepower and
some aesthetic tweaks that
Quavo greets with approval:
a handlebar grille, rimmed
headlights.
As we head north on I-85
for a quick ield trip through
Migos’ hometown of Law-
renceville, Quavo cues up
his solo track “Bubble Gum,”
where his Auto-Tuned Grego-
rian-style chants meet punch-
ier trap lyricism. Weaving 2019
through traic, he suddenly Mercedes-
notices the new G63’s biggest AMG G63
asset: its overhauled steering Though it was
and suspension. “The drive is first built in 1979
way better,” he says. “The old for both civilian
G-Wagon is wobbly as fuck.” and military use
(the Shah of Iran
Our irst stop is Jake’s Fire-
placed one of the
works — what used to be Fla- first large-scale
mingo Bar and Grill, where orders), the boxy
Migos broke “Bando” before G-Class didn’t ar- asks if he can e-mail Quavo house, with plans to renovate
the trio could access the rive in the United some beats. By the time we it and rent it at a discount to
nightclubs and radio stations States until 2002. pull up to a bungalow with a family in need. Parked in
in Atlanta. “We came every a Mercedes Sprinter in the the driveway, the G63 nearly
weekend just to make sure yard, the sun is setting. Migos dwarfs the place Quavo used
LEFT: DAIMLER AG
the song got played,” he says, lived here with Quavo’s mom to call home. CHRISTINA LEE
“hand the DJ a drink.” Next as they cut their breakout
is Club Drive Park, where mixtape, Young Rich N*ggas. MIGOS are on tour with Drake
a pickup-basketball player Quavo has since bought the through November 17th.
PHOTOGRAPH BY Diwang Valdez
 These days, cars change so fast T E ST DR I V E

it’s hard to keep up — so we got T A Y L O R G O L D S M I T H O F D AW E S

a little help. Here, some of music’s
brightest stars take the hottest
new rides for a spin. Plus: a look
The Quick Crossover
at the tech and trends shaping AWES FRONTMAN Taylor Goldsmith needed the perfect place to listen
to rough cuts of songs for the band’s most recent album, Passwords. His
how we’ll drive in the future. D choice: iancee Mandy Moore’s Volvo. Goldsmith loved the way music
sounded in the actress’s car so much that when he had to give feedback
on early tracks, he’d just sit in the driveway and crank up her stereo. “I
never had any notes about the mixes,” he says. “I think partly because I was listening
on such a good sound system.”
It’s the day before Dawes will head out on tour, and
Goldsmith is driving a Volvo XC60 T8 on the Angeles
Crest Highway near his Pasadena, California, home. A
15-foot-long crossover, the XC60 is built for comfort, not
F1 handling, so it’s not exactly carving the mountain
roads. But it boasts both a turbocharged and super-
charged gasoline engine and an electric motor that
together make 400 horsepower and 472 pound-feet of
torque. This Volvo is sneaky-quick. 2019 Volvo
Still, it’s the stereo Goldsmith really cares about. XC60 T8
As he drives, he plays Kate Bush on the 1,400-watt, An energy-
15-speaker Bowers & Wilkins sound system, which he absorbing body
admits is pretty much the sole reason he leased his own plus high-tech
Quavo praises
Volvo (an S90) last year. That purchase, however, meant features like
the G63’s steer-
saying goodbye to his car of nearly a decade, “a Ford auto-braking and
ing assistance:
oncoming-lane
“If my drip go Focus named Hocus Pocus,” he says. “I drove it till I just
mitigation (if
over the lane, it couldn’t drive it anymore.” KY HENDERSON you veer over
move me back.”
the line, it’ll
DAWES’ “Passwords” tour runs through November. steer you back)
make the XC60 a
breakthrough in
safety.

Goldsmith calls
overnight drives
during Dawes’
My G-W early touring

big. An agon days “downright

spiritual.”

some b d it’s got

a
I want t ss. So if
trap sh o hear
in the G it, I’ll go
TOP RIGHT: VOLVO

-Wagon
.

PHOTOGRAPH BY Nathanael Turner | 63

RS ROAD TEST

Comparing her
own F-150 to
this amped-up
model, Price
quips, “My truck
has a sunroof.”

road that runs near the she says. “There’s noth-

T E ST DR I V E MARGO PRICE countryside home she shares ing like driving through
with husband and bandmate the desert and arriving in

The Upgraded
Jeremy Ivey. “I’d like to ind a
big open ield that we could
go rip some doughnuts in,”
she says.
Back in the early days,
California for the irst time.”
It helps, though, if you have
a valid license, as Price
learned the hard way when
she got pulled over recently

Pickup Truck
Price drove her band to gigs, for expired tags. She had to
pulling the gear in a rented make an emergency visit to
trailer. “I could barely pay the DMV before today’s drive.
them, so the
least I could do
is drive,” she
HE FIRST CAR wheel of a 2018 Ford F-150. says, marveling
Margo Price She grins when she ires up at the F-150’s
T owned was a
Nineties silver
the diesel engine. This F-150
is the tricked-out King Ranch 2018 Ford
13,200-pound
towing capac-
Saturn she edition — air-conditioned F-150 King ity. “We had a
bought with money she saved seats that massage your ass; Ranch 4x4 Ford Explorer
from lifeguarding — and a cab that could it a small SuperCrew and a U-Haul
promptly wrecked in her par- band; leather trim — and on the back!”
The F-series has
ents’ driveway after rushing Price wants to go for a joy- been America’s
In the title
home to make curfew. “I ride. A lifelong Ford fan, she bestselling vehi- track to her
woke up the next morning, owns a 2016 F-150 herself, cle since 1982. In 2017 LP, All
and they had it up on a tow as well as a trucker hat that 2017, Ford sold American
truck,” she says. “My dad got reads I’D RATHER PUSH A 900,000 — about Made, Price
100 per hour.
home from working a second FORD THAN DRIVE A CHEVY. sings, “Something in my “It’s not that I’m an outlaw,”
HAIR AND MAKEUP BY

shift and found my car in the Cuing up Billy Joe Shaver’s bloodline or something in my Price says with a laugh, “I’m
BOTTOM LEFT: FORD
BRITTNEY HEAD.

ditch. It was in neutral.” dark but hell-raising “Ragged gut/Says to go to California in just lazy.” JOSEPH HUDAK
On this late-July evening Old Truck” (“The greatest a rusted pickup truck.”
in Nashville, the country song about a truck ever”), “It’s a beautiful thing to MARGO PRICE is on tour
singer is climbing behind the Price takes of down a narrow drive across this country,” through November.

64 | Rolling Stone | October 2018 PHOTOGRAPHS BY Alysse Gafkjen

 As the SUV’s dominance in America

THE continues unchecked, its utilitarian

cousin, the wagon, suddenly seems chic. The New Way
WAGON’S COOL The growing segment features stylish
models from usual suspects such as
BMW and Volvo, along with a few new
to Own a Car:
Subscribe
COMEBACK surprises. Here, four options dads can
proudly take to school pickup. JESSE WILL
Hate haggling? Get bored
with your car after a year?
For the conflict-averse and
commitment-phobic, there’s
a new way to shop for a ride
Volkswagen Golf Alltrack Buick Regal TourX — not by buying or leasing
but by subscribing. Brands
If you live in a left-leaning suburb, it can be tough to de- Buick took a break from wagons for more than two decades
from Ford to BMW and more
termine which Subaru Outback is yours. The new Alltrack, before turning out this cargo-friendly (73.5 cubic feet) and
have rolled out services in
a slightly lifted all-wheel-drive wagon, stands out from the sporty model. Like most new long-roofed wagons, it’s far
which a fee gets you a new
crowd and is more fun to drive than it has the right to be from the boxy trucksters of yore. Even better, it boasts high-
or gently used car with the
(you can even opt for manual transmission). end touches (acoustic glass for a quiet ride) at a great price.
chance to swap vehicles
PRICED FROM $25,955 PRICED FROM $29,070 (in the case of Book by
Cadillac, up to 18 times per
year) and covers insurance,
maintenance and roadside
assistance. Care by Volvo,
the only nationwide program
so far, works a bit diferently:
Pay monthly for a new XC40
SUV or S60 sedan for two
years, with the option to up-
grade after one year. Bonus:
Many programs will drop of
the car in your driveway. J.W.
Jaguar XF S Sportbrake Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo
Available for years in Europe and the U.K. but new to the One of the most recent brands to jump on the bandwag- THE PRICE IS RIGHT
states, the Jag wagon is a stout, supercharged V6-powered on: the purists at Porsche, who took their Panamera sedan
machine with a low, lithe profile and handling that puts most and resculpted the roof, along with an array of engineering Canvas (from Ford)
crossovers to shame. If James Bond’s next mission included changes, to build a sports car that hauls ass (one version L . A ., SA N F R A NC I SC O
parenting duties, this might be his ride. does zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds) . . . and stuf too. $329/month and up
PRICED FROM $71,215 PRICED FROM $96,200 Care by Volvo
NAT I O NW I D E
$650-$850/month
Book by Cadillac
DA L L AS, N E W YO R K , L . A .
$1,800/month
Access by BMW
NAS H V I L L E
$1,099-$2,699/month

The Supercar Race to Hit 300 MPH

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: VOLKSWAGEN; BUICK; JAGUAR; PORSCHE; HENNESSEY

Last November, Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg set the production-car speed record: 277.9 mph. Now, the company is battling boutique
builder Bugatti and Houston-based John Hennessey to break 300 as soon as next year. But first, engineers have to overcome a few hurdles J.W.

ENGINE HORSEPOWER AERODYNAMICS TIRE HEAT

COOLING
In Hennessey’s
Venom F5 (right) and
the Bugatti Chiron,
where massive en-
gines are placed just
behind the driver,
heat exits at the
rear. Designers help
the process along
by adding plenty of
vents and ports to
the car’s body.
Ridiculous speeds require ridiculous power. The Builders want the slipperiest designs possible, There’s no consumer
Venom F5 will hit 1,600 HP — more than 12 times but the lower the drag, the lower the downforce. tire rated for 300
that of the average Honda Fit. Splitters, air dams and a rear wing help keep mph. At such speeds
the car from going airborne. and under heavy
rotational loads,
heat can destroy
tires from the inside
out. To combat this,
Michelin is testing
tire compounds
using equipment
originally developed
for aircraft.

October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 65

 RISE OF THE
MACHINES
Slowly but surely, driverless cars are
starting to cruise our streets. How
soon before everybody has one?

PEEDING AT 75 MILES PER hour on

S I-79 north of Pittsburgh, I’m at the
wheel of an $88,000 Cadillac CT6.
But I’m not driving. The CT6 — arguably
the most sophisticated self-piloted vehicle
you can buy — is seamlessly steering itself
around curves and past ill-marked exits.
Impressive as it is, Cadillac’s Super
Cruise system only works on certain roads
(see box). And it relies on a face-detecting
camera to ensure you’re paying atten-
tion. You can’t hop into a CT6, enter a
destination and settle in for a nap. Nor can
you with any of Tesla’s models. The most
advanced semiautonomous systems on
consumer cars right now are essentially
highly evolved cruise control — and for
the near future,
that’s what
they’ll continue
to be, until
companies
develop the
technology to
handle factors
This model was
like unexpected
painted dark green Cadillac CT6
to resemble Fred roadwork.
Astaire’s Phantom. So when will Super Cruise
you be able to works on roads
that have been
buy a car that
laser-mapped so
can pick you up
T E ST DR I V E LUKE SPILLER OF THE STRUTS from the bar?
the car knows its
location within
Due to the cost centimeters.

The Supersedan
T’S COOL BEING IN HERE,” Struts frontman Luke Spiller says as
he reclines his seat in the back of a Rolls-Royce Phantom. The

2019 Rolls- ‘I roof’s interior is speckled with a constellation of lights, there’s

a bottle-size fridge between the seats, and he’s cranking AC/
Royce DC on the car’s bespoke stereo: “It’s so over-the-top and
Phantom fantastic — a bit like me.” He smirks. Like the vehicle, Spiller is decked out
Extended in bespoke gear: a black-and-red leather outit with the words 21ST CENTURY
Wheelbase DANDY stitched into the back. It’s a phrase he says represents his new stage Interior of the
persona and ties into the British glam-rock disciples’ upcoming second LP, semiautonomous
The Phantom’s
Cadillac CT6
handcrafted Young & Dangerous, which is full of fun, outsize rockers. The single “Prima-
leather headliner donna Like Me” even mentions riding in the back seat of a Rolls-Royce as
is perforated by part of the Dandy character’s delusions of grandeur. of equipping a vehicle with the necessary
1,420 fiber-optic
In the song, the car is a ploy to get attention, and it does the job in real sensors, cameras and processors, not
lights that are
each fit at a
life, too. As our driver takes us up Manhattan’s Upper West Side, passersby soon. “In 10 years, maybe, somebody who
specific depth to gawk. Spiller closes the curtains and ponders how he’d customize the car — is currently buying a Lamborghini will buy
register lighter or everything from the dashboard art to the wooden interior, and that roof con- one — a half-of-one-percenter,” says Alain
darker, mimicking stellation is up for grabs. “If this was mine,” he says, “I’d want a white roof Kornhauser, director of the Program in
ROLLS-ROYCE; CADILLAC, 2

a nighttime sky. and a black body. The interior would be royal red with my name stitched Transportation at Princeton. Instead, your
BOTTOM, FROM LEFT:

into the pillows.” Until then, he’s happy to relax and let the chaufeur deal irst driverless trip will likely be in a ride-
with the traic. “As far as I’m aware, this is the deinition of the architecture share vehicle. Waymo, formerly Google’s
of luxury,” Spiller says, not a twinge of irony in his voice. KORY GROW self-driving project, is already shuttling
400 “early riders” around Phoenix, and
THE STRUTS’ new album, “Young & Dangerous,” is out in October. will welcome more by year’s end. JESSE WILL

66 | Rolling Stone | October 2018 PHOTOGRAPH BY Christaan Felber

 Take center stage.
Introducing the all-new 2019 Mercedes-Benz CLS. With a bold stance and a spotlight-grabbing silhouette, it’s a
breathtaking statement of aerodynamic elegance. And while the exterior of the CLS sees a simplified reduction in lines and
edges, the interior gains a comfortable fifth seat. A reminder that innovation really does lead to beauty. MBUSA.com/CLS

2019 CLS450 Edition 1 shown in Graphite Grey paint. European model shown. Vehicle available fall 2018. ©2018 Mercedes-Benz USA, LLC For more information, call 1-800-FOR-MERCEDES, or visit MBUSA.com.
Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez
“Machines historically,
overwhelmingly support
male candidates. White
candidates. Wealthy
candidates,” says
Ocasio-Cortez. “If you’re
not any one of those
things, you’re facing
an uphill battle.”

68 | Rolling Stone
The
Rising
Tide
A record number of women
are running for office
in 2018, leading a wave of
progressive candidates
that could change the face
of American politics

Photographs by
AK ASHA R ABUT
 The Working-Class Hero
ALEXANDRIA O CASIO - C ORTEZ Running for U.S. Congress, New York’s 14th District

I
T WAS DECEMBER 2016, and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had just
left Standing Rock — the Native
American-led protest of the Dakota
Access Pipeline — when she got a call
from a newly formed organization called
Justice Democrats. They wanted to know
if she’d be willing to run for Congress in
New York’s 14th District. The 28-year-
old former bartender had been a ield
organizer for Bernie Sanders, phone-
banked for Barack Obama and worked
in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s oice as a college
student, but Ocasio-Cortez was jaded.
“I wasn’t sure if our democracy and
its electoral politics were really salvage-
able in the interests of working-class
people,” she says. Even if it was, she
wasn’t sure she was the person to do it.
“I had always thought in order to run for
oice you had to take big money.”
Sanders’ presidential bid, though,
helped change her mind. When she got
the call, she took it seriously, especially
after Standing Rock: “To see how a pri-
vate corporation essentially militarized
itself against the American people — I
really felt like I had to do more.” She
began quietly laying the groundwork for
her campaign, collecting signatures and
anticipating the diferent ways her oppo-
nent in the primary, Joseph Crowley, the
longtime head of the Queens Democratic
machine, might try to knock her of the
ballot and out of the race.
But the closer they got to Election
Day, the more she realized he was barely
campaigning against her. “Sexism, I
think . . . informed a lot of the way this
political machine reacted to me, and I
used it to my advantage,” Ocasio-Cortez
says. “ ‘She’s uninformed, she’s young,
she’s naive, she’s nothing to worry
about’ — I was ignored for 99.9 percent
of my campaign, and I liked it that way.”
Ocasio-Cortez, of course, ended up
blowing Crowley out of the water — win-
ning the primary by 15 points. She’s now
likely to become the youngest woman
ever elected to Congress.
“I lean into the misconceptions,” she
says. “[It] plays strategically to your
advantage when you’re running a cam-
paign, because other folks will take you
less seriously. But my constituents took
me very seriously.” TESSA STUART

The #MeToo
Activist
RACHEL CROOKS
Running for Ohio’s Statehouse,
88th District

O
N ELECTION DAY 2016, Rachel
Crooks went to bed without
watching the results. A friend
texted her in the middle of the night.
“It was something ambiguous, maybe
just the word ‘sigh,’ ” Crooks says. “I
knew what it meant, but I didn’t want
to believe it.”
Weeks earlier, Crooks had accused
Donald Trump of forcibly kissing her
while she was a 22-year-old receptionist
at Trump Tower in New York. Her story
ran in The New York Times days after
the Access Hollywood tape was released.
She “felt a lot of anxiety” sharing the
abusive encounter, says Crooks, now 35.
But she knew it was important. “I was
also scared for our country.”
Crooks, a Ph.D. candidate in educa-
tion, had volunteered for both Obama
campaigns, and made public appear-
ances with the #MeToo movement near
her home in Tiin, Ohio. But she didn’t
consider running for oice until friends
suggested it: “You start to feel that peo-
ple are looking to you, and you have this
responsibility. I decided to take that on.”
She faces a GOP incumbent who
ran unopposed in the last election,
an “issue in and of itself,” she says. If
elected, Crooks plans to focus on public
education, a fair tax system and income
inequality: “As silly as it is, we had to
pick a campaign song. I was getting
suggestions that were female-oriented
— it didn’t feel right. I ended up
choosing ‘Everyday People,’ by Sly and
the Family Stone. I feel like that’s the
group I want to ight for.” ANDREA MARKS

70

‘I
’M IN A state that does not look to
women to lead,” Paulette Jordan
says. Not lately, at least. “There
was a whole legacy of women leaders
who were chiefs,” says the former Idaho
state representative, present candidate
for governor and member of the Coeur
d’Alene people. “It’s this line of responsi-
bility that you inherit.”
Reclaiming that legacy won’t be easy:
ldaho hasn’t been led by a Democrat in
23 years. Jordan, 38, is aiming to make
The Trailblazer
PAULET TE JORDA N Running for Governor of Idaho
history, not only as the U.S.’s irst Native
American governor but as the state’s irst
female one: “Women not only have the
right, the power and the ability, but we
can show a diferent kind of leadership
that’s compassionate and sincere.”
Jordan grew up in rural Idaho, horse-
back-riding on her family’s farm on the
Coeur d’Alene Reservation. After gradu-
ating from the University of Washington,
where she became an activist for indige-
nous rights, she returned home to serve
71
on her tribal council before winning her
statehouse seat in 2014.
Jordan’s promises to expand Medic-
aid, fund STEM education and protect
the environment have helped her gain
the support of progressive groups like
the People for Bernie Sanders. But her
support for the Second Amendment has
endeared her to conservatives. “I’m a
gun-owning progressive who values pub-
lic lands, hunting and ishing rights, and
autonomy at the local level,” she says.
Protecting the land from those who
would seek to privatize it — for mining,
among other uses — is an issue she
thinks everyone can agree on. “People
want to see beautiful Idaho, where we’re
protecting our clean air and water,” says
Jordan, and she’s ready to take on any-
one who disagrees — even the president.
“As long as [Trump] is president, the
position I will take as governor is [to]
always ight for the voices of the people
and defend our state.” A.M.
72
 The Fighter
MJ H E G A R
Running for U.S. Congress,
Texas’ 31st District

M
ARY JENNINGS “MJ” Hegar
has overcome a lot of
conlict in her life. The
Round Rock, Texas, native faced
sexual abuse in the military and
domestic abuse at home before
becoming an Air Force pilot, serving
three tours in Afghanistan. When
her helicopter was shot down by
the Taliban in 2009, she held of the
enemy by clinging to the skids of
the chopper and iring of her rile,
earning her the Purple Heart and the
Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor
— making her one of the few women,
including Amelia Earhart, to ever
be awarded the honor. “You cannot
come out of a situation like that and
then waste your life,” says Hegar, 42.
“I gotta pay for that somehow.”
After being injured in the crash,
her piloting days were done, and she
left the military because of a law that
kept women from holding ground-
combat positions. So she set out to
change that policy. Working with the
ACLU, in 2012, she got it overturned
— with no help from her congress-
man. “When I was ighting to open
hundreds of thousands of jobs for
women in the military, he would not
take a meeting with me,” she says of
GOP Rep. John Carter, who has spent
15 unopposed years presiding over
Texas’ deep-red 31st District. “He
doesn’t meet with anyone. He takes
a paycheck, votes the way he’s told
and isn’t interested in hearing what
people have to say.”
She decided her district needed
new leadership, especially after the
2016 election. “I feel like I’m letting
my kids down if I don’t do some-
thing,” she says. “What were you
doing in 2017 when our rights were
under attack? I need to look at them
and say I was giving it my all.”
The Role Model
Hegar’s military experience lends JAH ANA H AY E S Running for U.S. Congress, Connecticut’s 5th District
itself to national-security issues, but
her chief concerns are job growth,

health care costs, diminishing the
power of special-interest groups and
strengthening public schools. “I’m
spending a lot of my funds explaining
to voters in this district that their
votes count, they’re not alone, and
they have a choice,” she says.
Hegar’s candidacy, aided by a slick
biographical campaign ad that went
viral, has electriied progressives
nationwide, but come November she
faces a tight race against the 76-year-
old incumbent. “It’s not insurmount-
able,” Hegar says. “And I do love
insurmountable odds.” SARAH GRANT
B
EFORE SHE WON her primary
in August, Jahana Hayes had
never run for public oice. She
hadn’t even thought about it. “I spent
the last two years waiting for someone
to step up,” says Hayes, 45. “I wasn’t
seeing it, and I just decided I’ll give
it a shot.”
Hayes, whom President Obama
named National Teacher of the Year
in 2016, is used to stepping up when
no one else will. As a social-studies
teacher in a high-poverty school
district in Waterbury, Connecticut,
she mentored at-risk students. “They
were living with grandparents, they
had parents who struggled with addic-
tion, they were transient,” Hayes says.
“They would say, ‘You don’t get it,’ and
I’d say, ‘No, I do.’ ”
Hayes grew up in public housing in
Waterbury until her family was evicted
when she was in the sixth grade; her
mother was an addict for most of her
life, and at 16, Hayes got pregnant.
She earned her diploma in a program
for teen parents in the basement
of Waterbury’s city hall, and worked
three jobs while getting a college
degree, then a master’s.
As teacher of the year, she traveled
all over the country, leading work-
shops for other educators. “I learned
that we’re not that diferent,” she says.
“We have the same concerns whether
you’re in a large, urban school system
or in a one-room, rural schoolhouse.”
Now she’s poised to bring those
lessons to Congress, as the state’s
irst black Democratic representative.
“You can’t unlearn all of this stuf you
learned,” she says, “and you say, ‘OK,
how can I begin to address these prob-
lems? I can’t just sit by and let these
things happen anymore.’ ” TESSA STUART

73
The Perfe

How climate change and Wall Street

almost killed Puerto Rico

BY JEFF G OODELL

THE AFTERMATH
“Even before the storm, Puerto Rico
was headed for disaster,” says one
San Juan resident. “When Maria came, it
blew back the curtain to expose it all.”

74 | Rolling StoneH|BY
M Andres
March
arch 2018Kudacki
ect Storm

March 2018 | Rolling Stone | 75

 The Perfect Storm

In San Juan, the capitol sits on a stately bluf

overlooking the Atlantic. By the time I arrived

I
T HAS BEEN a year since Hurricane Maria wiped
out Puerto Rico. If you drop onto the island for
a visit, the recovery looks almost complete. The
San Juan airport is crowded, the cruise ships
are docking on schedule, and the piña coladas
are lowing in Old San Juan. The lights work
and your cellphone gets pretty good reception.
If you ignore a few dead traic signals and bent
road signs, you might even be able to fool your-
self into thinking nothing ever happened.
But Puerto Rico has not recovered. In fact,
it’s arguably as close to collapse as it has ever
been. The power is on and the roads are open,
but if you look closely, the entire island is held
together with duct tape and baling wire. Tens
of thousands of people are still living under the
blue tarps that were installed by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency on houses
that had their roofs blown of during the storm.
Engineers are still discovering bridges that are
in danger of collapsing, and every time it rains,
new leaks are found in concrete foundations.
Unlike, say, New York after Hurricane Sandy,
there is no sense that the rebuilding is guar-
anteed, or that there is a better future ahead.
Many Puerto Ricans I meet feel that with one
more modest storm, it will all come tumbling
down again. “The whole territory is sufering
from PTSD,” Andrés W. López, a prominent
San Juan lawyer and Democratic Party fund-
raiser, tells me.
The grief and pain erupt in surprising ways.
In June, I was visiting the remote mountain
town of Utuado, where power was still out in
places and dozens of houses had tumbled down
the mountainside, when I saw pictures on my
Twitter feed of a spontaneous protest occur-
ring that afternoon in front of the capitol build-
ing in San Juan. A few days earlier, a bombshell
study conducted by Harvard University and
published in the prestigious New England Jour-
nal of Medicine had suggested that the number
of deaths that could be attributed to Hurricane
Maria, which the Puerto Rican government
that evening, hundreds of pairs of shoes —
running shoes, high heels, children’s sneakers
— were lined up in rows in the public square
between the capitol and the ocean. Many had
notes attached, including this one beneath a
new pair of loafers: “I bought you a new pair
of shoes because you died barefoot. I adore
you, daddy.” A small crowd walked among the
shoes, their eyes blank with grief.
I talk with Juan Reus, 62, who had come to
memorialize friends and family he lost in the
storm: His father-in-law died in a nursing home
that had lost power, another friend was burned
to death in a gas explosion, a third died of lepto-
spirosis, an infection caused by bacteria found
in animal urine and spread through loodwa-
ters. He tells me of a man whose father lay dead
in his home for two days after the storm be-
cause the roads were so badly damaged they
couldn’t get him to the morgue. In the moun-
tains, he says, it was even worse: “Eventually,
they had to bury [people] in their backyard.”
Reus looks over the sea of shoes and the
ghosts of lost Puerto Ricans who seem to in-
habit them. “Hurricane Maria,” he says, “hit us
like an atomic bomb.”
He’s right. Maria may have been a force of
nature, but the disaster itself was largely man-
made. Hurricanes have been sweeping through
Puerto Rico for thousands of years. This was a
manufactured catastrophe, created by an ex-
plosive mix of politics, Wall Street corruption,
poor planning and rising carbon pollution.
S THE CLIMATE warms, our world
A is changing fast: Temperatures
are rising, rainfall is getting more
extreme, droughts are persisting
and hurricanes are getting more
intense. Craig McLean, assistant administrator
of scientiic research for the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, calls it “the
new normal.” When extreme weather collides
with civilization, the results are deadly — and
expensive. 2017 was the costliest year on record
for natural disasters in the United States, which
included drought, wildires and six major hur-
ricanes, with a total price tag of $312 billion.
Hurricane Maria was the third-costliest
storm in U.S. history. It damaged or destroyed
more than 300,000 homes, left 3 million peo-
ple without power and caused about $100 bil-
lion in damage. The Puerto Rican government
now accepts 2,975 as the oicial death toll, al-
though that is still just a best estimate and could
be revised up or down in the coming months. If fessor of atmospheric science at MIT and one of
that igure holds, it will make Maria the deadli- the leading hurricane researchers in the world,
est U.S. hurricane since 1900. It’s also powerful predicts that Category 5 storms like Maria will
TODD HEISLER/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX

oicially estimated at 64, was more like 4,500.
(In August, a new study by George Washington
University, using a diferent methodology from
Harvard, put the death toll at 2,975.) To honor
and memorialize the uncounted dead, people
from all over the territory were leaving empty
shoes at the capitol.
Contributing editor JEFF GOODELL wrote
about climate refugees in February.
and tragic evidence that climate change will hit
the poorest and most vulnerable the hardest.
Climate scientists have long warned that
burning fossil fuels will heat up the planet and
lead to bigger, wetter, more destructive hurri-
canes. It’s impossible to say exactly how much
climate change contributed to Maria’s 155-mph
winds, but it is possible to say pumping carbon
into the atmosphere makes powerful storms
like Maria more likely. Kerry Emanuel, a pro-
go from a one-in-800-years event to a one-in-80-
years event by the end of the century. “Climate
change, if unimpeded, will greatly increase the
probability of extreme events,” Emanuel said.
“We’re going to be having Harveys, Irmas and
Marias as far as the eye can see.” Some scien-
tists are now suggesting that the ive-category
hurricane scale should include a Category 6.
Dependence on fossil fuels also contributed
to the tragedy in a more direct way. Before the

76 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

storm, 98 percent of the power on the island
was generated by fossil fuels — dirty and inei-
cient diesel fuel as well as coal and natural gas,
all of which have to be imported (Puerto Rico
has no reserves of its own). The oil, coal and
gas were burned in a handful of decrepit power
plants and pushed out over a rickety transmis-
sion grid that hasn’t changed much since the
1950s. When Maria hit, the grid collapsed.
Three months after the storm, 1.5 million peo-
ple were still without power. It took nearly a
year for electricity to be restored on the is-
land, making it the second-largest blackout in
THE NEW history. It contributed to thousands of deaths unemployed. Not surprisingly, the population
NORMAL
because of everything from failed air-condition- of the island was in rapid decline, falling by
ing systems to hospitals that couldn’t power more than 10 percent during the decade be-
An ocean of dialysis machines. fore Maria. Oh, and the Puerto Rican govern-
blue tarps in There were, of course, other factors that con- ment was $70 billion in debt. The territory’s i-
San Juan tributed to the catastrophe in Puerto Rico. The nances were in such disarray, in fact, that in
shows the
scale of the
most obvious one was poverty. 2016 Congress passed the Puerto Rico Over-
crisis: Tens of The Puerto Rican economy had stopped sight, Management and Economic Stability
thousands of growing in 2005 and entered a “lost decade” Act, known as PROMESA, which established a
homes remain of negative GDP growth. The poverty rate on seven-member Financial Oversight and Man-
damaged a
the island was a staggering 43.5 percent (more agement Board. The board is essentially
year after the
storm. than three times the rate for the overall U.S.); charged with working with the government to
more than 10 percent of the workforce was turn the economy around and balance the bud-
October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 77
 The Perfect Storm
get. It is known to many Puerto Ricans as “La
Junta,” and they feel it has basically unmasked
a return to colonial rule. (Quick civics lesson:
Since 1917, Puerto Rico has been a territory of
the United States. Puerto Ricans who live on
the island are American citizens but do not
have a voting representative in Congress and
cannot vote in federal elections. They don’t pay
federal income tax, but they do pay the same
Medicare and Social Security taxes as people
on the mainland.)
The tragedy was also compounded by a slow,
weak and disorganized response by FEMA,
which left many people without food, water
and decent shelter for months. Two weeks
after the storm, President Trump visited for
less than ive hours, threw a few rolls of paper
towels to a crowd and provoked a Twitter ight
with the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz
(after Trump called her “nasty,” she went on
TV proudly wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with
the word and said, “What’s nasty is showing
your back to the Puerto Rican people”). And
even now, after the true scale of the catastro-
phe is clear, Trump remains tone-deaf to the
sufering of the people in Puerto Rico. “I think
we did a fantastic job,” he said recently, re-
sponding to a question about relief eforts in
light of the fact that nearly 3,000 Americans
were killed.
It would be easy to dismiss the death and
destruction in Puerto Rico as a freak event,
a sorry collision of politics, economics and
Mother Nature. In fact, what happened in Puer-
to Rico was a powerful warning that preparing
for life in the new normal is about a lot more
than updating building codes and convening
blue-ribbon commissions to study sea-level rise
and extreme-rain events. The story of rebuild-
ing Puerto Rico demonstrates that virtually no
aspect of our current way of life, including our
legal and inancial systems, is ready for what’s
coming our way.
78 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
HEN PUERTO RICO Gov. Ricardo
W
Rosselló arrives in Aspen, Colo-
rado, in June, he looks like he
has just come from a funeral.
He wears a dark suit, polished
black dress shoes, and is surrounded by a hive
of similarly dark-suited aides and handlers.
Only after he sits down do I notice his socks
have cartoon images of Albert Einstein on them
— a subtle reminder of his former life as a
neurobiology researcher. “I used to be a scien-
tist — then I took a wrong turn somewhere,” he
likes to say.
If there is any place in the world that is less
like Puerto Rico, it may be Aspen. It’s an old
hippie town that has been consumed by big
mountains, big houses and big money. One of
the highlights of the summer is the Aspen Ideas
Festival, which attracts a mix of the smart, the
provocative and the rich who gather to debate
the most pressing issues of the day, as well as to
drink whiskey at the Hotel Jerome bar and do
early-morning yoga.
It might not be fair to say that Rosselló had
come to the festival to beg for money, but it
wouldn’t exactly be wrong, either. Puerto Rico
is bankrupt, and before it can have microgrids
and innovation hubs and all the other won-
drous things the governor likes to talk about, it
needs to have a thriving economy. Puerto Rico
is due to get $50 billion or more in disaster-
relief funds to help rebuild what has been bro-
ken, but those funds will dribble in over the
next ive to 10 years and will, at best, get Puerto
Rico back to where it was before the storm. If
the island is truly going to recover, Rosselló
has to convince people — especially people with
money — that Puerto Rico is a good place to
do business.
Rosselló, 39, is part of the Puerto Rican elite,
the son of Pedro Rosselló, governor from 1993
to 2001. He was a geeky but athletic kid who
represented Puerto Rico in the Internation-
al Mathematical Olympiad and was a three-
time junior tennis champion on the island.
He studied chemical engineering at MIT and
earned a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the
University of Michigan. He co-founded a com-
pany called Beijing Prosperous Biopharm that
developed drugs to ight cancer, diabetes and
HIV. “I planned to save the world,” he tells me.
In 2012, Rosselló decided he wanted to save
Puerto Rico instead. After returning to San
Juan, he started a group to advocate for state-
hood, but ended up running for governor. He
had plenty of political connections, but it didn’t
help that his father’s administration is widely
viewed as one of the most corrupt in Puerto
Rican history. (Víctor Fajardo, Puerto Rico’s
education secretary under Pedro Rosselló,
THE DAMAGE pleaded guilty to participation in a $4.3 million
DONE extortion scheme.)
But “Ricky,” as his friends call him, con-
vinced voters he was a new generation of
Left: Toa Baja,
just outside politician, driven more by data and facts than
San Juan, saw family ties and cronyism. From the beginning,
flooding of 13 he’s been outspoken about the threat of climate
feet. Right: A change. He joined California Gov. Jerry Brown
destroyed
home in
and other progressive governors in condemn-
Orocovis. The ing Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris
storm is now Agreement. “Climate change is a real problem
believed to be for all and requires immediate action to ensure
the deadliest
future generations are left with a sustainable
U.S. hurricane
in more than a planet,” Rosselló said in a statement less than
FROM LEFT: CHRISTOPHER GREGORY; ANDRES KUDACKI
century. “Maria four months before Maria hit.
hit us like an In Aspen, Rosselló participates in a discus-
atomic bomb,”
sion titled “Lessons From Natural Disasters.”
says a resident.
During a 30-minute talk, he introduces what
he calls his blank-canvas approach to rebuild-
ing Puerto Rico. It is an appealing concept for
a place that’s riddled with corruption, decay
and bureaucracy. At one point, he pulls a piece
of white paper out of his pocket, unfolds it and
shows it to the audience. “This is my blank
canvas for Puerto Rico,” he says. The paper
looks like the doodlings of a child, with green
 arrows and triangles and lists written in difer-
ent-color ink with headings like “Energy 2.0”
and “World-Class Education for All.” He talks
about “capacity building” and “transparency”
and about Puerto Rico being “open for busi-
ness.” It is all very dreamy and inspiring, as
long as you don’t think too hard about where
the money will come from. Or, for that matter,
about the real elephant in the room: Puerto
Rico’s $70 billion debt.
Once upon a time, Puerto Rico’s econom-
ic future seemed bright. In the late 1970s and
1980s, the economy was booming. Drug com-
panies, attracted by a loophole that basically
allowed businesses to operate tax-free, rushed
to open manufacturing plants on the island (for
years, the coastal town of Barceloneta, where
Pizer’s Viagra plant was located, was known
as Ciudad Viagra).
The island’s economic destiny changed in
1996. Pressured by House Republicans to cut
the deicit, President Clinton phased out the tax
loophole over the next decade. The pharmaceu-
tical companies led. The economy tanked. Tax
revenues collapsed. In May 2006, much of the
government, including all the public schools,
was temporarily shut down. But rather than cut
spending to make up for lost tax revenue, the
Puerto Rican government went the other way.
It started borrowing money. Two years later,
when the global inancial crisis hit, it borrowed
even more. Broke and desperate, it turned to
high-risk capital appreciation bonds and other
inancial instruments with astronomical inter-
est rates. A 2016 report on Puerto Rico’s debt
describes these loans as “the municipal ver-
sion of a payday loan.” Instead of jump-starting
CHRISTOPHER GREGORY, 2
the economy, it pushed the island deeper into
joblessness, recession and bankruptcy. In 2015,
then-Gov. Alejandro García Padilla warned that
the debt was “not payable.”
That didn’t stop Wall Street from lending
Puerto Rico money, however. From as early as
2005, there were signs the government wasn’t
going to be able to repay the loans. But the
banks didn’t care: They made money on bond
transaction fees, and the high interest rate on
these bonds pumped up their balance sheets.
The politicians didn’t care either; they just
wanted to keep the money lowing. Also, be-
cause Puerto Rico is not covered by U.S. bank-
ruptcy laws, many banks and hedge funds as-
sumed that if worse came to worst, they could
take the commonwealth to court and get their
money. They all knew about what Paul Singer,
the notorious founder of Elliott Management,
whom Bloomberg called “the World’s Most
Feared Investor,” had done in Argentina. After
buying up $600 million in bonds at a steep
discount, the hedge fund launched into a 15-
UNNATURAL year legal battle during which it tried to seize,
DISASTERS among other things, an Argentinian naval ship
as collateral for unpaid debts. Elliott eventually
won a court settlement for $2.4 billion.
Right: A
collapsed road When Congress stepped in with “La Junta,”
in Levittown, however, that fantasy ended. The laws govern-
linking to Toa ing the inancial oversight board basically made
Baja (left). With it impossible for Wall Street irms and other
the island more
than $70 billion
creditors to simply seek payment for their debt
in debt, its in court. It was up to the board to decide which
infrastructure bills Puerto Rico should pay. “The hard left
was damaged sees the board as nothing but tools of oppres-
even before
sive banking and political interests determined
Hurricane
Maria. Three to balance the budget on the backs of workers
months after and the poor, which it is,” says Tom Sanzillo,
the storm, 1.5 director of inance at the Institute for Energy
million people
Economics and Financial Analysis, who fol-
were still
without power. lows Puerto Rico’s budget negotiations closely.
“At the same time, board proponents see it as
a new forum that can be used to resolve iscal
problems and set a new responsible course —
and it’s that too.”
A consequence of this decade-long inancial
decline was little investment in infrastructure
— the roads, highways, bridges, water and sew-
age systems, and electric grid were all more or
less abandoned. There was no money for build-
ing inspectors to make sure houses were built
to code (in fact, there were only a handful of
inspectors on the entire island) and no funds
to stockpile medication in rural areas, much
less to build, say, a new hospital for Vieques,
a municipal island of 9,000 people with woe-
fully inadequate health care. “Even before the
storm, Puerto Rico was headed for a humani-
tarian disaster,” says López, the San Juan law-
yer. “That was obvious to anyone who cared to
look. When Maria came along, it blew back the
curtain to expose it all.”
Now, post-Maria, the central question the Fi-
nancial Oversight and Management Board faces
is this: What’s higher priority, paying back the
hedge funds or building schools? “Wall Street
wants them to cut services, schools, infrastruc-
ture,” says Sanzillo. “If you do that, the system
goes into a tailspin. It simply doesn’t work. The
only way forward is to cancel the debt, invest
in the economy, and rebuild roads and infra-
structure.” Not long after the storm, a group of
economists, including Nobel laureate Joseph
Stiglitz, basically agreed, publishing an open
letter suggesting that Puerto Rico’s debt should
be largely erased so that the commonwealth
can focus on rebuilding. In July, a group of sen-
ators, including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sand-
ers and Kirsten Gillibrand, all of whom are like-
ly presidential contenders in 2020 and thus
have reason to woo Puerto Ricans who live on
the U.S. mainland (and are therefore eligible
to vote in federal elections), introduced a bill
that would essentially wipe out the common-
wealth’s debt. But as long as Trump Republi-
cans are in charge, the bill will go nowhere.
Rosselló himself has gone from Wall Street
friend to foe. During his 2016 campaign, he ar-
gued that paying back the debt was important to
Puerto Rico’s future creditworthiness. In fact,
Rosselló was so friendly to Wall Street that he
was pegged as “the bondholders’ candidate.”
October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 79
 The Perfect Storm
After he took oice, that changed. He start-
ed calling Puerto Rico’s debt iasco “a big Ponzi
scheme.” In April, after Rep. Rob Bishop, a Re-
publican who helped establish the financial
oversight board, suggested that Puerto Rico
should listen to inancial creditors about how
to stabilize inances and accept labor reforms
and drastic cuts to pensions, Rosselló ired back
a blistering letter: “I cannot and will not permit
you to elevate concerns of bondholders on the
mainland above concern for the well-being of
my constituents.” In July, he basically declared
open war on the oversight board, iling a law-
suit against it that challenged its authority to
make budgetary decisions.
If the Puerto Rican government can’t get
a break from debt payments,
there is little chance Rosselló 1 tric power than they do
can make the kind of invest-
ments necessary to attract new
businesses and keep the econ-
omy going — let alone rebuild.
And if the economy spins fur-
ther down, tax revenues will
crash, giving the island less and
less money. More people will
leave Puerto Rico for the main-
land, further depleting the tax
base. This is how capitalism be-
comes an engine of destruction,
not rebirth.
After his talk, I ask Rosselló if
he believes Puerto Rico’s recov-
ery is being held hostage by Wall Street greed.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he says blunt-
ly. “But right now, I’m just trying to get the
economy moving again.”
HEN HURRICANE MARIA hit,
W
Pedro Sáez tried to protect him-
self by climbing under the bed.
But the bed was too low, so he
could only get his feet and legs
under it. Sáez, who is 56, a stooped, sickly man
with most of his front teeth missing, lives in a
small house in Vieques, where Maria irst made
landfall. It’s six months after the storm, but you
can still see the damage caused by Maria: Part
of Sáez’s roof is covered in a blue tarp, and
there is a soggy, rotting mattress sitting near the
front porch. As I look at his little bed, I try to
imagine his terror as he tried to hide under it,
the 155-mph wind blowing outside.
“I survived,” he tells me. His mother, Ana,
wanders by in a faded white dress. She has a dis-
tant gaze in her eyes and does not look at me.
“I’m trying to ix up the house now,” he says.
He says he got a few thousand dollars from
FEMA, which is more than many people I’ve
talked to but nowhere near enough. He turns
away for a few minutes to talk with a volun-
teer from ViequesLove, a nonproit that’s help-
ing people like Sáez rebuild their lives. The vol-
unteer, Brittany Bresha, is trying to persuade
Sáez to let her take him to a dentist to get his
teeth ixed.
When he turns back to me, I ask him what
he’s going to ix up irst on the house. I expect
him to say the roof. Instead, he says, “I want
solar panels.”
80 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
“Why solar panels?”
He looks at me like I’m nuts. “So I can have
electricity whenever I want it!”
In Puerto Rico, there are now millions of
people who think like Sáez. If the hurricane
taught them one thing, it’s that electricity is
just as important as, perhaps more important
than, food and water. And rather than depend
on a corrupt, expensive electric-power utility
like the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority
(PREPA) to deliver it to them, they want to pro-
duce it themselves. In a place like Puerto Rico,
creating your own power is a radical political
act, a way of thumbing your nose at the govern-
ment that has long abused you with high prices
and crappy service.
3 In recent years, PREPA has spent
In fact, if there is one place where Rosselló’s
“blank canvas” has some traction, it’s in re-
building the island’s power system. Everyone
agrees the old system was ancient, ineicient
and expensive. Now that it’s been destroyed,
why not build something stronger, cleaner and
cheaper? For Rosselló’s economic development
plans, not to mention the comfort and safety of
the people on the island, nothing is more im-
portant than a reliable, afordable power sup-
ply. And there are dozens of renewable-energy
companies, from Tesla to SunPower, that are
eager to get started. “For anyone in the solar in-
dustry, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” says
Ron Leonard, a longtime solar entrepreneur.
“You have billions of dollars of investment that
is just waiting to low onto the island.”
But it is not lowing, and there are two main
reasons for that. The irst is the Staford Act,
1988 legislation that requires all infrastructure
funded with FEMA money to be rebuilt more
or less as it had been before the storm. That
means if an ineicient, old oil-burning power
station is destroyed in a storm and you want to
use FEMA funds to rebuild it, you have to build
another oil burner.
The second is a fundamental mistrust of
PREPA, a government-run monopoly that sells
electricity at twice the price of power compa-
nies on the mainland yet still managed to fall
$9 billion in debt. You say “PREPA” to most
Puerto Ricans and they recoil in horror. They
tell you stories about power outages and sky-
high bills that threaten to
bankrupt them (I met a
number of Puerto Ricans
who pay more for elec-
for rent). They tell you
about the latest fuel-oil
scam and how PREPA ex-
ecutives are making mil-
lions by purchasing low-
grade oil at a discount,
billing customers for
high-grade oil and pock-
eting the diference. “We
spend $8 million on fossil
fuels every day,” said Li-
onel Orama-Exclusa, an
2 energy expert at the Uni-
versity of Puerto Rico.
between $2 billion and $3 billion on
fossil fuels annually. “That money
goes out of Puerto Rico, out of our
economy,” said Orama-Exclusa. “If
we develop renewables, those mon-
ies will stay in the island.”
Puerto Rico, of course, is a poten-
tial paradise for renewable energy
— wind, solar, water (hydropower)
and biomass. “It’s not that we can
go 100 percent, we can even go 200
percent [renewable],” Orama-Exclusa
said. A report has estimated that
truly making Puerto Rico’s grid hur-
ricane-ready — including rerouting
transmission lines of mountaintops,
hardening substations and towers,
NO RELIEF and moving to a more decentralized grid pow-
ered by more renewable energy — would cost
(1) Despite the
$17.6 billion and take a decade.
rising death After the storm, Rosselló announced that the
toll, Trump best way to ix PREPA was to privatize it, sell-
maintains his ing of the power plants while retaining con-
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS; DAN BAYER/
ASPEN INSTITUTE; XAVIER GARCIA/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
administration
trol of the transmission grid. While this might
did a “fantastic
job.” (2) Puerto sound like a decent way to attract some much-
Rico Gov. needed capital, the old power plants are es-
Ricardo sentially worthless. “Their value is the value of
Rosselló. (3)
the real estate they sit on,” says David Crane,
Protesters left
thousands of former CEO of NRG Energy. Even more trou-
shoes in front bling is the fact that PREPA is one of the largest
of the capitol employers on the island, with 6,000 workers,
in San Juan in many of whom allegedly got their jobs not be-
June to
memorialize cause they’re grid wizards but because they are
the dead. related to local politicians.
The best solution, of course, would be to
just abandon the wreckage of PREPA. As Lynn
Jurich, the CEO of Sunrun, a major residential-
solar company, puts it, “If you are going to start
over, why not do it right?”
As it stands, most solar entrepreneurs are
sitting on the sidelines, waiting for PREPA to
unravel. And it’s happening fast. (The compa-
ny has been through four CEOs since Maria.)
A few solar companies are now starting to take
cautious steps into the market. In June, Sun-
run announced it would begin ofering a solar-
rooftop-and-battery package in Puerto Rico.
Instead of charging for the solar panels and
batteries upfront, which can cost tens of thou-
sands of dollars, Sunrun basically leases the
technology to homeowners under a 25-year
service agreement that includes installation,
maintenance and insurance.
Jurich says she thinks they’ll be successful no
matter what happens to PREPA: “The costs for
rooftop solar are more or less on parity with
what customers in Puerto Rico are paying for
dirty power today.”
Jurich foresees the day when neighborhoods
of 200 houses or so band together to create
microgrids that can share power and feed it
onto the larger grid, creating what she calls “a
virtual power plant.” Other solar companies
have similar plans, using batteries and solar
or wind to create reliable,
stable sources of power
on the island. “PREPA can
speed up the revolution, or
“Wall Street wants them to cut
it can slow it down, but in
the long run, it can’t stop
services, schools, infrastructure,”
it,” one energy expert tells
me. “It’s a triumph of tech-
says an economist. “If you do that,
nology over politics.”
Right now, solar panels
are beginning to appear
on ire stations and hospi-
the system goes into a tailspin.”
tals around Puerto Rico, as
well as on the second homes of rich mainland-
ers in places like Dorado and Rincón. Most peo-
ple, however, are stuck with the crappy old
PREPA system. For Sáez and millions of Puerto
Ricans like him, the dream of a solar paradise,
powerful as it may be, is still in the distance.
N THE HILLS around Utuado,
I most of the houses are aban-
doned. Some have tumbled
down the mountainside, leaving
just a concrete foundation be-
hind, like a footprint of the lives that were once
lived there. Abandoned dogs wander the dirt
roads, and horses are starving behind locked
gates. The roads are empty. The only people I
see as I drive around the region with Antonio
Paris, an astrophysicist who grew up in Utuado
but now lives in Tampa, Florida, are some
lonely-looking men ishing of the dam at Lago
Dos Bocas. “Before the storm, this place was
thriving,” Paris says. He returned a number of
times in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
He set up a GoFundMe campaign to help fi-
nance his relief eforts, which included distrib-
uting hundreds of solar lashlights, radios and
water ilters to Utuado residents. But now, 10
months after the storm, most of the people he
helped are gone. He estimates that 90 percent
of the homes in the area are deserted. “These
people will never return,” Paris says. He watch-
es a vulture land on a dead snake in the road.
“Instead, I think nature is coming back and will
reclaim this place.”
The scale of the housing crisis after Maria
is still visible as you ly into San Juan and see
the ocean of blue tarps from the air. Hurri-
cane Maria destroyed at least 70,000 homes
and damaged another 300,000. There are no
hard numbers on how many of those have been
repaired, but anyone who spends a few hours
outside San Juan can see that many homes are
still in bad shape. Roofs are gone, windows
are missing, foundations are tilted. Many of
them will never be rebuilt because they were
“informal” — that is, illegal, built without the
proper title or permits — and thus did not qual-
ify for FEMA funding. As much as half the hous-
ing in Puerto Rico its into this category, and
one of the laudable goals of the rebuilding
efort is to shift people into better-built, legally
sound housing.
To help with this, the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development has awarded
Puerto Rico $18.5 billion in housing grants. Ri-
cardo Alvarez-Díaz, a prominent Puerto Rican
architect, estimates that 70,000 new homes
will be built in Puerto Rico over the next few
years. “The challenge,” says Alvarez-Díaz, sit-
ting in a San Juan cafe late one night, “will be
designing this new housing so that it strength-
ens communities rather than destroys them.”
He mentions the shoe memorial at the capitol,
which had moved him deeply. “If we do this
right, it’s a way of respect for the dead. A way of
showing their death is not meaningless.”
I mention my visit to Utuado and all the
empty homes there. “You are going to see a big
shift in where people live,” he predicts. “Cer-
tain remote areas like that — well, they’re not
going to be rebuilt. You’re going to see more
people moving into the cities, where a whole
new generation of housing is going to be built.”
Alvarez-Díaz invites me to an open house
the next day for a new development called
the Bayshore Villas, located near the water in
an industrial area of San Juan, which he says
is representative of the kind of housing he
hopes to see in Puerto Rico in coming years.
When I arrive the following day, I discover that
the villas look a lot like a middle-class condo
development you might ind in Atlanta or Phoe-
nix: 174 units in a dozen separate buildings with
courtyards, small balconies and commercial
space. Its buildings are all made of concrete,
designed to withstand even the most brutal
storms. But what’s really new, Alvarez-Díaz had
explained the night before, is that the develop-
ment was built through a public-private part-
nership, allowing about 80 percent of the units
to be devoted to government-subsidized hous-
ing, while the rest are rented at market rate,
which ranges from $800 for a three-bedroom
apartment to $370 for a one-bedroom.
In a world with so much wreckage and de-
spair, even a new condo development can be
cause for celebration. That morning, digni-
taries like Fernando Gil Enseñat, Puerto Ri-
co’s secretary of housing, gathered in a court-
yard to mark the occasion. (Gov. Rosselló was
supposed to be there too, but he canceled at
the last minute.) I wandered into one of the
model units to have a look, and it felt like I
was stepping into a Pottery Barn showroom.
It reminded me of the Home Depots and Best
Buys that I had seen driving over that morn-
ing, islands of middle-class aspiration in the
new Puerto Rico. If you have a good job, you
can live in a storm-proof concrete apartment by
the water and not worry too much about what
Mother Nature might throw your way.
But what if you don’t have a good job? What
if you’re one of the tens of thousands of Puer-
to Ricans whose house was blown down in the
storm and who doesn’t have the money to ix
it? What if you believe, as many Puerto Ricans
do, that the game is rigged against you, that you
will never be given the full rights of U.S. citizen-
ship? What if living in a Pottery Barn catalog is
not your idea of the good life?
HIS YEAR, THE annual May Day
T parade in San Juan began peace-
fully enough. People marched
down Ponce de León Avenue,
known as the Golden Mile,
through the heart of the island’s inancial dis-
trict, carrying signs of protest against health
care cuts and tuition increases. Some wore
T-shirts or carried placards painted with black
Puerto Rican lags, a symbol of resistance. Near
the end of the march, protesters clashed with
police in riot gear. Chaos erupted. Protesters
threw rocks, and the police launched tear-gas
canisters into the crowd. After a few minutes of
scuffling, people dispersed. But as Carlos
Cofiño, a 20-year-old college student at the
University of Puerto Rico who was there to pro-
test tuition increases, told a journalist covering
the march, “We’re on a downward spiral.”
Among the faces in the crowd that day was
Oscar Lopez Rivera, who laid low and kept his
distance from the police. Rivera is one of the
most controversial igures on the island — he is
seen by some as the Nelson Mandela of Puer-
to Rico, a man who has sufered years of politi-
cal persecution as a result of his belief in justice
and independence for Puerto Rico. To others,
he is nothing more than “a fucking terrorist,”
as one prominent Puerto Rican described him
to me, a man who has killed innocent people in
pursuit of his own political ideology.
What no one disputes is that in the 1970s
Rivera was one of the leaders of the Fuer-
zas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertor-
riqueña (FALN), a clandestine paramilitary
organization devoted to Puerto [Cont. on 97]
October 2018 | Rolling Stone | 81
Music

A PRINCE
WE’VE NEVER
SEEN BEFORE
A home demo from
the Eighties shows
us a young genius
exploring bold,
fun intimacy
By KORY GROW

Prince
Piano & A
Microphone 1983
WARNER BROS.

I
N 1983, Prince was a bud-
ding genius on a historic
run that would even-
tually redeine pop. A year
earlier he’d exploded into the
Top 10 with his synth-funk
double-LP opus, 1999, and he
was already hard at work on
Purple Rain, the album/ilm
project that would render
a version of his life story in
Beatles-size proportions.
One day, in the midst of
all this, he sat down in his
Chanhassen, Minnesota,
home studio and knocked
out a demo, just him at
the piano. Most of what he
recorded were works-in-
progress, along with a couple
of beloved covers and playful
improvisations. It’s likely he
never would have let this see
the light of day; it’s too

ILLUSTRATION BY
Olaf Hajek
Reviews Music

PRINCE
unguarded and intimate even for an artist as
ELLE KING’S RAW REVELATION
bold as he was. Now, that session has been The singer channels real trauma into bracing
unearthed as Piano & A Microphone 1983, a
fascinating look at a side of his brilliance we
retro rock By CHR ISTOPHER R. W EINGARTEN
didn’t know existed at the time.

E
“Can you turn the lights down?” Prince asks LLE KING’S break- impressive second album,
earnestly as he plays a jazzy chord sequence through 2015 hit “Ex’s Shake the Spirit, progresses.
at the start of the proceedings. Essentially and Oh’s” pulled of a At the start of the LP, she’s
all by himself, he is loose, freewheeling and neat trick: It was catchy main- the venomous man-eater of
impressionistic, litting between sketches — stream rock that felt fresh songs like “Shame” (“Trou-
90 feather-light seconds of “Purple Rain,” a without making concessions ble’s what you need/That’s
spacious reworking of 1999’s steamy “Inter- to hip-hop or EDM. King’s what you getting with me”),
national Lover” — exercising his ingers as he touchstones were Nancy “Baby Outlaw” (“Pity the man
plays broad chords like a piano man noodling Sinatra, Dusty Springield, that stands in my way/I’m a
on some Sinatra classics at the Waldorf. Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti- nightmare even in the day”)
Along those lines, you can see him folding western-soundtrack twang and “Man’s Man” (“Oh, and
his own artistry into American musical history.
Elle King by the way/While you were
In one audacious moment, he performs a soul- Shake the Spirit away/I fucked somebody on
ful interpretation of the spiritual “Mary Don’t EPIC our one-year wedding anni-
You Weep,” a song done by everyone from # versary day”).
Aretha Franklin to Bobby Darin, and then The back end of the
throws in a bit of his own, “Strange Relation- record, however, is more
ship,” a funk workout that eventually made regretful, itting a down-
1987’s Sign ‘O’ the Times. to-earth Americana sound
What emerges is the rare posthumous created by King and her
release that adds a whole new level to our ive-piece rock band, the
understanding of a great artist. Listening to it Brethren. Slow-winding,
now is like a glorious act of voyeurism, spying country-fried soul throwback
on a genius at work, watching his ideas unfold ballads like “Good Thing
in real time, exploring a side of his art he Gone” turn the spotlight back
wasn’t quite ready to show the world. on herself: “We could’ve tried
Sometimes he’s playful and funny, going a bit harder/I could’ve prac-
in and out of a gruf James Brown–like voice ticed more patience/Look at
(exclaiming “Good gawd!” here and there) and this good love we’ve wasted,”
stomping his feet as he plays. He opens with she croons. “Sober” plays like
“17 Days,” later the B side to “When Doves country bummer queen Mary
Cry,” beatboxing the drum part and humming Gauthier, and “Runaway”
the synth line. On the previously unreleased isn’t too far from the Del
“Cold Cofee and Cocaine,” a jumpy, Ray Shannon song of the same
Charles–style blues number, he hufs, “This is name but gender-lipped to
the last time, baby, I eat over at your place/All reveal that the woman doing
I get is a cup of cold cofee and cocaine and the running away has been
your ugly face — look out.” In more restrained and T. Rex glam shuffle. Her ing rocker-heroine wailing hurt by love too many times.
moments, he’s vulnerable, as on a spare cover debut LP, Love Stuff, illed out through her pain. It’s hard to pinpoint the
of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” that sound with a relatable Turns out, she was living exact amount of pride versus
As insightful as it is, Piano & A Microphone is persona — a blues rocker that drama too. King spent remorse in “It Girl,” a cheeky
also imperfect: You can hear him lub the running from time, addiction, the years since her initial suc- indie-confessional-meets-girl-
rhythm and adjust the tone of his voice. But the devil and, of course, her cess dealing with the fallout group novelty song about
that’s also part of what makes it so moving pesky exes. Whereas fellow of a short, secret, troubled giving middle-school hand
now. Here is a truly spontaneous moment, retro-loving diva Lana Del marriage, a subsequent jobs, but its “What if Liz Phair
something we can share with a departed icon, Rey played the coy, gothy, divorce, substance abuse and sang for the Crystals?” vibe
his 88 keys and anyone kind enough to dim California dreamer, King rehab. You can hear her map is hilarious, irresistible and
the lights. came on like a butt-kick- out her story, lyrically, as her occasionally poignant: “You
could be the It girl/If you use FROM TOP: SHANE MCCAULEY/RCA RECORDS; JAMIE MORGAN
a little spit, girl.”
She ends the album with a
BREAKING burst of resilience. “Little Bit
of Lovin’ ” is a six-minute
gospel-rock rave-up that
Christine and the Queens’ Omnivore Pop suggests Aretha Franklin in
NO ONE HAS harnessed the spirit of pop reinvention in recent years better than Héloïse 1967 via the Rolling Stones in
Letissier, the French singer who declared “I’m a man now” on her first album three 1969. “I don’t need nobody/
years ago. Cutting her hair short and now calling herself Chris, she’s a self-proclaimed I don’t need no one/But I still
pansexual whose second album as Christine and the Queens, Chris, references Eighties got a little bit of lovin’ left in
Letissier Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, Nineties G-funk and both Jacksons (Michael and Janet). me,” she sings. The sound is
The bright bounce of “Girlfriend” and “5 Dollars” finds her taking gratification wherever she vintage, the hard-won
finds it, but the softness of ballads like “What’s-Her-Face” hits even harder. JOE LEVY swagger is brave and
brand-new.

84 +++++Classic | ++++Excellent | +++Good | ++Fair | +Poor RATINGS ARE SUPERVISED BY THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE.
 Reviews Music

Quick Hit
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RAW POWER On her 10th LP, Chan Marshall

Cat Power displays the authority of a seasoned blues-
Wanderer woman. Highlights: the solidarity anthem
“Woman,” with Lana Del Rey, and a riveting
4
Domino
cover of Rihanna’s “Stay.” DAVID FRICKE
FRICKE’S PICKS

INDIE GUITAR HERO Vile is a master at

Kurt Vile

Bottle It In
chill fingerpicking and wry stoner whimsy;
the 10-minute “Bassackwards” is lazy, cob-
web-minded heaven, and “Loading Zones”
4 Petty’s
Matador
big-ups his gift for finding good parking. Unearthed
Jlin
FUTURIST JAMS America’s finest young
Treasures
electronic composer scores a piece for

Autobiography choreographer Wayne McGregor with her

signature cutting-edge synthetic textures
# Diving into an
Planet Mu
and brain-blendering pinball beats. incredible box of
unreleased music
NASHVILLE REBEL Church doubles down
Eric Church on soulful Southern-rock storytelling, and Arriving just a year after Tom

Desperate Man gets political on “The Snake,” a slithering

partisan parable suggesting strugglers of
# Petty’s death, the four-disc An
American Treasure is the kind of
EMI Nashville
all stripes consider their real enemies. memorial box set that usually
appears later in an artist’s wake,
when the missing eases and
hunger mounts for alternate
G LO O M & B O O M Swedish-Australian
Say Lou Lou twins excel at bigger-is-better pop
takes and abandoned songs.

Immortelle gloominess; their funereal cover of the

Church’s “Under the Milky Way” adds
# Opening with one of the first
and best of those orphans, “Sur-
Cosmos render,” from his 1976 first-album
pathos to a dreamy New Wave classic.
sessions with the Heartbreakers,
here is Petty’s life in relentlessly
high standards — the jangling
Elvis Costello and VINTAGE E.C. Costello evokes the biting
optimism of “Keep a Little Soul,”
the Imposters elegance of his Eighties watershed Impe-
ditched in 1982; the bar-band
Look Now
rial Bedroom, with help from pals like Burt
Bacharach and Carole King, who co-wrote
# boot-camp memoir “Gainesville,”
left of 1999’s Echo — and exper-
Concord the soul-kissed “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter.”
imental verve. “Wake Up Time” is
a sublime electric-country waltz
from the early work on 1994’s
Tom Morello RAGING ON A rap-rock/EDM throwdown
Wildflowers; a campfire-folk take
helmed by the Rage Against the Machine
on that album’s “Don’t Fade on
The Atlas guitarist; when it jells (see “Rabbit’s
3 Me” has a Petty vocal that could
Underground Revenge,” with Killer Mike, Big Boi and
Bassnectar), the results are explosive.
have come from The Free-
Mom + Pop wheelin’ Bob Dylan. Even the hits
in these 60 tracks go through
changes, often in performance

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Dose Your enties rock. Frontman Damian Abraham’s
3 acoustic “I Won’t Back Down”
Dreams gale-force growl can be a bit much, but
the sense of adventure is undeniable.
from 20 years later). And the
Merge oldest song here, “Lost in Your
Eyes” — a deep-soul ballad from
Petty’s struggling Seventies

SHUTTERSTOCK; MICHAEL CAMPANELLA/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

Slash, feat. Myles Kennedy EMPTY GUNS The boogie-rocking third with his pre-Heartbreakers band
and the Conspirators LP from Slash’s new crew often recalls Mudcrutch — still sounds like a

Living the Dream

Guns N’ Roses (especially singer Myles
Kennedy’s Axl-like vocals). There’s hot gui-
@ classic in waiting. “I’ve got so
much music left in me that I
Snakepit tar-playing too, but it lacks GNR’s bite. want to get out,” Petty told
me in 2014, still a youthful
63, when asked about the
MOD ROD Stewart resumes his career as pressures of mortality. “I
Rod Stewart pop player and disco cheeseball. His voice don’t know if I’ll have the
has held up, ditto his rakish likability. But
Blood Red Roses the modern production grates, and the
time.” He worked with that
same urgency all down
Republic
nostalgia trips are mostly too sentimental. the line.

CONTRIBUTORS: JON DOLAN, KORY GROW, WILL HERMES, MAURA K. JOHNSTON, CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN

Tom Morello

86 | Rolling Stone | October 2018

Reviews Music
GUIDE
Essential LPs
that defined the
island sound’s
golden age
By WILL HERMES
B
ORN IN Jamaica, reg-
gae grew from local
styles (mento, ska,
rocksteady, Rastafari drum
chants) and American R&B to
become a musical movement
as rich as any in the past
century. Over the decades, its
bedrock sound has mutated
into dub and digital dance-
hall, inluencing hip-hop and
shaping pop to this day. But
the genre’s classic era was
in the Seventies and early
Eighties, when its greatest
voices made their deinitive
statements.
Must-
Haves
The Wailers
Catch a Fire
1973
Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and
Bunny Wailer would soon split
their iconic trio, but this break-
out LP is a harmony-rich mas-
terpiece of activist soul. Tosh’s
“400 Years” laments generations
of slavery, and “Stir It Up”
advocates action in the
dance hall and bedroom.
Island Records’ Chris
Blackwell added over-
dubs to Americanize
the sound, a debatable
move, as the original
recordings show.
But it remains
reggae’s potent
urtext.
88
Various Artists
The Harder They Come
1972
The soundtrack to the film that
broke reggae internationally
was packed with Sixties and Sev-
enties gems: Desmond Dekker’s
rocksteady anthem “007 (Shanty
Town)”; Scotty’s giddy proto-rap
“Draw Your Brakes,” chanted in
thick patois over Keith and Tex’s
1967 “Stop That Train”; plus
standouts from the Maytals and
the film’s star, Jimmy Clif.
King Tubby,
Augustus Pablo
King Tubbys Meets
Rockers Uptown
1976
This LP from producer-keyboard-
ist Pablo and engineer King
Tubby established dub music
— instrumental tracks processed
with radical mixes and heavy re-
verb — as a genre. Massive bass
lines advance like lava; rhythms
chatter and ping-pong across
stereo channels; brass
flourishes appear and
disappear like images in
a hall of mirrors.
Toots and the Maytals
Funky Kingston
1975
As with many of the era’s great
singers, but more so, this album
is rooted in Southern U.S. R&B,
with the mighty Toots Hibbert
often conjuring Otis Redding.
The connection helped translate
reggae to American audiences.
Further
Listening
Culture
Two Sevens Clash
1977
This set of dub-wise declarations
envisioned 1977 as an apoca-
lyptic moment. With incandes-
cent trio harmonies, Culture
projected utter conviction, so
much so that on 7/7/77, wary
Jamaicans stayed of the streets.
The Congos
Heart of the Congos
1977
Produced by dub genius Lee
Perry, this may be the most
haunting reggae LP ever, with
the falsetto-baritone tag teams
of Cedric Myton, Ashanti Roy
Johnson and Watty Burnett
invoking biblical parables over
psychedelic soundscapes.
Peter Tosh
Legalize It
1976
On his first solo LP, ex-Wailer
Tosh plays Malcolm X to Marley’s
MLK, abetted by his former
bandmates. Banned in Jamaica,
the title track rails against mari-
juana laws (“Doctors smoke it/
Nurses smoke it/Judges smoke
it/Even the lawyer too,” Tosh rea-
sons). And on “Igziabeher (Let
Jah Be Praised),” Tosh conjures
harsh justice for evildoers.
Black Uhuru
Sinsemilla
1980
This group was a rare mixed-
gender vocal trio. Their
mesmerizing songs about Pan-
African solidarity and the joys
of A-grade weed rode buoyant
grooves that felt like video
games played while stoned,
thanks to the new synth-drum-
and-bass signature of rhythm
team Sly and Robbie, whose
production franchise would go
big-time from here.
Gregory Isaacs
Night Nurse
1982
Isaacs was the king of “lover’s
rock” — reggae less interested
in revolution than in hooking up.
This career high is crowned by
KIRK WEST/GETTY IMAGES
the title track, a banger driven
by the famed Roots Radics
band that doubles down on
Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”
metaphor. “Tell her it’s a case of
emergency,” he croons, “there’s a
patient by the name of Gregory.”

Going
Deeper
Big Youth
Screaming Target
1973
He wasn’t the first DJ to “toast” —
ad-lib rhymes over other artists’
hits — but Big Youth’s of-the-
hook style established toasting
as more than a novelty. On his
debut LP’s title track, he shrieks
and babbles over Dawn Penn’s
“You Don’t Love Me (No, No,
No),” and “Solomon a Gunday”
repurposes a nursery rhyme.
Burning Spear
Marcus Garvey
1975
Declaiming like an Old Tes-
tament preacher, Winston
Rodney led a powerful trio on
this breakout LP, which invoked
African history over brass-driven
tracks by the Black Disciples.
Reggae never got rootsier than
“Slavery Days.”
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Forces of Victory
1979
GEMS/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
A U.K.-based Jamaican poet,
LKJ teamed up with British dub
producer Dennis “Blackbeard”
Bovell to raise the bar for rev-
olutionary expression; see the
devastating, proto-Black Lives
Matter narrative “Sonny’s Lettah
(Anti-Sus Poem).”
FURTHER READING
So Much
Things to Say
There have been dozens of
Bob Marley books, but this
2017 oral history, decades
in the making, is definitive.
Roger Stefens knew
Marley and interviewed
key figures, and the story
charts the music’s history
from the singer’s early
ska work through his
reign (which included an
assassination attempt) as
one of the most important
artists of our time.
Lee “Scratch” Perry
Upsetters 14 Dub
Blackboard Jungle
1973
Not quite the first, but definitely
the wildest of the early dub LPs,
this was an experiment that
escaped the lab, in a sense —
only 300 copies were pressed
initially. The set established Perry
as Jamaica’s most adventurous
dub producer, alongside fellow
pioneers like King Tubby, around
the same time as his less-
dizzying work with vocal groups
like the Wailers, the Congos
and the Clash.
Aswad
Live and Direct
1983
Recorded at the Notting Hill
Carnival, London’s gigantic
West Indian cultural bacchanal,
it documents one of England’s
greatest bands at its peak, with
potent songs, murderous horns,
a lean rhythm section punching
above its weight, and a 10-min-
ute dancehall-rhythm medley
that drives the crowd mad. It’s
island Rasta theology hardened
into urban gospel. Diaspora
reggae has never been better.
One-Hits
More great songs from
reggae’s golden age
DAWN PENN, “YOU DON’T
LOVE ME (NO, NO, NO)”
From No, No, No, 1967
Her original, a Studio One re-
make of Willie Cobbs’ juke-joint
blues, was an island hit; her 1994
dancehall remake was covered
by Beyoncé and Rihanna.
THE PARAGONS, “THE
TIDE IS HIGH”
From On the Beach With the
Paragons, 1967
Blondie scored big with their
1980 cover; the original works a
slower groove with sun-kissed
harmonies.
Check out
Rolling
Stone.com
for a deep
Classic
Reggae
playlist.
JOE HIGGS, “THERE’S
A REWARD”
From Life of Contradiction, 1976
This inspirational soul burner
was a signature for reggae’s
godfather, a man who started
recording in the late Fifties and
later schooled a young Marley.
ALTHEA AND DONNA,
“UPTOWN TOP RANKING”
From Uptown Top Ranking,
1977
A surprise Number One hit in the
U.K. by this teenage duo, one of
reggae’s few girl groups, rewind-
ing the groove from Alton Ellis’
1967 song “I’m Still in Love.”
JUNIOR MURVIN, “POLICE
AND THIEVES”
From Police and Thieves, 1977
A Lee Perry-produced hit in
Jamaica and Britain, where
Murvin’s falsetto soundtracked
the Notting Hill Carnival riots, it
inspired the Clash to cut their
own version.
STEEL PULSE, “HANDS-
WORTH REVOLUTION”
From Handsworth Revolution,
1978
Inspired by the band’s hard-
scrabble life in Birmingham,
England, this freedom song went
international via the group’s
debut LP and tour with Marley.
October 2018
THE MIGHTY DIAMONDS,
“PASS THE KOUCHIE”
From The Mighty Diamonds’
Changes, 1981
A song about sharing a pipeful
of weed, later transformed by
British boy band Musical Youth
into “Pass the Dutchie,” a G-rated
global hit about hunger.
WILLIE WILLIAMS,
“ARMAGIDEON TIME”
Single, 1982
Williams’ laid-back delivery
makes the apocalyptic verses
of this slow-mo Coxsone Dodd-
produced classic all the more
chilling. It made for another
fine Clash cover.
SISTER NANCY,
“BAM BAM”
From One, Two, 1982
Rifing of the ’66 Maytals song
of the same name, this dubby
smash bridged roots and
dancehall; Kanye West, Jay-Z and
a zillion others have sampled or
interpolated it.
RITA MARLEY, “ONE
DRAW”
From One Draw, 1990
Bob’s widow and backup singer
scored a surprise hit with an
evergreen theme. “I want to
get hiiiiiigh, so high!” remains
one of the best opening lines
in reggae.
Toots and the
Caption here
Maytals,
circa 1973
| Rolling Stone | 89

LADY GAGA HITS ALL THE RIGHT NOTES
The singer and actor-director Bradley Cooper turn a
millennial take on ‘A Star Is Born’ into a modern classic
in her irst starring role, to
follow in the footsteps of the
legends who previously aced
the role of the newbie: Barbra
Streisand (1976), Judy Garland
(1954) and Janet Gaynor
(1937)? Talk about walking a
tightrope without a net.
The movie starts and you
think, “Oh, no, not again.”
PETER TRAVERS And then, boom, Cooper
sneaks up and snaps you to
O
NE STAR soars; the attention. Though there’s no
other crashes and disguising the ilm’s dated
burns. It’s a tale as origins, the actor-turned-
old as time, lattened and fa- director’s deiantly fresh
tigued by constant repetition. approach allows A Star Is
So why in hell did Bradley Born to emerge as a skyrocket
Cooper choose to make his of soul-stirring music, drama
debut as director with the and heartbreak. By dumping
third remake of A Star Is the usual Hollywood bullshit
Born? What could he bring to for something that feels raw,
the role of the self-destructive scrappy and lived-in, Cooper
headliner living in the shad- and Gaga knock it out of the
ow of the protégée he loves? park. Seamlessly integrating
And why did he have Lady terriic original songs with
Gaga, going out on a limb a script he wrote with Eric
90 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
Roth and Will Fetters, Cooper
refashions A Star Is Born for a
right-now generation tired of
watching blunt truth give way
to softball fantasy.
His character, Jackson
Maine, is a washed-up
country rocker with a love of
booze and lines of blow. His
depressive state has its roots
in a turbulent childhood
relected in his contentious
relationship with his older
brother Bobby (Sam Elliott),
who resents Jackson for
co-opting his voice. And Dave
Chappelle scores as Noodles,
a friend who worries that
not even love can save
the hard-livin’ musi-
cian’s soul. Cooper’s
performance is
enhanced by
his surprisingly
credible singing.
There are times
when Jackson’s
A song is
born: Cooper
and Gaga
compose.
A Star Is Born
DIRECTOR Bradley Cooper
STARRING Bradley Cooper,
Lady Gaga,
$
Sam Elliott,
Dave Chappelle,
Andrew Dice Clay
lyrics still get through to him,
as in, “Maybe it’s time to let
the old ways die.”
Or maybe it’s time for him
to ind his purpose in helping
Ally, a waitress who’s getting
nowhere as a singer-songwrit-
er. The role is usually played
as an ingénue looking for
guidance in a world of male
predators. Lucky for us — and
the movie — Gaga doesn’t
do ingénue. Her would-be
star from a boisterous Italian
family (Andrew Dice Clay
Gaga’s big
keyboard
moment
barrels through the role of
her rowdy Sinatra-crooner
dad) has been kicked around
by an industry that likes her
sound but not her look. She’s
a street ighter who knows
she’s good. Still, Ally balks
when this famous singer
drags her onstage.
Of course, the crowd goes
wild. Gaga is a lightning bolt
of emotions — and one hell of
an actress. Born Stefani Ger-
manotta, Gaga constructed
herself as a one-woman visual
extravaganza (remember that
meat dress?). But not in this
movie. To play Ally, she strips
herself of all artiice. There’s
nothing to hide behind. And
while Jackson shrinks from
the spotlight, she inhales it
like oxygen. The script hints
at a sharp notion, that Ally
might lose herself in the same
way her dad did. Her new
manager, Rez (Rai Gavron),
wants Ally to add dancers and
glitz to her act. Can she resist?
Cooper elevates a
shopworn genre by fully
integrating story and song.
And the ilm gains welcome
authenticity by recording the
songs live, solos and duets, at
various music fests, includ-
ing Coachella and Glaston-
bury. Jackson and Ally are
singer-composers who write
what they live. Early on, they
sit outside a supermarket at
night, crafting an anthem
about the euphoria and
terror of what’s ahead. It’s
called “The Shallow” — and
it’s easily the best movie song
in years.
The director’s gut-level
commitment to the material
comes through, even when
the ilm tips dangerously into
shallow sentiment. It helps
immeasurably that the songs
Cooper and Gaga wrote in
tandem with other musicians,
including Mark Ronson, Jason
Isbell and Lukas Nelson
(Willie’s talented son), give
FROM TOP: WARNER BROS. PICTURES; NEAL PRESTON/
a real-deal urgency to this
tragic love story. You get
pulled into a force ield,
thanks to Cooper’s be-
hind-the-camera chops
and Gaga’s sound
WARNER BROS. PICTURES
and fury. By the
time the end cred-
its roll, you realize
that, in fact, two
stars have been
born.
 ADVERTISEMENT

THE SKATE-RAT
KIDS ARE ALRIGHT BACKSTAGE PASS
J O N A H H I L L doesn’t
Mid90s act in Mid90s, but you
DIRECTOR
feel his seriocomic S P EC I A L O F F E R S A N D P R O M OT I O N S
Jonah Hill chops in every scene
STARRING of this coming-of-
Sunny Suljic age tale. Making his
A crisis for
Chalamet
# directing debut, the
and Carell actor-turned-triple-
threat shapes his script
into a story that plays like a European art ilm
with a sprinkle of Superbad. Stevie (a terriic

FATHER AND SON

Sunny Suljic) is a naive, unmanageable, lonely
13-year-old who’s battling life on the fringes
of Los Angeles. His older brother, Ian (Lucas

KNOW BEST Hedges, scary-good), is a bully who leaves

bruises, a fact Stevie keeps from their rootless
mom (Katherine Waterston). Things improve
D O “BAS E D on a when the kid connects with a crew of older
Beautiful true story” addiction skateboarders who boost his skills (the board
Boy dramas bum you out?
DIRECTOR You’ll still love Beautiful Hill on the Mid90s set
Felix Van Boy — it’s an emotional
Groeningen
powerhouse too pow-
STARRING
Steve Carell erful to resist. Steve
Carell digs deep as
$
David Shef, a journalist
trying to cope with the
meth addiction of his teenage boy, Nic (Timo-
thée Chalamet). The script draws on memoirs
from both father and son, and the dual per-
spective gives the ilm its devastating impact.
Sure, Nic is addicted — but David is just as
addicted to saving him. And the cycle of recov-
ery to relapse and back again is rendered with
startling immediacy; Belgian director Felix Van scenes are killer) and grow him up fast. The
Groeningen knows how to work an audience team leader, Ray (Na-Kel Smith), shows com-
over and put folks through the wringer. But it’s passion. But it’s Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt) who
the two leads who, thanks to their astonishing, takes on Stevie’s mom — and she isn’t sure
ripped-from-the-gut performances, make this her kid needs to ride high with thrill junkies
movie stand out; Chalamet’s withdrawal scene who high-ive when Stevie has his irst sexual
alone should put the Call Me by Your Name experience. At times, Hill lets the sentimental
Oscar nominee back in the awards race. It’s stuf dull the ilm’s edge. No matter. When our
a tough, achingly tender ilm that’s impossible young hero says “hell yeah” to life’s hairpin
to forget. P.T. turns, Mid90s is totally irresistible. P.T.

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Paul Dano She plays Jeanette, a
FROM TOP: FRANCOIS DUHAMEL; TOBIN YELLAND/

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distressed that her hus-
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has left to ight wild- turns spirits into love and goodness.
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a dazzling debut, constructs a spellbinding
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the ashes of her past. One word: Wow. P.T.

TV
MATTHEW WEINER’S UNEVEN RETURN
With his anthology series ‘The Romanoffs,’ the ‘Mad Men’
creator achieves moments of brilliance amid sprawl
Peggy bond during a long
night at work), beneited from
our collective knowledge of
the characters, but many
installments could function as
gorgeous stand-alones for the
sake of someone who’d never
seen the show before.
Now, three years after Don
Draper bought the world a
ALAN SEPINWALL Coke — and 11 months after
Mad Men writer Kater Gordon
accused Weiner of sexual
O
NE OF the key harassment — Weiner returns
characteristics to TV with The Romanoffs,
that distinguished which takes the short-story
Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men approach to its next logical
from its prestige-drama peers step: the anthology. Each
was that it was serialized, but episode is directed by Weiner,
focused irst and foremost on but the stories are linked in
making each episode its own only one way: All involve
beautiful, handcrafted work characters who believe them-
of art. Instead of a novel-for- selves to be descendants of
television, it was a short-story Russian royalty.
collection set in the same TV This might seem a thin
universe. The best stories, thread on which to hang eight
like “The Suitcase” (Don and episodes, but the irst two
92 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
suggest it can comfortably
hold a wide range of stories
and tones, albeit with laws.
The irst, “The Violet Hour,”
takes place in Paris (and
plays out mostly in subtitled
French) as a domineering,
racist old woman (Marthe
Keller) struggles to accept her
new Muslim caregiver (Inès
Melab), even while her neph-
ew (Aaron Eckhart) and his
girlfriend (Louise Bourgoin)
wait to inherit her palatial
apartment. “The Royal
We,” meanwhile, inds
Corey Stoll and Kerry
Bishé as a married
American couple
going through
a rough patch.
During a mem-
orable weekend
apart, she goes
on a Romanov- Married Stoll
themed cruise has his eye on
without him Montgomery.
Bishé’s Shelly feel cast out of the life they
lights up on a thought they should have in-
cruise without herited, unsure of what to do
her husband.
with the one they got instead.
Working on an expensive,
international canvas, Weiner
paints image after image suit-
able for framing. Watching
“Violet Hour,” it’s not hard to
fall in love with the apart-
ment and Paris itself given
the lush way he ilms both.
And he gets excellent, lived-in
performances from his ac-
tors, particularly the women.
Even a small moment like two
characters holding hands can
feel enormously moving.
But short stories should
be, well, short, and at 90
minutes apiece (others vary
from 60 to 90), both of these
tales end up overstaying
their welcome, repeating
certain beats too often while
other components feel oddly
rushed. (Melab’s character
makes a choice at the end
that feels wildly unearned.)
Each episode works better —
at times spectacularly so — in
individual moments than
The Romanofs either does as a whole.
NETWORK Amazon Coming of one of the
AIR DATE
STARRING
October 12th
Marthe Keller
Aaron Eckhart
greatest TV shows ever made,
and despite the allegations
against him, Weiner had the
Corey Stoll
clout for Amazon to let him
Kerry Bishé
do whatever he wanted.
# But creativity without limits
can be dangerous, even for
someone this gifted. Weiner’s
ictional wanna-be-Romanovs
(during which she lirts with have to make do with a less
Noah Wyle), while he tries opulent world than their DNA
to extend his jury duty to might tell them they deserve;
seduce Janet Montgomery. the series, likewise, may have
The stories overlap super- been better of living within
icially with talk of ancestry, stricter means.
but what primarily links them
is the same sense of existen-
tial confusion and dread that
fueled many of the best Mad
Men stories. All these people
FROM TOP: JAN THIJS/AMAZON STUDIOS; CHRISTOPHER RAPHAEL/
AMAZON STUDIOS; JAN THIJS/AMAZON STUDIOS
Eckhart and
Keller stroll the
Paris streets.
 WATCH LIST
What to stream, what to skip this month
FORCE OF NATURE
Camping
NETWORK HBO
AIR DATE October 14th, 10 p.m.
# to join a Beverly Hills high school
If you didn’t know Lena Dunham
and Jenni Konner’s Camping
started as a British comedy, you
might assume someone simply
dared the Girls duo to create a
character even more narcissistic
and of-putting than Hannah Hor-
vath. In Kathryn McSorley-Jodell,
a scheduling-obsessed helicopter
mom who corrals misbehaving
friends and family for an outdoor
weekend celebrating pushover
husband Walt’s birthday, they’ve
succeeded. But Kathryn is played
by the spectacularly likable Jenni-
fer Garner (and Walt by David Ten-
nant, in full Jimmy Stewart mode),
whose innate sweetness forgives a
lot of Kathryn’s more insuferable
behavior. Throw in sharp sup-
porting turns from Juliette Lewis,
Chris Sullivan and a back-from-
the-dead Ione Skye, and you have
a series that can be mortifying to
sit through, but has more empathy
PATRICK HARBRON/NETFLIX; RAY MICKSHAW/THE CW; AMAZON STUDIOS
for its characters than they often
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: ANNE MARIE FOX/HBO; ADAM ROSE/ABC; FX;
have for one another.
FOR THE WIN
All American
NETWORK THE CW
AIR DATE October 10th, 9 p.m.
3 of that via Justified’s
The elevator pitch for All
American sounds addictive:
It’s Friday Night Lights meets
The O.C. But the execution in
the early going falls well short of
TAKE TWO
Revisionist
Reboots
Can the show go on after its
star is canned in disgrace?
With three revamped series
coming up soon, we’re
about to find out
MISSING: ROSEANNE
THE
STREAMING
ARMS RACE
NETFLIX,
AMAZON AND
OTHERS ARE THE CONNERS
SPENDING
DEAD WOOD ABC, OCTOBER 16TH
WILDLY TO
Garner heads COMPETE Following Roseanne Barr’s
into the wild. racist tweets, John Good-
SERIES: man and Co. anchor a Barr-
A 2019 live- free Roseanne spinof. MAGA
that combination. Loosely based
on the life of fringe NFL player
Spencer Paysinger (a journeyman
Ryan plays Ray, a hit man who just
wants to spend more time with his
new girlfriend and his adorable
action adap-
tation of Star
Wars, to be
devotees will view it as
more proof that the world’s
against them, while lefty
linebacker last signed to the Car- daughter, if only opportunities for fans will want to wash their
directed by
olina Panthers in 2017), it features violence didn’t keep presenting hands of the whole thing.
Jon Favreau
Daniel Ezra as a temperamental themselves. “I wouldn’t say I enjoy
Compton football star recruited PLATFORM:
Disney
MISSING: KEVIN SPACEY
squad by a coach (Taye Diggs) COST:
desperate to keep his job. As $100 million/
Ezra moves from a neighborhood 10 episodes
of drive-by shootings to one of
wealth and privilege, All American SERIES:
trafics mostly in teen-soap clichés The Crown, an
told with minimal style and humor. addictive his-
It’s a great idea but needs to look torical drama
beyond routine plays to succeed. about the
life of Queen HOUSE OF CARDS
ALL THE RAGE Ryan comes
Elizabeth II
PLATFORM:
Netflix
NETFLIX, NOVEMBER 2ND
The sixth season, always
meant to be the drama’s last,
Mr Inbetween to grips.
COST: will focus on Robin Wright’s
NETWORK FX $130 million/ indomitable Claire Under-
hitting people,” he says. “If I hit
AIR DATE Tuesdays, 11 p.m. season wood, in the wake of alleged
somebody, I generally got a pretty sexual predator Kevin Spac-
# good reason.” The show can’t de- ey’s ouster. Creatively, it was
SERIES:
cide if it’s judging Ray’s behavior running on fumes anyway —
TV’s recent fascination with odd- A reported
or celebrating it, which puts it a but a Claire-centric year may
ball assassins — the BBC’s Killing five-season
notch below its Peak TV brethren. provide a jolt before the end.
Eve, HBO’s Barry — adds this Lord of the
But Ryan, who first played Ray in
deadpan Australia-set drama to Rings prequel
the mockumentary The Magician,
the collection. Creator-star Scott and possible
has a striking and compulsively MISSING:
spinof, to bow JEFFREY TAMBOR
watchable physical presence:
in 2021
bald, angular and utterly calm
even when he’s preparing to lay PLATFORM:
a beating on two young punks Amazon
who ruined his little girl’s ice COST:
cream cone. That unflap-
pable demeanor (think a
young Mike Ehrmantraut)
$1 billion
sufuses most of the TRANSPARENT
show’s action, as well as
AMAZON, 2019
its periodic forays into
macabre comedy. (Some Jefrey Tambor was fired
after accusations of sexual
Damon Herriman, who harassment from cast and
finally gets to use his native crew; the fifth season will be
Diggs, Ezra accent in an American the final one. Since many in
square of. show.) And the half-hour the LGBTQ community had
format means it won’t exhaust questioned a straight, cis
itself too easily. ALAN SEPINWALL actor playing a trans role,
maybe best to move on. A.S.
Rolling Stone | 93
 SUBSC R IBE TODAY

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ARETHA FRANKLIN
[Cont. from 58] Some saw Franklin’s quarrels as a
career strategy. “I call it the diva-ication of Aretha,”
said Erma. “And it all came about because of Clive.
He saw that the public loved divas. . . . Through sheer
will, they can overcome anything.”
That sheer will got hard-tested for Franklin. Her
sister Carolyn — who’d often sung backup for Are-
tha — developed breast cancer, yet was working to-
ward a degree at Detroit’s Marygrove College. Are-
tha moved Carolyn into her home and hired full-time
care. When the cancer grew more virulent, Aretha
helped arrange for Carolyn to receive her diploma
in bed, in cap and gown. Carolyn Franklin died on
April 25th, 1988, at 43. Then came Cecil: Though Are-
tha had refused to acknowledge it, her brother had
fallen into a heavy freebase-cocaine addiction in the
1980s. He entered rehab, but in the summer of 1988,
he faced another setback: Doctors found a spot on
Cecil’s lungs. The proximity to Carolyn’s death made
Cecil’s news particularly diicult for the singer. On
December 29th, 1989, at 2 a.m. Ruth Bowen called
the singer. “Aretha,” she said, “get to the hospital.”
By the time Franklin arrived, Cecil was gone. “Ebony
once wrote that he was ‘my greatest asset,’ ” said
Aretha. “Amen. No other manager, no other person,
no other living spirit could ever replace him.” Said
Bowen, “Without Cecil, and by managing herself, she
became completely impossible.”
Franklin never again had huge hits, though her
1998 single “A Rose Is Still a Rose,” co-written by Lau-
ryn Hill, hit the Top 40. Clearly, Franklin still pos-
sessed a remarkable instrument. In February 1998,
MusiCares — the Recording Academy and Grammys’
nonprofit charity on behalf of musicians in need
— awarded its Person of the Year Award to operat-
ic tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Among the artists pay-
ing tribute that night was Franklin, who sang Pa-
varotti’s signature aria, “Nessun Dorma,” from the
inal act of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot. After Mu-
siCares, Pavarotti told her, “Opera purists may take
issue with your liberties, but I loved your interpre-
tation. Puccini has great soul, but you made his soul
even greater.”
Two nights later, Franklin sang “Respect” at the
Grammy telecast at Radio City Music Hall, where
Pavarotti was also scheduled to perform “Nessun
Dorma.” When Pavarotti fell ill and canceled, produc-
er Ken Ehrlich asked Franklin: Since she knew the
aria, would she step in for Pavarotti? “This was do
or die,” said Franklin. Looking regal as she opened
the aria with a gospel-like growl, Franklin proceed-
ed with a greater dynamic range than is available to
most grand opera singers. In “Nessun Dorma,” Frank-
lin was able to maneuver a glissando from a whisper
to a scream; her pop and soul training rendered it
more vulnerable. She turned its inal burst — declar-
ing “Vincerò” (“I will win”) — into a mystic soul yowl.
It was the most spectacular public moment of her ca-
reer. Radio City Music Hall erupted in a standing ova-
tion. Wexler said, “She wasn’t afraid of the aria. She
owned it, claimed it and made it her own.”
Franklin had another spectacular moment in Janu-
ary 2009, when she sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”
at Barack Obama’s irst inauguration. Franklin’s big-
bowed hat — designed by Seoul, South Korea-born
Luke Song — famously stole the show, quickly earn-
ing a Facebook page. The Smithsonian was rumored
to have requested guardianship of the hat; a backup
hat went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
96 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
In August 2001, Erma (the irst person to record
“Piece of My Heart,” made famous by Janis Joplin)
was diagnosed with cancer. When Erma’s daughter
Sabrina called Aretha to tell her the news, “Aretha
became furious,” Sabrina told David Ritz. “She lew
of the handle. . . . She kept saying, ‘Don’t call me with
bad news like this. I just don’t want to hear it. I don’t
believe it, not for a minute.’ ” Soon, though, Aretha
had little choice but to accept the truth. Erma died
in September 2002, at 64. Nine weeks later, Aretha’s
half brother, Vaughn — who had taken up much of Ce-
cil’s work on behalf of the singer — died at 67.
Franklin had become the last living member of her
immediate family. Several had fallen to cancer, and
it would be only natural for her to fear its bequest.
In August 2010, Franklin reportedly fell in her show-
er. By November, it was apparent that the singer had
become seriously ill; she was sufering “excruciating
stomach pain,” according to Ritz.
After medical tests, and at her doctors’ insistence,
Franklin canceled all upcoming appearances. In
early 2011, she invited talk-show host Wendy Wil-
liams to meet with her for an interview. She said she
had gradually lost 85 pounds — but that was as much
as she would ofer up. When Williams remarked, “We
all found out that you were having abdominal sur-
gery,” Franklin shut the door on the inquiry. “Is that
what you heard?” she responded. “Well, that’s what
was said,” replied Williams. “OK. Well,” said Franklin,
“a lot of things were said. I’ve left that behind. I’m
feeling wonderful. I’m feeling great. And I couldn’t be
feeling any better than I’m feeling right now.”
This pattern would repeat itself again and again.
Shows would be scheduled, then called of; mourn-
ers would gather outside a Detroit hospital. Then,
in October 2014, she released her inal great album,
Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics. She also,
when she could, showed up for concert and TV ap-
pearances in her inal years. Some proved among the
best performances of her life.
Franklin’s most famous latter-day showing was at
the 38th annual Kennedy Center Honors, held on De-
cember 6th, 2015, in Washington (and later broadcast
on CBS). Honoring songwriter Carole King, Franklin
sat at a grand piano, wearing a loor-length gown,
singing “Natural Woman” as if it were her own decla-
ration rather than King’s composition — a hard-won
epiphany that brought President Obama to brush
aside some relexive tears. With an orchestra swell-
ing along beside her, Franklin took up the micro-
phone two-thirds of the way through the song, stood
and walked to the front center of the stage, and —
while ululating the song’s peak moment of self-dis-
covery — slipped her arms from her fur and let it
drop to the loor. It was a moment that echoed back
to those times when gospel queens would toss their
furs on top of the coins of other gospel queens — a
gesture that honored the dead but castigated death
itself, covering a casket with something better than
dirt. The Kennedy Center performance was a moving
and historic moment: the queen who abided, singing
about hope and forbearance and love for America’s
irst black president.
No matter what else ever went on in her life, sing-
ing became Franklin’s airmation, from the time she
was a child seeking a solution for the day her moth-
er walked out of the house and never came back.
“Things can never be that bad,” Franklin told Bego.
“For the blind man, there is always the fellow with
no feet. I’ve been hurt. You can’t get over it all, but
you can go on living and keeping on looking. . . . I’m
not free yet, but I will be. I will be!” Franklin could
be perplexing, private, proud, cold, contentious, in-
timidating — but she also profered a love that badly
needed the same avowal in return. Pianist Teddy Har-
ris, who served as one of Franklin’s musical directors
in the 1960s, said, “Aretha is the kind of girl, you’ve
got to love her hard.” When that love led her, she
grew resentful, but she also resolved never to let it
break her or keep her down.
Figuring out Aretha Franklin could be diicult,
but her enigma probably allowed her enough shield-
ing to put the best of herself into her music. Perhaps
we read too much of the times and needs into Frank-
lin, creating a burden for her. In What the Music Said,
Mark Anthony Neal wrote that “the notion of Are-
tha being the ‘voice’ of the black liberation move-
ment has been overstated.” If so, it was necessary
to the times — and even Franklin couldn’t have un-
done that. The liberation she invoked lifted people,
even rescued them. In Gerri Hirshey’s Nowhere to
Run (1984), a Vietnam veteran told the author, “We
had been fucked over, and we knew it, right of. This
woman, Miss Ree, saved some of us, I swear. . . . After
one of those suicide missions . . . after we itted as
many pieces as we could ind into the body bags, we
put on . . . ‘Chain of Fools.’ . . . This may seem weird,
but we danced. Like the fuckin’ fools we were. . . . And
I tell you, if we hadn’t have done it, I might have lost
my mind. I might have gone and died.”
Franklin told Hirshey, “I’ve had a lot of service-
men — Vietnam vets — come up to me and tell me
how much my music meant to them over there. I’m
sure all those guys were in a lot of pain. . . . But if they
found pain in my music, it has to be their person-
al interpretation. What I feel singing it, and where
it comes from, is something I keep to myself. Music,
especially the kind I make, is a very emotional thing.
And as an artist you’re happy when people get in-
volved, you know? But what they hear and what I feel
when I sing it can be very, very diferent. Sometimes I
wish I could make them understand that.” Whatever
went on in Franklin’s voice was a strange alchemy of
hurt and persistence. What moved her soul, though,
remained inscrutable and private.
In the days after her death on August 16th, when it
was learned that she died intestate (meaning, under
Michigan law, that her estate would likely be split
evenly among her four sons), observers were bewil-
dered: How could somebody who was reported near
death for so many years neglect to leave a will? Per-
haps Franklin never intended to die. She had denied
death’s imminence for years — her sheer will, com-
bined with the best medical care, carried her over
at improbable odds. Franklin still expected to get of
any deathbed and sing another show, inish anoth-
er album. Without what some saw as her stubborn
denial, she’d have been dead a long time ago, and
we wouldn’t have had those inal great performanc-
es and Sings the Great Diva Classics, her best album
since the early 1970s.
Franklin wanted to live. Indeed, she believed God
wanted her on Earth: Aretha Franklin. Faith, com-
bined with the instinct for self-preservation and
buoyed by the world’s love, really can make mira-
cles. Franklin not only exempliied perseverance at
the end, but all along she had given nerve — at cru-
cial moments — to countless others who recognized
themselves in both the pain and strength of her voice.
She once deined her singing as “me with my hand
outstretched, hoping someone will take it.” A lot of
people took that hand and felt themselves raised up
by it. Maybe we’ll never know if that was enough to
rectify the sorrow in Aretha Franklin’s eyes.

THE PERFECT STORM
[Cont. from 81] Rican independence that carried out
more than 130 bomb attacks in the U.S. and Puerto
Rico between 1974 and 1983. The most deadly at-
tack occurred on January 24th, 1975, when a dufel
bag stuffed with sticks of dynamite exploded in
Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan, killing four
people. Rivera spent ive years on the run, then was
inally arrested in 1981 and tried and convicted of
seditious conspiracy, interstate transportation of ire-
arms with the intent to commit violent crimes, and
transportation of explosives with intent to kill and
injure people and destroy government property. He
was sentenced to 55 years in federal prison. In 2017,
President Obama commuted his sentence and Rivera
was released. By that time, he had spent 35 years in
prison, including 12 years in solitary coninement.
Today, Rivera doesn’t look much like an ex-con.
He lives in a 1950s-style apartment complex in an
anonymous neighborhood of San Juan and spends
most of his day in a small oice near the university
that is decorated with a Puerto Rican lag and a small
black-and-white photo of Fidel Castro and Nelson
Mandela standing together. When I meet him, I am
struck by how small and slight he is. Dressed in jeans,
a T-shirt and orange Nikes, he looks more like a re-
tired mailman than a notorious terrorist. He has gray
hair and a gray mustache, and his voice is smooth
and quiet. But there’s a ierceness in how he talks
about things, especially Puerto Rican history and
the long legacy of colonialism. “Puerto Ricans have
been exploited by the United States for more than
100 years,” he says bluntly. “What’s happened since
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Hurricane Maria is just more of the same. You talk
about rebuilding? There is no rebuilding. At least, not
for most Puerto Ricans.”
Rivera goes on from there. He believes that the
Puerto Rican government is not really a government
at all, but an extension of U.S. rule. He believes that
the result of this will be to depopulate the island,
push out the poor people and make it a paradise for
yacht owners and blockchain billionaires. “We need
to invest in the poor communities, in the poorest of
the poor, and educate them about what is going on,”
he tells me. “And we need to start asking some funda-
mental questions about how we live. Can we accept
climate change? Can we accept a world powered by
coal and oil and the Koch brothers? Is that the kind
of world we want to live in?”
For Rivera, these questions all lead in the same
direction: toward Puerto Rican independence from
the U.S. It is not a view that many share, at least
not right now. It’s achieving statehood, not inde-
pendence, that inspires most people on the island,
including Rosselló, who made it an explicit goal of
his 2016 campaign. “I think that it is the right time
for the U.S. to eradicate this notion of second-class
citizenship, which is a real problem for American
democracy,” Rosselló told me.
It is hard to imagine Puerto Ricans rising up en
masse and marching in the streets when it’s so much
easier and more practical to express your disgust
with the way the island is being run by moving to
Orlando. After Maria, more than 300,000 people
left Puerto Rico for Florida, accelerating a decline in
the island’s population that began with the economic
crisis more than a decade ago and that will undoubt-
edly continue until the economy revives.
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Rivera, however, hopes to inspire Puerto Ricans to
stick around and ight.
“I have something I want to show you,” he says.
I follow him into another room. He opens a long,
narrow case and takes out a sword. It has elaborate
engravings on the handle and blade. “This is a replica
of Símon Bolívar’s sword,” he tells me. Bolívar was
a 19th-century military leader and politician who is
revered as El Liberator for freeing much of South
America from Spanish rule. I ask him if he is angry
about what has happened to Puerto Rico. “I’m not
angry, I want changes,” he says. He holds up the
sword, and I see a lash of the old revolutionary in
him. “Anything I can do to make the world a more
just place, I will do.”
But as Rivera knows as well as anyone, one year
after the storm, Puerto Rico remains an island lost at
sea. The economy will be pumped up by billions of
dollars in recovery funds over the next few years, but
after that? The path to statehood is likely to be long
and steep. You can spin out various possible futures
for the island: In one version, disaster capitalists and
bitcoin entrepreneurs arrive in their yachts and pri-
vate jets, turning Puerto Rico into a crypto St. Barts;
in another, post-capitalists build a paradise powered
by solar microgrids, community gardens and the re-
birth of local isheries; in a third, the territory falls
into a dystopian ruin, where everyone with brains
and ambition has led to the mainland, leaving be-
hind an aging, unhealthy population in slow but in-
exorable decline. But one thing that’s clear is that in
the age of accelerating climate change, what’s most
vulnerable is not ice sheets and coral reefs. It’s our
human-built world. As Puerto Rico demonstrates,
one big storm can blow the whole thing down.
 The
Last
Word
Who are your heroes? single.” He said, “No, man,
I met Nelson Mandela, think- you got to know that this
ing he wouldn’t have any can’t happen forever.” After
clue who I was. Somebody “Good Times,” we never real-
explained to him that I did ly had another big hit.
the score to Coming to Amer- What’s the craziest gig
ica and wrote the song “We you’ve ever performed?
Are Family.” He said, “It was When I was younger, play-
two of the biggest things that ing music in [this] superhell-
ever hit Africa.” Somebody hole, nefarious drug den [in
also said, “He wrote ‘Africa.’” New York]. We played a gig
They thought the song one night and there was a tri-
“Le Freak” was “L’Afrique” ple homicide in the club the
[French for “Africa”]. Just to night we auditioned. A guy
have gone through what he died on our bass player’s
had gone through and then amp. We set up our gear, and
to come out and be such a when we came back, it was
gentle soul. He treated every- a crime scene. They cleaned
up the joint and opened for
business the next day.
‘It’s About Time,’ What musical project do
Chic’s first studio LP you most regret not doing?
in 26 years, is out now.
If I had to do a replay,
there’s certain things that
I’m a little bit sad about.
body in the room as if they I regret not writing the
were the most important R&B dance record
person ever. for Miles Davis that
What’s the best advice he asked me to do be-
you’ve ever gotten? cause I thought he
My jazz-guitar teacher Ted was pulling my chain.
Dunbar at I.S. 201 in Harlem Because to me, jazz
said, “I know you don’t have guys were like gods
money. Why are you pay- and he was like
ing for lessons privately with the god.
me?” I said, “Oh, because You’re a life-
I want to make records, do long New York-
concerts, play in orchestras er. What are
and big bands and have all the best and
sorts of musical adventures.” worst things
He said, “Well, what if none about New
of those things ever hap- York today?
pen?” I said, “Shit, I’ll keep The best and
trying.” He said, “That’s why worst may al-
you’re my best student. Even most feel like the
if none of those things ever same: the gentriication.
happen, you’ll keep pursuing I wouldn’t be who I am if
it for the rest of your life.” poor people couldn’t live
What are the most right next door to rich peo-
important rules to live by? ple. I wouldn’t be who I am
One of my early attorneys if Greenwich Village didn’t
told us that if we wanted to have rental apartments
be in the music business all where [my parents], a cou-
of our lives, we’d have to ple of beatnik heroin addicts,
learn how to embrace failure. could live in the same build-
We were like, “What are you ing as a guy who won the
talking about? Every single Academy Award for playing
record we put out was a gold President Kennedy.
98 | Rolling Stone | October 2018
Nile Rodgers
The Chic co-founder and superstar producer
on meeting Mandela, getting lost in ‘Moby-
Dick,’ and how he handled life after hits
What was your favorite
book as a child?
Moby-Dick. It’s still one of my
favorite books to this day.
[I loved] the adventure, the
diverse characters. The way
Melville describes things was
so cinematic. I became ob-
sessed with the whole bucca-
neer thing. I wanted to pay
for my lunch with doubloons.
I didn’t have any other kids
to play with, so everything
was in my mind.
What is the single most
indulgent
pur-
chase
you’ve
ever made?
For a number
of years [in the late
Seventies], I got into
boating, and my boats
kept getting bigger and
bigger. The next thing you
know, I bought a 100-foot
yacht, which is a fabulous
boat, for millions. But it’s
just not my personality. I
was quite unsophisticat-
ed when it came to inan-
cial stuf.
What are the best and
worst parts of success?
The worst part of success is
the way it’s changed the peo-
ple in my life dealing with
me. The relationships have
deteriorated. I want to have
the same kind of fun like we
had when I was really poor,
because that fun was organ-
ic and wonderful and based
on us being friends. [Now],
no one’s ever paid me back.
I’ve given out millions. A few
months ago, I said to one of
my cousins, whom I adore,
“I just don’t want this rela-
tionship anymore. That’s the
only time I ever hear from
you.” The best part is you’ve
created something that peo-
ple will remember. Well after
I’m gone, “We Are Family”
will be like “The Itsy Bitsy
Spider.” JASON NEWMAN
ILLUSTRATION BY Mark Summers
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