50th ANNIVERSARY YEAR

Issue 1290
June 29, 2017

DEMOCRATS
2018 LORDE
CAN THE LIL
DEMS YACHTY
FIX
THE WILD
PARTY? NIGHTS
WITH
THE LAST MACHINE
BROTHER GUN
KELLY
GREGG
ALLMAN METALLICA’S
1947-2017 MASSIVE
RETURN

RACHEL
MADDOW
THE ROLLING STONE
INTERVIEW
 F E AT UR E S
Rachel Maddow
How America’s wonkiest
anchor became the most
trusted name in news.
By Janet Reitman ........... 34

Machine Gun Kelly

The Cleveland rapper may
finally be breaking big. All he
has to do is stay alive.
By Brian Hiatt ............... 40

Gregg Allman,
1947-2017
He survived five decades of
epic shows and unimaginable
disaster, but there was one
death he could never get over.
By Mik al Gilmore .......... 44

ON THE COVER Rachel Maddow

photographed in New York on May
17th, 2017, by Mark Seliger.
Hair and makeup by Birgitte Philippides at
Sally Harlor. Styling by Stefan Campbell for
SXSC Corp. Shirt by Club Monaco. Glasses
by Warby Parker.

SURVIVOR
Gregg Allman in
New Orleans in
1971, his first
appearance after
SIDNEY SMITH

his brother’s
death. Page 44

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 5
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6 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
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Correspondence
Lorde’s Next Act
a r e a l ly w e l l -w r i t t e n
and well-executed interview
with Lorde [“Lorde’s Grow-
ing Pains,” RS 1288]. I love her
music. And just like Rolling
Stone, professional but not to
the point of being boring. Bravo.
Tony, via the Internet
i e njoy ed l or de’s “pu r e
Heroine,” but . . . the “album that
changed pop”? Hardly. I’m not
sure if it’s with naiveté or willful
ignorance that she talks about
how she “reinvented the wheel.”
Maybe it’s just that she’s bought
into her own hype.
Chris Mirabueno
Via the Internet
as a 61-year-old musician
who’s not achieved a fraction of
Lorde’s success, I can’t help but
feel her artistic feats at such
an early age are mainly due to
being the child of an award-
winning poet. How lucky can
one person be?
Ken McNeill
Via the Internet
Montana Blues
it’s the day after the spe-
cial election in Montana [“The
Battle for Montana,” RS 1288].
After a venomous campaign,
many of us are trying to recover
before the next round. We’re
not idiots or badass rednecks.
We pay attention to worldwide
8 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
The Fracking Fight
In RS 1288, Justin Nobel reported on a Pennsylvania com-
munity that granted legal rights to the environment in
order to block a fracking wastewater well [“The Small
Town That Fought Fracking”]. Readers responded.
i wa s mo v e d b e y o n d
words by this small town’s
bravery and dedication to
fighting the destruction of
our natural resources. Keep
the faith, Grant Township –
we are with you!
David Sullivan
Mercer County, KY
if t he i n dust ry’s
lobby is so convinced
that fracking poses no
threat to the water sup-
ply or environment, I
would suggest that an
injection well be put
near their homes. Then
they could consider one in
Grant Township.
Cindy Fogarty
Schwenksville, PA
bei ng rur a l pen ns y l-
vanians, the residents, I
would guess, favored Re-
publicans. If so, they got
precisely what they voted for.
Robert Handelsman
Evanston, IL
concerns. We’ll survive, but it’s
gonna hurt.
Wendi Carpenter
Missoula, MT
these impossible losses
prove the DNC has no clue what
it’s doing beyond taking money
from donors. The GOP doesn’t
win elections. The Democrats
lose them all, just as Clinton did.
Janice Amato, New York
so the esta blishmen t
Democrats decided they would
rather lose to a Republican than
win with an actual progressive.
Why is this not surprising?
Zeffrey Heimer, Las Vegas
w e decided to donate
monthly to the Community
Environmental Legal De-
fense Fund, believing that
this is one of the great fights
of our generation.
Jan Tache
Penn Valley, CA
my family has been in
this state since 1720 and
never had benzene or other
chemicals in their water.
Now Republican-appointed
judges say you can’t prove
where those chemicals come
from. Benzene in rural
Pennsylvania? Maybe it
came from deer piss.
Harry Thorn
Philadelphia
Poison Rock On
er ik hedeg a a r d’s pi ece
not only evoked nostalgia, it
was reassuring to know this leg-
endary act is still going strong
[“The Last Hair Metal Band,”
RS 1288]. No less than with
prog rock or the British Inva-
sion, the dictum “rock & roll will
never die” applies to the great
metal given to us in the 1980s.
Sanjay Lal
Stockbridge, GA
let’s begin with the fact
that “hair band” is a derogatory
term. And to suggest that the
genre is dead discounts the
Love Letters
& Advice
many other hard-rockers still
packing venues around the
world. Don’t marginalize a
scene that is important to so
many.
David Shaw
Valley Stream, NY
Honest Willie
the interview with wil-
lie Nelson was one of the best
I’ve read in a long time [Q&A,
RS 1288]. I felt like I was en-
gaged in conversation with the
man himself. Plain truth in
plain-spoken words from a leg-
endary artist.
Bradley Ferguson
Via the Internet
Van Zandt Vows
in reading your article,
I am reminded why I avoid
the subject of my leaving the
E Street Band in the Eighties
[“Little Steven Is His Own Boss
Again,” RS 1288]. It was too
complicated to comprehend
then, and still is! In addition to
my sudden obsession with poli-
tics at the time, there was a po-
tential problem in my mind that
had to do with our (still) youth-
ful inability to balance friend-
ship and business. But that was
strictly between me and Bruce
and existed entirely in my own
neurotic thoughts. In my mind,
I left to safeguard the lifelong
friendship that meant so much
to me then, and obviously still
does. I explained it badly, but
did not mean to imply in any
way it had anything to do with
Jon Landau, who remains one of
my best friends to this day.
Stevie Van Zandt, New York
Contact Us
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Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
Also available at bn.com/rsfleetwoodmac.

1. Arcade Fire
“Everything Now”
Arcade Fire’s epic dance rock
usually tilts toward Berlin-Bowie-
esque darkness. Not this time.
From its ABBA pianos to its Village
People group-chant vocals, the title
track from their soon-to-be-out new
LP is a glorious disco inferno.
4. Elton John
and Jack White
“Two Fingers of Whiskey”
A raucous piano-blues duet from the
new documentary series The American
Epic Sessions – it’s like wandering into
the glammiest roadhouse in the Delta.
5. Torres
“Skim”
Truth-bombing songwriter Torres
makes some of the most darkly
powerful indie rock around. And
this chilling, guitar-grinding
study in lust and be-
trayal is a brilliant
case in point.
10
2. Radiohead
“I Promise”
This bonus track
from the new 20th-
anniversary reissue of
OK Computer dates back
to 1996; it’s a stately
Joy Division-like ballad
that offers a fascinating
glimpse of the Brit-pop
outliers in the earliest
days of one of rock’s
greatest reinventions.
3. 2 Chainz,
Travis Scott
“4 AM”
A Southern hip-hop
ode to the good life
that creeps along so
sumptuously you’ll get
lifted on contact.
6. Foo Fighters “Run”
He appears as a grizzled old-timer in the video, but when
Dave Grohl shreds his vocals on this majestic punk-metal
anthem, we’re reminded that the Foos’ power is ageless.
7. Carly Rae Jepsen
“Cut to the Feeling”
Jepsen’s latest blast of early-
Eighties dance-pop nostalgia
starts out with the same synth
splash that opens Madonna’s
“Lucky Star.” Big shoes, girl. And
it only gets better and brighter
from there. “I wanna dance on
the roof,” she sings, but this
feels more like partying
in the clouds – pure
fluffy fun.
MY LIST
Rob
Thomas
Five Songs About
Days of the Week
Thomas and his band
Matchbox 20 are launch-
ing their first tour in
four years this summer,
featuring co-headliner
Counting Crows.
The Boomtown Rats
“I Don’t Like Mondays”
A lot of people don’t real-
ize this is a song about a
school shooting. You can
see Bob Geldof’s social
awareness coming out
even back then.
The Rolling Stones
“Ruby Tuesday”
This was a great ex-
perimental time for the
Stones. There’s nothing
special about a Tuesday,
so you might as well start
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROBERTO RICCIUTI/WIREIMAGE; DALLE/INSTARIMAGES.COM; MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY
with this song.
The Cure
IMAGES; BRANTLEY GUTIERREZ; RACHEL MURRAY/GETTY IMAGES; BURAK CINGI/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
“Friday I’m in Love”
This song is pure candy,
especially for such a mo-
rose band. Robert Smith
smiles through the whole
video like a lunatic.
Rob Thomas
“Sunday Morning
New York Blue”
Stylistically, I was going
back to the Eagles’
“New Kid in Town” with
this. I’m bummed it never
made it on a record.
Sam Cooke
“Another Saturday Night”
To be a black singer that
crossed over like he did,
you have to be subver-
sive. He sang about his
pain in a way that white
kids could dance to.
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 The Music, Politics and People
That Changed Our Culture

Explore Rolling Stone’s past 50 years through

the world’s greatest photographers and writers.
Luxurious and oversized, this is the definitive
look into the magazine’s fascinating history.

AVAILABLE NOW WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD

 Q&A LIL YACHTY P. 24 | TV THE GORY WILD WEST THRILLS OF ‘PREACHER’ P. 25

Metallica’s
Monster
Summer
The band’s first U.S.
tour in eight years
has fire, no fighting
BY KO R Y G R OW

‘D
o you a lwa y s
do that?” James
He t f i e l d a s k s
Lars Ulrich with
a hint of agitation in his voice.
The two are facing each other
in the “Tuning Room,” where
they typically rehearse before a
show. They’re trying to get their
1991 classic “Wherever I May
Roam” right, but Ulrich is play-
ing a strange off-kilter rhythm.
DANA DISTORTION YAVIN

ST. ANGER
Hetfield onstage in
New Jersey in May

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 13
 R&R
Fifteen years ago, this might have re-
sulted in a long, teary group-therapy ses-
sion. But today, Hetfield drops the issue
and lets Ulrich play the song his own way
while exchanging grins with the rest of the
band. This is how Metallica are operating
on their first North American tour in eight
years (and first stadium run in nearly 20):
loose and easygoing, but also sensitive to
one another’s feelings. “We know where all
the nuclear buttons are with each other,
but we don’t push ’em,” says Hetfield later.
“We love what we do, and we want to keep
it going.”
It’s about 20 minutes to showtime on
the first night of the tour, at Baltimore’s
M&T Bank Stadium. The band arrived
earlier this afternoon, heading immedi-
ately to a meet-and-greet with fans who
paid $2,499 each for a photo, a Q&A and a 1
visit to the “Memo-
ry Remains” exhib- Ride the Lightning
it, which shows off
the group’s clothes, (1) The drum circle during “Now That
rare handwritten We’re Dead.” (2) A prestage huddle (“We
say goofy stuff like, ‘We’re going to go
lyrics and instru-
out there and kick some Baltimore ass,’”
ments fans can play. says Ulrich). (3) Practicing backstage in
(“It felt foreign to the “Tuning Room.”
us and, dare I say,
a little hokey,” Ul-
rich admits of the
VIP deals. “So we
just had to sort of
get to a place where
we would get com-
fortable with that.”)
After that, guitarist 3
Kirk Hammett did
some yoga and Ulrich made the set list. “I ing sessions. (The only hiccup happened
usually have all the information about last when Hammett lost his iPhone containing 2
time we played in a city and try to put in hundreds of song ideas. He still cringes
some deeper cuts that we didn’t play last when thinking about it – these days, he “Now That We’re Dead”: The band gathers
time,” he says. knows how to use the cloud.) The process in a drum circle, banging on giant Japa-
After 36 years, the bandmates have worked: Hardwired hit Number One and nese Taiko drums in unison. “I don’t know
touring down to a science: two weeks on, went platinum – and the band has been if it works or not, but I love it,” Hetfield
two weeks off. Metallica base themselves playing lots of new songs live: the eight- says. “I’ve dreamt about doing something
out of the nearest major city – tonight, minute rager “Halo on Fire” is becom- like that for a long time.”
they’ll jet back to New York in time for ing a new anthem, and “Atlas, Rise” is a “Do you want heavy?” Hetfield asks
Ulrich to make a late birthday party in time-shifting epic that turns the “snake before launching into “Sad but True,” the
Brooklyn. Hetfield won’t join him; he’s pit,” a small area in front of the stage, into start of a homestretch of hits that wraps
heading to a New Jersey shooting range a frenzy. (Hetfield has been thrilled with with “Enter Sandman.” “It’s just kinda
the next morning to “let off some steam.” how many young, first-time Metallica con- gotta be at the end,” Hetfield says. “It’s
In the years since its last U.S. tour, the certgoers he’s been seeing.) that song.” Afterward, the group toss-
band has stayed busy, playing to die-hard The show is Metallica’s largest produc- es picks and drum sticks into the audi-
European and South American audiences tion ever. Using 48 trucks, the stage takes ence and gives heartfelt thank-you’s be-
while indulging in creative whims. Lulu, three days to set up, equipped with lasers, fore speeding off to the airport. “It’s like
its 2011 album with Lou Reed, got mid- balloons, more than 300,000 total watts 1993 all over again,” says Hammett,
dling reviews. Metallica created their of audio, and a circular catwalk with a who sometimes wonders how Metalli-
Orion Music + More festival, which ran ministage that the band plays “Seek and ca have outlasted their hard-rock peers.
for two years, and self-funded Metallica Destroy” on, aiming to re-create the ga- “There are a few bands still doing it on
Through the Never, a 3D concert film. rage atmosphere where it was written. a level that’s similar to back in the day,
JEFF YEAGER/METALLICA, 3

Both projects were a hit with fans, but lost
money. In 2012, they left Warner Bros.
and started their own indie label to re-
cord 2016’s Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct.
The independence they felt resulted in
wilder arrangements and upbeat record-
During 1997’s “Fuel,” Hetfield screams as
40-foot flames shoot up around him. “I’m
a boy in a man’s body, so if you could have
40-foot flames instead of 10-foot flames,
why wouldn’t you?” he says with a laugh.
His favorite moment is the new thrasher
but it’s weird. Like, what happened to
everyone? Did they give up? Did the au-
dience lose interest? There are a bunch
of different questions on why they’re not
here now and why we are. I feel so moth-
erfucking lucky.”

14 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 R&R
Auerbach’s Cheat Sheet
Last year, Dan Auerbach turned down a lucrative tour with the Black Keys: “I was going crazy playing the same
songs every night.” Instead, he hunkered down in his Nashville studio to work with some of the city’s session
greats. The result is his excellent LP Waiting on a Song. Here’s a guide to the album’s biggest influences. PATRICK DOYLE
Del McCoury
Auerbach recently star ted
having “picking parties” at his
home in Nashville’s West End
neighborhood. One guest was
McCoury, 78. A veteran of Bill
Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he
is one of the last living links to
bluegrass’s golden era. “He flies
Bill Monroe’s flag hard,” Auer-
bach says. “I was raised on the
Stanley Brothers. I didn’t know
that you can’t be in both camps
– bluegrass beef, man.” Those
parties pushed Auerbach to
start writing on acoustic gui-
tar. “It couldn’t be a fragment
supported by studio magic,”
he says. “I wanted to be able to
sit down and just play ’em and
have them work. I’ve never been
able to do that.”
McCoury
Charlie Feathers
Auerbach loves both garage-
punk icons the Cramps and
swamp-blues great Junior
Kimbrough. Both have a com-
mon inf luence: Feathers,
the Mississippi rocka-
billy great who scored
hits like 1955’s “Peep-
in’ Eyes” for Sun Rec-
ords. He also arranged
hits for Elvis, but
clashes with boss
Sam Phillips got
Prine
him fired from
the label. Auer-
bach isn’t sur-
16
prised Feathers never broke big.
“It’s menacing. Scary, really,” he
says. “It’s the kind of music that
gets played before somebody
jumps out of the closet and stabs
you in the heart.”
John Prine
A couple of years ago, Au-
erbach went to see Prine
– most famous for trip-
py folk songs like “Angel
From Montgomer y ”
and “Hello in There” –
at Nashville’s Station
Inn. “It was like I was
hearing him for the
first time,” Auer-
bach says. They
booked a session.
TIGHTEN UP
Auerbach in
New York in May.
Prine doesn’t write much any-
more, so they decided to sing
about writer’s block. Auerbach
calls the song they recorded to-
gether, which became the title
track to the LP, an “instant
singalong.” “It was just great
to be around supreme crea-
tivity,” he says. Auerbach
learned to work fast:
“We’d only go about
an hour and a half
before we’d have to
go eat, then you
try to close the
deal when you
get back from
lu nc h. Joh n
k now s w he r e
meatloaf is every
day of the week.”
Cowboy Jack Clement
At Sun Records, Clement dis-
covered Jerry Lee Lewis and
wrote classics like Johnny Cash’s
“Ballad of a Teenage Queen.”
Later, as a producer, he became
what Auerbach
calls “a magnet
for a lot of the
pot-smoking,
hippie country
guys in Nash-
ville.” Several of
Clement
those musicians
play on Auerbach’s
LP, and Clement’s appren-
tice David “Fergie” Ferguson
co-produced (Clement died in
2013). “He wasn’t afraid of being
quirky,” says Auerbach, describ-
ing how Clement used Hawai-
ian lap steel and conga drums
on records. He also champi-
oned Charley Pride, the first
black country star, in the Six-
ties. “That was his idea – every-
one else said no to [Pride],” says
Auerbach. “He was a genius.”
Duane Eddy
“A fucking awesome soloist,”
says Auerbach of Eddy, whose
1958 instrumental “Rebel-
Rouser” is a twangy staple (its
echo was achieved by record-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SACHA LECCA; BETH GWINN/GETTY IMAGES; MARK HUMPHREY/
ing inside a water tank). Eddy
puts his trademark licks on Au-
erbach’s stomper “Living
in Sin.” Their friend-
AP IMAGES; TOM HILL/WIREIMAGE; STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GETTY IMAGES
ship was forged over
buffalo burgers. “He
said he met Elvis in
Vegas, and Elvis
said, ‘Do you
k now any
way I could
g e t aw a y
f r o m t he
Colonel? I
Eddy need a new
manager.’ ”
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 BOOKS

THIS WAS IT
(1) The Strokes living the dream, 2001. (2) Karen O
of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2002. (3) James Murphy 3
of LCD Soundsystem, 2005.

New York Stories

How the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and other great bands
revived the local rock scene, maybe for the last time
he new york rock scene of the 2000s many of its major stars – including the famously guard-

T was a flashpoint of guitars, drugs and dive

bars that created the Strokes, LCD Soundsys-
tem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ryan Adams, In-
terpol, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend and scads
of other great bands. “It was an important and poignant
period of time in the city, and I wanted to document it,”
says Lizzy Goodman, author of an excellent oral his-
tory, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and
Roll in New York City 2001-2011. Goodman covered the
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ANTHONY PIDGEON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES;
ed Strokes, who open up in detail for the first time ever
about guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s heroin addiction,
which nearly destroyed the band. Along with serving as
a snapshot of a much wilder time in New York’s music
history (one chapter is called “Party in a Bag”), the book
also reminds us what rock stardom was like before so-
cial media destroyed the aura of mystery and coolness
that surrounds artists. “A working title of this book was
‘The Last Real Rock Stars,’ ” says Goodman. “These peo-

local scene during that period, forging friendships with ple are relics of an era that’s gone.” ANDY GREENE
HAYLEY MADDEN/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; JIM DYSON/GETTY IMAGES

AL S O RE L E AS E D

A BIG HISTORY OF ROCK WRITING VAN HALEN’S WASTED GLORY DAYS

Co-edited by novelist Jonathan
Leth em, the nearly 600-page
Shake It Up: Great Ameri-
can Writing on Rock and
Pop From Elvis to Jay Z
may be the best anthol-
ogy of pop-music criticism
ever compiled. Arriving
with the classy imprimatur
of the Library of America,
it covers five decades of
music with an eclectic mix
of literary voices – from gonzo icon
Lester Bangs on the death of Elvis
in 1977 to feminist “fangirl”
Jessica Hopper on emo to
a great Kanye West dissec-
tion by hip-hop historian
Greg Tate titled “In Praise
of Assholes.” There are
also classic ROLLING STONE
pieces about the Cars and
David Bowie. It’s a rock-
nerd must-read. JON DOLAN
Too bad the title The Dirt was al-
ready taken. Noel Monk – who went
from being Van Halen’s
road manager to their busi-
ness manager during their
Diamond Dave prime –
holds nothing back in Run-
nin’ With the Devil, from
Eddie Van Halen’s alleged
biological confusion (“Is
there any way she could
have gotten pregnant from
giving me a blow job?”) to David
Lee Roth’s apparent Trump-level
narcissism to a guacamole
assault on Steve Perry.
Gossip aside, Monk paints
a convincing picture of a
brilliant, substance-addled
young band that wasn’t
built to last. During VH’s
final tour, he comes to a re-
alization: “Jesus, these guys
hate each other.” BRIAN HIATT

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 17
 Miley Cyrus
INSPIRATION Fleetwood Mac. Cyrus’ new hit
“Malibu” has a strummy feel that is pure
L.A. pop circa ’75. WHY Cyrus has called
the Mac “one of my favorite artists”; she’s
covered “Landslide” live several times.
STEVIE NICKS SAYS “I’m glad I can be an inspira-
tion to her. Today’s music is
all starting to sound the
GOMEZ
same, so I think they’re
looking back to
DAVID BYRNE the elite bands of
Selena Gomez the Sixties and
Seventies for
INSPIRATION Talking Heads. Gomez built her new hit, “Bad Liar,” around the funkily lurch- ideas.”
ing bass line on the Heads’ 1977 classic “Psycho Killer.” WHY “Selena and [co-writer Julia
Michaels] are huge Talking Heads fans,” says Justin Tranter, who also worked on the song.
One day in the studio, Michaels suggested they write to the famous bass sound. “Every-
thing clicked,” says producer Ian Kirkpatrick. DAVID BYRNE SAYS “I think her song is great.
Judge it on its merits and not on her in the tabloids.” Heads drummer Chris Frantz
called it a “delight” that a new generation will rock out to the riff.
CYRUS

Pop Radio STEVIE NICKS

Rocks Again Harry Styles

INSPIRATION His solo debut, Harry Styles, is deeply indebted
to artists from David Bowie to Badfinger. But no one
more than Harry Nilsson, whose solo recordings fused
Turn on the radio, and you might hear something unexpect-
psychedelic pop and singer-songwriter confes-
ed: pop stars taking inspiration from their parents’ record sions. WHY Styles told Cameron Crowe
collections. Harry, Miley and others are taking notes from he got “obsessed” with 1971’s Nilsson
Seventies sounds, from Laurel Canyon folk to New Wave and Schmilsson while recording in
glam. Here’s a guide to pop’s retro moment. DAVID BROWNE Jamaica: “There’s no story or
timeline – just 10 sick songs.
Every one is better than the
next.” KEY ENDORSEMENTS
Nilsson died in 1994, but HARRY
his old peers Mick Jagger NILSSON
Niall Horan and Paul McCartney are
Styles fans.
INSPIRATION As the Irish heartthrob of One
Direction, Horan credited Michael Bublé DON
and Frank Sinatra as influences. These HENLEY
days, he’s all about the Eagles. He calls
them his “favorite band of all time” and
aimed to channel Don Henley’s “The Boys
of Summer” on his new single “Slow
Hands.” DON HENLEY SAYS “[He] will
evolve into a resonant voice for
his generation.” Henley invited
Horan for drinks in London
on a tip from his daughter.
Horan told Billboard, “We
talk every couple of weeks.
It’s mad. I call him ‘Dad’
and he calls me ‘Son.’”

HORAN STYLES

18 | R ol l i n g S t o n e
 Fleetwood Mac’s New Spinoff
Lindsey Buckingham and Christine McVie didn’t want to stop after
the Mac’s last tour. So they hit the studio for the first time in decades
B Y JONA H W E I N E R

B
ack in 2014, something won-
derful happened to Lindsey Buck-
ingham and Christine McVie.
They tried writing songs togeth-
er for the first time in ages – taking a ten-
tative, low-stakes approach – and were
overjoyed to discover that “within the first
hour,” as Buckingham puts it, “it was like,
‘Holy shit, whatever we used to have—’ ”
“—is still there,” says McVie, sitting a few
feet away. It’s mid-May, and the Fleet-
wood Mac icons are on a soundstage in
L.A., about to rehearse. Those new songs
grew into an album, Lindsey Buckingham/
Christine McVie, which will imminently
give way to a new tour, so they’ve booked
this space for five weeks of practice.
The pair’s success was in no way guar-
anteed. Sure, back in the late Seventies,
while working on Rumours and Tusk,
McVie wrote epochal smashes like “Don’t
Stop” and “Think About Me,” which Buck-
ingham helped shape in
the studio. (He also wrote
plenty of hits, like “Go THE CHAIN Above: Buckingham and McVie
Your Own Way.”) But the in L.A., 2016. Left: The duo in 1979.
making of those LPs had
been famously turbulent – chance it would turn into a new Fleetwood
drugs, fights, love triangles Mac album, but Stevie Nicks was “busy
PREVIOUS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DON ARNOLD/WIREIMAGE; © GARY GERSHOFF/MEDIAPUNCH/IPX/AP IMAGES;
© DDNY/BROADIMAGE; RICK DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES; TOM HANLEY/ALAMY; SOFI ADAMS/GETTY IMAGES; © DENNIS VAN

– and the ensuing years with projects of her own,” McVie says. (“I
TINE/AVALON/ZUMA PRESS; PAUL NATKIN/WIREIMAGE. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: JOHN RUSSO; SAM EMERSON/POLARIS

hadn’t exactly been idyllic.
“The Sixties-into-the-Sev-
enties lifestyle ramped up,
and by 1987? I don’t know
how we ever got Tango in
the Night done,” says Buck-
ingham, 67. “We saw Ste-
vie for a couple of weeks out
of an entire year. Everyone was at their
worst. Hard living.”
Buckingham left the band for the better
part of a decade. Not long after he rejoined,
in 1997, McVie called it quits and returned
to her native England. “I thought, ‘I want
to be home.’ My dad was sick. I bought a
house in Kent, and it had to be rebuilt brick
by brick. I did that quite lovingly. Then my
marriage [to musician Eddy Quintela] fell
apart, and I found myself in this huge place,
alone in the middle of nowhere. I got my-
self in a bit of trouble, really. I fell down the
stairs, hurt my back and started taking pills
for the pain. La-di-da, one thing led to the
other, and I got a bit . . . isolated.” She even-
tually “sought help with a therapist, and
discovered I had other issues. Eventually I
had to figure out what the hell I was going
to do with my life.” The answer? “I needed
to find my way back to Fleetwood Mac.”
She signed up for the band’s 2014-15
On With the Show world tour. Before it
started, she sent Buckingham some “nug-
gets of ideas” to reorient themselves. But
creative sparks f lew in both directions.
“She’d take my stuff and come back with
something magnificent,” says Buckingham.
Adds McVie, 73, “We’ve always connected
musically in Fleetwood Mac, because” –
as the band’s guitarist and keyboardist,
respectively – “we’re the only people who
play more than one note. I’m not the best
pianist, but I know how to interlace around
what Lindsey’s playing.” They vowed to
return to the material, and there was a
needed my two years off,” Nicks said.) A
duets album took hold. They started tak-
ing liberties with each other’s songs in a
way that wasn’t previously possible. “In the
context of the band, there might have been
more politics,” Buckingham notes. It helps
that, amid the many romantic entangle-
ments that crisscrossed the group, there
was no such history between the two: “We
are free of baggage,” McVie says, chuckling.
Buckingham/McVie, featuring contribu-
tions from drummer Mick Fleetwood and
bassist John McVie, sounds crisp and up-
beat, even when the pair are reckoning with
subjects like what McVie calls her “hiberna-
tion.” On tour, they will sprinkle in Fleet-
wood Mac numbers, and the Mac them-
selves will reassemble for bigger shows later
this summer. Which Buckingham consid-
ers miraculous. “We were a dysfunctional
family,” he says. “But somehow we had the
strength. . . .” McVie grins and listens. “The
heroics that got us through Rumours,” he
adds, “when everyone was crumbling and
we realized we had a destiny to follow? That
same strength has kept us all together.”

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 19
 R&R
Jack Antonoff’s
Therapy Rock
How a neurotic refugee from a failed emo band became
Taylor Swift’s favorite new producer and a voice for the outcasts
ack antonoff has been getting
J a lot of shit today. It’s late May, the
same day news breaks that both Chris
Cornell and Roger Ailes had died.
From his Brooklyn apartment, An-
tonoff reacted with a tweet: “Roger Ailes
was a sexual predator who ruined many
lives,” he wrote. “Chris Cornell was a bril-
liant artist. World was made better and
worse today.” Reaction has been swift. His
Twitter mentions have lit up with people
calling him “stupid” and “terrible,” and in-
sulting his girlfriend, Lena Dunham. “A
surprising amount of people are saying,
‘But it’s a human life!’ ” says Antonoff, sit-
ting on a couch at Electric Lady Studios.
“Well, what if you spent your human life
ending and ruining other people’s human
lives? How many cops shot black kids be-
cause of that rhetoric? I said to someone
the other day, ‘I wish Trump would die,’ and
they were like, ‘Ahh.’ But he should die. Less
people would die if he died!”
Antonoff gets this kind of blowback a lot,
but he also knows that speaking his mind
is the reason he’s gotten this far. Just a few
years ago, he was the guitarist and second
banana in fun., who scored a Number One
hit with 2012’s “We Are Young.” He walked
away from the group to create Bleachers,
where he opened up about his anxieties
and personal tragedies within big Tech-
nicolor arena-pop arrangements inspired
by everyone from Billy Joel to Robyn. The
project has made him a hero to misfits who
might have been into emo a decade ago.
At the same time, Antonoff has carved out
a successful career as a producer, writing
with Taylor Swift, Lorde and others. “There
was something interesting about him,” says
Lorde of their first few meetings. “I could
imagine myself breaking down a wall with
him. He’s instantly disarming in that he
asks you very personal questions and you
don’t feel weird telling him.”
On the surface, Antonoff, 33, seems to
have had a charmed upbringing: He grew
up in northern New Jersey, the son of a
successful businessman. He attended a
performing-arts high school in Manhat-
22 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
BY PAT R ICK D OY L E
tan, where he dated Scarlett Johansson. Gone Now. He listened to a lot of Beat-
But there was also a lot of pain. When he les. He became obsessed with stereo pan-
was 18, his 13-year-old sister died of can- ning and the idea that no musical passages
cer. He still writes about the loss, and sus- should repeat without a new surprise.
pects his late sister is the reason he became Friends like Carly Rae Jepsen and Lorde
a musician. He remembers leaving home to dropped by to sing backup.
drive to Florida on a punk tour, at age 16. The process drove him a little nuts. His
“My sister was so sick,” he says. “That kind relationship with Dunham (whom he’s
of energy in the household puts things in been dating for five years) became strained
perspective. It was ‘Do whatever the fuck at times. He apologizes to a loved one on
you wanna do.’ ” “Foreign Girls” (“I know I’ve been a strang-
Antonoff calls his post-high school years er lately”). “That was a really intense one
“pretty delusional.” As the frontman of emo to write,” he says. “I’d taken such a deep
band Steel Train, he spent years “in a van, dive into my work, and I have no fucking
smoking pot, playing for two people.” His romance toward artists who are just fuck-
bandmates started leaving to get real jobs, ing assholes. I don’t want to be that.” On
so he formed fun. with two other indie- 2014’s Strange Desire, Antonoff presented
rock lifers whose bands himself as a hero who had
were also breaking up. overcome loss, but this
The band took off “like a time he found himself
meteor,” A ntonof f re- “It was a lot of ego, writing from the oppo-
members, going platinum a lot of drama,” site perspective. “When
and winning a Grammy Antonoff says of his you’re in a relationship
for its hit. But Antonoff last band, fun. “I just for a long time, you stop
had trouble getting ex- becoming the hero and
cited about the music. wanted to go home you start facing yourself,”
When fun. tried to record and write records.” he says. He thought a lot
a follow-up to their big about marriage and what
LP, Some Nights, “the vibe was holding him back (“I
was all fucked up,” Antonoff says. “It was a don’t know. I’m not there yet”).
lot of ego, a lot of drama. And I thought, ‘I He tackles that theme in “Let’s Get Mar-
want to go home and write records.’ ” ried,” which he wrote the day after the 2016
One recent morning, Antonoff shows off election. He and Dunham had attended
the studio he’s spent three years building. Hillary Clinton’s party at New York’s Javits
Located down a hallway in the apartment Center. “One of the worst nights of my life,”
he shares with Dunham, it’s a tiny room he says. They went to a Brooklyn diner,
full of Star Wars toys and family photos, where they broke down crying. “I saw Mexi-
old MIDI keyboards and beat-up pedals. can people working there, who are going to
He stresses he’s no technical expert, but he get fucked, and I’ve never felt so ashamed.”
knows how to get results as a producer. The Antonoff tells this story over lunch near
key is working with artists away from the his apartment, getting so worked up that
distractions of a big studio. He points out a couple at a nearby table ask him to stop
the corner where Swift recorded vocals for swearing (“Sorry, I wasn’t raised right,”
her recent hit “I Don’t Wanna Live Forev- he tells them). “I’m just trying to move
er.” “She just comes over and no one knows forward,” he says. “My biggest connection
we’re here,” he says. “It always comes out with Trump is that people are demanding
better when it’s two friends sitting together stuff that’s not crap. Because that’s essen-
wearing headphones.” tially what Trump is: crap. You want to do
This is where Antonoff spent many long something of value. That’s the ultimate po-
months making Bleachers’ new album, litical statement in my heart.”
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 JERSEY BOY
Antonoff in his
Brooklyn studio: “It
all comes out of this
tiny space.”

Photograph by Brya n Derball a RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 23

 R&R
L
il yachty has emerged as
one of hip-hop’s biggest stars
of the moment: the 19-year-
old’s first album, Teenage Emo-
tions, debuted at Number Five, after
his single “1 Night” racked up more
than 107 million YouTube views. But
Yachty is a polarizing figure: for his
casual indifference to hip-hop’s tradi-
tions and history (he single-handedly
exposed a genre-wide generation gap
last year by calling Notorious B.I.G.
“overrated” and saying he couldn’t
name many Tupac songs) and for the
deliberately juvenile irreverence of his
music (he rapped over the Rugrats
theme). At the same time, he’s won
over Kanye West, Chance the Rap-
per and countless young fans. “You
shouldn’t expect one lane, like a hip-
hop album,” says Yachty, whose real
name is Miles McCollum, of his new
LP. “If that’s what you’re looking for,
you’re definitely at the wrong place.”
How has the response to the album
been?
Good, but a shit-ton of people hate
it. That’s life. People hate me, bro.
What’s the difference between Miles
McCollum and Lil Yachty?
Yachty is probably me when Miles is
mad. Miles doesn’t get mad. I’m calm
now. But right before a show, right be-
fore the cameras turn on, I just switch
into a star. It’s an invisible switch.
What’s the first song you loved as a kid?
Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound.” I must
have been eight. I didn’t know the dif-
ference between hip-hop and rock. I
used to wake up before school when
my mom was already at work. That’s
where I first heard a lot of music, like
All Time Low, Fall Out Boy, Miley
Cyrus, Linkin Park. Listening to dif-
ferent shit opens my variety, which
makes it harder for hip-hop fans to
categorize my music.
Do you like any classic rock?
I fuck with the Beatles. My favorite
song of theirs is “I Am the Walrus.” It’s
just a trippy-ass song. I don’t do drugs,
but I can close my eyes and see that
journey. My dad used to play that Paul
McCartney song “Let ’Em In.” That
was dope.
On the new album, you sing that you’ve
never had a sip of beer.
That’s true. I’ve never been drunk.
I took a shot years ago. It burned my
throat. I’ve never had beer. It smells so
disgusting.
What about weed?
A bit back in high school. But I didn’t
like the way it made my brain feel. I
used to say that if I ever became a fa-
mous rapper, I’d start smoking. Once
24 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
you get famous, you get people around
Q&A
you that can make you do stuff. But
when you’re broke and you smoke, you
just sit on a couch and do nothing.
This is not a time to be smoking.
When were you at your most broke?
Shit. Probably in New York, when
I was living out here. I got a food-
stamps card. I used to do credit-card
scamming.
So what did you learn from getting
arrested?
I don’t ever wanna be arrested
again. I was in jail in a holding cell
with a whole bunch of people for a
couple of days. It was fucking terrible.
I was scared – I’m not gonna lie. That’s
when I knew I needed to do something
with my life.
You worked at McDonald’s a few years
ago. How were your Big Macs?
Fucking terrible. They were real
sloppy, but it was a ghetto McDonald’s.
They didn’t give a fuck. But they fired
me when I started showing up late.
On the song “No More,” you say you’re
afraid of women who “just want money.”
That scares me. I don’t like spend-
ing money on women I don’t know. I
did buy my mother a Range Rover and
a new crib. It feels good to say that.
You’ve recently tried to defend yourself
for the line “blow that dick like a cello”
on your single “Peek a Boo.”
I just make a joke out of it now. No-
body called it out when it dropped, but
then the lyrics came out a month or
two later, and everyone was like, “Wait
a minute. . . .” That’s when I started
backing into a dark corner. It seems
like there is nothing more important
in the world than me confusing a cello
with a woodwind instrument. It’s like
the world has nothing else in the world
to talk about.
Miley Cyrus recently caught heat for cat-
egorizing most hip-hop as crude. How
do you feel about that?
Lil Who gives a fuck? Everyone is enti-
tled to their own opinion, bro. If you’re
tired of hip-hop, just don’t listen to it.
I just wish there was a way you could
Yachty filter all the hate off the Internet or not
allow any opinions. Then again, I was
once a teenager on Twitter dissing J.
Cole for no reason.
You turn 20 in August. Any plans?
The “bubblegum-trap” Not really. I don’t want to be 20
yet. I dread my teenage years being
hitmaker on why he thinks over. Now, whenever I have an accom-
he’s a star and what it was plishment, it’s, like, three times bigger
because I’m 19. If I was 27 and got a
like working at a “ghetto Sprite deal, it’s like, “Yeah, OK, that’s
KENNETH CAPPELLO
McDonald’s” good.” But when you’re 19, it’s totally
different.
BY A N DY GR E E N E How do you picture your life at 27?
I can’t. I don’t want to.
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017

DESERT NOIR
Cooper as the
mystical holy
man on a quest
The Awesome Pulp
Sermon of ‘Preacher’
A trio of mystical outlaws embark on
a blood-soaked road trip to track down God
BY ROB SH E F F I E L D
D
eep in the he art of tex as,
three outlaws are on a road trip in
a vintage muscle car. At the wheel,
a gorgeous but deadly piece of work
named Tulip O’Hare. Riding shotgun is the
Rev. Jesse Custer, a preacher with a shady
past (and an even shadier sexual history with
Tulip). And never shutting up in the back
seat, an Irish vampire called Cassidy, who
PREACHER
MONDAYS, 9 P.M., AMC
smokes too much weed and rants about why
the medical-industrial complex hides all the
confiscated foreskins from circumcisions.
FROM TOP: SKIP BOLEN/AMC; WILSON WEB/TNT
These three speed down the dusty back roads
on a mission to hunt down a bad hombre on
the loose: God, who’s been reported missing.
Preacher is one of the most deeply weird
adventures on the air right now – fast,
bloody, blasphemous, darkly comic. It made
a surprise splash in its first season, some-
how turning this cosmic quest into a gore-
splattered Wild West occult thriller. It’s
based on the Nineties DC cult comic, and
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
Television
like AMC’s other massive comic adapta-
tion, The Walking Dead, Preacher mixes up
the otherworldly with buckets of blood and
guts, yet it’s infinitely funnier and sharper,
not to mention more over-the-top ridiculous.
As Cassidy says after a showdown with the
Man Upstairs, “You know, one time I took
quite a bit of angel dust, and then I drank an
eight-pack of Red Bull and went to a Bieber
concert. Honestly, this is crazier than that.”
The core trio is great – Dominic Cooper
chafing in his Roman collar as the preacher,
Joseph Gilgun as the loose-cannon vampire,
and, most of all, Ruth Negga as the wise-
cracking Tulip. The show has the right mock-
ing tone as the gang looks to get some an-
swers about why God has ditched the human
race. But as with John Wayne in The Search-
ers, it’s not quite clear what they plan to do
with God if they catch him. As the preacher
says, “Maybe he has good reason . . . but if I
don’t like his reason . . . I’m gonna hold that
son of a bitch to account.” Preacher doesn’t
promise any answers – just a wildly exhila-
rating mix of pulp theology and noir vio-
lence, as the road goes on forever.
RollingStone.com
When
Manicurists
Break Bad
‘Claws’ carves out new
territory in the corrupt
nail salons of Florida
Claws aspires to do for the
nail-salon scene what The Wire
did for drug dealers. Executive-
produced by Rashida Jones,
Claws gets into the down-
and-dirty world of South
CLAWS
SUNDAYS, 9 P.M., TNT
Florida strip malls, where even
cold-blooded killers need a
manicure before disposing of
a body. Down in the bedazzled
streets of Manatee County,
the ladies of the Nail Artisan
salon – mostly former strip-
pers or hookers – decide they
want to put an extra coat of
coral green on their cash flow.
So they get mixed up with
organized crime, including the
superbly named kingpin Uncle
Daddy, played by none other
Nash is all about
the Benjamins.
than Breaking Bad’s DEA agent
Dean Norris. Claws stars Niecy
Nash, fondly remembered from
Reno 911, along with Karrueche
Tran, the scream queen from
3-Headed Shark Attack. Claws
gets into trouble whenever it
takes the emotional drama too
seriously – the tone needs to
be more Bring It On, less Set It
Off. But it captures that trashy
South Florida ambience, where
everything from the guns to
the cars to the cash rolls look
like they’ve been lacquered in
acrylic. R.S.
| R ol l i n g S t o n e | 25
 WE WON’T STOP
Grande and Miley Cyrus
performed Crowded
House’s 1986 classic
“Don’t Dream It’s Over.”
“Special moment with
my very special girl,”
said Cyrus.

BIEB STEPS
UP Justin
Bieber got
spiritual
during his
acoustic set.
“God is in the
midst,” he
said. “He loves
you, and he’s
here for you.”

Ariana’s
Moving
Return
Two weeks after the bombing that
killed 22 people and injured more
than 100, Ariana Grande returned to ROAR AND
the city of the tragedy to host the PEACE
One Love Manchester concert. “We Perry wore a
won’t let hate win,” said Grande, dress adorned
who recruited Coldplay, Katy Perry, with photographs
Liam Gallagher and others to raise HYMN FOR THE WEEKEND of victims of the
more than $13 million for victims Gallagher and Chris Martin led attack. “It’s not

TAYLOR HILL/GETTY IMAGES FOR BOSTON CALLING MUSIC FESTIVAL; BOB WEIR/TWITTER
and their families. “It was beyond Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” easy to always
emotional,” says Manchester native FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: KEVIN MAZUR/ONE LOVE MANCHESTER/GETTY IMAGES, 4;
which became an anthem in the choose love, is
Gallagher. “If we come together, U.K. after the tragedy. it?” she asked.
we’re untouchable.”

Touch
of Green
Before Dead & Co.
played Boulder,
Colorado, Bob Weir
stopped at a local
marijuana dispensary.
“Big fun watching
Colorado let it grow,”
NEW JEWEL Killer Mike and El-P said Weir, who’ll join
of Run the Jewels checked out Phil Lesh for a special
the virtual-reality video for their set at the Lockn’
track “Crown” in Boston. festival in August.

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 MARTHA’S VINEYARD Martha
Stewart and Macklemore put on a
culinary display at Napa’s BottleRock
fest. “I’ve never been part of a rock
concert!” Stewart said.
Minor
Sna-Foo
“We were sorta
nervous,” said Dave
Grohl during Foo
Fighters’ BottleRock set,
their first major show
since 2015. It didn’t
go exactly as planned:
After curfew, organizers
cut the sound during
“Everlong.” The Foos
finished anyway, with
the crowd singing along.

BIG PINK
Frank Ocean
Summer Festival Season Kicks Off debuted a
pink haircut
Last year at New York’s Governors Ball, it rained so hard that they had to cancel the day Kanye in New York.
West was supposed to headline. This year was better, with excellent sets by Childish Gambino, So far this
Phoenix, Tool and Lorde, who threw a dance rager and gave a sermon about “the insanity of summer, he
being in your twenties.” “Fuckin’ hell,” she said later. “Wasn’t expecting that level of alchemy.” has canceled
three festival
UNCAGED ELEPHANT Matt Shultz performances
of retro rockers Cage the Elephant due to
stage-dived. “Always taking public production
transpo to the next level,” he joked. delays.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STEVE JENNINGS/WIREIMAGE; CHRIS TUITE; LRNYC/MEGA; BRUCE GLIKAS/
FILMMAGIC; GRIFFIN LOTZ; TAYLOR HILL/GETTY IMAGES FOR GOVERNORS BALL; GRIFFIN LOTZ

CHANCE GOES DEEP

Chance the Rapper
poked fun at his spiritual
side. “Damn, he praising
God now?” he said to
the Gov Ball crowd.

PANIC
ROYAL ATTACK
BLOOD Brendon Urie
Lorde was of Panic! at
on hand to the Disco
cheer Jack made his
Antonoff’s Broadway
Gov Ball set. debut in Kinky
He returned Boots. “I’m
the favor by terrified ...
joining her and anxious,”
onstage to he said
cover Robyn. beforehand.

RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 27
 CAN DEMOCRATS
FIX THE PARTY?
Trump’s victory exposed the party establishment as
utterly broken. With new leaders at the helm, the
Dems are now hoping to rebuild in time for a comeback in 2018
T
he obama years sparked
a Washington renaissance,
transforming the District of
Columbia from a jumble of
wealth and blight into a gilded
capital, one frankly worthy of
heartland resentment. Glassy
condos rise from a once-derelict warehouse
district now called “NoMa.” On gentrified
14th Street, brasseries like Le Diplomate
cater to the city’s elite. Anything that isn’t
under construction is gleaming – including
the Capitol dome, fresh from a $60 mil-
lion face-lift.
But at the dawn of the
Trump age, one complex just
south of Capitol Hill stands
out. It looks like it missed
the Obama boom entirely,
which is hard to fathom
because it’s the headquar-
ters of the Democratic Party
– home to the Democratic Na-
tional Committee (DNC) as well
as the Congressional Campaign Com-
mittee (DCCC). The sprawling three-story
concrete-and-glass structure is wedged be-
tween an elevated railroad track and the
Capitol Power Plant. Exterior paint that
may once have aspired to adobe has faded
to an indistinct pink, recalling lox. Streaks
of rust mar the walls. Someone has tried to
spruce up the joint, on the cheap, tacking
up a floor-to-ceiling poster in a third-floor
window of the party’s post-donkey logo, a
blue-circled “D.”
Our republic is in crisis. And the party
leaders who run this complex will play an
outsize role in determining how the Ameri-
can experiment survives the Donald Trump
presidency and a Republican Party that has
abandoned patriotism for power. Paradox-
28 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
By Tim Dickinson
ically, after eight years of the most success-
ful Democratic presidency in generations,
the Democratic Party finds itself not only
powerless in Washington, but with a party
infrastructure as battered as the building
that houses it. As Tom Perez, the intense
new chair of the DNC, tells me from his
top-floor office: “This is a turnaround job.”
The Democratic Party is in the worst
shape of its modern history. The presiden-
cy of Barack Obama papered over the fact
that the party was being hollowed out from
below. Over Obama’s two terms, Dem-
ocrats ceded 13 governorships to
the GOP and stumbled from
controlling six in 10 state leg-
islatures to now barely one
in three. Across federal and
state government, Demo-
crats have lost close to 1,000
seats. There are only six
states where Democrats con-
trol both the legislature and the
governor’s mansion.
More troubling: Even amid the great
upwelling of anti-Trump resistance, Dem-
ocratic favorability ratings have continued
to tumble since Election Day – to just 40
percent in a May Gallup poll. “Our nega-
tives are almost as high as Trump’s, as far as
party goes,” says Rep. Tim Ryan, a rugged
Ohio Democrat serving Youngstown. Ryan
led an unsuccessful 63-vote insurgency
against House Minority Leader Nancy Pe-
losi in November because, he says, “We
weren’t winning.”
There is no official accounting for this
erosion of power and popularity. Unlike
the GOP in the aftermath of Mitt Rom-
ney’s 2012 defeat, Democrats have not pub-
lished post-mortems. But get party insid-
ers talking – with anonymity exchanged
for candor – and there’s little debate about
how the party went sideways.
Responsibility rests foremost at the feet
of former President Barack Obama. As a
candidate, Obama sidestepped the party’s
next-in-line culture, riding into the White
House on the strength of a then-revolution-
ary digital-and-grassroots machinery of his
own creation. “Obama was almost like the
anti-Democrat,” a former DNC chair tells
Rolling Stone. “The president didn’t
care about the Democratic Party.”
Once in office, Obama had the weight of
the world to bear. He staved off financial
collapse and secured health insurance for
an estimated 20 million Americans, lever-
aging the party’s infrastructure for these
fights. “When you’re at the head of the DNC
and you have the White House,” says Sen.
Tim Kaine, who chaired the party from
2009 to 2011, “a lot of the job is about pro-
moting the president’s agenda.” But Obama
and his team neglected a far less heroic
duty: the care and feeding of the national
party, which Democrats had rebuilt during
the Bush years with a “50-state strategy”
that had empowered Obama with domi-
nant Democratic majorities in Congress.
The GOP took full advantage of the pres-
ident’s disregard for party politics. The Tea
Party vaulted Republicans to control of
the U.S. House and statehouses across the
country in 2010 – putting the party in the
driver’s seat for the once-a-decade redraw-
ing of legislative boundaries known as re-
districting. The White House mounted no
resistance. “The Obama team, David Axel-
rod, had no organized structural redistrict-
ing [game plan],” says a longtime Demo-
cratic strategist. “The Republicans just ran
up the fucking score everywhere. They got
two or three extra congressional seats in
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017

state after state after state, creating lasting
struggles to get back to a majority.” Case in
point: Democratic House candidates net-
ted 1.3 million more votes than Republi-
cans in 2012, but secured 33 fewer seats.
The 50-state strategy devolved under
Obama into a presidential-battleground
strategy, leaving state parties starved for
cash and leadership. “Obama didn’t put
resources into local parties unless it was
for his re-election effort,” says the for-
mer party chair. Making matters worse:
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Obama tapped ambitious Florida Rep.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz – a favor-
ite of White House senior adviser Valerie
Jarrett – to run the DNC in 2011. “That
congresswoman had no idea what she was
doing,” adds the former chair.
Wasserman Schultz went rogue. In a
rift with the White House that spilled
into a story on Politico, she was criticized
for using the DNC as a vehicle for self-
promotion, hoping the office would serve
as a springboard into House leadership.
The White House made over-
tures to oust Wasserman Schul-
tz, but she dug in, promising
an ugly fight that could tar the
president as both anti-wom-
an and anti-Semitic. (Wasser-
man Schultz, who was forced
to resign in the aftermath of
the Russian hack of the DNC,
declined to participate in this
story.)
Obama dodged that fight,
and instead fostered Organiz-
ing for Action, the grassroots
group born of his campaigns.
“They had a mirror organiza-
tion that did just their politics,
and it weakened the DNC,” says
a source in House leadership.
“It directed money elsewhere
and was not in the interest of
the long-term stability [of the
party]. It was a selfish strategy.”
The hobbled DNC’s chief re-
maining value was as a fund-
raising vehicle. For Obama, it
“was like his ATM – and Clin-
ton was the same,” says the for-
mer chair. Clinton pioneered a
strategy that allowed her largest
donors to give $10,000 to each
of 32 state parties participating
in her Victory Fund. But that
money didn’t stay in the states.
Instead, nearly every penny was
hoovered up to the DNC for the
benefit of Clinton’s election.
Clinton today says she found
the DNC to be a liability. In an
onstage interview at a Recode
tech conference in May, Clin-
ton recalled, “I get the nomi-
nation. . . . I inherit nothing
from the Democratic Party. It
was bankrupt. . . . I had to in-
ject money into it – the DNC –
to keep it going.” Clinton then
raised eyebrows by indicting
the DNC’s data, which the party
had inherited from the Obama
re-election campaign. “Its data
was mediocre to poor, nonex-
istent, wrong,” Clinton said.
(The DNC’s former data chief
hit back, tweeting that Clin-
ton’s broadside was “fucking
bullshit,” but declined to be interviewed.)
Under Obama, the party infrastructure
was honed to elect a president. And being
a presidential party is a powerful thing –
until you lose the White House. The Clin-
ton campaign lost significantly on its own
merits, though the party is loath to admit
it. The same candidate who was caught
flat-footed by the rise of Obama in 2008
found herself stunned by the grassroots
surge behind Sen. Bernie Sanders. “And
she was really surprised by how strong
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 29
Trump was – and part of it was she just
sucked,” says the Democratic strategist,
who criticizes Clinton despite being en-
trenched in her center-left, pro-trade wing
of the party. “At a really fundamental level
we gotta get people to acknowledge what
a fucking piece of shit her campaign was,
because Donald Trump should not have
won this election.” The strategist adds,
“Yes, Comey happened. And yes, the Rus-
sians happened. But she had more money
than God, and they spent all of it trash-
ing him and not actually rebutting his
ideological agenda.” By transforming the
election into a referendum on character,
Team Clinton let Trump off the hook as
the frontman for the extremist GOP plat-
form. “The country’s waking up shocked
FOR OBAMA, THE DNC ‘WAS LIKE HIS ATM,’ ” SAYS AN
EX-PARTY CHAIR. “HE DIDN’T PUT RESOURCES INTO LOCAL
PARTIES UNLESS IT WAS FOR HIS RE-ELECTION EFFORT.
to what he’s doing because Hillary didn’t
actually explain to anybody what he was
going to do when he became president,”
the strategist says. “We focused on him
groping people – and not on him saying
he was going to end our alliance with Eu-
rope or he was going to strip health care.
It was an amazing failure of our politics to
make our case.”
For national Democrats, the loss of
the White House was compounded by a
weak showing in House races. Clinton’s
3-million-vote popular victory – moot for
the Electoral College – should have paid
dividends in swing districts. But the elec-
toral machinery of the DCCC had its own
troubles. Hampered by poor recruiting,
the Democrats lost in 23 districts that
Clinton won, including seven in Califor-
nia alone. The party netted just six seats to
WITH US
Wonder Woman U.S. states join
pact to meet
Paris commitments.
30 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
remain in a two-dozen-seat deficit to Paul
Ryan and the House GOP.
The DCCC’s woes were separate from
the DNC’s. The committee has functioned
as the political machine of Nancy Pelosi,
leader of House Democrats since 2003,
who is the DCCC’s prodigious chief fund-
raiser and has hand-picked its chairman.
On Pelosi’s watch, the committee has
caught flak from allies for being slow to
adapt to the digital and demographic rev-
olutions in politics, creating a disconnect
with the emerging electorate. “We weren’t
focused on how to communicate with
younger people who are online and not
watching TV,” says Rep. Tim Ryan. A con-
sultant now working with the DCCC says
the party also lacked an effective Hispanic-
vote strategy. “We were not really talking
to a big chunk of the people we need to get
to vote for us,” he says. The result is that
House Democrats are beginning the 2018
cycle in a deeper hole than necessary. “We
should not be 24 seats down.”
T
he weight of reviving the
Democratic Party in the Trump
era rests on the trim shoulders of
55-year-old Tom Perez. The new
chair of the DNC has a runner’s
build, working-class teeth and a feisty
disposition. Perez favors dark suits and
baggy white dress shirts, with no tie. His
corner office is Spartan – save for a clus-
ter of photographs near his desk. A late-
Nineties picture with Ted Kennedy, whom
Perez worked for as special counsel, is in-
scribed by the late Massachusetts sena-
London Mayor Rock climber Ireland to have
Sadiq Khan calls ascends its first gay
for cancellation El Capitan prime
of Trump’s visit. without ropes. minister.
tor: “To Tom, with thanks for your skillful
help . . . in advancing the cause of equal jus-
tice under law.”
Facing off against Minnesota Rep. Keith
Ellison in the race for chair, Perez was
tarred by many as an avatar of the party
establishment. But that’s hard to square
with Perez’s biography. Raised in Buffalo,
the fourth child of Dominican immigrants,
Perez worked his way through Brown Uni-
versity with blue-collar jobs – including col-
lecting garbage. Earning both a law degree
and master’s in public policy from Harvard,
Perez spent much of his career as an attor-
ney at the Justice Department, and in the
early Obama years served as assistant at-
torney general for civil rights. From that
post, Perez blocked a discriminatory voter-
FROM LEFT: WARNER BROS.; PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE; PETER NICHOLLS/REUTERS;
ID law in Texas, sued Maricopa County
Sheriff Joe Arpaio over racist policing in
GLOWIMAGES/GETTY IMAGES; TIM GREENWAY/“PORTLAND PRESS HERALD”/GETTY
JIMMY CHIN/“NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC”/AP IMAGES; CLODAGH KILCOYNE/REUTERS;
Arizona and oversaw the first convictions
under an expanded federal hate-crimes act
IMAGES; RUSSELL ILLIG/GETTY IMAGES; DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
passed in 2009. His record drew the ire of
then-Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who de-
cried Perez’s “fundamentally political ap-
proach to the law.”
Perez gained a national profile as Pres-
ident Obama’s labor secretary; he fought
for adoption of the “fiduciary rule,” requir-
ing financial advisers to work in the in-
terests of mom-and-pop investors, not to
line their own pockets with commissions.
(This rule’s implementation has been de-
layed by President Trump, who is seek-
ing to overturn it.) Perez’s record is not as
a party insider but rather as a public ser-
vant who has stuck his neck out to protect
vulnerable Americans. “I’m quite proud
L.A.-area Unemployment James Comey:
Muslims break at 16-year low. “Lordy, I hope there
Ramadan fasting are tapes.”
at taco trucks.
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 of the battles that I’ve picked with Wall got a powerful ally in Washington. “If the Priebus invested tens of millions of dollars
Street,” he says. people on the ground – the city council to centralize Republican data and analyt-
Perez is not a natural politician. He members, the aldermen – are not feeling ics. The RNC developed powerful digital-
speaks with a taut seriousness that can like we’re backing them up,” Ellison warns, targeting tools and made them available to
lead to moments of abruptness. On an “then we’re failing.” anyone running for Republican office, from
eight-city “unity tour” with Sanders, Perez Perez envisions the DNC as a mainframe a city council candidate in Oklahoma City
accused Trump of not giving “a shit” about – distributing technology, cash and exper- to the presidential nominee. First deployed
people and decried the president’s “shitty” tise to state and local parties. “We’re in the in the 2014 midterms, the RNC’s data
budget. The peppering of profanity rang infrastructure business,” Perez says cheer- system was primed and ready for Trump
false – like a dad trying to “hang” with his fully. “You can’t run successful campaigns when he secured the 2016 nomination and
teenager’s friends. outperformed the data operation
But Perez earns unvarnished of the Clinton campaign. An RNC
praise from his former rival Ellison digital officer bragged to me, short-
– a natural communicator whom ly after the election, that Democrats
Perez tapped as his deputy chair. “are back at square one, and we’ve
“He’s an awesome human being. No got a product already built and test-
bullshit,” the congressman tells me. ed through two major elections.”
“He’s smart, incredibly earnest and In our interview, Perez touted a
serious. He’s good in terms of orga- tech advisory committee he’s con-
nizational management, and he’s vened with “the best and brightest
relentless.” minds” – including Obama’s chief
Perez brings years of experience digital strategist, Joe Rospars – to
wrangling federal bureaucracies to build “a platform that’s going to en-
his new job, and seems to relish the able us to engage voters in ways that
task of rebuilding the DNC: “I come we’ve never done before.”
to this enterprise with immense op- On the messaging front, Perez
timism.” The “turnaround job” Perez sees Trump’s mounting betrayals of
envisions has two components. One working-class Americans as an op-
IMAGES; JOSH HANER/“THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX; SHAH MARAI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
“ROLLING STONE”; CLAY HIGGINS/FACEBOOK; ABDULJABBAR ZEYAD/REUTERS; GETTY
TOP: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: MARK RALSTON/AFP/
GETTY IMAGES; NOAA/NASA; ALEXEI DRUZHININ/AP IMAGES, DIGITALLY ALTERED BY

is structural. “We have redefined our portunity to reassert what Demo-

NEW MANAGEMENT
mission,” he says. “We are no longer “We let Donald Trump hijack the narrative of the Democratic crats stand for. “We allowed Donald
just here to elect the president, but Party,” Perez says. “We’ve always fought for the underdog.” Trump to hijack the basic narrative
to elect Democrats up and down of the Democratic Party,” he says,
the ticket.” The other is message – “which is that we’ve always fought
restoring trust in a “wounded brand.” over time if you’re not organizing, if you for the underdog – to make sure that they
On the structural front, Perez has al- don’t have a voter-protection operation, have a good job, that pays a middle-class
ready taken control – he’s cleaned if you don’t have a robust voter file, if you wage, that provides health care and hous-
house from the Wasserman Schultz era don’t have a training operation. All of those ing and retirement security for their fami-
and brought on board a new CEO, Jess basic building blocks for success are what ly.” Perez is trying to build a big tent around
O’Connell, the former head of the pro- we’re trying to do here.” a fractured party, encouraging Demo-
choice fundraising powerhouse EMILY’s Even before Clinton’s attack at Recode, crats to look to the beliefs they share – and
List. Perez tells me he’s seeking to dou- Perez had made beefing up the DNC’s “dig- Trump threatens. “If our values were not
ble the DNC’s budget from $50 million ital architecture” a top priority. Despite the aligned,” he says, “then we’d have big trou-
to $100 million, with the aim of building wealth of voter data it inherited from the ble. But whether it’s climate, whether it’s
“state parties that can actually thrive.” pioneering Obama campaigns, the DNC wage inequality, whether it’s immigration,
The marker of success, Ellison tells me, is now playing catch-up to the Republican all of the abiding issues of our time, there’s
is that people entering Democratic politics National Committee. In the wake of Rom- a real alignment.” While some Democrats
at the community level will know they’ve ney’s loss in 2012, then-RNC chair Reince may “want to tweak the Affordable Care

AGAINST US
Kathy Griffin, No FEMA Russia hacked U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins Cholera U.S. overdose Trump tweets Terror attacks in
Bill Maher leader appointed U.S. election calls for murder of outbreak in deaths neared he still wants London, Manchester,
lose their as hurricane infrastructure radical-Islam suspects: Yemen 60,000 in “TRAVEL Baghdad, Kabul,
damn minds. season begins. before 2016 vote. “Kill them all.” 2016. BAN.” Portland

Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 31
Act” and others “want a Medicare-for-
all model,” he says, “those are discussions
wherein the value proposition is the same:
Health care is a right for all and not a priv-
ilege for a few.”
For average Americans, the first glimpse
of the DNC’s rebuilding effort will come
through a $1 million organizing project
called Resistance Summer, which launched
in June. Ellison explains the concept in an
interview off the House floor. Representing
Minneapolis, and the first Muslim mem-
ber of Congress, Ellison is best understood
as the DNC’s chief grassroots officer. The
53-year-old is the kind of politician who
amplifies the energy in a room. He has been
barnstorming the country, lavishing atten-
tion on Democrats in red states. “I went to
Boise, Idaho. They packed out the joint. In
Boise!” he says. “They packed out the joint
in Indianapolis. They’re fired up. They be-
lieve Indiana is a blue state if we can get ev-
erybody out to vote.”
Resistance Summer will put Democratic
Party boots on the ground at the rallies,
marches and parades of the anti-Trump
movement. Making common cause with
WE HAVE REDEFINED OUR MISSION,” PEREZ SAYS.
“WE ARE NO LONGER JUST HERE TO ELECT THE PRESIDENT,
BUT TO ELECT DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE TICKET.
protesters and a new universe of grassroots
political organizations is part of the cul-
ture shift Perez and Ellison are driving at
the DNC. “We’re getting local Democratic
Party units out of the campaign office and
into the street,” Ellison says. “When you
open your ballot on Election Day, you’re not
going to have Indivisible or Swing Left or
Our Revolution on your ballot. You’re going
to have to vote Democrat. We can’t show up
late to the party.”
By beginning in 2017 – an off-election
year – Ellison hopes Democrats can en-
gage in real dialogue, both listening to the
concerns of voters and making the party’s
pitch that “we can change this problem by
winning elections,” he says. “ ‘Do you like
being able to get health care when you have
a pre-existing condition? If you do, we’re
here to help.’ ”
Republicans in Congress have given
Democrats just the icebreaker they need
to talk to voters, Perez tells me – with the
Obamacare repeal vote. According to the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office,
the GOP bill would raise premiums by 20
percent in the first year and deprive 23 mil-
lion people of health insurance over a dec-
ade. “They want to get a tax break of $600
billion to rich people by making it harder
for you to access health care,” Perez says.
“We have to take that story to people. We’re
32 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
going to be talking about this in local may-
ors’ races. We’re going to be talking about
this in governors’ races in Virginia and New
Jersey. We’re going to be talking about this
when we take over the Congress next year.”
E
xc e p t i n da y dr e a m s of a n
anti-Trump tsunami, the congres-
sional takeover plotted by Demo-
crats for 2018 does not include the
Senate. The map is so deeply dis-
advantageous – with Democrats seeking
re-election in red states like West Virgin-
ia, North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri and
Montana – that defense is the name of the
game. “Here in the Senate we’re looking to
hold the blue line,” says Maryland’s Chris
Van Hollen, chair of the Democratic Sen-
atorial Campaign Committee. Van Hol-
len adds that there are a few “pickup op-
portunities”; Jeff Flake in Arizona, Dean
Heller in Nevada and, at the outside, Ted
Cruz in Texas could have tough races on
their hands.
The linchpin of the Democratic Party’s
anti-Trump efforts for 2018 is capturing
the House. The man crafting the strategy
is the chair of the DCCC, Ben Ray Luján, a
fifth-term representative from New Mexico
whose district includes Santa Fe. Luján is a
compact man with a Reaganesque haircut.
Like Perez, Luján is the first Latino to hold
his committee chair. In public appearances,
the 45-year-old plays up his working-class
roots – “My dad was an ironworker, my
mom worked for the local public schools”
– but this elides a deep political legacy. Lu-
ján’s father, Ben, was a lion of New Mexico
state politics, serving 11 years as speaker.
Though his sharp grooming wouldn’t
put him out of place on K Street, Luján has
a lilt to his speech and a folksy demeanor.
He gets riled up when asked whether Dem-
ocrats are ceding the heartland. Rural out-
reach, Luján insists, “is important to me;
it’s also personal. I represent a district
that’s 47,000 square miles. It takes eight
and a half hours to drive across it. In some
of the small towns, the town halls are at
the local saloon. After the meeting, people
talk over a beer.”
This is Luján’s second stint as chair of
the DCCC – a post to which he was ap-
pointed in 2015 by Pelosi and won re-
election for, unopposed, this cycle. I first
encounter Luján at a press conference at
party headquarters, where he announces
an expansion of Democratic targets on the
2018 electoral map – adding 20 addition-
al Republican districts, bringing the total
to 79. The increase has less to do with in-
dividual races than a national mood that’s
turning against the GOP – putting al-
most any district where Trump won by five
points or fewer into play. “With Donald
Trump’s favorability in the 30s, Paul Ry-
an’s in the 20s, we need to push in,” Luján
says. “The DCCC is preparing for battle.”
The air of confidence and optimism
around the DCCC is a sea change from the
weeks after Election Day – when rank-and-
file anger about 2016 House results spilled
over into a minor mutiny against Pelosi’s
leadership. Members were frustrated with
a political machine that failed to break
the GOP’s stranglehold on Congress for a
third consecutive cycle. Seth Moulton, a
38-year-old Massachusetts representative,
says that he and others pressed the com-
mittee to “come to terms with the fact that
we’ve been losing elections. To stop patting
themselves on the back and say, ‘What do
we need to change to start winning again?’ ”
Member anger wasn’t targeted at Luján
– who enjoys broad support, even among
DCCC critics – but rather at staff, pollsters
and consultants. “Ben Ray has been doing
a good job of trying to figure out a new
way to do it,” says Rep. Tim Ryan. Adroitly,
Luján did not fight calls for change, but
saw an opportunity to put his own stamp
on the committee, both with the support
of, and autonomy from, Pelosi. “He’s a very
dynamic person, and he wants to do things
that work,” says Pelosi’s deputy chief of
staff Drew Hammill. “She’s involved. She
meets with Luján frequently for updates
and strategy. She’s involved in fundraising.
But she’s not running the building. He is.”
In one key early change, Luján deployed
field staff to districts high on the DCCC’s
target list. “We were able to get a field
team put together in 20 Republican-held
districts starting in February,” he tells me.
When Democratic nominees eventually
step forward in these races, they’ll plug
into an organizing structure that’s already
been running in these districts for months.
The DCCC can be an oddly opaque in-
stitution. The committee did commission
a 2016 post-mortem, but its 28 recom-
mendations are treated like state secrets.
The one DCCC official I can persuade to
break the code of silence is Rep. Ted Lieu
– a 48-year-old Air Force Reserves colo-
nel who now serves in Henry Waxman’s
old seat in Santa Monica. Lieu is a Tai-
wanese immigrant in his second term.
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 He has shined among drab Democrats
for his willingness to spar with Trump
on Twitter. In person, Lieu is sober and
thoughtful, with the gravitas you’d expect
of a governor. (Jon Soltz, the chairman of
VoteVets, which helps elect veterans, de-
scribes Lieu in two words: “Unlimited.
Ceiling.”)
“The Democratic Caucus was not happy
with the performance of the DCCC the last
term,” Lieu says plainly. “So we made a se-
ries of reforms. We made the chair of the
DCCC elected; we created five vice chairs
– all elected – to provide additional guid-
ance, diversity of views,
more fresh faces. We also
are doing a deep dive on
our pollsters and our con-
sultants. Those who don’t
meet the standards will
be fired.”
As one of the five new
vice chairs, Lieu is respon-
sible for the Western re-
gion. “There is a systematic
change to decentralize the
decision-making so it’s
not all from Washington,
D.C.,” he says. For start-
ers, the DCCC is opening
a dedicated West
Coast “pod” in Ir-
v ine, C a lifor nia ,
with a staff of 10 that
will oversee the fight
for the nine districts
the DCCC is target-
ing in the state.
One of the reasons
D emo c r at s f a r e d
poorly in 2016, Lieu
says, was a weak class
of candidates. In too
many districts, he
says, “not only did we
not have a good Tier I
candidate, we didn’t
have a good Tier II
candidate. That’s not going to happen this
year. We have the opposite problem.”
“We’re raining candidates!” says the
DCCC’s head of recruiting, Rep. Denny
FROM TOP: CAROLYN KASTER/AP IMAGES; PAUL CHESNE/GETTY IMAGES
Heck of Olympia, Washington. “It’s un-
precedented.” Heck points to Pete Ses-
sions, a Texas Republican who ran unop-
posed in 2016 in a district that Clinton
carried. “We have 21 candidates who are
interested,” Heck says. “It’s like, ‘Where
were you people the last four years?’ I was
out there beating my head against the wall
trying to get people to run.”
Ultimately, the Democrats can’t control
whether 2018 becomes a wave election. The
upshot for the party is that their rebuilding
efforts don’t need to be perfect. The DCCC
can fall short on some of its 28 reforms. The
DNC’s reinvention can still be a work in
progress. “If Democrats retake the House,”
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
says David Wasserman of the nonpartisan disciplined and formidable. And while
Cook Political Report, “it won’t be because they’re all proud Democrats, their parti-
they suddenly devised some brilliant cam- sanship takes a back seat to patriotism.
paign strategy. It will be a voter backlash Josh Butner is a former Navy SEAL com-
against Trump. The vast majority of seats mander challenging Rep. Duncan Hunter
are subject to the political crosswinds of na- in a California district east of San Diego.
tional politics.” Hunter represents one of the most con-
Still, for the Democrats to win back the servative districts in the state but is also
House, the party will need to both harness under criminal investigation for alleged-
the energy of its base and reach to the cen- ly misusing campaign funds. Jason Crow,
ter. “What will put them over the top is if running in a swing district in Colorado
they start winning over huge shares of in- that Clinton won easily, is a former Army
dependent voters,” says Wasserman. “The Ranger who addressed the 2012 Demo-
last few times the House f lipped, inde- cratic National Convention for Obama, sa-
luting the repeal of “don’t
ask, don’t tell.” He’s run-
ning against Rep. Mike
Coffman, who promised
to stand up to Trump but
has emerged as a rubber
stamp.
And then there’s Mikie
Sherrill, a mother of four
and former federal pros-
ecutor who flew helicop-
ters for the Nav y after
graduating from Annap-
olis. (Sherrill also holds a
law degree from George-
town and a global-history
master’s from the Lon-
don School of Economics.)
As charismatic as she is
smart, Sherrill is running
for a New Jersey seat held
by Rep. Rodney Freling-
POWER PLAY Above: Rep. Ben Ray
huysen, a hoary 22-year
Luján, chair of the DCCC, with House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Left: incumbent who refuses
Rep. Ted Lieu, vice chair of the DCCC, to hold town-hall meet-
says, “There is a systematic change to ings and barked at con-
decentralize the decision-making so stituents questioning his
it’s not all from Washington, D.C.” support of Trumpcare to
“back off.” Frelinghuysen
even complained to one of
pendent voters voted his donors, a board member at the com-
for the out party by pany where a participant in the resistance
about 18 points.” was employed, that “one of the ringleaders
Most encouraging works in your bank!”
to Democrats today is that the anti-Trump Sherrill is aghast that Frelinghuysen
backlash is already producing a windfall won’t talk to his constituents, which she
of young veteran candidates – men and considers “Job One.” But she’s also run-
women in the mold of Tammy Duckworth, ning because she feels that America’s in-
a former Army helicopter pilot whose Sen- stitutions are “being attacked from with-
ate victory was one of the few bright spots in.” When I ask Sherrill at the end of our
for Democrats last November. “We’ve got interview if she has any closing thoughts,
about three dozen candidates who are vet- she sounds less like a rookie candidate
erans,” says Lieu. Moulton, who served and more like she could be the next secre-
four tours in Iraq, says he’s pleased to see tary of state.
the DCCC embrace veteran candidates. “I’m very concerned,” Sherrill says. “This
“The Democratic Party has realized that country is at its best when it leads from
some of these thoughtful public servants courage and optimism. This administra-
who serve the country are exactly the kind tion has been leading through fear and in-
of folks that independents are looking for timidation. It’s making us smaller than we
in these swing districts.” should be, and it’s decreasing our role glob-
To get a flavor of the class of 2018, I in- ally. The world looks to us to lead. And I’m
terviewed three veterans who weren’t re- afraid if we don’t live up to the task we’ve
cruited by the party but have tapped them- held for the last 50 years, we’re not gonna
selves to run for office. They’re all earnest, like what comes next.”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 33
THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW

Rachel Maddow
How America’s wonkiest anchor cut
through the chaos of the Trump
administration – and became the most
trusted name in news
BY JA N ET REI T M A N

34

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SELIGER

 LIFE AT
THE TOP
Maddow now
hosts the
number-one
show in cable
news.

achel Maddow sprints onto the set of The
Rachel Maddow Show, brain on fire, and
slides into her chair. It’s two minutes be-
fore airtime at MSNBC’s cavernous New
York studio in Rockefeller Center and Mad-
dow, dressed in her standard on-air black
blazer and black tank top, Levi’s and blue
suede Adidas Gazelles stealthily hidden by
her giant desk, hunches over her keyboard,
pounding out last-minute revisions to her
script with the speed of a court reporter.
On the agenda this Friday evening in May:
the ever-evolving Trump-Russia scandal
and the controversial termination of FBI
director James Comey, a story that might as
well have been concocted to suit Maddow’s
brand of scathing, methodical deconstruc-
tion. She begins the hour on a note of qui-
etly seething moral outrage, opening her
monologue with a breakdown of the Comey
firing, before moving through all the play-
ers in the Trump saga: Michael Flynn, Jeff
Sessions, Russian oligarchs, New York’s
former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara – and
ending with a note about a series of investi-
gations taking place in various inspectors-
general offices regarding the Trump-Rus-
sia matter. They could have a devastating
impact on the administration – provided
the president lets them continue, Maddow
notes: “He’s already fired the FBI director.
He’s already fired Preet Bharara and the
other U.S. attorneys. He fired the deputy
attorney general. Who do you think he’s
going to fire next?”
Launched nearly a decade ago, The Ra-
chel Maddow Show, hosted by an openly
gay Rhodes scholar who came to TV news
by way of progressive Air America Radio, is
now the number-one prime-time news pro-
gram on cable television. It’s a significant
though not totally improbable achievement
for a show whose mantra, “Increase the
amount of useful information in the world,”
has taken on new resonance in the Trump
era, when a single presidential tweet can
receive breathless coverage by the main-
Contributing editor Ja net Reitm a n
wrote about Betsy DeVos in March.
36 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Rachel
Maddow
stream press, and journalism itself is de-
nounced as “fake news.” Though Trump’s
so-far chaotic presidency has helped boost
cable ratings across the board, no program
has benefited as much as Maddow’s, whose
audience has almost tripled, from 849,000
nightly viewers in 2014 to more than 2.3
million today, and growing. In mid-May,
The Rachel Maddow Show was second only
to the NBA playoffs as the most-watched
program on cable, period.
In person, Maddow is taller than she
appears on TV – a lanky five feet eleven –
and also less feminine, her contact lenses
replaced by chunky black glasses, mascara
wiped off. Maddow’s one concession to the
female norms of TV news is agreeing to
wear makeup, which she does for precisely
one hour and 15 minutes per day. Off cam-
era, she dresses in grungy attire, which on
an afternoon before Memorial Day means
Levi’s, a beige T-shirt, a hole-ridden thrift-
shop denim shirt, and camouf lage Adi-
das Shell Toes. “They’re invisible,” she says
about her sneakers, though she could be
talking about herself. At 44, Maddow is
naturally, neutrally pretty, which is a posi-
tive if one’s aim is to let the words, not the
image, make the point. “I have no visual-
presentation goals for myself,” she says
in her office at 30 Rock. A long rack of
near-identical dark suit jackets hangs on
one wall. “It’s on purpose.
You line me up with Law-
rence O’Donnell and Chris “If the
Hayes and Brian Williams,
and we’ve all got a very
similar shade of the same
Trump
haircut.”
As is true for many jour- presidency
nalists, Maddow’s office is
sort of a mess, with ma- is knowingly
nila file folders stacked on
the floor, and printouts of
various stories she’s keep-
the product
ing track of piled on her
desk and along the win- of a foreign-
dowsill. “This is how I’m
going to die one day – intelligence
crushed under a pile of
paper,” she says, giving me
a quickie tour of her vari-
operation,
ous tchotchkes: the Trout
of North America wall that is a full-
calendar that she quick-
ly flips to May (it was still stop national
on March); her Vladimir
Putin nesting dolls; a G.I.
Joe, still in its box; a metal
crisis.”
Tabasco tub housing her
Emmy, which is lying sideways, a tiny bit
of gold orb emerging from the top. On the
whiteboard behind Maddow’s desk is a
running, if haphazardly diagrammed, list
of the stories she’s thinking about, with
the most important circled in blue marker.
Perpetual favorites like Flynn and Trump’s
ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort hold
a prominent place. Another name floating
in its own blue circle: Viktor Medvedchuk,
“a superclose-to-Putin oligarch” whose
name recently turned up in intercepts
for having had contact with the Trump
campaign. “But we haven’t talked about
the fact that he was [also] one of the first
individuals sanctioned by the U.S. govern-
ment after the Crimea thing,” says Mad-
dow. “And so what is that guy doing talk-
ing to the Trump campaign during the
campaign when he is one of the sanctioned
individuals?”
Maddow goes on like this, describing
the other stories she finds fascinating, or
more specifically, pinpointing the most
under-reported, yet possibly important,
facet of the stories that interest her, and
then drilling down, which can be riveting,
as well as exhausting. But that’s just how
Maddow’s brain works. “What’s remark-
able about Rachel is that she actually is
that brilliant,” says her senior producer
Laura Conaway, who has worked for Mad-
dow since 2009. “The thing about this
show is it starts with digesting an enor-
mous amount of information every day,
and then basically throwing it all out and
saying, ‘OK, that’s what everybody already
knows.’ It requires attention, and Rachel
is supremely gifted at paying attention.”
Maddow’s friend and fellow MSNBC
host Chris Hayes, who con-
siders her a mentor, compares
her to LeBron James. “No
one can do what she does,” he
says. “She is a master of the
medium in a way that is just
unparalleled – she can figure
out how to tell a story and do
things she cares about in ways
that grab people’s attention,
without just going to where
the attention is. And she does
that every night. To produce
what she produces every day
is kind of incomprehensible
to me, actually.”
Maddow came to jour-
nalism almost by accident.
Raised east of San Francis-
co in suburban Castro Val-
ley, she learned to read using
the newspaper – her parents,
an attorney and a school ad-
ministrator, have said she
was reading before kinder-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: PRODUCED BY COCO KNUDSEN
garten – but grew up in the
Bay Area as more of a partici-
pant than an observer, play-
ing high school sports and, by her teens,
becoming heavily involved in AIDS activ-
ism. At Stanford, where Maddow enrolled
in 1990, she studied public policy, and then
went on to earn her doctorate in politics at
the University of Oxford in England. After
returning from England in 1998, Maddow
moved to western Massachusetts to work
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017

4 “But it’s not our business.”
3 administration?
on her dissertation, crashing with friends
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DEL LAGRACE VOLCANO; SETH POPPEL
and working any odd job she could find:
bucket washer at a local coffee-roasting fac-
YEARBOOK LIBRARY; ALAMY; COURTESY OF MADDOWBLOG
tory, delivery girl, yard worker, minimum-
wage news reader at the local Holyoke
radio station. The station held a contest to
find a new sidekick for the host of its morn-
ing show. Maddow, who’d never worked in
media, entered and won. “I stumbled into
that job, but it just really clicked,” Maddow
says. “I liked being in charge of the news. I
found I really liked explaining things.”
TRMS is nothing if not a lengthy expla-
nation of the news that Maddow is most
interested in, particularly the opening
segment, or “A Block,” which she usual-
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
1 corded his meetings with Comey. Maddow,
Ready for
Prime Time
(1) Maddow’s high
school senior picture.
(2) With partner,
Susan Mikula, a
photographer, in San
Francisco. (3) Gone
fishing near her home
in western
Massachusetts. (4) In
1997, when Maddow
studied political
science as a grad
student at the
University of Oxford
in England.
2 What’s your rule about how to cover this
ly writes herself, sometimes with
help from Conaway or other pro-
ducers. The show’s format of deep-
dive analysis and investigative reporting is
not easy to produce, and a typical day can
last anywhere from 12 to 14 hours. Mad-
dow, who lives with her longtime partner,
photographer Susan Mikula, in western
Massachusetts, maintains an apartment
in Manhattan where she lives during the
week, making the three-hour-plus drive
back and forth to Massachusetts every
weekend. Her workday begins at around
11 a.m., when she arrives at her office,
reads through every bit of news she can
get her hands on, and then spends a few
hours researching or reporting what in-
terests her the most. At around 2 p.m.,
Maddow convenes her staff in the news-
room to plan the evening’s show, though,
given the volatility of the current news
cycle, what seems relevant at 3 p.m. might
be sidelined by six.
One afternoon, I sit in on a production
meeting with Maddow and about 20 staff-
ers. The news of the day pertains to the
president’s latest pre-dawn tweet storm,
in which Trump mused about canceling
White House press briefings, and later
hinted that he “might” have secretly re-
wearing a brown hoodie, stands in front of
a large whiteboard, marker in hand, study-
ing a long list of potential story ideas. She
considers the taping issue, which White
House spokesman Sean Spicer refuses
to comment on: “If Trump says there are
tapes and there actually is a taping sys-
tem, then it’s relevant that Spicer has no
comment.” She looks at her staff. “Who
thinks he has a taping system?” Everyone
raises a hand.
Why Trump would admit to this is puz-
zling. Quite possibly, he’s just being Trump;
on the other hand, as Maddow points out,
with the potential obstruction-of-justice
issues that secretly taping your FBI direc-
tor might raise, his comments are worri-
some. “It does seem like the president is
melting down, like there’s something . . . de-
generating in his statements,” she says.
“When is it our business?” asks Mad-
dow’s executive producer, Cory Gnazzo.
“When they invoke the 25th Amend-
ment,” says Conaway.
A short debate ensues over when, if ever,
the show could broach the president’s men-
tal fitness. Maddow quickly dismisses it.
“Trump has mastered the political media
by causing you to lose focus and then re-
center on whatever it is he’s just said,” she
tells me later. “But I’m not interested in
what the president has to say.”
We have a mantra when it comes to this
administration: “Don’t pay attention to
what they say, focus on what they do.” And
that is very helpful, because it’s easier to
cover a fast-moving story when you’re not
distracted by whatever the White House
denials are. It’s fascinating that H.R. Mc-
Master and Dina Powell and Rex Til-
lerson, these very impressive people, all
came out and denied that the president
gave the Russians secret intelligence in
the Oval Office. But, then, the next morn-
ing the president was like, “Yeah, I did
tell the Russians!” So that’s a sign to not
get too hung up on what the White House
is saying at any moment, because even
their most credible people are being put
forward to lie, bluntly, regularly . . . and
it’s OK!
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 37

Do you marvel at the degree to which the
administration just blatantly lies?
I think it’s more helpful to take that in-
formation, the fact that the White House
is putting out nonfactual information on
a regular basis, and internalize it. What it
means is there is a whole area of informa-
tion coming from “White House sources”
that has no meaningful impact on what I
understand to be true about the world. For
me, that’s helpful in an organizational way.
How do you decide what to cover?
First, you need to be able to synthesize a
lot of information, and then exclude from
your field of consideration the stuff that
isn’t important so you can find the salient,
new thing. And that is very rarely some-
thing overt.
Let’s talk about the Russia story. You got
on that very early, and stuck with it.
Well, I mean, I’m not keeping it alive for
its own sake. There’s a lot of scandal asso-
ciated with this new administration. Some
of it is like normal political scandal – like
Tom Price trading health stocks while he
was in a public position to regulate those
stocks. That’s a bad scandal, but it’s kind
of normal political corruption. It’s almost
quaint. Then, there are Trump-specific
scandals, like we now have a ruling fam-
ily where there’s a crowned prince who’s
an adviser without remit, and we’ve got
unqualified nepotistic appointments and
conflicts of interest and Trump not dis-
closing his taxes. And then there is this
third scandal, which is about the existence
of this presidency. That’s an existential
scandal. If this presidency is knowingly
the product of a foreign-intelligence oper-
ation, that’s not Tom Price trading stocks
that he was also affecting the price of as
a public official, you know? That is a full-
stop national crisis. Does that mean Rus-
sia makes the air every day, even if nothing
appears new? No. But when there is some-
thing to say about it, I’m going to report it
insistently. And I’m willing to do that even
if it bothers people.
Do you care if you have haters? Sean
Hannity called you one of the “worst ex-
amples” of the “propaganda press.”
Sean Hannity said that? That’s nice. I
don’t play requests. I get to decide what we
cover. From the very beginning, I’ve had a
deal with MSNBC that they don’t tell me
what to cover, what not to cover or how to
cover what I cover. I’m not trying to make
people happy. I’m trying to do an excellent
job telling the stories that I think are im-
portant. That’s all I can do.
Does it matter to you to be first on a
story?
No. I want to matter. When something
important is happening, I want people to
feel like they should come to me. Some-
times news will break during our hour,
and whether or not we’re first, we’ve got
to absorb it, figure out that it’s important,
38 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Rachel
Maddow
fact-check it, turn it around, present it to
the viewers, and we nail it, and that can be
a real source of pride.
Do you think it’s possible the Trump
campaign had no knowledge of the Rus-
sian hacking?
I absolutely believe it’s possible. I mean,
Russia clearly did this attack, and there’s
lots of circumstantial evidence that points
at lots of unexplained and surreptitious
contact between Trump people and Rus-
sian people at the time that was happening.
But circumstantial evidence is circumstan-
tial evidence. This is a serious thing that
needs to be chased down to the end.
It’s hard to chase Trump down – he’s like
an escaped electron.
Exactly – irradiating everything he
bumps into. That’s a pretty good analogy.
How did you manage the shock of elec-
tion night?
It’s funny – if you look at right-wing
social media there’s this whole thing about
how I had a meltdown on election night
and cried. And they found tape of me talk-
ing about a totally unrelated story months
earlier and said that that was me on elec-
tion night. But I was actually pretty calm
that night, and the reason I was pretty
calm is because there’s a lot to do. I’m not
a good ad-libber, and anchoring election
night is five, six, seven,
eight hours of ad-libbing,
which for me is like jug- “The
gling seven tennis balls
while merging onto the
freeway at night in the
president
rain with no wipers and
no lights. So, no, I had no denigrating
feelings on election night.
What about the morn- the press is
ing after?
I had the same shock
as everybody, but we had
important in
to get back on the air. And
that’s a very constructive terms of his
place to be, because my
job is to explain what’s behavior as an
going on, what’s impor-
tant and whether there
are factual and histori-
increasingly
cally analogous things
that might help you con- authoritarian-
nect and understand the
import of what’s hap- style leader,
pening. If I’m waylaid by
being upset or angry, that
doesn’t help me explain
period.”
what’s happening.
Do you have to work hard to contain
those emotions?
I’m not having an emotional reaction to
the news. I’m really not. It’s like if you’re
a surgeon who’s removing brain tumors.
While you’re doing the surgery, do you
feel sad for the person having gotten the
tumor? No, you’re working on taking care
of the tumor and fixing it.
Because tumors can be deadly if you
don’t get rid of them, which is not unlike
how some people see the state of our country
right now. . . .
People feel overwhelmed when they feel
like they can’t do anything about it. I can do
something about it! While we’re having this
incredibly scandalous presidency, and the
result of this foreign attack that had this big
effect on our country, I get to come to work
every day and make sense of it and explain
it and find out new information about it,
and put that out in the world. I feel like I’m
doing work that’s needed. That feels good.
How collaborative is your process?
It takes a village. I mean, there are indi-
vidual segments, and particularly A Blocks,
that I will just go into the silo and produce
on my own, but you can’t do that for the
whole show. You can’t write 8,000 words a
day on your own. There are definitely seg-
ments that are almost wholly born from
producers, and I really count on them.
Do you see yourself as the captain of
the ship?
Oh, I’m not a captain – I mean, if I was
a parent, the children would starve, you
know? Like, I can’t really deal with hir-
ings and firings and vacations and birth-
days and keeping people happy. I’m blessed
with producers who are really good with
humans. . . . I’m not great at
that. I focus entirely on edi-
torial content.
Do you ever find it frus-
trating that Trump’s sup-
porters just don’t seem
to care about any of these
scandals?
I don’t think much about
how the news is received,
or whether or not it is mov-
ing people. The news is
the news, whether or not
people are feeling it. The
scandals of the Trump ad-
ministration, I’d argue, are
the most serious scandals
that any president has ever
faced, not even just since
Nixon.
In the early days of
Watergate, about half the
country didn’t pay much
attention – it was only
when people started going
to jail that it resonated.
If the Trump scandals
prove to be as bad as they
might be and what the FBI is investigat-
ing turns out to be worst-case scenario –
guilty, did it – then I think the American
people as a whole will respond to that ap-
propriately, by recognizing this as an un-
precedented, and remarkably successful,
foreign attack on the foundations of our
country. Will there be outliers? Yes. But I
think, in general, if this thing proves out
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 – and it might not – the country will react
the way you would hope we would.
That is a very optimistic way to look at
the seemingly intractable partisan divi-
sions in our country.
The American people are more patriotic
than partisan when it gets to the end of the
day. It’s true that we’re tribal and partisan
and petty and all of those things, but there
is also a pride and awareness of
what it means to be the kind of
country we are, which is unlike
any other country on Earth, and
I think that will bear out.
I was surprised to hear you
don’t see yourself as partisan
when a lot of people would dis-
agree. How do you defend that?
Oh, I’m a liberal for sure. I’m
just not a candidate person. And
I’m not a huge fan of the Demo-
cratic Party. I’m also less inter-
ested in the Democratic Party as
a topic – the Republican Party is
more fascinating to me.
What about the Republican
Party fascinates you?
I’m like a sociological student
of the Republican Party – even
absent Trump. There is a robust,
well-funded, decades-old, su-
perorganized, focused, compe-
tent conservative movement that exists
outside the Republican Party that yanks
the party’s chain whenever they want
to. The Republican Party is like an old
burned-out husk of a Ford Pinto that blew
up ’cause its gas tank was in the wrong
place, but it’s attached to a giant jet en-
gine. The Democratic Party is like a Honda
Civic. It putters through the world in a pre-
dictable way, and you like it or not depend-
ing on if you find small, unpowerful things
cute. But the Republican Party has this in-
credible propulsion and no way to steer it.
You had a collegial relationship with
Roger Ailes, who helped create this toxic
political environment we’re in. What made
you seek him out?
I wasn’t seeking help from him on how
to “create a toxic political environment,” I
was looking for help on my camera angles!
But I don’t want to talk about the technical
advice he gave me, because I consider it to
be both a gift and also proprietary – like, I
use it, I don’t want anybody else to use it.
It was a nice thing that he did for me, and
it’s been very valuable – it helped me get an
advantage over my competitors.
Was it hard for you to reconcile the Ailes
you knew with the Ailes who was accused
of serial sexual harassment?
It was just never my experience of him.
I knew him in a very specific context. I’ve
never been in his office. I’ve never seen him
AN RONG XU
interact with his staff. I only ever saw him
in public. We’d meet and have breakfast.
I’m horrified by the allegations against him,
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
and I am appreciative of how serious Fox
must have found them to be in order to fire
him. But I didn’t know anything about it. I
was never in touch with Roger after those
allegations became public.
Did you ever try?
It’s funny, the last time that we had any
communication was within 48 hours of
that story breaking with the allegations.
That’s the Way It Is
“I don’t think much about how the news is
received,” she says. “The news is the news.”
I’d sent him a note saying that I wanted
to see him. Nothing urgent, just let’s put a
date on the calendar. After the story broke,
I remember thinking, “I wonder if he’ll ask
me to vouch for him or something.” But I
never heard from him again.
Your not having any idea is a bit hard
to swallow, when there were stories for
years about how he dealt with women.
Unless he treated you more like a guy?
Yeah, I’m not that female. I’ve been an
out lesbian since I was a teenager. I look
like a dude. I’m totally comfortable with
that. I am not trying to be on TV because I
like the way I look on TV or because I love
the glamour.
Though I vaguely remember seeing you
on Tucker Carlson’s show with longer hair
and a pink jacket.
That wasn’t me, dude. That was them.
When I first started at MSNBC, they had
this poor person whose job it was to dress
the talent, and she tried to turn me into a
person who looks the way they’re supposed
to look on television. Can you imagine?
Still, I’m curious if being a woman in
this business resonates for you.
Look, this business is very, very, very
male. It’s great that one outcome of the
Fox turmoil is that they’ve apparently got
a woman who’s taken [some part of] Bill
Shine’s job – the top executive job there.
You don’t see that here. You don’t see that
at CNN.
Why do you think some Americans hate
and distrust the media so much?
It’s a convenient foil. I don’t really care. I
am a cheerleader for the American media
and I feel like the free press is going to be
what saves us from the politi-
cal crisis that we are in. We just
need to keep doing what we’re
doing.
What do you think we could
do better?
I think the media needs to be
protective in terms of its busi-
ness model. There needs to be a
remunerative vocation, which is
called reporter, which is called
editor, which is called publish-
er. . . . We need to do what we
can to make sure that we de-
fend people that are attacked
for doing that work, and [also]
that there are journalism jobs
that pay above minimum wage
so we get good people doing this
work.
Amen.
Right? I mean, news doesn’t
just happen – people need to
appreciate that news comes from people
digging it up and that journalism is a noble
thing, and we’ve got to cheer for it when it
succeeds.
A lot of people criticized the way you
broke the Trump tax-return story. Do you
think that’s fair?
I had two pages of Donald Trump’s tax
returns from 2005. For me, it was very
important that I made sure they were real
and I wasn’t getting punked, and then
that I put them out there in the world in a
way that I felt explained their importance.
That’s what I do with the news every day.
I find something, figure out if it’s true, fig-
ure out what I think is important about it
and then explain what I think is impor-
tant about it. And I try to be accurate and
insightful.
But what people latched onto was that it
was promoted on Twitter in a way that led
people to believe it was going to be a bigger
deal than it was.
There were two tweets. I can’t even
quote it directly, but it’s like, “Breaking: We
have Trump tax returns. Seriously.” Then I
followed that up with, “We have the 1040
form from 2005.” And then I got on the air
and said, “We’ve got these two pages. This
is the 1040 form from 2005. This is how
we got them. This is why we believe they
are real. I’ve got the reporter here who got
them and here’s why it’s important that
the first-ever known authenticated Donald
Trump federal tax returns are now in the
public domain.” [Cont. on 56]
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 39
THE
WOUNDED
HEART OF
MACHINE
GUN KELLY
W
hy is everyone always picking
After years of hard on Machine Gun Kelly? It keeps hap-
pening, in ways big and small. Like
knocks and hard right now, in New York, where he
can’t even strut the quarter-block be-
partying, the Cleveland tween his chauffeured SUV and the

rapper may entrance to the glittery downtown

sushi-nightclub Tao without getting hassled. Twice. On

finally be breaking his way in, a homeless dude shouts “New Kids on the
Block!” at him. When MGK emerges a couple of hours
big. All he has later, stuffed full of tequila and yellowtail, a drunk frat
boy gets right in his face, asking if he’s Justin Bieber.
to do is stay alive “Dude,” MGK says, “everything is my fault when
you’re me. I don’t know why.” And if so much success

BY BRIAN HIATT
wasn’t finally coming his way, if he weren’t quite so high
most of the time, it might really bother him.
Truth is, even if he were still just Colson Baker,
Cleveland-raised former juvenile offender, Chipotle em-
Photograph by ployee and teenage dad, the same stuff would probably
Michael Bailey-Gates be happening. He just looks like trouble, somehow; the
air moves in weird ways around him. Even though he’s
40
IN BLOOM
MGK in
downtown
Manhattan
in May
 MACHINE
GUN
KELLY
actually the kind of guy who drives three
hours out of his way on a show day to visit
an injured fan in the hospital, the kind
of guy who calls his look-alike drummer,
Rook, his “little brother,” and treats him
as such – though it turns out they’re not
related and didn’t grow up together. (Rook
was a local fan until he won his gig, and
honorary sibling status, by sending MGK
videos of himself playing.)
After nearly a decade of slugging away as
a cult-y, rock-worshipping, guitar-playing,
live-band-leading hip-hop artist, MGK has
broken through with a real hit, cracking the
Top Five earlier this year with the dark but
poppy “Bad Things,” a duet with Camila Ca-
bello that evokes the Eminem-Rihanna col-
laborations of yore. It’s a sharp turnaround
for a rapper (he prefers “musician”) whose
career seemed to have nosedived just a cou-
ple of years ago, one whose rat-a-tat rhyme
style is out of step with the genre’s domi-
nant, liquid Atlanta f low
(though he adapts nicely on
the new Quavo collaboration “MAYBE
“Trap Paris). “I was going
into venues that we had just
THIS IS ALL
sold out the year before,” TOO GOOD
TO BE TRUE,”
MGK says, “and there was,
like, 100 fucking people. I
thought it was over.”
He’s six feet four, thor- SAYS
oughly tattooed and so
lanky that he seems to be
MACHINE
GUN KELLY.
even taller. His fashion sense
is singular: Think Axl Rose
styled by Elton John during “IN A LIFE
a blackout. Tonight, he’s got
on a distressed, acid-washed
FULL OF
pale-blue denim jacket with FAILS, HOW
thrill ryde etched on the
back, a black and red f lo- COULD A
ral shirt, low-hanging black
jeans (with safety pins where
WIN STAY
the f ly should be, a wallet
chain, plus a black ban-
A WIN?”
danna in a rear pocket) and
pink-tinted circular-lensed
glasses not unlike the pair
Canadian reggae artist Snow wore in the
“Informer” video. The shades nearly match
the ruby grilles on his teeth.
MGK has had a lot of brushes with ruin,
starting with felony charges he says he
faced at age 14, for crimes he won’t specify,
though one song suggests he shot up a car
in a jealous rage. “I will never forget my
dad’s face when I was in that courtroom,”
he says. “I was chained to, like, eight other
homeys, too. Not my homeys – just ran-
dom dudes.”
More recently, there was the time when
he had to spend all the money he had, and
then some, to pay a settlement to a bouncer
who sued him for allegedly striking him
with a bottle during a Florida bar fight. (“I
put my hands on a 400-pound bouncer,
whose job it is to whup people’s ass like
42 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
mine, and he sued me for $2 million!”)
After that, by his account, he faced penury,
or at least an “empty Christmas tree,” until
he persuaded one of his heroes, Cameron
Crowe, to cast him in Showtime’s Roadies,
kicking off a lucrative sideline as an actor.
Crowe was charmed by MGK’s audition,
not to mention his Almost Famous stomach
tattoo – “He was just so passionate, like a
big Labrador-retriever puppy banging into
the furniture, knocking stuff over, and still
hugged by everybody” – but worried that
his utter lack of experience would risk a
“dangerous learning curve.” But after MGK
broke protocol and placed a heartfelt call to
Crowe’s casting director on Christmas Eve,
he ended up getting the part.
Since then, he’s gotten out of his own
way. At 27, he’s grown up some, cooling it
on harder drugs (there are sweaty video
interviews online where he is “beyond
high . . . coked out”). He’s quit pulling moves
like an infamous 2012 tweet
where he declared that Emi-
nem’s then-teenage daugh-
ter was “hot as fuck,” a pass-
ing thought he’s convinced
earned him some serious
blacklisting.
He’s a loving dad to his
own seven-year-old daugh-
ter, who is giving him a new
perspective on his teenage
misbehavior as the son of a
super-Christian business-
man-turned-missionary dad
and a mother he describes
as largely absent from the
time he was nine. “I’m fortu-
nate to have a baby girl who’s
super into everything that
I say and do,” he says, “and
really cooperative and just
fun to be around. I couldn’t
imagine having a rebellious
kid like me. I’m not gonna
lie, I’d probably leave that
motherfucker on the curb.”
And after the demise of
the tortured relationship that inspired “Bad
Things,” he is happily spending a lot of time
with the alt-pop singer-songwriter Halsey.
They seem pretty snuggly at Tao and, later,
at the retro Emo Night L.A. at Webster
Hall, they scream along in unison to hits
of the ’00s. “Did it seem like you were in
the room with two people who fought for
the Number One record in the country at
the same time?” he asks. “Nah, there was
no celebrity to that shit. There was just
youthful, free spirit in the air and no fucks
given. I won’t comment exactly on titles or
labels or anything, but what I will say is I
feel 16 again.”
But still, trouble keeps finding him. On
the set of a sci-fi movie he just shot, an
actor playing a cop kept punching him in
the chest, for real, in take after take. When
he complained, he says, he was told to suck
it up. “As Colson Baker, I took that loss on
the chin,” MGK says. “But, like, dude: Ma-
chine Gun probably would’ve whupped his
fucking ass.”
And then there was the on-set driver
who claimed that MGK threatened his life.
“When you look a certain way,” MGK says,
“or you have a certain presence, people take
someone else’s word over yours.” An author-
ity figure on the film came to his trailer and
asked, “Are you here to make this movie?”
“And I was like, ‘Dude, my song is Num-
ber One, and I’m in a trailer at 5:00 in the
morning, on time, at work in the middle
of winter in Chicago. Of course I want to
make this fucking movie.’ ”
He’s happy to have acting gigs at all. And
on some level, he can’t quite believe that
it’s all going so well. That’s one reason why
there’s a song on his new album, Bloom,
called “27,” about his ever-so-slightly self-
aggrandizing fear that he will join heroes
like Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix by
dying sometime before his next birthday.
It’s one of several tracks in a row at the end
of the album where he lets himself sing. “I
was like, ‘Oh, man, maybe this is all just
too good to be true,’ ” he says. “Like, how
could this really work out? In a life full of
fails, how could a win stay a win? I just
want to get through this year. I just want
to fast-forward to 28.”
D
e ath ca me for him, right
on cue, on the night of his 27th
birthday, back in April. Or so it
seemed for a few minutes there.
He was onstage at a private gig,
staring down an audience of “older guys
in suits with young hot girls,” when his
chest started to feel like it was catching
fire, “like my fucking heart is getting a
bone jabbed in.” He paused the show after
six songs and ran backstage. Paramedics
showed up, started running tests to check
if he was having a heart attack. “Everyone
thought I was on blow,” he says.
In fact, all those punches on the movie PREVIOUS PAGE: GROOMING BY CHAZ HAZLITT. STYLING BY MORGAN PINNEY. COAT BY
set had fractured his chest plate. Doc-
tors told him to take a month off, advice
JOHN VARVATOS. SUNGLASSES BY THOM BROWNE. CHAINS BY MARTINE ALI.
he ignored. Instead, he’s added hydroco-
done to his regimen of weed, alcohol and
microdosed “booms,” a.k.a. psychedelic
mushrooms. “You know when you take
certain pills on an empty stomach and you
feel like you’re dizzy and gonna throw up?
That’s where I’m at right now,” he says in
New York, before we grab some meatballs,
pre-Tao.
It’s amazing that he made it to 27 at all.
“I think we all worry,” says Crowe, “that
he’s going to break his neck before he
achieves all his dreams. But that’s part of
the ride you take as an MGK fan.” Thanks
to a perilous combination of bad luck, fear-
lessness and serious partying, he keeps
getting hurt. Last year, he was wasted
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 1 2
in Denmark when he tried to imitate a
sport he’d just seen on TV (“What’s the
thing where they hop over the fences and
shit? Hurdling?”). “Do you guys wanna see
some real Olympics?” he asked his friends,
climbing on a car. He didn’t realize it had
rained. “My foot slides down the entire
front windshield . . . and I fucking face-
plant right on the concrete.” He needed
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: © STARMAX/NEWSCOM/ZUMA PRESS; DAVID LIVINGSTON/
facial stitches and a cast on one arm, but
still played his next show.
Even mature MGK still goes hard,
GETTY IMAGES; JOHN SHEARER/BBMA2017/GETTY IMAGES FOR DCP
though it’s all pretty innocent. On an over-
night ride from New York to Baltimore, his
tour bus is still raging as 5 a.m. approaches.
While a lugubrious lighting guy, whom ev-
eryone has taken to calling “Bobby Hill,”
rolls a fat joint for him, MGK breaks out an
electric guitar and mini-amp, assaying a
slowed-down “Voodoo Chile” before break-
ing into “Let You Go,” an unabashed pop-
punk song from his new album. He hopes
it could be a hit, though he’s been told it
has “too much guitar.” His reply: “How can
there be too much music in music?”
Shots of Ciroc are poured, and Bloom
tracks start blaring over the bus sound sys-
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
GOLDEN GOD
(1) Machine Gun Kelly has been
mixing rock – and a live backing
band – with rap since the
beginning of his career. (2) With
his seven-year-old daughter,
Casie. (3) His maybe-girlfriend
Halsey makes him “feel 16 again.”
3
tem, while MGK and his whole band shout
along to the track “Golden God,” rapping
the whole thing in my face. When it’s over,
they play it again, and repeat the perfor-
mance. “Yeah, bitch,” shouts Rook, before
swigging directly from a vodka bottle.
“That’s our shit right there!”
H
ere is a thing you should
never say to Machine Gun Kelly:
“I love your old shit, where I feel
it in my heart.” Those are the
exact words that a semiwasted
thirtysomething blond fan mumbles to
him on the street after his sold-out Balti-
more show. The performance went well:
He and his band faithfully covered Blink-
182’s “All the Small Things,” and he broke
into an impressive a cappella freestyle
when the sound briefly glitched. But he
winces at the fan’s attempt at praise, which
echoes nostalgia he’s spotted online for the
younger, more messed-up Kels. “I gotta
grow,” he tells her. “I can’t be broken for-
ever.” She tells him she likes the new songs,
too, but it’s too late.
As he heads back into the womb of the
bus, MGK can’t get the lady’s words out
of his head. It doesn’t help that he’s had a
bunch of hits off an atomic-powered joint
donated by another fan, who had prom-
ised that it contained “10 different flavors
of weed.” “What the fuck!” he yells, pacing.
“I just gave everything. I gave everything
on that fucking stage! That’s not right!
They don’t even know! I might not even
walk the same at 40 years old because of
how much shit I leave onstage. I’m fight-
ing every night up there! How are you
dissatisfied?” In the corner of the bus is a
young woman who’s seen dozens of MGK
shows; the band members, who know her
well, call her Penny, after the Almost Fa-
mous “Band Aid.” As MGK delivers his
lament, she wipes away a single tear.
“That’s my soul on that album,” he
continues. His tour manager, Andre
Cisco, points out that the fan couldn’t
have heard the whole album yet, but
MGK shrugs that off. “Let people have
fun!” he continues. “Not everyone
wants to be in misery in every song!
Not everyone’s had a heroin addiction.
Let everyone feel something.”
He plops down on a couch. “They
just don’t even know,” he says. “That,
like, defeats me. I live this shit! You
tear that shit down, it eats my soul.”
But after a few minutes of pep talk
and some hits from a perkier variety
of weed, his mood shifts. Talk turns to
his belief that Foo Fighters once set a
world record for decibel levels at Wem-
bley Stadium. “We’ll do Wembley soon
enough,” he vows.
He wants that, badly. He wants
other things too. To bring rock and
live instruments back. To be “one of
the G.O.A.T.s.” To play Coachella. To have
Sean Combs, who signed him years back,
publicly repeat compliments he pays in
private (“I wish he’d acknowledge what he
says I have. I’m asking for one more leap
of faith”).
But on the other hand, he says, “I don’t
really care if I’m accepted at this point. By
who, the quote-unquote cool kids? Fuck
those kids!”
So what’s the real goal? “I don’t want to
ever hold my head down again,” he says.
“I just want to, like, remain in this.” He
pauses, scratches his chin and rethinks it
all one more time. “Actually, man,” he says,
smiling for once, “I couldn’t give a fuck.
Like, I just want to not have to think about
buying a cheeseburger.”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 43
The Last
Brother
Gregg
Allman
1947-2017

The Allman Brothers

singer survived nearly 50
years of epic shows and
unimaginable disaster –
but there was one death
he could never get over
By Mikal Gilmore
 MIDNIGHT
RIDER
Allman
in 1973

R ol l i n g S t o n e | 45
 GREGG
ALLMAN
W
hen i met
Gregg Allman, he seemed like a ghost on
guard. It was 1990, in Miami. The Allman
Brothers Band had recently reunited for a
second time. In the early Seventies, they
single-handedly invented Southern rock,
but their hallmark was live shows that
mixed bedrock aggression and high-flown
invention in ways no other group did. Their
first breakup, in 1976, had been ugly; a re-
union a few years later hadn’t taken. But
here they were, nearly a decade later, im-
probably kicking off a new phase of a ca-
reer that time and tragedy had not been
able to kill off.
That day in Miami, the band was easygo-
ing and talkative when we met at producer
Tom Dowd’s studio – but not Gregg. He
wasn’t unfriendly; he just seemed dazed,
wary. He had rarely been an eager inter-
view subject since the band first became
popular in 1971, and the death that same
year of his older brother, Duane – one of the
most brilliant guitarists in history – had
left him stunned and heartsick. For years
Gregg narcotized himself, then entered
daily into drunken stupors.
None of that seemed to kill his singing or
musical spirit. Like Charlie Parker – who
at least once had to be held up so he could
blow his alto saxophone into studio micro-
phones – Gregg Allman thrived at musical
moments that he may not even have re-
membered clearly later.
Offstage, he could be different. I’d been
assured that he wanted to talk, but it didn’t
seem that way. The word was that he was
now sober, but something still enwrapped
him, kept him inside when he was around
a stranger. After Miami, I returned to pay
Gregg a visit at a fairground blues festival
in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was play-
ing a civil-rights benefit. Seated on a bus
before his performance, it was still strained
work to get him to talk about much of any-
thing. His personal history, he made plain,
was off-limits. “The private facts of my
life are just as private and painful as any-
body’s,” he said in his most revealing mo-
ment. “I don’t enjoy going over that stuff
all the time.”
Later that afternoon, I watched him play
with a basic blues band. As he sang Blind
Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” Muddy
Waters’ “Trouble No More” and Sonny Boy
Contributing editor Mik al Gilmore
wrote about Chuck Berry in April.
46 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Williamson’s “One Way Out,” Gregg came
alive. This wasn’t an interview, but never-
theless he was talking about hard truths
he’d faced his whole life, since he was a
boy. He sang blues not as a vocation but
as a heritage that went deep and ancient.
But that patrimony also reflected an on-
going personal history that hounded and
haunted him. It seemed that every time he
sang, Gregg Allman was addressing a spec-
ter – perhaps to appease it, or to frighten it
as much as it had always frightened him.
After he died at his Savannah, Georgia,
home in May, at age 69, I bet there wasn’t
a ghost that had the nerve to say “boo” to
him – except for one. In the early Seven-
ties, following one of the Allman Brothers
Band’s legendary three-hour shows, Gregg
watched horror movies with the sound off,
keeping an empty chair nearby. He main-
tained that a spirit sat in that chair. Into the
last years of his life, he said he still heard
from that ghost every night.
illis turner allma n
fought in World War II;
he’d been among the forc-
es that stormed Normandy
during the D-Day inva-
sions. After returning
home to Nashville, and to his wife, Geral-
dine, Willis got a job as a recruitment offi-
cer and the couple had two sons. Duane was
born November 20th, 1946; Gregory fol-
lowed on December 8th of the next year.
Willis moved the family near Norfolk, Vir-
ginia, but he was having trouble adjusting
after the war. He’d been in the infantry, fir-
ing a howitzer all day long. One day, after
Geraldine prepared his favorite dinner for
him, he flipped a table over and left. “Now
they call it post-traumatic syndrome,”
Gregg said. “That was back in the black-
and-white days. No color in the world.”
The day after Christmas 1949, Wil-
lis drove his new Ford to a tavern with a
master-sergeant friend. A stranger at the
“I THOUGHT
MY MOTHER
hated me,” Gregg
said. “But actually,
she sacrificed
everything so we
didn’t end up in
an orphanage.”
bar began asking them about Normandy.
He bought them beers until late and then
asked Willis for a ride home. “They got up
the highway,” Gregg wrote in his 2012 au-
tobiography, My Cross to Bear. “When they
got to a place where the corn stopped, the
dude pulled out an army .45. He told my
daddy to stop and get out, so they did.” The
man saw Willis’ new car and thought he
was looking at someone with money. Willis
told the gunman, “Take the car, take every-
thing.” The man replied, “Oh, you know my
name. Now I gotta kill ya.” Gregg’s grand-
mother would tell him it was probably for
the better he didn’t grow up with Willis; his
mental disturbance wasn’t going to lessen.
Geraldine moved her sons back to Nash-
ville and later enrolled them in military
school. They didn’t like it, but showed it
in different ways that became emblem-
atic of their temperaments. “If you look at
pictures of me and my brother while we
were there,” remembered Gregg, “I look
sad and depressed while Duane has this
look of defiance. That’s how he was – he
was probably feeling the same way as me,
but that’s just the way he came across. Me,
I just hated the whole idea. . . .” He trained
his anger on his mother. “Back then I knew
– I didn’t think, I knew – deep in my heart
that my mother hated me. I just couldn’t
figure out why. . . . I cried myself to sleep
at night for a week after I first got to that
place.” Later, he came to a different un-
derstanding: “She was actually sacrificing
everything she possibly could – she was
working around the clock, getting by just
by a hair, so as to not send us to an orphan-
age, which would have been a living hell.”
Duane adapted; Gregg grew introvert-
ed. Duane was in some ways like Gregg’s
father, giving him direction, sometimes
sheltering him, sometimes beating the shit
out of him. Eventually, Duane quit school
and rode his Harley-Davidson all over Day-
tona Beach, Florida, where the family had
moved in the late Fifties. He was tall and
thin, and his good looks and disposition
drew girls to him. Gregg developed more
slowly that way.
One thing they shared, though, was an
attraction to music – particularly the high-
lonesome wail of country music, and the
haunted passions of the blues. At 13, Gregg
worked a paper route and saved money to
buy a guitar at the local Sears and Roebuck.
Duane was immediately curious. While
Gregg was slogging his way through school,
Duane started playing his brother’s guitar
– and to his surprise and Gregg’s initial an-
PREVIOUS SPREAD: NEAL PRESTON
noyance, discovered that he had a gift for
the instrument. “Duane passed me up in a
flash,” Gregg remembered.
Soon, Duane and Gregg both owned
electric guitars, and Duane would hole
up with his for days, learning the music of
Robert Johnson and jazz guitarist Kenny
Burrell. This was in the period when the
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 1
2
FROM TOP: © PETER TARNOFF/RETNA LTD./MEDIAPUNCH; © BOB GRUEN/
3 nam War. One night, he got drunk and shot
BOBGRUEN.COM; COURTESY OF THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND
RAMBLIN’ MEN
(1) Gregg and Duane onstage, 1971.
(2) Butch Trucks, Gregg, Dickey
Betts, Berry Oakley and Jaimoe
(from left), 1972. After Duane died,
Gregg said, “We all got together
and said, ‘What do we do now?’ I
said, ‘We either play, or we go
crazy.’” (3) Duane and Gregg as
teens. “[He] was only a year older
than me, but in his mind it might as
well have been 20,” Gregg wrote.
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
Beatles and the Rolling Stones were in-
spiring thousands of young people to form
bands, and the Allmans did just that. On
bass, they brought in a black man they’d
met in Daytona, Hank Moore, who led his
own band. “He sat there,” Gregg wrote, “and
took us through ‘Done Somebody Wrong,’
and that changed my whole life. . . . Then my
mama came home, and she’d never grabbed
me by the ear or pushed me from behind,
but this time she did. She said, ‘Come in
the kitchen. . . . I want to know what you’re
doing with that nigger in the front room.’
‘Nigger?’ I asked, confused. ‘Ma, that ain’t
no nigger. That’s Hank Moore, [and] so
far, he’s taught us all kinds of good music.’ ”
Gregg also wrote, “I don’t know if my
mother had a racial thing per se. It was just
the way she was brought up. That kind of
thing is just passed on and passed on from
one generation to the next, and it’s still hap-
pening today. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand
it at all.” Gregg also had no use for the Viet-
himself in the foot. He was then exempt
from selective service.
The brothers went through a rapid suc-
cession of blues-oriented rock bands, in-
cluding the Allman Joys. Gregg became the
band’s singer. He was often critical of his
voice, but he developed his own sound: He
could sing softly (he admired the music of
Jackson Browne); he could be soulful; and
he could also harness a commanding howl.
By 1967, the Allman Joys had been over-
hauled into Hour Glass and had relocated
to Los Angeles. Gregg did not want to go,
did not want to become a band that made
pop moves and compromises in order to
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 47
 GREGG
ALLMAN
establish itself. He almost parted ways with
his brother over the matter, but Duane – the
band’s unquestioned leader – didn’t take no
for an answer. Hour Glass recorded two
LPs for Liberty Records. “The music had
no life to it,” wrote Gregg. “It was poppy,
preprogrammed shit.”
Ultimately, Hour Glass couldn’t match
Duane’s ambitions. In 1968, he made clear
where he stood: “Liberty Records can kiss
my fucking ass. . . . Stick your papers and
contracts up your ass, we’re outta here.” But
there was a problem. “Liberty,” Gregg re-
membered, “threatened to freeze us, so that
we couldn’t record for any other label for
seven years, unless I stayed and recorded
with their studio band. So I stayed. I stayed
for our band, and they hated me for it – they
did. Duane even told me how he felt on the
way out, between all the ‘fuck you’s.”
During this time, Duane played at Fame
Studios in Muscle Shoals, as a sideman for
Wilson Pickett. He’d go on to play sessions
for Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter, King
Curtis, Arthur Conley, Ronnie Hawkins
and Boz Scaggs, gaining a reputation as one
of the most musically eloquent and soul-
sensitive session guitarists around.
Back in California, Gregg was isolated.
He had gone through a painful love affair
and was making music he had no heart in.
“I had been building up nerve to put a pis-
tol to my head,” he would
write of that period.
Then he got a call from
his brother. THE ODD
COUPLE
w h i l e gregg was in “We were just
L.A., Duane was in Jack- different in a
sonville, Florida, putting a whole bunch of along well enough with his amount to one of the band’s signature at-
new band together. He and ways,” Allman brother to make it work, tractions: a powerfully erotic, poignant
a jazz drummer named Jai said of Cher. She but he also couldn’t wait and authoritative blues voice. No matter all
Johanny Johanson (Jai- tried to help him to get out of L.A. He left, the troubles and doubts – and the terrible
moe) began jamming in kick drugs; he telling Liberty to sue if it choices he made – in the years ahead, that
passed out in a
a room at Fame Studios wanted to. authenticity never fled Gregg Allman. In
plate of spaghetti.
with a skinny, longhaired When he arrived in fact, the bad times only deepened it.
bassist named Berry Oak- Florida, Gregg headed to Not long after, the musicians voted in
ley. They were soon joined Trucks’ house to join the a blind poll for a group name, and it was
by lead guitarist Dickey Betts (who had musicians who had coalesced around his near unanimous: the Allman Brothers
played with Oakley in a Jacksonville band, brother. “When you walk into a room and Band. (“I’m lucky my name is Allman,”
the Second Coming), and second drum- everybody knows everybody else except Gregg would say.) The bandmates told
mer Butch Trucks. One day, the five mu- you, it’s tough,” Gregg remembered, “espe- Gregg to get busy right away on new ma-
sicians gathered at Trucks’ home in Jack- cially when you’re as shy as I am. It was real terial; they had been playing blues songs,
sonville and began playing. It turned into a tense in that room.” Gregg told his brother stretching them out, but they wanted work
relentless jam that stretched for four hours he wasn’t sure he could cut it. Duane called of their own that extended on that back-
and left everybody involved feeling electri- him a punk and told him to start singing. ground and what they were now creating.
fied, even thunderstruck. When it was over, Duane’s daughter Galadrielle picked up Gregg immediately wrote “Black Hearted
Duane stepped to the entrance of the room the story in Please Be With Me: A Song for Woman” and “Whipping Post.” The lat-
and spanned his arms across the doorway. My Father, Duane Allman, her account of ter song alone was enough to establish
“Anybody who isn’t playing in my band is the band’s early years: “There was no way the band’s identity for eternity. Though
going to have to fight their way out of this out, so Gregg sang. He poured his anger the title might evoke the South’s legacy of
room,” he said. and stress into the song, and it fueled him. slavery, it was instead one man’s account
Duane soon told the others, “We’ve got He dug into the deepest, most guttural and of sorrow over a woman who has betrayed
to get my brother here, out of that bad situ- bluesy side of his voice and unleashed ev- him. But it was the band’s instrumental
ation. He’s a great singer and songwriter, erything he had. . . . Duane was so thrilled partnership, rather than Gregg’s lyrics,
NORMAN SEEFF

and he’s the guy who can finish this thing.” when he was done; he grabbed Gregg’s face that steered the song’s course. It sound-
He called Gregg and urged him to come to in both hands and kissed him on the lips.” ed like a titanic ghost memory, rattling
Jacksonville. Gregg doubted he could get What Gregg brought to that moment would through dark history.

48 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017

Essential Allman
The greatest songs in a career that
redefined the blues. By David Fricke
Power of Love 1968
The title nugget from
Duane and Gregg Allman’s
1968 LP as Hour Glass was a
prophetic high point in their
losing battle with psyche-
delic pop – hearty Southern
R&B (written by Dan Penn
and Spooner Oldham) with
Gregg, barely 20, in preco-
cious vocal form, primed
for the incandescent blues
to come.
It’s Not My Cross
to Bear 1969
Gregg’s entrance as a singer
and composer with the
Allman Brothers Band, on
their 1969 debut LP, was
a stunning introduction to
the emotional depth of his
white-soul fire and first-
person force in his writing.
Two years before the loss
of his brother, Gregg had
already found his true voice:
the bluesman as survivor.
Dreams 1969
The operatic swoop of
Duane’s slide guitar and
the graceful suspense of
the double drumming – in
a rhythm descended from
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue
– were jazz on acid. But
Gregg grounded that hyp-
nosis in working-class real-
ism, a gritty vocal admission
that only hard labor makes
dreams come true.
Midnight Rider 1970
Gregg’s best-known song,
written with roadie Robert
Kim Payne, was not a hit
for the Allmans; the single
never charted. But Gregg’s
portrait of outlaw nobility
and escape became South-
ern rock’s defining anthem,
while the original recording
on 1970’s Idlewild South re-
mains a perfect summing of
the blues, country and soul
that ran like a single river in
that voice.
Statesboro Blues 1971
The Allmans’ immortal
treatment, on 1971’s At
Fillmore East, of Blind Willie
McTell’s 1928 blues was
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
rightly ranked at Number
Nine by this magazine in a
2008 list of “The 100
Greatest Guitar Songs of All
Time.” But it would have
only been a dynamite
future-blues instrumental
without Gregg’s torrid howl.
Whipping Post 1971
It was easy to forget amid
the luminous turbulence
onstage, defined on record
by the extended improvising
ascension on Fillmore East,
but the Allmans’ signature
jam also had a great song
at either end: Gregg’s vivid
portrait of a man bound
and bloodied by a woman’s
betrayal, sung in despairing
crescendos and death-bed
moans.
Wasted Words 1973
Reeling again from sudden
loss – bassist Berry Oakley’s
death in late 1972 – the
Allmans pressed on with
defiant vigor, opening 1973’s
Brothers and Sisters with
Gregg’s rowdy challenge to
judgment (“I ain’t no saint,
and you sure as hell ain’t no
savior”), armed with Dickey
Betts’ silver-snake slide
guitar and new member
Chuck Leavell’s saloon-
ruckus piano.
These Days 1973
For a time, during his Hour
Glass days in Los Ange-
les, Gregg roomed with a
young songwriter named
Jackson Browne. On Laid
Back, Gregg’s late-1973
solo debut, he turned to
this Browne song of painful
confession and healing
reflection, covering it with
a compelling despair and
autobiographical need.
Brightest Smile
in Town 1977
Gregg’s 1977 solo album,
Playin’ Up a Storm, was
woefully mistitled, an under-
whelming artifact made in
the thick of personal turmoil
and his band’s disintegra-
tion. Ironically, Gregg found
renewed vocal strength and
inspiration in this 1963 Ray
Charles gem, a song about
bottoming out delivered like
precious refuge.
High Cost of Low
Living 2003
The Allmans’ last studio LP,
Hittin’ the Note, featured
Gregg’s most committed
writing for the band since
the Seventies – five songs,
mostly co-written with
guitarist Warren Haynes.
This cautionary tale reads
like a memo to self (“It’s
high time you turn yourself
around”), sung with the
weathered fire of a man
who’s done the math.
Desdemona 2003
This slow-burn blues – with
a Memphis-soul chorus
and a jazzy, improvising
breakout starring Haynes
and slide guitarist Derek
Trucks – was another burst
of late-period glory from
Hittin’ the Note, written by
Gregg with Haynes and
delivered by the former with
a pitted roar that seemed to
come straight from 1969.
Just Another Rider
2011
Produced by T Bone Burnett
with quietly magnetic, rustic
minimalism, Gregg’s 2011
solo album, Low Country
Blues, was all covers – the
kind of vintage blues and
R&B that sent the singer
on his path in the late Six-
ties – except for this song.
Written with Haynes, it is an
obvious, moving sequel to
“Midnight Rider”: the outlaw
at sunset, looking back
in hard-won wisdom and
sober, unflinching regret.
Trouble No More 2014
This Muddy Waters classic
was the first song Gregg
sang at his first rehearsal
with the Allmans in March
1969. And it was the final
encore at their last show,
on October 28th, 2014, in
New York. Gregg returned
to Waters’ blues like a pro-
foundly changed man for
whom nothing was different
onstage, in the music.
Soon, Phil Walden, who had become
Duane’s manager and would sign the All-
man Brothers to his label, Capricorn Rec-
ords, moved the group to Macon, Georgia.
Then they hit the road.
n short or de r , t h e a l l man
Brothers Band became perhaps the
best concert band in rock & roll. In
contrast, though, to the Grateful
Dead or Miles Davis, the Allmans
built tremendously sophisticated me-
lodic formations that never lost sight of mo-
mentum or palpable eroticism. The band
was attuned to the emotional meanings of
blues and the stylistic patterns of rock &
roll; at the same time, the Allmans loved
jazz and had spent many hours marveling
at the way visionaries like Davis, John Col-
trane and Charlie Parker had taken the
same primitive blues impulses that had
thrilled and terrified Robert Johnson and
turned them into an elaborate art form ca-
pable of intricate, spontaneous inventions.
In part to sustain their energy during
the incessant tours, the Allmans used an
increasingly wide range of drugs. Eventu-
ally, the substance abuse would worsen,
and no one in the band indulged more – or
for longer – than Gregg. But at first, the
drugs were softer, even useful – primarily
marijuana, amphetamines and psilocybin.
“There’s no question,” wrote Gregg, “that
taking psilocybin helped create so many
spontaneous pieces of music.”
In March 1971, they recorded two of
their three performances at the Fillmore
East in New York, for a two-record set that
would be widely regarded as the greatest
live album ever. In concert, the Allmans
earned every inch of their adulation. Night
after night, Duane would stand center-
stage, and, bouncing lightly on his heels, he
would begin constructing meditative, rhap-
sodic solos that ended up going places that
rock had never gone before. He thought in
perfectly formed complete lines, with all
the grace and dynamics of a carefully con-
sidered composition. He was perhaps the
most melodically expressive instrumental-
ist rock would ever witness.
At Fillmore East put the Allman Broth-
ers Band on a very big map, and it did so
right away. It began to climb the charts
within days of its July 1971 release. “We
are on a mission,” said Duane, “and it’s
time for this thing to happen.” In June,
the band had started working on a double
album – Eat a Peach – that would combine
more of the Allmans’ live power with their
growing songwriting ability (in addition to
Gregg, Duane, Betts and Oakley were all
composing) and virtuosic prowess in the
studio. They were starting to make a bit of
money. They invested some of it into a sort
of dream farm home in Macon – they called
it “the Big House” – but they also spent a
lot on drugs.
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 49
 GREGG
ALLMAN
One night, angry that Duane used up all
of his cocaine, Gregg visited his brother’s
home in Macon and found him passed out
on the bed. Gregg grabbed Duane’s vial,
snorted half of it, then headed back to his
own place. As soon as he was there, the
phone rang. “You little cocksucker,” said
Duane, “did you come over here and steal
some of my blow?”
In My Cross to Bear, Gregg wrote, “The
last thing I ever said to my brother was a
fucking lie, man. ‘No, I did not,’ I told him.
‘Okay, man, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have
called you up, accusing you of some shit
like that. I sure do love ya . . .’ and he hung
up. That was the last time I ever spoke to
my brother.” The conversation stayed with
him, haunted him.
“I have thought of that lie every day of
my life,” he wrote, “and I just keep recru-
cifying myself for it. I know that’s not what
he would want – well, not for long, anyway.
I know he lied to me about the blow in the
first place, but the thing is, I never got the
chance to tell him the truth.”
On October 29th, 1971, in the wan-
ing light of a Georgia afternoon, Duane
swerved his bike to avoid a truck that had
turned in front of him. The cycle skidded,
pinning Allman underneath it and drag-
ging him 50 feet. Duane’s girlfriend and
Oakley’s sister had been following in a car,
and stayed with Duane until an ambulance
arrived. At the hospital, a surgeon told the
others, “We brought him back up for just a
minute or two, but he’s gone.”
Something more than Duane died that
day. There was more to the band’s quest
than a yearning for music that took pain-
ful feelings and turned them into a joyful
release. The brothers – Gregg and Duane
– had formed the band as an extension
of family ideals of love and anger, loyalty
and rivalry, that they had given one an-
other in their lives together. The sources of
that dream ran especially deep. After all,
their real-life family had been tumultu-
ously shattered, and forming a band was a
way of creating a fraternity they had never
really known.
Another form of that dream, though,
stayed alive: The Allman Brothers Band it-
self was now a true family, and they weren’t
yet ready to let that go. “When Duane
passed away,” Gregg remembered in 2009,
“we all got together and said, ‘What do we
do now?’ I said, ‘We either play, or we go
crazy. Those are our choices.’ So, we played.
God, did we play. We were on the road for
306 days in 1970, and we stepped that up
after my brother died.”
The band finished Eat a Peach. Released
in February 1972, it was a critical and com-
mercial success (it peaked at Number Four
on Billboard’s charts). In October that year,
they began work on another album – Broth-
ers and Sisters – but the Allman Brothers’
success wasn’t bringing them peace. Bassist
50 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Oakley had been perpetually grief-stricken
over Duane’s death. Then, in November
1972, Oakley was riding his motorcycle
through Macon when he lost control and
slammed into a city bus. Within hours, he
died of a brain hemorrhage. The band kept
on, though Gregg said, “It was so hard to
get into anything after that second loss. I
even caught myself thinking that it’s nar-
rowing down, that maybe I’m next.”
To most, it seemed that Betts – who
wrote the band’s biggest hit, the country-
music-derived “Ramblin’ Man” – now as-
sumed the mantle of leadership. “There
was no power struggle or anything like
that,” Allman said. “He stood up, whereas
I sat down. It’s hard to be a frontman when
you’re sitting behind a 460-pound organ.
Up until then, we’d never really had a front-
man; Dickey took it upon himself to create
“THE LAST
THING I
ever said to my
brother was a
lie,” Gregg said.
“I’ve thought
about that every
day since then.”
that role.” It was a bitter pill for Gregg to
swallow, and it would cause problems for
years to come.
n the early seventies, there
was one low after one high after an-
other. It was with 1973’s Brothers and
Sisters that the Allman Brothers pio-
neered what became known as South-
ern rock: music that was aggressive
yet could swing gracefully, played by musi-
cians who were proud of their region and its
musical legacies. The Allmans’ outlook and
music were emblematic of the American
South’s ongoing struggle for redefinition,
and for its mounting desire to move away
from its violently earned image as a culture
of fierce racism and intolerance.
Then, almost simultaneously, the All-
mans achieved an unlikely accomplish-
ment, and suffered their greatest ruin. In
1974, Gregg came to know Georgia Gov.
Jimmy Carter. “He was our friend,” Allman
said in 2009. “I certainly never believed he
was going to make it to the White House.
A Southern president? You must be kid-
ding.” Carter’s campaign was nearly broke.
The Allman Brothers (with help from Phil
Walden and Capricorn Records artists)
held benefits for the governor’s campaign,
raising more than $800,000. Without the
donations, Carter probably wouldn’t have
weathered the costly primary season. After
Carter was in the White House, said All-
man, “I shared the first meal he served
there – back in the section where the family
lives – sitting right next to him.”
But the Allmans’ glory wore off before
Carter was even inaugurated. A number of
matters ran head on, and they all had to do
with Gregg. In January 1975, he met Cher
at the Troubadour in L.A. “She smelled like
I would imagine a mermaid would smell,”
he would recall. Their first date was a disas-
ter; Gregg passed out in the bathroom, high
on heroin. Cher gave him a second chance,
and they eventually found a groove. “Pull-
ing words out of Gregg Allman is like . . . for-
get it,” she told Playboy. “Things started
to mellow when he found out that I was a
person – that a chick was not just a dummy.
For him up till then, they’d had only two
uses: make the bed and make it in the bed.”
“I was married and divorced three times
by age thirty,” Allman would write, “and
looking back, I think I was trying to find
a friend, even if I had to marry one. . . . The
thing is, I really love women. I always have.
I think there’s nothing more beautiful than
the naked female human body. Nothing
else compares to that, and that’s the way
it should be. The guys from the band back
then would all say that I was such a pussy
hound, and such a cocksman. My nickname
was ‘Coyotus Maximus’. . . .”
Cher hinted that Gregg should marry
her. “There was one problem,” said Allman.
“She didn’t realize that I was a hop-head.
So I woke up one morning and told her,
‘Look, I’ve got to tell you something. I’m
addicted to narcotics.’ ‘Well, how do you fix
that?’ she asked. I didn’t have much of a re-
sponse beyond ‘Well . . .’ ‘I know what we’ll
do,’ she said. ‘We’ll go back to L.A., and I’ll
get my doctor friend to write you a big pre-
scription for Quaaludes, and you can just
sleep through it. When you wake up, it will
all be over.’ I tried it – what the hell – but
of course it didn’t work. Still, Cher was ac-
tually quite elated that I told her the truth
about my addiction.”
The two married on June 30th, 1975, at
Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, but Gregg’s
drug use deepened. By 1976, as Rolling
Stone later reported, “Allman was waking
up with a morning snort of cocaine, some
of it pure pharmaceutical cocaine obtained
by his sidekick and valet, Scooter Herring.”
That was the point when everything caught
up with Allman and the band. In early
1976, a federal narcotics force began inves-
tigating drug activities in Macon. In a short
time, Gregg found himself threatened with
a grand-jury indictment unless he testified
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
 against his personal road manager, Her-
ring, who had been charged with dealing
drugs. Allman complied, and Herring was
sentenced to 75 years in prison (later re-
duced to 30 months); plus, there were fears
that further indictments might be leveled
against other figures in the Capricorn and
Allmans organizations.
His bandmates were furious: Herring
had saved Allman from a drug overdose
on at least one occasion, and now Herring
had been betrayed. For Allman, it wasn’t so
simple. “Not one of the men in the band was
at that trial,” he said. “They weren’t there to
see the pressure. They weren’t there to see
the [lawyer] holding my manuscript right
in my nose just daring me, just fucking dar-
ing me, to swerve off of it just enough to get
me on a perjury charge.”
In August 1976, the Allman Brothers
Band officially broke up. Betts made an an-
nouncement in Rolling Stone. “In that
issue,” remembered Allman years later,
“there was a picture of Betts and a quote
from him saying, ‘I’ll never play onstage
with Gregg Allman again.’ No problem,
brother! I just wish we had held him to
that.” Still, it hurt: “The feelings, the close-
ness, the brotherhood that we’d once shared
– man, all those things were fucking gone.”
MARTIN SCHOELLER/ART + COMMERCE
allman moved to los angeles, but
his superstar marriage did not last long.
“We had our good times, we had our bad
times,” he said. “We were just different in
a whole bunch of ways. . . . I was really glad
that she never asked me what I thought of
her singing, because I’m sorry, but she’s not
a very good singer.” Even so, the couple re-
leased Two the Hard Way in 1977, credit-
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
ed to Allman and Woman. It was the big- town named Duanesburg when his rip cord
gest blemish of his recording career and did malfunctioned. In 1983, Lamar Williams,
nothing to help his fast-fading credibility who had replaced Oakley, died of cancer,
with any audience. “That record sucked,” not long after the Allmans disbanded for a
he wrote. “It bit the dirt, and it didn’t sell second time.
worth a shit.” Allman and Cher undertook
a tour of Europe in November 1977. Fans obody would have bl am-
of both the pop singer (dressed in formal ed the Allman Brothers if they
wear) and the Allman Brothers Band (in had left it there. But many
jeans and shirts) turned out, but so many patterns would repeat for the
fights between the contingents broke out band – especially for Allman –
that Cher tearfully demanded an end to the including raging fights, failed
tour. Not long after, Allman passed out at love and drug addiction. Allman, in fact,
an awards banquet, face down in a plate of was in awful shape for many of those years,
spaghetti. That was it for Cher. in an unceasingly tortured place. “I was just
Allman had recorded his first solo too drunk most of the time to care one way
album, Laid Back, in 1973. It was moody, or the other,” he said. By the early Eighties,
he was drinking at least a fifth of
vodka every day.
In 1986, Allman made a new
album for Epic, I’m No Angel. The
title song was a hit. Plus, classic
rock was now a successful radio
format. Epic wondered if either
Allman or Betts would consider
making a new “Southern rock”
album together. Allman’s drug
and alcohol problems still raged,
and he still had misgivings about
Betts, but the two talked and
agreed: If Epic wanted a South-
ern-rock band, how would the
label like to have the Southern-
rock group, the Allman Brothers
Band? Before entering a studio,
the Allmans toured. They want-
ed to see how Gregg would han-
dle the road; they also wanted to
see if they could still play like the
Allman Brothers. Allman,
Betts, Trucks and Johan-
son brought in three new
BLUE SKY members, who gave them
Allman in 2008. fresh impetus: guitar-
After years of drug ist Warren Haynes, bass-
much different than the and alcohol abuse, ist Allen Woody and key-
music he made with the he sobered up in boardist Johnny Neel.
Allmans, a midnight-blue the late Nineties: In the next few years,
soul masterpiece that ran “I was thankful to they made two of the
God that I had
deep. 1977’s Playin’ Up a best albums of their ca-
woken up before all
Storm was just as good – the innings of the reer, Seven Turns (1990)
like a Bobby “Blue” Bland game were over.” and Shades of Two Worlds
album. But, as it turned (1991). More important,
out, there remained a bond they were reborn as a live
between Allman and his band. In 1989, they played
former bandmates that couldn’t be shaken a multi-night showcase at New York’s Bea-
– another hellhound that wouldn’t let go. con Theatre; after that, they played near-
In 1978, the Allman Brothers Band re- annual spring residencies at the venue.
grouped, with a slightly revamped lineup. Some of the live recordings from those
They made one successful record, Enlight- stays, and from other occasions, caught
ened Rogues, but there were further bad the intellectual and spiritual passions of a
ends to come: In 1979, Twiggs Lyndon – band that seemed in perpetual renewal to
who was the Allmans’ first road manager an ever-eager audience.
and favorite roadie; who had once stabbed That’s the miracle part. Offstage, things
to death a club manager because he tried were darker than ever. Allman finally came
to cheat the band; who had gone to a men- face to face with his self-inflicted horror
tal hospital and undergone tremendous on what should have been one of the best
remorse – was skydiving over a New York nights of his career. The All- [Cont. on 57]
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 51
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Reviews
“All of the things we’re taking,
’Cause we are young and . . . ashamed
Send us to perfect places.
All of our heroes fading.”
—Lor de, “Perfect Places”

Lorde
Throws
an Epic
House
Party
On her long-awaited
second LP, the pop
diva proves she’s in
for the long haul

Lorde
Melodrama Lava/Republic
HHHH
BY WILL HERMES
On her debut, Pure Heroine,
Lorde ridiculed pop music
while glorying in it. The former
Ella Yelich-O’Connor displayed
an honor-roll-brat-in-deten-
tion-hall flow, a goth sense of
drama and the sort of supreme
over it-ness that only an actu-
al 16-year-old can muster. Full
of heart and nuanced writing,
the LP was a small masterpiece
and a massive hit as well. You
could tell the Auckland, New
Zealand, kid was in for the long
haul, and after a four-year wait,
her second album, Melodrama,
confirms that notion.
Now 20, Lorde signals a new
order straightaway, with lonely
piano chords where Pure Her-
oine’s electronic palette was.
They open the single “Green
Light,” a barbed message to an
ex who the singer can’t quite
shake. The song grows into a
stomping electro-acoustic thrill
ride, its swarming, processed
vocal chant “I want it!” recalling
another precocious, hyperliter-

Illustration by Ja n Feindt RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 53

Reviews
ate, synth-loving auteur sing-
er-songwriter: Kate Bush, who
insisted “I want it all!” back in
1982 on “Suspended in Gaffa.”
Give Lorde credit for wanting it
all too – the huge vistas of elec-
tronic music alongside the hu-
man-scaled and handmade.
That’s the trick here, abet-
ted playfully by co-writer/co-
producer Jack Antonoff, who
brings the rock-schooled song
sense he coined with fun. and
honed on Taylor Swift’s 1989 to
Lorde’s electro-pop craftiness.
Using empty space to spectac-
ular effect, the arrangements
veer from stark clarity to delir-
ium, often in a few bars. Like
the finger snaps on her break-
out, “Royals,” small touches
loom: the dry guitar opening
of “The Louvre,” with its ambi-
ent-dub atmospherics; the dis-
tant yelps and heraldic roots-
reggae brass on “Sober,” a sexy
midtempo jam endlessly sec-
ond-guessing its own pleasure;
the screeching industrial noise
and f-bombs on “Hard Feel-
ings/Loveless”; the trap beats
that strafe the title track’s or-
chestral brooding. As a pop-
song production display, it’s a
tour de force.
Lorde’s writing and fantas-
tically intimate vocals, rang-
ing from her witchy, unpro-
cessed low-register warbles to
all sorts of digitized masks,
make it matter. She has said the
album’s conceit is a house party
and its unfolding dramas; in-
deed, Pure Heroine’s cool snark
is now a hotter passion, in its
millennial-skeptical way. It’s
most vivid on the rueful piano
ballad “Liability,” a meditation
on the loneliness of an ambi-
tious pop drama queen.
But Melodrama’s most strik-
ing moment may be the aside
on “Homemade Dynamite” –
a goofy new-lust paean with a
Top Gun reference and a death
wish – when Lorde vocalizes
a tiny explosion amid total si-
lence, like a friend whisper-
ing a wordless message in your
ear in a nightclub booth as
chaos rages. It’s emblematic of
a modern pop record that priz-
es old-school intimacy, and lin-
gers well after the house lights
have gone up.
54 HHHHH Classic | HHHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
Katy Perry
Witness Capitol
HHH
Perry tries to find herself in
the arty side of the club
Katy Perry has replaced the eye
of the tiger with the heart of
a night owl on an album that
surfs on gentler throbs of house
and lets ballads smush into art-
pop soup. There’s a dancehall/
disco smashup (“Chained to the
Rhythm”), the Sam Smith-like
“Save as Draft,” and early-Nine-
ties house (“Swish Swish”). The
Sly leader: brassy voice that sang lines like
Foxes’ “I am a champion” is now de-
Pecknold voured in effects and reverb.
Among the exceptions is “Pen-
dulum,” which brings a vin-
Fleet Foxes tage Perry vocal performance
to late-Eighties filigrees; but
her lyrics double as self-criti-
Go on a Prog- cism: “Don’t try and reinvent
your wheel/’Cause you’re too
original.” CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN
Folk Odyssey
After a six-year hiatus, the coffee-shop
heroes are back with an epic album
Fleet Foxes Crack-Up Nonesuch HHH½ Dan Auerbach
Waiting on a Song
Let’s just say Fleet Foxes are emphasizing Easy Eye Sound
the “Y” in CSNY. The folk-rock band’s long- HHH½
awaited latest sort of feels like Neil Young’s The Black Keys multitasker
Buffalo Springfield collage-dream opus “Bro- makes his ‘Nashville record’
ken Arrow” if it lasted a whole album. The
Foxes’ sound is still rooted in the lush, beardly harmonies No one wants to be called a
and sky-bound strumming that made their first two LPs carpetbagger – so it was only
coffee-shop staples. But they’ve upped their prog ambitions a matter of time until this ace
– tracks wash together, song titles abound with opaque multitasker made his “Nash-
punctuation, and the sweeping melodies often wander into ville LP” (he based his Easy Eye
moody places, away from the safety of the campfire. Studio there). Dan Auerbach
The six-minute-plus opener, “I Am All That I Need/Ar- has tapped big talent to grow
royo Seco/Thumbprint Scar,” begins with frontman Robin his retro style without playing
Pecknold’s forlorn murmuring, then bursts into a disso- dress-up. The Seventies coun-
nant acoustic charge before riding eagles-wings orches- try-soul-rock palette is part Lee
tration toward more-reassuring loveliness. “Third of May/ Hazlewood, part Jim Ford. The
Odaigahara” suggests the soft rock of Seals and Crofts or title track is a meditation on
America as avant-garde psychedelia. These shape-shift- craft, written with John Prine;
ing arrangements can be dazzling, a balance of pasto- “Cherry Bomb” boasts Duane
ral beauty and studio whimsy, tradition and trippiness. Eddy’s signature twang; “Un-
SUZI PRATT/WIREIMAGE
Often, Pecknold’s lyrics reveal a divided mind to match the dertow” conjures the Spinners
music’s fragmented flow: “I can tell you’ve cracked like a with Philly-soul strings and
china plate,” he sings on the darkly spacious title track, a “Games People Play” quote.
a vision of things falling apart rendered as grand as an A “Nashville sound” the town
Aaron Copland fanfare. JON DOLAN could use more of. WILL HERMES
Ratings are supervised by the editors of R OLLING S TONE .

Love Is a Battlefield
The Beguiled
Nicole Kidman, Kirsten
Dunst, Colin Farrell
Directed by Sofia Coppola
HHH½
when a shirtless clint
Eastwood starred in The Be-
guiled in 1971, he played a
wounded Yankee soldier who
finds refuge from the Civil
War on the grounds of a South-
ern girls school – he was the
boss rooster in a henhouse.
That was then. Now writ-
er-director Sofia Coppola has
reshaped The Beguiled, based
on a 1966 novel by Thom-
as Cullinan, into a Southern
Gothic that simmers with vio-
lent undercurrents and dark,
subversive wit. Coppola, who
just won the directing prize
at Cannes, replaces the male
gaze in the Eastwood film
with a potent female perspec-
tive. These wonder women, led
by Nicole Kidman and Kirst-
en Dunst, lack superpowers,
but no man is going to boss
them around.
The “he” among the seven
“she’s” is Cpl. John McBur-
ney (Colin Farrell), an Irish
charmer found in the woods
FROM TOP: BEN ROTHSTEIN/FOCUS FEATURES; ERIC MCNATT/A24; CHIABELLA JAMES/UNIVERSAL PICTURES
by Amy (Oona Laurence), a
Even Cruise Can’t Bring This Stiff to Life
The Mummy
Tom Cruise
Directed by Alex Kurtzman
H turns them loose in
how meh is “the mummy”?
Let me count the ways. For all
the digital desperation from
overworked computers, this
reboot is DOA. Tom Cruise
doesn’t play the title role; he’s
Nick Morton, a hustler in an-
tiquities. In a gender f lip,
the Mummy is embodied by
Sofia Boutella. She’s Ahma-
net, an evil Egyptian prin-
cess who was buried alive in
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
Movies
By Peter Travers
Kidman
dominates
Farrell.
student who helps him limp to
her Virginia school, where he
tries to seize control with ben-
efits. The ladies have anoth-
er agenda that Coppola builds
with sly mischief and mount-
ing suspense.
Headmistress Martha (a
splendid Kidman) digs the
iron out of his leg and pro-
vides a sponge bath that
doesn’t miss a spot. Teacher
Edwina (Dunst, brilliantly nu-
anced) has more romantic de-
signs. And impulsive teen Ali-
cia (Elle Fanning) just wants
to kiss a man – on her terms.
Cruise
is very
afraid.
Mesopotamia, currently Iraq.
Nick unearths the tomb of
this “3,000-year-old prune”
who wants to use his body to
HHHH Classic | HHH½ Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
Coppola and the gifted cin-
ematographer Philippe Le
Sourd create a sultry atmo-
sphere of lacy beauty curdled
by bloodlust and the sound
of battle off in the distance.
But, oh, the war inside. Kid-
man and Farrell engage in a
mesmerizing duel of wits. But
it’s Dunst who finds the film’s
bruised heart. Coppola is a
virtuoso of image and sound.
Don’t mistake her delicate
touch for weakness. The Be-
guiled is a hothouse flower of
startling power and intimacy.
You can’t shake it.
house Set, the god
of the dead. Direc-
tor Alex Kurtzman
modern-day Lon-
don, where he fails
to generate even
a single meme of
fright or fun. Russell
Crowe shows up as
Dr. Jekyll, mostly as
a promo for Univer-
sal’s coming “Dark
Universe” series, of which The
Mummy is the first try. This
anticipation-killer is not going
to help. Epic fail.
A Smarter
Scary Movie
It Comes at Night
Joel Edgerton
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
HHH½
you wa n t hor ror t h a t
screws with your head? This
is it. Leave the gore to the tor-
ture-porn crowd. It Comes at
Night is the work of a true art-
ist, Trey Edward Shults, whose
2016 debut feature, Krisha, is
a family drama so intense it’d
make John Cassavetes flinch.
It Comes at Night goes a dif-
ferent route. On the surface, it
walks and talks a zombie game.
There’s a virus wiping out most
of civilization. Joel Edgerton
It comes
knocking.
excels as Paul, a rifle-toter who
bolts the door of his house in
the woods to protect his wife
(Carmen Ejogo) and teen son
(Kelvin Harrison Jr. is a stand-
out) from the infected, even if
they’re family.
Then a stranger (a superb
Christopher Abbott) comes
knocking with his own wife (a
tangy, terrific Riley Keough)
and toddler son Andrew (Grif-
fin Robert Faulkner). That’s the
setup. Almost no backstory. Just
razor-sharp tension that cuts to
the quick. Infection lurks just
outside the door. Shults does
wonders, especially during the
climactic standoff, when no one
in this house of psychological
horrors trusts the other. When
survival is everything, does hu-
manity go out the window – tak-
ing morality with it? That’s the
scary-timely theme that ani-
mates Shults’ harrowing and
haunting film. It truly will keep
you up at night.
R ol l i n g S t o n e | 55
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RACHEL MADDOW
[Cont. from 39]
oversold it, though?
Do you feel like you
I felt like I did exactly what I wanted
to do. You can’t really do any worthwhile
work if you’re hoping for a specific response
from people. This is what I do and some
people like it and some people don’t, and
some days you’re up and some days you’re
down in terms of whether people think
you’re a good person or a bad person.
Are you generally happy with your
performance?
Oh, I’m rarely satisfied – I mostly would
grade myself below a C for any particular
show, as our average.
Below a C?
Well, I mean, we have technical failures.
Sometimes we have boring guests. Some-
times I do a lousy job in an interview. Just
sloppiness, in writing, bad editing, typos
sometimes screw shit up. But occasionally,
we do shows that I think are really good
– I’m not blind to when we do a good job.
What’s your metric for doing a good job?
Whether I got it right and whether or not
I’ve advanced the story. And every once in
a while you see your influence in the world.
You see people grasp a story that you’ve
broken or a point that you have been able to
introduce into the dialogue around some-
thing. But again, you can’t aim at it. All you
can try to do is get the work right.
What would you say is your biggest defi-
cit on TV?
I don’t think I’m a very good interviewer.
In general, that’s not my skill. Sometimes
we’ve brought on a person because they
really have a thing to add, and then I just
don’t ask them the thing that elucidates the
thing that we brought them on the air for.
That makes me crazy.
Who do you see as a great interviewer?
You know who I think is amazing? Chris
Matthews. And I know that sounds weird,
because he’s famous for interrupting peo-
ple. But he interrupts people because he’s
listening so hard to them. He knows where
people are going and he jumps in to get
more out of them. The times I’ve seen Chris
interview Trump were the most illuminat-
ing interviews with him I’ve ever seen, be-
cause he was able to draw more stuff out of
Trump than anyone else.
I don’t see you as someone who is even
interested in that method – people come on
your show to have a conversation.
Right! I have a tacit contract with my
viewers that if I invite somebody onto my
show it’s because I believe they have some-
thing you ought to hear. But that genteel
kind of kid-glove handling of my guests
isn’t as extractive as it could be. I’m glad
there are a lot of different types of people
who do this job. The way I do it is not for
everybody.
56
Have you found the whole fake-news and
“alternative facts” stuff to be a distraction?
I mean, who cares? It’s like sticks and
stones. I am interested in the president
denigrating the press – and the judiciary
and the intelligence community and law
enforcement – because that is important
in terms of his behavior as an increas-
ingly authoritarian-style leader, the type
of which we have never had before at this
level of American politics, period. I am
not interested in it because it offends me.
When speech becomes behavior, then it is
relevant. I don’t watch the press briefing. I
don’t read the president’s tweets. In gen-
eral, “The president has tweeted X” is an
overblown story.
What was the thing that surprised you
most about working in TV?
Just how much smoke-blowing there is
– a lot of people saying, “Wow! That was so
awesome,” when you’re like, “Are you sure?”
You also get a lot of people who believe
that they’re great, when they kind of suck.
I’m always aware of all the ways that
failure can creep into everything I’m doing.
I’m constantly battling in order to achieve
something that I’m not embarrassed by,
which people think is self-deprecating, but
it’s fucking motivating.
And also tiring?
It’s really tiring. I have the best staff in
news, but it’s hard to keep people for the
long haul. Our work tempo is so exhaust-
ing. It’s just hard.
Can you ever unplug?
I threw my back out, so I unplug less
than I used to. There are three things I
do to stay sane: I exercise, I sleep – I’m a
good sleeper – and I fish. I cannot do any of
those things with this back injury.
Even fishing?
I mean, like, I can – I went out last week-
end with a friend of mine who blew out her
knee the day after I hurt my back. Usually,
we’re, like, out there in the river and rap-
pelling down gorges and doing crazy stuff.
Now, there’s the two of us in folding chairs,
fishing for shad in the Connecticut River.
It was so sad.
Aside from your passion for fishing, is
there a side to you that we don’t see on TV?
What do you think?
I think you’re essentially a private per-
son who prefers to reveal a part of yourself.
Yeah. I’m not pretending to be somebody
that I’m not on television. But there’s a slice
of me that I put on television.
How big of a slice?
Do any of us know the extent of who
we are?
Onscreen, you seem pretty authentic.
I try to at least give some cue that I’m
giving you my own personal take on this
now. But I don’t yell. I’m not gonna pound
the table and wave my fist in the air. That’s
not going to help.
GREGG ALLMAN
[Cont. from 51] man Brothers Band were
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame in January 1995. “I arrived in New
York on a Sunday,” he recalled, “got drunk,
and stayed drunk for five days, including
the induction ceremony itself.” The eve-
ning of the 12th he appeared at the Wal-
dorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom with other
band members. “In the acceptance speech,
I intended to say a bunch of things about
my mother, and about [Fillmore manager]
Bill Graham. But I just said, ‘This is for
my brother – my mentor,’ and then I split.
Afterwards I looked at that footage, and I
never took another drink. And I never will.”
That was perhaps a wishful exaggera-
tion, but he was nevertheless determined
to change. He hired in-home nurses who
worked in 12-hour shifts to help him finally
kick booze. In his book, Allman asked, “Did
I get any positive anything out of all that?
And you’ve got to admit to yourself, no, I
didn’t. You can see what happened and that
by the grace of God, you finally quit before
it killed you.”
Allman’s time in the lower depths was
over; he had stumbled into redemption, of
a sort. “[In the late Nineties],” he wrote, “I
started wearing a cross, because I finally
got some sort of spirituality. Until that
point I’d always felt alone, and while some-
times I still get that way because I have a
real phobia about being alone, at least now
I can do something about it. . . . Now, if I’m
having a problem, or a friend of mine is
having a problem, or something is keeping
me from sleeping, I’ll just lay there and not
really pray so much as just meditate. I get
real still and talk to the Man.”
In 2000, the Allman Brothers Band al-
most fell into another bitter disunion. Over
the years, a word often used among the
members to describe Betts’ leadership of
the band was “bullying.” Said former band
manager Danny Goldberg, in One Way
Out, “Dickey was the strongest willed, very
forceful. . . . He felt that he had written a lot
of music and been integral to the band but
because his name was not Allman, he would
never have the clout, and that bothered
him.” Over the decades, the relationship
between Betts and Allman would be the
dynamic that drove the band’s history, long
after Duane was gone. Like the dark secret
at the heart of a blues tale, the bond would
become more like hatred than kinship.
“Getting clean,” Allman would write,
“was like having my windshield washed,
and it felt like me, Jaimoe, and Butchie were
all too caught up with Dickey’s bullshit. In
the spring of 2000, we did an eight-show
run that ended in Atlanta on May 7th; dur-
ing this stretch, Dickey was drinking a ton
of beer, and God only knows what else he
was doing. He was in rare form, blowing
Ju n e 2 9 , 2 017
song after song, and the worse he got, the
louder he played. . . . Butch and I talked the
next day, and I told him, ‘Man, I cannot
take, and will not take, any more of this
shit from Dickey. I’m better than this, and
I cannot live another day with that son of a
bitch trying to lord his bullshit all over us.
Fuck this. I’m really pissed at myself for not
quitting five years ago.”
By then, Allman was ready to assert
himself. He sent Betts a fax, notifying him
that the band was laying him off for the
summer tour. The separation was eventu-
ally arbitrated, and it became permanent.
The guitarist never played with the Allman
Brothers Band again, though Betts and All-
man would make peace with each other be-
fore the singer’s death.
The band continued, with Trucks’ neph-
ew, Derek, on guitar. In October 2014, they
played their final shows at the Beacon. In
the years after Betts, they made their last
studio album – 2003’s Hittin’ the Note, their
most forceful work since At Fillmore East
in 1971 – and ended in top form. The band
had final tragedy in store, though, when
Butch Trucks committed suicide early in
2017. “I’ve lost another brother, and it hurts
beyond words,” Allman said in a statement.
Allman, for his part, was thankful he had
sobered up in time to enjoy the music – that
he “had woken up before all the innings of
the game were over,” he said. In 2011, he
released Low Country Blues, produced by
T Bone Burnett. It’s a modern-day blues
album like no other. In Skip James’ “Devil
Got My Woman,” Allman sings like the
ghost of the original singer, with a brood-
ing storm swelling up behind to act out his
vengeance, to cover for his fear.
Despite his sobriety, despite the dignified
end of his band, Allman still had reason for
dread. In 1999, before the end of the All-
man Brothers Band, he learned that he had
hepatitis C, which he believed he got from a
dirty tattoo needle. Soon, he needed – and
received – a liver transplant.
As he was healing, he began planning the
album he would make with Burnett. Low
Country Blues debuted at Number Five
– “the highest I’d ever been on the charts
and the highest debut ever for a blues rec-
ord, except for one by Eric Clapton, which
is pretty good company,” Allman wrote. It
also received a Grammy nomination for
Best Blues Album of 2011. Allman decided
it was time to grow closer to his children.
He had five, each with a different mother,
and he married seven times. “Every woman
I’ve ever had a relationship with has loved
me for who they thought I was,” he wrote
in 2012. “Maybe they were in love with
whatever was onstage, but when the lights
are out and the sound goes off, you’re left
with this dude, and that’s me. Obviously,
that’s the person they didn’t get to know. . . .”
That same year, though, he announced his
engagement to the woman who would be-
come his seventh wife and remain by his
side to the end: Shannon Williams, 40
years his junior. “This time,” he said, “I am
really in love.”
His physical problems, however, didn’t
go away. The doctors cut him open several
times – once through his back to remove
surgical debris. He also was hospitalized
due to atrial fibrillation. Allman seemed to
know an end was coming. He had always
been mindful of mortality. He even visited
the dead when he was younger. He’d talked
about nights in the 1960s, before anybody
really knew who the Allman Brothers were,
when he and some band members gathered
in the Rose Hill Cemetery, not far from
where they lived in Macon. Southern grave-
yards at night could feel like a blues invoca-
tion, a place where you sought a strong and
scary spirit to protect you or scare others, as
you tried to make it through a mean world.
Of course, like anything summoned in such
places, that specter could also turn on you,
follow you around without you knowing
it, until you start to look at the trail of bad
luck and troubles behind you as it catches
up and paves the distance into your future.
Certainly something stayed close to All-
man’s troubled soul his whole life. Maybe
something ancient and maleficent from
a long-ago moonless night. “It’s probably
because I beat myself to death with those
fucking drugs,” he wrote in 2012.
Allman still wanted to make music, and
he recently finished a new album, Southern
Blood. He recorded some of it at Muscle
Shoals, where his brother had played on
legendary sessions. “I would say he knew
for the last six months that he was getting
toward the end of his life,” Gregg’s man-
ager said, “and he became resolved and
peaceful.”
Gregg Allman died on May 27th, of
complications from liver cancer. He’d gone
through all the years of hell – much of it
his own making – and found himself in a
hard-earned place. “I sit here in my house
in Savannah, look out over the water at
the oaks, and know that I have a reason
to live,” he wrote during the last years of
his life. “After all I’ve been through, I can’t
help but feel I’ve been redeemed, over and
over. Sometimes I scratch my head about
why, but the only answer I can come up
with is that maybe I deserved it because
I’ve brought a lot of happiness to people’s
hearts. I get letters by the week from peo-
ple thanking me for my music, and you
can almost see the tears on the paper. Not
that this justifies anything I’ve done, or
says that it’s okay I got fucked up because
I made a lot of people happy – no way.
One right doesn’t snuff out a wrong. All
I’m saying is that maybe God just needed
me down here to make some folks happy.
Maybe it’s that simple.”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 57
 THE
LAST
WORD

Sammy Hagar
The singer on turning 70, his parenting style,
and what his ideal Van Halen reunion would look like
What are the best and worst parts of success?
The best part is that you get to live your dream. The only down-
side – maybe – is that someday you’re not as relevant as you were.
There are times when I go, “Wow, I can see it winding down. I’m
not gonna have a big hit record, I’m not gonna be this hottest-rock-
star-in-the-world kind of guy ever again.” I’m not having a hard
time, but some people can’t deal with that.
Who is your hero?
Elvis, man. He was a great singer, and he dressed far-out for his
days; people wanted to beat him up. The Beatles were fantastic,
but they were four guys that got away with what they were doing.
Brian Epstein kind of created it. Elvis created himself. Even
when he was old and fat and doing all them crazy things,
I still liked him.
What’s the most indulgent purchase you ever made?
My fucking plane, man. It’s a Bombardier
Challenger 300. Holds nine people, goes
seven and a half hours in the air at 525 miles
per hour. Without it, I couldn’t do half the
shit I do. If I had to jump on a commercial
flight two days ago to go to Dallas to meet with
Mark Cuban [about Hagar’s TV show], I would
have said, “Fuck you, I ain’t coming.” Same
with touring.
If you were on death row, what would you want
as your last meal?
If they’re gonna put me down, I would
take osso buco, which is braised veal
shanks with the marrow in the middle.
Not with saffron risotto; I like it over
linguine. With a little bit more sauce
so it’s a little bit soupier. And with
a great loaf of Italian bread. With
probably an ’85 Conterno Baro-
lo . . . that would make me very
happy.
Do you trust the prison not to
screw that up?
No! I’d say, “Hey, I wanna
cook it.” I’d need a full-blown
Wolf stove. I’m a real gourmet
chef. I’ve cooked for Emer-
il Lagasse, I’ve cooked for
Mario Batali, I’ve cooked for
Julian Serrano – uppity chefs.
I blow their minds.
Your daughter just turned 16. Do
you feel differently about speed lim-
its now?
That’s a tough one. I care so much
about my kids. But if I’m driving my
Hagar is on tour with the Circle
through September 30th; Season
Two of “Rock & Roll Road Trip With
Sammy Hagar” returns to AXS TV
on July 9th.
LaFerrari, for instance, the things it can do at 100 miles per hour,
some big tractor-trailer can’t do at five miles per hour. It’s safer.
Describe your parenting style.
Oh, I’m big fun. I wrestle my kids and tease my kids and goof off
all the time. But I’m really stern, and my wife is even more stern.
If you lie to me and I find out, you’re gonna get punished worse
than if you just told me the truth and it was something that real-
ly pissed me off. They don’t lie to me, so they’re afraid to do things
that they’re going to have to tell me about. It’s a real interesting
way to raise kids without having to use the iron fist.
How do you feel about turning 70 in October?
Fucking out of sight, man. If I’d have known when
I was 30 that things would be like this at 70, I
wouldn’t have been so worried. Not that I was
worried, but you get insecure and go, “Ah,
I wonder what I’m gonna do when I’m
60. What if I have to go back to work or
something?” Piece of cake, man. I can
sing as good and play guitar as good
as ever. I’m functional. I have sex as
much as I ever did.
How would you grade Trump as a pres-
ident so far?
I don’t think you can grade him
yet, because the poor guy can’t get
anything done. The opposition has be-
come so crazy that they’re not gonna
even give him a chance. I’d like to see him
have a chance. He’s the president of the
United States, and without getting any
changes he ain’t helping us. So maybe he
makes some changes that don’t work,
and then maybe the next guy will come
in and say, “That didn’t work, I’ll do it
this way.” Because I don’t think anybody
knows what the fuck they’re doing out
there right now.
There are rumors every few months that you’re
coming back to Van Halen.
I haven’t talked to anyone, and I’m not
reaching out. I’m gonna tell you exactly what
my dream would be, though. It would be Sam,
Dave, Mike, Al and Eddie [the band’s 1984 lineup,
plus Hagar]. If [Eddie’s son] Wolfie’s band opened,
that’s fine.
I’d say, “Dave, you go out and play two songs, then
walk off the stage. I walk out, I’ll do two songs.
I’ll walk off, you do two songs.” Can you imagine
the competition of that? Dave goes out and does
“Jump,” and “Ain’t Talkin ’Bout Love.” I go out there
and blow out something like “Good Enough.”
You gotta hit it hard, and you better be good.
I would give my money to food banks if they
would do the same. I would love to give the
fans the greatest Van Halen show they could
possibly have today. And then say, “OK, I still
don’t like you guys.” INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE

58 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Illustration by Mark Summers

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