Ongoing History of New Music

He was known by many names over the six decades he made music...and for the last 40-plus years, he was the most discussed, photographed, imitated, worshiped and admired rock star in history... No single rock and roll performer had a more profound an effect on our music as David Bowie...all of today’s best alt-rock bands all have a bit of Bowie in them …and that net can be cast much, much wider…Madonna, Lady Gaga, Prince…the list is endless... He was a singer, a songwriter, record producer, movie actor, stage performer, internet entrepreneur, artist, art critic, fashion maven, wall street investment and gay icon... He has been a trend-setter, a shapeshifter, a cultural mover-and-shaker…he’s Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Plastic Soul Man, the Thin white Duke...and now he’s gone…he’s David Bowie—and now that he’s gone, it’s important to recognize all the contributions he’s made to our music… This is Remembering David Bowie, Part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sound of a text coming through woke me up at 2:15 in the morning…what was so important that it couldn’t wait until later?...it was either a wrong number—or it was bad news… It was bad news…a friend in L.A. had just heard some awful information: David Bowie had died… This wasn’t supposed to happen…Bowie was supposed to be one of the immortals, someone who would always be with us….after all, he’d been making music through six decades… And yes, he’d been almost entirely out of sight for a decade, but we knew he was there…he released a surprise album in 2013 to much critical acclaim…and didn’t just release another acclaimed album just three days ago…how could be dead?.... No, there must be some mistake…one of internet hoaxes…but as soon as my computer booted up, I could see that it was all confirmed…David Bowie had suddenly, surprinslgy passed away….and from cancer?...he had cancer?... And so began weeks of mourning all over the world… Look, I realize that if you’re of a certain age, Bowie might be as foreign to you as some big band leader of the 1930s…he was an old guy that belonged to another generation, like Elvis or John Lennon…you might even feel that way about Kurt Cobain…Michael Jackson dying—you get that—but this Bowie guy?...why should I care?...why are people making such a big deal about this?...isn’t this just another baby boomer sob story… No, it’s not… here’s a line I’ve repeated again and again since Bowie died:  if you take any contemporary artist—and I don’t care which one—and you draw a line from that artist into the past, that line will inevitably, unavoidably intersect with bowie: something he did, something he touched, something he influenced…no matter where you start, all roads lead to Bowie… If you are to understand anything about today’s music, you to acknowledge this…fans already know this…and if you’re still uncertain, don’t go anyway…I will explain why Bowie does and will always matter…   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s just say it: Arcade Fire is weird…just about everything they’ve done in their career has been not only unconventional but against the rules… They rarely give interviews…they won’t license their music…they’d rather spend weeks working with the people of Haiti than lounging by a swimming pool somewhere…they won’t even stay on the stage when they perform… Yet whatever they’ve done has worked…junos, Grammy’s, Brits, The Polaris Music Prize…members have had their work nominated for an academy award…humanitarian awards… Critics have fallen all over them for years…they’ve made all the important magazine covers…big name stars all the way up to Chris Martin and U2 and David Bowie have lavished praise on them…and they’re one of the few new rock bands to emerge in the 21st century that is capable of selling out an arena… Okay, so they haven’t sold a gazillion records, but who has these days?...still, they’ve moved several million, which is very respectable…and all those records were made for a small indie label, not a major… Oh—get this: a chunk of the money they’ve big made—a million-dollar chunk—was donated to a Haitian relief organization… There are no reports of legal issues, tabloid scandals, drunken antics, drug use or any kind of anti-social behavior—unless you count it when singer Win Butler gets into foul trouble when he’s playing in a celebrity basketball game… All of this is very good…but in the context of rock’n’roll, it’s very weird… [off mic] how am I supposed to come up with all kinds of juicy bits when there’s nothing at all salacious about these people?...do my best?...what’s that’s supposed to mean?...thanks a lot… All right…let’s see what I can do…this is who the hell is Arcade Fire, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The music world went a little weird on February 13, 2011…and I remember it very, very well because I was in a hotel room in Vancouver with nothing to do but watch TV…I think I was coming back from a speaking thing in Victoria and my flight home had been cancelled… I ordered up a club sandwich from room service and lay on the bed watching the 53rd Grammy awards…all the usual suspects were there…lady gaga, whose album “the fame monster” had been, well, a monster…six nominations, including best album… Katy Perry…seven nominations for her “Teenage Dream” album…Eminem was back…Rihanna had a bunch of nominations…there was buzz about Justin Bieber, Jay Z, Alicia Keys, Bruno Mars, Lady Antebellum…. Finally, after more than three hours of awards and speeches and performances, it was time to present album of the year…the presenter was Barbra Streisand, who, earlier in the evening, was feted with the “musicares person of the year” honour—a big deal… She stepped onstage with the envelope….the crowd buzzed… “it’s gonna be Katy Perry” ….”No way! They’re gonna give it to Eminem!...”Are you crazy? Lady Gaga has this sewn up”… Babs opened the envelope and—well, just listen… Didn’t she sound so confused?...let’s listen again…and note the long pause as she stares at the printing on the card as if she doesn’t know what to do… Twitter exploded…I mean, it just melted down with indignation, outrage and hate…“The Suburbs?”…by who?...what’s an “Arcade Fire?….never heard of them…you people are Grammy…how come I don’t know who they are?....no one knows who they are…who the hell is Arcade Fire!” It was epic....and for those who still don’t get it, hang on…we can fix things for you…or at least try to… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever been responsible for managing a group of people, you’ll understand when I say, “humans are complicated” …as much life experience you may have, you will always, always encounter folks who have gone through lives that are much different from yours… You consider your life normal…they consider their lives normal, too…but the gulf between these senses of what’s “normal” can be huge… It all depends on your upbringing, your current environment, your family life and your state of mind…no judgements here: those are all statements of fact… When you’re a rock star, the definition of “normal” changes…living in your celebrity bubble skews things…when compared to civilians, things can quickly become abnormal—although because of your bubble, you don’t realize it…it’s like as usually, even though those on the outside find your life very weird… But even by the standards of rock star normal—which pretty weird to begin with—the life of Scott Weiland was off the charts…I mean, when a guy like slash takes you aside and says “dude, I’m worried. You’d better take it easy”—you know that you’re dealing with some extraordinary circumstances… This is the life and death of Scott Weiland, part 3…. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all react differently when we hear that a celebrity has died…if it’s someone whose work has managed to touch us in a particular way, the loss can really hurt… Our idols aren’t supposed to be life-sized…they’re something bigger than that…maybe not immortal, but somehow not subject to the day-to-day things we have to deal with…. It really, really bothered me when Joey Ramone died…it hurt when Kurt killed himself…and when Amy Winehouse OD-ed, it affected me even though I wasn’t what you’d call a big fan… A lot of people were similarly affected by the death of Scott Weiland…if you grew up in the 90s, his was one of the great voices of that era….and even though you knew about all his problems—drugs, alcohol, mental health issues and all the rest of it—you didn’t want to believe that things might end up going very badly for him…but deep down… So, what happened with him?...and I’m not just talking about his final days…I mean “what happened to him over the years that put him on this path towards dying in the back of a tour bus?”…. As I said when we started this investigation, this is going to take a while…this is Scott Weiland, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The layout of a tour bus is standard…first, you have the driver’s compartment…behind that is an area where everyone can hang out…a couple of tables, some seating, a fridge, a stove, a microwave and an audio-video system connected to a big-screen TV… Next is a hallway lined with sleeping bunks, usually about three per side…after that, a bathroom and maybe some shower facilities…and finally, we come to the rear bedroom… Here you’ll find a double bed, more seating, another TV and few more amenities… Sometime on December 3, 2015, Scott Weiland entered the back bedroom on his tour bus, which was parked outside a country inn and suites hotel northwest of Minneapolis…he wanted to rest up before that night’s show at the medina ballroom that night…he never came out alive… After 8:00 that night, police were called…there were reports of an unresponsive male, perhaps suffering from an overdose…it was Weiland—and by the time help arrived, he was long dead… The fact that scot weiland had died wasn’t the biggest surprise…it was that he had managed to live to 48…the man lived—and let’s be charitable—a colourful life…unfortunately, those colours were pretty dark… And he was well aware of it…this is a guy who published an autobiography until the title “not dead yet and not for sale”…the first-ever stone temple pilots single was called “dead & bloated,” which features the lines “I am smellin’ like the rose that someone gave me on my birthday deathbed”…Scott was always well aware that he wasn’t living the safest kind of life… At the same time, though, Scott Weiland was one of the great voices to emerge out of the 90s…he was up there with Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley and Eddie Vedder… But who was he?...and how did it eventually come to end in the back of a tour bus in snowy Minnesota?...let’s do what we can to find out… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of my great accomplishments of the year was the construction of a new home office…after 12 years working on this program in a converted bedroom, I built a full-feature workspace in the basement… Oh, it’s lovely…for the first time since I started doing this program in 1993, all my stuff is in one place…all the computers, all the CD’s and vinyl and books and magazines are all together…it’s a marvelously efficient workspace… This, however, was not an easy project…renovations being what they are, it took a full ten weeks longer than projected…permits, trades, materials—the usual problems…and then there was the matter of all the stuff I had scattered about the house… I feel terrible for Matt and Elisha…they were a couple of interns who had to haul thousands of books—most of them hardcover—out of storage and down into the basement where they had to be sorted by topic, alphabetized and neatly put on the shelves…mat had the horrible duty of filing hundreds of CD’s that I had neglected for a couple of years… And then there were dozens of bankers’ boxes, many filled with forgotten research notes and newspaper clippings…which brings me to this: collectively, me and the interns uncovered a lot of material that has never been used on an ongoing history program…it would be a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste, wouldn’t it?... So here we go…this is third annual office cleanout…it’s another edition of 60 mind-blowing facts about music in 60 minutes… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If anyone were to look at Linkin Park around 2011, there no reason to think that anything was going wrong… In the ten years since the band was formed, they’d sold over 80 million albums…they had millions of fans all over the world…they were in firm control of their career, planning to release a new album every 18 months or so, a schedule they, not the record label, set out… Plus they had time to indulge in all kinds of side projects, some musical, some not—like remix albums, soundtracks, even movies…DJ Joe Hahn had started to direct films …not a bad position to be for a bunch of guys still in their 30s, right?... That was the view from the outside…and for the most part, that rosey view was correct…but if anyone had taken the time to really get to know Chester Bennington, there might have been some warning signs…they would have been subtle, slow-burning, almost undetectable…but in hindsight, something was going on inside, something that would end tragically about six years later… This is the third and final part of our remembrance of Chester Bennington… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a musician dies, there’s a light that goes out in fans…it’s not like we knew this person, you know, personally…but it might feel that we did…that’s because the art they created expressed feelings and concepts and thoughts that we couldn’t articulate ourselves…it’s through their music that we are able to learn more about ourselves…that’s why we need artists… And we often don’t realize how deeply their music affected us and in what ways it has worked into our lives and psyches until that person is gone… We saw this when bowie died...it happened when prince left us…same thing with Chris Cornell and Gord Downie and any other musician you wanna mention…and it happened again when Chester Bennington died… Linkin Park sold tens of millions of records, many on the strength of Chester’s abilities to express how he felt, feelings that resonated with so many others…and now that he’s gone, we’re looking at how he did that on his own, with Linkin Park and with some of his side projects… This is remembering Chester Bennington, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices