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Issue 1195 >> November 7, 2013 >> $4.99
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RS1195 THAT FITS
“All the NEWS
”
FEATURES
35 GOP vs. the Poor
The Republicans’ war on food
stamps. By Elizabeth Drew
40 Paul McCartney
Can’t Slow Down
Scenes from the life of a legend
who’s still going full speed.
By Jonah Weiner
48 Lorde’s Teenage Dream
How a brainy, goth-y 16-year-old
from New Zealand became the
least-likely breakout pop star of
the year. By Jonah Weiner
52 The Unbreakable
Robin Quivers
How Howard Stern’s co-host
beat cancer, stayed on the air
and found the meaning of life.
By Brian Hiatt
58 About a Girl
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JEN MALER/RETNA LTD.; COURTESY OF ROBIN QUIVERS; CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP IMAGES
By the time Coy Mathis was
four years old, he knew one thing
for sure: He wasn’t a boy.
By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
ROCK & ROLL
14 Slim Shady Revisited
Inside Eminem’s grueling sessions
for the fall’s biggest rap album.
22 Jared Leto Gets Back
Sixteen-yearold chart-topper
Ella YelichO’Connor, a.k.a.
Lorde. Page 48
At home with the musician and
actor as he returns to movies.
DEPARTMENTS
RECORD REVIEWS
67 Arcade Fire’s Best Yet
James Murphy helps the band
make an epic dance-rock album.
MOVIE REVIEWS
74 ‘Dallas Buyers Club’
The 1980s AIDS war sparks
some top-notch performances.
Dallas Buyers Club
star Jared Leto.
Page 22
Howard Stern and Robin
Quivers, in their terrestrialradio days. Page 52
ON THE COVER Paul McCartney photographed in Los Angeles on September 23rd, 2013, by Peggy Sirota.
Styling by Vanessa Shokrian for Celestine Agency. Grooming by Lauren Kaye at Tracey Mattingly. Coat by Burberry, shirt by Comme des Garçons.
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EXCLUSIVE
The English singer-songwriter returns
with a new LP, Shangri La (produced
by Rick Rubin), on November 18th.
Can’t wait until then? Check out our
exclusive stream of the anthemic highlight, “Slumville Sunrise.”
VAN MORRISON:
ANOTHER SIDE
OF ‘MOONDANCE’
Morrison’s 1970 masterpiece is getting the
deluxe treatment, with remastered sound and
previously unheard outtakes. Hit rollingstone
.com to hear the best bonus tracks, including a
horn-free rendition of “Into the Mystic.”
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EXCLUSIVE
LIFE AFTER D.C.: CAN
VAN JONES SAVE CNN?
POLITICS
President Obama’s former “green jobs” adviser
has a new high-profile gig as Newt Gingrich’s
onscreen foil on CNN’s rebooted Crossfire. We
checked in with the tireless progressive advocate
about his surprising second act.
ON THE ROAD WITH
WILSON AND BECK
See our candid snapshots of founding Beach
Boy Brian Wilson and tourmate Jef Beck on
the day Wilson wowed a New York crowd by
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LETTERS
& ADVICE
CORRESPONDENCE LOVE
The Pension Scam
Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the sacking of public pensions by
Wall Street hedge funds raised howls of protest [“Looting
the Pension Funds,” RS 1193]. Salon called the piece “stunning,” while Moyers & Company’s Joshua Holland labeled it
“maddening” and threatened to bill Taibbi for his blood-pressure medication. R OLLING S TONE readers also weighed in.
t a i bbi d oe s i t ag a i n.
What truly saddens me, a
recent retiree from the New
York City school system, is
how many union people I
know who have drunk the
GOP Kool-Aid. They throw
their support behind politicians who dismantle unions,
raid and reduce pensions,
and make sure the rightfully earned benefits of present
union workers are not there
for our children. We don’t
have a chance.
Miley’s Party
t h e m i l e y c y rus c ov e r
story “Good Golly Miss Miley!”
[RS 1193] was utterly charming. I already knew Miley could
sing and act, but her adventures with Josh Eells revealed
how game, funny and selfaware she truly is.
h ug e m i l e y fa n h e r e .
I can’t decide who’s braver or
crazier (subject or reporter) to
have jumped out of a plane. As
always, really enjoyed the piece.
i n h e r r s i n t e r v i e w,
Miley Cyrus says she is “in a
way” mentoring Justin Bieber.
That’s like my three-year-old
explaining how the world works
to my two-year-old. Funny, but
ultimately doomed.
really appreciated
the piece on the
screwed-up pension
system. A s a young
teacher, I’m tired of defending myself against
those people who think
teachers are the reason for
our financial troubles. With
the way pensions are being
funded now, I’ll be working
until I’m 80 – good thing I
like my job!
Wayne Avren, Atlanta
Kyle Linder, Ashburn, VA
mil e y shou l d not be
blasted for how she expresses
herself. More power to her!
She’s her own person, and the
tongue is great.
as a state worker for
23 years, I always thought
something wasn’t quite
right. I just couldn’t put my
finger on it. Even during the
2008 crash, we were encouraged to contribute the maximum amount we could, with
Carla Smyth, via the Internet
Rick Moyer, via the Internet
Linda Bulloch, Savannah, GA
8 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
June Blair, via the Internet
wa i t, w e ’ r e t o wor k
until we drop, and politicians and hedge funds can
help themselves to our meager pensions under the guise
of saving them? What part of
the Great American Dream
didn’t I understand?
Anne Dalton, via the Internet
Guy Nevirs
Rockaway Park, NY
Sharon McCoy, via the Internet
a n yon e w ho t h i n k s of
Miley Cyrus as a free spirit should have been with us
in the soggy fields at Woodstock – that was a genuinely wild-child generation. Rock
on, Miley. And thanks to
Rolli ng Ston e for a vital
magazine.
the promise of great retirement. Now, thanks to Taibbi
and Rol l i ng S t on e , I
know that’s not true.
ful bigots and bullies who have
no business being in education.
Logan Green, Boston
a dol escence is h a r d
enough to negotiate without
ignorant adults using religious
intolerance to further their own
agendas. One easy authenticity
test cuts through all the rhetoric and moralizing: kindness.
David Donnenfield
San Anselmo, CA
Wage Slaves
thanks for covering jonathan Westin and the minimum-wage battle [The Hot
List, RS 1193]. The country’s
vaunted jobless recovery is expressed mostly in more minimum-wage jobs, but how are
we to raise families or to ever
advance on $7.25 an hour? Answer: We can’t.
Evelyn M. Bruce, via the Internet
King Krank
yet a nother informative Taibbi article about how
American workers are being
screwed by their elected officials. We watch as Egyptians
take to the streets in protest.
How much before we Americans say “enough”?
Kathy O’Connell, Ocala, FL
i t ’s b a d e nough t h at
this assault on pensions is
happening, but that it’s happening in darkness without
scrutiny is unconscionable.
gl a d to he ar th at dav e
Davies is feeling better after his
stroke [Checking In, RS 1193].
We’re all used to him ragging
on Big Brother Ray, but Kinks
drummer Mick Avory too?
C’mon, Dave, lighten up. Still,
I would drive many miles to attend a Kinks reunion concert.
Ned Gentz, Albuquerque, NM
Made in Heaven
d av i d f r ic k e w r i t e s
beautifully about Kurt Cobain
and In Utero [“Nirvana’s Last
Act,” RS 1193]. The album is
forever entwined with Cobain’s
life and death. Thank you for
the poignant reminder.
Gordon Jones, Seattle
Julie Stroeve, Minneapolis
Contact Us
Schools of Shame
as a gay 22-year-old who
attended a private Catholic
high school and had supportive faculty and friends, it sickens me to read what these kids
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are put through just for being
themselves [“The Hidden War
Against Gay Teens,” RS 1193].
People in those Georgia schools
need to stop using religion as
a smoke screen and come out
for what they really are: hate-
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4. M.I.A.
“Sexodus”
1. Bruce
Springsteen
“Dream Baby Dream”
After 18 months of arenashaking rock & roll, Springsteen’s massive Wrecking
Ball world tour finally wound
down this fall. He thanked
his fans with this spare,
heartstrings-yanking cover
of Seventies electro-punk
pioneers Suicide, one of his
favorite bands.
On this standout from the
pop provocateur’s latest
envelope-pushing album,
she invites Canadian crooner
the Weeknd to join her for
a woozy, catchy R&B romp.
5. My Morning
Jacket
“Don’t Do It”
YouTube
What’s cooler than MMJ
taking on the Band’s timeless Marvin Gaye cover?
This clip, where they jam
on it with Jakob Dylan in
Times Square.
Live at ACL Festival
We loved the debut LP from
Thom Yorke and Flea’s band
when it came out in February,
but seeing Atoms live is like
entering a whole other universe
of psychedelic goodness. See
what we mean by watching a
full recent gig, now available
on YouTube.
7. Best Coast
Fade Away
How’s this for great
timing: The California
power-pop duo deliver
a new EP that’s packed
with supersunny
melodies, just as
summer fades
into fall – sort of
like a vitamin D
injection, but
catchier.
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“Raspberry Beret”
This sounds like the genesis of all dance music to
me. Right from the start,
when you hear the kick
drum and the snare, they
sound better than any
drum machine today.
Unknown Mortal
Orchestra
6. Atoms for Peace
Hathaway’s 1970 tune was
already a vintage-soul
classic – but when French
disco king Dimitri From
Paris got his hands on
the song for this brandnew remix, he reworked
it into a next-level glitterball anthem.
Prince
“Street Hassle”
This song is almost like
Proust’s madeleine to
me – each time I hear it,
it brings back memories.
It’s a never-ending source
of inspiration.
The latest cut from Slim Shady’s Marshall Mathers LP 2 is six minutes
of concentrated speed-rap fury. “I’m devastating, more than ever
demonstrating how to give a motherfuckin’ audience a feeling like it’s
levitating,” Em declares in one of his sickest flows ever. Damn right!
“The Ghetto” remix
The Phoenix frontman is
rocking arenas on a world
tour through next year.
Lou Reed
2. Eminem “Rap God”
3. Donny
Hathaway
Thomas
Mars
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“FFunny FFrends”
When I first heard this,
I thought it was a good
song. Then I realized it’s
a great song. It’s so perfectly shaped. We played
this a lot backstage on
our tour this year.
Alain Bashung
“Bijou, Bijou”
This is a morning song for
me – I play it at breakfast
when I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s one of the most
French songs ever.
Kindness
“Swingin Party”
I hate covers. But this
is the counterexample –
it’s a Replacements cover,
and it’s such a surprise.
The first time I heard it,
I was in a studio at night
with a giant soundboard.
It felt like I was in 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: GAELLE BERI/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES ; DAVID BLACK ; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES ; FELIPE DANA/AP IMAGES ; GAELLE BERI/GETTY IMAGES FOR CBGB ; BRYAN BEDDER/GETTY IMAGES FOR CBGB ; JIM DYSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
GUEST
LIST
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Dillon Van Way
Mark Kleis
Dramatization*
Joe Nation
Dillon Van Way
*EPA-estimated 26 city/35 hwy/29 combined mpg. Actual mileage will vary. **Requires 93-octane premium fuel.
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ENCOUNTER JARED LETO RETURNS TO MOVIES PG. 22 | Q&A SHAUN WHITE PG. 26
GUESS
WHO’S
BACK?
Eminem
onstage
in France
Eminem
Revives
the Real
Slim Shady
Inside the grueling
sessions for fall’s
biggest rap album
By Brian Hiatt
ig h t n o w, i’ m
probably working
harder than I’ve
ever worked in
my life,” says a sleep-deprived
Eminem, gulping diet Red Bull
in his suburban Detroit studio.
He’s well past deadline (“They
keep telling me a diferent day,”
he says) on his new album, The
Marshall Mathers LP 2 – out
November 5th – and the final
mixes still aren’t quite done.
“Aside from around the time of
The Eminem Show, when I was
also doing the 8 Mile movie
and soundtrack and score and
shit like that. This is probably
the equivalent of that, but all
focused on the record.”
A lot of fans – including
Eminem himself, most days –
consider 2000’s original The
Marshall Mathers LP his best.
TRIP FONTAINE/DALLE/LANDOV
‘R
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EMINEM
FLASHBACK
Amnesty Tours Revisited
New box – featuring Bruce, U2,
Sting and more – celebrates
great Eighties benefit tours
B
On the ’86 run, Sting reunited the Police
– broken up for two years – for the final three
shows. “I hadn’t seen my drums in months,”
remembers Stewart Copeland. “I’ve always
been very fond of Amnesty, but if it had been
for Exxon I would have been there.” The tour
was such a success that Amnesty launched
another two years later, expanding the itinerary to South America, Asia and Africa – places that major rock acts rarely hit.
ruce spr i ng st e e n a n d t h e e
Street Band had been all over the
planet with Sting, Peter Gabriel and
Youssou N’Dour by the time the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour
touched down in Africa’s Ivory
Coast. But they’d never seen a
crowd like the 50,000 fans at
Félicia soccer stadium. “It was a
stadium of entirely black faces,”
Springsteen recalled recently. “Clarence [Clemons] said
to me, ‘Now you know what it
feels like!’ You could feel people sussing us out, and then the
whole place just exploded. The
band came of feeling like it was
the first show we’d ever done.”
The concert was one of the
last stops on the Human Rights
Now! Tour, the second of two
TWO HEARTS
all-star treks Amnesty staged
Sting and
to spread awareness of humanSpringsteen
rights atrocities. (The first,
in 1986, featured U2, Sting,
For Springsteen, the shows were one of
Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams, Lou Reed and
Joan Baez.) Now, a new six-disc package, the high points of the era. “The E Street
¡Released!, brings together a wealth of audio Band was still very much a provincial band,”
and video from the tours – including three he says in an interview on one of the discs.
shows, tons of behind-the-scenes footage and “It opened our minds to the world as one
revealing new interviews – for the first time. big place.”
ANDY GREENE
NEIL GAIMAN RESURRECTS CLASSIC ‘SANDMAN’
The strange mind behind
the pioneering twisted
comic brings it back
Comic fans, rejoice! Twenty-five
years after Neil Gaiman broke
through with his classic series The
Sandman, DC’s Vertigo imprint is
bringing it back in a limited run
this fall. “When I was originally
writing Sandman, this was a story
that for one reason or another
never got told,” Gaiman says. “The
new arc will go back to the very
beginning of the series and answer
some basic questions raised in
Sandman Number 1.”
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Gaiman
(right) and
one of the
first new
Sandman comics
The seriously lysergic Sandman
– a typical plot from the original
run has Lucifer turning over the
keys to hell to become a beachcomber – took monthly comics to
new dimensions. And Gaiman, 52,
remains the polar opposite of the
stereotypical comic-book
guy. He’s lean, British,
always dressed in
black and endlessly
cool. He’s also
extremely busy
– in addition to
The Sandman, he’s
written dozens of
books, from bestselling fantasy novels to
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the dark kids’ favorite Coraline. But
the thing he might be best known
for at this particular moment is his
very public marriage to musician
and professional provocateur
Amanda Palmer. (They have a combined 2.8 million Twitter followers,
who know more about them than
your family probably knows about
you.) “I hold back,” Gaiman insists.
“I had an incredibly embarrassing
conversation last night talking to
somebody who had been reading
my wife’s blog. They were saying,
‘When she put up that thing on her
blog about her getting that UTI, I
knew you guys were having lots
of sex!’ ”
SEAN WOODS
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So making an album worthy of
the name meant recording, and
then discarding, dozens of extra
songs. “Calling it The Marshall
Mathers LP 2, obviously I knew
that there might be certain expectations,” he says. “I wouldn’t want
to call it that just for the sake of
calling it that. I had to make sure
that I had the right songs – and
just when you think you got it, you
listen and you’re like, ‘Fuck, man!
I feel like it needs this or that,’ to
paint the whole picture.”
Some tracks, including the
Rick Rubin-produced, Beastieesque single “Berzerk,” draw on
old-school hip-hop. Eminem was
already headed that way when his
manager, Paul Rosenberg, hooked
him up with Rubin. “Getting with
him was like, ‘Holy shit!’ ” says
Eminem. “As many genres of
music that he is able to fuck with,
he’s like Yoda. I couldn’t do it. You
sit me there with a rock group, I
don’t know the first fucking thing
about banging on the drums.”
Eminem emphasizes that the
album, which includes collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Nate
Ruess and Rihanna (again), is
“not necessarily a sequel, as much
as it is a revisitation.
“So there’s not gonna be, like,
continuations of every old song
on there or anything like that,”
he adds. “To me, it’s more about
the vibe, and it’s more about the
nostalgia.”
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ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
Also available at bn.com/rsbeatles .
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ROCK&ROLL
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TUNE IN
FALL TV’S
WEIRDEST,
CRAZIEST
SHOW
Meet British stage
vet Tom Mison, star
of ‘Sleepy Hollow’
Albert Hammond Jr.’s
Rock & Roll Redemption
The Strokes guitarist puts drug
years behind him with new EP.
Plus: What’s next for the band?
n 2009, when the strokes began
working on 2011’s Angles at Albert Hammond Jr.’s upstate New York studio, the
guitarist was regularly spending up to
$2,000 a weekend on cocaine, heroin and
ketamine. “Ever yone
saw me at my worst,”
he says. “I’d sleep a few
hours, then I’d smoke
some crack or shoot
some coke, and be like,
‘Too much’ – so I’d take
a bunch of pills. No one
would speak to me until
Casablancas
they could trust me
and Hammond
again.” Hammond realonstage
ized he needed to go to
rehab – where, he says,
“you spend hours crying and in pain.”
Today, Hammond – who just released a new
solo EP, AHJ, on bandmate Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records label – is feeling way better.
“Being sober, weirdly enough, you’re more creative,” he says, sitting on a couch surrounded
by Strokes memorabilia at the band’s Wiz Kid
Management ofces in downtown Manhattan.
I
16 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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“I’ve got my advanced scuba-diving license, I’m
playing tennis. I don’t need anything to take
any of the edge of – the edge is just great.”
After finishing the Strokes’ 2013 LP, Comedown Machine, Hammond headed to the studio with producer Gus Oberg, recording five
songs with stuttering riffs and hypercatchy
hooks that recall the Strokes’ early work. In the
studio, Casablancas bristled at lyrics such as
“I’m beginning to feel that you don’t know what
you do” – which could
be a dig at his reluctance
to tour. “He was like, ‘Is
that about me?’ ” Hammond says. “I was like,
‘No!’ It’s really not.”
Hammond says the
Strokes are still an active band but admits
they’ve grown apart.
“When you’re 18, you
want pussy, drinks and
your friends, you know?
When you get married and want a family, that
separates everyone. But when we’re together, we’re like brothers. That’ll never go away.”
On November 3rd, Hammond will kick of
a North American tour, but further plans will
depend on the Strokes. “The ultimate thing
would be if I could open up for the band,” he
says. “That would be really cool.” PATRICK DOYLE
Mison as
Crane
31-year-old Brit, he’s a total
badass with a glam-rock
strut. “The first day I turned
up in the costume with
the wig,” Mison says, “the
producers said, ‘Fuck, yeah
– you look like a rock star.’ ”
A veteran of the London
stage, Mison never thought
he’d end up in a role like
this. “When I first read the
script, I couldn’t believe
the balls of them actually considering making
it,” he says. “I read it to my
flatmate and he said, ‘That’s
ridiculous.’ I knew that was
a good sign.”
ROB SHEFFIELD
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Hammond photograph by Griffin Lotz
FROM TOP: KENT SMITH/FOX; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE
CLOSE-UP
Fox’s Sleepy Hollow has to
be the hands-down craziest
show on TV: the time-traveling tale of Revolutionary
War soldier Ichabod Crane,
riding into modern-day
America to battle the forces
of evil, in tight pants. It’s
also one of the season’s only
actual hits. “There’s a bit
of a wink to the audience,”
leading man Tom Mison
says with a hearty laugh.
“But I think if the show was
completely earnest, it would
fall flat on its tits.”
In Washington Irving’s
classic 1820 short story
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod was kind of a
twerp. But as played by the
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ROCK&ROLL
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LATE NIGHT
‘Saturday Night Live’s’
New Secret Weapon
I
FUNNY FACE
Bayer as
(from left) a
game-show
contestant,
Jacob the Bar
Mitzvah Boy, a
girls’ pageant
entrant, King
Richard III’s
childhood
friend and
Miley Cyrus
October, the show opened with a
skit where the actual pop star meets
Bayer, who’s playing a pre-tongue
Miley. “She was really professional,”
says Bayer. “We were all sad to see her
go on Saturday.”
Most of her best characters, including Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy
and, surprisingly, Hillary Clinton,
come from her childhood in a heavily Jewish suburb. “We had a lot of bar
mitzvahs in the seventh grade,” she
says. “So it’s really fun to play that
awkward boy who is really into his
dad’s joke. And Hillary Clinton actually talks like one of my rabbis growing up who I used to impersonate! So
that helps me a lot.”
ANDY GREENE
BOX SET
JACK WHITE
UNEARTHS
OLD-TIMEY
DELIGHTS
Deluxe set gathers
800 songs from
Paramount Records
“We thought if we were
going to do it, let’s do it all
the way,” Jack White says of
the unprecedented anthology The Rise and Fall of
Paramount Records (Volume
One) 1917-1927, co-released
by his Third Man Records and
the late John Fahey’s imprint
Revenant. Housed in an oak
cabinet resembling a 1920s
portable Victrola, the $400 set
contains lavish books, a folio
of LPs and a USB drive with
800 songs. It tells the story of
a label, started by a Wisconsin
chair company, that caught
the birth of modern blues, jazz
and country on classic, vital
78s by pioneers including Jelly
Roll Morton, Blind Blake and
Ma Rainey. “You could be poor,
in a minority, and tell your
story on a record,” White says.
“What’s best about America is
in this box.”
DAVID FRICKE
CHECKING IN
Ginger Baker Returns, Angry as Ever
Cream’s cranky drummer
is back in the USA with a
hot new jazz combo
inger bak er’s life
has changed a lot since
the acclaimed 2012 documentary Beware of Mr. Baker.
For one, he’s moved to England
with his wife and teenage stepdaughter after years of living
G
18 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
on a South African ranch with
39 polo ponies. “I lost them all,”
he says of his horses. “There’s a
saying that ‘shit happens’ – and
it happened. All right?”
The notoriously cranky
drummer is in New York with
his new jazz combo. The last
time he played the city, in 2005,
was with Cream at Madison
Square Garden. So what were
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Baker in
New York
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those shows like? “The question I find most annoying is,
‘What was it like?’ ” Baker says.
“I played the drums, man!”
He cackles when asked about
still-touring peers like the Rolling Stones and the Who. “I
wouldn’t go within 10 miles of
a Rolling
Stones
caption
tk gig.” Why not?
“They’re not good musicians,
that’s why!”
PATRICK DOYLE
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: MICHAEL PIRROCCO; GRIFFIN LOTZ; DANA EDELSON/NBC, 5
n the four seasons that
Vanessa Bayer has been on Saturday Night Live, practically
the entire cast has left the show,
making the 31-year-old Cleveland native – best known for her impressions
of Miley Cyrus, Hillary Clinton and
Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy – one of
SNL’s most senior talents. “It’s sort of
crazy,” she says. “I haven’t been there
a real long time and I’m already one
of the most veteran people.”
The Miley Cyrus Show – where
Bayer plays Hannah Montana-era
Miley hosting an inane talk show
– became an audience fave in
her first season. When
Cyrus hosted SNL in
WorldMags.net
HOT BAND
The Head
and the
Heart
Aim High
On its second LP, the Seattle
folk-rock crew fights through
the challenges of success
T
Oslo Calling: The
Next ‘Gangnam Style’
h e h e a d a n d t h e h e a rt
were as surprised as anyone by
the success of their 2010 debut.
The album sold 280,000 copies after
being picked up by Sub Pop; the Seattle
folk-rock crew spent the next two-plus
years playing festivals and opening for
acts like My Morning Jacket and Dave
Matthews Band. “We were running
ourselves ragged,” says singer-guitarist Jon Russell. Adds frontman Josiah
Johnson, “All the great things about the
band started to fade behind all the little things that bug the shit out of you.”
They confront those tensions on
their new LP, Let’s Be Still. On the
melancholy ballad “Fire/Fear,” Johnson cries, “I want to feel the fire again,
with you or anybody else.” “I’m saying,
‘This isn’t cutting it for me,’ ” Johnson
says. “If we don’t remember why we’re
doing it, we can’t do this forever.”
The band spent five months recording on and of at Pearl Jam guitarist
Stone Gossard’s Litho studio. “We had
so many more instruments and sounds
at our fingertips,” says Russell. Next
up: a fall tour of big clubs and theaters.
Says Johnson, “It’s down the rabbit hole
from this point on.”
PATRICK DOYLE
The brothers are a big deal in their native land, where their highly rated talk
show, I Kveld med Ylvis, recently entered
its third season. “The Fox,” produced by
Norwegian hitmakers Stargate (who’ve
worked with Beyoncé and Rihanna),
began as a promo for the show. “The idea
was to make a pop song about a totally stupid subject: the sound the fox makes,” says
Vegard. “Like, ‘Sorry, we screwed this up!’ ”
Instead, “The Fox” has become the biggest U.S. hit by a Norwegian artist since
a-ha’s “Take On Me” in 1985. “You get used
to these sick, unbelievable things actually happening,” says Vegard. “This is how
it’s going to be – for a little while. There’s
probably going to be a frog song from
Germany next week.” SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON
HEART ATTACK Drummer Tyler Williams,
singer-violinist Charity Rose Thielen,
Russell, bassist Chris Zasche, Johnson and
keyboardist Kenny Hensley (from left)
FROM TOP: PETER KRAMER/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE/GETTY IMAGES; CURTIS WAYNE MILLARD
ON THE CHARTS
Meet Ylvis, the Norwegian
brothers whose comedy jam
“The Fox” is a surprise smash
B
eing a vir al star can really wear you out. Just ask Ylvis,
the Norwegian duo whose ridiculously catchy EDM joke jam “The
Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)” has racked
up more than 120 million YouTube views
and cracked the Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot
100. Last night, they played till 2:30 a.m. at
a Lower East Side club; three hours later,
they hit the Today show. “We’re exhausted,” says Bård Ylvisåker, sipping white
wine with his older brother Vegard at a
hotel bar. “But, like, happily exhausted.”
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FOXY BROS
Bård (left) and
Vegard on the
Today show
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19
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COMEDY
The New Louis C.K.
Comedian Bill Burr – a.k.a. Breaking Bad’s Kuby – is the
undisputed heavyweight champ of rage-fueled humor
was on Chappelle’s Show. Since 2007, he’s
hosted the popular “Monday Morning Podcast,” and he recently launched the podcast
network All Things Comedy with The Daily
Show’s Al Madrigal because, Burr says, “Artists start scenes, and then the businessmen
come in and own everything.” But Breaking
Bad was a whole new level. “It was a huge
moment for me,” he says. “It was like getting
sucked into your TV.”
As an Eddie Murphy-obsessed kid growing up in Canton, Massachusetts, where
success was measured mostly via sports
(“You either sucked in gym class or you were
good”), Burr never dreamed of a career in
comedy. But working in a warehouse after
college, he met a guy who loved standup as much as he did. “He said, ‘One
of these nights I’m gonna take a
shot of Jack Daniel’s and go up
onstage,’ ”
Bur r recalls. “I said
if he can do it,
I’m gonna try it.
And thank God
I did. Because I
sucked at everything else.”
CARINA CHOCANO
Burr
onstage in
Phoenix
I’m an
unbelievably
flawed human
being,” says
the comic.
20 | R ol l i n g S t o n e
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Cash at
Folsom
Prison
INSIDE THE
ULTIMATE
JOHNNY
CASH BIO
Rock writer great
Robert Hilburn goes
deep in new book
“I wanted to treat him
like a statesman,” Robert
Hilburn says of his new,
defining biography,
Johnny Cash: The Life
(Little, Brown and Co.). As
the pop-music critic at the
Los Angeles Times, Hilburn
covered Cash extensively for more
than three
decades. But
during his three
years of work
on the book,
Hilburn found
Cash’s life – a
well-documented hurricane of
drugs, domestic
strife and career
crisis – was “far darker
than I ever imagined.”
Members of Cash’s family,
including his daughter
Rosanne, gave extensive
interviews and provided
previously unpublished
letters. Hilburn also drew
on his many interviews
with Cash, including a profound talk about legacy a
year before Cash’s death,
in 2003. “He said, ‘What
do I represent? Will
people care about me?’ ”
Hilburn recalls, noting that
Cash “had tremendous
courage and tremendous
doubts. The doubts fueled
the courage.” DAVID FRICKE
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM TOP: © JIM MARSHALL PHOTOGRAPHY LLC; PAUL MOBLEY
Y
ou might have seen comedian Bill Burr on Breaking Bad,
playing Saul Goodman’s redheaded henchman, Kuby. Or
during one of his regular appearances on
Letterman, Conan and Fallon. But to really
get a sense of what Burr’s about, you have to
see him live – raging about everything from
overfed children to racism – during one of
his near-endless string of big-venue dates.
“I’m an unbelievably flawed human being,”
says the 45-year-old stand-up. Or, as he
put it in a classic bit, “Like, I went to this
place and I’m ordering food. The guy behind the counter asks me if I want a cookie. All of a sudden I have this unbelievable
urge to blast this guy right in
the face. I’m not trying to be
paranoid, but what kind of a
man asks another man if he
wants a cookie?”
Burr released his third
hourlong special, You People Are All the Same, last
year, selling it for $5 on
his website. He’s been
working in comedy
since the early
1990s; his
first highprofile gig
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ROCK&ROLL
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ENCOUNTER
Jared
Leto
At home with the actor-turnedrock-star as he makes his return
to movies By Gavin Edwards
I
n the department of pet names
that don’t require deep metaphorical
interpretation, there is Judas, a wolf
– yes, a wolf! – that Jared Leto used to
own. “He never hung with the dogs,” recalls the rock star (his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, just played a triumphant show at
the Hollywood Bowl) and actor (he stars in the
acclaimed new Dallas Buyers Club). “He always
had one eye on the hills. Such a special animal,
and a killer. One time, I had rolled down the
window in the car. He jumped out, took of running and took down a Canadian goose.”
Even though he’s a longtime vegan, Leto
was impressed. But the important thing to
take away from this story is that Jared Leto
is the kind of guy who would have a wild animal as a pet. The kind of guy who doesn’t accept the idea of limits. At 41, Leto has been
famous since the Clinton administration –
he broke through
as Claire Danes’
dreamy bad-boy love
interest on My SoI recommend Called Life. Since then,
he’s appeared in more
it for anyone
than 20 movies, includ– go pursue
ing American Psycho,
Fight Club and Requiem
something
for a Dream. But in 1998,
else. It
he launched Thirty Seconds
to Mars, even though he knew
certainly
he’d be labeled a dilettante, or
made me a
worse. And about six years ago,
better actor.” against all expert advice, Leto
shut down his movie career to
focus on his music. “I recommend it for anybody in any profession – go pursue something else,” he says. “I think it made me a better person,
but it certainly made me a better actor.”
Leto, eating popcorn and drinking coconut milk
straight from the carton, is sitting upright on a sectional sofa in his sleek Hollywood home. The walls
are covered with hip modern art – lots of Banksy –
and the massive cofee table threatens to buckle under
the weight of dozens of books: Plato, Stephen King, art
photographer Taryn Simon, an edition of Guinness World
22 | Illustration by Philip Burke
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Records that includes an entry on Thirty Seconds to Mars (“Longest Concert
Tour by a Rock Band”). “I’m just as likely to read a book about business or sociobiology as I am something for fun,” says
Leto, who takes special interest in technology and e-commerce, and has a team of
coders working on a live-streaming site
called VyRT. “I think it’s really important for creative people to be part of the
conversation about the digital architecture of tomorrow.”
The movie that lured him out of retirement is Dallas Buyers Club, one of
the fall’s most anticipated releases. Leto
plays a transgender woman named Rayon,
who partners with a homophobic HIVpositive cowboy (Matthew McConaughey)
to distribute experimental AIDS drugs in
Texas in the 1980s. Leto took an immersive
approach to the character, from the moment he arrived in Louisiana for the shoot:
Every day, he showed up on set in women’s
clothing, and then changed into
his wardrobe for the day. “He
got of the plane in a dress and
high heels and a wig,” says director Jean-Marc Vallée. “The
first week was awkward, because I didn’t know what to call
him. Her? Jared? Rayon? But I
got into it. He was a she, and
she was nice. At the end of the
shoot, I gave her a female gift:
a woman’s T-shirt with Marc
Bolan on it.”
W it h r aw, f u n ny p er formances, Leto and McConaughey totally upend the
Hollywood cliché of the sassy
drag queen imparting life lessons. (They’re both widely
expected to get Oscar nominations.) But even though his character displays remarkable joie de vivre in the face
of death, Leto found the role taxing, physically and emotionally. “The only way I can
do what I do is by going headfirst and diving deep,” Leto says. “I get out what I put
in. If you’re playing a transsexual drug addict dying of AIDS with a dialect, with all
those circumstances and emotional conditions, I don’t understand how you can let
all that go when someone says, ‘Cut.’
“There was a lot of discovery,” he adds.
“But I was counting down the days until
it was over.” So has he lined up his next
acting gig? “I haven’t read another script
since,” he says, grinning. “Not one.”
Two nights earlier, the other side of
Jared Leto is on full ear-ringing display
at the Hollywood Bowl, where Thirty Seconds to Mars are leaning into a sold-out
hometown gig. “I believe in you, California – do you believe in me?” Leto asks the
crowd. (Spoiler alert: They do.) The hugely entertaining show features giant color-
24 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
rollingstone.com
There was
a lot of
discovery.
But I was
counting
down the
days until it
was over.”
DOUBLE TROUBLE
Leto as Rayon (above)
in Dallas Buyers Club
and onstage with Thirty
Seconds to Mars in
California
changing balloons cascading through the
crowd, a worm-shaped dirigible, multiple
confetti cannons and elaborate videos that
include the message yes this is a cult.
Thirty Seconds to Mars make largescale theatrical rock music; like their
fellow travelers Panic! at the Disco and
the Killers, they are successful in the
States but even bigger in Europe. After
11 years, they’ve tallied four albums, 10
million copies sold and one protracted
$30 million lawsuit with their record
label that ended with the band extending its label deal. “I fail all the time,” Leto
says. “Every time I make an album, you
hear the 10 best songs. I wrote a hundred songs for the last album [Love Lust
Faith + Dreams]. Failure isn’t the enemy –
success often is.”
The band has allowed Leto tons of latitude to explore his various interests outside music, especially filmmaking – he directs the group’s elaborate videos, which
often end up more like short films. “To tell
you the truth, I edit more
than anything else,” Leto
says. For “City of Angels,”
he interviewed a bunch
of performers on the topic
of fame, from Kanye West
to a Michael Jackson impersonator; for “A Beautiful
Lie,” he shot on Arctic glaciers and edited the footage
for six months. His pseudonym on these projects is
Bartholomew Cubbins (a
name borrowed from a Dr.
Seuss book). “I made up the
story that he’s some insanely obnoxious Danish albino,” Leto says. Cubbins’
Twitter account gives Leto a
safe place to vent his spleen,
with erratically capitalized
sentiments such as “ChEW
mY coCKcuMBer u FaRTing bUtWhiSTle!”
After the show, the bandmates (a core trio that
include multi-instrumentalist Tomo Milicevic and
Jared’s older brother Shannon on drums) sign CDs for
thousands of fans, who have
come from as far away as
Portugal. An attractive brunette tells Leto, “My husband threw his wedding
ring at you when you were
in the crowd – did you happen to find it?”
Her husband, who apparently was trying
to also propose some kind of rock & roll
marriage to Leto, is a big guy sporting a
pink mohawk like the one Leto used to
have. Leto doesn’t accept the proposal, but
he does sign his CD with an extra flourish.
Leto didn’t have a serious girlfriend
until he reached his twenties: “I was never
very proficient with the ladies when I was
younger, but I started making up for lost
time.” (He dated Cameron Diaz from 1999
to 2003; the couple were engaged before
they split up.) And he doesn’t think he’s
particularly good boyfriend material at
this point in his life: “I’m too obsessed
with my own creative ambitions and my
own goals.”
A f ter thousa nd s of autog raphs,
Leto ponders his own life. “In five or six
years, I might disappear,” he muses. “How
many people do you need to love you to feel
OK about yourself? How many times do
you need to stand in front of tens of thousands of people who are singing your songs?
How many filmmakers need to hire you –
how many Darren Aronofskys and Oliver
Stones and David Finchers and Terrence
Malicks need to say, ‘He’s good enough
for me,’ before you’re good enough for
yourself?”
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM TOP: DEANO/SPLASH NEWS; STEVE JENNINGS/WIREIMAGE
ROCK&ROLL
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Shaun
White
The greatest snowboarder
of all time on his band,
the Olympics and Zeppelin
By Rob Tannenbaum
A
bou t 10 y e a r s a g o,
Shaun White won an ugly
yellow guitar at a snowboarding competition and
taught himself to play the White
Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” on one
string. And although his day job – being
the greatest snowboarder on Earth – keeps
him busy, he’s also been spending a lot of time
lately playing guitar (and doing a little singing)
in his band, Bad Things, which just released its
debut album. White, 27, called RS during a break
from training to defend his two gold medals at next
year’s Winter Olympics in Russia.
MTV has described your band as “Coldplaymeets-Blink-182.” Have there been any Bad Things
comparisons that sounded right to you?
Not exactly. At Lollapalooza, somebody told us we
sound like the Cure, which I found strange.
You don’t sound like the Cure.
That’s what I was saying! He was an older guy,
though, so I don’t know if he really had his finger
on the pulse.
Your band is signed to Warner Bros. Do you think
Bad Things would have a major-label deal if a famous athlete weren’t playing guitar?
I think so. Davis [LeDuke, the singer] has
been in other bands that had record deals.
Same with Jared [Palomar, the bassist]. To get
those kind of musicians, I had to earn their
respect, you know? If you hear I’m in the
band before you show up, you listen extrahard. I’m sure it’s helped us get more attention than normal, but on the other
side of things, we’ve had to overcome
extra scrutiny.
Are you able to tell when people
are suspicious of the band because
you’re in it?
I have plenty of friends who
said, “I was worried – I thought
your music was going to be horrible” [laughs]. I’m like, “Do
I look like the kind of guy
that half-asses anything?”
Forbes once estimated
that you earn about
$9 million a year from
sports. Does your band
travel in luxury?
26 | R ol l i n g S t o n e
We travel in a 15-passenger van. That’s where my snowboard career started – Mom and Dad in the van, driving me
to the mountains. But poor Lena [Zawaideh, the drummer],
I don’t think she’s ever been in a van, let alone with a bunch
of guys who – I mean, I don’t think Davis showers.
Have you seen The Crash Reel, the documentary that came
out earlier this year about snowboarder Kevin Pearce’s
catastrophic injury while he was training for the 2010
Winter Olympics?
No, I thought it might be a bit much to
watch that before going into a training
scenario where I’m testing the boundaries of what’s possible in my sport
[laughs].
The movie kind of makes you
seem like a jerk. Do you feel
like it’s accurate?
I can only tell you what I
heard: There was a story
about how Kevin and I
were living together at
one point, and after he
beat me at a competition,
I was so upset I called my
mother to have her throw
his things out of my house. Is
that correct?
Yes, that’s in the movie.
I’ve known Kevin since
I was eight, and at one
time he was a good friend of
mine. But at no point had we
ever lived together. And my
mom would never do that!
Making up a story about my
mom – that’s going too far!
Leave moms out of it, right?
You recently said, “I’m a
strange guy. I don’t hang out
with athletes.” Can you explain that?
[Laughs] When I go home,
I don’t want to think about
snowboarding. People think I
go sky diving to get an adrenaline fix. No, I’m really mellow.
I go to the park and play chess with
my friend. I live in two diferent
worlds.
Are you at least excited that it’s
almost winter?
Nope! I have asthma. When I get to
the mountains, I can’t breathe. That’s
my motivation to win – to get out of
there. I don’t hate the mountains – I
just prefer the beach.
What about with your band? What
does winning mean with them?
For me, it’s if the band is successful
enough to where I can continue to play.
It’s going to sound funny, but playing guitar was the first time I realized I wasn’t
going to be the best at something. I remember the day: I was watching the
Zeppelin video The Song Remains the
Same, and I’m like, “Oh, my God. I’m
not gonna be better than this guy.”
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
THEO WARGO/GETTY IMAGES
Q&A
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ROCK&ROLL
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DOCTOR
FEELGOOD
Lizzy Caplan
as sexual
pioneer
Virginia
Johnson
Dirty Sexy Science
t. l ou is, 1 957: t wo
scientists are conducting
an experiment on human
sexuality. Dr. William Masters
(Michael Sheen) and Virginia
Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) bring
their subjects into the lab, hook
them up to electrodes and then
S
Masters of Sex
Sundays, 10 p.m., Showtime
watch them masturbate. The
two have their own kind of sex
during the experiment, wildly yelling observations at each
other: “Phallus at 9.6 centimeters!” “Testicular enlargement!”
“Orgasmic phase!” They’re getting hotter than any of the subjects. When Caplan notices one
gazing at her while he gets of,
she calmly says, “It’s OK to close
your eyes, you know.”
Masters of Sex is the fall’s
best new show, by at least 9.6
centimeters. It’s a Mad Men of
science, chronicling the real-life
team who shook up American
society by studying human sexual behavior. Masters of Sex has
beaucoup nudity, in the great
Showtime tradition – moaning,
28 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
heavy breathing, the works.
And it has plenty of Fifties atmosphere – the cars, the hair,
the fashion. But as with Mad
Men, the décor is just window
dressing for a story full of sexual heat and emotional intrigue.
Dr. Masters is an academic
looking to understand the biological mechanics of boning –
at the university, they call him
“the alpha dog of coochie medicine.” But he’s too repressed
to get it. When he comes up
against perplexing questions
(why would a woman ever fake
an orgasm?), he realizes he
needs help. Enter his new research assistant, a twice-divorced single mom and lounge
singer. She’s not a doctor – she
doesn’t even have a college degree. But she understands a little about how sex works.
So much of Masters of Sex
comes down to Lizzy Caplan,
who can make any project 10
times as good just by showing up. She’s like a goth Barbara Stanwyck – her low voice,
her ice-pick stare, that shock
of black hair and evil eyebrows
against her pale skin. At this
point in her career, it looks like
she can do anything. She even
played a smoldering rock critic
in Hot Tub Time Machine, and
anyone who can make rock crit-
rollingstone.com
ics seem sexy is on some nextschool wavelength for sure.
As Virginia Johnson, she’s a
modern woman ahead of her
time. And she loosens up the
doctor, whose interest in coitus
is strictly scientific – he doesn’t
comprehend his own wife’s libido at all. He keeps his pajamas
on during sex, and he can’t figure out why she wants to watch
Elvis shake his hips on The Ed
Sullivan Show.
It’s an old-fashioned kind
of duo: the uptight professor
versus the brassy dame who
SHORT TAKE
The Dead March On
The Walking Dead
Sundays, 9 p.m., AMC
The Walking Dead is back, and
you’re not going to believe what’s
going on this time: more zombies
eating people! AMC’s zombie
blockbuster doesn’t mess with a
hugely successful horror franchise,
even with a new showrunner calling the shots. Andrew Lincoln’s
Rick Grimes and scrappy squad
of human survivors are still holed
up in a prison compound they’ve
converted into a fortress. But
that doesn’t fix their fundamental dilemma: Human flesh is still
mighty tasty, and the walkers are
still hungry. There’s only so much
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Lincoln:
Zombie
hunter
tinkering you can do with a zombie apocalypse, right? There isn’t
a lot of room on Walking Dead for
variety, finesse or (God, no) comic
relief. Instead, you know what
you’re going to get is buckets of
gore, as the “who’s gonna buy it
next?” tension builds.
R.S.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM TOP: CRAIG BLANKENHORN/SHOWTIME; FRANK OCKENFELS 3/AMC
Lizzy Caplan and Michael
Sheen are electric on the
season’s best new show
By Rob Shefeld
gives him street smarts. Think
of Stanwyck versus Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire, or Cary
Grant versus Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.
Or even Gene Wilder versus
Teri Garr in Young Frankenstein. Sheen and Caplan have
amazing chemistry. You can see
him breathing in her presence,
watching her eyebrows dance
around when she talks, and you
can see him try to get his brows
to wiggle a little in response.
This guy has a lot to learn.
Like Mad Men, Masters
of Sex is really a story about
American loneliness. It explores the ways we live with our
secrets, how far we go to hide
them, the painful extremes
we’ll risk for a chance to share
them with somebody else.
Sweet Virginia and Chilly
Bill are sexual revolutionaries,
boldly opening up the way to the
unzipped Sixties. But as individuals, they’re weighted down
with their own bad memories
and family histories. When they
meet, they’re a couple of lonely
adults, but the longer they work
together, the more they start
to feel like full-fledged human
beings. Because he’s a scientist, Masters keeps trying to
solve the mystery of why he’s so
drawn to Johnson – he wants to
study her, without any emotional risk. Masters wants to figure
it all out: Why do the technical
details of sex get tangled up in
so many messy human feelings?
But that’s one mystery science
hasn’t cracked yet.
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“The thing is, for me to say I wasn’t a genius, I would just be lying to you and to myself.” —Kanye West
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FAMEFLYNET PICTURES; RIHANNA/INSTAGRAM; GRPR RAAK GUTS/AKM-GSI; COCO FOTO, 2; ELAINE THOMPSON/AP IMAGES
GOOD GIRL
GONE GIRAFFE
Rihanna made
a new friend
at an animal
sanctuary before
a stadium gig in
Johannesburg.
“Mama AfRIHca!”
she tweeted.
Daddy
Day Scare
WATCH THE CHROME The day after hitting up the opera
with Kim, Kanye West rolled up to lunch with his dad at a
West Hollywood steakhouse in his $750,000 Lamborghini.
“Halloween is my favorite
time of year,” says Pete
Wentz, who took his son,
Bronx, to an L.A.-area
pumpkin patch. “I love
that for one day a year
the freaks rule the world!”
Phoenix’s Texas
Takeover
TACKLE-MORE!
Seattle Seahawks fan
Macklemore met the
team before hanging
with Will Ferrell
(whom he called
“my stepdad”)
in the locker room.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
Haim relaxed
backstage at ACL
after releasing their
hit debut LP.
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Nobody was more excited to play this
year’s Austin City Limits festival than
Phoenix. “When we played ACL four years
ago, it was the first time we had a huge
crowd,” says frontman Thomas Mars. “We
couldn’t see the end of it. This year was
even better because not only the crowd
was there but they were wilder than a
French fireman partying on Bastille Day.”
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31
RANDOM NOTES
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The Jacket’s New York Racket
My Morning Jacket played their only fall tour date at the CBGB Fest in Times
Square, tearing through live favorites and covers of Fela Kuti and the Band. “It
was so cool,” frontman Jim James tells RS. “It really felt like playing Red Rocks,
if Red Rocks was made out of computers and light.” Next up: MMJ hit the studio
to work on their follow-up to 2011’s Circuital. “We’re superstoked about that,”
James adds. “I’m piling up songs. I’ve got a lot of ideas I’m excited about.”
HUMAN
AFTER
ALL Daft
Punk’s
Thomas
Bangalter
took of
the mask
for a day
at the beach
in Miami.
POWER COUPLE
Hillary Clinton was all
smiles at the Elton
John AIDS Foundation
benefit in New York.
“I hope she becomes
president,” Elton said.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DEAN/MRM/NPG.COM; DANA (DISTORTION)
YAVIN; BRETT KAFFEE/THIBAULT MONNIER/© PACIFICCOASTNEWS.COM;
MATT SAYLES/INVISION/AP IMAGES; © 2013 RAMEY PHOTO; TMZ.COM/SPLASH
NEWS; JAMIE MCCARTHY/WIREIMAGE
HOLLYWOOD FOLK
The day before
rocking L.A.’s Shrine
Auditorium, Seth
Avett stepped out
with his girlfriend,
Dexter actress
Jennifer Carpenter.
MANSON EXPOSED Marilyn Manson
went makeup-free for a cameo on his
favorite show, Eastbound & Down. “It
was almost like I was a Make-a-Wish
kid,” he says.
DYE YOUNG
Ke$ha showed
of her colorful
new hair in
L.A. “Feeling
the rainbow!”
she said.
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
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©2013 Callard & Bowser Inc.
Curious? Facebook.com/altoids
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THE GOP’S WAR
ON THE POOR
Republicans are pushing to decimate food-stamp programs,
punishing the most vulnerable just out of sheer spite
By Elizabeth Drew
T
he way the progr am to provide the poor with the bare minimum of daily nutrition has been
handled is a metaphor for how
the far right in the House is systematically trying to take down the federal government. The Tea Party radicals
and those who either fear or cultivate
them are now subjecting the food-stamp
program to the same kind of assault they
have unleashed on other settled policies
and understandings that have been in
place for decades. Breaking all manner of
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
precedents on a series of highly partisan
votes, with the Republicans barely prevailing, the House in September slashed
the food-stamp program by a whopping
$39 billion and imposed harsh new requirements for getting on, or staying on,
the program. The point was to deny the
benefit to millions.
Hardly any other federal undertaking –
with the exception of the Afordable Care
Act – has attracted more hostility from
the far right than the food-stamp program. As recently as the mid-Sixties, ac-
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tual hunger and starvation existed in this
country on a significant scale, particularly in the Deep South and Appalachia.
In 1967, Robert F. Kennedy took a widely covered trip to the Mississippi Delta,
where he was quite evidently shocked at
the sight of listless babies with distended bellies who were unresponsive to his
touching them or trying to get them to
laugh. That same year, a group of doctors took a foundation- sponsored trip
to Mississippi and reported, “In child
after child we saw: evidence of vitamin
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| R ol l i n g S t o n e |
35
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There was a certain substantive as well
as political logic in linking nutrition support to farm surpluses – it helped unload
excess commodities, while at the same
time it could help feed the poor. Grocers
also supported the food stamps as a way of
selling more goods. (One of the program’s
greatest fans today is Walmart, which has
the distinction of having customers and
employees on food stamps.)
In 1979, 12 years after the original report calling attention to the appalling
hunger in the Deep South and Appalachia, the Field Foundation sent another
medical team to roughly the same areas,
and it found that despite no sizeable improvement in the condition of poverty,
Food stamps are far from an extravagant
benefit. The average allocation is $1.40
per person per meal. (Try it some time.) A
few years ago, the program was renamed
SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, to give it a more positive
facade, but that headed of not a whit of
anger at the notion that hordes of freeloaders were getting benefits they didn’t deserve
or were electing to become dependent on
food stamps rather than get a job.
In 1996, when Congress revised the separate welfare law, it also placed severe new
restrictions on food stamps. Able-bodied adults who weren’t raising children
were limited to receiving food stamps for
only three months out of three years if
FOOD STAMPS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NEARELIMINATION OF SEVERE HUNGER THAT WAS ONCE
WIDESPREAD IN MANY POVERTY-STRICKEN AREAS.
hero of the program.
Even before he became chairman of the
Agricultural Committee in 1975, Foley
had the insight that the way to politically protect food stamps – both in his fairly conservative committee and on the
House floor – was to combine the program with agricultural subsidies in the
farm bill that came up for renewal every
five years or so. The idea was classic if benignly intended log-rolling: Members
from urban areas, where unemployment
and the need for food stamps is relatively
high, would grudgingly vote for the farm
bill, while representatives from parts of
the country with agricultural interests
would grudgingly vote for food stamps.
Elizabeth Drew is a contributor to
“The New York Review of Books.” This is
her first piece for Rolling Stone.
there had been a dramatic reduction in
hunger and malnutrition as a result of
food stamps and other nutrition assistance. The data shows that while a significant number of nonelderly households left
the program as their income improved,
the group whose participation had increased the most was the working poor.
“Food stamps are largely responsible
for the near-elimination of the severe
hunger and malnutrition that was widespread in many poverty-stricken areas,”
says Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a
bearded, Old Testament-like figure who
ran the program during the last two years
of the Carter administration and is passionate about it. “Were it not for this program, we would see a lot more chronically
hungry people and more illness related to
malnutrition and undernutrition.”
they weren’t working at least 20 hours a
week or participating in a job-training
program. This grim rule applied no matter how hard they tried to find a job and
even if they hadn’t been able to get a slot
in a training program. An exception could
be made if they lived in an area of high unemployment and if their governor requested and received a federal waiver. The average income of these people is about $2,500
a year, or 22 percent of the poverty level.
The job-training program that’s part of
the food-stamp law is modest, nowhere
near the needed capacity, and other jobtraining programs the government ofers
are full, with waiting lists in many areas.
But Republicans have resisted significant
increases in training programs – if this
hurts the economy or large numbers of individuals, so be it. First things first: Undermine Obama’s presidency.
FROM LEFT: MELINA MARA/“WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES; SUSAN BIDDLE/“WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES; DOMINION;
MANUEL BALCE CENETA/AP IMAGES; COURTESY OF BANKSY; GETTY IMAGES; NO CREDIT; PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE
and mineral deficiencies; serious untreated skin infestation and ulcerations; eye
and ear diseases, also unattended bone
diseases secondary to poor food intake;
the prevalence of bacterial and parasitic
diseases. . . .”
In the years after these devastating revelations, two farm-state senators of diferent philosophies on many issues – South
Dakota Democrat George McGovern and
Kansas Republican Bob Dole – joined together to strengthen the program and extend it to more people in need. Over in the
House, Thomas Foley, a Democratic congressman from Spokane, Washington –
a major wheat-growing area – and later
House speaker, was the real legislative
WITH US
GOP sinks to
24 percent
popularity,
a record low.
Countering national
crackdown,
California expands
abortion access.
36 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
rollingstone.com
Largest coal
power plant in
New England to
be shuttered.
Random citizen
mows lawn of
Lincoln Memorial
during shutdown.
Banksy
secretly sells
art on the
street for $60.
Study finds centipede
venom could
trump morphine
as painkiller.
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L.A. Times
refuses to publish
letters from
climate deniers.
Malala meets
Obama,
denounces
drone warfare.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
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TOP: JACK THORNELL/AP IMAGES. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: JESSICA KEY/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF OMNIROMA; BILL PUGLIANO/GETTY IMAGES; PAUL
DRINKWATER/NBC/GETTY IMAGES; MARK WISE/U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS; MARK PETERSON/REDUX; HUSSEIN MALLA/AP IMAGES
CRUSADER
Robert F.
Kennedy’s 1967
trip to rural
Mississippi
spotlighted the
plight of the
hungry and
spurred
Congress to
strengthen
food-stamp
programs.
I
n 2009, desper ately trying to
revive the economy from the crash
and understanding that money for
food stamps is money quickly spent,
Obama proposed that the stimulus
bill raise food-stamp benefits for all recipients. These increases were scheduled
to die at the end of October. Thus the support level for it had been dropping significantly, despite the fact that the economy hasn’t recovered to the extent that had
been expected.
The House’s deep slash to the foodstamp program, combined with outlandish
restrictions, arose from various impulses.
There was, obviously, the long-standing animus within the Republican Party toward
poor people, and that’s been substantially
intensified as a result of the transformation
of the party, whose center of gravity has
moved south and west. Moreover, a minori-
ty of the party in the House, backed by powerful and wealthy outside interest groups,
has seized the reins by throwing terror into
the ranks that if they don’t conform to the
Tea Party’s agenda, they could face defeat
in a primary challenge from the right in
the next election. Bob Dole’s and George
McGovern’s time is long gone. Neither the
Senate, nor the House, nor American politics are anything like they were in their
time. The Republican Party in the Senate contains no Jacob Javits, the late New
York senator who fought to protect food
stamps. Among the Democrats, there’s no
Edward Kennedy to champion the causes
of the poor, to even enjoy doing battle for
them. One of the few unabashed liberals, Tom Harkin of Iowa, is retiring after
five terms. Harkin was born into modest
means, which he has never forgotten – he
needed no lectures about bootstraps.
Adding to the ferocity of the attack on
food stamps this year is that Tea Party
members had promised that when they got
to Washington, they would dramatically cut the size of government, but had little to show for it. Paul Ryan’s much-touted
budget was actually quite cautious in cutting entitlements in the near term. Medicare and Social Security were too popular,
even among the Tea Party’s own followers,
for Republicans to stick their necks out on
those issues. Medicaid is a component of
the health-care-reform law, and therefore
was being dealt with in another context.
That left food stamps.
The idea that the unworthy are cadging of the federal government – at a cost
to the right-thinking taxpayers (who, of
course, never, ever cheat) – goes deep in
our national psyche. Ronald Reagan’s
frequent evocation of the “welfare queen”
driving around in a Cadillac and the
“strapping young bucks” said to be dining on T-bone steaks purchased with
food stamps touched a racist nerve that
is more prevalent in this country than we
care to admit.
Through this rhetoric, Reagan helped
build the Republican Party’s base in the
South – with consequences that have lasted to this day. Newt Gingrich, it may be
recalled, made a big issue of food stamps
in his race for the 2012 Republican nomination, calling Obama the “food-stamp
president.” But despite Gingrich implying that lazy blacks were the personification of food-stamp recipients, only 22
percent of those who receive food stamps
are black (33 percent are white). Of the
roughly 47 million Americans on food
stamps, nearly half are children.
Policy by anecdote continued into this
year’s food-stamp debate. This summer,
Fox News triumphantly presented an unemployed 29-year-old man from La Jolla,
California, named Jason Greenslate, who
liked to surf and play in a rock band,
AGAINST US
Government
shutdown
blocks kids from
cancer trials.
Vatican misspells
“Jesus” on thousands
of medals.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
Former Detroit
mayor gets 28
years for corruption.
Dick Cheney
roast rife with
waterboarding,
war-crime jokes.
Kentucky kickbacks:
Mitch McConnell gets
$2.9 billion earmark in bill
to reopen government.
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Ted Cruz
raises $1.19
million in
third quarter.
rollingstone.com
Assad jokes
Nobel Peace
Prize “should
have been mine.”
| R ol l i n g S t o n e |
37
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U
ntil the house took it up
this year, the food-stamp program had mostly enjoyed bipartisan support from Capitol Hill.
Of all the commissions, committees and ad hoc groups formed in the past
few years to propose ways to cut the budget – the sainted (if overrated) SimpsonBowles, Domenici-Rivlin, the “Gang of
Six” – not one of them suggested cutting
food stamps.
What’s more, the hue and cry about
widespread food-stamp “fraud” is belied
by the facts. The Agriculture Department reported earlier this year that only
2.8 percent of all food-stamp benefits had
been provided to people who were ineligible or had received a larger payment than
they should have – and it said that the majority of the overpayments had been the
result of inadvertent mistakes by caseworkers or recipients. As for the widespread view that food-stamp recipients
are selling food stamps for cash, the department reports that such trafcking involves only one percent of benefits.
The fact that the size of the food-stamp
program had more than doubled from
nearly $38 billion in 2008 to $82 billion
this year of course fed suspicions that
there was a tremendous number of new
cheaters, or that Obama had loosened the
rules for getting on the program. Politicians who made such charges overlooked
the fairly obvious fact that beginning in
2008 this country sufered the greatest
recession since the Depression. A study
published in August by the prestigious
National Bureau of Economic Research
found that most of that increase was attributable to the recession.
None of this got in the way of legislators who lived by homilies about selfreliance when the House took up the issue
of reauthorizing the farm bill in June,
amid many warnings that the bill was on
shaky ground. The Agriculture Committee, which, like so much else in Washington, had been caught up in the House’s
drift to the right, cut the food-stamp program by $20.5 billion over 10 years. The
ranking Democrat, Collin Peterson from
Minnesota, cautioned the Republican
leadership that this large cut endangered
Democratic support for the farm bill and
warned that if amendments favored by
the extreme right were adopted on the
House f loor, the whole thing might go
down. But Cantor, he of the Southern
38 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
rollingstone.com
STAMP STOMPERS
House Majority Leader
Eric Cantor (below)
and Florida Rep. Steve
Southerland (right),
a Tea Partier elected
in 2010, have led
the eforts to gut
federal food-stamp
programs.
CANTOR
AWARDED THE TEA
PARTY RADICALS
A TROPHY BY
IMPOSING
ANOTHER $19
BILLION IN FOODSTAMP CUTS.
drawl, icy smile and dagger poised at John
Boehner’s back, had his own agenda.
Despite these warnings, when the bill
came to the House floor, Cantor promoted
an amendment sponsored by Rep. Steve
Southerland, a Tea Party member from
Florida, that imposed harsh and unrealistic new conditions, euphemistically called
“work requirements,” for receiving foodstamp benefits. Southerland isn’t a member of the Agriculture Committee, so this
was an end run by Cantor and Southerland around its chairman and Republican
membership.
Nevertheless, the Republican leadership
was stunned and stung when the farm bill
was voted down by the House on June 20th
by 234 to 195. Only 24 Democrats supported it and 62 Republicans voted against it –
most of them on the grounds that the cuts
weren’t deep enough. The bill was essentially a victim of the crossfire between the
Democrats who thought the food-stamp
cuts were too harsh and the Republicans
who thought the program hadn’t been
cut enough.
Cantor, in a bit of a bind, now had to
find a way to extricate the leadership from
their embarrassment over losing the farm
bill. He had two choices: Drop the Southerland amendment, moderate the committee’s food-stamp cuts and pass the farm
bill with the support of the traditional bipartisan coalition – or appease the far
right by splitting the bill into two, which
many conservatives had sought. Conservatives were never comfortable with their
farm subsidies being polluted by its coexistence with food stamps, and they failed to
understand that this had helped their favored agricultural subsidies survive. This
would of course make the food-stamp program more vulnerable. Despite the strenuous objections of Agriculture Committee
Chairman Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, who,
by the strength of his ofce, would ordinarily be treated with some deference by the
leadership, Cantor decided to split the bill.
Both bills would have to be passed overwhelmingly – or entirely – with Republican votes. The bipartisan accommodation
of more than 40 years was now shelved.
With agricultural interests clamoring
for a farm bill to be enacted by the end of
September, when the existing program was
set to expire, a second one, now consisting
of agricultural matters only, was brought
up in the House on July 11th, and it was
narrowly passed by a vote of 216 to 208. All
the Democrats who voted opposed the bill,
and they were joined by 12 Republicans.
But Cantor still had to decide what to
do with the newly separate food-stamp
bill. After a few weeks of quiet meetings
with members from both of his party’s
factions, he threw in with the forces on
the right. He awarded the Tea Party radicals a trophy by imposing another $19 billion in cuts to the food-stamp program –
on top of the $20.5 billion the Agriculture
Committee had already approved.
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM LEFT: JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/LANDOV; MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/“WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES
and who defiantly posed for the cameras buying lobster and sushi with the food
stamps he got from the government. Fox
then reportedly distributed the story to
House members, and at least one member admitted that it influenced him to
vote for a proposal to decimate the foodstamp program.
WorldMags.net
But his most spectacular and dangerous move was to urge the inclusion
of the Southerland amendment. Among
other things, this amendment gave hardstrapped states a financial incentive to
throw people of the food-stamp program
by allowing them to pocket half the federal
funds that would have been spent on food
stamps and use them any way they wished.
This preposterous bribery proposal goes
back to atavistic divisions that had bedeviled the food-stamp program in the House
from the beginning. (All along, it was more
popular in the Senate.) Back in the Sixties,
the program was designed to be paid for
entirely by federal funds after a huge fight
erupted between food stamps’ early backers and the Republican-allied “Boll Weevils” from cotton-growing Southern states
who wanted states to provide matching
funds – which would have been a convenient way to kill the program.
T
his remark ably mean-spirited food-stamp bill, brought up
on September 19th, was passed
by a vote of 217 to 210 – even narrower and more partisan than
the vote on the farm bill. Every Democrat who voted opposed the Southerland
amendment, and they were joined by 15
Republicans, most from districts in the
North that weren’t safe Republican seats.
The amendment raised an obscure
second-term member from Panama City,
Florida, a conservative area in the Panhandle, to sudden prominence. But there’s
strong evidence that Southerland was the
instrument of others – in particular, Cantor. Cantor, along with Paul Ryan and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, was a cofounder of the “Young Guns,” formed for
the 2008 election to search out promising conservative candidates – among them
Southerland – and groom them for election.
Those who won, and many did in 2010,
were expected, according to the Young
Guns website, to “play a vital role in keeping our Republican team on ofense and
help build a lasting and productive Republican majority for the American people.”
Southerland has received contributions
from Koch Industries and Cantor’s Every
Republican Is Crucial PAC, which contributed more than $2 million to congressional candidates, most of them highly
conservative. Like many Tea Party members, Southerland had no political experience before he ran for the House in
2010, defeating a long-serving conservative Democrat. A prosperous inheritor of
a family funeral-home business – his estimated worth in 2010 was nearly $3 million – Southerland is given to homilies
about the virtue of hard work and self-reliance. A few days after the food-stamp
bill passed, he told a group of unemployed
people at a job-training center in Wash-
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
ington, D.C., “I believe work is the greatest gift that you will receive.”
The amendment with Southerland’s
name on it had actually been written by a
mysterious and highly conservative organization of 17 state secretaries of human
services and workforce agencies called the
Secretary’s Innovation Group, or SIG, that
appeared out of nowhere a couple of years
ago and started issuing policy papers and
testifying before congressional committees. The thrust of their work reflected the
arch-conservative views of Jason Turner,
the group’s executive director, who had
published his own policy papers. In February of this year, Turner testified before
the House Ways and Means Committee,
where he presented what was to become
the Southerland amendment. Southerland was so excited about these ideas that
Cantor made him the public face of these
schemes for throwing more people off
THE BILL WILL
PUSH 3.8 MILLION
LOW-INCOME
AMERICANS
OFF FOOD STAMPS
AND REDUCE
BENEFITS FOR
MANY OTHERS.
food-stamp rolls and making them inaccessible to many, many others who would
otherwise qualify.
As is typical of the groups on the far
right that have sprung up or gained new
prominence in the past few years, SIG has
connections with the conservative Heritage Foundation, where Turner is a visiting fellow. Heritage is run by Jim DeMint,
the former South Carolina senator who
had managed to annoy many of his Republican colleagues by promoting Tea Party
candidates for the Senate (and in the process blowing opportunities for the Republicans to take several seats) before resigning
his own seat to take leadership of Heritage
earlier this year. Not exactly of a scholarly
bent, DeMint has steered Heritage in a far
more political direction than before: He
was a mentor to Ted Cruz as Cruz conducted his bootless efort to force the defunding of Obamacare, by threatening to shut
down the government. Heritage is funded
by (unsurprisingly) the Koch brothers and
some of the nation’s largest corporations,
among them defense contractors Boeing
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and Lockheed-Martin, insurance companies such as Allstate, and drug manufacturers like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer Inc.
So-called reform groups like SIG use
anodyne language that masks their true
intent: For example, SIG’s stated goal in
regard to food stamps is “promoting employment and self-sufficiency for ablebodied, working-age recipients.” Who’s to
argue against that? The problem was its
proposals have nothing to do with helping
the unemployed find jobs. In connection
with its most unusual bribery system, it
allowed states to deny or terminate an entire family’s food-stamp benefits if a parent wasn’t employed or enlisted in a jobtraining program – even if there weren’t
any jobs or training programs in the vicinity. It forbade waivers, thus closing the trap
on the able-bodied unemployed in areas
where jobs are scarce.
In sum, the House-passed food-stamp
bill would throw 3.8 million low-income
Americans of the food-stamp program in
2014, while reducing benefits to many others. In a statement he issued at the time,
Greenstein, president of the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, ripped into
the Republicans for their misleading portrayal of their “reforms” by adding “work
requirements.” On the contrary, he said,
“These provisions would end food-stamp
assistance for large numbers of people
who want to work, are looking for jobs and
will take a workfare or job-training placement, but who cannot find a job in a weak
labor market.”
W
here does all this leave
not just the food-stamp program but also the country?
Both have been the subject, or
the victim, of narrow-gauged
fanatics who observe no boundaries and
in their recklessness have left a lot of
wreckage in their wake. The Senate has
passed a unified farm bill containing the
food-stamp program. The bill cuts $4 billion from the program by addressing a
widely recognized, unintended loophole
in the way benefits are paid out. HouseSenate negotiations are to occur, and Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie
Stabenow says that the issue won’t be over
the diference between the figures of $4
billion and $39 billion, but over the policies that produced those figures. She had
no intention of meeting the House halfway or accepting its extremist policies.
The bribery provision, she says, leaves her
speechless.
Whatever happens in the short term,
the longer-term question is whether the
damage done to many areas of governance and policy that reflect long-standing American values and the delicate balances that have kept American democracy
going can ever be repaired.
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| R ol l i n g S t o n e |
39
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By
JONAH
WEINER
Photograph by
PEGGY
S I R O TA
SCENES
FROM THE
LIFE OF A
LEGEND
WHO CA N’ T
STAND STILL
40
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PAUL McCARTNEY
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If you’re
curious what
Beatlemania
looks like in
the year 2013 —
dubious, perhaps, about whether it looks
like much of anything at all – watch what
happens when Paul McCartney throws
a free concert on the street in Los Angeles. Hours before he’s even due to take the
stage, check out the mob of sweaty people jammed shoulder to shoulder on the
second-story balcony at the Sun Taco on
Hollywood Boulevard. Look higher, at the
heads dotting every rooftop and window
in sight; even higher, at the news chopper thrumming its blades in a low hover
over the boulevard; and higher still, at the
three small planes slowly circling – gawkers with pilot’s licenses, gate-crashing
from on high. Down on the street, scan
the tall swaths of cyclone fence lining the
sidewalk, draped with black vinyl sheeting, which mark the perimeter of a twoblock audience enclosure that will contain
10,000 screaming people tonight.
McCartney’s performance, outside the
El Capitan Theatre, will cap the season
premiere of Jimmy Kimmel Live! McCartney is here to promote his 24th postBeatles album, New. When Live! originally contacted the city about shutting down
Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere,
the musician attached to perform was Justin Timberlake – and ofcials rejected the
request. When the show asked again, this
time floating McCartney’s name instead,
the no became a yes. (Timberlake ended
up playing the next night.) But there are
still regulations to meet. Kimmel’s music
booker, Scott Igoe, is out front awaiting the
fire marshal, who needs to give his sign-of
on McCartney’s pyro rig. Igoe approaches
Contributing editor Jonah Weiner
profiled Juicy J in RS 1191.
42 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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McCartney’s longtime production manager, Mark Spring, to remind him of the
marshal’s visit. “That’s fine,” Spring says,
“though I’m not sure we’re even using pyro
tonight. It’s here in case Paul shows up and
decides he wants it.”
Just past 3 p.m., McCartney exits a car
behind the theater and falls into step with
a security crew led by his bodyguard Mike,
an oak-chested fiftysomething who could
pass for one of the Expendables. McCartney’s in a tailored indigo button-down and
a pair of skinny jeans that he wears with
more panache than a 71-year-old man has
any right to. His physique is long and trim,
the result of decades of vegetarianism and
a regimen of yoga and strength training he
adheres to even on tour, doing handstands
in hotel gyms with his security dudes posted nearby keeping oglers at bay. His hair,
dyed a rich auburn, fans jauntily across his
collar, his age squaring neither with his
appearance nor with the spry, impish pleasure he still clearly derives from the fact
that he is Paul Motherfucking McCartney.
Spotting fans camped out at either end of
a back alley, he busts out some elaborately
hammy air-guitar moves for them.
He snakes through the show’s downstairs corridors, accumulating an entourage as he goes, passing through a room
where quinoa wraps and tofu sandwiches
spill from Whole Foods bags marked “Paul
McCrew” – at McCartney gigs, his employees are free to eat all the bacon cheeseburgers they like, provided they do it elsewhere. He takes a staircase up to street
level, climbs the stage and, acknowledging
the shrieks sailing down from Sun Taco,
waves and shimmies in that direction,
doubling the fans’ volume. “He gives ev-
eryone their moment,” Chris Holmes, McCartney’s touring DJ, says. “When we’re on
the road, he’ll come up to the stage manager and dance with him a little bit, and for
the rest of that guy’s life he can say, ‘This
one time I danced with Paul McCartney.’
That’s just who Paul is. It’s not something
he turns on for the cameras.”
Onstage, the band launches into “Matchbox,” a roaring blues number that McCartney has been covering since 1962. A few
weeks ago, he was fighting a cold, and he
got nervous about his voice, but he mainlined vitamin C and used a throat remedy that Little Richard, whose scream inspired McCartney’s own, taught him ages
ago. “You get a boiling pot of water, you put
Olbas Oil in it” – leaning over, he mimes
putting a towel over his head – “and sniff
– gahhh! It knocks the back of your head
of,” McCartney says. “I first saw him do
it in Hamburg, and he’d come up from inhaling, look in the mirror and go, ‘Richard,
you’re so beautiful!’ ” Today, McCartney’s
baritone is sounding weathered but strong,
his howl still startlingly sharp. He keeps
dreading the day when he’ll reach into
his vocal arsenal for a long-beloved weapon and come up empty, “but it hasn’t happened yet,” McCartney says. “I just recently
met Billy Joel. He said, ‘Are you still singing ’em in the same key?’ I said yes. He said,
‘I’ve had to drop mine by, like, a half-tone.’”
After a slashing New track called “Save
Us,” McCartney frowns; the rhythm section sounds significantly more monstrous
than usual. “The danger when it’s all loud
and crazy is that you’re fooling yourself,
and it’s going to come through on telly
like shit,” he says. He turns and calls out
to his drummer. “Abe, let’s just do a drum
and bass thing to make sure we’re not distorting the hell out of this.” They lock into
a groove until McCartney nods. Turns
out he just forgot what a stage this small
sounds like: “I’m closer to my amp than
usual,” he says.
McCartney’s band members are seasoned industry pros, and they know him
as an exacting bandleader. “There are no
mistakes when you’re working with Paul
– no mistakes,” says Barrie Marshall, McCartney’s tour promoter since 1989. “Or
rather, you can make a mistake, but if you
do, you have to own up. Raise your hand,
look him in the eye and tell him, ‘I fucked
up.’ And then don’t ever do it again!”
As McCartney hurtles into “Drive My
Car,” the fans on the wrong side of the
enclosure have had all they can stand:
They tear down the black sheeting
and begin slamming their shoulders into
the fence, jostling it forward. Nine burly
crew dudes rush over to cram everything
back into place, ballasting the fence with
extra sandbags.
“Thank you, small but vociferous
crowd!” McCartney bellows, taking it in
stride. “Thank you, random citizens!”
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“THERE ARE NO MISTAKES WHEN
YOU WORK WITH PAUL,” SAYS HIS
PROMOTER. “IF YOU DO, YOU OWN
UP, THEN NEVER DO IT AGAIN.”
MARY MCCARTNEY
A
fter gi v ing the cr ew
his notes – spoiler: no pyro
tonight – McCartney gazes
around Kimmel’s studio,
then requests some technical modifications. “They’re bringing some
more lights out,” says John Hammel, McCartney’s guitar tech, sometime chaufeur
and general aide-de-camp. Hammel indicates the underside of his chin. “For young
people, a shadow here is cool. For us old
men, un-unh. Gravity takes over!”
A Live! producer soon arrives with a
script for McCartney’s approval: The show
has asked him to appear in a bit during the
monologue. An original proposal, rifng
on the old “Paul is dead” craze, had McCartney admitting that the crackpot theories were true, and that he is actually an
impostor named Gary. Instead, McCartney agreed to a simpler sketch in which he
helps Kimmel’s sidekick, Guillermo, take
a Beatles song-title quiz. McCartney’s dialogue has been cut down from a half-dozNo v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
en lines to one word, “to make it easier for
you,” the producer says. “Not much to rehearse there!” McCartney replies.
The writers also want McCartney to
join Kimmel up on the roof, remarking on
the massive crowd down below for a prerecorded cold open. McCartney is game,
aware that this will only contribute to the
evening’s sense of momentousness. “Just
lead me around by the ring in my nose,” he
tells the producer.
A segment producer named Ken approaches. “I’m going to be doing the pre-interview with you, just a conversation so you
know what Jimmy’s bringing up,” he says.
McCartney squints and purses his lips.
“Uh, or not, if you would rather not have
said conversation,” Ken continues. “Let’s
not,” McCartney says. “I prefer not knowing what’s coming.”
As showtime nears, McCartney disappears into his dressing room. His typical warm-up routine includes the boiling-water trick and a saltwater gargle.
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His wife of two years, Nancy Shevell, arrives, an elegant brunette with an aquiline nose and a faux-snakeskin purse designed by McCartney’s daughter Stella.
Much of New consists of love songs, including the bouncy title single, and “Save
Us,” which is about “the savior aspect of
having a good woman,” McCartney says.
As the show begins, husband and wife
stand together beside one of two oversize couches in the greenroom, watching
Kimmel’s monologue on a huge flatscreen
monitor. Everyone else stands several feet
behind them. McCartney slides his hand
up the back of Shevell’s jacket, resting it
toward the bottom of her spine, laughing at a couple of Kimmel’s Emmys jokes,
impassive otherwise. When McCartney
gets the cue to head out for his interview,
Shevell says, “I love you, babycake.” “I
love you,” he replies. (A few minutes later,
when the show throws to commercial with
a weird synthesizer arpeggio, Shevell, a
trucking-company scion who is clearly up
on her deep cuts, yells, “ ‘Temporary Secretary!’ ” correctly identifying track two
from 1980’s McCartney II.)
Before McCartney steps through the
stage door, his makeup lady, Lauren, adjusts his bangs and applies some spray
to the back of his head. Opposite Kimmel, McCartney pivots with finesse from
lighthearted (he gets of a cheeky sex joke
early on) to poignant, describing the dangers of shedding tears during live performances of “Let It Be.” When he returns to
the greenroom, he’s met by hooting from
his entourage.
“Time for a drink!” he shouts.
Everybody applauds again.
‘N
e w” sta rt ed ta k i ng
shape a few years ago,
with McCartney sketching out ideas at Hog
Hill Mill, the studio he
keeps in the English countryside, a 20minute drive from the organic farm he
calls home some of the year. Work began
in earnest when McCartney decided to
audition producers. At times in his career, McCartney has wanted to work with
others on music, and at other times he
has wanted nothing more than to be of
in some room banging ideas together
by himself – McCartney and McCartney II he made on his own, the latter
while holed up on a Scottish farm with
a bunch of synths and an endless supply
of marijuana.
“Writing was originally on my own, because I didn’t have anyone,” McCartney
says. “It was me, sitting in the little house
I lived in when I was a kid. Then I met
John and he’d been doing the same thing,
so now we were collaborators, and pretty much everything that came then in the
Beatles, there was no reason to write it on
your own – great. But after that had gone
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PAUL McCARTNEY
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There was another collaborator in the
room, McCartney says, who’s been there
for decades. “If I’m at a point where I go,
‘I’m not sure about this,’ I’ll throw it across
the room to John,” McCartney says. “He’ll
say, ‘You can’t go there, man.’ And I’ll say,
‘You’re quite right. How about this?’ ‘Yeah,
that’s better.’ We’ll have a conversation. I
use that; it’s a very valuable thing. I don’t
want to lose that.”
The day after the Live! performance,
McCartney climbs into an SUV, leaving
HE STILL TALKS
TO LENNON: “IF
I’M NOT SURE
ABOUT A SONG,
I’LL THROW IT
ACROSS THE
ROOM TO JOHN.
WE’LL HAVE A
CONVERSATION.”
the Rolling Stone cover shoot, headed
to the Beverly Hills Hotel for some tea. He
got on well with the photographer, to the
point that he couldn’t help thinking about
getting on better with her. “That was fun,”
he says. “She was great, she was cool. I kept
thinking, ‘If this was in the Sixties, I’d try
and be pulling her.’ And it would probably
show in the pictures. But I’m a granddad
and I don’t do that stuf anymore.” He grins
mischievously. “I can think it, though. I
knew she wanted that. She said she wanted me to be fun, but badass. I said,
‘Well, you know, that’s me, baby.’ ”
McCartney has long hated
the clichéd take on the Beatles
in which John is the far-out genius and Paul merely the benign,
dimple-cute sidekick. This view
certainly obscures one important fact about him: The man
has written tons of songs about
sex and lust. “I’m rather obsessed
by those subjects,” he says. He recalls scrounging up cash back in
Liverpool with buddies to buy
nudie magazines. “You’d search
for any information you could
get,” he says. “There was one
called Health & Efciency – what
a fascinating title! – which was
devoted to nudism, naturism, but
to us it was naked women. I once
baby-sat to earn a couple bob,
and I would look at the parents’
books – there was a sex manual, which we didn’t have at home.
This was a more liberal thinker,
whoever I was baby-sitting for.
I’d look through and see things
like ‘mons veneris,’ and it would
fi re up my adolescent imagination. All those things have stuck
with me.”
It’s a theme that’s only grown
more pronounced in his songwriting over time, extending from
“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” about
humping madly in public, to 1971’s “Eat at
Home,” to 2007’s “Nod Your Head,” readily interpretable as a feverish tribute to
oral sex, to numerous moments on New.
“ ‘Nod Your Head’ wasn’t conceived as that,
but obviously these things achieve double
meanings – it’s a reasonable assumption,”
McCartney says coyly. “If you’re building
your case against me for sexual perversion,
that could be submitted as evidence, but I
would deny it strongly.”
We arrive at the hotel, where McCartney has been hanging out almost as long
as he’s been coming to Los Angeles. As he
enters the Polo Lounge, fully half the restaurant’s staf seems to have gathered up
front: “Welcome back, Mr. McCartney!” A
guitarist is hunched in a corner – the evening’s musical accompaniment, about to
launch into easy-listening takes on Otis
Redding and U2 – messing with sound ca-
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MAVRIXONLINE.COM
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away, after the Beatles had had quite a
success, we weren’t in hotel rooms together all the time. He would live somewhere,
I would be somewhere else, and it separated of again. So I’ve really known both
ways, as far as writing is concerned, and
they were both good.”
For New, he was feeling social. His first
stop was at the London studio of Paul Epworth, the young producer and songwriter best known for his work on Adele’s 21,
which McCartney, like so many millions,
adored. McCartney arrived empty-handed. “I was like, ‘OK, what
am I going to do here?’ ” he recalls. “I’m very open – I just don’t
wanna bore myself.” Epworth
was assertive. He mouthed a
muscular, hurtling rock beat,
telling McCartney that this was
the tempo and energy he should
hit. “I said, ‘That’s a good idea,
let’s get lively, let’s not get all
deep and serious,’ ” McCartney
says. “So he jumped on the drum
kit, I jumped on the piano, we
multilayered it, I put chords in,
structured it a bit, and started
blocking out the words. Normally with me it’s melody and lyric
at the same time – I’ll follow the
train of thought, and the lyrics and melody all come at once.
But when you’re improvising,
you don’t have words, you don’t
know what the song’s about. You
just know how it feels and how
a vocal might sound, so you go
wada bada bada wado biddo
woo in order to get the melody,
then you find words that fit the
blocking.” The session yielded
“Save Us.”
Next up was the producer
Ethan Johns. “He’d done Kings
of Leon records, so I knew there
was an authenticity and a realness about what he did,” McCartney says.
“I brought him ‘Hosanna’” – a tender,
tentative acoustic ballad – “and I said, ‘I
wrote this song.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you
go in and sing it?’ So I did that and said,
‘Should I do it again? Should we fi x it up?’
He said, ‘No, that’s beautiful the way you
did it. I think that’s enough.’ I thought,
‘OK, this is the way he works: He’s gonna
be very raw, he’s gonna want it to spill
out, don’t think about it too much, just
say it.’ ” After that came auditions with
Mark Ronson, whose work with Amy
Winehouse McCartney admired, and who
DJ’d his wedding to Shevell, and Giles
Martin, son of longtime Beatles producer George, who’d worked with McCartney
closely on the 2006 Beatles Love remixes,
for a Cirque du Soleil show. Finally, rather than choose just one producer for the
album, McCartney hired all four, divvying up the track list.
WENN.COM
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bles. “I’ve done this once or twice!” McCartney calls over fraternally. Taking a
corner booth, he orders green tea and an
Evian. He says he doesn’t smoke weed anymore, and while he still enjoys a drink, he’s
booked a massage later on and wants to go
in clean. “I would like to have alcohol, but
it wouldn’t work,” he says. “I’ll regret it.”
Late-afternoon massages notwithstanding, McCartney says he has a hard
time fully relaxing. He feels like he can’t
rest on his laurels; inertia agitates him
on a deep level. When the Beatles were falling apart in 1969,
he suffered from depression –
staying in bed, forgoing shaving, drinking too much, taking
consolation in little beyond his
marriage to Linda Eastman. “At
a certain point I asked myself,
‘Are you going to sit around doing
nothing, or are you going to make
some music again?’ So I’d be at
home sitting around, doing something on guitar, and Linda would
say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could
do that!’ Then I’d be drumming –
‘I didn’t know you could do that!’
So I got back into it just to impress Linda, really. I wanted to
prove my usefulness again.”
Proving his usefulness is part
of why McCartney still plays
concerts that last longer than
The Hobbit; part of why he’s still
cranking out albums in his seventies; why he still remains hard
on himself. Whether it’s conjuring Lennon’s ghost or some other
no-bullshit inner voice, “I’ve always got the critic in my mind,”
McCartney says. “It’s a constant,
at exactly the same volume. He
keeps me on my toes – ‘Don’t just
get blasé about it.’ I don’t want
to become too smug, to think
I’m great. Let’s face it: I’m cool.
Everyone tells me I am. I’ve got a track
record. You’d think I’d stop wondering
whether anything I do is any good. I’ve
got a pretty good mountain of awards,
of successes. But for some reason, I don’t
have an awards room. People say, ‘Where
are all your gold discs?’ I don’t do that. I
just don’t wanna get smug – but of course,
on the other hand, I want to think I’m
great. Because when the hell am I going to
bask in this? What am I going to do, wait
till I die and go, ‘Oh, fuck, I should have
taken a week!’ ”
Working gives him pleasure, but so do
acts of simple reminiscence. His recall
is formidable. He remembers, for instance, scavenging for discarded cigarette packs in Liverpool, a hobby that inspired a backward-glancing lyric on New.
“I lived at the end of a bus route, and our
version of baseball-card collecting was
cigarette packets,” he says. “You’d rip the
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
which were the workingman’s cigarette.
We knew them all.”
He thinks back to taking long country walks as a kid, going down Dungeon
Lane, at Liverpool’s verdant southeastern edge, consulting a copy of The Observer’s Book of Birds. “It’s an airport now, but
then it was pristine countryside,” he says.
“The thing I’d see that I don’t see now is a
skylark rising. Have you ever seen that?
It’s beautiful. What they do is rise up singing” – he whistles – “and they go very
high, gotta be 100, 200 feet, in a
straight line, and he’s singing all
the time. Then he goes whoosh,
swup, swip and glides to another place. And why he’s swooping
is he’s leading you away from his
nest. I was fascinated by things
like that. When I wrote ‘Blackbird,’ I was probably imagining
the blackbird doing that. It’s all
brain fodder. It lodged in there. I
grew up being informed with that
kind of stuf, just looking at the
wonder of it – nature, music, society, people. I’ve always had this
sense of wonder; still have.”
McCartney applies his wonder equally, he says, to old and
new songs. He’s played “Blackbird” and “Yesterday” zillions of
times by now, but fresh mysteries and meanings present themselves with each performance.
With wife
“Logically, I ought to get sick of
Nancy Shevell
them, and I expect all the time
and daughter
to feel like that,” he says. “But it
Beatrice in
hasn’t worked out like that. What
January.
it is, is I’m actually trying to play
McCartney
the song like I know it efortlessly,
organizes his
performance
but there is a pattern that I must
and recording
not miss, and there are words
schedule
that I must put with that pattern,
around the
so I’m normally still trying to get
nine-year-old.
it right. And what I find myself
doing is re-examining the work
of this twentysomething. It’s like it’s not
mine. It’s not a dawdle. There’s hardly anything where I switch to autopilot. Instead
of being bored with a song, I’m still trying
to look at it – what the hell is this thing?
Why did I do this?”
He doesn’t have his wad of cigarette
packs anymore. Today he amasses Beatles memorabilia, alongside modern and
contemporary art: de Kooning, Picasso, Philip Guston. The title of a new song,
“On My Way to Work,” came from perusing a Damien Hirst book. “I was looking
through it for inspiration,” McCartney
says. “I’ll look anywhere, open up a book
and hope the first paragraph I see has a
killer line.” When it came time to conceive
the album cover for New, he summoned
his creative team, which includes Stella’s husband, Alasdhair Willis, and a consulting duo who go by Rebecca and Mike
– “ideas people, crazy student-y types,”
front of them of and have a wad of them,
trade them with your mates. The bus
came from the financial district of Liverpool, right through to the end where we
lived, the posh areas to the poor areas. So
you’d get the poor cigarettes, the middleclass people’s cigarettes, the rich people’s
cigarettes. Those were the higher-value ones: Passing Clouds, Russian Sobranie. Then you get down to the Craven ‘A,’
Senior Service, Player’s Navy Cut, and
you’d go right down to the Woodbines,
“I DON’T WANT
TO GET SMUG,
BUT I ALSO
WANT TO THINK
I’M GREAT.
BECAUSE WHEN
THE HELL AM
I GOING TO
BASK IN THIS?”
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21ST-CEN TU RY MACCA
EDM, folk, dub, piano ballads and beyond: The hidden treasures from McCartney’s late-career albums
Free Now
2000
A catchy, dubby electronic
groove from Liverpool Sound
Collage, McCartney’s wayexperimental collaboration
with far-out Welsh crew
Super Furry Animals and
producer Youth.
Your Way
2001
The best tune from the mellow Driving Rain, an understated, country-flavored love
song (most likely written for
then-girlfriend Heather Mills).
Fine Line
2005
This rollicking piano-guitar
duel – played almost entirely by McCartney himself
– opened Chaos and Creation
in the Backyard, produced by
Radiohead collaborator Nigel
Godrich, on an energetic note.
Riding to Vanity Fair
2005
Godrich’s psychedelic touch
enhances McCartney’s unusually biting lyrics on this kissof to a self-centered friend.
Too Much Rain
2005
Chaos and Creation hits an
emotional peak with this
elegiac tune – one of McCartney’s most eloquent meditations on loss and moving on.
Really Love You
2005
McCartney let the Freelance
Hellraiser, a hip mash-up DJ,
ransack his back catalog for
says McCartney. They hashed out a sleek
design, rendering the album’s title with
nine fluorescent rods in homage to the
minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin. “I like his
stuf,” McCartney says. “I haven’t bought
any, but I just like the idea when you see
it in a gallery space.”
Another artist whose work he admires?
Yoko Ono. “She’s badass,” McCartney
says. He and Ono worked together on
Love, along with Ringo Starr and Olivia Harrison, and he says that after years
of harboring recriminations and bitterness toward each other, they hit it off.
“Time, the great healer,” he says. “I
thought, ‘If John loved her, there’s got to
be something. He’s not stupid.’ It’s like,
what are you going to do? Are you going
to hold a grudge you never really had?
We were just pissed that the Beatles were
breaking up, that something was diferent, that there was a girl in the studio.
There’d never been that. John wanted
Yoko there, and the three of us bristled.
So I had to just sort of, in the end, say,
‘Let’s just see how I get on with her,’ and
we got on fine the minute I decided there
was no grudge.”
The more McCartney thinks about the
end, the more he thinks about reconciliation, forgiveness, putting old beefs to bed
– with Ono, with Lennon, with anyone.
“George would say to me, ‘You don’t want
stuff like that hanging around in your
life,’ ” he says. The impulse has its limits,
though. I ask if he could ever think of forgiving Mark David Chapman. McCartney inhales deeply. Perhaps we don’t have
the time to answer that question fully, I
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the rare vinyl double album
Twin Freaks. This wild remix
takes a deep cut from 1997’s
Flaming Pie out for a spin on
the dance floor.
Ever Present Past
2007
On the lead single from the
rocking Memory Almost Full,
McCartney looks at 65 over
sharp-edged electric rifs:
“Searching for the time that
has gone so fast/The time
that I thought would last. . . .”
Vintage Clothes
2007
Another reflective moment
from Memory. “Don’t live in
the past,” McCartney chides
himself – but he can’t help reliving his old glories just one
more time.
add. “We do,” he replies. “The answer’s
no. That was the action of a complete jerk.
That was not just someone you didn’t
particularly get on with. That was much
more, whether it was evil or just deranged
– it was unforgivable. I think I could
pretty much forgive anyone else. But I
don’t see why I’d want to forgive him.
This is a guy who did something so crazy
and terminal. Why should I bless him
with forgiveness?”
‘Y
ou want a shot of tequila?” McCartney asks.
The green tea is nice, but
it isn’t quite cutting it.
“Come on. Get him over
here. Gotta do it.” He whistles for the
waiter, and soon two glasses of Patrón
arrive, massage be damned. “Here’s to
us – health and happiness,” McCartney
says, giving me my moment. We take deep
swigs. “Hi-yahh!” he says, returning his
glass to the tablecloth. “Oh, baby.”
McCartney has a house near this hotel,
but he spends most of his time in England, close to his nine-year-old daughter, Beatrice, over whom he shares custody with his ex-wife, Heather Mills.
Beatrice has established herself as a crucial
sounding board for new songs. When
McCartney first picked up the mandolin a few years ago and tried to learn
it, he struck upon a spiraling, upbeat
rif that would become the 2007 single
“Dance Tonight.” “I was hitting the floor,
singing, and she came running in, dancing around,” he recalls. “I went, ‘Whoa,
there’s my proof.’ ”
Travelling Light
2008
McCartney reunited with
Youth for Electric Arguments,
released under their avantgarde alias, the Fireman. This
psych-folk vision was an unexpectedly gentle highlight.
My Valentine
2012
Most of the tracks on Kisses
on the Bottom are standards, but this new tune – a
flamenco-ish tribute to new
wife Nancy – is the high point.
New
2013
McCartney released this
bright, Beatles-y delight, with
shades of “Got to Get You
Into My Life,” to announce his
latest album.
He organizes his performance and recording schedule around Beatrice. They
like watching animation together, from
the old Disney films to Pixar releases. McCartney is currently set to return to the
road in November, playing several shows
in Japan. He’s in the process of working
out the stagecraft. “I’ve got an idea cooking,” he says. “When I knew the title for
the album would be New, I got this little
vision – you know, like you get waking up
in the morning – of me in front of a forest
in a checked shirt, kind of lumberjack-y,
just like I’m having my picture taken by
a neighbor. Only right next to me, with
his arm around me, was a robot, this very
shiny guy. So I’m working on the idea, at
the moment, of having this big guy onstage. I like the idea that I’ve got a big
mate who’s a robot.”
The best reference for how the robot
looks, he says, is The Iron Giant – a favorite of his and Beatrice’s. To design
the robot, McCartney commissioned the
same firm that made the elaborate puppets for the stage version of War Horse.
“It’s a highly speculative idea,” he says.
“Why would you build a robot? Just because you imagined a picture of yourself with one? But that’s what you do: You
have ideas and you try to bring them to
fruition. You have an idea for a song and
you try to bring it through.”
He thinks for a moment. “Well, this idea
has to do with newness. I’m the outdoorsman, sort of a country guy, living out in
the woods. . . .” He smiles. “But I have this
friend, and he’s the modern world. In fact,
he’s the future.”
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How a brainy, goth-y 16-year-old from a suburb in New Zealand
became the least-likely breakout pop star of the year
here’s a drink they make at the soho house in new york
that Lorde likes – she had one when she was there last week, but she can’t
quite remember what went in it. The Soho House is a big-bucks membersonly club with outposts in the world’s fancier cities, and tonight she’s at the
Los Angeles chapter, gazing out from a sumptuously upholstered booth at
the city lights stretching onward to the Pacific, trying to describe the drink to a waitress. “A
sort of fancy-lemonade situation, with a cucumber?” she says. “I don’t know if it’s lemonade.”
The waitress furrows her brow. Lorde is in L.A. to drop in on Ellen and perform her transfixingly hushed, sneakily catchy single, “Royals,” which is currently the most popular song in
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L ORDE
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Megan Fox before that,” Lorde says. “So
you can definitely order the trufe pie.”
“Royals” is a song about both succumbing to, and calling bullshit on, the allure of
hedonism and materialism. The refrain –
“Everybody’s like, ‘Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece’ ” – is defiant but
also a touch bittersweet: “We’ll never be
royals.” “I’ve always been fascinated with
aristocracy,” Lorde explains. (It’s where
her moniker comes from.) “I’m really interested in the Ivy Leagues, the final clubs,
all the really old-money families, the concept of old money.” She sings about class
from a privileged position, although one
that boasts more cultural than financial
capital. Her mother, Sonja Yelich, is an
award-winning poet who has been included in the Best New Zealand Poems anthology series four times, and whose last
collection imagined the grim life of an
American Marine in Iraq. Lorde’s father
is a civil engineer. The family is middleclass – “standard,” is how Lorde describes
it, noting that her father drives a Toyota.
On “Royals” she critiques rock and hiphop fantasies even as another part of her
covets them. She recalls a recent shopping
excursion in London, where, emboldened
by her success, she decided to splurge on
a couple of things from Comme des Garçons, which came to £780, and a hideously expensive cardigan that fit wonderfully and cost more than the Comme pieces
combined. “My credit card was declined,”
she says, laughing.
The food arrives. She has two slices of
the trufe pizza, and enjoys them. After a
while, Tim Youngson, who’s one of
Lorde’s managers,
comes over: “You
guys good?”
“Great,” Lorde
says.
“Kanye’s manager is over there,
and he’d love to say
hi,” Tim tells her.
“Whenever you’re
done.”
“OK, cool,” she says. Then she returns
to her fish tacos, in no particular rush to
finish.
orde’s “pure heroine”
plants its f lag squarely in
the gray area where mainstream blurs into fringe –
the album is full of references to acts like Drake, the
xx, A$AP Rocky, James Blake, Kanye and
Burial. When Lorde began making music,
at 12 or so, she says, Laurie Anderson was
a huge influence. “I’m someone who loves
electronic music and lots of alternative
music,” she says, “but I love a good pop
banger, too.”
Which is why she’s totally content to
perform on an afternoon talk show, even
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM TOP: ANDRE CSILLAG/REX USA/REX; TEMBER/SPLASH NEWS
America – it beat out Katy Perry’s “Roar” part to the fact that she has been devourand Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” for the ing the fiction of authors like Raymond
Number One spot.
Carver and Kurt Vonnegut since she was
Yesterday she was in Toronto, where she an adolescent.
played a sold-out club show, and where
When Lorde played Later . . . With Jools
fans “literally chased our van, scream- Holland in September, Kanye West, who
ing, everywhere we went,” she says. She’d was also performing that day, approached
been in New York before that, playing her backstage and said he liked her stuf.
three sold-out shows, where one of the At her first L.A. concert, in August, Chloë
audience members was fashion design- Moretz and Jared Leto turned up, as did
er Phillip Lim, whose leather jumpsuit Dr. Luke, who said he’d love to meet up
Lorde just happened to be wearing onstage sometime, bat some ideas around. Which
that night, having gotten it free at a photo Lorde admits is awesome, but she takes it
shoot. While in New York, Lorde also hung in stride. “I’m excited to maybe work with
out with Tavi Gevinson – the teen-style him – for other people,” she says. “Not so
icon and burgeoning publishing
guru – first at Soho House, which
is where she had the drink, then
at “this party over in Bushwick.”
“I know the drink,” the waitress says. “You must have had the
Eastern Standard: cucumber,
mint, lime . . .”
“That’s it!” Lorde says. She is
having a virgin version, because
despite the fact that this New
Zealand-born singer-songwriter is successful enough to score
a prime booth at the Soho House
on practically no advance notice,
Lorde is only 16 years old. She
sings about draining bottles and
house parties on her remarkable,
electronics-heavy debut album,
Pure Heroine, but she can take
alcohol or leave it. “I don’t feel
bummed about not getting super-crunk all the time,” she says,
then instantly realizes how Hannah Montana this sounds and
squeals with embarrassment. She
looks down at the tape recorder
that captured her words, imagining them in print: “Oh, no!” she
cries, laughing. “Tragic!”
Teen Spirit
Lorde – whose real name is Ella
Above:
Lorde on a BBC
Yelich-O’Connor – is the sort of
show. Right: With her
teen you forget is a teen. In conmom, award-winning New
versation, she comes of not simZealand poet Sonja Yelich.
ply self-possessed but downright
wise. Her eye contact is unwavering, her declarations contemplative but much for my stuf. But it’d be awesome to
crisp. On record, she wields a luxuriously figure out that side of things. He’s got, like,
deep voice over minimalist beats she her- an algorithm that just keeps working.”
self co-produces. Her lyrics explore classic
We scan the menus. She’s wearing a
teen-pop themes – social anxiety, roman- large, jagged crystal on a string around
tic yearning, debilitating ennui, booze- her neck, over a drape-y white T-shirt.
soaked ragers – with an eerie, zoomed- Her hair geysers in leonine curls. She setout detachment. On one song, describing tles on the chicken-liver toast, a baked
a passionate romance, her mind can’t help sweet potato and, to use her phrasing,
but jump-cut not only to the relationship’s “fish tacos, motherfucker!” I spot a blackinevitable failure, but past that, to death: truff le pizza on the menu and suggest
“I know we’re not everlasting/We’re a train we split it, but she’s immediately suspiwreck waiting to happen/One day the cious. “Then you’ll write about it like Lynn
blood won’t flow so gladly/One day we’ll Hirschberg!” she says, cannily referring to
all get still.” Lorde regards herself as a lyr- a celebrity journalist with a reputation for
icist first and foremost, attributing this in ordering trufe-infused dishes to make
profile subjects come of like pampered
one-percenters. “She did it with M.I.A. in
Contributing editor Jonah Weiner
the Times Magazine, and she did it with
wrote the cover story in this issue.
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if it’s a pretty long way down the coolness spectrum from partying in Bushwick with Tavi. “Ellen is awesome,” Lorde
says. On the afternoon of the taping, a van
awaits Lorde and her band outside her
Hollywood hotel, ready to take them to the
soundstage. Her touring outfit, composed
of fellow Kiwis, is light: Ru, the sound guy;
Jimmy, the keyboardist; Ben, the drummer. The vibe in the van is laid-back and
chummy – everyone seems amused by how
ridiculous their lives have become since
“Royals” broke big. Jimmy, who looks a bit
like Otto from The Simpsons, takes the
van’s rear-most bench. “I met J. Lo’s keyboardist at a tattoo parlor last night,” he
says, grinning. “Yeah, you sat on his lap!”
Ru calls out. “We can’t bring you anywhere,” Lorde says.
Lorde is wearing a fitted black top,
platform-sole granny oxfords and a
black mesh tennis skirt. “Got my sport-
she did attend school, she says, “I’d float.
I hung out with a lot of boys. Lots of my
friends are into sports, lots of them are
into art, drama. . . . I have friends all over.”
She has three siblings. “We’re all very different,” she says. “My big sister studies
German and is a film student, but also
doing a business degree. She rides horses. My little sister’s, like, superpersonable and bubbly – she’s beautiful. She’ll be
a TV show host one day. My little brother’s into sports and math. I’m much more
within myself; I’ve always read a lot and
been the quieter one.” At the same time,
she says, “I’ve been taking drama classes
since I was, like, five, and I’m, like, a fucking killer public speaker. I’m pretty good
at turning it on.”
Lorde’s other manager, Scott Maclachlan, arrives in the dressing room. Maclachlan caught wind of Lorde when she
was 12 – she sang Dufy’s “Warwick Av-
ber. Inspired by enigmatic acts like the
Weeknd, she decided to keep photos of
herself of the packaging and, to the extent that it was possible, of the Internet.
She posted her music for free on SoundCloud and watched her online buzz grow.
Then her label threw in its weight, and
“Royals” built from there – first hitting
Number One in New Zealand, and eventually spreading from alternative-rock
stations in the U.S. to pop radio. “I’d go
on YouTube – like, who’s watching this?”
she says.
“It’s weird, because, when you’re in the
early stages of a project, it’s so pure –
you’re like, ‘This will never be tainted,’ ”
Lorde says. “Then you get further on and
you’re like, ‘I want people to hear this record, so I’ve got to do something to support
it.’ ” She laughs. “I put my music out with
no kind of commercial expectation, and
found out I was a pop star.”
gothic thing going on,” she says. Her
mother, Sonja, is riding up front. She’s
an extremely friendly woman with bright
dyed-blond hair and thick-rimmed glasses. “It’s a bit like The Truman Show,” Sonja
says of life on the American pop promo
circuit. “I’m still taking it all in.” Her presence doesn’t encourage much self-censorship from the gang. Ru talks openly about
“hands-free vaporizers,” and Lorde happily ribs Jimmy about the girl he was “rolling around on a bedspread” with the other
night. When “Royals” comes on the radio,
Sonja sings along exuberantly, throwing
finger-pistols in time with the beat, and
everyone cheers.
In the dressing room at Ellen, Lorde
heads to a computer, fires up a Haim song
on YouTube and walks into the adjacent
makeup room. “Do you want me to curl
your bottom eyelashes?” the makeup artist asks. “Curl away,” Lorde says.
She flies back to New Zealand tomorrow, where she’ll have a week of downtime before more touring. Her hometown,
Devonport, is a seaside suburb of Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous city,
which hosts a naval base. Lorde has more
than a year of high school left, though she
hasn’t been to class in a while. “I don’t
know how school’s going to go,” she says.
She’s not sure when, or if, she’ll graduate, and has no specific college plans: “I
read and write so much anyway, I don’t
feel I’m particularly missing out.” When
enue” at a middle-school talent show, accompanied by a schoolmate named Louie.
Louie’s dad sent Maclachlan, a Universal
Records A&R guy in New Zealand, footage of the performance. “She had this
amazing voice, and actually it isn’t that
diferent now,” says Maclachlan. “It had
the same great sort of depth and timbre,
a real soul to it.” He signed Lorde to a major-label development deal. (Sorry, Louie.)
“One of the coolest things was that I could
have vocal lessons twice a week,” she recalls. “I’ve always had a low voice, but you
can find a couple of shitty covers on YouTube from when I was 12 or whatever, and
my voice is quite nasal. Strange tonally. I
got to strip all that stuf back and kind of
rebuild the machinery, take a lot of twang
out of my sound.”
Maclachlan paired Lorde up with various songwriters. “It didn’t work at all,” he
says. “I think Ella inherently sensed that
she was never going to sing other people’s
songs.” She finally found a simpatico collaborator in Joel Little, a graduate of the
New Zealand pop-punk circuit with some
national hits to his name and an ear for
spare, electronic beats. Little helped teach
Lorde about song structure. “I wanted to
bend the song around the lyric, as opposed
to vice versa, kind of squashing the words
in there,” she says. “Joel would say, ‘The syllables have to match up!’ ”
Lorde’s public debut was an EP called
The Love Club, released last Novem-
he “el l e n” per formance goes well. Lorde’s
voice is lush and assured;
she hunches her shoulders, smiles slyly and hardly moves her body beyond
a raised hand that flutters in time with
her words. The effect is oddly magnetic, and the audience can’t help but
clap with the beat. When it’s done, DeGeneres shouts, “So good!” and runs over to
Lorde, who beams. Lorde accepts a hug
from DeGeneres, then raises her mic as
if about to say something, drops it, raises and drops it again, then fixes her hair
self-consciously and just smiles, taking in
the applause.
Back in the dressing room, she drops
down onto a couch, accepts well wishes
and gets lost in her phone. Sonja tidies up
the dressing room, clearing empty bags of
chips and half-empty bottles of iced tea
from a cofee table, then sits beside her
daughter.
“Ella’s a better writer than I’ll ever be,”
Sonja says, beaming proudly. “A couple of
years ago, I wrote a thesis for my master’s,
and I asked Ella to proofread it – 40,000
words. She did an incredible job. And she
was 14.”
“Mommm!” Lorde yells. “Stop talking
about me!” She falls onto her side, blushing and burying her face in a couch cushion – acting, at least for a moment, like any
16-year-old.
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Quivers in her
Manhattan
apartment in
October
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The Unbreakable
Robin
Quivers
How Howard Stern’s co-host
beat cancer, stayed on the air
and found the meaning of life
By BRIAN HIATT
O
ne day last may, shortly after a 12-hour oper ation
that had surgeons flipping her around “like Cirque du Soleil”
as they struggled to remove a grapefruit-size tumor and surrounding cancerous tissue from her pelvis, Robin Quivers finally discovered the limits of Howard Stern’s sense of humor. She
had woken up around midnight in a darkened recovery room,
lying immobile for seven hours, listening to other patients’ bells
and buzzers going of, pondering possibilities. At 7:30 a.m., a
doctor finally came in to let her know that the surgery had been successful. She would
have to wear a colostomy bag, but only for a few months. Also, she no longer had a
uterus. ★ “I’m like a tranny now!” was Quivers’ first thought, an idea she found sufciently hilarious to share with Stern on the phone. “He didn’t think it was so funny,” she
says. “He was like, ‘No, you’re not!’ He was not in a laughing mood about the realities
of what was going on.” ★ Quivers had no idea she was sick until 10 days earlier, when
she had rushed to the doctor with an alarming symptom: She suddenly found herself
unable to urinate. The problem, she learned, was a cancerous mass pressing on her
bladder. During the surgery, doctors were initially pessimistic as they discovered how
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Robin Quivers
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far the cancer had spread. They emerged
every couple of hours to share increasingly
dire forecasts with Quivers’ friend Susan
Schneidermesser, who passed on the updates via phone to Quivers’ other friends.
None of them took the news harder than
Stern, who had threatened to quit his show
if his broadcast partner of 32 years didn’t
make it. “He cried like I’ve never heard a
grown man cry in my life,” says Schneidermesser. “That man just cried like a baby
every single time I spoke to him.”
Quivers never tried her cancer jokes on
a larger audience. From the safety of her
glass booth on The Howard Stern Show,
she had, over the years, revealed her use of
meat and vegetables as masturbatory aids;
shared the size of the largest penis she’d
ever seen (10 inches, if you must know);
recounted the time she engaged in anal
sex, bent over a bathroom sink, during an
encounter with a near stranger; flashed
her bra during a game of strip Jeopardy;
laughed through dozens of songs written
in tribute to the glories of her breasts (including “Robin’s Tits Are Big and Brown,”
sung to the tune of “Allentown”). With a
battle for her life looming, however, discretion at last prevailed.
“The first week we were back on the air
after the surgery, I talked to Howard, and
I said, ‘What do we do about this?’ ” Quivers recalls. “ ‘Should we tell people what’s
going on?’ ” But she found herself breaking
down in tears at the thought of it.
“Robin, you don’t have to do that,” Stern
told her. “You don’t owe anybody anything.
We don’t have to address it at all.”
So for 17 months, as Quivers endured
chemo and radiation, they didn’t mention any of it. “We left people at ‘Robin
can’t pee,’ ” she says. The whole time, Quivers stayed out of the studio, broadcasting
sometimes from her Manhattan apartment, sometimes from the Jersey Shore.
This summer, she bought a new,
seven-bedroom estate on the southern tip
of New Jersey, a present to herself after all
she’d been through. It comes with a private
dock for her boat and jet ski (she loves the
water, though she’s never actually learned
to swim), and the property has a dreamlike, serene beauty, from the flower-lined
driveway to the unbroken open spaces of
the ground floor. “That house is a healing
womb,” says Quivers’ friend Naomi Pabst,
who works as an “intuitive” – i.e., a psychic. “It’s freakishly fabulous.” The architecture is whimsically nautical: Many of
the windows are portholes, and the front
section is modeled after a lighthouse. On a
clear and bright late-September day, Quivers is sitting in a big purple-striped chair
in her second-floor ofce, where translucent cream-colored curtains let in the autumn light. Perched on a glass-topped
desk to her right are a serious-looking miSenior writer Bria n Hiatt profiled
Arctic Monkeys in RS 1194.
54 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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crophone and a pair of headphones that
are plugged into a tiny mixing board connected to a rack of studio gear. That setup,
plus an iPad with a Skype connection, is all
she’s needed to do the show from here since
July. The room, like the rest of the house,
is minimally decorated, with nearly empty
bookshelves – she’s had other priorities.
“Over the years,” she says, “people have
often said to us that they were going
through some horrible thing in their life
– maybe the worst thing that had ever
happened, or that they could think would
ever happen – and that, somehow, in that
state, we made them laugh. And I was like,
‘That’s a wonderful calling.’ ”
For the past year and a half, Quivers was
one of those people. Her silly job – running
through the news, laughing at Stern’s online porn habit, quizzing celebrities about
their sex lives, taking calls from the poor
souls in the Wack Pack, mocking inept
junior stafers – began to take on deeper
meaning. “This whole time, the show gave
me a reason to wake up in the morning,”
“The show gave
me a reason
to wake up in
the morning.
The person on
the air didn’t
have my illness.”
she says. “Gave me four hours of extreme
separation from what was really going on
in my life. The person on the air didn’t have
my illness. That was the four hours I got
not to be sick.”
Quivers’ doctors told her in July that
she’s cancer-free: “Cured” was the word
they used. After a lengthy seclusion, where
her only real contact with the world was
the radio show and doctors’ visits, she’s just
starting to get her life back.
Yesterday was the first time in months
she’d seen herself with a full head of hair
– a curly, reddish-brown wig, to be specific. Until now, she didn’t have enough of her
own hair to attach it, and she wasn’t ready
to glue the thing to her head. She’s expertly painted on eyebrows and applied “deep,
dark mascara” to conceal the fact that she
has no eyelashes. She’s wearing a flowing
blue top, ankle-length stretchy black pants
and sparkly flip-flops showing of toenails
painted blue this morning, in her first ped-
icure of the year. She looks healthy and
happy – almost glowing, actually – if not
quite the same as before the illness. “There
was a freedom in knowing it doesn’t matter anyway,” she says. “You know, I walked
out and I was like, ‘I’m still Robin Quivers
no matter how I look.’ ” At one point, she
claims, she ventured out in Manhattan
looking so rough that homeless guys didn’t
bother asking her for money.
The sun is beginning to set over the bay
behind the house, and we walk up many
flights of stairs to watch it from an outdoor deck. “You get that every night here,”
she says, hands at her hips, squinting at the
auburn spectacle at water’s edge.
She tends to appreciate each sunset a bit
more lately. “I, quite frankly, am grateful
for every day,” says Quivers, who turned 61
in August. “I don’t take anything for granted. When you’ve gone through something
like this, you know you won’t always be
here, that something will be taking you out
at some point. So what you do every day is
important, from now on.”
Q
uivers doesn’t cry when
she describes the moment,
post-surgery, when a doctor
told her that she still had only
a 10 percent chance of survival. She doesn’t cry when
she tells an awful story about her colostomy bag coming loose in a movie theater.
She doesn’t cry when she describes leaving the Stern studio right before her operation, not knowing if she’d ever be back.
She talks for a living, after all, and her big,
mezzo-soprano voice stays steady. But
when she speaks about the support that
Howard Stern gave her through her illness,
and tries to describe the depth of their
friendship, she chokes up.
Throughout her illness, Stern was far
more anxious than Quivers herself. “I felt
horrible,” she says, with her saxophone
blast of a laugh. “Burdening him, you
know? Because I know how anxious he
is in life. But I knew it was OK, because
he wanted to go through this with me,
and he wouldn’t have felt good having it
go any other way. So I gave up on feeling
bad about it. The day of the last show I did,
Howard walks into the studio and goes,
‘Oh, my God, how did you do last night? I
didn’t sleep a wink.’ I was like, ‘I slept like
a baby!’ ” Again, the laugh.
Her relationship with Stern is quite simple: They’re co-workers and best friends.
Other men in her life have come and gone.
Her longest relationship, with the law-enforcement ofcer known on the show as
Mr. X, lasted a decade. But Stern stayed
around. “Men have been intimidated by
my relationship with Howard,” she says.
“You know, it’s hard for them to imagine
that they could be number one, seeing this
relationship. He’s amazing and he’s powerful and they’re always comparing themselves to him: ‘How could she care for me
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
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when her best friend is this incredible juggernaut?’ And that gets in the way.”
There was one very brief moment when
she thought she might be attracted to
Stern – but that was based only on some
flattering promo pictures, before she actually met him. “I was like, ‘Oh, jeez, he’s kind
of good-looking,’ ” she says, with her loudest laugh yet. “ ‘I might have to be careful
around him.’ But not once I knew him! It
was never that way.”
After Mr. X, Quivers dated Jim Florentine, a younger comedian who had asked
her out on-air. By the time she got sick,
that was long over. She doesn’t flinch at the
question of whether it was harder to face
the illness without a partner. “Early on,
we had gotten another batch of bad news,
and Howard and I were both crying,” she
says. “And he’s going, ‘Robin, you must feel
so alone.’ And I was like, ‘No, I don’t. You
won’t let me alone!’ ” She roars.
“And he was like, ‘What?’ I was like,
‘You’re here all the time! You’re at the other
end of the phone. You know when my appointments are, and it’s like you can see
me, because you call me immediately after
I enter the door to find out what went on
last night. You are so with me.’
“And I have a couple of other friends
who were also with me to that extent. So
there was never a moment where I was sitting around going, ‘Oh, my God, how do I
get through this alone?’ They never left me
alone. I was like, ‘Maybe I haven’t figured
out how to have a great relationship, but
boy, do I have incredible friends.’ They literally kept me alive.”
When Quivers first heard that the surgery could leave her with a permanent colostomy bag, she decided that she would
rather die. “I told Howard, ‘I can’t live
like that.’ He goes, ‘Yes, you can!’ And I’m
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the eye. Quivers was there for
that one, safe and dry in her
booth.
“Her intellect is three times
everyone else’s on the show,”
says head writer Fred Norris.
“Most of the guys, their brains
look like a charcoal drawing,
and Robin’s is more of like a 3D
laser light show.”
It’s easy to see her as the superego to Stern’s id, or the Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder, but
that’s not how she looks at it.
“My attitude about the show
was big-sisterly,” she says. “I
know who he really is – these
silly things, these crass things,
that’s not who he really is, and
I’ve got to remind him who
he really is. So when people
NOT HIN G’S SHO CKI NG
on The Howard Stern
see that they go, ‘Oh, it wasn’t
Quivers and Stern (working
o co-hosts for 32 years.
radi
n
bee
that bad that he said that.’ ”
e
hav
3)
199
in
w
Sho
Back when the show was
on terrestrial radio, and was
the focus of the kind of controversy now reserved exclusively for Miley
Cyrus, people made a lot of insulting assumptions: chief among them that Quivers
was there mostly to let Stern get away with
racial and sexual material. “I don’t have
any function,” she says mockingly. “I don’t
do anything, I don’t contribute, I’m just
there. And that idea is totally racist and
sexist in itself! And who was saying that?
Black people. Women. So in other words,
you’ve decided that I’m too stupid to realize that I’m being exploited.”
She was more than ready to defend herself, arguing with a condescending Linda
Ronstadt on The Tonight Show, and yelling at Spike Lee when he berated her in a
private phone call. Recently, her publicist
told her that she needed to try to mend her
relationship with the black community. “I
said, ‘Do we really?’ ” An explosive, doubled-over laugh. “That sounds like hard
pressed to ever have a decent life if I’ve got work to me and I’m not really up to that!”
Meanwhile, her comfort within the
a permanent colostomy. So don’t expect me
to do that.’ The hurt in his voice! I was like, Stern show boys’ club, not to mention her
‘Oh, crap, now I’m going to have to figure perpetually unmarried status, has led
many people to assume she’s gay. “I’ve
out how to live with a colostomy.’ ”
Quivers defines her role on The Howard had women chase me, then look me in the
Stern Show as being “the best dance part- eye and go, oh . . . she’s not,” she says. For
ner,” following Stern wherever he might all the show’s focus on lesbian sexuality,
go, pulling him back when necessary. “The Quivers has never had the slightest urge
handful of times that Robin hasn’t been in that direction. “I don’t particularly care
there over the years,” says longtime pro- for women,” she says. “I mean, what am I
ducer Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate, “it’s gonna do with a woman?”
a diferent show. There’s a chemistry and
a balance that goes out the window. When
he is con vinced that her
Robin’s there, it’s not like we’re afraid to do
vegan diet, heavy on juicing,
stuf, but there is some level of decorum.
gave her the underlying health
Years ago she was out sick one day and we
and strength she needed to
were just like horny men. It seemed like the
fight cancer. Quivers did, by
teacher left the room during a test.” That
her account, recover with unsaid, it’s hard to imagine how the show usual speed from every phase of the treatcould get more extreme than, say, the day ment. (She has a new, recipe-filled book
a woman demonstrated female ejaculation about her dietary regimen, The Vegucation
so robustly that she sprayed Dell’Abate in of Robin – Stern calls her “the Paula Deen
“Men have been
intimidated by
my relationship
with Howard.
It’s hard for them
to imagine that
they could be
number one.”
S
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Robin Quivers
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PAGING NURSE QUIVERS
Quivers (below, in 1974) spent
two years as a military nurse
before changing her career path.
Right: Her 1986 publicity shot.
“I played with the idea of leaving
the show for a while, but it’s home.
I don’t know about life without it.”
vomiting in a bucket each time. The first
night brought harrowing visions of all the
misery sufered by womankind the world
over; the second night yielded a bunch of
pretty colors – and the shaman yelled at
her for doing it wrong. On the third night,
she learned the meaning of life. “What I
learned is very simple: that your life belongs to you. And it really doesn’t matter what you do with it, but it should be
what you want to do with it. Not what your
mother or father or friends or society want.
It should be ‘I’-directed. And that’s the
only purpose for being here.” She also did
a form of “breath work” that induces natural hallucinations and had another revelation: “There is so much love that you don’t
have to worry about it, it’s always there.”
That feeling of being surrounded by endless love kept her from fearing death. “It
was, like, perfectly OK to say this might be
it,” she says.
J
u s t a f t e r 5 a . m . on a
chilly morning in early October, a black SUV pulls up at
the deserted corner of 48th
Street and Sixth Avenue in
Manhattan. Quivers is in the
back seat, waiting for security to take her
into the studio. “I haven’t seen the streets
like this since May 22nd,” she says. She’s
about to return to the studio for the first
time in a year and a half, but she’s not feeling any nerves: “What would I be nervous
about? I’m not in any pain – this is how it
used to be!” Ronnie the Limo Driver, who
runs the show’s security, arrives to escort
us. Upstairs, Dell’Abate greets her with a
hug, and shows her that he’s covered her
booth in rose petals. Hapless media producer JD Harmeyer spots her: “Now you
can laugh at me in person,” he says.
Trailed by a Howard TV cameraman,
Stern arrives, looking tall and thin, almost fragile, with unexpectedly kind eyes.
“Robin looks better than me, and I wasn’t
even sick,” he says on his way into the studio, which has the neon look of an upscale
strip club.
When the show was first set to move to
satellite radio, Quivers wondered whether it might be time to leave. “I was like,
‘Maybe this is a time to peel of and go do
something else,’ ” she says. “I played with
that idea for a while, and I said to myself,
‘But Robin, if something incredible happens and you’re not there, you are going to
be miserable.’ It’s home. I don’t know about
life without it.”
Now safely inside her booth, Quivers
puts on her headphones, settles back in her
Aeron chair and takes a breath. It’s 6 a.m.,
and once more, it’s time to do a show.
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No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
COURTESY OF ROBIN QUIVERS, 2
of vegetables.”) But the illness was only the
most recent battle she’s had to fight.
She grew up lower-middle-class in Baltimore, in a house filled with enough secrets that it made perfect sense to spend
her working life in a place where there are
none. Her mother beat her badly enough
to put her in bed for days when she was
only four years old; her father molested
her for several nightmarish months when
she was 11. “I don’t know that they made
me feel unloved,” she says, “except that love
didn’t mean anything. It just means, ‘Oh, I
look over at you and I feel afection. And
now I’ll do whatever the hell I want to do.’ I
have become very self-sufcient as a result.
And what it actually did was keep people
from being able to give to me.”
She escaped to college, graduating with
a nursing degree that she quickly put to
use. An aggressive recruiter soon persuaded her to join the Air Force, and she spent
a couple of miserable years as a military
nurse. She had soured quickly on the work,
and decided to change careers, enrolling in
a Baltimore broadcasting school at age 27
on little more than a whim. “She grew up
in a household where people were perhaps
limited in their thinking,” says Norris. “If
you grew up in a house like that, who’s
going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, when I grow up I’m
going to be on the radio and talk to millions of people and make a lot of money’?”
She had always gotten compliments on
her speaking voice, even from patients,
but had never thought much of it. “I didn’t
think it sounded so much diferent than
anyone else’s voice until I got to the broadcasting school, and I raised my hand to
ask a question of the school president, and
he said, ‘See me after class.’ And the rest is
history.” She found work as a newscaster,
before being lured away for a gig at a Washington, D.C., rock station with a longhaired
young DJ named Howard.
Even as the show moved to New York
and her professional life prospered, she
was an emotional mess, fighting with Stern
and her co-workers, barely holding it together in her of hours. She needed to make
the real-life Robin Quivers as confident
and grounded as she was on air. She went
into therapy, took up Transcendental Meditation (Stern does it too) and, for a while,
cut her family out of her life before cautiously resuming contact.
When her dad died in 2005, Quivers
wept for 24 straight hours, without feeling
anything. “Then I was back in Baltimore,
and I felt this incredible sense of ease and
freedom in that home that I had grown
up in,” she says. “All of a sudden it wasn’t
scary. It was done. The monster was gone.
I remember saying to Howard, ‘You know,
the best thing my dad ever did for me was
leave, because now I feel whole.’ ”
But she was still looking for spiritual answers. A few years back, she went to
Peru and took the hallucinogen ayahuasca
with a shaman on three separate nights,
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about
a girl
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By the time
Coy Mathis
was four
years old,
he knew one
thing was for
sure: that he
wasn’t a boy
By
Sabrina
Rubin
Erdely
Photographs by
Gil l i a n L au b
Coy Mathis at home in
Colorado, October 4th, 2013
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hen coy mathis was a year
A b ou t a Gi r l
and a half old, he loved nothing
more than playing dress-up. He
didn’t show much interest in the
fireman costume or the knight
outfit, but would rummage
through the toy box to grab the princess dress with the flowery headpiece. His mother, Kathryn, would text photos to her
husband of their plump-cheeked blond boy twirling in a pair
of pink-and-purple butterfly wings or wearing a frilly tutu.
Cute, Jeremy Mathis would text back. A
former Marine who was attending college
in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Jeremy
agreed with his wife that Coy’s fascination
with all things sparkly, rufy and pink was
the harmless play of a toddler whose mind
was yet untouched by social constructs
of “masculine” and “feminine.” Coy was
one of four siblings – a triplet
with a same-age sister and
brother, plus an older sister
– and so was surrounded by
both “girl” and “boy” toys,
inside their cramped splitlevel house, where the living
room was covered by a patina of puzzle pieces and stray
Legos. Kathryn and Jeremy
figured it was just a matter
of time before Coy sorted it
out for himself.
As Coy hit the terrible
twos, though, his preference
for all things girly became
more insistent. He refused to eat unless
his food was served on a pink plate, with
pink utensils. He rejected the Matchbox
cars and Iron Man figurines his parents
gave him for Christmas, telling his brother, Max, “This is for you.” And at every opportunity Coy would wriggle out of his
jeans and T-shirts and reappear in his sister’s dress or, when he could get his hands
on it, her Dora the Explorer bathing suit.
His parents made concessions to pacify
Coy, including letting him remain dressed
in girl clothes, but only in the privacy of
their home. Living, as the Mathises did,
close to five military installations, as well
as near the headquarters of the far-right
evangelical advocacy group Focus on the
Family – and not far from New Life, the
10,000-member megachurch founded by
Ted Haggard – Kathryn and Jeremy figured their conservative neighbors might
not see Coy’s playful cross-dressing as benignly as they did.
“It’s a phase,” the Mathises reassured
each other. Kathryn, however, wondered
if it could be something more. She’d noticed the way Coy brightened whenever he
put on a dress or a fairy costume. She wondered whether their toddler might be gay.
The notion sat fine with her: The Mathises were recent transplants from Austin
T
hus bega n the
journey that would
lead the Mathis family to perform a radical social experiment,
put them on a collision
course with their local school district in
Focus on the Family’s backyard and transform Coy Mathis into the transgender
movement’s youngest icon – setting the
stage for a showdown in the very capital of
the American religious right.
Building upon the gains of LGB activists, the trans-rights movement is having
its moment, advancing more swiftly than
even its advocates ever imagined. This
past May, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was updated to
replace its old classification for trans people, “gender identity disorder,” with “gender dysphoria,” reflecting the new understanding that having a gender identity that
doesn’t match your birth anatomy doesn’t
make you mentally ill; only any associated
distress is considered a problem. The diagnostic change was greeted within the tiny trans community – gender dysphoria
is thought to afect as many
as one in 10,000 people – as
momentous a turning point
as the DSM’s 1973 declassification of homosexuality had
been for gays. The increasing acceptance also sparked
a new awareness of how early
in life some people begin to
realize they may have been
born in the wrong bodies.
“One kid in my practice
tried to cut off their penis
with a pair of scissors at five,” says pediatrician Johanna Olson, who is the director
of the country’s largest clinic for gendernonconforming kids, the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “It happens
more often than you might think.”
If the trans movement is the LGBT’s
final frontier, then transgender youth represents its farthest outpost. Kids are coming out as trans earlier than ever: A survey of the San Francisco school district
found that 1.6 percent of high school students and, incredibly, one percent of middle-school students identified as transgender. Children are packing the few U.S.
clinics like Olson’s, which are at the forefront of a new therapeutic approach, in
which children may live as their preferred
gender, complete with appropriate clothing, pronouns and often a new name. This
so-called afrmative model has found an
increasingly warm reception among the
worried parents of trans children. And so
while most doctors still consider this “social transition” for kids under the age of 10
“When are we going to go
to the doctor to have me
fixed?” Coy asked his
mother at the age of three.
“To get my girl parts?”
Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote about
the heirs to the Duke fortune in RS 1189.
60 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
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and considered themselves progressive
and open-minded; Kathryn herself had a
gay sister. But she told no one of her suspicion about Coy – it felt creepily premature to speculate about the sexuality of a
kid still in diapers.
Then one night in January 2010, Kathryn was tucking him in for bed under his
pink quilt, and Coy, then three, seemed
upset. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Coy, his
head resting against his kitty-cat-print pillow, hugged his pink stufed pony with the
glittery mane that he’d gotten for Christmas and said nothing, his mouth bent in
a tight frown. “Tell me,” Kathryn urged.
Coy’s chin began to quiver.
“When am I going to get my girl parts?”
he asked softly.
“What do you mean?”
“When are we going to go to the doctor
to have me fixed?” Coy asked, tears now
spilling down his cheeks. “To get my girl
parts?” That’s when it dawned on Kathryn Mathis, with a sinking feeling, that
she and Jeremy were dealing with a different issue altogether.
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to be controversial, already these intrepid campus, some 600 employees put a chunk Indeed, studies show that the threat to
young pioneers have begun venturing out of their $90 million annual budget to work transgender people is very real: One study
into the world – including, in rare cases, fe- creating LGBT intolerance on every front, showed more than half report being bulmale-to-male trans kids who undergo “top including fighting “safe-school” anti-bully- lied in school; 61 percent are physically asing initiatives and pushing reparative ther- saulted; 64 percent are sexually assaulted.
surgery” as early as age 13.
As such, the trans-rights movement apy. Leading Focus’ charge to push people Trans people have sky-high rates of unemhas speedily moved to a brand-new bat- back into the closet is its “gender-issues an- ployment, homelessness, substance abuse
tleground: public schools. Although 623 alyst” Jef Johnston, himself a proud “ex- and suicide: Forty-one percent of transAmerican colleges and universities have gay” – now a married father of three boys gender people attempt suicide, with trans
teenagers the highest at-risk group.
already adopted nondiscriminaGiven those staggering odds, many
tion policies to cover gender exclinicians are anxious to try somepression, high schools and middle
thing – anything – that might mitschools are being forced to grapple
igate that harm.
with the question of how to deal
“Kids that are supported from
with trans students in their lockearly childhood look very diferent
er rooms, athletic fields and bathfrom kids that come in here at 18,”
rooms. It’s a haphazard fight raging
Olson says of her practice of 250
at district, county and state levels;
children and young adults. “The
thus far, 2013 has been what apkids who come in at 18, 19, 20 are
pears to be a watershed year. This
highly traumatized.” How diferpast winter, educators in Massaently would they have turned out,
chusetts, Maine and Portland, Orshe wonders, if instead of enduregon, issued guidelines to accoming years of conflict and rejection,
modate trans students, allowing
they’d been met with support?
them to use bathrooms and play on
sports teams corresponding to the
gender with which they identify.
t thr ee a nd a
But in August, California trumped
half, Coy turned
them all by becoming the first state
sullen. He’d spend
to pass legislation spelling out that
days on the couch,
transgender students can choose
wrapped in the
which bathrooms, locker rooms
fuzzy pink secuand sports teams they wish, based
rity blanket he’d commandeered
on their gender identity.
from his sister. He didn’t want to
The national headlines have inplay, or talk. He especially didn’t
spired debate over whether this is
want to go outside; any enthusia laudable move to recognize the
asm Coy might show for a trip to
needs of trans kids – or a wrongthe playground would disappear as
headed manifestation of overindulsoon as he’d catch sight of the boys’
gent parenting. After all, what does
clothes he was expected to swap for
a child really know about authenthe dresses he wore at home. The
tic identity, or about what’s best
only thing Coy hated more was the
for them? However, any reasonprospect of getting a haircut; the
Girl, Interrupted
able discussion on the subject has
last time his parents had suggestAt age two, Coy insisted on wearing girls’ clothes,
been drowned out by conservative
ed it, Coy had taken to his bed for
refused to eat unless she had pink utensils and
Republicans, who have staked out
days, listless and tearful.
rejected Matchbox cars and Iron Man figurines,
a position that is reflexively anti“It was like what you see on comtelling her brother, Max, “This is for you.”
trans. “Is that not the craziest thing
mercials for severely depressed
you’ve ever heard?” Mike Huckapeople,” remembers Kathryn, a
bee asked at October’s right-wing
slender woman of 27. Her career as
Values Voter Summit, speaking of Califor- – who blames what he calls the “sexual bro- a photographer took a back seat to mothnia’s anti-discrimination-schools law; Cal- kenness” of LGBT people on a combination erhood after the couple’s assisted eforts
ifornia Republicans have already target- of poor parenting, molestation and origi- to have a second child had yielded unexed its repeal as a top priority. Earlier this nal sin. In his newsletters for Focus, John- pected triplets. Little by little, Kathryn
year, House Republicans tried to strip the ston treats trans people in particular with began letting Coy leave home dressed in
Violence Against Women Act of its protec- amused pity. “Male and female are catego- a pink shirt – anything to pry him from
tions for transgender women, and Arizona ries of existence,” he wrote this year. “It is the house with minimal fuss – and soon
state Rep. John Kavanagh introduced a bill dehumanizing to categorize individuals by enough, with pink sneakers to match. Jerthat would have made it a crime for trans the ever-proliferating alphabet of identities emy drew the line at letting Coy wear colpeople to use their preferred bathrooms. based on sexual attractions or behavior or orful hair clips outdoors. “I was trying to
Fox News commentators vehemently op- ‘gender identity’ – LGBBTTQQIAAFP- avoid a negative experience,” recalls Jerepose any accommodation of trans kids in PBDSM – however many letters are added. my, who is even-tempered and stocky with
schools, something Bill O’Reilly calls “an- No. We stand with the truth.”
rimless glasses. “Someone going, ‘Why are
archy and madness.”
And yet despite all the opposition, the you dressing your son up as a girl?’ ”
Perhaps no one is more outraged, how- movement toward early transition continOn her online parenting message
ever, than the religious right, of which ues forward, driven largely by a school of boards, Kathryn asked for advice. A transFocus on the Family reigns as a dominant thought within the medical community gender parent volunteered that Coy’s beforce. On Focus’ 81-acre Colorado Springs based around the idea of harm prevention. havior sounded awfully familiar. “I knew
KATHRYN MATHIS
A
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A b ou t a Gi r l
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Modern Family
kids from the merely gender-variwhen I was two or three,” he wrote,
The
Mathises
are no strangers to complication.
ant (though studies suggest that
a line that resonated with KathEldest daughter Dakota (on stairs) is autistic, and
extreme dysphoria in early childryn. She thought about the fact
Coy’s fellow triplet Lily was left with brain
hood can be a predictor of transthat Coy hadn’t wanted to be seen
damage from meningitis. They tried to deal with
genderism). But gender nonconfornaked since age two, oddly modest
Coy’s gender confusion by keeping an open mind.
mity doesn’t necessarily mean that
while his siblings pranced around
the kid will turn out transgender:
oblivious to their own nudity. She
A 2012 Harvard School of Public
thought about the disappointment
on Coy’s face when he asked her, “I’m a girl hardly their most urgent family matter. Health study found that 85 percent of chilThe Mathises resolved to deal with it the dren who expressed some form of gender
– why are you calling me ‘he’?”
Kathryn broached the subject with her way they dealt with everything: by stay- nonconformity actually grew up to not be
husband. “Coy is saying, ‘I don’t want to ing calm, tackling one crisis at a time, and LGB or T, but straight.
Lacking hard data and facing so much
have a beard.’ Maybe he’s – transgender or keeping an open mind.
At Coy’s wellness visit with his pedia- uncertainty, practitioners are eagerly
something?” she asked, testing the word.
“Yeah,” Jeremy considered. “Probably.” trician, the Mathises lightly brought up awaiting an American Psychological AsIt made so much sense that they bare- his gender issues. Not long ago, the dogma sociation committee’s expected release of
ly discussed it further – and yet the im- on how to treat such children was to urge guidelines in 2014. In the meantime, cliplications felt so huge that for a moment them toward conformity – a treatment nicians refer to the standards of care set
Jeremy was overwhelmed. Their house- model paralleling the now-discredited “re- by the World Professional Association for
hold was already bursting with compli- parative therapy” aimed at “curing” homo- Transgender Health, which advocates the
cations. Jeremy had bounced around jobs sexuals. The American Psychological As- cautious but loving approach that Coy’s peafter his military stint had been cut short: sociation and the American Academy of diatrician suggested, known as “wait and
He’d been discharged from the Marines Pediatrics have rejected the forced-con- see.” The Mathises were told to hold of
not long after basic training for a hip in- formity approach for gender-dysphoric pa- on decision-making and to simply express
jury severe enough that when he’d tried tients, saying that not only are such eforts support for Coy and his choices, follow his
to re-enlist after 9/11, they wouldn’t take doomed to fail but that, says the American lead and see where it might take them.
The next time Coy begged to wear barhim. Two of their children were special- Psychoanalytic Association, they “often rerettes in his shaggy hair while they ran erneeds: Their oldest, six-year-old Dakota, sult in substantial psychological pain.”
But despite having jettisoned the old rands together, Jeremy cringed but relentwas autistic, and one of the triplets, Lily,
had been left severely brain-damaged by a model, few health professionals are com- ed. At the store, an older woman looked at
bout of viral meningitis as an infant. The fortable urging parents to let their pre- father and son for a long moment, then apMathises had also just had another baby, a schooler pose as a diferent gender. There is proached. Jeremy braced himself.
“You have a pretty baby girl,” the woman
girl named Auri – their fifth child. Taken not yet a standard screening model to sepin perspective, Coy’s gender confusion was arate the small percentage of truly trans cooed.
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Jeremy blinked. “Thanks!” he practically shouted with relief. He looked down at
Coy, who beamed with pride.
For the next year and a half, while his
parents indulged his desires, Coy returned
to the happy, playful child he’d once been,
smiling as he romped around the backyard
with a giant Minnie Mouse-style hair bow
atop his head. They let him wear whatever frilly thing he wanted, gave him a Barbie, honored his wish to paint his bedroom
pink and, although they continued calling
him “he,” Coy seemed satisfied. His parents
were thrilled. In 2011 they signed Coy up
for half-day kindergarten right on schedule at the local public school, Eagleside Elementary, a sprawling building of tan-andmaroon brick, with the bland, spare look of
an ofce park. On Coy’s registration form, under “gender,” they checked “boy.”
their probl e ms began
almost immediately.
“I don’t wanna wear this!”
Coy would protest of the
boys’ pink polo shirts his parents had thought a fair compromise; sending their boy to
kindergarten dressed in girls’
clothing was out of the question. “You can wear whatever you want when you’re not
in school,” they told him, in
voices patient but firm. “But these are appropriate clothes for school.” Coy was miserable. In class he was anxious, tearful, unable to focus and made few friends. At the
end of each three-hour day he’d trudge out
of school crying because some classmate
had referred to him as a boy. The moment
Coy got home, he’d strip of his clothes as
though they were sufocating him, right
down to the pink underwear his parents
let him wear as a consolation, and put on
a dress to relax.
One day in mid-November, Coy’s kindergarten teacher pulled Jeremy aside at
pickup time to say there’d been an incident: That morning, they’d divided the kindergartners into two lines, boys and girls –
and Coy had lined up with the girls. “You’re
a boy,” the teacher had corrected. Coy had
sobbed for the rest of the day.
At home afterward, Coy remained inconsolable. “Even my teacher doesn’t know
I’m a girl!” he wailed, retreating to his bedroom to curl up with his pink blankie.
Something needed to be done; Kathryn
and Jeremy recognized they couldn’t continue onward like this. The “wait and see”
approach had made sense in theory. But as
Coy got older, they began to realize there
was no middle ground. When it came to
gender, they would have to choose one or
the other, pink or blue. It also struck them
that, by allowing Coy to be a girl at home
and forcing him to be a boy at school, they
had efectively helped their child to carve
out a closeted double life. “We were thinking, ‘If we give you a safe space to be who
you are, that’s our way of being supportive,’ ” recalls Kathryn. “But we were really sending the opposite message: It’s not
safe, but we’ll give you a place to hide.”
They were ready for a new approach. Coy
had long since made his choice; it was time
to fall into line behind him. “This whole
wishy-washy ‘What are we doing?’ That
was done,” says Jeremy.
With the help of the support group
TransYouth Family Allies, the Mathises
met with a psychologist in Boulder, Colorado, who noted that Coy met the criteria for gender dysphoria: He insisted he
was the opposite gender; he was persis-
them in small talk and some gave them a
wide berth. Kathryn was heartened by the
handful of people who approached asking
how they might explain Coy’s situation to
their own five-year-olds. The bluntness of
her answer may have taken them aback:
“The best way to explain it is, no bodies
are the same. Some girls have penises and
some boys have vulvas.” She was politely
thanked for her advice.
Surely, the community’s mostly gracious
reaction had much to do with the tone set
by Eagleside Elementary’s administration,
whose support had surprised the Mathises. When, after their visit to the psychologist, Kathryn had e-mailed Eagleside
asking for a meeting “regarding Coy and
the whole boy-girl thing,” she and Jeremy had been unsure of what
sort of reception they’d get.
After all, one of the town’s
chief exports was the vociferous opposition to any laws
favoring gay or transgender
rights. When, in 2008, a proposal had passed in the Colorado legislature to expand
the state’s anti-discrimination law to protect people based on sexual orientation, including trans people,
Focus on the Family had lobbied for its veto, warning that
the law would expose women
and children to dangerous perverts who
would now freely lurk in public restrooms.
Throughout the state, Focus ran a radio
scare ad titled “Predator,” which specifically cited the threat of trans people in
schools. “If the Colorado legislature has
its way, we could all be dealing with a new
type of predator,” warned the announcer.
“And instead of our kids worrying about
class work, they’ll be worrying about who
might be in the restroom with them.”
The proposal had passed anyway, making Colorado one of 17 states that now
prohibits discrimination on the basis of
gender expression. Kathryn and Jeremy
discovered the law’s existence while doing
research in preparation for their sit-down
with Eagleside administrators and, on the
day of the meeting, had arrived armed
with a printout of the particulars. They’d
been pleased to discover that the four stafers, including the school principal, had
shown up with a copy of the state law too.
“They asked what they could do to help,”
remembers Kathryn. “The school psychologist was just giddy.” As a result, Coy’s
transition had gone so smoothly that by the
end of kindergarten and into first grade,
she was thriving: happy, succeeding in
school and coming home with her backpack full of birthday-party invitations.
So the Mathises were unprepared when,
one night in December 2012, they got a call
at home from Principal Jason Crow. “Hey,”
“The school is being mean
to me,” Coy said afer being
pulled out of first grade.
“They’re telling me I’m a boy
when I’m really a girl.”
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
tent about it over a protracted time period;
and the incongruity was causing him distress. Now that Coy had an ofcial diagnosis, their next step was clear. And so it was
that, in December 2011, Coy showed up for
kindergarten in a rainbow dress and pink
leggings, chin-length blond hair held back
with barrettes, and a baby-toothed smile –
no longer a “he” but a “she.”
W
i t h t h e wat t age on her personality dialed back
up, Coy Mathis
proved a popular
little girl. At recess
she and the other kindergarten girls played
Mommies with their baby dolls, and at
pickup time her friends would call out her
name and wave elaborate goodbyes. There
had been some questions at first. “I thought
you were a boy,” some children asked her.
“No, I’m a girl,” Coy answered, which satisfied most kids; they appeared to accept the
gender switch as normal. Only one kid, a
girl, seemed perturbed. “You’re not a girl –
you’re a boy!” she’d insist day after day, upsetting Coy so much that Kathryn finally
asked the teacher to move the other child’s
seat to a diferent part of the classroom.
Reactions among the kindergarten parents were harder to gauge. No one said
anything rude, but Jeremy and Kathryn noticed that fewer parents engaged
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he said casually, “we have to have a meeting soon about Coy.” He informed them
that Coy would no longer be permitted to
use the girls’ bathroom. Kathryn and Jeremy were stunned. “I started ranting and
raving,” Kathryn says, “and then I went
into action. I looked up the law to make
sure nothing had changed, and it hadn’t.”
The school had never reported any problems with Coy’s gender status before; the
Mathises couldn’t imagine what had triggered the sudden policy switch.
But unbeknownst to the Mathises, a debate had been brewing for months. Unlike
kindergartners, who had a gender-neutral
bathroom in their classroom, first-graders used the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms
down the hall. Some parents were already
touchy about Coy; one mom had complained to Crow about her “moral issues”
with Coy’s upbringing – how would they
react to Coy using the girls’
room? As later explained in
legal documents, the superintendent of the FountainFort Carson school district
was concerned about the
precedent Coy’s access to the
girls’ bathroom would set.
“The district also had to
take into consideration that
this would not be an isolated
request, and that it was probable that it would be faced
with one or more requests in
the future,” the superintendent wrote. “And perhaps by
a student much older and more physically
mature than Coy.” The terrifying prospect
of this hypothetical older, maturer student
was key to their analysis. As attorney William Kelly Dude would write in the accompanying position paper, while perhaps
it seemed acceptable for a harmless sixyear-old like Coy to enter the girls’ room,
he vividly described what a future infiltrator could look like: “a male high school student with a lower voice, chest hair and with
more physically mature sex organs who
claims to be transgender and demands
to use the girls’ restroom” – a menacing
portrait of an impostor that echoed the
threat of Focus on the Family’s “Predator”
ad. That hairy deviant would soon be Coy
herself, as Dude would write the Mathises: “As Coy grows older and his male genitals develop . . . at least some parents and
students are likely to become uncomfortable with his continued use of the girls’
restroom.” The decision had come down
swiftly: For the protection of the district
as a whole, Coy was to be banned from the
girls’ restroom.
“You know this is against the law, right?”
Kathryn demanded of Principal Crow in
his ofce a couple of days after his phone
call. This wasn’t just about finding Coy a
toilet. It was about the larger message Coy
would be forced to internalize every time
she had to relieve herself: that she was abnormal, that there was something so grotesque or unsafe about her that her very
presence in a place as delicate as a bathroom was intolerable. And Coy wouldn’t
be the only one digesting that attitude; so,
too, would her peers.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Crow, a tall,
soft-spoken man with dark, slicked-back
hair, told Kathryn. “My hands are tied.”
“Then the kids aren’t coming back to
school,” Kathryn snapped, storming out of
his ofce. The Mathises were bewildered to
realize that the protections they’d thought
Coy had by law didn’t seem to protect her
at all in reality – and they worried about
what that gap might mean for the rest of
Coy’s life. “If we just back down, then it’s
going to be a fight again in middle school,
and in high school, and again in college,”
with whom she’d had an arms-length relationship anyway. Though she’s sure some
of her family objects to Coy’s living as a
girl, they know better than to articulate
their disapproval because, says Kathryn,
“if they were to be outspoken about their
problems with Coy, they would be cut of.”
Perhaps with that in mind, both Kathryn’s
and Jeremy’s families responded quite well
upon being told that Coy would be raised
as a girl. “Well, I figured,” Jeremy’s father
had remarked dryly, “ ’cause he’s wearing a
dress in all the pictures on Facebook.”
Absent much family support, the Mathises have built a new community for themselves by connecting online with other
parents of trans kids. Their eforts have
been made easier by the fact that their discrimination complaint made Coy an overnight LGBT luminary, her story splashed
in the pages of The New York Times and
on Katie Couric’s show. Over
the past few months, Coy has
stayed up well past her bedtime to appear at the redcarpet GLAAD awards and
at a trans-rights fundraiser, events where strangers
f locked to the Mathises to
thank them, and share their
own stories of discrimination. Jeremy has been so horrified to learn about the difculties trans people routinely
face – in the workforce, getting health insurance, in the
housing market, and don’t
even get him started on incarcerated
trans people – that he is about to begin law
school, determined to become a civil rights
lawyer. For Kathryn and Jeremy, their
swift rebirth into champions of an underdog cause has imbued their lives with a
new sense of forward motion. Thus, in a
short time period, necessity and now passion have turned the Mathises into a couple invested enough in trans issues to have
packed all five kids into their enormous
wheelchair-accessible van for the two-anda-half-day drive here to the annual TransHealth Conference, on what amounts to
their first family vacation.
As the hotel fills with families checking in, the lobby takes on the gushy feel of
a reunion, with parents whooping as they
greet one another and proudly introduce
their kids, who are running everywhere. “I
have three girls: two biological, one trans,”
one mom says to another by way of introduction. The most striking thing about the
crowd is their ordinariness: just a bunch of
earnest suburban moms and dads, accompanied by young children still so androgynous-looking that the trans kids are indistinguishable from their non-trans siblings.
Coy races by, shrieking with glee while
getting a piggyback ride from an older kid.
This evening Coy is wearing a mint-green
The ruling in Coy’s favor is
the nation’s very first to
uphold the rights of trans
students and is being viewed
as a landmark case.
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Kathryn says. “But if we can get the big
fight over with to make sure these places know they have to follow the law, then
maybe we won’t have to do it forever.”
The Mathises filed a discrimination
complaint with the Colorado Division of
Civil Rights. They withdrew Coy and her
siblings from school, explaining to the kids
that the school wasn’t being very nice right
now and that Mommy was going to be
their teacher for a while. Coy understood.
“The school is being mean to me,” she said.
“They’re telling me I’m a boy when I’m really a girl.” With that, the Mathises were
ready to take the next afrmative step.
O
n a b a nqu et t e i n
the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Philadelphia, on the eve of the
Trans-Health Conference, the moms are
drinking wine. “My mother says, ‘What
does she want for Christmas?’ ” says Kristine Janovitz, speaking of her 12-year-old
trans daughter. “I said, ‘A vagina!’”
Everyone around the table roars with
appreciative laughter, including Kathryn
Mathis, who looks shyly down at the table.
Kathryn could never be so open with her
own conservative, religious Texan family,
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dress with a butterfly print, pink leggings
and pink patent-leather shoes, her babyfine golden wavy hair pinned back with
two sparkly flower barrettes. As she shows
of by carefully balancing a dime on the tip
of her dainty ballet flat – “Look what I can
do!” she squeals, then wrinkles her brow
to better concentrate on lifting her pointed toe an inch higher – it seems impossible
to imagine that she is anything but a girl.
But with older trans kids tearing about
the conference, the Mathises get a glimpse
of how puberty will change everything for
Coy, and that’s a major reason why they
are here in Philadelphia: for the camaraderie, yes, and for present-day guidance,
but mostly to start amassing information
on what Coy’s future might hold.
The prevailing train of thought from
the afrmative camp goes like so: If these
kids are truly trans, why should they endure the horrific transformation of developing the “wrong” adolescent body in puberty – a trans girl with an Adam’s apple
and a low voice; a trans boy coping with
breasts and a monthly period – with all the
wrenching emotional consequences, only
to have to medically undo those changes
later in life, with less-than-ideal results?
Rather, a few clinics have adopted a series of medical interventions to delay puberty and then, later, give kids a smoother
gender reassignment. The first step, sometimes as early as age nine, are medications
called puberty blockers, which stave of
secondary sex characteristics, buying families precious decision-making time until
they feel sure of the child’s wishes. Though
concerns remain about whether kids on
puberty blockers develop adequate bone
density, pediatrician Olson says blockers
are an efective low-risk tool when used for
the short term: “The blockers allow us to
push the pause button and let kids explore
gender during what are really the most difficult years,” adding that if kids ultimately decide not to continue the regimen, they
could simply stop taking the meds, and
anatomical puberty begins.
Assuming the kid is still insistent,
though, step two begins in adolescence:
With the child’s prepubescent body a relative hormonal blank slate, cross-sex hormones are introduced, so that the child’s
body blossoms into his or her preferred
gender – resulting in a gender reassignment with far more convincing-looking
results than for those who transition as
adults. Step two is also the point at which
there’s no turning back, since once a child’s
voice drops, or there’s significant breast development, those changes will remain even
if they come of the drugs. And then, eventually, there’s step three: “bottom” surgery,
if they choose, at age 18 or older.
This path through adolescence can be
a frightening prospect even for the most
trans-positive parents. If early social tran-
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
sition is about following a gender-f luid
child’s lead into a possibly temporary experiment, then medical intervention is the
point at which parents take charge and decide their child’s permanent outcome. Before turning 18, a kid may wish for gender
reassignment, but he or she cannot legally
go down that path without parental consent; that burden falls on the adults. “Even
for the most accepting of parents, it’s very
much a grief process,” says Olson. “You’re
losing your son and gaining a daughter.”
And then there’s a parent’s worst fear:
Maybe they’re making a colossal, life-altering mistake for their child.
But at the conference over the next few
days, the Mathises will witness firsthand
the ramifications of not taking action,
when they survey their fellow attendees
swamping the Pennsylvania Convention
Center: beefy matrons who call to mind
Mrs. Doubtfire; delicate men sporting
overcompensatory beards; towering divas
with fantasy curves; and so many shades
of in-between as to make a conventioneer thankful for the name badges listing
everyone’s “preferred pronoun.” The fact
that their appearances are confusing even
here at the Trans-Health Conference, the
most safe and afrming venue on Earth, is
a painful reminder that out in the world,
these people are not “passing” – few have
the privilege of anonymity – and each has
to live with the scrutiny that brings.
A child like Coy, however, could have
the power to change public perception of
trans people. High-profile trans actors like
Laverne Cox on Orange Is the New Black,
or trans teenage characters like Wade
“Unique” Adams on Glee – and, more controversially, Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning – have brought transgender people a
level of visibility they’ve never before enjoyed. But such spokespeople could never
normalize transgenderism in the culture
as compellingly as a kid like Coy – whose
total inhabitancy of her gender identity is
right on the surface, undeniable, as is her
guileless wish to be accepted for who she
really is.
D
ays after the
Mat h i s f a m i ly r e turned home from the
convention, in June,
they discovered that
the C olora do Civ il
Rights Division had rendered a verdict
on their discrimination complaint against
Coy’s school. Director Steven Chavez had
weighed the case and decided resoundingly in Coy’s favor, granting her the right to
use the girls’ restroom, and coming down
hard on the Fountain-Fort Carson school
district for depriving Coy of her rights.
“Telling [Coy] that she must disregard her
identity while performing one of the most
essential human functions . . . creates an
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environment that is objectively and subjectively hostile,” Chavez wrote in his scathing
14-page ruling, adding that the school’s rationale behind forcing Coy to use a diferent bathroom is “reminiscent of the ‘separate but equal’ philosophy.”
The determination is the nation’s very
first to effectively uphold the rights of
trans students to use the bathrooms ref lective of their identities, and is being
viewed as a landmark case. “This decision happened in the middle of a cresting
wave,” says Eliza Byard, executive director
of the Gay Lesbian & Straight Education
Network. “This case was hugely important
to calling attention to the fact that when it
comes down to it, schools have an obligation not to discriminate.”
Not surprisingly, Focus on the Family’s Jef Johnston expresses disappointment with the ruling. “We don’t think it’s
healthy for girls to be exposed to a boy who
thinks he’s a girl in a bathroom,” Johnston
says. And he gently invites the Mathises
to seek counseling and stop screwing up
their kid. “It’s got to be painful to reject
your own masculinity. That’s painful internal conflict for a child,” he reflects. “You
want to afrm his essence and the goodness of being a boy – that your masculinity is a good thing, and it comes from God.”
The Mathises don’t pay such people
much mind. “All we ever wanted was for
Coy’s school to treat her the same as other
little girls,” says Kathryn. “We are extremely happy with the result.” Nevertheless, Coy won’t be returning to Eagleside
Elementary. The Mathises have moved
an hour and a half away to Aurora, where
they hope to get a fresh start in the more
progressive Denver metropolitan area.
The Mathises have been impressed with
how receptive Coy’s new school district
has been in dealing with its first openly
trans student, even going so far as to enroll
Coy as a girl – in accordance with Coy’s
new passport, obtained with the help of
doctors’ letters, which labels her as female
– and reassuring the Mathises that no one,
other than a few key stafers, would need
to know that Coy is transgender. As far as
Coy’s classmates know, she is just another
second-grade girl.
Coy loves her new school. “She already
has tons of friends, all girly-girl friends,”
says Kathryn. Her parents have been
cheered by the way Coy has flourished into
such a happy little girl – it feels like a signal that they’re heading in the right direction. And at her birthday party in September, under the pink and purple Chinese
lanterns that hung from the Mathis’ living
room ceiling, wearing the Wonder Woman
outfit Grandma had sent as a gift, Coy
stood with wide eyes as her pink kittycat cake appeared, topped with a glowing
candle shaped like the number seven. She
closed her eyes and made a wish.
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NEW ALBUMS............................ Pg. 68
SINGLES......................................... Pg. 69
MOVIES ........................................... Pg. 74
CHARTS........................................... Pg. 78
Arcade Fire’s Dance-Rock Epic
Montreal crew gets
a groove infusion on
its most ambitious –
and best – album yet
Arcade Fire
Reflektor Merge
HHHH½
BY DAVID FRICKE
“If this is heaven/I need something more,” Win Butler and
Régine Chassagne, Arcade
Fire’s founding singers, declare
in close, almost whispered harmony as the opening title song
of their band’s extraordinary
new album goes into high gear.
“Reflektor” is seven and a half
busy minutes of art and party.
Over a strident-disco hybrid
of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss
You” and Yoko Ono’s “Walking
on Thin Ice,” Arcade Fire and
their new co-producer, James
Murphy of LCD Soundsystem,
throw brittle-fuzz guitar licks,
grunting bass, mock-grand
piano and ballooning synth
chords across deep reverb like
frantic instrumental argument. They also find room for
David Bowie, one of Arcade
Fire’s first and biggest fans,
who sings with Butler near the
end and repurposes the descending vocal flourish from
his 1975 hit “Fame.”
The way Butler and Chassagne, who are married, sing
those lines in “Reflektor” is a
sublime moment in the commotion. It is also a perfect
summary of their group’s stillfervent indie-born hunger after a decade of mainstream
success, and specifically, the
decisive, indulgent ambition
on Ref lektor: a two-record,
75-minute set of 13 songs and
the best album Arcade Fire
Illustration by Jeffrey Smith
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67
REVIEWS MUSIC
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LISTEN NOW!
Hear key tracks from
these albums at
rollingstone.com/albums.
68
disc, is hardcore punk. But the
blitz quickly drops into meatier
surprise: a Gary Glitter-style
stomp. The song – a memorial
to female strength and sacrifice
– surges to an inevitable conclusion: long keyboard sighs and
Chassagne singing in French
through warping electronics,
as if from inside a ring of fire. It
is a dynamic, poignant finish,
and I doubt anyone would feel
cheated or unhappy if Reflektor
ended right there.
But the two discs have their
own mood swings, the second
less manic and more plaintive,
even luxuriant at times. The
sequence is loosely based on
Greek myth – the rapture, violent separation and eventual
reunion of the lovers Eurydice,
a nymph, and the musician Orpheus (depicted on the album’s
cover). “Feels like it never ends/
Here comes the night again,”
Butler sings with an eerie-Neil
Young effect in a reprise of
“Here Comes the Night Time,”
before the trouble starts.
There is dance music in this
half of Reflektor too: the industrial-funk strut and Bowieesque vocal glaze of “It’s Never
Over (Oh Orpheus)”; the “Blue
Monday”-prime New Order all
over “Afterlife.” But this is the
push and pull of loss and hope,
utter despair and the refusal
to quit. “I gotta know/Can we
work it out/Scream and shout/
Till we work it out,” Butler and
Chassagne ask each other, in
heated unison, in “Afterlife,”
before Reflektor dissolves into
the warm vocal-and-electronic
exhale of “Supersymmetry.”
There is no specific resolution
by then. But there is calm, at
least for now.
It is tempting to call Reflektor Arcade Fire’s answer to the
Rolling Stones’ 1972 double
LP, Exile on Main Street. The
similarities (length, churn, all
that reverb) make it easy. But
Reflektor is closer to turningpoint classics such as U2’s Achtung Baby and Radiohead’s
Kid A – a thrilling act of risk
and renewal by a band with
established commercial appeal and a greater fear of the
average, of merely being liked.
“If that’s what’s normal now,
I don’t want to know,” Butler sings on “Normal Person,”
sounding like a guy for whom
even this heaven, next time,
won’t be enough.
No
more
teenage
dreams:
Perry
Katy Tastes
the Rainbow
Max Martin, Dr. Luke help Perry make a more
adventurous version of her Earth-ruling pop
Katy Perry Prism Capitol HHH
Katy Perry’s 2010 album, Teenage Dream,
was such a massive blockbuster that we’ve
had to wait three years for the follow-up
where she reveals the multifaceted artist
behind the fun pop sheen. And Prism is as
prismatic as all get-out: There’s the Blakean feline of “Roar,”
the trap-rap interlocutor of “Dark Horse” (featuring Juicy
J of Three 6 Mafia), the jet-set gal pal of “International
Smile.” On “Ghost,” she lances the boil on her soul that is
Russell Brand. On “This Is How We Do,” she’s a liberated
weekday warrior, going from all-night parties with the boys
to “Japaneezy” nail appointments to kamikaze Mariah
karaoke. It’s amazing she was able to
KEY TRACKS:
cram all this Katy onto one album.
“Legendary
Some of Teenage Dream’s sunny efer- Lovers,” “Roar”
vescence remains intact here (“Time to
bring out the big balloons,” she promises on the lush disco
shwanger “Birthday”). But Perry and her longtime collaborators Dr. Luke and Max Martin often go for a darker,
moodier intimacy à la high-end Swedish divas Robyn and
Lykke Li. Songs like “Legendary Lovers” and “Unconditionally” set stark revelations to torrential Euro splendor.
Perry has always done a great job of letting us know she’s in
on the joke of pop stardom. Sadly, she doesn’t always bring
that same sense of humor and self-awareness to the joke
of pop-star introspection. The album’s raft of ripe-lotus
ballads is larded with Alanis-ian poesy she can’t pull of: “I
thank my sister for keeping my head above the water/When
the truth was like swallowing sand,” she sings on “By the
Grace of God.” A California girl should know that there are
better things to do at the beach.
JON DOLAN
WorldMags.net
Ratings are supervised by the editors of R OLLING S TONE .
HHHHH Classic | HHHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
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have ever made. Founded in
2003, the Montreal-based
band – which includes multiinstrumentalists Richard Reed
Parry and Butler’s brother Will,
bassist Tim Kingsbury and
drummer Jeremy Gara – has
always thought and acted big,
using serious echo and drumcircle-like percussion to amplify the emotional mysteries
in Win’s U2-meets-ellipticalSpringsteen writing. Arcade
Fire’s third album, 2010’s The
Suburbs, was urgent and clear,
a record about dreams and escape, gassed with classic-rock
punch. It was a Number One
hit and rightly won a Grammy
for Album of the Year.
Reflektor is even better, for
this reason: the jarring, charging union of Murphy’s moderndance acumen and post-punk
sabotage with Arcade Fire’s
natural gallop and ease with
Caribbean rhythm. (Chassagne
is of Haitian descent; she and
Butler have been active in relief
eforts there.) Murphy worked
on all but two songs, with most
of those tracks near or more
than six minutes long. The result is an epic made for dancing
and sequenced like whiplash.
“We Exist” rolls like the popleaning late-Eighties Cure,
then butts into the paranoid
mule-kick reggae of “Flashbulb Eyes.” “Here Comes the
Night Time” abruptly zigzags
between rapid Haitian drumming and a Talking Heads-atthe-beach stroll – as if Murphy and the band can’t decide
which night they like best –
while “You Already Know” is
buoyant New Wave Motown,
with Chassagne’s half of the
call-response chorus sparkling
in the reverb. That song has to
be a single. It ought to be a hit.
Arcade Fire don’t play a lot of
straight-up heads-down rock &
roll. But they are damn good at
it. “Normal Person” starts with
a joke (the sound-efect chaos
of a club band plugging in for
a night’s work), then sounds
like Butler singing in front of
the Velvet Underground with a
wobbly Little Richard on piano.
The opening shock of “Joan of
Arc,” the last track on the first
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Singer-rapper returns with a crazy
quilt of provocations and neon beats
M.I.A. Matangi Interscope HHH½
If Maya Arulpragasam has
a persecution complex, she’s
earned it. “Let you into Super Bowl/You tried to steal
Madonna’s crown/What the
fuck you on about?” she spits
KEY
on “Boom Skit,” conjuring her
TRACKS:
haters: generic racists, critical
“Bad Girls,”
magazine profilers, and the
“Matangi”
NFL litigators reportedly suing her for $1.5 mil for her bird-flip during her
2012 halftime performance with Madonna.
It’s a telling moment on her fourth LP, a mixtape-style mash-up of political provocations,
ripostes, tough-gal love songs, neon DJ memes
and ass-whooping South Asian-spiced beats.
Like Kanye West, M.I.A. seemingly needs
haters for fuel. On Matangi, her tank’s full.
The standouts are rewinds: “Bad Girls,”
the Arabic-f lavored club anthem from the
2010 Vicki Leekx mixtape, and “Come Walk
With Me,” a lover’s proposal teased last year
in a video post, here reworked with echoes of
her signature “Paper Planes.” It furthered the
rumor Matangi would be a “positive” LP, but
even her bedroom-R&B attempts – “Exodus”
Valerie June
Pushin’ Against a Stone
Concord HHH½
Folk songs meet crate-digger
R&B on Black Key-helmed debut
Preach
like a
priest,
sing like
a whore:
M.I.A.
and “Sexodus” – are skeptical interrogations.
She shows little need to resolve contradictions
or make her dazzling scraps cohere. But the
magic is in the frisson. “Preach like a priest/I
sing like a whore,” goes the quiltlike, Switchproduced title track. And the contradictions
keep coming.
WILL HERMES
The label debut by Tennesseeto-New York transplant Valerie June is a remarkably
braided album of roots music,
connecting country, string
band, gospel, blues and R&B
traditions so fluently, it’s like
the racially cleaved styles
never needed connecting. Dan
Auerbach adds his signature
crate-digger production and
guitar sizzle, but back-porch-y
tunes like “Somebody to Love,”
with Luca Kézdy’s delicious
fiddle, are no less rousing than
the juke-jointy ones. Credit
June’s vinegary, slightly oddball vocals, equal parts Diana
Ross and Dolly Parton, which
guide each song like an old
tractor retrofit with LED high
beams: luminous, ancient, unstoppable.
WILL HERMES
SINGLES
Skrillex and Alvin Risk
“Try It Out (Try Harder
Mix)” HHH½
American dubstep’s biggest
star teams up with D.C.
up-and-comer Risk for a
thrilling night drive through
a neon city. The skidding FX
and slam-dunk bass aren’t
surprising, but the way they
leaven it with chilly keyboards gives it both craft and
staying power.
MICHAELANGELO MATOS
FROM TOP: DANIEL SANNWALD; JIMMY KING; C FLANIGAN/FILMMAGIC
David Bowie
“Love Is Lost (Hello Steve
Reich Mix by James
Murphy for the DFA)”
HHH½
James Murphy of LCD
Soundsystem unretired
from remixing to make
this bold 10-minute
“Hello Steve Reich Mix”
of Bowie’s “Love Is
Lost.” He starts with
halting hand claps
(inspired by Reich)
and prolongs
a disjointed mood in the
first half, until the keyboard
hook from Bowie’s “Ashes
to Ashes” cues the drop of
a minimalist groove that’s
blue, blue, electric blue.
Murphy’s coup is
to ship Bowie
back to Berlin.
Deadmau5 and
Jonathan Doyon
“Suckfest9001” HHH
Joel Zimmerman and his
rodent headpiece can
be predictably
commercial. But
this buzzing
electro-house
ROB TANNENBAUM
jam breaks into
a cool, extended
TLC
trance build-up
“Meant to Be”
before the intro
Bowie
HH½
rif zooms back in
The third TLCaround the five-minute
greatest-hits album since
mark – an unexpected move
the death of the goddess Lisa
on first hearing that remains
“Left Eye” Lopes comes with
welcome each time after. M.M.
this new Ne-Yo-penned track,
which recalls the lilting
Paris Hilton feat.
prettiness and the
Lil Wayne
sweet realism of
“Good Time” H½
the group’s finest
No needless disrespect to
moments, minus the
Hilton, who has put out
crazysexy drive
listenable and even enjoyable
that made
music in the past, but
their legend.
Skrillex
rave-by-numbers tracks like
Like a lot of
this are often the reason pop
music today,
music gets a bad rap to begin
it’s sort of
with. Worst of, sadly, is
like the
Wayne, a rapper who once
Nineties, just
had everything to lose.
not as fun.
JON DOLAN
MIKE POWELL
Preservation
Hall Jazz Band
That’s It! Sony/Legacy
HHH½
New Orleans institution, MMJ
leader let the good times roll
This New Orleans crew has
been keepers of local jazz tradition for more than 50 years,
but it has never recorded an LP
of original material until now.
With help from songwriters
like Paul “Rainbow Connection” Williams and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James
contributing the reverently
hands-of production, the band
manages a set that subtly plays
with history. “August Nights,”
a bulletin from “the sorry side
of the street,” has post-Katrina
resonance, and the groove of
“I Think I Love You” connects
Basin Street and Brazil. The
rockingest thing here is the
title track, a tuba-charged, elephantine rumbler that could’ve
crushed it at the Cotton Club.
JON DOLAN
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
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REVIEWS MUSIC
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UPDATE: DANCE
Motörhead
Willie Nelson
HHH
HHH
To All the Girls Sony/Legacy
Aftershock UDR Music/UDR GMBH
Willie hooks up with Dolly,
Loretta and more for duets LP
Even as Lemmy Kilmister
closes in on 70, Motörhead’s
avalanche rock & roll still
makes most metal sound rigid
in comparison. On Aftershock,
“Lost Woman Blues” and “Dust
and Glass” relax enough to tap
Britain’s 1960s blues revival.
But your main choice, as ever,
is between fast and faster. Endlessly obsessed with damned
dames and the fugitive life,
K i l m i s t er r em a i n s mo s t
powerful at his most apocalyptic: piling up molten “Train
Kept A Rollin’ ” rifs in “Death
Machine”; “wishing that the
future didn’t look so grim” in
“End of Time.” Having gone
through a series of health issues,
he stares mortality directly
in the eye – but that’s his job,
right?
CHUCK EDDY
Dean Wareham
Emancipated Hearts
Head-Trip EDM
Three spacey and adventurous new albums
that work the club inside your mind
Four Tet Beautiful Rewind Text HHH½
Kieran Hebden makes electronic-dance tracks
for cosmic states of mind. Beautiful Rewind,
the U.K. native’s seventh LP as Four Tet, mixes
club-ready rhythms with touches of brain-melt
psychedelia: “Gong” opens with rumbling
drums and shaky metallic clangs active beneath
KEY
alien-vocal coos, as if lifted from a ritual by
TRACKS:
some deep-space tribe. Other tracks range
“Gong,”
from synths-on-the-fritz freakouts (“Parallel
“Parallel
jalebi”) to mantric spells of samples tweaked
jalebi”
through trance-inducing repetition (“Ba teaches
yoga”). A focus on beats and ecstatic dance fever comes at the
expense of more expansive songcraft revealed by Four Tet of
yore, but the efect remains otherworldly in its mix of finesse
and raucous musical adventure.
ANDY BATTAGLIA
Darkside Psychic Other People/Matador HHH½
Double Feature
HHH½
Late-night beauty for aging
indie-pop sweethearts
Dean Wareham is one of the
great New York guitar sophisticates, crafting soft, elegant
indie rock in Galaxie 500,
Luna and his husband-wife
duo, Dean and Britta. He’s now
an Angeleno, and his first solo
album is characteristically refined and intimate, sung in a
hymnlike mumble and steeped
in the Velvet Underground,
classical string drones, synthpop and country music (the
digital-only version has a great
Everly Brothers cover). Songs
like “The Deadliest Day Since
the Invasion Began” evoke loss,
sorrow and political angst but
always with great warmth;
when he sings, “We’ll find a way
to make the piggies pay,” it’s a
protest slogan that feels like
highbrow pillow talk. JON DOLAN
70 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
Four Tet in
New York
in May
rollingstone.com
Producer Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave
Harrington’s moody, seductive music unfolds
with the patience of minimal techno but often
sounds more like spacey classic rock set to
a beat. Structures are never as important as
atmosphere, and though some tracks are slow
getting going, the best of them (“The Only Shrine I’ve Seen”
and “Freak, Go Home”) focus with almost religious intensity
– a loose, organic approach that makes Harrington’s occasionally boilerplate blues rifs and the clumsy vocal tracks easier to
ignore. The sum is music that’s more spiritual than corporeal,
haunted by bursts of static and creaking ambient noise –
late-night disco for the black-light set.
MIKE POWELL
DJ Rashad Double Cup Hyperdub HHH
Chicago producer Rashad Harden’s instrumentals feel like cars hydroplaning toward brick walls
– somehow both weightless and brutally powerful. Blending a local style of dance music called
footwork with contemporary trap-rap, Double
Cup is a dense, dizzying album haunted by soulvocal loops and high-hats tapping out Hail Marys in a kind of
frantic Morse code. Between the crisp top layer and blurry sub
bass is a silence blacker than the dead of night. Thrilling in fiveminute bursts, a little tiring over a 50-minute LP, Rashad gives
us a take on minimalism in the no-attention-span era: repetitive,
ominous, eerily calm but always threatening to explode.
M.P.
WorldMags.net
“From Here to the Moon and
Back,” the pledge of eternal
devotion (with Dolly Parton)
that opens Willie Nelson’s conceptual collection of duets with
women, has major weddingdance potential. But several of
the pairings that follow lament
unions that couldn’t work.
Nelson’s partners, sometimes
updating songs he cut years
ago, span the country spectrum from folk to pop. Weepers
and waltzes prevail, but standouts push beyond that: Shelby
Lynne’s Western swing, Alison Krauss’ dark Latin tinge,
Wynonna Judd’s husky honkytonk blues, Mavis Staples’ Bill
Withers soul cover. And Nelson holds his unmistakable
own throughout, like no other
80-year-old could. CHUCK EDDY
BAND
TO
WATCH
Swearin’
Surfing Strange Salinas
HHH½
Indie kids brilliantly capture the
mood of youth going nowhere
If you’re looking for a guided
tour of the eternal-turning-23
blues, you can’t do better than
the second Swearin’ album.
These indie kids spend the LP
driving on the turnpike, listening to the crunch of the black
ice, wondering when they’re
going to give up running from
whatever they’re running from.
Allison Crutchfield and Kyle
Gilbride trade girl-boy vocals,
as the band goes for a pop-punk
crunch that recalls Superchunk or Bleach-era Nirvana.
Crutchfield, whose twin sister,
Katie, is in the excellent band
Waxahatchee, sings like she’s
left some blood on the tracks
behind her, venting about
“grudges unrequited,” doomed
crushes, broken relationships –
all the things that keep a young
woman alive.
ROB SHEFFIELD
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
JEREMY ROSS
Lemmy’s indestructible sound
and unshakable will
WorldMags.net
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REVIEWS MUSIC
WorldMags.net
BOOKS
Before They Were Fab
Tune In – The Beatles: All These
Years Vol. 1 Mark Lewisohn
Crown
HHHH
Never mind that epic, multivolume
studies are generally reserved for
stuf like the rise and fall of Rome:
The Beatles were bound to get
this sort of treatment, so here’s a
chance to rock out at max length.
And Mark Lewisohn does just
that in the first book of his three-volume
bio. Tune In runs 932 pages and ends before
Please Please Me is in the can. Skeptics will
argue that it’s all been said before, and while
a lot of it has, it’s all in the same place now.
There are fresh bits, but nothing on the order
of, say, Pete Best writing the early classics.
Instead, we get a new appreciation for
Beatle bonds. These guys lived in one
another’s pockets, fucked in front of one
another, and forged an unassailable “us
against the world” union. Lewisohn’s prose
can be workmanlike, and the man really
likes ellipses. The result is a sort of readable
reference book, with a lot of people trying
Sky Ferreira
The
Beatles
in 1962
Omar Souleyman
Night Time, My Time
Capitol HH½
Young synth-popper missed the
Eighties, loves the Eighties
The full-length debut from
model-actress-singer Sky Ferreira sounds like a soundtrack
for the Breakfast Club remake
playing in her head. Ferreira
airlifts her electropop hooks
straight from the Eighties, her
yelping, surly vocals frosted
with thick production and
her constant synths reflecting
every Tears for Fears anthem
ever blasted during a coastal
joyride. Some of the modern
EDM heaviness of Icona Pop
and Sleigh Bells kicks in latently, but the 21-year-old’s
iciness ultimately fails to
charm. Although, between
its well-placed chimes and
the propulsive hook about
ephemeral love, “24 Hours”
sounds like the Simple Minds
song you didn’t know you wanted to hear.
STACEY ANDERSON
72 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
to help a band for reasons no one seems to
understand, other than a prevailing notion that
“something’ll happen.” They almost break up a
bunch of times – new deets there – but it’s the
esprit de corps of early rock & roll culture that
powers book and band. Lewisohn makes you
want to crank Johnny Burnette and Ray Charles,
just as the Beatles did. In those moments, it’s
like writer, band and reader align to make a big,
prose-y chord – a nice way to feel reconnected to
a story you already mostly knew.
COLIN FLEMING
Wenu Wenu Ribbon Music
HHH½
Syrian pop star goes global
Wedding-singer-cum-Björk
remixer Omar Souleyman is
known for urban Syrian dabke
dance music. But his hookahbar synths, guitar-hero electric
saz runs and blazing digitized
hand percussion will probably
translate to most Western ravers as EDM-grade belly-dance
music. And why not? Singing in
Arabic and Kurdish, he pitches
R&B woo, invoking camelhair scarves (“Yagbuni”) and
Damascus honeymoons (the
Arab-world hit “Khattaba”)
with ferocious vocal fricatives,
while producer Kieran Hebdan
(Four Tet) sharpens the attacks
and decays without diluting
the style. Occasional Allah
invocations notwithstanding, this is party music, to be
sure – it’s a hot, fresh and, given our domestic Arab-phobia,
radical sound.
WILL HERMES
rollingstone.com
High Rise Play Pen
HH
STP return with Linkin Park
singer and some tepid tunes
Beyond replacing Scott Weiland with a moonlighting
Chester Benning ton from
Linkin Park, this EP – STP’s
skimpy return after three
years – doesn’t take chances.
All five songs check in between
3:15 and 3:32, and they’re all
midtempo. “Black Heart” and
“Cry Cry” at least manage a
moderately garage-y, vaguely
AC/DC-like boogie stomp, and
Dean DeLeo sneaks in passably rustic guitar fills here and
there. But the bright powerglam bounce that the band often achieved behind Weiland
is missing. And closing with
a dreary number called “Tomorrow” was a lapse in judgment – in the realm of fake
grunge, Silverchair own that
title forever.
CHUCK EDDY
Diane Birch
White Denim
HHH
Downtown
Speak a Little Louder S-Curve
Soul-soothing singer-songwriter
with a side of artiness
Diane Birch’s second album
trades up the rootsy comfort
food of her debut for something more sophisticated and
atmospheric – think early Kate
Bush, or maybe Carly Simon
put on dry ice. What Birch’s
voice can’t handle alone is
carried by her arrangements,
which occasionally get lost in
the smoke and mirrors of socalled good taste. Birch doesn’t
sound quite like Adele or Feist,
but she’s probably aware
of both, and here she joins
the ranks of adult-contemporary singers for a new generation, which, when it comes to
music, at least, likes to relax
more or less the same way the
old one did. “It’s hard to be
pretty in pain,” she sings. You’d
never know it by how poised
she sounds.
MIKE POWELL
WorldMags.net
Corsicana Lemonade
HHH½
Texas guitar band puts its
ADD to excellent use
Texas rockers White Denim
have a rich sense of rock history
and a 21st-century attention
span – like Steely Dan raised
on video games and weed. At
times, their blender whir of
blues boogie, hippie country,
jazz rock and psychedelia can
be a bit too-too head-spinning.
But as with the quartet’s great
2011 album, D, there are moments on Corsicana Lemonade when all of the pieces click
perfectly into place; “A Place
to Start” rolls along on a velvet soft-rock groove, and on
nearly every song, the band’s
knack for compacting oblong,
ramble-tamble jams into tight,
buzzing puzzles is dazzling. Are
these great songs? Not really.
But they’re great four-minute
workouts.
JON DOLAN
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
HARRY HAMMOND/V&A/GETTY IMAGES
Massive bio shows the act you haven’t
entirely known for all these years
Stone Temple Pilots
WorldMags.net
Van the Man:
Morrison in
Woodstock
in 1970
The 1975
The Head and the Heart
HH
HHH
The 1975 Vagrant/Interscope
Let’s Be Still Sub Pop
British foursome nearly drown
in sea of Eighties nostalgia
The 1975 could use some enunciation lessons and an editor: Their
debut, a Top 40 hit in America, is
a long, often inscrutable set that
rifles through synth-rock references like Neon Trees doing a poor
M83 impression. Their wouldbe smash, “Sex,” is LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” via the
Killers’ “Somebody Told Me,” but
the LP mostly forces unconvincing emo lyrics into a bloopy 1980s
package.
CARYN GANZ
The folk-pop tent revival
continues unabated
Extremely Deep
Into the Mystic
“The world’s just spinning a little
too fast,” declare these Seattle folk
rockers on album number two,
earnestly pumping the brakes.
Their strummy singalongs make
them kin to the Mumfords, their
choral singing to neighbors Fleet
Foxes. But they’re most compelling when the harmonies fray
(“Fire/Fear”) and whenever marble-mouth singer-violinist Charity Rose Thielen grabs the mic
(“Summertime”).
WILL HERMES
Van’s greatest album gets supersized with a
caravan of rarities, outtakes and early versions
Van Morrison Moondance (Deluxe Edition)
Royal Bangs
Brass Modern Art
HH½
Tennessee rockers, Patrick
Carney smooth out their edges
Royal Bangs have slid from
the noisy toe-tappers of earlier
records to a brighter pastiche of
styles heard on their fourth album
– a transformation not unlike the
Black Keys’, whose Patrick Carney
produced Brass. But it’s hard not
to hear stronger bands all over
the LP. The sweeping “Laurel”
could be a My Morning Jacket
B side, and ELO get a workout on
“Octagon.” Do the Shins know
about “Better Run”?
JOE GROSS
Warner Bros.
HHHH½
“Here we go to the main course!” ad-libs Van
Morrison on an extended “Caravan,” one
of the shaggy outtakes on this five-disc unpacking of the Belfast bard’s 1970 jazzy-pop
masterpiece. That LP is nearly all main
course, and if the numerous alternate takes here often feel
incomplete without their sublime, brassy final arrangements,
they compensate with intimacy – see “Into the Mystic,” take
11, mainly just Morrison and acoustic guitar. The set’s grail
is the long-lost outtake “I Shall Sing,” a Caribbean-style confection that became a signature for many (Miriam Makeba,
Judy Mowatt, Art Garfunkel). Its author delivers a meaty,
scatted-up reading here, alongside a ferocious early version of
the soul burner “I’ve Been Working” (His Band and the Street
Choir) and a roadhouse-piano reading of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” – the sound of
an Irish bluesman cruising at high altitude.
WILL HERMES
AFI
Burials Republic
HH
Punk rockers skew toward the
glum and the generic
AFI enter their too-big-to-fail
phase with the kind of glum altrock tailor-made for the end credits of action movies. “17 Crimes”
and “Greater Than 84” survive
with the band’s flair for camp still
intact. Others drown in pools of
eyeliner. Flamboyant, serious,
plagued by problems he never gets
too specific about, Davey Havok
invents a role part Morrissey, part
Bret Michaels – hair-metal pinup
for the Hot Topic era. MIKE POWELL
DVDS
Madonna: The MDNA Tour
Interscope
HHH½
FROM TOP: © THE ESTATE OF DAVID GAHR; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE
Madonna’s recent world tour
reminded all comers that she still
rules when it comes to meticulously
crafted, over-the-top spectacle. The
Miami show documented here is an
inclusive dance party wrapped in
bofo theatrical set pieces. There’s
a striptease to “Human Nature,” a version of
“Open Your Heart” reworked with Basque
musicians and “Like a Virgin” performed as an
aching piano ballad. For “Express Yourself,” she
does a baton-twirling routine and seamlessly
interpolates the chorus of Lady Gaga’s “Born
This Way” into her own song. There’s also a
behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals in which
Madonna gives instructions in French and looks
on as male dancers gamely hoof it in high heels
to “Girls Gone Wild”: “Gold star, gold star,” she
says like a loving teacher. Her concerts are still a
JON DOLAN
master class.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
Jimi Hendrix – Hear My Train
A Comin’
Experience Hendrix/Legacy
HHHH½
Yet another Hendrix doc? At
least it’s a great one. This American Masters doc is clearly timed
to coattail All Is by My Side, the
biopic starring OutKast’s André
Benjamin to which the Hendrix
estate denied music-use rights.
They’re certainly on board for this film, which
includes interviews with the Hendrix family,
girlfriends, journalists and Paul McCartney. But
the star is the music, showcased with a spectacular audio mix. In one bit of tape-vault magic,
engineer Eddie Kramer plays back the dazzling
vocal track from “Castles Made of Sand.” Newly
found footage from the 1968 Miami Pop Festival
adds to a well-known story. Yet it’s the familiar –
including the proud, heartbroken “Star-Spangled
Banner” from Woodstock – that still, somehow,
WILL HERMES
remains most astonishing.
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TWO FOR THE ROAD
Leto and McConaughey
fight to survive a plague.
No Retreat, No Surrender
The 1980s AIDS war sparks career-best acting from McConaughey and Leto By Peter Travers
Matthew McConaughey,
Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
HHH½
it’s ironic and then some
that good ol’ Texas boy Matthew McConaughey, 43, has
found the role of his career
playing a hate-spewing redneck in Dallas Buyers Club. It’s
the true story of Dallas pussyhound Ron Woodroof, a rabid
gay-basher who wound up
helping in the fight against the
AIDS virus, mostly to save his
own rodeo-cowboy ass.
“You hear Rock Hudson was
a cocksucker?” a revolted Ron
asks his buddies when the rugged Hollywood star succumbs
to complications from AIDS
in 1985. Suddenly, the “gay
disease” hits home, especially for Ron, who is diagnosed
with HIV from sex with a female druggie. No matter. His
pals paint the words “faggot
74
blood” on the side of his house
and run the other way. So does
the medical profession. Dr. Sevard (Denis O’Hare) at Dallas Mercy gives Ron 30 days
to live. Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner, a radiant actress of
rare spirit and sensitivity) offers a chance in the form of an
AZT trial. But a chance isn’t
good enough for Ron, whose
body is wasting away (McConaughey dropped 38 pounds for
the role). He steals AZT, and
when that doesn’t work he travels to Mexico to try experimental drugs administered by Dr.
Vass (a terrific Griffin Dunne).
Ron feels alone. The FDA
drags its heels. Big Pharma
keeps pushing costly A ZT.
Gays still make him puke, especially Rayon (Jared Leto),
the transsexual druggie he first
met at the hospital in Dallas.
But Rayon is not to be deterred.
Leto gives an award-caliber
performance of uncanny skill.
He makes sure Rayon never
loses her caustic wit and touchingly beleaguered grace. Leto is
flat-out perfect.
When Ron figures out a way
to jump legal hurdles – he’ll
form a Dallas Buyers Club that
gives away alternative, nonapproved medicines but charges a monthly membership fee
– it’s Rayon who becomes
his right hand. Just don’t expect to find Ron in big hugs
with Rayon and AIDS support
groups. Ron is a hardass, but
his grudging respect for the
gay activists he meets comes
through loud, clear and minus
the usual Hollywood bullshit.
All credit to the impassioned
script from Craig Borten and
Melisa Wallack that started
when Borten first interviewed
Ron in 1992. And to Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée
(C.R.A.Z.Y.) for using hand-held
cameras to keep Ron’s journey
burning with ferocity and feeling. The movie, brutally funny
and vitally touching as it is,
WorldMags.net
HHHH Classic | HHH½ Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
sometimes trips on its ambitions. McConaughey doesn’t.
Much has been written about
his career roll from rom-com
to the highs of Mud, Magic
Mike, Bernie and Killer Joe. But
what McConaughey does here
is transformative. Damn, he’s
good. Ron lived for nearly seven
years after his death sentence.
McConaughey makes sure we
feel his tenacity and triumphs
in the treatment of AIDS. His
explosive, unerring portrayal
defines what makes an actor
great, blazing commitment to
a character and the range to
make every nuance felt.
Bad Grandpa
Johnny Knoxville
Directed by Jef Tremaine
HH½
it’s not re a lly a mov ie.
It’s Johnny Knoxville, 42,
and his Jackass crew faking
out real people into believing
he’s 86-year-old Irving ZisNo v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
ANNE MARIE FOX/FOCUS FEATURES
Dallas Buyers Club
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FROM TOP: SEAN CLIVER/PARAMOUNT PICTURES AND MTV FILMS; IFC FILMS; KERRY BROWN/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
man, an old fart bag traveling cross-country to deliver his
eight-year-old grandson, Billy
(the up-for-anything Jackson
Nicoll), to his father. Mom’s in
jail for being a crack whore.
Even when his balls are hanging out, Grandpa means well. Is
Knoxville going soft on us? Nah.
Bad Grandpa is still the fuckedup family movie of choice, especially if your family has done
jail time. Knoxville remains
an indestructible comic anarchist. But it’s disconcerting to
see the Jackass team of Knoxville, director Jeff Tremaine
and producer Spike Jonze collaborate on a script that has
a beginning, middle and end.
Don’t worry too much. Everything devolves into a series of
hit-and-miss gags as Grandpa
and Billy bust into a wedding,
a funeral, a male strip joint and
a child beauty pageant. Billy
in drag grinds it out to “Cherry Pie.” In Borat style, hidden
cameras catch real people reeling in horror. Hard to believe.
Since MTV spawned
the Jackass series 2
in 2000, followed
by multiple movies
of scary stunts and
scarier self-abuse, the
shock value has worn
off. The Kardashians
have taken reality to
a place no one wants
to be. Knoxville keeps
on keeping on. But
if you’ve seen one old guy shit
himself, you’ve seen them all.
ishing romance. Director and
co-writer Abdellatif Kechiche
(The Secret of the Grain) follows Adèle and Emma through
a decade of roller-coaster emotions that are shaped and broken by sex, love, betrayal and
an unforgiving class system.
The politics of the film, loosely adapted from Julie Maroh’s
2010 graphic novel, can be read
bing pathos as Emma painfully
parts with Adèle. Exarchopoulos, 19, is a ball of fire in a
breakthrough performance of
startling power. Though she
finds a fulfilling career as a
teacher, Adèle never loses the
stinging memory of her first
amour. Love hurts in Blue Is
the Warmest Color. That’s why
it sticks with you.
1
(1) Knoxville and
Nicoll ride in Bad
Grandpa. (2)
Exarchopoulos
(left) and Seydoux
make love in Blue Is
the Warmest Color.
(3) Fassbender
and Bardem in
The Counselor.
3
Blue Is the
Warmest Color
Adèle Exarchopoulos,
Léa Seydoux
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
HHH½
this ardent and affecting French love story, now
unfairly categorized as “that
three-hour lesbian movie,” hits
wide release after taking home
the top prize at the Cannes Film
Festival. Sparks will fly. And
not just for the explicit girl-ongirl action that takes up only
a small percentage of its running time. In detailing the relationship between blue-collar
Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos),
15, and Emma (Léa Seydoux),
an older, sophisticated art
student, Blue Is the Warmest
Color sweeps you up on waves
of humor, heartbreak and ravNo v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
on the expressive faces of these
two unlikely lovers. Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, who deservedly shared the acting
prize at Cannes, give performances of unparalleled intimacy. Seydoux, 28, claimed the
nude scenes made her feel like
a prostitute but denies the sex
was real (“We had fake pussies
on. You have something to protect and tape it under. I don’t
make love onscreen”). Nonetheless, she achieves a stab-
The Counselor
Michael Fassbender, Javier
Bardem, Brad Pitt
Directed by Ridley Scott
HH
w h e n a n i n di s p u t a bl y
great author like Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, The
Road) writes his first original screenplay, attention must
be paid. When that screenplay
turns out to be as clunky as The
Counselor, “forgive and for-
WorldMags.net
get” are the words that come
to mind. Pulitzer Prize winner
McCarthy, 80, has earned his
place in the writing pantheon.
The Coen brothers shaped his
No Country for Old Men into a
Best Picture Oscar winner in
2007 by meshing McCarthy’s
words and their vision with
spare, thrilling exactitude.
No such discipline exists in
The Counselor, a droning meditation on capitalism in the form
of a thriller about cocaine trading on the Tex-Mex border. Director Ridley Scott gets in some
fierce action in the film’s final
third. But the emphasis on talk
leaves the words no room to
breathe, much less resonate.
McCarthy’s name has attracted a starry cast of chatterboxes. Michael Fassbender
plays the title role; no one calls
him anything but “Counselor.”
He naively signs on to expedite the importing of cocaine
from Colombia to Chicago in
a septic-tank truck. His reason for breaking bad? The girl
of his dreams (Penélope Cruz).
In the opening scene, they talk
dirty to each other. “You have
the most luscious pussy in all
of Christendom,” he says. “Oh,
God,” she says. A religious allegory? Let’s hope so. As eroticism, it’s, um, unconvincing.
The Counselor is soon in
over his head. Westray, a middleman played by a bemused
Brad Pitt, sets him straight:
“You think you can live in this
world and not be a part of it?”
Guess not. When the deal goes
bad, a panicked Counselor
turns to the fixer Reiner (Javier Bardem) to save him from
cartel vengeance. But Reiner
has his own problems. He and
his lady Malkina (Cameron
Diaz) enjoy letting two cheetahs run wild in the desert to
(symbol alert) hunt prey.
Reiner recounts a long, descriptive story about how Malkina once fucked his Ferrari.
Then the film shows her doing
it. “It was too gynecological to
be sexy,” says Reiner. I agree.
The rest of the movie piles
on beatings, killings and grisly decapitations punctuated by
conversations about morality.
Oddly, the published screenplay – while far from McCarthy’s top-drawer – reads better
than it plays. What’s onscreen
recalls a line from No Country:
“It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?”
rollingstone.com
| R ol l i n g S t o n e |
75
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CHARTS
1
COLLEGE RADIO
TOP 10 ALBUMS
1
Lorde
“Royals” Lava/Republic
Arctic Monkeys
AM Domino
1
NEW
2
NEW
3
2
4
NEW
Miley Cyrus
Bangerz RCA
Panic! at the Disco
Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die!
Decaydance/Fueled by Ramen
Drake
Nothing Was the Same
Young Money/Cash Money/Republic
Pusha T
My Name Is My Name G.O.O.D./Def Jam
5
1
Justin Timberlake
6
3
Lorde
7
NEW
8
NEW
4 Dr. Dog
9
NEW
Cassadee Pope
5 Franz Ferdinand
10
NEW
Mayday Parade
11
8
Negativity Partisan
12
NEW
7 Elvis Costello
13
4
14
NEW
15
NEW
Cage the Elephant
16
NEW
Amos Lee
17
NEW
18
NEW
19
16
Imagine Dragons
20
12
Florida Georgia Line
21
7
Kings of Leon
22
9
Jack Johnson
23
18
Bruno Mars
24
NEW
25
29
John Legend
26
10
Elton John
4 Xscape
27
15
Robin Thicke
5 Billy Joel
28
13
Justin Moore
29
17
Avenged Sevenfold
30
21
Keith Urban
31
26
Jay Z
32
NEW
33
33
NOW 47
34
23
Tamar Braxton
35
5
Tyler Farr
36
20
Alan Jackson
37
28
2 Chainz
38
30
WOW Hits 2014
39
32
Ariana Grande
40
6
Haim
2 Neko Case
2 Katy Perry
The Worse Things Get, The
Harder I Fight, the Harder
I Fight, the More I Love You Anti-
“Roar” Capitol
3 Avicii
3 Chvrches
“Wake Me Up” PRMD/Island
The Bones of What You Believe
Glassnote
4 Miley Cyrus
“Wrecking Ball” RCA
B-Room Anti-
5 Justin Bieber
“Heartbreaker” Island
Right Thoughts, Right Words,
Right Action Domino
6 Drake
“Hold On, We’re Going Home”
Young Money/Cash Money/Republic
7 Eminem
“Survival” Aftermath/Interscope
6 Deer Tick
and the Roots
Wise Up Ghost Blue Note
8 Ylvis
“The Fox (What Does the Fox
Say?)” Warner Bros.
9 Jay Z
“Holy Grail” Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation
10 Lady Gaga
8 Obits
Bed & Bugs Sub Pop
9 Volcano Choir
Repave Jagjaguwar
MGMT Columbia
COPYRIGHT © 2013 iTUNES
COPYRIGHT © 2013 CMJ HOLDINGS CORP
From the Vault
TOP 10 SINGLES
Mariah Carey
“Dreamlover” Columbia
2 Meat Loaf
“I’d Do Anything for Love
(But I Won’t Do That)” MCA
“All That She Wants” Arista
“Just Kickin’ It” So So Def
“The River of Dreams” Columbia
6 Zhané
On the Cover
“Hey Mr. D.J.” Flavor Unit
7 Tag Team
“Whoomp! (There It Is)” Life
“Right Here/Human Nature/
Downtown” RCA
9 Janet Jackson
“Again” Virgin
10 Tony! Toni! Toné!
“Anniversary” Wing
“The whole success thing, I feel
like everybody else in the band
is a lot happier with it than me.
Happy-go-lucky. They kind of
roll with it. They enjoy it, even.
I can’t seem to do that. It’s not
that I think I’m better than it.
I don’t know. I’m just not that
happy a person.”
—Eddie Vedder
Rolling Stone (ISSN 0035-791x) is published biweekly except for the first issue in July
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78 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
Soundtrack 20th Century Fox TV/Columbia
Korn
Paradigm Shift Prospect Park
Frame by Frame Republic Nashville
Monsters in the Closet Fearless
Cher
Closer to the Truth Warner Bros.
rollingstone.com
The Life of Miley
Miley’s all-out blitz for her
fourth album helped sell
270,000 copies in Week
One – 63 percent more
than her last LP, 2010’s
Can’t Be Tamed.
Alter Bridge
Fortress Alter Bridge/Universal
Luke Bryan
Crash My Party Capitol Nashville
Prince Royce
Soy El Mismo Sony
Melophobia DSP
Mountains of Sorrow, Rivers of Song
Joe Nichols
Crickets Red Bow
Danny Brown
Old Fool’s Gold
Night Visions Kidinakorner/Interscope
Here’s to the Good Times
Panic Attack
Panic! at the Disco toured
with emo-era bros Fall Out
Boy – and got naked in a
video – before releasing
their fourth LP, which sold
84,000 copies in Week One.
Mechanical Bull RCA
From Here to Now to You Brushfire
Unorthodox Jukebox Atlantic
Stone Temple Pilots with
Chester Bennington
High Rise (EP) Play Pen
3 Ace of Base
8 SWV
Glee: The Quarterback (EP)
Republic Nashville
RS 668, October 28th, 1993
1
Pure Heroine Lava/Republic
Blue Note
10 MGMT
“Applause” Interscope
The 20/20 Experience (2 of 2) RCA
Love in the Future G.O.O.D./Columbia
The Diving Board Capitol
Blurred Lines Star Trak/Interscope
Of the Beaten Path Valory
Pusher Man
Pusha T’s first solo album on
Kanye West’s label features
big names like Kendrick
Lamar, Rick Ross and Chris
Brown. It sold 75,000 copies in its first week.
Hail to the King Warner Bros.
Fuse Hit Red/Capitol Nashville
Magna Carta . . . Holy Grail
Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation
Lyfe Jennings
Lucid Mass Appeal
Various Artists Universal/Sony
Love and War Streamline/Epic
Redneck Crazy Columbia Nashville
The Bluegrass Album ACR/EMI Nashville
B.O.A.T.S. II #MeTime Def Jam
Various Artists Provident/Word-Curb
Yours Truly Republic
Days Are Gone Columbia
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Too Much Justin?
The 20/20 Experience (2 of
2) sold 350,000 copies in
its first week – but plummeted to just 70,000 in
Week Two, leaving it way
behind March’s 1 of 2.
00 Chart position on October 16th, 2013
00 Chart position on October 9th, 2013
NEW
2ND
New Entry
Re-Entry
Greatest Gainer
Copyright © 2013
Billboard/Prometheus
Global Media, LLC
All rights reserved.
No v e m b e r 7, 2 01 3
FROM TOP: TYRONE LEBON; ALEX R. KIRZHNER; NABIL ELDERKIN; TOM MUNRO/RCA RECORDS
iTUNES TOP 10
SONGS
Top 40 Albums
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