News 08.11.24: Five Essential Articles

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Original ideas were not Carson’s forte: “The Johnny Carson Show,” the only major TV program he tried to launch from scratch, quickly failed, and after leaving “Tonight” he was unwilling, or perhaps, unable, to come up with a follow-up. But, as a host, he was an innovator. His style—both sartorial and, at least on camera, interpersonal—represented a new kind of cool: relaxed but quick-witted, generous but judgmental, controlled but possessed of an anarchic streak that he could deploy whenever bored or presented with second-rate material, or whenever anything on “Tonight” went wrong. His easygoing exterior belied a deft improvisatory mind that could take the temperature of the room, the guest, and the viewer all at once, course-correcting with breathtaking speed. As Kenneth Tynan noted when profiling Carson for this magazine, he learned early on that his real scene partner was not his sidekick, Ed McMahon, or his guests, or even the studio audience, but, rather, the cameras broadcasting him into America’s homes. He was so successful because his asides to the camera, his quick looks and devastating one-liners and wry smiles, enlisted viewers into a kind of conspiracy. Guests appeared on the show to promote their work, but Carson used them, sometimes quite coldly, as a vehicle to get to the millions watching at home. Fail to impress, and you’d find your allotted six minutes whittled down to two as Carson cut you off to go to commercials. One guest compared the experience to “facing death.”

Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker

The first couple minutes of Quincy—the 2018 documentary about Quincy Jones, co-directed by his daughter Rashida—are really a quite striking prologue. The shots are simple enough: There’s the obligatory survey of so many record plaques and iconic portraits posted on so many walls of Quincy’s mansion in Bel-Air. Here this documentary is beginning to tell the story of Quincy Jones as much as it’s telling the story of American entertainment—not just music, but the whole showbiz shebang—in the 20th century. This initial overview neatly culminates with a thoroughly star-struck Dr. Dre sitting in Quincy’s living room and telling him that his music, more than anything else, inspired him to become a record producer in the 1980s. Until Dre breaks the ice, though, the soundtrack—“Summer in the City”—plays uninterrupted over these opening shots. You know the groove—it’s reverberated for half a century at this point without ever fading out. For these first couple minutes, Quincy lets the music speak, oh so sweetly, for itself.

Quincy Jones died on Sunday, at age 91. The immense outpouring of condolences from so many corners, in jazz, but also pop, in North America and beyond, from Gamble and Huff and Ron Carter to Will Smith, Mariah Carey, the Weeknd, and then of course his “celestial twin,”Michael Caine, hint at the vastness of Jones’s influence. That’s not even accounting for the many all-star collaborators whom he outlived—Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson. Quincy Jones wasn’t some distantly revered or abstractly influential figure. He was the ultimate collaborator. He really knew all of these people, even the musicians who you’d otherwise assume were too young and too musically new to be mentored by Quincy Jones, people like Dr. Dre. Jones was a player, a composer, an arranger, a producer—everything but a singer, really. He was the original superproducer, a man whose role in the studio was nebulous yet omnipotent. He was the man who told Michael Jackson how to make hit records: enough said. He was savvy and extravagant and accomplished, and yet, he always seemed to regard music with a certain God-fearing humility. He wasn’t an operator in an industry but rather a master of a craft. “God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money,” he once told Vulture—that’s hardly the most viral quote from that legendary interview with David Marchese, but it’s the one that best encapsulates his ethic, his ethos, his particular balance of making a lot of money over the years, yes, but nevertheless making stuff with feeling.

Jones’s life was a wild story. He grew up in Chicago and then Seattle, through the second half of the Great Depression into the bebop years. He was a “street rat” (his words) who wanted to be a gangster until he first took up piano and then eventually settled on trumpet and started playing in nightclubs as a teenager. He dropped out of Berklee to tour with the legendary big band leader Lionel Hampton in the 1950s. Jones had chops, but more importantly he had an ear for so many sounds that we now take for granted—the killer bass line, the undeniable chorus, the self-evident grandeur of the megahit. The sounds that could make even the most defensive youth concede that his grandparents have a point about “them” not making music like they used to. Jones’s musical prime ultimately spanned half a century, and his style, such as it persisted through so many shifts and upheavals in the wider entertainment landscape, defied any easy categorization by genre. Was it jazz? Soul? Funk? R&B? Disco? Pop? The answer is yes, and even then, that’s only the half of his sound. You know his groove when you hear it, whether it’s performed by a swing orchestra or singular artists like Sinatra and MJ.

Read the rest of this article at: The Ringer 

Some of this is the brilliantly honed shtick of a standup comedian. Some of it is Parker being an alcoholic. But some of those allusions to unproductive mornings and squinting unpreparedness belie an unease with the endeavor of book reviewing itself. She writes, at times, as if the column were happening to her: “This thing is getting me. I should have stopped before this and gone back to my job of cleaning out ferry boats.” Or, more bluntly: “Here it is high noon, and this piece should have been finished last Friday. I’ve been putting it off like a visit to my aunt.” Years later, when given the opportunity to select her own greatest hits for a Viking compendium, she included precisely none of these reviews.

Yet “Constant Reader” is a work of art, or at least a seminal artifact, which shows the evolution of her comic form and, therefore, of ours. It came into existence during the hugely creative seven-year period, between 1926 and 1933, when Parker published five books, including her best-selling début, “Enough Rope,” and “Death and Taxes.” Despite her best efforts to kill a successful writing career with booze and Hollywood, Parker’s legacy is also like that of the Arizona: enduring, grand, and forever leaking into the shallow waters of other people’s prose. If you are a woman who has dared to take a phrase and turn it, you will have been compared, unfavorably, with Dorothy Parker. This comparison, never a writer’s own, mind you, has the benefit of being not only reductive and disrespectful but baiting, practically begging readers to scoff at it (Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy). Do let me know if you find that aspirin.

Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker

Every second feels like an ­eternity when you’re hovering four inches from Stevie Nicks, noodling around with her blouse. This is Stevie Nicks, the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice — as a member of Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. Stevie Nicks, whose legendary shawl collection resides in its own temperature-controlled vault. Stevie Nicks, who, at 76, has become an obsession of younger generations, from her American Horror Story appearance to the original poem she wrote for Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department to a recent viral TikTok video, where she intensely stares down her ex-boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham during a 1997 performance of “Silver Springs.” (Yes, Nicks has seen it.)

This is also Stevie Nicks, who’s somehow gotten a long, spiraled, gold ring she’s wearing stuck in the mesh fabric of her blouse, requiring the up-close-and-personal assistance of an interviewer she met only minutes ago.

She is surprisingly nonchalant as I lean over her, delicately unwinding the thread from each loop of the ring. “It happened [recently] onstage,” she says of the ring tangling. “It was stuck on my ‘Gold Dust Woman’ cape, and the most handsome guy on our entire tour ran out and was down on one knee trying to undo it. I felt like a princess in a Cinderella movie.” She laughs. I loosen up. Miraculously, I free the material from the ring without a single tear. “Thank you, honey,” she says sweetly.

Nicks has been in Philadelphia for the past three days, wrapping up a massive tour and recording a Christmas song with former NFL star Jason Kelce. Tonight, she’s in her signature all-black attire, save for hot-pink hair ties that hold her blond, elegant French braid. Her tiny Chinese crested dog, Lily, saunters in and out of the room, occasionally sitting on her lap and staring at the massive charcuterie plate in front of us.

The spread will go untouched over the next three and a half hours while Nicks takes me on a wild ride through her life — and, at one point, into the bedroom to meet her Stevie Nicks Barbies. There’s the prototype, dressed in her beloved “Rhiannon” black dress, and the official Stevie Barbie, released last fall. Nicks didn’t love Barbies as a child, but there’s something special about this doll. “I never in a million years thought this little thing would have such an effect on me,” she says, holding the miniature Gold Dust Woman.

Read the rest of this article at: Rolling Stone