http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-art-of-rock-album-covers-1417808393
I also love that there's an article on Peggy Lee in the same issue:
The Voice of Experience
Peggy Lee had an essential duality—soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess.
By David Freeland
“Fever,” of course, was the 1958 pop smash that, as Mr. Gavin observes, “define[d] [Lee] permanently.” The song, a heavily rewritten version of an earlier hit by rhythm & blues stylist Little Willie John, embodied the coolness and sophistication—as in those opening finger snaps reprised spectrally during Richards’s gathering—that distinguished Lee and helped bring a new standard of restraint to pop vocalizing. Dusty Springfield, Bette Midler and Diana Krall are just a few of the later performers who would credit Lee’s less-is-more aesthetic as an influence.
For all her subtlety, though, Lee retained a sense of swing, a rhythmic fluency grounded in the idiom of the blues. Peggy Lee’s essential duality—the soulfulness lurking inside the manufactured blond goddess—is a main theme of Mr. Gavin’s probing, perceptive account. As the author reveals through numerous interviews with family members, friends and former associates, Lee’s abundant contradictions, so beguiling in performance and on record, bubbled over to engulf her life, trapping everyone in her world—including, most sadly, Lee herself—in a web of delusion and instability.
Read the rest here:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-is-that-all-there-is-by-james-gavin-1417811803
The New York Times has a small article on an interesting documentary airing this Thursday night on CNN:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/arts/television/whose-dinosaur-is-it-anyway.html
I love Google Play Books and how you can read novels on your iPad or iPhone, scanned exactly as they would have looked to readers during their original publication. This didn't get much reception during its day, but I just started it and it looks like it had potential:
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