Issue 1304/1305

January 11-25, 2018

The
ROLLING
STONE
INTERVIEW

Bono
By JANN S. WENNER
 “All the News
That Fits”
F E AT UR E S
The Death of the
American Trucker
Automated trucking promises
to improve road safety, reduce
emissions and cost 1.7 million
people their jobs. Will it also
be Trump’s greatest betrayal
of his blue-collar base?
By Tim Dickinson ............ 26

Bono: The Rolling

Stone Interview
U2’s frontman on the state
of his band, the state of the
world and what he learned
from almost dying.
By Jann S. Wenner ...........32

Justice for None

In Massachusetts, tens of
thousands of drug cases were
corrupted – and the system
covered it up.
By Paul Solotaroff ....... 42

RO CK & ROL L
Greta Van Fleet
How four kids out of
Michigan are reclaiming the
sound of the Seventies ..........11

The 2018 Forecast

From JT’s comeback to Neil
Young’s lost albums, there are
a lot of reasons to be excited
for the new year. .................. 18

DEPA R T MEN TS NEVER BE

THE SAME
Letters......... 7 Records......51 Camila
C FLANIGAN/FILMMAGIC

Playlist .........8 Movies ...... 56 Cabello in

San Jose,
ON THE COVER Bono California, in
photographed in New York on November.
December 1st, 2017, by Mark Seliger. Page 20

Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 5
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6 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
Correspondence
Making of Musk
amazing article on elon
Musk [“The Architect of To-
morrow,” RS 1301]. Maybe our
future is safe with creative, mo-
tivated people like him instead
of callous, greedy, power-hun-
gry Trumpites. Musk definitely
needs to pause and look with-
in to examine how his relation-
ships with women fail. Surely
he is worthy of the care and in-
tense focus he gives the prod-
ucts of his fertile imagination.
Linda Olson
Tacoma, WA
i commend musk for shar-
ing his life’s journey. The trau-
mas he has endured, especially
at the hands of his father, are
something I could relate to. We
can go on to be successful in
anything we have passion for,
while turning anger and resent-
ments into driving forces that
can literally change our world
– whether here on Earth or one
day on Mars!
Leilani Pacheco-Datta
Kailua-Kona, HI
neil str auss clearly got
into the head of Elon Musk, one
of the most important figures of
our lifetime. As an avid follower
of Musk (and a user of his prod-
ucts for years), I felt Strauss dis-
covered one fact above all: He’s
human and needs love and ac-
ceptance like the rest of us.
Doug Housman, South Salem, NY
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
Devouring Pizzagate
In RS 1301, Amanda Robb investigated the tangled roots
of the fake-news story that Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex
ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria
[“Anatomy of a Fake-News Scandal”]. Readers responded.
we need to take these
disinformation campaigns
seriously. It’s unlikely to
happen in the U.S. while the
beneficiaries are in office,
but other nations need to
compel the major social net-
works to stop being complic-
it in the destruction of truth
and democracy.
Terry McDonald
Via the Internet
t h i s l i e wa s e x-
posed, but what about
all the others? Practi-
cally none of the fables
about Clinton were true.
The real story of 2016
is how three decades
of conservative smears
placed an incompetent,
corrupt idiot in the White
House.
Jon Snow, via the Internet
these die-hard trump
supporters don’t realize they
are being used by the Rus-
sian government in a con-
The Real Malone
how disappointing to dis-
cover Post Malone is basically
Donald Trump with dreadlocks
[“Confessions of a Hip-Hop
Rock Star,” RS 1301]: paranoia,
conspiracy theories, an obses-
sion with guns and a whiny rant
about “reverse racism”?
Nate Brunner
Grand Rapids, MI
watch m a lon e’s episode
on YouTube where he eats hot
wings. He’s actually a pretty
cool person. Not boring. Inter-
esting!
Todd Bryant, Portland, OR
tinued effort to divide the
American public, and to “not
participate in democracy be-
cause they think it’s corrupt.”
Chick DeCicco
Hammonton, NJ
thank you for the very
informative story. Whatever
hope I had left for this coun-
try is now gone.
Steve Russell, Chandler, AZ
pizzagate is real. our
government has been taken
over by sex-traf f icking,
child-eating monsters, and
you’re perpetuating it by re-
porting this as fake news.
Sam Hain Speaks
Via the Internet
Fun With Futurists
i enjoyed “25 people shap-
ing the Future” [RS 1301]. But
one comment on CRISPR: “Re-
engineering coral reefs” is a
frightening notion. The way out
of our predicament is not just
finding some new technical fix,
it’s rediscovering humans’ place
on the planet and not altering
other species to better survive
our bad habits.
Russell Kilday-Hicks, Berkeley
i trust that david benja-
min (“socially conscience mad
scientist”) prevails over Alex
Steffen (“walkable urban cen-
RollingStone.com
Love Letters
& Advice
ters”). Creaky old bats like me
need some sort of transpo,
which implies wheels, to get
about. Or are we to be discard-
ed before that happens?
Marilyn Lott, Front Royal, VA
Legend of Dickey
i e x t e n d a wa r m t h a n k
you to David Browne for his ar-
ticle about my hero Dickey Betts
[“The Lost Allman Brother,”
RS 1301]. Betts belongs to that
great group of legendary guitar
players such as Johnny Winter,
Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie
Van Halen.
Bob Bartlett, Visala, CA
bet ts deserv es so much
credit for saving the Allman
Brothers when they were reel-
ing from the losses of Duane
Allman and Berry Oakley. Later
classics like Seven Turns show
the creative depth of the man
when he wasn’t self-sabotaging.
Bob Kealing, Longwood, FL
Moore’s World
i have always agreed with
Michael Moore’s politics [Last
Word, RS 1301], and I now agree
with his observations of women:
Lynn Sharon is indeed one hell
of a woman. She is my niece.
Lenny Sharon, Auburn, ME
Bowie’s Final Bow
david bowie’s absence is
bit tersweet [“Inside Bowie’s
Final Act,” RS 1301]. I wouldn’t
want him to bear witness to
what’s going on in the world. But
then, maybe he’d be able to help.
Greg Benson, via the Internet
Contact Us
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| R ol l i n g S t o n e | 7

2. N.E.R.D
feat. Future
“1000”
It’s great having Phar-
rell’s avant-rap crew
N.E.R.D back to make
hip-hop a weirder place.
When he sings about
“rainbow angst,” on
“1000,” it’s a perfect
way to sum up the mu-
sic’s radiant vertigo flow.
1. Charli XCX 3. Sorry
“Lies”
“Out of My Head” A top-drawer shame
“Glitter in my sheets/Dancing on no spiral from a great new
sleep,” the punky U.K. diva sings on this English alt-rock band.
darkly booming track (featuring Tove Lo Lead singer Asha Lorenz
and ALMA). It’s a club banger that feels moans about falling to
like a noir thriller, and more proof she’s pieces, and the guitars
one of pop’s true innovators. pull her hard into the
emo deep.
4. Sufjan Stevens
“Tonya Harding”
Stevens’ genuinely moving (and
totally hilarious) tribute to figure skat-
ing’s one true gangsta was rejected
by the makers of a new Tonya Harding
film. What idiots. It’s genius.
6. The Hold Steady
“Entitlement Crew”
Craig Finn slings lines like “Tecate
landing, tequila takeoff/Colfax
cookout, Pillsbury bake-off,” and
America’s greatest garage band
triangulates Born to Run and This
Year’s Model like only it can.
7. Seun Kuti & Egypt
80 feat. Carlos
Santana
5. Mt. Joy “Black Times”
“Silver Lining” Protest-funk from Afrobeat
Mt. Joy could be your legend Fela Kuti’s
new folk-rock heroes. On son – backed by
“Silver Lining” they sing Dad’s old band
about friends they’ve lost and Santana’s
to addiction and still kick a distorted
chorus that could raise the call-to-arms
roof of a hockey arena. guitar leads.
8 | R ol l i n g S t o n e
MY LIST
Dan
Auerbach
Five Songs
Where the First
Line Is Also
the Title
The Black Keys
frontman will hit the
road in February.
Robert Finley
“Medicine Woman”
Someone sent me a video
of Robert singing a song
on the street. I co-wrote
this for him. Every time
he opened his mouth to
sing, it parted my hair.
The Beatles
“Help!”
This was my jam when
I was a kid. They were
so funny in their movies.
They were always looking
cool, but also goofy at
the same time. It’s the
perfect combination.
Al Green
“Love and Happiness”
It’s a really personal
style of gospel. You
feel like you’re soul-
searching when you’re
listening to it.
Don Williams
“Lord, I Hope This
Day is Good”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DAVE SIMPSON/WIREIMAGE;
This is very intimate,
ALYSSE GAFKJEN; JACK VARTOOGIAN/GETTY IMAGES;
light and soulful. Nothing
sounded like his records
MICHAEL HICKEY/GETTY IMAGES; DANNY CLINCH
in Nashville when
they came out.
Willie Nelson
“Blue Skies”
It’s crazy someone in
the 1970s could take a
Broadway song from the
1920s and turn it into a
hit. Willie is on the Mount
Rushmore of country.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
Wherever Magazines Are Sold
FROM THE VAULT JIMI HENDRIX’S LOST SESSIONS P. 14 | Q&A BOB SEGER P. 22

Rock&Roll

The band (from

left, Sam, Josh and
Jake Kiszka, and
Danny Wagner)
on the Staten
Island Ferry

Greta Van Fleet’s Misty

Mountain Revival
How four Michigan kids are reclaiming
the sounds of the Seventies
B Y B R I A N H I AT T

Photograph by Devin Yalkin RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 11

 R&R
T
he fou r me mber s
of the Michigan band Greta Van Fleet look,
act and sound like they were grown in the
lab of some classic-rock-loving mad sci-
entist. How else to explain a group of kids
who go around dropping references to Va-
nilla Fudge’s Carmine Appice and Free’s
Paul Kossoff, who cover Fairport Conven-
tion and Howlin’ Wolf – and who, by the
way, make huge, throwback, blues-riff-
riding rock that often sounds preposter-
ously, uncannily close to newly unearthed
Led Zeppelin tracks? “We are like a bunch
of old men,” acknowledges pixieish, curly-
headed frontman Josh Kiszka, possessor of
a blowtorch of a high tenor, with casual ac-
cess to notes that Robert Plant misplaced
during the Carter administration.
The singer, who was starring in high
school plays not long ago, is sipping tea
on an early-December afternoon in the
band’s dressing room at New York’s Bow-
ery Ballroom, sporting the same college-
production-of-Hair look he’ll wear onstage
tonight for a sold-out show: blouse-y kurta,
ankle-high jeans, moccasins, a tribal neck-
lace he believes to be African in origin.
(“He’s always worn weird shit,” says Jake
Kiszka, the band’s longhaired, justifiably
self-assured guitarist, who’s more of a T-
shirt-and-skinny-jeans guy.)
There was (probably) no laboratory in-
volved, but three of the members are fam-
ily: Josh and Jake are 21-year-old twins,
while bassist-keyboardist Sam Kiszka is
their 18-year-old brother – in their cover-
band days, they had him playing biker
bars at age 12. As it turns out, their dad is
a chemist with a serious record collection
and a harmonica-playing habit, and their
mom is a former science teacher (their
grandpa, meanwhile, is in the Polka Hall
of Fame). The fourth member is strong-
footed drummer Danny Wagner, 18, one
of the few other kids in their tiny town
of Frankenmuth who shared his friends’
prodigious musical gifts and time-warped
sensibilities – their classmates didn’t even
know what to call the odd music they
liked, except “old.”
As incongruous as the whole Greta Van
Fleet experience may be, it’s catching on,
and quickly. Veteran exec Jason Flom –
who helped launch Paramore, Lorde and
Kid Rock – snatched them up for a major-
label deal. The first song they ever wrote,
the slide-guitar-heavy “Highway Tune,” hit
12 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Number One on mainstream rock radio, or
at least what’s left of it. And their flat-out
incredible live shows are attracting more
and more fans close to their own age –
something that first seemed possible back
when they played their high school’s home-
coming dance, and the kids freaked out.
As Josh and Sam tell it, Greta Van Fleet
landed on their Seventies-rock sound by
tracing the same blues-and-soul inf lu-
ences that shaped older bands, rather than
through direct imitation – although even
their earliest gigs were heavy on Cream
covers, plus the occasional Bad Company
tune. As a kid, Sam remembers listening
to “all the Kings – B.B. King, Albert King,
Freddy King – and then, like, Buddy Guy.”
“I didn’t know who fucking Led Zep-
pelin was until I was in high school,” Josh
“I didn’t know who
Led Zeppelin was until I
was in high school,” says
the band’s frontman,
Josh Kiszka.
adds. The story goes that his Plant-ian
shriek simply came out in practice one day
as he struggled to be heard over the band.
“We stopped,” recalls Jake, “and were like,
‘Whatever you just did, keep doing that,
’cause it sounds badass.’ ”
Jake does cop to careful scrutiny of
Jimmy Page – among many other guitar-
ists, including Pete Townshend. “I went
through a year of really intensely study-
ing what Page did,” says Jake, “to the point
where I knew how he thought.”
They’re not altogether averse to newer
music, citing, among other acts, Fleet
Foxes, Rival Sons, the Shins and especially
the Black Keys, whose 2012 Rol l i ng
Stone cover decorated their garage re-
hearsal space for years. “Our dad brought
the Magic Potion album home, and we’re
like, ‘Wow, this is contemporary music?’ ”
says Sam, whose long hair and boyish fea-
tures make him look like a lost Hanson
brother – albeit one who’s a phenomenally
melodic bass player, when he’s not switch-
ing to organ and handling the low end via
foot pedals, à la Ray Manzarek. But unlike
the Keys, none of Greta Van Fleet’s mem-
bers are hip-hop fans, and they can truly
sound decades older than their years when
they talk about current music. “People are
doing it for the wrong reasons,” says Sam.
“They are not doing it to change the world.
They are doing it to make money.”
Before Greta Van Fleet – who are named
“I went through
a year of really
intensely studying
Page,” says guitarist
Jake Kiszka.
after a local woman named Gretna Van
Fleet – can change the world, they have
to finish their first album. It’ll follow their
eight-song EP, From the Fires, which had
six originals (there’s also an excellent cover
of Fairport’s “Meet on the Ledge” – and an
ill-conceived version of Sam Cooke’s “A
Change Is Gonna Come”). The LP will be
all-new songs, most already written, with
time carved out in early 2018 to record.
In the meantime, they’re having fun.
Jake takes a preshow swig from a bottle of
Jack Daniel’s each night – “a rock & roll rit-
ual,” he calls it. But they swear that they’re
going to keep it all in check. “Everything
that you hear about the rock & roll lifestyle
is true,” says Josh, wide-eyed. “All of those
wild, absurd things that you would like to
romanticize about are very honest truth.
The amount of excess always around. The
amount of women that always want to
hang out. It really is all there. It’s tempt-
WILL OLIVER
ing, and it’s crazy stuff.” He smiles. “But we
don’t seem to have too much interest.” He
almost sells the line, too.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018

Meet This Year’s Class
Eighties arena rock, New Wave and the godmother of the
electric guitar are among the inductees to be honored in April
Ocasek
in 1987
THE CARS
The Ric Ocasek-led band broke
up in 1987, but re-formed in
2010 for a new album, Move
Like This, and a short tour. The
Cars have been quiet ever since,
but Ocasek says they will play
the ceremony. “We’ll probably
do songs people know, like ‘Just
What I Needed,’” he says. The
only bittersweet part will be
the absence of bassist Ben Orr,
who died in 2000. Says Ocasek,
“He’d be flipped out by this.”
FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: JOHN MOTTERN/“BOSTON GLOBE”/GETTY IMAGES; EBET ROBERTS/REDFERNS/
GETTY IMAGES; RON GALELLA/WIREIMAGE; KING COLLECTION/PHOTOSHOT/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL
OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; STEPHEN GOLDBLATT/JBA/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX
THE MOODY
BLUES
The 1960s proto-prog band
has been pounding out “Nights
in White Satin” on the oldies
circuit for years, but this is an
opportunity to reunite with
ex-members Mike Pinder and
Ray Thomas. “I miss them both,”
says frontman Justin Hayward.
Clockwise from top: Denny
Laine, Graeme Edge, Thomas,
Clint Warwick, Pinder, 1965
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
R O C K A N D R O L L H A L L O F FA M E
BY A N DY GR E E N E
Knopfler
BON JOVI in 1985
They’ve sold 130 million records and played almost
every stadium in the world, but it took nearly a decade
of eligibility for Bon Jovi to enter the Hall. It’s a chance
for them to play with original bassist Alec John Such
(who has been largely off the grid since he left in 1994)
and guitarist Richie Sambora, who departed in 2013,
citing burnout from the road. “Nobody has called me
yet,” he says. “But I imagine [a reunion performance]
would be protocol, and I’d be obliged. There’s no mal- DIRE STRAITS
ice or anything – 31 years in a band is just a long time.”
The biggest potential reunion
of the class of 2018. Besides an
impromptu set at bassist John
Illsley’s wedding in 1999, they
haven’t played since they split
after their 1992 world tour. The
decision to perform will be made
by frontman Mark Knopfler, who
is staying quiet. “There’s a lot of
water under the bridge,” says
Illsley. “We’re just going to have
to wait and see. But if anyone
plays, I’ll be a part of it.”
Jon Bon Jovi
in 1987
Tharpe
in 1938
NINA SIMONE SISTER
ROSETTA
The civil-rights-era “High Priestess
of Soul” has never been short on THARPE
accolades, but the 2015 Netflix
documentary What Happened, Miss EARLY INFLUENCE Nearly two dec-
Simone? and the 2016 Zoe Saldana- ades before Chuck Berry
starring biopic, Nina, coupled with hit the scene, this gospel singer
recent high-profile samples by shredded revved-up blues on
Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne her guitar and helped lay the
have introduced her music to a groundwork for rock & roll. Only
whole new generation. “I heard her recently has her true impact
Simone,
sing a song in French – I didn’t even been celebrated. She “was a
know what she was saying, and I
1969 powerful force of nature,” said
started crying,” said Mary J. Blige. Bob Dylan. “A guitar-playin’,
“Nina could sing anything, period.” singin’ evangelist.”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 13
 R&R
MANNISH BOY
Hendrix in 1968
Jimi Hendrix’s Lost,
Blissful Blues Sessions
A wild set of studio jams is coming in March
BY KORY GROW
S
tephen stills r emembers the
day well. It was late 1969 when he vis-
ited the Record Plant in New York for
a day of musical fun with friend Jimi
Hendrix. Hendrix was game for anything, at
one point picking up a bass to back Stills on an
upbeat version of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock.”
Stills left invigorated. “Watching him play was
like watching the greatest athlete you ever saw
– like Muhammad Ali,” he says. “He taught me
to quit thinking and let it happen.”
That version of “Woodstock” appears on
Both Sides of the Sky (out March 9th), an
album of unheard studio recordings Hendrix
made in the last two years of his life, as he
stockpiled tapes to release after he resolved
a contract dispute. It’s the last LP in a trilogy
that began with 2010’s Valleys of Neptune,
after Sony reached an agreement with Hen-
drix’s sister Janie to release the music.
Both Sides of the Sky is heavy on the blues,
capturing the fun Stills describes: There’s
a charging “Mannish Boy,” Hendrix falset-
14 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
FROM THE VAULT
to-singing along with his fiery guitar lead;
during “Lover Man,” a concert favorite, he
spontaneously breaks into the theme from
Batman. “When everything falls apart, he’d
start playing the Batman or the Peter Gunn
theme,” says Hendrix’s engineer Eddie Kram-
er, who worked on the project. “He wanted to
keep it light.” Kramer singles out “Cherokee
Mist,” a wild, hypnotic seven-minute instru-
mental with Hendrix on guitar and sitar.
“It sounds like a beast that got loose in the
studio,” Kramer says. Revisiting the songs,
Kramer recalled the joy of working with Hen-
drix, who’d mix his own parts as Kramer ran
around the board fading other instruments
in and out at the same time: “After we faded
down, we’d collapse laughing.”
Is this the last word on Hendrix’s studio
work? “It is hard to say,” co-producer John
McDermott says. “With Jimi, there is always
hope that there is a cache of tapes out there
that would really be great. He just loved to re-
cord and create.”
The Lost History
of the ‘Louisiana
Hayride’ Show
A 20-CD set perfectly captures
the show where rock & roll began
On October 16th, 1954, Elvis Presley
made his first appearance on Loui-
siana Hayride, performing “That’s
All Right,” recorded weeks earlier.
“They’ve been looking for some-
thing new in the folk-music field for
a long time,” the radio show’s host
Frank Page told the 19-year-old.
“And I think you’ve got it.”
Sixty-plus years after that mo-
ment, Presley’s revolutionary rock
& roll may not seem so radical, but
on Bear Family’s enormous new
box set, At the Louisiana Hayride
Tonight, it’s possible to hear the
world start to change. Compared
to its role model, Grand Ole Opry,
Louisiana Hayride was an upstart,
happy to take chances on unknowns
GOOD ROCKIN’ TONIGHT
Presley and band on Hayride, 1955
such as Presley and Hank Williams.
Producer Martin Hawkins compiled
the 20-CD set from hundreds of
hours of recordings, taking pains to
“strike a balance between known
FROM TOP: CHUCK BOYD/© AUTHENTIC HENDRIX, LLC;
and unknown artists, regulars, visi-
tors and one-time hopefuls.”
Hawkins intended to re-create
the experience of a postwar country
radio barn dance, so the box is pep-
COURTESY OF BEAR FAMILY RECORDS
pered with ads, games and chatter.
Hearing legends like Williams,
George Jones, Johnny Horton, Kitty
Wells and Johnny Cash within the
context of their emergence makes
them sound fresh and underscores
not just how they found something
new in the folk-music field, but that
they were part of this tradition.
STEPHEN THOMAS ERLEWINE
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 R&R

Fans at
Lactember
Fest in
Blackshear,
Georgia

GREEN ACRES
Nashville rapper
Big Smo, whose
songs include
“Rednecks Got It
Right” and “I’m So
Kuntry,” hanging out
HERE FOR THE PARTY at Lactember Fest:
“Tex” Dahlgren of “This is the center
the California duo of the whole country-
Moonshine Bandits hip-hop thing.”

Backwoods Rhymes
Billboard’s rap and country charts. Ford

I
t’s a saturday in l ate septem-
ber, and darkness has descended on
Moccasin Creek Off-Road Park in
rural southeast Georgia. Despite near-
triple-digit heat, more than 5,000
people have turned out to camp, drink
beer, ride four-wheelers and listen to a
strain of Southern hip-hop called coun-
try rap. The event is the sixth annual
Lactember Fest, named after headliners
the Lacs, who are currently rocking the
crowd. Clay Sharpe, a brawny colossus in
a Falcons hat and sleeveless vest, trades
verses with his partner, Brian King, reed-
thin in a black T-shirt, swigging from a
can of Bud Light. As the band repeats
a twangy guitar lick over a simple beat,
Sharpe digs into the opening number,
“Keep It Redneck”: “I’m a thoroughbred
redneck down-home rapper/And a lot of
y’all folks still call me a cracker.”
Gigs like this, at mud parks around
the South, are country rap’s lifeblood.
The music, sometimes called hick-hop,
is essentially the hybrid its name prom-
ises: It’s rap made almost exclusively by
Inside country rap,
a thriving hip-hop
offshoot that’s full
of big dreams and
contradictions
BY DAV I D PE ISN E R
white male Southerners. Songs celebrate
jacked-up trucks, drinking, mudding and
other virtues of so-called redneck life,
and lyrics extolling the Confederate flag
and the Second Amendment are not un-
common. “This is the voiceless people, the
Walmart demographic,” says Sharpe, in
language eerily similar to exit-poll analysis
on election night 2016. “They’re not heard a
lot of times, but when they need to, they’ll
show up.”
Country-rap stars like the Lacs, Colt
Ford, Big Smo and Upchurch are part
of a growing hip-hop subculture. Two
Lacs albums have gone Top Five on both
has sold more than 1.5 million albums.
Videos for songs like the Lacs’ “Country Boy
Fresh” and Big Smo’s “Kickin’ It in Tennes-
see” can top 10 million YouTube views. All
this has taken place with little or no help
from radio or traditional media outlets.
Country rap’s origins can be traced to
Georgia native Bubba Sparxxx, who mixed
down-home storytelling with Dirty South
beats on his Timbaland-produced 2003
LP Deliverance. If Sparxxx birthed coun-
try rap, former Sparxxx collaborator Ford
and his label, Average Joes Entertainment,
deserve credit for nurturing it. “[Bubba]
was a rapper from the country,” says Ford.
“I’m a country boy that can rap.” In 2008,
he was booked to play his first mud park
in South Carolina. Instead of the few hun-
dred fans who usually came to his club
shows, he was greeted by nearly 5,000.
Three years later, Jason Aldean took a
cover of Ford’s “Dirt Road Anthem” to the
top of the country charts.
Country rappers were raised on art-
ists like Tupac and N.W.A as well as tons

16 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Photographs by R ay mond McCrea Jones


SOUTHERN COMFORT
Despite recent events
like Charlottesville,
the Confederate flag
is a ubiquitous symbol
at country-rap shows.
of Southern rap. “In the country, they’re
listening to the same stuff everybody is lis-
tening to: Young Dolph, Blac Youngsta, Lil
Yachty,” Sparxxx says. Most country rap-
pers originally made music that reflected
those styles. Ford started out under the
name X-Man, spitting Ice Cube-influenced
gangsta rap while wearing a mask onstage.
“Growing up the way I did, I didn’t know
about that shit,” he says. “I was like, ‘If they
ever get this mask off me, they’re going to
fuckin’ kill me!’ ” Eventually, he found he
was more comfortable rapping about his
own experience.
Right now, the guy with the brightest
future is Upchurch, a talented rhymer and
singer who is also unabashedly confron-
tational in his political views. Upchurch
was hanging drywall and cutting lawns
in rural Tennessee when his music career
SCOTT GRIES/GETTY IMAGES (BUBBA SPARXXX)
started blooming a couple of years ago.
SCOTT LEGATO/GETTY IMAGES (COLT FORD);
Now he’s a social-media star with more
than 2.5 million Facebook followers and
500,000 YouTube subscribers.
He posts videos almost daily, opining on
current events, skewering so-called social-
justice warriors and feuding with detrac-
tors. One song, “Bloodshed,” released in
the wake of this summer’s violent white-
nationalist protests in Charlottesville, calls
for unity while spouting the kind of rheto-
ric that makes that unity difficult: “Ameri-
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
Ford
performing
in Michigan
in 2016
Sparxxx
in 2002
can flags, Confederate flags, Nazis with
swastikas/Hate groups throwing piss be-
cause they’re mad at a monument.”
Lactember Fest is light on maga hats
and Trump gear – partying, not politics,
seems to unify the audience. Songs by
Chance the Rapper and Young Thug can
be heard blasting from people’s cars and
four-wheelers. As I wander the festival
grounds, I meet a black teenager riding a
four-wheeler alongside his white friend.
When I ask what brought him to the festi-
val, he smiles: “The music, the riding, the
drinking, the girls.”
Confederate flags are a common sight
at Lactember Fest. Fans tote them around
throughout the weekend, and the Lacs
themselves celebrate it in their song “Let
Your Country Hang Out.” Skinny DeVille,
of black hip-hop group Nappy Roots,
describes a show they played with the Lacs
in Michigan as “Confederate-flag crazy.”
“We’ve never looked at the flag the way a
lot of people are looking at it now,” says
Sharpe of the Lacs, sitting on his tour
bus at the festival. “It sucks for us because
some people did bad shit, they had this flag
flying, and it’s a bad reflection. All the flag
is saying for us is, ‘We’re Southerners. We
know where we’re at.’ ”
All the same, the Confederate-f lag
waving is troubling – and seems espe-
A Lactember
Fest attendee
in a Trump
mask goes
mudding.
cially tone-deaf after events like Char-
lottesville. Thomas Sapp (a.k.a. Teacher
Preacher), one of the few country rappers
of color, says, “I don’t put a rebel flag out
there because I’m biracial. Do I think it
represents racism?” he asks. “Yeah, to some
it does. But the people I’ve dealt with in the
country-rap world who fly it have never
treated me different than anyone else.”
Country rapper Struggle Jennings, a for-
mer drug dealer who happens to be Waylon
Jennings’ grandson, says that while he
was growing up in Nashville, the rebel
flag “wasn’t a part of my upbringing.” He
explains, “I love the country, I love the
South, I’ve been fishing and hunting, but
I’m not a hick. I’m not hick-hop.” Even the
Lacs are beginning to question such Con-
federate imagery. “It does draw a barrier,”
says Sharpe, kicking back on the band’s
tour bus before a set. Yet he also acknowl-
edges that fans might see ditching the flag
as a kind of selling out.
All these contradictions are especially
troubling for a veteran artist like Sparxxx,
who has been embraced as a godfather of
today’s country rap. “My goal was always
to build a bridge between people,” he says.
“It wasn’t trying to say, ‘Let’s take this and
go have our own party.’ I’m just like, ‘Y’all
motherfuckers didn’t pay attention at all,
did you?’ ”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 17
 R&R

The 2018 Forecast

As streaming remakes the music industry, there are
a whole lot of reasons to be excited about the new year –
from Kanye’s comeback to the death of ticket bots

The Return The Next Wave

of Justin of Boy Bands
Timberlake
After One Direction split in 2016,
the race was on to find the next
When Timberlake steps
heartthrob crew. Simon Cowell has
onstage at the Super Bowl
assembled PrettyMuch (below),
in Minneapolis in February,
whose dancing and harmonies
he will likely perform music
recall an updated Boyz II Men.
from his first album in four
Lorde and Khalid both tweeted
years, which, sources say,
their approval, and their label has
is due out early in 2018.
set them up with 1D’s producer,
“The music we just made?
Savan Kotecha, and is planning a
It’s gonna put him on an-
“turbocharged” 2018 campaign.
other plateau,” his longtime
They have competition: Why
producer Timbaland told
Don’t We, who signed to Atlantic,
R OLLING S TONE recently.
released five EPs in the past year
Though Timberlake is push-
and amassed 2 million Instagram
ing 40, he proved he’s still
followers. “They’re talented beyond
a chart-topping force with
belief,” says co-manager Randy
2016’s Number One “Can’t
Phillips. Adds Steve Greenberg, who
Stop the Feeling!” Someone
discovered Hanson and the Jonas
who’s heard the new album
Brothers, “There’s always space for
says it “pushes boundaries
a new boy band.”
in ways you don’t expect.
It’s gonna have a lot of hits”
and includes a collabora-
tion with country star Chris
Stapleton. Another source
confirms that Timberlake is
also planning an arena tour.
His last one, the 14-month
20/20 Experience world tour, Can’t stop the feeling:
earned $230 million. “It’s Timberlake is planning
going to be humongous,” an arena run.
says one promoter.

Neil Young Digs Up Lost ’70s Albums

Young has finally launched his long-anticipated Archives project online, a
collection of every studio recording in stunning quality. He’s planning to use
the site to roll out “about 10 unreleased albums and a few unreleased films.”
Here are four gems that will finally see the light of day soon.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOHN SHEARER/GETTY
IMAGES; NEV TODOROVIC; GARY BURDEN

The Roxy Homegrown Odeon/ Chrome

An LP capturing This 1975 LP Budokan Dreams
Young’s 1973 was a planned A soundboard The original
club gigs de- return to the tape from “Powderfinger”
buting Tonight’s commercial Young’s fieriest and “Pocahon-
the Night. He Harvest sound tour ever, with tas” were on
often sparred before Young Crazy Horse in this LP, which
with the crowd, shelved it. “It 1976. It features he held back in Young calls Archives
which was unfa- was too per- the definitive favor of 1977’s “a living document,
miliar with the sonal,” he said. “Cortez the heavy American
new songs. “It scared me.” constantly evolving.”
Killer.” Stars ’N Bars.

18 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ja n u a r y 1 1-2 5 , 2 018

 Kanye’s
Comeback
After a meltdown and a
Trump Tower visit, Kanye
West ducked the spotlight in
2017. That may change; he
reportedly spent time in the
Wyoming mountains
recently on album number
eight, and was just seen
leaving an all-night session
in the same clothes as the
day before – a sign that the
Fonsi, whose old Kanye is back!
“Despacito” is
the most- Stones in the Studio
watched video
of all time 2018 might finally be the year for the Rolling
Stones’ long-promised follow-up to 2005’s A
Bigger Bang. Keith Richards recently said the
‘Despacito’ Launched a band is readying “a really good original album,”
Latin-Pop Revolution which was put on pause for 2016’s covers LP,
Blue & Lonesome. Richards even called sessions
with Mick Jagger “really fun.”
Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” dominated 2017,
spending 16 weeks at Number One, teaching the industry
a big lesson: “All-Spanish records can work,” says Tom
Poleman, chief programmer for iHeartMedia. As a result,
major labels are investing heavily in Latin music, from trap
to reggaeton. “The Latin population in the U.S. keeps grow-
ing,” says Fonsi, who expects the genre will compete with
YouTube Enters the Music-Streaming Game
hip-hop, rock and country. And just as Justin Bieber scored
a hit by appearing on the “Despacito” remix, more artists The company, with 1 billion hours of daily streams, is planning a music-streaming service
are gunning to work with Latin peers (Beyoncé and Logic that could launch by March. “If it does blend video and audio in one service, inter-
already have). “Before, we would seek general-market art- changeably, why would you use Spotify?” says industry vet Jim McDermott. Lyor Cohen,
ists,” says Horacio Rodriguez, vice president of marketing at YouTube’s head of music, thinks it has a shot: “I want to show the industry that we’re ca-
Universal Music Latino. “Now, we’re getting calls from them.” pable of finding those most likely to subscribe and [lead] them to a subscription model.”

Hip-Hop Loses
Chart Dominance?
2017 was a radical year for the charts,
with Number One hits going to hip-
hop newcomers like Cardi B and Post
Malone. That may change in 2018
when Billboard adjusts its guidelines,
giving less weight to free streams
and YouTube views in favor of paid
subscribers’ listening habits. Hip-hop,
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: © JOHN SALANGSANG/REX SHUTTERSTOCK/

with artists who accumulate huge

numbers on free services, may take a
ZUMA PRESS; TAYLOR HILL/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL CAMPANELLA/

hit. “Rap singles will have less impact

on the charts,” says A&R expert Jeff
Vaughn. This has angered
REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; DIA DIPASUPIL/GETTY IMAGES

YouTube, which stated

the plan “[says] the
only music fans
that count are
those with credit
cards.” Some
experts say You Can Finally Score Face-Value Concert Tickets
rock will ben-
efit because
It used to be impossible to score good seats to big shows, with brokers using bots to snatch roughly half the
its listeners
tickets. But in 2016, Ticketmaster launched Verified Fan, which uses an algorithm that weeds out fishy sales. It
tend to
worked. Only three percent of tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s Broadway run were resold, and 70 artists have
pay for
joined in. “We’re doubling down on it,” says David Marcus, a vice president at Ticketmaster. Taylor Swift signed
music.
up, with a twist: Fans who bought merch or watched her videos got priority. Others may follow her lead. “Tick-
eting has been lacking that sort of innovative thinking,” says Larry Rudolph, manager of Britney Spears.

Cardi B CONTRIBUTORS: Patrick Doyle, Andy Greene, Steve Knopper, Elias Leight, Brittany Spanos

Illustration by John Hendrix RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 19

 R&R
From Cuba With Pop:
Camila Cabello’s Rise
How the singer left the girl group Fifth Harmony and found
a chart-topping sound with an ode to her immigrant past
he year’s fastest-rising
T
pop star is lounging back-
stage in Capital One Arena in
Washington, D.C., eating spicy
Takis corn snacks and trying
to figure out what to do with a rare bit of
free time. In three hours, Camila Cabel-
lo will be gyrating onstage in knee-high
boots and a corset, but at the moment,
she’s dressed like a college kid, in an over-
size gray sweater and leggings, her glossy
brown hair in a bun. It’s a Monday in mid-
December, the kind of frigid day in a bor-
ing city that makes Cabello, 20, wish she
was back home in Miami. But there’s al-
ways Netflix. “Do you wanna watch reruns
of Friends?” she asks, sounding genuinely
excited about the idea.
Right about now, Cabello is excited about
pretty much everything, and who could
blame her? It’s been almost a year since she
parted ways with the hitmaking girl group
Fifth Harmony, who were assembled back
in 2012 by judges including Simon Cowell
on the now-defunct U.S. version of The X
Factor. And launching her solo career now
looks to have been a great idea – even if it
angered some fans at the time (and left the
now-four-member group with a name that
makes no sense). Cabello has a smash single
that happens to be close to her heart: the ir-
resistible, clave-tinged, Young Thug-assist-
ed “Havana” – “an ode to my heritage, my
culture” that began as just a title in notes
on her iPhone. The track – which finally
finds a distinctive use for her big, sultry
voice – pays homage to the Cuban capital,
where she was born to a Mexican dad and
a Cuban mom, who is hanging out in the
dressing room right now. The song’s success
also helped Cabello figure out a direction
for her upcoming album: Her next single,
the rock-tinged “Never Be the Same,” is al-
most as singular, with a breathy chorus that
pushes near the top of her range. (In the live
version, she even plays electric guitar.)
Cabello’s family immigrated to the U.S.
when she was six, which lends a poet-
ic appropriateness to her ascent in our
Trumpian era. “I didn’t even realize,” she
20 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
BY BR I T TA N Y SPA NOS
said recently, “how much racism was still ship or, um, the messy demise of, say, a
prominent in our country.” When she first five-member singing group: “I gave you all
arrived in Miami, she couldn’t speak Eng- of me,” she sang. “My blood, my sweat, my
lish – and was shy on top of that – so she’d heart and my tears.”
do her best to lure new friends by blasting But that was way back in May. The
pop tunes on a boombox. “That was my album is now just called Camila, and
way of communicating,” she recalls. “My it’s way more upbeat than she initially
grandma always said that I had this really planned. “At first I thought it was gonna be,
strong inner world.” like, a sad-song album,” she says. “Then the
She’s been touring and recording nearly more I got into the year, it just was better.
nonstop since age 15, when she went on I felt way happier. I feel that it has a good
X Factor – against her parents’ wishes, balance of the emo and the happy.”
though they ended up driving her to the Next year will once more be filled with
audition – inspired by a YouTube clip of promos and touring. But Cabello wants
One Direction giving performance tips to make sure she doesn’t miss out on real
(Cowell assembled that group, too, on the life along the way. “The way that I have
show’s U.K. version). Success followed, but worked,” she says, “makes it hard on rela-
along the way, something tionships, on friendships,
def initely went wrong even health.”
within Fifth Harmony. Lack of time may be
That became clear to the
“My grandma said one reason why she’s
outside world when Ca- I had a really strong never had a serious re-
bello breached pop pro- inner world,” says lationship. That said, “I
tocol and started putting Cabello, who didn’t always have a crush on
out solo tracks, including somebody,” she says. “It’s
her hit duet with Machine speak English when just how I am! It’s boring
Gun Kelly, “Bad Things,” she came to the U.S. without that. A girl’s gotta
before officially leaving daydream!”
the group. But Cabello, When she recorded
who started writing her own songs by age tracks for her album in L.A. this year, she
16, isn’t ready to tell all, blaming an aver- felt adrift, isolated. “I do like to forget that
sion to drama and an unwillingness to I’m a singer or somebody that’s famous,”
bum out fans – she won’t even say whether she says – she couldn’t pull that off out
she actually quit or was thrown out. “A lot there. “In L.A., it was hard to have people
of my fans were, or are, fans of the group,” just look at me as a 20-year-old kid. It was
she says, losing her usual enthusiasm as like I didn’t really have a life outside of
the conversation turns to her least-favorite the studio.”
topic. “I don’t like to ruin the dream. They She always imagines being “super-old”
believed in something that’s beautiful. I’m and looking back at her life, which is why
DENNIS LEUPOLD/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
sure with One Direction, too, nobody re- many of her dreams have nothing to do
ally saw behind the scenes. You just see with music. “I want to be able to go to Italy,
the dream.” to live in Spain for a few years,” she says. “I
She’s growing and changing so fast that want to go to New York and get my apart-
she’s switched the title and vibe of her first ment, and I want to fall in love.” Today is all
album, due January 12th, in midstream. about meet-and-greets (with red Taki dust
She had originally given it the rather melo- still on her fingers), radio interviews and
dramatic title The Hurting, the Healing, performing for an arena full of screaming
the Loving, with a downer teaser track, “I fans. But she can picture another existence.
Have Questions,” to match. Its lyrics could “I really do want to live,” she says. “I just
be about the nasty breakup of a relation- want to be a kid sometimes.”
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 R&R
Q&A
B
ob seger wa s h av i ng a
pretty amazing 2017. His
music had finally hit stream-
ing services, he launched a
successful tour and released I Knew
You When, his new album that fea-
tures tributes to Glenn Frey, Lou Reed
and Leonard Cohen. But on the morn-
ing of September 30th, he woke up
to leg pain caused by a ruptured disc
in his back. “My doctor said to me,
‘Oh, no, that’s it, you’re done with this
tour,’ ” says Seger, on the phone from
his Michigan estate, where he’s half-
way through a three-month recovery
process. He hopes to reschedule the
tour for this spring. “I’m feeling better
all the time,” he says. “They aren’t let-
ting me lift anything over five pounds.
I can’t do anything: no piano, no gui-
tar, no nothing. But as soon as the pain
stops, I’ll be playing again.”
You’re 72, still touring and releasing new
music. Did you ever see that coming?
God, no. I thought I’d be done by 30.
My original plan was to do it for five
years between the age of 25 and 30
and then buy a motorcycle and drive
across Europe, and then get a real job.
It didn’t work out that way. The more
you do it, I guess, the more you love it.
The new album has two songs about
Glenn Frey: “I Knew You When” and
“Glenn Song.”
He was my oldest friend in music.
I met him in 1966, and we recorded
“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” that year.
We were just a couple of knuckleheads
starting out – he was from Royal Oak
[Michigan], and I was from Detroit.
He was such a positive influence in
my life. We’d always call each other for
advice. I pushed him to do that Eagles
reunion [in 1994]. He was the only
one that didn’t want to do it for years.
I said to him, “I think you’d have fun.”
You sing a lot about your high school
days on the album, much like you did
on classics like “Against the Wind” and
“Night Moves.”
It was probably my favorite time. Up
until high school I was supershy. And
then I developed a bunch of friends
across town and came out of my shell.
After that, it was 12 years of doing 250
to 300 shows a year in various bars,
universities and gymnasiums.
Trump won your home state of Michi-
gan, which had been blue since 1992.
near Trump country, getting
Well, I understand it because I live
here. The second you got out of town,
every rural area had a Trump sign. I
and what losing fellow icons
never saw a Clinton sign.
How do you explain that?
They’re very dissatisfied with Wash-
ington, and they thought he could do
22 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Bob
Seger
The Detroit hero on living
into the streaming game,
has taught him about life
BY A N DY GR E E N E
something different. And now we’re
all paying the price for it because we
didn’t go out and vote. Less than 55
percent of the freakin’ country voted!
I was at the Kennedy Center honor-
ing Glenn last year. I got to talk to
Obama. I said, “Mr. President, I want
to thank you for your dignity and wis-
dom.” He was my favorite president of
my lifetime. This is awfully different.
I’m worried about [Trump’s] mental
health. I think he’s slightly off, and
they’re going to have to take a look at
that. He doesn’t seem rational.
Your music finally made it to stream-
ing services last year. There were many
years when it was very hard to access
your music.
Yes, but at the same time, I can’t
complain about my success. My man-
ager hasn’t been wrong too many
times. And it could be a reason why we
were the biggest-selling catalog album
between 2000 and 2010 [Greatest
Hits]. Nobody outsold us, and it could
be because we stayed off that grid.
I read that Bruce Springsteen’s “Jun-
gleland” inspired you to write “Night
Moves,” because it had two bridges.
Absolutely. I had the first two vers-
es forever. It took me six months to
write it. I just kept coming back to it
and was like, “Nah, that’s not it.” Then
I heard “Jungleland.” I remember call-
ing [Don] Henley and saying, “Have
you heard ‘Jungleland’?” He said he
didn’t know if he was into Bruce. I
read him the line “They’ll meet ’neath
that giant Exxon sign that brings this
fair city light.” It’s still one of my favor-
ite records.
It’s been a brutal couple of years in
terms of losing rock stars.
You sure think about your own mor-
tality. It’s important to do what you
want to do and follow your own per-
sonal vision. It just reinforced that. I
worked harder this tour than I ever
have. I did songs I’d never done be-
cause they were too high. This tour, I
didn’t care. I wore myself out. People
were singing along to every word of
“You’ll Accomp’ny Me.” I guess that’s
the power of Greatest Hits selling
10 million.
Many of your earliest albums have been
out of print for decades. What’s it going
to take to get them out?
Jack White is always asking me
about that. He wants to remix them
all, and said he’d do it for free. But I’m
always on to the next thing – the next
album, the next tour. Maybe when I re-
tire I’ll get serious about it.
KEN SETTLE
Don’t you feel bad for fans who have
been waiting for them?
No! [Huge belly laugh]
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 Television

Is This the
Sad Last Act
of Fall TV?
After another dreary
season of shows, it’s
time for a new model

The fall TV season is one

of our nation’s cherished
institutions – and like
so many of those, it’s in
rickety shape. It used to
be that checking in on the
networks’ rookie offerings
was a basic part of every
LOONEY TUNES American’s civic duty,
Meloni and his even if that meant giving
unicorn, Happy, a shot to Outsourced
voiced by Oswalt or Emily’s Reasons Why
Not. Fall 2016 had its
contenders, from This Is

A Hit Man and His

Us to The Good Place. But
with streaming and on-
demand to mess with, the
old-school TV-time-space

Imaginary Friend continuum is looking less

and less like the place
to build a new hit. What
‘Happy!’ starring Patton Oswalt as a flying can it possibly mean that
2017’s idea of a freshman
unicorn is a wild, ultraviolent, noir fantasia smash is the Will & Grace
revival? This fall’s one
BY ROB SH E F F I E L D bona fide blockbuster is

remotely uplifting about Happy! ends – it’s

M
eet nick sa x, a bad ex-cop
who can’t even shoot himself in
the head right. On Syfy’s trippy
and mega-violent series Happy!,
the weirdest thing about Christopher Mel-
oni’s Nick is how he’s managed to stay alive
this long, while leaving piles of bullet-riddled
corpses behind him. Once a hero detective,
he’s fallen into disgrace and hit the skids. Nick
HAPPY!
WEDNESDAYS, 10 P.M., SYFY
has turned into a drug-fiend hit man, a cor-
rupt degenerate prowling the mean streets
of a psycho-noir New York City, boozing and
snorting his way to the next bunch of low-
lifes he puts out of their misery. His misery –
FROM TOP: SYFY; MICHAEL BECKER/FOX
outrageously gory, morally repulsive, deeply
strange, gruesomely funny. Based on the
comics written by Grant Morrison and drawn
by Darick Robertson, it’s brought to TV by
co-creator Brian Taylor, half of the Neveldine
& Taylor team behind the Crank action flicks.
If you’re a fan of Crank house style, you can
see how it provides inspiration for Happy! –
the hyperactive effects, brutal humor, high-
speed violent antics.
As Nick, Meloni has the right toxic mojo to
bring Happy! to life. And he likes bantering
with a bucktoothed cartoon unicorn about as
STAR DREK MacFarlane’s
much as you would. (Who can forget Meloni space odyssey
as Camp Firewood’s fridge-humping Nam-
vet cook in Wet Hot American Summer?)
Oswalt makes Happy a brilliantly irritating ABC’s The Good Doctor,
your basic tear-jerking

that’s another problem. He growls, “My life is
an ever-swirling toilet that just won’t flush.”
And he’s got another problem: an imagi-
nary friend who’s an animated blue donkey/
unicorn with wings, voiced by Patton Os-
walt. The imaginary friend turns out to be
even more disturbing than the hard-boiled
hit man. All Happy wants is for Nick to res-
cue a little girl who’s been abducted by a psy-
chopathic Santa, but that’s where anything
sidekick, a flying unicorn who belongs in a
medical soap. But the next
nice Disney movie. Instead, he’s here, amid closest thing? The Orville,
all the lurid obscenities and over-the-top Seth MacFarlane’s Star
violence. “My imagination is very limited,” Trek homage, a dreary ego
Nick tells Happy. “It usually involves inflict- trip that lets MacFarlane
ing pain in ways that may not have occurred command a starship while
to most.” The chemistry between Meloni foxy ladies tsk-tsk at him.
and Oswalt is the comic friction that keeps If this is what a fall hit
Happy! buzzing – the perfect cocktail of psy- looks like, beam us up. R.S.
chedelic carnage and Looney Tunes.

Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 23
RandomNotes

May the Yorke Be With You ROYAL FLUSH Ed Sheeran received an

It’s never easy for a genius like Thom Yorke to find someone who can converse on his level, MBE from Prince Charles in recognition
so he was clearly psyched to enjoy an intimate sit-down with beloved Star Wars droid BB-8 of his charity work. “My granddad was
at the Los Angeles premiere of The Last Jedi. Yorke just finished a brief solo tour and is a huge royalist, and he died four years
gearing up for a series of South American dates with Radiohead early this year. ago [to the day],” said Sheeran. “He
probably would’ve got real emotional.”

PHOENIX RISING Thomas Mars of Phoenix was

hoisted by the crowd at KROQ’s Almost Acoustic
Christmas in L.A., where he called the band’s
music “an alternative to puppy videos.”

SWIFT
FOR DISNEY; PA IMAGES/INSTARIMAGES.COM; DOUG PETERS/

RETURN
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JESSE GRANT/GETTY IMAGES

Taylor Swift
PA IMAGES/INSTARIMAGES.COM; KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY
IMAGES FOR IHEARTMEDIA; JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC

returned to the
stage for five
holiday radio
shows. “See
you on tour,”
Swift told the
crowd at
JINGLE BALLERS London’s Jingle
The Chainsmokers – Ball. She
a.k.a. Alex “Nice” Pall begins a
and Andrew “Naughty” stadium tour
Taggart – were decked in May.
out for L.A.’s Jingle Ball.
They promised “a lot
of great music” for 2018.

24 | R ol l i n g S t o n e Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 Rihanna called
the ceremony “a day
my people and I will
never forget!”
THE DEPP SHOW
Johnny Depp joined
Marilyn Manson at
Wembley Arena in SHUT UP AND DRIVE Rihanna was honored
London. “Most in Barbados, where the street she grew up
eligible bachelor on was named after her. She recalled a tight,
onstage: me,” Manson supportive community: “It takes a village, and
joked. “Second: I’m glad my village was you!”
Johnny Depp.”

CHANCE
MEETING
Chance the
Rapper joined
SZA at a club
show in New
York. The
breakout
R&B star is
nominated for
five Grammys.
“It puts my
wildest dreams
to shame,”
SZA said.

MIAMI NICE Drake, Lil Wayne,

Tory Lanez and 2 Chainz fired
up at a Miami club during the
Art Basel fest. “This is, like, one
of the best times of my life,”
Drake said.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JENN FIVE; SPLASH NEWS;
MEGA; 247PAPS.TV/SPLASH NEWS; SETH BROWARNIK/
STARTRAKSPHOTO.COM; SACHYN MITAL

Love in an Elevator
In what many took to be an allusion to their infamous 2014
elevator incident, Beyoncé and Jay-Z let paparazzi snap
them exiting an elevator at a New York movie theater, where
Beyoncé had treated Jay-Z to a private screening of Wonder
Wheel on his 48th birthday. Next stop: the Grammys, where
Jay is nominated for eight statues.

Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 25
 DEATH OF THE
AMERICAN TRUCKER
Automated trucking promises to improve road safety, reduce
fossil-fuel emissions and put up to 1.7 million people out of work.
Will it also be Trump’s greatest betrayal of his blue-collar base?
W
h e n dona l d t ru m p si-
dles up to a semi truck, he’s
usually selling policy only a
plutocrat could love. Cam-
paigning to repeal the Af-
fordable Care Act in March,
Trump pinned an i y trucks button to his
lapel and honked the horn of a Mack truck
outside the White House. “Obamacare,” he
said, “has inflicted great pain on Ameri-
can truckers.” In October, at a rally before
the “proud men and women of the Ameri-
can Trucking Associations” in Pennsylva-
nia, Trump touted GOP plans to slash cor-
porate taxes by 40 percent and to end “the
crushing, horrible and unfair estate tax.”
Behind him, positioned for the TV camer-
as, was an 18-wheeler – emblazoned with
an unlikely slogan: truckers for tax re-
form. He vowed his America First agenda
“means putting American truckers first.”
In his stagecraft, Trump puts truckers on
a pedestal. Behind the scenes, his admin-
istration is seeking to hasten a revolution
in robotic driving that poses an existen-
tial threat to their livelihoods. We’re at the
dawn of the self-driving truck. The tech-
nology will benefit most Americans: Ev-
er-alert robotic semis promise safer high-
ways, reduced emissions, faster ship times
and, for the 70 percent of goods that trav-
el by truck, lower costs. Yet this same rev-
olution threatens every single job in heavy
trucking – 1.7 million in all, according to
a White House analysis published in the
final days of the Obama administration.
Truckers earn $60 billion in annual wages.
And trucking is now the most common pro-
fession in 29 states, according to an NPR
analysis of census data, including the Rust
Belt trio of Wisconsin, Michigan and Penn-
sylvania that put Trump into office.
26 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
By Tim Dickinson
Ultimately, automated driving could
offer a dark replay of the decline of factory
work. In Trump’s misdiagnosis, “disastrous
trade deals” undermined American man-
ufacturing jobs. But the true culprit is not
cheap Chinese labor as much as it’s robots
here at home. From 2000 to 2010, output
from American factories soared, but man-
ufacturers slashed 5.6 million jobs, with au-
tomation and other tech advances driving
88 percent of those layoffs, according to re-
search from Ball State University.
Full automation of our highways might
take decades – lessening the blow to today’s
drivers. But there’s a gold rush on to disrupt
the $700 billion American trucking indus-
try. A report by the International Trans-
port Forum projects a scenario in which
roughly 1 million heavy-truck drivers lose
their jobs by 2025. McKinsey Global In-
stitute offers an even more dramatic possi-
bility: 85 percent automation, or nearly 1.5
million jobs lost, by 2027. At that pace, the
Trump administration and Republicans in
Congress need to begin backing aggressive
policies to support displaced truckers. But
in its first year, the Trump administration
YOU CANNOT
IGNORE MILLIONS OF
WORKERS’ VOICES,”
SAYS A TEAMSTERS
REPRESENTATIVE.
“OR YOU DO SO AT
YOUR OWN PERIL.
has sided with the automators: Trump’s
short-lived business advisory council was
stocked with CEOs pushing the envelope of
robotic trucking, including Uber and Tesla.
Trump’s tax plan offers big breaks for in-
vestment in automation. And Transporta-
tion Secretary Elaine Chao has vowed the
administration will be “a catalyst” for a
driverless future. It is a revealing betrayal,
exposing rot at the core of Trump’s promis-
es to “make America great again.” Far from
putting the country’s forgotten workers in
the driver’s seat, Trump’s administration
threatens to make them economic roadkill.
This is a dangerous political game for
the president, whose link to trucking runs
deeper than the half-million maga truck-
er hats reportedly sold by his campaign.
Truckers are Trump’s people: 95 percent
lack a college education; more than 90 per-
cent are men; three out of four are white.
This demographic voted for the president at
a 71 percent clip. “Anyone who has paid at-
tention to the last two years of our politics
knows you can’t ignore millions of workers’
voices,” says Sam Loesche, the legislative
representative for the Teamsters union. “Or
you do so at your own peril.”
Robotic trucking may go down easy – at
first. Market-ready tech offers semiautono-
mous cruise control and other advances to
ease the work burden on truckers, without
making them redundant. But the slippery
slope of automation leads to a cliff: Trucks
with no role – or room – for a human.
Eventually, “none of the new trucks will
have a cab on them,” predicted Anthony
Levandowski, Uber’s former star automa-
tion engineer, in 2016. “It just doesn’t make
sense to have that.”
Heavy trucking has emerged as an un-
expected hotbed of innovation. In Novem-
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
ber, Tesla founder Elon Musk stood be-
fore hundreds of superfans at an airport
hangar next to his SpaceX headquarters
outside Los Angeles. Wearing jeans and a
barn jacket, Musk unveiled his long-haul
electric rig: the Tesla Semi, featuring phe-
nomenal acceleration, bulletlike aerody-
namics (less drag than a Bugatti Chiron
roadster) and a 500-mile range. The truck
“will be running on sunlight,” Musk said
in his lilting South African accent, de-
scribing the Semi’s 30-minute recharg-
ing time at a planned network of solar-
powered “megachargers.”
The Tesla Semi is also automation-ready.
It incorporates “Enhanced Autopilot” tech-
nology already at work in Tesla’s cars. Re-
lying on radar and an elaborate system of
cameras mounted about the rig, the Semi
will robotically follow the speed of traf-
fic, maintain and change lanes, and even
come to a controlled stop should the driv-
er fall asleep or become incapacitated. An
animation projected behind Musk teased
the Semi’s convoy capability, where a lead
Semi with a human driver is followed by
a pair of self-driving trucks. “You’re more
like a train driver,” Musk said. Called “pla-
tooning” by competitors, this technology
synchronizes the human smarts and intu-
ition of a lead driver with the steering, ac-
celeration and braking of the autonomous
trailing trucks. “This is something we can
Illustration by Da niel Dow ney
do today, 10 times safer than a human driv-
er,” Musk said. “I want to be clear: This is
something we can do now!”
The first Tesla Semis will not roll off the
production line until 2019. (PepsiCo, An-
heuser-Busch and Walmart, among others,
have reserved nearly 300 trucks.) But pla-
tooning is already being road-tested by in-
dustry giants including Volvo and Daimler.
In a diesel scenario, platooning also offers
big fuel savings even for manned trucks;
each trailing rig uses 10 percent less fuel.
But with advances in autonomy, trucking
companies will be able to shed costly driv-
ers, until even the lead vehicle in a virtual
train of autonomous semis is piloting itself
by artificial intelligence. A software engi-
neer working for Daimler tells Rolling
Stone that employment for truck drivers
in a world of platooning will soon get Dar-
winian: “It’s adapt or die.”
T
ru ly dr i v er l e ss t ruck
technology has already made a
great leap from the test track to
the open roadway. On a chilly
night in October 2016, an Uber
subsidiar y called Otto dis-
patched an automated rig with all-Amer-
ican cargo: 2,000 cases of Budweiser. The
robotic truck hauled 120 miles south along
the base of the Rockies from Fort Collins
to Colorado Springs, navigating a tricky
curve by Denver’s Mile High stadium with-
out its trailer drifting from the lane. The
only human on board, a sandy-haired driv-
er named Walter, sat in the cab’s sleeper
berth. Radar, cameras and GPS systems
mounted about the airfoil and bumper –
combined with lidar, a technology that cre-
ates a view of the road with reflected lasers
– fed a torrent of data to an on-board com-
puter, guiding the AI autopilot through
each decision: accelerating and braking,
turning, changing lanes.
A police convoy accompanied the pre-
dawn run, but the ride went off without a
hitch. When it was time to exit the freeway,
Walter took the controls and finished the
drive to the distribution center. Dan Mur-
ray, vice president of the American Trans-
portation Research Institute (ATRI), who
observed the Otto run, says, “The technol-
ogy is almost ready for prime time.”
Otto was the brainchild of Levandowski,
a former top engineer of Google’s self-driv-
ing-car unit, who early on saw the disrup-
tive potential in trucking. City traffic can
bedevil AI driving systems – does the wav-
ing cyclist want the vehicle to slow down or
to speed up and go around? But highway
driving is as much as 50 times simpler. “It’s
really silly to have a person steering a truck
for eight hours just to keep it between two
lines on the highway,” Levandowski told re-
porters at Otto’s launch.
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 27
 In his race to market, Levandowski
didn’t attempt to build a brand-new semi.
Instead, he created an aftermarket kit to
automate existing diesel trucks. His dirty-
fast-and-first ethos was a cultural fit for
Uber, which bought Otto for $680 mil-
lion in August 2016. But Levandowski and
Uber have since landed in legal jeopardy.
Google’s self-driving unit Waymo has sued
Uber, estimating damages at $1.9 billion –
alleging Levandowski stole lidar technolo-
gy when he left the company. Levandows-
ki has pleaded the Fifth in court, and Uber
has been humbled by a cascade of legal
and sexual scandals leading to the ouster
of CEO Travis Kalanick.
The industry’s jack rabbit may have
stumbled, but competitors are surging
ahead. Embark is a Silicon Valley start-
up founded in 2016 by Alex Rodrigues, a
22-year-old with blue eyes and a shock of
black hair, who built his first automated
robot as a 13-year-old wunderkind. Em-
bark includes a military-grade GPS that
could enable driving in low-visibility con-
ditions. In November, Embark announced
it had begun shipping refrigerators as far
as 650 miles – from El Paso, Texas, to Palm
Springs, California – “the longest automat-
ed freight route in the world today,” accord-
ing to Rodrigues.
In Embark’s business model, long-haul
highway robots work in concert with local
drivers at either end of a route. These hu-
mans act like harbor pilots – ferrying trail-
ers from a staging area by the freeway’s
edge to the warehouse or box store and
back. For now, a human driver sits behind
the wheel of Embark’s trucks as a fail-safe.
But Rodrigues insists his goal is “a fully au-
tonomous truck.”
There’s already stiff competition. In
China, a startup called TuSimple is striv-
ing to introduce road-safe autonomous
semis by 2020. In Sweden, Volvo has been
putting a new robotic truck through the
paces in the dark twists and turns of an
underground mine. Mining, in fact, is the
clearest place to see where heavy trucking
is headed. In 2016, Rio Tinto deployed doz-
ens of autonomous trucks – each the size
of a small house – to haul iron ore in Aus-
tralia. The rigs run 24 hours a day, with no
breaks, and eliminate minor human errors
that slow production. “We’re going to con-
tinue as aggressively as possible down this
path,” Rio Tinto’s productivity chief told
MIT Technology Review. The trucks in the
mine today still have cabs, but Rio Tinto’s
supplier, Komatsu, showcased a new line
of Autonomous Haulage Vehicles last year
in Las Vegas – with no place for any driver.
The race to automate our highways
could be good for the nation as a whole
– increasing productivity, sparking GDP
growth and raising living standards. “At
an economy level, we’d like automation to
happen as quickly as possible,” says Victor
28 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
Bennett, a Duke economist and lead au-
thor of the Obama White House study on
automation. “But that’s really difficult for
people whose jobs are in trucking.”
A
t the lu nch cou n ter of a
Countr y Pride restaurant in
Troutdale, Oregon – inside a
truck stop by Interstate 84, con-
necting Portland to Salt Lake
City – I meet Louis Pribble, who
has been driving trucks since 1987. The
shaggy-haired Pribble, 52, sports a Bone
Collector camo hunting cap. His red T-
shirt has a silkscreen of a bullet and the
slogan share a round with isis.
Like the drivers of dozens of rigs in the
parking lot, Pribble is idled here on this
drizzly afternoon for a federally mandat-
ed rest. These long breaks are a key drag
on the economics of trucking that inno-
vators hope to disrupt. If robots are doing
AT AN ECONOMY
LEVEL, WE’D LIKE
AUTOMATION TO
HAPPEN AS QUICKLY
AS POSSIBLE. BUT
THAT’S REALLY
DIFFICULT FOR
PEOPLE WHO WORK
IN TRUCKING.
the driving, says Murray of ATRI, “sud-
denly the mandate that 10 hours off is re-
quired for fatigue management and safety
– it has nothing to do with that anymore.”
Embark recently persuaded Peterbilt to
add enough diesel capacity on test trucks
to run 48 hours straight. And that’s not an
upper limit. “When you no longer need a
driver in the cab, there’s all this room where
you potentially can add fuel capacity,” Em-
bark chief operating officer Mike Reid says.
“That voids the need for having to pull over
to refuel the truck.”
Pribble drives “all 48” contiguous states,
running 12,000 miles a month in a 2016
Volvo, delivering packaged meals to gro-
cery stores, and he makes decent money
– up to $5,500 a month. In an America of
stagnant annual wages, trucking is a rare
bright spot, rising 5.7 percent last year to
more than $52,000, according to Glass-
door. With his disposable income, Prib-
ble collects abstract art created by drum-
mer Steven Adler of Guns N’ Roses – “my
retirement account,” Pribble jokes. And he
had recently splurged on a test-track drive
of a Lamborghini at a facility across from a
truck stop in Las Vegas. Pribble spends his
downtime playing Xbox in his cab and his
off days at golf courses across the country.
He’s cycled out of trucking in the past, he
says, but found it impossible to get ahead
working in his hometown of Hermiston,
Oregon: “Last job I had, it took two and
a half weeks of work to just make a pick-
up payment.” Trucking, he says, is “better
money than any other job out there.”
The wage premium for truckers com-
pensates for work that is taxing, tedious
and not infrequently deadly. According
to the Department of Labor, heavy-truck-
ers “have one of the highest rates of in-
juries and illnesses of all occupations”
– about three times the average worker –
owing to long hours, sedentary time be-
hind the wheel, road accidents, and dan-
gerous tasks around the truck, like securing
cargo. Trucking is America’s deadliest job
in pure numbers – 745 fatalities in 2015 –
and deadlier on average than even electri-
cal power-line work. It’s also lonely. Prib-
ble sees his girlfriend back home only a
few days a month. “It’s hard on both peo-
ple,” he admits.
Pribble is a Trump supporter, cultur-
ally and economically. He’s angry that
Hermiston is, in his words, “full of illegal
Mexicans.” He bristles at regulation of the
truck industry and loves Trump’s propos-
al to cut two regulations for every new one
put in place. Above all, Pribble is confident
the president will bring jobs roaring back
in America. “Trump is trying to keep his
promises,” he tells me.
When it comes to the threat of auto-
mation, Pribble is skeptical that a robot
will soon take his job away. “Everybody is
all worked up about it,” he says, but Prib-
ble thinks the boy wonders of Silicon Val-
ley have yet to grapple with down-and-
dirty parts of his job. “I’d like to see that
driverless truck put chains on,” he says
with a laugh. “I’d like to see that driver-
less truck in snow.” Maybe younger guys
should think twice about a career in truck-
ing, he concedes. As for him? “By the time
we get to the George Jetson era, I’ll be long
retired,” he says. “Probably dead.”
N
ext to bad weather – snow
can blind laser and optical sen-
sors – the greatest technical hur-
dle to deploying autonomous
trucks is the complexity of urban
driving. But Kyle Vogt, the head
of Cruise, GM’s self-driving-car unit, has
been testing a fleet of autonomous Chevy
Bolts on the streets of San Francisco and
will soon tackle New York. Vogt recent-
ly posted a video of a Cruise car autono-
mously navigating a notorious six-way San
Francisco intersection – with the traffic
signal out. “Self-driving cars have 360-de-
gree vision – there’s no blind spots,” Vogt
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 says. “They’re looking everywhere, all the
time. And able to process complex scenes
at a much higher rate than a human could.”
There are also regulatory, social and se-
curity hurdles. The U.S. now has a patch-
work of state regulation – where any exists
– controlling the deployment of autono-
mous trucks. The Otto beer run in Colorado
would have been prohibited in Ohio, where
a human is required to remain in the driv-
THE DRIVER’S SEAT Above: Tesla unveiled its Semi in November.
Right: Trump invited a group of truckers to the White House in March.
er’s seat. And while automation promises to
eliminate human error, no one is sure who
pays for an automated crash – particularly
in the transitional phase, where a human
still sits inside the cab. “What happens if a
driver is supposed to take control in a split
second, and for whatever reason there’s a
crash?” asks Lamont Byrd, the Teamsters’
safety and health department director.
“That hasn’t been worked out.” Terrorists
have killed dozens of civilians in New York,
Barcelona and Nice by weaponizing trucks.
“Imagine three vehicles controlled by a guy
with a laptop halfway around the world,”
FROM TOP: TESLA; MELINA MARA/“THE WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES
says Loesche, the Teamsters’ legislative rep-
resentative. “Those are monster, monster
hurdles – especially in D.C.” Finally, even
if self-driving vehicles are proved safer as a
matter of statistics, they may not feel safer
to fellow drivers on the road. “Driving next
to any car or truck, and not seeing a human
in it,” says Murray, “is certainly going to
freak out Grandma.”
But none of these obstacles are likely to
keep truckers from becoming the new coal
miners. The gut punch of job loss will be
heightened by a decline in next-job wages.
Truckers “currently enjoy a wage premi-
um over others in the labor market with
the same level of educational attainment,”
the 2016 White House report says, and are
unlikely to “regain this wage premium if
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
displaced.” The traditional fallback for a
trucker – another driving job – will also be
vanishing in this revolution. Uber, to name
one example, signed a pledge to buy 24,000
self-driving SUVs from Volvo. More than
3.7 million Americans make a living behind
the wheel, and 3.1 million of those jobs are
at risk. A report by Goldman Sachs found
that when autonomous vehicles reach peak
deployment, 25,000 drivers a month will
be out of work.
And that flood of
unemployed driv-
ers, says Bennett,
the Duke econo-
mist, would also
“push down the
wages of other low-
wage jobs.”
Tr u mp h a s
shown little con-
cern for this threat
to truckers. Treasury Secretary Steve
Mnuchin insisted in a March 2017 inter-
view that job loss from automation is “not
even on our radar screen,” adding, “I’m not
worried at all.” Meanwhile, Trump’s bud-
get outline aims to slash the Labor Depart-
ment by more than 20 percent, including
deep cuts to job-training grants that might
help drivers laid off for robots.
At the Transportation Department, the
Trump administration is championing au-
tomation in driving. “I want to issue a chal-
lenge to Silicon Valley, Detroit and all other
auto-industry hubs to step up and help ed-
ucate a skeptical public about the bene-
fits of automated technologies,” Secretary
Chao told the National Governors Associ-
ation conference in 2017. She was met with
unexpected resistance from Republicans
in attendance. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder
pressed Chao to look “far enough ahead
so we don’t create job-loss opportunities.”
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker was
more blunt: “I can’t urge you enough – au-
tonomous vehicles have tremendous oppor-
tunity, but at the same time there are some
big-time workforce issues,” adding the ad-
ministration should take policy steps now
to avoid “a tremendous amount of econom-
ic hardship along the way.”
Chao validated the governors’ worries:
“As a former secretary of labor, I’m very,
very concerned about that,” she said. “We
do have to transition people.” (Chao de-
clined to comment.) But even under Demo-
cratic administrations, America has a bleak
history of retraining blue-collar workers.
Factory workers pushed out of $25-an-
hour jobs with generous benefits often can
only find service-sector jobs that pay half
as much. Dislocation has created a loss of
purpose – death rates among middle-aged
white men have risen, largely due to sui-
cide and substance abuse. Ironically, argues
Arthur Brooks, president of conservative
think tank AEI, it is this “dignity gap” that
Trump exploited to win the White House.
Washington’s lack of interest in policy
solutions is ceding
the arena to icons
of tech and local
government. Bill
Gates has called
for taxing robots
to generate reve-
nues equivalent to
the taxes paid by
displaced humans
– funds to be in-
vested in subsidiz-
ing labor where
automation is less
useful. Musk has
called for a univer-
sal basic income to
offset the sting of
automation. “It’s
going to be neces-
sary,” he advised the World Government
Summit in Dubai. In an interview with
Rolling Stone, California Gov. Jerry
Brown agreed: “Income assistance is some-
thing that needs to be looked at careful-
ly. . . . We need to get at it sooner rather
than later.”
Other interventions could include auc-
tioning permits for self-driving vehi-
cles to slow adoption. Or levying a vehi-
cle mileage tax to capture social costs of
driver displacement; Americans would
still get cheaper goods, just not at the ex-
pense of human drivers. “What we’d like
very much is to not have to make a trade-
off between 300 million people getting
lower prices and safer roads and 3 mil-
lion people losing their jobs,” says Ben-
nett. “The question is: Is there a way to not
make that trade-off?”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 29
THE CASE FOR COLLUSION
How one journalist’s chance
interview led to a definitive
account of the Trump
campaign’s ties to Russia
By Tessa Stuart
w h e n lu k e h a r di ng
sat down with Christopher
Steele in a London pub in
December 2016, he hoped
Steele might help him de-
velop an admittedly thin
lead that Russia covertly
financed Donald Trump’s
campaign. At the time,
Steele was a relatively unknown former
British intelligence officer, despite the fact
that he had helped uncover widespread
corruption at FIFA and the Kremlin’s hand
in poisoning ex-FSB agent Alexander Lit-
vinenko. During their 45-minute meeting,
Steele didn’t offer much more than vague
encouragement that there was a story on
the Trump campaign to expose. “There was
no hint he had been involved in what was
the single most important investigation in
decades,” Harding writes in his new book,
Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money,
and How Russia Helped Donald Trump
Win. “Though he implied we were on the
right track.”
Harding previously spent four years as
the Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow,
where he not only became familiar with the
Kremlin’s habit of collecting kompromat – The result is a gripping, nonfiction po- its Russian successor really have tried to
compromising intel on high-profile individ- litical thriller that offers the most com- cultivate Donald Trump over a period of
uals (including himself) – but also with a prehensive account to date of the evidence decades. And I think that to understand
number of central characters in the ongoing that Trump captured the presidency with the story of Donald Trump and Russia
federal investigation into the Trump cam- the Kremlin’s help – from early KGB efforts you have to understand the story of the
paign. He once spent a day with Aras Agal- to cultivate Trump to a series of question- KGB and Soviet espionage. It’s not that
arov, the oligarch whose son helped broker able loans from Deutsche Bank. Although they are geniuses. They’re not – they’re
a deal to pass “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to the White House denies any wrongdoing, kind of opportunists, but they have meth-
Donald Trump Jr. And in 2007, he inter- Robert Mueller’s investigation has sup- ods they’ve tested over a period of time.
viewed Paul Manafort, who was then help- ported a number of Harding’s findings: The They’ve always been interested in Ameri-
ing to install the Kremlin’s preferred can- special counsel has indicted four members cans because America is the chief enemy.
didate as president of Ukraine, and would of Trump’s campaign and is reportedly ex- You look at the kind of people they want to
later become Trump’s campaign manager. amining the president’s personal finances. recruit and obviously Trump fits the bill,
But it wasn’t until weeks after Harding’s “I understand how the Russian regime because of his personality, because of his
meeting with Steele, when Buzzfeed pub- thinks,” Harding says. “I understand just narcissism, because of his corruptibility,
lished the ex-agent’s now-infamous dossier how dark and thuggish it can be. And also because of his alleged adultery, his predi-
of allegations on Trump’s relationship with that it lies. About everything. Once you re- lection for young women, allegedly. He’s
the Russian government, that he realized alize that, you have the most thrilling story the perfect guy.
he had the inside track on the biggest po- – and that was the story I tried to tell.” Do we know if he cooperated with any of
litical scandal, possibly, in American his- Russia’s efforts?
tory. “The book came together in my head Based on your reporting, how far back does We don’t know, and maybe we’ll never
at that stage very quickly,” Harding says. Russia’s interest in Trump go? know, to what degree Trump has wittingly
“The following weekend, I started writing, I think we can say, without being hy- collaborated with Russian intelligence. I
in secret, for months.” perbolic, that the Soviet government and mean, I think he has, but it’s impossible to

30 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Illustration by Victor Juhasz

judge from the perspective of 2017. Vladi- running a large-scale money-laundering

FROM RUSSIA
mir Putin knows the extent to which So- scheme for Kremlin VIPs, who are still
viet and Russian intelligence have engaged anonymous. While these two lines come
with him, and what degree of willingness rather close to each other, they don’t con-
he has shown. But I think we’re absolutely
across the line of collusion. I actually think
there’s a lot more to come. I think it’s now
WITH LOVE verge, because I can’t prove it.
Trump disputes reports that his financial
records at Deutsche Bank New York have
question-mark treason. And I don’t want The Trump campaign’s contacts been subpoenaed. What do you know?
to exaggerate that. We have to be clear, if with Russian agents during the People I talk to, who are kind of in-
you’re going to quote me: “Trump denies election and beyond siders, say that if Mueller had served
this and it may not be true,” but I think NOV
Deutsche Bank with a subpoena, it’s highly
2015
that’s the zone we’re in. probable the White House wouldn’t know.
11.3.2015 12.10.2015
What does “question-mark treason” mean? Indeed, it may be part of the subpoena
Felix Sater, Michael
If Trump had pre-knowledge that the a Trump Flynn visits that they can’t tell the client – the client
Kremlin had hacked this stuff to help him associate, Russia for a being Donald Trump. That would be sort
writes paid speech.
and hurt Hillary, and there was a degree Trump’s At dinner, of standard procedure. So when the White
of coordination in terms of when stuff was lawyer: “I will he is seated House says “That’s not true,” I am kind of
released, then I think that question comes get Putin on next to skeptical because they would not be in the
this program Putin.
into play. And we can’t prove that, but and we will position to call it.
the circumstantial evidence, to me, seems get Donald 4.26.2016 How significant is Michael Flynn’s coopera-
elected.” George
pretty strong. We now know that [Trump’s tion with the investigation?
Papadoupolos
campaign adviser] George Papadopoulos 6.9.2016 meets Of all the people who have been indict-
was told by this weird Maltese professor in Donald a professor ed, Flynn is the most serious so far. First,
Trump Jr., who says
April 2016 that the Kremlin was sitting on Jared he knows he was on the team very early. He has this
a very big mountain of material from the Kushner “high-level conversation with a senior adviser who, it
and Paul Russian
Democrats. So the Trump team had a jump government turns out, is Jared Kushner, when he was
Manafort
on this stuff – they knew about it, certainly meet with a officials” talking to [Russian Ambassador] Sergey
before the FBI knew, and certainly before Kremlin- with “dirt” Kislyak in December 2016. So what he was
connected on Clinton.
the Democrats knew. Russian doing in his basically back-channel nego-
I do want to hear your thoughts on the pee lawyer. 7.7.2016 tiation with the Russians was authorized
tape referenced in the dossier. Do you think An adviser, from the top. You have to ask yourself, “If
6.22.2016 Carter Page,
it exists? DNC e-mails meets in Rus- he was getting the green light from Kush-
Who can answer that question? Putin hacked by sia with the ner, who is Kushner talking to?”
can answer that question. Probably eight Russia are deputy prime But I think the other fascinating aspect
published by minister,
to 12 people in the FSB can answer that. WikiLeaks, and allegedly is that rather like Donald Trump himself,
Trump can answer that question. But they whose the head it seems pretty clear that the Russians
servers are of Russia’s
would have had a recording facility in the later moved national oil mounted a fairly major cultivation opera-
penthouse suite. Those five-star Moscow to Moscow. company. tion of Flynn. Some of this is in the Steele
hotels are basically under the thumb of 7.2016 12.2016
dossier, some of it you can infer, but this
the FSB and, again, everyone in Moscow At the GOP At Trump trip in 2013 to visit [Russia’s military in-
knows it. So, really, it’s not a question of convention, Tower with telligence] is extremely odd. I think it is
whether they have a tape, it’s a question of Russian Flynn and something that Mueller will certainly be
Ambassador Kislyak,
what Trump did. Sergey Kushner asking about. And, of course, the man who
You write about other instances in which Kislyak proposes a organized that trip was Kislyak.
meets with secure line to
similar sex tapes – secretly recorded by the Jeff Sessions the Kremlin to There seems to be an effort to discredit the
FSB – have been strategically released for and Page. bypass U.S. Steele dossier by saying the Clinton cam-
intelligence.
political purposes. paign paid for some of it.
12.29.2016
The KGB has been doing it for years. Flynn tells 5.9.2017 We know that originally [the conser-
They even have this rather charming name Kislyak that A day after vative website, the Free Beacon, funded
for it: “swallows,” very attractive young sanctions firing FBI by Paul Singer, a Marco Rubio support-
imposed Director
women sent to try and seduce high-profile on Russia James Comey, er] commissioned it. Then he dropped
Westerners, with a view to blackmailing by Obama Trump meets out when Trump got the nomination,
could be with Kislyak
them and entrapping them and possibly rolled back. and Russia’s and the Democrats took over. But that
recruiting them. They’re specialists in this foreign doesn’t really matter – the queen of Eng-
stuff. Why wouldn’t they do it? 7.7.2017 minister in the land could have paid for it. The point is,
Oval Office.
Another potential piece of leverage Putin Trump and Steele didn’t know who the client was, at
Rex Tillerson
may have on Trump is financial – related meet with 12.5.2017 least not for some time. He had a brief
to this massive debt with Deutsche Bank. Putin for Reports to ask the question “What was Donald
more than surface that
There are two parallel lines: One is the two hours at Robert Mueller Trump’s relationship with Russia?” He
capture of Deutsche Bank Moscow by a summit in subpoenaed didn’t know for whom he was asking. But
Vneshtorgbank, which is basically the Germany. Deutsche more importantly, “Is it true?” Because
That night, Bank, which
FSB; the other line is Deutsche Bank New Trump has made unusual the allegation is so desperately serious:
York’s extraordinary lending to Trump. another loans to that Trump cheated by getting external
hourlong Trump while
What we can say is that Deutsche Bank chat with embroiled in help from a power that clearly doesn’t wish
New York – even though Trump had been Putin. a $10 million anything good toward the United States
Russian
in default and sued them – continued to money-laun- of America. So, whether you are a Repub-
lend very large sums to Trump, while si- DEC
dering scam. lican or Democrat, that has to be the es-
2017
multaneously its Moscow division was sential question.

Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 31
 THE
ROLLING STONE
INTERVIEW

BONO
U2’s frontman on the state of his
band, the state of the world and what
he learned from almost dying
BY JANN S. WENNER
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTON CORBIJN

I
n 1985, shortly a fter u2 brok e through in a merica, “rolling
Stone” named them the “band of the Eighties.” Over the course of 30 years
and 16 cover stories, the magazine has forged a deep relationship with U2.
The band’s new album, Songs of Experience, topped the charts in early De-
cember, meaning U2 now have a Number One album in each decade from
the Eighties on. p I first interviewed Bono in 2005, when we talked for 10
hours over a long weekend in Cancún, Mexico, starting an intimate dia-
logue about rock & roll, social justice, faith and the purpose of art. This in-
terview picks up where that one left off, although this time the stakes are much
higher. The election of Donald Trump and a rising wave of fascism in Europe had
rocked Bono, as had a near-death experience he suffered while making Songs of Ex-
perience. While he still finds it difficult to talk about his “extinction event,” as he
calls it, Bono opened up about its profound effect on both his life and on the new
album. p We conducted the interview over two sessions at the kitchen table of my
New York apartment, around the corner from Bono’s own place in the city. In per-
son, Bono is warm, engaging and thoughtful, even while discussing difficult sub-
jects. What shines through as much as anything is his ambition, which burns as
brightly as ever. U2 remain hungry – for new approaches to songwriting, for finding
their place in the age of streaming, for a new tour planned for the spring. Bono con-
tinues to pour his energy into global causes, meeting with world leaders and work-
ing on behalf of his ONE Campaign, which fights extreme poverty. He is the rarest
of rock stars – an artist and an activist in the same measure. As always, he remains
an optimist – and one of rock’s greatest talkers, full of wit and candor and poetry.

32
 Bono in
Mexico City
in October
 BONO
You just finished the “Joshua Tree” tour.
Nostalgia is something U2 like to avoid, so
what was it like going out and playing an
old album every night?
The stance that we took was [to act] as
if we had just put out The Joshua Tree the
week before. So there were no old Super 8
films or anything to give the sense of that
time. We felt that its strength was that it
had meaning, maybe even more meaning
now than it did then. That was the conceit,
and it got better and better. We ended
with four nights in Sao Paulo, in front of,
I think, nearly 300,000 people, and it was
quite the crescendo.
But if I am honest – and I probably
should be in this interview – I haven’t
quite recovered from it. I gave myself to
the singing in new ways, but there wasn’t a
lot of going out and discovering the places
we were playing, the cit-
ies that we were playing,
which I really love to do.
Stepping inside the songs
was more of an ordeal
than I thought it would be. A POET
They are very demanding I’VE KNOWN
in terms of their emotional
– what word am I looking
FOR YEARS
for . . . forthrightness. And TOLD ME,
then we were preparing for ‘IF YOU WANT
Songs of Experience. All
that promotion takes a lot TO GET TO
more work than I remem- THE PLACE
ber, but if you believe in the
songs, you have to defend
WHERE THE
and present them. WRITING
“Songs of Experience” LIVES,
just debuted at Number
One on the albums chart, IMAGINE
which means you’ve had YOU’RE
a chart-topping album
in every decade from the
DEAD.’ THAT
Eighties on. Why do you IS GREAT
still push so hard for hits? ADVICE. I
I mean, it’s not for ev-
erybody – and it can’t be JUST DIDN’T
for us all the time. But it WANT TO
just felt right. These last
two albums mix up the per-
HAVE TO
sonal and the political so FIND OUT
that you don’t know which THE HARD
one you’re talking to. That’s
a kind of magic trick, and WAY.
realizing that of course
all the problems that we
find in the exterior world
are just manifestations of
what we, you know, what
we hold inside of us, in our
interior worlds. The biggest
fucker, the biggest asshole,
the biggest, the most sexist we can be,
the most selfish, mean, cunning, all those
characters you are going to see them in
the mirror. And that is where the job of
transformation has to start first. Is that
not what experience tells us?
34 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
How did you envision “Songs of Experi-
ence” in relation to “Songs of Innocence,”
its companion album from 2014?
I had this idea of your younger self talk-
ing to your older self for quite a while. It
is an interesting dramatic device. [Sev-
eral years ago] I was at an exhibition of
Anton Corbijn’s photographs in Amster-
dam, and someone asked me what would
I say to this photo; I think it was a shot of
me at age 22. I thought about it, and then
I said, “Stop second-guessing yourself.
You’re right.”
And then the person asked what the
younger me would say to the older me. I
got a bit nervous. I wasn’t sure. I took that
hesitation as a clue that maybe I wasn’t
comfortable with where I am now. I was
starting to realize that I had lost some
of that fierceness. Some of that clarity,
that black-and-white point
of view.
But now it seems like
you’re in another place
entirely. It seems like you
have more clarity, that you
learned more.
I’m less unsure about
taking political risks or so-
cial risks. When I became
an activist, people were like,
“Really?” But they eventu-
ally accepted that. Then I
started to be interested in
commerce and the machin-
ery of what got people out of
poverty and into prosperity.
And then a few people said,
“You can’t really go there,
can you?”
I said, “But if you are an
artist, you must go there.”
You and I have had the con-
versation over the years:
What can the artist do?
What is the artist not al-
lowed to do, and are there
boundaries? Now, I would
say to my younger self: “Ex-
periment more and don’t
let people box you in. There
is nothing you can’t put on
your canvas if it is part of
your life.” We have this idea
in the culture that came out
of the Sixties and Seventies,
that artists were somehow
above the fray, or should be
above the fray.
That they have an excuse
not to participate.
I had an excuse not to
participate. But I knew that some people
who have regular jobs are just as valuable
as the artists, maybe more valuable. And
there are more assholes per square inch
amongst us artists. I remember meeting
Björk, and she said that in Iceland, mak-
ing a chair is a big deal. Like, a song is not
more important than a chair. And I went,
“Well, depending on the chair, Irish people
know that to be true.” So if that is true,
then stop this nonsense that an artist is an
elevated person.
One thing this record seems to be about
is survival. The survival of the world, and
of our political system. But let’s talk about
your own survival. In the middle of record-
ing, you had a near-death experience. Tell
me what happened.
Well, I mean, I don’t want to.
I understand. I had my own experi-
ence recently. People want to ask about my
health, and I’m hesitant to talk about it.
Why do I feel that way? Am I ashamed? Is
it weakness I am trying to cover up?
It’s just a thing that . . . people have these
extinction events in their lives; it could be
psychological or it could be physical. And,
yes, it was physical for me, but I think I
have spared myself all that soap opera. Es-
pecially with this kind of celebrity obses-
sion with the minutiae of peoples’ lives – I
have got out of that. I want to speak about
the issue in a way that lets people fill in the
blanks of what they have been through,
you know?
It’s one thing if you were talking about it
in a place of record like Rolling Stone,
but by the time it gets to your local tabloid
it is just awful. It becomes the question
that everyone is asking.
But let’s talk about it in an elliptical
sense. I mean, it’s central to the album.
Yeah. This political apocalypse was
going on in Europe and in America, and
it found a perfect rhyme with what was
going on in my own life. And I have had a
hail of blows over the years. You get warn-
ing signs, and then you realize that you are
not a tank, as [his wife] Ali says. Edge has
this thing that he says about me, that I look
upon my body as an inconvenience.
In 2000, you had a throat-cancer scare,
right?
No, it was a check for it. One of the spe-
cialists wanted to biopsy, which would
have risked my vocal cords – and it turned
out OK.
A few years ago, I visited you in the hos-
pital with your arm in some kind of George
Washington Bridge structure.
After my bike accident, pretending it
was a car crash.
It looked bad, and then the latest thing.
That is a lot of brushes with death.
There is comic tragedy with a bike ac-
cident in Central Park – it is not exactly
James Dean. But the thing that shook me
was that I didn’t remember it. That was the
amnesia; I have no idea how it happened.
That left me a little uneasy, but the other
stuff has just finally nailed me. It was like,
“Can you take a hint?”
You are making the album and then
all of a sudden you had to deal with your
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 U2 TV
The band onstage during the Joshua
Tree tour in July. The tour ran for 52
shows and played to 2.7 million fans.
“The stance we took was to act as if
we had just put out the album a week
before,” Bono says.
health issue. How did it affect the album
and your vision of it?
Well, strangely enough, mortality was
going to be a subject anyway just because it
is a subject not often covered. And you can’t
write Songs of Experience without writing
about that. And I’ve had a couple of these
shocks to the system, let’s call them, in my
life. Like my bike accident or my back inju-
ry. So it was always going to be the subject.
I just didn’t want to be such an expert in it.
I met this poet named Brendan Ken-
nelly. I have known him for years; he is an
unbelievable poet. And he said, “Bono, if
you want to get to the place where the writ-
ing lives, imagine you’re dead.” There is no
ego, there is no vanity, no worrying about
who you will offend. That is great advice. I
just didn’t want to have to find out outside
of a mental excursion. I didn’t want to find
out the hard way.
So how did the idea of mortality come
into play?
Gavin Friday, one of my friends from Ce-
darwood Road [in Dublin], has written one
of my favorite songs. It is called “The Last
Song I’ll Ever Sing,” about this character
in Dublin, back when we were growing up,
called the Diceman, who died at 42, five
DANNY NORTH
years after he was diagnosed with HIV. I
realized only recently that “Love Is All We
Have Left” is my attempt to write that song.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
Can you be more precise? Like, what
songs do you think came directly out of
your near-death moment?
It’s not so much songs as . . .
The mood of it.
I think . . . I mean, how about this: “The
Showman” – that is a light song, a fun song,
and it became a really important song. Not
surrendering to melancholy is the most
important thing if you are going to fight
your way out of whatever corner you are in.
Self-pity? The Irish, we are fucking world-
beaters on that level; it’s our least-inter-
esting national characteristic. And I never
wanted to surrender to that, so punk rock,
the tempo of some songs, suddenly became
really important.
But the second verse is the key, and it has
the best line in the album, which is this:
“It is what it is, it is not what it seems/This
screwed up stuff is the stuff of dreams/I
got just enough low self-esteem to get me
to where I want to go.” I wish I could say
it was mine, but it was Jimmy Iovine who
said it. A friend of mine was slagging him
off, and I said, “Oh, a little insecure there,
Jimmy?” And Jimmy turned around and
said, “I got just enough low self-esteem to
get me where I want to go.”
That sounds like a realistic appraisal of
you and your bullshit.
Performers are very insecure people.
Gavin Friday, his line to me years and
years ago was “Insecurity is your best se-
curity for a performer.” A performer needs
to know what is going on in the room and
feel the room, and you don’t feel the room
if you are normal, if you’re whole. If you
have any great sense of self, you wouldn’t
be that vulnerable to either the opinions of
others or the love and the applause and the
approval of others.
The whole event enriched the album,
though – talk about an experience.
But isn’t that great? I thought Experi-
ence would be more contemplative, and it
has got that side, but the heart of the album
is the spunk and the punk and the drive of
it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A
lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of
the funniest lines, I think. “Dinosaur won-
ders why he still walks the Earth.” I mean,
I started that line about myself.
Being a dinosaur?
Yeah, of course, but then I started to
think about it in terms of what is going on
around the world. And I thought, “Gosh,
democracy, the thing that I have grown up
with all my life . . . that’s what’s really facing
an extinction event.”
In an interview that you and I did in
2005, you said this: “Our definition of art
is breaking open the breastbone, for sure.
Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were
an easier way, but people want blood, and
I am one of them.”
Life and death and art . . . all of them
bloody businesses.
How did your faith get you through all
of this?
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 35
 BONO
The person who wrote best about love man, shouting at God, “Why did this hap- demonic rage, Saul turns against him, tries
in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, pen to me?” But there’s honesty in that to kill him with a spear, and he is, in fact,
who became Saint Paul. He was a tough too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. exiled. He is chased, and he hides out in a
fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, cave. And in the darkness of that cave, in
is fierce and he has, of course, the Dama- don’t you think David looks like Elvis? the silence and the fear and probably the
scene experience. He goes off and lives as He’s a great beauty. stink, he writes the first psalm.
a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he It is also annoying that he is the most fa- And I wish that weren’t true. I wish I
writes this ode to love, which everybody mous Jew in the world and they gave him an didn’t know enough about art to know
knows from his letter to the Cor- that that is true. That some-
inthians: “Love is patient, love times you just have to be in that
is kind. . . . Love bears all things, cave of despair. And if you’re
love believes all things” – you still awake . . . there is this very
hear it at a lot of weddings. How funny bit that comes next. So
do you write these things when David, our hero, is hiding out in
you are at your lowest ebb? the cave, and Saul’s army comes
’Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t looking for him. Indeed, King
deepen myself. I am looking to Saul comes into the cave where
somebody like Paul, who was David is hiding to . . . ah . . . use the
in prison and writing these love facilities. I am not making this
letters and thinking, “How does up – this is in the Holy Scrip-
that happen? It is amazing.” tures. David is sitting there, hid-
Now, it doesn’t cure him of ing. He could just kill the king,
all, of what he thinks of women but he goes, “No, he is the anoint-
or gay people or whatever else, ed. I cannot touch him.” He just
but within his context he has an clips off a piece of Saul’s robe,
amazingly transcendent view of and then Saul gets on his horse
love. And I do believe that the as they go off. They’re down in
darkness is where we learn to the valley, and then David comes
see. That is when we see our- out and he goes, “Your king-ness,
selves clearer – when there is your Saul-ness, I was that close.”
no light. It is a beautiful story. I have
You asked me about my faith. thought about that all my life,
I had a sense of suffocation. I because I knew that’s where the
am a singer, and everything I Family Man blues were born.
do comes from air. Stamina, On “Lights of Home,” you
Bono with (from left)
it comes from air. And in this his wife, Ali, and write, “I shouldn’t be here be-
process, I felt I was suffocating. daughters Eve and cause I should be dead. I can see
That was the most frightening Jordan. “Landlady,” uncircumcised . . . that’s the lights in front of me. I believe my best
thing that could happen to me from U2’s new LP, is a just crazy. But, any- days are ahead, I can see lights in front of
because I am in pain. Ask Ali. song of thanks to Ali. way, he is a very attrac- me. Oh, Jesus, if I’m still your friend, what
She said I wouldn’t notice if I tive character. Dances the hell, what the hell you got for me?”
had a knife sticking out of my naked in front of the There is a Bob Dylan reference in that
back. I would be like, “Huh, what is that?” troops. His wife is pissed off with him for song; I’ll just tell you ’cause I know you
But this time last year, I felt very alone and doing so. You sense you might like him, but love Bob. It goes, “Hey, now, do you know
very frightened and not able to speak and he does some terrible things as he wan- my name? Where I’m going? If I can’t get
not able to even explain my fear because I ders through four phases – servant, poet, an answer in your eyes, I see it, the lights
was kind of . . . warrior, king. Terrible things. He is quite of home.” At least in my head, the reference
When you felt like you were suffocating? a modern figure in terms of his contradic- is to one of my favorite Dylan songs, “Señor
Yeah. But, you know, people have had so tions. . . . Is this boring? Señor.” In that song, he meets an angel and
much worse to deal with, so that is another But if you go back to his early days, he, like, goes on this ride with him. I have
reason not to talk about it. You demean all David is anointed by Samuel, the prophet always imagined it is the angel of death.
the people who, you know, never made it Samuel, and, above all, his older broth- The full name of the song is “Señor (Tales
through that or couldn’t get health care! ers, a sheepherder presumably smelling of of Yankee Power).” Does that help explain?
Do you feel like you lucked out? sheep shite, he is told, “Yeah, you are going No, I think that is Bob putting you off
Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest to be the king of Israel.” And everyone is the trail.
man on Earth. I didn’t think that I had laughing, like, “You got to be kidding – this Your song asks, “Jesus, what have you
a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be kid?” But only a few years later, Saul, the got for me?” Well, what do you think he has
inconvenient ’cause I have a few albums king, is reported as having a demon and got for you?
to make and kids to see grow up and this the only thing that will quiet the demon There is an unbelievable release in let-
beautiful woman and my friends and all of is music. . . . Makes sense to me. David can ting go. I thought I already had, but this
MATT BARON/REX SHUTTERSTOCK

that. But I was not that guy. And then sud- play the harp. As he is walking up to the was the next installment in trust. You
denly you are that guy. And you think, “I palace, he must be thinking, “This is it! know, people of faith can be very annoy-
don’t want to leave here. There’s so much This is how it is going to happen.” Even ing. Like when people on the Grammys
more to do.” And I’m blessed. Grace and better, when he meets the king and gets to thank God for a song and you think, “God,
some really clever people got me through, be friends with the king’s son Jonathan. It’s that is a shite song. Don’t give God credit
and my faith is strong. like, “Whoa, this is definitely going to hap- for that one – you should take it yourself!”
I read the Psalms of David all the time. pen! The old prophet Samuel was right.” I am sure I have done that myself. And
They are amazing. He is the first blues- And then what happens? In a moment of someone’s like, “I got this directly from

36 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
the mouth of God!” And you’re thinking,
“Wow, God has no taste!”
He can’t write a fucking tune!
Like, “That is a bad rhyme, God!” So
you have got to be very careful of this, but
if you’re asking me what I learned, I’ve
learned to try and put time aside to medi-
tate on the day ahead. I don’t want to get all
religious on your ass, so do forgive me, but
if you’re interested, this is today’s medita-
tion. I will share this with you because it is
beautiful and because it might make you
smile. Here it comes. This is Psalm 18, and
it is one of those psalms of David that has
been translated into a modern idiom by this
man called Eugene Peterson – great writer.
It goes: “God made my life complete when I
placed all the pieces before him. When I got
my act together, he gave me a fresh start.
Now, I’m alert to God’s ways. I don’t take
God for granted. Every day
I review the ways he works.
I try not to miss a trick. I
feel put back together, and
I’m watching my step. God
rewrote the text of my life I HAVE COME
when I opened the book of TO PEACE
my heart to his eyes.” Isn’t
that beautiful?
WITH THE
That is beautiful. Tell me YOUNGER
about the theme of love on ZEALOT
this album. You start the
record with “Love Is All We THAT I USED
Have Left.” TO BE. AND
It will take me a while to
answer your questions, but
I THINK
I will answer them eventu- THE ZEALOT
ally. I was imagining a sci- WOULDN’T
ence-fiction Frank Sinatra.
[Sings torchily] “Love and DISAPPROVE
love is all we have left.” It’s OF WHERE
almost comic in one sense,
except it rips your heart out.
I ENDED UP.
Tragic comedy. I thought MAYBE THE
it would be interesting to PROCESS
write a song from the point
of view of a person who OF GETTING
maybe wouldn’t sing anoth- THERE HE
er song. One of the things I
ask myself on this album is,
MIGHT NOT
“If you have one thing to say, HAVE LIKED.
what is it? If this is all we
are left with, I am content
with it – love.”
What I wanted to do on
this album is to occasion-
ally have a dialectical con-
versation where younger me
assails the older me. And
so you have that voice in “Love Is All We
Have Left”: [Sings] “Now, you’re at the
other side of the telescope/Seven billion
stars in her eyes/So many stars, so many
ways of seeing/Hey, this is no time not to
be alive.” It is the innocent you speaking to
the experienced you and saying it is OK. I
have come to some peace with that younger
zealot that I used to be. And I think that
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
that younger zealot wouldn’t disapprove of
where I have ended up. Maybe the process
of getting there he might not have liked.
You’re not just singing love songs; these
are deep meditations about the power of
love.
It is probably our big subject as a band.
When we sang “Pride (In the Name of
Love),” that was an excruciating thing for
a young male to sing, if you think about
it. But if you are asking what side of love
this is, you know, the English language is
so rich, but it is limited in this word “love.”
There are many other words. . . .
What about the song “Ordinary Love”?
That’s nonromanticized love. The love
that people make, the deals that people
make to stay together. What Yeats calls
“cold passion.” I love the idea that great re-
lationships have a lower temperature.
Not a transactional love,
but a day-to-day willing-
ness to tolerate and accept,
which requires more pa-
tience and less passion.
Yes. Ali and I are prob-
ably more in love now than
when we got together in the
first place. I don’t think it
is given much credit, but
when people work through
their problems and stay to-
gether – “Ordinary Love”
is that. I hope it’s interest-
ing to write love songs. Not
the hundreds of thousands
of songs about passion and
losing your mind to love.
Isn’t it interesting to write
cold, measured, how-we-
got-here songs?
“Landlady” is an extra-
ordinarily pretty love song
about you and Ali and
thanking her for so much.
Getting home – that is the
big key for me. I can’t believe
it because I grew up sleep-
ing on people’s couches,
sleeping on their floor, run-
ning away to the circus and
joining a rock & roll band. It
has taken me a long time to
figure out where home is. I
left home probably the week
my mother died [when Bono
was 14]. I mean, I stayed
there on [childhood home]
10 Cedarwood Road for the
next few years, but I wasn’t really there.
On Songs of Innocence, “This Is Where You
Can Reach Me Now” explains the realiza-
tion that I had, while sitting there, moved
address. I was with the band. The band was
where I live. They were another family.
It has taken me a long time, but I think I
finally came home. But the only way I could
say that is with some humor. And so on
“Landlady,” there is a little faux Bob Dylan
line, which is “I’ll never know what starv-
ing poets meant ’cause when I was broke it
was you that always paid the rent.” I have
learned a lot from Bob Dylan over the years,
and one thing I’ve learned is that at your
most serious moment you need humor. You
need fucking humor. That is why I am so
proud of the album. You have all this feisty
stuff, but you also have, on “Blackout,” “The
dinosaur wonders why it’s still on the Earth.
A meteor promises it is not going to hurt.”
That is funny, but so is “Landlady,” and that
is why “Landlady” works. It hopefully has
just enough humor and humility for it not
to be fucking excruciating.
Let me ask you about “Summer of Love,”
which is about Syria and the refugees.
Where did that song come from, musically?
There is a guy working with Ryan Ted-
der, who wrote a beautiful little guitar part.
And this was Edge going through his little
excitement, saying, “Oh, if you want some-
thing, you just ask for it. Like hip-hop, sam-
ple it. Sample it, or replay it.” It was a great
freedom for him. So that was part of the
spirit of this record too. It was like, “Let’s
look in places you don’t normally look.” And
so we got this beautiful mood, and we have
this beautiful melodic sort of almost ode
to the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the
Papas, and then found the twist. And the
twist is the west coast of Syria. And not the
west coast of Ireland or California, as a lot
of people have reviewed it as.
The charts these days are dominated by
younger acts. Most everything on the Top
40 is hip-hop or pop. Rock is no longer at
the center of our culture. Where does U2 fit
into this new world?
The table has been gamed a little bit.
Right now, streaming is on the ad-based
model. And that is very, very young, and it’s
very, very pop. It’s dominated by frequency
of plays, but that is not actually a measure
of the weight of an artist. When you move
from an ad-based model to a subscription
model, a funny thing happens. Then, the
artist who will make you sign up is actually
more valuable.
The one you pay for?
The one you pay for. If you are a teen-
ager and you are listening to whatever
the pop act is, you’re probably listening
to them 100 times a day. It’s a teenage
crush, but in a year’s time you won’t care
about that. But artists that have a connec-
tion with you and your life, you pay for the
subscription service. In fact, we are going
to witness a revolution in the way artists
and their fans interact. Chance the Rap-
per, who has a beautiful soul and a mind to
match it, has no record label. He is doing
it himself, and he is successful to the point
where he can give a million dollars to the
Chicago school system.
But if your music is on Apple or on Spot-
ify, you can speak straight to people. What
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 37
 BONO
you need from record labels is advice and,
you know, help with how you manage your
band or brand or the artwork and the vid-
eos and all of that. This is really a transi-
tion period. It has been very unfriendly to
a lot of artists. I knew Spotify would come
through for people, but a lot of my friends
were angry for believing me because they
said, “We are just getting micropayments.”
I said things were going to change once this
gets to scale, and it is going to take a while.
It is going to be unpleasant; not a good
time to be Cole Porter right now.
Is Spotify starting to pay off?
As it gets to scale . . . if the record labels
don’t share out what they’re receiving from
Spotify, artists will bypass the record la-
bels and go straight to Spotify or Apple.
And so in the ecology of this, where do
you fit?
We gave away our last
album; or rather, Apple
gave it away. And very gen-
erously, I believe. But the
album before that, No Line
on the Horizon, was very OUR BAND
adult, not of the demo- COULD TOUR
graphic that are interest-
ed in streaming. So we are
FOR THE
just going into this now. We REST OF
haven’t really started yet. ITS LIFE
So you think that the
music you are doing now is ON WHAT
more streaming-friendly? WE’VE DONE.
Yeah. It’s so, so interest-
ing, though. We’re back to
BUT I AM
the Fifties now, where the ASKING
focus is on songs rather THEM TO
than albums. U2 make al-
bums, so how do we sur- PUT A LOT OF
vive? By making the songs ENERGY INTO
better. And having, I hope,
the humility to accept that
RECORDING
we need to rediscover song- NEW SONGS
writing, which is one reason AND SELLING
Edge and I took on Turn Off
the Dark, the Spider-Man OUR WARES,
musical, to get into musi- LIKE WE DID
cal theater, the Rodgers
and Hammerstein aspect
WHEN WE
of songwriting – a lot of the WERE KIDS.
American Songbook came
from musicals. We started
to get into what you might
call formal songwriting.
We asked Paul McCart-
ney, “Where did you get all
those incredible chords in
those Beatles songs?” And
he said, “Well, you know, we were a rock
& roll band, but to get good gigs we had
to do weddings. Like posh weddings. We
had to learn Gershwin, all that stuff.” And
I went, “No, I didn’t know.” And Paul says,
“Oh, yeah, we got better-paying gigs.” And
I went, “Ah!” It was like, “Note to self and
Edge: Let’s get into musical theater. Let’s
think about that.”
38 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
I would say halfway through Songs of
Innocence, we really started thinking dif-
ferently about songwriting, being more
formal about it. And now these new songs
have melodies you can hear across the
street, around the corner. When they’re
good, you can hear them through the walls.
How do you discover new music?
The band is always listening to music,
and I have got my kids. Jordan is a music
snob, an indie snob. Eve is hip-hop. Elijah
is in a band, and he has got very strong
feelings about music, but he doesn’t make
any distinction between, let’s say, the Who
and the Killers. Or, you know, Nirvana and
Royal Blood. It is not generational for him.
It is the sound and what he is experiencing.
He believes that a rock & roll revolution is
around the corner.
Do you believe it?
I think music has got-
ten very girly. And there
are some good things about
that, but hip-hop is the only
place for young male anger
at the moment – and that’s
not good. When I was 16,
I had a lot of anger in me.
You need to find a place for
it and for guitars, whether
it is with a drum machine
– I don’t care. The moment
something becomes pre-
served, it is fucking over.
You might as well put it in
formaldehyde. In the end,
what is rock & roll? Rage
is at the heart of it. Some
great rock & roll tends to
have that, which is why
the Who were such a great
band. Or Pearl Jam. Eddie
has that rage.
And therefore you think
that there is space still
available. . . .
It will return.
You agree with Eli?
His angle was, if the rock
& roll revolution isn’t hap-
pening, we are going to
start it.
Who do you think U2’s
audience is? A couple of
years ago, you were saying
you had to go out and get a
younger, newer audience,
had to go on a small college
tour, had to reinvent.
The Apple experiment really helped in
that way. Larry [Mullen Jr.] had been very
skeptical about that. But, later, he was say-
ing, “Look, I am up on my [drum] perch
[at concerts]. I can see what you can’t see,
and I can see that the audience is young-
er.” I asked him how did he know it was
related to the Apple experiment. He said,
“Well, because they don’t know the words
of ‘Beautiful Day,’ but they do know the
words of ‘Every Breaking Wave.’ ” And as
we go ahead with this album, we are on the
radio – it’s amazing. I can’t think of another
artist in their fifties who is on the radio. On
mainstream radio. Can you think of any?
Nope. Not Bruce, not the Stones . . .
You know that song Bruce wrote,
[2007’s] “Girls in Their Summer Clothes”?
I heard that song and said, “This song
should be on the radio, why is that not
all over the radio?” I spoke to somebody
recently, a Bruce fan, and I said, “Do you
know this song? It is the most insightful
song about aging. It is a song of experience,
actually.” And they said, “No, I don’t know
that.” So these songs, they can slip through
the cracks of culture. That’s why U2 go
after selling our wares the same way we did
for our first album.
How will you measure success for “Songs
of Experience”?
I would like it to have famous songs, so
that when we play them in our live show
people don’t go, “What is that? Should we
go to the bathroom now?”
Which songs do you think will become
famous?
I know that “You’re the Best Thing About
Me” is going to be one of them. I think “Get
Out of Your Own Way” is going to be one of
them. The biggest one of all could be “Love
Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way,” but it
might be that that is what the radio people
are telling us. It could be something like
“The Showman,” something unexpected
or, you know, “Red Flag Day,” “Summer of
Love” . . . you know, I don’t know.
What is the hardest part about being in
U2 right now, in 2017?
Getting consensus.
For example?
Some people, in a very sane way, are
thinking, “Why do you want to do this?
Why do you want our songs on the radio?”
And I say that, if we believe in our songs,
we have to use any medium we can find
to reach people. We don’t need to do it for
money. We don’t need to do it for anything.
And, of course, our band could tour for the
rest of its life just on what we’ve got. I am
asking them to put a lot of energy into re-
cording these new songs and then selling
our wares, laying it all on the table, like
we did when we were kids. Except we’re
not kids.
So there is a bit of an existential divide
as to your ambition, which runs as white-
hot as ever.
I feel a compulsion to the songs. If you
are going to go this far, you have to go all
the way. And I don’t know if that can last
forever. But, wow, do we have the songs
now. Coming down here in the car, on one
station we heard “You’re the Best Thing
About Me.” On another station, called the
Wave, I heard “Bullet the Blue Sky.” Quite
a ride . . . through about 30 years.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 How does the rest of the band feel about together for 30 years?” I mean, that was I used to think that my insecurity was
the new songs? crazy. We are at 40 years now, and I think humility because I don’t throw my weight
I would say that Edge seems like some- the only way we can conceive of that is to around, because I try to treat whomever I
one who wants to be in the band more imagine what if the Clash were around? meet with respect. But I am not sure if it
than ever. Certainly more focused on it as We would have been very interested to see actually was humility. I think that might
a whole. I think the past two albums have what work they would have done. And, you have been just good manners.
reminded him that U2’s strengths – above know, the fact that the Rolling Stones are I still have that thing, that “hellhound
atmospherics and innova- on my trail,” whatever that
tion and all that stuff that Robert Johnson image is.
he loves – are big melo- When I am onstage, I still
dies and clear thoughts. meet that other self, that sort
That’s where we came in. of shadow self. I still have
The verse melody in “The some work to do on myself to
Best Thing” was a return to get to a place that you might
form from him. I was call- recognize as humility.
ing it punk Motown, but I But it is a struggle you
was the punk and he was constantly undertake.
definitely the Motown. I think so. I hope you
Adam [Clayton] is sam- haven’t seen me behave in a
pling older eras and drop- very arrogant way.
ping them into new eras Nothing I can recall.
like a postmodern art- And I have tried not to be,
ist. He’s our postmodern I have tried not to pour cof-
postman. Warhol start- fee all over people. . . .
ed that sampling thing; What do you make of the
he would see it like that. refugee crisis that’s going on
Certain songs have a feel in Europe?
he’s copped from some- Can I step back and try to
one else. Adam sees us all give a more macro picture
as artworks. It’s like he’s before we get into that? In
walking through the art the Western world, in our
market and always look- lifetime, there has never been
ing for something interest- a moment, until very recent-
ing. I am not sure Larry ly, when fairness and equal-
knows what to make of the ity was not improving. There
album. He loved the tour, were setbacks, but it was as if
but he and I are probably the world was on a trajectory
the hardest on every U2 re- toward fairness and justice
cording. After we finished and equality for all.
Joshua Tree, I remember There is the famous Mar-
going to Chris Blackwell’s tin Luther King quote.
place in Jamaica. The two “The arc of the moral uni-
of us held up the bar each verse is long, but it bends to-
night, commiserating over ward justice.” You and I grew
what a mess we’ve made of up in a world where things
were getting better, despite
it. He has that sort of Irish
[thing of being] down on
Innocence all the setbacks. This was not
all things new. I have had Bono in his early around is a kind of a miracle in the wider world, not in the whole world,
twenties. What would
that myself at times, but and some grace. but in the world that we grew up in. And
he say to his younger
not with this album. But, self? “Stop second- You’re writing about hu- the reason for that was largely because
you know, we are just like guessing yourself. mility on the album. How do after the Second World War, it became very
that. It is hard to explain. You’re right.” you stay humble in your po- clear for the first time that in the history of
You once said that you sition, especially in an age of the human race we had the ability to ex-
were in the business of ap- over-the-top self-promotion? tinguish all life.
plying for the job of best band in the world. There’s a difference between humility That was a shock to the system that we
LISA HAUN/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Are you still in that business? and insecurity. I have the insecurity of the haven’t properly calibrated. It changed
I mean, look, the singer is a crowd-stir- performer, as I said earlier. As a performer, the way Giacometti made art. It changed
rer and a carny barker. We have to get at- you can feel the room. Even if it’s some sort the way Picasso painted human figures;
tention for our band, and the firework I of get-together, a dinner party or an open- everything changed both consciously and
will throw into the towns is something ing, I can feel the room – that is insecurity. unconsciously. Rock & roll erupted. All
outrageous like, “We are reapplying to be Humility is different. Humility is a genu- that love and peace stuff came from peo-
the best band in the world.” It is just to get ine sense of your place in the universe and ple born out of the rubble of the Second
people annoyed or talking about it. understanding that it is OK to play a quiet, World War.
But also to get yourself stirred up a little. supportive role in the lives of others. . . . I’m When the [2016] election happened and
That is true. We just lived with this idea, not there yet. Greatness as a person comes people intuited that something awful and
even in the first 10 years of the band’s life, from not pursuing it. Pretty dull if you’re something unprecedented was happening,
“What if we didn’t screw it up like everyone a performer – the fireworks display is why there was a sense of grief. We had Brexit,
does? Wouldn’t it be amazing if we stuck people are at the show. so people in Europe are feeling this as well.

Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018 RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 39
 BONO
And I thought, “This is melodrama.” Why
are people, rational people I know, feeling
like they are grieving like someone just
died? It is an election, and it will correct
itself, whatever.
But then I realized that something had
died. People’s innocence had died. And a
generation that had grown up thinking
that the human spirit had a natural evolu-
tion toward fairness and justice was learn-
ing this might not be the case. My attitude
was, “OK, good. Now it is time we wake
up and realize we can’t take any of this for
granted.” Big primates have been around a
lot longer than democracy, and this dude
who shall not be named – he is just a new
manifestation of that big primate. We got
shook. Even in Europe, people have forgot-
ten what fascism did to them. Whether it
was fascism described as Stalin or Mao in
the state communism, whatever you want
to call it. It is forgotten.
We are actually going
back to the way we used to
be. The new normal is the
old normal. That is terrify-
ing. The demonizing of “the THERE IS
other” has returned. HOPE. THE
But to get back to your MOMENT
JUST HAS
question. In Europe, peo-
ple are afraid for their lives
and their lifestyles and TO BE
their livelihoods and their
cultural homogeneity, and RECLAIMED.
have started to put up walls THIS IS THE
around their definition of BLEAKEST
ERA SINCE
Europe. It’s becoming for-
tress Europe, and there’s an
up-drawbridge mentality NIXON. IT
probably stoked by outside
forces. The shame of it is, at UNDERMINES
the start of the refugee cri- THE VERY
sis, you had those incredible IDEA OF
AMERICA.
photographs of families ar-
riving from Syria on trains
in Germany, in Munich, and REPUBLICANS
the wonderful reception
they received. People bring-
KNOW IT,
ing shoes and clothes for DEMOCRATS
the kids – spontaneously, KNOW IT.
NO ONE IS
not organized. Just the gen-
uine goodness of the Ger-
man people. And [Angela] COMING OFF
Merkel all of a sudden be-
comes not only the head of
WELL HERE.
Europe, but the heart of Eu-
rope. And what happens?
Those to the right of her
start to crowd in, and peo-
ple start to carp. And there
was a moment in France
where if Le Pen had won
the election, not Macron,
the unification of Europe would have been
under threat. Think about that. One of the
great positives that came out of the nega-
tivity of the Second World War could have
been lost.
40 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
What happened here in the United
States is that Le Pen won.
That’s right.
There is this long history where we have
seen the country split apart over great
moral issues, and survived it, more or less.
What might happen here? Are you talking
about democracy being a dinosaur?
As I said, big primates have always ruled
the environments, and democracy is not
the natural habitat of homo sapiens.
Democracy is a remarkable conceit that
depends on an effective news media. So
“fake news” is not a fake threat. You have
a post-truth president leading a post-trust
country. The chilling bit is not that the big
primate is quite smart, which he clearly is,
but what if he was very smart and less easy
to read. What also should be easy to read
are the lessons the left and right need to
learn from how this absurdity came about.
It shouldn’t take a reality-
TV star to read the boos
and hisses of discontent
people ready to roll the dice
on business not as usual.
We all need to do a better
job of understanding where
that anger and sense of dis-
placement comes from.
As an activist, you have
a history of working with
politicians. How do you
work with anyone in Wash-
ington, D.C., right now?
I realized I couldn’t work
with this president wheth-
er he wanted to or not,
because you can’t believe
what he says. So I took a
meeting with Mike Pence.
He had been a defender
of PEPFAR [President’s
Emergency Plan for AIDS
Relief ]. Thir teen mil-
lion people owe their lives
to PEPFAR, and Pence
stood up and fought for it
in Congress when I was
there. So I went, “Great, I
can work with him,” but
that was in the early days.
Cuts [to PEPFAR] were
promised with the over-
all slashing of foreign aid.
The vice president told us
in our meeting that he was
supportive of PEPFAR,
but I have to say it’s Con-
gress that deserves credit
for stopping the cuts from
going through. That makes
you ask harder questions
about the administration.
You visited George W. Bush in Texas
recently. Tell me about that.
I think that on his exit from the Oval
Office he was a much humbler man. When
I visited him at his ranch, I found him liv-
ing very quietly. He hasn’t done a lot of
speechifying but does do a lot of painting.
I am sure he’s pained by seeing casualties
of recent wars that returned home, and he
paints those very people.
Laura and his two daughters are very
proud of the work America has done in the
fight against HIV/AIDS. We worked close-
ly together on that. Condoleezza Rice and
Bush’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten, also de-
serve a lot of credit. It is the largest health
intervention in the history of medicine.
There’s now roughly 20 million lives saved
in a war that had previously cost 35 million
lives. If you want to think about it this way,
as many as half the people who died in the
Second World War were lost to a tiny little
virus. It still hasn’t sunk in. There’s a lot of
us who worked on this, but I’m not sure we
even now fully appreciate the scale of what
was accomplished in the face of such hor-
ror, but it should remind people of what’s
possible if we can put aside partisanship.
What do you say to people discouraged
by this moment? Is there hope after this?
There is. There is. I think the moment
just has to be reclaimed. This is surely the
bleakest era since Nixon. It surely under-
mines the very idea of America, what is
going on now. And Republicans know it,
Democrats know it – no one’s coming off
well here. We know some who should know
better have tried to piggyback the man’s
celebrity to get stuff done. They will live to
regret it. Before I went out against him in
the primaries, I called a lot of Republican
friends that I have and said, “I can’t in all
conscience be quiet as this hostile take-
over of your party and perhaps the coun-
try happens.” And I made the quote, and
I still stand by it, “America is the greatest
idea the world has ever had, and this is po-
tentially the worst idea that has ever hap-
pened to it.”
In “American Soul,” you said America
“is a dream the whole world owns.”
Yeah, that is on this album. Ireland is a
very nice country. France is a great coun-
try. Great Britain is a great country, but it
is not an idea. America is an idea, and it’s
a great idea. And the world feels a stake
in that idea. We want you, it, to succeed,
which is why we become fucking obnox-
ious and shoot our mouths off about it.
The world needs America to succeed, now
more than ever.
Tell me about the ONE Campaign, which
fights against extreme poverty. Where are
you now with it, and how involved are
you?
We have nearly 9 million members now,
just over 3 million members in Africa.
I am hoping that the voices south of the
equator will drown out the voices north
of the equator. I hope eventually to be put
out of a job. And it is becoming a more and
more independent organization. Women
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 are stepping to the forefront. Our lead
campaign at the moment is called Poverty
Is Sexist. And there is another one called
Girls Count. About 130 million girls can’t
go to school who want to go to school. And
I am working more in the background.
And that is OK.
So I am trying to make my own lead-
ership more strategic, more behind the
scenes. If I am called on for
meetings, I will go. We cam-
paign for transparency in the
mining sector and the extrac-
tives industry. I am proud of all
that work. It is not much writ-
ten about, but it’s as important
as fighting HIV/AIDS. Biggest
killer in the developing world is
not a disease – it is corruption.
How are you fighting corrup-
tion?
ONE campaigned for a rule
demanding every mining com-
pany registered on the New
York Stock Exchange declares
how much it pays for mining
contracts. Because if those ar-
rangements are not transparent,
then it is easy for
local governments
to fiddle with those The Activist
numbers, and they
Top: Bono with
are very big num- French President
bers. There is a new Emmanuel Macron
African proverb, I and his wife, Brigitte.
kid you not: Pray Below: With Barack
that we do not dis- Obama, 2011.
cover oil. Because
it brings all the
wrong people to town. If there is an anti-
dote to corruption, if there is a vaccine, it is
transparency. Just bring it out in the open.
How involved are you with it? You’re
trying to withdraw from it?
I’m not withdrawing at all. I am still
heavily involved, but I think it’s healthy
that the organization doesn’t have to rely
on me. We’ve some brilliant people. Our
new boss, Gayle Smith, ran development
FROM TOP: EMMANUEL MACRON/TWITTER; MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
for President Obama and is a real force
– Gayle Force, we call her. You’d think
during touring it would get quieter, but ac-
tually we’re meeting leaders in every single
place we’re in. When U2 played Paris, I
went to see Macron and [his wife] Brigitte.
What was he like?
Macron was very kind to see me; he had
just been elected to one of the most power-
ful offices in the world. I was really taken
by his humility in letting me enter it so jo-
vially. He has a quick and inspiring mind,
and a secret weapon of a wife who was
superaware of ONE’s push on girls educa-
tion in the developing world. . . . Education
is not easy, it’s expensive. We talked about
his commitment to get France to allocating
0.7 percent of GNI [gross national income]
to development assistance, ODA.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
And he agreed to 0.55 percent by 2022,
something he had not been public about
until that meeting. It was a great meeting.
But what was impressive about him was
that he wasn’t focused on the numbers. He
was focused on it being effective. He said,
“You are making us keep our promise. We
are happy to keep our promise. You have to
make sure that the French people get value
from money. Because we want to support
the fight against extreme poverty.”
Now, would I have gotten that meeting
if the tour wasn’t coming to a stadium near
you? Maybe, because he is more curious
and interested than most, but for other
leaders, no. The hoopla and razzmatazz of
arriving into town with the circus makes
people anxious to have a meeting. In
America, we have had as many Republi-
cans as Democrats visit us on this last tour.
This is no joke. Senators, congressional
people, even though we have a moment in
the show where we stick it to the man who
shall not be mentioned.
You’ve been associated with Aung San
Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar,
whose release you advocated for when she
was a political prisoner. Now, she seems to
be, at best, standing idly by as her country
perpetrates what appears to be an ethnic
cleansing. What is your take on what is
going on there?
That is very hard, and I’m – I feel kind of
nauseous about that. I have genuinely felt
ill, because I can’t quite believe what the
evidence all points to. But there is ethnic
cleansing. It really is happening, and she
has to step down because she knows it’s
happening. I am sure she has
many great reasons in her head
why she is not stepping down.
Maybe it’s that she doesn’t want
to lose the country back to the
military. But she already has, if
the pictures are what we go by,
anyway. The human rights that
are being torched, the lives that
are being burned out in Rakh-
ine State are more important
than a unity without them.
You think she should resign?
She should, at the very least,
be speaking out more. And if
people don’t listen, then resign.
This is all just really troubling.
I am still confounded by it, ac-
tually.
It is startlingly brutal.
Is it that we project onto peo-
ple who we want them to be? We
find somebody we like, and we
tell ourselves that a person ex-
ists that is better than us. More
able than us. A truer moral com-
pass than us. We imbue them
with all these qualities. We do
that with people. I think I have
had it done to me. People have
their version of you, they proj-
ect what they want to see on
you. Maybe she was always a
politician. She was not a saint.
She was not some sort of savior.
Maybe we were always wrong,
and we just have to accept we
were wrong. Or maybe some-
thing terrible has happened to
her that we just don’t know.
You have done the “Joshua Tree” tour,
you’ve gotten the new record out, and now
you are getting ready to come back for an-
other tour in the spring.
What are your thoughts now that the
year is over? Any last words of wisdom?
I am holding on to the idea that through
wisdom, through experience, you might in
some important ways recover innocence. I
want to be playful. I want to be experimen-
tal. I want to keep the discipline of song-
writing going forward that I think we had
let go for a while. I want to be useful. That
is our family prayer, as you know. It is not
the most grandiose prayer. It is just, we are
available for work. That is U2’s prayer. We
want to be useful, but we want to change
the world. And we want to have fun at the
same time. What is wrong with that?
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 41
AND
Inside the biggest law-
enforcement scandal in
Massachusetts history –
tens of thousands of drug
cases corrupted – and how
the system covered it up
By Paul Solotaroff
Illustration by Sean McCabe

JUSTICE
FOR
Sonja Farak is in the grip of a rubbed-
raw depression that hasn’t responded to medication.
It’s been like this forever, or at least since girlhood. She
attempted suicide in high school and was hospitalized
in college, but somehow soldiered through to graduate
with high distinction from the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute. A bright, curious kid who was passionate
about science, she found a job at a state drug lab and
settled down with a woman she met in her twenties.
But even on her best days, she felt alien and unseen,
a ghost floating through her own life. Now, at 35,
she’s landed in a ditch. Her performance at work has
fallen off a cliff, and she walks into nightly conflict

NONE
42 | R ol l i n g S t o n e

at home, where her wife, disabled by a
stew of mental ailments, spends her hours
surfing the Web in a haze. Farak’s arms
are pocked with welts from compulsive
scratching; she’s been thinking a lot about
killing herself, and driving rashly enough
that she just might do it – if she doesn’t
have a heart attack first.
But none of those things are her chief
concern on this chapped winter morning
in 2013. No, what’s eating Farak today, as
she sits in a county courthouse in down-
town Springfield, Massachusetts, is that
she needs to get high this nanosecond.
Since 2004, when she started pilfering
drugs from her longtime place of employ-
ment – the Amherst crime lab of the Mas-
sachusetts State Police – her addiction to
stimulants has galloped away and grabbed
the reins of her life. She’s a chemist who
performs forensic analysis of the street
drugs cops bring in, running samples
through complex machinery to determine
the chemical makeup of each substance.
Her findings, based partly on instrument
data and partly on her veteran intuition,
form the basis for criminal cases brought
against people charged with coke and her-
oin sales in Western Massachusetts. Until
recently, Farak has been a standout per-
former. In less than nine years, she’s helped
send away between 8,000 and 10,000 de-
fendants. The only thing more prolific than
her output is her drug use. Farak’s been
high since virtually the day she was hired.
For years, her drug of choice was liq-
uid methamphetamine; she discovered
a big bottle of it in the fridge of her lab.
When she polished off the meth oil, Farak
switched to cocaine, helping herself to
big and small chunks of the seizures cops
sent in. It was absurdly easy to do so. The
Amherst site was decrepit and woefully
mismanaged. It performed no routine au-
dits and placed no cameras in the halls;
employees had carte blanche access to
the drug safe. So rudderless was the lab
that Farak smoked crack in the restroom
and cooked batches beneath the site’s one
working fume hood. Legally unfit to drive
home at night, she was nonetheless al-
lowed to do sensitive tests on samples she’d
smoked or snorted herself. Each time she
did so, she committed two crimes: theft
of narcotics from a dispensary and pos-
session of a Class B drug. And though she
wasn’t a cop, she shared a duty with them –
to zealously protect each sample she tested
as it made its way to court. On the count-
less occasions when she altered a drug
– stealing a couple of grams here, a half
pound there – and replaced the missing
weight with ersatz powder, she committed
a third, and most onerous, felony: tamper-
ing with evidence.
Contributing editor Paul Solotaroff
wrote about El Chapo in August.
44 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
JUSTICE
FOR NONE
Meanwhile, Farak’s crack jones is burn-
ing a hole in her soul. She’s been smoking it
10, 12 times a day; the urges, she’ll later tes-
tify, are “ridiculous.” Finally, come lunch-
time, she runs out to her car and beams up
behind the wheel. She’s feeling a lot better
when she returns in an hour to take the
stand at a drug trial. But as she enters the
courtroom, she’s stopped by state troopers
and taken to a conference room. It seems
someone’s finally noticed that coke has
been wandering off from the Amherst evi-
dence room. A search that morning turned
up two torn mailers that contained what
was left of the seizures. Those mailers,
along with a makeshift crack pipe, were
recovered from Farak’s desk by state cops.
The troopers at the courthouse try to get
her talking. Farak will have none of it. She
lawyers up and declines to let them search
her car; she’s arrested and formally charged
the next morning. By then, the state’s lead-
ers are on wartime footing: This is the
second massive scandal in five months.
In August 2012, a chemist named Annie
Dookhan was busted for faking tens of
thousands of drug tests at her Boston lab,
always in favor of the prosecution. Worse,
when she was feeling especially helpful,
she’d add bogus weight to a borderline sam-
ple, pushing the charge from distribution
to narco-trafficking. (She seems to have
been motivated by scorn for addicts, saying
that she wanted to get drug dealers “off the
street.”) Her crimes had blown the top off
the state’s justice system. Countless convic-
tions were cast in doubt, inmates jammed
court dockets with appeals, and both the
state’s district attorneys and attorney gen-
eral’s office scrambled to protect their taint-
ed verdicts. It was the worst-ever scandal in
SO MISMANAGED
WAS THE CRIME LAB
THAT EMPLOYEES
HAD CARTE BLANCHE
ACCESS TO THE DRUG
SAFE AND A CHEMIST
SMOKED CRACK
IN THE RESTROOM.
the state’s war on drugs. If the defendants
in Farak’s cases were to learn of her crimes,
there wouldn’t be enough lawyers on the
Eastern Seaboard to staunch the run on
the courts. Between them, the two chemists
had potentially helped wrongfully convict
more than 32,000 defendants.
But those defendants were never notified
of Farak’s misconduct. In fact, five years
after her arrest on January 19th, 2013, very
few of the people she helped to imprison
have been told that they’re the victims of
state crimes. Instead, in the days after
Farak was taken in and charged with drug
theft and tampering, the attorney general’s
office embarked on an egregious fraud. It
lied to the DAs in Western Massachusetts,
gave false information to two Superior
Court judges and covered up documents
that proved Farak’s years-long addiction,
blocking every legal bid to view them. Last-
ly, it contrived to keep thousands of people
in jail, even after the evidence came to light.
“It was a catastrophic failure by the attor-
ney general’s office, and calls into question
the idea that prosecutors are beacons of
fairness,” says Daniel Medwed of North-
eastern University, author of Prosecution
Complex: America’s Race to Convict and
Its Impact on the Innocent. “There’s no ac-
counting for what they did, and this could
just be the tip of the iceberg. Prosecutorial
misconduct is rampant in America.” That
most of the people impacted dealt and used
narcotics is a fact that no one disputes; they
were street addicts tried in district court,
where minor drug offenses are dispatched.
But in America, even addicts have inalien-
able rights, the most basic being the right to
a fair trial. Nowhere over the past five years
has that liberty been more abused than in
Massachusetts. This is what we’ve come to,
almost 50 years along in the unwinnable
War on Drugs: The accused can’t even get
an honest shake in one of the bluest states
in the country.
Luke Ryan is the Platonic ideal of the
lawyer you call when you’re caught carry-
ing weight. He’s the son and grandson of
eminent judges in Massachusetts, a proud
inheritor of his family’s commitment to
protect the poor and afflicted. He’s also, at
45, a seriously late bloomer who spent the
better part of a decade drunk or high. “I
took very few sober breaths in college,” he
says. “My best friend killed himself when I
was 16. From that point on, I didn’t have a
drugs-and-alcohol problem as much as a
drugs-and-alcohol solution.”
At 26, he got involved with a church-
ministry group devoted to racial justice and
realized, with the clarity of the newly clean,
that white privilege had probably kept him
out of jail. He enrolled in law school at 30,
graduated magna cum laude from West-
ern New England Law and went to work
for a small firm that gave him the lati-
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018

tude to defend the poor and sick.
Those court-appointed cases bill
at $60 an hour, but Ryan’s value
to his employers lies elsewhere.
Last year, Massachusetts Lawyers
Weekly selected him as a Lawyer
of the Year.
In 2011, Ryan was assigned a
narcotics case involving a man
named Rolando Penate. Penate,
SPRINGFIELD POLICE DEPARTMENT (PENATE); DON TREEGER/“THE REPUBLICAN”/AP IMAGES (FARAK)
a Cuban exile in his mid-fifties
who’d survived a hellscape youth
– sent to prison in Cuba as an
11-year-old boy, he was tortured and beat-
en unconscious by guards before being
administered electroshock – had stitched
together a life on the streets of America by
using and selling half-gram bags of heroin.
“He had a sheet of priors, but it was addict
stuff, like stealing scrap out of abandoned
houses,” says Ryan. Busted for dealing $20
of smack three times to an undercover
cop that fall, Penate was charged with 13
counts by the Hampden County DA. That’s
no typo: That is standard practice on the
part of prosecutors.
In the past 40 years, DAs have been
given excessive powers to bully defendants
into plea deals. Add-on “aggravators” –
charges of selling in a school zone or near a
public park; carrying a gun or knife while
dealing, etc. – have been drafted in every
state to get tough on dealers and maximize
the time they serve in prison. Ninety-five
percent of all convictions in America are
Ryan photograph by Ton y Luong
The Crusade
(1) Defense
attorney Luke
Ryan has spent
the past five
years trying to
get justice for
the cases Farak
contaminated.
(2) Rolando
Penate, who was
sentenced to five
and a half years
for a $20 bag of
heroin – evidence
that Farak vetted.
(3) Farak served
13 months for
her crimes.
1 2
3 10 hours, she was trapped in an R.
plea-bargained in lieu of trial. Since the
wholesale rewrite of our sentencing stat-
utes began in the early 1970s, the total
population of our prisons and jails has
quadrupled to 2.3 million. Two-thirds of
those inmates “meet medical criteria” for
addiction, said the National Center on Ad-
diction and Substance Abuse in its annual
report last year. Eighty-five percent of drug
arrests are for simple possession, meaning
small drug weights for personal use.
But Penate insisted on fighting the
charges. The state had hit him with a fire-
arm count for an inoperable antique pistol
in his basement, and he refused to plead to
that. Ryan had no inkling of Farak’s mis-
conduct when he took Penate on as a client.
But he knew from prior cases what a hovel
the Amherst lab was – no accreditation
from the national board; no quality-con-
trol standards or annual reviews – and so
he resolved to put the lab itself on trial. In
pretrial motions, Ryan demanded the test-
ing data from the chemist who examined
the samples. It was, of course, Farak; she’d
signed certificates, or “drug-certs,” for each
of Penate’s three samples. The last of those
assays was signed January 9th, 2012, a date
that rings out for several reasons. First, that
cert helped send Penate to prison for more
than five and a half years – it was the only
count on which he’d be convicted. Second,
Farak was so high that day, she saw “colors
swaying in the wind.” Third, it goes to the
heart of the fraud that the attorney gener-
al’s office concocted.
Farak, who hasn’t been heard from
since her release from prison (she served
13 months and was paroled in 2015), de-
clined requests for comment through her
lawyer. But Rolling Stone has obtained
Farak’s grand-jury testimony, diaries of
her omnivorous decade-long drug use,
and treatment records furnished by her
therapists. Those pages richly document
the events of that day. On the morning of
January 9th, Farak helped herself to mul-
tiple samples of coke. Before lunch, she was
assigned a vial of liquid acid and downed
some of its contents in the lab. For
Crumb comic. As she’d later tell a
grand jury, she was “freaking out.”
At one point, she found herself
“crawling on the floor . . . trying to
find crack, which I thought was
there.” Nonetheless, she contin-
ued to test samples that day, one of
them being Penate’s. Ryan learned
none of this when Farak was ar-
rested almost exactly a year later.
Nor did he learn of it in early 2014,
when Farak copped a plea and
went to jail. Instead, he was force-
fed a packet of lies by the attorney
general’s office. “They announced,
after a ‘thorough investigation’ by
cops, that her drug use only went
back four months [to September 2012],” he
says. “Why four months? They said they’d
talked to her colleagues, who said, ‘We
thought she looked normal till last fall.’ ”
The untruths started within hours of
Farak’s arrest. Martha Coakley, the then-
attorney general who was locally famous
for losing a forever-blue seat in the U.S.
Senate to a one-time nude model for Cos-
mopolitan named Scott Brown, took to the
podium to declare the Farak bust a “vastly
different” matter from Dookhan’s. The
alleged crimes were limited to “two sam-
ples,” she said, and no defendants’ due-
process rights were violated. Ryan knew in
his bones he was being spun. “When they
arrested her, they found five and a half
grams of coke and boxes of ‘lab papers’ in
her car that they wouldn’t let anyone see,”
he says. Obviously, the state was in panic
mode: “They were freaked that this was
Dookhan, Part II.”
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 45

At the other end of the state, 1
a lawyer named Matt Segal was
working to unwind Dookhan, Part
I. Though Segal, like Ryan, is devot-
ed to social justice and, like Ryan,
drives a Prius to prove it (Prius is
the official pace car of public-service
lawyers), the two men aren’t much
alike. Ryan, who shows for dinner
in a sweatshirt and jeans, is the
untucked product of the Pioneer
Valley in rural Western Massachu-
setts. Earnest and uninflected, he
feels lightly broken in, like a pair of
good hiking boots. Segal, a son of
suburban Maryland, is as crisp as
new-bought broadcloth. He wears
preppy suits, is funny in measured
doses and bears a fair resemblance
to Matthew Broderick when peo-
ple still called Broderick “puckish.”
Segal has a way with extended met-
aphor, which probably serves him
well in court. “Pretend you have a
chronic illness,” he says, “and you go
see a doctor for treatment. He tells
you, ‘There are three medications I
could prescribe right now – but for you, I
recommend . . . jail.’ That’s how we deal with
addiction in America: Our cure for it is jail.”
Segal, 40, is the legal director of the
ACLU in Massachusetts. He was lead
counsel in the civil suit that blocked
Trump’s Muslim ban and won a Massa-
chusetts Lawyer of the Year award the year
before Ryan did. While Ryan was launch-
ing his two-year fight to view the papers
found in Farak’s car, Segal embarked on
a war of attrition for the victims of Annie
Dookhan. Dookhan, who briefly worked
beside Farak at the Hinton State Labora-
tory in Boston, behaved like a bad detec-
tive in a lab coat. Rather than actually
test seized samples, she looked at
a given powder and pronounced it 4 Martha Coakley’s office
cocaine. Except when she called it
heroin. Or meth. As with Farak,
most of the cases were handled in
district court, meaning the weights
involved were minor. We’ll never
know what fraction of them were
actually drugs; the vast majority
were never retested. (It is a crime to
sell fake drugs but a misdemeanor
that rarely results in jail time.)
Dookhan’s crimes were long suspected
by her fellow chemists. They bitterly de-
nounced her to their supervisors: Not only
was she sending the presumed innocent
to jail, she was making all her colleagues
look bad. A crime-lab chemist is deemed
productive if he or she tests 100 samples
a month. Dookhan was doing 300, and
seemed to have never encountered a single
sample that didn’t test positive for drugs.
But her superiors at Hinton shrugged off
complaints and treated her like a super-
star. When she was arrested in 2012, none
46 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
JUSTICE
FOR NONE
2 3
Systemic Failure
(1) Annie Dookhan was busted for
faking thousands of drug tests at her
Boston lab to help the prosecution.
(2) Attorney General
scrambled to contain
the scandal. Her
successor, Maura Healey
(3), says, “Every legal
remedy to which these
defendants are entitled,
they should get.”
(4) Matt Segal has
sued on behalf of the
wrongfully convicted:
“You had misconduct
by a crime-lab chemist and an
egregious case of prosecutorial fraud.”
of the bosses fell with her. Instead, they
were fired quietly, and the lab was shut-
tered. That left only Dookhan to deal with
prison – well, her and the 22,000 people
she helped convict.
“Everyone – from Gov. [Deval] Patrick
on down – said the right things when she
was arrested,” says Segal. Even the DAs
group issued a statement saying “they’d
be proactive in identifying cases.” They
weren’t. While defen-
dants were filing pe-
titions to get out of
jail, the Essex Coun-
ty DA ran to court,
suing to keep them
in prison. It discour-
aged Dookhan’s vic-
tims from even seek-
ing relief when the
DA retried one de-
fendant and nailed
him with a longer sentence than he’d been
serving. “That sent a shock wave through
the defendant class,” says Segal. “If they
challenged convictions that the state ob-
tained through fraud, their reward could
be even worse verdicts.”
Joining forces with Rebecca Jacob-
stein, staff attorney for the public defend-
ers’ office of Massachusetts, Segal filed a
couple of landmark lawsuits beginning
in 2014. He asked the Supreme Judicial
Court, the highest court in the state, to
FROM TOP: BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/AP IMAGES; EVAN VUCCI/AP IMAGES;
shield Dookhan victims from being pun-
ished for challenging their convictions.
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES; © 2011 MARILYN HUMPHRIES
More, he asked that it compel DAs to either
toss Dookhan verdicts or show that they
were untainted. It had been two years since
Dookhan’s arrest and the attorney general’s
office still hadn’t even told him which cases
she’d handled. “If you’d taken a plea and not
gone to trial, you’d have no way of knowing
she did your sample,” Segal says.
But while he won round after round in
court – judges discouraged DAs from ma-
licious reprosecution and ordered them to
reveal the names of Dookhan’s victims and
to notify them – months and years passed
and few of the victims gained relief. So
Segal and his colleagues reached out to
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
the attorney general’s office, urging it to
quietly intervene. “We asked that they be
a force for good – tell the DAs to notify de-
fendants,” says Segal, who knew that once
those victims got the facts about Dookhan,
they’d file their appeals by the tens of thou-
sands and force the state to dump verdicts
en masse.
That was in the spring of 2015, after
a new attorney general had been seated.
Maura Healey succeeded Coakley, who
left office in January after running a failed
race for the governor’s office. Healey, a pro-
gressive and a former civil-rights attorney,
seemed a quantum leap up from Coakley;
Segal nursed hopes that she’d be an ally.
But talks with her staff dragged on through
the summer, and a proposed summit with
the attorney general’s office and the state’s
DAs never materialized. Meanwhile, a se-
ries of bombshells landed on the courts:
Ryan had unearthed big batches of proof
that Farak’s crimes rivaled Dookhan’s –
and that Coakley’s team knew and had
buried the truth. That fall, the attorney
general’s office went radio silent. Segal
didn’t hear from them again.
Between the day of Farak’s ar-
rest and the fall of 2014, Ryan had made
a dozen requests of the attorney general’s
office to view those papers seized from her
car. Court motions, subpoenas, e-mails,
letters – long after his fellow lawyers gave
up hope, Ryan kept plugging away. He was
hopelessly blocked, though, by Anne Kac-
zmarek, the assistant attorney general who
controlled the evidence.
Kaczmarek had been tasked to run the
attorney general’s criminal case against
Farak. She was, to say the least, a regret-
table choice. For one thing, she’d already
been assigned the Dookhan case and was
badly overmatched trying to unpack that
nightmare when the Farak story broke. For
another, Kaczmarek was a bottom-rung
grunt in the criminal bureau. (Kaczmarek,
who has since left the attorney general’s
office to become an assistant clerk-magis-
trate in Boston, declined direct comment
for this story.) Her responsibilities were
vast. She had to plumb the bottom of near-
ly a decade’s worth of crimes at opposite
ends of the state; reveal to relevant parties
– defense lawyers, DAs and judges – how
the evidence in her cases impacted tens of
thousands of others; and establish, beyond
a margin of doubt, when the crimes of the
two chemists began. Ideally, her bosses
would have tasked two teams of lawyers to
split the cases and follow the facts where
they led. Instead, they dumped it all on
Kaczmarek and went about their business
– then hid beneath their desks, claiming
collective amnesia when the cover-up ex-
ploded years later.
Several weeks after Farak’s arrest in
2013, Kaczmarek got a note from Sgt. Jo-
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
seph Ballou of the Massachusetts State
Police. Ballou, a veteran detective assigned
to the attorney general’s office, had just
been handed compelling proof that Farak
had tampered with drugs as far back as
2005: A seizure she tested then had been
returned to cops weighing four grams less.
She’d also swiped a large bag of Oxycontin
and replaced it with obvious fakes. Kacz-
marek wrote back, begging him to bury
that information. “Please don’t let this get
more complicated than we thought. If she
were suffering from back injury – maybe
she took some oxys?” Kaczmarek’s law-
yer, David Rich, denies the implication
that she “sought to limit the scope of the
investigation.” Such a suggestion, he adds,
is “belied by Anne’s actions in obtaining
Farak’s conviction.”
Ballou was one of three cops who
searched Farak’s car and found 300 pages
of documents in her trunk. Taken together,
they’re the diary of a drug-distempered
mind – and the cloud map of a binge that
stretched back years. Included in those
pages was a series of filled-out worksheets
for a substance-abuse program Farak at-
tended. On one sheet (undated but clearly
from December 2011), Farak jotted down
which drugs she stole at work, then duti-
fully recorded the triggers that led her to
use. There were a half-dozen worksheets
from her outpatient group; a dossier she’d
compiled about her therapist’s husband,
whom she’d obsessed over for months; and
a yellowing sheaf of stories about cops and
chemists who’d been busted for stealing
drugs in other places.
Every word in that cache was mate-
rial to her case – and to the many thou-
sands of people she’d helped imprison.
“THIS COULD JUST
BE THE TIP OF THE
ICEBERG,” SAYS
ONE LEGAL EXPERT.
“PROSECUTORIAL
MISCONDUCT IS
RAMPANT IN
AMERICA.”
The substance-abuse worksheets dated
her addiction to 2011; the fact that she
was in treatment meant that other people
knew this and could testify that her drug
use stretched back further. Ballou wrote
Kaczmarek an e-mail titled “Farak Ad-
missions.” It began, “Here are those forms
with the admissions of drug use I was talk-
ing about . . .” to which he pinned scanned
copies of diary pages. At this point, Kac-
zmarek’s duties were clear. She was re-
quired, by law, to tell her bosses of Ballou’s
find, to notify DAs that their Farak cases
were tainted and to demand a full probe
of the Amherst lab by the state’s office of
inspector general. Kaczmarek did none of
these things.
Instead, per Superior Court Judge Rich-
ard Carey, who would later preside over
an exhaustive inquiry into the attorney
general’s office, “Kaczmarek improperly
discouraged such an investigation.” In the
spring of 2013, she wrote a friend at the
inspector general, urging her not to inves-
tigate Amherst. “The notion that Anne had
any authority to impact an investigation by
the inspector general is absurd,” says Rich,
Kaczmarek’s lawyer. But Carey found that
she intentionally duped DAs about Farak’s
drug use – she “omitted the mental-health
worksheets” in her note to them – and lied
to her own colleagues when telling them
that she’d furnished all the evidence in the
case. Then she decided to shrink the scope
of Farak’s crimes to the four-month span
before her bust. That lie, from which doz-
ens of other big lies sprang, kept thousands
of people unlawfully in jail. “Spending
more time incarcerated due to prosecuto-
rial withholding . . . cannot be cured by a
new trial,” wrote Carey. The impact of her
misconduct was “nothing short of system-
ic.” It constituted “a fraud upon the court.”
As Farak’s case moved forward in
2013, the first defendants filed pleas in
Western Massachusetts, seeking relief in
their convictions for drug cases certified
by the chemist. Two were clients of Luke
Ryan: Penate and a man named Rafael Ro-
driguez. One of seven kids born to a single
mom in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez had been
jettisoned at a tender age to fend for him-
self on the streets. In his early twenties, he
landed in New England with no money, no
guardian and no English. Like Penate, he
did time for petty crimes – and like Penate,
got addicted to heroin. In 2002, he met a
woman named Madelyn Vazquez. The cou-
ple got off to a bumpy start: Cops raided
their apartment and found small bags of
dope. Rodriguez went to prison twice in
three years, then cleaned up in rehab and
came home.
By the time Rodriguez was released,
in 2005, Vazquez had found God and
gained her footing. She’d landed a good
job at a greeting-card firm, moved herself
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 47

and their young daughter to Chicopee, a
working-class suburb of Springfield, and
was spending her nights in Bible study at
a nearby Pentecostal church. Rod riguez
couldn’t find work because of his felony
sheet but devoted himself to the job of
stay-at-home dad. “He was wonderful with
the kids, always clowning, doing dances –
he was really just a big kid himself,” says
Vazquez, who became his common-law
wife. (They had a second child, Rafael
Jr., in 2006.) “You couldn’t be with him
and not be laughing,” says Millieonie, his
straight-A-student daughter, now 15.
Rodriguez was clean and sober for four
years, stopping by the clinic for his metha-
done dose. But being broke and jobless
gnawed at his pride. One day, he met a guy
looking for coke. The man pestered him
with phone calls for weeks. Finally, Rodri-
guez relented and phoned a friend. Alas,
he’d been set up: The buyer was a snitch
who was working off a drug bust with the
cops. For a deal in which he stood to make
$50, Rodriguez was popped for posses-
sion-with-intent and took a five-year plea
in 2011. In prison, deprived of methadone
and his kids, he sank into depression and
used again.
He’d been in jail 15 months when Farak,
who had tested his sample, was arrested.
Ryan got his sentence stayed in April 2013;
he was released while contesting his guilty
plea. That summer, C. Jeffrey Kinder, a
Superior Court judge, was appointed to
oversee all post-conviction petitions from
Farak victims. A hearing was scheduled
for early September. Its purpose was to
establish when her drug crimes began,
so that defendants who’d been impacted
could appeal. Before the hearing, defense
lawyers, including Ryan, subpoenaed Bal-
lou and Kaczmarek – as well as any e-mails
passed between them. It was at this point
that the attorney general’s office made a
second grave error: It appointed the green-
est lawyer in its appellate bureau to fight
off Ryan’s subpoenas.
Kris Foster, a former assistant DA in
Boston, had been hired that summer. She
was so inexperienced that she asked her
boss how to write a motion to quash Ryan’s
subpoena. She also failed to review all the
papers found in Farak’s car and the ex-
changes between Ballou and Kaczmarek.
Had she done so, Foster would have found
the drug journals and seen how vital they
were to the thousands of affected defen-
dants. She knew those papers existed: She
attended meetings where Kaczmarek dis-
cussed them with her bosses. Curiously,
none of those bosses demanded to see the
worksheets themselves. Instead, they took
her word that they were irrelevant to peo-
ple like Penate and Rodriguez.
Foster filed a motion to exclude the
e-mails and anything regarding “med-
ical . . . treatment of individuals.” She
48 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | RollingStone.com
JUSTICE
FOR NONE
showed up at the hearing without the pa-
pers, arguing they were off-limits to de-
fendants. But under questioning from the
judge, Foster confessed that she hadn’t
even viewed them herself. Kinder explod-
ed, telling her to submit them within a
week; he’d be the one to gauge their rele-
vance. She went back with her tail between
her legs, telling her bosses the judge had
“yelled” at her. (Foster, who has since left
the attorney general’s office for a job at the
state’s beverage commission, has declined
to comment through her lawyer.)
A week later, Foster wrote a letter to
Kinder that was as false as it was vague.
In it, she claimed that “after reviewing
Ballou’s file, every document in his posses-
sion has been disclosed.” Note the telltale
grammar: not “I have reviewed” or “my
superiors have reviewed”; no one reviewed
that file but Kaczmarek. On the basis of
Foster’s letter, though, Kinder made two
fateful rulings. First, that Farak’s drug
use began in July 2012; no one whose case
predated that month would have their
verdict dismissed. Second, the state could
block Ryan and other lawyers from seeing
evidence in its case against Farak. That
walled off those worksheets indefinitely –
or at least until her case played out.
These were devastating blows to the
thousands of defendants – none more so
than Penate and Rodriguez. Penate, who’d
already done a year in jail while awaiting
his autumn trial, was sent to state prison
to serve four more years for the drug-cert
Farak signed while tripping her brains
out. Rodriguez was imprisoned again in
early 2014; Ryan got him out, on a second
THE JUDGE’S RULING
TRAINED ITS FIRE
ON THE ATTORNEY
GENERAL’S OFFICE,
SAYING THE SCOPE
OF THE MISCONDUCT
WAS “SYSTEMIC,”
“PROLONGED AND
“DECEPTIVE.”
stay of sentence, but still the state kept
coming for Rodriguez. (His drug convic-
tion dated to 2011, a year before Kinder’s
cutoff.) Had Kinder not been duped, he’d
have seen the drug worksheets and de-
manded an immediate probe into Farak’s
addiction. Instead, years passed before
that probe was launched; another year
passed before the findings came out; and
a fourth went by before verdicts were dis-
missed. One of those dismissals was Pena-
te’s. He was released in June 2017, having
done five and a half years for a $20 bag of
smack. Rodriguez’s case would have been
tossed then, too – but he’d been dead for
a year. Depressed and panicked about a
third trip to prison, Rodriguez OD’d on his
kitchen floor in April 2016. His wife found
him dead, the syringe beside him. Mil-
lieonie ran home from school as his corpse
was loaded out. Twenty months later, she
hasn’t slept a night through. She lies awake
in bed, writing love songs to her father on
the iPad he bought her before he died.
It took Ryan almost two years to final-
ly view the worksheets. Kaczmarek quit
the attorney general’s office in July 2014
for the plum job of assistant clerk-magis-
trate; when Ryan filed his umpteenth mo-
tion, she wasn’t around to oppose it. That
fall, he inspected the papers at the attor-
ney general’s office. What he saw made the
blood bounce off his skull. There were the
drug journals he never knew existed until
that day; Farak’s file that documented her
obsession with her therapist’s husband; an
NFL schedule (Farak was a Patriots fan
who’d played boys’ varsity football in high
school); and a sheaf of tortured ramblings
about her wife. Ryan pulled his phone out,
took photo after photo, then e-mailed the
batch to himself.
That night, he started a letter to the at-
torney general’s office. It ran 11 pages, took
30 hours to finish and built an indictment,
point by point, of gross misconduct. The
response? Stone silence. The attorney gen-
eral’s office said nothing to Judge Kinder
about the facts it had buried. Nor did it
inform the judges of the Supreme Judicial
Court, which was hearing arguments in
a benchmark case to nail down the time-
line of Farak’s crimes. Ryan wrote to the
court about the papers he’d just found;
the judges, bewildered, called timeout.
They strongly urged the state to launch
a full-bore probe into Farak and the Am-
herst lab.
That order came down in the spring of
2015. It took the state a year to find what
any competent cop could have learned
about Farak in a week: that she’d abused
drugs before she started at Amherst.
Meanwhile, the attorney general’s office
commissioned a probe of its own house.
Healey, who seemed intent on learning
why her predecessors withheld evidence,
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
 was a blue-chip reformer with a
history of keystone wins. She’d
famously defeated the Defense
of Marriage Act in court, tough-
ened the state’s ban on assault-
style weapons and pushed for
a major rollback of sentencing
laws that sent nonviolent addicts
to jail. “I inherited something
that is significant and should not
have happened,” says Healey of
the Farak scandal. “I have been
clear that the conduct of the two
line prosecutors was unaccept-
able and beneath the standards
I have set for my office.”
Regrettably, the retired judge
she hired to vet her office out-
sourced that work to two state
troopers. They served no subpoe-
nas, put no one under oath and
impounded no e-mails. Their 15-
page whitewash, which cleared
the attorney general’s office, ac-
cused only one party of ethical
failures: Luke Ryan, for making
“unfounded allegations.” Ryan’s
colleagues were incensed. “If that
report had been fair,” says Segal,
“it would’ve nominated Luke for
an award.” But Ryan wasn’t done
swinging his hammer. This time,
he’d put it through the wall of bricks pro-
tecting the justice system.
Sometimes, legal outcomes depend
less upon lawyers than the temperament
of the person who sits above them. For
two years, Ryan had gone before Kinder,
an ex-prosecutor who ran courtrooms
with a master sergeant’s pacing and never
strayed an inch below the surface. But in
the fall of 2015, Kinder was promoted to
Appeals Court; he was replaced in the
Farak matter by Judge Carey. Carey was a
different kettle of fish: impatient and iras-
cible but determined to get the truth. “He
took no nonsense,” says Jacobstein, Ryan’s
colleague in the Farak appeals. “He want-
ed to know who knew what when, and why
they’d told no one about it.”
In December 2016, Carey held a six-
day hearing to excavate the facts about
Farak. Ryan seized his chance: He called
Kris Foster and showed her the letter she’d
written to Kinder. She reluctantly admit-
ted writing a “deliberately vague letter,”
but said she’d done so under orders from
her bosses. This sent shock waves around
the court; no one was more astonished
COURTESY OF MADELYN VAZQUEZ
than Carey. For the next four days, he in-
terrogated those bosses, haranguing every
aspect of the letter’s production. Foster’s
colleagues pleaded ignorance. Not one of
them could recall having prior input or re-
viewing it before it went out.
Mass amnesia was the theme of the hear-
ing. John Verner, the ex-head of the crimi-
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
CASUALTY OF THE DRUG WAR
Rafael Rodriguez died of an OD before his
case was voided because of misconduct.
nal bureau, said he was “pissed” to learn
that the worksheets had been suppressed.
Ryan reminded him that he’d headed in-
house meetings to discuss how to withhold
the papers; Verner said he didn’t remember
what the meetings covered. (Verner didn’t
respond to requests for comment.) Indeed,
no one who’d attended – Kaczmarek, Foster
and three supervisors – could recall a sa-
lient detail from those meetings. Appalled,
Ryan called upon Kaczmarek.
He began by reading aloud to the court
an e-mail she’d sent to Foster after Ryan
had asked Foster to see the papers. “Why
is that evidence relevant to his case? I re-
ally don’t like him,” Kaczmarek wrote back.
Ryan let that sentence resonate a moment
– then commenced to take her apart limb
from limb. Regarding Ballou’s e-mail with
Farak’s drug admissions, he shot holes in
her story that she’d simply gotten the years
wrong. (Kaczmarek said she “mistook” the
date of the rehab worksheet for 2012. Ryan
retorted that this required her misreading
dozens of papers in those boxes from 2011,
not just a stand-alone worksheet.) He asked
about her e-mail to Ballou, begging him to
bury Farak’s coke theft of 2005. That, Kac-
zmarek explained, wasn’t collusion but a
“plea to God” – she feared “the avalanche
of work” that would land on her if Farak’s
crime spree stretched back years.
Ryan hammered away for
hours. Kaczmarek denied meet-
ing with Farak’s law yer and
promising her she’d suppress the
drug journals; Farak’s lawyer
contradicted her, citing chapter
and verse of their huddle at the
Hampshire County Courthouse.
Kaczmarek admitted writing her
friend at the office of inspector
general, urging her not to probe
Farak’s lab – but that, she said,
was because her friend had young
children, and it would be such
a long drive for her to Amherst.
When the hearing concluded,
Ryan walked downstairs and saw
Kaczmarek in the lobby with her
husband. For a moment, he felt a
twinge of sadness, he says. Then
he thought of Penate, who was
still in prison, and Rodriguez,
dead and buried at 44.
Months passed before Carey
rendered his findings on Farak.
When his ruling came down, at
the end of last June, it arrived
in thunderbolts. For 127 pages,
he savaged the attorney general’s
office, saying it offered “patently
baseless defenses” for withhold-
ing evidence and “deceived Judge
Kinder” with the “ruse that [it] turned over
documents.” Then he trained his fire on
Kaczmarek and Foster. The scope of their
misconduct was “systemic” and “inten-
tional, repeated, prolonged and deceptive”;
they’d “violated their oaths as assistant at-
torneys general and as officers of the court.”
That left him no choice but the nuclear op-
tion: He dumped six of the 11 Farak verdicts
put before him “with prejudice,” meaning
they could never be retried by the state.
Rafael Rodriguez wasn’t on that list: Hav-
ing died before the ruling, he had his name
erased from Carey’s docket. “It was really
bittersweet to read that finding,” says Ryan.
“I’d been fighting in his name since this
tragedy started. To not see that name there
– it still hurts me.”
It took Segal three years to get the list
of Dookhan’s victims, and another year to
finally win them justice. In January 2017,
the Supreme Judicial Court delivered a
landmark decision called Bridgeman II.
It ordered the state to retry the falsely
convicted or dismiss their cases in 90
days. That spring, every DA with relevant
verdicts brought forth their lists of dis-
missals. In a single day, April 19th, 2017,
almost 22,000 people had their Dookhan
convictions waived – it was the most in
U.S. history.
Last fall, Segal and Jacobstein filed a
massive suit for the victims of Sonja Farak.
“We argued that Bridgeman II wasn’t
enough this time. Here [Cont. on 57]
RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 49
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
Wherever Magazines Are Sold
Reviews
“It’s true, I’m a Rubik’s, a beautiful mess.
At times juvenile, yes, I goof and I jest.
A flawed human, I guess.
But I’m doing my best.”
—Eminem, “Walk on Water”

Slim
Shady:
Blonde
on the
Tracks
Eminem takes stock
of his career, says he’s
sorry to his daughter
and goes off on Trump

Eminem
Revival Interscope
HHH½
BY CHRISTOPHER
R. WEINGARTEN
At various points throughout
his 20-year-plus career, Emi-
nem has reigned supreme as
rap’s greatest poison-tongued
potty-mouth, successfully turn-
ing his petty beefs and battles
with personal demons and drug
problems into cinematic epics.
But, at 45, he hasn’t had a good
pop-culture feud in ages, and
his pill-popping days of vice
are behind him: “I only go to
meetings court-ordered from a
shrink,” he raps on a pickup line
from Revival.
The title of his ninth LP
evokes old-timer nostalgia, and
its most electric moments do
look back, suggesting a con-
fused and conciliatory man
taking stock of his own lega-
cy – the kind of honesty that’s
always made him such a com-
pelling memoirist. The album
opener, “Walk on Water,” fea-
turing deus-ex-machina back-
ing vocals from Beyoncé, won-
ders if he’ll ever be relevant

Illustration by Nigel Bucha na n RollingStone.com | R ol l i n g S t o n e | 51

Reviews
again. Eminem details his own
missteps and self-doubt over
a mostly beatless track as the
sounds of crumbling paper and
errant swears underscore his
lack of confidence. That confes-
sional power also comes out as
he revisits another long-stand-
ing theme: his failings as a dad.
The LP’s last two tracks, “Cas-
tle” and “Arose,” form a pow-
erful suite that moves from
his days as a struggling dad
penning letters to his unborn
daughter, to the pill-hazed su-
perstar screaming about his
loss of privacy.
Revival isn’t all Blood on the
Tracks stock-taking; sometimes
he even sounds like he’s having
a good time. On “Heat,” he un-
leashes a ridiculous litany of
dirty puns (“You got buns, I got
Asperger’s”), and he’s a triple-X
LL Cool J on “Remind Me,” rap-
ping about boobs ‘n’ butts while
Rick Rubin flips Joan Jett’s “I
Love Rock ‘N’ Roll.”
Eminem’s solipsism also gets
The Radical
interrupted by world events.
Here, he follows his insane anti-
Trump freestyle from the BET
Reawakening
Jim James
Tribute to 2 ATO
HHH½
The MMJ frontman reimagines
old-school pop and soul gems
From My Morning Jacket’s
early days, frontman Jim James
had a thing for vocal reverb.
On his second solo covers set,
it persists, and serves the proj-
ect well – these classic songs
feel like live broadcasts from
distant memory, or clouds in
heaven. Of course, James’ gor-
geous tenor lies at the heart of
it. Brian Wilson’s “I Just Wasn’t
Pharrell Made for These Times” is hand-
Williams somely ghostly; ditto the Ori-
oles’ doo-wop gem “Crying in
the Chapel,” distilled to a sin-
gle lonely voice. The curveball
is “Baby Don’t Go,” the singer
multitracking himself on Sonny
and Cher’s 1965 hit, refreshing
a pop classic for a new, gender-
fluid generation. WILL HERMES

Awards with the huge piano-

ballad screed “Like Home,”
hooked around a soaring vocal
from Alicia Keys: “All he does
is watch Fox News like a parrot
and repeats,” Em raps. “While
he looks like a canary with a
beak/Why you think he banned
transgenders from the military
with a tweet?” “Untouchable”
even goes beyond vitriol to offer
ideas: “Hire more black cops,
the crap stops.”
At nearly 80 minutes, Reviv-
al is a heavy listen, going deep
on duets with guests like Ed
Sheeran and X Ambassadors,
including “River,” “Tragic End-
ings” and “Need Me” – three
narratives about powder-keg
relationships. But a certain in-
dulgent messiness has always
been part of the Eminem ex-
perience. On “In Your Head,”
which samples the Cranber-
of N.E.R.D
Pharrell reboots his avant-rap crew for an
album of wild beats and urgent politics
N.E.R.D No One Ever Really Dies Columbia HHH½ Luke Bryan
What Makes You Country
In the early ’00s, while his career as a pop Capitol
hitmaker was taking off, Pharrell Williams HHH
invented his side project N.E.R.D, with Chad Nashville superstar’s eclectic
Hugo and Shay Haley, as a dumping ground vision of being a good guy
for his most off-kilter impulses – scrambling
everything from funk rock to hallucinatory soul to prog- Country superstar Luke Bry-
rock. If their records sounded like a hodgepodge, that an’s sixth album opens with the
wasn’t a drawback. It was the whole liberating point. title track, a Southern-rock as-
The fifth N.E.R.D LP, and first since 2010’s forgetta- sertion of down-home cred that
ble Nothing, feels urgent in a way their music never has, argues “country” can be any-
fitting our political moment while remaining as stylisti- thing you want. To his cred-
cally looped-out as ever. “If not me, then who?” Pharrell it, Bryan practices what he
asks on the vertiginous booty-shaker “Lemon,” which fea- preaches: from the surprisingly
tures a scorching rap from Rihanna. “Don’t Don’t Do It,” believable R&B sex jams “Bad
one of two songs to brandish Kendrick Lamar verses, un- Lovers” and “Hung over in a
dercuts its brunch-funk keyboards and sunny bounce with Hotel Room” to the synth-driv-
lyrics about police brutality. “Secret Life of Tigers” refer- en gender-role flip “Pick It Up.”
EARL GIBSON III/GETTY IMAGES

ries’ “Zombie,” he says sorry
to his daughter for forcing her
to grow up appearing in songs
with fucked-up guys like Slim
Shady and Eminem. But when
Revival works, it proves they’re
still co-stars in one hell of a
horror show.
ences Guns N’ Roses and right-wing parents, then springs There are a couple of whiffs
off into a sprawling electro-funk seizure with “more space (“She might be a mess, but she’s
than NASA.” It’s refreshingly weird to watch Mr. “Happy” a hot one,” he sings on “She’s a
contort his nice-guy smile into a psychedelic scowl. But Hot One.”) He’s more likable on
there’s beauty and hope here too. The closing track, “Lift- songs such as “Most People Are
ing You,” is a liltingly optimistic island-tinged dub tune Good,” where his lyrical nice-
with Ed Sheeran on bright backing vocals – a little shot of ness suits his sound’s generous
light to help us wander out of the darkness. JON DOLAN eclecticism. JON FREEMAN

52 HHHHH Classic | HHHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE .
 Update: Reissues
Rock, Folk and Soul That
Found Power in Darkness
W
ith george h.w. bush in
the White House and the Gulf
War escalating, things looked
grim when R.E.M. began demos
for Automatic for the People at Prince’s Pais-
ley Park studios. Twenty-five years after its
1992 release, the record’s aching, empathetic
folk rock feels as resonant as ever. Following
the pop richness of 1991’s Out of Time, it was
more rock & roll elegy than rock album, per
se, and the main thrill of this four-disc set is
the 20 demos showing it come into focus.
The word rush of “The Sidewinder Sleeps
Tonite” takes shape on “Wake Her Up.” A
skeletal “Everybody Hurts” (initially labeled
“Michael’s Organ”) has flickers of an Otis
Redding ballad. “C to D Slide 13” is “Man
on the Moon” with Stipe’s word-
less vocals as placeholders, while
“Cello Scud” sketches “Sweet-
ness Follows” with acoustic
guitar and organ. More in-
triguing are songs that didn’t
make the cut: the Byrds-ian
“Mike’s Pop Song”; the half-
formed “Eastern 983111,”
named for a (doomed?) airline
R.E.M.
flight; and the haunted medita-
tion “Devil Rides Backwards” (“. . . on
a mule named Maybe/Down the road of
indecision”). There’s also the band’s sole live
set from this period, recorded at the 40 Watt
Club in Athens, Georgia. Much bootlegged,
it’s been cleaned up and turns elegy into
raw rock & roll affirmation.
Another artist with Southern roots
and soulful folk-rock inclinations,
Angel Olsen gathers recent B sides
and rarities on Phases, a victory lap
in the wake of last year’s head-turn-
ing My Woman. The material spans
FROM TOP: KYLE COUTTS; ANTON CORBIJN; JEFF GOODE/
the years since sessions for her
equally stirring 2014 set, Burn
Your Fire for No Witness. Ar-
rangements are spare, her re-
markable voice showing vul-
nerability of startling power:
“TORONTO STAR”/GETTY IMAGES
the sinewy mewl of “Sans,”
the howling yodel of “Sweet
Dreams” and a fragile take on
Springsteen’s “Tougher Than the
Rest” that sounds like she’s sing-
ing through a supermarket PA,
huddled in a stockroom with a
guitar and a hungry heart. Shane
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
Olsen
R.E.M.
Automatic for the People:
25th Anniversary HHHH½
Angel Olsen Phases HHH½
Jackie Shane Any Other Way HHH½
Transgender soul singer Jackie Shane
was raised in Nashville in the 1940s and
eventually fled to Toronto, where by the
mid-Sixties she’d become a local star.
After she retired in 1971, her cult sta-
tus grew. The 25-track anthology
Any Other Way asserts her remark-
able talent and place in history. “Tell
her that I’m happy/Tell her that I’m
gay/Tell her I wouldn’t have it/
Any other way,” she sings on the
title track, dipping dramat-
ically in register for the last
three words. It’s devastat-
ing. Sly, campy humor flash-
es throughout: Check how
her backup singers turn
the word “tenement” into a
chipper chant on the Six-
ties throwback “In My Ten-
ement.” Like many artists
faced with oppression,
Shane turned it into
fierce joy. WILL HERMES
RollingStone.com
K. Michelle
Kimberly: The People I Used
to Know Atlantic
HHH½
VH1 reality fixture shows off her
mean vocal power
As the star of her own VH1 re-
ality show, singer K. Michelle
has logged enough TV hours
to know that airing grievanc-
es can be delicious, and her
fourth album lets the vitriol
fly. She takes on lousy exes (the
icy kiss-off “Crazy Like You”),
racist media outlets and other
shady characters over classi-
cally minded yet fashionably
adorned R&B. She does find
time for love here and there,
whooping through the trium-
phant “Brain on Love” and get-
ting down with soulman Jer-
emih on “Takes Two.” But her
best moments come when she
reminds us she isn’t here to
make friends. MAURA JOHNSTON
Alborosie
Soul Pirate – Acoustic GeeJam
HHH½
Sicilian roots reggae singer’s
acoustic Quiet Storm
Like hip-hop and jazz, reg-
gae is international music, so
it shouldn’t be surprising that
Sicilian-born Alberto D’Ascola
is part of the new wave of roots
revivalists. He’s got skills and
soul, and if his style feels some-
what undistinguished, this re-
wind of his 2008 debut, Soul
Pirate, is a step toward some-
thing unique – a sort of Quiet
Storm reggae folk. “Herbalist”
blends dancehall chat, psych
guitar and Nyabinghi-style
drums; “Black Woman” floats
on flute and lush backing vo-
cals; and “Johnny B. Goode”
gets remade as a Blue Moun-
tain blues about a reggae leg-
end. Here’s looking forward to
a dub version. W.H.
| R ol l i n g S t o n e | 53
Reviews
The Clash: The Guide
Every album by punk’s greatest band – from riot-starting garage
rock to opuses that redefined rock & roll. By Will Hermes
MUST-
HAVES
The Clash
1977
Released nine months
before the Sex Pistols’
debut, this album planted
the flag of British punk
– yet remained a shared
secret in the U.S. until
1979, when a rejiggered
domestic version finally
appeared. Co-leaders Mick
Jones and Joe Strummer
unleashed an outburst of
class rage (“White Riot”),
punk thrust (“Remote
Control”) and vintage
hooks. The classic is among
the most visceral political
rock & roll LPs ever made.
London Calling
1979
A 19-song rallying cry
sprawled over two LPs
that found the band
refining all the elements
54 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |
that made it great, while
adding new ones. With its
martial cadence and
parched howls, the title
track kicks hero worship to
the curb (“Don’t look to
us/Phony Beatlemania
has bitten the dust!”),
alongside hot-wired
rockabilly (“Brand New
Cadillac”), a bilingual
revolutionary history
lesson (“Spanish Bombs”),
potent roots reggae
(bassist Paul Simonon’s
“The Guns of Brixton”) and
even a hit single (“Train in
Vain”). It’s post-punk’s
White Album.
FURTHER
LISTENING
Give ’Em
Enough Rope
1978
The Clash’s second LP –
and their U.S. debut –
showed a band focusing
on hard-rock verities as
much as punk subversion
or stylistic mash-ups.
Producer Sandy Pearlman
(Blue Oyster Cult) cranked
up the guitars as Strummer
and Jones broadened their
vision, staring down
post-colonial racial strife
on “Safe European Home”
and draconian drug laws
on “Julie’s Been Working
for the Drug Squad.”
RollingStone.com
Black Market
Clash
1981
Collecting U.K.-only B
sides and other rarities,
this 10-inch EP follow-up
to London Calling stands as
a great LP unto itself, with
the withering broadcast
indictment “Capital Radio
One” (Elvis Costello’s
“Radio, Radio” soon
followed) and indelible
reggae-rock covers,
including Toots and the
Maytals’ “Pressure Drop”
and Willie Williams’
“Armagideon Time.”
Sandinista!
1980
Their most ambitious
record: a triple-LP,
36-song data dump with
global perspective,
hopscotching from
calypso to jazz to dub to
rap, expanding their
sound with guest
musicians and digging
deeper into current
events, like the
Nicaraguan revolutionary
movement that gave the
album its name.
Combat Rock
1982
Powered by a more
polished sound and a
couple of big hits – “Rock
the Casbah” and “Should
I Stay or Should I Go?”
– this was the band hitting
its commercial peak, a
mix of great songs that
didn’t shy away from
political contradictions
(see “Straight to Hell”).
The Clash’s final album
with Jones, Combat Rock
marked the end of their
golden era.
GOING
DEEPER
Cut the Crap
1985
A Clash album in name
only, sans Jones and
drummer Topper Headon,
this is Strummer’s last
stand fronting the band he
birthed. Nevertheless, it
shows a flame still burning;
the synth-powered “This Is
England” is both stirring
anthem and parting shot
from a group that never
stopped evolving.
From Here to
Eternity: Live
1999
These 1978-1982 live
recordings sample some
ferocious early U.K. gigs
alongside later iconic U.S.
shows, with highlights
including their signature
cover of “I Fought the
Law.” The Clash were
always a live band at
heart; here’s proof.
Live at Shea
Stadium
2008
In the wake of Combat
Rock’s worldwide success,
the Clash opened two
New York shows for the
Who in late 1982 – taking
the stage with something
to prove and managing a
symbolic passing of the
torch that was also one
of their final great
moments with Jones.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
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A Film for Right Now
The Post
Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks
Directed by Steven Spielberg
HHH½
the first thing to know
about The Post, besides the fact
that it’s one of the best and tick-
tock-timeliest movies of the
year, is that it’s a love story: It
celebrates the bond between a
free press and every thinking
human being, however dimin-
ished the relationship has be-
come in Trump America.
It’s set in 1971, when Wash-
ington Post publisher Katha-
rine Graham (Meryl Streep)
and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom
Hanks) defied threats from the
Nixon White House and pub-
lished the Pentagon Papers,
which exposed a massive gov-
ernment cover-up about the
unwinnable war in Vietnam.
It was military analyst Daniel
Ellsberg (a very fine Matthew
Rhys) who pilfered the papers.
It was The New York Times that
first published them, until the
Justice Department issued a
stop order in the name of na-
tional security. So what did
the Post do? Plenty. In flout-
ing Nixon’s orders, the paper
‘Star Wars’ Doesn’t Get Better Than This
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Mark Hamill, Daisy Ridley
Directed by Rian Johnson
HHH½
w e ’ r e i n a no - sp oi l e r
zone, so let’s just say that The
Last Jedi is simply stupendous.
Writer-director Rian John-
son (Looper) fills the screen
with knockout fun, breathless
action and shocking revela-
tions that’ll make you holler,
“Holy shit!” As Leia (Carrie
Fisher), now a general, leads
the Resistance against the evil
First Order of Supreme Lead-
56 | R ol l i n g S t o n e
Movies
By Peter Travers
Hanks and
Streep fight for
a free press.
faced conspiracy charges, jail
time and financial ruin.
Steven Spielberg directs
The Post with fierce commit-
ment and fervent heart. And
the script by Liz Hannah and
Josh Singer bristles with ur-
gency. Take the film’s inspired
use of Nixon’s real voice, as he
divulges his crimes and rails
against the press for revealing
them. Sound familiar?
Hanks and Streep power-
charge the screen. Playing a
woman who has deferred to
men most of her life, Streep
lets us see Graham grow in
Ridley is
ready for
action.
er Snoke (Andy Serkis), Rey
(Daisy Ridley) drags AWOL
Jedi master Luke Skywalk-
er (Mark Hamill) back to the
HHHH Classic | HHH½ Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
confidence and conscience.
When Graham risks all to say,
“Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s pub-
lish,” you’ll want to cheer. The
Post misses the classic level of
1976’s All the President’s Men,
which tackled Watergate. But
Spielberg’s film triumphs as
a call to resist any attempt to
kill the right of journalists to
speak truth to power. The Su-
preme Court ruled in favor of
a free press in 1971. Would it
today? It’s a scary thought, and
a major reason why The Post
is the game-changer we need
right this effing minute.
good fight that might
save his nephew Kylo
Ren (Adam Driver)
from the dark side.
Ridley and Driv-
er excel, but Hamill
deepens the role that
made him a star in
1977. The Last Jedi,
the middle part of
the current trilogy,
ranks with the Star
Wars pinnacle of The
Empire Strikes Back by point-
ing the way ahead to a next
generation of skywalkers and,
thrillingly, a new hope.
Art and Love
Go to War
Phantom Thread
Daniel Day-Lewis
Directed by
Paul Thomas Anderson
HHH½
rey nolds woodcock, the
1950s British fashion titan
played by the great Daniel Day-
Lewis in what he cruelly insists
is his final film role, likes to sew
secrets into his clothes, to mark
his art as indelibly his. Paul
Thomas Anderson, who wrote,
directed and served as uncred-
ited camera operator on Phan-
tom Thread, crafts films the
same way, daring audiences to
look hard and dig deep.
Krieps and
Day-Lewis
The wildly inventive and per-
versely funny Phantom Thread
concerns a workaholic nar-
cissist who beds a long line of
models whom he quickly dis-
cards. Or rather his sister Cyril
(the magnificent Lesley Man-
ville) does. Then his eyes fall on
Alma (Vicky Krieps), a young
waitress who won’t toe the line.
She criticizes his clothes, dis-
rupts his routine, goads him
into jealousy and then takes
more sinister measures to keep
FROM TOP: NIKO TAVERNISE/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX;
him. Day-Lewis traces the arc
LAURIE SPARHAM/FOCUS FEATURES; LUCASFILM LTD.
of his character from remote ty-
rant to willing slave with a ma-
jestic command that leaves you
in awe. The Luxembourg-born
Krieps has a harder go of it try-
ing to negotiate Alma’s truce
with the twin obsessions of love
and art. Is each in its own way
a poison or a cure? Deciphering
Anderson’s puzzle makes for a
tantalizing challenge. Go for it.
Phantom Thread grips you like
a dream that won’t let go.
Ja n u a r y 1 1 -2 5 , 2 018
JUSTICE FOR NONE
[Cont. from 49] you had misconduct by a
crime-lab chemist and an egregious case
of prosecutorial fraud,” Segal says. What
he wanted, besides relief for all Farak
cases, was a ruling so decisive that it would
forever change the way the state handles
wrongful convictions. As in Bridgeman,
district attorneys were given a brief win-
dow to identify and dispose of Farak cases.
On November 30th, their window closed.
That morning, Segal picked up a client
named Nicole Westcott and drove her into
Boston for the decision. Westcott, seven
months pregnant with her second child,
was an addict well-established in recovery.
Her childhood was hectic and riddled with
loss; by her fifth or sixth foster home, she
was dabbling with drugs and wound up
addicted to heroin. For seven lost years,
she ran the streets and was in and out of
jail. Three of her convictions were Farak-
related – and hung over her head long after
she got clean and started over as a recov-
ery counselor.
For the millions of people carrying drug
convictions, the pain doesn’t stop at the
prison gates. Rather, it’s outsourced to the
probation system, where ex-cons are bled
for their earnings. They pay fines, fees and
The Complete Issue.
Every Word. Every Photo.
Now Available on Mobile
drug-test costs that add up to thousands of
dollars. Worse, they’re saddled with CORI
sheets, or Criminal Offender Record In-
formation. Wherever they apply for work
or housing, they must acknowledge and
show those files. Practically speaking, that
makes it all but impossible to find safe
lodging or earn real wages. Post-convic-
tion, Westcott cobbled together a thread-
bare existence, pulling 60-hour weeks at
fast-food jobs. Finally, she was hired by
ServiceNet, a drug-treatment program
that had counseled Farak.
In Boston, Westcott would learn if those
convictions were getting tossed – and with
them, the collateral damage to her life.
When she got to Segal’s office, there were
reporters and lawyers packing a confer-
ence room. At 10 a.m., some of the numbers
were in. More than 6,000 cases were slated
for dismissal; three of those cases were
Westcott’s. Shaking with some amalgam
of disbelief and joy, she stood and fielded
questions from the press. Asked how the
convictions had impacted her since prison,
she talked about being kept from her five-
year-old son and begging landlords “to give
me a chance.” Someone asked about re-
sentments, raising Farak’s name. Westcott
paused to let a sob pass through. “I would
try to help her. She suffers addiction like I
57
CURATED PLEASURE OBJECTS | BONDAGE PLAY | EROTIC LUXURY
do. I just want the state held accountable
for what it did.”
So does Segal. He’ll press on with his
suit, taking the attorney general’s office to
court next spring. What he’s seeking isn’t
merely the erasure of past wrongs, but
real reparations for those like Westcott.
Regarding Foster and Kaczmarek, formal
complaints were lodged against them with
the state’s Board of Bar Overseers, co-filed
by Medwed, the Northeastern professor,
and the Innocence Project. Ryan is after
a more fungible kind of justice: He wants
damages paid by Foster and Kaczmarek.
This fall, he filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit
on behalf of Penate. It’s virtually unheard of
for prosecutors to be charged with crimes,
and the Supreme Court has granted them
blanket immunity from civil litigation. But
Ryan is testing that protection: He’s suing
them not as prosecutors but as “evidence
custodians” who mishandled crucial evi-
dence in Penate’s case. If his case survives
dismissal, it will be a widely watched set
piece in the War on Drugs. What happens
when drug warriors cheat and lie – are they
bound by the same laws addicts are, or are
they shielded from such trif les by their
badges? “We’re going to get some answers
next year,” says Ryan. “But power concedes
nothing without a struggle.”
Raise your expectations.
T H E EQU U S WAV E
liberator.com
 THE
LAST
WORD

Erykah Badu
The singer on learning from her grandmothers
(and Pink Floyd), and why her midlife crisis was a party
Who are your heroes? You went through a wild-child period when you hit 40. Why then?
My grandmothers, Thelma Gipson and Viola Wilson. They’re My midlife crisis was a party. I was still doing concerts and
both 90. They keep me grounded. Thelma was a principal’s as- making albums and raising my children, but I took that head
sistant at an elementary school. She made sure my siblings and I wrap off. Along with the changing hormones and everything
were properly fed, even when she was really tired. Viola worked for changing in the air politically and socially, I had to loosen my grip.
Rockwell International, which built the space shuttles. She and I What was the craziest thing you did during that time?
work in the yard, paint, continuously redecorate. She bought me Shit, man. I cannot tell you that, but it was definitely on my tour
my first piano and made sure that if I was singing about some- bus. “This is drunk? OK. This is high? OK. This is staying out all
thing, it was something I knew about. night? OK.” I just naturally adapted. I never partied as
What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten? a young girl; I was always performing or studying
Thelma would say, “Don’t call him. Let or doing something “responsible.” So this was
him call you.” That set the stakes for ev- fun, real fun.
erything in life. Don’t be desperate. What was your favorite book when you
Set things in motion and then watch were a kid?
them happen. Let them grow. Judy Blume’s Are You There, God?
What music moves you the most? It’s Me, Margaret. It was a collection
Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Mar- of diary entries from a girl named
vin Gaye, Nina Simone, Yoko Margaret. It taught me about talk-
Ono, John Lennon, Pink ing about your feelings and the
Floyd. The Dark Side of the importance of journaling. Writ-
Moon is one song all the way ing things down is powerful. I
through. I love the produc- have about 70 to 80 journals at
tion of it, the composition this point.
of it, how the drums were Are you pessimistic or optimistic
mixed, the time-signature about our era?
changes, the vocals in “The Always optimistic. I see what’s
Great Gig in the Sky.” Every- happening as a rebirthing pro-
thing about it is perfect. cess, and labor is hard. You don’t
Have you ever tried playing it while know what’s going to happen. You
watching The Wizard of Oz on mute? have to wait until you are dilated to 10
Of course I have. It’s crazy. before you can give birth. We at about a
You have daughters ages eight and 13. five right now.
What music do they listen to? What’s your coping mechanism?
They listen to pop music. They like No matter how noisy it is, I try to con-
Rihanna and Selena Gomez. [Talks nect to the stillness underneath every sin-
to younger daughter Mars] Oh, gle thing. Searching for stillness gives me
I’m sorry. She says she hates Selena discipline, patience and immense com-
Gomez. She likes Ed Sheeran. Demi passion for people. I walk a lot, box, do tae
Lovato. Lil Uzi Vert. kwon do, hot yoga. I do breathing exercis-
Are you familiar with those artists? es in the sauna. I jump on a trampoline with
Absolutely. I’m driving in the car pool my eight-year-old, I go to dance class with my
listening to it. I like what’s happen- 13-year-old. Me and my son lift weights. I keep
ing with music. Right now my favor- healthy people around me.
ite thing to listen to is the Lil Uzi Vert What’s the most important rule you live by?
and Pharrell song, “Neon Guts.” I lis- Follow my intuition. It won’t give me what
ten to this band from Toronto called I want. It’ll give me what I need.
BadBadNotGood. When I go to a You once said you’d like to direct an in-flight
Young Thug or Uzi Vert or Ugly God video. Is that still a dream?
show, what I’m seeing is a genera- I don’t want to think about what I got
tion with something to communi- to do when the motherfucker crashes. My
cate. It sounds like mumbling to you, video would be more realistic: “None of this
but it sounds like vibration to me. shit is going to help, but if you see those masks
drop, start praying and getting right with the
Badu curated a new Fela Lord.” I would want it to be funny. At the end,
Kuti box set and is preparing I would say, “Just think positive,” and say a
a deluxe edition of her 1997 little prayer for the pilot. Total acceptance
debut, “Baduizm.” is the best way. INTERVIEW BY DAVID BROWNE

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

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