Rolling Stone veteran offers candid interviews with music and film legends This book collects the most intimate and revealing interviews by Anthony DeCurtis, one of our country's premiere
cultural journalists. His many subjects all speak with rare candor about the meanings within and the motivations behind their best work. These gripping conversations will make readers feel that
they are sitting, as DeCurtis did, at a dinner table or in a quiet room alone with some of the most revered artists of our time, learning everything they wanted to know about them. * Features
23 interviews including Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Keith Richards, Rufus Wainwright, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, Iggy Pop, Bono, Michael Stipe, Billy Joel and Elton John, Phil Spector,
The Eagles and Eminem.* Many of these interviews have been significantly expanded beyond their original versions, and DeCurtis has written new introductions that tell the story behind these
stories. Excerpt: Billy Joel was the subject of the first cover story I ever wrote for Rolling Stone, in 1986. The afternoon we met - in midtown Manhattan at an Italian restaurant, natch - we
got merrily drunk on Sambuca, and then he brought me back to the studio expressly to meet his producer, Phil Ramone. It was a typical Billy Joel performance all around. The brashness, the
drinking, and the rough-edged camaraderie all made the singer a very recognizable New York type to me, like one of the guys I had grown up with. I'd never met Elton John before doing this
story, but when he and Joel were about to play three shows together at Madison Square Garden, I thought it might be a perfect occasion to do a songwriters discussion piece I'd been talking
about with the New York Times. ADC: Music came naturally for you, and the words were a struggle? EJ: Yeah, and that led to me writing to other people's lyrics - Bernie's mostly, of course. ADC:
Billy, you've called songwriting "the world's loneliest activity." Have you ever tried collaborating? BJ: I tried it, and the only thing worse than doing it by yourself is doing it with
somebody else. You can't share the responsibilities. There's got to be one captain of the ship. Now, I've seen him write to Bernie's lyrics. He looks at the lyric, and he sits down and starts
writing music. I do it the other way around. I write music first, and then I jam lyrics on top of it. So there's a totally different dynamic to how we work.
