Nick Paumgarten

Lee Jaffe, the musician’s friend, fixer, and collaborator, recalls falling in with the Wailers and compiling his new book, “Hit Me with Music.”

And yet, a month later, I found myself on the way to Las Vegas, where the band was a dozen shows into thirty at that glimmering new Sno Ball of a hall just off the Strip. Half the seats on the flight seemed to be occupied by fellow-Deadheads, identifiable, as ever, by the hieroglyphs. I had checked no luggage, but I carried some personal baggage. It had been forty years, almost to the day, since I’d caught my first Grateful Dead show. The week of my flight, an elderly evangelist in a sun hat had…

Can’t do that here, bub. Still, East Coast summertime has its own dibs situations: the territorial beach umbrella, the Great Lawn Philharmonic blanket grab, the incumbent at the top of the national ticket who won’t cede his perch. In these parts, unlike in Chicago, the prerogative is often disputed. A weekend in the Berkshires, on the grounds of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams: the biennial Solid Sound arts-and-music festival, convened and headlined by the band Wilco…

3 days ago ... On a recent afternoon, Alan Braufman, the jazz composer and saxophonist, stopped outside what used to be his home, at 501 Canal Street, ...

The novel, which won the National Book Award, is narrated by an unnamed writer in Manhattan whose friend and mentor, a more famous writer, has recently died by suicide. She inherits his dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. “The Friend” is about a lot of things—grief, memory, loneliness, goatish men, writing, teaching, kids today—but it is, fundamentally, a love story between two bereaved creatures, writer and dog, seeking consolation and companionship in a treacherous world. Siegel and McGehee had ac…

And yet, sure enough, there I was in Vermont, on Monday morning, for the express purpose of bearing witness to the latest full solar eclipse. (A thought: Why don’t eclipses, like hurricanes or full moons, get names?) My brother lives in Stowe, Vermont, and so, a year ago, I had staked a claim to his guest room and begun scheming about the best place to be at the appointed hour. It was just a five-hour drive from Manhattan—on Sunday, anyway. My plan was this: to hike up with my skis from the top…

“Here’s how it happened,” Khan said the other day. “There was a bathroom attached to the room, and I couldn’t fucking figure out the toilet-paper holder.” She posted a query about it on Instagram. Rae replied with a how-to-load-the-toilet-paper-holder video she’d made, and this led to a D.M. exchange about singing together. Rae had also invited Mayowa to her room to sing with her. “I was so nervous,” he recalled. “I stood outside her room and thought, I’m gonna bail.” “I hear this knock on the d…

Trouser Press, as it came to be called, soon became a scrappy yet integral vehicle for the incursion on these shores of Brit genres, like prog and New Wave, that the critics and radio programmers initially snubbed. For a while, he worked part time, too, at a microphone-importing company (“I was cleaning spit out of Stevie Wonder’s microphone, basically,” he said the other day), but by 1978 Trouser Press was his main gig, with a midtown office and a salary of twelve thousand a year. He also began…

Visconti, who will turn eighty this spring, has been doing it—in this case, producing records—for six decades. He made his reputation with Marc Bolan and T. Rex, and with David Bowie (Visconti produced half of his studio albums, including his final one), but in the years since has ranged far and wide. By his count, he has made more than two thousand tracks. He was in Montclair to produce an album by Rogue Oliphant, a project led by Paul Muldoon, the poet. Muldoon had written lyrics and had conve…

Copeland, tall, still boyish, and lean in dark blue, made his way through the exhibit, encountering puppets he hardly knew. The Swedish Chef meant nothing to him. “Is that Fonzie?” You mean Fozzie Bear? No, it is Rowlf the Dog. “These guys I know,” he said. Statler and Waldorf, the balcony hecklers. Copeland grew up in the Middle East and then in London. His father was an American spy—an O.S.S. officer and a founding member of the C.I.A. “I remember the day television hit Lebanon,” Copeland said…