Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

Always compelling, singer-actress Marianne Faithfull was once Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and a darling of England’s swinging ’60s scene. A gorgeous girl of noble ancestry (her mother was an Austrian baroness with roots in the Habsburg Dynasty), she scored her first pop hit at 18, singing Mick’s and Keith Richards’ “As Tears Go By.” But her decline came as rapidly as her rise. Throughout the ’70s, her career plummeted and her life was beset by heartache, drug abuse and suicide attempts. Faithfull launched her comeback with a series of strong, startling confessional albums, including Broken English, Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather and Blazing Away. The latter two were produced by H...

Often called the world’s greatest rock-and-roll band, the Rolling Stones recorded what is widely regarded as their greatest album in less-than-favorable conditions. Having fled England amid a tax dispute with the British government, the group holed up in the south of France in the summer of 1971, in a luxurious villa rented by Keith Richards, who was busy feeding his heroin habit at the time. Mick Jagger, meanwhile, seemed more interested in his recent marriage to Nicaraguan-born model Bianca Pérez Morena de Macias. Despite the tensions, drugs and distractions, the Stones somehow managed to produce a masterpiece. Released as a double album, Exile on Main Street featured a glorious mess of ro...

For a British rock band with a salacious past, the setting was devilishly ironic: a former girls' boarding school, nestled in the moneyed hills of New England. For eight weeks this summer, The Rolling Stones took possession of the secluded Wykeham Rise School in the small northwest Connecticut town of Washington - a two-hour drive from New York City - to prepare for the band's first concert tour in seven years. The three-month tour opened with a blast of raw energy last week in Philadelphia and made a two-concert stop in Toronto this week, before going on to Vancouver, Montreal and about 36 U.S. cities. On a balmy afternoon last month at Wykeham Rise, bassist Bill Wyman, guitarist Ron Wood a...