Rolling Stone farewell, republished from October, 2008
The following post was published on rollingstone.com’s “Capri Lounge” in October, 2008, but was lost in a subsequent redesign of the website.
By Evan Serpick
I recently left Rolling Stone after three years as a writer for the magazine. In that time, I had the opportunity meet and interview some of the most incredible artists of our time and become a small part of the legacy of one of America’s most iconic magazines. Upon reflection, I’ve come up with five highlights of my time at RS — and dishonorable mention that I can’t hold onto any longer…
— In December, 2006, I was sent to travel with Wyclef Jean to his native Haiti on a humanitarian mission for his organization, Yele Haiti. Walking around Haiti with Wyclef is kinda like walking through the Vatican with Jesus. The island nation’s most famous son was swarmed everywhere he went, and, to his credit, Wyclef did not brush people off or use bodyguards to keep them at bay. He hugs and listens to everyone he can, it seems. He’s a complicated man, with confidence in his abilities and intelligence that borders on arrogance, but also a profound devotion to his homeland that I haven’t witnessed in any other celebrity. Through Yele Haiti, Wyclef provides basic services the government can’t afford, like sanitation and teacher training. Before playing a free concert for 20,000 in the coast city of Jacmel, he and a few friends took a motorcycle ride through town. I flagged down a kid on a scooter and paid him to follow them (an AFP photographer was also riding along and there’s a wire service shot of the scene, below, where you can see me — a single terrified white face clinging to some poor teenager’s shoulder — in the background). We rode through the town’s slums, where Wyclef stopped to hear people’s concerns and kiss a few babies, before taking off on a road that runs alongside the country’s beautiful coastline. No one was wearing helmets, even though speeds easily reached 60 or 70 MPH — no problem for Wyclef’s BMW motorcycle, but certainly much faster than the ragtag scooter I was riding was designed to handle. With a three-month-old baby boy back home, I prayed to make it back in one piece, and tried to enjoy the scenery. With the sun setting over the ocean, Wyclef pulled up alongside me and said, “Isn’t my country beautiful?”
(2020 postscript: Jimmy O, the Haitian rapper I interviewed for my Wyclef story, was among the tens of thousands killed in the 2010 Haitian earthquake.)
— A few months before blues legend Junior Lockwood died in late 2006, I had the chance to sit down with him and fellow original guitar hero Honeyboy Edwards before a gig they played together at B.B. King’s Blues Club in New York. It was one of the only times in my career that I felt I was getting primary source information about the history of American music. Lockwood learned to play guitar from Robert Johnson himself and Edwards was there on the night Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.
(2020 postscript: Unfortunately, this story was also lost during the rollingstone.com redesign)
— A couple months after Katrina decimated New Orleans, the Edge was headed down to the city to tour the devastation and launch a new charity, Music Rising, that he co-founded to help musicians in the area get back on their feet. He invited Rolling Stone to come along and I got the assignment. We toured the Lower 9th Ward and other hard-hit areas, where we saw leveled block after leveled block, mountains of destruction and whole sections of the city that had been completely abandoned. We met up with local legends like sax player Brian “Breeze” Cayolle and guitarist Walter “Wolfman” Washington (who jammed with the Edge at a local Guitar Center, a co-sponsor of Music Rising) to assess the situation and had dinner at the French Quarter’s Restaurant August — which had reopened days earlier — with Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu and Jazz Fest organizer Quint Davis as they plotted a course to revive the Crescent City’s cultural institutions.
(2020 postscript: Alas, another story lost during the rollingstone.com redesign)
— Earlier this year, I flew to London to visit Coldplay as they put the finishing touches on their new album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends, for a short profile. Chris Martin and friends welcome me to their cozy studio/clubhouse in a tony section of North London near all of their houses. They were still debating which songs to include on the album, and in what order, but had generally agreed to stop recording or re-recording for now. They graciously let me listen to a rundown of the strongest contenders for the album and asked for my thoughts afterwards. I genuinely liked many of the songs and said so. Without much forethought, I mentioned that the middle section of “42” — a complex composition in three parts and a real highlight — sounded a bit like the last section of Radiohead’s “Sit Down Stand Up” (ya know, “the rain drops, the rain drops…”) Martin stared intently for a second, then moved on and I didn’t think anything of it. I had temporarily forgotten the band’s reputation as Radiohead copyists, or hadn’t realized how deeply Martin had internalized it (in his Rolling Stone cover story a couple months later, Martin said of Radiohead: “Sometimes I feel like they cleared a path with a machete, and we came afterward and put up a strip mall.”) In any case, when I returned to the pad later that night, Martin was coaxing reluctant guitarist Jonny Buckland back into the studio. Martin told me that after thinking about what I said, he wanted Jonny to overdub some guitars on “42.” “It’s not that I mind sounding like Radiohead,” he said. “It’s just that when I hear the song in my head, that’s not what I hear.” After I got back from London, I got an email from a friend of the band, who was in the studio that night, thanking me for doing them “a huge favour.” “You encouraged us to go back and revisit that part of the song,” he wrote. “We’ve now improved it a great deal — giving it a lot more energy and bite.” I consider it my sole recorded legacy.
— The only time my picture appeared in the magazine was when I went to Montreal for a story about McGill University professor Dr. Daniel Levitin and his research into the way music affects the brain. I actually became a subject in his research: As pictured, I was rolled into an MRI machine and my brain was scanned while I listened to series of snippets of music. The results were fascinating: James Brown stimulated the part of my brain used to dance, while Eminem lit up areas that showed I personally related to the performer. A full-color scan of the extensive blood flow in my brain while I listened to Mozart is still hanging up in my office and probably will for a long time.
(2020 postscript: this story was also lost in the rollingstone.com redesign, but there is a PDF on Dr. Levitin’s website. Also, the scan is no longer hanging up in my office.)
— And one dishonorable mention: It’s a story I’ve felt compelled to tell publicly for no other reason than because it’s funny, and it gets at the very strange job of celebrity/music journalists. We are given access to musicians or other artists and have a brief, but hopefully very human interaction with them. Sometimes too human. A few weeks ago, for one of my last assignments as a Rolling Stone staffer, I was sent to Atlanta for a short profile on T.I. The rapper, currently releasing a new album while dealing with court-ordered community service for felony gun charges, among other things, was a gracious host. He drove me all over ATL in his massive white GMC Denali, to some of his speaking engagements, to the recording studio, to Popeye’s for lunch — seemingly a typical day for T.I. Maybe I got a little too comfortable. At one point, with just Tip and myself in the car, I, uh, well, I farted. It was silent, but I had feeling that it might also be deadly (Popeye’s!) I panicked. What would T.I. do or say when he smelled my nasty fart in his pristine ride? I hit the button to lower my window. After letting things air out for a second or two, I acted as if it was a mistake and rolled it back up. If anything, I think T.I. thought I was an idiot who had never seen power windows before. That’s fine. At least he doesn’t know I cut the cheese in his Denali.
I’ll miss my days at Rolling Stone. I left last month to fulfill a long-held desire to return to my hometown of Baltimore and raise my kids among extended family. Thanks, RS, for the memories.