Conjure Woman (Village Voice 1999)

Conjure Woman (Village Voice May 4 1999)

I have always found it slightly unsettling that so many of my parents' generation christened my male peers Miles. It is no easy invocation. Some may even call it a curse. Or at least a weight. Miles is beyond complicated, beyond icon, beyond genius. He is beyond his mammoth musical talent. He is in many ways, like so many great Geminis who marry their separate selves, beyond definition. Late in Miles's musical career, Stanley Crouch called him a "death's head hovering over" modern jazz. My friend, the artist Arthur Jafa, read beyond the dis and appropriated Crouch's observation in a spooky painting he calls "Winged Death Head." For folks like A.J., those who are struggling with Black genius both as an intellectual construct and a reality, the very notion of Miles can be crippling. How can we make our cinema, our fine art, our utterances, worthy of placement in the same room as say the Big Fun album cover? We are a people, no matter our conscious practices guided by ancestral worship.

Of course Miles personified cool. Was flippant. And perhaps more important, blessed us with the most essential of 21st-century survival poses— irreverence. So our obsession would have smelled to him too much like a gallery foyer. Like cheap white wine. It is unlikely he would have felt honored by Cassandra Wilson's newest CD, Traveling Miles. He might have done something like spit at the album cover's photograph of her as him. But we can't be concerned with reptilian Miles when we honor him. With misogynist Miles. We bury that Miles. Bad Miles. Miles as Gabriel is who we ask to rain on us. Miles who made the trumpet whisper. Miles whose sound was in every way feminine, in every way sensual. In every way loving.

I'm just returning to Cassandra Wilson. Though many of my sister-friends rediscovered jazz because of her, I spent most of her last two albums avoiding her. Same way I avoided Tracy Chapman. I remember hearing pieces of her collaboration with producer Craig Street, and I was moved by her intimate music video for "Until." But I'm cranky and hard to please, and well, even if Joni is one of her heroes, I just plain like it better when Cassandra's playing jazz. All right, fuck it, real jazz. I've always known she is a great thinker, and have enjoyed reading the many articles that have accompanied the success of her two pop albums. But her as Miles? Her in Miles drag? Her penning lyrics to Miles (and Wayne Shorter) compositions? This was no easy sell.

Forget that the Times critic and his unskeptical friends had already found reason to celebrate— I found plenty of reasons to be highly suspicious. The most glaring discrepancy in my mind was Cassandra's sound: a mud deep, rich alto. So masculine. Miles, as I suggested, is in every way piercing, womanly. So I stared at Honey in her khakis and ascot a full week before I even cracked the cellophane. It is a compelling image. I read the lyrics: " . . . the night of my conception/the stars were fixed . . . here in this quiet place we own/we're reborn." She is a magnificent writer. Still, I approach the music gingerly. Spend time with her remakes of "Someday My Prince Will Come" and "Time After Time" and am in every way satisfied. There is sweet Miles. Miles who took his time with the music. Slept with the note. And all with no horn. I see where she's going. Be it Chango or Oshun, you've got to first deal with the gatekeeper, Elegua.

"Seven Steps" is a joyful interpretation that could be added to hymnbooks. Sanctified Miles. And her "Sky and Sea (Blue and Green)" from Miles's universally celebrated Kind of Blue has been in her live repertoire long enough to sound very much like perfection. On Shorter's "Never Broken (ESP)," she lays so deep in the cut, like a masked thief— adding not only lyrics but a mandocello— that the song becomes hers. But it is in her interpretation of "Run the Voodoo Down" from Miles's wildly inventive Bitches Brew that she truly dances with Miles. Cornet player Olu Dara, known to my generation as Nas's father, uses his horn to charm Miles from resting; Cassandra takes him down south, further than Alabama. Maybe Cuba, but more like Bahia, where resurrections are served with morning plantain. Cassandra is never mounted. Even in death, Miles is too composed for that. Sharkskin wrinkles. But she displays a cool courage that makes her tribute seem like the most natural thing. Like a road that simply must be traveled. She ignores the warnings about the duplicitous nature of the dead. That those we never really knew may not all be who we need them to be. We are discouraged from engaging them, from inviting them into our realms. But how then shall we truly embrace them in dance?

All of the Above (Village Voice 2001)

All of the Above (Village Voice

Tuesday, Feb 13 2001)

Rebecca Walker begins her memoir with a disclaimer: "I don't remember things." Like her fragmented memory, her ethereal detachment to codes of identification—racial, more than sexual—makes her slippery trek toward self-discovery within a biracial, bisexual body less a search for a box to check during the census than for some sense of center in what she calls her "shifting self." Each move she makes—from New York to the Bay Area, from her public school friends to those at her progressive, hippie high school, from her Brooklyn Jewish family to her Southern black one—requires she pull out of her closet a "her" that fits.

As a "movement child," one of the selves she tries on, she is keenly aware that skin is this country's bar code: She assumes strangers on the subway think she's Arab; her cousins in Georgia see in her face her Jewish father; a suburban white boyfriend drops her because of her blackness; her paternal great-grandmother from Russia refuses her a glance. Episodic, brief chapters punctuated by spare poetic details reinforce her idea of herself as a vaporous being who floats in and out of skin. She poignantly pulls this moment from her early adolescence. "This is the last time I will see my father naked. This is the last time he and I will share the bathroom, the last time we both will be quiet and exposed in the same room together, when we will not have to speak to be connected."

But when she settles into a moment she remembers everything: the head count in the waiting room at the abortion clinic where her mother, feminist author Alice Walker, acts as the ninth grader's escort one Friday afternoon, the purple pants and the yellow high-top Reeboks she's wearing when she meets a new lover while working as a production assistant on the set of The Color Purple(though she never mentions the film's title). In fact, her famous mother is only one in a cast of many characters, loving but not entirely present, available but largely preoccupied.

This is as much a memoir about growing up in the '80s as a child of working parents as it is one of a child of mixed race or a famous parent. Her parents have figured out a family schedule where they alternate in raising their daughter by shuttling her between them every two years. But she is certainly her mother's daughter, with the same thorough, patient way of moving through an idea that Walker uses as an essayist. In Black, White, and Jewish, there is no resolution, no declaration of a single, solid self: She simply grows big enough to fit her disparate family history and her considerable experiences into her slight, yellow (light-skinned) frame.

But when she settles into a moment she remembers everything: the head count in the waiting room at the abortion clinic where her mother, feminist author Alice Walker, acts as the ninth grader's escort one Friday afternoon, the purple pants and the yellow high-top Reeboks she's wearing when she meets a new lover while working as a production assistant on the set of The Color Purple(though she never mentions the film's title). In fact, her famous mother is only one in a cast of many characters, loving but not entirely present, available but largely preoccupied.

This is as much a memoir about growing up in the '80s as a child of working parents as it is one of a child of mixed race or a famous parent. Her parents have figured out a family schedule where they alternate in raising their daughter by shuttling her between them every two years. But she is certainly her mother's daughter, with the same thorough, patient way of moving through an idea that Walker uses as an essayist. In Black, White, and Jewish, there is no resolution, no declaration of a single, solid self: She simply grows big enough to fit her disparate family history and her considerable experiences into her slight, yellow (light-skinned) frame.

Separating Soul (Village Voice 1998)

Separating Soul (Tuesday, Oct 13 1998 Village Voice)

There is one song that moves me on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill: "I Used To Love Him," a self-explanatory duet with Mary J Blige. That Lauryn, like Mary (fuck it, like me, like my sister K., like a lot of us), natural goddess, superior rhyme stylist, she possessed of too many talents and God-given blessings to list, should have experienced the kind of deep pain she has, speaks volumes about men. Or rather a particular kind of man. All right, a very specific kind of behavior found in this particular kind of man.

Have you ever fallen for a thief? The kind of masked man who, as sister Alice Walker put it, eats hearts. "Finds heart meat delicious, but not rare." Lauryn knows of whom I speak. He was the ocean -- she was the sand. After your senses have been dulled, your vision blurred, after sacrificing too much and giving all your power, after making attempts to close wounds so deep and wide they threaten to bloody your very life, you're left with but one question: How could I let this happen? I like to lie about it. When a new friend asked the other day if I'd ever been in love, I said without hesitation, No. Cuz you know? Fuck him. And his fucking mirrors and smoke. Does he deserve a place in my history? Lauryn wrestles with her home invader's not-so-distant ghost on practically every track. How could I have been so naive, she asks? After I took your abuse, played your mind games, wrote your rhymes ("...now you get it"), spun the press... After all that what I get is a blade in the back?
Because she truly seems to try to live in truth she is constantly praying aloud for the ability to become forgiveness. The evolutionary resolution on "I Used To Love Him" is about giving her life back to the Creator. And it's a return that's neither insincere nor sacrificial. "I don't now!" she shouts convincingly over Mary's vocals. And you want to believe her. But you're mad all over again at this brotha, the one with all the potential, the one who indeed betrayed his very self in betraying her. Because Lauryn, being all the woman she is (even at 23) could have helped him actualize who it is she has to believe he really wanted to be.

That Lauryn in this very personal solo debut should use her work to work this love affair out is justice. Though I love "You Just Lost One" and "Final Hour," straight hip-hop joints that remind us she's one of the nicest MCs ever, period, and like very much her song with D'Angelo, the sexy "Nothing Even Matters," the album as a whole is a little heartbreaking. Lauryn exercised an enormous amount of control over this album. And I'm for that Patrice Rushen kind of control coming from a sister. But Hill doesn't have the musical ability of a Patrice Rushen, and some of her best ideas are only semi-realized. Perfection from people capable of perfection is a fair thing to want. Wanting less would make them less. But as I pray for L, and her name is beneath a white candle on my altar, I will pray that she not only find the kind of happiness the one with blood on his teeth promised her, but that she find a producer, a musical partner from whom she will take direction, someone in whose hands she can put the most true part of herself, a collaborator she can trust, the way she once trusted Clef. --dream hampton

Is This Detroit Or Calcutta? (2009)

Is This Detroit Or Calcutta? (Global Grind

12/17/2009)

As before, Detroit has become the boogeyman in the recession obsessed American imagination. As Reagan promised, the effect trickled. First there were the Vanity Fair profiles of the fallen super rich whose mammoth East Hampton mansions were abandoned, semi-erect. Time-shares with Marquis were jettisoned and the Wall St. set had to hump it out in First Class on commercial carriers. Now the middle class, aware, seemingly for the first time, of their precarious position, are petrified of becoming the working poor. And the poor working poor have been trying to hold onto a heated room since NAFTA. And what comes after it all? Where would the proverbial bottom be? America's Calcutta? Why, that would be Detroit. Time magazine bought a mansion in historic Indian Village for the price of a latte---front row seats to the future. On the covers of international magazines, Detroit's become a cautionary tale. 'If you don't do something soon America, you could become Detroit'. Abandoned homes, empty manufacturing plants, vacant lots, 50% unemployment, pathological rappers, the Lions.

Being a native Detroiter can sometimes feel like being a graduate from the set of Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, you want to scream, sh*t is f*cked up, but have you seen the colors? My god the colors. In the 80s, when I was a high school student and Reagan was busting unions, Detroit had a parallel, shadow economy: the billion dollar crack industry. Though not a 'port' city, the men (many of them teenagers) from my city embraced their latent entrepreneurial spirit. The consequences were real and high: Detroit became synonymous with murder capital and incarceration rates skyrocketed. But consumerism, the driving engine of American capitalism was alive and well. There were gators boots and german big bodies to be had in every color.

Now, not so much. The same legal gangsters, the corporate heads and the boards of the Big Three, who welcomed, even begged for Reagan's brand of union busting/workers' disenfranchisement, have watched their companies crumble. The hostile white suburbs, many of them, like the ones north of the city, only established during the post-riot white flight period of the early 70s, are finally realizing there is no Metro Detroit without Detroit. While local politics can be woefully local, widespread corruption isn't to blame. Rather a racist and stubborn standoff where the white suburbs carry on a silent embargo of Detroit, ever punishing the city for being 'too black.' This isn't the place to get into a lengthy diatribe on said standoff and the late, great Mayor Coleman Young (soon come with that rant), but what has become clear, at least to the media, is just how closely the near death of one of America's oldest cities is linked to the future of the country.

Jagged Edges (Essence 2001)

Jagged Edges (Essence 2001)

My love for him is wide. My soul reached out and chose him. It holds on even when I want to be free. When we come together, it is all the things I'm told are dangerous to seek. It's perfect. Every moment is a dream. It transcends who we are, the other lovers we might know. It's all things made possible. It's utterly distracting. When we make love, it feels as if he is trying to disappear inside me, as if he wants to climb inside and make me his home. When we collaborate, I can see our future, a full life of love and art and purpose. Our conversations are marked by both kindness and a deep desire to understand.

Our connectedness feels many lifetimes old, and easy. When we part, and we do, for years at a time, I have private conversations with him in my mind. I need to know if he thinks my absurd thoughts might be brilliant. I want to know if he read the same book I did, if he knows to see the movie I just loved. Walking down the street I find myself laughing aloud at some quirky observation he made nearly 18 months before. I imagine him in his apartment with his imported vinyl, or on his farm with his children. I conjure in my mind his long fingers, his light touch, his comfort with silence, his bizarre sense of humor. I keep him near me in this parallel reality because to banish him altogether would be for me a virtual death. Loving him, I've learned my passion is a boundless place, impossible to map or contain.

Unchecked, I worry: Is my passion no different than romantic obsession? Is this lover, unable to totally commit no matter how complete our love, merely living proof of my own woundedness? Can my passion weather his moodiness? I am afraid that my hunger for him is matched only by his for other women. And now I understand blues women who cut their men. Or burned them with grits. But because I know this man, because I have held his heart in my hands, I find it impossible to truly judge or be angry with him. I'm disappointed, certainly, at the reckless way he sometimes moves through life. But no more so than I am with the many ways I have betrayed and hurt the ones I truly love.

He calls my love a pretty pressure, and concedes to failure before he even gives us a chance. I accuse him of cowardice, because crippling a giant love like ours is a way to do less living. So I punish him with my absence, create distance between the nape of my neck and his kisses, as if wind could be bottled. I don't want passion that is measured by fits. I don't want to be so damn Billie. I try so hard to get it right. I try, as my therapist friends recommend, to "disentangle," and where I can manage, I do. I visualize the mature, whole relationships I'm told to want. I even make attempts at them, but it is our love, burdened by the irreversible pain we have caused each other, that occupies, as if in protest, the seat of my heart. This stormy love, this makes-me-feel-alive love, this private, nameless love, this hold-on-my-soul love.

Ice, Ice Baby (Village Voice 1996)

Ice, Ice Baby (Village Voice, 1996)

Introducing my newborn to hip-hop has been a real struggle. Mostly it makes her cry a lot. Which is often my response exactly, so I persist. My first mistake: Ultramagnetic MC’s Critical Beatdown. I figured Kool Keith shared some of her doe-eyed fascination, plus he possesses an insatiable appetite for nursery rhymes, but alas, the shallow sonics turned her off. The Chronic and Doggystyle soothed her; Dre’s steady bass probably reminded her of my heartbeat while the melodic overtones were reassuring. She began to find her center.

So I figured she was ready for Illmatic. And while she seemed to prefer the mellifluous sounds submitted by producers Tip and Extra P, I was basically back at square one. I looked at her like she was a stranger. What part of me wasn’t in love with Nas? He’s easily one of the most important writers of the century and the only genius I’ve ever seen in concert. I had to remember this motherhood thing is also about patience. It Was Written was a godsend----the lyrics are printed on the back. So I read them to her every night, placing my own gentle pressure on his verbs so they flow like a lullaby.

I’m hoping hip-hop will help her understand me and mine in the same way Revolutionary Suicide, Parliament, and Iceberg Slim have helped me understand my father and his pimped out friends. Messy as it ism there’s no way to truly place my generation’s hyper-capitalism, numbness, cartoonish misogyny, and constant return to myth of action, if the billion dollar crack industry that crack became (and the subculture it spawned) isn’t chronicled in detail.

I’d give my nationalist-born life if my baby’s bedtime stories were about land and liberation rather than suitcases full of Benjamins and ice. But the truth is most of the boys I grew up with (boys who’d memorized whole scenes from Scarface and The Godfather) had Mafia fantasies. My fellow tenth graders left for summer break aspiring breakdancers and returned that fall as ballers---dripping in gold laced with South African diamonds, pushing 300s and bumping "Criminal Minded." Who knew our flygirl ghetto molls would end up strippers, all the ice pawned for Similac? Who knew we’d warrant the attention of a Bob Mackie-wearing First Lady, mandate whole new laws with tailor-made penalties, and inspire the erection of dozens of new prisons? Who could have known?

One of the highest prices of the drug game has been our schism from our parents, whose generational contribution was a militant fire for freedom. Financial independence made us cocky; living like Blake Carrington makes Jay-Z ask “….nigga you broke/Now what the fuck you gon’ tell me?” Though hip-hop received the bad rap it was actually my generation’s ruthless economic movement that could never be considered anything but self-destruction by those who knew better. Isolated, we became obsessed with ourselves. The world was us.

Nas’s second album, It Was Written, and Jay-Z’s debut, Reasonable Doubt, are two enduring testaments to hustling. Both artists remember the drug game like veterans with nightmares. Sure, there are fond memories of male bonding (either over murder or chicken) and spending sprees. But the bloodstains are always there, crimson clouds that never disappear and occasionally rain on them while they sleep. The have schemes of revenge and Technicolor flashbacks of team members choking on their last breath, wet from Techs that prefer Black life. Capitalism is greedy like that---always looking for the next human sacrifice.

“A killa in me slash drug dealer MC” ~Nas

Nas is a radical philosopher in the tradition of Rakim and Nietsche (“When I was twelve/I went to hell for snuffin Jesus”). Jay-Z is strictly business, with visions of expansion (“Dabbled in crazy weight/…I’m still spending money from ‘88”) Nas is a pensive poet with a vast vocabulary. Jay-Z is a sharp conversationalist with impeccable timing. Nas crams to understand the world in one verse. Jay-Z rethinks space, giving pauses gravity. Nas always knew his destiny lay beyond hustling (“I’m a rebel stressing to pull out/Of the heat not doubt”). Jay-Z went for his. Before he caught his drug case, the millionaire from Brooklyn’s Marcy’s projects must have considered the hard white a full-time gig (“I’d rather die enormous than live dormant”).

Mostly Nas and Jay-Z were born to rhyme. (In a just world, who knows?) Their co-domination of this hot summer reminds us that there’s no better place to be than now, right here. Hip-hop is at its absolute best and most sophisticated. Self-reflexive, indeed obsessed with the dialectical, hip-hop uses the art of sampling, and more increasingly, covers, to constantly edit and revise its own history, submitting a more perfect version with each important album.

Ninth-grade dropout Nas is a hip-hop scholar with a standing respect for rap’s forefathers. You will remember the title and chorus of “If I Ruled the World” belonged to Kurtis Blow first (sans Lauryn Hill, of course); the track for “If I…” was lifted from Whodini’s “Friends.” Whodini was once rap royalty. For Nas they are a musical marker of an era when hustlers his age were really doing it. Nas titled the love letter he wrote his man upstate on Illmatic after Whodini’s “One Love.” For Nas’s version, Q-Tip, jazzminer that he is, robbed the Heath Brothers for their vibe. Similar vibes are put to work for It Was Written’s “Affirmative Action.” That can only be read as a tribute to Marley Marl’s “The Symphony, Part I,” the classic mob cut and the one joint that put Queens’s formidable MCs on the map forever.

Nas’s collaboration with Dr. Dre for “Nas is Coming” will probably be interpreted as an arranged marriage meant to quell wars, but the truth is more benign: just two super-talents with a little time on their hands. In fact, the current East-West battle, when put in perspective, is manageable. For the most part, it all breaks down to Gemini Tupac flipping on Gemini Biggie and dragging in Gemini diva Faith to test Biggie’s manhood (a thoroughly offensive notion invented by boys). So with that safely in pocket, it’s some kind of wonderful to hear Rakim’s heir fortified by our generation’s Leon Ware.

What’s a little more pathological is the backlash to Biggie’s success. First there was Ghostface’s pointed but cloaked hit on Raekwon’s album. The Fugees dis him softly: “Did you shoot him?/Nah, I didn’t have the balls/That’s when I realized I’m pumpin too much Biggie Smalls.” Even five-star Nas felt compelled to respond to Big’s Source cover: “There can only be one king.” (You really have to live for this to know this petty shit.) It would be dangerous to discount Big’s narrative slow flow, and it’s plain erroneous to reduce him to designer sunglasses and Pac’s drama; he’s always injected humor and wit in his storytelling, and if he continues to do his thing right, Cube’s crown is his.

Because they share pre-rap drug game connects, Jay-Z invites his notorious to get down on “Brooklyn’s Finest.” (And just so you know Big knows the fucking deal, he gives himself a hilarious new tag---“most hated.”) The albums other duet is of course his summer hit with The Firm’s Foxy Brown. And though I’ve long stopped paying attention to what niggas have to say about mothers of the universe on wax, I do recognize Jay-Z and Foxy’s skillful banter as inter-gender baller politics made danceable. Jay-Z believes he’s being respectful (it’s the free hoes he has nothing for), and Foxy (freestyle mathematician that she is) figures she’s getting a fair price. For my money, Reasonable Doubt’s real gem is the DJ Premiere-produced “Friend or Foe,” a spoken warning to a kid who thought Jay-Z’s block could be his: “You draw?/Better be Picasso/…the best.”

“I’ll be flooded with ice/So hellfire can’t scorch me” ~Nas

Because I want her to trust me completely, I’ll never tell my daughter Mary was a virgin. But hell may be a little trickier. Nas and Jay-Z, sons of Five Percent philosophy, believe it’s their last stop. On Jay-Z’s sinister “D’Evils,” he “prays to Gotti,” then wonders exactly where it was he lost his soul. I know. It was at the mall, around the corner from the car dealership, and down the street from that broken Black body.

Exodus (BobMarley.com 2007)

Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers (2007)

'Exodus' book focuses on Bob's 1977 exile

By Dream Hampton

It is impossible to talk about Bob Marley's monumental album Exodus without an account of his own flight from Jamaica after the assassination attempt made on his life at 56 Hope Road on the night of December 3, 1976. Exodus: Bob Marley and The Wailers, Exile 1977 is a collection of rare photos and probing essays that contextualize Bob's time in exile, the two classic albums he produced in London, Exodus andKaya and the politically charged times that left Bob in need of recuperation.
Contributor Lloyd Bradley, whose running essay "The Story of Exodus," serves as the book's thread, provides the story of the post-colonial, post-Independence period in Jamaica's history. Britain made its official exit in 1962, but not before essentially locking down the tourism, banana and bauxite industries. Within a decade, poverty enveloped the island; the murder rate per capita was triple that of New York and Kingston became so lawless that drivers were instructed to disobey traffic lights lest they get caught in the crossfire of midday gunplay. Bradley argues that Bob and the Rasta community essentially won Manley the 1972 election, believing his campaign promises to legalize marijuana and to assist in repatriation to Ethiopia. But by the 1976 election, those promises remained unfulfilled and so "Bob and other Rastas stayed away from the politricks of Babylon."

Still, Bob hoped to offer a reprieve to Kingston's masses, held hostage by the often politically motivated violence, with his "Smile Jamaica" concert. He ignored warnings via anonymous phone calls to his home to cancel his performance and even after he was shot, performed two nights later with a bullet lodged in his left arm. After the show Bob, the Wailers and his entourage chartered a late night flight to the Bahamas. Two weeks later they were in London.

Poet Kwesi Linton, whose essay "The Poetry of Exile" takes on Exodus' lyrical import and finds the assassination attempt essential to reading even the more spiritual songs on the album. "'Natural Mystic,' 'Three Little Birds' and 'One Love' only become significant in the light of the assassination attempt," he writes. "It is in Marley's Rastafarian faith, and his implacable belief in a 'natural mystic' that we locate the thematic thread, as we are taken through songs about faith, betrayal, persecution, defiance, resistance, recuperation, love and hope."

In the introduction to the book, Chris Blackwell argues that while Bob directly addressed the shooting on "Guiltiness" and "So Much Things to Say," Exodus as a whole contained "fewer political songs and a greater proportion of love songs [because] things were good." Though the accolades for Exodus would come much later (music critic Robert Christgau points out that Kaya charted better in the U.S.) the album that Time magazine named "Album of the Century" at millennium's end was recorded at what Blackwell calls a time of "confidence." Far from being derailed from his musical mission after the attempt on his life, the recording of Exodus was more than productive, it was a regenerative time, one where he was able to re-commit, relax and revitalize.

Longtime collaborator Vivien Goldman, who also authored a definitive book about the making of Exodus, remembers Bob's unique working style, one that saw him drifting between the collaborative jam sessions that his creativity required and the deep solitude in which he was able to retreat despite a crowded studio, where, she says, one could find him "locked in his own concentration."

Football (or soccer), Bob's other great passion, is duly documented by inside photographer Dennis Morris. Editor Richard Williams penned "The Football Match" about the many games Bob played as seriously as he would an arena concert. It was in London during one such match that Bob injured his toe and as girlfriend Cindy Breakspeare remembered, failed to "give it a chance to heal." It was also in London, after four concerts that marked the end of the European tour in support of Exodus that Bob was diagnosed with melanoma, a cancer that would eventually claim his life. Exodus, Exile 1977 captures a year that would not only forever alter Bob's life but the entire global musical landscape for decades to come.