With a pending break from touring with The Heartbreakers, TOM PETTY revives his original band, MUDCRUTCH, 35 years later.

At the end of the story—well, the end so far—we arrive at the beginning. “I hadn’t thought about it that clearly,” allows the man who is both summing up and starting over, “but I guess that’s probably true.” In the studio of his Malibu hacienda, tucked away in the trees just off Pacific Coast Highway, Tom Petty is the sort of person who doesn’t so much gaze at the garden outside his window as peer at it, leery it might stare back. He’s just returned from a gig at San Francisco’s Fillmore, a week into a West Coast tour with his band Mudcrutch.

Wait. Mudcrutch? That’s not the band’s name is it? Isn’t there another? Isn’t referring to Petty’s band as Mudcrutch a little like referring to Paul’s band as Wings, even as an earlier shadow is so large as to swallow up the surrounding ground? Except this is stranger—as though Wings had preceded those other guys before Paul returned to them, as in fact Mudcrutch preceded The Heartbreakers, the band with whom Petty found fame over the last three decades and stormed the citadel of immortality. “The funny thing,” Petty says, “is we’re making better music than we ever have.” But then, who is this “we”?

After nearly 40 years, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood have finally resolved the issues that once plagued their momentous musical relationship. Fresh off three historic shows together, Winwood reflects on Blind Faith’s history, his own artistic evolution and a promising collaborative future.

The first time through it all ended in haze and chaos. On July 12, 1969, nearly 20,000 shaggy, eager concertgoers braved the police presence and the poor acoustics at Madison Square Garden for the U.S. debut of a group that had recently emerged from a shroud of rumor and speculation. Just one month earlier, five times that number had made the pilgrimage to London’s Hyde Park to witness the first public performance of the band that paired Steve Winwood, at age 21 already a celebrated veteran of both The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, with one of the rock era’s newly anointed guitar gods, Eric Clapton. Clapton had dubbed the group Blind Faith, something of a cynical nod to the hype machine that had quickly surrounded the formation of the group that also featured Cream drummer Ginger Baker and Family bassist Rick Grech.

Blind Faith’s MSG appearance was marked by tension both within and outside the confines of the band room. Audience anticipation approached frenzy levels for the group that many imagined would somehow build on the power of Cream and take that group’s music to some ineffable, unattainable next level. This expectation was fueled by a sense of unknown, since Blind Faith’s self-titled debut wouldn’t be released for another eight weeks.

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Photography by Matthew Mendenhall

After an acrimonious split five years ago, both Chris and Rich Robinson thought The Black Crowes were over for good. Now, with Warpaint—one of the group’s best albums to date—The Black Crowes again reign as one of rock’s most authentic practitioners. Just don’t expect it to be all warm and fuzzy—it never was.

The striking building that houses the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts on the now ultra-fashionable Lower East Side of Manhattan was built more than 150 years ago. Now a performance and exhibition space, it is the city’s oldest surviving synagogue, a rare architectural example of a Gothic synagogue, a kind of fusion of Jewish and Christian aesthetics. It had been abandoned and run down for decades, before being purchased in the mid-‘80s by Angel Orensanz, a Spanish-American sculptor. Now the neighborhood is on the upswing, and the gorgeous building itself stands as a dignified reminder of deep spiritual traditions and rich, dynamic communities that preceded the inexorable gentrification of Manhattan.

Angel Orensanz is a fitting setting, then, in which to meet with Chris and Rich Robinson of The Black Crowes who, after all, wrote “Talks to Angels.” The Crowes, too, are on the upswing. After splitting up acrimoniously in 2002, the band re-formed in 2005 and is now about to release Warpaint, the group’s most confident and instantly appealing album since the raw, raucous Shake Your Money Maker first brought the group national attention in 1990—and sold more than five million copies to boot. In addition, the Crowes, too, see themselves as symbols of vanishing values. Sometimes disparaged, run aground for a stretch, newly energized, the brothers Robinson view themselves and their band as keepers of the rock and roll flame in an era in which slickness, irony, self-indulgence and soulless technology threaten to plunge the music world into darkness. Their new album is called Warpaint for a reason.

“It’s the perfect title for where we are,” Chris says. “There are clandestine messages in there for people who like rock music.”

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Twenty-five years later and eight albums in, the BEASTIE BOYS are still checkin’ heads

Somehow, I just knew this was gonna happen. I mean, it had to. Of course it was going to.

After waiting for more than an hour for the Beastie Boys to amble into a spare dressing room backstage at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, the 20 minutes allotted for the first interview for this cover story have been reduced to ten, and after Mike D and MCA spend the first few minutes going over the night’s setlist—and with label execs waiting to speak with the band before they take the stage in roughly 35 minutes, or so we’re told—the three wiseacres that comprise the Beastie Boys are pretty much impossible to reign in.

They’re in the middle of their trademark interview schtick: One riffs, while the others think up witty retorts. Meanwhile, the interviewing journalist—me—struggles to glean a usable quote from the stream-of-consciousness babbling, and of course there aren’t many. Well, that’s not true. It’s just that most of it has nothing to do with music, the group or its new album, The Mix-Up. And to some degree, that’s okay.

Somehow, that tag-team wisecracking—an almost identical version of which you could have easily caught on MTV News in the mid-‘80s—has landed them on the topic of communication. Adam “MCA” Yauch dryly explains that the Beasties are exploring primitive means of communication of late—you know, semaphore, smoke signals—before Mike D (originally Michael Diamond) notes that he’s thinking about building a system of pneumatic tubes under Manhattan through which he, MCA and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz could send notes to one another.

MCA: I’ve actually been tunneling. Did I not tell you about that? I’m doing a bigger tunnel so we can climb in.

MIKE D: That’s a great idea. So, to go to O-Scope [the band’s New York studio], instead of me having to walk, I could just pneumatic tube?

MCA: Yeah, your wife will put you in the tube and drop you in.

MIKE D: Why do I need Tamra to do it?

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