Jessica Hopper

  • culture September 17, 2018

    Extralife

    Saturday was the Hold Steady video. It is a good thing not all one hundred people showed up because we had room for about thirty-three total. People later said they did not show because filming video is waiting around for twenty hours to act fake-excited in one-minute spurts.

    Saturday was the Hold Steady video. It is a good thing not all one hundred people showed up because we had room for about thirty-three total. People later said they did not show because filming video is waiting around for twenty hours to act fake-excited in one-minute spurts. Which might be true when you are on the set of Sum 41’s “Spooge Patrol” shoot, but this is the Hold Steady; they are a punk band on a punk budge, no time to spare. I got paid with a latte and a vegan muffin. It was like a Hold Steady show, except it lasted three hours, and they played the same song eight times all the way

  • print Summer 2018

    Van Diagram

    IN ASTRAL WEEKS: A SECRET HISTORY OF 1968, Ryan H. Walsh pursues the story behind the inspiration and creation of the now-classic Van Morrison album of the same name, searching for the unexplored answers that have been hiding in plain sight. But the mystery of why and how the singer-songwriter came to be in Boston—a faltering Belfast phoenix landing in a fizzled folk scene—is merely the entry point for Walsh’s romp through the city’s countercultural history.

    Which is to say, it’s a Van Morrison book that is also about the Velvet Underground (whose White Light/White Heat was released in January

  • culture Dec/Jan 2018

    Wenners and Losers

    Sticky Fingers raises an overdue question: Is the era of devoting epic tomes to the exploits of mercurial pricks officially over? If so, Joe Hagan’s skilled filleting of Jann Wenner’s history as the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine is one hell of a coffin nail.

    The book was born over lunch at an upstate New York eatery. Wenner, in his egotism, offered Hagan, then a journalist at New York magazine, unfettered access and deep cooperation (he asked to review only details of his sex life, which are nonetheless abundant), without requiring final approval, so sure was he that Hagan’s excavation