Gordon Lightfoot Book, Music and More!

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...

From Cream to the Travelling Wilburys, supergroups are nothing new. But SuperHeavy, Mick Jagger’s side project with Joss Stone and Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics fame, is worlds away from Crosby, Stills Nash & Young. Rounded out by Bob Marley’s son Damian and Bollywood’s A.R. Rahman, the group sounds like a hip United Nations soundtrack. Clearly, they’re having fun: the video for reggae track “Miracle Worker” features Jagger as a neon-pink-suited witch doctor promising “love and laser” cures.

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...