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      Lizzo’s Empowerment Pop Gets Stuck in the Same Groove

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      “Special,” her second major-label album, gestures toward complexities that would broaden her image as the queen of the mirror pep talk, but retreats to her comfort zone.Since her charismatic breakout hit “Truth Hurts” dominated the Hot 100 in 2019, the music of the Houston-raised singer, rapper, songwriter and flutist Lizzo has been a pop cultural omnipresence — a glossy sonic lacquer ready to provide any humdrum moment with a hater-repellent sheen.That signature spirit of uplift is all over “Special,” Lizzo’s fourth album, and the follow-up to her 2019 major-label debut, “Cuz I Love You.” “In case nobody told you today, you’re special,” Lizzo sings on the title track, briefly abdicating her role as the rap game Mae West to become a millennial Mister Rogers. Later, on the bouncy, brassy “Birthday Girl,” she asks, “Is it your birthday, girl? ’Cause you looking like a present.” Another propulsive, synth-driven track succinctly captures Lizzo’s bawdily empowering ethos in its title: “I Love You Bitch.”As a self-described “big grrrl” preaching unapologetic sex positivity and self-love, Lizzo, 34, is a refreshingly radical personality, on red carpets and on social media, where she is candid and outspoken. But the cultural ubiquity of her recent music emphasizes its general agreeability and attests to its political limitations: Now many Lizzo songs have come to signify the treat-yourself mood major corporations wish to capture when they want you to buy something. In the past few years, Lizzo’s music has appeared in advertisements for several competing technology companies, alcoholic beverages and soft drinks, a food-delivery app and the rebranded Weight Watchers (for which she was criticized by some fans and semi-apologized, stating, fairly, “I deserve the space to learn from my actions”). The “Cuz I Love You” diversity anthem “Better in Color” accompanied a 2021 commercial introducing the many hues of iMacs.In 2022, there’s no such thing as selling out — everyone is entitled to make money in a challenging music industry — but artists run the risk of diluting their message. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that on “Special” Lizzo often sounds caught between the personal and the personal brand. Occasionally, on songs that chronicle her less-than-ecstatic feelings, she gestures toward complexities that challenge the one-dimensional image of her as the high priestess of the mirror pep talk — only to retreat back to the anodyne comfort zone of songs like “Special” (which debuted as part of a Logitech ad campaign early this year) and “Birthday Girl,” which features a spoken-word segment of people gleefully shouting out their astrological signs.Like her irresistibly fun 2019 single “Juice,” many of Lizzo’s best songs cruise in the same lane that Bruno Mars skillfully dominates: uncannily reproduced ’70s-funk and ’80s-pop simulacra, updated for the present moment with slangy, winking vocals. Her current hit, the disco-lite summer jam “About Damn Time” (produced by her “Truth Hurts” collaborator Ricky Reed and Blake Slatkin) is a bit Lizzo-by-Numbers: a showy flute solo, relentlessly vampy delivery, lyrics that could double as Instagram captions. But the bass line’s gummy groove holds all the disparate parts together, allowing Lizzo to glide elegantly from arch, semi-rapped verses to a belted-out bridge that shows off the full range of her vocals. When it works, it works.And when it doesn’t, well … you get a song like overzealous-ally anthem “Everybody’s Gay,” which aims for Paradise Garage euphoria but lands closer to Target’s collection of Pride month apparel. The energy of the opening track, “The Sign,” somehow manages to be both relentless and listless, Lizzo’s usual cheeky wit blunted by generic lines like, “I live inside his head and pay no rent, yeah/It’s lit, yeah.” The best thing about the abrasive, Beastie Boys-sampling “Grrrls” is that it is the shortest song on the album.“Grrrls” is one of several tracks on “Special” centered around an interpolation of another older and more famous song, which, repeated often on a relatively short pop album, starts to feel less like homage and more like an overreliance on other people’s hooks. The soulful, midtempo “Break Up Twice,” produced by Mark Ronson, draws out a melodic line from Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” to address a disappointing partner, but after the dueling “Ex-Factor” samples in Drake’s “Nice for What” and Cardi B’s “Be Careful” in summer 2018, interpolating the untouchable Hill has come to feel like an overused trope. “Coldplay” features a sped-up and ill-fitting sample of “Yellow,” which Lizzo later shouts out as her go-to soundtrack for nursing a broken heart: “It made me sad, I cried,” she sings over a skittish, jazzy beat, “Singin’ Coldplay in the night.”“Coldplay,” the album’s final track, concludes the loose thematic arc of “Special,” which finds Lizzo wondering if all this work on her self-confidence has made it more difficult to let her guard down and allow herself to be swept away by romantic love. “I’ve learned to love me as myself,” she sings on the searching ballad “If You Love Me,” “But when I’m with somebody else/I question everything I know.” On the energetic “2 B Loved (Am I Ready),” which has a bright, synth-driven chorus reminiscent of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” the antic butterflies of a new romance make Lizzo question her hard-won identity as an independent single woman. “I’m good with my friends, I don’t want a man, girl,” she sings, before the ringing of her phone upends that stability: “And now he callin’ me, why do I feel like this? What’s happenin’ to me?”What happens when the woman who proclaimed she would “put the sing in single” finds herself in a monogamous relationship? Or when the queen of empowerment pop wakes up feeling something less than good as hell? In its more tantalizing moments, “Special” articulates these questions but falls short of committing to an answer. On her major-label albums, Lizzo has yet to risk traveling to a depth from which she cannot immediately pull herself up, with triumphant fanfare, on the very next song.Lizzo“Special”(Nice Life Recording Company/Atlantic) More

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      ‘The Day the Music Died’ Review: ‘American Pie,’ the Life of a Hit

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      Don McLean tries to clear up some misapprehensions about the eight-an-a-half-minute song that took on a life of its own, in this documentary.Even those who don’t like Don McLean’s song “American Pie” have to admit that it’s a distinctive pop culture achievement. A nearly eight-and-a-half minute allegory that goes from mournful to infectious to mournful again, the monster 1971 radio hit is seemingly known to all generations and still sung at bar-closing times the world over.That last fact is according to this reverent documentary about the song. Directed by Mark Moormann, the movie travels all over America to bring home the idea that “American Pie” says something profound about the country. It interweaves McLean’s biography with an account of the last days of the ’50s rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, creating a compelling narrative about the effect the plane crash that took their lives in 1959 had not just on young McLean, but American music itself. The movie then alternates with a history of McLean’s professional career (including his mentoring by the folk legend Pete Seeger) and scenes in which stars including Garth Brooks rhapsodize about the song.Back in the day, kids analyzing the lyrics surmised that the bits about “the devil” expressed McLean’s moral and aesthetic disapproval of Mick Jagger. But to many of the interviewees here, including Brooks (who brought McLean onstage to sing it with him at his giant Central Park concert in 1997) and the Cuban-born musical artist Rudy Pérez, the song is “about freedom.”The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.McLean, who has frequently been portrayed as a prickly figure, and worse, puts on his most ingratiating mien here. And why not. Few musicians are given such generous opportunities to be docent to their legacies.The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      David Dalton, Rock Writer Who Lived the Scene, Dies at 80

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      An early writer for Rolling Stone, he traveled in the same circles as the Beatles, Janis Joplin and other stars, witnessing and documenting a time of cultural transformation.David Dalton, who chronicled the rock scene as an early writer for Rolling Stone and brought firsthand knowledge to his biographies of rock stars from having lived the wild life alongside them, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 80.His son, Toby Dalton, said the cause was cancer.Beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Dalton showed a knack for being where cultural moments and evolutions were happening. Before he was 20 he was hanging out with Andy Warhol. In the mid-1960s he photographed the Yardbirds, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits and other rock groups that were part of the British Invasion. He was backstage at the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway in California. He was hired, along with Jonathan Cott, to write a book to accompany a boxed-set release of the Beatles’ 1970 album, “Let It Be.” He traveled with Janis Joplin and James Brown and talked about Charles Manson with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.As his career advanced, he gravitated toward writing biographies and helping celebrities write their autobiographies. His books included “Janis” (1972), about Joplin, revised and updated in 1984 as “Piece of My Heart”; “James Dean: The Mutant King” (1975); and “Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan” (2012). Autobiographies that he helped their subjects write included Marianne Faithfull’s “Faithfull: An Autobiography” (1994), “Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back” (1999), Steven Tyler’s “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (2011) and Paul Anka’s “My Way” (2013). He collaborated with Tony Scherman on “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” (2009).Lenny Kaye, the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group and a writer who collaborated with Mr. Dalton on the 1977 book “Rock 100,” said Mr. Dalton, early in his career, was among a group of writers who took a new approach to covering the music scene.From left, the actress Edie Sedgwick, the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Mr. Dalton, the artist Marisol and an unidentified man in 1965. Mr. Dalton was hanging out with Andy Warhol before he was 20.David McCabe“In those days of rock journalism, there was not a lot of separation between writers and artists,” he said in a phone interview. “The writers aspired to create the same kind of artistic illumination as those they wrote about.”“David got to be very friendly with many people,” Mr. Kaye added, “and I believe that helped enhance his writing style. He had a way of assuming the persona of the person he was writing about.”Mr. Dalton’s wife of 44, years, Coco Pekelis, a painter and performance artist, said Mr. Dalton fell into writing almost by accident. He had read that Jann Wenner was starting a new music magazine, Rolling Stone, in 1967 and began sending in some of the pictures of bands that he had been taking.“He was taking photographs of groups like the Shangri-Las, and Jann wanted captions,” Ms. Pekelis said by email. “So David started writing. And wrote and wrote and wrote. I asked him the other day when he knew he was a writer, and he said, when his captions got longer and longer.”Mr. Dalton assessed his voluminous output in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, explaining how his work had changed over the decades.“When I wrote rock journalism I was younger,” he noted. “I was involved in the scene as it was happening, evolving. I went anywhere at the drop of a hat. When I got into my 30s I began writing about the past and have lived there ever since.”Janis Joplin was among the many people whose biographies Mr. Dalton wrote. He also helped celebrities like Meat Loaf and Marianne Faithfull write their autobiographies.John David Dalton was born on Jan. 15, 1942, in wartime London. His father, John, was a doctor, and his mother, Kathleen Tremaine, was an actress. His sister, Sarah Legon, said that during German air raids, David and a cousin, who grew up to be the actress Joanna Pettet, would be put in baskets and sheltered under a staircase or taken into the Underground, the London subway system, for protection.David grew up in London and in British Columbia — his father was Canadian — and attended the King’s School in Canterbury, England. He then joined his parents in New York, where they had moved, and he and his sister became assistants to Warhol, Ms. Legon said, helping him edit an early film, “Sleep.” In 1966, Mr. Dalton helped Warhol design an issue of Aspen, the multimedia magazine that came in a box or folder with assorted trappings.“Coming from England at the beginning of the sixties,” Mr. Dalton wrote in “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,” “I encountered Pop Art with the same jolt of excitement and joy I’d experienced on first hearing the blues. I was fortunate enough to meet Andy Warhol at the beginning of his career, and through his X-ray specs I saw America’s brash, bizarre and manic underworld of ads, supermarket products, comics and kitsch brought to garish, teeming, jumping-out-of-its-skin life.”In the middle and late 1960s and the early ’70s, Mr. Dalton spent time on the East Coast, on the West Coast and in England, rubbing elbows with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and more. In California, he spent time with Dennis Wilson, who, he said, once expressed admiration for Charles Manson.After Manson had been charged in some brutal 1969 murders, Mr. Dalton began looking into the case for Rolling Stone with another writer, David Felton.“Like most of my hippie peers,” he wrote in an unpublished essay, “I thought Manson was innocent and had been railroaded by the L.A.P.D. It was a scary awakening for me to find out that not every longhaired, dope-smoking freak was a peace-and-love hippie.”His thinking turned when someone in the district attorney’s office showed him photographs of victims of Manson’s followers and the messages written in blood at the crime scenes.“It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” Mr. Dalton is quoted as saying in “Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine” (2017), by Joe Hagan. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.”For Rolling Stone, Mr. Dalton also wrote about Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Little Richard and others. By the mid-1970s he had moved on and was focusing on books, though still applying his full-immersion approach. For “El Sid: Saint Vicious,” his 1997 book about Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who died of an overdose in 1979, “I actually started to hear Sid’s voice talking to me,” he wrote. David Nicholson, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, found it compelling.“There is a certain hypnotic quality to the story that is akin to watching someone standing in the path of an onrushing train,” he wrote. “The writing throughout is graceful and intelligent, even when it is in your face.”Mr. Dalton once described his biography technique this way:“Essentially you distill your subject into a literary solution and get high on them, so to speak. Afterwards, one needs brain detergent and has to have one’s brain rewired.”Mr. Dalton lived in Andes, N.Y. His wife, son and sister are his only immediate survivors.Mr. Kaye said Mr. Dalton had been both present for a sea change and part of it.“It was a fascinating time,” he said, “and David was one of our most important cultural spokespersons.” More

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      Lizzo Conquers Self-Doubt With an ’80s Jam, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Brent Faiyaz, Pink, Marcus Mumford and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lizzo, ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” — from Lizzo’s new album, “Special” — is a self-questioning self-help pop track with 1980s drum machines and synthesizers pumping syncopated octaves and handclaps over an aerobics-friendly beat, heading toward the upward key change of a classic pop single. As Lizzo sings about temptation and insecurity contending with the promise of pleasure, it’s clear what’s going to win.Pink, ‘Irrelevant’Self-doubt turns to defiance and then to righteous anger in “Irrelevant,” a thumping, guitar-strumming, generalized pop-rock protest that makes up in spirit and momentum what it lacks in focus. As the arrangement builds behind her, Pink sings about fear, calls out religious hypocrisy, makes common cause with “the kids” and finally, backed by a mass of vocals, belts, “Girls just wanna have rights/So why do we have to fight?”Demi Lovato, ‘Substance’After all Demi Lovato’s travails, the singer wails a 21st-century plaint about superficiality and loneliness: “Am I the only one looking for substance?” The backup is pure professional punk-pop, pushing those loud guitars and muscular drums as Lovato works up to a near-shriek and flings “whoa-oh” as a hook. But the frustration comes through as loudly as the guitars.Brent Faiyaz, ‘Loose Change’Brent Faiyaz, an R&B singer, songwriter and producer, has landed collaborations with Drake, Alicia Keys and Tyler, the Creator. His surprise-released second album, “Wasteland,” which is full of songs and skits about romantic suspense — both good and bad — is poised for a big debut on the Billboard 200 album chart. “Loose Change” backs him with an implied beat — no drums, lots of space — sketched by syncopated chords from a string ensemble, skulking synthesizer tones and his own imploring voice. In a tremulous tenor croon that echoes Usher, he sings about how infatuation can turn to irritation, indicting his own worst impulses and wondering, “What’s left of us, what’s left of our lives?”The A’s, ‘When I Die’“When I Die” is morbid but practical, and ultimately affectionate. The A’s are Amelia Meath, from the electronic band Sylvan Esso, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig from Daughter of Swords. Their new album, “Fruit,” is mostly other people’s songs, but “When I Die” is their own. Singing close harmony in what could almost be a nursery-rhyme melody, they add percussion and synthesizer bass lines over what sounds like marching feet. And they calmly provide instructions for a memorial — loud music, flowers, dancing, toasts and a funeral pyre “to light your way back home” — to remind survivors that “I’m sorry I left you behind/and I’m kissing you through this song.”Marcus Mumford, ‘Cannibal’Marcus Mumford, from Mumford and Sons, confronts deep and confusing trauma in “Cannibal,” from a solo album due in September. He doesn’t specify what happened, but he insists, “That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child.” Most of the track is just his voice and a few guitar notes picked on low strings. But as he faces up to how hard it is to speak about the events, and pleads “help me know how to begin again,” a arena-filling band suddenly materializes behind him; it’s the breakthrough he longs for.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Because I Liked a Boy’Things go wrong fast in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Because I Liked a Boy” from her new album, “Emails I Can’t Send.” It starts out sounding cozy and old-fashioned, with just an echoey electric guitar playing 1950s chords as she sings about what could be a rom-com flirtation: “We bonded over black-eyed peas and complicated exes,” she coos. “It was all so innocent.” But the chorus changes everything; an ominous synthesizer bass tone arrives and she’s being accused of being “a homewrecker” and “a slut” and getting truckloads of death threats, and the bass and drum machine heave beneath her like the ground is shaking. She keeps her composure, but just barely.Pantha du Prince, ‘Golden Galactic’Pantha du Prince — the electronic musician Hendrik Weber — works where ambient and dance music overlap. He’s fond of nature imagery and pretty, consonant sounds, but his music is changeable and contemplative rather than saccharine. “Golden Galactic,” from his upcoming album “Golden Gaia,” uses plinking, harplike motifs, repeating them a few times and moving on, constantly changing up the implied rhythms instead of settling into a loop. That restless motion is enfolded in swelling string-section chords, going nowhere in particular yet not staying still. More

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      black midi Bristles at a Bleak World With ‘Hellfire’

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      The British trio’s third studio album is a virtuosic exploration of brutality that showcases its technical mastery, expanded orchestrations and sardonic humor.War, disease, murder, exploitation, sleaze, cynicism, callousness. Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi.Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment. The lyrics present an assortment of fractured narrative strategies featuring largely unsavory characters engaging in deadly sins like lust, greed, pride and gluttony. The songs’ protagonists include killers, brutal military commanders and a performer whose last show is his own death. There’s also some grim philosophizing, like the lines Geordie Greep rattles off in “Hellfire,” which opens the album: “No such thing as luck/Only chance and rot, inevitable loss.”But the songs don’t lament. They bristle.The members of black midi, all in their early 20s — Greep and Cameron Picton, playing guitars and many other assorted instruments, and the indefatigable drummer Morgan Simpson — met at the BRIT School, England’s celebrated performing-arts high school. From the beginning, the band has flaunted its technical mastery and omnivorous listening, and its tastes encompass prog-rock, post-punk, pop, funk, jazz, contemporary classical music, cabaret, electronics, flamenco, noise and more.Most black midi songs, old and new, are as frenetically choreographed as the climactic scenes of a martial-arts extravaganza. Speed, precision, complexity and sudden change have always been at the band’s fingertips, which can move incredibly fast. And while the musical and verbal constructions are meticulously cerebral, the effect is jolting and visceral.“Schlagenheim,” black midi’s 2019 debut album — when it was a quartet including the guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin — was puristically recorded by the band members alone. But with the album “Cavalcade” in 2021, and even more so on “Hellfire,” black midi has expanded and orchestrated its songs. The contrasts of blitz and delicacy are even greater, as daintily arranged string sections or screaming winds and brass appear and vanish at will.Even in their occasional quiet moments, the songs on “Hellfire” have a white-knuckle momentum. This album fully surfaces Simpson’s remarkable drumming, always at the service of the composition: crisp cymbal taps and surging across-the-kit rolls, high-speed fusillades and cymbal whispers, snappy marching-band snare drum, patiently repeated funk or Latin beats that suddenly explode. This time around, black midi’s music often moves so fast that Greep doesn’t bother with melody. Many of his vocals arrive spoken, working up to an auctioneer’s hyperspeed in songs like “The Race Is About to Begin,” which is not so much rapped as spewed.A sardonic, deeply British gallows humor infuses the songs, along with the conviction that no scenario or structure is too convoluted. “The Defence” is the rationalizations of a smug brothel owner — “My girls are destined for hell or so says our priest/But find me a Christian who spends as much time on their knees” — delivered as something like a big-band show tune from a vintage Hollywood musical.In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a farmhand becomes a hired killer who realizes that the employer who stiffs him is Satan; the music is a jazzy lilt that moves in and out of waltz time and other, much trickier meters, eventually swarmed by saxophone and brass before Greep finally barks “Futile regret!”As if the songs don’t provide enough puzzles, black midi previewed the album with a video for “Welcome to Hell” — a gnashing, snarling, tempo-shifting chronicle of a hapless soldier’s shore leave — that had viewers deciphering a cryptic graphic alphabet. With “Hellfire,” black midi envisions a decadent, collapsing, zero-sum culture, a war of all against all. The music — brainy, hyperactive, overloaded, bitterly absurd — is a ferocious counterattack.black midi“Hellfire”(Rough Trade) More

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      ‘Elvis’ vs. Elvis

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis” has been one of this summer’s box office success stories, demonstrating the ongoing appetite for stories about Elvis Presley, one of pop music’s dynamic and contentious figures, as well as the cinematic power of Luhrmann’s vivid, overwhelming style, which is optimized for the big screen.The film is loyal to Presley (Austin Butler), and uses his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as a narrator and also a moral foil. It emphasizes Presley as a performer and cultural agitator more so than as a person, while combining or rewriting historical moments to serve the larger narrative.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Presley’s career, how the film smooths out the rough edges of his story, and the role that fantasy and imagination play in remembering pop culture heroes.Guests:A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic of The New York TimesAlanna Nash, author of “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley,” “Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him” and several other booksConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Rare-Book Dealer Charged After Pilfered Eagles Lyrics Come to Light

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      Glenn Horowitz and two other men are accused of conspiring to sell Don Henley’s notes, including the words to “Hotel California.”In the late 1970s, as Southern California’s Eagles sailed into rock superstardom, one of the band’s main songwriters generated reams of handwritten lyrics and notes — among them, the words to such FM-radio staples as “Hotel California.”And then, the papers vanished.Nearly five decades later, Glenn Horowitz, a New York rare-book dealer, and two other men were charged on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan with conspiring to sell about 100 pages of the stolen notes written by the songwriter, Don Henley, lying to law enforcement authorities and fabricating stories about the provenance of the papers, which are valued at around $1 million.“This action exposes the truth about music memorabilia sales of highly personal, stolen items hidden behind a facade of legitimacy,” Irving Azoff, Mr. Henley’s manager, said. “No one has the right to sell illegally obtained property or profit from the outright theft of irreplaceable pieces of musical history.”Those charged include Mr. Horowitz, 66, who helped create a frothy market in writers’ archives, curating filing cabinets’ worth of manuscripts, drafts, letters and ephemera into a coherent and sellable whole. He placed the papers of Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker and others in leading university libraries, and brokered major deals with musicians: In 2016, he sold Bob Dylan’s vast archive to two institutions in Oklahoma for a sum estimated to be as high as $20 million.Lawyers for Mr. Horowitz and the other defendants, Craig Inciardi, 58, and Edward Kosinski, 59, denied the charges.“The D.A.’s office alleges criminality where none exists and unfairly tarnishes the reputations of well-respected professionals,” the lawyers said in a statement. “These men are innocent.”A lawyer for Mr. Inciardi added that the men had turned themselves in and had been released on their own recognizance.The indictment is a stunning turn for Mr. Horowitz, a mainstay of New York City’s rare book and manuscript market who is known for mixing a keen business sense with deep literary learning and a showman’s flair.A visit to his Midtown Manhattan office with its terrace overlooking the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden might offer a glimpse of a choice historical letter or a jaw-dropping literary artifact — accompanied by a comment that the viewing was off the record.“As Glenn himself says, he’s a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter,” Rick Gekoski, a book dealer in London who regularly did business with Horowitz, told The New York Times in 2007.The notes at the heart of the case announced on Tuesday are the lyrical spine of what would become one of the most recognizable, ubiquitous albums of the 1970s. The Eagles made music that drew on blues and country rock but that was suffused with the particular malaise of Southern California in its post-hippie, pre-punk period.Half a century since its 1976 release, the “Hotel California” album and Mr. Henley’s gnomic musings — “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — have fueled unending speculation among fans about the lyrics’ meaning. The band’s continuous world tour, on which it plays the album front to back with a full orchestra, has filled arenas for more than two years.Mr. Horowitz obtained Mr. Henley’s notes in 2005, according to a news release from Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. The manuscripts were originally stolen from the songwriter in the late 1970s by a writer working on a book about the band, the release said. The notes include handwritten lyrics to “Hotel California,” the albums’s title track.Mr. Henley became aware of the notes’ reappearance when Mr. Horowitz sold them to Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski, fellow collectors who tried to market them further. According to the district attorney’s office, Mr. Henley filed police reports and told the collectors the notes were stolen.“Rather than making any effort to ensure they actually had rightful ownership, the defendants responded by engaging in a yearslong campaign to prevent Henley from recovering the manuscripts,” the district attorney’s release said.The men sought to launder the notes through Sotheby’s auction houses and engaged in a five-year effort to hide where the documents had come from, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Horowitz later tried to leverage the 2016 death of Glenn Frey, the Eagles’ other frontman, as possible cover, suggesting that Mr. Frey was the initial source for the papers, according to the news release.Mr. Frey “alas, is dead, and identifying him as the source would make this go away once and for all,” Mr. Horowitz said in a fabricated statement of provenance after the notes were seized by investigators from a Sotheby’s warehouse, the district attorney’s office said.Mr. Horowitz was charged with conspiracy, attempted criminal possession of stolen property and hindering prosecution. Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski were charged with possessing stolen property and conspiracy.Alex Traub More

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      Earl McGrath Was a Character. His Closet Was Filled With Rare Recordings.

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      When the art and music world figure died in 2016, he left behind a trove of reels from his years scouting for his own label and the one he ran for the Rolling Stones.An outsize character, Earl McGrath had variously worked as a record company head, film executive, screenwriter and art dealer before he died in early 2016 at age 84. Afterward, the contents of his Midtown Manhattan apartment were carefully cataloged and valued. His art collection, including prized works given to him by Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and Ed Moses, was sent to auction at Christie’s. His papers, containing correspondence with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Stephen Spender, were donated to the New York Public Library’s archives.But the boxes stored at the top of McGrath’s large walk-in closet — filled with old reels of recordings — were largely overlooked. They were about to be sold blind to a record wholesaler when the journalist Joe Hagan stepped in.Hagan had been researching “Sticky Fingers,” his biography of the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jann Wenner, when he stumbled upon McGrath. “Little known outside a rarefied ’70s jet set of rock ’n’ rollers, movie stars, socialites and European dilettantes,” Hagan would write, “his name was once a secret handshake.”Rummaging through McGrath’s closet in the spring of 2017, the first tape Hagan discovered was an unedited master copy of the Rolling Stones’ 1978 album, “Some Girls.”“I instantly broke into a cold sweat,” Hagan said in a phone interview. He also found rare and unreleased recordings from Hall & Oates, the New York Dolls’ David Johansen, Terry Allen and the Jim Carroll Band. “It was like peeking through a keyhole in time. I thought, This is a real treasure trove — wouldn’t it be great if people could hear this stuff?”After purchasing the roughly 200 tapes from the McGrath estate, Hagan spent several years researching and compiling the material, along with a co-producer, Pat Thomas. This week, “Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980” will be released by the reissue label Light in the Attic. Its 22 tracks feature material collected by McGrath during his years as an Atlantic Records executive, where he operated his own imprint, Clean, before he later ran the Rolling Stones’ label.Moving musically and geographically through the 1970s, from California country-rock to New York post-punk, “Earl’s Closet” is a fittingly eclectic sampler that places the hillbilly soul of Delbert & Glen alongside the surrealist warbling of the Warhol “superstar” Ultra Violet.“I wanted the record to capture Earl’s spirit,” Hagan said. “He’s really the muse of the whole thing. It’s almost like being at a party at Earl’s house: You don’t know who you’re going to meet.”To that end, the collection’s through line is McGrath’s role as an exuberant social connector.“If you were to add up Earl’s achievements in terms of record making or art sales, that wasn’t who he was,” Jann Wenner said in an interview. “He thrived on his friendships. He loved talented people, interesting people — and his range of acquaintances were remarkable, literally from Zen masters to Z Listers.”In an email, the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger remembered McGrath as a “joker,” who “knew everybody in New York and beyond and was a lot of fun to be with.”McGrath introduced the actress Anjelica Huston to her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham, who died in 2008. “He was funny,” Huston said of McGrath. “He was daring. In his own way, Earl, he was the glue that held a lot of people together.”From left: The poet-turned-rocker Jim Carroll, McGrath and Mick Jagger. Camilla McGrathMcGRATH’S HUMBLE CHILDHOOD in the Midwest was far from the A-list world he would navigate so easily as an adult, but he could spin it into a more stately tale.“If you asked Earl, ‘Where are you from?’” the artist Ed Ruscha said, “He’d say, ‘I’m from Superior — of course — Wisconsin. And I lived on Grand — naturally — Avenue.’ That’s the way he talked.”McGrath’s blithe manner belied the troubled home life he endured as a youth, which included physical abuse at the hands of his father. “He would get drunk and beat him,” said Valerie Grace Ricordi, a family friend who now serves as executive director of the McGrath family foundation. “Earl never understood what he’d done wrong in his father’s eyes.” According to interviews with several of McGrath’s friends and biographical details included in Hagan’s liner notes and an essay in a 2020 photo book, at age 14, after his father broke his arm, McGrath left home for good — moving into a local YMCA and supporting himself as a dishwasher until he could get out of town.Largely self-educated, McGrath found solace devouring literature, poetry and philosophy, and came to see himself as a Proustian character. Transforming from dishwasher to aesthete, as a young man McGrath evinced the qualities that would carry him through life: a disarming sense of humor and an uncanny ability to befriend the cultured, the famous and the wealthy.In between stints as a merchant seaman, McGrath drifted out to California, corresponding and visiting with Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles and Henry Miller in Big Sur. He also developed an unlikely friendship with the English poet W.H. Auden, who would provide introductions for McGrath when he moved in the early ’50s to New York City, where he fell in with a lively crowd that included the writer Frank O’Hara and the pop art godfather Larry Rivers.In 1958, the 27-year-old McGrath began working as an assistant to the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, helping organize the inaugural Spoleto Festival in Umbria, Italy. There, he struck up an unlikely romance with an heiress, Camilla Pecci Blunt, the daughter of a Florentine marchesa and an American financier. The couple married in 1963 against the wishes of her family, and while they endured long stretches of physical separation in subsequent decades, he remained committed to their union.One of his next moves was to Los Angeles, where McGrath found his way into the movie business and developed a tight social circle of Hollywood literati, including Joan Didion, who dedicated her 1979 essay collection, “The White Album,” to McGrath. The writer Eve Babitz’s biographer, Lili Anolik, said McGrath “was one of the most influential and damaging people in her life,” explaining how Babitz was working as a fine artist and album designer in the early ’70s when McGrath offhandedly questioned one of her color choices. Her confidence shot, “she switched her focus to writing,” Anolik said. “So, we, the culture, owe Earl big in a way.”Joan Didion and McGrath in the early 1970s. The writer dedicated her essay collection “The White Album” to him.Camilla McGrathBUT McGRATH MADE perhaps his biggest impact with Atlantic Records.When he met the label’s co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in the early ’60s, the two sparked an immediate friendship. “Earl made him laugh,” Hagan said. “Ahmet really just loved having him around.” McGrath’s European society connections also helped Ertegun impress Mick Jagger, who brought the Rolling Stones into the Atlantic fold in 1971.That same year, Ertegun — along with Robert Stigwood, manager of the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton — decided to back McGrath and give him his own Atlantic-distributed label, Clean Records (the company motto: “Every man should have a Clean record”). McGrath’s West Hollywood home became Clean’s headquarters, where he’d regularly throw parties — attended by a mix of Cool School artists, Old Hollywood grandees and New Journalism figures — in lieu of A&R meetings.“He’d have these afternoon soirees where there’d be some 18-year-old musician on the edge of OD’ing in one room, and outside Joseph Cotten and Patricia Medina would be strolling through the lawn,” said the Texas singer-songwriter Terry Allen, among the first artists McGrath signed. “You never knew what was going to happen when you went to Earl’s.”One of the groups that McGrath discovered was a fledgling folk-soul duo from Philadelphia, Daryl Hall and John Oates, who had been struggling to find a record deal when their music publisher flew them out to meet McGrath in 1972.“There was all these interesting people hanging out,” Hall remembered in an interview. “One of the Everly Brothers was there and I think a young Harrison Ford, too.” They played McGrath a few songs. “Next thing we knew, we were signed.”Clockwise from left: Robert Stigwood, Ahmet Ertegun, McGrath and Eric Clapton returning from Barbados in 1974.Camilla McGrathThe history of Clean Records might have turned out quite differently had Hall & Oates actually recorded for the company. Ertegun, sensing the duo’s hit potential, snatched them from McGrath and put them on Atlantic proper, where they sold millions of records. Clean, meanwhile, would release just a handful of poorly selling titles before ceasing operations in 1973.Moving to New York in the early ’70s, McGrath became an omnipresent figure on the city’s pre-punk scene. “I used to see him everywhere,” said Johansen, the New York Dolls singer whose earliest solo work appears on “Earl’s Closet.” “Funny thing is, I didn’t know Earl as a music business guy — it was just one of the things he did.”McGrath’s real passion was bringing together his many fabulous friends. The McGraths’ West 57th Street apartment, opposite Carnegie Hall, would become the site of endless dinners and parties attended by a cross-section of cultural giants: where the cast of “Star Wars” might run into Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg; where the poet-turned-songwriter Jim Carroll mingled with the silent-film-era pioneer Anita Loos; and where Jagger first laid eyes on his future partner Jerry Hall. (The gatherings were often photographed by Camilla McGrath, with a collection of the photos published in a 2020 book from Knopf, “Face to Face.”)In 1977, the Rolling Stones were looking for someone to run their record label, replacing the longtime company head Marshall Chess. With Ertegun’s backing, McGrath lobbied for the gig in a letter to Jagger, admitting that he hadn’t been very successful in the music business, but “I was successful enough to marry a princess in Italy.” He got the job.“He was a very unusual choice to run a record company,” Jagger said. “But he had a great flair.”A number of the artists represented on “Earl’s Closet” are acts McGrath considered for the Stones label — including the Detroit saxophonist Norma Jean Bell and the Texas soul combo Little Whisper and the Rumors — but whose signings never came to fruition. “Earl was good at recognizing talent, but he wasn’t much for following through,” Hagan said.McGrath’s tenure did ultimately produce some successes: He negotiated a deal to bring the acclaimed reggae star Peter Tosh to the label in 1978, and a year later, he signed Carroll. Carroll, who died in 2009, noted in a 1981 interview with Musician magazine that McGrath was an anomaly in the music business. “He understood very well what I was doing,” Carroll said then. “He had some literary references that no other record executive would’ve had.”McGrath and Jagger after one of the legendary dinners at the McGrath home, where artists of different types mingled.Camilla McGrathAfter a few years in the Stones’ employ, McGrath found himself caught in the middle of the increasingly fractious relationship between Jagger and Keith Richards. As the guitarist recounted in his 2010 memoir “Life,” at one point he threatened to throw McGrath off the roof of Electric Lady Studios if he didn’t rein Jagger in. Angling to launch a solo career, Jagger was more than happy to let band relations, and the label’s business, sour. McGrath resigned his post with Rolling Stones Records in 1981, effectively ending his career in the music business.OVER THE NEXT three decades, McGrath would bounce between coasts, opening and closing art galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Although he and Camilla never had a family of their own, over time McGrath became godfather to nearly 30 children. Late in his life, McGrath’s older sister finally revealed the secret that had been kept from him: His birth had been the result of an affair between his mother and his father’s brother.As McGrath reckoned with his complicated past, an even bigger blow came with Camilla’s death in 2007, following a series of strokes. Within a few years, McGrath developed serious health problems. On Jan. 7, 2016, he died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage.McGrath had been happy over the years to remain out of the spotlight. “He didn’t want to be a public figure, he only wanted to be well known amongst the well-known,” Hagan said. With the release of “Earl’s Closet,” McGrath’s legacy — his unique gifts as a kind of artistic alchemist — is finally being given its due.“It feels like we tapped into some kind of core sampler of the ’70s,” Hagan said. “It’s the story of the culture and where the artistic emphasis was going, about the end of a certain period and the beginning of another. And, of course, the element that threads everything together on this record — just like he did in life — is Earl McGrath.” More