IN THIS ISSUE: Nile Rodgers, David Hockney & a Photographer Who Fell Asleep on Paul McCartney

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Dear friends,

Welcome. Thank you for reading the very first Alchemy newsletter.
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This is a new adventure for us. Our mission with Alchemy is to create a community that celebrates artists and the craft & mystery of the creative process.
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The Alchemy newsletter will be published every other Wednesday as a companion to my YouTube show. We’ll be sharing the backstory behind each new episode here.
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We’ll also be sharing what has caught our eye or ear culturally - music we’re listening to, films or shows that we’ve seen, anything that we love, new and old.

I started Alchemy because in this age of quick clips and short takes, I was craving more depth. I needed more soul. If you feel that need too I hope you’ll join us and subscribe:

SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE

And please, as we go along, we’d love to hear from you to better understand what’s working - and what isn’t - and to know what you’d like to hear from us. So just reply to this email and let us know!

- Anthony

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This week on Alchemy: Nile Rodgers

Episode four of Alchemy features one of my favorite artists, Nile Rodgers. And it comes at a special moment for him. The New York Times just named Nile one of the "30 Greatest Living American Songwriters." There’s been a lot of debate about that list, but there’s no doubt to me that Nile belongs there.

Rolling Stone earlier ranked him #7 on its list of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time, saying “the full scope of Nile Rodgers career is still hard to fathom.”

Yet for all of his accolades, I think Nile may still be underrated. His fingerprints are all over American music. Nile produced "Let’s Dance" with Bowie and "Like A Virgin" with Madonna. He co-wrote "We Are Family" and "He’s the Greatest Dancer" for Sister Sledge. And “I’m Coming Out” and “Upside Down” for Diana Ross.

And with Bernard Edwards, Nile co-founded Chic, one of the preeminent dance bands of the '70s. “Le Freak” and “Good Times,” which he and Bernard co-wrote, were both #1 pop hits. One of the most sampled songs of all time, "Good Times," provided the bedrock beat of The Sugarhill Gang’s "Rapper’s Delight," the first rap song to crack the Top 40 in 1979.

As Nile says on Alchemy, even at 73 his work ethic is insane. He’s always on tour or in the studio. When we bump into each other in New York, he’s usually carrying a guitar case on his way to his next musical adventure. The day we sat down for Alchemy, he was worried he’d played a bad gig the night before. But when he watched the video that morning realized he’d actually been “pretty good.” “No,” I said to him. “You were actually great, Nile. I was there.” Chic is one of the tightest bands on tour.

For a long time, Nile had no desire to be a frontman. Maybe that’s why he isn’t better known. As he acknowledges on Alchemy, he was a shy kid who “always struggled to fit in.” In his crazy early years in New York, he would take his guitar onto the subway at night and ride til dawn. On Alchemy, he talks about how it was the place he felt “safe.”

But Nile has blessed American music with his own unmistakeable groove. I love what Johnny Marr, the great guitarist with The Smiths, says about his guitar playing in the Times’ tribute to him: “You hear Nile’s heart in his right hand and his soul in his left.”

​Click here to see Episode 4 of Alchemy with Nile Rodgers.

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Remembering David Hockney

David Hockney, the great British artist best known for his bright California paintings died this past week at 88.

One of my most memorable assignments in my years with CBS was the day I visited Hockney in his Los Angeles studio in 2016. The occasion was the publication of “A Bigger Book,” a sumo-sized retrospective of his extraordinary career.
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Hockney was a genial and bemused host. He greeted me in his familiar round rimmed glasses & white cap. And we wandered around his studio, the walls of which were covered with his colorful sketches and drawings - from floor to high ceiling. “When I was eight or nine,” he recalled, “I wanted to be an artist. You don’t realize how lucky you are if you know what you want to be in life. But I did.”
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Hockney grew up in the dingy industrial city of Bradford in Northern England. “It was gothic gloom,” he remembered. Raised in such a bleak environment, I wondered where his sense of color had come from.
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“Well, probably California,” he said. “The moment I came here it took off.”
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He first moved to Los Angeles in 1964 at age 27, drawn by Laurel & Hardy movies. “I’d always noticed the shadows in them. So I knew that was a sunny place. I got excited by California. I still am.”
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Hockey’s pool paintings have become iconic. As we flipped through some of them in “A Bigger Book,” he said, “It’s always an interesting thing, how do you paint water? How do you paint something transparent?”
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Two years after we met, Hockney’s 1972 painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), would set what was then an auction record for a work by a living artist when it sold for more than $90 million. Here’s a video I shot in November 2018 of the painting being uncrated at Christie’s:

What struck me most about Hockney that day in 2016 was his newfound fascination with the iPad. At 79, he’d discovered a drawing app and was sketching on it religiously. “I’m always interested in any technology that’s about picture making,” he said.
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He showed me a drawing he’d made of the Eiffel Tower from a hotel balcony. The app had recorded every stroke of his stylus and he replayed them backwards and forwards for me. So I could see a Hockney drawing take shape stroke by stroke. It was fascinating. “The great thing about the iPad is that everything is just here at your fingertips,” he told me. But the thing he loved most about his new toy: “You don’t have to clean them. You don’t have to clean up.”
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We sat side by side in a couple of chairs in his studio as he shared his iPad portfolio. I couldn’t help studying the floor around his feet which was stained with cigarette burns. Hockney had already been slowed a bit by his cigarette habit, but he was undaunted. “I’m still a smoker,” he said when I pointed out the burns. “I mean, I just go on. And one day, I’ll fall over. Yeah, I don’t mind.”

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What I'm listening to

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Maggie Rose, "Red Shoes"

This song has been at the top of every playlist I’ve put together for the past couple of months. The first single off of Maggie’s forthcoming album, "Half Moon" (August 14), it’s a brassy, infectious ode to escapism.

A singer’s singer, Maggie is as at home at the Nashville Symphony as she is on the Grand Ole Opry stage. I’ve seen her perform with the Mavericks at the Ryman in Nashville, with Bill Murray at the Café Carlyle in New York, and on her solo tour. She’s an exquisite singer and in “Red Shoes” I think she’s written her new anthem.

Her last album, "No One Gets Out Alive," earned Maggie a couple of Grammy nominations. On her new record she’s collaborated with two of my favorite producers: Lawrence Rothman (Amanda Shires, Margo Price) and Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges) to create a sound that feels both old and new.

I’ve never ever owned red shoes, but Maggie made me want to go out and buy a pair.

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Olympia Vitalis, “Daze”

I don’t recall exactly how I discovered Olympia Vitalis. I think it was a recommendation from a British soul page on Instagram, but I put on “Daze” and was immediately entranced. I ended up on 3 mile beach walk looping her music as the soundtrack.

I couldn’t find out much about Olympia. She comes out of West London and clearly has Motown, gospel and jazz influences. You’re reminded of Amy Winehouse and RAYE, but she has her own vibe.

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What I'm reading

“The Beatles by Jim Marshall: Live at Candlestick Park 1966” by Amelia Davis (Chronicle Books)

Sixty years ago, on August 29, 1966, the Beatles played their last proper concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Apart from an impromptu gig on the London rooftop of Apple Records a few years later, they would never perform live again.

Jim Marshall was the only photojournalist given “all access” that day at Candlestick. If you look carefully, in the background of our Alchemy shows, one of Jim’s shots of Lennon and McCartney from that gig hangs on my wall. I bought it after I met Jim nearly 20 years ago.

I was in my early days of doing stories on musicians for CBS. And Jim had offered me some invaluable advice. “It’s all about trust,” he said. Jim demanded “all access” to the artists he photographed (his reputation meant that he could) but then made himself a fly on the wall. It gave his photographs an intimacy and a spontaneity.

“Jim was such a great photographer because I never knew he was there,” Michelle Phillips of the Mama and the Papas said in one of Jim’s books. “I would be surprised when I saw some of this great work because I didn’t realize he was taking photos until afterwards."

Jim worked in an age before stylists and glam squads. He didn’t take celebrity portraits. He was a photojournalist. “I'm like a reporter, only with a camera,” he wrote in the introduction to his earlier book, "Not Fade Away." “I react to my subject in their environment, and if it's going well, I get so immersed in it that I become one with the camera.”

Jim, who grew up in San Francisco, was stopped by a stranger on the street one day in 1960. "He asked me for directions to a club," Marshall later remembered. It was a story he told often. The stranger turned out to be jazz great John Coltrane. “I told him I'd pick him up and take him there if he'd let me take his picture.”

Jim took some of the most iconic shots of his era. The picture of a boyish Bob Dylan rolling a car tire down a Greenwich Village street in 1963 is his. The shot of Hendrix setting his guitar alight at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967 is a Marshall image. So is the photograph Johnny Cash "flipping the bird" during a performance at San Quentin prison in 1969. Annie Leibovitz called him "the rock 'n' roll photographer.”

I met Jim in the later years of his life in 2009, when he was having a show at the Morrison Hotel Gallery down on Prince Street in New York. On opening night in SoHo the crowd was spilling onto the street. As I squeezed past the folks at the front door, I bumped into a guy with bushy eyebrows and a crooked nose that looked like it had been rearranged in a bar fight. “Who was that?” I asked gallery owner Peter Blachley. “Oh, that’s Jim,” he said.

I was going to be using the gallery’s upstairs loft space a few days later to shoot an interview with Paul McCartney for CBS. Jim reminded me that he had shot the Beatles’ Candlestick Park concert and asked if he could sit in on the interview. I agreed thinking it might soften my introduction to Paul, who I was meeting for the first time.

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Paul arrived solo that day, without an entourage. He and Jim reminisced about San Francisco. Then Jim tucked himself into a sofa in the back corner of the studio, out of the camera’s eye when our interview started. About twenty minutes into my conversation with Paul, I heard a rumbling guttural sound over my shoulder. Someone was snoring. I looked back. Jim was sprawled on the sofa, eyes closed, mouth agape. He had fallen asleep. It is my lasting memory of perhaps the greatest music photographer ever. I wish I had a picture.

Jim called me a couple of times over the next year to tell me he was working on something and that I should do a story on him. I knew he deserved it. And in 2010, it was finally about to happen.

He had put together a book called "Match Prints" with his friend and fellow photographer Timothy White. Jim and Timothy had photographed many of the same artists, each in their own unique styles. It was a great idea to pair their pictures in a book.

We scheduled an interview. A few days before, while I was on vacation in Rome, I got a phone call. Jim had died in bed in a New York hotel room. He was 74. I remember thinking, “Oh Jim, we were so close.” But I talked to Timothy and we decided to go ahead with the story as a tribute to our friend.
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Jim always said, “I have no children. My photographs are my kids.” Looking through "The Beatles by Jim Marshall," you will see Jim had a lotta great kids.

• ​"The Beatles by Jim Marshall" by Amelia Davis (Chronicle Books) is available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org​

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From Anthony's archive

Tomorrow, June 18, Sir Paul McCartney celebrates his 84th birthday! In my first interview with Sir Paul back in 2009 (the one Jim Marshall fell asleep in) I asked him why he and John Lennon had worked so well together:

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