The Masters: Conversations with Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen

For this essential collection, Rolling Stone founder Wenner (Like a Rolling Stone) gathers together his interviews with rock legends from the past 60 years. “Rock history is full of songs about hoping it would never die,” Mick Jagger told the author in 1995—a theme that runs through these conversations, as musicians excavate the sources of the music’s “power and depth” and capture its legacy (as “an enormous catalyst for altering culture, society, and the country,” according to Springsteen in 2023). Wenner has a knack for drawing honesty and vulnerability from his subjects, as when the Who’s Pete Townshend confessed in 1968 that “I played the guitar—because of my nose,” hoping to divert attention from his face. Elsewhere, Bob Dylan, whom Wenner describes as “an incandescent moral and literary figure as well as a musical genius,” comments in a 2007 interview that Paul McCartney is “the only one that I am in awe of. He can do it all.” Chock-full of trivia (Jerry Garcia acknowledged his dislike of The Grateful Dead’s name while admitting, “I just found it to be powerful”) and animated speculation about rock’s essence (“Energy, anger, angst, enthusiasm, a certain spontaneity,” according to Jagger), these interviews—by turns cerebral, revealing, and electric­—capture some of music’s biggest names from a rare and intimate vantage point. This captivates. (Sept.)