By the time the Bea­t­les fin­ished The White Album, it seemed they might not ever make anoth­er record togeth­er. “The group was dis­in­te­grat­ing before my eyes,” record­ing engi­neer Geoff Emer­ick remem­bers. “It was ugly, like watch­ing a divorce between four peo­ple. After a while, I had to get out.” Emer­ick left, but thank­ful­ly the band hung in a while longer and man­aged to patch things up in the stu­dio to make their final record.

When they called Emer­ick to work on Abbey Road, they promised to get along for what would turn out to be their last album. (Emer­ick points out that on the cov­er they’re walk­ing away from Abbey Road stu­dios.) Not only did they man­age to avoid per­son­al con­flict, but more impor­tant­ly “the musi­cal telepa­thy between them was mind-bog­gling.” As if to seal the moment of accord for­ev­er, they end­ed the album, and the Bea­t­les, with a med­ley.

Abbey Road shows every mem­ber of the band ris­ing to their full song­writ­ing poten­tial, espe­cial­ly George Har­ri­son, who ful­ly came into his own with “Some­thing,” a song every­one knew would be “an instant clas­sic.” Har­ri­son became more con­fi­dent and talk­a­tive in inter­views, sit­ting down on the day of Abbey Road’s release with Aus­tralian music writer and John Lennon friend Ritchie York to offer his impres­sions of each track.

In the enhanced audio inter­view above, Har­ri­son briefly com­ments, track-by-track, on what he thinks of each song and the album as a whole. What is per­haps most inter­est­ing, giv­en Emer­ick­’s com­ment about “musi­cal telepa­thy,” is how the music seems to come from some­where else, a kind of intu­ition or chan­nel­ing that tran­scends the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties of each Bea­t­le.

Take Ringo’s “Octopus’s Gar­den,” a song Har­ri­son loves. “On the sur­face,” he says, “it’s just — it’s like a daft kids’ song. But the lyrics are great, real­ly. For me, y’know, I find very deep mean­ing in the lyrics, which Ringo prob­a­bly does­n’t see, but all the things like… ‘We’ll be warm beneath the storm.’… Which is real­ly great, y’know, because it’s like this lev­el is a storm, and it’s always — y’know, if you get sort of deep in your con­scious­ness, it’s very peace­ful. So Ringo’s writ­ing his cos­mic songs with­out notic­ing!”

The genius of Lennon, says Har­ri­son, comes through par­tic­u­lar­ly in his tim­ing, “but when you ques­tion him as to what it is, he doesn’t know. He just does it nat­u­ral­ly.” As for the album as a whole, Har­ri­son says, “it all gels, it fits togeth­er and that, but… it’s a bit like it’s some­body else, y’know?.… It does­n’t feel as though it’s us.… It’s more like just some­body else.”

Har­ri­son does­n’t say much about the record­ing process, but he does talk about the song­writ­ing and influ­ences on the album. When he wrote “Some­thing,” he says, he imag­ined “some­body like Ray Charles doing it.” He calls Paul’s “Maxwell’s Sil­ver Ham­mer,” which Lennon hat­ed, an “instant sort of whis­tle-along tune” that peo­ple will either love or hate.

The con­ver­sa­tion even­tu­al­ly moves to Har­rison’s feel­ings about The White Album and oth­er top­ics. Where he real­ly opens up is near the end when the sub­ject of India comes up. We see him walk­ing away from Abbey Road on his own path. When York asks him about “the Indi­an scene,” Har­ri­son replies, “I dun­no, it’s like it’s kar­ma, my kar­ma.… I’m just pre­tend­ing to be, y’know, a Bea­t­le. Where­as there’s a greater job to be done.”

Hear the inter­view in full above and read a tran­script here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Har­ri­son “My Sweet Lord” Gets an Offi­cial Music Video, Fea­tur­ing Ringo Starr, Al Yankovic, Pat­ton Oswalt & Many Oth­ers

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Watch Pre­cious­ly Rare Footage of Paul McCart­ney Record­ing “Black­bird” at Abbey Road Stu­dios (1968)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“I am cre­at­ing a rev­o­lu­tion here! I don’t want musi­cians, I want sabo­teurs, I want assas­sins, I want shock troops!” — Mal­colm McLaren in FX’s Pis­tol

“Peo­ple are try­ing to make it out as a bit of a joke, but it’s not a joke. It’s not polit­i­cal anar­chy either; it’s musi­cal anar­chy, which is a dif­fer­ent thing.” — John Lydon (John­ny Rot­ten), Inter­view with Mary Har­ron, 1976

“What do you think of Steve [Jones]?” says Mal­colm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sang­ster) to his part­ner Vivi­enne West­wood (Talu­lah Riley) before telling her his plans to man­age the future Sex Pis­tols in Oscar-win­ning direc­tor Dan­ny Boyle’s FX mini-series Pis­tol. “Very dam­aged,” says West­wood, “but that’s quite good.” This sits well with bud­ding impre­sario McLaren, who sees then-lead singer Jones as exact­ly the bomb he needs to throw at the estab­lish­ment. “He’s got noth­ing else to live for,” says McLaren cold­ly.

The kids in the UK punk scene McLaren and West­wood stage-man­aged may have been out­casts, but many also came from staid sub­ur­ban back­grounds, as did many of the punks in the down­town New York scene. When McLaren calls Jones (Toby Wal­lace) “the real deal,” he means the angry, drunk­en teenage face of a work­ing class with lit­tle left to lose. Boyle’s series sets Jones up as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what made British punk so angry and “edgy” (to use one of Jones’ favorite words). The very first scene recre­ates his famous theft of David Bowie’s instru­ments to start the band. Genius steal­ing from genius.

Jones not only steals famous musi­cians’ gear, but he joyrides in stolen cars, and tries to steal leather pants from SEX, McLaren and West­wood’s S&M‑themed bou­tique. There, future Pre­tenders front­woman Chrissie Hyn­de (Syd­ney Chan­dler) works the counter, and threat­ens to beat him with a crick­et bat. The focus on Jones almost exclu­sive­ly in the first episode sug­gests that he is the sin­gu­lar “Pis­tol” of the title.

Oth­er char­ac­ters show up even­tu­al­ly — front­man John­ny Rot­ten (Anson Boon) makes his appear­ance in the sec­ond episode (or “Track”) to bump Jones from vocals to gui­tar. The penul­ti­mate episode is titled “Nan­cy and Sid” in homage to Alex Cox’s cult biopic Sid and Nan­cy. But in the begin­ning, when the band was called “The Swankers,” it was all Steve Jones’ show, Boyle’s series sug­gests, from procur­ing the gear, to writ­ing the first songs, to land­ing McLaren as man­ag­er.

Why release a bio­graph­i­cal series on the Sex Pis­tols in 2022? The sto­ry has been told, in inter­views, mem­oirs, and films, by the band, their entourage, hang­ers-on, and fans, and their man­ag­er, styl­ists, road­ies, jour­nal­ists, and pho­tog­ra­phers. It has been told so many times, so many ways, it makes the mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives of Kuro­sawa’s Rashomon seem easy to rec­on­cile. (See com­par­isons between Boyle’s show and oth­er doc­u­ments above.) What could one more telling, stream­ing on a net­work once owned by Rupert Mur­doch and now owned by the Dis­ney Cor­po­ra­tion, add to the liv­ing mem­o­ry of 1970’s British Punk™?

We can hear some answers from series co-cre­ator Boyle in the inter­view clip just above with the BBC. He describes what the band meant to him when he was a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent read­ing the news of the under­ground Lon­don in NME. “It’s only when you cre­ate true chaos,” he says, “that some­thing new can emerge.” Does Pis­tol bring some­thing new? The series is enter­tain­ing, recre­at­ing events famil­iar to us from any of the mul­ti­ple his­to­ries of the Sex Pis­tols and doing so in a stream­lined, hard­ly chaot­ic, nar­ra­tive style.

Keep­ing the focus square­ly on the hand­some, charis­mat­ic Jones in the first episode (and to a less­er extent dap­per orig­i­nal bassist Glen Mat­lock and boy­ish drum­mer Paul Cook) soft­ens the band’s usu­al por­trait. Maybe they seem more palat­able at first to the very estab­lish­ment McLaren tried to det­o­nate in his rev­o­lu­tion. But as Lydon, who hap­pi­ly took over as their spokesman, told Mary Har­ron in a 1976 inter­view, the idea that the Sex Pis­tols should be thought of as “social­ly sig­nif­i­cant” nev­er appealed to him. “We want to be AMATEURS,” he sneered.

They wrote scathing nihilist protest songs like “EMI” and “God Save the Queen” (which they played on the Thames on the Queen’s Sil­ver Jubilee in 1977, above). But the Pis­tols were not actu­al­ly anti-cor­po­rate anar­chists. They were anti­so­cial shock-rock the­ater. It is bewil­der­ing, nonethe­less — because of the weight of their influ­ence on polit­i­cal­ly-charged punk rock — to see them turned into fic­tion­al­ized heroes in cor­po­rate media. And it is jar­ring to hear Lydon praise Trump, Nigel Farage, and the far right, with­out a trace of irony, as the real inher­i­tors of punk. Nev­er one to with­hold an opin­ion, he’s made his views on the show clear (below): “It’s dead against every­thing we stood for.”

Iron­i­cal­ly, Mat­lock, who is cred­it­ed with writ­ing ten of the twelve tracks on Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s the Sex Pis­tols, once said exact­ly the same thing about John­ny Rot­ten. So, what did the Sex Pis­tols stand for? Piss­ing peo­ple off, becom­ing absolute­ly hat­ed, and get­ting rich? Only the last part of McLaren’s plot failed when he lost con­trol of his mon­ster. For all his rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vor, even McLaren was ini­tial­ly shocked (then delight­ed, then hor­ri­fied and dis­gust­ed) by the band’s bad man­ners. Maybe writer and under­ground punk car­toon­ist John Holm­strom said it best: “It’s unbe­liev­able that a rock group that played no more than one hun­dred live per­for­mances… and exist­ed for only twen­ty-sev­en months, could become as inter­na­tion­al­ly dis­liked as the Sex Pis­tols.” It’s even more unbe­liev­able that they’ve become so inter­na­tion­al­ly beloved.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

The Sex Pis­tols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Con­certs in Dal­las, Mem­phis, Tul­sa & More

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

The Sex Pis­tols’ Sid Vicious Sings Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: Is Noth­ing Sacred?

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

By any mea­sure, David Bowie was a super­star. He first rose to fame in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties, a process gal­va­nized by his cre­ation and assump­tion of the rock­er-from-Mars per­sona Zig­gy Star­dust. In the fol­low­ing decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out sta­di­ums and dom­i­nat­ed the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot out­side the main­stream. It was in the nineties, after his aes­thet­i­cal­ly cleans­ing stint with gui­tar-rock out­fit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his star­dom to explore his full spec­trum of inter­ests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mun­dane to the macabre.

This sug­gests a good deal in com­mon between Bowie and anoth­er high-pro­file David of his gen­er­a­tion: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film direc­tors alive. “There are many obvi­ous, sur­face con­nec­tions and inter­sec­tions between Lynch and Bowie,” write film crit­ics Cristi­na Álvarez López and Adri­an Mar­tin. “Both have dab­bled in film and music, as well as paint­ing, the­atre and per­for­mance art. Both are actors — Bowie slight­ly more con­ven­tion­al­ly so than Lynch.” Lynch would no doubt agree with Bowie’s insis­tence that “my inter­pre­ta­tion of my work is real­ly imma­te­r­i­al,” that “it’s the inter­pre­ta­tion of the lis­ten­er, or the view­er, which is all-impor­tant.”

These words appear in López and Mar­t­in’s analy­sis of Twin Peaks, the tele­vi­sion series Lynch cre­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Mark Frost, and Out­side, the album Bowie cre­at­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bri­an Eno. When it pre­miered on ABC in the spring of 1990, Twin Peaks became a minor sen­sa­tion by con­jur­ing a famil­iar yet deeply strange atmos­phere such as no one had nev­er seen on tele­vi­sion before. It also pio­neered what López and Adri­an Mar­tin call “the Dead Girl/Woman genre, which traces out a labyrinthine mys­tery from the dis­cov­ery of a young female corpse.” What brings Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er to Twin Peaks, Wash­ing­ton, we recall, is the mur­der of home­com­ing queen Lau­ra Palmer.

What brings Nathan Adler, a detec­tive in the Art Crimes unit, to Oxford Town, New Jer­sey is the mur­der of the four­teen-year-old Baby Grace Blue. Thus begins the Twin Peaks-inspired sto­ry­line of Out­side, Bowie’s own 1995 entry into the genre of the Dead Girl/Woman. Like Lynch and Frost’s show, Bowie’s album has a cast of eccentrics: Adler and Baby Grace, but also the likes of crim­i­nal “out­sider” Leon Blank; Alge­ria Touchshriek, deal­er in “art-drugs and DNA prints”; and a sin­is­ter fig­ure known as both the Artist and the Mino­taur. All are played by Bowie him­self, who makes use of var­i­ous accents (a tech­nique prac­ticed with his appear­ance in the 1992 Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me) and voice-pro­cess­ing tech­niques.

At the time this 75-minute “non-lin­ear Goth­ic Dra­ma Hyper-Cycle,” as Bowie labeled it, gave his lis­ten­ers a lot to take in, to say noth­ing of the major media out­lets attempt­ing to pub­li­cize it. “This new project is all about sex, vio­lence, and death,” says the CBC’s Lau­rie Brown in a typ­i­cal piece of tele­vi­sion cov­er­age. But it also deals with the merg­ing of those human eter­nals with art and pop­u­lar cul­ture, a process that fas­ci­nat­ed Bowie more and more as the nineties pro­gressed — as did “the re-emer­gence of Neo-Pagan­ism, rit­u­al body art, and the frag­men­ta­tion of soci­ety,” as he puts it in Out­side’s offi­cial mak­ing-of video.

Bowie and Eno intend­ed Out­side (offi­cial­ly 1. Out­side) as the first in a series that would ulti­mate­ly con­sti­tute “a diary in music and in tex­ture of what it felt like to be around at the end of the Mil­len­ni­um.” In one press con­fer­ence, Bowie hint­ed that “the nar­ra­tive might fall by the way­side,” much as Lynch and Frost orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to leave Lau­ra Palmer’s death unsolved. That the sec­ond vol­ume nev­er appeared only under­scores the tan­ta­liz­ing incom­plete­ness of Out­side, which López and Mar­tin high­light as anoth­er sim­i­lar­i­ty to Twin Peaks: “Both works are ser­i­al and mul­ti­ple, exist­ing in var­i­ous offi­cial and unof­fi­cial forms, in spin-offs, out­takes” — not least the nev­er-prop­er­ly-released “Leon suites” Bowie and Eno record­ed before the album itself — “and in numer­ous fan com­men­taries.”

A kind of cir­cle closed in 1997 when Out­side’s “I’m Deranged” sound­tracked the open­ing cred­its of Lynch’s Lost High­way. But the work con­tin­ued to hold out pos­si­bil­i­ties until the end of Bowie’s life: “We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fall­en through the cracks,” Eno said. “We talked about revis­it­ing it, tak­ing it some­where new.” Despite his Lynchi­an resis­tance to inter­pre­ta­tion, Bowie did acknowl­edge even in 1995 the the­mat­ic impor­tance of mor­tal­i­ty itself. Out­side’s first sin­gle was called “The Heart’s Filthy Les­son,” and “the filthy les­son in ques­tion is the fact that life is finite.” For him, “know­ing that I’ve got a finite time in life on Earth actu­al­ly clar­i­fies things and makes me feel quite buoy­ant.” Bowie knew — or learned — that life is too short not to fol­low your fas­ci­na­tions to their lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Bowie & Bri­an Eno’s Col­lab­o­ra­tion on “Warsza­wa” Reimag­ined in a Com­ic Ani­ma­tion

When Bil­ly Idol Went Cyber­punk: See His Trib­ute to Neu­ro­mancer, His Record­ing Ses­sion with Tim­o­thy Leary, and His Lim­it­ed-Edi­tion Flop­py Disk (1993)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

“I nev­er knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzger­ald sing them.” — Ira Gersh­win

No one ever gave Ella Fitzger­ald faint praise. We could point to cuts from near­ly any one of her over 200 albums as evi­dence for why she is the undis­put­ed “Queen of Jazz,” a title for which she worked hard in her near­ly 60-year career. But she’s bet­ter known by anoth­er name, “The First Lady of Song,” for defin­i­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of Cole Porter, Duke Elling­ton, Irv­ing Berlin, and, of course, George and Ira Gersh­win. Fitzger­ald’s record­ings of their songs played “an essen­tial role in the broad­er trans­for­ma­tion of the Gersh­win’s music from show tunes to Amer­i­can Song­book stan­dards,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan’s Gersh­win Ini­tia­tive.

What’s fas­ci­nat­ing about that trans­for­ma­tion is the way in which Fitzger­ald’s ren­di­tions of pop­u­lar songs ele­vat­ed them to eter­nal main­stream sta­tus by draw­ing on the rhyth­mic and melod­ic resources of jazz, a dis­tinct­ly Black Amer­i­can music some­times cast as a threat to the U.S. estab­lish­ment when Fitzger­ald began her career. (We need look no fur­ther than the vicious per­se­cu­tion of Bil­lie Hol­i­day by the coun­try’s first drug czar, Hen­ry Anslinger, as case in point.) Amer­i­ca may not always have been eager to embrace Fitzger­ald, but she was hap­py nonethe­less to gift the coun­try its great­est music.

Fitzger­ald’s 5‑LP set of Gersh­win songs, pro­duced by Nor­man Granz in 1959, con­tin­ues to be “the most ambi­tious of the cel­e­brat­ed song books record­ed by Ella,” Jazz Mes­sen­gers writes, “and one of the best vocal jazz albums ever made.” Record­ed two years ear­li­er by Granz in Los Ange­les, her Por­gy and Bess with Louis Arm­strong “remains one of the true gems in jazz his­to­ry.” Fitzger­ald’s voice is unpar­al­leled. She could do almost any­thing with it, from reach­ing down low to imi­tate Arm­strong’s growl to break­ing a glass with her high C for a Mem­o­rex ad twen­ty years lat­er.

Dizzy Gille­spie once said that Fitzger­ald could sing back any­thing he played for her, and she cit­ed horns as her pri­ma­ry vocal inspi­ra­tion. “She sang like an instru­ment,” says pianist Bil­ly Tay­lor, who played with her in the 1940s, “like a clar­inet or like a trom­bone or like a what­ev­er.” The irony, of course, is that horns and many oth­er melod­ic instru­ments achieved their tim­bre by try­ing to imi­tate the human voice. Fitzger­ald had the orig­i­nal; she need­ed no accom­pa­ni­ment — she was the music, with “impec­ca­ble tim­ing and per­fect pitch,” NPR writes. “In fact, band musi­cians said they would tune up to her voice.”

In the video at the top from a per­for­mance in Berlin in 1968, you can see Fitzger­ald “destroy” the har­mon­ic minor scale, as the YouTube uploader puts it, while pianist Tee Car­son looks on in awe. The song, from Por­gy and Bess (see the full per­for­mance fur­ther up), is just one of many writ­ten by the Gersh­wins that “tran­scends its musi­cal the­atre ori­gins” due to Fitzger­ald’s impro­visato­ry bril­liance and musi­cal sen­si­tiv­i­ty. Just above, you can hear that live vocal track stripped of instru­men­ta­tion except Ella’s voice in a Wings of Pega­sus analy­sis video of the “depth of her expres­sion” and vocal per­fec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ella Fitzgerald’s Lost Inter­view about Racism & Seg­re­ga­tion: Record­ed in 1963, It’s Nev­er Been Heard Until Now

How Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Helped Break Ella Fitzger­ald Into the Big Time (1955)

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Record­ings by Great Female Jazz Musi­cians

How “America’s First Drug Czar” Waged War Against Bil­lie Hol­i­day and Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you fol­low music news, or just scan enter­tain­ment head­lines, you might have noticed that a few weeks after his death, beloved Foo Fight­ers’ drum­mer Tay­lor Hawkins’ final days became a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject. Accord­ing to a Rolling Stone arti­cle quot­ing Pearl Jam drum­mer Matt Cameron and Red Hot Chili Pep­pers drum­mer Chad Smith, Hawkins was exhaust­ed by the Foo Fight­ers’ tour­ing sched­ule. He need­ed a break, and he did­n’t get one. Both drum­mers have issued state­ments dis­avow­ing the arti­cle. Mean­while, as GQ not­ed, a Rolling Stone “Insta­gram post high­light­ing the arti­cle is being slammed by crit­i­cal fans in the com­ments.”

Argu­ing over hearsay about a musi­cian’s state of mind before his death seems like a poor way to remem­ber him soon after he’s gone. If you’d rather steer clear of this scene, the orig­i­nal Rolling Stone piece is still worth check­ing out for its intro­duc­tion: a feel­go­od sto­ry from three days before Hawkins, 50, was found in his Bogotá hotel room.

After Foo Fight­ers can­celed a head­lin­ing con­cert in Asun­ción, the cap­i­tal city of Paraguay, due to weath­er, Hawkins end­ed up hang­ing out with nine-year-old drum­mer Emma Sofía Per­al­ta out­side the Sher­a­ton. She’d brought her drum kit and played for him. He posed for a pho­to with her, “crouch­ing next to her and flash­ing the sort of warm, toothy smile that estab­lished him as one of the most beloved drum­mers in rock.”

More details of Hawkins’ death may become pub­lic, or they may not. But they should­n’t obscure the rea­son he was famous in life. Like every­one else in the band, but most espe­cial­ly his “twin” Dave Grohl, Hawkins always looked like he was hav­ing the time of his life, whether onstage or meet­ing fans. The band won mass devo­tion not only through stel­lar song­writ­ing and per­for­mances but through sheer, unbri­dled enthu­si­asm: the kind of spir­it that drove 1000 musi­cians to stage a con­cert cov­er­ing “Learn to Fly” in 2015, in a bid to bring the Foo Fight­ers to the town of Cese­na, Italy. It worked, and thus was born the Rockin’ 1000 con­cept.

Get­ting a hand­ful of rock musi­cians to show up on time is a feat in itself, much less 1000 of them, all play­ing not only on time but in time as well. Rockin’ 1000 has pulled this off con­sis­tent­ly since they start­ed, and their trib­ute above to Hawkins above is no dif­fer­ent — a sta­di­um-sized cov­er ver­sion of “My Hero” that con­veys all the emo­tion of the orig­i­nal while mul­ti­ply­ing it by the ampli­tude of a hun­dred march­ing bands. A fit­ting remem­brance of what Hawkins meant to his fans if ever there was one.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Foo Fight­ers’ Tay­lor Hawkins (RIP) Give a Drum­ming Mas­ter­class

Watch 1,000 Musi­cians Play the Foo Fight­ers’ “Learn to Fly,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

Dave Grohl Falls Off­stage & Breaks His Leg, Then Con­tin­ues the Show as The Foo Fight­ers Play Queen’s “Under Pres­sure” (2015)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness