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Black Cat Bones
Rocking in the Free World
Tales of Voodoo, Mojo and Friendship on the Road with South Africa's band of blues rock brothers
Written and Photographed by Willim welsyn
For the past six years Baily Hanekom, a guy who works half of the year as a problem-solving engineer at an energy power plant in Russia, puts together a private little New Year’s festival at Zeegunst, his family’s beach property in Fransmanshoek near Mossel Bay. He’ll book about six or seven bands to perform over the course of three days heading into the New Year. He’ll pay them, feed them, supply them with booze and allow them and their girlfriends to swim at their choice of three private, untouched beaches.
Rihanna
Relentless pop juggernaut or poster chIld for bad choIces? RIhanna doesn’t want you to worry
about her
By Josh Eels
Photography by Terry Richardson
So a superfamous pop star walks into a comedy club… Actually, “walks” isn’t quite right. Rihanna more glides. She slips in through the back door, GoodFellas-style, at 10pm sharp, and makes a beeline for the corner table, sliding into the chocolate-leather booth in her stonewashed Lee jeans with a red cartoon heart sewn on the butt like a tattoo. Her long ombré hair is shaved on the left side, à la Skrillex, and she smells like her own perfume (her third, Nude, has notes of guava and sandalwood). “Jack and ginger,” she says to the waitress.
Cama Gwini
With her third album in seven eventful years, Native Rhythms’ prodigal daughter CAMA GWINI
“dies”, comes back, and returns rock’n’roll to the African Watchtower. BONGANI MADONDO books a ticket aboard rock’n’roll’s noisiest township space-ride
Photography by Andrew Ndiweni
“RE-BIRTH”: The 29-year-old Cama Gwini’s latest and third ring in the three-tiered rings of fire of African Healing Music she’s been experimenting with over the years, sometimes disastrously, sometimes ambitiously, sometimes so ache-full as to belie her age, is the sort of record that would make you go loco.
Rolling Stone Issue 16
Donna Summer
March 23, 1978
While Mikal Gilmore was interviewing Donna Summer, her boyfriend suggested she see a “psychic” of his acquaintance. A month later, she broke with her management... and her boyfriend. It’s lonely at the top of the disco heap.
By Mikal Gilmore
Until I saw Donna Summer a year ago on a Midnight Special with Lou Rawls, I’d viewed her music simply as brilliantly packaged aural sex, nothing too meaty, and, in spite of its implied intimacies, nothing too personal. But when she joined Rawls on the dais dressed like a Bloomingdales Cleopatra, she sang probably the most a ectingly full-blooded version of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” I’d ever heard. This wasn’t the cooing voice she used on records.