Fifty years ago, the Doobie Brothers‘ Tom Johnston urged people to “Listen to the Music.” Fifteen years later, he helped them do some dirty dancing. Johnston was, at least on paper, an outlier on the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing, the hit 1987 film about Catskills summer-resort life that grossed more than $214 million at the […]
Writing about his heroin addiction inadvertently led Motley Crue‘s Nikki Sixx to another musical habit. Six years after the release of the band’s best-selling 2001 memoir The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band in 2001, Sixx decided to dig a little deeper into his own story with The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life […]
Sammy Hagar has released a cover of Elvis Costello‘s “Pump It Up” as the second single from his forthcoming album with the Circle. He says the Top 25 U.K. hit from 1978 “has been a Circle go-to backstage jam before shows.” Hagar first mentioned possibly recording it last year in a post that also featured […]
Both of Perry Farrell’s best-known bands have started making a lot of noise all of a sudden. To be fair, Jane’s Addiction was already set for a busy year. They scheduled a handful of festival dates this summer, including Lollapalooza and Welcome to Rockville, but later had to pull out due to guitarist Dave Navarro’s […]
Paul Simon‘s surprise July appearance at the Newport Folk Festival might be part of a larger return to music. Sessions are on-going at New York’s Reservoir Studios for a new album that’s tentatively titled The Seven Psalms, according to Spin magazine. In a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell for the Miracle and Wonder audiobook series, Simon […]
Michael McDonald had been a key collaborator on the Doobie Brothers‘ platinum-selling Top 10 album Takin’ It to the Streets. He wrote or co-wrote four of the 1976 LP’s nine songs while singing on five. Two of them became Top 40 hits, however, leading to a seismic shift in roles for the follow-up. “By the […]
As incredible as it might sound now, there was a time when televised entertainment wasn’t available around the clock. That all changed with Burt Sugarman’s music-oriented variety show The Midnight Special, which debuted on Aug. 19, 1972. Until the early ’70s, it was standard practice for most TV stations to shut off their programming after […]
It’s been decades since the Kinks notched a Top 10 hit with “Lola,” but Dave Davies believes the song is more relevant than ever. The 1970 single was controversial upon release because of lyrical content which detailed the narrator’s romantic encounter with what was presumed to be a drag queen or transgender individual. Some stations […]
The Rolling Stones are well known for their dogged endurance. Very little deters them. It’s an unwavering attitude that applies to their touring schedule as much as it does to their willingness to think outside the box. “The more ways you do it, the better it is because you get more variety,” Mick Jagger said in a 2007 […]
Eddie Vedder celebrates the communal spirit of Joe Strummer in a new video cover of “Long Shadow,” a song the late Clash frontman originally recorded with the Mescaleros. The fireside clip, released ahead of what would have been Strummer’s 70th birthday on Aug. 21, shows Vedder strumming an acoustic guitar outdoors. “I hear punks talk […]