Former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick reflected that even support from the band’s fans couldn’t save Union, the group he formed with John Corabi in the late ‘90s. The project took form after Kiss’ return to makeup with its original lineup meant there was no room for him, and after Corabi had been ejected from Motley […]
A Michael McDonald solo album seemed kind of inevitable by the summer of 1982. Born in Missouri, McDonald moved to Los Angeles in 1970 with his band Blue, worked with Steely Dan from 1975-76, and then joined the Doobie Brothers in 1975, quickly giving the band two big hits — “Takin’ It to the Streets” […]
Jefferson Airplane’s legacy may be intertwined with peace, love and the hippie counterculture, but the vibes were far from serene on Aug. 21, 1972, during the group’s performance at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio. A crowd of roughly 20,000 fans filled the stadium that day, but the trouble started among the hundreds more who […]
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 […]
Whitney Houston "The Bodyguard" (Red)