Favorite Seventies Artists In The News

Posted by Administrator on February 18th, 2015

Neil Young is teaming up with Supreme, a US clothing company known for skateboarding and street attire, to promote their clothing line. Young is featured in a new ad campaign for the 20-year-old streetwear company, who has partnered with the likes of Lou Reed and Shane McGowan in the past. Supreme are also selling a Neil Young T-shirt which is currently available on their website. - New Musical Express, 2/18/15......Alice Cooper has signed on to perform at the 2015 Rock in Rio festival in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, this September with a backing back that will include Aerosmith's Joe Perry and actor Johnny Depp. The group will perform under the name Hollywood Vampires, which takes its name from infamous group of heavy-drinking rock stars that Cooper formed in the 1970s alongside John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Bernie Taupin, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon and Micky Dolenz. Cooper has recently been serving as he opening act for veteran "hair band" Motley Crue, who are currently in the middle of an 18-month farewell tour that will mark the end of the group after 24 years. Cooper has offered to "kill them onstage" during their final gig on New Year's Eve with one of the infamous guillotines in his live shows. - NME, 2/15/15...... Van Morrison announced on Feb. 17 he'll releasing a new album, Duets: Re-Working the Catalogue, on Mar. 24 via RCA Records that sees the Celtic crooner returning to some of the songs he made famous with the help of classic and contemporary artists. Morrison will rework such tracks as "Wild Honey" with Joss Stone, "Some Peace of Mind" with Bobby Womack, "Higher Than the World" with George Benson, and "Irish Heartbeat" with Mark Knopfler. Recorded in Belfast and London over the past year, the 16-track album was produced by Morrison, Don Was and Bob Rock, and finds the rock icon "deliberately steering away from his more well-known classics." Duets's first single, a new version of 1990's "Real Real Gone" featuring Michael Bublé, is already available. Duets will be Morrison's follow-up to 2012's Born to Sing: Plan B. - Billboard, 2/17/15...... Paul McCartney gave a Valentine's Day present to fans in New York City on Feb. 14 when he performed a semi-private show in an Irving Plaza hall holding barely more than a thousand people for a $40 admission fee. Paul played a mix of Beatles and Wings favorites, including "Matchbox," "Eight Days a Week," "All My Loving," "I've Just Seen a Face," and "Jet," as well as a recent composition, the lovely minor-key ballad "My Valentine." The following day, Macca participated in an all-star afterparty jam for the 40th anniversary celebration of NBC's Saturday Night Live with such stars as Taylor Swift, Prince, Bill Murray, Martin Short and Dan Aykroyd, among others. The set notably included Swift's "Shake It Off" and the Beatles'"I Saw Her Standing There." The massive three and a half hour event included more than 100 guests, and became the most tweeted TV show in history. - The Hollywood Reporter/Billboard, 2/15/15...... In other Beatles-related news, it was announced on Feb. 16 that the historic Abbey Road Studios in northwest London are set for a multi-million pound renovation, in order to bring in more pop stars and also help with the creation of film scores. The studios will boast brand new, state-of-the-art equipment including a Dolby Atmos system, a surround sound system set to be used in the making of film soundtracks. The work is scheduled to be completed in 2016. - NME, 2/16/15...... Elsewhere on the Fab Four front, a new photo exhibit by Pattie Boyd, the former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton, went on display at the San Francisco Art Exchange on Feb. 17. Boyd, 69, took many photos of some of the era's biggest rock stars including Harrison, Clapton, and the Beatles during their 1968 visit to India. "I feel very lucky that I was part of that whole scene in the '60s and '70s," Boyd says. "I love ooking at the photographs because everyone was young, and they were so gorgeous to look at." Boyd was married to Harrison from 1966 to 1977 and Clapton from 1979 to 1989. The photos will remain on exhibit until Mar. 15. - CNN, 2/12/15...... Jimmy Page was honored with a Rock'N'Soul award during the New Musical Express Awards ceremony at London's O2 Academy Brixton on Feb. 17. Page was on hand to accept the award handed out by NME Best New Band honoree Royal Blood and give an acceptance speech. "Thanks so much for this award, NME. It's a real honour to get it, [but] as far as whatever I've managed to do in music, I've learned from records and my heroes. I'm only just passing on the baton. I got the music and passed it on. There it is, for everyone," the guitarist said. Page recently oversaw a remastered deluxe reissue of Led Zeppelin's 1975 double LP, Physical Graffiti. - NME, 2/18/15...... In other award show news, late Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia will be among the class of 2015 inductees into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June, it was announced on Feb. 18. The SHOF's 46th Annual Induction and Awards Dinner will take place at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. - AP/Billboard, 2/18/15...... '60s teen singer/songwriter Lesley Gore, known for such epic songs of teen angst including "It's My Party," "Judy's Turn to Cry" and "You Don't Own Me," died of lung cancer on Feb. 16 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. She was 68. Brooklyn-born and New Jersey-raised, Gore was discovered by Quincy Jones as a teenager and signed to Mercury Records. Her other hits include "She's A Fool," "That's the Way Boys Are" and "Maybe I Know, and she co-wrote with her brother, Michael, the Academy Award-nominated "Out Here On My Own" from the film Fame. Gore also played Catwoman's sidekick in the cult '60s TV comedy Batman. She officially came out to the public when she hosted several episodes of the PBS series, In The Life, which dealt with gay and lesbian issues. During the 2012 presidential campaign, she turned "You Don't Own Me" into an online video public service announcement demanding reproductive rights, and had been working on a stage version of her life when she died. - AP, 2/16/15...... Radio, TV and voiceover performer Gary Owens, best known as the announcer on NBC's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In from 1968 to 1973, died on Feb. 12 at his home in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 80. Mr. Owens, who had been diabetic since the age of 8, also lent his voice to more than 3,000 cartoons, providing the voice of cartoon character Space Ghost as well as Blue Falcon, Roger Ramjet, Powdered Toast Man and even Batman. Mr. Owens' possessed a baritone voice with impeccable nuanced timing, and he was equally adept at comedy or deadpan delivery. He was also the announcer on Sesame Street since its inception in 1969, and was one of the original contributors to PBS series The Electric Company. - Variety, 2/13/15.

Bob Dylan announced a 19-city US trek on Feb. 12 that begins on Apr. 10 in Atlantic City, N.J., and hitting other mid-sized markets including Baltimore (4/11), Richmond, Va. (4/12), Savannah, Ga. (4/14), Montgomery, Ala. (4/15), North Charlston, S.C. (4/17) and St. Augustine, Fla. (4/18). Dylan will wrap the tour in San Antonio, Tex., on May 7. Dylan's 36th studio album, Shadows in the Night, has moved 50,000 units in its first week of release, giving it the No. 1 spon on Billboard Top Rock Albums chart. Shadows also scored a No. 7 position on the Hot 200 albums chart, some 50 years after he first reached the Hot 200 Top 10 with Bringing It All Back Home on May 29, 1965. Meanwhile, ELO's 1976 hit "Evil Woman" benefited from Jeff Lynne's performance of the song on the Grammy Awards show on Feb. 8. The song soared on the Rock Digital Songs chart by 958 percent to 6,000 sold. The other track that the Jeff Lynne-led band performed, "Mr. Blue Sky" (from 1978), surged by 822 percent to 5,000. - Billboard, 2/12/15...... Jimmy Buffett has added a handful of summer dates to his 2015 Workin' 'n Playin' tour, which gets underway on Apr. 1 in Key West, Fla. Buffett and his Coral Reefer Band will play St. Louis, Bristol, Va., Cincinnati, and Chicago during June, before wrapping in Camden, N.J., on Aug. 20. Other dates include West Palm Beach, Fla., Orlando, Fla., Tampa, Fla., New Orleans and Houston, Tex. - Billboard, 2/13/15...... Neil Diamond will kick off a 63-date North American tour on Feb. 27 in Allentown, Pa., and is promising fans can expect to be treated to many of his biggest hits along with selections from his latest album, Melody Road. "There's always a lot of songs in a show people know," Diamond says. "I can't leave them out, so the shows get bigger and bigger. This show will probably have more songs in it than any show I've ever done because I don't want to take out 'I Am I Said' or 'Sweet Caroline' or 'Holly Holy.' And there are 15 or 20 like those, and I also want to make sure I do a fair share of the new songs and keep the audience involved in every way. It's going to have a lot of songs, and it's gonna be a big show." The 74-year-old singer added that he's also "anxious" to share newer songs from his last two Rick Rubin-produced LPs because they "work very well." Diamond will be on the road through May 31. - Billboard, 2/13/15...... '70s disco icon Giorgio Moroder will support current pop sensation Kylie Minogue on her 5-date Australian arena tour, which begins Mar. 14 at Perth Arena and will run through Mar. 21 at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. Moroder, who has produced '70s stars including Donna Summer, David Bowie, Blondie and Freddie Mercury, will play a DJ set at each Kylie show on the tour. - Billboard, 2/13/15...... Former Genesis member Mike Rutherford has just released a memoir, The Living Years: The First Genesis Memoir, in the US after becoming a best-seller in his native Britain in 2014. The Living Years is dominated by Rutherford's life with Genesis, and he credits the book with helping to bring the five key members of the group together for group interview segments seen in the documentary Sum of the Parts that aired on Showtime (and the BBC) during October and was released on DVD in January. Rutherford says there's "nothing planned" for a Genesis reunion. "We've done an awful lot recently. But it's been nice, and I do treasure the fact that we're still sort of friends. That's good." Instead, his main focus now is his spinoff band Mike + The Mechanics, which he reactivated in 2010 with vocalists Tom Howard and Andrew Roachford and recorded a new album, The Road, that came out in 2011. Rutherford is bringing the group across the pond for its first North American tour since 1989, starting February 26-27 in Alexandria, Va., followed by a European trek during April and May. - Billboard, 2/12/15...... Paul McCartney's new collaboration with Kanye West and Rihanna, "FourFiveSeconds," has just topped Billboard's Top Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, giving the former Beatle a new chart record: he now has the longest span between No. 1 songs in the history of that particular Billboard chart. McCartney first topped the chart in 1983 with "The Girl Is Mine," his duet with Michael Jackson, and now "FourFiveSeconds" gives him a 32-year span on the chart. The record was previously held by Ray Charles, for "Let's Go Get Stoned" in 1966 through 1990's "I'll Be Good To You." - Billboard, 2/12/15...... In other Beatles-related news, Yoko Ono will release two 10-inch vinyls on Feb. 18 to mark her 82nd birthday called "Antony & Yoko" and "Yoko Ono & John Zorn." On "Antony & Yoko," Ono and Antony Zorn perform a vocal duet over piano on song "I Love You Earth," while "Yoko Ono & John Zorn" features "intense and imaginative" improvisations on song "Blink" from Ono and John Zorn. Ono's birthday will also see the release of a new photo book by Bob Gruen and Judy Denberg called See Hear Yoko. It will include black and white photos of the singer, as well as 25 years' worth of interviews. Meanwhile, John Lennon's sister Julia Baird narrates a new documentary called Come Together which features a handful of the world's estimated 8,000 Beatles cover bands as they set out to pay homage to the most influential band of all time during the annual "International Beatleweek" in Liverpool. The film, which was released digitally on Feb. 3, takes place in a variety of Beatle-friendly haunts, including the famed Cavern Club, which launched the four mop-top Brits into international superstars. - New Musical Express/Billboard, 2/9/15...... Elsewhere on the Fab Four front, Ringo Starr has announced that his 18th studio album, Postcards From Paradise, will drop on Mar. 30. The 11-track album will feature original tracks from Ringo, with such guest contributors as Joe Walsh, Benmont Tench, Dave Stewart, Ann Marie Simpson, Richard Marx, Amy Keys, Peter Frampton, Nathan East and Glen Ballard. Starr will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Oh., in its "Award For Musical Excellence" category, on Apr. 18. - NME, 2/11/15...... Def Leppard has announced a 48-date summer concert tour with Styx and Tesla that will launch June 23 in Tampa, Fla., and run through Oct. 4 in Bismarck, N.D. "We've toured with both of these bands before," band frontman Joe Elliott says. "Styx is a great bunch of guys and as American as mom's apple pie all the way through. And we had Tesla on board when we did the Hysteria tour back in '87; they were out for at least six or seven months with us before they went off to do their own thing. So it'll be a great time on stage and backstage, I think." - Billboard, 2/12/15...... Eddie Van Halen traveled to Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12 to donate some of his instruments to the National Museum of American History and discuss making music and his innovative guitar and amp designs, some of which he holds patents on. Van Halen says he considers his most important innovation with his guitar was "combining a Gibson (guitar) with a Fender." "There was no Fender or a Stratocaster-style guitar with a humbucker in it," he says. "After that, every company on the planet made a guitar like that." Van Halen recently announced they will release a 25-track live album, its first with founding singer David Lee Roth, and it's waiting for a release date. - AP, 2/11/15...... Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood says the Stones are planning a summer tour of North America in 2015. "Yeah, we had a meeting in New York with the boys and we're gonna come [to] North America again in the summer," Wood says. Wood offered no details about when those dates will take place or where else the band might play during the year, but in 2014 fellow guitarist Keith Richards mentioned the possibility of South America. The North American tour, if it happens, would be the Stones' first North American dates in decades without saxophonist Bobby Keys, who died Dec. 2 after skipping the Australia and New Zealand dates due to his declining health. Meanwhile, Wood is prepping for the May release of a diary he wrote in 1965 about the year he spent playing in his first band, the Birds, titled How Can It Be? A Rock & Roll Diary, via Britain's Genesis Publications. The book replicates his handwritten pages and adds some new commentary and sketches. - Billboard, 2/11/15...... On Feb. 11 AC/DC announced formal plans for a late summer North American tour, named the Rock or Bust Tour (after their 2014 album). The 13-date trek will kick off on Aug. 22 in Foxboro, Mass., and hit venues in East Rutherford, N.J. (8/26), Montreal (8/31), Ottawa (9/3), Detroit (9/8), Toronto (9/10), Chicago (9/15), Vancouver, B.C. (9/22) and San Francisco (9/25) before wrapping in Los Angeles on Sept. 28. The tour will follow a string of European dates which begins on May 5 and runs through late July. The dates will include replacement drummer Chris Slade, who performed with the band on Feb. 8 at the Grammys. AC/DC last toured the world 2008 through 2010 on the Black Ice World Tour. - Billboard, 2/11/15...... Barry Manilow kicked off what he promises will be his "last big tour" on Feb. 11 in Omaha, Neb. The crooner's final tour will include 27 dates before wrapping up June 17 in his hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y. "It doesn't mean I'm retiring or anything. I'll do shows and I'll promote albums if I make any more, but no more big tours," Manilow says. "That's it. It's too much packing. It's 40 years -- more than that, really -- of packing and waiting for room service. People think it's glamorous, but glamorous is the last word I would use for this job. You don't see anything; you see the inside of your hotel room, you see the inside of a car, you see the inside of your dressing room and then you're gone. I haven't gone sightseeing, ever. It's a job." Manilow's One Last Time! Tour also coincides with the 40th anniversary of "Mandy," his first No. 1 hit and a song that launched a string of 16 top 10 hits between 1974 and 1981. "I'm trying to do as many of the well-known songs as I can, hardly any album cuts this time," he adds. - Billboard, 2/11/15...... Chic featuring Nile Rodgers have announced a March 2015 UK tour in support of "I'll Be There," their first single in 23 years. "I'll Be There" will be released on Mar. 20, coinciding with a UK tour, while their new album will be out later in 2015 after it was announced that they had signed to Warner Bros Records. The group will play London (3/20), Leeds (3/22), Glasgow (3/23), Manchester (3/24), Birmingham (3/25) and London (6/21). - New Musical Express, 2/9/15...... On Feb. 10 a federal appeals court revived a copyright lawsuit against Frankie Valli and fellow Four Seasons band member Robert Gaudio over "Jersey Boys," the popular musical about the band. Donna Corbello, the widow of Four Seasons band member Thomas DeVito, sued Valli and Gaudio in 2011 for copyright infringement, claiming the musical was based in part on an unpublished autobiography that her late husband ghost-wrote. DeVito maintains she is entitled to share in the profits from the musical's success. Daniel Mayeda, an attorney for Valli and Gaudio, said he was disappointed in the ruling, but he had not yet decided whether he would appeal. Corbello is also suing DeVito. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that DeVito had transferred his copyright in the autobiography to Valli and Gaudio, and therefore had to account to Corbello for any profits he obtained from it. - AP, 2/10/15...... It has come to light that last November Donny Osmond personally called a lifelong fan who is dying of cancer and was in hospice care until her impending death. The woman, unable to walk and ravaged by brain cancer, was in her mid 50's and a loyal fan of Osmond's. The woman's husband, not knowing how to get in touch with Osmond, or knowing anyone in show business at all, sent a message through Osmond's website, basically a "Hail Mary" pass, explaining the situation and that there wasn't much time, and asked if there was some way for the busy entertainer to please get in touch with his wife and provide a few words of cheer. Four days later, the entertainer personally called the woman to ask how she was doing and thank her for her support all these years....... In other '70s teen heartthrob news, David Cassidy filed for bankruptcy protection on Feb. 11. Cassidy, 64, reportedly owes hundreds of thousands to creditors, with debts to companies such as Wells Fargo ($292,598), American Express ($21,952), and Citi ($17,150). Cassidy's financial troubles are in addition to his brushes with the law recently for drunk driving arrests. He was arrested for DUI for the third time in Jan. 2014, after having been previously arrested for drunk driving in Aug. 2013 and Nov. 2010. In Feb. 2014, Cassidy's wife Sue filed for divorce after 23 years of marriage. "This has been looming for some time," Sue told TMZ.com of the breakup. "I am truly heartbroken that our marriage is ending." - US Weekly, 2/12/15...... Joe Maudlin, the bassist for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, died on the morning of Feb. 7 in Nashville. He was 74. The Lubbock, Tex.-born Maudlin replaced Crickets bassist Larry Welborn in 1957, and over the next two years the band scored a string of Top 10 pop hits, including "That'll Be the Day," "Maybe Baby," "Oh Boy!," "Rave On" and "Heartbeat." Holly's dream came to an end on Feb. 3, 1959 when he, Richie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson were killed in a light plane accident outside of Clear Lake, Iowa. Mauldin left the Crickets in 1965 and moved into sound engineering, doing much of his work at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles. He also occasionally reunited with drummer Jerry Allison as the Crickets over the decades. The Crickets, including Mauldin, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012 in a special committee vote that was meant to right the mistakes made in the past of inducting lead singers without their backing bands. He is also a member of the West Texas Walk of Fame in Lubbock and the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville. 2/8/15...... Actress Lizabeth Scott, whose sultry looks and smoky voice led many a man astray in 1940s and '50s film noir, died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 31 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 92. Scott aspired to be a stage actress but was stereotyped as the femme fatale in the hard-boiled, film noir world of crime, tough talk and dark secrets. - L.A. Times, 2/2/15.

One night in the Seventies, music-biz executive Russ Regan had a strange dream. "I saw Japanese planes flying ot Pearl Harbor with 'Here Comes the Sun" playing," he says. "I thought, 'Wow.'" That vision paved the way for one of the oddest rock movies ever, All This and World War II, which paired covers of Beatles songs with footage from newsreels and movies: Tina Turner singing "Come Together" to images of Japanese soldiers, Rod Stewart doing "Get Back" to marching Nazi troops, the Bee Gees' "Golden Slumbers" to the bombing of London. "It was sometimes a bit of a reach," admits director Susan Winslow, "but there had to be some connection." The movie -- a flop when it was released in 1976 -- remains in the can, but its soundtrack (which also includes Fab Four remakes by Elton John, Keith Moon, Bryan Ferry and more) has just been reissued by Culture Factory USA. "The interpretations are compelling," says the label's Rory MacPherson. Regan, who's still proud of the project, knows it remains controversial: "At the time, I said, 'There might be a lot of people out there who don't understand what we're doing here,' and I was right. But there will never be anything like it. It's one of the first music videos." - Rolling Stone, 2/12/15.