Favorite Seventies Artists In The News

Posted by Administrator on September 13th, 2019

Eddie Money, the '70s and '80s classic rock star who became rock radio's most relatable "everyman" with such top 40 hit singles as "Baby, Hold On," "Two Tickets to Paradise" and "Take Me Home Tonight," died on Sept. 4 after being diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer earlier in 2019. He was 70. Born Edward Mahoney in Brooklyn on Mar. 21, 1949, Money was the son of a New York City policeman who seemed destined to follow in his dad's footsteps when he attended the New York Police Academy. At night, however, he moonlighted as Eddie Money in a rock & roll band and decided he loved rock more than police work. Money quit the academy and moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he sang in Bay Area bars and became managed by local promoter Bill Graham, who negotiated a contract for the rough-voiced singer with Columbia Records. His self-titled debut LP was released in 1977 and spawned two Top 40 hits, "Baby, Hold On" and "Two Tickets to Paradise," which became his signature turnes and eventually were certified double-platinum by the RIAA. Money continued to release hit albums and singles for the next several years, including 1979's Life For the Taking and 1982's No Control, which followed his debut album to platinum status. After the latter LP he maintained a low profile for about three years as he worked to overcome a drug problem, but made a huge comeback in 1986 with "Take Me Home Tonight," which would become his biggest hit.The single -- which featured '60s pop legend Ronnie Spector and borrowed the iconic hook and drum beat from her own biggest smash with The Ronettes, "Be My Baby" -- peaked at No. 4 on the pop chart, while its striking black and white video established Money as an MTV star as well as a radio one, and he became a familiar face in the early days of MTV. He continued his chart success with such singles as "I Wanna Go Back" (No. 14, 1987), "Endless Nights" (No. 24, 1987) "Walk on Water" (No. 9, 1988) and "The Love in Your Eyes" (No. 24, 1989). His final top 20 entry came in 1990 with the greatest hits LP single "Peace in Our Time," and he faded from the mainstream with the rise of alternative rock in the '90s. Nevertheless, Money remained a draw on the touring circuit, his songs continued to be heard on classic rock radio and also appeared in a variety of commercials, TV shows and movies -- with "Take Me Home Tonight" even providing the title of a 2011 retro comedy film set in 1988. Money's engaging presence made him a natural fit on reality TV, and he starred in the AXS cable channel family show Real Money in 2018, during which his recent health struggles were revealed. His final album, Brand New Day, had been scheduled for release this July, but delayed after the singer was forced to undergo a heart valve procedure earlier that month, which reportedly led to him developing pneumonia. "I missed the boat when it came to the big money," Money once said, perhaps referring to AOR giants in his field like Bruce Springsteen or john Mellencamp, but his attitude remained positive. "The kids aren't in jail, they're not in rehab, nobody's wrecked the car this week and there's still milk in the refrigerator," he said in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone. "I'm having a good month." A statement from his family on Sept. 13 said that Money "passed away peacefully early this morning." It continued: "It is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to our loving husband and father. We cannot imagine our world without him. We are grateful that he will live on forever through his music." Among the fellow rock stars paying tribute to him on Twitter were Sammy Hagar ("He put up a good fight. And his songs will play on forever"), Paul Stanley ("I remember his first album which I LOVED. A fine singer through the years), and Rick Springfield ("So sad to hear our rock and roll brother Eddie Money passed away this morning. Love to your family and great memories of you Eddie"). - Billboard, Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock, 9/13/19.

Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, who plays a wealthy art dealer in the new movie The Burnt Orange Heresy, attended the Venice Film Festival on the first weekend of September to help promote the closing film from director Giuseppe Capotondi. Jagger, with actor Donald Sutherland who also appears in the film, quickly turned political when they were asked to comment on a peaceful demonstration about climate change and anti-immigration policies that overtook the red carpet earlier in the day. "I'm absolutely behind that," said Jagger of the protest. "I'm glad they're doing that because they're the ones who are going to inherit the planet." He then blasted U.S. Pres. Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris Agreement. "We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the U.S., where all the environmental controls that were put in place -- that were just about adequate -- have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out," he said. "The U.S. should be the world leader in environmental control but now it has decided to go the other way," Jagger added. Jagger also talked about his role in the new movie. "I'm not really a collector. I throw things away," he said. "I buy things and then lose them. I'm a completely hopeless collector. I'm the complete opposite." - The Hollywood Reporter, 9/7/19...... I Am Woman, a biopic of '70s Australian singer and women's rights pioneer Helen Reddy, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 5. The principal cast ofI Am Woman is Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Reddy, Evan Peters as Reddy's manager and (now ex) second husband Jeff Wold, and Danielle Macdonald as trailblazing music journalist and Reddy's close friend Lilian Roxon. While director Unjoo Moon knew Reddy well, met Jeff Wold and had the "whole family involved" in the biopic, its star, 24-year-old Cobham-Hervey, chose not to meet Helen in preparation for the role. Hers is not the voice we hear in the film, but rather a combination of Reddy and Australian singer Chelsea Cullen. The soundtrack includes an original song, "Revolution," sung by Reddy's granddaughter Lily Donat and written and produced by Alex Hope (Alanis Morissette). Moon says that Reddy is endorsing his film "absolutely." "She really gave it her blessing. She really enjoyed it. And her whole family, 'cause obviously it includes a lot of them in the film," he says. Moon added his film is still in need of a distribution deal. Reddy, who scored 15 top 40 singles on the pop chart with her signature tune "I Am Woman" going all the way to No. 1, officially retired in 2002 but still performs periodically, most recently in Las Vegas in 2015. She also sang "I Am Woman" a cappella at the 2017 Women's March in Los Angeles. Moon says he's still looking for a distributor for I Am Woman. - Billboard, 9/6/19...... English New Wave singer Gary Numan, who scored a No. 9 single in the U.S. in 1979 with "Cars," has reflected on the 40th anniversary of his sole U.S. hit and top 20 album The Pleasure Principle from which the single was taken. "I'd been out to buy a bass guitar, because I wanted to learn to play bass guitar better... I thought it would be useful in the studio," Numan says. "Still living in my mum and dad's house, I came home from London, and having bought the guitar -- I've still got it, actually -- I took it out of the case, I put it on my lap, and I played [the first four notes of 'Cars']. And I thought, 'Oh, that sounds all right.' The very first thing! The very first four notes that I played when I picked the thing up, having not been a bass player, was f---ing 'Cars'! There is no way you can put that down to any kind of talent... That is just as lucky as you can get!" Numan added that it "took me 10 minutes to write that entire song, all the parts for it. I mean, there's only three... another 20 minutes to put the music to the lyrics, but I think I'd done the whole song in 30 minutes... It's the quickest song I ever wrote, and I'm still learning ridiculously well from it today, 40 years later. That's luck! So for me to ever feel that I was special would be ridiculous." Numan, who has scored more than a dozen top 20 singles in the U.K., says he still hopes to have another hit in the U.S. "Every time I make a record and I put out a single, I still think that there's a chance that it might do something. I'm amazed that I've got the credibility that I've got in the U.S., having only had one big single, really. I don't know how that happened or why that happened. It may be the begrudging recognition that I'm still trying... I'm extremely optimistic." - Billboard, 9/7/19...... It was announced on Sept. 4 that Elton John and his Rocketman doppelgänger Taron Egerton will perform together at a Rocketman concert at L.A.'s Greek Theatre on Oct. 17. The concert will feature the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra playing live-to-picture all the songs from the Paramount Pictures film -- scored by Matthew Margeson -- under the direction of principal conductor John Beal. The film's music producer Giles Martin will produce the music for the performance. "I'm thrilled to debut 'Rocketman: Live in Concert'," Sir Elton said in a statement. "I can think of no better city than Los Angeles to bring the magic of this movie to life and perform live with the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra. I can't wait for the audience to experience the film in a new and profound way." It is unclear what song or songs John and Egerton will perform. Public ticket sales begin Sept. 6 via the Greek Theatre and AXS.com and will be available from $44.50 to $230. When purchasing tickets, fans will also have the opportunity to preorder John's forthcoming autobiography, Me, which will be hit shelves from Macmillan on Oct. 15. - The Hollywood Reporter, 9/4/19...... A new box set of Freddie Mercury solo material was announced on Sept. 5, what would have been the late Queen frontman's 73rd birthday. Never Boring will be the first ever curated selection of Mercury's music as well as his spoken words and visuals. Consisting of three CDs with 32 tracks, a Blu-ray and DVD featuring 12 promo videos and a 10 3x10 3 hardback book, Never Boring provides fans with the chance to delve into the musician's work outside of Queen. Never Boring's titled comes from actor Rami Malek, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Mercury. "Freddie was extreme. He was absolute, he was all or nothing, he was always or never. Freddie Mercury was never boring," Malek once said. Never Boring will hit stores on Oct. 11. - New Musical Express, 9/5/19...... Details of a new David Bowie deluxe box set called Conversation Piece that tracks the rocker's development through 1968 and 1969 were announced on Sept. 5. Conversation Piece will bring together home demos, BBC radio sessions, studio recordings with John "Hutch" Hutchinson, and tracks from the experimental music and mime group Feathers. It will also feature 12 previously unreleased tracks and demos from that era alongside a new mix of the David Bowie (aka Space Oddity in the U.S.) album by long-time Bowie producer and collaborator Tony Visconti. The set will also include a 120-page hardback book featuring exclusive memorabilia from Ken Pitt, Bowie's former manager and the David Bowie Archive. A 2019 mix of "Space Oddity" will also be available separately and will come as a CD, standard digital, 96/24 digital, and vinyl release. - NME, 9/6/19...... Meanwhile, Bowie's sometime collaborator Iggy Pop has just released his 18th studio album, Free. Free arrived on digital music platforms on Sept. 6 and includes the previously released tunes "James Bond," "Sonali" and the title track. Free, the follow-up to Pop's 2016 LP Post Pop Depression, has been described by Iggy as having "virtually nothing in common sonically with its predecessor -- or with any other Iggy Pop album." - Billboard, 9/6/19...... A new mix of the Beatles' 1969 track "Oh! Darling" has been freshened up by producer Giles Martin for the 50th anniversary release of the Fab Four's Abbey Road album on Sept. 27 via Apple Corps/Capitol/UMe. Giles freshened up the sound of "Oh! Darling," which can be heard on YouTube, to make Paul McCartney's heartfelt vocals sound sharp as ever. The deluxe Abbey Road will contain 23 outtakes and demos, as well as 17 original songs, remixed by Giles from the original multi-track tapes recorded by his father, the band's longtime producer George Martin. "The Beatles recording journey had gone through many twists and turns, learning curves and thrilling rides," McCartney wrote in the foreword for the anniversary edition packages. "Here we were -- still wondering at the magic of it all." Additionally, Apple Corps unveiled another version of "Oh! Darling," an unreleased "Take 4" from the band's Abbey Road sessions, featuring a Hammond organ from Billy Preston. - Billboard, 9/6/19...... In other Beatles-related news, Paul McCartney says headlining the 50th anniversary Glastonbury Festival could be a "remote possibility" next year. Sir Paul is the English bookies' favourite to headline the 2020 Glastonbury fest, alongside the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Elton John, and on the BBC 2's Breakfast Show on Sept. 5 he did little to quell the speculation. "I mean people are saying that it would be good if I did it, so I'm starting to think about whether I can or whether it would be a good thing. My kids are saying 'Dad we've got to talk about Glastonbury' and I think I know what they mean," said McCartney, who previously topped the Glastonbury bill in 2005. "...It is a great festival and we played there quite a long time ago so, maybe it is time to go back, I don't know, I'd have to put a few things in place and try and do that but it's starting to become some sort of remote possibility... I mean it's definitely not fixed yet but people are starting to talk about it," he added. - New Musical Express, 9/5/19....... Director Ron Howard, who co-produced the new Robbie Robertson and The Band documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, has announced a worldwide distribution deal for the movie outside of Canada. "Magnolia is going to distribute the movie theatrically around the world. We've very excited about this collaboration and partnership," Howard announced at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 6, where the film had its world premiere. Also attending the press conference was Howard's business and creative partner Brian Grazer, Once Were Brothers director Daniel Roher, and Robertson himself. Once Were Brothers is based on Robertson's 2016 memoir, Testimony, and covers the first three decades of his life. It was also executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who directed The Band's 1978 swan song concert doc The Last Waltz. - Billboard, 9/6/19...... Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford has announced he'll be releasing a holiday-themed album, Celestial, on Oct. 18 via Legacy Recordings. Halford says the album blends holiday favorites with some of his new compositions. "[Heavy metal] can look pretty intimidating. And it is a very strong, powerful experience," Halford says. "But it comes at different levels. I think the music that we've made on Celestial, for example, gives a display of that. Metal maniacs -- as we call ourselves -- are just as ready for the holidays as everybody else. And what we've tried to do with this music is to reach out to as many of those metal dimensions as we possibly can." Celestial also taps into the holiday spirit by including Halford's family, with his brother on drums, his nephew on bass, his sister on bells, and the twin guitar tandem of Robert Jones and Jon Blakey. "[The holidays are] a beautiful thing as far as bringing families together," Halford adds. "So, what better way to celebrate it than with your family, friends... and music. You must have music at Christmas time." - Billboard, 9/6/19...... For the first time since 1986, vinyl records have outsold CDs, according to a mid-year report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The 2018 RIAA reported revealed that CD sales are dying three times as fast as vinyl sales are growing, and it's more of the same in this year's. Vinyl revenue grew by 12% in the second half of 2018 and first half of 2019, and CD rates barely changed. The report also revealed that, despite vinyl's growing popularity in relation to CD sales, it still accounts for a relatively small percentage of overall music purchasing, accounting for only 4% of overall revenues. Paid subscriptions to streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, meanwhile, accounted for 62%. - New Musical Express, 9/7/19...... Valerie Harper's only child Cristina Cacciotti reportedly made a loving and funny speech about her mom's toughness during an emotional tribute to her mother on Aug. 30 at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles before her late mom was laid to rest. "I don't have balls, I have steel ovaries," Cristina remembered her mother saying. Rhoda director/producer James L. Brooks, actor Elliott Gould and actress Frances Fisher were some of the guests who came to pay their last respects. Harper suffered through years of health problems, including leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, lung cancer and brain cancer, and reportedly sunk $3 million into cancer treatments to try and stay alive, according to RadarOnline.com. Harper died at age 80 on Aug. 3. - American Media Inc./Canoe.com, 9/8/19...... Former James Bond star Sean Connery says he's recovering after riding out the recent Hurricane Dorian at his home in the Bahamas. Connery, 89, says he opted not to evacuate from his property on New Providence as the monster storm battered the islands and now admits he and his wife Marcheline are "lucky to be alive." "We are both fine," Connery told the UK's Daily Mail paper. "We were lucky compared to many others and the damage here was not great. We had been prepared for the storm, everything was ready in advance -- we weren't taking any chances and knew what to do," he added. Dorian, a Category 5 storm, levelled much of the Bahamas and claimed the lives of more than 20 people. - WENN/Canoe.com, 9/6/19...... Session guitarist Jimmy Johnson, the co-founder of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and the guitarist of the studio's sessioning group The Muscle Shoals Swampers, died on Sept. 5 of as yet unannounced causes. He was 76. Johnson started out his career in the early '60s, working as a session guitarist at Rick Hall's FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. There, he lent his guitar skills to records by acts such as Paul Simon, Rod Stewart and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He also went on to play sessions alongside soul and R&B icons such as Aretha Franklin, Etta James and Clarence Carter. Johnson later left FAME with the studio's other backup musicians Roger Hawkins, Barry Beckett and David Hood to establish the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, where they recorded albums by Levon Helm, Russell Smith and Delbert McClinton. In 1969, the Rolling Stones recorded part of theirSticky Fingers album at their studio. Johnson was credited as a recording engineer on three tracks on the LP, including "Wild Horses," "Brown Sugar" and "You Gotta Move." "Recording was in Jimmy's blood," a Facebook post by the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio read, adding that "Jimmy was a part of the family at the studio, often stopping by during tours. He was always happy to share a story about his sessions." - New Musical Express, 9/6/19...... Actress Carol Lynley, a former child model who had an intense film acting career mirroring the country's transformation from the modest Eisenhower era into the sexually frank 1960s, died of a heart attack on Sept. 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 77. Ms. Lynley may be best remembered as the nave, soft-spoken adolescent who becomes pregnant by her equally wide-eyed boyfriend, played by Brandon De Wilde, in the 1959 film Blue Denim. It was a role she had originated on Broadway the year before, when she was 16. The blond beauty then made at least a half-dozen Hollywood movies over the next eight years, but by the time she was in her mid-20s her star had faded, and she was never directly in the public eye again. Still, she did make a notable if brief comeback in 1972, when she turned up wearing hot pants and go-go boots in the disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, singing (or at least lip-syncing) the Oscar-winning song "The Morning After." Born Carole Ann Jones in New York City on Feb. 13, 1942, Ms. Lynley made her film debut, The Light in the Forest, in 1958, followed by Blue Denim and Hound-Dog Man in 1959. Her portrayal of more knowing characters began in 1961 with Return to Peyton Place followed by Under the Yum-Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon in 1963. She was 23 when she posed discreetly nude in Playboy magazine and played the title role in Harlow (1965), a biographical film about the 1930s screen star and sex symbol Jean Harlow. That same year, she won positive reviews as a distraught young mother in Otto Preminger's London-set thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing, but neither critics nor fans responded to her in the same way as they had during her teenage years. Ms. Lynley was was a favorite guest star on television throughout the 1970s and among a handful of actors that Fantasy Island producers turned to multiple times a season, never playing the same character twice. She worked steadily till 1991, just doing a handful of things after. Her later projects included Vic (2006), a 30-minute short about an older actor, directed by Sage Stallone, a son of Sylvester Stallone, and A Light in the Forest (2002), in which she played the grandmother in a family-oriented fantasy. That film had no connection to Ms. Lynley's first movie, which had almost exactly the same title. Ms. Lynley was married from 1960 to 1964 to Michael Selsman, a film industry publicist, and they had a daughter, Jill, who survives her. She also had a long on-again, off-again relationship with the television host David Frost. - The New York Times, 9/6/19...... Cable channel HGTV will premiere A Very Brady Renovation on Sept. 9 at 8:00 p.m. EDT, where the original Brady Bunch kids take the real home in Los Angeles that served as the exterior for the series and remake the inside to match the famous set. - AP, 9/9/19.