Classic Rock 93.9

High-quality audiophile versions of the Electric Light Orchestra‘s fourth studio, 1974’s Eldorado, will be released in the coming months by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab — as a two-LP box set mastered at 45 rpm, a single LP mastered at the standard 33 rpm, and on the hybrid SACD format.

All three versions have been remastered from the original analog tapes, and can be pre-ordered now at MusicDirect.com.

The single-LP version and vinyl box sets, which are both pressed on 180-gram “SuperVinyl,” will be available in March and September, respectively, priced at $59.99 and $125.

The LPs in the two-disc collection were created using Mobile Fidelity’s ultra-hi-fi UltraDisc One-Step lacquering process. The sets are limited to 10,000 numbered copies.

The SACD version will be released in April and is priced at $29.99.

Originally released in September ’74 in the U.S., Eldorado was a concept album that frontman Jeff Lynne wrote about a man who escapes the disillusionment of his dull life by journeying into fantasy worlds via his dreams. Musically, the record is heavily influenced by The Beatles, and blends pop and rock sounds with orchestral and choral elements.

Eldorado became ELO’s first album to break into the top 40 of the Billboard 200, peaking at #16. It featured the group’s first stateside hit, “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” which reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“Our team is proud and honored to reissue ELO’s groundbreaking album Eldorado,” says Mobile Fidelity executive president John K. Wood. “We want to bring fans closer to the music by revealing all the intricate sonic details and subtle nuances in Jeff Lynne’s mix of this iconic album.”

Here’s the full Eldorado track list:

“Eldorado Overture”
“Can’t Get It Out of My Head”
“Boy Blue”
“Laredo Tornado”
“Poor Boy (The Greenwood)”
“Mister Kingdom”
“Nobody’s Child”
“Illusions in G Major”
“Eldorado”
“Eldorado Finale”

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Van Morrison is among the music artists and composers who will discuss their Oscar nominations for this year’s Best Original Song honor during a virtual event hosted by the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

You can tune in to watch beginning March 3 at 8 p.m. ET. The event is free to watch, though you do need to register ahead of time.

Morrison is nominated for his song “Down to Joy,” from the film Belfast.

The conversation will also include Billie Eilish and her brother FINNEAS, Diane Warren, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Dixson, who are nominated for their respective songs for the James Bond film No Time to Die, Four Good Days, Encanto and King Richard. Disco and funk legend Nile Rodgers, who is the current chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, will moderate the discussion alongside Oscar-winning composer Paul Williams.

Incidentally, Morrison is a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, as are Warren, Rodgers and Williams.

For more info, visit SongHall.org.

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Eddie Vedder had a “serious” case of COVID-19 ahead of his just-wrapped solo tour.

The Pearl Jam frontman discussed his experience with the virus during his show in Los Angeles last Friday, telling the crowd, “I got the COVID right before we were supposed to start practicing [for the tour], probably five, six weeks ago.”

“[I] literally saw my life flash in front of my eyes,” Vedder said.

He added, “To get through that and then be back in a room like this facing this many people facing this way and listening to us play for you…it’s been a gift and an honor.”

You can watch fan-shot footage of Vedder’s comments streaming now on YouTube.

Vedder’s tour, which supported his new solo album, Earthling, concluded Sunday in San Diego. Both the LA and San Diego shows were postponed from earlier in February due to a positive COVID-19 test amid Vedder’s touring party.

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Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have debuted a music video for their new cover of the 1965 soul tune “Searching for My Love,” which appears on the duo’s 2021 collaborative album, Raise the Roof.

The clip, which is the first official music video that Plant and Krauss have released in 14 years, depicts a series of lonely male travelers on various quests to find seemingly unattainable objects of desire.

The video includes scenes of a man climbing to a mountaintop, a pirate standing in front of a treasure chest, an adventurer soaring through gray clouds on man-made wings, and a man swimming in the ocean toward a mermaid who disappears just as he reaches her.

“Searching for My Love,” which originally was recorded by American soul group Bobby Moore & The Rhythm Aces, is a tune that Plant first sang when he was a teenager. The Led Zeppelin frontman says the song was “another nugget of beautiful lost soul music which has been ricocheting between me and Alison for a long time.”

As previously reported, Raise the Roof, which was released in November, is a 14-track collection that features 13 covers of songs by “legends and unsung heroes of folk, blues, country and soul music,” as well as one original tune co-written by Plant and producer T Bone Burnett, titled “High and Lonesome.”

In support of Raise the Roof, Plant and Krauss will launch a U.S. tour leg that runs from a June 1 show in Canandaigua, New York, trough a June 17 appearance at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee. The duo also has a series of European concert in late June and July.

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Police drummer Stewart Copeland made a surprise appearance at Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder‘s solo concert in Los Angles this past Friday.

Vedder invited Copeland on stage for the show’s encore, which included a ramshackle cover of The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” — “Still practicing,” Eddie quipped at one point — and a closing performance of Neil Young‘s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Copeland’s guest spot allowed Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Chad Smith, who’s been Vedder’s drummer for the tour, to take a breather during “Message in a Bottle,” but he returned to the stage to play guitar on “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Fan-shot footage of the performance is streaming now on YouTube.

Vedder’s tour, which launched earlier this month in support of his new Earthling solo album, concluded Sunday in San Diego. For the run, Vedder was joined by his Earthlings solo band, which included Smith, ex-RHCP guitarist and current Pearl Jam touring member Josh Klinghoffer, Jane’s Addiction bassist Chris Chaney, singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, and producer and guitarist Andrew Watt.

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Brian Jones, the accomplished slide guitarist and multi-instrumentalist who founded The Rolling Stones, was born 80 years ago today, February 28, 1942.

Jones, who died at age 27 in July 1969, formed The Stones in 1962 to showcase the music of the American blues artists he loved, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James. Brian came up with his band’s name, taken from the Waters song “Rollin’ Stone Blues,” and he initially was the group’s leader.

Jones’ slide guitar was a key element of the group, and he also played harmonica on many of the band’s recordings.  However, the band’s leadership soon shifted to singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, as they emerged as The Stones’ main songwriting team.

As The Rolling Stones began exploring other musical styles, Brian’s ability to play almost any instrument allowed him to add interesting sonic flavors to many songs.  Jones played the recorder on “Ruby Tuesday,” sitar “Paint It Black,” dulcimer on “Lady Jane,” marimba on “Under My Thumb” and “Out of Time,” Mellotron on most of 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request album, and autoharp on “You Got the Silver.”

However, as the 1960s progressed, Jones’ talents became increasingly hindered by drugs and his contributions began to wane. In June 1969, he was fired from The Rolling Stones. Less than a month later, he was found dead in the swimming pool at his house in Hartfield, U.K.

The coroner ruled Jones had died by drowning and later listed the cause as “death by misadventure,” noting that he had an enlarged liver and heart due to drug and alcohol abuse. Allegations that Jones had been murdered have circulated over the years, but a 2010 review by local police asserted that no new evidence had emerged to change the coroner’s original verdict.

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Green Day has canceled the band’s upcoming concert in Moscow due to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

“With heavy hearts, in light of current events we feel it is necessary to cancel our upcoming show in Moscow at Spartak Stadium,” the punk trio writes in an Instagram Story.

“We are aware that this moment is not about stadium rock shows, it’s much bigger than that,” the statement continues. “But we also know that rock and roll is forever and we feel confident there will be a time and a place for us to return in the future.”

The Moscow concert was scheduled to take place in May, ahead of the European leg of Green Day’s Hella Mega tour with Fall Out Boy and Weezer, launching in June.

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Last week, Journey kicked off their Freedom Tour 2022 with opening act Toto, marking the first time the two bands have hit the road together.

Toto frontman Joseph Williams tells ABC Audio that he’s “insanely excited” to be touring with Journey, noting that not only is he a “huge fan” of that band, but that the trek also is giving his own group the opportunity to play larger venues than they usually do in the U.S.

The 41-date U.S. leg of the 2022 Freedom Tour is scheduled through a May 11 concert in Hartford, Connecticut. Toto initially planned to launch its own headlining trek dubbed The Dogz of Oz Tour in late February, and then were supposed to have joined Journey’s outing in April, but things changed when Billy Idol was forced to drop off the February-to-April opening slot with Journey because of a sinus ailment.

Williams says the set Toto is playing as opening act on the Journey tour obviously is shorter than the one they showcase as a headliner, but notes, “[I]t’s still a great show. And it’s…mostly just sort of hit, hit, hit that way.”

Meanwhile, Toto announced last year that founding keyboardist/singer David Paich — who had retired from full-time touring in 2020 because of health reasons — “could pop in any time for a show as a special surprise” during the band’s 2022 trek.

Regarding how often Paich might perform with Toto this year, Williams says, “The frequency of his appearances…we still don’t know. What I can tell you is that he’s looking great, sounding great.”

Joseph adds, “We will invite him and try and coax him to…all of the concerts, as many as he wants to go to.”

Check out Toto’s full schedule at TotoOfficial.com.

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Graham Nash shares stories behind some of his most famous songs in a new episode of the Apple Music 1 podcast Deep Hidden Meaning Radio, hosted by Chic‘s Nile Rodgers, which premieres this Saturday, February 26 at 11 a.m. ET.

As revealed in a preview provided to ABC Audio, one of the tunes Graham spoke about was his classic “Teach Your Children,” which appeared on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young‘s 1970 debut, Déjà Vu.

He explained to Rodgers that the tune was inspired by a famous 1962 Diane Arbus photograph of a boy holding a toy hand grenade in New York’s Central Park.

“[W]hen I was looking at the [photo]…I began to realize that if we didn’t teach our kids a better way of dealing with each other, then humanity itself was kind of screwed,” Nash recalls. “That was the beginning of ‘Teach Your Children.'”

Graham also revealed that in 1989, when he was selling some photo prints, including one of the Arbus photo, a tall young man introduced himself to him and told him he was the boy with the grenade, and shared his memory of his picture being taken that day.

Nash also talked about “Marrakesh Express,” the 1969 Crosby, Stills & Nash hit that he wrote. Graham explained that he first recorded the song with his previous band The Hollies, but he felt that version “absolutely sucked.”

He said that it was his CSN band mate Stephen Stills‘ guitar playing that made “Marrakesh Experess” a great song.

“When you are writing a song about a train, it needs a train,” Graham noted. “It needs urgency, it needs energy, it needs to be tracking right along. And that guitar part that Stephen Stills put on was unbelievable to me.”

The full podcast will stream for free at Apple.com.

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In a career filled with best-selling albums, worldwide tours and jam sessions with nearly every legendary rock star on the planet, Dave Grohl may have found his most unexpected project yet with Studio 666.

The new horror-comedy film stars Grohl and the rest of the Foo Fighters as fictionalized versions of themselves, who enter a creepy mansion to record their next album. Things soon turn from spooky to downright evil when Grohl is possessed by demonic forces and begins killing the other band members.

In between the R-rated flick’s blood, gore and entrails, one might find a metaphor for the way a song might “possess” someone as they write it, though Grohl doesn’t think it’s exactly the same thing.

“Well, it’s a little different, because in the film I’m inspired by Satan,” Grohl tells ABC Audio. “That’s not my typical motivation when I’m writing a Foo Fighters song. ‘Times Like These’ is not about the Devil.”

He adds, “Making this movie, we know what it’s like to make an album. We just had to learn what it’s like to make an album possessed by the Devil.”

Even putting Satan aside, making Studio 666 brought its fair share of surprises to Grohl and company.

“I thought the hardest part was sitting around waiting,” Grohl says, channeling his one-time band mate, Tom Petty.

“Remember the room that we would sit around and wait in?” laughs guitarist Chris Shiflett. “We did it so f***ing low-budget. Like, there was two folding chairs and, like, a dirty old couch or something in this room, and we would just be huddled in there for, like, 12 hours a day.”

Studio 666 is in theaters today.

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