Classic Rock News

Another day, another chart record for Sir Elton John.

Earlier this week, he officially registered 50 years of top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and now he’s set a similar record for longevity back home in the U.K.  Specifically, he’s now the only act in the history of the U.K. singles chart to score a top-10 hit in six different decades, thanks to his Dua Lipa collabo, “Cold Heart.”

“Cold Heart” is Elton’s 33rd top 10 on the chart.  His first one came in 1971, with “Your Song.” Overall, he scored 10 top 10s in the ’70s, seven in the ’80s, eight in the ’90s, seven in the 2000s, one in the 2010s, and one in this decade.

Overall, Elton’s notched seven number-one singles but that number could increase to eight, because “Cold Heart” is poised to take over the top spot this week, dethroning Ed Sheeran‘s “Shivers.”

In other Elton news, the U.K. tabloid The Sun reports that he’s going to have to miss a reception honoring his late friend, Princess Diana. The October 19 event will celebrate the unveiling of a statue of the late princess, and Elton was invited by Diana’s son, Prince William. However, The Sun has confirmed he’s sent his regrets because he’s recovering from a hip operation.

A source told The Sun, “Elton underwent hip replacement surgery at the start of the month. It went well and he is on the mend but is taking things slow.“

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“Brown Sugar” is one of The Rolling Stones‘ biggest hits and most popular songs, but the classic’s potentially racially and culturally insensitive subject matter and lyrics apparently have prompted the band to stop playing it in concert.

A recent Los Angeles Times article, which featured a new interview with Stones members Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, noted that the band had performed “Brown Sugar” 1,136 times in concert, although the song has been left off the group’s set lists for its current No Filter Tour of the U.S.

“You picked up on that, huh?” Keith Richards commented to the Los Angeles Times when asked about the tune’s omission. “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it.”

“Brown Sugar,” which spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971, includes Jagger-penned lyrics that appear to be about a slave trader and a slave master abusing Black women.

On the subject of not currently performing the song, Jagger told the newspaper, “We’ve played ‘Brown Sugar’ every night since 1970. So sometimes you think, ‘We’ll take that one out for now and see how it goes.’ We might put it back in.”

Richards added of the matter, “At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s***. But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”

It’s worth noting that in 1995 Rolling Stone interview, Jagger reflected with apprehension about “Brown Sugar’s” lyrics, telling the magazine, “I never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself.”

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Chicago will return to The Venetian Resort Las Vegas next year for a limited run of shows.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Famers will perform six shows at the hotel’s Venetian Theatre: February 16, 18, 19, 23, 35 and 26. Tickets go on sale to the general public this Monday, October 18, at 10 a.m. PT via Ticketmaster, VenetianLasVegas.com, or by calling 866-641-7469.  It’ll be Chicago’s fifth consecutive year playing at the venue.

In fact, Chicago just wrapped a three-night stint at the Venetian Theatre last month.  The Vegas venue was also the last place that Chicago played in 2020 before they had to cancel their tour plans due to the pandemic.  The legendary group also has a variety of concerts scheduled in other U.S. cities through December 17.

The Venetian shows in September featured pretty much every song you’d want to hear from Chicago, from early material like “Make Me Smile,” “Saturday in the Park” and “Beginnings,” to mid-period hits like “Call On Me” and “If You Leave Me Now,” to the 1980s-era hits “You’re the Inspiration,” “Hard Habit to Break” and “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.”

2022 will mark Chicago’s 55th consecutive year of touring.

 

 

 

 

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Apparently, Paul McCartney doesn’t think much of The Rolling Stones, at least in comparison with his own famous band.

During an interview with The New Yorker published on Tuesday, the rock legend seemingly shaded his British Invasion counterparts, suggesting that The Beatles worked from a broader range of musical languages.

“I’m not sure I should say it, but they’re a blues cover band, that’s sort of what the Stones are,” McCartney, 79, said. “I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”

McCartney also made headlines recently by again stating that his late band mate John Lennon was the one who broke up The Beatles.

“I didn’t instigate the split. That was our Johnny,” McCartney said regarding the late Lennon in the upcoming BBC Radio 4 special, This Cultural Life, as reported by The Guardian.

Paul went on to say that he and his band mates Ringo Starr and George Harrison were “left to pick up the pieces” by being forced to keep Lennon’s exit a secret.

“So for a few months we had to pretend. It was weird because we all knew it was the end of The Beatles but we couldn’t just walk away,” Sir Paul recalled.

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The estate of the late David Bowie is launching a year-long celebration dubbed Bowie 75, commemorating what would have been the influential rock legend’s 75th birthday.

The campaign will begin with the opening of two themed pop-up stores at significant locations in two cities that David called home during his life — London and New York.

The shops will open on October 25, 75 days before the 75th anniversary of Bowie’s January 8 birthday. One will be located in New York at 150 Wooster Street, near the downtown Manhattan neighborhood where David lived for many years, while the other will open in London at 14 Heddon Street, where the cover of Bowie’s classic album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was shot.

Both stores, which will remain open until late January 2022, will offer immersive experiences treating fans to a career-spanning look at Bowie’s music, art, fashion and more.

The Bowie 75 shops will feature audio and high-def video screening rooms presenting 360 Reality Audio listening and viewing experiences, including rare behind-the-scenes footage. They’ll also offer limited-edition releases of Bowie apparel, memorabilia, collectibles, CDs and vinyl LPs; photo galleries; art installations; and special guest appearances.

In addition, fans will be able try on versions of some of Bowie’s iconic outfits and take photos of themselves wearing them in front of specially designed sets.

For more details about the stores, visit Bowie75.com.

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The first official trailer for the highly anticipated three-part Beatles documentary series The Beatles: Get Back has just debuted, and it’s really “Something.”

As previously reported, the docuseries — which was created from hours of unseen footage and audio recorded in January 1969 during sessions that yielded the Fab Four’s final album, Let It Be — premieres on Disney+ over three days, November 25, 26, and 27. Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

The nearly four-minute trailer gives some historic background about the sessions while offering clips of the band members working on songs, joking around and discussing musical ideas and plans, including whether they want to perform live for the first time in almost three years.

As the promo points out, the goal of the sessions was, over the course of three weeks, to capture The Beatles making a new album and debuting those songs with an at-first-undetermined live gig.

The trailer includes scenes of the band working on future classics like “Get Back” and “Something,” and segments of a conversation about the proposed concerts. We see John Lennon saying, “I would dig to play on stage,” while George Harrison counters, “I think we should forget the whole idea of a show.”

The clip also touches on how Harrison briefly quit the band during the sessions, and ends as The Beatles prepare to give what became their last-ever live performance, the famous surprise concert on the roof of Apple headquarters on London’s Savile Row.

The docuseries, which was directed by Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson, will include the full footage of rooftop show.

Each part of The Beatles: Get Back runs about two hours.

In addition to the trailer, the official poster art for the film event also debuted today.

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Happy Golden Anniversary to Elton John, who can now officially brag that he’s been scoring top 40 hits for 50 years.

“Cold Heart,” his collaboration with U.K. pop star Dua Lipa that’s a mashup of four of his past songs, has jumped from #36 to #32 on the Billboard Hot 100.  It’s the first time he’s been in the top 40 of the chart since “Written in the Stars,” his 1999 duet with LeAnn Rimes.

According to Billboard, that means Elton’s top 40 hits now span 50 years and 10 months — his first top 40 hit, “Your Song,” charted in December of 1970.  Not including holiday songs, this is the longest span for any artist in Billboard history. Michael Jackson previously held the record at 46 years, eight months and three weeks.

Elton recently told Billboard that he credits “Dua Lipa’s popularity” with a lot of the song’s success, as well as the “brilliant” remix that the Australian dance act Pnau did in mashing up the songs.  However, he notes, “I feel very, very content and happy that I’m relevant. I’ve always tried to be relevant.”

Billboard also points out the mind-blowing fact that the week in 1970 when Elton scored his first top 40 hit, the artists in the top five were Smokey Robinson, Santana, George Harrison, The Fifth Dimension and The Partridge Family.  Now, it’s the likes of Drake, Justin Bieber, Lil Nas X and Ed Sheeran.

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Fender is bringing back the Kurt Cobain Jag-Stang, a new guitar that the late Nirvana frontman created with the company back in the early ’90s. As Fender EVP of Product Justin Norvell tells ABC Audio, the collaboration first came about thanks to Cobain’s penchant for destroying guitars.

“Kurt was not the most precious with his guitars back in the day,” Norvell recalls. “He would smash a lot of guitars, need guitars repaired.”

“Through that Fender formed a relationship with Kurt and the Nirvana camp,” he explains. “And just within that, Kurt started to throw ideas, [saying], ‘I’ve been drawing this dream guitar of mine for a while.'”

Those drawings, which can be seen in the posthumously released Cobain book Journals, combined elements of two different Fender guitars: the Jaguar and the Mustang. It was that hybridization that really caught the attention of Fender, which normally only built signature guitars with artists based on preexisting models.

“For an artist to actually have a vision for a complete guitar — that was a completely new guitar and a whole encapsulated idea — was fascinating,” Norvell says.

When Cobain died in 1994, the Jag-Stang was still in the final stages of development and received only a limited release. Now, Fender’s finally reissuing it widely to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Aesthetically, the Jag-Stang boasts a “pawn shop, 1960s” feel, while its two-pickup design will help you recreate Nirvana’s classic, Pixies-inspired loud-quiet-loud dynamic.

“The fact that it’s offset and off-kilter, it’s almost like an abstract, almost cubist take on guitar playing I think fits [Cobain’s] style,” Norvell says.

The Kurt Cobain Jag-Stang is available now via Fender.com. To celebrate the launch, Fender has added 11 Nirvana songs to its Fender Play guitar instruction app.

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Paul Simon, one of the most important singer/songwriters of the rock music era, celebrates his 80th birthday today.

Simon came to fame in the mid-’60s as half of the legendary folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, and then launched a successful solo career in the early 1970s that has seen him incorporate jazz, African, Brazilian and Latin music influences into his pop-rock sound.

Paul’s melodic, intelligent and poetic songs helped make Simon & Garfunkel one of the most popular and celebrated music acts of the 1960s and early ’70s. The duo topped the Billboard Hot 100 three times, with “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.” Simon won eight Grammy Awards for his work with Art Garfunkel, including a 1970 Album of the Year prize for Bridge over Troubled Water, and Record of the Year and Song of the Year honors for the title track.

Simon enjoyed similar success as a solo artist, winning 1975 and 1986 Album of the Year Grammys, respectively, for Still Crazy After All These Years and Graceland. The latter album was not only a huge commercial success, selling more than five million copies in the U.S. alone, it’s considered a critical high-water mark for Paul, who collaborated with South African musicians to create an infectious hybrid of world music and pop.

Simon has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of Simon & Garfunkel in 1990 and as a solo artist in 2001. Other accolades include induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1982, being named MusiCares Person of the Year in 2001, receiving a Kennedy Center Honor in 2002, being awarded the first Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007, and receiving Sweden’s prestigious Polar Music Prize in 2012.

Paul retired from touring in 2018, although he has continued to play select concerts that raise money for various charities he supports. Simon’s most recent album was 2018’s In the Blue Light, a collection of new versions of some of his favorite tunes from his back catalog, reimagined to incorporate jazz and classical influences.

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A new 10-CD box set titled The Official Live Bootlegs Volume 1, featuring recordings of five concerts by Asia‘s original lineup from various years of the prog-rock supergroup’s career, will be released on November 26.

Two shows featured in the expansive collection took place during the band’s initial early-1980s heyday, while the other three concerts were recorded after the original lineup reunited during the 2000s.

The concerts were recorded in May 1982 at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York; in August 1983 at The Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts; in March 2007 at the Credicard Hall in São Paulo, Brazil; in May 2008 at the International Forum in Tokyo; and in December 2010 at The Forum in London.

Asia’s classic lineup featured former King Crimson and UK singer/bassist John Wetton, longtime Yes guitarist Steve Howe, Emerson, Lake & Palmer drummer Carl Palmer and Buggles/Yes keyboardist Geoff Downes.

The original band recorded two albums, 1982’s Asia and 1983’s Alpha, before Howe exited the group. Wetton, Howe, Downes and Palmer reunited in 2006 to mark Asia’s 25th anniversary and the group went on to record three more albums together — 2008’s Phoenix, 2010’s Omega and 2012’s XXX — before Howe again left the band in 2013.

The concerts feature Asia playing its classic songs “Heat of the Moment,” “Only Time Will Tell” and “Don’t Cry,” while the post-2000 shows also include renditions of tunes by the members’ other famous groups, among them Yes’ “Roundabout,” King Crimson’s The Court of the Crimson King and The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

The Official Live Bootlegs Volume 1 can be pre-ordered now. A digital album featuring 24 tracks from the box set also will be released on November 26.

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