Classic Rock News

The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko reportedly features an eerie declaration from John Lennon regarding whether he felt his political activism put his safety at risk.

The film covers Lennon’s planned Free The People Tour in the early ’70s, which aimed to raise money for people who were jailed but unable to afford bail. It wound up being called off.

But People reports that one scene in the film includes archival footage of the Beatles legend talking on the phone with drummer Jim Keltner about the risks of the tour. Keltner asks whether Lennon has “any paranoia” about people ahead of the tour launch.

“What people? … You mean people trying to kill us or something like that? I’m not about to get myself shot,” Lennon replies. “It’ll cause excitement in its own way. But, er, you know, I’m still an artist, but a revolutionary artist, right?”

In another clip Lennon talks to a journalist about concerns he and wife Yoko Ono have for their safety, noting, “We started noticing people hanging outside the apartment. And I have a driver, he’s an ex-cop. But we’re getting followed by this car, all the time. So we’re all very nervous.”

Both of those comments from Lennon were made almost eight years before his death. Lennon was shot and killed in 1980 outside his New York apartment, The Dakota. He was only 40.

One to One: John & Yoko focuses on the couple’s move to New York City in the ’70s and culminates with their 1972 One to One concerts, which were Lennon’s only post-Beatles full-length performances.

The film recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival and so far does not have an official release date.

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Van Halen drummer Alex Van Halen has shared a clip of a previously unreleased song he wrote with his late brother, Eddie Van Halen. 

The rocker just shared a snippet of the tune, “Unfinished,” on social media. It will be featured on the audiobook of Alex’s upcoming memoir, Brothers. The post also includes personal photos that will likely be featured in the book, as well.

According to the description of Brothers, “Unfinished” is “the last piece of music” Eddie and Alex wrote together. 

Brothers is described by Alex as a love letter to Eddie, who passed away in October 2020. It will be released Oct. 22 and includes previously unseen photos from Alex’s private collection. It will delve into their childhood and also includes “tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behavior.”

Brothers is available for preorder now.

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Elton John has revealed on social media that he’s been struggling with an eye infection that has affected his vision.

“Over the summer, I’ve been dealing with a severe eye infection that has unfortunately left me with only limited vision in one eye,” he writes. “I am healing, but it’s an extremely slow process and it will take some time before sight returns to the impacted eye.”

Elton went on to express his gratitude to the medical professionals and his family “who have taken such good care of me over the last several weeks.” 

“I have been quietly spending the summer recuperating at home and am feeling positive about the progress I have made in my healing recovery so far,” he concluded, signing the note, “With love and gratitude, Elton John.”

Elton is the subject of a new documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, which will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. That will be followed by screenings at the New York Film Festival, which he’s expected to attend, and the BFI London Film Festival. It will debut on Disney+ on Dec. 13.

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Billy Corgan is sharing a message of body positivity alongside a photo of a birthmark that covers his hand and part of his arm.

“I’m a fan of body positivity movements because at the end of the day it is about celebrating what makes us ‘us,'” the Smashing Pumpkins frontman writes in an Instagram post. 

Corgan adds that he was inspired to make the post by model Carlotta Bertotti, who, as the “1979” rocker writes, is a “beautiful young woman with a birthmark who has embraced her ‘difference’ with grace.”

“My point being that my whole life I’ve [endeavored] to hide my ‘port wine’ birthmarks because as you can imagine I was teased unmercifully about them as a child,” Corgan says. “So much so that people who have known me for a decade are shocked when they finally ‘see it.'”

“Even now strangers will stop me on the street not because they recognize me but because they think something is wrong with me that requires medical attention,” he continues. “Plus the random questions: Is that a burn? Are you sick? Is it contagious? Does it hurt?”

Concluding with a “positive message for the day,” Corgan writes, “Whoever you are, I hope you find peace with who you are because: I would like to know that person and no one else.”

Corgan and the Pumpkins are currently on tour supporting Green Day.

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The Kinks’ Dave Davies has let everyone know how he feels about an AI-generated track that was supposed to sound like a Kinks song, and his opinion was enough to get the song taken down.

“What the (f***) is this??? This Kinks AI cover is like horror show sounds (f******) horrible,” Dave wrote on social media alongside the link to the AI-generated song “Hop Skip Jump!” He also noted “it wasn’t even vaguely like a Kinks song, which I’m glad it’s not. This Kinks AI cover is like horror show.’” 

Not long after Davies posted his comments, the link was taken off YouTube. The creator, who goes by @leeroymusical on social media site X, replied to Davies’ post, “Sorry Dave I’m a big fan and my favourite all time band. I meant no disrespect. I have taken down.”

He then added, “Hopefully you prefer my cover of Living in a Thin Line,” to which Davies seemed to approve, sharing, “I really like your cover.”

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On This Day, Sept. 3, 2017 …

Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker died at the age of 67, just months after he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of esophageal cancer.

Becker, born in Queens, New York, was the guitarist, bassist and co-songwriter for the group, which he co-founded in 1971 with Donald Fagen.

The band released nine studio albums over the course of their career, including such classics as Pretzel Logic, Aja, Gaucho and 2000’s Two Against Nature, which won four Grammys, including Album of the Year. They released their final studio album, Everything Must Go, in 2003.

Steely Dan was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, and Becker and Fagen were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2024.

In October 2018 a ceremony was held naming a street in Forest Hills, Queens, Walter Becker Way.

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The Beach Boys’ Al Jardine recently released a new single, “Wish,” which was inspired by his Beach Boys bandmates Brian and Dennis Wilson.

Jardine tells Rolling Stone he first had the idea for the song about 30 years ago. “It just dawned on me how much I missed them,” he said. “Dennis, of course, had passed, and Brian was pretty much out of the action. I felt very emotional.”

But it took until this spring for him to finally finish and record the song with his longtime songwriting partner Larry Dvoskin.

“It’s a good message because right now we’re all wishing that things were the way they used to be, especially at our age,” Jardine says of the tune, “because our memories are wonderful, our musical memories are intact, and it’s just important to finish these great songs that we’ve written.”

Jardine’s aim is for the song to appear on his next solo album, which will be his first since 2010’s A Postcard From California.

“This song is kind of like the appetizer,” he says. “I’m actually working on a lot of unfinished tunes that are pretty close to being done. They come from all different backgrounds and fields of my musical endeavors over the years.” 

He also plans to go out on tour with Brian Wilson’s touring band. While he says Brian “isn’t physically in shape to join us,” he notes, “It wouldn’t surprise me if he could make a few of the shows in the Los Angeles area where we intend to do a trial performance.”

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Peter Frampton is getting ready to launch his Positively Thankful tour, and after all these years performing, he likes to change things up now and again when making his set list.

“Obviously there’s certain songs that have to be there,” Frampton tells ABC Audio, but after that he and his bandleader, Rob Arthur, have some fun finding new songs to play.

“We go, ‘OK, we need a couple of songs we haven’t done before. Let’s go through the albums to have a look, you know, and have a listen,’” he says. “And we change it up that way.” He adds that this time “we’ll probably do another couple of things that we haven’t done before.” 

And while fans sometimes surprise him with songs they want to hear, in the end Frampton has the final say.

“The bottom line is selfish in as much as we want to play the ones we enjoy playing,” he says. “You know, there’s certain songs we have to do, but luckily we enjoy doing those too,” joking, “But put it this way, we don’t rehearse ‘Do You Feel Like I Do.’”

Frampton says his favorite thing about touring is the “time on stage.”

“Like they say, you know, they don’t pay us for the two hours on stage. They pay us for the 22 hours of getting there.”

He also loves being with his band and crew, who feel like family.

“I look forward to being with everybody,” he says. “And everyone in my road family is there, they’ll cancel other things just to be there, you know? And that blows me away.” 

Frampton’s Positively Thankful tour kicks off Sunday in North Charleston, South Carolina. A complete list of dates can be found at frampton.com.

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While many top rock bands of the ’60s and ’70s have disappeared, Pink Floyd seems just as popular today as they were back then. And nobody’s more surprised at that than guitarist David Gilmour.

“It’s always amazing to me that Pink Floyd didn’t fizzle out the way others do,” he tells The Sun. “In some way, it has kept going to the present day.” But Gilmour says as a result, it’s sometimes hard for him to get some honest feedback.

“After you achieve these dizzying heights, people tend to show you way too much deference,” he tells The Sun. “It becomes hard to retrieve the setup you had when you were young. In the earlier stages of Pink Floyd, we could be as rude and insulting to each other about our personalities and our music as we wanted — and yet everything would be all right in the end.”

“No one ever stomped off permanently — until that bloke did,” he adds, referring to Roger Waters. Gilmour says after Waters left the band in 1985, “I was thrust into being band leader … and, later, into being a solo artist. But I feel a more collaborative approach is better for me.”

So it’s no wonder that he enlisted many helpers on his new album, Luck And Strange. It features contributions from his wife, Polly Samson, his children, a new producer, a new arranger and some longtime musical collaborators. There’s also a piece of music he recorded in 2006 with late Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright.

Gilmour is thrilled with the result. He says, “There’s a wholeness to it that I can’t pin down. It goes all the way through without any concept album bulls***.”

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If you know anything about Thunderclap Newman, it’s probably that they had one hit, “Something In the Air,” produced by The Who‘s Pete Townshend. But their story is evidently interesting enough to have spawned an entire book, which comes out Oct. 1 on Jack White‘s Third Man Books.

Hollywood Dream: The Thunderclap Newman Story features a foreword penned by Townshend, who also played bass on and produced the band’s one and only album, Hollywood Dream, in his home studio.

The band was comprised of jazz pianist Andy Newman; Townshend’s friend and driver John “Speedy” Keen, who wrote “Armenia City in the Sky” on 1967’s The Who Sell Out; and 15-year-old Jimmy McCulloch, who went on to play guitar in Wings during the ’70s.

Keen penned their #1 U.K. hit “Something In the Air,” which remains popular through its use in movies, commercials and cover versions, including one by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

Townshend writes in the foreword, “For me Thunderclap Newman was a great adventure and one I try to relive often … [the book] is carefully and devotedly researched with lots of input from all kinds of other friends of mine who shared their journey, and that itself builds a unique picture of the kind of Boiler Room world that musicians thrived in during the mid to late ‘60s.”

Pete writes of the band, whose members have all passed away, “The saddest part of it all is that they don’t exist today. This book brings them back to life.”

A hardcover limited-edition signed by Pete and author Mark Wilkerson is available only through thirdmanbooks.com.

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