Classic Rock News

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.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

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.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

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***.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

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.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko is ostensibly about John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s move to New York City in the ’70s and their 1972 One to One concerts, which were Lennon’s only post-Beatles full-length performances. But according to People, the doc also shows Ono airing her grievances about how she was treated because of her relationship with Lennon.

In one portion of the film, People reports, Ono is seen giving a speech at the First International Feminist Conference in 1973, where she told the crowd that after she and Lennon got together, “the whole society started to attack me, and the whole society wished me dead.” 

In another part of the documentary, Ono says that because she was made a scapegoat for the breakup of The Beatles, she received letters while pregnant that read, “I wish you and your baby would die,” and was even sent a voodoo doll stuck with pins.

According to People, in the film Ono also expresses disappointment over the fact that, she claims, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney never “set the record straight” about the fact that she wasn’t the reason the band broke up.

“Whenever they ask me about the Beatles, I said, ‘The Beatles are four beautiful, very intelligent, creative, artistic people … and they’ve outgrown the group.’ Whereas none of the Beatles made any comment on me,” she says in the movie. “Have you heard of any comment about me in the press by the Beatles? They ignored me. That’s male chauvinism.” 

Lennon, however, had Ono’s back. People reports that in a clip in the documentary, he says, “I fell in love with an independent, eloquent, outspoken, creative, genius … I started waking up.”

The doc premieres Aug. 30 at the Venice Film Festival.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Back in 2006, Bon Jovi teamed up with Jennifer Nettles of the country duo Sugarland for a duet version of their song “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” which became a Grammy-winning hit. Now the band has teamed up with another country duo for a duet version of a song on their latest album.

The song is question is “The People’s House,” which appears on Bon Jovi’s latest album, Forever. Joining them on the new version is Grammy-nominated duo The War And Treaty, comprised of husband and wife Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter. While they are generally regarded as a country act, their music also encompasses Americana, blues, gospel and soul.

The song is about healing the division that currently exists in the U.S., with lyrics that go, “Old ways have changed/ No crime to look out for each other/ Father, Mother, Sister, Brother/ Can’t keep fightin’ one another/ We are buildin’ this house of love/ This is the people’s house.”

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

John Mellencamp‘s children really love reality TV: His daughter Teddi was a regular on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and his son Hud just finished in the top three on ABC’s Claim to Fame, which pits the relatives of celebrities against each other. But as a consolation prize, Hud may have found love.

Hud tells People that he’s sort of involved with fellow Claim to Fame contestant Mackenzie Adkins, the daughter of country star Trace Adkins. Trace is no stranger to reality TV himself, having famously appeared on The Apprentice.

“We’re just hanging out, seeing what happens,” Hud tells People. “He visited me a few times in Nashville,” Mackenzie adds. “I visited him. Yeah, going well.”

She also said out of all the contestants, she “especially” liked connecting with Hud, because they were both on the show due to the fact that their dads are musicians.

Hud, whose mother is Mellencamp’s third wife, Elaine Irwin, is one of the five children John has from three marriages. Hud told People that he didn’t reveal to his famous father how he did on the show prior to the finale, which made the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer “furious.”

If you missed it when it aired, you can watch Hud and Mackenzie’s relationship unfold by streaming Claim to Fame on Hulu.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

The first poster for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has been released.

The image shows Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, wearing the sunglasses he usually sported during the time covered in the film.

As previously reported, A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, arrives in theaters Christmas Day. It follows Dylan from his arrival in New York City at age 19 to his groundbreaking decision to “go electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

In addition to Chalamet, who does his own singing in the film, A Complete Unknown stars Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash and Nick Offerman as Alan Lomax. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie Russo, a character based on Dylan’s real-life girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

On This Day, Aug. 30, 1986 …

Former Traffic star Steve Winwood landed his first Billboard Hot 100 #1 with “Higher Love,” from his fourth solo album, Back in the High Life. 

The song, featuring backing vocals by Chaka Khan, spent one week on top of the chart. It went on to win Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Male Vocal Performance.

Winwood’s second and only other #1 single came less than two years later when “Roll With It,” from the #1 album of the same name,  topped the chart in July 1988. 

Whitney Houston covered “Higher Love” in 1990, which was released on the Japanese version of her hit album I’m Your Baby Tonight. In 2019, Norwegian DJ Kygo released a remix of that version, which hit #1 on the Dance Club Songs chart.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

A deluxe edition of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers‘ 1982 album, Long After Dark, is coming on Oct. 18.

The album, featuring the singles “You Got Lucky,” “Change of Heart” and “Straight Into Darkness,” was the first to feature new Heartbreaker Howie Epstein on bass and was a top 10 hit.

Petty once said, “There was some music recorded for Long After Dark that didn’t get on the record, that I thought would’ve made it a better album. I left off … four things that I liked quite a bit. And probably a few more written that never even got in the door.”

The deluxe edition will add some of these missing songs. It includes the remastered original album, plus 12 bonus tracks, among them Petty’s versions of his songs “Never Be You” and “Ways to Be Wicked,” which were previously recorded by Rosanne Cash and Lone Justice, respectively. Other additional tracks were taken from sessions for French TV.

The new package will be available in various configurations, including digital; a two-LP vinyl set pressed on red with black splatter vinyl; a three-disc CD and Blu-ray set; and various other color vinyl versions.

In addition, as part of a yearlong release plan, The Petty Legacy archives will put out previously unseen film and audio of the band. The first release is a French TV performance of “Straight Into Darkness,” which you can watch and listen to now.

Here’s the track list:

DISC 1
“A One Story Town”
“You Got Lucky”
“Deliver Me”
“Change Of Heart”
“Finding Out”
“We Stand A Chance”
“Straight Into Darkness”
“The Same Old You”
“Between Two Worlds”
“A Wasted Life”

DISC 2
“Stories We Could Tell” (French TV)
“Never Be You” *
“Turning Point” (Original Drums Version)
“Don’t Make Me Walk The Line” *
“I’m Finding Out” (French TV) *
“Heartbreakers Beach Party” (Extended Version)
“Keeping Me Alive” (French TV)
“Straight Into Darkness” (French TV)
“Ways To Be Wicked” (Denver Sessions) *
“Between Two Worlds” (French TV) *
“One On One” *
“Wild Thing” *

* previously unreleased

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.