Classic Rock News

Pink Floyd fans in the Detroit area will be able to experience their music in a whole new way next month.

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra will be holding a special event, The Music of Pink Floyd, at Orchestra Hall. It’s being held on April 20 aka 4/20, which just happens to be a holiday celebrated by weed smokers across the U.S., which seems a bit appropriate for Pink Floyd fans.

The event will have the orchestra, backed by the rock band Windborne, performing Floyd tunes like “Money,” “Learning to Fly” and “Comfortably Numb,” along with selections from their classic 1979 album The Wall.

Tickets for the special show are on sale now.

Next up for Pink Floyd fans, on April 16 the band will release The Dark Side of the Moon Collector’s Edition, featuring the 2023 remastered version of the iconic album on crystal clear vinyl. It’s part of their continuing celebration of the album’s 50th anniversary. It is available for preorder now.

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Chicago has hit a new career milestone.

The band headlined the 50th show of their Las Vegas residency at The Venetian Theatre inside The Venetian Resort Las Vegas on Tuesday, March 6, earning them the honor of being the longest-running residency artist in the venue’s history.

Chicago has been playing The Venetian for the past seven years and has sold more than 80,000 tickets. The new milestone was marked with a plaque that was presented to them onstage, along with a custom cake by Cake Boss‘s Buddy Valastro‘s Carlo’s Bake Shop. 

Chicago is getting ready to wrap their Vegas residency for 2024. They’ll play shows on March 8 and 9. They then hit the road starting May 15 in La Vista, Nebraska, and have dates booked with Earth, Wind & Fire starting July 19 in Maryland Heights, Missouri. A complete list of dates can be found at chicagotheband.com.

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Wolfgang Van Halen has teamed up with the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation music education charity to announce a new campaign called Adopt a School.

The initiative aims to connect donors with schools across the U.S. in need of musical instruments, supplies and education programs. To launch the program, Wolf and the Van Halen family are donating $1,000 to 100 schools.

Wolf’s father, the late Eddie Van Halen, was a longtime supporter of Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation and left a donation to the organization in his will. The younger Van Halen continued the partnership and donated the proceeds from his debut Mammoth WVH single, “Distance,” to the foundation.

For more info, visit MHOpus.org.

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Peter Gabriel is set to appear in a new documentary, Resynator, which is set to premiere at SXSW.
 

The film has director Alison Tavel trying to learn about her late father, Don Tavel, through the synthesizer prototype he created, the Resynator.

Tavel tells Variety that she reached out to several musicians, including Jon Anderson and Fred Armisen, to talk about the synthesizer, telling Variety, “I’m so grateful that so many musicians were interested and down to experiment. Everyone’s experiences were unique and helped me gain insight into the Resynator’s capabilities.”

But she felt it was particularly important to get Gabriel in the flick.

“After discovering a decades-old letter from his team ordering three Resynators for his synth distribution company, I knew I had to try to make contact, and it worked,” she says. “He remembered the Resynator from the ’80s and was gracious enough to meet with me about it all.”

A trailer for the film shows Gabriel telling Alison that he remembers playing the instrument. It also features Armisen, Gotye, Foo Fighters keyboardist Rami Jaffee and others.

Resynator is set to premiere at South by Southwest on March 10.

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The Black Crowes will be celebrating the release of their new album, Happiness Bastards, with an intimate live performance. 

The band will headline a special show for Amazon Music’s City Sessions on release day, Friday, March 15, playing tunes from the new album as well as some classic hits. 

The show will take place at the 650-capacity Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, and fans will be able to enjoy the concert from home via Amazon Music’s twitch channel, starting at 9 p.m. ET. Tickets to the show are on sale now. 

Happiness Bastards is The Black Crowes’ first album of new music in 15 years. It is available for preorder now.

The band will also be heading out on the Happiness Bastards tour this spring, hitting 35 cities starting April 2 at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville. A complete list of dates can be found at theblackcrowes.com.

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Bon Jovi has shared another look at their upcoming four-part Hulu documentary, Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story.

The new trailer for the series features interview footage with Jon Bon Jovi, former guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboardist Dave Bryan and drummer Tico Torres, as well as fellow New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen, who shares, “Jon’s choruses demand to be sung by 20,000 people in an arena.” 

Toward the beginning of the trailer, Richie jokes, “I’m excited, are we telling the truth, are we gonna lie, what are we gonna do?” Later clips reveal the band will get real about Richie’s 2013 departure. 

“It was real fun and I thought everybody else was enjoying it too,” Jon says, to which Richie replies, “wrong.” He later adds, “I don’t regret leaving, I regret how I did it.” 

The clip is sprinkled with archival footage from the band’s early days, performance clips from over the years and more. It also shows Jon dealing with his recent vocal issues and worries about the future of the band.

“With every decade comes another life’s lesson. It’s all or nothing,” Jon shares at the end of the trailer. “That’s why the legacy matters.”

Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, directed by Gotham Chopra, debuts Friday, April 26, on Hulu. It will have its premiere at South by Southwest on March 14.

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A lawyer for Don Henley claims the Eagles rocker has been “victimized” by the dismissal of the case against three men accused of stealing his handwritten notes, including the lyrics to well-known Eagles songs.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office requested the dismissal after Henley delayed handing over some 6,000 pages of material, using attorney-client privilege as his excuse. This made it impossible for the defense to cross-examine him about the documents, and the judge accused the rocker and his legal team of trying “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging to their position that the lyric sheets were stolen.” 

But Henley’s newly hired attorney Dan Petrocelli tells Entertainment Weekly that Henley did nothing wrong.

“The attorney-client privilege is a foundational guardrail in our justice system, and rarely, if ever, should you have to forsake it to prosecute or defend a case,” Petrocelli tells the mag. “As the victim in this case, Mr. Henley has once again been victimized by this unjust outcome.”

He adds, “He will pursue all his rights in the civil courts.” 

Glen Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinki were charged with trying to sell manuscripts of Henley’s lyrics, which they knew to be stolen. They were allegedly taken in the late 1970s by an author who’d been hired to write an Eagles biography. In 2005, he sold the manuscripts to Horowitz, a rare books dealer, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.

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Little Feat is set to release their first new album in 12 years, Sam’s Place, on May 17. The record is the group’s first blues album, and the first to feature percussionist Sam Clayton on lead vocals.

The nine-track album is made up of a mixture of blues covers and one new song, “Milk Man,” which Sam wrote. The album also features a guest appearance by Bonnie Raitt on a cover of Muddy Waters’ “Long Distance Call.”

“I’m very happy because I was never expecting anything like that,” Clayton says of singing on the album. “I mean, I have wanted to, but I just wasn’t expecting it to come to fruition. It was a long wait, but it’s satisfying.”

To give fans a little preview of the record, Little Feat has just released the track “You’ll Be Mine,” a cover of a Willie Dixon-penned tune made famous by Howlin’ Wolf.  

You can listen to “You’ll be Mine” now via digital outlets and on YouTube. 

Sam’s Place is available for preorder now.

Little Feat is set to hit the road on their Can’t Be Satisfied tour starting May 31 in Berkley, California. A complete list of dates can be found at littlefeat.net.

Here is the track list for Sam’s Place:

“Milk Man”
“You’ll Be Mine”
“Long Distance Call”
“Don’t Go No Further”
“I Can’t Be Satisfied”
“Last Night”
“Why People Like That”
“Mellow Down Easy”
“Got My Mojo Working (Live)”

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Wolfgang Van Halen has responded to David Lee Roth‘s multiple shots at him, telling Billboard, “I’m honored he thinks about me as much as he does, I guess.”

As previously reported, the former Van Halen vocalist has released multiple videos aimed at the Mammoth WVH frontman, who, of course, is the son of the late Eddie Van Halen and started playing bass in the “Panama” outfit in 2006. In one, Roth refers to Wolf as “this f****** kid” as he tells multiple stories about how the younger Van Halen apparently had some of his backstage guests kicked out. In another, he appears to make fun of the last Van Halen album, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, which featured both Wolf and Roth.

“I would sure love to not have to be part of some sort of Van Halen drama at all,” Wolf now says. “I think I’m just gonna continue to sit in my no-comment zone … ’cause at the end of the day it’s just not worth it.”

“It’s one thing when there’s some [person] on Twitter saying a lie about me,” he continues. “But when there’s other people trying to lie about me and make me look bad? It’s just like, you can believe whatever you want, I guess. The people who hate me are gonna continue to hate me, and I’m just gonna be over here doing my thing.”

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Lawyers for Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose have filed a response to a lawsuit filed in November by former Penthouse Pet of the Year Sheila Kennedy, who claimed that back in 1989, the rocker sexually assaulted her in his hotel room after they met at a New York nightclub.

In their response, Rose’s lawyers deny a sexual assault occurred and argue that on two occasions, Kennedy acknowledged that her encounter with Rose was consensual.

The first time was in 2016 in her memoir No One’s Pet. “I was okay with this. I had wanted to be with him since the minute I’d first laid eyes on him, and now I was getting him,” she wrote. The second time was in the 2021 documentary Look Away when she said of the encounter, “I did not consider it rape. It was consensual.” 

They argue that Kennedy’s suit is an attempt to “rewrite history,” clearly implying she’s doing so for financial gain. They note her story only changed after New York passed the Adult Survivor’s Act, which allowed victims of sexual abuse to sue in cases that would have otherwise fallen outside the usual statute of limitations.

“Kennedy cannot and will not succeed in this unscrupulous attempt at a financial windfall,” they write.

In her suit, Kennedy claimed she “suffered severe emotional, physical, financial and psychological distress” from the encounter with Rose and had “issues with physical and emotional intimacy.” She is seeking unspecified damages.

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