The full lineup for Milwaukee’s annual Summerfest has just been announced, with over 100 acts booked for the festival, now in its 55th year. This year’s fest will take place over three weekends, June 22 to 24, June 29 to July 1 and July 6 to 8, with bands playing across 12 stages.
James Taylor and Sheryl Crow are set to headline a June 24 show at the American Family Insurance Amphitheater, while Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Styx, Cheap Trick, 38 Special, Night Ranger, Survivor, Soul Asylum and more are confirmed for the festival stages.
Tickets for Summerfest are on sale now. A complete lineup and concert schedule can be found at summerfest.com.
Rocker Billy Joel married supermodel Christie Brinkley on a yacht in New York’s Hudson River. The two stars met in 1983 in St. Barts, and Brinkley later appeared in Joel’s video for “Uptown Girl” before they eventually wed.
They welcomed their first and only child together, Alexa Ray, that December.
It was the second marriage for both Joel and Brinkley but it didn’t last. They divorced in August 1994, and both went on to marry two more times.
Joel has been married to current wife Alexis Roderick since 2015 and they have two daughters together, Della Rose and Remy Anne.
John Fogerty is a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, with plenty of huge hits behind him, but even he questions his abilities sometimes — at least when it comes to playing guitar.
“I didn’t feel that I was a virtuoso on guitar,” Fogerty tells Guitar World of his Creedence Clearwater Revival days. “I did feel I knew how to get a sound out of my instrument, which was pretty important.”
He adds, “I think musicians, especially guitar players, tend to be a humble bunch because it’s sort of the Wild West. There’s always some guy louder and faster and going to call you out in the street. And it’s just a matter of a flip of a coin if you get bushwhacked.”
But even though he believes “there were a lot of people running around that were better than me,” Fogerty was OK with that: “I felt very comfortable within my own band.”
The rocker says the important thing was that he and his CCR bandmates “were good together.”
“I didn’t think any of us was, let’s say, the best in the world, or even in our own country or our own state, at what we were doing,” Fogerty says. “To me, that didn’t matter. I thought it was much more important to sound good together.”
March 23 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of ZZ Top’s eighth studio album, Eliminator, which went on to be the band’s most commercially successful album, peaking at nine on the Billboard Album chart.
The album, which used more synthesizers and drum machines than previous ZZ Top records, featured four hit singles: “Legs,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharped Dressed Man” and “TV Dinners.” “Gimme All Your Lovin’” peaked at two on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, with “Legs” and “Sharp Dressed Man” also making the top 10. “Gimme All Your Lovin’” also landed on the Billboard Top 40 chart.
The success of the album and the songs were helped by a series of hugely popular videos for “Legs,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’” and “Sharped Dressed Man.” They wound up in regular rotation on MTV, helping to attract a younger fan base.
All three featured a trio of models, along with a red 1933 Ford coupe, like the one that appeared on the cover of the album, with the video for “Legs” marking the debut of the band’s spinning guitars, covered in white sheepskin. “Legs” went on to earn ZZ Top an MTV Video Music Award for Best Group.
Eliminator was the first of the band’s albums to become a worldwide success and went on to sell over 11 million copies in the U.S. It has been certified Diamond by the RIAA.
And while ZZ Top lost member Dusty Hill in July 2021, they haven’t slowed down. They hit the road next month on a solo tour and will co-headline a tour this summer with Lynyrd Skynyrd, dubbed The Sharp Dressed Simple Man Tour. A complete list of tour dates can be found at zztop.com.
Nabbing tickets to see Bruce Springsteenand The E Street Band certainly wasn’t easy. For those who missed out, The Boss is now giving his fans a chance to win a trip to see him in his home state of New Jersey.
Springsteen has teamed up with Propeller for a new sweepstakes that helps raise money and awareness for The Ally Coalition, which works to better the lives of LGBTQ+ youth.
And the lucky winner and a guest will nab quite a grand prize: two tickets to The Boss’ April 14 show at the Prudential Center in Newark, along with airfare, hotel accommodations and ride-share credit. The winner will also take home a signed Fender American Original ’50s Telecaster guitar.
KISS may be ready to say goodbye to the road in December, but it’s not like they’ll be completely gone. In fact, we’re about to learn a whole lot more about their early years, courtesy of a new KISS biopic that’s in the works.
The news of the biopic was confirmed by the band’s manager, Doc McGhee, during an interview with The Rock Experience With Mike Brunn, in which he discussed things coming up for KISS once they retire from the road.
“We have a movie getting ready to be filmed … it’s a biopic about the first four years of KISS,” McGhee said. “We’re just starting it now. We’ve already sold it, it’s already done, we have a director. That’s moving along and that’ll come in ’24.”
As for those two final shows, taking place December 1 and 2 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, it sounds like fans who couldn’t snag tickets may eventually get a chance to see what went down. When asked if the shows would be filmed or recorded for a DVD or pay-per-view special, McGhee noted, “I’m sure we’ll come up with something. We want to do something very special. We’re working on it right now.”
Foo Fighters and Green Day are among the headliners for Canada’s 2023 FEQ festival, taking place July 6-16 in Quebec.
Other headliners include Weezer, Imagine Dragons and Lana Del Rey, with the lineup also featuring Heart‘s Ann Wilson, Bad Religion, The Smile, Vance Joy and more.
For the full lineup and all ticket info, visit FEQ.ca.
Foo Fighters are also playing festivals including Bonnaroo, Boston Calling, Outside Lands, Louder than Life and Sonic Temple, as well as several headline shows in May and June. The performances are part of their live comeback following the death of drummer Taylor Hawkins last year.
Paul McCartney has never been one to play it safe in his career, but amongst all the risks he’s taken, he now reveals forming Wings was one of his biggest.
“The main question I had was whether to keep going after The Beatles, because it was a hard act – some might say, an impossible act – to follow,” he shares on his website in response to a question on Twitter. “Once that band had finished, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and trying something new was really risky.”
Paul notes that then deciding to put wife Linda in Wings was another big risk, because “she was not a ‘musician.’” He describes early reviews about her as hurtful: “But I rationalized it by thinking about when we started The Beatles and none of us knew our chords – over time we got better and picked things up.”
McCartney describes the beginning of Wings as going “back to square one.”
“I’d doubled back to almost being nothing – just some guy in the band – and now I was earning my fame again,” he says. “By the time the mid-70s came around when we were doing a big American tour, that was the vindication of it. We were so tight and had come up together, as it were. The risk paid off.”
He says his bandmate John Lennon was a much bigger risk-taker than he was, noting, “If there was a cliff to be jumped off, John would jump!”
“Obviously, I’m not completely square,” he says. “I do a lot of zany stuff! That’s in my character too, but I don’t live my life as a risk-taker. I try and work it out to some extent.”
Lindsey Buckingham seems to be trolling folks on social media. Following the premiere of the Amazon Prime series Daisy Jones & the Six, a clip of Fleetwood Mac’s 1997 reunion concert performance of “Silver Springs” has gone viral on social media, and Lindsey appears to have responded.
Buckingham shared a portion of the performance on TikTok, featuring just his guitar solo, stopping just as Stevie Nicks is about to sing the song she wrote about their breakup. Buckingham captioned the clip, “I hear we’re talking about that ‘97 Silver Springs’ again…,” which prompted several responses on social media.
“Leaving in the solo but cutting off before the bridge when Stevie stares a hole right through your soul,” one person commented, while another added, “He knows well and good that is not the part we’re talking about.” Daisy Jones star Riley Keough responded to his post, “Yes we are.”
“Silver Springs” was written for 1997’s Rumours, but was left off of it. It became a B-side for “Go Your Own Way,” and the live version was featured on the 1997 album The Dance. The performance clip has gone viral because Daisy Jones author Taylor Jenkins Reid says the book was inspired by watching that Fleetwood Mac concert, and particularly mentioned the performances of “Silver Springs” and “Landslide.”
Elton John’s “Rocket Man” is one of his biggest hits, but apparently even Elton didn’t know what the song was about until recently.
Elton is celebrating last year’s 50th anniversary of Honky Château, the album “Rocket Man” is on, and in a clip posted to Instagram, we see the moment he learned what the tune was really about.
“’Rocket Man’ was our first-ever number-one record I think. And it was on the Honky Château record,” he says. “It was a pretty easy song to write a melody to because it’s a song about space so it’s quite a spacious song.”
But apparently it really isn’t about space, with Elton’s songwriting partner Bernie Taupin setting him straight.
“It was actually a song inspired by Ray Bradbury from his book of science-fiction short stories called The Illustrated Man,” Taupin explains. “In that book, there was a story called The Rocket Man, which was about how astronauts in the future would become sort of an everyday job, so I kinda took that idea and ran with it.”
Well, that was news to Elton, who responded, “Do you know, I never knew that.” He captioned the clip “you learn something new every day.”
Elton is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Honky Château with an anniversary edition, which is dropping Friday. It is available for preorder now.
