Rock News, July 10th...

"Happy Birthday Ronnie"...

Today would've been Ronnie James Dio's 70th birthday. The inventor of the devil horns tragically passed away in May of 2010 from complications of stomach cancer, but his spirit will live on in the world of heavy metal forever. Many artists and bands cite Dio as a huge influence, and without his music, metal would never be the same. So, here's to you, Ronnie…

-Metalinjection.net

David Lee Roth Addresses Van Halen Super Bowl Rumor...

Van Halen usually keep pretty tight-lipped about rumors but front-man David Lee Roth has broken with tradition to address the recent rumor that the band was set to play the half-time show at next year's Super Bowl.

Roth sent an open letter to fans via the leading news site for the band, Van Halen News Desk. Here is what he had to say:

I'm compelled to address the now-rampant rumors that Van Halen is playing the Superbowl. First of all let me say this — be still my pigskin heart. That honor has not been bestowed upon us at this time though it is one we would accept in a NY minute.

Having heard VH blaring through stadium speakers on any given Sunday – more like every given Sunday, the idea of playing there live would be like – 'okay, now we're in the game'.

Van Halen's collective memories are – and with all due respect to each and every one of these memories, teeming with been-theres and done-that's, but none include playing at the Superbowl. Playing at the Superbowl is a veritable holy grail of musical recognition, a highly prized rite of passage for (game-changing) artists. Not a spiritual rite with snake pits or Hebrew school or anything, but it's up there.

We are not on Commissioner Goodell's dance card at this time, but we would be most honored to dance the halftime away in New Orleans.

It's an honor to be considered and for that we would like to thank the rumormongers all over the World Wide Web.

-Antimusic.com

Iron Maiden Legend Retiring From Music...

Paul Di’Anno has shocked fans by announcing 2013 will be his final year as a performer.

The colourful ex Iron Maiden singer has struggled against jail stints, ill health and addiction issues to keep delivering rock shows since rising to fame with the NOWBHM outfit in 1980.

Today he said via Facebook: “I am gonna be ‘Pulling The Plug’ next year 2013, and making it my ‘Farewell Tour’…it was good whilst it lasted.”

The news took followers by surprise, many of whom replied with expressions of astonishment and urging him to rethink his decision.

Later he added: “I can’t find the right words to tell you all how much I’ll miss you. All of you have my love and respect forever, and anyone who knows me knows that ain’t a load of bollocks. You have kept me going through difficult times, happy times and a lot of heartbreak. I thank you all with all my heart and I’m glad you’re not here right now watching me write this crying like a big Jessie (for you, mates, it means a wuss!). You will be with me always.”

It had been reported he was working on a new solo album, but it’s not known whether he’ll complete the project before bowing out. He has nearly 90 shows booked for the rest of this year, and he’s believed to be planning a series of gigs with fellow ex-Maiden singer Blaze Bayley.

It’s thought upcoming surgery on his knee is part of the reason he’s retiring.

Di’Anno, real name Paul Andrews, fronted Maiden for their first two albums before being replaced by Bruce Dickinson. Often outspoken in his attitude to the band, he fluctuated between criticising and supporting his ex-bandmates.

He went on to play with a number of outfits including Gogmagog, Praying Mantis and Battlezone. He was last jailed in 2011 after UK benefits investigators discovered he’d been performing concerts across the world while claiming he was incapable of working due to a back complaint. He’d fraudulently claimed over £45,000.

On his release he said: “Prison’s hard, but I’m harder. And I managed not to pick up the soap.”

-Classicrockmagazine.com

Drummer Mick Brown (Ted Nugent/ex Dokken) arrested for drunkenly stealing golf cart...

One golf cart: $4,000. Two traffic cones: $80. Being drunk enough to pull this off: Probably at least $100. Bail: Another $4,000. This story altogether: Priceless. Sunday night (July 8th), Ted Nugent was playing a show in Bangor, ME that was part of the Waterfront Concert series. The band was paired up with Styx and REO Speedwagon, which altogether sounds like a solid night already. But apparently, Ted Nugent drummer Mick Brown was in for a bit more fun and stole a golf cart.

According to the police report, two police officers were made aware of the missing golf cart by the concert venue’s security personnel around 9:45pm. Apparently Brown was intoxicated and driving the golf cart around the Front Street recklessly, speeding past the officers once only to reappear with two women on board. In the end, one of the officers managed to physically remove him from his new ride after also running over two traffic cones, one still stuck under the cart. Brown, who is currently still in the works of forming a new group with some of his Dokken bandmates, reportedly resisted by shoving the officer. Eventually, Brown was arrested and brought to the Penobscot County Jail. The official charge is operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, driving to endanger, theft and assault.

He was released on a $4,000 bail, and the mugshot they took of him at the Penobscot County Jail (as seen above) all but screams “That was so worth it!” I mean, his nickname is “Wild” Mick Brown, and we now know which member of both Ted Nugent and Dokken we’d most want to party with. The court date is set for August 15, so we’ll find out then just how funny Lady Justice herself thought Brown’s stunt was.

-Metalinsider.net

 Aerosmith Releasing New Video Today...

Aerosmith will release the video for their new single, “Legendary Child,” Today.

Steven Tyler shared the news with fans on Monday, as well as posting a few images from the footage.

Directed by Casey Patrick Tebo, the clip will be the band’s first video in 8 years.

The song is from the band’s forthcoming new album, "Music From Another Dimension," which will be released November 6. The track also appears in the new film "G.I. Joe: Retaliation."

This week, Aerosmith continue their Global Warming tour with shows in Laval, Quebec (Tue), Quebec City (Thu), and Grand Falls, Newfoundland (Sat).

-Hennemusic.com

 Motley Crue Writing New Music But Might Not Release Another Album...

Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx hooked up with fans for a live online chat on Friday. (July6th)

The event was to help promote the Crue’s summer tour with KISS, which will hit more than 40 cities once it kicks off July 20 launch in Bristow, VA.

Sixx was asked about many things, including photography, Sixx A.M., favorite songs, artists and albums, and if – and when – the Crue might release a new album.

"We're writing…and when the songs are ready, we'll record them,” said Nikki, “and how we will release them, we don't know, because everything is changing and we kinda like it."

Things are changing with Crue’s new releases, including the launch of their new single, “SEX,” which will debut on Friday, July 13 on Sirius/XM and be available on Tuesday, July 17.

“It will be surfacing in different ways,” explained the bassist. “The music industry is changing and we are changing in the way that we deliver music to the fans. I think you are all going to be very excited with, not only the song, but what we do with it.”

The full transcript of Sixx’s online chat is available here.

-Hennemusic.com

Green Day Plan To Release Two Documentaries...

Two documentaries on Green Day are expected to complement the release of three albums between late September and the middle of January.

Filmmakers Tim Lynch, a producer of "Green Day: Bullet in a Bible," and Tim Wheeler, a co-producer and editor of "The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights," are creating a documentary on the making of the band's upcoming three albums, "¡Uno!," "¡Dos!" and "¡Tre!" A second documentary is being created from vintage footage from their pre-"Dookie" days.

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong tells Billboard.com that "the two Tims" have shot the band performing in clubs, rehearsing and recording over the last year and a half.

"It's not going to be the sitting down, head shot of me going, 'We started out blah blah blah'," Armstrong says. "We wanted to get into lifestyles of rock 'n' roll and playing rock n roll and letting the story kind of tell itself rather than create revisionist (history)."

Green Day Reveals 'Tre!' Artwork, 'Uno!' Track List

The filmmakers will be filming the band as they rehearse before heading to Japan and Europe for a few festival dates. Executives at Green Day's label, Warner Bros. Records, hope the making-of film will be ready by early next year to possibly premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

Green Day is also reuniting with director Sam Bayer, who shot several of the band's videos, among them "Jesus of Suburbia." The band has already issued a couple of trailers for the albums that feature instrumental versions of two of the albums' tracks.

The first Green Day single from the upcoming albums, "Oh Love," will be released July 16; "¡Uno!" comes out Sept. 25.

-Billboard.com

Guns N' Roses Success Helped Kill L.A. Glam Scene...

Imagine coming home from a work trip to suddenly find that everybody you saw was a clone of you. That's exactly what confronted Duff McKagan after his first Guns N' Roses tour.

In an interview with the New York Times [read it here], McKagan said that when the band left on tour, the glitzy glam look that GNR railed against was still in vogue. "We left on tour in June of ’87 and were gone for a year and a half," he said. “There were no computers, no social media, hardly even fax machines, so we had no idea that people in L.A. made this shift in culture to look and sound like us. Imagine landing back on Planet Earth: People were all glammed out when you left, and now you could tell the photo of us they were trying to look like. There was the Izzy [Stradlin] guy, the Slash guy, the Axl [Rose] guy, the me guy, the Steven [Adler] guy, and they were walking all over Hollywood. It was weird.”

In the same piece, Poison's Bret Michaels describes the appeal of the era. “They solely want to wrap it up as a fashion statement and throw it out," he says. "But when you listen to the musicians who played then — Slash, Zakk Wylde, the songs that we wrote — we really spent time learning our craft. Something stood the test of time?"

-Nytimes.com

Metallica Release Creeping Death Video From Orion Fest...

By all accounts, Metallica’s inaugural Orion Music + More festival last month in Atlantic City was a huge success.

Fans were treated to more than 30 artists on the weekend bill, plus onsite activities like Kirk’s Crypt, the Orion Custom Car + Motorcycle Show and the Hit The Lights Films tent. 

Metallica headlined both nights: on Saturday, they played their classic “Ride The Lightning” album in its entirety and, for the first time ever in the U.S., performed the “Black” album on Sunday.

The metal icons are now sharing footage of their opening night performance of “Creeping Death.”

To watch Metallica’s complete set from Saturday, click here.

-Hennemusic.com

 KISS Go Global With New Song...

Last week, KISS released their new single, “Hell or Hallelujah.”

The song is the lead track from the band’s 20th studio album, “Monster,” due in October.

Produced by Paul Stanley, the album is the group's first studio effort since 2009’s "Sonic Boom."

KISS originally offered up an English-language lyric video for the single, and now they've put together regional versions for 11 different languages, including:

• Arabic

• Chinese

• French

• German

• Hebrew

• Japanese

• Italian

• Korean

• Brazilian-Portugese

• Portual-Portugese

• Spanish

KISS kick off a summer tour of North America with Motley Crue; shows begin July 20 in Bristow, VA.

-Hennemusic.com

Bon Scott...

"Happy Birthday"

Bon Scott...

Today would have marked the 66th birthday of Bon Scott, the original lead singer of the Australian hard rock group AC/DC. Scott, who was their front man during the first wave of the band’s success, died of acute alcohol poisoning on February 19th, 1980, and was another of rock’s true blue go for broke and take no prisoners individual, who relished and leapt full frontally into all the swirling decadence that came with his endeavor. With his gritty voice and attitude, his ballsy approach on the microphone, his charmingly sleazy demeanor, and dying young like so many of rock and roll’s greats before him, Bon Scott remains a celebrated figure in the annals of hard rock history.

He was born Ronald Belford Scott in Scotland on July 9, 1946, before his family moved him from there to Australia when he was six. Having recently arrived from Bonnie, Scotland at that point when he went to school, he was christened with the nickname “Bon” and it stuck with him for the rest of his life.

(Bon Scott in the lap of his mother   Isabelle (Isa) Cunningham Mitchell, along with her husband, Charles (Chick) Scott, in the background.)

He worked various jobs when he was a teenager, picking up the drums eventually and forming the band The Spektors when he was 12, playing the backbeat and also occasionally singing. His distinctive vocal sound was influenced by the great Little Richard, who also had a propensity for wailing and screeching lyrics, almost in a guttural sense onto his recordings. Scott played in various other bands throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, some of them sporting minor hit singles in Australia. He also started to relish his party lifestyle and manifested it as the days went by more and more. By 1974, Scott had gotten into a major drunken altercation with a band member, took off on a motorcycle and crashed it, suffering injuries so severe he was in a coma for three days. A man with the colorful name of Vince Lovegrove gave Scott odd jobs to do during his recovery from the accident, and he also ran a management/booking agency. It was Lovegrove who introduced Scott to AC/DC, who needed a new singer as the original singer, Dave Evans, had departed due to irreconcilable differences between him and the rest of the group.

(AC/DC with Lead Singer Dave Evans, 1974)

(Dave Evans) 

At first glance of the suggestion, the band, led by the Young brothers, George, Malcolm, and Angus, thought Scott was too old and didn't think his injuries would make him a capable, viable front man for the heavy rock ensemble. Scott defense was that he didn't think the band was old enough and could rock out at all. A quick get together soon afterward in the guise of a jam session that lasted until the break of dawn proved otherwise, and thus, the first classic lineup of AC/DC was in place.

 

The first album with Scott as the front man, High Voltage, released October 1974, took only ten days to record. Scott added lyrics to what were mainly instrumental tunes that had been written by the Young brothers.

By the following year, their second album, TNT included what is essentially the first in a long string of AC/DC rock anthems, “It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll).” At the time the album was only released in Australia and New Zealand, and they slowly built a fan base that was cultivated by appearances on a nationally broadcast music program called Countdown, which spring-boarded AC/DC into becoming one of the biggest acts down under. In 1976, they signed with Atlantic Records for an international distribution deal, and toured non-stop all over Europe, supporting seminal rock acts at the time such as Black Sabbath, Kiss, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, and others. 

 

The first two albums that were released in Australia were repackaged as one album, also entitled High Voltage, and sold over 3 million copies to date, and the band started its slow domination of the globe. 

The next release, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, with its crunching metal sing-a-long feel of the title track and the song “Big Balls” which parlayed a rather tongue in cheek innuendo done to a delicious and positively perfectly slimy albeit top notch turn by way of Scott’s vocalizing, was another standout. The record was also successful and remains another of the band’s high watermarks of their career and extensive catalog.

The next release, entitled Let There Be Rock, came out in 1977, during which time the band played America for the first time, supporting a reunited MC5 in Flint, Michigan, and performing a few songs. 

The following year’s Powerage started to set the tone AC/DC is well known for, as their riffs became more harder and the record more leaner, Scott’s confident vocals still the primary showcase for the band and perfectly complementing the jackhammer sound of the music. A single from the album, “Rock and Roll Damnation,” hit number #24 on the charts, giving the band a surprise and unexpected hit.

But it was the release of Highway to Hell in 1979 that made AC/DC poised for the superstar status they would achieve in the wake of Bon Scott’s death that following year. It also marked the band’s first real breakthrough in America, as the album reached the top 20 on the album charts. Produced by Robert “Mutt” Lange, who became a seminal force for the band and a large influence in their change of direction, Highway to Hell found the band tighter and rocking harder this time around, retaining their core signature sound, but even found Scott more focused and less grimy in his approach, which while successful on the prior AC/DC releases, was decidedly more popular to a cult fringe of the band’s audience. With Highway to Hell, AC/DC was risen to a higher level in the eyes and ears of their hard rock compatriots and audience respectively.

By 1980, the band had already started working on the next album, Back in Black. But on February 19, 1980, Scott had passed out in a friend’s car after a heavy night of drinking and died. The first chapter of AC/DC had come to an abrupt close. The band considered quitting but they soldiered on to complete Back in Black, employing a new singer by the name of Brian Johnson, who they knew from of all people, Bon Scott. Bon had touted Johnson to the band, saying he had a vocal style and range which sounded like, one of his earliest heroes, the one he tried to emulate the most growing up, Little Richard.

Back in Black, released near the end of the year, became one of the biggest-selling records of all time, became regarded as one of rock and roll’s greatest most influential releases, and the band found themselves enjoying the superstar status that was right on the cusp with Bon Scott. The band continues to this day selling out arenas all over the world and AC/DC remains one of rock and roll’s most legendary music ensembles to millions of fans globally.

But Bon Scott has not been forgotten by any means. He still gets plenty of radio play on classic rock radio, as “Highway to Hell,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” “TNT,” and “It’s a Long Way to the Top” still get heavy rotation on the airwaves. New generations of fans still are discovering the fact that the Bon Scott era of AC/DC still packs a leather-studded glove wallop to the musical chest as much as the more mainstream later Brian Johnson-era AC/DC records do. Fans who have been there since the beginning, still consider Bon Scott as one of the greatest hard rock front men of all time. Critics’ polls in various music and metal magazines still put Scott in their “top ten greatest rock singers of all time” lists. It’s a testament to the legacy of Bon Scott that generations of AC/DC fans still keep his name and attitude alive and well into this 21 century. Birthday greetings of the highest order to Bon Scott, the man who really was TNT, he was dynamite.

-Geeksofdoom.com