Former Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm's new autobiography Juke Box Hero: My Five Decades in Rock 'N' Roll chronicles the singer's successes, especially Foreigner's multi-platinum track record and his early solo albums Ready Or Not and Long Hard Look. But it digs into the darkness as well, including his struggles in pre-Foreigner bands, his early 90's stint in drug rehab and his harrowing but ultimately successful battle with brain cancer that started in 1997. He also writes in depth about his relationship with Mick Jones, a push-and-pull that led to Gramm leaving Foreigner "a couple times" before being replaced by Kelly Hansen in 2004. "We have had our problems, the two of us," Gramm says with a chuckle. "It's kind of a book about the different aspects of a relationship." Gramm and Jones are due to perform again as they are honored during an upcoming Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony. Gramm and his book co-writer, Scott Pitoniak, will begin a series of book signings later in May to promote Juke Box Hero, and a full schedule can be found at www.lougramm.com. Gramm says he's also planning a follow-up to his 2009 solo album, Baptized By Fire. - Billboard......
Black Sabbath has announced they'll debut their upcoming single "End of the Beginning" on the May 15th season finale of the hit TV detective series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. According to a press release, they'll perform the tune when series stars Ted Danson and Marc Vann attend a BS concert as they "investigate a trail of murders with horrifying similarities to the sins in Dante's Inferno." Sabbath's new album, 13, is their first studio album with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals since 1978's Never Say Die!, and is due on June 11. The band has announced dates behind the new LP in Australia and Europe, but no American dates have been announced yet. They'll kick off a UK arena tour on Dec. 12 at London's O2 Arena, before hitting Belfast (12/12), Sheffield (12/14), Glasgow(12/16), and Manchester (12/18) before wrapping in their hometown of Birmingham on Dec. 20. - Rolling Stone/New Musical Express...
Randall Miller and Jody Savin, the filmmakers behind the upcoming film about New York's legendary CBGB club, have obtained the rights to Gregg Allman's best-selling 2012 autobiography My Cross to Bear and are planning to make a film out of it as well. The duo say they'll focus on two fronts of Allman's eventful and oft-tragic life: his journey as a struggling artist through the formation of the Allman Brothers Band and its explosion on the music scene, and on a portrait of an older Allman as a 64-year-old man who knows he has to clean up. Also, they plan to use a mix of Allman's original songs and songs performed by the actor/musicians who have yet to be cast. Miller and Savin said they had planned to follow up their CBGB movie with a documentary about the famed recording studio Caribou Records but couldn't pass up the opportunity to adapt My Cross to Bear. The Caribou Records doc will now likely to be made after the Allman movie. - The Hollywood Reporter....
Wings Over America, Paul McCartney & Wings' chart-topping 1976 live album that captured the famous former Beatle's band in its prime, will be reissued in a variety of formats, including CD and vinyl, on on May 28. McCartney and Wings performed some of their biggest hits on the original triple-LP vinyl set, including "Band on the Run," "My Love," and "Live and Let Die," as well as McCartney's first-ever performance of such Beatles' classics as "Lady Madonna," "Blackbird," and "Yesterday." Also, a Deluxe Box Set version of the reissue will be packaged as a four-book, four-disc (three CDs and a DVD) package, including a bonus disc recorded live at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The DVD will feature the rare 75-minute TV special Wings Over the World and a photo gallery. In addition, the set will feature four art books, including a 110-page tour book, with new interviews and liner notes by Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke. Rockshow, a live McCartney and Wings concert film documenting the same 1976 tour, will also be released on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time on June 10. Originally released on Betamax, it marks the first time the documentary has been released fully restored from the original 35mm film with a 5.1 audio mix. Rockshow captures the band performing at Seattle's Kingdom. - Yahoo...
Original Eagles member Bernie Leadon will join the group on their upcoming "History of the Eagles Tour," his fellow guitarist and current Eagles member Joe Walsh has announced. "Bernie's brilliant. I never really got a chance to play with him, but we've been in contact. We see him from time to time, and I'm really glad he's coming because it's going to take the show up a notch, and I'm really looking forward to playing with him, finally," Walsh recently told Billboard. Walsh didn't get into detail, but he implied that Leadon, will only perform material from his time in the band, which lasted from 1971 to 1975. It is unclear whether other former Eagles including bassist Randy Meisner and guitarist Don Felder will also be joining the band on the tour, which gets underway on July 6 in Louisville and is expected to play intermittently throughout the year. - Rolling Stone...
Bruce Springsteen won't have to worry about the "plug getting pulled" in London this year as he plays the Hard Rock Calling festival in June. The time curfew at east London's Olympic Park where the festival is held has been extended to 11:00 p.m. by the Newham Council as it relaxes the rules ahead of the Wireless and Hard Rock Calling festivals later this year. Springsteen famously had the plugged pulled on him in Hyde Park last summer during an onstage collaboration with Paul McCartney after they overran the curfew. Hard Rock Calling 2013 is set for June 29 and 30 at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, London. Springsteen and his E Street Band will headline the final night, after openers the Black Crowes and Alabama Shakes. - NME...
Paul McCartney has announced his first live date of 2013 that marks the beginning of a new tour dubbed "Out There!" that will focus on places he's never visited before. According to a post on his official site, Sir Paul will be playing Poland's National Stadium in Warsaw on June 22, his first-ever show in the former Communist bloc country. McCartney, who is set to appear at this year's Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tenn., also posted he's working on a new studio album that will be the follow-up to his 2012 album, Kisses on the Bottom. He added more dates on the "Out There!" tour will be forthcoming. Macca is also planning a new 12" vinyl record, a 1976 promo live version of "Maybe I'm Amazed" from his Wings days, to support the UK's Record Store Day, which takes place on Apr. 20. David Bowie fans will also be able to purchase a 7" vinyl copy of "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)"/ "Where Are We Now?" limited to 1,000 copies on the same day. - Rolling Stone..
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are preparing for a six-week summer tour blitz in May and June that combines arena concerts, festival appearances (including a headlining slot at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn.) and two rare, intimate residencies: five dates at New York's Beacon Theatre, then six shows at Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. "I don't want to do a 'greatest hits' night," Petty says of the theater gigs, his first small-hall run since a 2003 stretch in Chicago and long stands at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1997 and 1999. "We need to learn a lot of songs, some covers, some of our old stuff... We can present these songs in a way that will feel fresh to people who know them and be a lot of fun if you've never heard them," the singer-guitarist says. Petty added he and the band have recorded a dozen songs form a new studio album, their first since 2010's Mojo. He and the band return to their L.A. studio-and-rehearsal space in July to finish the LP, which he expects to release in 2014. "The album is based in blues but more rock than Mojo. It shows the band all grown up and looking pretty good," he says. - Rolling Stone....
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame just announced that it will host a major Rolling Stones retrospective beginning in May at the Cleveland, Oh.-based hall and museum to help mark the band's 50th anniversary. "The Rolling Stones: 50 Years of Satisfaction" will include "personal items and extraordinary collections that have never been seen before by the public," according to a press release. "This first-ever exhibit gives us an opportunity to tell the story of one of the definitive rock and roll bands," RRHOF president and CEO Greg Harris said in the presser. The exhibit, taking up two-and-a-half floors of the site, will run from May 24 through March 2014. The Stones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 1989. - Billboard...
The mobile recording studio once owned by the Rolling Stones and used to record some of the band's biggest albums including Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street is set to be revamped and restored for use at a future music venue in Calgary, Canada. The moveable facility, which was built for the band in 1968 after they grew tired of travelling to recording studios and keeping daytime hours, fell into disrepair and was purchased in 2000 by the National Music Centre in Canada in 2000 but has remained in storage since then. Now the NMC's electronics technician, John Leimseider, says his organization plans to get the studio back to working order. "My plan is a very conservative restoration," Leimseider says. "There are people who will take consoles and rewire everything -- we're not changing anything, and the plan is to clean it up and make it work perfectly," he added. The mobile studio, which was also used by such bands as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Wishbone Ash, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Santana to record some of their albums -- will be a component of the organization's new building, which is expected to open in 2015. - NME...
Peter Frampton has announced he's planning a "Peter Frampton's Guitar Circus" summer 2013 tour that will include such superstar guests as B.B. King. Frampton says he intends to tour with the concept throughout the summer and will bring in special guests for various periods of time. Legendary blues guitarist B.B. King is the first guest signed up for the tour, and will participate for three weeks in August. "I'm so honored. I can't wait to speak to him and thank him," Frampton said, adding his repertoire is undecided at this point, though it will include new material, instrumentals from his Grammy-winning 2006 release Fingerprints, and "the old favorites." Frampton is currently promoting a Blu-ray, DVD and CD release of his Frampton Comes Alive 35th anniversary tour, FCA! 35, and is producing a ballet that will open in Cincinnati, Oh. - Billboard.....
Carlos Santana has inked a book deal with publisher Little, Brown and Co. for his memoirs. The autobiography is scheduled for release sometime in 2014 and is as yet untitled. The Grammy-winning guitarist, 65, is expected to dish on his relationships with such friends and peers as Miles Davis, Eric Clapton and Herbie Hancock. Little Brown also published Keith Richards' best-selling 2010 book, Life. - AP...... In related news, the Who's Pete Townshend will release his autobiography, Who I Am, on Oct. 11 via HarperCollins. The legendary rock guitarist, songwriter and screenwriter has been working on the book for 15 years, and according to a statement it will share details of his "incredible life and elaborates on the turbulences of time spent as one of the world's most respected musicians, being in one of rock's greatest ever bands, and wanting to give it all up." It was during the writing of the book in 2003 that Townshend was cautioned by police for accessing child pornography on the Internet. When questioned by police about the material he cited researching for the book as his reason for doing so. - NME.....
Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford recently told Billboard that his British heavy metal outfit, which recently wrapped its Epitaph World Tour, is "ramping things up to get back into full writing and recording mode" back home England. "We'll see what we can do over the next couple of months, look at everything, lay it all out and then start the hard work of picking out the best material," says Halford, who added he and guitarist Glenn Tipton have "a tremendous amount of material in the vaults already. Meanwhile, Priest has released Screaming For Vengeance - Special 30th Anniversary Edition. It features the two bonus tracks from the 20th anniversary edition -- a live version of "Devil's Child" and the Turbo outtake "Prisoner of Your Eyes" -- as well as four previously unreleased live tracks from a 1982 show in San Antonio. - Billboard......
Shout Factory! has just reissued Alice Cooper's ghoulish masterwork The Strange Case of Alice Cooper on DVD. The film, which was shot during a stop on the shock-rocker's 1979 Madhouse Rock tour and inspired by Cooper's stay in a New York sanitarium, has been unavailable for more than 30 years and includes such Alice chestnuts as "No More Mr. Nice Guy," "Billion Dollar Babies," "School's Out," "From the Inside," "I'm Eighteen," "Devil's Food" and, of course, "Welcome to My Nightmare." In other Alice news, the Coop says "can't wait to kill this audience" when he performs at this year's Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn., on the final night of June 9. "I always like to put Alice where he doesn't belong," Cooper says. "I think there's going to be 80 percent of that audience that has never seen Alice. They've only heard of Alice via Slipknot or Marilyn Manson or whatever. They'll see the real thing this time. If you're in the first 20 rows, you'll probably get some blood on you," he added. - USA Today/Billboard....
Late Grateful Dead mastermind Jerry Garcia will be the subject of a new feature-length documentary from filmmaker Malcolm Leo, who has previously made biopics about Elvis Presley and the Beach Boys. Leo and his partner John Hartmann (who has managed such bands as the Eagles and CSN&Y and is the brother of late Saturday Night Live star Phil Hartmann) say they've secured the music rights to tell Garcia's story, something that's eluded other potential filmmakers over the years. Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1995. - Rolling Stone.
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