Archive: 2005

For Guster, it was a short northeast run that allowed the headliner to showcase new material from their 2006 spring Reprise album

Going strong, five albums deep, Atmosphere

Festival season begins early in South Florida, and the Langerado Music Festival is the destination of choice for traveling music lovers ready to start the journey. The festival, now in its fourth year, is preparing to host a slew of fans from colder climates: music lovers, college spring-breakers and sun seekers who are aching for festival season to begin.

Voted “Best Music Festival” by City Link magazine, for 2006 Langerado announces its biggest and best line-up ever: Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, The Black Crowes, The Flaming Lips, Wilco, The Meters, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, Keller Williams, Burning Spear, G. Love & Special Sauce, Steel Pulse, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Drive-By Truckers, The Secret Machines, Umphrey’s McGee, The Disco Biscuits, Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, MOFRO, Slightly Stoopid, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Brazilian Girls, Kid Koala, Lyrics Born, RJD2, Kinky, Rose Hill Drive, Brothers Past, Pnuma Trio, Lotus, Mike Relm and more!

visit langerado.com/artists for a complete list of performers.

The fourth annual Langerado Music Festival which will take place March 11 &12, will be held at Markham Park in Sunrise, Florida for the second year in a row. The gorgeous sprawling facility perched at the eastern edge of the Everglades Conservation Area will house multiple stages, food and crafts vendors including an extensive selection of micro-brewed beers, a children’s play area, limited on-site camping, art installations by LEBO www.lebostudios.com and more!

To ensure an intimate experience for all involved, only 15,000 tickets will be sold for each day. Music will play from 11 am to 9 pm, with Langerado Late Night shows to take place at multiple venues throughout Ft. Lauderdale.

Tickets go on sale Friday, December 9 at 10am EST through the festival’s online secure ticketing system at langerado.com

Jerry Garcia’s dishwasher, toilets and other home appliances will be auctioned by a nonprofit group hoping to raise more than $100,000. The items, which also include stereo cabinets, cupboards and a freezer, will be available for bidding on the online auction site eBay from Dec. 18-24.

Revenue will benefit the Sophia Foundation, a San Francisco Bay area nonprofit that aids children and families during marital separations and divorces, said the group’s chairman, Henry Koltys.

Koltys bought the Nicasio, Calif. home of Garcia, the lead singer and guitarist of the Grateful Dead, in 1997, two years after Garcia died of a heart attack. An appraiser has valued the items at about $75,000, but Koltys said he expects people will end up spending more.

“There’s a lot of Deadheads out there with money, and they want a piece of Jerry somehow,” he said.

Source billboard.com.

Widespread Panic will close out 2005 with a Dec. 30-31 run at Atlanta’s Philips Arena and will also drop by the city’s Roxy Theatre for a Dec. 29 benefit for Tunes for Tots. Tickets for that gig go on sale Saturday (Dec. 3), with all proceeds earmarked for music education programs in Georgia.

The Athens, Ga., based band will hit the studio in January with famed producer Terry Manning to begin work on its next album, which is expected for a summer release. It will be the follow-up to 2003’s “Ball,” which has sold more than 101,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Breaking a 15-month hiatus that began in 2004, Widespread toured for much of the year, including stints at Lollapalooza and Farm Aid.

Source billboard.com.

Last week Grateful Dead Merchandising (GDM) pulled all of the band’s free live music downloads from the popular Live Music Archive. Deadheads responded bitterly by circulating a petition calling for a boycott of the organization — including CDs and pay music downloads — until the decision was reversed. More than 5,000 fans signed the online petition. It was announced last night that the protest paid off: The decision was reversed. For the most part.

A November 30th statement posted on Live Music Archive reads: “We at archive.org now realize that our mistaken attempts to move quickly were based on what we thought the Grateful Dead wanted. For this we apologize to both the Grateful Dead and their community.” While all of the band’s live audience recordings — and there are thousands — are once again available for free download, soundboard recordings will now be available only in streaming format. Archive.org notes that there could be future changes and thanked the Deadhead community for “helping guide this process.”

Source: RollingStone

One Fell Swoop, the sophomore CD by Spill Canvas, is hard to dislike. From the very first note, this hard rocking band is in overdrive. They slow it down for

Mighty Sam McClain is that most seasoned and agreeable of old school performers, a master of soul and R&B blues in the manner of Bobby “Blue” Bland, whom McClain has called an idol, and whose influence on him is lovingly pronounced. The show at the Stone Church (made even more so by a dark, starless night and plenty of car-obscuring fog) was not an all-star salute at Madison Square Garden, planned to the minute and sponsored beyond its ability to breathe comfortably. It was a warm, emotional benefit concert, and for the gathering of townies, friends (Sam now makes his home in New Hampshire) and dance-hearty music lovers in attendance, the place to be.

With their latest release Howl, BRMC has made their boldest statement yet. Gone are the walls of reverb, buzzing guitars and Jesus and Mary Chain comparisons, as they’re replaced with a collection of true Americana revealing 60’s counter-culture and Johnny Cash outlaw hymns.

Guster is eyeing a spring 2006 release date for its next Reprise album, “Ganging Up on the Sun.” Among the tracks tipped for inclusion are “Hang On,” “The Beginning of the End,” “C’mon,” “One Man Wrecking Machine” and an as-yet-unnamed track featuring vocals from a cashier who works at a food shop near where the band recorded in Woodstock, N.Y.

“I definitely think this is our most ambitious album and we were a lot more fearless going into this one musically, lyrically and production-wise,” vocalist/guitarist Ryan Miller tells Billboard.com. “In some ways, these songs are all over the map in texture and sound and tempo and feel but I hope, and think, that there emerges a through line that draws them all together. What that line is, I don’t really know. Melody? Pop sensibility?”

“Each of our albums have progressed logically from the one before,” Miller says. “‘Lost and Gone’ was the last chapter of the ‘bongo drum’ era and ‘Keep It Together’ was us getting our sea legs with new instrumentation and a renewed sense of creativity. With the addition of [multi-instrumentalist] Joe [Pisapia] in the last two years, it felt like we were finally hitting some sort of writing stride.”

“I think we step into the studio every time hoping to make a classic album,” Miller continues. “I certainly can’t say if we achieved that goal this time, but it’s definitely the closest we’ve come.”

Source billboard.com.