News

As rock veterans go, you don’t find many more enduring than Steve Winwood. He made his name fronting venerable outfits like Traffic, Blind Faith, and the Spencer Davis Group, and he’s been a solo performer for nearly three decades.

The Grammy-winning vocalist/keyboardist is still on the march, and has unveiled plans for a fall theatre tour of the U.S. that will stretch for more than a month.

Winwood will launch the trek at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom September 20, then skip across to the West Coast for a series of California gigs. He’ll come back through the Midwest to the East Coast in October and wrap things up in Boston October 15.

The British rocker’s last solo release, About Time, dropped in 2003 after a six-year absence. He’s done numerous tours since then, including some largely sold-out U.S. runs earlier this year.

Source pollstar.com.

My Morning Jacket, the racous band from Louisville, Ky. will be traveling north this autumn for about a month’s worth of shows.

The tour begins on October 6 in Atlanta at the Roxy Theatre. After a few shows in Tennessee, MMJ will head through Washington D.C., and then play a two-day stint in Philadelphia on October 12 and 14. Dates in major New England cities will follow an October 19 show in Toronto.

MMJ will work their way West after a show in Cleveland on October 20, playing major cities around the Great Lake states, before finishing the tour up on Ocotber 29 in Minneapolis.

Two days before the start of the tour, MMJ will be releasing their fourth full-length album, Z, the follow-up to 2003’s critically lauded It Still Moves. Z is the first album which features the two newest members of MMJ. Carl Broemel (guitar) and Bo Koster (keys) joined after the departure of two founding members of MMJ at the end of 2003.

Beside a few one-off shows in June and a couple of opening slots for Wilco, this will MMJ’s first tour of 2005, having spent the first half of the year working on Z. U.K. fans get a dose of MMJ in London on September 6. The band’s frontman, Jim James, will also be performing solo on September 7 at London’s St. James’s Church.

Source pollstar.com.

Although the track list has not yet been revealed, a DVD chronicling Cream’s May reunion run at London’s Royal Albert Hall will be released Oct. 4 via Rhino. The shows found Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker performing together for the first time in nearly 37 years, save for a one-off set at Cream’s 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The group is said to be mulling a similar run at New York’s Madison Square Garden in late October, but has yet to confirm specifics. The London shows grossed more than $3.6 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.

Source billboard.com.

Following up on the success of 2003’s OLD WORLD UNDERGROUND, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?, Canadian 4-piece Metric is excited to announce the release of a new album, LIVE IT OUT, which will street October 4th on Last Gang Records. Single “Monster Hospital” will hit the airwaves during the last week in August, and, in support of the new album, Metric will kick off an extensive US tour, beginning October 2nd at The Paradise in Boston.

METRIC “LIVE IT OUT” TOUR

October 2: Boston, MA @ The Paradise
October 3: Providence, RI @ Century Lounge
October 5: New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
October 6: Brooklyn, NY @ Southpaw
October 7: Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church
October 8: Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
October 10: Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle
October 11: Atlanta, GA @ The Loft
October 12: Birmingham, AL @ Zydeco
October 13: Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
October 14: Cincinnati, OH @ Top Cats
October 15: Cleveland, OH @ The Grog Shop
October 17: Detroit, MI @ The Magic Stick
October 18: Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
October 19: St. Louis, MO @ Creepy Crawl
October 20: Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
October 21: Omaha, NE @ Sokol Underground
October 22: Minneapolis, MN @ Ascot Room at The Quest
November 1: Seattle, WA @ Crocodile Caf

Arguably, the festival of the year – The Austin City Limits Music Festival to be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 23, 24, & 25, 2005 at Zilker Park in Austin Texas had announced their schedule grid. Scattered over eight stages, this year

Hip-hop artist Talib Kweli, modern rock acts Arcade Fire and Animal Liberation Orchestra (ALO) and progressive jam band Umphrey’s McGee have been added to the lineup of the inaugural Vegoose festival. The Oct. 29-30 festival at Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Stadium is being organized by by A.C. Entertainment and Superfly Presents, the same team that has staged the successful Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee for the last four years.

As previously reported, Vegoose will boast appearances by Dave Matthews and Friends, Jack Johnson, Widespread Panic, Trey Anastasio, Flaming Lips, Primus, Gov’t Mule, Digable Planets, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and others.

Tickets sent on sale August 13th through the Vegoose Web site. Two-day passes are priced at $128.50, with VIP tickets also available.

Hasidic reggae artist Matisyahu will take his spiritually-filled music on the road in September for a two-week tour of the U.S.

The outing follows a handful of August dates opening for Trey Anastasio. That pairing brought Matisyahu full-circle–he once spent a year following Phish on the road while trying to find his place in the world.

According to his label biography, the former Matthew Miller’s spiritual curiosity was initially piqued following a camping trip in Colorado, where he had the opportunity to take an introspective look at himself and contemplate his environment. He then set off on his first trip to Israel, where his dormant Jewish identity began to flourish.

Today, his hippie roots, his early musical wanderlust and his Hassidic Judaism create the foundation for his reggae/hip-hop band, which includes Jonah David on drums, Aaron
Dugan on guitar and Josh Werner on bass.

Matisyahu’s fall 2005 tour gets underway Sept. 8 at Webster Hall in New York. He then heads west for a run of dates in Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona.

He is touring in support of the re-release of his Epic/Or Music/Jdub album “Live at Stubb’s.” He is also busy preparing a new studio album, due out later this year.

September 2005
8 – New York, NY – Webster Hall
19 – Seattle, WA – Showbox
20 – Portland, OR – Aladdin Theatre
21 – San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall
22 – West Hollywood, CA – House of Blues
24 – San Diego, CA – Belly Up Tavern
25 – Tempe, AZ – Marquee Theatre
26 – Albuquerque, NM – Sunshine Theater
27 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater
28 – Memphis, TN – Hi-Tone
29 – Nashville, TN – Exit/In

October 2005
1 – Bloomington, IN – Bluebird Nightclub

Despite battling each other in the courts, the surviving members of the Doors have been working together on plans for the band’s fortieth anniversary in 2007. The festivities will begin early, with the limited-edition box set Love/Death/Travel this October, followed a month later by the two-volume, double-CD set tentatively titled The Doors — Live in Boston, capturing singer Jim Morrison and Co. in 1970.

To read more visit rollingstone.com.

After a month of rehearsals in Toronto in preparation for their world tour, which launches August 21st at Boston’s Fenway Park, the Rolling Stones gave the city a big thank you last night by performing an eighty-minute, rootsy set for 1,100 fans at the Phoenix Concert Theatre. People had been lined up down the street since Tuesday to snatch up the bargain $10 tickets for the show, filmed for a reported DVD.

“I want to thank everybody in Toronto for being so welcoming to us,” frontman Mick Jagger said. “You kind of leave us alone, but give us enough attention to get our egos up for the tour.”

To read more visit rollingstone.com.

A civil court judge ruled yesterday (Aug. 10) that the landmark New York rock club CBGB can’t be evicted from its Bowery location, saying it shouldn’t be punished for not noticing it owed its landlord money. The ruling was a victory for the club where groups like the Ramones and Blondie defined the punk scene in the 1970s, but CBGB’s future is still uncertain.

Its lease with the Bowery Residents’ Committee expires on August 31, and a renewal remains up in the air. The executive director of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, Muzzy Rosenblatt, said he had not seen the ruling so he could not comment on it.

“All we’re looking for is a responsible tenant,” he said of his group, which provides shelter for homeless people in the building that houses the club.

The dispute involved about $100,000 in rent increases, interest and fees. The club says the increases went unpaid for four years because of a bookkeeping mix-up. CBGB said it wasn’t billed for the increases, but Rosenblatt said the increases were clearly stated in the lease. CBGB’s rent is $19,000 a month.

In her ruling, Judge Joan Kenney praised the club’s impact on the neighborhood, which she said was plagued by “destitution, degradation and substance abuse” when CBGB opened in 1973.

“CBGB has proven itself worthy of being recognized as a landmark — a rare achievement for any commercial tenant in the ever diverse and competitive real estate market of New York City,” she wrote in the ruling, a copy of which was provided to the Associated Press by the Save CBGB’s Coalition.

“It would be unconscionable for this court to allow petitioner to proceed with its intent to evict CBGB … because it failed to notice that monies were outstanding for approximately four years,” the judge wrote.

As part of its proposal for a new lease, CBGB has said it would find a third-party guarantor and would raise money for the committee every year with benefit concerts. As previously reported, a month-long series of benefit shows is already underway at the venue.

Source billboard.com.