2004

A longtime friend of late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton has a batch of his unreleased demo tapes, which he hopes to donate to a burgeoning musician. Burton was killed in 1986 when the band’s bus crashed in Sweden on the Master of Puppets tour.
“There are Metallica mega-hits that will never be,” says Dave DiDonato, a drummer in his own right, of the tapes. “All these killer riffs . . . he was working on them until he died.”

Such tapes were key to Metallica’s songwriting process. Burton, singer-guitarist James Hetfield and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett (and his predecessor, Dave Mustaine) would record them, and bandleaders Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich would then sift through them to construct songs. After Burton’s death, the bassist earned a posthumous songwriting credit when one of his riffs served as the foundation for “To Live Is to Die,” from 1988’s …And Justice for All.

Burton’s parents gave DiDonato the tapes after their son’s death, and DiDonato wants to get them in the hands of someone who can continue in Burton’s spirit. “I would love to find a young bass musician following in [Cliff’s] footsteps,” he says, “someone who would utilize this material to improve his craft and appreciate the music, and devote himself to doing what Cliff was doing.” (Interested parties can contact DiDonato through his rotgrub.com Web site.)

The tapes were recorded in the Burton family’s Castro Valley, California, home, and — not surprisingly — the sound quality is often rough. “It was usually late at night, and he couldn’t play loud,” says DiDonato, “and he had this really crummy little bass amp. On a lot these, you hear string slapping, grunting and his equipment squeaking . . . His mom would walk in and go, ‘Cliff, turn it down!’ [laughs].”

DiDonato’s Web site has begun selling CDs of jam sessions from the early to mid-Eighties, featuring Burton on bass, ex-Faith No More member Jim Martin on guitar and DiDonato beating on empty fifty-five-gallon oil drums. The setting for these jams was also late at night, outdoors at Martin’s parents’ California ranch. “We never really talked or practiced,” says DiDonato, “and sometimes it’s really absurd and the time signatures are completely wrong.” But the jams are not without charm, or significance: Metallica and Faith No More songs such as “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “Woodpecker From Mars” were birthed during these sessions.

As for his reaction to hearing the works of his old friend, DiDonato says, “I get goosebumps.”

Source rollingstone.com.

The fourth annual Bonnaroo Music Festival is set for June 10-12. The hugely successful jam band fest will return to the same 700-acre site in rural Manchester, Tenn., about 60 miles South of Nashville.

Jonathan Mayers, president of Superfly Productions, producer of the event with Ashley Capps and A.C. Entertainment, tells Billboard.biz that the lineup is being finalized and an announcement of the bill and on-sale information is tentatively set for January.

“We will continue to have our core [jam band artists], but we’re also into introducing fans to all types of music,” ” Mayers says. “We think these fans are very open to different kinds of music.”

Bonnaroo was the second-highest-grossing concert of 2004, according to Billboard Boxscore, taking in $14.5 million from a lineup that included the Dead, Dave Matthews & Friends, Trey Anastasio, Bob Dylan, and nearly 80 other acts. Mayers says ticket prices, $139 and $164 in 2004, will increase slightly in 2005, but capacity, 90,000 last year, will not.

Source billboard.com.

Redsand today announced its exclusive agreement with Propaganda Headquarters, Inc. to present the 2nd annual

In a recent rare interview with Rolling Stone

If all goes according to plan, fans should get to hear new music from the Panic Channel — which features three quarters of the most recent lineup of Jane’s Addiction (guitarist Dave Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins, and bassist Chris Chaney) and former Skycycle vocalist Steve Isaacs — as early as this month.

“We’re gonna go and mix some tracks and potentially put some stuff out, maybe do it online [at thepanicchannel.com],” Navarro said backstage at Los Angeles’ Key Club, where the quartet made its official live debut Thursday night as part of a benefit to feed the homeless sponsored by L.A. radio station Indie 103.1.

The Panic Channel played nine songs, all of which are likely to come from their as-yet-untitled debut album, currently being recorded in L.A. with producer Brian Virtue (who worked on the last Jane’s album, Strays). At present the group is not working with a label, but Navarro says the project is coming along. “We’re almost done recording our record, and we’re very happy with where we’re at,” he says. “We’re kind of doing this homegrown, and it’s a blast. It’s like when we were fifteen years old.”

“It’s power and melody,” says Isaacs, who played Tommy for a year and a half in the stage production of the Who’s rock opera, of the group’s sound. Perkins believes that all four musicians get to express themselves in the Panic Channel. “You can hear Dave and me and Chris and Steve all say something throughout the songs,” he says. “That’s important to me: being surrounded by great musicians and then having something to say.”

Onstage those unique blended together effectively, as the quartet showed off surprisingly heavy chops on the Tool-esque opener “Go On” and paid homage to Chaney’s favorite band, Led Zeppelin, on the “Rain Song”-like ballad, “Outsider.” The band hopes to launch a tour this spring.

The quartet has been working together since May, when Navarro, Chaney and Perkins recruited Isaacs to handle vocals for a song they were asked to record for a film. “I met Steve when he was working at as a VJ at MTV,” says Navarro, who starred in the cable network’s reality show ‘Til Death Do Us Part with actress/model wife Carmen Electra. “I knew he was a great singer, and we did this track and it came out phenomenal. The film passed on it, but we continued working and decided, ‘Why not just make music?'”

The Jane’s members formed the Panic Channel after a less-than-friendly split with their frontman Perry Farrell, who told Rolling Stone at the time, “The band went astray, falling into shallow holes … Jane was getting stripped of her majesty.”

According to Navarro, the new band is still forming its identity. “We’re just getting to know each other musically,” he says. “Us three have played together for a long time, but the four of us is a new unit.”

Source rollingstone.com.

After several delays, Stevie Wonder’s new studio album, “A Time 2 Love,” is expected to be out in April via Motown.

“As an artist, you get anxious and excited — you want to show what you can do,” Wonder tells Billboard in an exclusive interview for the Dec. 11 issue, on newsstands today (Dec. 3). “But for me, I had to make a real decision not to rush. I wasn’t feeling that the timing is right. A lot of what I do when I do an album is based on whether the timing is right.”

“A Time 2 Love” will be Wonder’s first studio set since 1995’s “Conversation Peace,” which debuted at No. 16 on The Billboard 200. “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he says of the amount of time that elapsed between projects. “On the other hand, it wasn’t a panic-mode situation, either, where we’ve got to do this or we’re going to have a problem up in here.”

The set will be a single-disc affair, although Wonder says, “in these nine years I’ve done more than just the songs that will be on the album. And it’s going good. In these nine years I’ve found the songs that feel most comfortable for me.”

Among the tracks earmarked for the set are “If the Creek Don’t Rise” (“something I wrote a while back that I recently revisited,” Wonder says) and “If Your Love Cannot Be Moved,” the latter of which features live instrumentation by Wonder and several guest spots.

“I have myself playing, some symphony musicians from [Los Angeles] and Doug E. Fresh doing a little beat-box thing,” he reveals. “I also have a female talking-drum player from Nigeria. And we’re going to have the West Los Angeles choir sing. I’m going to record the choir at the church.”

After “Time” is released, Wonder says he has “three immediate goals”: a “jazz album with harmonica,” a gospel album and a musical.

Source billboard.com.