October 17, 2005

The Black Crowes have tapped My Morning Jacket and the North Mississippi Allstars for a New Year’s Eve show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, marking the reunited rock act’s first headlining concert at the venue. Tickets go on sale Saturday (Oct. 22) via Ticketmaster.

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Radiohead recorded a “song a day” last week in its Oxfordshire, U.K., studio, and is planning to spend this week putting ideas on tape before breaking until December. The group’s as-yet-untitled seventh studio album is expected next year; as previously reported, its contract with longtime label EMI has expired.

According to a post from bassist Colin Greenwood on the band’s Web site, there is also “exciting talk of shows next year. It’s good to have a plan.”

Among the songs that appear on the studio blackboard as having been attempted are “Pay Day,” “Burn the Witch,” “Videotape,” “Solutions,” “House of Cards,” “Down Is the New Up,” “Last Flowers,” “Skirting on the Surface” and “Morning Mi Lord.”

“The blackboard [is] filling up with ideas,” frontman Thom Yorke wrote recently. “Lots of things happening all over the studio at once, which I always like, although I keep having to remind myself to sit down occasionally.”

Source billboard.com.

A never-before-released Bob Marley song believed to have been recorded in a Miami bedroom in 1979 will be found on the upcoming compilation “Africa Unite: The Singles Collection.” Due Nov. 8 via Island/Tuff Gong/UME, the set features “Slogans,” the master tape of which was discovered in 2003 by Marley’s sons Ziggy and Stephen.

In addition to adding their own parts and producing, the Marleys drafted Eric Clapton to record a guitar part for the finished version. Ziggy first revealed the existence of unheard Marley material to Billboard.com in 2003.

“I didn’t know any of these songs,” he said at the time. “The way he was playing the guitar on one song that I heard, it was like jazz. It wasn’t what you would expect from him at all.”

“Africa Unite,” which collects early recordings as well as Marley’s biggest hits, is rounded out by a new remix of the title track from the Black Eyed Peas’ will.i.am plus Ashley Beedle’s mash-up of “Get Up, Stand Up” and youngest Marley son Damian’s “Welcome to Jamrock.”

As previously reported, Nov. 8 will also see the release of the DVD “Live! At the Rainbow,” a 1977 London concert originally released in 1991 on VHS. A sample of Marley’s “Johnny Was” can be heard on a newly released Notorious B.I.G. single, “Hold Ya Hand.”

Source billboard.com.

On what would be the last day of his life, John Lennon posed for photographs with Yoko Ono in a session with photographer Annie Liebovitz. One of the pictures, a naked Lennon curled around and kissing a clothed Ono, became the cover for Rolling Stone magazine’s tribute to him.

That iconic image published a month after his December 1980 death has been ranked the top magazine cover of the last 40 years by a panel of magazine editors, artists and designers. Others on the list include images from the Sept. 11 attacks, the Vietnam War and of Katiti Kironde II, the first black woman on the cover of a national women’s magazine, in the August 1968 Glamour.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the competition on Monday during the American Magazine Conference in Puerto Rico. The competition was held as a way to mark the 40th anniversary of the group’s awards.

“Both the choice of a cover and the execution of a cover are crucial for any magazine,” said Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek and ASME president. “Every editor wants their cover to stand out.”

Coming in second was the shot of a very pregnant Demi Moore on the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, followed by an April 1968 image from Esquire of boxer Muhammad Ali with arrows in his body. The Saul Steinberg drawing of New York’s West Side dwarfing the rest of the country, published in The New Yorker on March 29, 1976, came in fourth. Esquire’s May 1969 image of Pop Art maven Andy Warhol drowning in a can of tomato soup took the fifth spot.

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