Archive: 2005

Since forming in Modesto in ’92, Grandaddy has released some of the more interesting and beautiful albums in the indie genre. Stirring together a strange concoction of nature and technology, Jason Lytle and the boys always seem to drag a new emotion from its listeners.

Originally planned for release earlier this year and then bumped to December, the soundtrack to the OutKast film “Idlewild” has now been removed from LaFace/Jive’s 2005 schedule. Group member Big Boi said over the weekend at the Vibe Awards that it would appear sometime during the first quarter of 2006, but a label spokesperson says there is no confirmed date.

“We’re trying to pick the single right now. It’s all about a gut instinct,” Big Boi said at the Vibe Awards.

The change in the soundtrack’s release date has apparently had a corresponding affect on the roll-out of the movie, which HBO Films was eyeing for early January. A company spokesperson says a new date has yet to be nailed down.

“Idlewild” is set in the 1930s, and Big Boi says that period in history has rubbed off on some of the music. “In our own little way,” he told Billboard.com earlier this summer. “Just with the Ragtime feel. It’s hip-hop. It’s OutKast. It is what we’ve been doing for years. Some songs have a little more piano or whatever, but the whole project was a natural progression from a double CD. It was like, where do we go from here?”

Big Boi stressed, “This is an OutKast album. It isn’t like a soundtrack where we go get this person or that person.”

Source billboard.com.

Photos by Brian Gearing of the 2005 Vegoose Festival, Las Vegas, NV – 10/28/05 through 10/30/05. Performers included Widespread Panic, The Shins, The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, The Flaming Lips, Primus, The Arcade Fire, Trey Anastasio and Gov’t Mule among many others.

The influences of Queen and the rage of punk are undeniable, yet Emery has emerged with a distinctive raw, edgy footprint of its own.

Prodigal jazz-funk trio Medeski Martin & Wood were the consummation of all things experimental this Halloween in midtown

Dates are beginning to trickle in for Billy Joel’s return to the road. It looks like the outing will start in January and run well into the spring months. A formal announcement of the arena tour is expected in the next day or so.
This will mark the Piano Man’s first solo headlining tour since his 1998-99 run which grossed $47.1 million over 73 shows. His subsequent tours with Elton John were even more lucrative and made the two pop kings the highest-grossing touring duo ever.
The new tour comes on the heals of the November 22 release of a Joel box set, curated by the artist himself. The four-CD / one-DVD package includes 23 unreleased tracks and loads of bonuses.

Motley Crue is taking their Carnival of Sins Tour back on the road in 2006. Tour dates and pre-sale information will be announced via Ticketmaster this Monday, November 14th. Presale begins Tuesday, November 15th @ 7am local time and ends Friday, November 18th @ 6pm local time. Tickets go on sale to the general public Saturday, November 19th @ 10am local time.

Coming off the heels of the epic “Red, White and Crue” reunion tour, which turned into one of the biggest concert events of 2005, Motley Crue is poised to continue their assault on North America. Having sold more than 40 million records worldwide and coming off last year’s Pollstar Top 10-grossing extravaganza, expect Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars to continue their domination in the year to come. The brand-new edition of their acclaimed “Carnival of Sins” will be seen by several million people around the country and the world in 2006, as the band performs all its greatest hits, with the spectacular production and pyrotechnics providing that patented Motley mayhem fans have grown to love.

Warren Haynes’ 17th annual Christmas Jam concert is set for Dec. 17 at the Civic Center Arena in Asheville, N.C. The artist will perform with his band Gov’t Mule at the event, which will also feature Trey Anastasio, Ray Lamontagne, John Scofield, Ivan Neville and John Medeski.

Other artists on the bill include Electric Hot Tuna, Audley Freed, Kevn Kinney, Edwin McCain, Dave Schools, Dr. Ralph Stanley, Marty Stuart and Patterson Hood and Jason Isbell from the Drive By Truckers.

Post-production proceeds benefit Habitat for Humanity. Prior to the 2003 concert, Haynes gave keys to a family for their new Habitat for Humanity home, which was constructed with funds from the 2002 concert. The 2003 and 2004 events raised $100,000 each, bringing the total for the last four years to more than $300,000.

Gov’t Mule is in the midst of its About to Rage tour, which will conclude Dec. 3 in Cincinnati. The band will then regroup for a Dec. 29-31 stand at New York’s Beacon Theatre, dubbed Mule-a-Go-Go.

Source billboard.com.

Two Boston Music Award 2005 nominees, The Slip and Apollo Sunshine, have announced their New Years Eve show will be held at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA. The Slip will headline the event, with AS starting off the evening. Tickets are on sale now.

Leading up to the holiday celebration, The Slip will also be playing at Lupo’s in Providence, RI on 12/28 (with Apollo Sunshine opening) and at Southpaw in Brooklyn on Friday, 12/30.

for more info see: theslip.com

Elvis Costello is slated to head into the studio the week of Thanksgiving to begin a collaboration with songwriter/arranger/pianist Allen Toussaint. Joe Henry will produce the album for Verve Records.

Henry likens the project to Costello’s 1998 pairing with Burt Bacharach, “Painted from Memory” (Mercury/Universal). “That project was a very legitimate collaboration between the two artists, and this will feature Elvis as a singer doing both classic songs that Allen has written as well as new material [the two are writing],” Henry tells Billboard.com.

New Orleans veteran Toussaint recently performed with Costello at a number of New York benefits for the victims of hurricane Katrina. Toussaint, who has written such songs as Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time” and Lee Dorsey’s “Workin’ in a Coal Mine,” appeared as a pianist on some of Costello’s early 1980s albums.

“Elvis, like a lot of people, re-committed himself to the importance of the legacy of [New Orleans] music,” Henry says. “I was talking to Allen about doing a solo record, and Elvis had appeared with Allen on stage at various benefits in New York, and the wheels were turning.”

Henry, who has toured with Costello in support of his own solo releases, recently produced Bettye LaVette’s “I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise” for Epitaph’s Anti- imprint, as well as the multi-artist “I Believe to My Soul” for his newly formed Work Song label. The latter was released via a partnership with Rhino Records and Starbucks’ Hear Music, and features Toussaint, Billy Preston, Mavis Staples, Ann Peebles and Irma Thomas.

Henry says he and Costello have discussed working together for a few years now, and Henry had been prodding Toussaint to record a solo effort for Work Song. “Elvis and I talked off and on about working together,” Henry says. “He’s been a big booster of ‘I Believe to My Soul’ and he’s a big a Bettye LaVette fan. After the hurricane, it brought home to him how significant that relationship with Allen was.”

Source billboard.com.

As it prepares for its maiden tour of South America, which begins Nov. 22 in Santiago, Chile, Pearl Jam continues to work on its new studio album, which is due next spring via J Records.

“It’s been a difficult record and it’s like sometimes the harder something is, then the more valuable it becomes,” frontman Eddie Vedder said earlier this week during a Brazilian radio interview. “It’s easily the best stuff we’ve done but also some of the hardest stuff. It’s very aggressive, because again, it’s kind of a product of what it’s like to be an American these days. It’s pretty aggressive, especially when you turn it loud.”

The band has been working on and off throughout the year on the as-yet-untitled set, but Vedder admitted, “It’s not quite done. I’m hoping to finish the last of the songs while I’m down [in South America]. I’m bringing my tape machines and all that down. If I can come back and finish the last few songs in January, then it will be out in April or something.”

For now, Pearl Jam is not planning to unveil any new songs in a live setting. “We want them to be heard for the first time when the record comes out,” Vedder said.

But he added he had been mulling an album title that was a play on Soundgarden’s “Superunknown”: “I was thinking of the word ‘un-owned’ — not owned by anybody,” he said. “The sky is un-owned. The moon is un-owned. We’re un-owned. We want to remain un-owned. The title was ‘Superun-owned.'”

Continuing a new initiative launched during Pearl Jam’s recent fall North American tour, the South American shows will be available for paid download from the band’s Web site within hours of their completion.

Source billboard.com.

If The Art of Virtue is any indication, Adrienne Young lives by Ben Franklin

With his next studio album not due until next year, Ray LaMontagne will tide fans over with a live EP and short run of tour dates. Due Dec. 6 via RCA, “Live From Bonnaroo 2005” features six tracks recorded at this summer’s incarnation of the Tennessee festival, including “Burn”, “Trouble” and the previously unreleased “Empty.”

The artist will hit the road beginning Nov. 30 in Portsmouth, N.H., with support from Brandi Carlile. As previously reported, LaMontagne will also appear at Warren Haynes’ 17th annual Xmas Jam, to be held Dec. 17 in Asheville, N.C.

Here are Lamontagne tour dates:

Nov. 30: Portsmouth, N.H. (Music Hall)
Dec. 1: Montreal, Quebec (Outremont Theater)
Dec. 2-3: Boston (Berklee College of Music)
Dec. 5: New York (Town Hall)
Dec. 7: Chicago (Park West)
Dec. 8: Minneapolis (Pantages Theater)
Dec. 10: Atlanta (Tabernacle)
Dec. 12: Keene, N.H. (Colonial Theater)
Dec. 17: Asheville, N.C. (Asheville Civic Center)

Source billboard.com.

Taking nods from My Bloody Valentine, Syd Barrett and Eno might be making for a monumental listen, but for Animal Collective, Feels is just another commitment to studio experimentation for an art rock band.

Blind Melon, the lost link that bridged the gap between the burgeoning jam scene of the early 1990

Initial reports had Charlie Hitchcock walking away from Particle, but apparently that wasn

Hasidic reggae rapper Matisyahu will release his studio debut, “Youth,” Jan. 31 via Epic/Or Music/J Dub. As previously reported, the majority of the project was overseen by noted producer Bill Laswell. Three other tracks were co-produced by Jimmy Douglass and ill factor.

Matisyahu has been touring all year in support of the concert set “Live at Stubb’s,” which reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Reggae Albums chart and No. 14 on the Top Heatseekers survey. The album has sold 87,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. “Youth” will feature two songs from “Stubb’s”: “King Without a Crown” and “Warrior.”

The artist’s busy touring schedule will continue through the end of the year, having just announced a six-show Hanukkah tour that begins Dec. 24 in Philadelphia.

Matisyahu is also tipped to appear on two songs from P.O.D.’s new album, “Testify,” due early next year via Atlantic.

Source billboard.com.

Hal Abramson, promoter of this summer’s Shakedown Festival in Oregon, has resurfaced and given Pollstar his side of the story. The jam band event was canceled just hours before gates were to open, leaving a lot of fans and concert insiders scratching their heads.

Lowell MacGregor, owner of festival site Columbia Meadows near the city of Saint Helens, has been fielding calls all summer, giving his side of the story. Abramson, on the other hand, left the area soon after the would-be August 26-28 concert collapsed and could not be reached. His side of things showed up online at the Shakedown’s Web site.

Abramson says he’s quit the music biz and is living at his mother’s house. The experience left him destitute and he’s now under the care of a psychiatric clinic. He recently fired off a screed to the Columbia County board of commissioners, detailing MacGregor’s alleged mishandling of the festival.

To read more, visit pollstar.com.

Unlike Christmas shopping, you can

Photos by Robert Massie of The String Cheese Incident at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, PA on 10.14.05

For more of Robert’s work, please visit: jampics.com