Search Results for: seattle

Back from a lengthy European jaunt, Lenny Kravitz will launch his thirty-three-date summer tour tomorrow night in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in support of his latest album, Lenny. Abandoned Pools will open all dates, with Pink playing the middle slot. Pink’s presence on the list had nothing to do with label politics coercing a veteran artist to take out a youngster. “She called me up and said she wanted to be on the tour,” Kravitz says. “And she sent me a pair of panties with her name and my name in rhinestones. It said, ‘Lenny’ and ‘Pink’ with a lightning bolt.… Read more »

Stunned fans of The Who’s John Entwistle left flowers and consoled each other outside a casino concert hall where the bass player who helped make the band one of the biggest in rock history had been expected to perform Friday. Entwistle was found dead Thursday in his Hard Rock Hotel room of an apparent heart attack. He was 57. “The Ox has left the building – we’ve lost another great friend,” bandmates Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey wrote on Townshend’s Web site. The Who’s celebrated drummer, Keith Moon, died in 1978. Former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman described Entwistle as… Read more »

Sonic Youth will take their sixteenth album, Murray Street, out on a twenty-two-date tour, starting August 1st in Dallas. The tour will be the group’s second as a five-piece, as the group brought producer Jim O’Rourke onboard while promoting their last studio record, 2000’s NYC Ghosts and Flowers. The dates will run through a September 1st appearance at the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle and include a free concert at Central Park in the band’s hometown of New York City. The majority of Murray Street, which will be released on June 25th, was written last summer, and the band recorded the… Read more »

Trey Anastasio spent 17 years ripping genres apart and sticking them back together at odd angles with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink uber-jam band Phish. So maybe it’s no surprise he’s whipped up another unusual concoction: a jam/swing hybrid dotted with sugary-sweet love songs and chamber music. The self-titled release has the elements you’d expect from Anastasio, from the drawn-out, frenetic jams to the catchy guitar riffs. But it’s also a departure: It’s got horns, it’s got soul, it’s got more horns. It’s clearly not a Phish album hiding under a different name. “I’ve been listening to a lot of big band music,”… Read more »

Roughly one month after the tragic death of his close friend and former bandmate Layne Staley, Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell returned to the town that made them both famous, and despite the feeling that a big hole existed where his former partner once stood, it was a rocking, if bittersweet, trip back in time. With plenty of classic AIC material in tow, Cantrell took a sparse but enthusiastic audience at Key Arena on Friday back to the halcyon days of the early ’90s – a time of lank hair, big angst and bigger guitars, before the Bizkit and its… Read more »

Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is enjoying his biggest hit in five years with “I Need A Girl (Part One)” featuring Usher and Loon, which is currently Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The song is the lead single from the mogul’s latest collection, P. Diddy & Bad Boy Records Present…We Invented The Remix, which was released on Tuesday (May 14). Recently LAUNCH spoke with Combs, who explained that he seems to have success when speaking from the heart. “‘I Need A Girl’ was just me speaking from my heart. It was a remix off my original album… Read more »

The Hives begin swarming the U.S. next week. Even though the Swedish rock band have been playing since they were seventeen-years-old, they are just now finding themselves pinned as rock’s next critical darling, alongside bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes. “We get asked a lot of times if we compare ourselves to those bands, but it’s hard to say,” says guitarist Vigilante Carlstroem. “We might have some of the same influences but we come to different conclusions.” And the Hives certainly are not an overnight success – their most recent album, Veni, Vidi, Vicious was recorded over two… Read more »

“I have a buttload of material,” says Courtney Love of the archive of unreleased material by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. “I have the holy grail of rock & roll. That’s the story.” There are 109 tapes. “But not all of it’s great. Some of it’s fragments.” She thinks there are between five and eight “solidly good,” unheard acoustic songs. “There’s some stuff that’s not very melodic that I’m not fond of, but, hey, if you’re a fan of [Radiohead’s] Kid A, it might be really great. “On those tapes,” Love continues, “are everything from shitty collages to some pretty stunning,… Read more »

So you’re too young to be sweatin’ to the oldies with Richard Simmons. And with musical tastes that lean closer to the Buzzcocks than Britney, you’ll feel a bit dorky getting your body started with the Pink-inspired Bally Total Fitness Center cardio-workout. The beach season is creeping up faster than you can say “Gabba Gabba Hey,” so what’s a self-respecting rocker who wants to get toned to good tunes gonna do? If said rocker can get their flabby butt to Boston or New York, they can shed their spare tire to the sounds of the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and… Read more »

Cake will headline this summer’s Unlimited Sunshine Tour, featuring the Flaming Lips, De La Soul, Modest Mouse and the Hackensaw Boys. “When I make mix tapes it’s a Frank Sinatra song followed by an AC/DC song followed by a Flaming Lips song,” says Cake singer-guitarist John McCrea of the diverse bill he and his band put together. “It’s not just rock band, rock band, rock band. I really think a lot of listeners listen to a wide variety of music, and those people unfortunately don’t have radio stations to listen to. In a way, we’re taking our own frustrations and… Read more »