Search Results for: stephen king

It’s a good day for pop-punk as Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan and Billy Talent are all up for a handful of Juno awards. This year’s Juno nominees were just announced and leading the charge is Lavigne, one of Canada’s biggest international exports. She’s up for five awards including Artist Of The Year. Toronto rapper K-OS, West Coast jazz star Diana Krall and 2003’s Juno host, Shania Twain, join Simple Plan and Billy Talent with three noms each. Single Of The Year: River Below, Billy Talent; One Thing, Finger Eleven; Crabbuckit, k-os; Not Ready To Go, The Trews; Party For Two,… Read more »

“You wouldn’t believe how many idiots think I live in an igloo.” Stephen Kozmeniuk, founder and lead singer of Boy, is talking about the misperceptions he’s had to deal with regarding his hometown. Whitehorse, Yukon, may not be the music capital of the world, but Kozmeniuk is quick to assure outsiders that it’s just your average Canadian burg – Wal-Mart and all. “It’s all the stuff around it that makes it beautiful,” he adds. Few musicians are better qualified to assess the characteristics of the average Canadian town than Kozmeniuk. Not only does he hail from one of the country’s… Read more »

New York – In 2001, Martin Amis, Rick Moody and other authors and artists gathered in New York to honor a peer they regarded as a giant of the times. They compared him to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Arthur Rimbaud. They called him a bard, a shaman and a master of “art as revenge.” That man was Bob Dylan. Had he lived in England, he’d be Sir Bob Dylan, maybe even Lord. Scholarly books have compared him to Dante and Keats; admirers lobby for him to get the Nobel Prize. At a 1997 Kennedy Center ceremony, where fellow honorees… Read more »

New York – After taking himself out of the music business “to regenerate, get free of myself and make an album for the right reasons,” Billy Idol has completed his first album featuring new songs in over 10 years, aptly titled DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND. The CD, which may or may not be named after a location deep inside the Idol mind, is scheduled for release on March 22, 2005, and is the English rocker’s first for CSP Records/Sanctuary Records. The first single, “Scream,” is a down and dirty love romp featuring the sinister signature guitar of Steve Stevens and Idol’s rock… Read more »

Los Angeles – Some of Elvis Presley’s first RCA recordings from nearly 50 years ago, including never-before-heard takes of “All Shook Up” and “Jailhouse Rock,” will be put up for bid on Sunday at an auction of show business memorabilia. The six unedited reel-to-reel tapes – “pre-master” originals from the private collection of the studio engineer who recorded them, are valued at between $30,000 and $50,000, according to international auction house Bonhams & Butterfields. Highlights will be played on Saturday for potential bidders at the Bonhams gallery in Los Angeles, marking their first public exhibition, auction spokesman Erik Simon told… Read more »

What a week for Perry Farrell. Just days after his beloved Lollapalooza summer concert tour got canned due to poor ticket sales comes news his three Jane’s Addiction bandmates have joined forces with another singer to form a new group. The on-again, off-again Addiction had reunited last year to record the album Hypersonic, the band’s first since 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual. But a statement from Jane’s Addiction guitarist (and Carmen Electra sidekick) Dave Navarro says that the band is officially off again and that he, bassist Chris Chaney and drummer Stephen Perkins have moved on with Skycycle vocalist Steve… Read more »

Despite their hackneyed interchangeability, there’s a difference between a rock concert and rock show. Anyone thinking of challenging this should check out a stop on Blink-182 and No Doubt’s monthlong co-headlining trek. Even though they recorded a song called “The Rock Show,” Blink’s set Thursday night at the PNC Bank Arts Center definitely fell on the concert side of the spectrum. Bassist Mark Hoppus and guitarist Tom DeLonge stood dwarfed by the vast, mostly barren stage, save for five trapezoidal video screens positioned behind them. Were it not for a shirtless, mohawked Travis Barker peering down from a massive drum… Read more »

Marilyn Manson has a wedding and a greatest-hits album on his plate, but his next project may be a lawsuit. The rocker and his bandmate Madonna Wayne Gacy have filed a suit against former bandmember Scott Putesky (a.k.a. Daisy Berkowitz) and Empire Musicwerks Records to stop the continued distribution of an early Manson album, according to Richard Wolfe, lawyer for Empire Musicwerks. The album was released on April 20. Manson and Gacy (a.k.a. Brian Warner and Stephen Bier, respectively) filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, Western Division, on April 28. The action… Read more »

An Internet company wants a federal appeals panel to help disarm lawyers for the music industry, blocking them from using special copyright subpoenas in a campaign to track and sue computer users who download songs online. Verizon Communications Inc. is challenging the constitutionality of the subpoenas under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A trial judge, John D. Bates, earlier had approved use of the subpoenas, forcing Verizon to turn over names and addresses for at least four Internet subscribers. The 1998 law, passed years before music downloading was popularized, permits music companies and others to force Internet providers to… Read more »

The week the music industry brought suit against 261 users of Internet file-sharing services, Donald L. McCabe was in St. Louis to talk about a different form of digital copying. Mr. McCabe, a Rutgers University professor, has made a career of studying the cheating of American high school and college students. His most recent study found that cheating was spreading almost like file-sharing. Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year. More striking to Mr. McCabe, 44 percent said they considered this sampling no… Read more »