Search Results for: The Roxy

It was better late than never for Prince. The Purple One may have showed up at emerging singer Janelle Monáe’s show last night at L.A.’s Viper Room, but he didn’t arrive until an hour after she was done. So instead of coming into the club, Prince held court in his car. Janelle joined him for a little chitchat in the backseat. Slow down with your dirty assumptions. I’ve been assured it’s completely platonic between the two… Prince appears to have taken a shine to the young, funky, Atlanta-based singer and recently reached out to her to offer career advice, according… Read more »

The Take Action Tour (www.takeactiontour.com) kicked off in DC with an evening of hard-hitting music from Sugarcult, The Early November, Hawthorne Heights, Hopesfall and Gym Class Heros. The event is the brainchild of Louis Posen, president and founder of punk/hard-core label Hopeless Records. In 1998, five years after forming Hopeless, Posen formed Sub City Records, an offshoot label that donates 5 percent of its prof- its to charity, according to the Web site. In 1999, Sub City took its socially conscious act on the road. The idea of the Take Action Tour is to connect Sub City bands – and… Read more »

Multiplatinum acts Jay-Z and Linkin Park are the latest to merge musical forces in a legally sanctioned mash-up. With the help of MTV, the two acts have taken the concept – which intertwines two songs, often placing the vocals of one track atop an instrumental section of another track – one step further. Instead of simply doing a mash-up remix of one track, as other artists have done, Jay-Z and Linkin Park have created an entire CD/DVD project based on the mash-up concept. The result, “MTV Ultimate Mash-Ups Presents Jay-Z/Linkin Park: Collision Course,” arrived Nov. 30 from Warner Bros. The… Read more »

Linkin Park love to mix things up. Their two albums, Hybrid Theory and Meteora, consistently and seamlessly blend different styles of music together, melding rap and rock with just enough electronic flourish to keep the ears burning and turning that blend into a digestible, accessible pop formula for millions of hungry fans to eat up. In the last three years the band have sold several million albums worldwide, sold out arenas around the globe, toured with Metallica and progressed further than all their long-since-disappeared rap-rock contemporaries. They are (as our May 2003 issue featuring ’em on them cover declares) the… Read more »

Rick Van Santen, a co-president of Goldenvoice, a Los Angeles concert promotion company that ushered punk rock from the fringes of the music scene to a wide audience, died last Sunday at his home in Ventura County of flu-related complications, his Goldenvoice partner Paul Tollett said. He was 41. In the 1980s, a time when major promoters shunned punk because of its reputation as a violent subculture, Goldenvoice presented acts in large, established rooms with quality sound, such as the Hollywood Palladium and the Palace (now the Avalon). “There cannot be any L.A. band since the early ’80s that was… Read more »

As the MTV Video Music Awards rocked New York City Thursday (August 28), Hanson was on the other side of the country performing their first of two sold-out acoustic shows at the Roxy in Los Angeles. The trio performed songs from its upcoming third studio album Underneath. Hanson is also scheduled to perform at the Roxy on Saturday (August 30), and then at the House Of Blues in Anaheim on Sunday (August 31). Twenty two-year-old singer Isaac Hanson explained that the New York and Los Angeles show are usually the toughest shows of the tour. “Yeah, the New York and… Read more »

The San Diego rock group Switchfoot are continuing to make an extraordinary impact with their Columbia/RED Ink debut “The Beautiful Letdown.” The album debuted on the Billboard Top 200 at #85 the first week of its release and is still currently on the chart at #187, with sales nearing the 100,000 mark. Switchfoot have embarked on a U.S. headlining tour over the last three months, selling out nearly every show well in advance, in top markets including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, Nashville and recently in Los Angeles at both The House of Blues on June 13th as well… Read more »

Dirk Lance, it was nice to know you, but Incubus fans have reason to welcome new bassist Ben Kenney with open arms. “He’s been very inspiring for all of us,” guitarist Mike Einziger said at the recent ASCAP Pop Music Awards of the onetime Roots member. “He’s a very different musician than Dirk, so it adds a very different dynamic to what we’re doing. It’s just like a big fresh breath of air.” Incubus aren’t recording yet, but they’ve set up their instruments in a rented house and are writing new material they’ll take to a studio after finishing Lollapalooza.… Read more »

Though some artists have been known to exaggerate a broken heart for the sake of art, the All-American Rejects have no need for such artistic license. For them, the truth is often sadder than fiction. “There’s rarely a happy ending in any of my songs,” singer/bassist Tyson Ritter said. “As far as the guy getting the girl in the end, it’s all fictitious. It’s all made up in my mind, I guess; all wishful thinking.” Such weighty fare fills the self-titled full-length debut by Ritter, 18, and multi-instrumentalist Nick Wheeler, 20. Two kids from Stillwater, Oklahoma, shouldn’t know so much… 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 »