Search Results for: house parties

Five artistic legends sat alongside President Bush in Washington’s top theater on Sunday night, and were starry-eyed themselves as political and Hollywood heavyweights paid tribute to their glittering careers. Actress Julie Andrews, pianist Van Cliburn, music maestro Quincy Jones, actor Jack Nicholson and opera singer Luciano Pavarotti received the Kennedy Center Honors for their contributions to American culture. “The recipients for 2001 make quite a collection…. As one newspaper put it in the headline, this year’s honorees can carry a tune and then there’s Jack,” Bush told them at a White House reception before the gala. “Perhaps it’s a nice… Read more »

Top showbiz execs pledged Sunday to step up their contribution to the war effort after a meeting with White House senior advisor Karl Rove. Details of Hollywood’s multifront initiative will be forged over the next few weeks, but industry moguls made clear their desire to pitch in. The campaign will include helping the Bush Administration spread its message regarding the war on terrorism both at home and abroad, support for U.S. troops and buttressing resolve among the American public. “All of us in the industry have an incredible urge to do something,” said Paramount Pictures chief Sherry Lansing. One concrete… Read more »

Virgin Records vice chairman Nancy Berry, the estranged wife of ousted music executive Ken Berry, Tuesday became the latest casualty of a restructuring at ailing British music company EMI Group Plc, where the couple reigned over rock ‘n’ roll for several years. Alain Levy, who abruptly replaced Ken Berry as chief executive officer of EMI’s recorded music division last week, announced Tuesday that Nancy Berry will leave Virgin immediately after more than two decades at the EMI unit. The news, which was not a surprise to many industry insiders, broke as Virgin prepares to release key albums in coming weeks… Read more »

With Wes Borland’s job in Limp Bizkit vacant, the band is already setting up “interview” sessions for a new guitarist. The remaining Bizkit members, Fred Durst, DJ Lethal, Sam Rivers and John Otto, will launch a U.S. tour which will double as guitarist auditions and “fan parties.” “It’s just a great chance for us to be with our fans,” Durst explained. “We could be at a club, at your house, at the mall, at your high school, who knows?” Stops for the tour have not been set, but the band is expected to play major cities like New York, Dallas,… Read more »

In an effort to continue their tradition of remaining close to their fans, Fred Durst, DJ lethal, Sam Rivers, and John Otto will embark on a tour of the U.S. to hold a series of guitarist auditions and “fan parties.” The group intends on keeping the fan parties loose in format. “It’s just a great chance for us to be with our fans,” says Durst. The parties will be different in each city. “We could be at a club, at your house, at the mall, at your high school, who knows,” said Durst. The guitarist auditions will offer the opportunity… Read more »

American songwriters and music publishers have reached preliminary agreement with the on-line file sharing service Napster to settle the class-action lawsuit currently pending in federal court in California. The agreement includes terms under which the songwriters and music publishers will license their music to Napster’s new membership-based service. The announcement of the proposed settlement was made jointly by Edward P. Murphy, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, Inc., Gary L. Churgin, president and CEO of The Harry Fox Agency, Inc., George David Weiss, president of The Songwriters’ Guild of America, Inc., and Napster president and CEO Konrad… Read more »

Though they’d rather be making their own movies, Sonic Youth are back in the studio laying down atmospheric music for a French film and noisy dinosaur rock for their next album. “We’re improvising and getting into these long, elaborate stretches of music and keeping an ear for soundtrack cues but at the same time listening for how they would work for song elements,” singer/guitarist Thurston Moore said last week. “We sit around drinking iced coffee, and then we start getting it together and playing and all hell breaks loose and it just becomes like a creative mosh pit for a… Read more »

Once a punk rock outcast who was locked up in a psych ward, Iggy Pop is now a celebrity, a Reebok model who rubs shoulders with the cream of society. But his elevated status does not stop him from noticing the absurdity of the situation, as he told Reuters in a recent interview: the kid raised in a Michigan trailer park is often the center of attention at various phoney-baloney shindigs. “Occasionally I’ll go to one of these VIP affairs or parties, and I always sorta look around thinking, ‘My God, how shallow and crass these people are! Not like… Read more »

Roc-A-Fella Records CEO Damon Dash put just a little more of a pimp stroll than usual in his confident swagger as he walked into the penthouse of Manhattan’s Hotel Giraffe Thursday night. Dash was about to show a handful of invited guests his trump card – the new Jay-Z album, The Blueprint, which features appearances by Eminem and, apparently, Michael Jackson. “I don’t want to say we’re the backbone of hip-hop, because that may sound arrogant, but it is what it is,” Dash said before playing seven songs from the LP, which comes out September 18 and features the single… Read more »

Word spreads by flyer and e-mail, drawing a small but dedicated corps of young hipsters to a nondescript club on a sleepy, dimly lit street corner. They are in search of deejays spinning a sound so new that some have crossed state lines for their first chance to dance to it. That sound is UK Garage, or Two-step, a dance genre from London’s underground club scene that has crossed the Atlantic – and not just to such likely haunts as New York and San Francisco. It’s also growing in popularity from Washington to Dallas and, in this case, Minneapolis, where… Read more »