Search Results for: nirvana

SANTA MONICA, California – It’s been awhile since we’ve heard from Garbage, but don’t worry, they didn’t break up. Or maybe they did. “It depends on which one of us you ask,” bassist/guitarist Steve Marker said during a recent visit from their Madison, Wisconsin, home base to Los Angeles. “I think we took a break, but some of us think that we broke up, so we haven’t even resolved that yet. We should probably talk about that. It got pretty weird between the four of us, and the music wasn’t really happening, so we took a break. There were times… Read more »

Forget the stage, it’s been almost a decade since Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez – a.k.a. 75 percent of ’90s grunge icons Alice in Chains – have even been in the same room. Sure, they’ve jammed with each other in various permutations since Alice last played a show together (a 1996 taping of MTV’s “Unplugged”), but never all three together. So when they announced that they’d be taking the stage again this month, it had to be for a good reason. “We all saw what happened with the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. It was such an overwhelming tragedy,”… Read more »

Washington – Eleven years after the demise of his million-selling rock band Nirvana, Krist Novoselic is back on the road, but this time he’s getting out of bed before noon. Novoselic, whose bass guitar anchored one of the most popular and influential bands of the 1990s, now spends his time pushing for voting reforms that he thinks could change the cynicism many people feel about U.S. politics. It’s a gig that requires him to wear a suit and tie and speak to audiences that measure in the dozens, rather than the thousands. But Novoselic, 39, sees parallels with the heady… Read more »

Legally challenged rocker Courtney Love can put “parent” back on the list of things she sometimes does-right up there with “sing” and “act.” A judge ruled Monday that Love could regain custody of her 12-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, whose father is the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. “Frances has been returned to [Love] after a judge indicated satisfaction in Ms. Love’s efforts to turn around her life and found it was in the best interests of mother and daughter to be reunited,” Love’s attorney, Howard Weitzman, said in a statement. Frances has not been in Love’s care since her mother’s… Read more »

New York – Christmas sales came in the nick of time, saving the holiday selling season for most merchants at the last minute. After watching sales waver on an almost daily basis in the first half of December, most retailers say that because the weeks before and after Christmas were strong, stores could top last year’s numbers. “Christmas was late coming, but once it did, it came crushing in,” says Geoffrey Caruso, manager of the Amoeba store in Berkeley, Calif. “In the first part of December, it vacillated from day to day.” Indeed, Nielsen SoundScan numbers confirm that for the… Read more »

Anyone who visited their Web site and thought that Hearts That Hate were the next big thing out of the emo scene is about to get a reality check from MC Lars. The fictitious band has a starring role in “Signing Emo,” the second single off Lars’ Laptop EP. The song, a send-up of the bandwagon-jumping that goes on in the music industry, finds a 40-year-old, overweight and out-of-touch A&R exec named Marty feeling pressure from his boss to ink an emo band – any emo band – to the label because the boss’ daughter likes Dashboard Confessional. Just before… Read more »

New York – The Thanksgiving weekend kicked off with a bang for U.S. music retailers, turned into a whimper and rebounded nicely. “Friday exceeded our expectations, and then Saturday was softer than expected,” reports Bob Higgins, chairman/CEO of Trans World Entertainment in Albany, N.Y. “Overall, the weekend was good and we are still positive that it will be a good holiday season.” Likewise, Jim Urie, president of Universal Music & Video Distribution, reports: “We are getting a pretty consistent story from retail; overall, it was not great, but not horrible. Friday was great – in fact, better than great –… Read more »

Hot Hot Heat are getting ready to pull off the bandages and rock the dance floor once again. The Canadian hipster dance-punk act have finished putting together the much-anticipated follow-up to 2002’s indie hit Make Up The Breakdown. The band had hoped to get the new LP, Elevator, into your waiting arms by now, but for one reason or another, the release has been pushed back to April 2005. Over at the Hot Hot Heat website, the lads have posted the track list to tide fans over. Tongue-twister “You Owe Me An IOU” will be the first single to step… Read more »

ock trio Sleater-Kinney has signed with venerable Seattle label Sub Pop Records after releasing its past four albums for fellow indie Kill Rock Stars. The group will begin recording its Sub Pop debut Thursday with producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev) in upstate New York, with an eye on a May release. “We instigated it because we wanted to do something different,” vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker told Billboard.com. “We really like the team that’s at Sub Pop now. There are people there who are really enthusiastic and putting out really good music. We’ve done a lot of records with Kill… Read more »

Johnny Ramone, guitarist and co-founder of the seminal punk band “The Ramones” that influenced a generation of rockers, has died. He was 55. Ramone, who had been fighting a five-year battle with prostate cancer, died in his sleep Wednesday afternoon at his Los Angeles home surrounded by friends and family, said the band’s longtime artistic director Arturo Vega. “He was the guy with a strategy. He was the guy who not only looked after the band’s interest but he also was their defender,” Vega said in a telephone interview from New York. Ramone, whose birth name is John Cummings, had… Read more »