Search Results for: nirvana

Green Day will toast the release of American Idiot on Tuesday, but perhaps an even bigger cause for celebration these days is the 10-year anniversary of their breakthrough LP, Dookie. The modern-day classic not only launched the Bay Area punk trio into the mainstream, it opened the door to a mid-’90s wave of popped-up punk and provided a launching pad for the current crop of melodic pop-punkers. “[Dookie] changed my life,” confessed Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden. “It made me want to start Good Charlotte…. Right after that record came out, we were like, ‘We have to start a band in… Read more »

The judge in Courtney Love’s drug possession case set a July 23 hearing date Thursday on prosecutors’ request to have her bail set at $40,000. Prosecutors asked for the bail after Love failed to appear in downtown Los Angeles last Friday for arraignment in another case in which she is accused of hitting a woman with a bottle. Love’s attorney, Michael Rosenstein, said outside court Thursday that Love, 40, remains hospitalized in New York City. “She will 100 percent be back voluntarily before the jurisdiction to face any and all charges against her,” he said. “She’ll be back as soon… Read more »

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has logged some time behind the drum kit with Nine Inch Nails, which is recording its first studio album since 1999’s “The Fragile.” Eagle-eyed fans spotted Grohl on Nine Inch Nails’ in-studio Web cam last week, sitting behind a mixing console. His contributions are expected to appear on the Trent Reznor-led act’s long-awaited new album, “Bleed Through,” due later this year via Interscope. His presence was also tipped off by members of rock act the Exies, who are recording their next album at the same studio, Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif. “Last week,… Read more »

Troubled rock star Courtney Love was taken to a New York hospital on her 40th birthday after missing an arraignment on an assault charge in California, her lawyer said. “It is not a suicide attempt, not drug-related, not drug-overdose related,” Michael Rosenstein said Friday. “It’s a gynecological medical condition for which she is receiving treatment.” Rosenstein and Love’s publicist did not return phone calls Saturday to update her condition. Photographs showed Love on a stretcher, and published reports said witnesses saw the singer being put into an ambulance outside her Manhattan apartment. The New York City fire and police departments… Read more »

Fans of safe and sentimental melodic pop-rock were treated to the best of both worlds Thursday, when Something Corporate and Yellowcard hit the Roseland Ballroom stage near the end of their six-week co-headlining tour. Where Something Corporate mostly played amidst an air of soul-baring and introspection, Yellowcard’s cheer and bravado helped dissipate any gray clouds that may have hovered overhead. With three flags marked by upside-down hearts hanging from the rafters and spotlights almost always fixed on Andrew McMahon’s upright piano at center stage, Something Corporate’s set alternated between songs about being in and out of love from their 2002… Read more »

An antique piano formerly used by Elton John and pictured on an album cover, was auctioned off over the weekend for $164,500, well below the minimum estimate of $300,000, organizers said on Sunday. The other big seller at Heritage Galleries’ auction in Dallas on Saturday was a guitar used by late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. It sold for $117,500, down from a minimum estimate of $250,000. (All sale prices include a 17.5 percent buyer’s fee.) The instrument with the highest estimate, the upright bass used by late Motown session musician James Jamerson on such early ’60s tunes as “My Guy”… Read more »

Kurt Cobain and his band, Nirvana, spent only three years in the public eye, and they released only three studio albums. But what he accomplished before committing suicide 10 years ago Monday at age 27 – deciding it was “better to burn out than fade away,” as he quoted Neil Young in his suicide note – was remarkable. Beneath this bridge above the muddy banks of the Wishkah River, a troubled young Cobain would come to escape his unhappy home and the persistent gray drizzle of the Washington coast. Among the cracking concrete supports, he would smoke pot and drink… Read more »

Leland Cobain spreads a few yellowing pieces of art across his dining room table. The Aberdeen Museum of History, in the next town over, has asked him to contribute to an exhibit about his grandson, late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. One adorable Christmas card Kurt made for his grandparents at age 13 shows a hapless toddler, fishing, who has hooked the back of his shirt. There are radiant watercolor seascapes and depictions of Disney characters. Then there are the other paintings, in an apartment 55 miles northeast of Leland’s trailer. They are surrealistic, stark and powerful, revealing skeletons, aliens and… 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 »

Cris Kirkwood, former bassist for influential alternative rock band the Meat Puppets, remained hospitalized Monday after being shot in the abdomen on Friday. Kirkwood was shot outside a post office in downtown Phoenix by a security guard escorting him off the premises after he was involved in an argument with a woman over a parking space, according to a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was taken to Good Samaritan Medical Center in nearby Banner, Arizona, in critical condition and underwent surgery on the wound, a hospital spokesperson said. As the 43-year-old Kirkwood attempted to back into a… Read more »