Search Results for: sting

The lead guitarist for the rock band Rush said his arrest at a New Year’s Eve party was unfair. Alex Zivojinovich – known on stage as Alex Lifeson – was arrested for what police described as drunken, violent behavior at the Naples Ritz-Carlton hotel. He faces six charges, including four felonies, the most serious of which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years. “This gives new meaning to dinner at the Ritz,” Zivojinovich, 50, said as he left jail Friday on $14,500 bond, wearing the same black suit he wore to the New Year’s Eve bash. Zivojinovich said he didn’t… Read more »

The past year has been an array of ups and downs for Puddle Of Mudd. According to frontman Wes Scantlin, the very release of their second major label album, Life On Display, was, at times, in jeopardy. “When I thought the record was done, some idiot came back in and said that he wanted to re-edit the shit. We had been in the studio for a year! The best thing that happened was someone saying, ‘Hey, your record is done. We’re happy with it now!’ Well, I was happy with it two months ago, asshole!” Their sophomore album’s first single… Read more »

Sir Richard Branson offered to buy back Virgin Records, the label which set him on the road to a fortune, from its owners EMI, it emerged yesterday. A spokesman confirmed that Sir Richard was still hankering to bring the business which launched his career back into the Virgin stable, “if the opportunity arose”. Set up in 1973, when Branson was prescient enough to guess that Mike Oldfield’s quirky Tubular Bells album would sell like hotcakes, Virgin Records went on to sign the Sex Pistols in 1977. It was sold to EMI for £650m in 1992, and the proceeds used to… Read more »

Gibson Audio, launched by the Gibson Guitar Corp. in May 2003, will introduce the Wurlitzer Digital Jukebox at the Consumer Electronics Show, to be held Jan. 8-11 in Las Vegas. Two of the three Wurlitzer Digital Jukebox models – a floor-standing, all-in-one design featuring a Klipsch speaker system and a component version designed for integration into existing home entertainment equipment – enable users to store 1,000 CDs as Windows Media files and feature a wireless touchscreen remote control. Both will be priced for less than $2,000. The third, which will sell for less than $1,000, is a tabletop model with… Read more »

The future of the music industry is being held, quite literally, in the palm of a twentysomething’s hand. Not the “business” side of the music industry – you know, the folks you’ve perhaps heard weeping into their bowls of caviar over the 31 percent decrease in album sales over the course of the past year, a downturn the suits pin on the advent of digital music downloading and CD burning. No, the “art” side of music business is being forceably changed. Artists are either coming to terms with changes in the ways their music is distributed – or doggedly railing… Read more »

Works by Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and George Harrison are among the major catalog titles slated to be released in the first quarter of 2004. On Feb. 24, Universal Music Enterprises (UME) will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the British Invasion with a multi-disc set on the Hip-O label. UME will also begin a year-long, multi-title campaign feting rock’n’roll’s birth. Rhino delivers “Black Box: The Complete Original Black Sabbath,” an eight-CD set collecting each album issued by the band’s original lineup (plus a bonus DVD) in March. On March 9, Sony catalog division Legacy will honor metal gods Judas Priest… Read more »

Radio is awesome, isn’t it? It’s free, it’s on whenever you want it, and you can choose from among eight or 10 stations. About the only people who could possibly complain about it, in fact, are people who have to listen to it. They’ll tell you that the music you hear on the radio is mostly the same cloying pop junk, played over and over. That 20 minutes of every hour is ads, played over and over. And that as you drive, the signal comes and goes with the territory. Two years ago, two companies – XM and Sirius –… Read more »

Child molestation charges against Michael Jackson are being driven by “money and revenge,” said defense attorney Mark Geragos, who vowed to derail the alleged victim’s credibility and fight what he called a prosecutor’s vendetta. For District Attorney Thomas Sneddon, whose similar 1993 case against the pop singer evaporated when the accuser reportedly accepted millions in settlement money, the charges filed Thursday represent a second chance to convict the fading pop star before the prosecutor begins his planned retirement. Unlike the 1993 case, Sneddon says, this time he has a cooperative witness who isn’t interested in a piece of Jackson’s fortune.… Read more »

Janet Jackson will perform on one of the world’s biggest stages, the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. The National Football League championship football game is set to air Feb. 1 live on CBS from Houston’s Reliant Stadium. MTV is producing the Super Bowl halftime show, having previously produced the segment in 2001, which featured Aerosmith, ‘N Sync and Britney Spears. Last year’s halftime event saw Shania Twain, No Doubt and Sting perform at halftime. Jackson is working on her still-untitled follow-up to her 2001 album “All For You.” It is set for release sometime in 2004 on Virgin Records. Her… Read more »

There’s one drawback to Blink-182’s decision to release “I Miss You” as their next single. “This is the thing, the song’s really hard to play,” singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge said backstage at KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas on Sunday. “We’ve never played it before. We might play it in the future, or we might have it on a ghetto blaster onstage and we might do an interpretive dance. It’s one of those things, but it’s gonna be good, though, no matter what it is.” It’s not like the band doesn’t have a good excuse for not having the ballad of sorts… Read more »