Search Results for: when we were young

The MTV pop channel is using its global reach, the sparkle of its stars and the moral authority of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela to send a message of AIDS awareness and tolerance to young people worldwide. Video footage from a Cape Town concert Saturday featuring stars Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Alicia Keys will be combined with an earlier concert in Seattle to produce a 90-minute program, likely to reach up to two billion people around the world, MTV executive Bill Roedy told Reuters Friday. The Cape Town concert – which the stars will be performing for free – and… Read more »

In true punk spirit, rowdy music fans pelted the Sex Pistols with beer on Saturday as the one-time scourge of the British establishment played its first U.S. concert in six years outside Los Angeles. The hailstorm may have been meant as an homage to the band’s own anti-establishment roots, but drenched singer John Lydon was having none of it, labeling one thrower a “turd” and a “wuss,” to the delight of the 50,000-strong crowd. The Sex Pistols, who briefly ruled the music world in the late 1970s with such incendiary anthems as “God Save The Queen” and “Anarchy in the… Read more »

“American Idol” winner Kelly Clarkson may have the magic to put RCA Records back on top. All the major record labels are pulling out their big-gun releases for the fourth quarter in hopes of hitting some high numbers to make up for the year’s extreme sales dip. RCA has been struggling overall because of a weak release schedule. The label has thus far scored hits only with Dave Matthews Band’s “Busted Stuff,” which has sold more than 1.2 million units, and critically acclaimed postpunk band the Strokes, whose “Is This It” has passed the half-million mark. Clarkson’s two-sided single release,… Read more »

The guys in IMX promise that their Scream 2 Tour this summer with B2K and headliner Bow Wow is going to offer just as much excitement as one of those Hollywood blockbusters that drop around this time of year. However, the trio also revealed last month that some of the most action-packed and suspense-filled moments are going to take place behind the scenes at the concerts: A lot of the guys are practical jokesters and it’s going to come down to who gets who first. “They never got me,” IMX’s Romeo bragged. “[B2K’s] Lil’ Fizz is my brother, we’ll think… Read more »

Roughly one month after the tragic death of his close friend and former bandmate Layne Staley, Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell returned to the town that made them both famous, and despite the feeling that a big hole existed where his former partner once stood, it was a rocking, if bittersweet, trip back in time. With plenty of classic AIC material in tow, Cantrell took a sparse but enthusiastic audience at Key Arena on Friday back to the halcyon days of the early ’90s – a time of lank hair, big angst and bigger guitars, before the Bizkit and its… Read more »

South by Southwest, Austin’s annual music conference that usually showcases the best new artists coming down the pike, kicked off, oddly enough, with a plea to go back. The call came from Robbie Robertson. The onetime leader of the Band expressed mild alarm at the state of the music business during his keynote address Thursday morning. Go back, he suggested, to that first moment of musical discovery. “Music took us on a journey, and we’re still on that journey,” he told a packed ballroom at the Austin Convention Center, noting that his own first impressions came during childhood visits to… Read more »

Someone should give Gen. Colin Powell another bronze star. Last week the secretary of state went on MTV and committed an unabashed act of heroism. He threw himself into the debate over condom use as a way to fight AIDS – and rounds of flak have been flying at his head ever since. The hostilities began after a young woman from Italy asked him on the show what he thought about condom use in light of the AIDS epidemic. Now, anyone who has climbed as far up the ladder in Washington as Powell knows what to do in this situation:… Read more »

For any young band, the idea of performing before thousands on their first arena tour is a daunting proposal. When the heroically titled Saves the Day were tapped as openers for Weezer’s North American tour, which begins February 5, however, they pushed the butterflies aside and focused instead on rising to the occasion. “Every tour that we go on, we hope to be more comfortable as a live band,” bassist Eben D’Amico said. “Just being able to do our thing onstage that much better. We’re always honing and perfecting what we do.” While the Princeton, New Jersey-rooted quintet may come… Read more »

Despite a cancellation and a police arrest, approximately 500 people in three cities have put their guitars where their mouths are so far, and more than a dozen have gotten to jam with the rhythm section of Limp Bizkit. In its quest to find a guitarist to replace Wes Borland, the band is holding open auditions at Guitar Centers in cities all over the country. The Put Your Guitar Where Your Mouth Is auditions have drawn an average of 150 players each day in Fresno, California; Clackamas, Oregon; and Seattle, with the try-outs running from approximately 10 a.m. to 10… Read more »

Looking to take advantage of what they say is a large and lucrative niche audience untapped by television programmers, two cable divisions of Viacom (news/quote), MTV Networks and Showtime, are developing a plan to create the first cable channel aimed directly at gay viewers. The still unnamed channel would be offered to cable system operators as a pay channel like HBO or Showtime – only much less costly at $5 or $6 a month – but it would also include advertising. MTV Networks and Showtime have conducted extensive audience testing and concluded that there is, as one Showtime executive put… Read more »