SOXTALK'S 50 FAVORITE ROCK ACTS

[knightni]

50. Weezer

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 27 points - highest ranking #9 Cali

 

Weezer is an alternative rock band from Los Angeles, California formed in 1992. Initially, the band consisted of Rivers Cuomo (lead vocals, lead guitar), Patrick Wilson (drums, guitar, backing vocals), Matt Sharp (bass, backing vocals), and Jason Cropper (rhythm guitar, backing vocals). Cropper was later replaced by Brian Bell. Matt Sharp was subsequently replaced by Mikey Welsh who was later replaced with Scott Shriner. They have released seven full-length albums, five EPs, and a DVD. Weezer has sold more than eight million records in the US to date.

 

The band is best known for their successful singles "Buddy Holly," "Undone - The Sweater Song", "Island in the Sun", "Hash Pipe", "Beverly Hills" and "Pork and Beans".

 

The band's seventh studio album, Raditude, was released on November 3, 2009. The album's first single, entitled "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To", was released on August 18, 2009.

 

Weezer's first gig was opening for Keanu Reeves' band Dogstar. Weezer recorded their debut album with producer Ric Ocasek at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. During the recording, Jason Cropper left the band and was replaced by Brian Bell, the bassist for the band Carnival Art. The band released Weezer in May 1994. The record label originally did not wish to release a single, to see how much sales could be created by word-of-mouth alone. Soon after the release of Weezer a DJ, Marco Collins, on the Seattle radio station, The End, started playing "Undone - The Sweater Song" after hearing of their semi-success in California, which led their record label to release "Undone - The Sweater Song" as the first official single. The music video was directed by Spike Jonze. Filmed in an unbroken take, it featured Weezer performing on a sound stage with various amusing studio antics, including a pack of dogs swarming the set. The video became an instant hit on MTV.

 

Jonze also directed the band's second video "Buddy Holly". The video featured footage from the television sitcom Happy Days spliced with the band performing in a remade "Arnold's Drive-In", a familiar setting from the series. The video achieved heavy rotation on MTV and went on to win Jonze and the band four MTV Video Music Awards, including Breakthrough Video and Best Alternative Music Video, and two Billboard Music Video Awards. The clip is also featured on the installation CD for the Microsoft Windows 95 computer operating system. A third single, "Say It Ain't So", followed. Weezer is currently certified triple platinum in the United States, making it Weezer's all-time best seller.

 

Many modern bands, such as Bloc Party, Emery, Manchester Orchestra, Brand New and The Fall of Troy list Weezer as an influence. Weezer themselves have listed several influences, among them KISS (with direct references in the song, "In the Garage"), Nirvana (who was their labelmate for a very brief time before Kurt Cobain's death), Pixies (especially early on in their career), Wax and Sonic Youth. Early Weezer demos, such as "Paperface", have very obvious ties musically to the Pixies and Nirvana. Also, the song, "Susanne" originally read, "Even Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose" , instead of "Even Izzy, Slash, and Axl Rose", changed after Cobain's death. There is also a direct reference to Nevermind in "Heart Songs", a track found on The Red Album. As a side project, Weezer also briefly played Nirvana and Oasis covers under the stage moniker "Goat Punishment". In 1998, Weezer covered "Velouria" by the Pixies for a Pixies tribute album, and in 2005 briefly got to tour with their idols for a few dates. Green Day has also been said to be an influence (there is a direct lyric about Green Day in the song, "El Scorcho"), and it has been acknowledged that the two bands are friends with one another and enjoy each other's music. Weezer contributed the song "Worry Rock" to Different Shade Of Green: A Green Day Tribute. Rivers Cuomo also covered "Brain Stew" in a 2009 AOL Sessions set.

 

Weezer discography

 

1994 "Undone - The Sweater Song" - US Hot 100 #57 - US Modern Rock #6 - US Mainstream Rock #30

1994 "Buddy Holly" - US Mod #2 - US Main #34 - US Pop #17

1995 "Say It Ain't So" - US Mod #7

1996 "El Scorcho" - US Mod #19

1996 "The Good Life" - US Mod #32

2001 "Hash Pipe" - US Hot 100 #106 - US Mod #2 - US Main #24

2001 "Island in the Sun" - US Hot 100 #111 - US Mod #11

2001 "Photograph" - US Mod #17

2002 "Dope Nose" - US Mod #8

2002 "Keep Fishin'" - US Mod #15

2005 "Beverly Hills" - US Hot 100 #10 - US Mod #1 - US Main #26 - US Pop #6

2005 "We Are All on Drugs" - US Mod #10 - US Main #35

2006 "Perfect Situation" - US Hot 100 #51 - US Mod #1 - US Pop #44

2006 "This Is Such a Pity" - US Mod #31

2008 "Pork and Beans" - US Hot 100 #64 - US Mod #1 - US Main #25 - US Pop #70

2008 "Troublemaker" - US Hot 100 #121 - US Mod #2 - US Main #35

2008 "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" - US Mod #35

2009 "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" - US Hot 100 #81 - US Mod #2 - US Rock #5

 

Factoid: In their new album Raditude, Weezer is collaborating with hip-hop artist Lil Wayne on the track "Can't Stop Partying."

 

"Hashpipe"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-kwtxanqp

[knightni]

49. The Police

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 30 points - highest ranked #9 FlaSoxxJim

 

The Police were an English rock trio, from London, England, formed originally in 1977. The trio consisted of Gordon Sumner, CBE (born 2 October 1951), widely known by his stage name of Sting (lead vocals, bass guitar), Andy Summers (guitar, vocals) and Stewart Copeland (drums, vocals, percussion).

 

The band became globally popular in the late 1970s and are generally regarded as one of the first New Wave groups to achieve mainstream success, playing a style of rock that was influenced by jazz, punk and reggae music. Their 1983 album, Synchronicity, was number one in the UK and the US and sold over 8,000,000 copies in the US.

 

While having huge worldwide fame and record sales between 1979 and 1983, The band was having internal fighting due to lead singer Sting's increasing individual fame that seemed to overshadow the group's success.

 

The band broke up in 1984, but reunited in early 2007 for a one-off world tour lasting until August 2008, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of their hit single "Roxanne" and also, to a lesser extent, that of their formation as a group.

 

The Police have sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, and became the world's highest-earning musicians in 2008, thanks to their reunion tour. Rolling Stone ranked The Police number 70 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

 

The Police Discography

 

1979 "Roxanne" Hot 100 #32

1979 "Message in a Bottle" Hot 100 #74

1980 "Don't Stand So Close to Me" Hot 100 #10

1980 "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" Hot 100 #10

1981 "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" Hot 100 #3

1981 "Spirits in the Material World" Hot 100 #11

1983 "Every Breath You Take" Hot 100 #1

1983 "Wrapped Around Your Finger" Hot 100 #8

1983 "Synchronicity II" Hot 100 #16

1984 "King of Pain" Hot 100 #3

 

 

A little factoid: Old Comiskey Park hosted the opening show of The Police's last pre-reunion world tour in 1983.

 

"Message In A Bottle"

http://media-convert.com/ echo $langdir; ?>?xid=7-mmbxmhih

[knightni]

48. Lynyrd Skynyrd

 

 

5 of 24 lists - 34 points - highest ranked #12 Milkman delivers

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd (pronounced /ˌlɛnərd ˈskɪnərd/ LEN-ərd-SKIN-ərd) is an American rock band, formed in Jacksonville, Florida in 1964. The band became prominent in the Southern United States in 1973, and rose to worldwide recognition before three members and one road crew member died in an airplane crash in 1977, including lead vocalist and primary songwriter Ronnie Van Zant.

 

The band reformed in 1987 for a reunion tour with Ronnie's younger brother Johnny Van Zant as the frontman and continues to record music today.

 

The band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 13, 2006.

 

In 1972 the band was discovered by musician, songwriter, and producer Al Kooper of Blood, Sweat, and Tears, who had attended one of their shows at a club in Atlanta. They changed the spelling of their name to "Lynyrd Skynyrd", (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd) and Kooper signed them to MCA Records, producing their first album Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd. Released January 1st, 1973, the album featured the hit song "Free Bird", which received national airplay, eventually reaching #19 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and is still considered a rock and roll anthem today.

 

On Thursday, October 20, 1977, just three days after the release of Street Survivors, and five shows into their most successful headlining tour to date, Lynyrd Skynyrd's chartered Convair 240 ran out of fuel near the end of their flight from Greenville, South Carolina, where they had just performed at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Though the pilots attempted an emergency landing on a small airstrip, the plane crashed in a forest in Gillsburg, Mississippi. Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray were all killed on impact; the other bandmembers suffered serious injuries.

 

Following the crash and the ensuing press, Street Survivors became the band's second platinum album and reached #5 on the U.S. album chart. The single "What's Your Name" reached #13 on the single airplay charts in January 1978.

 

The original cover sleeve for Street Survivors had featured a photograph of the band, particularly Steve Gaines, engulfed in flames. Out of respect for the deceased (and at the request of Teresa Gaines, Steve's widow), MCA Records withdrew the original cover and replaced it with a similar image of the band against a simple black background . Thirty years later, for the deluxe CD version of Street Survivors, the original "flames" cover was restored.

 

Lynyrd Skynyrd Discography

 

1974 "Sweet Home Alabama" Hot 100 #8

1974 "Free Bird" Hot 100 #19

1975 "Saturday Night Special / Made In The Shade" Hot 100 #27

1976 "Free Bird (live) / Searchin' (live)" Hot 100 #38

1977 "What's Your Name? / I Know A Little" Hot 100 #13

1987 "Truck Drivin' Man" US Mainstream #12

1988 "Swamp Music" US Main #16

1991 "Smokestack Lightning" US Main #2

1991 "Keeping The Faith" US Main #10

1993 "Good Lovin's Hard To Find" US Main #6

2003 "Red White and Blue" US Main #1

 

 

 

Factoid: Their most popular single, "Sweet Home Alabama" is a response to Neil Young's "Alabama" and "Southern Man;" similar to when rap artists "dis" each other in their songs today.

 

"Tuesday's Gone"

 

http://media-convert.com/ echo $langdir; ?>?xid=7-cyeqgntx

[knightni]

47. Fleetwood Mac

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 37 points - highest ranking #4 Tex

 

Fleetwood Mac are a British–American rock band formed in 1967 in London.

 

Band founder Peter Green named the group by combining his two former bandmates' surnames.

 

The two most successful periods for the band were during the late 1960s British blues boom, when they were led by guitarist Peter Green; and from 1975 to 1987, with more pop-orientation. The band featured Mick Fleetwood, John and Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

 

In in 1976, with the success of the band also came the end of John and Christine McVie's marriage, as well as Buckingham and Nicks's long term romantic relationship. Even Fleetwood was in the midst of divorce proceedings from his wife, Jenny. The pressure put on Fleetwood Mac to release a successful follow-up album, combined with their new-found wealth, led to creative and personal tensions, fueled by high consumption of drug and alcohol.

 

The album the band members released in 1977 was Rumours. Critically acclaimed, the band laid bare the emotional turmoil experienced at that time. It was the recipient of the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for 1977. Hit singles included Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way", Nicks's U.S. #1 "Dreams" (sample (info)), and Christine McVie's "Don't Stop" and "You Make Loving Fun". Buckingham's "Second Hand News", Nicks' "Gold Dust Woman" and "The Chain" (the only song written by all five bandmates) also received significant radio airplay. By 2003, Rumours had sold over 19 million copies in the U.S. alone (certified as a diamond album by the RIAA), and a total of 40 million copies worldwide, maintaining its status as one of the biggest-selling albums of all time.

 

Buckingham was able to convince Fleetwood to allow his work on their next album to be more experimental and to work on tracks at home, then bring them to the band in the studio. His expanded creative role for the next album was influenced by an appreciation for New Wave music, specifically Gary Numan.

 

The result of this was the quirky double album, Tusk, released in 1979. It spawned three hit singles; Lindsey Buckingham's "Tusk" (U.S. #8), which featured the USC Trojan Marching Band; Christine McVie's "Think About Me" (U.S. #20); and Stevie Nicks' seven minute opus "Sara" (U.S. #7). The last of those three was cut to 4½ minutes for both the hit single and the first CD-release of the album, but the unedited version has since been restored on the 1988 Greatest Hits compilation and the 2004 reissue of Tusk as well as Fleetwood Mac's 2002 release of The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac. Original guitarist Green also took part in the sessions of Tusk, but his playing for the Christine McVie track "Brown Eyes" is not credited on the album.

 

Tusk remains one of Fleetwood Mac's most ambitious albums to date, although selling only four million copies worldwide. This, in comparison to the huge sales of Rumours, inclined the label to deem the project a failure, laying the blame squarely with Buckingham himself. Fleetwood, however, blames the album's relative failure on a major U.S. radio station's playing all 20 tracks in their entirety prior to release, thus allowing home taping. In addition, Tusk was a double album, which increased its retail price in stores compared with that of a single album.

 

The band embarked on a huge 18-month tour to support and promote Tusk. They traveled extensively across the world, including the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In Germany they shared the bill with reggae superstar Bob Marley. It was on this world tour that the band recorded music for the Fleetwood Mac Live album, which was released at the end of 1980.

 

The band's popular lineup broke up in 1987, but reformed in 1997, where sans Christine McVie, they still tour today.

 

Fleetwood Mac Discography

 

1975 "Over My Head" Hot 100 #20

1976 "Rhiannon" Hot 100 #11

1976 "Say You Love Me" Hot 100 #11

1976 "Go Your Own Way" Hot 100 #10

1977 "Dreams" Hot 100 #1

1977 "Don't Stop" Hot 100 #3

1977 "You Make Loving Fun" Hot 100 #9

1979 "Tusk" Hot 100 #8

1979 "Sara" Hot 100 #7

1980 "Think About Me" Hot 100 #20

1982 "Hold Me" Hot 100 #4 - US Mainstream #3 - Adult Contemporary #7

1982 "Gypsy" Hot 100 #12 - US Main #4 - Adult Con #9

1982 "Love in Store" Hot 100 #22 - Adult Con #11

1987 "Big Love" #5 - #2 - #23

1987 "Seven Wonders" #19 - #2 #13

1987 "Little Lies" #4 - #14 - #1

1987 "Family Man" Adult Con #23

1987 "Tango in the Night" US Main #28

1988 "Everywhere" #14 - #22 - #1

1988 "Isn't It Midnight" US Main #14

1988 "As Long as You Follow" #43 - #15 - #1

1990 "Save Me" #33 -#3 - #6

1990 "Skies the Limit" US Main #40 - Adult Con #10

1990 "Love Is Dangerous" US Main #7

1992 "Paper Doll" US Main #26

1997 "The Chain" (live) US Main #30

1997 "Silver Springs" (live) Adult Con #5

1998 "Landslide" (live) Hot 100 #51 - Adult Con #10

2003 "Peacekeeper" Hot 100 #80 - Adult Con #10

2003 "Say You Will" Adult Con #17

 

Factoid: The only member present in the band from the very beginning is its namesake drummer, Mick Fleetwood.

 

"Landslide"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-fxfjsjme

[knightni]

46. Pearl Jam

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 37 points - highest ranking #3 Sonik22

 

Pearl Jam is an American rock band that formed in Seattle, Washington in 1990. Since its inception, the band's line-up has included Eddie Vedder (lead vocals, guitar), Jeff Ament (bass guitar), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), and Mike McCready (lead guitar). The band's current drummer is Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, who has been with the band since 1998.

 

Formed after the demise of Ament and Gossard's previous band Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam broke into the mainstream with its debut album, Ten. One of the key bands of the grunge movement in the early 1990s.

 

Pearl Jam was criticized early on—most notably by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain—as being a corporate cash-in on the alternative rock explosion. However, over the course of the band's career its members became noted for their refusal to adhere to traditional music industry practices, including refusing to make music videos and engaging in a much-publicized boycott of Ticketmaster. In 2006, Rolling Stone described the band as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame."

 

Since its inception, the band has sold over thirty million records in the U.S., and an estimated sixty million worldwide. Pearl Jam has outlasted many of its contemporaries from the alternative rock breakthrough of the early 1990s, and is considered one of the most influential bands of the decade. Allmusic calls Pearl Jam "the most popular American rock & roll band of the '90s."

 

Released on August 27, 1991, Ten contained eleven tracks dealing with dark subjects like depression, suicide, loneliness, and murder. Ten's musical style, influenced by classic rock, combined an "expansive harmonic vocabulary" with an anthemic sound. The album was slow to sell, but by the second half of 1992 it became a breakthrough success, being certified gold and reaching number two on the Billboard charts. Ten produced the hit singles "Alive", "Even Flow", and "Jeremy". Originally interpreted as an anthem by many, Vedder later revealed that "Alive" tells the semi-biographical tale of a son discovering that his father is actually his stepfather, while his mother’s grief turns her to sexually embrace her son, who strongly resembles the biological father. The song "Jeremy" and its accompanying video were inspired by a true story in which a high school student shot himself in front of his classmates. Ten stayed on the Billboard charts for more than two years, and has gone on to become one of the highest-selling rock records ever, going thirteen times platinum.

 

The band members grew uncomfortable with their success, with much of the burden of Pearl Jam's popularity falling on frontman Vedder. While Pearl Jam received four awards at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards for its video for "Jeremy", including Video of the Year and Best Group Video, the band refused to make a video for "Black" in spite of pressure by the label. This action began a trend of the band refusing to make videos for its songs. "Ten years from now," Ament said, "I don't want people to remember our songs as videos."

 

In 1994, Pearl Jam was outraged when, after it played a pair of shows in Chicago, Illinois, it discovered that ticket vendor Ticketmaster had added a service charge to the tickets. The United States Department of Justice was investigating the company's practices at the time and asked the band to create a memorandum of its experiences with the company. Gossard and Ament soon testified at a subcommittee investigation in Washington, D.C. The band eventually canceled its 1994 summer tour in protest. After the Justice Department dropped the case, Pearl Jam continued to boycott Ticketmaster, refusing to play venues that had contracts with the company. Music critic Jim DeRogatis noted that along with the Ticketmaster debacle, "the band has refused to release singles or make videos; it has demanded that its albums be released on vinyl; and it wants to be more like its '60s heroes, The Who, releasing two or three albums a year." He also stated that sources said that most of the band's third album Vitalogy was completed by early 1994, but that either a forced delay by Epic or the battle with Ticketmaster were to blame for the delay.

 

The band continued its boycott against Ticketmaster during its 1995 tour for Vitalogy, but was surprised that virtually no other bands joined in. Pearl Jam's initiative to play only at non-Ticketmaster venues effectively, with a few exceptions, prevented it from playing shows in the United States for the next three years. In the same year Pearl Jam backed Neil Young, whom the band had noted as an influence, on his album Mirror Ball. Contractual obligations prevented the use of the band's name anywhere on the album, but the members were all credited individually in the album's liner notes.

 

Pearl Jam's 2000 European tour ended in tragedy on June 30, with an accident at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Nine fans were crushed underfoot and suffocated to death as the crowd rushed to the front. After numerous requests from Festival officials to stop playing, the band finally stopped and tried to have the crowd step back but it was already too late. The two remaining dates of the tour were canceled and members of the band contemplated retiring after this event. Pearl Jam was initially blamed for the accident, but was later cleared of responsibility.

 

A month after the European tour concluded, the band embarked on its two-leg 2000 North American tour. On performing after the Roskilde tragedy, Vedder said that "playing, facing crowds, being together—it enabled us to start processing it." On October 22, 2000, the band played the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, celebrating the tenth anniversary of its first live performance as a band. Vedder took the opportunity to thank the many people who had helped the band come together and make it to ten years. He noted that "I would never do this accepting a Grammy or something." The song "Alive" was purposely omitted from all shows on this tour until the final night in Seattle. The band performed that night for over three hours, playing most of its hits along with covers such as "The Kids Are Alright" and "Baba O'Riley" by The Who.

 

Pearl Jam has been praised for its rejection of rock star excess and its insistence on backing causes it believes in. Music critic Jim DeRogatis said in the aftermath of the band's battle with Ticketmaster that it "proved that a rock band which isn't comprised of greed heads can play stadiums and not milk the audience for every last dime... it indicated that idealism in rock 'n' roll is not the sole province of those '60s bands enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." Eric Weisbard of Spin said in 2001, "The group that was once accused of being synthetic grunge now seem as organic and principled a rock band as exists." In a 2005 USA Today reader's poll, Pearl Jam was voted the greatest American rock band of all time. In April 2006, Pearl Jam was awarded the prize for "Best Live Act" in Esquire's Esky Music Awards. The blurb called Pearl Jam "the rare superstars who still play as though each show could be their last." Pearl Jam's fanbase following (often referred to as the "Jamily") has been compared to that of the Grateful Dead's, with Rolling Stone magazine stating that Pearl Jam "toured incessantly and became one of rock's great arena acts, attracting a fanatical, Grateful Dead-like cult following with marathon, true-believer shows in the vanishing spirit of Bruce Springsteen, the Who and U2."

 

Pearl Jam Discography

 

1991 "Alive" US Mainstream Rock #16 - US Alternative #18

1992 "Even Flow" US Main #3 - US Alt #21

1992 "Jeremy" US Hot 100 #79 - US Main #5 - US Alt #5

1993 "Go" US Main #3 - US Alt #8

1993 "Daughter" US Hot 100 #97 - US Main #1 - US Alt #1

1994 "Animal" US Main #2

1994 "Dissident" US Main #3

1994 "Spin the Black Circle" #18 - #16 - #11

1995 "Not for You" US Main #12 - US Alt #38

1995 "Immortality" US Main #10 - US Alt #31

1996 "Who You Are" #31 - #5 - #1

1996 "Hail, Hail" US Main #9 - US Alt #9

1996 "Off He Goes" US Main #34 - US Alt #31

1998 "Given to Fly" #21 - #1 - #3

1998 "Wishlist" #47 - #6 - #6

1999 "Last Kiss" #2 - #5 - #2

2000 "Nothing as It Seems" #49 - #3 - #10

2000 "Light Years" US Main #17 - US Alt #26

2002 "I Am Mine" #43 - #7 - #6

2003 "Save You" US Main #23 - US Alt #29

2006 "World Wide Suicide" #41 - #2 - #1

2006 "Life Wasted" US Main #13 - US Alt #10

2009 "The Fixer" #56 - #10 - #3

 

Factoid: The band first took the name Mookie Blaylock, in reference to the then-active All-Star basketball player. However, concerns about trademark issues necessitated a name change.

 

"Last Kiss"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-qherskcf

[knightni]

45. Radiohead

 

3 of 24 lists - 38 points - highest ranking #7 MexSoxFan#1

 

Radiohead are an English alternative rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano, beats), Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboard, other instruments), Ed O'Brien (guitar, backing vocals), Colin Greenwood (bass guitar, synthesizers) and Phil Selway (drums, percussion).

 

Radiohead released their first single, "Creep", in 1992. The song was initially unsuccessful, but it became a worldwide hit several months after the release of their debut album, Pablo Honey (1993). Radiohead's popularity rose in the United Kingdom with the release of their second album, The Bends (1995). Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), propelled them to greater international fame. Featuring an expansive sound and themes of modern alienation, OK Computer has often been acclaimed as a landmark record of the 1990s.

 

Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) marked an evolution in Radiohead's musical style, as the group incorporated experimental electronic music, Krautrock, post-punk and jazz influences. Although critical opinion was initially divided, Radiohead remained popular. Hail to the Thief (2003), a mix of guitar-driven rock, electronics and lyrics inspired by headlines, was the band's final album for their major record label, EMI. Radiohead independently released their seventh album, In Rainbows (2007), originally as a digital download for which customers could set their own price, later in stores, to critical and chart success.

 

Radiohead's work has appeared in a large number of listener polls and critics' lists. For example, in 2005 Radiohead were ranked number 73 in Rolling Stone's list of "the greatest artists of all time". While the band's earlier albums were particularly influential on British rock and pop music, their later albums brought them a wide audience. Their work has influenced other musicians in genres ranging from jazz and classical music to hip hop and R&B.

 

Radiohead Discography

 

1992 "Creep" US Hot 100 #34 - US Hot Modern Rock #2

1993 "Stop Whispering" US Mod #23

1995 "High and Dry" #78 - #18

1995 "Fake Plastic Trees" US Mod #11

1995 "Just" US Mod #37

1997 "Karma Police" US Mod #14

1997 "Let Down" US Mod #29

2000 "Optimistic" US Mod #10

2001 "I Might Be Wrong" US Mod #27

2003 "There There" US Mod #14

2003 "Go to Sleep" US Mod #32

2007 "Bodysnatchers" US Mod #8

 

Factoid: Radiohead's original name was On A Friday - the band's usual rehearsal day in their school's music room.

 

"Karma Police"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-rdscscfz

[knightni]

44. Talking Heads

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 38 points - highest ranked #4 RibbieRubarb

 

Talking Heads was an American rock band formed in 1974 in New York City and active until 1991. The band comprised David Byrne, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison. Auxiliary musicians also frequently made appearances in concert and on the group's albums.

 

The new wave musical style of Talking Heads combined elements of punk rock, avant-garde, pop, funk, world music and art rock. Frontman and songwriter David Byrne contributed whimsical, esoteric lyrics to the band's songs, and emphasized their showmanship through various multimedia projects and performances. Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes Talking Heads as being "one of the most critically acclaimed bands of the '80s, while managing to earn several pop hits."

 

In 2002, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Four of the band's albums appeared on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and the Channel 4 100 Greatest Albums poll listed one album (Fear of Music) at number seventy-six. Their concert film Stop Making Sense is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of the genre.

 

David Byrne, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. There Byrne and Frantz formed a band called "The Artistics" in 1974. Weymouth was Frantz's girlfriend and often provided the band with transportation. The Artistics dissolved within a year, and the three moved to New York, eventually sharing an apartment. Unable to find a bass player in New York City, Frantz encouraged Weymouth to learn to play bass by listening to Suzi Quatro albums. They played their first gig as "Talking Heads" opening for the Ramones at CBGB on June 8, 1975.

 

Later in 1975, the trio recorded a series of demos for CBS, but the band was not signed to the label. In 1976, they added Jerry Harrison (guitar, keyboards, vocals), formerly of Jonathan Richman's band The Modern Lovers. The group quickly drew a following and was signed to Sire Records in 1977. The group released their first single, "Love → Building on Fire" in February of that year.

 

Their first album, Talking Heads: 77, which did not contain the earlier single, was released soon thereafter.

 

It was with their second album, 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food that the band began its long-term collaboration with producer Brian Eno, who had previously worked with Roxy Music, David Bowie and Robert Fripp; the title of Eno's 1977 song "King's Lead Hat" is an anagram of the band's name. Eno's unusual style meshed well with the group's artistic sensibilities, and they began to explore an increasingly diverse range of musical directions. This recording also established the band's long term recording studio relationship with the famous Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. Though "Psycho Killer", from the debut album, had been a minor hit, it was "Take Me to the River" that broke Talking Heads into general public consciousness.

 

The experimentation continued with 1979's Fear of Music, which flirted with the darker stylings of post-punk rock. The single "Life During Wartime" produced the catchphrase, "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco." 1980's Remain in Light, heavily influenced by the Afro-Beat of Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, to whose music Eno had introduced the band, explored African polyrhythms, foreshadowing Byrne's later interest in world music. In order to perform these more complex arrangements the band toured with an expanded group, first at the Heatwave festival in August, and later in their concert film Stop Making Sense. During this period, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz also formed a commercially successful splinter group, the hip-hop influenced Tom Tom Club, and Harrison released his first solo record. Likewise, Byrne - in collaboration with Eno - released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which incorporated world music, 'found' sounds, and included a number of other prominent international and post-punk musicians. All were released by Sire.

 

The Remain in Light album's lead single, "Once in a Lifetime," became a Top 20 hit in the UK but initially failed to make an impression upon its release in the band's own country. But it grew into a popular standard over the next few years on the strength of its music video.

 

After releasing four albums in barely four years, the group went into hiatus and nearly three years passed before their next release, although Frantz and Weymouth continued to record with the Tom Tom Club. In the meantime, Talking Heads released a live album, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, toured the US and Europe as an eight-piece group, and parted ways with Eno, who went on to produce albums with U2.

 

1983 saw the release of Speaking in Tongues, a commercial breakthrough that produced the band's only American Top 10 hit, "Burning Down the House." Once again, a striking video was inescapable owing to its heavy rotation on MTV. The following tour was documented in Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, which generated another live album of the same name. The Speaking in Tongues tour would be their last.

 

Three more albums followed: 1985's Little Creatures (which featured the prominent hit singles "And She Was" and "Road to Nowhere"), 1986's True Stories (Talking Heads covering all the soundtrack songs of Byrne's musical comedy film, in which the band also appeared), and 1988's Naked. The sound of Little Creatures and True Stories was much more American pop-rock, while Naked showed heavy African influence with polyrhythmic styles like those seen on Remain in Light. During that time the group was falling increasingly under David Byrne's control, and after Naked the band went on "hiatus".

 

It took until 1991 for an official announcement to be made that Talking Heads had broken up. A brief reunion occurred, however, later that year for "Sax and Violins," an original single that appeared on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World. Only Byrne and Harrison appear in the song's video, however, lending doubt to Frantz and Weymouth's participation on the track. During this breakup period, Byrne continued his solo career, releasing Rei Momo in 1989 and The Forest in 1991. This period also saw a revived flourish from both Tom Tom Club (Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom and Dark Sneak Love Action) and Harrison (the Casual Gods album/band).

 

Despite David Byrne's lack of interest in another album, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison reunited for a one-off album called No Talking, Just Head under the name The Heads in 1996. The album featured a number of vocalists, representing some of the most distinctive voices of '80s and '90s alternative rock, including Debbie Harry of Blondie, Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde, Andy Partridge of XTC, Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Ed Kowalczyk of Live, Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays, Richard Hell, and Maria McKee. The album was accompanied by a tour which featured Johnette Napolitano as the vocalist. Byrne took legal action against the rest of the band because of "The Heads" abbreviation—something he saw as "a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Talking Heads name."

 

The band played together on March 18, 2002, at the ceremony of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, however reuniting for a concert tour is unlikely. David Byrne states: "We did have a lot of bad blood go down. That's one reason, and another is that musically we're just miles apart." Weymouth has been critical of David Byrne, describing him as "a man incapable of returning friendship" and that he doesn't "love" her, Frantz, and Harrison.

 

Talking Heads discography

 

1977 "Psycho Killer" - US Hot 100 #92

1978 "Take Me To The River" - Hot 100 #26

1979 "Life During Wartime" - Hot 100 #80

1981 "Once in a Lifetime" - #103

1983 "Burning Down the House" - #9 - US Mainstream Rock #6

1983 "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" - #62 - US Main #24

1985 "Road to Nowhere" - #105 - #25

1985 "And She Was" - #54 - #11

1985 "Once in a Lifetime (live)" - #91

1986 "Wild Wild Life" - #25 - #4

1988 "(Nothing But) Flowers" - US Main #5

1991 "Sax and Violins" - US Modern Rock #1

1992 "Lifetime Piling Up" - US Mod #11

 

 

Factoid: "Take Me To The River", one of their biggest hits, was an Al Green song - also covered by "Billy Bass."

 

 

"Psycho Killer"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-jwdbgezg

[knightni]

43. Soundgarden

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 38 points - highest ranking #2 Steve9347

 

Soundgarden was a Grammy Award winning American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1984 by lead singer and drummer Chris Cornell, lead guitarist Kim Thayil, and bassist Hiro Yamamoto. Matt Cameron became the band's permanent drummer in 1986 while bassist Ben Shepherd became a permanent replacement for Yamamoto in 1990.

 

Soundgarden was one of the key archetypes in the creation of grunge, a style of alternative rock that developed in Seattle and was based around the band's record label Sub Pop. Soundgarden was the first grunge band to sign to a major label, though the band did not achieve commercial success until Seattle contemporaries Nirvana and Pearl Jam popularized grunge in the early 1990s.

 

Soundgarden achieved its biggest success with the 1994 album, Superunknown, which debuted at number one on the Billboard charts and yielded the Grammy Award–winning singles "Black Hole Sun" and "Spoonman". In 1997, the band broke up due to internal strife over its creative direction. Soundgarden has sold eight million records in the U.S., and an estimated twenty million worldwide.

 

Soundgarden traces its origins to a cover band called The Shemps that performed around Seattle, Washington in the early 1980s.[4] The Shemps featured bassist Hiro Yamamoto and drummer and vocalist Chris Cornell. Following Yamamoto's departure from The Shemps, the band recruited guitarist Kim Thayil as its new bassist.[4] Thayil had moved to Seattle from Park Forest, Illinois with Yamamoto and Bruce Pavitt, who would later start the independent record label Sub Pop.[5] Cornell and Yamamoto stayed in contact, and after The Shemps broke up Cornell and Yamamoto started jamming together, eventually bringing in Thayil to join them.[4]

 

Soundgarden was formed in 1984 by Cornell (drums and vocals), Yamamoto (bass), and Thayil (guitar). The band named themselves after a wind-channeling pipe sculpture, "A Sound Garden," located on NOAA property next to Magnuson Park, Seattle, Washington. Cornell originally played drums while singing, but in 1985 the band enlisted Scott Sundquist to allow Cornell to concentrate on vocals.

 

KCMU DJ Jonathan Poneman was impressed after seeing Soundgarden perform one night, later saying, "I saw this band that was everything rock music should be." Poneman offered to fund a release by the band, so Thayil told him to team up with Bruce Pavitt. Poneman offered to contribute $20,000 in funding for Sub Pop, effectively turning it into a full-fledged record label. Soundgarden signed to Sub Pop, and the label released "Hunted Down" in 1987 as the band's first single. The B-side of the "Hunted Down" single, "Nothing to Say", appeared on the KCMU compilation tape, Bands That Will Make Money, which was distributed to record companies. Upon hearing the song, record labels began contacting the band. Through Sub Pop, the band released the Screaming Life EP in 1987, and the Fopp EP in 1988. A combination of the two was issued as Screaming Life/Fopp in 1990.

 

Bassist Ben Shepherd replaced previous bassist Jason Everman and the new line-up recorded Soundgarden's third album in 1991. Cornell said that Shepherd brought a "fresh and creative" approach to the recording sessions, and the band as a whole said that his knowledge of music and writing skills redefined the band. The resulting album, Badmotorfinger, was released on October 8, 1991. Steve Huey of Allmusic said that the songwriting on Badmotorfinger "takes a quantum leap in focus and consistency." He added, "It's surprisingly cerebral and arty music for a band courting mainstream metal audiences." Thayil suggested that the album's lyrics are "like reading a novel [about] man's conflict with himself and society, or the government, or his family, or the economy, or anything." The first single from Badmotorfinger, "Jesus Christ Pose", garnered attention when MTV decided to ban its corresponding music video in 1991. Many listeners were outraged by the song and its video, perceiving it as anti-Christian. The band received death threats while on tour in the United Kingdom in support of the album. Cornell explained that the lyrics criticize public figures who use religion (particularly the image of Jesus Christ) to portray themselves as being persecuted. Although overshadowed at the time of its release by the sudden popularity of Nirvana's Nevermind, the focus of attention brought by Nevermind to the Seattle scene helped Soundgarden gain wider attention. The singles "Outshined" and "Rusty Cage" were able to find an audience at alternative rock radio and MTV. Badmotorfinger was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 1992. The album was among the 100 top selling albums of 1992.

 

Soundgarden began work on its fourth album after touring in support of Badmotorfinger. Cornell said that while working on the album the band members allowed each other more freedom than on past records, while Thayil observed that the band spent a lot more time working on the actual recording of the songs than on previous records. Released on March 8, 1994, Superunknown became the band's breakthrough album, driven by the singles "Spoonman", "The Day I Tried to Live", "Black Hole Sun", "My Wave", and "Fell on Black Days". Upon its release in March 1994, Superunknown debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. The songs on Superunknown captured the creativity and heaviness of the band's earlier works, while showcasing the group's newly evolving style. Lyrically, the album was quite dark and mysterious, as much of it is often interpreted to be dealing with substance abuse, suicide, and depression. Cornell was inspired by the writings of Sylvia Plath at the time. The album was also more experimental than previous releases, with some songs incorporating Middle-Eastern or Indian music. J.D. Considine of Rolling Stone said Superunknown "demonstrates far greater range than many bands manage in an entire career." He also stated, "At its best, Superunknown offers a more harrowing depiction of alienation and despair than anything on In Utero." The music video for "Black Hole Sun" became a hit on MTV and received the award for Best Metal/Hard Rock Video at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards and in 1995 it received the Clio Award for Alternative Music Video.Soundgarden won two Grammy Awards in 1995; "Black Hole Sun" received the award for Best Hard Rock Performance and "Spoonman" received the award for Best Metal Performance. Superunknown was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album in 1995. Superunknown has been certified five times platinum in the United States and remains Soundgarden's most successful album.

 

Following the worldwide tour in support of its previous album, Superunknown, the band commenced work on what would become the band's final album. The members of Soundgarden opted to self-produce the record. However, tensions within the group reportedly arose during the sessions, with Thayil and Cornell allegedly clashing over Cornell's desire to shift away from the heavy guitar riffing that had become the band's trademark. Cornell said, "By the time we were finished, it felt like it had been kind of hard, like it was a long, hard haul. But there was stuff we were discovering." The band's fifth album, Down on the Upside, was released on May 21, 1996. The album was notably less heavy than the group's preceding albums, and marked a further departure from the band's grunge roots. Soundgarden explained at the time that it wanted to experiment with other sounds. David Browne of Entertainment Weekly said, "Few bands since Led Zeppelin have so crisply mixed instruments both acoustic and electric." The overall mood of the album's lyrics isn't as dark as on previous Soundgarden albums, with Cornell describing some songs as "self-affirming." The album spawned several singles, including "Pretty Noose", "Burden in My Hand", and "Blow Up the Outside World". "Pretty Noose" was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1997. Despite favorable reviews, the album did not match the sales of Superunknown.

 

Tensions continued to increase during the band's ensuing tour in support of the album. When asked if the band hated touring, Cornell said, "We really enjoy it to a point and then it gets tedious, because it becomes repetitious. You feel like fans have paid their money and they expect you to come out and play them your songs like the first time you ever played them. That's the point where we hate touring." At the tour's final stop in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 9, 1997, Shepherd threw his bass into the air in frustration after suffering equipment failure, and subsequently stormed off the stage. The band retreated, with Cornell returning to conclude the show with a solo encore. On April 9, 1997, the band announced its disbanding. Thayil said, "It was pretty obvious from everybody's general attitude over the course of the previous half year that there was some dissatisfaction." Cameron later said that Soundgarden was "eaten up by the business." Soundgarden's final release, a greatest hits collection entitled A-Sides, was released the following fall.

 

Cornell released a solo album in September 1999, entitled Euphoria Morning. Later, in 2001, he formed the supergroup Audioslave with the former instrumental members of Rage Against the Machine and recorded three albums as Audioslave's vocalist (Audioslave (2002), Out of Exile (2005), and Revelations (2006)). Cornell departed Audioslave in early 2007, resulting in the band's break-up. His second solo album, Carry On, was released in June 2007 and his third solo album, Scream, produced by Timbaland, was released in March 2009, both to mixed commercial and critical success.

 

Soundgarden was one of the early bands of the 1980s Seattle music scene and is regarded as being one of the originators of the genre later known as grunge. The band has been praised for its technical musical ability and the expansion of its sound as the band's career progressed.

 

Regarding Soundgarden's legacy, in a 2007 interview Cornell said, "I think and this is now with some distance in listening to the records but on the outside looking in with all earnestness I think Soundgarden made the best records out of that scene. I think we were the most daring and experimental and genre pushing really and I'm really proud of it. And I guess that's why I have trepidation about the idea of reforming. I don't know what it would mean. I guess I just have this image of who we were and I had probably a lot of anxiety during the period of being Soundgarden, as we all did, that it was a responsibility and it was an important band of music and we didn't want to mess it up and we managed to not, which I felt is a great achievement."

 

Soundgarden Discography

 

1994 "Spoonman" - US Mainstream Rock #3 - US Modern Rock #9

1994 "The Day I Tried to Live" - US Main #13 - US Mod #25

1994 "Black Hole Sun" - #1 - #2

1994 "My Wave" - #11 - #18

1994 "Fell on Black Days" - #4 - #13

1996 "Pretty Noose" - #4 - #2

1996 "Burden in My Hand" - #1 - #2

1996 "Blow Up the Outside World" - #1 - #8

1997 "Rhinosaur" - US Main #19

1997 "Bleed Together" - #13 - #32

 

 

Factoid: Chris Cornell was once in a band called Temple of the Dog. This band consisted of all present members of Pearl Jam with Cornell added.

 

"Fell On Black Days"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-jrfoagkq

[knightni]

42. Guns N' Roses

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 39 points - highest ranking #2 TheGooch

 

Guns N' Roses is an American hard rock/heavy metal band that formed in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California in 1985. The band, led by frontman and co-founder Axl Rose, has gone through numerous line-up changes and controversies since its formation; the current lineup comprises vocalist Rose, guitarists Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, DJ Ashba and Richard Fortus, bassist Tommy Stinson, drummer Frank Ferrer and keyboardists Dizzy Reed and Chris Pitman. The band has released six studio albums, three EPs and one live album during its career.

 

The band has sold an estimated 100 million albums worldwide, including over 43 million in the United States. The band's 1987 major label debut album Appetite for Destruction has sold in excess of 28 million copies and reached number one on the United States Billboard 200. In addition, the album charted three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including "Sweet Child o' Mine" which reached number one. The 1991 albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II debuted on the two highest spots on the Billboard 200 and have sold a combined 14 million copies in the United States alone and 35 million worldwide. After over a decade of work, the band released their follow-up album, Chinese Democracy, in 2008.

 

Their mid-to-late eighties and early nineties years have been described by individuals in the music industry as the period in which "they brought forth a hedonistic rebelliousness and revived the punk attitude-driven hard rock scene, reminiscent of the early Rolling Stones."

 

The group was formed in early 1985 by Hollywood Rose members Axl Rose (vocals) and Izzy Stradlin (rhythm guitar), and L.A. Guns members Tracii Guns (lead guitar), Ole Beich (bass) and Rob Gardner (drums). The band created its name by combining two of the group members' names. A short time later, bassist Ole Beich was fired and replaced by Duff McKagan. After a short while Tracii Guns was replaced by Slash; after Tracii didn't show up to rehearsal. Slash had played with McKagan in Road Crew and Stradlin during a short stint in Hollywood Rose. The new line-up came together quickly, but after deciding to go on a "tour" from Sacramento, California to Duff's home town of Seattle, drummer Rob Gardner quit and was replaced by Slash's close friend Steven Adler. The band, which continued to be called Guns N' Roses even after the departure of Tracii Guns, established its first stable line up on this so-called "Hell Tour". In an interview, Slash stated, "That [trip to Seattle] is really what cemented the band" and established its chemistry.

 

The band's first album, Appetite for Destruction was released on July 21, 1987. The album underwent an artwork change after the original Robert Williams cover design (a surrealist scene in which a dagger-toothed monster vengefully attacks a robot rapist) spawned complaints from religious groups and caused some record stores to brown bag, obscure, or refuse to sell the album. The revised cover was a design by Bill White, a tattoo artist, who had originally designed it for a tattoo Rose had got the previous year. The design featured each of the five band members' skulls layered on a cross. Rose later insisted that the Gold and Platinum plaques issued by the RIAA be set using the original cover. The artwork from the original cover can be found in the booklet of the CD release. In the US, "Welcome to the Jungle" was issued as its first single with an accompanying music video. Initially, the album and single lingered for almost a year without performing well, but when Geffen Records founder David Geffen was asked to lend support to the band, he obliged by personally convincing MTV executives to play "Welcome to the Jungle" during their after hours rotation. Even though the video was initially only played one time at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, rock and punk fans took notice and soon began requesting the video and song en masse. In Japan, an entire EP entitled Live from the Jungle was issued, containing the album version of "Sweet Child o' Mine" along with a selection of numerous Marquee Club recordings.

 

"Sweet Child O' Mine" was the album's second US single co-written by Axl Rose as a poem for his girlfriend and future wife, Erin Everly. Due to the growing grassroots success of the band and the cross-gender appeal of the tune, the song and its accompanying music video received heavy airplay on both radio and MTV, and became a smash hit during the summer of 1988, reaching the top of the charts in the U.S. Slash stated on VH1's 100 Greatest songs of the 80's, "It was actually my least favorite song we ever wrote...I hate it, but it turns out to be our greatest song ever". "Welcome to the Jungle" was then re-issued as a single, with new pressings of records and tapes and new artwork. It was a successful re-release, as the single reached #7 in the U.S. The UK re-release was backed with an acoustic version of "You're Crazy", recorded much earlier than the one featured on the G N' R Lies EP.

 

By the time "Paradise City" and its video reached the airwaves and peaked at #5 in the U.S., the band's touring success and fame had catapulted the album to #1 on the Billboard charts. "Welcome to the Jungle", "Sweet Child o' Mine" and "Paradise City" were all top ten singles in the U.S. To date, Appetite for Destruction has sold over 28 million copies.

 

The band's next release was G N' R Lies in 1988, which reached #2 in the Billboard music charts. The album included the four Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide recordings on one side and four acoustic songs on the other. The song "One in a Million", which included the words "n**gers" and "f**gots" among other such obscenities, led to controversy in which critics accused the band, and specifically Axl Rose, of racism and homophobia. Rose responded (in a 1990 interview with MTV) by saying the claims were unfounded, particularly considering Slash himself is half black. He went on to explain that the words were those of a protagonist and not a personal statement, and that the lyrics reflected racial and prejudicial problems within society rather than promoting them. Rose also cited that he idolized gay/bisexual singers like Freddie Mercury and Elton John. The band had played gigs alongside the all-black metal band Body Count, and lead singer Ice T wrote in his book, The Ice Opinion, that Axl had been "a victim of the press the same way I am".

 

In 1990, Guns N' Roses returned to the studio to begin recording their most ambitious undertaking yet. During the recording session of "Civil War", drummer Steven Adler was unable to perform well due to his struggles with cocaine and heroin addiction—his difficulties in the studio caused the band to do nearly 30 takes. As a result, Adler was fired in July 1990, and was replaced by former Cult drummer Matt Sorum, who Axl credited for saving the band. A few months prior, keyboardist Dizzy Reed became the sixth member of the group when he joined as a full time member. The band fired their manager, Alan Niven, in May 1991, replacing him with Doug Goldstein. According to a 1991 cover story by Rolling Stone magazine, Rose forced the dismissal of Niven (against the wishes of some of his bandmates) by refusing to complete the albums until he was replaced.

 

With enough music for two albums, the band released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II on September 17, 1991. The tactic paid off when the albums debuted at #2 and #1 respectively in the Billboard charts, setting a record as they became the first and only group to date to achieve this feat. The albums spent 108 weeks in the chart.

 

Guns N' Roses accompanied the Use Your Illusion albums with many videos, including "Don't Cry", "November Rain" and "Estranged"—some of the most expensive music videos ever made. The hit ballad "November Rain" (#3 U.S.) became the most requested video on MTV, eventually winning the 1992 MTV Video Music Award for best cinematography. It is also the longest song in chart history to reach the Top Ten, clocking in at 8:56. During the awards show, the band performed the song with Elton John accompanying on piano.

 

On November 23, 1993, Guns N' Roses released a collection of punk and glam rock covers entitled "The Spaghetti Incident?". Despite protests from Rose's band-mates, an unadvertised cover of the Charles Manson song "Look at Your Game Girl" was included on the album at his request. Years later, Rose said he would remove the song from new pressings of the album, claiming that critics and the media had misinterpreted his interest in Manson. Axl can be seen wearing a black Manson shirt in the video for "Estranged" from Use Your Illusion II. He also can be seen wearing a red Manson shirt in footage from their show in Milton Keynes, England in 1993. This version of the shirt had additional text on the back, "Charlie Don't Surf'. "Look at Your Game Girl" is still on the album. The Spaghetti Incident? did not match the success of the Illusion albums and tension increased within the band.

 

Interviews with Guns N' Roses band members suggest that between 1994 and 1996, the band sporadically began to write and record new material, most of which, according to Slash, had been written by Axl. At the time, the band had intended to release a single album with 10 or 12 songs.

 

Regarding the dysfunction of the band's recording at that time, Axl is quoted as saying "We still needed the collaboration of the band as a whole to write the best songs. Since none of that happened, that’s the reason why that material got scrapped."

 

Slash and Duff McKagan later left the group, and as such all of the original members (aside from Axl Rose) had departed from the band. 1994 was the last year Axl held a press conference or performed until 2001 with his new cast. Axl's only performance in 1994 was a duet with Bruce Springsteen on a cover of the Beatles song "Come Together". An actual break-up of Guns N' Roses never occurred, as new players were brought in as the old ones left. (For more information on the personnel changes over the years see the article: "List of Guns N' Roses band members")

 

McKagan was the last of Rose's original bandmates to leave; in 1997 he was replaced by Tommy Stinson (formerly of The Replacements.) By the end of 1998, a new version of Guns N Roses had emerged: many musicians have come and gone from the new band, but the core group has included Rose, Stinson, keyboardist Dizzy Reed, multi-instrumentalist Chris Pitman, and guitarist Robin Finck.

 

The New Guns N' Roses

 

The revised lineup finally made a public appearance in January 2001, with two well-received concerts, one in Las Vegas and one at the Rock in Rio Festival in Rio de Janeiro. The band played a mixture of old hits as well as new songs from their forthcoming album.

 

Chinese Democracy was released on November 22, 2008 in Europe and Australia, in North America on November 23, 2008 and in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2008, becoming the band's sixth studio album and their first since 1993's "The Spaghetti Incident?".

 

Guns N' Roses signed with a major label within eight months of their inception and topped national sales charts weeks after garnering late hours airplay on MTV. Appetite for Destruction is the highest-selling debut album of all time.

 

Their peers in the music industry often spoke highly of the band: Ozzy Osbourne called Guns N' Roses "the next Rolling Stones." In 2002, Q magazine named Guns N' Roses in their list of the "50 Bands To See Before You Die". Also, the television network VH1 ranked Guns N' Roses ninth in its "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock" special, and also ranked 11th on "Top 50 bands". Appetite for Destruction appeared in the Rolling Stone Magazine special issue "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Guns N' Roses #92 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". "Welcome To The Jungle" had also been voted "Best Rock Song".

 

The band has not been free of criticism. The flagrant alcohol and drug abuse by some members of the group, and Axl's fondness of Charles Manson T-shirts, were used by the media to portray Guns N' Roses as a poor example and negative influence on their young fans. The long periods of time that the band took to release albums were also a source of heavy criticism (the band's second album, GN'R Lies, was actually an EP and an old EP packaged together, and one of the songs was an acoustic cover of one from the band's debut album, it took from 1987 to 1991 to come up with a proper follow up to Appetite for Destruction, and it took over 15 years to release Chinese Democracy).

 

Frontman Axl Rose has become a source of both controversy and criticism since the other founding members left the group. His constant elusiveness, such as the fact that he has not held a press conference since 1994, has led to several stories claiming he is suffering from bipolar disorder. Music critics have blamed Rose for the break-up of the original group, have criticized him for continuing the band after the original members had departed and have questioned the constant change in band members. They also cite his neurotic behavior and sense of perfectionism as a cause of personal conflict and the long delays between albums.

 

 

Guns N' Roses discography

 

1987 "Welcome to the Jungle" - US Hot 100 #7 - US Mainstream Rock #37

1988 "Sweet Child o' Mine" - US 100 #1 - US Main #7

1989 "Paradise City" - US 100 #5 - US Main #14

1989 "Patience" - #4 - #7

1989 "Nightrain" - #93 - #26

1991 "You Could Be Mine" - #29 - #3

1991 "Don't Cry" - #10 - #3

1991 "Live and Let Die" - #33 - #20

1992 "November Rain" - #3 - #15

1992 "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" - US Main #18

1992 "Yesterdays" - #72 - #13

1993 "Ain't It Fun" - US Main #8

1994 "Estranged" - US Main #16

1994 "Since I Don't Have You" - US 100 #69

1994 "Hair of the Dog" - US Main #11

1994 "Sympathy for the Devil" - US 100 #55 - US Main #10

1999 "Oh My God" - US Main #26

2008 "Chinese Democracy" - US 100 #34 - US Main #5

2008 "Better" - US Main #18

 

 

Factoid: Guns N' Roses originally wanted to use an image of Tiananmen Square rendered as an amusement park for the cover of Chinese Democracy.

 

 

"You Could Be Mine"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-fzhlxeav

[knightni]

41. Creedence Clearwater Revival

 

 

4 of 24 lists - 39 points - highest ranking #12 RibbieRubarb, Soxy

 

Creedence Clearwater Revival (often abbreviated CCR) was an American rock band that gained popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a number of successful singles drawn from various albums.

 

The group consisted of lead vocalist, lead guitarist, and primary lyricist John Fogerty, his brother and rhythm guitarist Tom Fogerty, bassist Stu Cook, and drummer Doug Clifford. Their musical style encompassed rock and roll and swamp rock genres. Despite their San Francisco Bay Area origins, they are sometimes also cited as southern rock stylists.

 

CCR's music is still a staple of American and worldwide radio airplay and often figures in various media. The band has sold 26 million albums in the United States alone. CCR was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

 

John Fogerty, Doug Clifford, and Stu Cook (all born 1945) met at senior high school in El Cerrito, California and began playing instrumentals and "juke box standards" together under the name The Blue Velvets. The trio also backed singer Tom Fogerty— John's older brother by three years—at live gigs and in the recording studio. By 1964, the band had signed to Fantasy Records, an independent jazz label based in San Francisco at the time.

 

For the band's first release, however, Fantasy co-owner Max Weiss renamed the group The Golliwogs (after the children's literary character, Golliwogg), apparently to cash in on a wave of popular British bands with similar names.

 

The group had suffered a setback in 1966 when the draft board called up John Fogerty and Doug Clifford for military service. Fogerty managed to enlist in the Army Reserve instead of the regular Army while Clifford did a tenure in the United States Coast Guard Reserve.

 

In 1967, Saul Zaentz purchased Fantasy Records from Weiss and offered the band a chance to record a full-length album, but only if the group changed its name. Never having liked The Golliwogs, the foursome readily agreed. Zaentz and the band agreed to come up with ten suggestions each, but he enthusiastically agreed to their first: Creedence Clearwater Revival. The band took the three elements from, firstly, Tom Fogerty's friend Credence Newball, (to whose first name Credence they added an extra 'e', making it resemble a faith or creed); secondly, "clear water" from a TV commercial for Olympia beer; and finally "revival", which spoke to the four members' renewed commitment to their band. (Rejected contenders for the band's name included 'Muddy Rabbit', 'Gossamer Wump,' and 'Creedence Nuball and the Ruby', but the latter was the start that led to their finalized name.)

 

By 1968, Fogerty and Clifford had been discharged from military service. All four members subsequently quit their jobs and began a heavy schedule of rehearsing and playing area clubs full-time. Unlike many other rock artists of the day, they (for the most part) eschewed drug use.

 

The resulting 1968 debut album Creedence Clearwater Revival struck a responsive note with the emerging underground pop culture press, which touted CCR as a band worthy of attention. More importantly, AM radio programmers around the United States took note when a song from the LP, "Suzie Q", received substantial airplay in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as on Chicago's WLS. Blues aficionados doubtless appreciated the similarities between CCR's tough style and R&B artists on the Chess and Vee-Jay labels.

 

A remake of a 1956 song by rockabilly singer Dale Hawkins, "Suzie Q" was the band's second single, and its first to crack the Top 40. Reaching #11 nationally, it would be Creedence's only Top 40 hit not written by John Fogerty. Two other singles from the debut were released: a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell On You" (which made it to #58) and "Porterville", written during John Fogerty's Army Reserve stint.

 

While undertaking a steady string of live dates around the country to capitalize on their breakthrough, CCR also was hard at work on their second album Bayou Country at RCA Studios in Los Angeles. Released in January 1969 and becoming a #7 platinum hit, the record was the first in a string of hit albums and singles which continued uninterrupted for the next three years.

 

Bayou Country's seven songs were well-honed from Creedence's constant live playing. The album showed a distinct evolution in approach, much more simple and direct than the band's first release. The single "Proud Mary", backed with "Born On the Bayou", went to Number 2 on the national Billboard chart. It would eventually become the group's most-covered song, with some 100 cover versions by other artists to date, including a hit version in 1971 by Ike and Tina Turner. Bob Dylan named it his favorite single of 1969. The album also featured a blistering remake of the rock & roll classic "Good Golly Miss Molly" and the band's nine-minute live-show closer, "Keep On Chooglin' ".

 

Only weeks later, in March 1969, "Bad Moon Rising" backed with "Lodi" was released and peaked at #2 on the charts. The band's third album, Green River, followed in August and quickly went gold along with the single "Green River", which again reached #2 on the Billboard charts. The B-side of "Green River", "Commotion"—a one-chord two-step about the perils of city life—peaked at #30. The bar-band story of "Lodi" became a popular staple on then-emerging FM radio. The band's emphasis on remakes of their old favorites continued with "The Night Time Is the Right Time", which found its way into the band's live set as a crowd sing-along.

 

Creedence was busy honing material for a fourth album, Willy and the Poor Boys, released in November 1969. "Down on the Corner", a good-time street-corner number, and the famously militant "Fortunate Son" climbed to #3 and #14, respectively, by year's end.

 

Just after the new year, 1970, CCR released yet another new double-sided 45, "Travelin' Band"/"Who'll Stop the Rain". John Fogerty has said that the flip side was inspired by the band's experience at Woodstock. The speedy "Travelin' Band", however, bore enough similarities to "Good Golly, Miss Molly" to warrant a lawsuit by the song's publisher; it was eventually settled out of court. In the meantime, the single had topped out at #2.

 

In April 1970, Creedence was set to begin its first European tour. To support the upcoming live dates, Fogerty came up with "Up Around the Bend", a good-time party rocker, and the brooding "Run Through the Jungle", about the burgeoning problem of societal violence in the United States. The single—written, recorded, and shipped in only a few days' time—went to #4 that spring, enjoying enthusiastic response from European live audiences and high commercial success in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

 

The band returned to Wally Heider's San Francisco studio in June to record what many consider the finest CCR album, Cosmo's Factory. The title was an in-joke about their various rehearsal facilities and factory work ethic over the years. (Drummer Doug Clifford's longtime nickname is "Cosmo", due to his keen interest in nature and all things cosmic.) The album contained the earlier Top 10 hits "Travelin' Band" and "Up Around the Bend" plus highly popular album tracks such as the opener "Ramble Tamble", an ambitious and snarling seven-minute cut about life in urban America with its "police on the corner, garbage on the sidewalk, actors in the White House."

 

Cosmo's was released in July 1970, along with yet another #2 national hit, "Lookin' Out My Back Door"/"Long As I Can See the Light". It was the band's fifth #2 single. Though they topped some international charts and local radio countdowns (such as WLS's, which rated three of their singles at #1), Creedence Clearwater Revival never had a #1 Billboard Hot 100 hit. Their five #2 singles were exceeded only by Elvis Presley and Madonna with 6 each. CCR has the odd distinction of having the most #2 singles on the Billboard charts without ever having had a #1.

 

Other cuts on the "Cosmo's Factory" album included an incisive eleven-minute jam of the 1967 and 1968 R&B hit "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" ( which would become a minor hit when an edited version was released as a single in the 70s a few years after the group's breakup ) and a nearly note-for-note homage to Roy Orbison's "Ooby Dooby". John Fogerty's musical range clearly had expanded. He now wove in slide guitar, keyboards, saxophones, tape effects, and layered vocal harmonies—and pushed himself vocally more than ever on "Long As I Can See the Light". The album, eleven songs in all, was Creedence's best seller and went straight to #1 on the Billboard 200 album charts and #11 on Billboard's Soul Albums chart.

 

The Cosmo's Factory sessions had seen the stirrings of tensions within the foursome as the incessant touring and heavy recording schedules took their toll. John had taken control of the group in its business matters and its artistic output. The situation began to grate on Tom, Stu, and Doug, who wanted more of a say in the band's workings. John resisted, feeling that a 'democratic' process would threaten their success. Other issues included John's decision at a 1970 Nebraska gig that the band would no longer give encores at its live shows.

 

Pendulum, released in December 1970, was another top seller, spawning a Top 10 hit with "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?". The album marked yet another shift in the band's approach. But even continued musical innovation and success could not resolve the differences between John and Tom Fogerty. During the recording of Pendulum Tom Fogerty, who had already quit the band several times in disgust but was always talked into returning, left Creedence Clearwater Revival permanently. His departure was made public in February 1971. The band members considered replacing Tom but never did, Fogerty saying on an Australian TV broadcast that no new member could endure being in Creedence.

 

Creedence Clearwater Revival never reunited after the break up, although Cook and Clifford eventually started the band Creedence Clearwater Revisited.

 

In 1973, John began his solo career with The Blue Ridge Rangers, his one-man band collection of country and gospel songs.

 

His first major solo hit was Centerfield, a chart-topping success in 1985. On tour in 1986, however, Fogerty suffered complaints over his steadfast refusal to play Creedence songs live and suffered with recurring vocal problems which he blamed on having to testify in court. Fogerty's explanation for not playing CCR songs was that he would have had to pay performance royalties to copyright holder Saul Zaentz—and that it was "too painful" to revisit the music of his past.

 

With the Centerfield album, Fogerty also found himself entangled in new, tit-for-tat lawsuits with Zaentz over the song "The Old Man Down the Road" which was, according to Zaentz, a blatant re-write of Fogerty's own 1970 Creedence hit "Run Through the Jungle".

 

On February 19, 1987, at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles, Fogerty broke his self-imposed 1972 ban on performing his CCR hits, on an admonition from Bob Dylan and George Harrison (who both joined him onstage) that "if you don't, the whole world's gonna think 'Proud Mary' is Tina Turner's song." At a Fourth of July benefit for Vietnam veterans, Fogerty finally ran through the list of Creedence hits—beginning with "Born on the Bayou" and ending with "Proud Mary"—to an ecstatic audience. He retreated from music again in the late 1980s but returned in 1997 with the Grammy-winning Blue Moon Swamp. John Fogerty still tours frequently and plays CCR tunes alongside material from his newer albums.

 

Creedence Clearwater Revival discography

 

1968 "Suzie Q (Part One)" - #11

1968 "I Put a Spell on You" - #58

1969 "Proud Mary" - #2

1969 "Bad Moon Rising" - #2

1969 "Green River" - #2

1969 "Down on the Corner" - #3

1969 "Lodi" - #52

1969 "Commotion" - #30

1969 "Fortunate Son" - #14

1970 "Travelin' Band" - #2

1970 "Up Around the Bend" - #4

1970 "Lookin' out My Back Door" - #2

1971 "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" - #8

1971 "Sweet Hitch-Hiker" - #6

1972 "Someday Never Comes" - #25

1976 "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" - #43

1982 "Cotton Fields" - Country #50

 

Factoid: In 1980, John Fogerty traded his rights to CCR's songs in order to cancel his remaining contractual obligations to his previous record company. When he released "The Old Man Down The Road", the old record company sued him essentially for plagiarizing himself because it sounded so much like "Run Through the Jungle".

 

 

Travelin' Band

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-gdgrzeoo

[knightni]

40. Paul McCartney/Wings

 

3 of 24 lists - 40 points - highest ranking #6 RibbieRubarb

 

Wings (sometimes credited as Paul McCartney and Wings) was a rock group formed in 1971 by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife Linda McCartney. The group was the only "permanent" group that any of the former members of the Beatles were ever involved with after their break-up. Wings had 12 top-10 singles (including one #1) in the United Kingdom and 14 top-10 singles (including six #1's) in the United States. All 23 singles credited to Wings reached the US Top 40 (and one single, Junior's Farm/Sally G, reached it with each side). Of the nine albums credited to Wings during the group's life, all went top 10 in either the UK or the US, with five consecutive albums topping the US charts.

 

Wings was noted for its personnel changes as well as its success. The only three permanent members of Wings were McCartney, his wife Linda, and ex-Moody Blues guitarist and singer Denny Laine. In less than a decade, Wings had three different lead guitarists and four different drummers.

 

As the Beatles were breaking up in 1970, McCartney was working on his debut solo album, McCartney. Backing vocals were provided by his wife, Linda, whom he had married the previous year. McCartney had insisted from the beginning of their marriage that his wife should be involved in his musical projects, so that they did not have to be apart when he was on tour. On his second solo album, Ram, McCartney added select outside musicians, including drummer Denny Seiwell, who had to perform in a secret audition for Paul and Linda before being chosen.

 

In August 1971, Seiwell and guitarist/singer Denny Laine joined Paul and Linda McCartney to record Paul's third post-Beatles project on Apple Records. The result was Wild Life, released December 7. It was the first project to credit Wings as the artist. In an attempt to capture the spontaneity of live performances, five of the eight songs on Wild Life were first takes by the band. However, the record left music critics cold.

 

The band name is said to have come to McCartney as he was praying in the hospital while Linda was giving birth to their second child together, Stella McCartney. Paul McCartney recalled in the film Wingspan that the birth of Stella was "a bit of a drama"; there were complications at the birth and that both Linda and the baby almost died. He was praying fervently and the image of wings came to his mind. He decided to name his new band Wings.

Denny Laine during the 1976 tour.

 

In late 1971, McCartney added ex-Spooky Tooth guitarist Henry McCullough, a native of Northern Ireland, to the line-up of Wings and returned to touring, mounting an impromptu tour of U.K. universities and later a tour of small European venues (with the group driving around in a van), playing no Beatles numbers. In February 1972, Wings released a single called "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", a response to the events of Bloody Sunday. The song was banned by the BBC for its anti-Unionist political stance and only mentioned in chart rundowns on BBC Radio 1 as "a record by Wings". Despite its limited airplay, it reached #16 in the United Kingdom, as well as #1 in The Republic of Ireland and #1 in Spain.

 

Partly in reaction to the ban, Wings released a children's song, "Mary Had a Little Lamb", as its next single, which surprisingly reached the Top 10 in the United Kingdom. However, Wings followed that with November 1972's "Hi, Hi, Hi", which was again banned by the BBC, this time for its alleged drug and sexual references. The B-side, "C Moon", was played instead. The single made it into the Top 5 in the United Kingdom and the Top 10 in the United States.

 

In late 1972, Wings was re-christened Paul McCartney and Wings for the 1973 album Red Rose Speedway, which yielded the first U.S. #1 Wings hit, the romantic ballad "My Love". One possible reason for the renaming was that two songs on this album had been recorded by Paul, Linda, and Denny Seiwell during the Ram sessions; Denny Laine added backing vocals to one of these songs, but Henry McCullough was not on either. Among the unreleased songs recorded by Wings during the extensive sessions for this album (which stretched over seven months and two continents) was the Linda composition "Seaside Woman", which was finally released in 1977 (although credited to "Suzy and the Red Stripes").

 

Near the end of these sessions, in October 1972, Wings recorded the theme song to the James Bond film Live and Let Die, which reunited McCartney with Beatles producer/arranger George Martin. The uptempo song, released as a non-album single in the summer of 1973 (immediately after "My Love"), became a sizable worldwide hit and has remained a popular part of McCartney's post-Wings concert performances (often accompanied by pyrotechnics). That same year, McCartney released his first American TV special James Paul McCartney, which featured extensive footage of Wings but was savagely criticised by noted rock journalist Lillian Roxon.

 

After a successful British tour in May-June 1973, Wings went right into rehearsals for the next album. However, Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell left the band in August, at the end of rehearsals, leaving the McCartneys and Laine to cut what turned out to be Wings' most successful album, Band on the Run, at EMI's primitive 8-track recording studio in Lagos, Nigeria. The album went to #1 in both the United States and United Kingdom and spawned three hit singles: the rockers "Jet" and "Helen Wheels" (originally included on the U.S. album only) and the title track—a suite of movements recalling side 2 of Abbey Road. It also included "Let Me Roll It", which was seen as an affectionate impersonation of John Lennon's vocal style, and "No Words", the first song released by Wings that was co-written by Denny Laine (all Wings releases to this time were either Paul and Linda compositions or cover versions). Band on the Run enjoyed very positive critical reception and did much to restore McCartney's tarnished post-Beatles image among critics.

 

After Band on the Run, Jimmy McCulloch, former lead guitarist in Thunderclap Newman and Stone the Crows, joined the band. The first Wings project with McCulloch was McGear, a 1974 collaboration between Paul and his younger brother Mike McGear, with session musician Gerry Conway playing drums. Warner Bros. Records chose not to play up the "Wings" angle in its marketing for McGear, and the album sold poorly. However, the sessions also generated a single credited to McGear's group The Scaffold, "Liverpool Lou", which became a top-10 hit in the United Kingdom.

Paul and Linda McCartney at the Los Angeles Academy Awards, April, 1974.

 

Shortly thereafter, Geoff Britton joined Wings on drums, and the first recording session with this full lineup was held in Nashville, where the band stayed at the farm of songwriter Curly Putman Jr. The trip was memorialized in the 1974 non-album single "Junior's Farm", backed with a straight country track entitled "Sally G", the group's last release on Apple Records. In a rare occurrence, both sides of the single separately reached the Billboard Top 20 in the U.S. During these sessions, Wings (with guest musicians Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer) also recorded a single that was attributed to The Country Hams entitled "Walking in the Park with Eloise," a song written years before by Paul's father James. At the end of 1974, Paul McCartney's contract with Apple expired, and the band returned to just being named Wings.

 

Wings started recording sessions for its next album in London in November 1974, then moved to New Orleans to complete Venus and Mars (1975), the first release from the group on MPL Communications, distributed worldwide by EMI (Parlophone in the United Kingdom, Capitol in the United States). The album topped the charts and contained the U.S. #1 single "Listen to What the Man Said", which also featured Dave Mason of Traffic on guitar and Tom Scott on saxophone. When the Venus and Mars recording sessions moved to New Orleans, Britton quit Wings and was replaced by Joe English. Like Denny Seiwell before him, English won the job at a secret audition before McCartney. McCulloch co-composed (with former bandmate Colin Allen) and sang one song ("Medicine Jar"); Laine sang lead vocals on a McCartney song ("Spirits of Ancient Egypt"); Paul composed and sang the rest.

 

In the Autumn of 1975 Wings embarked on the Wings Over the World tour, starting in Bristol, which took them to Australia (November), Europe (March 1976), the United States (May/June), and Europe again (September), before ending in a four-night grand finale at London's Wembley Empire Pool. For this tour, added to Wings' stage act was a horn section consisting of Tony Dorsey, Howie Casey, Thaddeus Richard, and Steve Howard on horns, brass, and percussion.

 

In between, Wings recorded Wings at the Speed of Sound, which was released at the end of March 1976, just prior to the U.S. leg of the world tour. It represented a departure from the prior Wings template in that each of the five primary members of the band (including Linda and Joe English) sang lead on at least one song, and both Laine ("Time to Hide") and McCulloch ("Wino Junko", again with Colin Allen) contributed songs. However, the two U.S. #1 singles, "Silly Love Songs" and "Let 'em In", were both written and sung by Paul. Four of the album tracks were played in the 1976 portion of the tour, which also included five Beatles songs. Laine sang lead vocals on several songs (including his old Moody Blues hit "Go Now" and Paul Simon's "Richard Cory"), and McCulloch on one ("Medicine Jar"), emphasizing that Wings was more than just Paul McCartney's backing band. One of the Seattle concerts from the American leg of the 1975–76 world tour was filmed and later released as the concert feature Rockshow (1980). The tour also spawned a triple live album, Wings over America (1976), which became the fifth consecutive Wings album to reach number 1 in the U.S.

 

After the world tour, and following the single release of a live version of "Maybe I'm Amazed" in early 1977, Wings took a break. Later in the year, the band started recording their next album in the Virgin Islands, but the sessions were interrupted by Linda's pregnancy and then by the departures of both Jimmy McCulloch and Joe English. McCulloch, who joined The Small Faces, had difficulty handling the rock'n'roll lifestyle, ultimately dying of a heroin overdose in 1979. English joined Chuck Leavell's band Sea Level and later founded the Christian-oriented Joe English Band.

 

Undeterred by their departure, Wings released the already-completed McCartney-Laine ballad "Mull of Kintyre", an ode to the Scottish Mull of Kintyre coastal region where McCartney had made his home in the early 1970s. Its broad appeal was maximized by a pre-Christmas release. It became a massive international hit, dominating the charts in Britain (where it was Wings' only #1 single), Australia and many other countries over the Christmas/New Year period. Ultimately, it became one of the biggest selling U.K. singles of all time. However, it was not a success in the United States, where the B-side "Girls School" received most of the airplay but barely reached the Top 40.

 

The core trio of Wings then released the album London Town in 1978, a collection that sometimes included McCulloch and English. Much of the album had been recorded before the departures of McCulloch and English, but only pictures of the remaining trio appeared on the album. It was a commercial success, although it became the first Wings album since Wild Life to not reach #1 in the United States (peaking at #2),. London Town featured a markedly softer-rock, synth-based sound than prior Wings albums. Laine co-wrote five of the album's songs with McCartney and sang two of them. "With a Little Luck" reached #1 in the United States and #5 in the United Kingdom, but "I've Had Enough" and "London Town" were commercial disappointments in both countries.

 

Later in 1978, lead guitarist Laurence Juber and former Elton John drummer Steve Holley joined the band, restoring Wings to touring strength. In 1979, McCartney signed a new record contract, leaving Capitol, the company he had been with since he was a Beatle, in the United States and Canada and joining Columbia Records, while remaining with Parlophone/EMI in the rest of the world. Influenced by the punk and New Wave scenes, Wings abandoned its mellow touch and hired former Apple engineer Chris Thomas to help in the production process. The result was a somewhat less polished sound. This new version of Wings first released the disco-oriented single "Goodnight Tonight", backed by "Daytime Nighttime Suffering", which reached the top 5 in both the United States and United Kingdom. However, the subsequent album Back to the Egg, which was not favorably received by critics, sold disappointingly, at least when compared to its immediate predecessors. Still, it went platinum in the United States. It contained the Grammy-winning song "Rockestra Theme", the result of an October 1978 superstar session with members of Wings, The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd, among others. Two other singles were culled from the album, but both performed poorly on the charts. One album song ("Again and Again and Again") was composed and sung by Laine; the rest were Paul's.

 

During much of 1979, Wings was inactive as McCartney worked on a new solo album (McCartney II) without the band. In November and December 1979, Wings performed its final tour of the United Kingdom, once again adding the horns and brass section consisting of Tony Dorsey, Howie Casey, Thaddeus Richard, and Steve Howard. This tour climaxed with a massive "Rockestra" all-star collection of musicians in London in aid of UNICEF and Kampuchean refugees. Also during this tour, a live version of the McCartney II track "Coming Up" was recorded in Glasgow and became Wings' sixth and final U.S. #1 hit (as well as the last Wings single, although once again credited to Paul McCartney and Wings) the following year.

 

Plans for a new Wings world tour were abandoned when Paul McCartney was arrested for possession of about 7.7 ounces of marijuana at Tokyo airport on 16 January 1980. Other Wings members were questioned but not charged. Although McCartney was released from jail after 9 days, on 25 January, he was deported from Japan. As a result, the Japanese tour was cancelled along with other short-term plans for Wings.

 

During 1980, Wings continued to demo some more tunes, and some work was done on a never-released "cold cuts" album of previously unreleased songs. Finally, in October 1980, Wings returned to the studio to record demonstration versions of a number of songs for its next album. However, following the murder of John Lennon in December 1980, Paul McCartney was unable to continue with the sessions, and Wings went into hiatus. When McCartney restarted the project on 2 February 1981 as a solo album to be dedicated to Lennon and soon after, Juber and Holley left the band although Denny Laine continued as part of what became the Tug of War sessions, which ended on 3 March. On 27 April 1981, it was announced that Laine also had left the group, and that Wings had formally disbanded. McCartney claimed that the group members "parted in a friendly way."

 

Unlike other post-Beatles projects such as the Plastic Ono Band, Wings was more than just a backing band for an ex-Beatle. Both Denny Laine and Jimmy McCulloch wrote songs, and Laine, McCulloch, Joe English, and Linda McCartney all contributed lead vocals. However, Paul McCartney was unquestionably the band's leader and star. Every song on a single credited to Wings was at least co-composed by Paul, and the only three songs to appear on Wings singles that weren't sung by Paul were all B-sides: "I Lie Around" (Denny Laine, flip of "Live and Let Die"), "Cook of the House" (Linda McCartney, flip of "Silly Love Songs"), and "Deliver Your Children" (Laine, flip of "I've Had Enough").

 

The success of Wings was a vindication for McCartney (although, as one commentator noted, McCartney really did not need the vindication). His early home-grown solo output, which often featured simpler songs and less lavish production than The Beatles received from George Martin, often was dismissed by critics as "lightweight" next to the more serious nature of his former bandmates' solo output after the breakup. But, by 1975, John Lennon's solo career had been put on hold following the birth of his son Sean, and he stopped recording. A year later, George Harrison had all but retired from performing live (although not from recording). Ringo Starr was living in L.A. and he was still recording and writing, but his success was intermittent. As the leader of Wings, however, McCartney continued to tour regularly and to enjoy hit singles and albums the world over. By 1980, even Lennon was envious of Wings' (and McCartney's) continuing success, which largely inspired Lennon's own comeback that year.

 

Paul McCartney/Wings discography

 

1971 "Another Day" - US Hot 100 #5 - US Adult Contemporary #4

1971 "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" - Hot 100 #1 - US AC #9

1972 "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" - Hot 100 #21

1972 "Mary Had a Little Lamb" - Hot 100 #28 - US AC #29

1972 "Hi, Hi, Hi" - Hot 100 #10

1973 "My Love" - #1 - #1

1973 "Live and Let Die" - #2 - #8

1973 "Helen Wheels" - Hot 100 #10

1973 "Jet" - Hot 100 #7

1974 "Band on the Run" - #1 - #22

1974 "Junior's Farm" - Hot 100 #3

1975 "Listen to What the Man Said" - #1 - #8

1975 "Letting Go" - Hot 100 #39

1975 "Venus and Mars/Rock Show" - Hot 100 #12

1976 "Silly Love Songs" - #1 - #1

1976 "Let 'Em In" - #3 - #1

1977 "Maybe I'm Amazed" (live) - Hot 100 #10

1977 "Seaside Woman" - Hot 100 #59

1977 "Mull of Kintyre" - #33 - #45

1978 "With a Little Luck" - #1 - #5

1978 "I've Had Enough" - Hot 100 #25

1978 "London Town" - #39 - #17

1979 "Goodnight Tonight" - #5 - #30

1979 "Getting Closer" - Hot 100 #20

1979 "Arrow Through Me" - Hot 100 #29

1980 "Coming Up (Live at Glasgow)" - #1 - #48

1980 "Waterfalls" - Hot 100 #106

 

Solo Artist

1982 "Ebony and Ivory" (w/Stevie Wonder) - #1 - #1

1982 "Take It Away" - #10 -#6

1982 "Tug of War" - #53 - #31

1982 "The Girl is Mine" (w/Michael Jackson) - #2 - #1

1983 "Say Say Say" (w/Michael Jackson) - #1 - #3

1983 "So Bad" - #23 - #3

1984 "No More Lonely Nights" - #6 - #2

1985 "Spies Like Us" - US Hot 100 #7

1986 "Press" - Hot 100 #21

1986 "Stranglehold" - Hot 100 #81

1986 "Only Love Remains" - US AC #9

1987 "Once Upon a Long Ago" - AC #68

1989 "My Brave Face" - #25 - #4

1989 "This One" - #94 - #28

1989 "Figure of Eight" - #92 - #47

1990 "Put It There" - AC #11

1993 "Hope of Deliverance" - #83 - #9

1993 "C'Mon People" - AC #27

1993 "Off the Ground" - AC #27

1997 "Young Boy" - AC #44

1997 "The World Tonight" - Hot 100 #64

2001 "From a Lover to a Friend" - AC #24

2001 "Freedom" - #97 - #20

2005 "Fine Line" - AC #25

2007 "Dance Tonight" - Hot 100 #69

2007 "Ever Present Past" - #110 -#16

 

 

Factoid: When she joined Wings, Linda McCartney couldn't play any instruments or really sing, Paul had to teach her.

 

"Band On The Run"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-tcpemgsx

 

 

 

[knightni]

39. David Bowie

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 41 points - highest ranking #8 RibbieRubarb

 

David Bowie (pronounced /ˈboʊ.iː/; born David Robert Jones; 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. Active in five decades of popular music and frequently reinventing his music and image, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He has been cited as an influence by many musicians and is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth of his work.

 

Although he released an album (David Bowie) and several singles earlier, David Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in the autumn of 1969, when the song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK singles chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era as the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona epitomised a career often marked by musical innovation, reinvention and striking visual presentation.

 

In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer identified as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album Low (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK Top Five and garnered lasting critical praise.

 

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" and its parent album, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", but reached a commercial peak in 1983 with the album Let's Dance, which yielded the hit singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love". Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was Reality (2003), which was supported by the 2003-2004 Reality Tour.

 

In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie ranked 29. Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums, and ranks among the ten best-selling acts in UK pop history. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time.

 

 

Bowie's interest in music was sparked at the age of nine when his father brought home a collection of American 45s, including Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and, most significantly, Little Richard. Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". His half-brother Terry introduced him to modern jazz and Bowie's enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic saxophone for Christmas in 1959. Graduating to a real instrument, he formed his first band in 1962, the Konrads. He then played and sang in various blues/beat groups, such as The King Bees, The Manish Boys (cf. "Mannish Boy"), The Lower Third and The Riot Squad in the mid-1960s, releasing his first record, the single "Liza Jane", with the King Bees in 1964. His early work shifted through the blues and Elvis-inspired music while working with many British pop styles.

 

During the early 1960s, Bowie was performing either under his own name or the stage name "Davie Jones", and briefly even as "Davy Jones", creating confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees. To avoid this, in 1966 he chose "Bowie" for his stage name, after the Alamo hero Jim Bowie and his famous Bowie knife. During this time, he recorded singles for Parlophone under the name of The Manish Boys and Davy Jones and for Pye under the name David Bowie (and The Lower Third), all without success.

 

Bowie released his first album in 1967 for the Decca Records offshoot Deram, simply called David Bowie. It was an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall. Around the same time he issued a novelty single, "The Laughing Gnome", which utilized sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals. None of these releases managed to chart, and he would not cut another record for two years. His Deram material from the album and various singles was later recycled in a multitude of compilations.

 

Influenced by the dramatic arts, he studied with Lindsay Kemp—from avant-garde theater and mime to Commedia dell'arte—and much of his work would involve the creation of characters or personae to present to the world. During 1967, Bowie sold his first song to another artist, "Oscar" (an early stage name of actor-musician Paul Nicholas). Bowie wrote Oscar's third single, "Over the Wall We Go", which satirized life in a British prison. In late 1968, his then-manager, Kenneth Pitt, produced a half-hour promotional film called Love You Till Tuesday featuring Bowie performing a number of songs, but it went unreleased until 1984.

 

Bowie's first flirtation with fame came in 1969 with his single "Space Oddity," written the previous year but recorded and released to coincide with the first moon landing. This ballad told the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who becomes lost in space, though it has also been interpreted as an allegory for taking drugs. It became a Top 5 UK hit. Bowie put the finishing touches to the track while living with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. Finnigan and Bowie joined forces with Christina Ostrom and the late Barrie Jackson to run a Folk Club on Sunday nights at The Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street, south London. This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab and became extremely popular. In August 1969, The Arts Lab hosted a Free Festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival".[26] In 1969 and 1970, "Space Oddity" was used by the BBC during both its Apollo 11 moon landing coverage and its coverage of Apollo 13.

 

The corresponding album, his second, was released in November 1969 and originally titled David Bowie, which caused some confusion as both of Bowie's first and second albums were released with that name in the UK. In the US the same album originally bore the title Man of Words, Man of Music to overcome that confusion. In 1972, the album was re-released on both sides of the Atlantic by RCA Records as Space Oddity, a title it has kept until today.

 

In 1970, Bowie released his third album, The Man Who Sold the World, rejecting the acoustic guitar sound of the previous album and replacing it with the heavy rock backing provided by Mick Ronson, who would be a major collaborator through to 1973. Much of the album resembles British heavy metal music of the period, but the album provided some unusual musical detours, such as the title track's use of Latin sounds and rhythms. The original UK cover of the album showed Bowie in a dress, an early example of his androgynous appearance. In the US, the album was originally released in a cartoonish cover that did not feature Bowie.

 

His next record, Hunky Dory in 1971, saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as the droll "Kooks". Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes on tracks such as "Oh! You Pretty Things" (a song taken to UK number twelve by Herman's Hermits' Peter Noone in 1971), the semi-autobiographical "The Bewlay Brothers", and the Buddhist-influenced "Quicksand". Lyrically, the young songwriter also paid unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen b****", which Bowie's somewhat cryptic liner notes indicate as a Velvet Underground pastiche. As with the single "Changes", Hunky Dory was not a big hit but it laid the groundwork for the move that would shortly lift Bowie into the first rank of stars, giving him four top-ten albums and eight top ten singles in the UK in eighteen months between 1972 and 1973.

 

Bowie further explored his androgynous persona in June 1972 with the seminal concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which presents a world destined to end in five years and tells the story of the ultimate rock star, Ziggy Stardust. The album's sound combined the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock of Hunky Dory and the fast-paced glam rock pioneered by Marc Bolan's T. Rex. Many of the album's songs have become rock classics, including "Ziggy Stardust," "Moonage Daydream," "Rock & Roll Suicide" and "Suffragette City."

 

The Ziggy Stardust character became the basis for Bowie's first large-scale tour beginning in 1972, where he donned his famous flaming red mullet and wild outfits, designed by Kansai Yamamoto. The tour featured a three-piece band representing The Spiders from Mars: Ronson on guitar, Trevor Bolder on bass, and Mick Woodmansey on drums. This was Bowie’s first tour to visit the US, making his first appearance on 22 September 1972 at Music Hall in Cleveland, Ohio. The album made number five in the UK on the strength of the number ten placing of the single "Starman". Their success made Bowie a star, and soon the six-month-old Hunky Dory eclipsed Ziggy Stardust, when it peaked at number three on the UK chart. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing" (not released in the US until 1979) peaked at UK number twelve, and "All the Young Dudes", a song he had given to, and produced for, Mott the Hoople, made UK number three.

 

Around the same time Bowie began promoting and producing his rock and roll heroes, two of whom he met at the popular New York hangout Max's Kansas City: former Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed, whose solo breakthrough Transformer was produced by Bowie and Ronson; and Iggy Pop, whose band, The Stooges, signed with Bowie's management, MainMan Productions, to record their third album, Raw Power. Though he was not present for the tracking of the album, Bowie later performed its much-debated mix. Bowie sang back-up vocals on both Reed's Transformer, and Iggy's The Idiot.

 

The Spiders From Mars came together again on Aladdin Sane, released in April 1973 and his first number one album in the UK. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", all the new songs were written on ship, bus or trains during the first leg of his US Ziggy Stardust tour. The album's cover, featuring Bowie shirtless with Ziggy hair and a red, black, and blue lightning bolt across his face, has been described as being as "startling as rock covers ever got." Aladdin Sane included the UK number two hit "The Jean Genie", the UK number three hit "Drive-In Saturday", and a rendition of The Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together". Mike Garson joined Bowie to play piano on this album, and his solo on the title track has been cited as one of the album's highlights.

 

Bowie's later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, as well as a few earlier tracks like "Changes" and "The Width of a Circle", were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. His announcement—"Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it's the last show that we'll ever do. Thank you."—was preserved in a live recording of the show, filmed by D. A. Pennebaker and belatedly released under the title Ziggy Stardust - The Motion Picture in 1983 after many years circulating as an audio bootleg.

 

Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favorites, was released in October 1973, spawning a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. By this time, Bowie had broken up the Spiders from Mars and was attempting to move on from his Ziggy persona. Bowie's own back catalog was now highly sought: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with the second David Bowie album (Space Oddity). Hunky Dory's "Life on Mars?" was released as a single in 1973 and made number three in the UK, the same year Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", hit number six.

 

1974 saw the release of another ambitious album, Diamond Dogs, with a spoken word introduction and a multi-part song suite("Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (reprise)"). Diamond Dogs was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music. Bowie also made plans to develop a Diamond Dogs movie, but didn't get very far. Bowie had originally planned on writing a musical to 1984, but his interest waned after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel. He used some of the songs he had written for the project on Diamond Dogs. The album—and an NBC television special, The 1980 Floor Show, broadcast at around the same time—demonstrated Bowie headed toward the genre of soul/funk music, the track "1984" being a prime example. The album spawned the hits "Rebel Rebel" (UK number five) and "Diamond Dogs" (UK number twenty-one), and itself went to number one in the UK, making him the best-selling act of that country for the second year in a row. In the US, Bowie achieved his first major commercial success as the album went to number five.

 

To follow on the release of the album, Bowie launched a massive Diamond Dogs tour in North America from June to December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production broke with contemporary standard practice for rock concerts by featuring no encores. It was filmed by Alan Yentob for the documentary Cracked Actor. The documentary seemed to confirm the rumors of his cocaine abuse, featuring a pasty and emaciated Bowie nervously sniffing in the backseat of a car and claiming that there was a fly in his milk. Bowie commented that the resulting live album, David Live, ought to have been called "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory," presumably in reference to his addled and frenetic psychological state during this period. Nevertheless the album solidified his status as a superstar, going number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in a cover of "Knock on Wood". After the opening leg of the tour, Bowie mostly jettisoned the elaborate sets. Then, when the tour resumed after a summer break in Philadelphia for recording new material, the Diamond Dogs sound no longer seemed apt. Bowie cancelled seven dates and made changes to the band, which returned to the road in October as the Philly Dogs tour.

 

For Ziggy Stardust fans who had not discerned the soul and funk strains already apparent in Bowie's recent work, the "new" sound was considered a sudden and jolting step. 1975's Young Americans was Bowie's definitive exploration of Philly soul—though he himself referred to the sound ironically as "plastic soul." It contained his first number one hit in the US, "Fame", co-written with Carlos Alomar and John Lennon (who also contributed backing vocals). It was based on a riff Alomar had developed while covering The Flares' 1961 doo-wop classic "Foot Stompin'", which Bowie's band had taken to playing live during the Philly Dogs period. One of the backing vocalists on the album is a young Luther Vandross, who also co-wrote some of the material for Young Americans. The song "Win" featured a hypnotic guitar riff later taken by Beck for the track/live staple "Debra" off his Midnite Vultures album. Despite Bowie's unashamed recognition of the shallowness of his "plastic soul," he did earn the bona fide distinction of being one of the few white artists to be invited to appear on the popular "Soul Train." Another violently paranoid appearance on ABC's The Dick Cavett Show (1974 5 December) seemed to confirm rumours of Bowie's heavy cocaine use at this time.[36] Young Americans was the album that cemented Bowie's stardom in the US; though only peaking there at number nine, as opposed to the number five placing of Diamond Dogs, the album stayed on the charts almost twice as long. At the same time, the album achieved number two in the UK while a re-issue of his old single "Space Oddity" became his first number one hit in the UK, only a few months after "Fame" had achieved the same in the US. Around this time, Bowie performed with Cher on her second variety tv program, The Cher Show doing a medley of his songs and popular hits, as well as a version of his song Fame.

 

Station to Station (1976) featured a darker version of this soul persona, called "The Thin White Duke". Visually the figure was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the character Bowie portrayed in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Station to Station was a transitional album, prefiguring the Krautrock and synthesizer music of his next releases, while further developing the funk and soul music of Young Americans. By this time, Bowie had become heavily dependent on drugs, particularly cocaine; many critics have attributed the chopped rhythms and emotional detachment of the record to the influence of the drug, to which Bowie claimed to have been introduced in America. Bowie refused to relinquish control of a satellite, booked for a worldwide broadcast of a live appearance preceding the release of Station to Station, at the request of the Spanish Government, who wished to put out a live feed regarding the death of Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco. His sanity—by his own later admission—became twisted from cocaine: he overdosed several times during the year. Additionally, Bowie was withering physically after having lost an alarming amount of weight.

 

Nonetheless, there was another large tour, the Isolar - 1976 Tour, which featured a starkly lit set and highlighted new songs such as the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would remain a stable unit through the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but also mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and detained by customs in Eastern Europe for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London on 2 May 1976, in what became known as the 'Victoria Station incident', when Bowie arrived in an open-top Mercedes convertible and apparently gave a Nazi salute to the crowd that was captured on film and published in NME. Bowie claimed that the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave,and later blamed his addictions and the character of The Thin White Duke for his troubles at this time.

 

Bowie's interest in the growing German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to dry out and rejuvenate his career. Sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with his friend Iggy Pop, he co-produced three more of his own classic albums with Tony Visconti, while aiding Pop with his career. With Bowie as a co-writer and musician, Pop completed his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Bowie joined Pop's touring band in the spring, simply playing keyboard and singing backing vocals. The group performed in the UK, Europe, and the US from March to April 1977.

 

The brittle sound of Station to Station proved a precursor to Low, the first of three albums that became known as the "Berlin Trilogy". Partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu! Bowie journeyed to Neunkirchen near Cologne to meet the famed German producer Conny Plank. The album provided him with a surprise number three hit in the UK when the BBC picked up the first single, "Sound and Vision", as its 'coming attractions' theme music. The album was produced in 1976 and released in early 1977.

 

Much of the band were present for the first five days only, after which Eno, Alomar and Gardiner remained to play overdubs. By the time Bowie wrote and recorded the lyrics everybody but Visconti and studio engineers had departed. The next record, "Heroes", was similar in sound to Low, though slightly more accessible. The mood of these records fit the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolized by the divided city that provided its inspiration. The title track, a story of two lovers who met at the Berlin Wall, is one of Bowie's most-covered songs.

 

In 1977, Bowie also appeared on the Granada music show Marc, hosted by his friend and fellow glam pioneer Marc Bolan of T. Rex, with whom he had regularly socialized and jammed before either achieved fame. He turned out to be the show's final guest, as Bolan was killed in a car crash shortly afterward. Bowie was one of many superstars who attended the funeral.

 

For Christmas 1977, Bowie joined Bing Crosby, of whom he was an ardent admirer, at the ATV Television Studio in Herts England to do "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "Little Drummer Boy" with a new lyric.[44] The resultant video in a Christmas seasonal setting was actually recorded during a late summer heatwave with the air conditioning breaking down. The two singers had originally met on Crosby's Christmas television special two years earlier (on the recommendation of Crosby's children—he had not heard of Bowie) and performed the song. One month after the record was completed, Crosby died. Five years later, the song would prove a worldwide festive hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day 1982. Bowie later remarked jokingly that he was afraid of being a guest artist, because "everyone I was going on with was kicking it", referring to Bolan and Crosby.

 

Bowie and his band embarked on an extensive world tour in 1978 (including his first concerts in Australia and New Zealand) which featured music from both Low and Heroes. A live album from the tour was released as Stage the same year. Songs from both Low and Heroes were later converted to symphonies by minimalist composer Phillip Glass. 1978 was also the year that saw Bowie narrating Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

 

Lodger (1979) was the final album in Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy", or "triptych" as Bowie calls it.[48] It featured the singles "Boys Keep Swinging", "DJ" and "Look Back in Anger" and, unlike the two previous LPs, did not contain any instrumentals. The style was a mix of New Wave and world music, which included pieces such as "African Night Flight" and "Yassassin". A number of tracks were composed using the non-traditional Bowie/Eno composition techniques: "Boys Keep Swinging" was developed with the band members swapping their instruments while "Move On" contains the chords for an early Bowie composition, "All The Young Dudes", played backwards; the song "Red Money" took backing tracks from the Iggy Pop/David Bowie composition "Sister Midnight" from Pop's album The Idiot. This was Bowie's last album with Eno until 1. Outside in 1995.

 

In 1980, Bowie's style retrogressed, integrating the lessons learnt on Low, Heroes, and Lodger while expanding upon them with chart success. Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) included the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer, and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The imagery Bowie used in the song's music video gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement and, with many of the followers of this phase being devotees, Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the video, renowned as being one of the most innovative of all time.

 

While Scary Monsters utilised principles that Bowie had learned in the Berlin era, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically, reflecting the transformation Bowie had gone through during his time in Germany and Europe. By 1980 Bowie had divorced his wife Angie, stopped the drug use of the "Thin White Duke" era, and radically changed his concept of the way music should be written. The album had a hard rock edge that included conspicuous guitar contributions from King Crimson's Robert Fripp, The Who's Pete Townshend, and Television's Tom Verlaine. As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway starring in The Elephant Man on 23 September 1980.

 

In 1981, Queen released "Under Pressure", co-written and performed with Bowie. The song was a hit and became Bowie's third UK number one single. In the same year Bowie made a cameo appearance in the German movie Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the real-life story of a 13 year-old girl in Berlin who becomes addicted to heroin and ends up prostituting herself. Bowie is credited with "special cooperation" in the credits and his music features prominently in the movie. The soundtrack was released in 1982 and contained a version of "Heroes" sung partially in German that had previously been included on the German pressing of its parent album. The same year Bowie appeared in the BBC's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with transmission of the film, a five-track EP of songs from the play was released as David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal, recorded at Hansa by the Wall the previous September. It would mark Bowie’s final new release on RCA, as 1983 saw him change record labels from RCA to EMI America. In April 1982, Bowie released "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" with Giorgio Moroder, for director Paul Schrader's film Cat People.

David Bowie on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

 

Bowie scored his first truly commercial blockbuster with Let's Dance in 1983, a slick dance album co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers. The title track went to number one in the United States and United Kingdom. The album also featured the singles "Modern Love" and "China Girl", the latter causing something of a stir due to its suggestive promotional video. "China Girl" was a remake of a song which Bowie co-wrote several years earlier with Iggy Pop, who recorded it for The Idiot. In an interview by Kurt Loder, Bowie revealed that the motivation for recording "China Girl" was to help out his friend Iggy Pop financially, contributing to Bowie's history of support for musicians he admired. Let's Dance was also notable as a stepping stone for the career of the late Texan guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who played on the album and was to have supported Bowie on the consequent Serious Moonlight Tour. Vaughan, however, never joined the tour after various disputes with Bowie. Vaughan was replaced by the Bowie tour veteran Earl Slick. Frank and George Simms from The Simms Brothers Band appeared as backing vocalists for the tour.

 

Bowie's next album was originally planned to be a live album recorded on the Serious Moonlight Tour, but EMI demanded another studio album instead. The resulting album, 1984's Tonight, was also dance-oriented, featuring collaborations with Tina Turner and Iggy Pop, as well as various covers, including one of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic Top Ten hit "Blue Jean" whose complete video — the 21-minute short film "Jazzin' for Blue Jean" - reflected Bowie's long-standing interest in combining music with drama. This video would win Bowie his only Grammy to date, for Best Short Form Music Video. It also featured "Loving the Alien", a remix of which was a minor hit in 1985. The album also has a pair of dance rewrites of "Neighborhood Threat" and "Tonight", old songs Bowie wrote with Iggy Pop which had originally appeared on Lust for Life.

 

In 1985, Bowie performed several of his greatest hits at Wembley for Live Aid. At the end of his set, which comprised "Rebel Rebel", "TVC 15", "Modern Love" and 'Heroes', he introduced a film of the Ethiopian famine, for which the event was raising funds, which was set to the song "Drive" by The Cars. At the event, the video to a fundraising single was premièred – Bowie performing a duet with Mick Jagger on a version of "Dancing in the Street", which quickly went to number one on release. In the same year Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group on the song "This Is Not America", which was featured in the film The Falcon and the Snowman. This song was the centerpiece of the album, a collaboration intended to underline the espionage thriller's central themes of alienation and disaffection.

Bowie performing in 1987

 

In 1986, Bowie contributed several songs to as well as acted in the film Absolute Beginners. The movie was not well reviewed but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also took a role in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, as Jareth, the Goblin King who steals the baby brother of a girl named Sarah (played by Jennifer Connelly), in order to turn him into a goblin. Bowie wrote five songs for the film, the script of which was partially written by Monty Python's Terry Jones.

 

Bowie's final solo album of the 80s was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his two earlier albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. The album, which peaked at number six in the UK, contained hit singles "Day In, Day Out", "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie himself later described it as "my nadir" and "an awful album".

 

Bowie decided to tour again in 1987, supporting the Never Let Me Down album. The Glass Spider Tour was preceded by nine promotional press shows before the 86-concert tour actually started on 30 May 1987. In addition to the actual band, that included Peter Frampton on lead guitar, five dancers appeared on stage for almost the entire duration of each concert. Taped pieces of dialogue were also performed by Bowie and the dancers in the middle of songs, creating an overtly theatrical effect. Several visual gimmicks were also recreated from Bowie's earlier tours. Critics of the tour described it as overproduced and claimed it pandered to then-current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing. However, fans that saw the shows from the Glass Spider Tour were treated to many of Bowie's classics and rarities, in addition to the newer material.

 

In 1989, for the first time since the early 1970s, Bowie formed a regular band, Tin Machine, a hard-rocking quartet, along with Reeves Gabrels, Tony Sales, and Hunt Sales. Tin Machine released two studio albums and a live record. The band received mixed reviews and a somewhat lukewarm reception from the public, but Tin Machine heralded the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration between Bowie and Gabrels.

 

The original album, Tin Machine (1989), was a success, holding the number three spot on the charts of the UK. Tin Machine launched its first world tour, featuring a now unshaven David Bowie and additional guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, that year. Despite the success of the Tin Machine venture, Bowie was mildly frustrated that many of his ideas were either rejected or changed by the band.

 

Bowie began the 1990s with a stadium tour, in which he played mostly his biggest hits. The Sound + Vision Tour (named after the Low single) was conceived and directed by choreographer Edouard Lock of the Quebec contemporary dance troupe La La La Human Steps, with whom Bowie collaborated and performed on stage and in his videos. Bowie vowed during the tour that he would never play his early hits again.

 

Though he surprised no one when he later reneged on that promise and also on the promise that his set in each country would be focused on the favourite hits voted by phone poll in that country — an idea quickly jettisoned when a campaign by the British magazine NME resulted in a landslide in favour of The Laughing Gnome, it is true that his later tours generally featured few of those hits, and when they appeared, they were often radically reworked in their arrangement and delivery.

 

Bowie's negative press-image continued when the cover of Tin Machine's second album became unusually controversial, due to the presence of naked statues as its cover art.

 

After the less successful second album Tin Machine II and the complete failure of live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby, Bowie tired of having to work in a group setting where his creativity was limited, and finally disbanded Tin Machine to work on his own.

 

In 1992 he performed his hits "Heroes" and "Under Pressure" (with Annie Lennox) at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. 1993 saw the release of the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers. The album hit the number one spot on the UK charts with singles such as "Jump They Say" (a top-10 hit) and "Miracle Goodnight".

 

Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), based on incidental music composed for a TV series. It contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.[55]

 

The ambitious, quasi-industrial release Outside (1995), conceived as the first volume in a subsequently abandoned non-linear narrative of art and murder, reunited him with Brian Eno. The album introduced the characters of one of Bowie's short stories, and achieved chart success in both the UK and US. The album and its singles put Bowie back into the mainstream of rock music. In September 1995, Bowie began the Outside Tour with Gabrels returning as guitarist. In a move that was equally lauded and ridiculed by Bowie fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as the tour partner; Trent Reznor also contributed a remix of the Outside song "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" for its single release. On 17 January 1996, Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the eleventh annual induction ceremony.

 

Receiving some of the strongest critical response since Let's Dance was Earthling (1997), which incorporated experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass and included a single released over the Internet, called "Telling Lies"; other singles included "Little Wonder" and "Dead Man Walking". There was a corresponding world tour. Bowie's track in the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls, "I'm Afraid of Americans" was remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The video's heavy rotation (also featuring Reznor) contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100.

 

In 1998, David Bowie had reunited with Tony Visconti to record a song for The Rugrats Movie called "(Safe in This) Sky Life". Although the track was edited out of the final cut, and did not feature on the film's soundtrack album, the reunion led to the pair pursuing a new collaborative effort. "(Safe In This) Sky Life" was later re-recorded and released as a single b-side in 2002 where it was retitled "Safe". Among their earliest work together in this period, was a reworking of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", from the album of the same name, in which Visconti oversaw the additional production required when Bowie's harmonized vocal was added to the original version for a strictly limited edition single release.

 

In 1999 Bowie made the soundtrack for "Omikron," a computer game. Bowie and his wife, Iman, made appearances as characters in the game. That same year, re-recorded tracks from Omikron and new music was released in the album 'hours...' featured "What's Really Happening", with lyrics by Alex Grant, the winner of Bowie's "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition. This album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica, with an emphasis on more live instruments.

 

Plans surfaced after the release of 'hours...' for an album titled Toy, which would feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs. Sessions for the album commenced in 2000, but the album was never released, leaving a number of tracks, some as yet unheard, on the editing floor. Bowie and Visconti continued collaboration with the production of a new album of completely original songs instead. The result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen, which had a dark atmospheric sound, and was Bowie's biggest chart success in recent years. 2002 also saw Bowie curate the annual Meltdown festival in London. Amongst the acts selected by Bowie to perform were Phillip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. Bowie himself played a show at the Royal Festival Hall which notably included a rare performance of his experimental opus Low in its entirety.

 

In 2003, a report in the Sunday Express named Bowie as the second-richest entertainer in the UK (behind Sir Paul McCartney), with an estimated fortune of £510 million. However, the 2005 Sunday Times Rich List credited him with a little over £100 million.

 

In September 2003, Bowie released a new album, Reality, and announced a world tour. 'A Reality Tour' was the best-selling tour of the following year. However, it was cut short after Bowie suffered chest pain while performing on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany, on 25 June 2004. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery; an emergency angioplasty was performed at St Georg Hospital in Hamburg by Dr Karl Heinz Kuck.

 

He was discharged in early July 2004 and continued to spend time recovering. Bowie later admitted he had suffered a minor heart attack, resulting from years of heavy smoking and touring. The tour was cancelled for the time being, with hopes that he would go back on tour by August, though this did not materialise. He recuperated back in New York City.

 

In October 2004, Bowie released a live DVD of the tour, entitled A Reality Tour of his performances in Dublin on 22 and 23 November 2003, which included songs spanning the full length of Bowie's career, although mostly focusing on his more recent albums.

 

Still recuperating from his operation, Bowie worked off-stage and relaxed from studio work for the first time in several years. In 2004, a duet of his classic song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher appeared in Shrek 2. The soundtrack for the film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou featured David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese by cast member Seu Jorge (who adapted the lyrics to make them relevant to the film's story). Most of the David Bowie songs featured in the film were originally from David Bowie (debut album), Space Oddity, Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Bowie commented, "Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in Portuguese I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with".

 

Despite hopes for a comeback, in 2005, Bowie announced that he had made no plans for any performances during the year. After a relatively quiet year, Bowie recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written by Brian Transeau, for the movie Stealth. Rumors flew about the possibility of a new album, but no announcements were made.

 

David Bowie finally returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, alongside Arcade Fire, for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, his first gig since the heart attack. Bowie has shown interest in the Montreal band since he was seen at one of their shows in New York City nearly a year earlier. Bowie had requested the band to perform at the show, and together they performed the Arcade Fire's song "Wake Up" from their album Funeral, as well as Bowie's own "Five Years" and "Life on Mars?". He joined them again on 15 September 2005, singing "Queen b****" and "Wake Up" from Central Park's Summerstage as part of the CMJ Music Marathon.

 

Bowie contributed back-up vocals for TV on the Radio's song "Province" from their album Return to Cookie Mountain. He made other occasional appearances, as in his commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio. He appeared on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 release, No Balance Palace, sharing lead vocals with Kashmir singer Kasper Eistrup on the song "The Cynic". The album was produced by Tony Visconti, who also arranged the contact. No Balance Palace also featured a spoken word performance by Lou Reed, making it the second project involving both Bowie and Reed in two years, since Reed's 2003 The Raven.

 

On 8 February 2006, David Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November, Bowie performed at the Black Ball in New York for the Keep a Child Alive Foundation alongside his wife, Iman, and Alicia Keys. He duetted with Keys on "Changes", and also performed "Wild is the Wind" and "Fantastic Voyage".

 

For 2006, Bowie once again announced a break from performance[67], but he made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May 2006 concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He sang "Arnold Layne" and "Comfortably Numb", closing the concert. The former performance was released, on 26 December 2006, as a single.

 

In May 2007, it was announced that Bowie would curate the High Line Festival in the abandoned railway park in New York called the High Line where he would select various musicians and artists to perform.[68]

 

Bowie contributed backing vocals to two tracks - "Falling Down" and "Fannin' Street" - on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head.

 

On 29 June 2008, Bowie released a new compilation entitled iSELECT. This CD was a collection of personal favorites compiled by Bowie himself and was available exclusively as a free gift with the British newspaper The Mail On Sunday. The compilation is notable in that it only contained one major hit single, "Life on Mars?", and concentrated on lesser-known album tracks.

 

A double-album of the 2003 A Reality Tour is due to be released in January 2010.

 

David Bowie discography

 

1969 "Space Oddity" - US Hot 100 #15

1972 "Changes" - Hot 100 #41

1972 "Starman" - #65

1972 "The Jean Genie" - #71

1974 "Rebel Rebel" - #64

1975 "Young Americans" - #28

1975 "Fame" - #1

1975 "Golden Years" - #10

1976 "TVC 15" - #64

1977 "Sound and Vision" - #69

1980 "Fashion" - US Hot 100 #70

1981 "Under Pressure"(w/Queen) - Hot 100 #29 - US Mainstream Rock #7

1982 "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" - Hot 100 #67 - Main #9

1983 "Let's Dance" - #1 - #8

1983 "China Girl" - #10 - #3

1983 "Modern Love" - #14 - #6

1983 "Without You" - Hot 100 #73

1984 "Blue Jean" - #8 - #2

1984 "Tonight" (w/Tina Turner) - #53 - #32

1985 "This Is Not America"(w/Pat Metheny Group) - #32 - #7

1985 "Dancing in the Street" (w/Mick Jagger) US Hot 100 #7

1986 "Absolute Beginners"- #53 - #9

1986 "Underground" - US Main #18

1987 "Day-In Day-Out" - #21 - #3

1987 "Time Will Crawl" - US Main #7

1987 "Never Let Me Down" - #27 - #15

1992 "Real Cool World" - US Modern Rock #11

1992 "Jump They Say" - Mod #4

1995 "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" - #92 - #20

1997 "I'm Afraid of Americans" - #66 - #29

 

 

Factoid: Bowie portrayed Pontius Pilate in the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ.

 

"Starman"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-kczatpjr

[knightni]

38. Rise Against

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 41 points - highest ranking #7 2nd_city_saint787

 

Rise Against is an American punk rock band from Chicago, Illinois, formed in 1999. Their current lineup consists of Tim McIlrath (vocals, guitar), Joe Principe (bass guitar), Brandon Barnes (drums), and Zach Blair (guitar), all of whom are straight edge (excluding Barnes) PETA supporters and strict vegetarians/vegans. The band is currently signed to Geffen, a record label owned by Universal Music Group. As of 2009, Rise Against has released five studio albums, two EPs, and one DVD.

 

Rise Against spent its first five years signed to the independent record label Fat Wreck Chords, on which it released two studio albums. The band gained mainstream popularity with its first two releases on Geffen, Siren Song of the Counter Culture (2004) and The Sufferer & the Witness (2006), which produced several high-charting singles, including "Swing Life Away", "Prayer of the Refugee", and "The Good Left Undone". Their most recent studio album, Appeal to Reason, was released in North America on October 7, 2008, peaking at number three on the U.S. Billboard 200 and producing the singles, "Re-Education (Through Labor)", "Audience of One", and "Savior".

 

Rise Against was formed under the name Transistor Revolt in 1999 by former members of the bands 88 Fingers Louie and Baxter. The first lineup consisted of Tim McIlrath (vocals), Joe Principe (bass and vocals), Toni Tintari (drums), and Mr. Precision (guitar and vocals). Though the band never performed live with this lineup, it released a self-produced demo/EP entitled Transistor Revolt in 2000, a year before signing with Fat Wreck Chords. Tintari left shortly after recording Transistor Revolt, and was replaced by Brandon Barnes, after a short time with Dan Lumley of Screeching Weasel and Squirtgun as the drummer. The band changed its name to Rise Against in 2001 and released its first album, The Unraveling (produced by veteran punk producer Mass Giorgini) on Fat Wreck Chords that same year. Mr. Precision left the band in 2001, and was replaced by Todd Mohney before the band began writing their second full-length album.

 

After touring in support of The Unraveling, the band returned to the studio in December 2002 to work on their second full-length, Revolutions per Minute (produced by Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore at The Blasting Room), which was released in 2003. The band toured extensively in support of its first two records, performing in supporting roles for Sick of It All, NOFX, Agnostic Front, No Use for a Name, AFI, and Strung Out. In addition, Rise Against participated in the 2003 Warped Tour.

 

Rise Against signed onto Dreamworks Records in December 2003 and recorded their third album, Siren Song of the Counter Culture, in 2004. Dreamworks was shortly absorbed by the Universal Music Group, and Rise Against found itself with Geffen Records, a Universal Music Group subsidiary. Shortly after the band signed with Geffen, Mohney left and was replaced by guitarist Chris Chasse. Rise Against released Siren Song of the Counter Culture in August 2004 on Geffen Records. The album, in addition to being the band's first on a major record label, was their first to reach the Billboard 200 chart and to be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The album received generally slightly positive ratings from critics. It was mainly criticized for its accessibility and melodious sound compared to previous Rise Against works. In giving the album 3 out of 5 stars, Johnny Loftus of Allmusic said that Siren Song of the Counter Culture sometimes "gets carried away with its own melodic urgency." However, he goes on to say that because of the album being the band's major-label debut, "maybe the fuller sound and occasional forays into acoustic guitars and cello overdubs...are OK."

 

Rise Against toured North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan in support of Siren Song of the Counter Culture. Some of the most notable mentions include performances on the first international Taste of Chaos tour in 2005 (with Funeral for a Friend, Story of the Year, The Used, and Killswitch Engage), a worldwide tour to the UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan, the Give It a Name tour in the UK, the Reading Festival and Leeds Festival in the UK, a US tour with Alkaline Trio, and the Warped Tour in North America.

 

In January 2006, after touring in support of Siren Song of the Counter Culture, Rise Against recorded their fourth studio album at the Blasting Room studio in Fort Collins, Colorado with producers Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore. Mixed by Chris Lord-Alge at Resonate Sound in Burbank, California, The Sufferer & the Witness was released on July 4, 2006. The album peaked at number 10 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling 48,397 copies in its first week of release; it was eventually certified gold by the RIAA in 2008. The Age newspaper said that with The Sufferer & the Witness, the band "returns to their punk roots." In addition to earning Rise Against its best chart and sales numbers at the time, the album was generally well-received by critics. Corey Apar of Allmusic, in giving the album 4 out of 5 stars, said of it, "the band's inner grit is aptly drawn out amid all the pit-ready choruses and fist-in-the-air, stirring lyrics." She goes on to say, "Rise Against continue to muscularly confront political and personal grievances to the tune of swirling guitars, assertive rhythms, and Tim McIlrath's sandpapered vocals." Contrastingly, Christine Leonard of Fast Forward Weekly says of the band, "Returning to their old school form with the ballistic intensity of "Bricks," they just as quickly lose focus with questionable efforts such as 'Worth Dying For' and the oh-so-weary 'Prayer of the Refugee.'"

 

A DVD titled Generation Lost was released on December 5, 2006 to promote the band and their new album. It contains a documentary of the careers of the band members, as well as live performance videos and making-of clips. Rise Against toured in support of The Sufferer & the Witness throughout the second half of 2006 and all of 2007. The band was a headliner in the 2006 Warped Tour. In late 2006, the band co-headlined a tour with Thursday that included the bands Circa Survive and Billy Talent. In early 2007, the band supported My Chemical Romance as openers on the first half of their arena tour. On February 23, 2007, Rise Against announced the departure of guitarist Chris Chasse on the band's official website. Chasse was replaced by longtime friend Zach Blair from Only Crime. On June 15, 2007, the band began their first official headlining tour in support of The Sufferer & the Witness; it was a North American tour that lasted throughout the summer months. During this tour, on July 3, 2007, Rise Against released an EP in Canada titled This Is Noise, which was subsequently released in the United States on January 15, 2008.

 

To support the upcoming album, Rise Against played at the sixteenth annual KROQ Weenie Roast on May 17 in Irvine, California, and at the sixth annual Download Festival on June 13 at Donington Park, England. They also played at Switzerland's Greenfield Festival as well as Germany's Hurricane Festival and Southside Festival. Like several previous years, the band participated in the Vans Warped Tour, although they decided only to perform on the tour's west coast swing from August 6 to August 17.

 

Rise Against's fifth studio album Appeal to Reason was released on October 4 in Australia, October 6 across Europe, and October 7 in the United States. The album sold 64,700 copies in its first week and peaked at number three on the U.S. Billboard 200, making it Rise Against's highest charting album to date. Appeal to Reason was met with generally positive reviews. However, critics did not rate it as highly as The Sufferer & the Witness, mostly blaming the movement toward the mainstream and away from faster hardcore punk. Giving the album a C+ rating, Marc Weingarten of Entertainment Weekly says the album is filled with "protest anthems that lean closer to the burnished angst of such bands as New Found Glory and Fall Out Boy than the genuine outrage of brainy Green Day" and songs that are "peppy but pretty empty, power-chord downers with little bark or bite." Kyle Anderson of Rolling Stone states that the songs on Appeal to Reason "are driven by an ever-sharpening pop sensibility." He concludes by saying, "Rise Against may be nervous about leaving the underground behind, but with sharp songs like these, they're ready for the rest of the world."

 

Rise Against embarked on a North American tour with fellow bands Rancid, Billy Talent, Killswitch Engage, and Riverboat Gamblers in June and July 2009. They will be on a short tour of the UK in November, which is supported by the bands Thursday and Poison the Well. The band will release a split record with Face to Face, although no date has been announced. After completing a European tour from October to November 2009 and an Australian tour in January and February 2010, Rise Against will begin working on a new album.

 

Rise Against's musical style throughout the band's career has been described by most critics as hardcore punk, melodic hardcore, or punk rock. The band has cited numerous punk and hardcore bands as influences to its music. In 2004, drummer Brandon Barnes stated: "I think we have a lot of different influences from hardcore like old Cave In, to a lot of punk like Face to Face, Screeching Weasel, and Down By Law."

 

In 2006, Tim McIlrath stated of the band's style: "We’re emulating Minor Threat and Black Flag. Who knows, maybe if Ian MacKaye was wearing eyeliner then I would be." Other bands that have influenced Rise Against include Descendents, Dead Kennedys, and Bad Religion.

 

 

Rise Against discography

 

2004 "Give It All" - US Modern Rock #37

2005 "Swing Life Away" - US Hot 100 #117 - US Pop #95 - US Mod #12

2005 "Life Less Frightening" - US Mod #33

2006 "Ready to Fall" - US Mod #13

2006 "Prayer of the Refugee" - US Mod #7

2007 "The Good Left Undone" - US Mod #6

2008 "Re-Education (Through Labor)" - Hot 100 #112 - US Mod #3 - US Mainstream Rock #22

2009 "Audience of One" - US Mod #4 - US Rock #16

2009 "Savior" - Hot 10 #109 - US Mod #4 - US Main #27 - US Rock #9

 

 

Factoid: All of the group's members are vegetarians/vegans and active supporters of PETA, an animal rights organization.

 

 

"Give It All"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-xgpmdeuw

[knightni]

37. Tom Petty / Heartbreakers

 

 

4 of 24 lists - 41 points - highest ranking #8 TheGooch

 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are a Heartland rock band, most of whose members are from the United States of America. They were formed in 1976 by Tom Petty, Mike Campbell, and Benmont Tench, all of whom had been members of Mudcrutch. Petty and the Heartbreakers are known for hit singles such as "American Girl", "Breakdown", "The Waiting", "Learning to Fly", "Refugee" and "Mary Jane's Last Dance."

 

The Heartbreakers still tour regularly and continue to make and record albums. They have gone through numerous line up changes between 1982 and 2002, with Tench, Petty and Campbell being the only members consistently in the band from when it first started.

 

Petty has fought against his record company on more than one occasion, first in 1976 over transference to another label and then again in 1981 over the price of his record, which was (at that time) considered expensive. He is also outspoken on the current state of the music industry and modern radio stations. On his 2002 album, The Last DJ Petty sang about that and other issues and talked about them on the bonus DVD that came with the limited edition album.

 

Although most of what they do is together as The Heartbreakers, they have also participated in outside projects, with Petty himself releasing solo albums, the most successful being 1989s Full Moon Fever.

 

Although Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have not released an album since 2002, the three founding members, along with Randall Marsh and Tom Leadon recorded an album by Mudcrutch. This was the band's first album, made more significant by the fact that they had not recorded together since 1974.

 

The Heartbreakers began their recording career with a self titled album. Initially, the Heartbreakers did not gain much traction in America, although they achieved success in the UK playing "Anything That's Rock 'n' Roll" on Top of the Pops. Early singles included "Breakdown" and "American Girl". "Breakdown" was re-released in the USA and became a Top 40 hit in 1978, after word filtered back to the States that the band was creating a firestorm in the UK.

 

Their 1978 second album You're Gonna Get It! marked the band's first gold album, and featured the singles "I Need to Know" and "Listen To Her Heart". In 1979, the band was dragged into a legal dispute when ABC Records was sold to MCA Records.

 

Petty refused to simply be transferred to another record label without his consent. He held fast to his principles, which led to him filing for bankruptcy.

 

After the dispute was settled, the Heartbreakers released their third album Damn the Torpedoes (1979) which rapidly went triple-platinum. It included "Don't Do Me Like That" (#10 U.S., the group's first Top Ten single ) and "Refugee" (#15 U.S.), their U.S. breakthrough singles.

 

Though he was already extremely successful, Petty ran into record company trouble again when he and the Heartbreakers prepared to release Hard Promises (1981), the follow-up album to Damn the Torpedoes. MCA wanted to release the record at the list price of $9.98, which was considered a high price for a record album at the time. This so-called "superstar pricing" was $1.00 more than the usual list price of $8.98. Petty voiced his objections to the price hike in the press, and the issue became a popular cause among music fans. Non-delivery of the album or naming it Eight Ninety-Eight were considered, but eventually MCA decided against the price increase. The album became a Top Ten hit, going platinum and spawning the hit single "The Waiting" (#19 U.S.). The album also included the duet "Insider", with Stevie Nicks.

 

On their fifth album, Long After Dark (1982), bass player Ron Blair was replaced by Howie Epstein (formerly of Del Shannon's backing band), giving the Heartbreakers their line-up until 1991. Long After Dark features the hits "You Got Lucky" (U.S. #20) and "Change of Heart" (U.S. #21), and was to feature a track called "Keeping Me Alive", but producer Jimmy Iovine vetoed it from the album. Petty has expressed that he feels the album would have turned out better if the song had been included on the album.

 

On the next album, Southern Accents (1985), the Heartbreakers picked up where they had left off.[clarification needed] The recording was not without problems; Petty became frustrated during the mixing process and broke his left hand after punching a wall. The album includes the psychedelic-sounding hit single "Don't Come Around Here No More" (#13 U.S.), which was produced by and co-written with Dave Stewart. The video for the single, which starred Stewart featured Petty dressed as the Mad Hatter, mocking and chasing Alice from the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, then cutting and eating her as if she were a cake. This caused minor controversy after it was criticized by feminist groups, but the video did win an MTV Video Music Award.

 

A successful concert tour led to the live album Pack Up the Plantation: Live! (1985). The band's live capabilities were also showcased when Bob Dylan invited the Heartbreakers to join him on his True Confessions tour through Australia, Japan and the U.S. (1986) and Europe (1987). Petty praised Dylan, saying "I don't think there is anyone we admire more."

 

Also in 1987, the group released Let Me Up (I've Had Enough), a studio album made to sound like a live recording, using a technique they borrowed from Bob Dylan. It includes "Jammin' Me", which Petty wrote with Dylan and Campbell. Dylan recorded an edited version of the early Petty composition, Got My Mind made up, on his album, Knocked Out Loaded.

 

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1989 tour featured college rock band The Replacements opening every show. Petty eventually borrowed Paul Westerberg's line "rebel without a clue" from "I'll Be You" for the title track of the Into the Great Wide Open album.

 

In 1991 the band released Into the Great Wide Open, produced by Jeff Lynne who had worked with Petty in Traveling Wilburys. Songs included the title track itself and "Learning to Fly". By this time, multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston had joined the band. In 1993, Petty released Greatest Hits which included hit single "Mary Jane's Last Dance". In 1994 Lynch was fired from the band and replaced by Steve Ferrone who had worked with Tom, Benmont, Mike and Howie on Petty's 'solo' album, Wildflowers

 

In 1995, a six CD box-set entitled Playback was released. Approximately half of the tracks were previously available on albums, and the rest were B-sides, demos and live tracks. Two notable tracks are a solo version of Tom's 1981 duet with Stevie Nicks, "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around", and the song "Waiting For Tonight", which features vocals from The Bangles. The latter song also appeared on the two CD anthology released in 2000, Anthology: Through the Years.

 

In 1996, Petty "reunited" with the Heartbreakers and released a soundtrack to the movie She's the One starring Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston (see Songs and Music from "She's the One"). Three songs charted from this album; these were "Walls (Circus)" (featuring Lindsey Buckingham); "Climb that Hill"; and a song written by Lucinda Williams, "Change the Locks". The album also included a cover of a song by Beck, "Asshole".

 

In 1999, Petty and the Heartbreakers released the album Echo with producer Rick Rubin at the helm. The album reached number 10 in the U.S. album charts and featured, amongst other singles, Room at the top

 

In 2002, Petty and the Heartbreakers released The Last DJ. Many of the tracks' lyrics contain stinging attacks on the music industry and major record companies. The album reached number 9 in the U.S. charts. Ron Blair played on three of the tracks. He also replaced the man who had previously been his replacement, Howie Epstein on the band's 2002 tour as a result of Epstein's deepening personal problems and drug abuse. Epstein died in 2003 at the age of 48. Tench described him as "the coolest guy in the band."

 

In 2008, the Heartbreakers were also featured as the Super Bowl XLII Halftime Show. In april that year, the members of Petty's prior band, Mudcrutch, including Heartbreakers Petty, Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell, along with Randall Marsh and Tom Leadon, got together to record a Mudcrutch album. In late 2008 a live album featuring Mudcrutch was released.

 

A collection of live recordings will be released on November 23.

 

Solo Albums

 

Petty has released critically acclaimed solo albums, the first of which was 1989's Full Moon Fever which included his signature tune, "Free Fallin'" as well as "I Won't Back Down", covered by Johnny Cash, and "Runnin' Down a Dream".

 

The Heartbreakers were dismayed by Petty's decision to go solo; despite this Campbell plays on every track, Tench contributed to the album, and Howie was invited to do but declined due to his disliking of the song.

 

Tom's second solo album, Wildflowers was, to all intents and purposes, a Heartbreakers record as it included all members except for Stan. The album, which featured Steve Ferrone on drums, produced the single "You Don't Know How It Feels".

 

Petty's most recent solo album was Highway Companion.

 

 

Tom Petty/Heartbreakers discography

 

1977 "Breakdown" - US Hot 100 #40

1978 "I Need to Know" - #41

1978 "Listen to Her Heart" - #59

1979 "Don't Do Me Like That" - #10

1980 "Refugee" - #15

1980 "Here Comes My Girl" - #59

1981 "The Waiting" - Hot 100 #19 - Mainstream Rock #1

1981 "A Woman in Love (It's Not Me)" - #79 - #5

1981 "Nightwatchman" - Main #21

1982 "You Got Lucky" - #20 - #1

1982 "We Stand a Chance" - Main #37

1982 "A One Story Town" - Main #15

1982 "Between Two Worlds" - Main #35

1983 "Change of Heart" - #21 - #10

1985 "Don't Come Around Here No More" - #13 - #2

1985 "Make It Better (Forget About Me)" - #54 - #12

1985 "Rebels" - #74 - #5

1986 "Needles and Pins" - #37 - #17

1986 "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" - Main #9

1987 "Jammin' Me" - #18 - #1

1987 "Runaway Trains" - Main #6

1987 "Think About Me" - Main #36

1987 "All Mixed Up" - Main #19

1989 "I Won't Back Down" - #12 - #1

1989 "Runnin' Down a Dream" - #23 - #1

1989 "Free Fallin'" - #7 - #1

1989 "I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better" - Main #18

1989 "Love Is a Long Road" - Main #7

1990 "A Face in the Crowd" - #46 - #5

1990 "Yer So Bad" - Main #5

1991 "Learning to Fly" - #28 - #1

1991 "Out in the Cold" - Main #1

1991 "Into the Great Wide Open" - #92 - #4

1992 "Kings Highway" - Main #4

1992 "Makin' Some Noise" - Main #30

1994 "Something in the Air" - Main #19

1994 "American Girl" - US Hot 100 #109

1994 "You Don't Know How It Feels" - #13 - #1

1995 "You Wreck Me" - Main #2

1995 "It's Good to Be King" - #68 - #6

1995 "A Higher Place" - Main #12

1995 "Cabin Down Below" - Main #29

1995 "Waiting for Tonight" - Main #6

1996 "Walls (Circus)" - #69 - #6

1996 "Climb That Hill" - Main #6

1997 "Change the Locks" - Main #20

1999 "Free Girl Now" - #120 - #5

1999 "Room at the Top" - Main #19

1999 "Swingin'" - Main #17

2002 "The Last DJ" - Main #22

2006 "Saving Grace" - #100 - #26

 

Factoid: Petty was in a Supergroup in the late 80s called The Traveling Wilburys. Members included ex-Beatle George Harrison, ELO lead singer Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan.

 

"Runnin' Down A Dream"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-nnuuxzec

 

[knightni]

36. Bruce Springsteen / E Street Band

 

 

4 of 24 lists - 41 points - #6 Milkman delivers

 

 

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born September 23, 1949), nicknamed "The Boss", is an American singer-songwriter. He records and tours with the E Street Band. Springsteen is widely known for his brand of heartland rock infused with pop hooks, poetic lyrics, and Americana sentiments centered on his native New Jersey.

 

Springsteen's recordings have tended to alternate between commercially accessible rock albums and somber folk-oriented works. Much of his status stems from the concerts and marathon shows in which he and the E Street Band perform intense ballads, rousing anthems, and party rock and roll songs, amongst which he intersperses whimsical or deeply emotional stories.

 

His most successful studio albums, Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A., epitomize his penchant for finding grandeur in the struggles of daily life in America, and the latter album made him one of the most recognized artists of the 1980s within the United States. Because of his support for the presidential campaigns of Senator John Kerry and Senator Barack Obama, Springsteen has gradually become identified with liberal politics. He is also noted for his support of various relief and rebuilding efforts in New Jersey and elsewhere, and for his response to the September 11th attacks, on which his album The Rising reflects.

 

He has earned numerous awards for his work, including nineteen Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes and an Academy Award, and continues to have a strong global fan base. He has sold more than 65 million albums in the United States and 120 million worldwide.

 

Springsteen signed a record deal with Columbia Records in 1972, with the help of John Hammond, who had signed Bob Dylan to the same label a decade earlier. Springsteen brought many of his New Jersey-based colleagues into the studio with him, thus forming the E Street Band (although it would not be formally named as such for a couple more years). His debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., released in January 1973, established him as a critical favorite, though sales were slow. Because of Springsteen's lyrical poeticism and folk rock-rooted music exemplified on tracks like "Blinded by the Light" and "For You", amongst others, as well as the Columbia and Hammond connections, critics initially compared Springsteen to Bob Dylan. "He sings with a freshness and urgency I haven't heard since I was rocked by 'Like a Rolling Stone'," wrote Crawdaddy magazine editor Peter Knobler in Springsteen's first interview/profile, in March 1973. Crawdaddy "discovered" Springsteen in the rock press and was his earliest champion. Famed music critic Lester Bangs wrote in Creem, 1975, that when Springsteen's first album was released....."many of us dismissed it: he wrote like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, sang like Van Morrison and Robbie Robertson, and led a band that sounded like Van Morrison's." The track "Spirit in the Night" especially showed Morrison's influence, while "Lost in the Flood" was the first of many portraits of Vietnam veterans and "Growin' Up" his first take on the recurring theme of adolescence.

 

In September 1973 his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, was released, again to critical acclaim but no commercial success. Springsteen's songs became grander in form and scope, with the E Street Band providing a less folky, more R&B vibe and the lyrics often romanticizing teenage street life. "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" and "Incident on 57th Street" would become fan favorites, and the long, rousing "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" continues to rank among Springsteen's most beloved concert numbers.

 

In the May 22, 1974, issue of Boston's The Real Paper, music critic Jon Landau wrote after seeing a performance at the Harvard Square Theater, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time." Landau subsequently became Springsteen's manager and producer, helping to finish the epic new album, Born to Run. Given an enormous budget in a last-ditch effort at a commercially viable record, Springsteen became bogged down in the recording process while striving for a wall of sound production. But, fed by the release of an early mix of "Born to Run" to progressive rock radio, anticipation built toward the album's release. All in all the album took more than 14 months to record, with six months alone spent on the song "Born To Run." During this time Springsteen battled with anger and frustration over the album, saying he heard "sounds in [his] head" that he could not explain to the others in the studio. It was during these recording sessions that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt would stumble into the studio just in time to help Springsteen organize the horn section on "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" (it is his only written contribution to the album), and eventually led to his joining the E Street Band. Van Zandt had been a long-time friend of Springsteen, as well as a collaborator on earlier musical projects, and understood where he was coming from, which helped him to translate some of the sounds Springsteen was hearing. Still, by the end of the grueling recording sessions, Springsteen was not satisfied, and, upon first hearing the finished album, threw the record into the alley and told Jon Landau he would rather just cut the album live at The Bottom Line, a place he often played.

 

On August 13, 1975, Springsteen and the E Street Band began a five-night, 10-show stand at New York's Bottom Line club; it attracted major media attention, was broadcast live on WNEW-FM, and convinced many skeptics that Springsteen was for real. (Decades later, Rolling Stone Magazine would name the stand as one of the 50 Moments That Changed Rock and Roll.) With the release of Born to Run on August 25, 1975, Springsteen finally found success: while there were no real hit singles, "Born to Run", "Thunder Road", "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out", and "Jungleland" all received massive album-oriented rock airplay and remain perennial favorites on many classic rock stations to this day. With its panoramic imagery, thundering production, and desperate optimism, some fans consider this among the best rock and roll albums of all time and Springsteen's finest work. It established him as a sincere and dynamic rock and roll personality who spoke for and in the voice of a large part of the rock audience. To cap off the triumph, Springsteen appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, on October 27 of that year. So great did the wave of publicity become that Springsteen eventually rebelled against it during his first venture overseas, tearing down promotional posters before a concert appearance in London.

 

A legal battle with former manager Mike Appel kept Springsteen out of the studio for over two years, during which time he kept the E Street Band together through extensive touring across the U.S. Despite the optimistic fervor with which he often performed, the new songs he was writing and often debuting on stage had taken a more somber tone than much of his previous work. Reaching settlement with Appel in 1977, Springsteen finally returned to the studio, and the subsequent sessions produced Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). Musically, this album was a turning point of Springsteen's career. Gone were the rapid-fire lyrics, outsized characters, and long, multi-part musical compositions of the first three albums; now the songs were leaner and more carefully drawn and began to reflect Springsteen's growing intellectual and political awareness. Some fans consider Darkness Springsteen's best and most consistent record; tracks such as "Badlands" and "The Promised Land" became concert staples for decades to come, while the track "Prove It All Night" received a significant amount of album rock radio airplay. Other fans would prefer the work of the adventurous early Springsteen. The cross-country 1978 tour to promote the album would become legendary for the intensity, and length, of its shows.

 

By the late 1970s, Springsteen had earned a reputation in the pop world as a songwriter whose material could provide hits for other bands. Manfred Mann's Earth Band had achieved a U.S. number one pop hit with a heavily rearranged version of "For You" and Greetings' "Blinded by the Light" in early 1977. Patti Smith reached number 13 with her take on Springsteen's unreleased "Because the Night" (which Smith co-wrote) in 1978, while The Pointer Sisters hit number two in 1979 with Springsteen's also-unreleased "Fire".

 

In September 1979, Springsteen and the E Street Band joined the Musicians United for Safe Energy anti-nuclear power collective at Madison Square Garden for two nights, playing an abbreviated setlist while premiering two songs from his upcoming album. The subsequent No Nukes live album, as well as the following summer's No Nukes documentary film, represented the first official recordings and filmings of Springsteen's fabled live act, as well as Springsteen's first tentative dip into political involvement.

 

Springsteen continued to consolidate his thematic focus on working-class life with the 20-song double album The River in 1980, which finally yielded his first hit Top Ten single as a performer, "Hungry Heart", but also included an intentionally paradoxical range of material from good-time party rockers to emotionally intense ballads. The album sold well, and a long tour in 1980 and 1981 followed, featuring Springsteen's first extended playing of Europe and ending with a series of multi-night arena stands in major cities in the U.S.

 

The River was followed in 1982 by the stark solo acoustic Nebraska. According to the Marsh biographies, Springsteen was in a depressed state when he wrote this material, and the result is a brutal depiction of American life. The title track on this album is about the murder spree of Charles Starkweather. The album actually started (according to Marsh) as a demo tape for new songs to be played with the E Street Band, but, during the recording process, Springsteen and producer Landau realized they worked better as solo acoustic numbers; several attempts at re-recording the songs in the studio with the E Street Band led them to realize that the original recording, made on a simple, low-tech four-track tape deck in Springsteen's home, were the best versions they were going to get. However, the sessions with the E Street Band were not all for naught, as the band recorded several new songs that Springsteen had written in addition to the Nebraska material, including "Born in the U.S.A." and "Glory Days". These new songs would not see release until two years later, forming the basis of Springsteen's next album.

 

While Nebraska did not sell especially well, it garnered widespread critical praise (including being named "Album of the Year" by Rolling Stone magazine's critics) and influenced later significant works by other major artists, including U2's album The Joshua Tree. It helped inspire the musical genre known as lo-fi music, becoming a cult favorite among indie-rockers. Springsteen did not tour in conjunction with Nebraska's release.

 

Springsteen probably is best known for his album Born in the U.S.A. (1984), which sold 15 million copies in the U.S. alone and became one of the best-selling albums of all time with seven singles hitting the top 10, and the massively successful world tour that followed it. The title track was a bitter commentary on the treatment of Vietnam veterans, some of whom were Springsteen's friends and bandmates. The song was widely misinterpreted as jingoistic, and in connection with the 1984 presidential campaign became the subject of considerable folklore. Springsteen also turned down several million dollars offered by Chrysler Corporation for using the song in a car commercial. (In later years, Springsteen performed the song accompanied only with acoustic guitar to make the song's original meaning more explicitly clear. An acoustic version also appeared on Tracks, a later album.) "Dancing in the Dark" was the biggest of seven hit singles from Born in the U.S.A., peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard music charts. The music video for the song featured a young Courteney Cox dancing on stage with Springsteen, an appearance which helped kickstart the actress's career. The song "Cover Me" was written by Springsteen for Donna Summer, but his record company persuaded him to keep it for the new album. A big fan of Summer's work, Springsteen wrote another one for her, "Protection". A number of the videos for the album were made by noted film directors Brian De Palma or John Sayles. He was featured on the "We Are the World" song and album in 1985.

 

After this commercial peak, Springsteen released the much more sedate and contemplative Tunnel of Love (1987), a mature reflection on the many faces of love found, lost and squandered, which only selectively used the E Street Band.

 

In 1989 Springsteen informed the E Street Band members that he would not be using their services for the foreseeable future. He had already recorded one completely solo album, Nebraska. The last full band activity had been autumn 1988's Human Rights Now! Tour. Band members started to go their separate ways and onto separate projects — Tallent to Nashville to work on record production, Federici to California, Clemons to Florida, Lofgren to Maryland to resume his long-time solo activities. Weinberg, besides an abortive try at law school, was putting together the band Killer Joe and recording an album. Scene Of The Crime included a guest appearance from Little Steven, playing guitar on the Springsteen written instrumental "Summer On Signal Hill." In 1993, Weinberg became the band leader on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and remained such for its entire run. When O'Brien moved to The Tonight Show in 2009, Weinberg reprised his role as bandleader, and the show's house band - formerly called the Max Weinberg 7 - was redubbed Max Weinberg and the Tonight Show Band.

 

In 1992, after risking charges of "going Hollywood" by moving to Los Angeles (a radical move for someone so linked to the blue-collar life of the Jersey Shore) and working with session musicians, Springsteen released two albums at once. Human Touch and Lucky Town were even more introspective than any of his previous work. Also different about these albums was the confidence he displayed. As opposed to his first two albums, which dreamed of happiness, and his next four, which showed him growing to fear it, at points during the Lucky Town album, Springsteen actually claims happiness for himself.

 

Some E Street Band fans voiced (and continue to voice) a low opinion of these albums, (especially Human Touch), and did not follow the subsequent "Other Band" Tour. For other fans, however, who had only come to know Springsteen after the 1975 consolidation of the E Street Band, the "Other Band" Tour was an exciting opportunity to see Springsteen develop a working onstage relationship with a different group of musicians, and to see him explore the Asbury Park soul-and-gospel base in some of his classic material.

 

In 1995, after temporarily re-organizing the E Street Band for a few new songs recorded for his first Greatest Hits album (a recording session that was chronicled in the documentary Blood Brothers), he released his second (mostly) solo guitar album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, inspired by Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winners author Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson. This was generally less well-received than the similar Nebraska, due to the minimal melody, twangy vocals, and political nature of most of the songs, although some praised it for giving voice to immigrants and others who rarely have one in American culture. The lengthy, worldwide, small-venue solo acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad Tour that followed successfully featured many of his older songs in drastically reshaped acoustic form, although Springsteen had to explicitly remind his audiences to be quiet and not to clap during the performances.

 

Following the tour, Springsteen moved back to New Jersey with his family. In 1998, Springsteen released the sprawling, four-disc box set of out-takes, Tracks. Subsequently, Springsteen would acknowledge that the 1990s were a "lost period" for him: "I didn't do a lot of work. Some people would say I didn't do my best work."

 

In 1999, Springsteen and the E Street Band officially came together again and went on the extensive Reunion Tour, lasting over a year. Highlights included a record sold-out, 15-show run at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey to kick off the American leg of the tour.

 

Springsteen's Reunion Tour with the E Street Band ended with a triumphant ten-night, sold-out engagement at New York City's Madison Square Garden in mid-2000 and controversy over a new song, "American Skin (41 Shots)", about the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. The final shows at Madison Square Garden were recorded and resulted in an HBO Concert, with corresponding DVD and album releases as Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band: Live in New York City.

 

In 2002, Springsteen released his first studio effort with the full band in 18 years, The Rising, produced by Brendan O'Brien. The album, mostly a reflection on the September 11 attacks, was a critical and popular success. (Many of the songs were influenced by phone conversations Springsteen had with family members of victims of the attacks, who in their obituary, it was mentioned how his music touched their life.) The title track gained airplay in several radio formats, and the record became Springsteen's best-selling album of new material in 15 years. Kicked off by an early-morning Asbury Park appearance on The Today Show, The Rising Tour commenced, barnstorming through a series of single-night arena stands in the U.S. and Europe to promote the album in 2002, then returning for large-scale, multiple-night stadium shows in 2003. While Springsteen had maintained a loyal hardcore fan base everywhere (and particularly in Europe), his general popularity had dipped over the years in some southern and midwestern regions of the U.S. But it was still strong in Europe and along the U.S. coasts, and he played an unprecedented 10 nights in Giants Stadium in New Jersey, a ticket-selling feat to which no other musical act has come close. During these shows Springsteen thanked those fans who were attending multiple shows and those who were coming from long distances or another country; the advent of robust Bruce-oriented online communities had made such practices more common. The Rising Tour came to a final conclusion with three nights in Shea Stadium, highlighted by renewed controversy over "American Skin" and a guest appearance by Bob Dylan.

 

Devils & Dust was released on April 26, 2005, and was recorded without the E Street Band. It is a low-key, mostly acoustic album, in the same vein as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad although with a little more instrumentation. Some of the material was written almost 10 years earlier during, or shortly after, the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour, a couple of them being performed then but never released. The title track concerns an ordinary soldier's feelings and fears during the Iraq War.

 

Springsteen's next album, titled Magic, was released on October 2, 2007. Recorded with the E Street Band, it featured 10 new Springsteen songs plus "Long Walk Home," performed once with the Sessions band, and a hidden track (the first included on a Springsteen studio release), "Terry's Song," a tribute to Springsteen's long-time assistant Terry Magovern who died on July 30, 2007. The first single, "Radio Nowhere," was made available for a free download on August 28.

 

Bruce Springsteen/E Street Band discography

 

1975 "Born to Run" - US Hot 100 #23 - Cashbox #17

1976 "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" - #83 - #63

1978 "Prove It All Night" - #33 - #53

1978 "Badlands" - #42 - #52

1980 "Hungry Heart" - #5 - #6

1981 "Fade Away" - US Hot 100 #20 - Cashbox #20 - US Mainstream Rock #14

1981 "Cadillac Ranch" - US Main #48

1982 "Atlantic City" - US Main #10

1982 "Open All Night" - US Main #22

1984 "Dancing in the Dark" - Hot 100 #2 - CB #1 - Main #1

1984 "Cover Me" - Hot 100 #7 - CB #10 - Main #2

1984 "Born in the U.S.A." - Hot 100 #9 - CB #9 - Main #8

1984 "I'm on Fire" - Hot 100 #6 - CB #8 - Main #4 - US Hot Adult Contemporary #6

1985 "Glory Days" - #5 - #9 - #3

1985 "I'm Goin' Down" - #9 - #9 - #9

1985 "My Hometown" - #6 - #7 - #6 - #1

1986 "War" - #8 - #9 - #4

1987 "Fire" - #46 - #45 - #14

1987 "Brilliant Disguise" - #5 - #4 - #1 - #5

1987 "Tunnel of Love" - #9 - #12 - #1

1988 "One Step Up" - #13 - #17 - #2

1988 "Spare Parts" - Main #28

1992 "Human Touch" - #16 - #13 - #1 - #8

1992 "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" - #68 - #62 - #6

1992 "Better Days" - #16 - #13 - #2

1992 "Leap of Faith" - Main #28

1994 "Streets of Philadelphia" - #9 - #6 - #25 - #3

1995 "Murder Incorporated" - Main #14

1997 "Secret Garden" - Hot 100 #19 - US AC #5

2002 "The Rising" - Hot 100 #52 - Main #24- AC #26

2005 "Devils & Dust" - Hot 100 #72

2007 "Radio Nowhere" - Hot 100 #102

2007 "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" - Hot 100 #95 - Main #27

2008 "Working on a Dream" - Hot 100 #95 - Main #35

2008 "My Lucky Day" - Main #37

2008 "The Wrestler" - US Hot 100 - #120

 

 

Factoid: Nineteen-year-old Jay Weinberg has filled in at drums for his father, Max, during portions of shows or for some full shows on the 2009 Working on a Dream Tour, due to the elder Weinberg's obligations for the debuting Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. The 49-year age difference between the younger Weinberg and 67-year-old bandmate Clarence Clemons is one of the largest within any current popular musical act.

 

 

"Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-dleenqhd

[knightni]

35. Queens of the Stone Age

 

 

4 of 24 lists - 41 points - highest ranking #1 StrangeSox

 

Queens of the Stone Age is an American Grammy Award-nominated rock band from Palm Desert, California, United States, formed in 1997. Originally formed under the name Gamma Ray by guitarist Josh Homme, following the breakup of his previous band, Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age developed a style of riff-oriented, heavy music which has been described by Homme as 'robot rock', saying that he "wanted to create a heavy sound based on a solid jam, and just pound it into your head". Their sound has since evolved to incorporate a variety of different styles and influences.

 

The band's first release was Gamma Ray, a two-track EP featuring the songs "Born to Hula" and "If Only Everything" (which would later appear on their self titled debut as 'If Only'), released in January 1996, featuring Joshua Homme (Kyuss), Matt Cameron (Soundgarden and Pearl Jam), Van Conner (Screaming Trees) and John McBain (Monster Magnet). The band's first live appearance was probably November 20, 1997, at OK Hotel in Seattle, Washington. In December of the same year, the band released a split EP, Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age, which was the first official release by the band under the name Queens of the Stone Age, and featured three tracks from the Gamma Ray sessions as well as three Kyuss tracks recorded in 1995 just prior to their break-up.

 

 

The band released their self-titled debut, Queens of the Stone Age (1998) on Loose Groove records (the album was also released on vinyl by Man's Ruin Records), which was recorded with Homme handling both guitar- and bass guitar-playing duties (though basswork is credited to Homme's alter-ego, Carlo Von Sexron), Alfredo Hernández on the drums, and included several other instrumental and vocal contributions by Chris Goss and Hutch. Homme reportedly asked Screaming Trees' vocalist Mark Lanegan to appear on the record, but he was unable to due to other commitments.[citation needed] Soon after the recording sessions were finished for the album, former Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri joined and touring commenced. Consisting entirely of ex-Kyuss members, this is widely regarded as QOTSA's original lineup. Guitarist Dave Catching joined shortly after. A recording of a phone message which plays the voice of Oliveri stating his decision to join the band can be heard at the end of the album's final song, "I Was a Teenage Hand Model". From this point forward, the band's line-up would change frequently. By the time their second album was being recorded, Hernández was no longer in the band.

 

2000's Rated R featured a myriad of musicians familiar with Homme and Oliveri's work and "crew" of sorts: among others, drummers Nick Lucero and Gene Trautmann, guitarists Dave Catching, Brendon McNichol, and Chris Goss contributed, and even Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford, recording next door, stepped in for a guest spot on "Feel Good Hit of the Summer". The album garnered positive reviews and received a lot more attention than their debut, despite the fact that the lyrics to "Feel Good Hit of the Summer" were deemed by mega-retailer Wal-Mart to promote drug use, almost causing the record to get pulled from store shelves. The success of the record also earned the band notable opening slots with The Smashing Pumpkins, the Foo Fighters, Hole, and a place at Ozzfest 2000.

 

Frequent touring for Rated R generated support for the band which grew when Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl joined in late 2001/early 2002 to record their third album. Songs for the Deaf was released in August, again featuring Mark Lanegan, as well as adding former A Perfect Circle guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen to the touring line up following the album's release. Although Songs for the Deaf gained major attention, Grohl returned to his other projects and was replaced on the European leg of the album's supporting tour by former Danzig drummer Joey Castillo, who joined the band full time. Also featured on Songs for the Deaf for the final track Mosquito Song were former A Perfect Circle bassist Paz Lenchantin (on viola and piano) and Dean Ween on guitar.

 

Songs for the Deaf was a critical and commercial success and its popularity peaked when the album reached gold status in 2003, with sales peaking at over 900,000 copies. The singles "No One Knows" and "Go with the Flow" became hits on radio and MTV, with the former voted Triple J radio's number 1 song and peaking just outside of the Billboard Top 40. Both "No One Knows" and "Go with the Flow" were also featured on the first iterations of the popular video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band (respectively). "No One Knows" also re-appeared in the compilation title Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits.

 

In 2005, Homme, along with Eleven multi-instrumentalist Alain Johannes and remaining band members Van Leeuwen and Castillo recorded the Queens' fourth studio album, Lullabies to Paralyze, a title taken from a lyric in "Mosquito Song" from their previous album. The album was leaked onto the internet in February 2005 and was aired by Triple J radio in Australia on March 3, 2005 as an unsubstantiated 'World Premiere'. Lullabies was then officially released on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 in the USA, debuting in the number 5 slot on the Billboard Music Chart, the greatest initial success of any Queens record to date.

 

On Valentine's Day 2007, the band's official website announced the new album would be titled Era Vulgaris, and would be released in June. Later in February, teaser videos surfaced showing Homme, Castillo, Van Leeuwen and Johannes in studio. Several sites reported that the album would include many guest vocalists, including Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, Julian Casablancas from The Strokes, Mark Lanegan, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and deceased humorist Erma Bombeck.

 

Era Vulgaris was completed in early April 2007 and released in June 2007 in the U.S. The tracks "Sick, Sick, Sick" and "3's & 7's" were released as singles in early June. Homme has described the record as "dark, hard, and electrical, sort of like a construction worker".

 

In a September issue of NME, Josh Homme stated that he was going back to make the new Queens of the Stone Age and Desert Sessions records, along with remastering the 1998 self-titled album, for an early-2009 release. However, such plans have been delayed until later in the year. Homme also stated Queens' new album is going to be a "desert orgy in the dark."

 

Throughout its career the band has been described as hard rock, alternative rock, art rock, heavy metal, stoner rock and several other genres. Homme himself rejects the term stoner rock and has often described the band style as "robot rock" referring to the band's solid and repetitive riffs in the bands song structures. Homme has described the band's self-titled debut album as driving music, angular and recorded dry. Rolling Stone magazine also noted a "connection between American meat-and-potatoes macho rock of the early 1970s, like Blue Cheer and Grand Funk Railroad, and the precision-timing drones in German rock of the same period". The bands following album - Rated R - contained a wider variety of instruments, several recording guests and lead vocals shared by Homme, Oliveri and Lanegan. Homme has also commented that "Our first record announced our sound. This one added that we’re different and weird." The band continued to experiment on their third album Songs for the Deaf, which also featured a line-up including three lead vocalists, many guest appearances and wide range of instrumentation including horn and string sections. Lullabies to Paralyze was in comparison to the bands previous releases a darker record much due to the departure of long time member Nick Oliveri, with lyrics inspired by The Brothers Grimm folk and fairy tales. The band also almost exclusively used semi hollow body guitars during the recording of the record. With Era Vulgaris the band continued to evolve their signature sound with more dance orientated elements while Homme has gone back to being the only vocalist in the band and uses more distinct vocal melodies.

 

Queens of the Stone Age discography

 

2000 "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" - US Mainstream Rock #21 - US Alternative #36

2002 "No One Knows" - US Hot 100 #51 - Main #5 - Alt #1

2003 "Go with the Flow" - Hot #116 - Main #24 - Alt #7

2005 "Little Sister" - Hot #88 - Main #13 - Alt #2

2005 "In My Head" - Main #39 - Alt #32

2005 "Burn the Witch" - Alt #40

2007 "Sick, Sick, Sick" - Main #40 - Alt #23

2007 "3's & 7's" - Alt #25

 

 

Factoid: Dave Grohl, lead singer of the Foo Fighters and former drummer of Nirvana, played drums and backing vocals for Songs for the Deaf and toured in support of the album in 2002.

 

"No One Knows"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-aaggirgd

 

[knightni]

34. Slipknot

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 44 points - highest ranking #2 whitesox901

 

Slipknot is an American heavy metal band from Des Moines, Iowa, formed in 1995. Slipknot consists of nine members, the current band members are Sid Wilson, Joey Jordison, Paul Gray, Chris Fehn, Jim Root, Craig Jones, Shawn Crahan, Mick Thomson, and Corey Taylor. Each member of the band wears a unique mask.

 

Slipknot formed in 1995 and underwent several line-up changes following the independent release of their first demo Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. in 1996. That album featured original lead vocalist, Anders Colsefini. Their self-titled, major label debut, Slipknot, was released in 1999, featuring permanent new lead vocalist, Corey Taylor, and was followed by Iowa in 2001 and Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) in 2004. On August 25, 2008, the band returned to release their fourth studio album, All Hope Is Gone, which debuted at the top spot on the Billboard 200 charts. The band has released three DVDs, including Disasterpieces, which was certified quadruple-platinum in the United States.

 

In late 1998, Slipknot entered the recording studio to work on their debut album. In the early new year, guitarist Brainard decided to leave the band due to personal reasons. His replacement was Jim Root leaving the band with the line-up they retain. Recording finished in early 1999, with "Me Inside" and "Purity", and the band attended the Ozzfest which began in March. On June 29, 1999, the band released their eponymous album Slipknot. Regarding the album, Rick Anderson of Allmusic wrote "You thought Limp Bizkit was heavy? They're The Osmonds. Slipknot is something else entirely." The band performed in the Livin La Vida Loco tour in support of Slipknot.

 

Slipknot included variations of previously released songs, including "(sic)"; a version of the previous song "Slipknot". These versions were faster than their previous recordings and this shift in intensity was welcomed by old fans. In the same year, Slipknot released their first home video Welcome to Our Neighborhood (which was later released on DVD in 2003). In early 2000, Slipknot was certified platinum, a first for an album released by Roadrunner Records. In July 2001, Q named Slipknot as one of the "50 Heaviest Albums of All Time".

 

After the success of their debut, Slipknot decided to enter the studio again for a second album. By then, the band had created a huge fan base, and the expectations for their follow up album were great. They went back into the studio in early 2001 to work on a new album. Iowa, the band's second album with Roadrunner Records, was released on August 28, 2001. Jason Birchmeier of Allmusic said "It's really all you could ask for in a Slipknot album, and then some", and David Fricke of Rolling Stone called the album "the first great record of the nu metal era." It was also a commercial success, peaking at number three on the Billboard album charts, and at number one on the UK album chart. In mid-2001, the band once again toured with Ozzfest, and performed in the Kill The Industry tour in support of Iowa. The band also appeared in the concert scene of the 2002 movie Rollerball. In the same year, while touring Europe on their European Iowa Tour, the BBC said that Slipknot stole the show and proved entertaining after the band performed at Reading Festival in England. After touring Europe, the band performed at venues in Japan for the Japan Iowa Tour. In the same year, Slipknot released their second visual output with the release of their DVD Disasterpieces.

 

n late 2003, Slipknot began writing and recording with producer Rick Rubin, who had previously worked with artists such as Johnny Cash, System of a Down, and Slayer. Roadrunner Records also announced they would no longer be distributing Slipknot's albums in Scandinavia, due to financial terms. However Slipknot managed to pen a deal with Nuclear Blast Records in early 2003 for the releases in Scandinavia. The band released their third album, Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) on May 24, 2004, which peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200. Johnny Loftus of Allmusic called the album "a satisfying, carefully crafted representation of [the band's] career to date", while Robert Cherry of Rolling Stone said the album "experiments with even newer extremes, which in Slipknot's case means tunefulness and traditional song structures." The title of the album denotes that this is their third album, band members later mentioned that they do not consider Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. as an album which reflects the band. In 2004, the band toured on the Ozzfest for a third time, the same year they made their first appearance at Download Festival where Jordison replaced Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich after he was rushed to hospital. In 2005, Slipknot made live appearances without percussionist Crahan—who was supporting his wife during an illness—including their return to Download Festival.

 

Slipknot released their fourth studio album All Hope Is Gone on August 20, 2008. It is the first Slipknot album to ever peak at number 1 on the Billboard 200. The Album has gone on to sell 825,000 copies in the U.S., been awarded a Gold certification, and has spawned 5 singles with the third single Dead Memories charting at #1 on the Hot 100 Mainstream Rock tracks. Preparation for the album started in October 2007 with recording pushed back to February 2008. For this release the band expressed an interest in making it their heaviest album to date with an expansion of the thrash metal riffing introduced on Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses). However, they also wanted to make it their most experimental record, and wished to include more acoustic guitars and melodic vocals, as well as introducing hi-hats and cymbals to the additional percussion. The album was the band's first work with Dave Fortman as producer. Along with the album, the band debuted "evolved" masks and uniforms, which matched the style of the album. Slipknot headlined the first ever Mayhem Festival festival in July and August 2008. The band was scheduled to play in the Reading and Leeds Festivals in August 2008, but was forced to cancel after drummer Joey Jordison broke his ankle.

 

During an interview ahead of the band's debut at Sonisphere in the Netherlands, percussionist Chris Fehn stated that the follow up to All Hope Is Gone is likely to be released in 2010. The band also confirmed a 10th Anniversary Edition re-release of their self-titled debut album which will include all tracks from the original release, as well as several demos, remixes and the track Purity. A new DVD, entitled "Of the (Sic): Your Nightmares, Our Dreams", comprising of footage from 1999-2000 will also be included in the release.

 

The band have stated that their primary influences include Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Slayer, Judas Priest, Korn, AC/DC, Kiss and Beastie Boys. Death metal, black metal and heavy metal have been mentioned as a key influence on the band's musical direction alongside nu metal, the category the band is generally listed as. They have also stated that they are influenced by industrial bands like Head of David, Godflesh and Skinny Puppy as well as Neurosis and jungle music like Roni Size.

 

Slipknot are seen as pioneers of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal developing a lean and aggressive brand of metal formed from thrash, metalcore and death metal. In this they can be compared with groups such as Pantera, Machine Head, Biohazard, Life of Agony, and Prong and are known for often chaotic and energetic live shows. The extreme performance style provided by their large line-up featuring a typical heavily down-tuned guitar set-up (lead, rhythm, and bass guitars), two percussionists in addition to the primary drummer, and electronics (samplers and turntables). Robert Cherry of Rolling Stone compared the band's sound to "a threshing machine devouring a military drum corps".

 

Their early work hosted a diverse range of vocal styles, ranging from rapping to occasional singing to growled vocals. In more recent work, this vocal style remains present, but now includes more melodic singing. The lyrics generally follow a very aggressive tone and feature themes such as darkness, nihilism, anger, disaffection, love, misanthropy and psychosis. Rick Anderson of Allmusic regards the group's lyrics as "not generally quotable on a family website". There has been controversy surrounding Slipknot's lyrics, including a case in which a pair of young killers blamed the lyrics from the song "Disasterpiece" for their vicious crime and a case in 2006 in which lyrics from the song "Surfacing" were found at the site of a grave robbing.

 

The band is known for its attention-grabbing image: the members wear matching jumpsuit uniforms, and each one has a unique mask. In the past, their jumpsuits have featured large UPC barcodes printed on the back and sleeves, which are identical and render the same barcode number to the barcode on their first demo, Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. Aside from their real names, members of the band are referred to by numbers zero to eight.

 

With each new album, Slipknot has used new masks and coveralls. The masks haven't changed dramatically with the release of their second and third albums, as the masks are more of an extension of what they previously were. Jordison addressed the issue in an interview in 2004, stating that the change in masks are to show growth and difference within age. During the music video and live performances of their single "Vermilion" the band change their respective masks to death masks made from casts of their own faces. Also in 2004, Gray claimed that the special effects company Screaming Mad George made their masks from their third album cycle, and pictures of the band's masks from their second album cycle can be found on the SMG website.

 

The masks have been subject of much criticism, generally thought of as a gimmick to try sell their product. The band strongly objects to these claims, proclaiming that the masks are used to draw the attention away from themselves and put it on the music. Several members have said how the masks are a visual representation of how the music makes them feel and how they put the members in an animal-like mentality. The coveralls and numbers are an extension of the anti-image concept they created with the masks.The integrity of the masks is also a topic of criticism as band members have appeared outside of Slipknot without the masks. The issue has been addressed by most band members. Percussionist Crahan specifically addressed the issue during an interview on The Sauce when discussing the release of their 2006 DVD Voliminal: Inside the Nine, proclaiming that the masks are always going to be part of the Slipknot show.

 

Slipknot discography

 

2000 "Wait and Bleed" - US Alternative #34

2001 "Left Behind" - Alt #30

2004 "Duality" - US Hot 100 #106 - US Mainstream Rock #5 - Alt #6

2004 "Vermilion" - Main #14 - Alt #17

2005 "Before I Forget" - Main #11 - Alt #32

2005 "The Nameless" - Main #25

2008 "Psychosocial" - Hot #102- Main #7 - Alt #20

2008 "Dead Memories" - Main #3 - Alt #19

2009 "Sulfur" - Main #18

2009 "Snuff" - Main #16 - Alt #26

 

 

Factoid: Drummer Joey Jordison replaced Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich after he was rushed to hospital during 2004 Ozzfest.

 

"Psychosocial"

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-fbexmfjg

[knightni]

33. Modest Mouse

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 44 points - highest ranking #5 whitesoxfan99, StrangeSox

 

Modest Mouse is an American alternative rock band formed in 1993 in the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, Washington by singer/lyricist/guitarist Isaac Brock, drummer Jeremiah Green, and bassist Eric Judy. Since their 1996 debut album, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, their lineup has centered around Brock, Green and Judy. Guitarist Johnny Marr (formerly of The Smiths) joined the band in May 2006, along with percussionist Joe Plummer (formerly of the Black Heart Procession) and multi-instrumentalist Tom Peloso, to work on the album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. Guitarist Jim Fairchild joined the band in February 2009.

 

The band has attained significant mainstream success since being signed to Sony's Epic Records in 2001 and have been one of the leading bands in the commercialization of indie rock, beginning with The Moon & Antarctica and Good News for People Who Love Bad News, which have been certified gold and platinum by the RIAA respectively. They have gone on to sell over three million records since. Elements of Modest Mouse's early sound have been likened to or inspired by that of Pixies and numerous other alternative rock and space rock bands. Their name is derived from a passage from the Virginia Woolf story "The Mark on the Wall" which reads, "I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises."

 

n 2000, Modest Mouse released The Moon & Antarctica, their first album on Epic Records. The album was more instrumental compared to their previous work, and this was partially due to Brock having his jaw broken during recording. Not knowing if he would be able to sing, he focused on making a more instrumental and experimental album. The band enjoyed some success on alternative radio with the singles "3rd Planet" and "Gravity Rides Everything." It was critically well-received including a 9.8 out of 10 score from online music magazine, Pitchfork Media. It has subsequently gone on to receive further acclaim. Brock has since released an album with his side project Ugly Casanova on Sub Pop. The band licensed "Gravity Rides Everything" for a commercial for Nissan's Quest minivan, a move that Brock has publicly acknowledged as blatantly commercial but necessary to achieve financial stability.

 

In 2001, Modest Mouse released the EP Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks, a collection of unused songs from the The Moon and Antarctica recording sessions. In 2002, they joined Cake, De La Soul, The Flaming Lips, The Hackensaw Boys and Kinky on the Unlimited Sunshine Tour.

 

In March 2003, Green quit the band after suffering a nervous breakdown; the official word was that he was quitting to work with his side project, Vells. The same year, he and bassist Eric Judy appeared on Adam Forkner's debut solo album, VVRSSNN. Green was replaced with two new members, drummer Benjamin Weikel (who also drummed for The Helio Sequence, as well as playing keyboard) and guitarist Dann Gallucci (who had been a member of Modest Mouse previously, and appears on Sad Sappy Sucker and The Lonesome Crowded West). On April 6, 2004, Modest Mouse released their fourth album, the platinum-selling Good News for People Who Love Bad News, which scored two hits with "Float On" and "Ocean Breathes Salty" (both of which they performed on Saturday Night Live on November 13, 2004). The album was nominated for a Grammy for Best Alternative Rock Album that year. Later that year, Green returned to the band, and Weikel returned to drumming exclusively for The Helio Sequence. Gallucci left the band in August.

 

In May 2006, Dann Gallucci (who had left the band amicably in September 2004) was replaced on guitar by Johnny Marr. The album, entitled We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank was released on March 20, 2007 after being delayed from December 19, 2006. The album was successful in being the first Modest Mouse album to reach number one on the US Billboard 200 charts, and spawned the hit single "Dashboard", as well as "Missed the Boat" and "We've Got Everything".

 

In issue 1045 of Rolling Stone magazine, Brock reported that his biggest priority is to finish a Modest Mouse EP; referring to the songs that did not make it onto Good News and We Were Dead. He says there are songs named "The Whale Song" and "Satellite Skin" as well as another song with The Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

 

Modest Mouse discography

 

2004 "Float On" - US Hot 100 #68 - US Modern Rock #1

2004 "Ocean Breathes Salty" - Mod #6

2007 "Dashboard" - Hot #59 - Mod #5

2007 "Missed the Boat" - Mod #24

 

Factoid: Modest Mouse was mentioned by name in the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of MGM v. Grokster. Justice David Souter wrote that on the Grokster P2P network, "Users seeking Top 40 songs, for example, or the latest release by Modest Mouse, are certain to be far more numerous than those seeking a free Decameron, and Grokster and StreamCast translated that demand into dollars."

 

 

"Dashboard"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-spoihfvo

[knightni]

32. Green Day

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 45 points - highest ranking #5 Steve9347

 

 

Green Day is an American rock trio formed in 1987. The band has consisted of Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals, guitar), Mike Dirnt (bass guitar, vocals), and Tré Cool (drums, percussion) for the majority of its existence.

 

Green Day was originally part of the punk rock scene at 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California. Its early releases for independent record label Lookout! Records earned them a grassroots fanbase, some of whom felt alienated when the band signed to a major label. Nevertheless, its major label debut Dookie (1994) became a breakout success and eventually sold over 10 million copies in the U.S. and 15 million worldwide. As a result, Green Day was widely credited, alongside fellow California punk bands The Offspring and Rancid, with reviving mainstream interest in and popularizing punk rock in the United States. Green Day's three follow-up albums, Insomniac, Nimrod and Warning did not achieve the massive success of Dookie, but they were still successful, reaching double platinum, double platinum, and gold status respectively. Green Day's 2004 rock opera American Idiot reignited the band's popularity with a younger generation, selling five million copies in the U.S. The band's eighth studio album, 21st Century Breakdown, was released on May 15, 2009.

 

Green Day has sold over 22 million records in the United States. They have won three Grammy Awards; Best Alternative Album for Dookie, Best Rock Album for American Idiot, and Record of the Year for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams".

 

Larry Livermore, owner of Lookout! Records, saw the band play an early show and signed them to his label. In 1989 they recorded their first EP, 1,000 Hours. Lookout! would release Green Day's first LP, 39/Smooth in early 1990.

 

Green Day would record two EPs later that year: Slappy and Sweet Children, the latter of which included some older songs they had recorded for Minneapolis indie label Skene! Records. In 1991, Lookout! Records released 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, a compilation of the 39/Smooth, Slappy, and 1,000 Hours EPs. In late 1990, shortly after the band's first nationwide tour, Sobrante left the East Bay area to attend college. The Lookouts drummer Tré Cool began filling in as a temporary replacement, and when it became clear that Sobrante did not plan to commit to the band full time, Tré Cool's position as Green Day's drummer became permanent.

 

Kerplunk's underground success led to a wave of interest coming from major record labels, and they eventually left Lookout! on friendly terms and signed with Reprise Records after attracting the attention of producer Rob Cavallo. Signing to Reprise caused many punk rock fans to regard Green Day as sellouts. Reflecting on the period, Armstrong told Spin magazine in 1999, "I couldn't go back to the punk scene, whether we were the biggest success in the world or the biggest failure ... The only thing I could do was get on my bike and go forward." After signing with Reprise, the band went to work on recording its major label debut, Dookie.

 

Released in February 1994, and recorded in 3 weeks, Dookie became a commercial success, helped by extensive MTV airplay for the videos of the songs "Longview", "Basket Case", and "When I Come Around", all of which reached the number one position on the Modern Rock Tracks charts. That year, Green Day embarked on a nationwide tour with queercore band Pansy Division as its opening act. At a September 9, 1994 concert at Boston Esplanade, mayhem broke-out during the band's set (cut short to seven songs) and by the end of the rampage, 100 people were injured and 45 arrested. The band also joined the lineups of both the Lollapalooza festival and Woodstock 1994, where they started an infamous mud fight. During the concert, a security guard mistook bassist Mike Dirnt for a stage-invading fan and punched out some of his teeth. Viewed by millions by pay-per-view television, the Woodstock 1994 performance further aided Green Day's growing publicity and recognition, and helped push its album to eventual diamond status. In 1995, Dookie won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album and the band was nominated for 9 MTV Video Music Awards including Video of the Year.

 

In 1995, a new single for the Angus soundtrack was released, titled "J.A.R.". The single went straight to number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The song was followed by the band's new album, Insomniac, which was released in the fall of 1995. Insomniac was a much darker and heavier response by the band, compared to the poppier, more melodic Dookie. Insomniac opened to a warm critical reception, earning 4 out of 5 stars from Rolling Stone, which said "In punk, the good stuff actually unfolds and gains meaning as you listen without sacrificing any of its electric, haywire immediacy. And Green Day are as good as this stuff gets." Insomniac used a piece of art by Winston Smith entitled God Told Me to Skin You Alive for its album cover. The singles released from Insomniac were "Geek Stink Breath", "Brain Stew/Jaded", "Walking Contradiction", and "Stuck With Me". Though the album did not approach the success of Dookie, it still sold two million copies in the United States. Insomniac won the band award nominations for Favorite Artist, Favorite Hard Rock Artist, and Favorite Alternative Artist at the 1996 American Music Awards, and the video for "Walking Contradiction" got the band a Grammy nomination for Best Video, Short Form, in addition to a Best Special Effects nomination at the MTV Video Music Awards. After that, the band abruptly canceled a European tour, citing exhaustion.

 

After taking a break in 1996, Green Day began to work on a new album in 1997. From the outset, both the band and Cavallo agreed that the album had to be different from its previous records. The result was Nimrod, an experimental deviation from the band's standard pop-punk brand of music. The new album was released in October 1997. It provided a variety of music, from pop-punk, surf rock, and ska, to an acoustic ballad. Nimrod entered the charts at number 10. The success of "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" won the band an MTV Video Award for Best Alternative Video for the song's video, which depicted people undergoing major changes in their lives while Billie Joe Armstrong strummed his acoustic guitar. The song was also used in the second "clip show" episode of Seinfeld and on two episodes of ER. The other singles released from Nimrod were "Nice Guys Finish Last", "Hitchin' a Ride" and "Redundant". The band made a guest appearance in an episode of King of the Hill entitled "The Man Who Shot Cane Skretteberg", which aired in 1997.

 

In 2000, Green Day released Warning, a step further in the style that they had hinted at with Nimrod. Critics' reviews of the album were varied. Allmusic gave it 4.5/5 saying "Warning may not be an innovative record per se, but it's tremendously satisfying." Rolling Stone was more critical, giving it 3/5, and saying "Warning... invites the question: Who wants to listen to songs of faith, hope and social commentary from what used to be snot-core's biggest-selling band?" Though it produced the hit "Minority" and a smaller hit with "Warning", some observers were coming to the conclusion that the band was losing relevance, and a decline in popularity followed. While all of Green Day's past albums had reached a status of at least double platinum, Warning was only certified gold.

 

At the 2001 California Music Awards, Green Day won all eight awards that they were nominated for. They won the awards for Outstanding Album (Warning), Outstanding Punk Rock/Ska Album (Warning), Outstanding Group, Outstanding Male Vocalist, Outstanding Bassist, Outstanding Drummer, Outstanding Songwriter and Outstanding Artist.

 

In the summer of 2003 the band went into a studio to write and record new material for a new album, tentatively titled Cigarettes and Valentines. After completing 20 tracks, the master tapes were stolen from the studio. The band chose not to try to re-create the stolen album, but instead started over. By the end of 2003, Green Day collaborated with Iggy Pop on two tracks for his album Skull Ring. On February 1, 2004 a new song, a cover of "I Fought the Law" made its debut on a commercial for iTunes during NFL Super Bowl XXXVIII. The band underwent serious "band therapy," engaging in several long talks to work out the members' differences after accusations from Dirnt and Cool that Armstrong was "the band's Nazi" and a show-off bent on taking the limelight from the other band members.

 

The resulting 2004 album, American Idiot, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts, the band's first ever album to top the chart, backed by the success of the album's first single, "American Idiot." The album was billed as a "punk rock opera" which follows the journey of the fictitious "Jesus of Suburbia". American Idiot won the 2005 Grammy for "Best Rock Album" and the band swept the 2005 MTV music awards, winning a total of seven of the eight awards they were nominated for, including the coveted Viewer's Choice Award.

 

In 2006, Green Day won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" which spent 16 weeks at the number one position of Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks, a record it shared along with Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Scar Tissue" and Staind's "It's Been Awhile," (the record has been since been beaten by Foo Fighters' 2007 hit "The Pretender" which reigned at the top spot for 18 weeks).

 

The new album, titled 21st Century Breakdown, was released worldwide on May 15, 2009. It received rave reviews from the likes of Nirvana's Krist Novoselic. The album had mainly positive reception from critics, getting an average rating between 4 and 5 stars. After the release, the album hit #1 in fourteen different countries, hitting Gold or Platinum in each. 21st Century Breakdown achieved Green Day's best chart performance to date. The band started playing shows in California in April and early May. It was their first live show in about 3 years. Green Day is currently on a world tour that started in North America in July, 2009 and continuing around the world throughout the rest of 2009 and early 2010.

 

Green Day's sound is often compared to first wave punk bands such as the Ramones, The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Jam, and the Buzzcocks. The majority of their song catalog is composed of overdriven guitar, fast, manic drums, and relatively high-treble bass. Most of their songs are fast-paced and under four minutes. Billie Joe Armstrong has mentioned that some of his biggest influences are seminal alternative rock bands Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, and that their influence is particularly noted in the band's chord changes in songs. Among other influences, Green Day have also cited Queen, proto-punks The Who, and power pop pioneers Cheap Trick. Armstrong's lyrics commonly describe alienation, ("Jesus of Suburbia", "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Road to Acceptance", "Disappearing Boy", "Castaway") hysteria ("Basket Case", "Panic Song", "American Eulogy"), girls ("She", "80" "Only of You","Maria" "She's a Rebel"), growing up ("Longview" and "Welcome to Paradise"), and the effects of doing drugs ("Geek Stink Breath", "Green Day", "Give Me Novacaine"). The Ramones had similar lyrical themes such as hysteria ("Anxiety", "Psycho Therapy"), alienation ("Outsider", "Something To Believe In"), girls ("I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend", "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker"), and drugs ("Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "Chinese Rocks").

 

Green Day discography

 

1994 "Longview" - US Alternative #1 - US Mainstream Rock #13

1994 "Welcome to Paradise" - Alt #7

1994 "Basket Case" - Alt #1 - Main #9

1995 "She" - Alt #5 - Main #18

1995 "When I Come Around" - Alt #1 Main #2

1995 "J.A.R. (Jason Andrew Relva)" - Alt #1 - Main #17

1995 "Geek Stink Breath" - Alt #3 - Main #9

1996 "Brain Stew / Jaded" - Alt #3 - Main #8

1996 "Walking Contradiction" - Alt #21 - Main #25

1997 "Hitchin' a Ride" - Alt #5 - Main #9

1997 "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" - Alt#2 - Main #7

1998 "Redundant" - Alt #16

1999 "Nice Guys Finish Last" - Alt #31

2000 "Minority" - Hot 100 #101 - Alt #1 - Main #15

2000 "Warning" - Hot 100 #114 - Alt #3 - Main #24

2001 "Waiting" - Alt #26

2004 "American Idiot" - Hot #61 - Alt #1 - Main #5

2004 "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" - Hot #2 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2005 "Holiday" - Hot #19 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2005 "Wake Me Up When September Ends" - Hot #6 - Alt #2 - Main #12

2005 "Jesus of Suburbia" - Alt #27

2006 "The Saints Are Coming" (w/U2) - Hot #51 - Alt #22 - Main #33

2007 "Working Class Hero" - Hot #53 - Alt #10 - Main #18

2007 "The Simpsons Theme" - Hot #106

2009 "Know Your Enemy" - Hot #28 - Alt #1 - Main #1 - Rock #1

2009 "21 Guns" - Hot #22 - Alt #3 - Main #17 - Rock #5

2009 "East Jesus Nowhere" - Alt #21 - Main #35 - Rock #27

 

 

Factoid: Green Day performed "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Teenage Lobotomy" when the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

 

"21 Guns"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-mmikpnlk

[knightni]

31. The Killers

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 45 points - highest ranking #4 Cali

 

The Killers are a rock band from Las Vegas, Nevada, formed in 2002. The band consists of Brandon Flowers (vocals, keyboards, synths), Dave Keuning (guitar, backing vocals), Mark Stoermer (bass guitar) and Ronnie Vannucci Jr. (drums, percussion).

 

Part of the post-punk revival movement, The Killers draw their influences from music styles of the 1980s. The group's debut album, Hot Fuss (2004) brought the band mainstream success. The Killers' second album, Sam's Town, was released in 2006, and the compilation album Sawdust containing B-sides, rarities, and new material, was released in 2007. Their third studio album, Day & Age, produced by Stuart Price, was released in 2008.

 

The Killers released their album Hot Fuss in June 2004 in the United Kingdom on Marrakesh Records, and in the United States on Island Records. Hot Fuss has been classified 4x Platinum by the BPI and 3x Platinum by RIAA. The band also had chart success with its singles "Mr. Brightside", which reached the Top 10 in the UK when released, and "All These Things That I've Done". However, their main mainstream success came when they scored a number three chart position in the UK with their re-release of "Somebody Told Me".

 

The members of the band appeared as themselves in the episode "The New Era" of the teen television drama The O.C., which aired in December 2004. In July 2005, The Killers performed on the London stage of the Live 8 concert, playing "All These Things That I've Done". Robbie Williams incorporated the song's refrain "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" into his own performance. Coldplay and U2 followed suit and, at their separate concerts played in Las Vegas, with The Killers in the crowd, incorporated the line into their songs "God Put a Smile Upon Your Face" and "Beautiful Day", respectively.

 

The Killers' second album, Sam's Town, was released in October 2006 under Island Def Jam Music Group. Brandon Flowers said that Sam's Town would be "one of the best albums people would remember 20 years from now", though the album received a mixed response from critics and fans. The album sold over 706,000 copies worldwide in the first week of release, with a number two debut on the Billboard chart. The record sold over a million copies by January 2007. The album produced four singles in the United Kingdom and United States: "When You Were Young" released in September 2006, "Bones" which was released in November 2006, "Read My Mind" which was released in February 2007, and "For Reasons Unknown" which was released in June 2007. The first single from Sam's Town, "When You Were Young", entered the chart on downloads alone at number five, and the following week on its official release went to number two on the UK Singles Chart.

 

The Killers finished working on a third album, which was released on November 24, 2008 in the UK and November 25, 2008 in North America. Brandon Flowers confirmed the album's title as Day & Age in an interview with NME. They worked with Stuart Price who did the Thin White Duke remix of "Mr Brightside" and produced "Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf" and "Sweet Talk". The first single from the album was "Human", although originally planned for Sawdust, it was released on September 22, with the music video released on iTunes on October 16. The band released a third Christmas single in December 2008, "Joseph, Better You Than Me". It features Elton John and Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys. Proceeds from the downloads will benefit Product Red. Day & Age became the band's third studio album to reach number one in both the UK and Ireland, it reached number six on the Billboard 200 album chart.

 

Since going platinum, the band (and principally Flowers) have incited a few rivalries—most notably with The Bravery and Fall Out Boy, who are both labelmates (Island Records). Flowers has said that these bands, especially The Bravery, are riding on the coattails of the success of The Killers, to which Bravery frontman Sam Endicott replied calling Flowers 'A Little Girl' and a 'Kid in a Wheelchair'.

 

Additionally, in an article of NME, Flowers claimed Fall Out Boy was hogging the A&R man both bands share, setting off Fall Out Boy's bassist Pete Wentz. However, after Wentz made a couple of rants on his blog in September 2005, he offered a virtual cease-fire. Flowers has since apologized to The Bravery, Fall Out Boy, and Panic at the Disco, saying "I'd like to take it all back - these people are just doing what they want to do, just like I am," and said that he was "not proud of" his actions.

 

Fired by The Killers in May 2005 during their ascent to worldwide fame, Merrick filed a $16 million breach-of-contract suit in federal court in Los Angeles against the Las Vegas-based band in February 2006. His chief complaint was that after the band began making millions with its original release, "Hot Fuss," and touring worldwide, they simply stopped paying him his reported 25% service fee (from the band's annual gross income) for a contract that Merrick claimed ran through 2007. The Killers swiftly filed their own breach-of-contract counter suit, alleging Merrick's poor management had cost the band millions. The lawsuit was dismissed on October 9 2009. Merrick is now a partner at a new music label, Bright Antenna.

 

The Killers discography

 

2004 "Somebody Told Me" - US Hot 100 #51 - US Alt #3 - US Dance Club #31

2004 "Mr. Brightside" - Hot #10 - US Pop #5 - Alt #3 - Dance #4

2004 "All These Things That I've Done" - Hot #74 - Pop #58 - Alt #10

2005 "Smile Like You Mean It" - Alt #15

2005 "Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll" - Hot #113 - Pop #71

2006 "When You Were Young" - Hot #14 - Pop #18 - Alt #1 - Dance #5

2006 "Bones" - Alt #21

2006 "A Great Big Sled"(feat. Toni Halliday) - Hot #54 - Pop #42

2007 "Read My Mind" - Hot #62 - Pop #62 - Alt #8 - Dance #1

2007 "Shadowplay" - Hot #68 - Pop #43 - Alt #19

2007 "Don't Shoot Me Santa" - Hot #108 - Pop #73

2008 "Human" - Hot #32 - Pop #39 - Alt #6 - Dance #1

"Spaceman" - Hot #67 - Alt #8 - Dance #2

"A Dustland Fairytale" - Alt #36

 

 

Factoid: Although they are from Nevada, The Killers have had more chart success in the UK than in the US.

 

 

"Mr. Brightside"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-nzlmawos

[knightni]

30. Boston

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 46 points - highest ranking #4 Milkman delivers

 

Boston is an American rock band from Boston, Massachusetts that achieved its most notable successes during the 1970s and 1980s. Centered on guitarist, keyboardist, songwriter, and producer Tom Scholz, the band is a staple of classic rock radio playlists. Boston's best-known works include the songs "More Than a Feeling", "Peace of Mind", "Foreplay/Long Time", "Rock and Roll Band", "Smokin'", "Don't Look Back" and "Amanda". They have sold over 31 million albums in the United States, of which 17 million are their self-titled album.

 

he debut album, Boston, released in August 1976, was an enormous success. The record ranks as the best-selling debut album in U.S. history with over 17 million copies sold.

 

During the summer and fall of 1976, Boston attracted much publicity due to the unprecedented record sales by an unknown act, its unique sound, and singer Brad Delp's abilities. However, there was "a conscious effort to de-emphasize Scholz as the total mastermind behind Boston." After opening for Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Foghat and others, the band embarked on a headlining tour in the winter & spring of 1977 to support the album. This helped establish Boston as one of rock's top acts within a short time, being nominated for a Grammy award as a "Best New Artist". Boston was the first band in history to make their New York City debut at Madison Square Garden.

 

The album spawned three singles, "More Than a Feeling", "Long Time" and "Peace of Mind", all which charted on national charts. Additionally, the album peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200 and remained on the charts for 132 weeks.

 

Despite having problems with manager Paul Ahern, being caught in the middle of a fight between Ahern and McKenzie, and doing most of the recording work alone, Scholz completed the second Boston album two years after the debut album's release. The sophomore album, Don't Look Back, was officially released by Epic in August 1978.

 

At the time this was considered a long gap between albums, but Scholz still considered Don't Look Back to be a rush job and was unhappy with the album's second side in particular. Overall Don't Look Back sold about half as well as the debut album, eventually shipping over 7 million records.

 

Another tour followed, and the album's title track became a Top 5 hit. Additionally, two other singles, "A Man I'll Never Be", and "Feelin' Satisfied" went Top 40 and Top 50 respectively. Despite the success, Scholz's relationship with Ahern completely deteriorated. Delayed by technical renovations to his studio, Scholz eventually began the process of working on Boston's third album, determined to complete the album at his own pace and up to his demanding standard.

 

In late 1979, Scholz began writing new material, but Boston's former co-manager, Paul Ahern, argued that, according to an agreement Scholz had signed years earlier with Ahern, Ahern owned a percentage of all songs Scholz wrote from that point on. Delayed further by the dispute, Scholz suggested, in the meantime, the individual members should work on whatever other projects they might be considering. Goudreau then decided to record a solo album which featured Boston members Delp and Hashian, and which was recorded with the help of an engineer and producer familiar with Scholz' studio techniques. The album, released in 1980, was titled Barry Goudreau and featured a minor charting single "Dreams". There was tension when CBS's marketing connected the album to Boston's signature guitar sound, despite Scholz playing most of the guitar tracks on the Boston albums. Scholz objected to the ad copy, but it became irrelevant when Epic dropped promotion on Goudreau's album citing lack of interest. Goudreau ended up leaving the band in 1981, and forming the band Orion the Hunter. Delp contributed vocals and co-wrote songs on their debut album, but returned to Boston and recorded vocals on the third album.

 

While Scholz and Delp were recording new material for the third Boston album, CBS filed a 60 million dollar lawsuit against Scholz, alleging breach of contract for failing to deliver a new Boston album on time.

 

The legal trouble slowed progress toward the completion of the next album, which took six years to record and produce. Joining Scholz in the album's development again were Delp and Jim Masdea. In 1985, guitarist Gary Pihl left Sammy Hagar's touring band to work with Scholz as both a musician and an SR&D executive. As CBS v. Scholz played out in court, CBS opted to withhold royalty payments to Scholz, hoping to force him to settle on unfavorable terms.

 

The lawsuit's first round was eventually decided in Scholz' favor, and Scholz moved the band to MCA Records.

 

Despite the adversity, progress continued to be made on the third Boston album. A tape of one of the songs, "Amanda", leaked out of the studio in 1984. The song became the lead single when Third Stage was finally released in September 1986.

 

Third Stage was the strongest charting Boston release to date. The album and lead single "Amanda" both went to #1 on Billboard, and subsequent singles, "We're Ready" and "Can'tcha Say" were Top 5 and Top 30 respectively.

 

The group headed off on tour to promote Third Stage in 1987 and 1988. Third Stage was played in sequence in its entirety during the shows, with expanded arrangements of some cuts. For the tour the group was joined by Doug Huffman and David Sikes, both of whom stayed with the band into the mid-1990s.

 

The CBS case took seven years to run its course, and in April 1990 Scholz won. A jury awarded him millions in unpaid royalties and punitive damages.

 

By Spring 1990, Scholz was back in the studio working on the band's fourth studio album. Later that year, Delp told Scholz he wanted to concentrate on other projects, and might not be available for some time. With Delp's departure, Scholz was now the last remaining original member. Before he left, Delp co-wrote the song "Walk On" with Scholz and David Sikes, which eventually became the title track of the new album.

 

Delp subsequently joined Barry Goudreau's new band, RTZ. Scholz eventually replaced him with Fran Cosmo, who had previously been in Goudreau's previous band Orion the Hunter.

 

For the second album in a row, and for the second time in a decade, Scholz's work was unavoidably delayed by renovations to his studio. In the end, eight years passed between Third Stage and Walk On, which was released in June 1994. Walk On was certified platinum by the RIAA, but only reached #7 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. It failed to chart in the Top 5 like all their previous albums. It produced one hit single, "I Need Your Love" which was widely played on some rock radio stations. Delp reunited with Boston at the end of 1994. Their first appearance was for two benefit shows at the House of Blues on December 12 & 13th, 1994 in Cambridge. The band also handed a check of $5,000 to Globe Santa and another check of $5,000 to Operation Christmas in Fall River.

 

The group, with Delp now back in the band, toured in the summer of 1995 with both Cosmo and Delp combining vocals. By this time drummer Huffman had been replaced by Curly Smith, who was previously with Jo Jo Gunne. Following the conclusion of the "Livin' For You" tour in 1995, Scholz announces that a greatest hits album would be released. Initially planned for release in August 1996, the album was pushed back to a 1997 release date.

 

Scholz headed back to the studio in 1998 to begin work on a fifth album, which eventually turned out to be Corporate America. The title track of "Corporate America" was uploaded by Tom Scholz to MP3.com under the pseudonym of "Downer's Revenge" in early 2002 in order to test the album's appeal to a younger demographic. The song reached #2 on the progressive rock charts on the website for two weeks.

 

November 2002 marked the official release of Corporate America on the independent label, Artemis Records. This album featured the largest Boston lineup ever; returning members included Delp and Cosmo on guitar and lead vocals, Scholz on lead guitar and organ, and Gary Pihl on guitar, along with new members Anthony Cosmo on rhythm guitar, Jeff Neal on drums and Kimberley Dahme on bass and vocals. Dahme, Delp and Cosmo all contributed lead vocals to the album. The group embarked on a national tour in support of the album in 2003 and 2004. In 2006, the first two Boston albums appeared in remastered form.

 

On March 9, 2007, lead singer, Brad Delp, took his own life at his home in Atkinson, New Hampshire. Police found Delp dead in his bathroom, along with several notes for whoever would find him. In the bathroom where Delp committed suicide, two charcoal grills were found, and the door sealed. Police Lt. William Baldwin called the death "untimely" and said that no foul play was indicated. Delp was alone at the time of his death according to the police report. Delp's death was a result of suicide and he was found by his fiancée, who saw a dryer hose attached to his car. According to the New Hampshire medical examiner, Delp's death was the result of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning as evidenced by carboxyhemoglobin. Delp's last concert with Boston was performed at Boston Symphony Hall on November 13, 2006 at a concert honoring Doug Flutie.

 

A concert in honor of Delp named Come Together: A Tribute to Brad Delp occurred on August 19, 2007 at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston. The concert included, in order of appearance, Ernie and the Automatics, Beatlejuice, Farrenheit, Extreme, Godsmack, RTZ, Orion the Hunter, and finally the current version of Boston.

 

All of the living members of Boston were invited to perform in the concert on August 19. The singers for Boston included Michael Sweet of Stryper, former band member Curly Smith, band member Kimberley Dahme, and Tommy DeCarlo. Another former Boston vocalist Fran Cosmo was unable to sing because of a ruptured blood vessel in his throat but did play guitar. Jim Masdea, Fran Sheehan and even Barry Goudreau joined Scholz and the rest of the band on stage for the finale, "Don't Look Back". Curly Smith and Kimberley Dahme split the lead vocal on the finale.

 

Boston's genre is considered by most to be classic rock, while combining elements of progressive rock and heavy metal into their music. Former singer Brad Delp was well known for his extended vocal ranges, shown on hits such as "More Than a Feeling."

 

Guitarist and primary song writer Tom Scholz' blend of musical styles, ranging from classical to 1960s English pop, has resulted in a unique sound, most consistently realized on the first two albums (Boston and Don't Look Back). This sound is characterized by multiple lead and blended harmonies guitar work (usually harmonized in thirds), often alternating between and then mixing electric and acoustic guitars. Scholz and Brian May are well regarded for the development of complex, multi-tracked guitar harmonies. Another contributing factor is the use of handmade, high tech equipment, such as the Rockman, used by artists such as Journey guitarist Neal Schon, the band ZZ Top, and Ted Nugent. Def Leppard's album Hysteria was created using only Rockman technology. Scholz' production style combines deep, aggressive, comparatively short guitar riffing and nearly ethereal, generally longer note vocal harmonies. A heavier, lower and darker overall approach came in the next two albums (Third Stage and Walk On). The original track, "Higher Power," on the Greatest Hits album exhibits a near Germanic, almost techno influence with its sequencer-sounding keyboards, a sound most fully realized on Corporate America's title track.

 

Singer Brad Delp, who was strongly influenced by the Beatles, is also credited for helping to create Boston's sound with his signature vocal sound, one that associates him with Boston as closely as Freddie Mercury is with Queen, Mick Jagger with The Rolling Stones, Steve Perry with Journey, Roger Daltrey with The Who, Dennis DeYoung with Styx, and Steve Walsh with Kansas - all fellow classic rock bands.

 

Boston discography

 

1976 "More Than a Feeling" - Hot 100 #5

1977 "Foreplay/Long Time" - Hot 100 #22

1977 "Peace of Mind" - Hot 100 #38

1978 "Don't Look Back" - Hot 100 #4

1978 "A Man I'll Never Be" - Hot 100 #31

1979 "Feelin' Satisfied" - Hot 100 #46

1986 "Amanda" - Hot 100 #1 - Mainstream Rock #1

1986 "We're Ready" - Hot 100 #9 - Main #2

1987 "Cool the Engines" - Main #4

1987 "Can'tcha Say (You Believe in Me)" - Hot #20 - Main #7

1994 "I Need Your Love" - Hot #51 - Main #4

1994 "Walk on Medley" - Main #14

 

 

Factoid: Lead singer Tommy DeCarlo, is a Boston fan from North Carolina who was chosen to sing based on his performances of Boston cover songs on his MySpace page. While Boston tours, he's on leave of absence from his job at The Home Depot.

 

"Foreplay/Long Time"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-ulvbaqrm

 

 

[knightni]

29. Cream / Eric Clapton

 

 

4 of 24 lists - 46 points - highest ranking #8 Flash Tizzle

 

Cream were a 1960s British blues-rock band and supergroup consisting of bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce, guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton, and drummer Ginger Baker. Their sound was characterized by a hybrid of blues, hard rock and psychedelic rock. Combining Clapton's blues guitar playing with the powerful voice and intense basslines of Jack Bruce and the jazz-influenced drumming of Ginger Baker, they have sold over 35 million albums worldwide. Wheels of Fire was the world's first platinum-selling double album. Cream are widely regarded as being the world's first notable and functioning supergroup.

 

Cream's music included songs based on traditional blues such as "Crossroads" and "Spoonful", and modern blues such as "Born Under a Bad Sign", as well as more eccentric songs such as "Strange Brew", "Tales of Brave Ulysses" and "Toad". Cream's biggest hits were "I Feel Free" (UK, #11), "Sunshine of Your Love" (US, #5), "White Room" (US, #6), "Crossroads" (US, #28), and "Badge".

 

Cream, together with The Jimi Hendrix Experience, made a significant impact upon the popular music of the time, and along with Hendrix popularized the use of the wah-wah pedal. They provided a heavy yet technically proficient musical theme that foreshadowed and influenced the emergence of English bands such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and The Jeff Beck Group in the late 1960s. The band's live performances influenced progressive rock acts such as Rush, jam bands such as The Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead, Phish and heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath

 

Cream was ranked #16 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock and Rolling Stone Magazine named them the sixty-sixth greatest artist of all time.

 

By July 1966, Eric Clapton's career with The Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers had earned him a reputation as the premier blues guitarist in Britain. Clapton's virtuosity and raw power with the instrument inspired one fan to spray paint the words "Clapton is God" on the wall of an Islington underground station. Clapton, however, found the environment of Mayall's band confining, and sought to expand his playing in a new band.

 

In 1966, Clapton met Baker, then the leader of the Graham Bond Organisation, which at one point featured Jack Bruce on bass, harmonica and piano. Baker, too, felt stifled in the GBO, and had grown tired of Graham Bond's drug addictions and bouts of mental instability. "I had always liked Ginger", explained Clapton. "Ginger had come to see me play with John Mayall. After the gig he drove me back to London in his Rover. I was very impressed with his car and driving. He was telling me that he wanted to start a band, and I had been thinking about it too." Each was impressed with the other's playing abilities, prompting Baker to ask Clapton to join his new, then-unnamed group. Clapton immediately agreed, on the condition that Baker hire Jack Bruce as the group's bassist; according to Clapton, Baker was so surprised at the suggestion that he almost crashed the car.

 

Clapton had met Bruce when the bassist/vocalist briefly played with the Bluesbreakers in March 1966; the two also had worked together as part of a one-shot band called Powerhouse (which also included Steve Winwood and Paul Jones). Impressed with Bruce's vocals and technical prowess, Clapton wanted to work with him on an ongoing basis.

 

What Clapton did not know was that while Bruce was in Bond's band, he and Baker had been notorious for their quarreling. While both were excellent jazz musicians and respected each other's skills, the confines of the GBO had proved too small for their egos. Their volatile relationship included on-stage fights and the sabotage of one another's instruments. After Baker fired Bruce from the band, Bruce continued to arrive for gigs; ultimately, Bruce was driven away from the band after Baker threatened him at knifepoint.

 

Nevertheless, Baker and Bruce were able to put aside their differences for the good of Baker's new trio, which he envisioned as collaborative, with each of the members contributing to music and lyrics. The band was named "Cream", as Clapton, Bruce, and Baker were already considered the "cream of the crop" amongst blues and jazz musicians in the exploding British music scene. Before deciding upon "Cream", the band considered calling themselves "Sweet 'n' Sour Rock 'n' Roll". Of the trio, Clapton had the biggest reputation in England; however, he was all but unknown in the United States, having left The Yardbirds before "For Your Love" hit the American Top Ten.

 

Cream made their unofficial debut at the Twisted Wheel on 29 July 1966. Their official debut came two nights later at the Sixth Annual Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival. Being new and with few original songs to their credit, Cream performed spirited blues reworkings that thrilled the large crowd and earned them a warm reception. In October, they also got a chance to jam with Jimi Hendrix, who had recently arrived in London. Hendrix was a fan of Clapton's music, and wanted a chance to play with him onstage. Hendrix was introduced to Cream through Chas Chandler, the bassist of The Animals, who was Hendrix's manager. It was during the early organization that they decided Bruce would serve as the group's lead vocalist.

 

Cream's debut album, Fresh Cream, was recorded and released in 1966. The album reached #6 in the UK charts and #39 in the United States. It mainly consisted of blues covers, including "Four Until Late", "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (written by Muddy Waters), "Spoonful" (written by Willie Dixon and recorded by Howlin' Wolf), "I'm So Glad" and "Cat's Squirrel". The rest of the album featured songs written (or co-written) by Jack Bruce, most notably "I Feel Free" (which was a UK hit single, but only included on the American edition of the LP), and two by Ginger Baker (one of which, "Toad", contained one of the earliest examples of a drum solo in rock music).

 

The early Cream bootlegs display a much tighter band showcasing more songs. All of the songs are reasonably short five-minute versions of "N.S.U.", "Sweet Wine" and "Toad". But a mere two months later, the setlist shortened, with the songs then much longer.

 

Cream first visited the United States in March 1967 to play nine dates at the RKO Theater in New York. They returned to record Disraeli Gears in New York between 11 May and 15 May 1967. Cream's second album was released in November 1967 and reached the Top 5 in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Produced by Felix Pappalardi (who later co-founded the Cream-influenced quartet Mountain) and engineer Tom Dowd, it was recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York. Disraeli Gears is often considered to be the band's defining effort, successfully blending psychedelic British rock with American blues. It was also the first Cream album to consist primarily of original songs, with only three of the eleven tracks written by others outside the band. Disraeli Gears not only features hits "Strange Brew" and "Tales of Brave Ulysses", but also "Sunshine of Your Love".

 

Although the album is considered one of Cream's finest efforts, it has never been well represented in Cream's live sets. Although they consistently played "Tales of Brave Ulysses" and "Sunshine of Your Love", a setlist consisting of several songs from Disraeli Gears was quickly dropped from the set in mid-1967, favoring longer jams instead of short pop songs. "We're Going Wrong" was the only additional song from the album which saw some occasional play time in their live sets. In fact, at their 2005 reunion shows in London, Cream only played three songs from Disraeli Gears: "Outside Woman Blues," "We're Going Wrong," and "Sunshine of Your Love."

 

In August 1967, Cream played their first headlining dates in America, playing at the Fillmore West in San Fransisco for the first time. The concerts were a great success and proved very influential on both the band itself and the flourishing hippy scene surrounding them. Faced with a new listening audience, it was during this time that Cream started to stretch out on stage, incorporating more jamming time in their repertoire, some songs reaching 20 minutes. Long drawn-out jams in numbers like "Spoonful", "N.S.U." and "Sweet Wine" became live favorites while songs like "Sunshine of Your Love", "Crossroads", and "Tales of Brave Ulysses" remained reasonably short.

 

In 1968 came Cream's third release, Wheels of Fire, which topped the American charts. Wheels of Fire studio recordings showcased Cream moving slightly away from the blues and more towards a semi-progressive rock style highlighted by odd time signatures and various orchestral instruments. However, the band did record Howlin' Wolf's "Sitting on Top of the World" and Albert King's "Born Under A Bad Sign". According to a BBC interview with Clapton, the record company, also handling Albert King, asked the band to cover "Born Under a Bad Sign", which became a popular track off the record. The opening song, "White Room", became a radio staple. Another song, "Politician", was written by the band while waiting to perform live at the BBC. The album's second disc featured three live recordings from the Winterland Ballroom and one from the Fillmore. Eric Clapton's second solo from "Crossroads" has made it to the top 20 in multiple "greatest guitar solo" lists. Ginger Baker's "Toad" is now widely-regarded as one of the greatest live drum solos in rock history.

 

After the completion of Wheels of Fire in mid-1968, the band members had had enough and wanted to go their separate ways. As Baker would state in a 2006 interview with Music Mart magazine, "It just got to the point where Eric said to me: 'I've had enough of this,' and I said so have I. I couldn't stand it. The last year with Cream was just agony. It damaged my hearing permanently, and today I've still got a hearing problem because of the sheer volume throughout the last year of Cream. But it didn't start off like that. In 1966, it was great. It was really a wonderful experience musically, and it just went into the realms of stupidity." Also, Bruce and Baker's combustible relationship proved even worse as a result of the strain put upon the band by non-stop touring, forcing Clapton to play the perpetual role of peacekeeper.

 

Clapton had also fallen under the spell of Bob Dylan's former backing group, now known as The Band, and their debut album, Music from Big Pink, which proved to be a welcome breath of fresh air in comparison to the incense and psychedelia that had informed Cream. Furthermore, he had read a scathing Cream review in Rolling Stone magazine, a publication he had much admired, where the reviewer, Jon Landau, called him a "master of the blues cliché." It was in the wake of that article that Clapton wanted to end Cream and pursue a different musical direction.

 

At the beginning of their farewell tour on 4 October 1968, in Oakland, nearly the entire set consisted of songs from Wheels of Fire: "White Room", "Politician", "Crossroads", "Spoonful", "Deserted Cities of the Heart", and "Passing the Time" taking place of "Toad" for a drum solo. "Passing the Time" and "Deserted Cities" were quickly removed from the setlist and replaced by "Sitting on Top of the World" and "Toad".

 

Cream was eventually persuaded to do one final album. That album, the appropriately titled Goodbye, was recorded in late 1968 and released in early 1969, after the band had broken up. It featured six songs: three live recordings dating from a concert at The Forum in Los Angeles, California, on 19 October, and three new studio recordings (the most notable, "Badge", was written by Clapton and George Harrison, who also played rhythm guitar). "I'm So Glad", which first appeared as a studio recording on Fresh Cream, appeared as a live track on Goodbye. It was the only song to appear on both Cream's first and last albums.

 

Cream's "farewell tour" consisted of 22 shows at 19 venues in the United States between 4 October and 4 November 1968, and two final farewell concerts at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 November 1968. Initially another double album was planned, comprising live material from this tour plus new studio tracks, but a single album, Goodbye was released instead with three live tracks taken from their performance at The Forum in Los Angeles on 19 October 1968, and three studio tracks, one written by each of the band members. The final United States gig was at the Rhode Island Auditorium, 4 November 1968.

 

The two Royal Albert Hall concerts were filmed for a BBC documentary and released on video (and later DVD) as Farewell Concert. Both shows were sold out and attracted more attention than any other Cream concert, but their performance was regarded by many as below standard. Baker himself said of the concerts: "It wasn’t a good gig ... Cream was better than that ... We knew it was all over. We knew we were just finishing it off, getting it over with." Cream's live performances were already declining. In an interview from Cream: Classic Artists, Ginger Baker himself agreed that the band was getting worse by the minute.

 

Cream's supporting acts were Taste (featuring a young Rory Gallagher) and the newly formed Yes, who received good reviews. Three performances early in Cream's farewell tour were opened by Deep Purple. Purple had originally agreed to open the entire U.S. leg of the tour, but Cream's management removed Purple after only three shows, in spite of favorable reviews and good rapport between the bands. Purple fans sometimes attribute the decision to Purple's being "too good" to open - and upstaging the declining Cream.

 

From its creation, Cream was faced with some fundamental problems that would later lead to its dissolution in November 1968. The rivalry between Bruce and Baker created tensions in the band. Clapton also felt that the members of the band did not listen to each other enough. Clapton once told a story that when Cream were playing in a concert, he stopped playing and neither Baker nor Bruce noticed. Clapton has also commented that Cream's later gigs mainly consisted of its members showing off. Cream decided that it would break up in May 1968 during a tour of the US. Later, in July, an official announcement was made that the band would break up after a farewell tour of the United States and after playing two concerts in London. Cream finished its tour of the United States with a 4 November concert in Rhode Island and performed in the UK for the last time in London on 25 and 26 November.

 

Blind Faith was formed immediately after the demise of Cream, following an attempt by Clapton to recruit Steve Winwood into the band in the hope that he would help act as a buffer between Bruce and Baker. Inspired by more song-based acts Clapton went on to perform much different, less improvisational material with Delaney & Bonnie, Derek and the Dominos and in his own long and varied solo career.

 

Jack Bruce began a varied and successful solo career with the 1969 release of Songs for a Tailor, while Ginger Baker formed a jazz-fusion ensemble out of the ashes of Blind Faith called Ginger Baker's Air Force, which featured Winwood, Blind Faith bassist Rick Grech, Graham Bond on sax, and guitarist Denny Laine of the Moody Blues and (later) Wings.

 

In 1993, Cream was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and set aside their differences to perform at the induction ceremony. Initially, the trio was wary about performing, until encouraging words from Robbie Robertson inspired them to try. The end result was an incendiary set consisting of "Sunshine of Your Love", "Crossroads", and - interestingly, as the band had never played it live during their original tenure - "Born Under a Bad Sign". Clapton mentioned in his acceptance speech that their rehearsal the day before the ceremony had marked the first time they had played together in 25 years. This performance spurred rumours of a reunion tour. Bruce and Baker went so far as to say in later interviews that they were, indeed, interested in touring as Cream. A formal reunion did not take place immediately, as Clapton, Bruce and Baker continued to pursue solo projects, although the latter two worked together again in the mid-1990s as two-thirds of a power trio BBM with Irish blues-rock guitarist Gary Moore.

 

Clapton Solo Career

 

Clapton's career successes in the 1970s were in stark contrast to his personal life, which was troubled by romantic longings and drug and alcohol addiction. In addition to his (temporarily) unrequited and intense attraction to Pattie Boyd, he withdrew from recording and touring to isolation in his Surrey, England residence. There he nursed his heroin addiction, resulting in a career hiatus interrupted only by the Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971 (where he passed out on stage, was revived, and continued the show).[8] In January 1973, The Who's Pete Townshend organised a comeback concert for Clapton at London's Rainbow Theatre aptly titled the "Rainbow Concert" to help Clapton kick his addiction. Clapton would return the favour by playing 'The Preacher' in Ken Russell's film version of The Who's Tommy in 1975; his appearance in the film (performing "Eyesight to the Blind") is notable as he is clearly wearing a fake beard in some shots, the result of deciding to shave off his real beard after the initial takes in an attempt to force the director to remove his earlier scene from the movie and leave the set.

 

In 1974, now partnered with Pattie (they would not actually marry until 1979) and no longer using heroin (although starting to drink heavily), Clapton put together a more low-key touring band that included Radle, Miami guitarist George Terry, keyboardist Dick Sims, drummer Jamie Oldaker and vocalists Yvonne Elliman and Marcy Levy (better known as Marcella Detroit who later recorded in the 1980s pop duo Shakespears Sister). With this band Clapton recorded 461 Ocean Boulevard (1974), an album with an emphasis on more compact songs and fewer guitar solos; the cover-version of "I Shot The Sheriff" was Clapton's first #1 hit and was important in bringing reggae and the music of Bob Marley to a wider audience. The 1975 album There's One in Every Crowd continued the trend of 461. The album's original title The World's Greatest Guitar Player (There's One In Every Crowd) was changed before pressing, as it was felt its ironic intention would be misunderstood. The band toured the world and subsequently released the 1975 live LP, E.C. Was Here.[citation needed] Clapton continued to release albums and toured regularly. Highlights of the era include No Reason to Cry, whose collaborators included Bob Dylan and The Band, and Slowhand, which featured "Wonderful Tonight", another song inspired by Pattie Boyd, and a second J.J. Cale cover, "Cocaine".

 

During an August 1976 concert in Birmingham, Clapton provoked a controversy that has continued to follow him when he made pointed remarks from the stage in support of British politician Enoch Powell's efforts to restrict immigration to the UK.

 

As Clapton recovered from his addictions, his album output continued in the 1980s, including two produced with Phil Collins, 1985's Behind the Sun, which produced the hits "Forever Man" and "She's Waiting", and 1986's August.

 

August, a polished release that was suffused with Collins's trademark drum and horn sound, became Clapton's biggest seller in the UK to date and matched his highest chart position, number 3. The album's first track, the hit "It's In The Way That You Use It", was also featured in the Tom Cruise-Paul Newman movie The Color of Money. The horn-peppered "Run" echoed Collins' "Sussudio" and rest of the producer's Genesis/solo output, while "Tearing Us Apart" (with Tina Turner) and the bitter "Miss You" echoed Clapton's angry sound. This rebound kicked off Clapton's two-year period of touring with Collins and their August collaborates, bassist Nathan East and keyboard player/songwriter Greg Phillinganes. While on tour for August, 2 concert videos were recorded of the four-man band, Eric Clapton Live from Montreux and Eric Clapton and Friends. Despite his own earlier battles with alcoholism, Clapton remade "After Midnight" as a single and a promotional track for the Michelob beer brand, which had also marketed earlier songs by Collins and Steve Winwood. Clapton won a British Academy Television Award for his collaboration with Michael Kamen on the score for the 1985 BBC television thriller serial Edge of Darkness. In 1989, Clapton released Journeyman, an album which covered a wide range of styles including blues, jazz, soul and pop. Collaborators included George Harrison, Phil Collins, Daryl Hall, Chaka Khan, Mick Jones, David Sanborn and Robert Cray.

 

The early 1990s saw tragedy enter Clapton's life again. On 27 August 1990, fellow guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, who was touring with Clapton, and two members of their road crew were killed in a helicopter crash between concerts. Then, on 20 March 1991, Conor, who was four years of age, died when he fell from the 53rd-storey window of his mother's friend's New York City apartment, landing on the roof of an adjacent four-storey building. Clapton's grief was expressed in the song "Tears in Heaven", which was co-written by Will Jennings. He received a total of six Grammy Awards that year for the single "Tears in Heaven" and his Unplugged album.

 

While Unplugged featured Clapton playing acoustic guitar, his 1994 album From the Cradle contained new versions of old blues standards highlighted by his electric guitar playing. Clapton's 1996 recording of the Wayne Kirkpatrick/Gordon Kennedy/Tommy Sims tune "Change the World" (featured in the soundtrack of the movie Phenomenon) won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1997, the same year he recorded Retail Therapy (an album of electronic music with Simon Climie under the pseudonym TDF). The following year, Clapton released the album Pilgrim, the first record featuring brand new material for almost a decade. Clapton finished the twentieth century with collaborations with Carlos Santana and B. B. King.

 

Following the release of the 2001 record Reptile, Eric performed "Layla" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at the Party at the Palace in 2002. On November 29 of that year the Concert for George was held at the Royal Albert Hall, a tribute to George Harrison who had died a year earlier of cancer. Clapton was a performer, and also the musical director. The concert featured Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Ravi Shankar, and others. In 2004, Clapton released two albums packed full of covers by legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, Me and Mr. Johnson and Sessions for Robert J. The same year Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Clapton #53 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".

 

Clapton has performed songs by myriad artists, which include Bob Marley, J.J. Cale, Bo Diddley and Bob Dylan. He cites Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin both in musical influence and on his style on the guitar. However, he holds no other artist higher in esteem as that of Robert Johnson. In his book, Discovering Robert Johnson (which he co-authored with several other writers), Clapton said of Johnson, that he was "...the most important blues musician who ever lived. He was true, absolutely, to his own vision, and as deep as I have gotten into the music over the last 30 years, I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice, really. ... it seemed to echo something I had always felt." In 1974, Clapton persuaded Freddie King to sign with RSO, Clapton's record label at the time. He has recorded more than six of J. J. Cale's originals and has put out an album with him. Other artists with whom Clapton has made collaborations include Frank Zappa, B.B. King, George Harrison, Santana, Ringo Starr, Roger Waters, John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band. Clapton also collaborated with singer/songwriter John Mayer on his 2006 album release, Continuum. Mayer cites Clapton in his liner notes Eric Clapton knows I steal from him and is still cool with it. Clapton and Mayer wrote several songs together which have yet to be released. Clapton's influence inspired Mayer to write "I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)" which loosely holds characteristics of Clapton's musical and fashion style. A popular misconception is that his Slowhand nickname is from his style of guitar playing, either because of his speed or a as joke on the fact that he played slowly. This name was created by The Yardbirds' manager because whenever Clapton broke a string he would disappear backstage whilst the audience would perform a 'Slow-hand' clap until he returned on stage.

 

Some guitarists that Clapton has influenced are: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duane Allman, Derek Trucks, Eddie Van Halen, John Mayer, and Alex Lifeson.

 

Cream/Clapton discography

 

1966 "I Feel Free" - #116

1968 "Anyone for Tennis" - #64

1968 "Sunshine of Your Love"/"SWLABR" - #5

1968 "White Room" - #6

1969 "Crossroads" - #28

1969 "Badge" - #60

1970 "Layla" / "Bell Bottom Blues" (w/Derek and the Dominos) - #10

1970 "After Midnight" - #18

1972 "Let It Rain" - #48

1974 "I Shot the Sheriff" - #1

1974 "Willie and the Hand Jive" - #26

1976 "Hello Old Friend" - #24

1977 "Lay Down Sally" / "Cocaine" - #3

1978 "Wonderful Tonight" - #16

1978 "Promises" #9 US

1980 "Cocaine" - #30

1980 "Blues Power" - #76

1981 "I Can't Stand It" - #10

1981 "Another Ticket" - #78

1983 "I've Got a Rock n Roll Heart" - #18

1985 "Forever Man" - #26

1985 "See What Love Can Do" - #89

1987 "It's In the Way That You Use It" - #1 US Rock

1989 "Bad Love" - #88

1990 "Pretending" - #55 US

1992 "Layla" (live, unplugged) - #12

1992 "Tears in Heaven" - #2

1998 "Change the World" - #5

 

Factoid: Eric Clapton was actually shy about singing. Early on, he occasionally harmonized with Jack Bruce in Cream but, in time, took lead vocals on some notable Cream tunes including "Four Until Late", "Strange Brew", "Crossroads", and "Badge".

 

"SWLABR"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-esoewyxg

 

 

 

[knightni]

28. Linkin Park

 

 

3 of 24 lists - 47 points - highest ranking #1 SoxAce

 

Linkin Park is an American rock band from Agoura Hills, California, formed in 1996. Since their formation, the band has sold more than 50 million albums and won two Grammy Awards. It achieved mainstream success with its debut album, Hybrid Theory, which was certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2005. Its following studio album, Meteora, continued the band's success, topping the Billboard 200’s album charts in 2003, and was followed by extensive touring and charity work around the world. In 2003, MTV2 named Linkin Park the sixth greatest band of the music video era and the third best of the new millennium behind Oasis and Coldplay.

 

Having adapted the nu metal and rap rock genres to a radio-friendly yet densely-layered style in Hybrid Theory and Meteora, the band explored other genres in their next studio album, Minutes to Midnight. The album topped the Billboard charts and had the third best debut week of any album that year. They have also collaborated with several other artists, most notably with rapper Jay-Z in their mashup album Collision Course, and many others on Reanimation.

 

Linkin Park released Hybrid Theory on October 24, 2000. The album, which represented half a decade’s worth of the band’s work, was edited by music producer Don Gilmore. Hybrid Theory was well received by music fans; the band sold more than 4.8 million records during its debut year, earning it the status of best-selling album of 2001, while singles such as "Crawling" and "One Step Closer" established themselves as staples among alternative rock radio play lists during the year. Additionally, other singles from the album were featured in movies such as Dracula 2000, Little Nicky, and Valentine. Hybrid Theory was also nominated for three Grammy Awards, including best new artist, best rock album, and best hard rock performance (for "Crawling"). MTV awarded the band their Best Rock Video and Best Direction awards for "In the End". Through the winning of the Grammy for best hard rock performance, Hybrid Theory’s overall success had catapulted the band into the mainstream's attention.

 

During this time, Linkin Park received many invitations to perform on many high-profile tours and concerts including Ozzfest, Family Values Tour and KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas. The band also formed its own tour, Projekt Revolution, which featured other notable artists such as, Cypress Hill, Adema, and Snoop Dogg. Within a year’s stretch, Linkin Park had performed at over 320 concerts. The experiences and performances of the precocious band were documented in its first DVD, Frat Party at the Pankake Festival, which debuted in November 2001. Now reunited with former bassist Phoenix, the band began work on a remix album, dubbed Reanimation, which would include works from Hybrid Theory and Hybrid Theory EP. Reanimation debuted on July 30, 2002, featuring the likes of Black Thought, Jonathan Davis, Aaron Lewis, and many others. Reanimation claimed the second spot on the Billboard 200, and sold nearly 270,000 copies during its debut week.

 

Following the success of Hybrid Theory and Reanimation, Linkin Park spent a significant amount of time touring around the United States. The band members began to work on new material amidst its saturated schedule, spending a sliver of their free time in their tour bus' studio. The band officially announced the production of a new studio album in December 2002, revealing its new work was inspired by the rocky region of Meteora in Greece, where numerous monasteries have been built on top of the rocks. Meteora featured a mixture of the band's previous nu metal and rapcore styles with newer innovative effects, including the induction of a shakuhachi (a Japanese flute made of bamboo) and other instruments. Linkin Park's second album debuted on March 25, 2003 and instantly earned worldwide recognition, going to #1 in the US and UK, and #2 in Australia.

 

Meteora sold more than 800,000 copies during its first week, and it ranked as the best selling album on the Billboard charts at the time. Music videos for some of the album's singles, including "Somewhere I Belong", "Breaking the Habit", "Faint", and "Numb", received significant radio attention. By October 2003, Meteora sold nearly three million copies. The album's success allowed Linkin Park to form another Projekt Revolution, which featured other bands and artists including, Mudvayne, Blindside, and Xzibit. Additionally, Metallica invited Linkin Park to play at the Summer Sanitarium Tour 2003, which included well-known acts such as Limp Bizkit, Mudvayne and Deftones. The band released an album and DVD, entitled Live in Texas, which consisted of audio and video tracks of some of the band's performances in Texas during the tour. In early 2004, Linkin Park started a world tour titled the Meteora World Tour, supporting bands on the tour include Hoobastank, P.O.D. and Story of the Year.

 

Meteora earned the band multiple awards and honors. The band won MTV's awards for Best Rock Video ("Somewhere I Belong") and the Viewer's Choice Award ("Breaking the Habit"). Linkin Park also received significant recognition during the 2004 Radio Music Awards, winning the Artist of the Year and Song of the Year ("Numb") awards. Although Meteora was not nearly as successful as Hybrid Theory, it was the third best selling album in America during 2003. The band spent the first few months of 2004 touring around the world, first with the third Projekt Revolution tour, and later several European concerts.

 

Linkin Park returned to the recording studios in 2006 to work on new material. To produce the album, the band chose producer Rick Rubin. Despite initially stating the album would debut sometime in 2006, the album was delayed until 2007. The band had recorded thirty to fifty songs in August 2006, when Shinoda stated the album was halfway completed. Bennington later added that the new album would stray away from its previous nu metal sound. Warner Bros. Records officially announced that the band’s third studio album, entitled Minutes to Midnight, would be released on May 15, 2007 in the United States. After spending fourteen months working on the album, the band members opted to further refine their album by removing five of the original seventeen tracks. The album’s title, a reference to the Doomsday Clock, foreshadowed the band's new lyrical themes. Minutes to Midnight sold over 600,000 copies in its first week, making it one of the most successful debut week albums in recent years. The album also took the top spot on the Billboard Charts.

 

The album's first single, "What I've Done" was released on April 2, and premiered on MTV and Fuse within the same week. The single was acclaimed by listeners, becoming the top-ranked song on the Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks and Mainstream Rock Tracks charts. The song is also used in soundtrack for the 2007 action film, Transformers. Later in the year, the band won the "Favorite Alternative Artist" in the American Music Awards. The band also saw success with singles such as "Bleed It Out", "Shadow of the Day", "Given Up", and "Leave Out All the Rest", which were released throughout 2007 and early 2008. The band also collaborated with Busta Rhymes on his single "We Made It", which was released on April 29.

 

In April 2009, Mike Shinoda revealed on his blog that Linkin Park will be working on the score for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with successful film composer Hans Zimmer. On May 7, it was further confirmed that the song recorded for the film is titled "New Divide," and was released as a single on May 18. A clip from the song can be heard 14 seconds into the new trailer. The music video for "New Divide" was released on June 12, 2009 and was directed by Mr. Hahn. On June 22, 2009, the band played a short set after the premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The concert took play on the street in Westwood Village.

 

In May 2009, Linkin Park announced that they were working on their fourth album which will be released in 2010, with the aim for it to be "genre-busting". Shinoda also stated recently in an interview with IGN that the new album will have in comparison to Minutes to Midnight a bigger "thread of consistency" and will also be more experimental and "hopefully more cutting-edge". Additionally the band's other vocalist Chester Bennington confirmed in an interview with Taipei Times that Rick Rubin returns as the producer of the new album.

 

Both Hybrid Theory and Meteora combined the alternative metal, nu metal, and rap rock sound with influences and elements from hip-hop, alternative rock, and electronica, utilizing programming and synthesizers. William Ruhlmann from Allmusic regarded it as "a Johnny-come-lately to an already overdone musical style," whereas Rolling Stone called "Breaking the Habit" "risky, beautiful art".

 

In Minutes to Midnight the band experimented with their established sound and drew influences from a wider and more varied range of genres and styles, a process Los Angeles Times compares to a stage in U2's work. In it, only two of the songs feature rapping, and the majority of the album can be considered alternative rock rather than nu metal or rap rock. It is also their first studio album to feature guitar solos.

 

In concert the band has covered songs by artists as varied as The Cure, Deftones, Guns N' Roses, and Nine Inch Nails.

 

Linkin Park's use of two separate vocalists has become a large part of their music. Chester Bennington is most known for using screaming vocals common in various forms of metal and hardcore, while also using more melodic singing, and was placed 46th in Hit Paraders list of "Heavy Metal's All-Time Top 100 Vocalists".

 

Mike Shinoda is the group's MC and does all of the rapping. Mike has also done all of the backing vocals live, and in their latest album, Minutes to Midnight, he sings lead vocals on "In Between", "Hands Held High", and the B-side "No Roads Left". Shinoda has also been placed in Hit Parader's list of "Heavy Metal's All-Time Top 100 Vocalists" at number 72.

 

Linkin Park discography

 

2000 "One Step Closer" - US Hot 100 #75 - US Alternative #5 - US Mainstream Rock #4

2001 "Crawling" - Hot #79 - Alt #5 - Main #3

2001 "Papercut" - Alt #32

2001 "In the End" - Hot #2 - Alt #1 - Main #3

2002 "Pts.OF.Athrty" - Alt #29

2003 "Somewhere I Belong" - Hot #32 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2003 "Faint" - Hot #48 - Alt #1 - Main #2

2003 "Numb" - Hot #11 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2004 "Lying from You" - Hot #58 - Alt #1 - Main #2

2004 "Breaking the Habit" - Hot #20 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2004 "Numb/Encore" (with Jay-Z) - Hot #20

2007 "What I've Done" - Hot #7 - Alt #1 - Main #1

2007 "Bleed It Out" - Hot #52 - Alt #2 - Main #3

2007 "Shadow of the Day" - Hot #15 - Alt #2 - Main #6

2008 "Given Up" - Hot #99 - Alt #4 - Main #5

2008 "Leave Out All the Rest" - Hot #94 - Alt #11 - Main #33

2009 "New Divide" - Hot #6 - Alt #1 - Main #1

 

Factoid: Chester Bennington worked at a Burger King restaurant before starting his career as a professional musician.

 

"Crawling"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-gvmhjonj

[knightni]

27. Alice In Chains

 

 

4 lists of 24 - 48 points - highest ranked #8 JPN366, Cali

 

Alice in Chains is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1987 by guitarist Jerry Cantrell and vocalist Layne Staley. Although widely associated with grunge music, the band's sound incorporates heavy metal and acoustic elements. Since its formation, Alice in Chains has released four studio albums, three EPs, two live albums, four compilations, and two DVDs. The band is known for its distinct vocal style which often included the harmonized vocals of Staley and Cantrell.

 

Alice in Chains rose to international fame as part of the grunge movement of the early 1990s, along with other Seattle bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. The band was one of the most successful music acts of the 1990s, selling over 17 million albums worldwide, including 11.5 million in the United States alone. The band achieved two number-one Billboard 200 albums (Jar of Flies and Alice in Chains), 11 top ten songs on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, and six Grammy Award nominations.

 

Although never officially disbanding, Alice in Chains was plagued by extended inactivity due to Layne Staley's problems with substance abuse, culminating in his death in 2002. Alice in Chains reunited in 2005 with new lead vocalist William DuVall and released Black Gives Way to Blue, their first studio album in 14 years, on September 29, 2009.

 

Layne Staley met guitarist Jerry Cantrell while working at Music Bank rehearsal studios, where the two struggling musicians became roommates, and lived in a rehearsal space they shared. Alice N' Chainz soon disbanded and Staley joined a funk band who at the time also required a guitarist. Staley asked Cantrell to join as a sideman. Cantrell agreed on condition that Staley join Cantrell's band Diamond Lie, which at the time included drummer Sean Kinney and bassist Mike Starr. Eventually the funk project broke up and in 1987 Staley joined Cantrell on a full-time basis. Diamond Lie played in clubs around the Pacific Northwest, often stretching 15 minutes of material into a 45-minute set. The band eventually took the name of Alice in Chains.

 

Their final demo was named The Treehouse Tapes, and found its way to the music managers Kelly Curtis and Susan Silver, who also managed the Seattle-based band Soundgarden. Curtis and Silver passed on the demo to Columbia Records' A&R representative Nick Terzo, who set up an appointment with label president Don Ienner. Based on The Treehouse Tapes (a 1988 demo tape sold by the band at shows), Ienner signed Alice in Chains to Columbia in 1989.

 

Alice in Chains soon became a top priority of the label, who released the band's first official recording in July 1990, a promotional EP We Die Young. The EP's lead single, "We Die Young", became a hit at metal radio. After its success, the label rushed Alice in Chains' debut album into production with producer Dave Jerden. Cantrell stated the album was intended to have a "moody aura" that was a "direct result of the brooding atmosphere and feel of Seattle".

 

The resulting album, Facelift, was released on August 21, 1990, peaking at number 42 in the summer of 1991 on the Billboard 200 chart. Facelift was not an instant success, selling under 40,000 copies in the first six months of release, until MTV added "Man in the Box" to regular daytime rotation. The single hit number 18 on the Mainstream rock charts, with the album's follow up single, "Sea of Sorrow", reaching number 27, and in six weeks Facelift sold 400,000 copies in the US. The album was a critical success, with Steve Huey of Allmusic citing Facelift as "one of the most important records in establishing an audience for grunge and alternative rock."

 

Facelift was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America by the end of 1990, while the band continued to hone its audience, opening for such artists as Iggy Pop, Van Halen, Poison, and Extreme. In early 1991, Alice in Chains landed the opening slot for the Clash of the Titans with Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer, exposing the band to a wide metal audience. Alice in Chains was nominated for a Best Hard Rock Performance Grammy Award in 1992 for "Man in the Box", but lost to Van Halen for their 1991 album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

 

n February 1992, the band returned to the studio, again with producer Dave Jerden, to record its follow-up album. With new songs written primarily on the road, the material has an overall darker feel than Facelift, with six of the album's twelve songs dealing with addiction. "We did a lot of soul searching on this album. There's a lot of intense feelings." Cantrell said, "We deal with our daily demons through music. All of the poison that builds up during the day we cleanse when we play".

 

On September 29, 1992, Alice in Chains released its second album, Dirt. The album peaked at number six on the Billboard 200, and since its release has been certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA, making Dirt the band's highest selling album to date. The album was a critical success, with Steve Huey of Allmusic praising the album as a "major artistic statement, and the closest they ever came to recording a flat-out masterpiece". Chris Gill of Guitar World called Dirt "huge and foreboding, yet eerie and intimate", and "sublimely dark and brutally honest". Dirt spawned five top 30 singles, including "Rooster", "Them Bones", and "Down in a Hole", and remained on the charts for nearly a year. Alice in Chains was added as openers to Ozzy Osbourne's No More Tears tour, but just days before the tour began, Layne Staley broke his foot in an ATV accident, forcing him to use crutches on stage. While on tour, bassist Mike Starr left the band to spend more time with his family, and was replaced by former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Mike Inez. In 1993, the band recorded two songs with Inez, "What the Hell Have I" and "A Little Bitter", for the Last Action Hero soundtrack.During the summer of 1993, Alice in Chains joined Primus, Tool, Rage Against the Machine, and Babes in Toyland for the alternative music festival Lollapalooza, which was the last major tour Alice in Chains played with Staley.

 

On November 7, 1995, Columbia Records released the eponymous Alice in Chains, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, and has since been certified double platinum. Of the album's four singles, "Grind", "Again", "Over Now", and "Heaven Beside You", three feature Cantrell on lead vocals. Jon Wiederhorn of Rolling Stone called the album "liberating and enlightening, the songs achieve a startling, staggering and palpable impact." The song "Got Me Wrong" unexpectedly charted three years after its release on the Sap EP. The song was re-released as a single on the soundtrack for the independent film Clerks in 1995, reaching number seven on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. The band opted not to tour in support of Alice in Chains, adding to the rumors of drug abuse.

 

Alice in Chains resurfaced on April 10, 1996, to perform their first concert in three years for MTV Unplugged, a program featuring all-acoustic set lists. The performance featured some of the band's highest charting singles, including "Down in a Hole", "Heaven Beside You", and "Would?", and introduced a new song, "The Killer Is Me". The show marked Alice in Chains' only appearance as a five-piece band, adding second guitarist Scott Olson. A live album of the performance was released in July 1996, which debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, and was accompanied by a home video release, both of which received platinum certification by the RIAA. Alice in Chains performed four shows following the 1993 Lollapalooza tour supporting the reunited original Kiss-lineup, with the final live appearance of Layne Staley on July 3, 1996, in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

Although Alice in Chains never officially disbanded, Staley became a recluse, rarely leaving his Seattle condominium following the death of his ex-fiancée Demri Parrott in 1996, due to bacterial endocarditis. "Drugs worked for me for years", Staley told Rolling Stone in 1996, "and now they're turning against me, now I'm walking through hell". After a decade of battling drug addiction, Layne Staley was found dead in his condominium on April 19, 2002. An autopsy revealed Staley had died from a mixture of heroin and cocaine 14 days prior to the discovery of his body. In his last interview, which was given months before his death, Staley admitted, "I know I'm near death, I did crack and heroin for years. I never wanted to end my life this way." Cantrell dedicated his 2002 solo album, released two months after Staley's death, to his memory.

 

Comes with the Fall vocalist William DuVall joined Alice in Chains as lead singer during the band's reunion concerts. Velvet Revolver and ex-Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan also joined the band for the reunion tour, playing rhythm guitar on selected songs. Before the tour, Kinney mentioned in an interview that he would be interested in writing new material, but not as Alice in Chains. However, AliceinChains.com reported that the band had begun writing new material, with DuVall on lead vocals. On June 11, 2009, Blabbermouth.net reported that the new album would be titled Black Gives Way to Blue, and was officially set to be released on September 29, 2009.

 

Although Alice in Chains has been labeled grunge, alternative rock, and hard rock, Jerry Cantrell identifies the band as primarily heavy metal. He told Guitar World in 1996; "We're a lot of different things... I don't quite know what the mixture is, but there's definitely metal, blues, rock and roll, maybe a touch of punk. The metal part will never leave, and I never want it to".

 

Jerry Cantrell's guitar style combines what Stephen Erlewine of Allmusic called "pummeling riffs and expansive guitar textures" to create "slow, brooding minor-key grinds". While down-tuned distorted guitars mixed with Staley's distinctive "snarl-to-a-scream" vocals appealed to heavy metal fans, the band also had "a sense of melody that was undeniable," which introduced Alice in Chains to a much wider pop audience outside of the heavy metal underground.

 

The band has been described by critics as "hard enough for metal fans, yet their dark subject matter and punky attack placed them among the front ranks of the Seattle-based grunge bands". Three of the band's releases feature all acoustic music, and while the band initially kept these releases separate, Alice in Chains' self-titled album combined the styles to form "a bleak, nihilistic sound that balanced grinding hard rock with subtly textured acoustic numbers".

 

Alice in Chains is also noted for the unique vocal harmonies of Staley and Cantrell, which included overlapping passages, and dual lead vocals. Alyssa Burrows said the band's distinctive sound "came from Staley's vocal style and his lyrics dealing with personal struggles and addiction". Staley's songs were often considered "dark", with themes such as drug abuse, depression, and suicide, while Cantrell's lyrics dealt more with personal relationships.

 

Alice in Chains has sold more than 14 million albums in the United States, released two number-one albums and 21 top 40 singles, and has received six Grammy nominations. The band was ranked number 34 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. Alice in Chains was named 15th greatest live band by Hit Parader, with vocalist Layne Staley placing as 27th greatest vocalist of all time. The band's second album, Dirt, was named 5th best album in the last two decades by Close-Up magazine. In August 2009, Alice in Chains won the Kerrang! Icon Award.

 

 

Alice In Chains discography

 

1991 "Man in the Box" - Mainstream Rock #18

1992 "Sea of Sorrow" - Main #27

1992 "Would?" - Main #31

1992 "Them Bones" - Main #24 - Modern Rock #30

1993 "Angry Chair" - Main #34 - Mod #27

1993 "Rooster" - Main #7

1993 "Down in a Hole" - Main #10

1993 "What the Hell Have I" - Main #19

1994 "No Excuses" - Hot Airplay #48 - Main #1 - Mod #3

1994 "I Stay Away" - Main #10

1994 "Don't Follow" - Main #25

1994 "Got Me Wrong" - Main #7 - Mod #22

1995 "Grind" - Main #7 - Mod #18

1996 "Heaven Beside You" - Air #52 - Main #3 - Mod #6

1996 "Over Now" - Main #4 - Mod #24

1996 "Again" - Main #8 - Mod #36

1999 "Get Born Again" - Hot 100 #106 - Main #4 - Mod #12

1999 "Fear the Voices" - Main #11

2000 "Man in the Box" (live) - Main #39

2009 "A Looking in View" - Main #12 - Mod #38 - Rock #27

2009 "Check My Brain" - Hot #92 - Air #71 - Main #1 - Mod #1 - Rock#1

 

Factoid: One day before the band was due to record their first demos at the Music Bank studio in Washington, police shut down the studio during the biggest marijuana raid in the history of the state.

 

"Man in the Box"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-aiunlkld

[knightni]

26. Rage Against The Machine

 

 

5 of 24 lists - 48 points - highest ranking #8 Sonik22

 

Rage Against the Machine (sometimes referred to as RATM, or more informally simply Rage), is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California, formed in 1991. The band's lineup, unchanged since its formation, consists of vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk.

 

Rage Against the Machine is noted for its innovative blend of alternative rock, punk rock, rap, heavy metal and funk as well as its revolutionary politics and lyrics. Rage Against the Machine drew inspiration from early heavy metal instrumentation, as well as rap acts such as Public Enemy, Urban Dance Squad, and Afrika Bambaataa. The group's music is distinguished primarily by their powerful stage energy, de la Rocha's rhyming styles and Morello's unorthodox guitar techniques.

 

Rage Against the Machine released their self-titled debut album Rage Against the Machine in 1992, which became a commercial success, leading to a slot in the 1993 Lollapalooza. The band did not release a follow-up record until 1996, with Evil Empire. The band's third album The Battle of Los Angeles was released in 1999. During their initial nine year run, they became one of the most popular and influential political bands in contemporary music.

 

In 2000, shortly after breaking up, the band released their fourth studio album Renegades, which is comprised entirely of cover songs. Zack de la Rocha started a low-key solo career; the rest of the band formed the rock supergroup Audioslave with former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, which disbanded in 2007.

 

In April 2007, Rage Against the Machine performed together for the first time in seven years. Sam Jennings covered for guitarist Tom Morello at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The band continued to perform at multiple live venues around the world in 2008.

 

The band's debut album, Rage Against the Machine, reached triple platinum status, driven by heavy radio play of the song "Killing in the Name," a heavy, driving track featuring only eight lines of lyrics. The "f*** You" version, which contains 17 iterations of the word f***, was once played on the BBC Radio 1 Top 40 singles show. The album's cover featured Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 in protest of the murder of Buddhists by the US-backed Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm's regime. To promote the album and its core message of social justice and equality, the band went on tour, playing at Lollapalooza 1993 and as support for Suicidal Tendencies in Europe.

 

After their debut album, the band appeared on the soundtrack for the film Higher Learning with the song "Year of tha Boomerang." An early version of "Tire Me" also appeared during the movie. Subsequently, they re-recorded the song "Darkness" from their original demo for the soundtrack of The Crow and also "No Shelter" appeared on the Godzilla soundtrack.

 

Despite rumors of a break up for several years, Rage Against The Machine's second album, Evil Empire, entered Billboard's Top 200 chart at number one in 1996. The song "Bulls on Parade" was performed on Saturday Night Live in April 1996. Their planned two-song performance was cut to one song when the band attempted to hang inverted US flags from their amplifiers ("a sign of distress or great danger"), a protest against having Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes as guest host on the program that night.

 

In 1997, the band opened for U2 and back-lined Green Day on their PopMart Tour, for which all Rage's profits went to support social organizations. including U.N.I.T.E. , Women Alive and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation. Rage subsequently began an abortive headlining US tour with special guests Wu-Tang Clan. Police in several jurisdictions unsuccessfully attempted to have the concerts cancelled, citing amongst other reasons, the bands' "violent and anti-law enforcement philosophies." Wu-Tang Clan were eventually removed from the line-up and replaced with The Roots. On the Japan leg of their tour promoting Evil Empire, a bootleg album composed of the band's B-side recordings titled Live & Rare was released by Sony Records. A live video, also titled Rage Against the Machine, was released later the same year.[citation needed]

 

The following release, The Battle of Los Angeles also debuted at number one in 1999, selling 450,000 copies the first week and then going double-platinum. That same year the song "Wake Up" was featured on the soundtrack of the film The Matrix. The track "Calm Like a Bomb" was later featured in the film's sequel, 2003s The Matrix Reloaded. In 2000, the band planned to support the Beastie Boys on the "Rhyme and Reason" tour; however, the tour was canceled when Beastie Boys drummer Mike D suffered a serious injury.

 

On October 18, 2000, de la Rocha released a statement announcing his departure from the band. He said, "I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed. It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal." The band's final studio album, Renegades, released shortly after the band's dissolution, was a collection of covers of artists as diverse as Devo, Cypress Hill, MC5, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. The following year saw the release of another live video, The Battle of Mexico City, and 2003 saw the release of a live album titled Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium, an edited recording of the band's final two concerts on September 12 and 13, 2000 at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. It was accompanied by an expanded DVD release of the last show, and also included the previously unreleased music video for "Bombtrack".

 

On April 14, 2007, Morello and de la Rocha reunited onstage early to perform a brief acoustic set at a Coalition of Immokalee Workers rally in downtown Chicago. Morello described the event as "very exciting for everybody in the room, myself included." This was followed by the scheduled Coachella performance on Sunday, April 29 where the band staged a much anticipated performance in front of an EZLN backdrop to the largest crowds of the festival.

 

Rage Against the Machine continued to tour in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, and also played a series of shows in Europe in Summer 2008 including Rock am Ring and Rock im Park, Pinkpop Festival, T in the Park in Scotland, the Hultsfred Festival in Sweden, the Reading and Leeds Festivals in England and the Oxegen Festival in Ireland. The band also performed on August 2, 2008, in Chicago as one of the headliners (Radiohead, Kanye West and Nine Inch Nails being the other three) for the 2008 Lollapalooza Music Festival.

 

In April 2009, Morello was asked about a new album from Rage Against The Machine, replied "Not anytime soon" but also said that "There may be some more Rage shows in the future"

 

Rage Against the Machine discography

 

1996 "Bulls on Parade" - Hot 100 #62 - Mainstream #36 - Modern #11

1998 "The Ghost of Tom Joad" - Mainstream #35 - Modern #34

1998 "No Shelter" - Main #30 - Mod #33

1999 "Guerrilla Radio" - Hot #69 - Main #11 - Mod #6

2000 "Sleep Now in the Fire" - Hot #112 - Main #16 - Mod #8

2000 "Testify" - Main #22 - Mod #16

2000 "Renegades of Funk" - Hot #109 - Main #19 - Mod #9

2001 "How I Could Just Kill a Man" - Main #39 - Mod #37

 

Factoid: On January 26, 2000, filming of the music video for "Sleep Now in the Fire", which was directed by Michael Moore, caused the doors of the New York Stock Exchange to be closed and the band to be escorted from the site by security, after band members attempted to gain entry into the Exchange.

 

 

"Bulls On Parade"

 

http://media-convert.com/convert/?xid=7-jfcgcwju