Classic Hits

The Grateful Dead has been chosen as the 2025 MusiCares Person of the Year, with the honor coming as they celebrate their 60th anniversary.

Surviving original members Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bobby Weir will be recognized for “their immense contributions to music, their tireless philanthropic efforts and their pioneering role in fostering communities through their concerts and activism.” The night will also feature a special posthumous tribute to the band’s late founder, Jerry Garcia.

“We are deeply honored to be recognized as MusiCares Persons of the Year,” Hart, Kreutzmann, Lesh and Weir said in a statement. “This honor is truly a testament to the legacy of the music, which has always been bigger than us—it’s about the connection between us, the crew, and all those who’ve been on this long strange trip.”

They add, “It’s not just about what we create, but about making sure the people behind it, behind us every night, the ones who quietly make it all happen, get the support they need to keep going, no matter what life throws at them. We’re grateful to stand with MusiCares and hope everyone continues to support this vital mission to ensure music thrives in perpetuity.”

Launched in 1991, previous MusiCares Person of the Year recipients include Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Tom Petty. Grateful Dead is only the third band to receive the honor; Fleetwood Mac got it in 2018 and Aerosmith got it in 2020.

The 2025 MusiCares Person of the Year gala will take place Jan. 31 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, two nights before the 67th annual GRAMMY Awards.

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Well, here’s some good news for fans of The Who.

While Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have been trading comments over the past year about the future of the band, Townshend has now given fans hope for a possible tour in the near future.

“I met with Roger for lunch a couple of weeks ago. We’re in good form. We love each other,” he tells The Standard. “We’re both getting a bit creaky, but we will definitely do something next year.”

Townshend suggests that a new album’s unlikely but not out of the question, sharing, “The album side of it … Roger’s not keen. But I would love to do another album and I may try to bully him on that.”

And if they do go back to touring, it seems Pete’s ready to get back to basics.

“The last big tours that we’ve done have been with a full orchestra, which was glorious,” he says, “but we’re now eager to make a noise and make a mess and make mistakes.” 

Meanwhile, Townshend had some thoughts on another big tour that’s happening next year, the Oasis reunion tour.

“Well, I’m disappointed,” he told the paper, but when asked if it was because he couldn’t get a ticket, Pete replied, “No, because I really like their solo albums.”

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We will never be able to see Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young again now that David Crosby has passed, but Graham Nash says it’s doubtful he’ll ever play with his other bandmates, Stephen Stills and Neil Young, again either.

While talking to Rolling Stone about the new CSNY live album, Live At The Fillmore East, 1969, Graham noted that they dedicated the record to Crosby because “he really was the heartbeat of this band, and his passing brought a halt to us all making music together.” 

“I don’t think that me and Stephen and Neil will ever play together again,” he added.

As for why he doesn’t think it’ll happen, Nash explains, “There’s no heart there. David was the center of it all, as crazy as he was. And my God, he was crazy. But he was the heart of this band,” adding, “And that’s why I think that if Stephen and Neil and I ever played together, people would be missing Crosby. We would be missing Crosby. It just would be a much colder scene.” 

“I really miss him. I miss him more every day because life is choices, and I only choose to remember the good times that David and I had, the good music that we made together,” Nash says. “When I try and think about the bad things that happened, I don’t want to do that. I made the choice to only remember the good stuff.”

David Crosby died Jan. 18, 2023.

Live At The Fillmore East, 1969 is due out Friday. It’s available for preorder now.

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On This Day, Oct. 23, 2010 …

Members of Buffalo Springfield — Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay — reunited for Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit in Mountain View, California. It was the band’s first performance together in more than 18 years. 

The band’s set included such classics as “For What It’s Worth,” “Bluebird” and “Mr. Soul.” 

The Bridge School Benefit was two days of mostly acoustic concerts raising money for the Bridge School, which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs. 

Other artists on the bill included Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Idol, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett’s Speaking Clock Revue featuring Elton John, Leon Russell and Costello, and others.

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Power-pop rocker Matthew Sweet, best known for his early ’90s hit “Girlfriend,” suffered a stroke in Toronto while on tour.

A GoFundMe set up by Sweet’s management shares, “He has been unexpectedly and tragically forced off the road and onto a long, uncertain path to recovery. We are asking for financial help in this difficult time from his family, friends, and fans. Without insurance or touring income, Matthew faces an enormous financial burden.”

“The doctors and hospital care in Toronto were instrumental in saving Matthew’s life, but health care is not free for Americans in Canada,” the page continues. “He must now be flown back to the States on an ambulance transport plane with medical staff on board, to a specialized rehabilitation center, where he will receive around-the-clock care and therapy for six weeks. He will then require months of treatment and rehabilitation that we hope will lead to a full recovery. Needless to say, the costs for all of this treatment will be overwhelming.”

The GoFundMe is hoping to raise $250,000. So far, the campaign has received donations of $1,500 from Judd Apatow and $1,000 from John Mayer, Ken Jennings, Peter Buck and Jon Cryer.

“Girlfriend,” the title track off Sweet’s 1991 album, was a top-10 single on Billboard’s Alternative and Mainstream Rock Airplay charts. It was introduced to a new audience when it was included in 2006’s Guitar Hero II video game.

Sweet, 60, also charted singles with “Sick of Myself,” “The Ugly Truth” and “Where You Get Love.”

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The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is set to open the David Bowie Center next year, which will be the new home of the David Bowie Archive.

The center, which was first announced in February, will open Sept. 13 at the new V&A Storehouse at East Bank, in the new cultural quarter in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Storehouse is opening May 31.

The Bowie opening will mark the first time fans will have access to the over 90,000 items in the Bowie Archive, with the items tracing the rocker’s “creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon, and advocate for self-expression and reinvention.”

It will include costumes from the Ziggy Stardust era, lyrics to songs like “Fame” and “Heroes,” and a whole lot more. The center will be split into three different zones, with curated displays and audio visual installations, as well as areas where visitors can explore the archives on their own. 

But the Bowie Center is only one part of the new V&A Storehouse. It will also include over 500,000 creative works, including the Glastonbury Festival Archives and Elton John’s costumes.

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Fresh off the celebration of the band’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Foreigner has announced more dates for their Farewell tour, which originally launched in 2023.

The latest additions kick off March 13 in Hollywood, Florida, and wrap Oct. 10 and Oct. 11 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

And Foreigner is planning to have some special guests with them for upcoming shows.

The band just announced that original members Rick Wills and Al Greenwood, who were inducted into the Hall of Fame with Lou Gramm and Mick Jones on Saturday, will join Foreigner for their upcoming eight-show residency at The Venetian in Las Vegas, which kicks off Friday.

In addition, original lead singer Gramm is in talks to take part in 2026 shows, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the band.

A complete list of Foreigner dates and ticket information can be found at ForeignerOnline.com.

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The recording console used to track The Beatles’ final album, 1969’s Abbey Road, is going up for sale in October. 

The fully restored EMI TG12345 console will be sold through the Reverb shop of London’s recording studio experts, MJQ Ltd, on Oct. 29.

“Abbey Road is one of the best albums that’s ever been made, and it sounds so good because of this recording console,” said Dave Harries, who worked with the console during numerous Beatles recording sessions. “Because of the way that Abbey Road was recorded, the album has a distinctive sound that hallmarked the future of pop recording.”

The console had been sitting unused for more than five decades, and it took five years for it to be fully restored, using 70% of its original parts.

In addition to Abbey Road, the console, custom built in 1968 by EMI Studios, was used for several other Beatles solo projects, including John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!,” Paul McCartney’s solo album McCartney, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey, all of which were released in 1970.

More info on the sale can be found at reverb.com.

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ABBA‘s Björn Ulvaeus is one of several musicians and actors who’ve signed a petition protesting the use of training generative AI with their work without their consent. 

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” the statement reads. 

Others who’ve signed the petition include the five members of Radiohead, The Cure frontman Robert Smith and actors Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore and Rosario Dawson.

For more info, visit AITrainingStatement.org.

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Alex Van Halen’s new memoir, Brothers, is out now, and in it he sets the record straight about the reports that Van Halen’s rider would demand M&M’s in their dressing rooms, minus the brown ones.

“I know. We sound like jerks,” he writes in the book, according to People. “Like rock star prima donnas looking to make some poor kid sit around picking through candies till he goes blind. But it wasn’t about a power trip, and it wasn’t about some strange aversion to the color brown.”

While Alex writes that over the years the band “played it up for yuks,” when asked why they put that in their rider, he now says there was a very good reason for doing so.

“If we see brown M&M’s, we know: we are not in the hands of professionals,” he writes, because it meant that they didn’t read the rider carefully. “If they didn’t bother with this, what else didn’t they bother with, what other corners are being cut?”

Brothers, described as Alex’s love letter to his late brother, Eddie Van Halen, was released Tuesday. Alex is currently on a book tour supporting the release and will be in Northvale, New Jersey, on Tuesday, and Culver City, California, on Thursday.

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