Classic Hits

Mick Jagger is expanding his harmonica line. The Rolling Stones frontman just announced edition two of his harmonica line.

“I was blown away by the response to our first range of harmonicas!” Jagger shares. “I hope everyone has enjoyed playing their harps, and that more people are falling in love with my favourite instrument.”

According to the description, The Mick Jagger Series: Edition Two is a “meticulously designed harmonica that faithfully replicates the exact specifications used by Mick Jagger throughout his iconic career,” giving fans a chance to replicate “that unmistakable Jagger blues sound.”

Like the original, it is a collaboration with harmonica company Lee Oskar that features the signatures of both Jagger and Oskar and comes in a Jagger-branded case.

In addition to the single harmonica, a limited edition box set is available featuring three harmonicas in diatonic keys of C, A and G. Only 300 are available, and they come in a vegan leather case, with a hand-numbered printed art card. 

Both the harmonica and the box set are available for preorder now and will begin shipping on October 2.

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Yes is returning to the road this fall. The band, made up of Steve Howe, Geoff Downes, Jon Davison, Billy Sherwood and Jay Schellen, have announced a new U.S. leg of their Classic Tales of Yes tour.

The trek has the band performing tracks from their 50-year catalog along with songs from their 2023 release, Mirror to the Sky. It will kick off September 24 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and wrap November 4 in Riverside, California.

“We’re putting together a great setlist covering the length and breadth of Yes’ career,” Howe shares, with Downes adding, “As always, we are committed to pushing new boundaries and are very excited to be performing another chapter in the rich legacy of the band.” 

Tickets for the new dates go on sale Friday, July 21. A complete list of dates and ticket information can be found at yesworld.com.

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Some of today’s top musicians are opening up about their voices in a new book set for release this September. 

The Singers Talk – The Greatest Singers of Our Time Discuss the One Thing They’re Never Asked About: Their Voices features interviews with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Roger Daltrey, Chrissie Hynde, Michael Stipe, Brian Johnson, Dionne Warwick and more, all discussing one of the keys to what made them famous: their vocal chops.

Written by Jason Thomas Gordon, the lead singer and drummer for the Los Angeles-based rock band Kingsize, the book also discusses several famed voices that are no longer with us: Stevie Van Zandt talks about Little Richard, producer Butch Vig discusses Kurt Cobain, Nile Rodgers shares thoughts on David Bowie, Jimmy Iovine discusses Tom Petty and more.

The Singers Talk will be released September 5, with proceeds going to a good cause. All royalties will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which was founded by Gordon’s grandfather, famed entertainer Danny Thomas.

The Singers Talk is available for preorder now.

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Paul McCartney gave fans insight into his songwriting process in his bestselling book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and now, fans will be able to hear him talk about his songs in a new podcast premiering this fall. 

McCartney: A Life In Lyrics will feature The Beatles legend and his The Lyrics collaborator Paul Muldoon chatting about the creative process, with each episode focusing on a specific song from the rocker’s more than 60-year career.

Season one will consist of 12 episodes, with Sir Paul discussing such songs as “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be,” “Penny Lane,” “Live and Let Die,” “Helter Skelter and more. Season two will consist of another 12 episodes to follow in February 2024.

“When we listened back to the tapes, we realized there was something very special happening in these conversations,” Muldoon explains. “It was McCartney unfiltered.”

McCartney: A Life In Lyrics will drop weekly wherever podcasts are available.

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Pete Townshend’s magnum opus Life House — parts of which became The Who‘s 1971 album, Who’s Next — will finally be released as he intended when he first started working on it over 50 years ago.

Dropping September 15, the Who’s Next/Life House Super Deluxe edition will feature a whopping 155 tracks, with 89 songs that have never been released and 57 fresh remixes. That includes Townshend’s Life House demos, various session recordings and two complete concerts from 1971: one recorded at London’s Young Vic theater and one recorded at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium.

Townshend had hoped to tell one story with Life House but eventually scrapped the project, instead evolving it into Who’s Next. In a statement about the new releases, he describes the story as a “portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution.” 

The story also features a sort of proto-internet called the grid, to which people are forced to plug into for entertainment.

Noting the timeliness of his concept, Townshend writes, “Songs that depicted a dystopian world in which faceless corporations control our lives may have been fiction at the time, but they have come to be more like documentary.” 

The Super Deluxe edition will be released as a 10-CD set, with a 100-page hardcover book, new sleeve notes, the newly commissioned Life House – The Complete Graphic Novel, which tells the story behind project, plus concert posters, programs and more. The novel will also be available separately in a limited edition of 1,000 signed by Townshend and Roger Daltrey. 

Also coming is a limited-edition four-LP set that includes the 1971 San Francisco concert, a two-CD set and various other vinyl configurations.

All are available for preorder now.

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Billy Joel performed the final concert at New York’s historic Shea Stadium ahead of its demolition.

The show, a culmination of a two-night stand at the home of the New York Mets, saw Joel welcoming several guests, including Tony Bennett, Garth Brooks, Steven Tyler, Roger Daltrey and Paul McCartney, who was driven to the stage by the same groundskeeper who drove The Beatles when they played Shea in 1965.

A documentary of the shows, Last Play At Shea, premiered in 2010 at the Tribeca Film Festival and later played at Citi Field, the stadium that replaced Shea. A CD and DVD of the shows were released in March 2011.

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The Police guitarist Andy Summers kicks off The Cracked Lens + A Missing String tour on Friday, July 21, and fans should expect more than just Andy performing his classic tunes onstage.

“Essentially, I guess it’s what you would call a multimedia show,” he tells ABC Audio, noting it’s a combination of his photography, stories from his book Fretted and Moaning and his music.

“I play some solo guitar pieces. I do a section of Brazilian music, which is very nice,” he says. “Then it ends, of course, with an insane rendering of some Police songs,” noting he encourages fans to sing along to those classics.

Andy says his love of photography stems from his teenage years, when he “became addicted to going to the cinema.” He says, “I thought, then, ‘I want to be a film director.’ But of course, I was a teenager absolutely obsessed with the guitar, and that sort of overrode everything.” 

He turned to photography during a tour stop in New York with The Police when he had some free time and decided to get a camera, noting after that he “never looked back.”

A new tour is not something most 80-year-olds would be considering at their age, but it sounds like there’s no stopping Summers.  

“I guess it’s a life thing everybody goes through,” he says, “but I am definitely spurred on by creativity and I don’t really see any stopping until they go, ‘OK, old guy, off you go.’”  

Andy Summers’ The Cracked Lens + A Missing String tour launches Friday, July 21, in Beverly, Massachusetts. A complete list of dates can be found at andysummers.com.

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Bob Dylan is getting rid of one of his homes. In case you missed it, the Scottish Daily Express reports the “Like A Rolling Stone” singer has put his mansion in Scotland on the market.

Dylan and his brother, David, purchased Aultmore House and estate in the Scottish Highlands back in 2006 for about $2.8 million, and they are now selling it for almost $4 mil.

The home, which sits on 24 acres of land, features 16 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a music room, a walled garden, croquet lawn and more, along with three four-bedroom cottages that can be rented for about $1,200 a week.

According to Tom Stewart-Moore, who works for selling agents Knight Frank, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic Dylan and his brother would spend “a few weeks a year” at the estate.

“They’ve not been able to use it in recent years and that’s the reason for the sale,” Stewart-Moore says. “They bought it because it’s stunningly beautiful — and most importantly, very, very private.”

The Scottish Highlands are apparently a very important place to Dylan. In his 1997 album, Time Out Of Mind, he included a song called “Highlands,” which included the lyric, “My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam/ That’s where I’ll be when I get called home.”

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Queen is known for having foot-stomping anthems that the audience can sing along to, and according to guitarist Brian May, that was very deliberate on their part — although not at first.

“It wasn’t common to have a participatory concert experience with the audience when we started it off,” May shares in a new interview with Vulture. “You didn’t go to a Led Zeppelin concert and sing along. It wasn’t cool. Black Sabbath, you didn’t do that. So when people started doing it for our songs, our first reaction was, ‘Why don’t they just listen? What’s going wrong here?'”

But May says the band soon realized, “This is new. This is a phenomenon. It seems we shouldn’t be fighting this. We should be embracing it.” And that’s exactly what they did.

“I went away and wrote ‘We Will Rock You’ trying to imagine what an audience could do if they’re all crammed in and can hardly move,” he says. He notes that song and the Freddie Mercury-penned “We Are The Champions” were “deliberately angled at allowing the audience to be part of the show.”

“From then on, we became a band that was absolutely dedicated to making our shows an interactive experience,” he says. “The funny thing is that it’s become common now in all kinds of music. So it’s something I feel proud of.”

And fans will get a chance to be part of Queen’s show when they hit the road with Adam Lambert on their Rhapsody tour, starting October 4 and 5 in Baltimore, Maryland. A complete list of dates can be found at queenonline.com.

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On This Day, July 17, 2011…

At Asbury Park, New Jersey’s Wonder Bar, Bruce Springsteen made a surprise appearance for a tribute to his late friend and E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who had passed away in June of that year.

The 45-minute set for 400 fans included soul classics as well as “Savin’ Up,” which Bruce wrote for Clemons’ 1983 album with the Red Bank Rockers.

Clemons was a member of Bruce’s E Street Band from 1974 until his passing at the age of 69. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the E Street Band in 2014.

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