Classic Hits

Gov’t Mule is set to drop their 12th studio album, Peace…Like A River, on Friday, June 16, and it sounds like it wasn’t too hard for frontman Warren Haynes to come up with the title of the record.

“When I was going through all the lyrics, I realized that the word ‘peace’ and the word ‘river’ appear more than anything else, several times in multiple songs,” he tells ABC Audio. “And so I wanted to find something that combined those two things together.”

The title was also inspired by the Paul Simon song “Peace Like a River,” with Haynes noting, “We almost recorded it and we may still at some point.” 

The album was recorded during COVID-19 lockdowns, during the same sessions as 2021’s Heavy Load Blues. Haynes explains they decided to work on both “because we had all this time on our hands and I had written a ton of material, and we couldn’t travel and we couldn’t tour, so it was the best way to utilize our time.” 

Haynes says the pandemic did affect the way he was thinking and feeling while writing the record, but he insists, “I tried not to let it affect the subject matter so much.”

“I didn’t want to write a bunch of COVID-centric songs, but at the same time, that’s what the world was going through,” he shares. “And so I tried to write songs that were universal, but with the mindset that was happening at the time.” 

Peace…Like A River is available for preorder now.

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Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band fans in Washington, DC, will have to wait an additional month before they can see them hit the stage.

It was just announced that The Boss’ August 28 concert at Nationals Park has been postponed to September 29, noting tickets to the original show will be valid for the new date.

No reason for the move was given.

Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band are currently on tour in Europe and are scheduled to play Landgraaf, The Netherlands, on Sunday, June 11. The tour returns to North America with a two-night stand at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, August 9 and 11. A complete list of dates can be found at Springsteen.net.

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Cher is taking a stab at horror movies. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the iconic singer is teaming up with her son, Chaz Bono, to executive produce the horror flick Little Bites.

The film will star Krsy Fox as a young widow and mother trying to protect her young daughter from a flesh-eating monster named Agyar by allowing the creature to feed on her body.

Bono, who has appeared in American Horror Story and Curb Your Enthusiasm, will also have a role in the film. The rest of the cast includes well-known horror stars Barbara Crampton, Heather Langenkamp and Bonnie Aarons, along with Elizabeth Caro, who’ll play Fox’s daughter, and Jon Sklaroff as Agyar.

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KISS just kicked off the European leg of their End of the Road tour and it’s got Gene Simmons reflecting on the band’s legendary career. In an interview with Good Morning Britain, Simmons says he feels “pride in a half a century of defying the critics.”

“We use them as mulch. You know what that is? You grind ’em up and you put ’em in the dirt. They don’t mean anything,” he shares. “If it was up to critics, we wouldn’t have our favorite things — Star Wars and, you know, all the fun stuff in life. We completely ignored them.”

As for the decision to stop touring, Simmons notes, “You have to have a little pride and self-respect. Know when to get off the stage,” joking, “It’s been half a century, and boy, do I look good.”

He adds, “I can’t tell you how much it means to us to be in front of the fans and put on the spectacle of all spectacles.” 

Finally, he says of the end, “It’s gonna be happy, because of the amazing journey we’ve had, but sad, of course, because it’s gonna be heartbreaking.” 

KISS’ End of the Road tour hits Prague on June 10. They wrap the tour for good December 1 and 2 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. A complete list of dates can be found at kissonline.com.

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Neil Young recently revealed he’s hitting the road this summer on a West Coast solo tour, and now we have the dates. 

Young’s Coastal Tour, featuring special guest Chris Pierce, will consist of 13 dates, kicking off with a four-night stand at Los Angeles’ John Anson Ford Theatre on July 1, 2, 4 and 5.

The tour will hit California cities like Santa Barbara, San Diego and Paso Robles, plus stops in Washington and Oregon, before wrapping July 23 in Napa, California. A complete list of dates can be found at neilyoungarchives.com.

Tickets for all shows go on sale Wednesday, June 14, at 10 a.m. local time. To cut down on scalping, tickets purchased through Ticketmaster can only be resold through Ticketmaster’s Face Value Exchange.

As previously reported, Young revealed in a Zoom with Neil Young Archives subscribers that the tour will focus on songs he hasn’t actually played live before. The tour will be Young’s first since before the pandemic. 

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Eric Clapton is giving fans another taste of his upcoming box set The Definitive 24 Nights, dropping June 23. The latest is a previously unseen performance, “Key to the Highway (Live At Royal Albert Hall).” 

The Definitive 24 Nights features six hours of music from Clapton’s historic 24-night run at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1991, including 35 never-before-released performances. During the run, Clapton performed with three lineups — a rock band, a blues band and an orchestra; “Key to the Highway” was featured in the blues section of the shows.

The Definitive 24 Nights will be released in a six-CD or eight-LP set. There will also be standalone versions of each genre — 24 Nights: Rock, 24 Nights: Blues and 24 Nights: Orchestra. All options are available for preorder now.

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On This Day, June 9, 1978…

The Rolling Stones released the album Some Girls, which was their first album to feature guitarist Ronnie Wood as a full-time member.

The album, which went to #1 in the U.S., featured the #1 song “Miss You,” along with future classics “Beat of Burden,” which peaked at #8 on the chart, and “Shattered.”

There was some controversy surrounding the album’s artwork, which featured the band members in drag, alongside pictures of famous females like Lucille Ball, Farrah Fawcett, Liza Minelli, Marilyn Monroe and more. Several of them threatened to sue over the use of their likeness without permission, and the cover was reissued without the celebrities images.

In marking the anniversary of the Some Girls release on Instagram, the band noted that the album “became the longest-running studio album on the American chart in the Stones history,” adding it was their first studio album to earn a Grammy nod for Album of the Year.

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Queen is back with episode 20 of their weekly YouTube series Queen The Greatest Live, this week looking at one of their classic performances of “Is This the World We Created…?”

The performance was recorded at one of their Magic Tour sell-out shows at London’s Wembley Stadium in July 1986, and shows how the acoustic performance, featuring just Freddie Mercury and Brian May, can captivate an audience just as much as their more epic tunes.

The song, from 1984’s The Works, was penned by Mercury and May after watching a documentary on the African famine of the eighties. A year earlier they had performed the song for the Live Aid concert at the very same venue.  

And coming up next week – “Adapting Songs.”

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June 10 marks the 40th anniversary of Stevie Nicks’ sophomore solo album, The Wild Heart, which peaked at five on the Billboard 200 Album chart, spending seven weeks in that position. It went on to spend over a year on the chart.

Released almost two years after her monster solo debut, Bella Donna, The Wild Heart featured the hit single “Stand Back,” which peaked at five on the Billboard Hot 100. The song featured an uncredited cameo by Prince on synthesizers; he got a 50% writing credit, reportedly because Nicks took inspiration for the song from his hit “Little Red Corvette.”

Nicks infamously shot two videos for “Stand Back,” the first featuring lavish production and a big price tag. Stevie rejected that clip, reportedly because she thought she looked fat. Instead she released a lower budget clip, featuring footage of her singing and dancing, along with a choreographed dance group.

In addition to Prince, Toto’s Steve Lukather appeared on “Stand Back,” while the album also featured guest appearances by Tom Petty on “I Will Run To You” and Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood on “Sable on Blond.”

The Wild Heart went on to be certified double Platinum by the RIAA.

Also turning 40 on June 10 is The Kinks’ 20th studio album, State of Confusion, which peaked at #12 on the Billboard album chart.

The album’s success was aided by the single “Come Dancing,” which peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100. The tune was a tribute to Ray Davies’ older sister Rene, who passed away from a heart attack during a night out dancing. The video for the song became a staple on MTV, helping the tune become one of the band’s highest charting U.S. singles of their career, tying with their 1965 track “Tired of Waiting For You.”

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Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson is featured in the latest episode of Gibson TV’s My First Gibson, and in it he explains that he was 12 years old when he got his guitar.

“I wanted to play guitar because I just thought it was such a cool instrument, I thought it sounded really cool,” he shares. “You know, when I listened to music that had guitar music in it, particularly like The Beach Boys in that period, in the mid ’60s, it was just the driving force of the music and it just kinda spoke to me I think.” 

He says when he was in his teens, every Saturday he’d go to a music store in Toronto called Long and McQuade’s and take down a guitar and play until a sales person would kick him out. He talks about all the guitars he used to try out, until he finally got himself a Gibson, noting, “I just couldn’t believe how easy it was to play.”

Lifeson says that guitar was his main axe until Rush got their record deal, and he and the band went back to Long and McQuade’s to buy new instruments; that was when he was able to purchase his first Les Paul.

“It was so cool doing that, it was like a dream come true for any young musician,” he says.

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