Classic Hits

Tony Bennett has canceled his fall and winter 2021 tour dates, according to Variety.

The legendary crooner — who marked his 95th birthday last week by performing with Lady Gaga at two-sold out shows at New York’s Radio City Music Hall — has pulled out of concerts in New York, Maryland, Connecticut, Arizona, Oklahoma and Canada.

The tour — consisting of pre-pandemic show dates that had been rescheduled — was set to begin in September. Ticket holders should check with the local venues for information regarding refunds.  The shows won’t be rescheduled, as Bennett is retiring from the road.

Bennett’s son and manager Danny Bennett tells Variety, “There won’t be any additional concerts. This was a hard decision for us to make, as he is a capable performer. This is, however, doctors’ orders. His continued health is the most important part of this, and when we heard the doctors — when Tony’s wife, Susan heard them — she said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

“He’ll be doing other things, but not those upcoming shows. It’s not the singing aspect but, rather, the traveling. Look, he gets tired. The decision is being made that doing concerts now is just too much for him,” Danny adds, noting, “We’re not worried about him being able to sing. We are worried, from a physical standpoint… about human nature. Tony’s 95.”

Bennett’s two shows with Gaga — a prequel for the pair’s second duets album, Love for Sale, due out October 1 — had been billed One Last Time: An Evening with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga and announced as the singer’s last NYC public performance.

Bennett’s family revealed back in February that he’d been battling Alzheimer’s disease for the past four years.

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After releasing the five-song Zoom In EP this past March, Ringo Starr has unveiled plans to issue a new four-track EP called Change the World on September 24 on CD, cassette and digital formats.

In addition, a 10-inch vinyl version will follow on November 19.

Starr first announced details about Change the World during a livestream event Thursday at TalkShop.Live that featured an interview with the former Beatles drummer while giving fans the chance to pre-order the EP’s various versions.

Coinciding with the announcement, Ringo has released the EP’s lead track, “Let’s Change the World,” digitally. The uplifting pop-rock song was co-written by Toto‘s Joseph Williams and Steve Lukather, the latter of whom also is a longtime member of Ringo’s All Starr Band.

The second track is a reggae-flavored tune titled “Just That Way,” which Ringo co-wrote with his longtime engineer Bruce Sugar, and features veteran reggae guitarist Tony Chin.

Track three is the country-influenced “Coming Undone,” which was penned by hit-making songwriter/producer Linda Perry. Perry also plays on the tune, as does acclaimed New Orleans musician Trombone Shorty.

Closing out Change the World is Ringo’s homage to the early rock ‘n’ roll that served as such a big inspiration to him, a cover of Billy Haley & His Comets‘ classic “Rock Around the Clock.” Eagles guitarist — and Starr’s brother-in-law — Joe Walsh lends his talents to the track.

Like Zoom In, Ringo recorded Change the World at his home studio, Roccabella West.

“I’ve been saying I only want to release EPs at this point and this is the next one,” notes Ringo. “What a blessing it’s been during this year to have a studio here at home and be able to collaborate with so many great musicians.”

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John Illsley, who played bass with Dire Straits for the band’s entire career, has written a memoir about his life and his experiences with the famous British group led by singer/guitarist Mark Knopfler.

My Life in Dire Straits: The Inside Story of One of the Biggest Bands in Rock History will be released on November 9, and will feature Illsley’s first-hand recollections of the band’s journey — from playing U.K. pubs, to the stages of some of the world’s biggest venues. The bassist also shares details about the recording of Dire Straits many classic songs and albums.

“This book above all is about passion and pursuing your dreams — taking the unpredictable path, not the easy option,” Illsey says. “It charts the journey from my innocent teens strumming a few chords, to playing on the biggest stages in the world; a chance meeting in 1976 with Mark Knopfler that created a musical partnership that lasted 20 years, and a strong friendship that continues to this day.”

He adds, “Dire Straits was an idea that created a phenomenal musical legacy, an extraordinary journey of joy, fun, companionship and surprises. I am immensely proud of my contribution to this journey.”

Knopfler has penned the book’s foreword. He writes in one segment, “For us, it was a huge adventure and a hell of a ride, with all its comedy, absurdity, exhaustion, madness, and sadness…This ride is not for everyone, not for those who can’t take the pressures and the pace…It was a different world. And John has remembered a pretty big chunk of it.”

Besides Knoplfer, Illsley was the only Dire Straits member to play with the band from its inception to its 1995 dissolution. John also has released eight solo albums and is an accomplished painter.

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Sheryl Crow‘s career has brought her into contact with music legends like Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Walsh, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Stevie Nicks, most of whom went on to become friends and mentors to her.  But only one music legend — that we know of — faced off against her on the basketball court.

Asked by SPIN if it’s true that she once shot hoops with Prince, Sheryl says, “That is hilarious…Yeah, he had a basketball [hoop] set up at Paisley Park and he invited me. Gosh, it’s so weird. I don’t even remember how I met him, but he recorded [my song] ‘Every Day is a Winding Road’ and invited me to come to Paisley Park.”

“I went and I recorded with him — I played harmonica on a couple of things — and he showed me around the studio, and he had a basketball court,” she adds. “He was an excellent basketball player. I, on the other hand, was, and still am, a terrible basketball player!”

Prince’s version of “Every Day is a Winding Road” appeared on his 1999 album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.  That same year, the late legend dropped in at a stop on the Lilith Fair tour to sing the song with Sheryl.

And speaking of touring, Friday, Sheryl is releasing a 27-track album called Live from the Ryman and More, recorded in 2019 with guest artists like Nicks, Brandi Carlile and Emmylou Harris. 

She tells SPIN, “I guess my hope for it is that in the middle of all this weird separation that we’ve endured…it brings back memories of us all being together and being able to listen to music and be in the room.”

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For her upcoming birthday on August 16, Madonna wants get in bed with you — metaphorically and physically.

Madonna is asking her fans to help support the Mercy James Centre, the hospital she built in Malawi four years ago, which is the only pediatric intensive care unit in the entire country. Specifically, she needs more beds in the hospital — 50 of them, to be exact — so she’s asking fans to donate money to purchase those beds.

“I want to ensure that every child that comes into that hospital and has an operation or surgery of any kind has a bed to recuperate in afterwards, and is taken care of,” Madonna explains in an Instagram video.

She adds, “I will name that bed after you and you will forever be, not only in my heart, but in the hearts of all the children of Malawi and their families. Thank you in advance for your generosity, and happy birthday to me!”

You can donate at RaisingMalawi.org. If you’ve got deep pockets, you can donate $5,000 and get a bed named after you.  If you don’t have that kind of money, you can donate $2,500 and share the bed name with one other donor, or $500, to have your name listed with nine other donors.

Even if you can’t afford that, you can give $100 to contribute to a nurse’s salary, or even $25 to pay for a month’s worth of medicine for one child.

Of course, helping the children of Malawi is one of Madonna’s pet causes, because it’s the country where four of her children — David, Mercy, Stella and Estere — were born.

 

 

 

 

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Billy Idol became a grandfather for the first time last year, and the 65-year-old pop-punk singer tells People that the experience has enriched his life.

“It opens you up emotionally,” he says. “Everything is a new experience for her. In a way, I’m reliving those experiences myself.”

Idol’s daughter, Bonnie Broad, gave birth to a daughter of her own in May 2020. Billy says his one-year-old grandkkid, who’s named Poppy Rebel, is already a fan of his music.

“The other day she was bouncing up and down to ‘Rebel Yell,'” he says of his 1983 hit. “But of course, she also loves ‘Baby Shark.'”

The rocker, who just announced that he’ll be releasing a four-song EP next month titled The Roadside, says the downtime he had during the COVID-19 pandemic gave him the chance to spend some quality time with his granddaughter.  He tells People that he’s been teaching the little one how to talk and walk.

“She can say ‘dude,’ ‘duck’ and ‘fish,'” he reports.

Last month, Billy posted an adorable video on his Instagram of Poppy feeding him blueberries.

Idol recently launched a run of 2021 U.S. tour dates that continues tonight with a show in Airway Heights, Washington. The trek winds down with a four-show Las Vegas residency in October.

Meanwhile, the lead single from The Roadside, “Bitter Taste,” is available digitally now.

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The July 28 death of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill apparently has spurred fans to revisit the Texas trio’s catalog and has driven a number of their recordings back up the Billboard charts.

The band’s 1974 hit “La Grange” lands at the top of Billboard‘s latest Hard Rock Digital Song Sales, with 1,600 units sold during the most recent week-long tracking period, according to MRC Data. The track becomes ZZ Top’s first song to hit #1 on the list. The previous week, shortly after Hill’s passing, “La Grange” reached #2 on the chart.

Three other ZZ Top songs currently are in the top 10 of the Hard Rock Digital Song Sales — 1983’s “Sharp Dressed Man” at #2, 1975’s “Tush” at #5, and 1983’s “Gimme All Your Lovin'” at #6.

“La Grange” also sits at #6 on the general Rock Digital Song Sales tally, while the other aforementioned tunes all are in that chart’s top 20.

Meanwhile, ZZ Top’s 2019 hits compilation Goin’ 50 entered Billboard‘s Hard Rock Albums chart at #5 and the Top Rock Albums tally at #20 after accruing 8,400 album-equivalent units.

Overall, the band’s catalog was streamed 12.7 million times in the U.S. during the most recent tracking period, while notching 8,000 in album sales and 14,000 digital downloads of its songs.

Hill died suddenly at his home in Houston at the age of 72. He had been taking a break from the group’s current tour to seek treatment for a number of medical issues. No cause of death has been announced.

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Led Zeppelin‘s Robert Plant has reteamed with acclaimed country-bluegrass artist Alison Krauss to record a new collaborative album titled Raise the Roof, a follow-up to their Grammy-winning 2007 duets collection, Raising Sand.

Like its predecessor, the 12-track Raise the Roof collection was produced by T Bone Burnett and features mostly of covers songs.

The album includes renditions of tunes by Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint, The Everly Brothers, British folk legend Bert Jansch and many others. Raise the Roof also features a new original tune called “High and Lonesome” that Plant co-wrote with Burnett.

One of the tracks, a version of the Randy Weeks song “Can’t Let Go” — which Lucinda Williams previously covered for her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road — has been released as an advance digital single.

Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo and Robert’s Band of Joy collaborator Buddy Miller contributed to the album, as did a few musicians who also appeared on Raising Sand — drummer Jay Bellerose, guitarist Marc Ribot and bassist Dennis Crouch.

Discussing working with Krauss again on the Raise the Roof material, Plant notes, “You hear something and you go ‘Man, listen to that song, we got to sing that song!’ It’s a vacation, really — the perfect place to go that you least expected to find.”

Adds Alison, “We wanted it to move. We brought other people in, other personalities within the band, and coming back together again in the studio brought a new intimacy to the harmonies.”

In support of Raise the Roof, Plant and Krauss are planning to tour together in 2022.

Raising Sand won five Grammys in 2009, including Album of the Year.

Raise the Roof will be released on November 19, and can be pre-ordered now.

Here’s the full track list:

“Quattro (World Drifts In)”
“The Price of Love”
“Go Your Way”
“Trouble with My Lover”
“Searching for My Love”
“Can’t Let Go”
“It Don’t Bother Me”
“You Led Me to the Wrong”
“Last Kind Words Blues”
“High and Lonesome”
“Going Where the Lonely Go”
“Somebody Was Watching Over Me”

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In June, Journey released a new single called “The Way We Used to Be” that will part of the band’s forthcoming studio album, which will be the group’s first collection of new, original songs since 2011’s Eclipse.

Journey guitarist Neal Schon tells ABC Audio that “The Way We Used to Be” began as a musical idea he came up with using a keyboard loop, to which he then added guitar, bass and string sounds before sending it to the band’s longtime keyboardist, Jonathan Cain, for him to fill out with lyrics and melodies.

Schon admits that when he first sent the tune to Cain, he didn’t think it sounded like a Journey song.

“I thought it was more like…a Bad English song or something for John Waite or Rolling Stones with a little harder edge,” Neal explains. “And I’m glad that 90 percent of the people that have heard it love it. Some others are just going, ‘Wow, that doesn’t sound like Journey.’ And I go, ‘Well, it wasn’t meant to be’…but it ended up on our album.”

Speaking about the band’s studio effort, Schon says, “There’s so much great material on this album that we’ve…produced and I’ve been working on for well over a year now with everybody.”

Neal tells ABC Audio that it was “a blessing” for him to get to record a lot of his parts live in the studio with Journey’s new drummer, Narada Michael Walden, who also is producing the album, while the other band members generally laid down there parts remotely.

As for when the new album might be released, Schon reports, “It could come out at the end of this year, or, if it doesn’t, I believe that it will come out sometime after the first [of January].”

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Marlon Wayans says he wanted to give Aretha Franklin‘s first husband and manager Ted White a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T when he channeled him in the new biographical drama, Respect. Unfortunately for the actor, that wasn’t an easy task.

“It was funny because I couldn’t really get anything out of anybody about Ted,” Wayans tells ABC Audio. “They said he was a really nice dresser. They said he was stroppy. They said he was charming, but…that there was a bad guy in there.”

Wayans says before he decided to take his own “creative license” to portray the accomplished songwriter, he first tried to “reach out to Ted” to get his perspective — “but Ted didn’t want to talk.” 

“So, I…based [Ted] on a minute-and-a-half interview I saw with him and Aretha,” Wayans says. “And from there, I started thinking about the psychology of a guy like Ted, because as much of a devil [that] he was, there was something angelic about him. And so I focused in on not him being all good or all bad, but sometimes he couldn’t keep his bad under control.”

To that end, Wayans says he formed a back story for White that helped explain his harsh behavior.

“And I focused on him maybe having… mommy issues and a lack of appreciation for women,” he shares. “And…even pimps and guys like that, they’re not bad people. They’re hurt people.”

Wayans continues, “Damaged people damage people. And so I wanted to protect that little nugget of innocence in him, because I think in order to make a great bad guy — you’ve got to love him and you got to hate them.”

Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson as the Queen of Soul, hits theaters Friday.

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