Tom Petty, heartland rocker with dark streak, dead at 66

NEW YORK—Tom Petty, the heartland rocker whose classic melodies but dark storytelling created a string of hits over four decades, died Monday of cardiac arrest, his family said. He was 66.

His family confirmed that Petty passed away Monday evening surrounded by loved ones after a confusing day in which several media outlets reported and then retracted premature news of his death.

“On behalf of the Tom Petty family we are devastated to announce the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend Tom Petty,” a family statement said.

Petty early Monday suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu, just a week after he closed his career in a triumphant fashion.

The rocker had played three sold-out shows at the iconic Hollywood Bowl to wrap up a tour celebrating 40 years of his band the Heartbreakers.

He closed the encore with one of his earliest and best-known songs — “American Girl,” which tells of an ambitious girl “raised on promises” now contemplating suicide, set to guitar harmonies from the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll.

The song was one of many by Petty about struggling to overcome long odds. “I Won’t Back Down,” perhaps his best-known song, took on a second life as a US patriotic anthem after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The singer and guitarist — recognizable for his shoulder-length blonde hair — delivered his vocals in short punches that let on an underlying anger, such as on “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”

The rocker’s characters — small-town Americans full of aspirations but running into a wall of setbacks — reflected the hardscrabble early life of Petty.

His grandfather was a logger from Georgia rumored to have fled south to Florida after axing a man to death in an argument. Petty was born in Gainesville, the university town in northern Florida, to a belligerently drunk father who sold wholesale tobacco and candy.

Petty once recalled that his father, intoxicated and unimpressed by his son’s passion for music, once smashed up the boy’s record collection.

The future rocker said he told him, “Dad, if you’ll just leave me alone, I’ll be a millionaire by the time I’m 35.” It was a prediction that proved prophetic.

Rock as early escape

Petty, speaking in 2015 to Men’s Journal, credited his mother Kitty with saving him by making sure “to show us there was more to life than rednecks.”

“She read to me a lot. And she liked music: She had a record player and would play Nat King Cole and the ‘West Side Story’ soundtrack. I think of her every time I hear those songs,” he said.

But he remained consumed by inner rage.

“Any authority I didn’t agree with could just make me go crazy,” he said of his early life haunted by his father.

He struggled with depression most of his life and formed an addiction to heroin, although later in his life his only vice was marijuana and he instead embraced transcendental meditation to calm himself.

Petty embraced the country influences of the South, especially when he crafted the 1985 concept album “Southern Accents.”

Touring the United States, he flew a Confederate flag on stage — a decision he later regretted, telling Rolling Stone that “people just need to think about how it looks to a black person” as he likened the
controversial symbol to a Nazi swastika.

In a speech in February as he was presented a lifetime award at the Grammys, Petty said he owed a debt to African Americans such as Chuck Berry whom he credited as the creators of rock ‘n’ roll.

But like so many music fans of his generation, he discovered rock ‘n’ roll via Britain when he saw The Beatles perform on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.

“I had my eyes opened like so many others and I joined the conspiracy to put black music on the popular white radio,” Petty said.

Campaigner for artists

Petty in the late 1980s joined one of The Beatles, George Harrison, in a supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys, that also featured Bob Dylan. The project was short-lived after the death of another member, Roy Orbison.

Fresh from the glory of the Wilburys, Petty — long backed by the Heartbreakers — in 1989 released his first solo album, “Full Moon Fever,” which featured the wistful “Free Fallin'” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” as well as “I Won’t Back Down.”

Other major hits by Petty included “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” written with David A. Stewart of New Wave duo The Eurythmics. The track’s playful video, themed around “Alice in Wonderland,” cemented Petty’s reputation as a favorite among stoners.

The three-time Grammy winner was steadfast on artistic control and had a reputation for battling with the music industry — most memorably with the 1981 album “Hard Promises” after he was angered by his label’s plan to put the store price higher than usual.

More recently, English singer Sam Smith agreed to credit Petty as a songwriter on his worldwide hit ballad “Stay With Me” due to the similarities — coincidental, by all accounts — in the chorus to worldwide hit “I Won’t Back Down.”

Agence France-Presse

JYJ’s Junsu opens up about hotel controversy

Junsu of K-pop group JYJ attempted to clear the controversy involving him and Toscana Hotel employees via Instagram on Tuesday.

A local media outlet reported Tuesday that Junsu had allegedly earned an unfair profit of $2.62 million from the hotel business. The employee came forward with multiple allegations of financial grievances after the hotel was sold to a real estate company in January.

The 30-year-old singer called the report defamatory and said that he had never made money by harming others.

“Someone used false information and made that ring true to others. It made me sound like a total swindler,” he said.

The Toscana Hotel on Jeju Island was built in September 2014 on the land purchased by Junsu in January 2011. His father was appointed chairman of the hotel while his brother assumed the post of CEO.

“I chose to sell the hotel because a businessmen advised me that that would be better for the hotel and the employees’ future,” Junsu said.

Singer-actor Kim Moo-young, the twin brother of Junsu, took up the issue on his Instagram account on Wednesday.

“My brother has been trying his best to support the hotel management, even selling his cars and wristwatches,” he said. “Please let Junsu join the military without any more concerns.”

The artist was sued by the construction company involved in the hotel project in November 2014, a case which he won in June 2015.

Junsu will begin his two-year military service on Thursday.

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Singer / singwriter Fiona Apple arrested - police mugshot revealed

Fiona Apple has been arrested in Texas for possession of drugs found by police in a routine search of her tour bus.

The singer-songwriter, who came back with her first album in seven years earlier this year, was caught in possession of hashish by police in Sierra Blanca, Texas.

TMZ reports that Apple is still being held in Hudspeth County Jail. Fellow musicians Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg have both been arrested in Texas on similar charges in the past.

source: gigwise.com

Michelle Branch covers Rolling Stones classic

US singer-songwriter Michelle Branch has posted audio for her version of The Rolling Stones’ Play With Fire.

Track: Michelle Branch – Play With Fire

File under: sparse, country-tinged rendition of the Stones chestnut

The song was produced by John Leventhal, who previously worked on the Arizona-born Branch’s 2003 full-length Hotel Paper and 2010′s EP Everything Comes And Goes, not to mention her music with Jessica Harp in The Wreckers.

source: classicrockmagazine.com

Jimi Hendrix: "I Don't Want to Be a Clown Anymore"

This story is from the November 15th, 1969 issue of Rolling Stone.

Records, film, press and gossip are collectively ambitious in creating the image of a rock superstar. With Jimi Hendrix – as with Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison – mythology is particularly lavish.

Unfortunately, it is also often irreversible–even when it's ill-founded or after the performer himself has gone through changes.

Several weeks ago, Life magazine described Jimi as "a rock demigod" and devoted several color pages to kaleidoscopic projection of his face. Well, why not? The fisheye lens shot on his first album cover shows him in arrogant distortion: on the second album, he becomes Buddha. Lest anyone forget, Leacock-Pennebaker's Monterey Pop has immortalized his pyromaniacal affair with the guitar. Rock-media bedroom talk makes him King Stud of the groupies. Stories circulate that he is rude to audiences, stands up writers, hangs up photographers, that he doesn't talk.

What Jimi's really all about – and where his music is going – is an altogether different thing.

For most of the summer and early fall, Jimi rented a big Georgian-style home in Liberty, New York – one of Woodstock's verdant "suburbs" – for the purpose of housing an eclectic family of musicians: Black Memphis blues guitarists; "new music" and jazz avantgardists; "Experience" member Mitch Mitchell; and – closest to Jimi and most influential – Juma Lewis, a multi-talented ex-progressive jazzman who is now the leader of Woodstock's Aboriginal Music Society.

The hilltop compound – replete with wooded acreage and two horses – was intended for a peaceful, productive musical growth period. But hassles did come, sometimes sending Jimi off on sanity-preserving vacations in Algeria and Morocco: local police were anxious to nab "big-time hippies" on anything from dope to speeding; the house was often hectic with hangers-on; pressure mounted from Jimi's commercial reps to stay within the well-hyped image and not go too far afield experimentally.

But with it all, growth, exchange and – finally – unity was achieved among Jimi and the musicians, whose work-in-progress was evidenced in occasional public appearances in the New York area (at the Woodstock/Bethel Festival, Harlem's Apollo Theater, Greenwich Village's Salvation discotheque, and ABC's Dick Cavett show) and has been recorded for Reprise on an LP which will be released in January. The name of the album, Gypsies, Suns and Rainbows, epitomizes the new Hendrix feeling.

With close friends of Jimi, I drove up to Liberty on a quiet September weekend. The melange of musicians and girls had departed. In a few weeks, Jimi himself was to give up the house, woods and horses for less idyllic prospects: a Manhattan loft and a November hearing on the narcotics-possession charge he was slapped with in Toronto, May 3rd.

Photographs have a funny way of betraying his essentially fragile face and body. He is lean. Almost slight. Eating chocolate chip cookies on the living room couch in this big house – furnished straight and comfortable – he seems boyish and vulnerable.

He offers questions with an unjustified fear of his own articulateness that is charming – but occasionally painful. "Do you, uh – where do you live in the city?" "What kind of music do you li— would you care to listen to?" He is self-effacing almost to a fault: "Do you ever go to the Fillmore? No? – that was a silly question, sorry." "I'm sorry, am I mumbling? Tell me when I'm mumbling. Damn ... I always mumble."

It becomes uncomfortable, so one says: "Jimi, don't keep putting yourself down. There's everybody else to do that for you." He attaches to that statement, repeats it slowly, whips out the embossed Moroccan notebook in which he jots lyrics at all hours of day and night, and scribbles something down.

Fingering through his record collection (extensive and catholic; e.g., Marlene Dietrich, David Peel and the Lower East Side, Schoenberg, Wes Montgomery), he pulls out Blind Faith; Crosby, Stills and Nash; and John Wesley Harding. The Dylan plays first. Jimi's face lights: "I love Dylan. I only met him once, about three years ago, back at the Kettle of Fish [a folk-rock era hangout] on MacDougal Street. That was before I went to England. I think both of us were pretty drunk at the time, so he probably doesn't remember it."

In the middle of a track, Jimi gets up, plugs in his guitar, and – with eyes closed and his supple body curved gently over the instrument – pick up on "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest," riding the rest of the song home with a near-religious intensity.

He talks intently to Juma and his girl. He cherishes real friends and will do anything for them. They, in turn, feel protective toward him. "Poor Jimi," one says. "Everyone's trying to hold him up for something. Those busts ... Even the highway patrol exploits him. They know his car: they stop him on the road between New York and Woodstock and harass him. Then they have something to gloat about for the rest of the day. Once a cop stopped me on the highway and started bragging: 'Hey, I just stopped Jimi Hendrix for the second time today.'"

On the bookcase is a photograph of a Fifties Coasters-type R&B group: processed hair, metallic-threaded silk-lapel suits, shiny shoes. The thin kid on the far left in a high-conked pompadour, grinning over an electric guitar: is it – ? "That's okay," Jimi smiles at the impending laughter. "I don't try to cover up the past; I'm not ashamed of it." But he is genuinely humble about the present. For example, he'd been wanting for some time to jam with jazz and "new music" avantgardists, but worried that such musicians didn't take him seriously enough to ever consider playing with him. "Tell me, honestly," he asked a friend, "what do those guys think of me? Do they think I'm jiving?"

We are listening now to the tape of such a session, the previous night's jam: Jimi on electric guitar, avantgarde pianist Michael Ephron on clavichord, Juma on congas and flute. A beautiful fusion of disparate elements, disjunct and unified at alternating seconds. Now chaotic, now coming together. "Cosmic music," they call it. Ego-free music. Not the sort of stuff the waxlords make many bucks off. Not the kind of sound guaranteed to extend the popularity of a rock superstar.

"I don't want to be a clown anymore. I don't want to be a 'rock and roll star,'" Jimi says, emphatically. The forces of contention are never addressed but their pervasiveness has taken its toll on Jimi's stamina and peace of mind. Trying to remain a growing artist when a business empire has nuzzled you to its bosom takes a toughness, a shrewdness. For those who have a hardness of conviction but not of temperament it isn't a question of selling out but of dying, artistically and spiritually. Refusing to die yet ill-equipped to fight dirty, many sensitive but commercially-lionized artists withdrew. I watch Jimi quietly digging the pictures of faraway people and places in a book, The Epic of Man ("South America ... wow, that's a whole different world. Have you ever been there?") and I wonder just where he will be and what he will be doing five years from now.

We crowd into Jimi's metal-fleck silver Stingray ("I want to paint it over – maybe black") for a sunrise drive to the waterfalls. ("I wish I could bring my guitar – and plug it in down there.") The talk is of puppies, daybreak, other innocentia. We climb down the rocks to the icy brook, then suddenly discover the car keys are missing. Everyone shuffles through shoulder pouches and wallets. "Hey, don't worry," Jimi says. "They'll turn up. No use being hassled about it now." Jimi's taking pictures and writing poetry. "I want to write songs about tranquility, about beautiful things," he says.

Back at the house, he pads around, emptying ashtrays, putting things in order. "I'm like a clucking old grandmother," he smiles. "I've just gotta straighten things out a little." It's 7 a.m. and he has to be at the recording studio in Manhattan at 4 in the afternoon. Everyone's exhausted.

After a few hours of sleep, Jimi floats into the kitchen looking like a fuzzy lamb unmercifully awakened and underfed. He passes up the spread of eggs, pork chops, crescent rolls and tea; breakfast, instead, is a Theragran and a swig of tequila in milk. "Jimi, you never eat ..." Juma's girl worries aloud.

We pile into the car for the two-hour drive into Manhattan. Passing two Afro-haired guys in an Aston-Martin, Jimi turns and flashes a broad grin, extending his fingers in a peace salute. We turn up the radio on Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour"; groove on Neil Diamond, Jackie deShannon, the Turtles. Everything is everything: We're playing with a puppy, grateful for clear skies, clear road, clear AM station. What more could a carload of travelers in an inconspicuous blue Avis ask?

We pull into a roadside stop. No giggly bell-bottomed young girls in sight, Jimi gets out and brings back chocolate milk and ice cream for everyone. Truckers pay no attention. Middle-aged couples glare disdainfully.

The talk is of the session. They'll record at a studio on West 44th Street, then go somewhere else to mix it – maybe Bell Sound of A&R – because Jimi says the recording studio they're going to "has bad equipment ... likes to take advantage of so-called longhair musicians."

Downtown traffic on the West Side highway is light at rush hour. The fortresses of upper Riverside Drive are handsome in the sun, but the air has lost its freshness. Getting off the highway at 45th Street, it's 4:45. The session, costing $200 an hour, was booked to begin at 4:00. But delay couldn't be helped; no hassle. A carful of teenagers alongside us has the radio turned up loud on "If Six Was Nine" – the cut being used as part of advertisment for Easy Rider. I ask Jimi if he's seen the film; he doesn't answer.

Turning around, I find him stretched out on the back seat, legs curled up embryonically, hands clasped under his cheek. Sleeping soundly.

article source: rollingstone.com

Sheryl Crow Claims Benign Brain Tumor Gives Her ‘A Fit’

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Sheryl Crow was diagnosed with a brain tumor last year but she does not worry about it because it is benign, the singer-songwriter told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

In a story posted on the newspaper’s website on Tuesday, Crow, whose hits include “All I Wanna Do” and “Soak Up the Sun,” said the tumor was discovered when she went to a hospital to be tested because she was experiencing memory loss.

“I haven’t really talked about it,” she told the newspaper’s nightclub and entertainment reporter Doug Elfman, “In November, I found out I have a brain tumor. But it’s benign, so I don’t have to worry about it. But it gives me a fit.”

A representative for the singer was not immediately available for comment.

Crow told the Review-Journal that she has a history of memory loss dating back to the 1990s when she forgot the lyrics to her hit “A Change Would Do You Good” while singing in a show in Las Vegas.

“I worried about my memory so much that I went and got an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). And I found out I have a brain tumor,” she said. “And I was like, ‘See? I knew there was something wrong.’”

She made headlines in May when she forgot words to “Soak Up the Sun” at a show in St. Petersburg, Florida. Onstage at the time, she joked, “I’m 50. What can I say!”

Crow, who has two children, was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer in 2006, which was successfully treated that year.

source: mb.com.ph

Noel Gallagher: 'If Obama loses, I'll run for president myself'

(CNN) -- "I don't know the ins and outs of his politics (but) for his procession to become President I was in America and his speeches were spine tingling. Barack Obama can talk, and coming after Bush it was something to behold. In my humble opinion, if he loses the next election to the other bunch then, good Lord, I will run myself."

So says Noel Gallagher, former creative force of British band Oasis and one of rock 'n' roll's biggest mouths. Singer-songwriter, brother to Liam and now a U.S. presidential candidate: 2012 promises to be quite a year for the 45-year-old whose song-writing talent has taken him from unemployment in a city called Manchester in northern England to sell-out stadium tours around the world, playing to millions.

By September, Gallagher will have completed the tour of his first solo album since the demise of Oasis in 2009; an expedition entailing 81 shows across Europe, the Pacific (Japan and Australia) and America as well as being a voyage into the unknown for the forthright backing-singer-now-frontman.

It was initially intended as a small affair, but such has been the demand for the new record -- "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds" topped the charts in the UK in October 2011-- theaters have rapidly been upgraded to arenas to cope with demand. A move that surprised the man himself and maybe explains the overriding mood of calm satisfaction the guitarist exudes from beneath a leather jacket as he sits down with a coffee to talk to CNN.

source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/06/showbiz/music/noel-gallagher-oasis-obama-high-flying-birds/index.html