Well, we are losing our best team member ever, Shawn! She’s moving on to greener pastures and we wish her the best! WAAAAH! OK, on to the music news: What does a Chicago furniture company, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and Resistance Pro Wrestling have in common? A tv ad! It’s completely inane, but I can see if you are a Chicagoan, it totally makes sense! Click here Smithe Furniture-Billy Corgan and see for yourself! As Corgan told the Chicago Tribune, “I can honestly say that if it had been anybody else in the country outside of Chicago … I probably wouldn’t have done it,” Corgan said Wednesday. “(And because) the commercial’s obviously very focused on the Chicago market.” In the spot, Corgan is shown playing musical chairs in a wrestling ring with the three Smithe brothers. When one of them pushes him out of his seat, Corgan calls in his real-life Resistance Pro wrestlers to rough the Smithes up a bit. The business suit-wearing brothers and spandex-clad grapplers trade licks — complete with bone-crushing cartoon sound effects — until one of the wrestlers holds a chair up high over a Smithe, as if to crash it down on him. “Wait!” Corgan exclaims in the spot’s only spoken line. “That’s a Walter E. Smithe chair!” Kookie!…..Pulse Content reports Bullet For My Valentine‘s fourth studio album, Temper, Temper, sold 44,000 copies in its first week of release in the U.S. to debut at Number 13 (we like that number!) on the Billboard 200 album chart. The Feb 12th release follows up 2010’s Fever, which moved 71,000 copies in its opening week to land at Number Three on the chart. With three well-received previous albums behind them, we asked singer Matt Tuck if the band felt any pressure to repeat that success with Temper, Temper: “The only pressure that we’ve had has just been pressure from ourselves to just write the best songs we can. So I think that’s the only thing I’ve really learned which has really come in useful, is to kind of not let any outside kind of influence creep in there, you know. We do what we want to do, and if it feels good, we’ll roll with it. Living by those rules, you know, it’s worked out really well for us.” The band is getting ready to tour in Europe before packing up and heading to the U.S. to headline the hardDrive Live Five Tour with Halestorm and Young Guns! Needless to say, we are counting down the days!….Congrats are in order! Pearl Jam‘s 1991 debut album, Ten, has now officially sold 10 million copies, according to Billboard, which tracks record sales via Nielsen SoundScan. Although the set received its “diamond” status a while back for shipping 10 million copies to stores, the band passed the actual sales figure this week as the disc moved another 4,000 copies. This makes Ten the 22nd release to sell that many copies since Nielsen began tracking sales data in 1991. Here’s a list for you folks out there that like to read ’em:
1. Metallica, Metallica (1991), 15.9 million
2. Shania Twain, Come On Over (1997), 15.5 million
3. Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill (1995)
, 14.8 million
4. Backstreet Boys, Millennium (1999)
, 12.2 million
5. The Beatles, 1 (2000)
, 12.2 million
6. Whitney Houston, The Bodyguard (1992)
, 12.1 million
7. Santana, Supernatural (1999)
, 11.7 million
8. Creed, Human Clay (1999)
, 11.6 million
9. Bob Marley & the Wailers, Legend (1984), 11.3 million
10. *NSYNC, No Strings Attached (2000)
, 11.1 million
And finally today, it was 10 years ago yesterday that we lost a friend of hardDrive and Lou Brutus: The one and only Dr. Metal, Mike Gonsalves, of WHJY in Providence, RI. Mike was one of over 100 people who lost their lives and countless other victims who were injured in a freak accident at the Station nightclub in Warwick. 80’s metal band Great White had taken the stage after Dr Metal introduced them, and during their first song, a spark from their pyro set off the foam panels in the ceiling, causing the devastating fire. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the families still filled with sadness and the emotion of that day. We miss ya, Dr Metal (“How are ya?!“)
