Happy Friday! The BF and I are driving to Pittsburgh for the weekend for his best friend’s husband’s retirement party. #jealous!. But how could I ever leave YOU guys?!….We are so stoked! We have a new station signing on the air on Monday in Eau Claire, WI! Welcome to Real Rock 92-9 THE X.! Is there a city in WI we are NOT on? WI <3 hardDriveRadio! HA!…This weekend on hardDrive with Lou Brutus is our STOP A BULLY special edition! The show features Metallica’s Rob Trujillo, Brann Dailor of Mastodon, Rob Zombie, Shinedown’s Brent Smith, Maria Brink from In This Moment, Myles Kennedy & Mark Tremonti of Alter Bridge, Joey Jordison of Slipknot, Ivan Moody of Five Finger Death Punch and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park and STP talking about their experiences with bullies or offering up some really great advice. Hope you can check it out! Even if in some small way we can help to stop this terrible epidemic of teen suicide, it will be a great achievement. The new version of Stone Temple Pilots, with Chester Bennington on lead vocals, made its TV debut last night (Oct 3rd) with a performance on NBC’s The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. The band just completed its first tour with Bennington as its new singer and will release a new EP titled High Rise on Tuesday (Oct 8th). Bennington told me that going on tour with STP for the first time, it was important to gain the respect of the STP fabs: “We’re going out here and we know that we have a lot to prove. And there are a lot of people who don’t understand what’s going on, they don’t know the intimate, working relationships that these guys have had throughout their careers, and how difficult it has been. And they also know me for what I do and it’s kind of hard to see how the two might mix. So we know we want to go out, and we know what we expect of ourselves, and we want to go out and we want to prove ourselves and earn the respect of the people there.” And keep an eye on the band’s website for some of the interview we did with the band last month in Huntington, NY during their stop at the Paramount Theater. And here is their EPK on the making of the High Rise EP…Pulse of Radio also reported on a story I saw about Tool guitarist Adam Jones revealing he is working on a new music video from the group — for a song off its last album, 2006’s 10,000 Days. During an online chat with Guitar World, Jones — who created most of Tool’s videos — was asked why he did not direct any for songs from 10,000 Days. He replied, “We just haven’t finished them yet. We ran into a really big snag because the first video is all CGI and we had some vicious production problems. The company we started with kinda screwed us, but luckily my friend’s company is bailing us out. Since he’s helping us, they can only work on it when their schedule is clear. But it’s gonna be great. When I go home, practically all my time is spent on it.” Jones added, “I thought the CGI process would be a lot easier than physically filming something, which is what we’ve always done in the past. But it’s actually a lot harder to get action down and get it moving and looking right . . . We’re also doing pre-production on the second video, which will be all stop-motion.” Jones did not direct the sole video released to date from the 10,000 Days album, for the song “Vicarious,” although he has directed many of the band’s creepiest and most popular clips. Jones, who worked as a visual effects artist before Tool took off, told us a while back how visuals have always played a major role in the band’s music: “I’ve just always thought in vision, I mean, just, like, putting on headphones when I was a kid and trying to dream stuff while I was listening to music. I guess I still do that today when I play. But it’s a lot more emotional than visual and I know that sounds pretentious, but it really is, what the four of us do. The visuals just kind of, like, bring themselves in it.” The guitarist also spoke about long-awaited plans for Tool to make a live DVD, saying, “Yeah, we’ve talked about it. We had shot a bunch of live concert footage and were going to put out a DVD, but it turned out to not sit very well with our band. We were like, What can we do that’s more epic than just a live DVD? I think we’re just going to keep shooting stuff, and when we’re ready, we’ll put something out. Of course, we’d like to do something really epic, like the movie version of The Wall, but movie deals are really tough.” Jones and the rest of the members of Tool are reportedly working at last on the follow-up to 10,000 Days, although as usual information on that remains murky. Here’s a the cool video for “Vicarious” that Adam didn’t direct..When I am in LA in about a week, I will be heading over to the home of A Perfect Circle’s Billy Howerdel for a lunch and a chat about the band’s upcoming box set. I am very much looking forward to that!….Also looking forward to seeing Korn in Las Vegas next Saturday night at The Pearl at the Palms!….Slash‘s first film from his production company, Slasher Films, called Nothing Left To Fear opens today. Check out the trailer. And Metallica: Through The Never opens wider this weekend. Last Friday, it opened in IMAX theaters in it’s 3-D version….I love Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. And he hopes you like him enough to agree he should be cast in the upcoming Stars Wars film. Check this out….Oh man, this is hilarious. And no offense to Catholics out there (me being one), but you have GOT to check out what this Chicago restaurant has done by creating the GHOST Burger! (Thanks Blabbermouth!) ….Celebrating birthdays this weekend: Happy 72nd today to writer Anne Rice, Happy 46th to Liev (Ray Donovan) Schreiber and Happy 56th to my friend Russell “Rush” Simmons. Saturday, Happy 66th to Brian Johnson of AC/DC and Sunday, Happy 47th to Tommy Stinson (Replacements and Axl Rose’s Guns N Roses). He still owes me $40 he stole from me in a poker game in 1985! LOL Have a great weekend, y’all!
