Good morning Radicals! Hope everyone had a great weekend. Especially those in the northeast who dealt with a big storm over the weekend. Here’s what’s up in music news today:
Stone Temple Pilots were joined by actor Johnny Depp and legendary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer on stage Friday night (March 4th) at the opening show of the band’s U.S. tour at The Canyon in Santa Clarita, California. The pair came onstage during the encores to jam with the group on a cover version of the MC5’s classic song “Kick Out the Jams” followed by STP’s “Sex Type Thing.”
The 19-song set, which launched STP’s first tour with new singer Jeff Gutt, featured two cuts from the quartet’s upcoming album, expected hits like “Plush,” “Vasoline” and “Interstate Love Song,” plus surprising deep tracks such as “Glide” from the band’s No. 4 album, which was performed live for the first time ever. Other rarities included “Army Ants,” “Atlanta” and opener “Regeneration,” a track from the Shangri-La Dee Da LP that was played for the first time since 2001.
Guitarist Dean DeLeo told us that the charter members of STP feel confident again onstage with Gutt on the mic: “Look, I mean, you’re like a football team going out there, you know. You’re a team. You’re all relying on one another to execute. And you know, when everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing, boy, it’s a good feeling, man.”
Depp is a bandmate of STP bassist Robert DeLeo in Hollywood Vampires, which also features Alice Cooper and Joe Perry. Gutt, a Michigan native and former X Factor contestant, was previously a member of the bands Rival City and Dry Cell. He was not found through the year-long open audition process that STP held in 2016, but worked in secret with the band throughout 2017 to write and record new music.
Gutt’s first album with the band, a self-titled effort and STP’s seventh overall, is due out on March 16th. STP next plays at the Rose in Pasadena on Thursday night, March 8th. You can see all the stops on the Road Rage page.
Members of Linkin Park have been spotted in the studio together. Singer Mike Shinoda and guitarist Brad Delson were recently tagged in a studio Instagram post, while bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell also shared an in-studio photo that may have been from the same location. Linkin Park has not officially announced whether the group intends to continuing recording and touring together, following last July’s suicide of frontman Chester Bennington.
The band staged an emotional all-star tribute concert for the fallen singer last October, and released a concert album in December, titled One More Light Live, which was recorded on their last tour with Bennington.
Shinoda released three new solo tracks as a digital EP in late January. Titled Post Traumatic, the set directly addressed Bennington’s death and Shinoda’s own anxiety over what would come next.
In the first indication that the band did indeed plan to carry on, Shinoda wrote on Twitter after the EP’s release, “I have every intention on continuing with LP, and the guys feel the same. We have a lot of rebuilding to do, and questions to answer, so it’ll take time.”
Three Days Grace has debuted a new lyric video for “Right Left Wrong,” the opening number and third track to be shared from the band’s upcoming album Outsider. The tune follows up the previously released singles “The Mountain” and “I Am An Outsider.” The LP is Three Days Grace’s sixth studio effort and follows up 2015’s Human.
Drummer Neil Sanderson told us the band felt comfortable taking its time to make the new LP: “We realized that, you know, the fans are on this journey with us, we’re having lots of success overseas and stuff, we felt like we could really take our time and make the record that we truly wanted to make. And I think Outsider definitely has all the things that we wanted to make, and the messages are clear that we wanted to put across on the album, and we’re really proud of it.”
The video for “The Mountain” has been streamed over over six million times on YouTube alone, while the song is currently Number Six on the rock radio chart. Other tracks on Outsider, which is out March 9th, include “Infra-Red,” “Nothing To Lose But You,” “Me Against You,” “Strange Days,” “The New Real” and more.
Outsider is the second Three Days Grace effort to feature Matt Walst on lead vocals, following the departure of original frontman Adam Gontier in late 2012. Walst’s debut with the group, Human, debuted at Number 16 on the Billboard 200 album chart and yielded two chart-topping singles in “Painkiller” and “I Am Machine.” Three Days Grace will play a handful of radio festivals in April before heading to Columbus, Ohio for a May 18th appearance at the Rock On The Range festival.
Summer 2018… pic.twitter.com/LuTNSGpDMd
— Breaking Benjamin (@breakingbenj) March 3, 2018
Breaking Benjamin has released a video teaser for a summer 2018 U.S. tour that will also feature Five Finger Death Punch, Nothing More and Bad Wolves. The official announcement, including exact cities and dates, is expected later this month. Breaking Benjamin’s sixth album, Ember, will arrive on April 13th. Five Finger Death Punch and Nothing More have LPs out, while Bad Wolves will also issue its debut disc this spring.
Woodshedding for the summer tour has never felt so good….see you out there….(I’ll learn the words by then, I swear)
Thanks to Mighty Mike for the inspirado. (Oh, and Halen and Lennon, too) pic.twitter.com/VB8x6ipsmT
— Foo Fighters (@foofighters) March 3, 2018
Foo Fighters kick off a lengthy North American tour next month and are apparently preparing some new cover songs for inclusion in the set. The band has shared a video from rehearsals in which it mashes up John Lennon‘s “Imagine” with Van Halen‘s “Jump,” with Dave Grohl writing, “Woodshedding for the summer tour has never felt so good….see you out there….(I’ll learn the words by then, I swear).” The trek kicks off on April 18th in Austin, Texas, with dates throughout the spring, summer and fall.
A one-minute preview of the first episode of Ozzy Osbourne and family’s new podcast is available online. The 10-week podcast, which launches on Monday (March 5th), will see Ozzy, his wife/manager Sharon and their children Jack and Kelly talking about the groundbreaking reality show The Osbournes that ran on MTV from 2002 to 2005. The Osbournes Podcast will premiere on the 16th anniversary of the show’s MTV debut. New episodes will become available every Monday.
Late AC/DC singer Bon Scott will be honored with a statue in Melbourne, Australia. The three-meter-high-and-two-meter-wide sculpture will be officially unveiled at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, March 6th on AC/DC Lane, named for the Australian rock band. The statue is part of the Victorian Government’s “Rockin’ The Laneways” Initiative. Local artist Mike Makatron worked on the project and said, “It’s an honor to add a permanent 3D element that pays tribute to a great Australian rock and roll band and its lead singer Bon Scott, but also to music in general.” Scott sang on AC/DC’s first six albums and achieved international fame with the band before his death at the age of 33 in 1980 from alcohol poisoning.
Former Guns N’ Roses and The Cult drummer Matt Sorum said in a new interview on the 2 Hours With Matt Pinfield podcast that his upcoming book will be “the juiciest of the juiciest” of memoirs written by veterans of Guns N’ Roses, with the book set to explore not just his career as a musician but the sketchy way in which he made a living before he got his big break in music.
Sorum revealed, “Before I was in a rock band, I was a drug smuggler. I used to smuggle cocaine across borders. I’d fly on airplanes with two kilos strapped around my waist.” Sorum said he quit after a trip to Hawaii on which he was sure he was followed. He explained, “I told the guy that I flew this stuff for . . . ‘I can’t do this. I’m being followed.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, man, you’re just high.’ I’m like, ‘No, man. I’m not doing it. I’m going back to L.A.’ The guy that took my place got arrested. 20 years in a federal penitentiary, international drug smuggling. That would have been me.”
Sorum replaced Steven Adler in Guns N’ Roses, recorded the highly successful 1991 albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II and 1993’s “The Spaghetti Incident?”, while touring extensively with the band for four years. Sorum was not invited to participate in Guns N’ Roses’ current “Not In Our Lifetime” reunion tour, although he was inducted as a member of the band into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in April 2012.
More details have emerged about the massive Rob Zombie box set coming out on March 30th. The set will be limited to 1,000 copies worldwide, each foil-stamped and numbered, and will feature 11 Zombie solo albums exclusively on 15 audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl LPs. It collects all of Zombie’s studio and live solo albums, including several previously out-of-print or previously unreleased on black vinyl, plus the vinyl LP for Zombie’s brand new live album, Astro-Creep 2000: Live, which also debuts on CD and digitally on March 30.
The vinyl box set also includes all 11 albums as digital audio on an exclusive Creeper Robot USB device and other Rob Zombie-designed and commissioned extras available only in the new collection. Except for Hellbilly Deluxe 2, all the albums are also available for individual preorder on standard weight black LPs.
The set collects Zombie’s music from his 20-year solo career. The newest addition to Zombie’s catalog, Astro-Creep 2000: Live, features a complete performance of White Zombie‘s final album, 1995’s Astro-Creep 2000, recorded in September 2016 at Riot Fest Chicago.
That’s a lot of stuff going on today! Crank it to 11 and meet us tonight on hardDrive XL!
