Good morning Radicals! We’re in countdown mode here at hardDriveRadio, gearing up to head out to Rock on the Range this weekend! Here’s what’s up in music news today:
The members of Tool hosted their first in a series of musical clinics in St. Paul, Minnesota on Friday night, May 11th. The intimate event, which starred guitarist Adam Jones, drummer Danny Carey, and bassist Justin Chancellor, featured a discussion and demonstration of the band’s songwriting process, along with questions from the audience and information about the band’s long-awaited new LP.
According to a Reddit report, the band members confirmed that every song on the new LP is more than 10 minutes long. The drums have already been tracked, with Chancellor to lay down his bass parts next, followed by Jones. Singer Maynard James Keenan will record his vocals last.
The band was also asked why they rarely change their set list, to which they responded that “certain songs are f**king horrible for (Keenan)’s voice,” adding, “Also, songs that they related to and wrote when they were young and angry just don’t translate to who they are today.”
Further clinics will be hosted in Chicago, Indianapolis, Royal Oak, Columbus, Cleveland and Pittsburgh before finishing in Philadelphia on May 23rd. Collectable merchandise will also be on hand, along with a display of rare Tool memorabilia. Tickets start from $500 and are still available. The new Tool album, its first since 2006’s 10,000 Days, will arrive either later in 2018 or early next year.
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl performed on Saturday night, May 12th, at Notes & Words, a small benefit festival for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland. During the largely acoustic set, Grohl was joined on stage by his daughter, 12-year-old Violet, for a cover of Adele’s “When We Were Young,” with Violet singing and her father on acoustic guitar. They were later joined by Grohl’s nine-year-old daughter Harper on drums for “The Sky Is A Neighborhood.”
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals state that they are “founded on the belief that all children deserve access to world-class medicine . . . We also help ensure the health of our community, advocating for vulnerable children living in at-risk situations and providing early interventions for kids facing challenges like asthma, obesity, and diabetes.”
Foo Fighters just wrapped up the first leg of a North American tour that will resume on July 6th in Columbia, Maryland.
In other news, Grohl told Madison.com that he is planning to record a 25-minute instrumental on which he plans to play everything himself. Grohl explained, “I’ll hit play and the clock will start ticking. I will record the first drum part, then I will run to the next drum set and play another drum part that will record over the first. Then I will do the same with all the guitars, all assigned to a different moment in the instrumental.” He added that everything will be filmed so that “you will see and hear one song being played for 25 minutes, with six different Dave Grohls playing every note, on every single instrument, all the way through in one take.” Grohl did not say if, how or when the piece, which he’ll record at his private studio in Los Angeles, will be released.
Disturbed frontman David Draiman said in a new behind-the-scenes video that the band goes to “war” each time it makes a new album to make sure it’s the best it can be. Draiman explained, “You fight for the strength of your creation, you fight to make the greatest thing you possibly can, and it’s worth every minute, it’s worth every bit of sweat, it’s worth every tear. So that’s what we live for.”
He added, “Every time we put out a piece of art, it continues to define who we are. What could possibly be more important than that and require more of your focus and your time and your energy.”
The video was shot at the Hideout Recording Studio in Las Vegas, where Disturbed is working on its seventh studio LP with producer Kevin Churko. Guitarist Dan Donegan told us a while back that the band doesn’t like to waste time in the studio: “I mean, we definitely go in there very prepared. We never enter the studio unless we feel like, right now, if these are the songs we record, that we would have an album that we’re proud of and we’re excited about. And we put everything under the microscope and examine it the best we can to make sure that we’re prepared. We don’t like going in there wasting time. We go in there to work, and to try to make the best album we can.”
The new disc will follow up 2015’s Immortalized, which ended a four-year hiatus for the quartet and was its fifth album to enter the Billboard 200 chart at Number One. Immortalized featured the band’s cover of Simon & Garfunkel‘s “The Sound Of Silence,” a massive hit that introduced Disturbed to new audiences.
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready was honored last Thursday night, May 10th at the Showbox in Seattle, where he was bestowed with the Stevie Ray Vaughan Award from MusiCares, the charity that supports musicians dealing with addiction. McCready was presented with the award by Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, who said of his longtime friend, “Whenever I see you playing the guitar, I see the madness and beauty of an addict being set free.”
The all-star event also featured testimonials and performances from Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Mike Ness of Social Distortion, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm and others there to celebrate McCready as well as their own sobriety. Many in attendance said that McCready helped get them on the path to recovery.
McKagan said that McCready, his former high school friend, was the person he knew he could lean on if “the big red exit sign” of temptation was in sight. In his acceptance speech, McCready spoke of the multiple losses that the Seattle music community has endured over the last 30 years with the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Mother Love Bone frontman Andy Wood and Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell. McCready also paid tribute to his late Mad Season bandmates, singer Layne Staley and bassist John Baker Saunders, by leading a performance of that band’s “River Of Deceit.”
McCready told us a while back that he often wonders what his two bandmates would have done if they had lived: “It’s an interesting, sad feeling at times, because I wonder what those guys would be like now. You know, I wonder if Layne would be a dad or Baker would be a dad or, you know, those kind of things that are important to me now, as opposed to when I was in my 20s, are so different and I wish they could experience that.”
McCready performed throughout the evening, including numbers with his Stooges tribute band Raw Power and his UFO tribute act Flight To Mars.
The Pretty Reckless singer Taylor Momsen, has paid tribute to Chris Cornell nearly one year after the Soundgarden frontman committed suicide in a Detroit hotel room last May 18th. Momsen, whose band was opening for Soundgarden during the tour on which Cornell took his own life, wrote on Instagram, “A year ago today was a day I will never forget. I was sitting outside our dressing room in Indianapolis, when I heard someone say, ‘Taylor?’ I looked up to see a man standing there, with the sun blazing behind him. He looked familiar . . . and then my heart dropped, because it was Chris Cornell.”
She continued, “I’d met him a couple times before in passing, but here he was, actually talking to me. We hung out for a while chatting about things like singing and their record King Animal and how much I loved it. Later that night, after we played our show opening for them, we were watching their set from behind the stage when he started talking into the mic, and my heart dropped again when I heard him say our band’s name…twice. He dedicated ‘By Crooked Steps’ to us and we all were as happy as we could ever be. It was magical.”
Momsen added that The Pretty Reckless’s longtime producer Kato Khandwala, who died last month from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, “was with us that night (in Indianapolis) sharing the experience.” Khandwala produced all three The Pretty Reckless studio albums to date, including 2016’s Who You Selling For.
Despite still reeling from both deaths, Momsen said she and her band will carry on. She remarked, “We have lost so much this year and it has put our passion for music to the test, but as humans, we are all built to handle this pain. It will make us stronger, and we will return, because the music will always live on.”
Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda played his first solo shows since the death of the band’s co-vocalist, Chester Bennington, on Saturday, May 12th at the KROQ Weenie Roast in Los Angeles and Sunday, May 13th at the Identity LA festival, also in L.A. Shinoda mashed up some Linkin Park songs along with his solo material, singing some of Chester Bennington’s parts from songs like “Bleed It Out.” He played “In The End” on piano and let the fans sing most of Chester’s vocal parts, though at times he came in and sang his parts.
Shinoda’s set at the Identity LA festival was nearly twice as long since he was headlining, and featured a guest appearance from Linkin Pak DJ Joe Hahn during the song “Castle Of Glass.” Shinoda and Hahn last performed together at Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington memorial show at the Hollywood Bowl in October 2017.
Shinoda will release a new solo album, titled Post Traumatic, on June 15th. He has revealed that Deftones frontman Chino Moreno and rapper Machine Gun Kelly are among the guests who appear on the LP. Shinoda has said that he wants Linkin Park to continue, but that he isn’t sure how the band would go about doing that at this point in time.
Rob Zombie has finished shooting his next movie, 3 From Hell, and told podcast host Eddie Trunk that he’ll continue to work on it this fall after finishing his summer tour with Marilyn Manson. Zombie explained, “We’re done shooting it. I finished about two weeks ago. And, basically, the process just stops and waits for me. ‘Cause the film will just basically sit and wait till I get back from tour, which is the end of August, maybe . . . beginning of September. And then we’ll start editing. And that’ll take me through the rest of the year.”
3 From Hell is the third part of a trilogy that Zombie started with 2003’s House Of 1,000 Corpses and 2005’s The Devil’s Rejects. Zombie said about making a third entry, “After the second one, I thought, ‘We’re done with it,’ but I always think that with every movie. And then you kind of live with it for a long time, and the movies sort of take on a life of their own, or they start getting popular and the fans really start embracing them and the characters, and you start thinking, ‘Well… Hmmm… What if I did this? What if I did that?’”
Zombie told us a while back why he’s never really sure what his next film might be until it actually happens: “I mean, movies are weird because, like, people come to you, people that own the rights to things, and they want to do it, but sometimes just getting the funding to make the project go will take forever. That’s why you’re never quite sure what’s next. Basically, whatever’s next is usually whatever you can get the money for next.
3 From Hell is said to continue the story of the Firefly clan — Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding, Bill Moseley as Otis and Sheri Moon Zombie as Baby — whom we saw go down in a torrent of bullets at the end of the last film. It’s not clear whether Zombie plans to resurrect the Firefly trio from the dead in some kind of supernatural fashion in the new film or has found a way to explain that they survived the original movie’s climactic shootout. 3 From Hell is tentatively due out in early 2019. Meanwhile, Zombie’s 29-date North American summer tour with Marilyn Manson will kick off in Detroit on July 11th.
Finally, we’d like to wish a Happy Birthday to Alice In Chains bassist Mike Inez, the Cult singer Ian Astbury and A.F.I. bassist Hunter Burgan! Congrats all around!
