Happy hump day to you! Kick it off right with the latest news in the world of rock:
Linkin Park DJ Joe Hahn has turned up as a judge on a Korean reality TV show. The show, called Super Band, premiered in South Korea last Friday (April 12th). The goal of the series is to create a “super” band composed of versatile musicians capable of producing music spanning many musical genres.
The contestants will pair with each other to make their own bands and advance to each round. The winning act will receive prize money and the chance to embark on a concert tour.
Hahn said at a press conference prior to the show’s premiere, “I love listening to bands and waiting for each member to really stand out and how the combinations of that really become larger than life and that makes me want to see them in concert.”
Hahn was also asked in another interview with a Korean news agency whether Linkin Park will ever return, with the turntablist replying, “I don’t want to set a deadline. We just want to focus on the present and talk about music. We aren’t discussing detailed plans. I just want to go back to those days when I made music in the garage.”
Linkin Park has been on an indefinite hiatus since the suicide in July 2017 of lead singer Chester Bennington. The surviving band members last performed in public together in October of that year at a tribute concert for Bennington.
Korn bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu has taken up “mixed media” painting and is auctioning off autographed prints of some of his recent work. Arvizu discussed his new hobby in a Facebook post, writing, “From February 2018-February 2019, during a difficult time in my life, I unexpectedly began a journey of mixed media painting on canvas. The result are these 10 characters I created that I call ‘Izms.’ Without any real knowledge of what I was doing, I just dove in and found a place of creative peace. Now I’m excited to share ‘Izms’ with you.”
Arvizu has been married three times and is the father of five children. He got sober and became a born-again Christian more than a decade ago, chronicling his journey in a 2009 autobiography titled Got The Life: My Journey Of Addiction, Faith, Recovery, And Korn. His bandmate and fellow Christian, guitarist Brian “Head” Welch, has also written several books about his life and faith.
Korn is currently working on material for a new album, tentatively due in the fall. The follow-up to 2016’s The Serenity Of Suffering will be the band’s 13th studio offering.
Korn and Alice In Chains will head out on a co-headlining amphitheater tour across North America this summer, starting on July 18th in Del Valle, Texas and wrapping on September 4th in Mountain View, California. Underoath will join as special guest on all dates, with HO99O9 and Fever 333 opening on select dates.
Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor played a solo concert on Sunday (April 14th) at Green Bay Distillery in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Billed as Corey Taylor & Friends, the show featured Taylor running through a number of cover songs, including tunes from Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses and punk act the Dead Boys.
The night also included an opening set by Cherry Bombs, the all-girl dance group led by Taylor’s fiancée Alicia Dove. The couple announced their engagement last week. Taylor has been married twice previously and has two children.
Tickets to the Green Bay show reportedly sold out in less than an hour when they went on sale in February.
Taylor told us a while back why he enjoys performing covers: “The thing I love about playing covers is that a) it’s a chance to walk in the footsteps of your heroes. It’s a chance to have fun. There’s a certain amount of relaxation that comes when you don’t have to worry about your song. This is someone else’s song, you know. This is where you can relax and just remember why you’re a music fan in the first place.”
Slipknot will head out this summer on a massive “Knotfest Roadshow” headlining tour, starting on July 26th in Mountain View, California and continuing through September 8th, where it will conclude in The Woodlands, Texas. Volbeat, Gojira and Behemoth will join as special guests on all dates of the 29-city outing, which will coincide with the release of the band’s long-awaited sixth studio LP on August 9th.
Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee has disputed the truth of an incident portrayed in the Motley Crue biopic The Dirt, in which Ozzy reportedly snorted a line of ants off the ground while hanging out poolside with members of the Crue during a day off on tour.
In the film, a young Ozzy Osbourne — played by Tony Cavalero — holds an impromptu gross-out contest of sorts with Crue bassist Nikki Sixx at a Florida hotel swimming pool in 1984. After exposing himself to some hotel guests, Ozzy asks the Crue for cocaine. Sixx hands over a straw, and Ozzy kneels on the ground and snorts up a crawling line of ants.
Lee, who played guitar for Osbourne on the 1984 tour, told Tone-Talk about the incident, “I was there, and I never saw ants. I was right there. He snorted a little spider. There was a not a trail of f**king ants there. Tommy (Lee, Crue drummer) says it, Nikki says it, Ozzy says it — they were f**ked up. I was not . . . I don’t care what the other guys say — there was no ants.”
The rest of the scene in the movie features Ozzy urinating on the ground and licking it up, challenging Sixx to do the same. But when Sixx relieves himself, Osbourne kneels down and laps it up first. As for that part of the story, Lee confirmed, “Oh, that was true.”
Ozzy told us a while back that what little he remembers of the ’84 tour with the Crue was pretty wild: “The 1984 tour was the most craziest tour I think I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t remember it, but I remember I used to wake up every morning or come around thinking, ‘What the f*** went on last night?’ I mean, everybody keeps asking me, ‘Hey Ozzy, did you really snort a line of ants?’ You know what, the answer to that is: I don’t know, but it’s very possible.”
Sixx recounted the ant-snorting incident in the Crue’s 2001 autobiography, The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, and has reconfirmed it in several recent interviews. The Netflix film based on the book arrived last month after being in development at several different studios for more than a decade.
Guitarist Tom Morello, who played alongside late singer Chris Cornell in the band Audioslave between 2001 and 2007, said in a new interview that he is willing to sign the online petition that has been started to name the recently photographed black hole after the vocalist. A group of fans want the cosmic object named after Cornell in honor of him and his 1994 hit with Soundgarden, “Black Hole Sun.”
Asked by Chattanooga, Tennessee radio station WRXR for his thoughts on the petition, Morello replied, “I think that would be really nice. I don’t know who you send that petition to, but I’d be happy to officially add my name to that . . . that seems absolutely appropriate.”
The petition was started by Giuliana Jarrin, who wrote, “I ask NASA, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and all the astronomers and scientists involved in this discovery, to name this black hole after Chris Cornell. This would be a ‘surreal’ and amazing way to honor his life and his contribution to music.”
The petition may be pointless, because the black hole has already been named. It’s called Powehi, a Hawaiian name referring to the embellished dark source of unending creation. Located in the Messier 57 galaxy, it is the first phenomenon of its kind to be photographed.
Cornell wrote “Black Hole Sun,” which topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks and spent a total of seven weeks at Number One. He committed suicide in May 2017 at the age of 52.
Tool and A Perfect Circle vocalist Maynard James Keenan is set to appear in an episode of Sammy Hagar‘s Rock & Roll Road Trip With Sammy Hagar this summer. Keenan will appear alongside fellow guest Guy Fieri on an episode dubbed “Tool’n Around In Flavortown.” That episode will air on AXS TV on July 7th. The new Tool album is due out sometime this summer. Speaking of Maynard, today’s his birthday!
Rival Sons have unveiled a new video for the song “Too Bad,” in which the band performs the tune to an empty theater. “Too Bad” is taken from the group’s sixth studio LP, Feral Roots, which also features the recent rock radio hit “Do Your Worst.” Rival Sons are currently touring behind the album on a headlining North American run that stops on Wednesday (April 17th) in Philadelphia.
A video is now online of a man named David Drambyan performing the Metallica classic “For Whom The Bell Tolls” on a carillion, which is a musical instrument that consists of at least 23 cast bronze, cup-shaped bells, typically housed in the bell tower of a church or municipal building. Drambyan caused a sensation last year with a video of him playing AC/DC‘s “Highway To Hell” on Europe’s largest carillion in a church in Germany.
Once again, Happy Birthday to Maynard James Keenan, and have a great day!
