Good morning Radicals! It’s UN General Assembly in NYC this week, which means traffic is even more of a nightmare than usual. To distract myself from the horror, let’s take a look at the latest news from the world of rock and roll!
Chevelle bassist Dean Bernardini has announced that he will “take a break from the road” after completing this year’s shows with his bandmates. He added that he will “continue to work” in music in some form or another while also spending more time with his family and putting time into his art and furniture business at home.
The band and Bernardini both issued statements on the matter, with the band seeming to leave the door open for Bernardini’s return while acknowledging that “big changes” were afoot for the group.
Bernardini has been with Chevelle since 2005, even though 2007’s Vena Sera marked his first studio recording with the band. The brother-in-law of singer/guitarist Pete Loeffler and drummer Sam Loeffler, he replaced their brother Joe in the group.
Bernardini wrote, “It is with a heavy heart that I have decided I will be taking a break from the road to spend some much needed time at home with my family. I consider myself lucky to have been a part of Chevelle and have shared the stage with such incredible musicians.”
Chevelle’s final show of 2019 will take place on December 14th in Robinsonville, Mississippi. The band has been working on its ninth studio album and is nearing the end of the recording sessions, with an early 2020 release likely.
Foo Fighters have released an EP titled 00050525 Live in Roswell, containing a June 18th, 2005 concert that the band played in Roswell, New Mexico, where a UFO allegedly crashed in 1947. The group has shared the EP to mark “Storm Area 51 Day,” which took place on Friday (September 20th) and saw several hundred conspiracy theorists assemble at the gates of the famously secretive airbase.
While Area 51 is located in the Nevada desert, both it and Roswell have long been associated with alien and UFO conspiracy theories. Dave Grohl‘s record label is named Roswell Records, and the Foos themselves actually got their name from a term used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe UFOs.
Grohl has long been fascinated by UFOs and told us a while back how he even made a cameo in an episode of The X-Files called “Pusher”: “I went up there to talk to (show creator) Chris Carter about doing a video for a song we put on the first X-Files record. I went up to the set to watch them film, I was standing there and the director said, ‘Hey, do you want to be in a shot?’ ‘Yeah, sure, okay!’ The scene begins and I’m standing behind the bad guy, and I walk off — I’m onscreen for two seconds. You blink and you miss it.”
The EP features seven songs, including renditions of “Monkey Wrench,” “All My Life” and a 10-minute version of of “Stacked Actors.” The band also shared an accompanying poster detailing proper behavior at “Storm Area 51 Day,” including “Control yourself at the barbecue,” “Should you encounter extraterrestrials, be polite” and,of course, “Rock out at all times.”
“Storm Area 51 Day” began as a joke Facebook event to invade the once-secret Nevada military base and look for the alien bodies and technology rumored to be long stored there from the Roswell crash and other encounters. The event quickly went viral, garnering millions of RSVPs and prompting the Air Force to issue a warning against people assembling at the facility.
Korn singer Jonathan Davis told Maniacs that the release of new LPs from his band, Slipknot and Tool all within the last six weeks feels like “a camaraderie of bands,” adding that “one band being successful helps all of us because we’re becoming a dying breed.”
All three bands got their start in the 1990s: Tool’s debut EP Opiate emerged in 1992, while Korn and Slipknot’s self-titled debuts arrived in 1994 and 1999 respectively.
Saying it’s “good to be in good company,” Davis explained, “I feel like since the music industry took a turn that there’s no more labels willing to spend money to help rock artists be bigger than life rock and roll things any more . . . It’s awesome to see that bands like us are still out there doing this and we’re flying the flag for rock’n’roll.”
Davis told us a while back that Korn has always kept improving at what it does throughout its career: “We’ve grown leaps and bounds from the times when we began. We were just little kids, we were just havin’ fun making music. Nothing’s really changed, we’re still a bunch of little kids, we’re just older. I don’t know, from doing it for so long, you just hit this next level, I guess, and we’re set in our ways and know what we do, and know how to do what we do well.”
Korn’s 13th studio album, The Nothing, arrived on September 13th, while Slipknot’s We Are Not Your Kind and Tool’s Fear Inoculum both emerged last month.
Metallica’s second annual “All Within My Hands Foundation Helping Hands Concert And Auction” will be held on Saturday, March 28th, 2020 at the Masonic in San Francisco, California.
Just like last year’s event at the same venue, the show will celebrate the band’s All Within My Hands non-profit foundation, which was launched in 2017 to help create sustainable communities by tackling the issues of hunger and workforce education and encouraging volunteerism.
The first All Within My Hands Foundation concert was held in November 2018. In addition to acoustic versions of some of Metallica’s classic songs, the band performed covers of tunes from Deep Purple, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult and Bob Seger. The four members of Metallica were joined by a quartet of backing musicians who provided additional percussion, keyboards, strings and vocal harmony.
The event raised $1.3 million, which went to food banks in cities the band played on its current “WorldWired” tour and carefully selected community colleges throughout the country.
Bad Wolves have released another new track, called “Sober,” from their upcoming sophomore album, N.A.T.I.O.N., due out on October 25th. The song tells the story of a relationship gone bad as one person struggles with sobriety, but ultimately finds recovery possible for those who can stay the course.
Singer and writer Tommy Vext said, “The song is very personal to me about my recovery. The message is very powerful to not give up on ourselves or the people who are trying — who are really, really trying to make and better themselves.”
Vext, who has been sober for more than a decade, was awarded the Rock To Recovery Service Award at last year’s third annual “Rock To Recovery” benefit concert for his dedication in helping others fight their own battles with addiction. He told Psychology Today last year that helping others also kept him on the right path, saying, “It’s the foundation of my recovery and it’s the fabric of everything I do.”
“Sober” is the third single to surface from N.A.T.I.O.N., following “Killing Me Slowly” and “I’ll Be There.” The band will set out on a North American tour with Five Finger Death Punch, Three Days Grace and Fire From The Gods starting November 1st in Las Vegas.
Toni Cornell, daughter of late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, has shared her new song “Far Away Places.” The track was written by the 15-year-old artist when she was 12 years old, and the recording was produced by her father in February 2017 at their home studio in Miami, just three months before Chris’ death.
Toni previously lent the song out for use in the short film Far Away Places, which is currently touring the film festival circuit. Proceeds from the song’s sale on digital music services will be donated to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Chris Cornell took his own life at the age of 52 in May 2017, following a Soundgarden concert in Detroit.
In August 2017, following the deaths of both her father and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Toni paid tribute to the singers by performing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” alongside OneRepublic on Good Morning America. Toni also shared a duet she and her father recorded of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Well, that’s a good start to the week, now get out there and conquer the day!
