Toto guitarist Steve Lukather put out a great solo CD earlier this year called Ever Changing Times.
And now the unthinkable has occurred: Steve is touring to support the disc, and inside the run of scheduled tour dates, are 13 U.S. shows!
The U.S. shows begin with a date at Red Rocks opening for Jethro Tull, and then a string of headlining shows, including a gig here in Cleveland on August 22nd at the Winchester!
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of weeks, and without further ado, here is the info!
Steve Lukather: guitars, vocals
Ricky E. Zahariades: guitars, vocals
Steve Weingart (El Grupo, Dave Weckl): keyboards
Carlitos Del Puerto: bass, vocals
Eric Valentine (T-Ride, Joe Satriani): drums, vocals
From Lukather, here’s what you can expect at the shows:
“I will be doing songs from my first solo record Lukather, Candyman, Luke, and Ever Changing Times with a few Toto album cuts that I wrote and sang (NO ballads or hits!!!) a few songs I wrote for other people and a cover or 2 that I have recorded on tribute records myself in the past.”
I expressed to Lukather’s PR person how much I had loved the Luke album, and he told me that I would love the new album even more. And man, that was no hype - Ever Changing Times is a must for Toto fans, Lukather fans, guitar fans, and fans of good music in general!
I’m happy in these financially challenging times of touring, that Lukather is employing an electric band for the U.S. dates. I’m very stoked to see that Eric Valentine (now a fine record producer in his own right) will be drumming for Steve…..I had no idea when I wrote about T-Ride earlier this year, that I’d soon be seeing Eric back behind a kit!
I know that attendance for Toto’s U.S. tour dates was less than stellar for their most recent round of touring, and I’m HOPING that music fans will come out for this SUPER-RARE opportunity to see Lukather in the solo setting.
Hopefully my Friday night will consist of rocking out with Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters!
Music comrade John Soeder caught up with Foos guitar player Chris Shiflett for a conversation that led me to discover that somehow, their brilliant cover of “Band on the Run” has taken a walk away from my Ipod.
It also made me think about their previous cover of “Baker Street,” which is always a favorite when it pops up.
Foo Fighters - Baker Street
I’ve haven’t heard a cover song yet from Foo Fighters that I don’t like!
Check out John’s Foo Fighters interview right here.
As long as we’re talking about interviews, I thought I would feature another interview from my music pal Chris Akin, since many of you enjoyed his conversation about Heart with author Jake Brown.
Chris comments on the above Heart article in reference to the Survivor albums I mentioned in that article…
Point of reference for your article…I’m the guy that knows that CAUGHT IN
THE GAME was the followup to EYE OF THE TIGER…not prior to it.
Oops. My bad. That was back in the good ole’ days of the music industry, when you could have a big album like Eye of the Tiger, and follow it with a bomb like Caught In The Game….and they’d still let you stick around to make another album called Vital Signs.
Good thing, since Vital Signs ended up doing “ok,” (note my sarcasm) with three hits inside the top 20, including the top 5 smash “The Search is Over.”
I’ve always been a big Queensryche fan, and thought that you all would probably enjoy the interview that Chris (and fellow co-host Neeley) did with guitarist Michael Wilton on last weekend’s edition of The Classic Metal Show.
Within the interview, they discuss Queensryche (of course) and also his collaboration with former Judas Priest / Iced Earth singer Tim “Ripper” Owens on the new material from Wilton’s Soulbender side project.
I was listening this past weekend to the Queensryche Empire album, and it’s still one of my favorite albums from the 90s, without a doubt.
It’s one MP3 file, with a whole mess of songs, so even though it’s only one download, you’re getting plenty of songs. Some things to note: In order to get the album for $0.49 (rather than the whopping price of $0.89), you need to use the link I posted above and:
* Click on the “Buy MP3 album with 1-Click” button
* Download Amazon’s MP3 Downloader (takes 1 minute)
* Proceed with purchase
Enjoy!
In the meantime, here is one of my Westerberg favorites from the good ole’ days of the 90s….
I finally got my hands on a copy of Live in Glasgow, the new live DVD from New Wave electronic godfathers New Order. As I continue to hammer away at my musical bucket list of bands from the 80s that I haven’t seen live yet, New Order sadly remain on the “haven’t seen” list, and will likely remain in that position for a good while, although I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Live in Glasgow proved to be a worthy substitute for the real New Order experience. With nearly four hours of live New Order spread across two discs, there’s a little bit of something for everyone on Live in Glasgow. Casual fans will enjoy the main concert portion of the set, which occupies the first DVD in the set. The 18 song set captures the present-day New Order live in concert in 2006 in support of Waiting For The Siren’s Call, their most recent album to date.
Filmed over two nights in Glasgow at the Carling Academy in October 2006, Live in Glasgow finds New Order in fine form with a setlist that includes a number of tracks from the new album, including the Grammy nominated title track. The new material is mixed well with hits (”Blue Monday,” “Temptation,” etc.) and a brilliant triple shot of Joy Division classics to close out the set.
Singer Bernard Sumner is in fine voice throughout, and it’s hard to believe that conflict between Sumner and bassist Peter Hook would cause New Order to implode as a functioning unit less than a year after these concerts were recorded for Live in Glasgow. The band are brilliantly connected throughout, and deliver a vibrantly energetic performance.
Diehard fans will likely skip straight to the bonus disc of Live in Glasgow, which is a great collection of nearly two hours of rare and unreleased footage from the band’s archives, personally selected by drummer Stephen Morris. The disc opens with six performances recorded at festivals in 1981, a short time after the demise of Joy Division, including three songs from the band’s first performance at the legendary Glastonbury Festival.
The video quality is consistently decent for most of the bonus material, although quality suffers a bit on occasion due to the rare source material - particularly the footage from the band’s 1989 Bay Area appearance at the Shoreline Amphitheater, which is likely sourced from in-house video. The transition from the Shoreline material to a 2006 headlining appearance is a bit jarring, as our heroes age nearly 20 years with the quick transition.
All you need to know:
New Order are one of the few bands in their genre that understood what it meant to deliver a “show” while so many of their contemporaries were completely sterile in the live setting, to the point that you probably could have just pressed play on a boombox on the stage, and would anyone have really noticed?
With new interview footage with all three principal members of New Order recorded exclusively for the DVD, Live in Glasgow is a great present-day bookend to the recent documentary and best-of releases by Joy Division. You can’t argue the value of this set - the bonus disc of additional live performances would be worth the price on its own merits, and with its inclusion here, what might have felt like a needless cash grab to the longtime New Order fans, instead feels like a thank you gift for the years of support.
Hopefully we haven’t seen New Order for the last time on a concert stage, but if Live in Glasgow proves to be the recorded swan song for New Order as a band, it will certainly leave things on a high note.
Live in Glasgow
Track Listing:
Disc 1
1. “Crystal”
2. “Turn”
3. “True Faith”
4. “Regret”
5. “Ceremony”
6. “Who’s Joe”
7. “These Days”
8. “Krafty”
9. “Waiting For The Sirens Call”
10. “Your Silent Face”
11. “Guilt Is A Useless Emotion”
12. “Bizarre Love Triangle”
13. “Temptation”
14. “Perfect Kiss”
15. “Blue Monday”
16. “Transmission” (Joy Division)
17. “Shadowplay” (Joy Division)
18. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Joy Division)
Disc 2
Celebration 1981
1. “Ceremony”
2. “I.C.B.”
3. “Chosen Time”
Glastonbury 1981
4. “Senses”
5. “Procession”
6. “The Him”
Rome 1982
7. “Ultraviolence”
8. “Hurt”
Cork 1983
9. “Leave Me Alone”
10. “Everything’s Gone Green”
Rotterdam 1985
11. “Sunrise”
12. “As It Is When It Was”
13. “The Village”
14. “This Time Of Night”
Toronto 1985
15. “We All Stand”
16. “Age Of Consent”
17. “Temptation”
Shoreline, Bay Area 1989
18. “Dream Attack”
19. “1963″
Hyde Park, London, 2006
20. “Run Wild”
21. “She’s Lost Control” (Joy Division)
This morning, my Ipod was shuffling away, and hit on some Hall and Oates. That made me think of the Hall and Oates playlist that I had made for the Ipod, and I quickly navigated towards it.
Within that playlist is one of my all-time favorite musical segues that happens in the opening moments of the 1984 Hall and Oates release Big Bam Boom.
Big Bam Boom opens with an opening sequence that pays a bit of musical homage to Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines.” Appropriately titled “Dance On Your Knees,” the track slips seamlessly into “Out of Touch,” and before you even realize that you’re into the second track, you’re off and rolling through one of the more musically adventurous Hall and Oates releases of the 80s.
Dance On Your Knees/Out of Touch
And how can you not dig this video?
Hall and Oates - Out of Touch
With the above video, Hall and Oates made an impression with me that was further intensified by the band’s concert performance at Liberty Park in Jersey City, NJ on July 4th, 1985, several days before their performance at Live Aid. As I recall, the full show was broadcast live by HBO, subsequently released on VHS(long out of print,) and unfortunately is not available on DVD.
On my wish list of things that I wish would come out on DVD, The Liberty Concert is smack at the top of the list.
I can summarize Hall and Oates in 22 tracks. Grab the Looking Back import compilation, add the live version of “Wait for Me” and “Say it Isn’t So” from Rock and Soul, and throw in “Dance On Your Knees/Out of Touch,” “Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid,” and “Possession Obsession,” from Big Bam Boom, and you’re done!
And while you’re at it, grab the audio from The Liberty Concert below - as Hall and Oates live shows go, this one is one of the better ones.
Speaking of good live stuff from Hall and Oates, “Acoustic Power” - remember those words.
We’ll get to that.
Hall and Oates
The Liberty Concert
Liberty Park
Jersey City, New Jersey
7/4/85
My fellow Vinyl friends, it is a good day here at the Vinyl Empire.
If a tree falls…
After nearly a month, the tree that fell in my back yard is being removed, no thanks to my neighbor (whose yard this tree was formerly in.) After he went AWOL, I decided to pursue my original gameplan, and put an ad on Craigslist on Friday morning, offering up the tree’s wood in exchange for removal of the tree.
I posted the following in the “barter” section:
You have a chainsaw and a truck? The wood is yours to keep. I have a large tree currently occupying a large portion of my back yard that fell during a recent storm.
Please contact me if interested - would appreciate the help, greatly!
Within a day, I had a message from someone who said he would bring his sons and chainsaws and take care of it. Right now, they are doing exactly that.
So if you aren’t taking advantage of Craigslist, do yourself a favor and explore it - In the past few years, I’ve gotten a great computer for about 200 bucks, a computer desk (from a guy that builds them in his garage) for about 30 bucks, and when I was moving to the east side, Craigslist was a godsend for getting rid of various items - you can’t beat the age old concept of “cash and carry” - they come to my house, give me cash, and boom, the item is GONE.
Back to music:
Wednesday night, I made a return trip to Dayton, OH (the neighboring suburb of Kettering, to be precise,) to see former Dire Straits mainman Mark Knopfler for the second time in the past few years, again at Fraze Pavilion.
His 2005 appearance at Fraze is one of my all-time favorite shows. Seeing someone like Knopfler for the first time in the intimate confines of Fraze, which always has great sound, was a mind-blowing experience. Fraze is a beautiful outdoor amphitheater (uncovered, with a capacity of roughly 4300) that really delivers a wonderful experience for both the artist and people in attendance.
It’s no surprise that artists like Knopfler, who only do a short run (10-12 shows) of North America dates when touring, choose to return to Fraze when booking their next round of touring.
In these times where everything is booked on a national level by giants like Live Nation, Fraze again veers off the beaten path, with a schedule that is locally booked, which allows for a unique summer schedule of shows that often feature musically pleasing one-off dates for artists (and sometimes 2-3 artists on the same show) that might otherwise bypass Ohio, because they aren’t part of a large Live Nation-driven package tour. Fraze continues to deliver a show experience that still feels homemade, and for someone in Cleveland, that’s well worth the drive to get there.
As for Knopfler, it was a show that didn’t disappoint, yet it wasn’t quite as satisfying overall as the show that I saw in 2005. Touring in support of his latest album Kill to Get Crimson, the setlist of course featured a number of tracks from the new album, including the opening track “Cannibals.” While Knopfler was musically excellent as always, I didn’t feel like the material from the new album went over as well as the new material from Shangri-La did on the last tour.
Knopfler also seemed like he might have been struggling a tad vocally, but persevered with his longtime band (including former Dire Straits keyboard player Guy Fletcher,) the bulk of whom have been playing with Knopfler since the 1996 sessions for Golden Heart, longer than any Dire Straits lineup. Knopfler himself has said that the band “plays Dire Straits better than Dire Straits did.”
And let’s face it, Mark Knopfler basically WAS Dire Straits, hence why he has been making albums since the mid-90s under his own name, instead of the Dire Straits banner.
One of the many things that impresses me about Knopfler, is that the Dire Straits material included in his solo setlist is not the typical songs you would expect, with the possible exception of “Sultans of Swing.”
There was no “Walk of Life,” no “Money For Nothing.” Instead of coasting on the proven hits, Knopfler mixes solo material like the excellent “Sailing to Philadelphia,” with Straits cuts like “Romeo and Juliet,” and once again, another mesmerizing version of “Telegraph Road.”
To be fair, both cuts (and Sailing as well) are often in Knopfler’s touring setlist, and I don’t think you’ll see many protesting their continued inclusion. I’d love to see Knopfler stretch out a bit and throw some different Straits material into the setlist….perhaps “Love over Gold” and “Skateaway” for example.
Overall, watching and hearing Knopfler play guitar is enough of an enjoyable experience for me, that I won’t quibble too much over the setlist, and anytime he wants to throw out “Telegraph Road” in all of its 13 minute glory, I’m down.
Knopfler is one of the underrated guitar greats of our time, and I’d put him right up there with Clapton. In fact, have you heard any of the live stuff from the tours that he did playing second guitar for Clapton?
Crazy.
Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler - Badge (live 1988)
All you need to know:
Knopfler tours infrequently, and is a great musician that you should get out to see live, while you still can. If you’ve got him on your list of artists you would like to see someday - make it happen, you won’t regret it.
Dire Straits - Telegraph Road (live)
I don’t even want to post the picture here, because it is horrifying. I’m trying to erase it from my head as we speak. But if you’d like to see it, check it out right here courtesy of Captains Dead.
The good Captain shares Love’s open letter to Ryan Adams within the same post, with comment:
Oh, no. Someone let Courtney out of her cage. The only thing worse for this woman than smack is a keyboard. We’re pretty sure this is one single run-on sentence.
Hopefully you’re already reading the frequent Myspace dispatches from Love……what, you’re not?
Take care of that problem right now, catch up here!
First, an update to the Westerberg entry I posted yesterday - it seems like you might have to wait a bit longer to plunk down 49 cents for 49 minutes of new Paul Westerberg. The new music is supposed to be available today, and might be still - but it’s more likely that the download link will be posted on Monday. Keep your eyes peeled for further updates at Westerberg’s official site.
My musical comrade Michael was trying to twist my arm to get me to road trip to NYC for one of the two Billy Joel shows at Shea Stadium this past week. I couldn’t quite pull it off, and in retrospect, I wish I would have. Guests for the Wednesday night show included Don Henley, John Mayer, Tony Bennett and John Mellencamp.
We had heard rumors that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would join Joel on Friday, and those rumors ended up being half-true. Michael was sending me text updates as the special guests made their way out. Tony Bennett made a return appearance on “New York State of Mind,” Garth Brooks made a rare appearance to duet on “Shameless,” Steven Tyler on “Walk This Way,” Roger Daltrey on “My Generation,” and finally - Sir Paul McCartney! McCartney came out for “I Saw Her Standing There,” and closed the show with a tried and true seated performance of “Let It Be” at the piano.
The setlists for both shows were pretty cool too - I like it when he closes a show with “Souvenir.” You can grab a great version of “Souvenir” on the recently released 30th Anniversary box set for The Stranger, and also via this great show that I posted here recently.
Both Shea shows were recorded for eventual CD and DVD release, and while it seems likely that Joel fans will grumble about YET another live release, I’ll be looking forward to this one!
You can grab merchandise from the Shea shows right here.
Barenaked Ladies singer Steven Page got busted for drugs this past week, and the band’s new children’s album is called Snacktime. Coincidence?
Wilco and Jayhawks fans take note: Related “supergroup” Golden Smog have a best-of release on the way, that will include a previously unreleased cover version of Brian Wilson’s “Love and Mercy,” a longtime staple of the group’s live set. The set will not have any material from Another Fine Day or Blood on the Slacks.
And of course, we’re going to get a live CD and DVD from the Police reunion tour.
On that same subject of live releases, Bob Lefsetz says that industry veteran Irving Azoff is ready to release a Van Halen live DVD for $7.99 if Dave will sign off on it.
Prog rock fans will have a new Dream Theater live CD/DVD in September to annoy their girlfriends with. It’s true, some prog rock fans actually do date!
One final bit - ex-Foreigner frontman Lou Gramm will release a Christian rock solo album.
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