We Will Rock You

Most of you who read We Will Rock You routinely probably already know that I am the author of a book from 2007 entitled The Grand Delusion: The Unauthorized True Story of Styx. That book changed my life and career in a number of ways. I went from “little-known freelance writer” to “kinda-familiar-guy-who-wrote-that-book-you-read-something-about-somewhere”. My name appeared at the top of an (unimportant)  Amazon sales chart.  I received very favorable reviews in Classic Rock magazine, Goldmine and Record Collecter. I appeared in a (really bad) show on VH1 with Dennis DeYoung (separately, but I was there, damn it).

One of the most unexpected side effects of going out and promoting my Styx book was a fairly in-depth interview I got to do on a radio show in Canada called Rock Talk. Someone from my Yahoo group emailed me and told me that there was this cool Canadian radio show called Rock Talk, and the host  -  Greg Godovitz from the Canadian band Goddo  -  was an old friend of Styx singer/keyboardist Lawrence Gowan.  I sent  a copy of the book in the hope that Greg might mention it on the air, and was floored when he wrote me an email saying that he loved the book and would like to have me as a guest on the show.

I called Greg, and in talking about building the most interesting show possible he mentioned putting together a roundtable with me and his old friend Lawrence, who lived in Canada and could be there live in the studio while I joined in by phone. “That would be great, but don’t get your hopes up,” I cautioned him. “Gowan wouldn’t give an interview for this book, so I don’t know what his position will be on the finished product.”

A day later Greg called me to say, “Lawrence is in, and he’s going to speak to (Styx guitarist and founding member) JY about it, too.” I remember I laughed out loud at that. “Now you’re really reaching,” I said. “JY is never going to do this. He’s been against this project from the very start.” Which was true  -  JY had spoken to various people involved with the career of Styx and told them that the band had nothing to gain by speaking to me.

Imagine my utter astonishment when Greg called me the next day to say, “JY is in  -  he and Lawrence can do this Thursday if you can.” Seriously?! Damn right I’ll do this Thusday, or any other day you can name. At this point I could scarcely believe it, but I figured I’d just roll along and just see what ended up happening.

Thursday comes along, and I dialed in to the number provided. The way the show was structured was this: Lawrence was in the studio with his keyboard, and the first interview segment was all about him. I dialed in during the first commercial break, and Lawrence and I were briefly introduced while the show was off-air for commercials. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and in mapping the next segment Greg mentioned that my book said Gowan had been hired by Styx after playing the Queen song “Somebody To Love” at the palace at Althorp for the Diana Memorial.

“No, that’s not right,” Lawrence said. “It was my song ‘Healing Waters’ that I played on the show. That’s why I did that show. It was a favorite of the family.”

Uh-oh . . . this story had come to me from Styx drummer Todd Sucherman, who said he had recommended Gowan as a replacement for Dennis DeYoung after seeing him sing “Somebody To Love” at the palace at Althorp. Had he steered me wrong?

“This was at the after party,” I ventured, upon which Gowan immediately exclaimed, “Oh, the after party, of course! That’s exactly right!” So as we were headed back for live air, Greg asked Gowan to play us back on the air with “Somebody To Love”. Gowan obliged, but changed the opening lyric to say, “Each morning I get up I die a little/ I just read Sterling’s book”, at which I exploded into laughter. That set the tone for the next segment with me and Gowan, which was pretty light-hearted and allowed me to say a lot of what I wanted to say about my book. Gowan turned out to be an absolute blast.

We went to commercial again, and Gowan was perusing my book for the first time, having been given a copy by Greg Godovitz. He made some nice comments, and then JY called in for the next segment and came on the line. He and Lawrence exchanged greetings, and then he and Greg spoke, and right as we were getting ready to go back to air Greg said, “and also on the line, JY, is Sterling Whitaker.” JY laughed at that  -  I had the impression he thought they were kidding  - and I gave a sort of mock-evil laugh and said, “Hey, JY.”   That’s all we had time for and then it was straight back to live air and the next segment, which featured Gowan, JY and me together.

This could have been uncomfortable, but I credit everyone involved for being cool and moving the show forward.  It was obvious to me at this point that the reason JY had agreed to do this show with me as the other guest was because he hadn’t been told I was going to be the other guest. That could have been a disaster if he had chosen for it to be, but he was cool, and it turned out to be a great spot for all involved. At one point JY did say, in response to a question about my book, “I never really agreed to be interviewed by Sterling, and in fact this is the first time I’ve spoken to him  -  and I thought you were kidding when you said it, but I recognize you’re not.” That was that . . . we did the show, I got to promote my book a lot (thanks Greg!), and JY and Lawrence got to talk a lot about Styx and its current endeavors. As we were wrapping up off-air I bid each of them goodbye, and Lawrence’s parting words were, “Good to talk to you, Sterling; we’ll talk again.” So I went away feeling that I had not only just had a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but that I had forged a new business relationship with at least one of the guys.

That turned out to be absolutely true. When I first conceived We Will Rock You, one of the first interviews I wanted to do was with Styx drummer Todd Sucherman, who by that time was an old friend by interview standards. I thought it would be interesting to spice it up by including Lawrence, and asked Todd if he thought that would be possible. It was, and my dual interview with Todd and Lawrence was one of the things that launched We Will Rock You and helped me to do as well as I have done with it.

Thanks once again to Greg Godovitz, Lawrence Gowan, and James “JY” Young, as well as Todd Sucherman.

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FROM WWW.CLASSICROCKREVISITED.COM:

This news is brought to you by VH1 Radio’s Dave Basner

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson is currently trekking across America on a solo tour.  So what can fans expect to hear at his shows?  The singer filled us in.

“A mixture of Jethro Tull acoustic music but also a mixture that includes some of the classic rock songs of Jethro Tull done in the way that they perhaps began life, being strummed on an acoustic guitar in a Holiday Inn in the Midwest somewhere and then developed into rock songs.  But this is a way of going back and reexamining their origins and how they may have turned out if they’d been kept in a more acoustic framework.  So there are a few songs from the Aqualung album like that and there’s also a couple of new pieces that we have not yet recorded.”

 Ian plays in Worchester, Massachusetts tonight.  For all of his dates, head to JethroTull.com. 

FROM WWW.CLASSICROCKREVISITED.COM:

This news is brought to you by VH1 Radio’s Dave Basner

There might be a little awkwardness and perhaps even some bad blood between Kiss and the band’s former members, but they all still care about each other.  Recently, former drummer Peter Criss revealed he battled breast cancer last year though he has since gotten a clean bill of health.  In response, the current members of the band wrote an open letter to Peter in which they express shock over the revelation but gratitude for Criss sharing the personal matter and happiness that he is cancer-free.  They end the note, “We’re in your corner and wish you continued good health.”  Read it all at KissOnline.com.   

FROM WWW.CLASSICROCKREVISITED.COM:

This news is brought to you by VH1 Radio’s Dave Basner

Tomorrow, Brutal Legend comes out.  The third-person video game centers around “Eddie,” a roadie who gets hit on the head and wakes up in a world where every heavy metal album cover and lyric he knows has come to life.  Judas Priest singer Rob Halford lends his voice to the game and he told us more about it. 

 “It’s all about, it’s metal characters, it’s metal music, it’s all these great metal bands and it’s a real homage to that genre of music.  And we’ve got this character called ‘Lionwhite’ who has to kind of fend off all these different things, primarily the lead character whose voiced by Jack Black, the movie actor.”

So how did Halford like doing a voice for the game?

 “The voiceover really is just kind of getting into this defensive, kind of cajoling, slightly cynical, ‘Yeah, you can’t get past me’ mode and you just read off the script in front of you.  It’s like doing I guess anything like that, that animation or so.  It was a lot of fun to do, I was just there for the day and I can’t wait to see the final pieces.”

Brutal Legend also features the voices of Lita Ford and Lemmy Kilmister.  Learn more about it at BrutalLegend.com. 

FROM WWW.CLASSICROCKREVISITED.COM:

This news is brought to you by VH1 Radio’s Dave Basner

Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences received the first screener of a movie they should consider for an Academy Award, and that film is Anvil! The Story of Anvil.  According to the L-A Times, the documentary was 2009’s first screener sent to the six-thousand members of the Academy.  Not only is that a nice distinction, but in recent years it’s been good luck.  Oscar winners Little Miss Sunshine, Junebug and Frozen River all held the title of first screener. 

FROM WWW.BILLBOARD.COM:

It’s a warm, sunny Monday afternoon in August and Lynyrd Skynyrd is at DR&A Television and Film Production Studios in downtown Nashville filming a video for the single “Simple Life.” Standing on the bare set, guitars blazing and hair blowing, Johnny Van Zant, Rickey Medlocke and Gary Rossington look like three rock legends who haven’t got a care in the world. But life in Lynyrd Skynyrd has never exactly been simple.

“God & Guns,” the band’s first new studio set since its 2003 album “Vicious Cycle,” was recorded during another sad period in the band’s history: Founding member/keyboardist Billy Powell and longtime bassist Ean Evans died earlier this year. Losing two members during the recording of an album might derail most bands permanently, but Lynyrd Skynyrd has survived tragedy before. In 1977 a plane crash killed three members-founder/lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines-en route to a show in Louisiana. Guitarist Allen Collins was later paralyzed in a car accident and died in 1990 of pneumonia. Bassist Leon Wilkeson died in 2001, guitarist Hughie Thomasson in 2007.

“We are a big family,” says Johnny Van Zant, who took over lead vocal duties when Skynyrd resumed performing in 1987 with a historic appearance at Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam XIII. “I have been in this band for 22 years and if you take any big family, in probably the last 22 years they have loss. And you know what? Families do not stop living. We have got to keep going on. This is what people do.”

Evans and Powell recorded parts of the album before they passed on, but neither lived to finish the project. The band’s lineup now consists of Van Zant, Medlocke, Rossington, keyboardist Peter Keys, bassist Robert Kearns, longtime drummer Michael Cartellone and guitarist Mark Matejka. The Honkettes-as Skynyrd’s background vocalists were first dubbed in the ’70s-are Rossington’s wife, Dale Krantz Rossington, and Carol Chase, both of whom have served for more than two decades.

Working with producer Bob Marlette, the band crafted an album that is more a raucous celebration of life than a somber epitaph. It was released on Sept. 29 on Loud & Proud/Roadrunner Records, a partnership that gives Lynyrd Skynyrd the ongoing experience of longtime business collaborator Tom Lipsky, the president of Loud & Proud (which formed in 2007), and Roadrunner’s marketing and distribution backbone.

“They write great songs and they are absolutely great players,” Lipsky says. “They survive personally and professionally every day, every year and every decade, and they continue on. That is the American spirit in a nutshell, and that is what always pushes me to work with them.”

The group’s memories of their bandmates drove them to new heights, Van Zant says. “To be honest-besides some of the circumstances that we were underneath — creatively this was probably one of the greatest times I have had working with a producer,” he says. “I actually sang all of the vocals inside the control room. Bob [Marlette] would set up for it and I would just sing. Anything he would want to suggest to me, I would just take the headphones off instead of pushing the talk back button. It really helped me out, I think, vocally.”

THE NEXT CHAPTER

Van Zant says new members Keys and Kearns fit perfectly into the band. “God works in mysterious ways,” he says. “With Robert and Peter coming into this band, it was like they were sent to us. It was not a hard job to find these two guys. They just kind of came into our world and fit in perfectly.”

Keys is a North Carolina native who previously was with the band Cry of Love, which scored a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart with “Peace Pipe.” “He’s a Southern boy,” Van Zant says. “When he walked in, he just kind of reminded us of Leon [Wilkeson]. Peter is actually a transplant from Detroit all the way down here to Nashville. Actually, we found out about him through Kid Rock. He got the audition-it was so cool because he just came in and played-and said, ‘I thank you for the opportunity,’ and walked out. We were like, ‘Wow!’ ”

The album was preceded by two singles: “Still Unbroken” and “Simple Life.” Both were accompanied by videos. The band wrote every song on the album, except the title track, and the set includes guest appearances from friend and guitarist John 5 and singer Rob Zombie on the track “Floyd.”

Though “Still Unbroken” is a personal anthem about overcoming adversity, Rossington feels it strikes a universal chord. “Huey Thomasson wrote that song with us-me, Johnny and Rickey-and he passed away a couple of years ago, so that shows you how long we were writing for this album,” Rossington says. “That is kind of our story, but you can find a lot of people in life that are still unbroken. You go through stuff and you keep going.”

The veteran rockers admit the title track will likely strike people as politically incorrect, but self-censorship has never been in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s vocabulary. “We were just in Europe and [with] everybody that was the first question: ‘What is the meaning of this “God & Guns?” ‘ ” Van Zant says. “We believe in God and I think that Rickey says it best: ‘Any religion that you believe in you should be able to pray to it.’ For me, personally, it is Jesus Christ and the Lord above.”

Van Zant says he doesn’t own any handguns, but supports the rights of others to do so. “It is a scary world out there and believe me that if someone were to try to come into my house, I want to be able to protect myself,” he says. “We are not saying that every idiot out there should own a gun-and there should be better background checks on guns. Not everybody should have the right.”

On “Skynyrd Nation,” the band sings about a fan base that is “three generations strong,” and Van Zant says the group is pleased to see fans who weren’t born when “Free Bird,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “That Smell,” “Gimme Three Steps” and other Skynyrd classics first ascended the charts in the ’70s.

“I have said many times that the Lynyrd Skynyrd band is one of the purest rock bands you will ever see,” says Charlie Daniels, who sang at Ronnie Van Zant’s funeral and wrote a tribute carved in stone at Van Zant’s grave. “If you like rock music, you’ve got to like the band. They play together incredibly well and stay true to the sound they started with.”

Now, with the creative part of the album wrapped, Skynyrd’s members are optimistic about the future. “It has been 22 years and it feels like 22 seconds to me. It really does,” Van Zant says. “I am proud that I have done this. Skynyrd is a big family. We have argued, fussed and fought. We have drank and done other things that we should not have done but we are in a good spot now. I think that from here on out life is going to be a good thing.”

Read the article and see the videos: http://www.billboard.com/#/features/lynyrd-skynyrd-video-feature-praise-the-1004021219.story?page=1

FROM WWW.BILLBOARD.COM:

“I do like being on the road,” says Joe Perry, Aerosmith’s legendary lead guitarist, and he isn’t letting the band’s accident-plagued and ultimately cancelled summer tour slow him down. As he told Billboard.com doing a recent interview as he preps the release of his fifth solo album, “Have Guitar, Will Travel,” he bought a tour bus and is taking his other band out on their own tour this fall. “Most places that have electric power can probably expect a call from me,” he says.

“Have Guitar, Will Travel” was recorded in Perry’s home studio, The Boneyard, with both longtime musical collaborators and showcases the voice of a young German singer known as Hagen. “My wife found him on You Tube, we sent him a ticket and he mixed in really well,” Perry explains. “He sings incredible.”  From the hard rock power ballad “Do You Wonder” to sleek sheen of “We’ve Still Got A Long Way To Go” to “Somebody’s Gonna Get (Their Head Kicked In Tonite)”, a rockabilly tribute to Perry’s own hero Gene Vincent, the album highlights the many facets of Perry’s incredible guitar vocabulary.

As for Aerosmith, Perry is circumspect. “The thing that bothers me the most is how it affects the fans,” he says. “The only reason you’re there is because of the fans. You owe them a lot, and when you start taking them for granted it’s just wrong. I think that a lot of what happened with Aerosmith over the last two or three years has been a case of that. And I’m not talking about everybody in the band. I think at this point the four band members are willing to not play for a while until the fifth member gets together and decides to come and join us again.”

Watch Joe’s interview with Billboard: www.billboard.com?bcpid=41231827001&bctid=44540362001