Author: LRussell

The voice of late-Grateful Dead singer Jerry Garcia has been recreated through AI and will be available to read audiobooks, articles and more.

The development is part of a partnership with Garcia’s estate and the AI voice company ElevenLabs. Fans will be able to utilize the rocker’s AI voice via the ElevenReader app. The virtual Garcia will be able to speak in more than 32 different languages, while reading everything from e-books and poetry, to fan stories and PDFs.

“My father was a pioneering artist, who embraced innovative audio and visual technologies,” Keelin Garcia, Jerry’s daughter and the co-founder of the Jerry Garcia Foundation, said via statement (as shared by Billboard). “In the 1990’s, my dad introduced me to the computer, digital art, and video games. When we traveled on concert tour, we played on Game Boy. At home, we’d have fun playing on the Macintosh in the studio where my father created his first digital art, and housed his MIDI guitar. Now, as technological landscapes continue to expand, ElevenLabs AI Audio technology will offer fans the first opportunity to hear and stream a replica of my father’s voice reading their favorite books and other written content.”

READ MORE: Top 10 Grateful Dead Songs

Beyond the app, Garcia’s AI voice will also be used in various projects for the Jerry Garcia Foundation, such as narrated documentaries and art exhibits.

Growing Trend of AI and Late Celebrities

As AI has continued to evolve, its use to recreate dead celebrity’s voices has become a growing trend. Most notably, the technology helped bring the final Beatles song, “Now and Then,” to life. The tune was released in late-2023 and recently earned two Grammy nominations.

READ MORE: Why ‘Now and Then’ Was Left Off Beatles’ ‘Anthology’

ElevenLabs has been actively involved in the voice model movement. In addition to Garcia, their “Iconic Voices” feature boasts AI versions of such dead celebrities as Judy Garland, John Wayne, Burt Reynolds, James Dean, Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dr. Maya Angelou.

“At ElevenLabs, we’re committed to preserving and celebrating cultural legacies while pushing the boundaries of technology,” Dustin Blank, Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs, explained during the announcement of Garcia’s addition. “By bringing voices like Jerry Garcia to our platform, we’re not just enhancing our app – we’re creating new ways for people to experience content. This project has been a labor of love, and we couldn’t be happier with how Jerry’s voice has been recreated. It’s a beautiful thing to bring his sound to life again for both longtime fans and a new generation of listeners.”

Rockabilly revivalists the Stray Cats hit 1982 album Built for Speed featured two Top 10 hits: “Stray Cat Strut” and “Rock This Town”. They followed it up with Rant n’ Rave with the Stray Cats just over a year later. Despite yielding two Top 40 singles, “(She’s) Sexy + 17” and “I Won’t Stand in Your Way,” as well as other songs that demonstrated that the band’s range included styles outside classic rockabilly, the band was challenged by the typical difficulties faced by young rock and roll musicians trying to maintain their breakthrough success.

In Christopher McKittrick’s book Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night: The Tale of the Stray Cats, the author explores how a trio of throwback-loving musicians from the suburbs of Massapequa, Long Island—guitarist/singer Brian Setzer, drummer Slim Jim Phantom, and bassist Lee Rocker—returned rockabilly to the international pop charts as the Stray Cats. Over forty years and many classic studio and live albums later, the Stray Cats still epitomize the spirit of the founding fathers of rock and roll—a coolness that never goes out of style.

Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night is now available via Backbeat Books. In the exclusive excerpt below, McKittrick recounts a little-known fact about the final weeks of the band’s initial run—the addition of Tommy Byrnes, better known for his ongoing thirty-plus year run as a guitarist in fellow Long Islander Billy Joel’s band, to the group. Byrnes remains the only “fourth Stray Cat” to perform alongside the otherwise unchanged Stray Cats lineup of Setzer, Phantom, and Rocker that has persisted throughout the band’s various reunion albums and tours since their first breakup in 1984, including most recently the Stray Cats’ 2024 summer tour. Though Byrnes’ tenure in the band was brief, he would later work with Setzer on his first two solo albums (including 1986’s The Knife Feels Like Justice) and has remained with Billy Joel’s band throughout worldwide tours and the Piano Man’s record-shattering Madison Square Garden residency.

Chapter 8: The Cats Go Astray

The substantially lower sales of Rant n’ Rave with the Stray Cats compared to Built for Speed appeared to have shaken Setzer’s confidence in the future of the group. Perhaps influenced by the musical support he had recently received on stage during shows on the last tour from Jeff “Skunk” Baxter and Mel Collins, when Stray Cats returned to the road for a July 4 warm-up performance at the Rio Theatre in Valley Stream, Long Island (an 1,800-seat movie theater located fifteen miles west of the band’s native Massapequa that occasionally featured concerts) for the first of the final twenty shows of the group’s original era, it appeared the members were already looking toward a potentially very different future. The most obvious change was the line-up—joining Stray Cats on stage for the entire performance was Tommy Byrnes as additional guitarist and backing vocalist.

Byrnes, who is best known today as a guitarist with Billy Joel’s band since 1989, is a native of Lynbrook and Oceanside, New York, two South Shore Long Island towns located a few miles west of Massapequa. Since he was a teenager, Byrnes began playing the same Long Island club scene as Phantom, Rocker, and Setzer. In the early 1980s, Byrnes played in the BMT’s, a local favorite band which at times included Freddy “Frogs” Toscano, a fixture on the Long Island scene for decades (in 1983 Setzer said in a profile in the Long Island music paper the Island Ear that Freddy Frogs & BMT’s were his favorite group). The BMT’s played a variety of music, including 1950s songs by Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino, and frequently played Max’s Kansas City on Sundays. The BMT’s even played shows in Europe in the early 1980s after their single, “Crazy Little Mama” (a cover of the doo-wop song by El Dorados & Magnificents) reached the charts in the UK.

Byrnes first saw Stray Cats perform at one of their frequent Long Island gigs, TK’s Place. “I was only 19 years old, and I remember watching them and I said, ‘What the fuck is this?’” Byrnes recalls with a laugh. “They were all over the place. It was a three-ring circus, and they were animated as hell. They all had the best moves I’d ever seen on stage. I was an instant fan. In the back of my mind’s eye, I see Brian with an orange zoot suit and a pink pompadour—which I’m not sure but was entirely possible—Jimmy standing on the bass drum while playing the snare and the cymbal, and Lee standing in the crook of the upright bass. It was like an acrobatics show. It was fun to watch and listen to, and Brian, Lee, and Jim brought a level of musicianship to rockabilly that had never been seen before.” Byrnes subsequently met the band after the show, and shortly afterward Phantom, Rocker, and Setzer departed for London.

After hearing the first recordings by Stray Cats, Byrnes appreciated how well they were able to capture that sound and energy on record. “I always thought Bill Haley’s records were the best-sounding records of that day, like ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ ‘See You Later, Alligator,’ or ‘Flip, Flop, and Fly.’ The way the stand-up bass and snare drums were recorded, it’s unbelievable how great it sounds and how tight it is. And then I remember listening to the recording of ‘Runaway Boys’ for the first time and saying, ‘That’s it right there.’ Dave Edmunds totally nailed it with these guys.”
Byrnes recalls that Stray Cats returned stateside after their initial success in London, perhaps in December 1980 when Setzer briefly returned to Massapequa for the holidays or around the time of their one-off performance at the Bond International Casino in New York in January 1981.

“They had a coming-home party for Brian—I don’t think it was a party for the whole band—and we were the band [for the party],” he remembers. “He came in, saw that we were there, and somebody went home and got his guitar and amp and that was the first time we played together.”

Even after becoming known for his work with Stray Cats, Setzer would occasionally join the BMT’s on stage for their local performances while he still lived on Long Island. An October 1982 edition of the Hofstra Herald, the newspaper of local college Hofstra University, noted that Setzer had recently performed with the band at the Massapequa bar Heckle and Jeckles and both Setzer and Rocker performed with the group at the Bellmore bar Arrows. “Brian and I became fast friends, and he would come down and jam with us at Heckles because it was local for him,” says Byrnes. “He would bring people down, like Dave Edmunds, and the two of them jammed at Heckles. I would just hang out with him and go up to his house and we’d play guitar.”

Even though he and Setzer became friendly, Byrnes admits that the offer to join Stray Cats caught him completely unaware. Immediately before joining Stray Cats, Byrnes was playing with an upstate New York-based group named the Velcros that opened for Van Halen on their 1984 tour (the Velcros had previously opened for Stray Cats in 1982). At the time, Van Halen typically took unsigned bands with them on tour as their opening acts, and Byrnes later shared stories about being pelted with garbage by Van Halen fans to Eddie Van Halen when he met him backstage at the inaugural Farm Aid. “One day I went up to Brian’s—he lived in Old Westbury at the time—and we went up to the music room, and he started playing a Stray Cats song,” says Byrnes. “He said, ‘What would you play if I was playing this?’ So I started playing with him and we played different versions of the chords of ‘Stray Cat Strut’ and some other songs. And he said, ‘Good, how’d you like to join the band?’ I was like, ‘What?’ and he said, “You know, I’ve been doing this three-piece for so long and I’d really like to add another dimension to it.’ I said, ‘I would love to!’ I was a huge fan, and Brian was like my first guitar hero that I ever actually met.”

Byrnes began rehearsing with Setzer and remembers that he taught him a lot about some of the musicians who had inspired Stray Cats. “I knew Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, but I didn’t know Cliff Gallup, who was Gene’s guitar player, and I didn’t know who Scotty Moore was, who was Elvis’s guitar player,” he recalls. “I knew who Jimi Hendrix was because I knew guitar players, but I didn’t know the insides of what made those records so great.”

Byrnes’ role as the “fourth Stray Cat” brought a new dynamic to the group both visually and sonically, and his brief tenure of less than two dozen shows over a period of two months at the end of the band’s initial lifespan has even come as a surprise to devoted Stray Cats fans when they learn about Byrnes’s brief tenure in the band. He was never officially announced as a member of the group, though he did appear in a few posed photos with the other band members which may suggest he was destined for a permanent role in the group had the band not formally broken up at the end of 1984.
After the Fourth of July performance on Long Island, the four-piece Stray Cats played two more U.S. shows—July 6 at Milwaukee’s annual Summerfest music festival and July 8 at Trout Aire Amphitheatre in Minneapolis—before heading to Europe for three festival shows (two in France and one in Switzerland). At both U.S. shows the band opened for George Thorogood and the Destroyers, a fellow roots-rock devotee (though more inclined to Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker than rockabilly) who was also an EMI America artist at the time. One of the songs the four-piece Stray Cats performed at Festival D’Exilir in St. Pabu, France, “Rebels Rule,” was broadcast on television. The clip remains the only known professionally filmed footage of Byrnes performing with the band.

Stray Cats returned to North America for their final shows of the tour with a performance at Kingswood Music Theatre in Toronto on July 29. “The first time I saw them was at Kingswood Music Theatre at Canada’s Wonderland, just north of Toronto,” recalls Lee McCormack, musician and host of the Tramps Like Us music podcast. “I was 10 years old and two years into my fandom by then. Super excited that my father took me, he was also a fan. The details are somewhat vague, but I do remember having the greatest time, hearing these songs performed live and seeing the fellas in person. I remember they came out in leather jackets, hair greased back and looking cool. I remember the stripped-down, bare stage. Quite a contrast to the bands of that early era with the big stage shows—I was into heavy metal and those live shows were all about big stages and walls of amps and pyro and lights and more is more. A small stand-up drum kit for Slim Jim and a couple of amps for Brian was all there was. I vividly remember a few trash cans on stage, complete with spray paint graffiti. I think they actually may have served as guitar stands—you could see the neck of a Gretsch guitar sticking out. I remember the crowd was full of rockabillies and punk rockers. I had found my people and my scene. That moment when the music becomes real and tangible. After listening to the records for the last two years, the music had come to life.”

The group also radically reworked the setlist for the tour, best evidenced by a recording of the August 6, 1984, concert at the Park West in Chicago. While “Rumble in Brighton,” “Runaway Boys,” “Stray Cat Strut,” “(She’s Sexy) + 17,” “Fishnet Stockings,” “Something’s Wrong With My Radio,” and “Rock This Town” remained the standard originals in the setlist and “Double Talkin’ Baby,” “Somethin’ Else,” and “C’mon Everybody” were the obligatory doses of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran covers, the band skipped ahead a generation to include two covers of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, “Hey Tonight” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” plus an unexpected rendition of The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song, “Love Is All Around” (Stray Cats previously recorded and released “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” as the B-side to the “Rebels Rule” single, though the sleeve misidentifies the song as “Lookin’ Through My Back Door”). But perhaps most surprising were three as-yet-unreleased original songs, “Time Is on My Hands,” “Barbwire Fence” and “Bobby’s Back.” The first song of the three, “Time Is on My Hands,” is a slower blues jam and features an extended guitar solo by Byrnes. Rocker performed the lead vocals on the song and it later appeared on the first Phantom, Rocker, and Slick album (credited as a Phantom-Rocker composition), with the guitar lead reworked by Earl Slick.

The latter two songs eventually surfaced on Setzer’s first solo album, The Knife Feels Like Justice (both credited to Setzer alone). “Barbwire Fence” as performed by Stray Cats is almost fully formed as the song that appears on Setzer’s solo album. It deals with more serious material—the lyrics utilize the barbwire fence as a metaphor for what separates humanity from one another as we hurt the earth and our fellow man (Setzer later told Guitar World that he wrote “Barbwire Fence” about the Cold War). While Setzer would play banjo on the version for his solo album to highlight its country influence, the Stray Cats rendition is a full-on rock blast.

In contrast, “Bobby’s Back” differs in parts from the version eventually released by Setzer. The soul-influenced song features slightly different lyrics than the finished version, including an incomplete chorus. The song is about the singer’s acquaintance, Bobby, who just gets out of prison and discovers that much of the life he had known before going to jail has changed—his girlfriend has moved on and friends have settled down. The song ends by revealing that Bobby dies in a car accident several years later (speeding in Stray Cats version, high on drugs and alcohol in the later Setzer version) and the singer laments his fate. Like “Barbwire Fence,” it was certainly heavier content than the typical Stray Cats song in which speeding in a car was typically highlighted as an enjoyable pastime. The song, buoyed by Byrnes’ harmony vocals, hints at what a circa 1985 Stray Cats album may have sounded like since it seems entirely possible that all three of these songs were considered for inclusion on the next Stray Cats album because they were being debuted live. If Stray Cats recorded demo versions of these songs during the breaks in their tours in 1984, they have yet to surface.

The lyrics of the two future Setzer solo songs undeniably dealt with more mature themes than the lyrics of any of the songs on the band’s previous three albums, something that Setzer had expressed earlier in the year to Trouser Press. “I know that with the next album we’re gonna have to make a bit of a change,” he explained about the band’s then-hypothetical fourth album. “I can’t be singing about hot rods and Harleys my whole life, and I won’t want to. I’ll want to change and write some different things.” While Setzer did take that approach on his next album (his first solo album), the opposite actually happened in the long run—even forty years later, Setzer is still largely writing, recording, and performing music in the same thematic vein as the hits he became known for in the early 1980s.

And yet despite those signs pointing to the band’s future a full four years after the band’s lightning-bolt arrival on the London music scene, there was no denying that the group’s popularity had substantially waned in the UK, where the group experienced a nearly two-year head start. Because of that, it was arguably logical to anticipate that the band’s popularity would be similarly fleeting in North America over the coming months as well. “If one of your albums sells two million copies and the next one sells only 500,000—forget the fact that that’s enough to make it gold, which is more than most records do—it’s considered a failure,” Rocker told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette two years later. “Your record company, your management, and everybody else who expected to make some cash from your success are bummed out. The most difficult thing to do in this business is maintain.”

Actor Timothee Chalamet has revealed the details of the years of work he spent to play the role of Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown.

The movie is set for release on Dec. 25, and covers the period leading up to Dylan’s controversial electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. It’s based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, and Dylan himself advised on the script.

In a new interview with Apple Music 1 (video below) Chalamet said: “For the movie, I had to learn 13 [songs], let’s say… but in total, I could probably play 30.”

READ MORE: Here’s the Best Preview Yet of Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan

He continued: “Tim Monich was a dialect coach… who I worked with for years on this. I worked with a harmonica coach for five years, and then worked with a woman named Polly Bennett, who’s a movement coach… [A]ctually we got more out of just working on the script together than anything physicality related.

“And then, for my own spirit-gathering – for lack of a better metaphor – I retraced Bob’s steps through Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin… I started in Hibbing, in Duluth. And I spent about a week where he is from in Minnesota.”

Timothee Chalamet’s ‘Weird’ Connection to Bob Dylan

Discussing the pressure he felt to deliver, the actor explained: “It was the most unique challenge I’ve taken on. But where my confidence came through is eventually doing all the music live.”

He reported that his own life experiences meant he could relate to some of Dylan’s own in a “weird” way. “Bob wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll star – Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis Presley… Equally, I wanted to be a big movie actor.

He added: “I’m now deep in the church of Bob, and I feel like I get this opportunity to kinda be a bridge to this music.”

Watch Timothee Chalamet Discuss Bob Dylan

How an Unlikely Collaboration With Bob Dylan Changed Michael Bolton

Grammy-winning keyboardist Dr. Fink announced the auction of an unreleased Prince album later this week and said he didn’t feel any guilt at parting with it.

Matt Fink worked with Prince from the late ‘70s until the early ‘90s, mainly as a member of The Revolution, and was part of Prince’s short-lived Rebels side-project, who in 1979 recorded the unreleased album currently being auctioned by Fink. The Rebels also featured Dez Dickerson, André Cymone, Gayle Chapman and Bobby Z.

The record was never released because the label didn’t want to dilute Prince’s image after he’d already put out two albums under his own name.

READ MORE: Was Prince’s Famous Rock Hall Guitar Solo an ‘Act of Revenge’?

“Prince did it on the sly,” Fink told the Star Tribune in a new interview, “and then came to Warners after the fact and said, ‘Look what I did. Can you do something with this?’” He added: “That Rebels cassette has been out there as bootlegs [but] I’ve never bootlegged anything.”

The auction takes place on Nov. 15 via the U.K.-based Popstore. Among the lots on offer from Fink are an ‘80s Oberheim OB-8 synth used on tour with Prince, a tour-used mixing desk, 39 cassette tapes recorded during rehearsals with Prince, a draft script for Purple Rain, a number of gold and platinum discs and a range of stage costumes and tour shirts.

Why Dr. Fink is Selling His Prince Memorabilia

The 66-year-old noted that he was keeping some of his most prized items –  including his Grammy for the Purple Rain album – but that his sons weren’t interested in his collection, and also that his music career had forced him to draw down on his pension scheme.

“Income is very inconsistent in this industry,” he said. “Prince did take care of us. [But] there were difficult times between then and now.”

He was reported to be “neither guilty about selling nor sentimental about the items,” which run to 54 lots and are expected to sell for between $150,000 and $300,000 in total.

Bids are now being taken on the Popstore website. it’s unlikely that the winner of the unreleased album will have the rights necessary to legally release it.

The year’s release schedule is winding down, but there’s still time for a few more concert recordings and special reissues.

This final monthly list of new music is topped by the next archival Rolling Stones live project. Welcome to Shepherd’s Bush was recorded during a rarities-packed surprise 1999 concert at the 1,800-seat London venue. Assorted formats include 4K UHD and both black and white vinyl. Blue Oyster Cult continues celebrating a key career milestone with 50th Anniversary Live: Third Night, recorded during the last of a trio of concerts held in late 2024 at New York City’s Sony Hall. Highlights include a performance of Blue Oyster Cult’s third album Secret Treaties in its entirety.

Jesse Malin never found widespread fame as he followed a career path winding from punk pioneer to singer-songwriting troubadour. The upcoming 2CD/3LP benefit album Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin might just change that, with covers by Bruce Springsteen, Ian Hunter, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and MC5‘s Wayne Kramer, among others. (Springsteen appeared on Malin’s 2007 album, Glitter in the Gutter.) The title of Williams’ new 12-track LP, Lucinda Williams Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road, says it all: Sessions took place at the London studio where the Beatles recorded their 1969 album of the same name.

An expanded and remixed version of 2003’s The Jethro Tull Christmas Album subtitled Fresh Snow at Christmas highlights Jethro Tull‘s last LP with stalwart guitarist Martin Barre. The limited-edition 4CD/Blu-ray edition includes all-new artwork and additional live material. Duran Duran’s expanded vinyl release of their latest LP, dubbed Danse Macabre: De Luxe, features three bonus tracks – including a cover of the Electric Light Orchestra‘s “Evil Woman” and a new version of “New Moon on Monday” with Andy Taylor.

More information on these and other pending rock albums can be found below. We’ve also included a brief preview of some of 2025’s biggest scheduled releases. Remember to follow our continuously updated list of scheduled new music for details on records issued throughout the year.

Dec. 6
The Blasters, Over There: Live at the Venue, London – The Complete Concert (expanded reissue)
Fleetwood Mac, Tango in the Night (hybrid SACD reissue)
Duran Duran, Danse Macabre: De Luxe (expanded vinyl release)
Iain Matthews [Fairport Convention], Thro’ My Eyes: Vertigo Years 1970-1974 (5CD box set)
Jethro Tull, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album: Fresh Snow at Christmas
Laura Nyro, Hear My Song: The Collection 1966-1995 (19CD box)
Lucinda Williams, Sings the Beatles From Abbey Road
Peter Tosh, Mystic Man (green recycled vinyl edition)
Rolling Stones, Welcome to Shepherd’s Bush (2CD, 2CD/Blu-ray, 2LP or 4K ultra HD Blu-ray); Hackney Diamonds (vinyl reissue)
Steve Wonder, The Definitive Collection (gold double vinyl reissue)
Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night (raspberry vinyl reissue)
Various artists, Lazy Days: The British Progressive Pop Sounds of 1975 (3CD box with Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, the Kinks, Ian Hunter, Jethro Tull, others)
Various artists, Best of Jethro Tull Redux; Aqualung Redux
Various artists, Silver Patron Saints: The Songs of Jesse Malin (2CD set with Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Billie Joe Armstrong, MC5’s Wayne Kramer, others)

Dec. 13
Alan Parsons Project, Pyramid (45 RPM audiophile edition)
Blue Oyster Cult, 50th Anniversary Live: Third Night
Erasure, Snow Globe; Tomorrow’s World; The Violet Flame (vinyl reissues)
George Harrison, Brainwashed (vinyl reissue)
Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, Bare Bones: The Duo Recordings (3CD box or double vinyl)
Little Richard, The Rill Thing (opaque pink vinyl reissue); Lifetime Friend (opaque turquoise vinyl)
Various artists, Pulp Fiction: Music From the Motion Picture (30th anniversary reissue)
Wham!, Last Christmas 40th Anniversary EP

January 2025 and Beyond
Ringo Starr, Look Up
Robert Palmer, Live at the Apollo; Rhythm & Blues; Drive (vinyl reissues)
Eric Clapton, Meanwhile (vinyl and compact disc release)
Iggy Pop, Live at Montreux Jazz Festival 2023 (CD/Blu-ray set)
Thin Lizzy, Acoustic Sessions
Hawkwind, Live at the Royal Albert Hall (3CD or 3LP editions)
Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Steve Vai, G3 Reunion Live
Steely Dan, Katy Lied (vinyl reissue)
Dave Matthews Band, Where Are You Going: The Singles (2LP)
Dream Theater, Parasomnia
John Mayall, Second Generation: Live Magic 1968-1993 (30CD box)
Ozzy Osbourne, See You on the Other Side V2.0 (18LP box)

Rock’s Most Expensive Out-of-Print LPs

Pete Townshend doesn’t appreciate pundits who claim they know the secret to creativity.

During a recent appearance on the Rockonteurs podcast, the Who legend talked about the creative process, and singled out Rick Rubin for what he perceived as conflicting messages regarding songwriting.

“You see a lot of stuff on YouTube and Instagram, people nagging you about the way that you have to be creative,” Townshend explained. “Somebody needs to occasionally slap Rick Rubin, because one minute he’s telling us that we need to do whatever we like, and then on the other hand, he’s telling us that we mustn’t do this, and we mustn’t do that.”

Townshend went on to note that he’s utilized all types of creative processes throughout his career.

READ MORE: Top 10 Pete Townshend Lyrics

“I’ve dabbled with all of those methods. I’ve carried complete big, recording studios on the road with me sometimes, and then sometimes I’ve used little cassette machines. I’ve recorded in all kinds of different ways. And if I fancy going into a studio with a huge orchestra, I’ve done that too,” the rocker noted. “But what’s most interesting is the paper. The paper, the photograph, the writing.”

Townshend further insisted that creativity is “not just about rock stars, pop stars, singers, musicians, artists, or whatever. It’s about everybody.”

Many Other Rockers Have Criticized Rick Rubin

Townshend certainly isn’t the first rocker to criticize Rubin. Geezer Butler once called the producer’s tactics “ridiculous,” while former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer said Rubin was “way more a hindrance than a help” in the studio.

While the producer’s methods may be polarizing, Townshend admitted he did agree with Rubin on one point.

“As Rick Rubin so rightly says, and many other pundits about creativity, it has to be fun,” the Who guitarist noted. “It has to be enjoyable. It has to be something that you love to do, and it also has to be something that you like what you do. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody else will like it.”

Break out your flannel, scrunchies and high-rise jeans, because it’s time to revisit the ’90s with the new book 501 Essential Albums of the ’90s: The Music Fan’s Definitive Guide.

Featuring contributions from Ultimate Classic Rock team members Michael Gallucci, Matthew Wilkening and book editor Gary Graff, 501 Essential Albums of the ’90s is designed both to inform and to start arguments.

The exclusive excerpt below features the book’s descriptions of 10 of the most essential rock albums of 1994, featuring Tom Petty, Nirvana, Soundgarden and more.

With lively descriptions of the releases and over 600 images, this hefty 448-page volume curates 501 albums spanning genres and subgenres— including pop, hip-hop, R&B, grunge, metal, country and world music. Graff has assembled a team of experienced music journalists to detail the circumstances of each release, highlight notable singles and discuss their influence on contemporary and later artists.

501 Essential Albums of the ’90s is available now from Amazon and all other major retailers. You can also enter to win one of five free copies of the book below.

Soundgarden, Superunknown
A&M | Producers: Michael Beinhorn, Soundgarden
Released: March 8, 1994

With Superunknown, Soundgarden hit the mainstream and hit it hard. The Seattle band’s fourth album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, went six-times platinum, and spawned five singles that went on to dominate the US Alternative Airplay and Mainstream Rock charts. Most notable among those, of course, was “Black Hole Sun,” a trippy yet heavy-hitting track with an even trippier video that became an MTV staple back when that still meant something.

Perhaps Superunknown was simply the right album at the right time. Pearl Jam’s Ten and Nirvana’s Nevermind had softened the ground that later nurtured hit albums such as Alice in Chains’ Dirt, Stone Temple Pilots’ Purple, and Hole’s Live through This. Trends aside, by
the time of Superunknown, Soundgarden had reached a level of musical maturity that made its songwriting simultaneously more sophisticated (check some of those crazy time signatures), more melodic, and more accessible.

The quartet’s obvious classic rock antecedents, including The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, were plainly evident in songs such as “Head Down,” “Half,” “Black Hole Sun” and others, though the Zep comparison especially was anathema to frontman Chris Cornell, who abhorred hard rock’s toxic machismo. But while the album’s radio-ready sound struck a chord with the masses, Superunknown hardly presented a kinder, gentler Soundgarden. Themes of apocalypse, alienation (a grunge given), and suicide—chilling, given Cornell’s eventual self-determined demise—dominate the lyrics. At the time, Cornell dismissed the latter reading as too literal; “Let Me Drown,” he admitted, was “one of the most disturbing songs I’ve ever written. It made me question whether it was a song that was alright to play.” But others, he maintained, were “like watching a horror movie; it makes you feel better after feeling worse.” (Daniel Durchholz)

 

Oasis, Definitely Maybe
Creation | Producers: Owen Morris, Mark Coyle, Noel Gallagher
Released: August 29, 1994

Technically, the members of Oasis weren’t yet rock stars when Definitely Maybe was released. But the album is a declaration, the sound of the group willing itself into the spotlight. “Toniiiiiiiiight, I’m a rock ’n’ roll star,” Liam Gallagher wails on the opening track. You gonna tell him he’s not? Definitely Maybe introduced the world to the forever feuding Gallagher brothers—Liam and songwriter/guitarist Noel, his big brother—a pair of working-class lads from Manchester, England, who took on the globe even as they warred with each other. Guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan, and drummer Tony McCarroll rounded out the line-up, though the non-Gallagher personnel would shift throughout the band’s existence.

Definitely Maybe was full of loud guitars, sneering attitude, and several metric tons of swagger. Forget introspection—Oasis was chasing immortality, and the group found it in “Live Forever,” a bulletproof rocker for the ages about not being beholden to the limits of time or space. “You and I are gonna live forever,” the chorus goes, and it makes you think that band just might. Everything is mega and anything is possible on Definitely Maybe; the trick is the nuggets of encouragement baked into the booze-soaked psalms. “I’m feeling supersonic, give me gin & tonic,” Liam sang on “Supersonic.”

Later, on the squealing, hedonistic “Cigarettes & Alcohol,” he comes on like a motivational speaker, turning a song about overindulgence into an anthem for self-starters. As the Britpop movement it helped usher in took flight, the band’s dreams of superstardom were made whole when Oasis headlined Britain’s Glastonbury Festival the year after Definitely Maybe’s release. Then again, was there ever a doubt it would? Then and forever more, Oasis’s members are rock ’n’ roll stars. (Adam Graham)

 

Tom Petty, Wildflowers
Warner Bros. | Producers: Rick Rubin, Tom Petty, Mike Campbell
Released: Nov. 1, 1994

Tom Petty stepped outside of the Heartbreakers to make a solo album with 1989’s Full Moon Fever and, in the process, scored one of the most successful albums of his career. He repeated that feat five years later with Wildflowers, a fifteen-song collection that shows Petty at the peak of his songwriting powers. The album’s enduring legacy—some justifiably consider it Petty’s all-time best—owes much to the diversity of the songs. It was originally conceived as a double album, but by winnowing it to a single disc (albeit a CD size sixty-three minutes, the remainder of which would surface on a 2021 box set), it displayed a range of winsome acoustic ballads, up-tempo rockers, moody diversions, and points in between.

The title track and album opener, for instance, is classic Petty, strumming an acoustic guitar and perhaps telegraphing his own emotions as he declares, “You belong somewhere you feel free.” The rocking “You Wreck Me,” one of two tracks co-written with Heartbreakers guitarist and Wildflowers co-producer Mike Campbell, became a concert staple for the band, as did the single “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” which raised eyebrows with the controversial (for 1994, at least) chorus line about rolling another joint.

The dueling finger-picked acoustic guitars on “Don’t Fade on Me” showcase how instinctually synced Petty and Campbell were musically. “It’s Good to Be King,” meanwhile, features excellent keyboard work from the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench, and the album-closing “Wake Up Time” offers a rare moment of Petty on piano.

All of the Heartbreakers play on the album, along with an assortment of guests, including Ringo Starr and the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson, but Wildflowers is unquestionably one man’s deep and heartfelt expression, rendered with an exquisite sincerity that holds its own alongside any of the legendary singer/songwriter classics that came before it. (Steve Taylor)

 

Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral
Nothing / Interscope | Producers: Trent Reznor, Flood
Released: March 8, 1994

With Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, Trent Reznor proved that industrial music could have a place in the mainstream if it played by some of pop’s old rules. By instilling melody and traditional verse-chorus-verse structures to industrial rattles and clangs, virtual one-man band Reznor had a hit on his hands, eventually selling more than three million copies of an independently released record from a genre that rarely peeked out of the underground. For Nine Inch Nails’ follow-up LP, he aimed bigger.

A sixty-five-minute concept album about one man’s mental breakdown, The Downward Spiral perfectly captured the ethos of the flourishing alt-rock movement of the mid-’90s. Dark, despairing, and filled with loud, aggressive music that wore its bruised heart on its sleeve, the fourteen-track album was a critical work during what was arguably the biggest year for the alt-rock nation. Adding to its legend, the album was recorded in the house where the Manson Family murdered actress Sharon Tate and others during the summer of 1969. The result was an album of harrowing imagery, abrasive sounds, and lyrical themes that encompassed complete hopelessness. The Downward Spiral, with its unflinching look at depression and suicide, somehow became a commercial juggernaut. It peaked at No. 2, went four-times platinum, and featured a handful of radio hits, including “Closer,” a widely misinterpreted song about self-hate. And then there was “Hurt,” a six-minute track that brought The Downward Spiral to its drawn conclusion.

The slow-building ballad, whose industrial buzzes underlie an irresistible pop chorus, was covered by Johnny Cash and served as a requiem to his long career. The Downward Spiral had that much reach. (Michael Gallucci)

 

Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York
DGC | Producers: Alex Coletti, Scott Litt, Nirvana
Released: Nov. 1, 1994

Nirvana was one of the biggest bands on the planet when it performed a set for MTV’s popular Unplugged series during November 1993. The group had followed its landmark 1991 album Nevermind with the raw and uncompromising In Utero in 1993. Two months after the second album’s release (and its debut at No. 1), Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, and touring guitarist Pat Smear performed an hour-long set at New York’s Sony Music Studios with help from cellist Lori Goldston and Meat Puppets members Cris and Curt Kirkwood.

Instead of playing the best-known songs from its two hit albums, Nirvana filled its setlist with deep cuts: covers of David Bowie (“The Man Who Sold the World”), the Vaselines (“Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam”), and Lead Belly (“Where Did You Sleep Last Night”), plus three Meat Puppets favorites. It was a revelatory performance, a stripped-down antidote to the blistering abrasion of In Utero. The program aired on December 16, 1993; four months later, Cobain died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. When MTV Unplugged in New York arrived as an album in November 1994, it served as a requiem for the late Nirvana leader and a memorial to his legacy. (Michael Gallucci)

 

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded
Atlantic| Producers: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant
Released: Oct. 31, 1994

Two Led Zeppelin reunions had been dissatisfying on many fronts, making the possibility of more seem remote. But when MTV reached out with an idea for one of its Unplugged episodes, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were game. “Forgetting” Zep mate John Paul Jones’s phone number, the two reunited for this ambitious troll through the Zep catalog, plus four new songs, accompanied by expanded instrumentation (mandolin, bodhran, hurdy-gurdy, banjo) and an eleven-member ensemble.

The results were revelatory, from Blind Willie Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” slowed considerably from the slamming version on Presence in 1976, and peaking with an epic “Kashmir” that sounded even more in tune with the Vale of Kashmir than its 1975 original. Both men were clearly comfortable and invigorated by these new sonic surroundings (which weren’t completely unplugged, of course), and the new tracks fit well enough to suggest a future was at hand. Page and Plant managed to tour and release a new studio album, 1998’s Walking into Clarksdale, before pulling the curtain on this chapter. (Gary Graff)

 

Melvins, Stoner Witch
Atlantic | Producers: Melvins, GGGarth
Released: Oct. 18, 1994

Of all the Seattle-area bands signed to major labels during the post-Nirvana gold rush, Melvins may have been the most influential and deserving. Naturally, it also probably benefited the least. Still, we got three great records out of the trio’s Atlantic Records years, and Stoner Witch, home to perhaps the closest thing Buzz Osbourne and Dale Crover have ever had to a hit in “Revolve,” still makes a great jumping-on point for anyone curious about the group. And let’s be clear, you should hear everything you possibly can from these ever-inventive, constantly evolving hard rock geniuses. (Matthew Wilkening)

 

Green Day, Dookie
Reprise | Producers: Rob Cavallo, Green Day
Released: Feb. 1, 1994

When Green Day titled its third album and major label debut Dookie, the young punks must have been pretty confident it wasn’t a piece of you-know-what. They were, and it wasn’t. You can just imagine the scatological reviews that would have followed otherwise. Dookie may have seemed like a load of whiny brattiness to the old Clash fans, but for a segment of a restless Gen X it captured real, everyday life in a raw, game-changing, genre-defining pop-punk package. While Nirvana was up the coast brooding rather opaquely about boredom and apathy, the Berkeley, California, trio was laying it out there in plain English and having a blast doing it, starting with the opening line “I declare that I don’t care no more!” And what kid couldn’t relate to this classic verse from the breakout single “Longview”: “I sit around and watch the phone/But no one’s calling/ Call me pathetic, call me what you will/My mother says to get a job/But she don’t like the one she’s got/When masturbation’s lost its fun, you’re f*cking lazy.” Under the helm of producer Rob Cavallo, the poppunk goodness is darn-near relentless on Dookie, which spawned four more singles: the hyper, panic-driven “Basket Case”; the more amped-up “Welcome to Paradise” (originally on 1991’s Kerplunk!); “She,” inspired by a feminist poem an ex showed to frontman Billie Joe Armstrong; and “When I Come Around,” a lurching mid-tempo anthem about a boy who won’t be tied down. Dookie shot to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, won a Grammy Award, propelled the group to Woodstock ’94, topped Rolling Stone’s 50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums list, and established Green Day as the premier band in a genre ready to explode. (Scott Mervis)

 

Pearl Jam, Vitalogy
Epic | Producers: Brendan O’Brien, Pearl Jam
Released: Nov. 22, 1994

Having positioned itself among the leaders of the grunge revolution, Pearl Jam got weird on its third album. The classic rock and punk influences that ran through its first two records were still present, but, firmly settled on top of the commercial mountain, the Seattle five-piece revealed its experimental side while still giving fans the gnarly guitars and Eddie Vedder’s anguished howls that made Ten and Vs. such monster hits. In some ways, Vitalogy was Pearl Jam’s reaction to that success. The album was mostly written and recorded on tour, allowing the band to indulge in its most primal urges as it pieced together tracks that rarely sounded like they belonged on the same record. “Bugs,” for instance, was spoken-word rambling over a single repeated accordion riff. “Aye Davanita” broke things down further to a wordless chant, and “Stupid Mop,” a seven and-a-half-minute sound collage that must have confused the hell out of “Even Flow” lovers, dispensed with the music altogether. Still, Vitalogy debuted at No. 1 and went five-times platinum: “Not for You,” “Corduroy,” and “Better Man” were all radio hits not too far removed from the expectations Pearl Jam was quickly shedding. (Michael Gallucci)

 

Stone Temple Pilots, Purple
Atlantic | Producer: Brendan O’Brien
Released: June 7, 1994

Stone Temple Pilots’ (STP) first album, Core, was a hit with the record-buying public but trashed by most critics, the general complaint being that it was generic, copycat grunge. The quartet held the singular distinction of being named Best Band of 1994 by Rolling Stone readers and Worst Band of 1994 by the magazine’s critics. Whether it was a desire to silence those cynics or just flex its musical muscles, STP expanded its sonic palette for its second release.

On Purple, the band injected elements of blues, jazz, country, funk, and folk into its songwriting and performance while staying true to the grungey rock roots of Core. This expanded musical direction was particularly showcased on the track “Lounge Fly,” which opened with psychedelic guitar, moved to a funky verse akin to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then shifted to a rock anthem chorus followed by a soft acoustic guitar bridge before grinding to the finish. “Interstate Love Song” was as at home on a Texas roadhouse jukebox as it was on arena stages, and “Big Empty” started with jazzy chords and vocals before hitting its rocking, singalong chorus. The experiment not only worked artistically but paid off big as Purple debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, where it stayed for three weeks, eventually selling more than six million copies. “Vasoline” and “Interstate Love Song” were both No. 1 Mainstream Rock chart hits and No. 2 on Alternative Airplay. Purple also made some of 1994’s best albums lists, achieving the rare feat of converting detractors into believers while keeping its core audience happy. (Gary Plochinski)

Top 30 American Classic Rock Bands of the ’90s

Former Iron Maiden frontman Paul Di’Anno‘s cause of death has been revealed.

“Dear fans and friends, we have received permission from Paul’s family to bring you the news of Paul’s cause of death, after the results of the autopsy have been received,” according to an official statement. “His sisters Cheryl and Michelle confirmed the following: ‘Basically he had a tear in the sac around the heart and blood has filled inside it from the main aorta artery and that has caused the heart to stop.’ Paul’s death was instantaneous and hopefully painless. May he rest in peace.”

Di’Anno died in October. He was 66.

READ MORE: Iron Maiden’s Most Interesting History Lessons

The statement was accompanied by a photo of Di’Anno’s friends and family, who gathered last Thursday for a tribute concert in London: “This weekend, an In Memoriam show was held at Underworld Camden, where many of Paul’s fans, friends, colleagues and family members came. With a magnificent musical set, his musical colleagues said a worthy farewell to their friend.”

Di’Anno fronted Iron Maiden during a seminal period as they wrote, recorded and toured behind their first two studio projects, 1980’s Iron Maiden and 1981’s Killers.

“The two albums I made with the band were pivotal [to the metal genre],” Di’Anno argued in 2020. “Later on in my life when I met Metallica, Pantera and Sepultura and they told me that those albums were what got them into music, it made me incredibly proud.”

Iron Maiden’s Rarest Songs

Estranged bandmates David Gilmour and Roger Waters have taken radically different approaches with Pink Floyd‘s catalog during their most recent solo tours.

Only two of their former band’s songs appeared nightly on the set list: The title track from 1975’s Wish You Were Here and 1979’s “Comfortably Numb.”

But even then, Waters dramatically re-worked the latter track for his 2022-23 This is Not a Drill Tour, stripping “Comfortably Numb” down to a create haunting sound – and notably removing Gilmour’s iconic song-closing guitar solo.

David Gilmour Leaned Heavily on Post-Waters Output

Gilmour’s brief four-city, 23-show 2024 tour found him splitting the set list evenly between his solo career and his time in Pink Floyd. He played the entirety of 2024’s Luck and Strange every night, and played more songs from 1994’s post-Waters Pink Floyd album The Division Bell than he did from their 1973 landmark The Dark Side of the Moon.

READ MORE: Ranking Every Pink Floyd Live Album

Like a divorced couple, Gilmour and Waters divided Dark Side‘s songs up almost exactly in half, with Gilmour performing three songs from the album’s first side while Waters’ show climaxed with a performance of the entire second half, from “Money” to “Eclipse.”

Gilmour used a relatively straight-ahead but still impressive stage show, with his traditional circle-shaped video screen behind the band, and top-notch lighting and lasers. One particularly inventive moment came during “High Hopes,” when giant beach balls were released in coordination with their appearance on the screen.

Roger Waters’ Stage Show Casts New Light on Classics

Waters, as usual, pushed the boundaries of arena show staging to inspired new heights on his tour, performing in the round with an innovative cross-shaped stage that was often covered with dazzling visuals. (Hopefully, a pro-shot version of this tour will be released on home video at some point soon.)

He devoted 17 of his typical set list’s songs to Pink Floyd’s golden era, with big doses of Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and 1979’s The Wall. Three more came from his well-received 2017 solo album Is This the Life We Really Want?, and the tour also featured the debut of a brand-new song entitled “The Bar,” which appeared at two points during the show.

You can see the set lists and fan-shot video from both tours below.

Watch David Gilmour Perform ‘Wish You Were Here’

David Gilmour’s Nov. 9, 2024, Madison Square Garden Set List

1. “5 A.M.”  – From Rattle That Lock (2015)
2. “Black Cat” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
3. “Luck and Strange” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
4. “Breathe (In the Air)” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
5. “Time” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
6. “Breathe” (Reprise) – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
7. “Fat Old Sun” – From Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother (1970)
8. “Marooned” – From Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994)
9. “A Single Spark” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
10. “Wish You Were Here” – From Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975)
11. “Vita Brevis” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
12. “Between Two Points” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
13. “High Hopes” – From Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994)
14. “Sorrow” – From Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987)
15. “The Piper’s Call” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
16. “A Great Day for Freedom” – From Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994)
17. “In Any Tongue” – From Rattle That Lock (2015)
18. “The Great Gig in the Sky” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
19. “A Boat Lies Waiting” – From Rattle That Lock (2015)
20. “Coming Back to Life” – From Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994)
21. “Dark and Velvet Nights” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
22. “Sings” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
23. “Scattered” – From Luck and Strange (2024)
24. “Comfortably Numb” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)

Watch David Gilmour Perform ‘Comfortably Numb’

Watch Roger Waters Perform ‘Wish You Were Here’

Roger Waters’ Dec. 9, 2023, Estadio Olimpico Atahualapa Set List

1. “Comfortably Numb” – From The Dark Side of the Moon Redux (2023)
2. “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
3. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
4. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
5. “The Powers That Be” – From Radio K.A.O.S. (1987)
6. “The Bravery of Being Out of Range” – From Amused to Death (1992)
7. “The Bar” – New song
8. “Have a Cigar” – From Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975)
9. “Wish You Were Here” – From Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975)
10. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” (Parts VI-VII, V) – From Wish You Were Here (1975)
11. “Sheep” – From Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977)
12. “In the Flesh” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
13. “Run Like Hell” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
14. “Deja Vu”- From Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017)
15. “Deja Vu” (Reprise)
16. “Is This the Life We Really Want?” – From Is This the Life We Really Want? (2017)
17. “Money” –  From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
18. “Us and Them” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
19. “Any Colour You Like” –  From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
20. “Brain Damage” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
21. “Eclipse” – From Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
22. “Two Suns in the Sunset” – From Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut (1983)
23. “The Bar” (Reprise) –
24. “Outside the Wall” – From Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)

Watch Roger Waters Perform ‘Comfortably Numb’

When Alice Cooper Got Stoned with Pink Floyd

Tom Morello is more than a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, he’s an active member of the organization’s nominating committee.

The Rage Against the Machine guitarist got involved with the institution roughly a decade ago, after confronting Jon Landau – Bruce Springsteen’s manager and one of the Hall’s key executives – about the organization’s credibility.

“My argument was this,” Morello recalled during a recent conversation with Sirius XM’s Eddie Trunk. “If you’re a little league player, your dream as a young baseball player is to have such a career that you would end up in the baseball hall of fame. I said, ‘A lot of young rock and roll guitar players have no respect for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. None of their favorite bands are in it.”

READ MORE: 25 Rock Stars Who Have Criticized the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Morello insisted that the Hall needed to be “a place that everyone who loves rock and roll aspires to be in because their heroes are there. And you don’t have that right now.” Landau was so moved by the guitarist’s passion that he invited Morello to get involved. “To his credit, he put me in the room.”

Tom Morello Says Iron Maiden’s Hall Absence Is an ‘Egregious Oversight’

Morello has championed many artists’ Hall cases over the past decade, including Kiss, MC5, Randy Rhoads and Judas Priest. Still, one omission weighs heavily on the guitarist.

“I will chew my leg off like a coyote in a trap if I can’t get Iron Maiden in,” Morello declared. “While there are many other deserving acts, Iron Maiden for me is the last most egregious oversight in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

“Iron Maiden is like the gold standard of metal bands and they’re not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” Morello continued. “And I know Bruce Dickinson said he doesn’t really care. Well I care as a fan. I care very, very much about it. So I’m gonna do all I can to get, [with] whatever limited influence I have, to get Iron Maiden in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

READ MORE: 5 Reasons Iron Maiden Should Be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

As Morello mentioned, Iron Maiden has been vocally against enshrinement in the Hall, with Dickinson even describing the organization as “an utter and complete load of bollocks.” Still, the Rage Against the Machine rocker insists such comments have no bearing on Maiden’s case.

“I’m sure there are some people who are thinking about, ‘What will the show be if one of the headliners doesn’t show up?’ But that doesn’t [come up].”

Mitch Malloy has previously discussed his brief stint with Van Halen in 1996 – but in a new series of comments he said he was still upset that anyone had ever found out about it, and was also upset that he’d been left on his own to deal with the public fallout.

The singer has released a new version of “It’s the Right Time,” which he demoed with the band while they tried to work out if he was to be the band’s third frontman, following their split with Sammy Hagar. In the end, Malloy said he decided not to join the band, paving the way for Gary Cherone and Van Halen III.

Malloy has previously explained that he wasn’t attracted to the music Van Halen had been prepping for that album, and has now rebuilt “It’s the Right Time” – which contained contributions from other writers – out of the parts Eddie Van Halen had personally created.

READ MORE: Hear the Full Version of Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s ‘Unfinished’

Malloy’s seemingly cleaned-up version of the track, available below, is accompanied with a series of photos. One shows the singer and guitarist in the studio together, with a caption explaining Joe Walsh had just called to recommend a singer, but Eddie had told him: “Oh, thanks, Joe, but we got Mitch Malloy.”

A later moment shows the fax sent to Van Halen’s management, reading: “Mitch has asked me to pass along his regrets that do to his strong commitments and excitement about his solo career in Nashville he will have to respectfully pass on the opportunity to be considered as the new lead vocalist in Van Halen.

“After spending time with Eddie and the guys, Mitch feels a strong bond that he will carry with him throughout his life. Thanks again for the opportunity. Best of luck with the endeavor and please pass along our best to the band.”

Malloy commented below the video, saying: “Instead of being celebrated as Van Halen’s first choice to replace Sam, I’m left with sticking up for myself. It’s not right and it’s not fair to me. And I’m kinda pissed.

“Anyone else would not have had handled this as well as I have. Ed told me that last time I saw him. I just wish in the end he’d told the press the truth… so I don’t have to. I wish no one knew, to be honest.”

Mitch Malloy’s ‘Wicked Chemistry’ with Van Halen

Asked once again about the Van Halen III demos, the singer said they were “not inspiring enough for me to even make songs out of. But we had wicked chemistry, as you can hear. So we would have grown into a badass writing team for sure.

“I would have encouraged some of [Eddie’s] heavy side, but you never know. Of course the riffs and chords came from him. He was a master of that. I would have tried to take a nod from Dave [Lee Roth] as well as I love the first few records.”

He added: “Obviously I was never gonna sound like Dave… but that’s OK too. It would have been great, I’m sure of it. Of course not everyone would have thought so, but we would have.

“I will forever cherish every second with Ed and Alex.”

Watch Mitch Mallow’s New ‘It’s the Right Time’ Video

Steve Lukather recalled how Quincy Jones stopped him from turning “Beat It” into a heavy metal song – even though the late producer wasn’t even there at the time.

The Toto guitarist and session veteran hailed Jones’ ability to operate like a movie director, guiding his chosen musicians to bring the best out of everyone in pursuit of a great song.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Lukather recalled that he’d listened to Eddie Van Halen’s contribution to Michael Jackson‘s “Beat It” and decided to support that with a heavy rhythm guitar base.

READ MORE: Eddie Van Halen Broke a Band Rule to Play on ‘Beat It’

“The thing that people never say about Quincy is what a great casting director he was,” the guitarist explained. “He had a Rolodex of musicians of all sorts that he could grab at, and when he would get certain material, he’d go, ’OK, this is the right guy.’”

Lukather first entered Jones’ world at the age of 23. “You never knew who you were gonna get with Quincy,” he said. “I was trying to play it cool because I was a young fan, up in the room with the greats: ‘Oh, Stevie Wonder’s playing keyboards today – that’s kind of cool.’ He didn’t write out parts for us; he gave us free rein. He’d give us a chord sheet and say, ‘What do you guys got? Make me look good!’ Then once he started to get a feel for everything, he was a great director: ‘OK, that’s great; I like that, work that.’”

Lukather and Toto bandmate Jeff Porcaro got the call to work on Jackson’s Thriller, and their first assignment was the track “The Girl Is Mine,” featuring Paul McCartney. “We were like, ‘You’re kidding me – Quincy, Michael and Paul McCartney?’ You’re not going to get bigger than that in 1982,” Lukather marveled. “So we were excited. I mean, granted, the song is a bit silly – let’s all be honest about it. But that was my first encounter with one of the Beatles: a big deal, because they’re the reason why I started playing. Paul and Linda walked in the room, it was like the energy changed; it was very palpable.

“We just had a simple song – some chords written on it, and we started a groove and then everybody finds a part,” Lukather continued. “All the musicians were so good, by the end of the first take, we’re real close. Third take was probably the magical take.”

Why Quincy Jones Needed Steve Lukather to Hold Back on ‘Beat It’

Turning to “Beat It,” Lukather recalled: “We did it backwards: Michael’s lead vocal and the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo were done with a couple of small overdubs but no click track. Jeff made a click track and then a drum part, and I played a bunch of really wild guitar parts, because I knew Eddie’s solo was on it – I was doing real hard rock, a quadruple-track riff.

“Quincy wasn’t even there; he was at Westlake [Recording Studios] doing overdubs on ‘Billie Jean’ while we were fixing ‘Beat It’ — so we’d be on the phone and he goes: ‘It’s too metal, you gotta calm down. I gotta get it on pop radio! Use the small amp, not so much distortion.’”

The results spoke for themselves. “Beat It” became a chart-topping smash and won Grammys for Record of the Year and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance in 1984. Lukather credited Jones for his vision on that song and many others.

“Quincy is the only guy that can do a solo album without playing or writing anything,” Lukather said. “Somehow, no matter what he did, there was a Quincy Jones sound, even if he didn’t play, sing, write or whatever. He was a director.”

The Eagles‘ ongoing residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas is one of the most anticipated musical events of the year, but in a recent interview, iconic singer and guitarist Vince Gill admits that while the show is jaw-dropping, it’s not necessarily his personal cup of tea.

The show features the extensive multi-media elements that are the 20,000-seat arena’s hallmark, in a striking contrast to most Eagles shows, which generally focus on the music over visuals. Gill says he finds the visual elements distracting, to say the least.

RELATED: Vince Gill Rocks Out on “Heartache Tonight” at Eagles’ Sphere Debut

Gill tells American Songwriter that the stage is very small in relation to the content walls.

“Then all the stuff goes to the sides and up to the ceiling. The ceiling is 15, 20 times bigger than all of that,” he states. “It’s staggeringly massive.”

The country legend — who joined the Eagles in 2017 after the death of Glenn Frey — says he even started “getting loopy” during rehearsals when he first experienced the scope of the show’s visual content.

“I was getting kind of where I felt like I was going to fall over because things are tilted, and you think you’re moving, but you’re not,” Gill states.

“It’s a trip. It’s the most people I’ve ever been ignored by when I’m playing. You’re playing, and they’re all staring at all the stuff on the ceiling. They’re not paying any attention to you. It’s kind of fun, really.”

Though Gill concedes the Eagles’ Sphere residency is a “great show,” he also says the visual content is “the whole point” of the venue.

“I never wanted to see anybody running around on the stage and yelling at me and being aerobic and bombs going off and pyro and whatever,” he states.

Gill’s idea of a good time is watching an artist like Merle Haggard simply stand and deliver one great song after another, more like what Gill does in his solo shows, or the Eagles do in their performances outside the Sphere.

“It’s still what I want to hear when I go to hear music,” he said. “I don’t necessarily go to see it.”

Gill will join the Eagles for more dates at the Sphere in 2025, but before that, he and his wife, Christian singer Amy Grant, will undertake their annual series of Christmas shows at the legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in November and December.

When MTV debuted in 1981, it ushered in a golden era of music videos.

The network’s launch was groundbreaking for artists everywhere. Suddenly, music was no longer a purely audible medium. Visuals soon meant as much – or perhaps even more – than what the song sounded like.

Some bands jumped head first into the music video revolution, while others took a little bit longer to embrace the trend. Regardless, MTV’s influence resonated with generations of music lovers and helped launch many artists’ careers.

READ MORE: Rock’s 40 Biggest MTV Moments

As the power of music videos became evident, bands and record labels began heavily investing into creating memorable clips. ZZ Top, Tom Petty, the Police, Peter Gabriel, and Prince are just some of the noteworthy acts who crafted timeless pieces. Below, we rank the Top 30 music videos from the 1980s.

30. Twister Sister, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”
Rebellion is a core foundation of rock, and one of the genre’s classic tropes is young people pushing back against parental authority figures. Twisted Sister captures this perfectly in their 1984 music video for “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Mark Metcalf, best known as Douglas C. Niedermeyer from Animal House, aggressively scolds his son. The teen responds by saying he wants to rock, then strums a riff so powerful it propels his dad straight out the window. The kid then turns into Dee Snider in full Stay Hungry attire, complete with makeup and wild crimped hair. Is the whole thing cheesy? Sure, but it was the ‘80s!

 

29. Motley Crue, “Home Sweet Home”
Motley Crue offered up plenty of gratuitous sexuality in their ‘80s videos (see “Girls, Girls, Grils” for example), yet it’s their heartfelt clip for “Home Sweet Home” that makes our list. Aside from the opening – in which each band member answers a phone call and responds with “I’m on my way!” – the video is largely made up of footage from the group’s touring. Concert performances and backstage recordings show the band’s tireless work ethic and dedication to their fans – a side of the Crue rarely shown to the public.

 

28. B-52s, “Love Shack”
The music video for 1989’s “Love Shack” perfectly suits the B-52’s, one of the ‘80s most colorful and ebullient groups. The band cruises in their classic convertible, pulling up to “Shaque Damour.” Inside, they lead a wild dance party, featuring fluorescent outfits, plenty of cocktails and a pre-fame Ru Paul.

 

27. Billy Idol, “White Wedding”
For many, the image of Billy Idol in “White Wedding” – shirtless, bleach-blonde hair, wearing a rosary and leather gloves – is the first thing that comes to mind when the rocker’s name is mentioned. Here was Idol emphatically putting his stamp on the ‘80s, mixing punk and goth looks to create his own distinctive style. An eerie wedding, leather-clad dancers and a motorcycle crashing through a stained glass window added further elements to the classic clip.

 

26. Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”
How did a cow get in the boardroom? Why is Dave Stewart playing the cello, on a song that clearly has none? Perhaps the deeper symbolism of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” video is lost on us, but one thing is clear: the powerful presence of Annie Lennox. Dressed in a suit, with her short, bright red hair, the singer immediately became an androgynous icon upon the clip’s release. “We wanted our visual statements to be strong and powerful, because we knew they’d be there forever,” Lennox later recalled. “I was trying to be the opposite of the cliché of the female singer. I wanted to be as strong as a man, equal to Dave and perceived that way.”

 

25. George Michael, “Faith”
For this memorable 1987 video, George Michael debuted a new, distinctive look. With stubble on his face, aviator sunglasses, blue jeans and a leather jacket, the singer embodied an updated version of rock’s classic ’50s style. Likewise, his moves in the “Faith” video echoed those of Elvis Presley, as the English vocalist danced and gyrated his way through the tune. The single became a No. 1 hit, while its video helped Michael transition from pop star to rock force.

 

24. Def Leppard, “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
There were actually two videos made for Def Leppard’s classic 1987 hit “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” but the U.S. version (covered here)  is the one that was plastered all over MTV. The performance piece captured the unbridled excitement of Def Leppard’s concerts, while black and white backstage footage gave a glimpse into the band’s pre-show preparation.

 

23. Blondie, “Rapture”
Few ‘80s stars had the magnetism of Debbie Harry. Whether performing onstage or appearing on screen, the Blondie frontwoman had effortless charisma. It’s no surprise that the band opted to make her the focus of their 1981 music video for “Rapture.” In it, Harry shows off her moves on the dancefloor before wandering through Manhattan’s East Village, where she glides past graffiti artists, a Native American, Uncle Sam and a child ballet dancer. A figure in a white suit and top hat — referred to in the lyrics as the “man from Mars” — appears at various points throughout the clip, while viewers can also spot hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy and famed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat making cameo appearances – that is, if they can take their eyes off Harry.

 

22. Poison, “Nothin’ But a Good Time”
We’ve all been there: You’re working a menial, minimum wage job. Your boss comes in and yells at you, so you kick down a nearby door to reveal Poison rocking through one of their biggest hits. Much like the song itself, the music video for “Nothin’ But a Good Time” will never be confused for high art, but its irrepressibly fun nature made it hugely popular on MTV.

 

21. Genesis, “Land of Confusion”
The 1986 music video for “Land of Confusion” can be considered amazing or nightmarish, depending on your perspective. Regardless, the clip was unquestionably memorable, landing it at No. 21 on our list. The song took aim at world leadership in the shadow of the Cold War, and with such weighty subject matter, Genesis naturally decided the music video needed puppets. Lots of them. More than 60 were reportedly created for the video, at a price tag of $10,000 each. While band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks were turned into puppets, so too were many of the era’s most famous faces. There were politicians (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev), pop stars (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince), rock legends (Pete Townshend, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger) and famous actors (Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood). It all amounted to a video that was truly unforgettable – whether you wanted to or not.

 

20. Queen + David Bowie, “Under Pressure”
For music fans, a collaboration between Queen and David Bowie, two of the biggest acts in rock history, was already reason for excitement. Then came the music video for “Under Pressure,” which surprisingly didn’t feature any star power at all. None of the musicians appeared in the clip, reportedly due to touring commitments at the time. Instead, director David Mallet built a video entirely made out of stock footage and pieces of classic films. Building on the concept of pressure, Mallet juxtaposed scenes of explosions, societal stress and political unrest with clips of exuberant concertgoers and old fashioned romance. The result was one of the ‘80s defining music videos.

 

19. Metallica, “One”
Up until 1989, Metallica had eschewed music videos completely. That changed with “One” and its hauntingly memorable clip. Picking up on the song’s theme of war, Metallica opted to use scenes from the 1971 film Johnny Get Your Gun. These clips were spliced with black and white footage of the band performing in a warehouse, giving the video a strong cinematic vibe. Directors Bill Pope and Michael Salomon opted to use many close up shots of the rockers, highlighting their impressive musical dexterity. Overall, it marked an emphatic music video debut for Metallica.

 

18. Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”
The Buggles will always hold a special place in pop-culture history, as their music video for “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first clip ever shown on MTV. While the song’s title and subject were perfect for the groundbreaking moment, people often forget how quirky and offbeat the video itself is. The clip, which was actually created two years prior to MTV’s launch, features the band performing in a futuristic laboratory, as a spandex clad, metallic-haired woman dances inside a clear cylindrical case.

 

17. Whitesnake, “Here I Go Again”
Even in an era of video vixens, there were none more adored than Tawny Kitaen. Her appearance in the 1987 music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” was so iconic that it actually overshadowed the band. Ask anyone who watched MTV at the time and they’ll undoubtedly remember Kitaen, dressed in white, writhing on the top of two Jaguar cars. The other half of the video, which featured the band performing “Here I Go Again”? That was just filler.

 

16. Aerosmith and Run DMC, “Walk This Way”
Aerosmith originally released “Walk This Way” in 1977. Nine years later, it became a groundbreaking release thanks to a new version featuring rap group Run-DMC. The collaboration helped bring hip-hop to mainstream audiences, while its music video was a mainstay on MTV. “Do you want to do this video of you guys playing, and then you break down a wall, and we’re side by side?’” guitarist Joe Perry recalled being asked. “We said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ that was pretty amazing. It was amazing because it really did break down walls. At the time, I don’t think that there were any minority acts on MTV, except for Michael Jackson, up to that point. If there was, it wasn’t a lot, and I think it definitely opened some doors, and I’m really proud of that. I’d like to say we planned it and that we knew that it was going to happen, but we didn’t. I’m just glad it was Aerosmith and Run-DMC that did it.”

 

15. Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love”
While English rocker Robert Palmer was the man behind “Addicted to Love,” the corresponding video became famous because of the other people on screen. In the clip, Palmer belts out the upbeat tune while backed by a band of five models. All of them are dressed the same way, in black outfits with pale makeup, dark hair and bright red lipstick. Despite moving and swaying to the song, their faces remain stoic and emotionless throughout the piece. The video became massively popular and has been routinely parodied in the years since, including a memorable homage in the film Love Actually.

 

14. Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”
Axl Rose opens the music video for “Welcome to the Jungle” as a bright-eyed dreamer arriving in the big city. The concrete jungle sends him descending into darkness, and by the end of the video he’s a street-hardened punk. Of course, what you see on screen is just part of the “Welcome to the Jungle” story. As rock history recalls, the video was rejected by MTV until label head David Geffen struck a deal to get it aired one time at 5AM on a Sunday morning. Despite the strange time slot, response to the video was electric. “Welcome to the Jungle” soon moved into MTV’s regular rotation, and Guns N’ Roses were suddenly on their way to becoming the biggest band in the world.

 

13. Van Halen, “Hot for Teacher”
The Van Halen crew embraced their inner child with this 1984 music video. The campy clip is set in an elementary school and follows Waldo, a classic, bowtie-wearing nerd who seems overwhelmed by the world around him. Child versions of all four Van Halen members appear in the clip, regularly cheering on teachers who pull off their homely dresses and become bikini models. The real Van Halen appears as well, occasionally donning matching tuxedos and showing off choreographed dance moves.

 

12. Police, “Every Breath You Take”
The music video for “Every Breath You Take” was a major presence on MTV in 1983. Shot in black and white, the clip’s minimalist style was very different from the bright and brash videos which dominated the network at the time. Instead, the Police largely let the song itself do the talking, while the crisp cinematography of Daniel Pearl helped amplify the tune’s emotion. The video for “Every Breath You Take” was one of MTV’s early mainstays and its popularity has barely waned in the decades since its release. In 2022, it was recognized for more than a billion streams on YouTube.

 

11. INXS, “Need You Tonight”
Live action and animation were combined in the memorable video for “Need You Tonight.” The 1987 hit topped charts around the world and helped elevate INXS into the upper stratosphere of fame. Meanwhile, the music video – whose distinctive look was created by cutting up 35mm film, photocopying the individual frames, then re-layering the images over the original footage – earned heavy rotation on MTV. It took home five awards at the 1988 VMAs, including Video of the Year.

 

10. Duran Duran, Hungry Like the Wolf”
“Indiana Jones is horny and wants to get laid” – that’s how Andy Taylor summed up Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” music video, and it’s honestly the best description we can think of. Shot in Sri Lanka, the clip finds the band navigating the country’s bustling markets, before journeying into the sprawling jungle. Meanwhile, model Sheila Ming appears as a mysterious woman, hunting and eventually sensually battling frontman Simon Le Bon. The exotic video grabbed viewers’ attention and helped expand Duran Duran’s popularity worldwide.

 

9. Prince, “When Doves Cry”
Considering Prince insisted on having control over all of his artistic output, it’s no surprise he dismissed the director hired by his label to helm the music video for “When Doves Cry.” Instead, the singer directed the clip himself, augmenting footage from the Purple Rain film with several new scenes. The opening sequence, in which white doves emerge from double doors, then reveal Prince in a bathtub, ranks among the most iconic images of the ‘80s.

 

8. Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
Few ‘80s stars could match the charm of Cyndi Lauper. From her unique fashion sense to her bubbly persona, the singer was one of the era’s most distinctive pop culture influencers. The music video for Lauper’s 1983 hit “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was created with modest funds – it only cost $35,000 to make and most of the cast members were volunteers. Still, its buoyant energy captured viewers across the globe as it became one of the most recognizable videos of the ‘80s. Bonus point for the appearance of Captain Lou Albano – a professional wrestling legend and close friend of Lauper’s – who played the singer’s father in the clip.

 

7. Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing”
Sure, it’s funny to look at Dire Straits’ 1985 music video for “Money for Nothing” through a modern lens. Today, our senses are constantly bombarded with computer animation and AI creations. However, back in the Regan years, this clip was an example of groundbreaking technology, as crude 3D animation reflected the story of moving men pontificating about rock stars (as chronicled in the song’s lyrics). The video became one of the most popular in MTV history — the refrain of “I want my MTV” certainly didn’t hurt.

 

6. Van Halen, “Jump”
Unlike other videos on this list, which dazzled with artistry, effects or storytelling, Van Halen’s 1985 clip for “Jump” resonated with viewers thanks to simple chemistry. The video is a straightforward performance piece, with the group rocking through their catchy hit, but every band member is at their charismatic best. David Lee Roth emotes effortless swagger as he dances and sings, Eddie Van Halen is all smiles both on guitar and keyboard, Alex Van Halen pounds out the backbeat with ease, while bassist Michael Anthony looks like he’s having more fun than anyone else. “‘Jump’ really was just about personality, really,” the video’s director, Pete Angelus, explained in the book MTV Ruled the World. “The initial concept was just to film them in a very simple live setting, and let the personalities show through. We did it very quickly. Seriously, I think that we probably spent more money on pizza delivery than we did on the video itself. But that was the intention — make it a very intimate, personal feeling, with a very big band.”

 

5. ZZ Top, “Sharp Dressed Man”
Perhaps no act did a better job of embracing the music video revolution than ZZ Top. Though the little ol’ band from Texas was already popular, their MTV explosion brought fame and fortune beyond anything the band had previously experienced. Three major elements helped ZZ Top build their MTV mystique (which coincided with their 1983 album Eliminator): First, the band’s iconic beards, which helped make the trio instantly recognizable. Second, their hot rod, which appeared in their videos and famously graced the Eliminator cover. Third, the Eliminator girls, a trio of women who appeared in three of the band’s most successful videos. We could have easily made an argument for “Gimme All Your Lovin’” or “Legs” in this spot, but we opted to go with “Sharp Dressed Man” and its tale of a humble valet turned into super-stud thanks to the power of ZZ Top.

 

4. Tom Petty, “Don’t Come Around Here No More”
The dawn of the music video age turned Tom Petty into an unlikely MTV star. Rock fans already knew Petty was an unmatched songwriting talent, but his willingness to embrace the medium – and even stretch the creative boundaries of music videos – earned him a new generation of fans. The clip for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was Petty’s most memorable video, a trippy, Allison in Wonderland-inspired piece in which the rocker played the Mad Hatter. While hugely popular, it also caused controversy, specifically the ending when Alice turns into a cake which Petty eats. Tipper Gore – the second lady who notoriously started the Parents Music Resource Center – was shocked by the moment. “Apparently, Tipper’s daughter saw that scene and freaked out — and then Mom started taking notice of what was going on, on MTV. And I’m not kidding: I was cited for promoting cannibalism by a parents/teachers group,” Jeff Stein, the video’s director, recalled decades later. “I thought, ‘Well, this has to be a career high, if you can bring back cannibalism as a fad!’”

 

3. Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”
You may remember Toni Basil as the singer who scored a massive hit with the cheerleader-esque tune “Mickey,” but she was also a successful choreographer and music video director. Together with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, Basil helped create the group’s iconic 1981 clip for “Once in a Lifetime.” In it, Byrne spasmodically dances and gyrates in front of a blue screen, which – at various points – shows footage of tribal dancers or multiple versions of himself. The image quality was purposefully low, even by ‘80s standards, giving the clip a further DIY feeling.

 

2. Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer”
One of the most celebrated music videos of all time, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” clip sits in rarified air. Created with a mix of stop motion, claymation and pixilation, the video took a painstakingly long time to be made. Gabriel spent 16 hours lying under a sheet of glass as each frame was shot. Whether your favorite part is the train that circles around the singer’s head, the sequence when painted clouds move across his face, or when a pair of uncooked chickens do a little dance, the video is chock full of memorable moments (Fun fact: Future Academy Award winner and Wallace & Grommet creator Nick Park handled some of the clip’s claymation). “Sledgehammer” won nine MTV Video Music Awards, which remains a record for any single video. So what could possibly rank higher on our list?

 

1. A-Ha, “Take on Me”
In terms of pop culture impact, no music video left a deeper impression than A-ha’s 1985 classic “Take on Me.” With its distinctive visual elements, which combined pencil-sketches with real life, the clip looked and felt like nothing else on MTV. The undertaking to create it was tedious, as live-action footage was traced frame-by-frame via a process called rotoscoping. It took 16 weeks to complete the video, but the result was more than worth the time. Thanks largely to the clip’s popularity, “Take on Me” became one of the ‘80s most recognizable hits. Meanwhile, the music video remains a landmark piece of pop culture history, copied in commercials, on TV shows like Family Guy and even in other artists’ videos.

Gregg Allman and Warren Haynes shared a bond for a long time, even before they knew each other.

“Gregg was one of my favorite singers forever,” Haynes tells UCR now. “Even before I picked up a guitar, I was a fan of Gregg’s voice. Once I started playing guitar, I became a huge fan of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts‘ guitar playing, but it was Gregg’s voice hat pulled me into that music in the first place and his songwriting style.”

As Haynes details in the conversation below, the presence and influence of Allman, who passed away in 2017, continues to be felt each day in a variety of ways. As he was working on his newest solo album, Million Voices Whisper, it was a song that Allman had never completed that served as the catalyst for some of the other music that followed.

Haynes reunited with his longtime Allman Brothers Band bandmate Derek Trucks to work on the unfinished Allman track initially and the pair ended up finishing a total of four songs together for Million Voices Whisper. Other longtime associates, including keyboardist John Medeski, also brought their musical talents into the mix. The resulting record is arguably Haynes’ strongest to date.

Some of the songs, like “From Here on Out” and “Day of Reckoning,” as he shares, were written during the pandemic. Yet the entire album plays out as a hopeful soundtrack for listeners who might be encountering it now during the current challenges of the present.

During a recent conversation with Ultimate Classic Rock Nights, Haynes shared some stories behind the album’s creation, as well as some thoughts about the final Allman Brothers Band concert, 10 years later.

One of the things that came out recently is the audio of the final Allman Brothers Band show from 2014. You put together the set list that night, sticking to songs from the first six albums. What was your methodology?
I think we were mostly just thinking from a historical context what songs we wanted to represent the final show. You know, we had been talking for, actually, at that point, two or three years, about going out on top, and at a time when the band was was still firing on all cylinders — and picking the right location, the right time and place to to call it quits. The set list, I think was really just about making the most impactful, timeless statement we could. I got a lot of feedback and input from various members of the band, especially Derek.

Derek and I collaborated on the set lists in the last few years [of the band] quite a bit. You know, it sounds like an easy [task], but at that point, we had made a practice of playing a different show every night. So when we would do the Beacon for 14 or 15 nights, we wanted every night to be different, but still stand on its own. That wasn’t always an easy thing to do and we had a lot of special guests joining us. But we knew for that night, we wanted it to be just us. So putting together a set list that we would all be proud of, that was representative of the band at its finest was important.

READ MORE: Allman Brothers Band Says Goodbye With Epic Show

Listen to the Allman Brothers Band Perform ‘Midnight Rider’ at Their Final Concert in 2014

You and I have talked about many of the various members in the past. But you’re a guy who spent a lot of time playing with Butch Trucks and Jaimoe. What was special about the dynamic those two guys had?
The way Butch and Jaimoe played together was extremely unique and special. Largely, because their styles were so different. Jaimoe is a much more soft touch, jazz style player. Butch is a harder hitting freight train kind of drummer. I think that’s what made it work. You know, the two styles meshed. Of course, I wasn’t around in the beginning. But they talked about it being kind of an unspoken thing. It just happened naturally and they didn’t have to talk about it. The way they tuned their drums and everything was so different. Jaimoe just sounded like an extension of Butch, rather than two people doing the same thing.

READ MORE: Butch Trucks Remembered by Allman Brothers Band Alumni, Family and Friends

What set the tone for this new album?
You know, that’s a good question. Some of these songs go back to the COVID lockdown, things like “From Here on Out,” “Day of Reckoning” and “Go Down Swinging” were all written during that time period and go that far back. The rest of them, for the most part, were written in the last two or three years. That being said, the oldest song is “Real, Real Love,” that Gregg Allman had started and never finished. After I finished writing that song, I called Derek and said, “Hey, I just finished this song that Gregg started writing. I really love it. I think we should record it together.” That turned into, “Hey, maybe we should go in the studio and do several songs together.” Which led to, “Let’s do some writing.” So Derek and I wrote “These Changes” and “Hall of Future Saints” together. The whole process kind of led to the overall product, I think.

Listen to Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks Perform ‘Real, Real Love’

What were the challenges for you when it came to getting “Real, Real Love” right in the image of the way you were hearing it as far as how Gregg would have done it?
You know, just keeping in mind what his vision of the song would have been — or what we’re guessing it would have been. For example, bringing the horn section in for that, I just know for a fact that he’d say, “Oh, we need horns on this.” Gregg loved working with horn sections. All of the way down to the way I approached it from a vocal standpoint and lyrically as well, I’ve never done something that was quite so focused on somebody else’s personality. I wanted to honor the song as if he were part of it. You know, his spirit was definitely in the room when we were doing it.

We were talking about Gregg’s solo version of “Midnight Rider” here in the office the other day. He seemed to have an interesting ability to reconsider his own work as well. 
Yeah, absolutely. He did that several times and the reinterpretations were always really different and stood on their own. In some ways, I prefer the Laid Back version of “Midnight Rider.” They’re both fantastic, but that version is haunting.

It seems like it would have been an emotional thing working on “Real, Real Love.”
It was very emotional. It came together really quickly when I first started writing it and that’s usually a good sign. That’s something Gregg and I talked about a lot — when a song comes quickly, you’re very thankful for it. Because they don’t always and it doesn’t mean better or worse. Some of the best songs take a long time, but some of them come instantly and that one kind of did. There was a lot of inspiration. But, [as I mentioned], his presence was very much felt throughout that whole process. The fact that we’re all in the room together recording and Derek and I are looking at each other in the same room while we’re recording, amde all of the difference in the world.

How did you end up writing with Booker T. Jones for “Sailin’ Shoes?”
You know, Booker T. and I wrote the tune together when I was out in L.A. for the Grammys a few years ago and it was a wonderful opportunity. We’ve been casual friends for a while, but it just fell into place. He has an apartment in L.A. and I went by there. We spent a few hours together and the next thing you know, that tune was born. I got to see him again recently  when we did the [shows] for Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday and we talked about it a bit. I’m just such a fan. He’s a beautiful human being and such an amazing part of American musical history.

You’ve been on the road with a lot of cool folks as part of the Life is a Carnival tour. In particular, what’s it been like playing with Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell?
Both of those guys are fantastic musicians and sweethearts as human beings. It’s been a lot of fun. You know, Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs did a tour with Gov’t Mule a couple of years ago and that was really fun. Benmont and I have played together a handful of times here and there. He’s just one of those rare eloquent Southern keyboard players that has such a handle on the history of American music. He’s drawing from so many different pools and can play so many different genres. But it all has this natural flow that is so musical and always seems to serve the song. Mike Campbell is the same in a similar way. You know, Mike always manages to play some memorable hook that becomes a part of the song. I love both of those guys.

READ MORE: ‘Life is a Carnival’ Tour Continues Robbie Robertson Tributes

I appreciate what you’re doing with the upcoming benefit show at Madison Square Garden. You’ve always been good about using your music to help others going through hard times. I know for you personally, Asheville got hit hard this time around.
Asheville and all of Western North Carolina were devastated by Hurricane Helene. Of course, my family is still there and tons of close friends. Most of them relocated and a lot of them, mostly, are back now. But a lot of them just got power and cell service and in some cases, still don’t have drinking water. It’s just been devastating, but everybody’s safe and sound, so that’s great news. But it’s going to be a long process. It’s going to take years to rebuild. So the least we can do is try to raise as much money for the cause as possible.

Now that Kiss‘ farewell tour is over, Paul Stanley has admitted he feels a bit adrift.

“There’s no way to give that up and not feel a sense of, if not lost, kind of disoriented,” he recently explained on the podcast Rock of Nations With Dave Kinchen & Shane McEachern. 

“It was time [for Kiss to stop touring], and intellectually it made sense, but that doesn’t mean that emotionally, it doesn’t play a part in it,” he continued. “So, yeah, being home, as I am right now, is normal. What’s not normal is I’m not going back out.”

Stanley clarified that he sees a difference between the continuing legacy of the band, as well as his stage persona, and his real life.

“Kiss remains,” he said. “We’re so involved in what’s going on now and the future and this phenomenal, mind-boggling Kiss avatar show. But, yeah, to not be up there — I see video from 10 months ago, 11 months ago, and it almost seems like a lifetime ago, because I’ve kind of come to grips with not doing that again. … Star Child is forever — but me up there, that’s done.”

The Kiss Avatar Show

Kiss’ avatars were first unveiled in December of 2023 at the band’s final concert, which brought the End of the Road tour to completion. Not long after that, Gene Simmons noted in a social media post that it would be a while before the virtual band will make their official debut: “2027. A show is coming.”

READ MORE: 18 Musicians Who Secretly Performed on Kiss Albums

In the meantime, Stanley isn’t voicing regrets about coming off the road.

“I think that we’ve all earned the right, and always have the right, to decide what we do and for how long,” he said. “An audience has a right to stop coming. But the rest is up to the individual.”

Lou Gramm accused the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame of pulling a “fast one” on Foreigner ahead of their induction ceremony last month.

The original singer said he, along with fellow co-founders keyboardist Al Greenwood and bassist Rick Wills, had believed they were going to be a major part of the performance on the night.

But he claimed they only discovered hours before the event that others would be leading a set of cut-down Foreigner classics instead, including current band members and guests Sammy Hagar, Slash, Chad Smith, Demi Lovato and Kelly Clarkson.

READ MORE: How One Person Saved Foreigner From Obscurity

The induction went ahead in the absence of two surviving originals: band leader Mick Jones, due to his ongoing illness, and drummer Dennis Elliott, who, Gramm said, refused to take part on having heard earlier that he wouldn’t be allowed to perform.

“The thing for me is I am first and foremost a rock singer, and it’s the Rock Hall of Fame,” Gramm told Eddie Trunk in a recent interview on SiriusXM. “And somehow I couldn’t sing a rock song at the Rock Hall of Fame when I’m being inducted? It doesn’t make any sense to me, and it sticks in my craw.”

He said he’d been told “time restraints” were the reason behind the organizers’ decision, to which Trunk pointed out that “if someone else is singing” the same time was still being used.

“I don’t think anybody else sang ‘Juke Box Hero,’” Gramm added. “But I know they did ‘Hot Blooded’ and ‘Feels Like the First Time.’ … I thought an edited version of ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’ into an edited version of ‘Juke Box Hero’ would have been okay… but he didn’t explain to me. He just said, ‘No, it’s not gonna work.’”

Turning to Elliott’s no-show, the singer explained: “The reason Dennis didn’t come was because he found out from management a number of days before Rick, Al and I… that we weren’t gonna play.”

Lou Gramm Questions His Own Rock Hall Attendance

“As soon as Dennis found out that we weren’t performing on our night, he decided he wasn’t gonna come,” Gramm continued. “And we’re just going, ‘Dennis, come on… We’re gonna play.’ … And then we found out the afternoon of the show that we weren’t performing.

“We thought we were gonna be performing, and Dennis was gonna be there, and we’d have the guitar player from the new Foreigner play mixed parts and play a couple songs. And then we found out at the last minute that it was the new Foreigner who was gonna be playing and Rick and Al would be standing there singing background vocals.”

Asked if he’d have attended if he’d known about the performance plans, Gramm replied: “I don’t know. I didn’t know sooner… and when I found out that that’s why [Elliott] didn’t come, I even got more angrier – but not at him. It was almost like there was a fast one being played.”

Listen to Lou Gamm on SiriusXM

Kid Rock has offered an olive branch to Kamala Harris voters, telling fellow supporters of newly re-elected President Donald Trump that “now is not the time to gloat.”

Republican nominee Trump handily defeated the Democratic candidate Harris in Tuesday’s presidential election, making him just the second person ever to be elected to the country’s highest office for non-consecutive terms.

You can see Rock’s video below.

A longtime supporter of Trump, Rock posted a video Friday that begins with him in on-stage mode, complete with a “Kid Rock election reaction” caption. Wearing a flame-adorned track suit, Rock prepares to speak then thinks better of it, pointedly drops the microphone, grabs his crotch and flips the bird to the camera.

Read More: Rockers React to Trump’s Election With Joy and Anger

After a burst of static, he returns with the caption now crediting Bob Richie (his real name), dressed as if he’s about to go mow his lawn or maybe attend a Weezer concert. “First off, let me convey to my family, friends and supporters that now is not the time to gloat,” he begins.

“We must remember that most of our left-leaning friends are good people, who want the same things in life as we do, but simply think differently on how to get there,” he continues as scenes of small town America blend with his own concert footage, and finally to the failed July assassination attempt on Trump. “It is now time to be the bigger man, to extend an olive branch and unite all reasonable people of this great nation. God has blessed America, and together with President Trump, we will make America great again.”

Before the Election, Kid Rock Offered Similar Praise for Taylor Swift and Eminem

In a video posted on October 25, Rock offered kind words to another Detroit-based rapper, Eminem, who was vocal in his support for Harris. “I love Eminem. We’ve been friends for many years,” he explained. “I don’t agree with his politics, but I do give credit to him and people like Taylor Swift for standing up and not being afraid to be vocal for that in which they believe. Thinking differently and having the freedom to do so is what makes this country great.”

My wife spent years in higher education earning a PhD and has since helped improve the lives of countless people with PTSD and other mental health issues. I spent high school skipping as many classes as I could to read old Rolling Stone magazines, and have since written hundreds of articles about Kiss.

We have overlapping but certainly not identical musical tastes, and after taking her to one live Kiss show I’ve mostly left her alone about the group. But I have learned that after a particularly tough day there’s nothing that cheers her up more than watching a captioned YouTube video of an overly horny song from the band’s makeup-free ’80s and ’90s era.

“This isn’t real! They didn’t really say that, right?,” she’ll say in between fits of uncontrolled laughter, as Gene Simmons compares a woman’s body to a stick of butter, a glove or a fireplace. “You had this made up, or somebody else did it as a parody?”

Here are 7 of the dumbest Kiss lyrics, as chosen by my wife:

“Uh! All Night”
From: Asylum (1985)

Sample lyric: “Well we work all day / And we don’t know why / Well there’s just one thing that money can’t buy / When you’re body’s starved, feed your appetite / When you work all day you gotta Uh! all night.”

The part where they just say “Uh!” over and over gets her every time. I’m not sure she could even survive watching the actual video, which at one point features an army of scantily clad blondes dancing in formation while pushing around rolling beds complete with flashing red lights.

 Read More: 10 Worst Kiss Songs

“Spit”
From: Revenge (1992)

Sample lyric: “Hot damn and lord above, I want a lotta woman with a lot of love. Well thin is in but it’s plain to see / It don’t mean spit to me / I need big hips, sweet lips / Make a man out of me / The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’ – most definitely”

I’ve tried to convince my wife that Kiss might actually on the right side of the thin line between clever and stupid this time out, not only openly and unironically quoting Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom” but also taking a stand against conventional beauty standards. Yeah, she didn’t fall for it either.

 

“(You Make Me) Rock Hard”
From: Smashes, Thrashes & Hits (1988)

Sample lyric: “You make me sweat, you turn me ’round / You get me up, you never let me down / You make rock hard, baby all night / Love’s like a glove and it fits just right.”

Upon hearing this, the wife suggested that Paul Stanley‘s license to use similes be taken away immediately. There are only two new songs on Kiss’ 1988 greatest hits compilation, and amazingly this one has the least embarrassing lyrics. As with “Uh! All Night,” I’m saving a screening of the actual trapeze-themed video for a day in the future where she really needs cheering up.

“Fits Like a Glove”
From: Lick It Up (1983)

Sample lyric: “Cause when I go through her, it’s just like a hot knife through butter / Ooh yeah / Baby, baby, guess you win the prize / Maybe, baby, where the sun never shines.”

“Gross. Gross, gross, gross. Get away from me. Sit on the other sofa.” And that was without even hearing the live version, where Simmons really stretches out every bit of the line, with extra grunts and dramatic pauses.

 

“Let’s Put the X in Sex”
From: Smashes, Thrashes & Hits (1988)

Sample lyric: “She said she knew my secrets / But I didn’t have a clue / Then I saw those black lace panties and I knew that it was you / Baby let’s put the X in sex / Love’s like a muscle and you make me want to flex”

Truth be told, my wife has never stopped laughing long enough to explain exactly how she feels about this Penthouse letter set to music, beyond a quick “so this is their attempt at a Robert Palmer video?”

 

“Burn Bitch Burn”
From: Animalize (1984)

Sample lyric: “Oh babe, I wanna put my log in your fireplace.”

About 15 years ago I accidentally touched my mother-in-law’s butt. Long story, we don’t need to get into it here. It is, deservedly, the thing for which I am most often mocked at family gatherings. But ever since she heard this – her all-time favorite dumb Kiss lyric – the laughter and wise cracks that erupt from my wife whenever I go near any fireplace or fire pit is a close second: “Feeling horny, are we?”

 

“Just a Boy”
From: Music From ‘The Elder’ (1981)

Complete lyrics: “Who steers the ship through the stormy sea? / If hope is lost, then so are we / While some eyes search for one to guide us / Some are staring at me / But I’m no hero / Though I wish I could be / For I am just a boy / Too young to be sailing / I am just a boy / And my future’s unveiling / And I’m so frightened of failing / While some eyes search for one to guide us / Some are staring at me.”

“Never mind, I take it all back they should just sing about sex and nothing else.”

 

BONUS MOM VOTE: “I Just Wanna”
From: Revenge (1992)

Sample lyric: “I don’t want a romance, I just want to dance, I just want to for, I just want to for, I just want to forget you”

The summer after I graduated college (a miracle, admittedly!), weeks before I moved to New York City to begin my adult life, my normally very calm mother ran into my room ready to destroy my stereo because of this song. She thought Paul Stanley was singing “I just want to f— at you.” When I told her that didn’t make any sense, she pointed out that very little of the music I listened to had an overabundance of logic, but agreed not to cause any property damage as long as she never had to hear this particular track ever again.

Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan has played stages both big and small all over the world for decades. So it’s a surprise to hear him say that he still gets nervous as he’s getting ready to go on, even if it’s a giant stadium with GNR.

“You just feel honored,” he tells UCR. “I end up coming out on stage and first of all, it’s like, ‘Is anybody going to show up when I come out around my amps? Is there going to be people here? Wow, there’s people here. Amazing.’ Doing these smaller shows, it’s like that on steroids, because you can see everybody.”

McKagan began the latest leg of his ongoing Lighthouse tour this week in Boston, followed by a show in New York City. You can see photos from New York below. His next concert happens tonight in Chicago (Nov. 8).

He checked in with Ultimate Classic Rock Nights host Matt Wardlaw on Halloween as he was getting set to leave for tour. In the below discussion, he shares stories about what he’s learned about touring and what he continues to find out each night. McKagan also discussed the three new songs he recently released, including his cover of “Heroes” by David Bowie, a live version which features his longtime comrade Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.

The touring you’ve been doing for the Lighthouse album and beyond, it just seems like it’s been so much fun. I love that you got the chance to share the stage with Steve Jones again. Obviously, there’s a lot of history there with you two.
He remains a hero, although he’s a close family friend now. He’s like an uncle to my daughters and he’s my buddy. But he’s also Steve Jones. I learned to play guitar listening to Steve Jones. When we started Neurotic Insiders with me playing guitar with him, I was like, “Oh, he’s going to find out that every riff I know is his.” But he was super cool about it, like, “All right, mate.” Having him play “Heroes” with us in London, that whole tour, the first leg, the European run, was really magical. I have a really good band, like the murderer’s row of players from Seattle and I got them.

They were all available for this tour. It worked out, the crowd and the amount of people that showed up to the shows, if it wasn’t sold out, it was super close. All of the rooms were packed. To put out a record 10 months prior and then go tour, you’re like, “I don’t know if anybody will come, or if they’re into it.” You know, you just don’t know. It turns out, it may be a good idea to wait that long, because people were invested in the songs. They knew the lyrics and they were emotional about some of the songs. It worked out amazing.

Watch Duff McKagan Perform David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ With Steve Jones

I like that you still have that feeling where you don’t know if anybody’s going to come. I think it shows that you’re still invested and you’re not lost in your own shit.
No, no. I think that with Guns shows, I’m still [nervous]. The other thing that I think about that kind of dawned on me, about 10 years ago or so, was that I’ve talked to enough people and traveled enough and I observe culture. You realize in your life, everybody’s got some story. Everybody’s got some deep thing — they might have saved somebody’s life the day before. Everybody’s got some fascinating part of their story. Everyone. So when you go out and play to people, realizing all of this, it’s like, all of these people that have stories, they came to our show. They took the time, bought the tickets and did all of that stuff. But with Guns, I look out and it’s a lot of energy.

That’s a lot of stories and a lot of people. You just feel honored. I end up coming out on stage and first of all, it’s like, “Is anybody going to show up when I come out around my amps? Is there going to be people here? Wow, there’s people here. Amazing.” Doing these smaller shows, it’s like that on steroids, because you can see everybody. Some people are singing the songs and crying, like, I wonder what that means to them? It obviously relates to something in their life. So these are the things I’m thinking about. It becomes this huge honor and you realize that we all have our own stories. There’s no difference between us. I’m up on the stage and you’re out there in the audience, we’re all in this thing together. There’s nothing separating us here and now.

I talk to a lot of artists and it’s like, “the show is the show,” But it’s obvious that you feel otherwise.
Absolutely and any size venue, you know? I take a lot away, and it’s a lot of energy and I plug into it. I do it on purpose — I plug into the energy, I think, of anybody I play with. You know, the musicians I choose to play with. Guns N’ Roses, Iggy Pop, Jerry Cantrell, Ozzy Osbourne, they’re all those people that plug into the audience and don’t just phone it in. I wouldn’t play with somebody that just phones it in, if that’s even a thing. But you have to have that connection. You’re doing the truth, you know? The songs are all pieces of truth and you’ve got to be plugged in.

Watch Duff McKagan Interview Lee Ving of Fear

I liked watching your conversation with Lee Ving. I don’t think that teenage Duff would have sat there going, somewhere in all of this, Lee Ving is a country guy. What’s the most interesting thing you took away from that conversation?
I’ve gotten to know Lee over the years and that’s cool, man. My life is cool. I’ve gotten to meet and get to know some of my heroes. Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Lee Ving, Joey Shithead, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, it goes down the line. The thing I take away, with Lee, for what you see? Like, he scared the crap out of me in 1980. He scared the crap out of all of us. And he’s the real thing — and like, he will kick your ass, as well. So he’s still that to me. He’s that real presence of Fear. But the flip side of that coin is that he’s the nicest gentleman. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. Very sweet.

Slash and I did that cover of “Nice Boys.” We went down to Orange County and played in the studio and he was just like this really wonderful host. “Oh, guys, can I get you anything?” No, Lee, you just be Lee Ving! I went and saw FEAR in Orange County, right around that time. I’m taking to him backstage and he’s like, “How’s the wife and the girls?” “They’re great, Lee.” Then, he comes out on the stage with FEAR and I back up three steps, because there he is! There’s Lee Ving. I’m looking forward to doing these shows with him. We’re going to hopefully share a song together. I did these two punk songs and Lee co-sings one of them and Joey Shithead does the other, so hopefully he will get up on stage and do that song with me.

We talked about Steve Jones earlier and he guests on your version of “Heroes.” How daunting was it for you to tackle that song?
I just did it, you know? I didn’t let it daunt me. I was recording a bunch of songs at that point. I had a song with a working title called “Heroes” — and I have it and it’s not going to be the title of the song. My producer, Martin [Feveyear], suggested, “Hey, you really should try covering ‘Heroes.'” Jamie [Douglass], my drummer, was there and we were tracking songs. I learned the song really quick and thought, “Okay, the vocal is in my vocal range. It’s kind of like the music I recorded for Lighthouse and Tenderness, three chords.” There’s a great historical story [within the song] of the Berlin Wall and the star-crossed lovers and how she had to go back to East Germany and he had to go back to London.

Bowie’s observing this whole thing and the lyrics, “And the guns shot over our heads,” like, I love that stuff. I’m a history freak, you know. So I bought into the lyrics and bought into the song….I mean, everybody buys into that song, how can you not? I started to add guitars, sang it and put the bass on it and thought, “This came out alright.” I decided to put it out. So it wasn’t daunting. It just happened and it was natural and we put out the studio version before we went to Europe. We play it live and people dig it and the live version with Steve Jones in London [just came out].

I’ll wrap with this. You talked about how you’ve done a lot of cool stuff. So this tour with Lee and Joey, that’s another one off the bucket list…
…and my daughter is opening for me. She finally agreed to open for me. She stays away from the nepotism thing. I said, “Would you consider doing a show with me on the Lighthouse tour? She loves the message of Lighthouse, so I get Lee Ving, Joey Shithead and in the middle of it, I get my daughter opening the show. So all of this stuff is bucket list stuff for me, if there’s a bucket list. You know, I mean, I’m not there yet.

Listen to Duff McKagan’s ‘My Name is Bob’ With Joey Shithead of D.O.A.

Pity the always-overlooked No. 2. Second place is often simply thought of as the best-finishing loser. One of the key synonyms for this condition says it all: also-ran. It’s as if anything that doesn’t end up first is somehow instantly relegated to a nameless rabble.

It’s no different with rock stars. Mick Jagger may have never, ever sounded sadder than when he memorably admitted that the Rolling Stones had been outshone by the Beatles during their heyday. “That’s us,” he said. “We have to be better because we’re only No. 2.”

Meanwhile, the victors are ubiquitous. Read enough best-album lists, for instance, and the entries become almost standardized, this kind of rote rock. The Stones’ Exile on Main St. will, of course, be there, and the Doors‘ debut album and the Allman Brothers Band‘s At Fillmore East and Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon, too.

READ MORE: Yes, They Actually Wore This in the ’80s

But what about the albums that live in their ever-lengthening shadows – the projects that give some sense of perspective and proportion to these legendary careers? An endless focus on career-defining albums overlooks the quality, effort and consistency of these next-best things.

The truth is, the so-called runner-up efforts by many of music’s most popular groups are simply spectacular. Maybe they’ll never be No. 1. But, as you’ll see in our list of Classic Rock’s Second Best Albums, they’re still very, very good.

They Hated Their Own Albums

Nomination announcements for the 2025 Grammy Awards are underway, with key early nods going to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Black Crowes, Metallica, Pearl Jam and Green Day.

The nominees for Best Rock Album included the Black Crowes (Happiness Bastards), Green Day (Saviors), Pearl Jam (Dark Matter), the Rolling Stones (Hackney Diamonds) and Jack White (No Name). The Beatles’ “Now and Then” was nominated for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance.

Nominations for the Best Rock Song songwriting Grammy went to the Black Keys (“Beautiful People [Stay High]”), Pearl Jam, (“Dark Matter”) and Green Day (“Dilemma”), among others. Elsewhere in the rock performance category, the Black Keys (“Beautiful People [Stay High]”), Green Day (“The American Dream Is Killing Me”) and Pearl Jam (“Dark Matter”) again earned Grammy nods.

READ MORE: 10 Times the Grammys Got It Wrong

Metallica (“Screaming Suicide”) and Judas Priest (“Crown of Horns”) were nominated in the Best Metal Performance category. This list will be updated as others are confirmed.

Nominee announcements began at 11AM ET today via livestream featuring Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, among others. The 67th Grammy Awards ceremony is set for Feb. 2, 2025, at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles and will air live on CBS and Paramount+. Only material issued between Sept. 13, 2023 and Aug. 30, 2024, was considered.

Last year’s winners included Metallica for Best Metal Performance with 72 Seasons. A newly constructed clip for the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping” was named Best Music Video. The David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream earned a Grammy in 2024 for Best Music Film. Joni Mitchell claimed a Best Folk Album award for At Newport.

Rock’s 45 Biggest Grammy Winners

Rock’s Worst Grammy Snubs

In the new horror movie Heretic, Hugh Grant’s character Mr. Reed plays the Hollies’ ’70s-era hit single “The Air That I Breathe” while allowing that his chosen victims might not recognize the song. Still, he adds, they’ll likely remember Radiohead’s 1992 hit “Creep” – and there’s a legal argument connecting the songs.

He goes on to mention a suit against Lana Del Rey too, and all of it plays well against the movie’s theme of the desire to control. “Creep” is a song about the same notion, and these courtroom battles also addressed the concept of ownership.

“The Air That I Breathe” was the Hollies’ final hit, reaching No. 50 in the U.S. and No. 2 in the U.K. in 1974. Written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, the song first appeared on Hammond’s debut album It Never Rains in Southern California in 1972, before being covered by Phil Everly in 1973.

READ MORE: Why Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ Was Initially a Failure

Fast forward to 1992, and Radiohead was playing mind games while working on their own debut, Pablo Honey. Frontman Thom Yorke had written “Creep” while at college, and as his bandmates worked on the music, a section of “The Air That I Breathe” was deliberately put in. Guitarist Ed O’Brien is purported to have pointed out the similarity in the music they’d been developing, and Jonny Greenwood’s response was to replicate the 1972 construction perfectly during one section, making a sarcastic musical point.

Watch a Trailer for ‘Heretic’

How Radiohead Was Tricked Into a Hit

That wouldn’t have been a problem had the track been left out of their recording sessions, as the band expected. But producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie sensed a hit. Yorke had light-heartedly described “Creep” as the band’s Scott Walker song, leading Slade to think it was a cover version. Discovering it wasn’t, Radiohead was encouraged to perform “Creep” in the studio, not knowing they were being recorded. It was an easy trick since the producers were known for preferring a live approach to tracking records.

The recording went up the ladder at EMI, with Kolderie’s recommendation that “Creep” be released as a single. With positive responses from the label, that’s what happened. Radiohead’s control over their output was limited after the failure of their first EP. Things didn’t improve when “Creep” only reached No. 78, as the all-powerful BBC refused to playlist the single due to its depressing tone.

READ MORE: When Radiohead Imitated Their Heroes on ‘Pablo Honey’

Gradually, things changed. “Creep” became an underground hit in Israel, then New Zealand and parts of Europe, and finally the U.S. embraced it as a slacker anthem like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It reached No. 7 after being re-released in the U.K., then secured cool status when it appeared on Beavis & Butt-Head in 1994. The band’s American label, Capital, ended up promoting Radiohead using the line “Beavis and Butt-Head say they don’t suck.”

Eventually, “Creep” reached the ears of Rondor Music, publishers of Hammond and Hazlewood’s “The Air That I Breathe.” A copyright infringement claim was initiated. Given that Radiohead had always been up-front about referring to the older song, the case was more or less a foregone conclusion. In an out-of-court settlement, Hammond and Hazlewood were granted co-writing credits on the song.

Listen to the Hollies’ ‘The Air That I Breathe’

Inside Radiohead’s Losing Case

An analysis of the legal case pointed out that the second chord of a four-chord sequence introduced a note alien to the key in which the song is written. “G#… jars against the G natural which is heard in the chord of C major and creates surprise,” according to Lost In Music’s report. As a result, “one eight-bar phrase the melody of ‘Creep’ appears to imitate the melody of ‘The Air That I Breathe.’ This occurs at the words ‘she’s running out the door again’ in ‘Creep,’ and can’t be coincidence.”

When the song was released, the publisher “felt it was a steal … and he sued Radiohead, and they agreed. Radiohead agreed that they had actually taken it from ‘The Air That I Breathe,’” said Hammond, father of the Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr. “Because they were honest they weren’t sued to the point of saying, ‘We want the whole thing.’ So we ended up just getting a little piece of it.”

Watch Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ Video

Why ‘Creep’ Went Back to Court

“Creep” had more business to offer the legal trade. In 2018, Radiohead’s reps sued Del Rey over her song “Get Free,” pointing out obvious similarities. “Although I know my song wasn’t inspired by ‘Creep,’ Radiohead feel it was and want 100% of the publishing,” she wrote on social media. “I offered up to 40 over the last few months, but they will only accept 100. Their lawyers have been relentless, so we will deal with it in court.”

Radiohead said the percentage claims weren’t accurate but that Del Rey had been approached and discussions were underway. The result of the dispute was never publicized, but she performed “Get Free” at a subsequent festival in 2018 and then told the crowd: “Now that my lawsuit’s over, I guess I can sing that song any time I want, right?”

Watch Lana Del Rey’s ‘Get Free’ Video

The Lasting Legacy of ‘Creep’

Over time, Radiohead distanced themselves and “Creep.” They’ve never had an entirely comfortable relationship with the song, perhaps because of the control issues regarding its release, its reception and its continued influence over how their work has been perceived.

Yorke has admitted that he was against the idea of re-releasing the single, having felt “horribly gutted, pissed off, self-righteous” over the original’s chart failure. “There are good and bad things to it though,” he added. “A lot of people are asking ‘why isn’t it a hit?’ That’s a good thing. It stands us in good stead.”

Yorke later revealed that the song was about a real-life woman he had a months-long obsession with, and she was said to have attended at least one Radiohead show. “The way I write lyrics is just to ramble away for ages and ages. That was the ramble I came up with and I just kept using it – and it fits rhythmically really well,” he said.

“The song goes along and then you have that ‘fucking’ thing and then you have Jon’s ‘ker-runch’ [guitar] thing come in, and the song is like slashing its wrists,” Yorke added. “Halfway through the song it suddenly starts killing itself off, which is the whole point of the song, really. It’s a real self-destruct song.”

Many years ago, someone discovered that Pink Floyd‘s The Dark Side of the Moon and the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz will sync up in eerie ways when jointly started at just the right moment.

This theory came to be known as “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.” In the years since, however, members of Pink Floyd and their production team have described it all as a coincidence. David Gilmour reiterated that on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

“I only heard about it years later,” he said during Thursday’s episode. “Someone said you put the needle on … and on the third roar of the MGM lion, you put the needle on for the beginning of Dark Side and there’s these strange synchronicities that happen.”

READ MORE: Top 20 Pink Floyd Solo Songs

Gilmour even admitted that he’s tried it out for himself. “There are these strange coincidences,” he told Fallon. “I’ll call them coincidences.”

Roger Waters’ Take on ‘Dark Side of the Rainbow’

In 2022, Roger Waters shared a similar perspective when asked about the two pieces – but in a typically far more confrontational manner: “Bullshit,” Waters said during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience.

“I mean, it may not be – it may [work] if you do what they say,” Waters added. “But it has nothing to do with us – any of us. Nothing to do with anyone in Pink Floyd or anyone who wrote or recorded any of the music. It’s something that somebody thinks – it’s a coincidence. … Maybe it’s cosmic coincidence!”

When Alice Cooper Got Stoned With Pink Floyd

Lou Gramm has offered details on his decision to leave Foreigner.

It was 2003 when Gramm, the group’s founding vocalist who was then in his second go-round with the band, decided to quit for good. During a conversation with SiriusXM’s Classic Rewind, he recalled the circumstances that led to his exit.

“In the late ’90s, early 2000s, Mick [Jones] and I began writing. And we put some really, really good ideas together,” Gramm remembered (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “I think we had about seven songs complete. And we were hoping to finish with about three or four more songs and put out a new Foreigner album.”

At the time, Foreigner hadn’t released a new album in close to a decade. Still, the band was actively touring, and while on the road Gramm decided his run with the group was over.

READ MORE: How One Person Saved Foreigner From Obscurity

“We were playing something called ‘Night of the Proms’ [in October 2002],” the singer recalled. “It was done in Brussels, Belgium, and they had a huge indoor tennis arena where there could be four games of tennis going on at once. It held 80,000 people. And after that series of shows, I left the band…. I just had enough.”

The reason, Gramm explained, came down to his fractured relationship with Jones.

“[Mick is] the founder of the band, he’s the leader of the band, but he wasn’t necessarily doing the job the way he used to do it, and he was suppressing a lot of my creativity,” Gramm noted. “‘Just sing your parts, Lou.’ And after contributing to just about every hit song that the band had released in 20-some years, to be reduced to just a non-creative part, just the singer, didn’t sit well with me.”

Lou Gramm Has ‘Never Had Any Regrets’ About Quitting Foreigner

Following their performance in Belgium, Gramm and the rest of the band flew back to America. Soon afterward, he informed management he’d be leaving the group, officially departing in early 2003.

READ MORE: Forgotten Frontmen: 27 Lead Singer Fans Don’t Remember

“’Why? What could be wrong? Everything’s going so good,’” Gramm recalled being asked. “I said, ‘It’s not going good.’ I said, ‘I’m being shut out creatively, which is extremely important to me.’ I said, ‘I’m not just a singer. I’m a songwriter.’ I said, ‘And I always have been, even before Foreigner.’ So I left the band. And I’ve never had any regrets about it since.”

Kelly Hansen would be brought in as Foreigner’s new frontman, a position he has held since 2005. Meanwhile, Gramm stayed estranged from the band for over a decade. He eventually joined Foreigner for a few performances during their 2017 40th anniversary tour and most recently played with the group’s current lineup when Foreigner was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Lou Gramm has offered details on his decision to leave Foreigner.

It was 2003 when Gramm, the group’s founding vocalist who was then in his second go-round with the band, decided to quit for good. During a conversation with SiriusXM’s Classic Rewind, he recalled the circumstances that led to his exit.

“In the late ’90s, early 2000s, Mick [Jones] and I began writing. And we put some really, really good ideas together,” Gramm remembered (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “I think we had about seven songs complete. And we were hoping to finish with about three or four more songs and put out a new Foreigner album.”

At the time, Foreigner hadn’t released a new album in close to a decade. Still, the band was actively touring, and while on the road Gramm decided his run with the group was over.

READ MORE: How One Person Saved Foreigner From Obscurity

“We were playing something called ‘Night of the Proms’ [in October 2002],” the singer recalled. “It was done in Brussels, Belgium, and they had a huge indoor tennis arena where there could be four games of tennis going on at once. It held 80,000 people. And after that series of shows, I left the band…. I just had enough.”

The reason, Gramm explained, came down to his fractured relationship with Jones.

“[Mick is] the founder of the band, he’s the leader of the band, but he wasn’t necessarily doing the job the way he used to do it, and he was suppressing a lot of my creativity,” Gramm noted. “‘Just sing your parts, Lou.’ And after contributing to just about every hit song that the band had released in 20-some years, to be reduced to just a non-creative part, just the singer, didn’t sit well with me.”

Lou Gramm Has ‘Never Had Any Regrets’ About Quitting Foreigner

Following their performance in Belgium, Gramm and the rest of the band flew back to America. Soon afterward, he informed management he’d be leaving the group, officially departing in early 2003.

READ MORE: Forgotten Frontmen: 27 Lead Singer Fans Don’t Remember

“’Why? What could be wrong? Everything’s going so good,’” Gramm recalled being asked. “I said, ‘It’s not going good.’ I said, ‘I’m being shut out creatively, which is extremely important to me.’ I said, ‘I’m not just a singer. I’m a songwriter.’ I said, ‘And I always have been, even before Foreigner.’ So I left the band. And I’ve never had any regrets about it since.”

Kelly Hansen would be brought in as Foreigner’s new frontman, a position he has held since 2005. Meanwhile, Gramm stayed estranged from the band for over a decade. He eventually joined Foreigner for a few performances during their 2017 40th anniversary tour and most recently played with the group’s current lineup when Foreigner was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

These days, streaming is the most popular form of listening to music, and there’s no denying its benefits. At the touch of a button — anywhere, anytime — an artist’s entire catalog can be found at your fingertips, ready for you to choose your own adventure.

Presently, Spotify remains the most popular of all the streaming platforms, accounting for hundreds of millions monthly listeners. Included in that population are those that stream Eagles music, who boast over 20 million monthly listeners.

Below, we’re crunching those numbers even further and counting down the 20 Most-Streamed Eagles Songs, according to data from the time of this writing, Nov. 6, 2024.

20. “Seven Bridges Road” (Live)
From: Eagles Live (1980)
Number of Streams: 58,991,395

Even as they began to fall apart, Eagles decided to do something they’d never done before: release a live album. Eagles Live arrived in 1980, featuring a cover of Steve Young’s “Seven Bridges Road,” which the band had recently reincorporated into their concert set lists.

 

19. “Already Gone”
From: On the Border (1974)
Number of Streams: 73,815,992

Interestingly, “Already Gone” is another Eagles song on this list written by, well, not any of the members of Eagles. It was written by Robb Strandlund and Jack Tempchin, the latter of whom also co-wrote “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”

“It was at this time that we changed producers [from Glyn Johns] and started working with Bill Szymczyk,” Glenn Frey would recall to Cameron Crowe in 2003. “I was much more comfortable in the studio with Bill, and he was more than willing to let everyone stretch a bit. ‘Already Gone’ — that’s me being happier; that’s me being free.”

 

18. “Heartache Tonight”
From: The Long Run (1979)
Number of Streams: 81,088,721

The list of people credited as songwriters on Eagles’ “Heartache Tonight” reads like a kind of supergroup lineup: Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Bob Seger and J.D. Souther. Frey and Souther has gotten the song started with a verse, Seger came up with the chorus and Henley helped with the rest of the lyrics.

 

17. “Hotel California” (Live at the Forum)
From: To the Limit: The Essential Collection (2024)
Number of Streams: 82,805,487

This is just one of several versions of “Hotel California” present on this list. Coming in at No. 17 is the band’s 1976 live version performed at the Forum in Los Angeles. This concert took place in October of 1976, approximately two months before Hotel California the album was released.

 

16. “The Best of My Love”
From: On the Border (1974)
Number of Streams: 86,765,622

We’re going to slow things down here for a minute with “The Best of My Love,” another Souther co-write that also took some initial inspiration from one of Frey’s California neighbors. “I was playing acoustic guitar one afternoon in Laurel Canyon, and I was trying to figure out a tuning that Joni Mitchell had shown me a couple of days earlier,” Frey recalled to Cameron Crowe in 2003. “I got lost and ended up with the guitar tuning for what would later turn out to be ‘The Best of My Love.'”

 

15. “Witchy Woman”
From: Eagles (1972)
Number of Streams: 90,114,376

“This is a song that’s hard to go with,” Bob Dylan wrote about “Witchy Woman” in his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song. “It’s about spirits in the air. It’s cheerless and grim — puts ashes in your mouth.” And yet, listeners love it, accounting for some 90 million streams on Spotify.

 

14. “Hotel California” (Live on MTV)
From: Hell Freezes Over (1994)
Number of Streams: 92,861,687

In April of 1994, Eagles reconvened after nearly a decade and a half to film an MTV special, which resulted in 11 live tracks that found a home on that year’s Hell Freezes Over album. One of them was a stripped-down version of “Hotel California” that took on a much more Spanish flavor.

 

13. “Love Will Keep Us Alive”
From: Hell Freezes Over (1994)
Number of Streams: 94,697,917

“Love Will Keep Us Alive” is notable for a few reasons. Firstly, it features bassist Timothy B. Schmit on lead vocals, earning itself a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It’s also the last single to include guitarist Don Felder before his 2001departure from the band.

 

12. “I Can’t Tell You Why”
From: The Long Run (1979)
Number of Streams: 113,738,109

“One thing that the Eagles did that never really got noticed very much or talked about is pretty heavily into R&B,” Henley once explained in an interview with Musician magazine. “We were influenced by Al Green. ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ is straight Al Green, ’cause Glenn was a big R&B freak. He’s from Detroit, and he grew up with all that stuff. When we first started trying to do it on the third album, it was terrible and too white, but we got better at it.”

 

11. “Take It to the Limit”
From: One of These Nights (1975)
Number of Streams: 127,521,172

Like most bands, the members of Eagles had their share of differences and disagreements, but their collaborative work over the years spawned some of the most popular rock songs of their time. “Take It to the Limit” was started by Randy Meisner, and finished with the help of Frey and Henley.

“I just remember being very happy for Randy,” Henley recalled to Cameron Crowe. “We had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a piece of material for him — or from him — that might be a hit single, or turn into one. I don’t think we ever consciously tried to make a hit single. We finally succeeded with ‘Take It to the Limit.'”

 

10. “Tequila Sunrise”
From: Desperado (1973)
Number of Streams: 154,781,693

When you hear the name “Tequila Sunrise,” you may picture the colorful cocktail in your mind, but Henley and Frey were using it in a different way, a sort of play on words that instead alludes alludes to drinking tequila all night until the sun rises in the morning.

“I love the song,” Frey told Cameron Crowe. “I think the goal of any songwriter is to make a song appear seamless, to never show the struggle. Nothing should sound forced. ‘Tequila Sunrise’ was written fairly quickly, and I don’t think there’s a single chord out of place.”

 

9. “New Kid in Town”
From: Hotel California (1976)
Number of Streams: 161,403,799

It’s hard to believe now, all these successful years later, but there was very much a time when Eagles assumed their fame would eventually wane. “‘New Kid’ emerged from our whole fascination with gunfire as an analogy. And the point was at some point some kid would come riding into town that was much faster than you and he’d say so, and then he’d prove it,” Souther once explained to Songfacts. “That’s the story of life. That’s the story of aging, especially coming out of your teenage and young man years and as you approach 30, you begin to see that things don’t stay the same forever. And that there’s a lot other guys like you and gals like you that want the same thing that are coming up, and they want their moment, too, and they’re going to get it. And it’s fine. It’s as it should be.”

 

8. “Lyin’ Eyes”
From: One of These Nights (1975)
Number of Streams: 171,362,056

Los Angeles in the ’70s was a different breed, full of glamor, money and people who weren’t always who they claimed to be. One day in a bar, Frey and Henley took notice of a stunning young woman accompanied by a much older and much less charming wealthy man. “She can’t even hide those lyin’ eyes,” Frey commented, sparking a song.

 

7. “Please Come Home for Christmas”
From: 1978 Single
Number of Streams: 186,306,280

There’s just something about a sad Christmas song. In 1978, Eagles put their spin on “Please Come Home for Christmas,” which landed at No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 — the first Christmas song to make the Top 20 since Roy Orbison‘s “Pretty Paper” in 1963.

 

6. “Peaceful Easy Feeling”
From: Eagles (1972)
Number of Streams: 192,409,295

Jack Tempchin is the lone songwriter behind “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” a No. 22 hit. It’s not your average love song — Tempchin actually wrote it after getting stood up by a waitress he’d asked out — more of a mantra to oneself. “It was something I wrote for myself and because, I thought, it’s not actually a love song, it’s just kind of different idea,” he told Billboard in 2019.

 

5. “Desperado”
From: Desperado (1973)
Number of Streams: 202,477,458

“Desperado” was one of the first songs Henley and Frey collaborated on, in the former home of Roger McGuinn. “[Frey] came over one afternoon,” Henley recalled to Rolling Stone in 2016, “and although I was hesitant, I showed him a partially formed chord progression and a melody that I’d been carrying around with me since the late 1960s.” That turned into none other than “Desperado.”

 

4. “One of These Nights”
From: One of These Nights (1975)
Number of Streams: 303,961,582

Who could resist that sliding bass line in “One of These Nights,” especially when coupled with a four-on-the-floor drum part that clearly nods to ’70s disco? Evidently not millions of Spotify listeners. This style may have had something to do with the fact that when Eagles were recording parts of One of These Nights in Miami the Bee Gees were right next door.

 

3. “Life in the Fast Lane”
From: Hotel California (1976)
Number of Streams: 345,467,088

There’s no mistaking the introductory guitar riff in “Life in the Fast Lane” as the work of Joe Walsh — hard, funky and catchy. Walsh came up with it on accident while getting ready for a concert one night. “I was just playing, warming up for the show and Glenn comes busting in my dressing room [and] says ‘What the hell is that? I love it,'” Walsh recalled to Paul Shaffer Plus One in 2019, “and I said I don’t know, it’s just this warm up. What he said was ‘Joe, this is an Eagles song.'”

 

2. “Take It Easy”
From: Eagles (1972)
Number of Streams: 707,912,404

Jackson Browne is partially responsible for this signature Eagles track, who co-wrote the song with Frey. Browne had started the song, intending for it to be included on his own self-titled debut album in 1971. That never came to fruition and so Frey wound up finishing it with Browne. “At that point the song, I mean, I can’t even imagine what I would’ve said in that, you know, I took it up to ‘Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona,'” Browne recalled to The Nation in 2014. “Only Glenn would’ve had the girl slowing down to take a look at him.”

 

1. “Hotel California”
From: Hotel California (1976)
Number of Streams: 1,725,035,713

Even people not all that familiar with Eagles know “Hotel California,” and here we have the original 1976 studio version, Record of the Year Grammy winner in 1978. “‘Hotel California’ is six minutes, the intro is a minute long, it stops in the middle with no drums, and you’ve got a two-minute guitar solo at the end. It’s the absolute wrong format for a single,” Felder would later recall not only thinking to himself at the time. but also telling Henley directly. How sweet it is to be wrong sometimes.

Eagles 10 Most Famous Concerts

Howard Jones has played with countless musical legends at this point. But the ’80s keyboardist caught some major flak when he decided to record his own version of Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y. (What a Wonderful World)’ in the early ’90s.

“I came up against the [general] opinion, ‘Who do you think you are, covering [that song]?,” Jones recalls now during a conversation with UCR, laughing at the memory. “I literally heard DJs say that.”

In his view, he was simply trying to pay proper tribute to the music of a fellow songwriter who he had a lot of respect for. It’s something he’s had the chance to do a number of times, as you’ll read in the below interview, where he details his collaboration with Phil Collins and moments on stage with similarly major musical luminaries like Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Eric Clapton.

He has had lots of experiences along those lines, including a stint in Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and also, a memorable encounter with fellow keyboardist Keith Emerson. Sometimes, these interactions lead to further collaborations. That’s exactly what happened when Jones taped an episode of Daryl Hall’s popular series Live From Daryl’s House. Now, the pair are set to hit the road for a series of tour dates together that begin tonight (Nov. 7).

During a recent Zoom interview, Jones detailed what fans can expect at the shows with Hall. 

I enjoyed watching you reimagine some songs from your catalog on Live From Daryl’s House. You’ve always enjoyed doing that kind of thing.
Yeah, obviously, I’m mainly touring with my electric band, with sequencers and lots of keyboards and electronics. But there’s been periods of my career where I worked with a live band, with horns and strings and everyone playing together in the same room. For the Perform.00 album, actually, I was able to do kind of a live recording in my studio back in Maidenhead. So I [already] had the charts and the arrangements for a more regular type of band ready to go. I presented that to [Daryl] and the guys. It was such fun for me, because I was playing songs I play live a lot, but in a completely different way.

You mention the horns and as you all are playing “Things Can Only Get Better,” they take that long Cuban-style solo to play out the song, which is really cool.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I’ve, I’ve wanted to do that again for so long, but, you know, I haven’t been playing with it with a brass section for quite a while. But it made me think, “Oh, I really want to do that again.”

Watch Daryl Hall and Howard Jones Perform ‘Things Can Only Get Better’

On Daryl’s House, one of the band members compliments the pre-chorus for “Things Can Only Get Better.” You said a very wise thing, that it’s just three chords. It seems important to learn as a writer that less is more, the impact that can actually have.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it’s what you do with those three chords. I remember speaking to Phil Collins, you know, when I was working with him on “No One is to Blame.” He said to me, “The thing I like about your writing is that you always throw in something unexpected I didn’t think was going to happen.” That’s always been my philosophy, really, with [my] songs. People think it’s going to go a certain way and then you surprised them with a new fresh direction in the middle of the song. I often have two middle eights and things like that. The pop song format, obviously, it’s changed. We’re in a different era. But my era was such a classic form. What could you do with it to give it a new twist and make it memorable? The simplicity is good, because it means everyone is going to remember it quickly. But then, there’s a few moments where you want to surprise people. That’s what I’ve always tried to do.

I think your origins as a Keith Emerson fan, people will forgive you if you throw in everything and the kitchen sink occasionally.
[Laughs] Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

READ MORE: How Keith Emerson Inspired Synth-Pop Legend Howard Jones

You mentioned Phil Collins and he always feels like a guy who just loves to play. You can feel that in his performances.
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I got to know him when we were doing the Prince’s Trust shows, He was the drummer and I was the keyboard player. We got on really well and I really liked him. That’s why I felt comfortable asking him to have a go at “No One is to Blame.” For him, making records seemed pretty effortless, really.

Which is nice if it can be that way for you. It’s not that way for a lot of people.
That’s right. I mean, there’s so much experience. Obviously, he really saw the value in the song and believed that we could come up with a great version of it that would work at radio, because you know, that’s a good thing. And that’s what happened. It was so much fun making it, because it was so quick. It wasn’t labored, you know. We spent two weekends [working on it]. Boom, mixed, done.

What are some of your favorite moments from doing those Prince’s Trust gigs?
It was great to be playing other people’s songs. There’s a lot of pressure because, you know, the keyboard player, you’ve got to do everything. You’ve got to play [things like] the brass parts, the organ solo, I mean, there’s so much detail that people want. That was the challenge, I hope I did okay with that. But you know, things like getting to play with David Bowie and Mick Jagger on “Dancing in the Street,” [was incredible]. Mick wanted to go through the song even though they’d just recorded it and it had been a big hit. He wanted to go through it right before we actually got on stage, which is understandable.

He’s such a professional about it. It was just me and him backstage with a keyboard and he had one set of headphones. I could sort of hear what was coming through the headphones — so I could hear the piano. He was hearing the piano and I was playing through the chords with him and he was singing a lot. It’s such a treasured memory, I mean, when would that ever happen? It’s so cool. Then, I also played with Peter Gabriel doing “Sledgehammer” and the brass parts in front of that, I mean, [the highlights] are just endless, really. It was a fantastic experience and wonderful to be involved.

Watch Mick Jagger and David Bowie Perform ‘Dancing in the Streets’ at the Prince’s Trust Concert in 1986

It’s an interesting juxtaposition of bucket list moments. In the moment, it all had to feel pretty nerve-wracking at times.
Yes, yes, that’s right. Exactly. Another charity thing, Eric Clapton was part of the band. We were doing one of my songs called “You Know I Love You, Don’t You?” Clapton did this incredible solo in the middle of it. It wasn’t recorded, so there’s no evidence of it — it just lives on in my head. That was brilliant. Clapton came over to me and asked, “What are the chords of the song?” Because the [way] people play, you’ve got to know the chords. Clapton’s asking me  what the chords are [for one of my songs]. That was a cool thing to [experience].

You’re doing these dates with Daryl Hall. How much will you get to replicate the jamming part of what you did on Live From Daryl’s House with these shows?
We had a really great time recording the show. I got to hang out with Daryl afterwards. We spent two or three hours just sitting down and chatting about stuff, getting to know each other. I think that’s one of the reasons why we all thought it would be a great pairing on tour. I listened to pretty much everything he’d ever done with Hall & Oates and also, his solo career. I just did a deep dive into everything, so I got to know him through his music as well, which was really interesting. I chose a couple of tracks I thought I would be okay at that he would think were fun as well. There’s a song called “Let Love Take Control” that he did [on the Hall & Oates album, Our Kind of Soul]. Nobody ever asked to do that on the show. In fact, he’d sort of almost forgotten the song. I said, “Daryl, that’s a really cool track.”

We had fun doing that. Then, I thought it would be good for me to sing “I’m in a Philly Mood,” because that’s a little bit out of my comfort zone and I would learn a bit more about how to get that sort of style of singing going within me. I just hit it off with the band. They’re so good and so much fun to work with and so brilliant. With the way they do what they do, I can just concentrate on my singing and my performance. These shows are going to be brilliant. I’m going to do some songs that I don’t normally do, like “I.G.Y.,” the Donald Fagen [song], “Lift Me Up,” which I never do and “Tomorrow is Now.” Also, “No One is to Blame,” but the version as recorded by Phil. Normally, I just play it as an acoustic song, but this is going to be based on the record. There’s going to be some great things I’m going to do with Daryl as well.

How did you get into Steely Dan’s music back in the day?
It was the first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill and “Reelin’ in the Years.” I heard that early and just grew up with them from there. Obviously, the music got more and more complex as the albums came out. I was progressing in my own musical world as well. I was taking it all in and thinking, “Oh my God, what chords are they playing?” I tried to work out how to play those songs. They’re so amazing and I think it’s really important for a developing musician and writer to pick things that you don’t really know how they are doing it. You don’t know what those chord changes are, so learn them. You play the record over and over and educate yourself. I got to hang out with Walter Becker for a couple of hours once. I was in L.A. at A&M Studios doing some recording and he happened to be there. I had such a great time chatting with him.

Your version of “I.G.Y.” was kind of a cool Easter egg to find at the time, in the ’90s.
Yeah, I came up against the [general] opinion, “Who do you think you are, covering [that song]?” [Laughs]  I mean, I literally heard DJs say that, you know, not in so many words. Well, it’s an homage to somebody I love and I think I did a pretty good job on the track! [Laughs]

Listen to Howard Jones’ Version of ‘I.G.Y.’

Not many bands can claim to be single-handedly responsible for an entire genre and musical movement, but The Cure can.

The post-punk found on their 1979 debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, quickly evolved into a gloomier and moodier form of music on their second LP, the following year’s Seventeen Seconds. The next few years gave birth to the goth subgenre, as dark music, darker moods and a super-dark outlook went on to inspire a generation of sad-sack kids – and plenty of crappy music – over the next three decades.

But the Cure wasn’t done yet. As the ’80s moved on, so did the band, which has been fronted by Robert Smith since the start. By the decade’s end, their music had steered them into new territories, including psychedelic, jangly alt-rock and cheery pop.

Their dozen-plus LPs over the years have swung through all these almost effortlessly, as you’ll see in the below list of Cure Albums Ranked Worst to Best. There were some stumbles along the way, but without an album like 1984’s bleak The Top, they may have never gotten to The Head on the Door, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Disintegration.

Their influence continues four decades after songs like “Killing an Arab,” “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” introduced them to the world. Their 2019 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame may not be the culmination of their long career, but it stamps validity on a music catalog that helped shape an era.

New wave music was around before the early ’80s when the genre first started an advancement onto the U.S. charts. Often seen as punk’s poppier younger siblings, new wave artists often shared radio airplay and record-store shelves with the more aggressive music.

As you will see in the below list of the Top 50 New Wave Songs, chosen by the UCR staff, many of these tracks would fit comfortably within other playlists from the era, not just punk, but also pop, rock and electronic. Think synth-pop, post-punk and art-rock convening for a dance party for the ages.

The ’80s, not so surprisingly, are well-represented in the list. Many of the best new wave songs come from the early part of the decade when several new forces – including the introduction of MTV that led to an ensuing gate crashing at radio – assembled to give exposure to some of the decade’s most enduring tracks. All these years later they’re still influencing countless genres.

50. New Order, “Temptation” (From 1982 single)

Two years after singer Ian Curtis’s death, New Order was still searching for a post-Joy Division identity, but with their fourth single, they finally broke from his shadow. “Temptation” signaled a turn from post-punk synth-pop toward structured new wave, the electronics merging with melody for the first defined time. Their next single, 10 months later, “Blue Monday,” heralded one of the decade’s most original voices.

 

49. The Police, “Every Breath You Take” (From Synchronicity, 1983)

When the Police released their final album in 1983, the trio was barely on speaking terms. But the creative tension resulted in their best work, a record that tightened their knotty, twisty interplay with songs that turned down darker alleys. “Every Breath You Take,” Synchronicity‘s highlight, is told from the point of view of a very disturbed man, refusing to let go even when presented with the facts. Astonishingly, a worldwide No. 1.

 

48. Joy Division, “Isolation” (From Closer, 1980)

“Isolation”‘s place on Joy Division’s second and last album balances the heaviness that hangs over so much of Closer following singer Ian Curtis’ death just two months earlier. Almost minimalist in its approach, the electronic drums and sweeping synth-rock of “Isolation” temporarily lift the album’s post-punk cloud. In many ways, the song prefigures the less shadowy new wave the band would soon undertake as New Order.

 

47. Big Country, “In a Big Country” (From The Crossing, 1983)

Scottish quartet Big Country went big on their 1983 debut, The Crossing, applying widescreen scope to the album’s 10 songs. For the opening track and lead single (and sort of namesake track), “In a Big Country,” guitarists Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson fed their instruments through effect pedals, giving them a sound that recalled triumphant bagpipes. The result was a Top 20 single worldwide.

 

46. Pretenders, “Middle of the Road” (From Learning to Crawl, 1984)

The years leading to the Pretenders‘ third album found the band facing a series of new challenges, including the deaths of two founding members. Meanwhile, leader Chrissie Hynde had a daughter as she entered her 30s. All of this comes crashing and colliding in “Middle of the Road,” a state-of-the-artist report from the front lines two months before the release of the equally reflective Learning to Crawl. A fierce, personal anthem.

 

45. The Knack, “My Sharona” (From Get the Knack, 1979)

The Knack‘s arrival to new wave was by accident. The Los Angeles quartet modeled itself after the Beatles – from dress to album cover art – and played a mix of garage-inspired power pop that had more in common with the era’s ’60s-derived pop-rock than the skinny-tie brigade. But the jerky rhythms and frontman Doug Fieger’s clipped vocal performance in “My Sharona” – a No. 1 hit – edged the song into new wave.

 

44. The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (From Combat Rock, 1982)

The most straightforward cut on the final album by the Clash‘s classic lineup, “Should I Stay or Should I Go” skirts the political themes of Combat Rock‘s other songs, including fellow singles “Rock the Casbah” and “Straight to Hell.” But its passionate delivery – Mick Jones takes the lead – and power-chord riffing have made it a favorite. Jones was gone when a revamped Clash returned with Cut the Crap three years later.

 

43. Devo, “Whip It” (From Freedom of Choice, 1980)

Devo was as unconventional and media-baiting as they came in the late ’70s and early ’80s, subscribing to an evolution-in-reverse belief system and making music that reflected their views. But they somehow still had a Top 15 hit in 1980 with “Whip It,” a winking slice of metronomic new wave that played up their quirkiness and yet couldn’t quite prepare new listeners for what they had in store. Its video was an early MTV hit.

 

42. Blondie, “Call Me” (From American Gigolo, 1980)

Blondie was entering the height of its popularity when Debbie Harry and the group were recruited to perform the theme song for the 1980 movie American Gigolo. Working with Italian disco maven Giorgio Moroder, who wrote the music, Blondie played up their dance-club credentials. “Call Me” shot to No. 1 and stayed there for six consecutive weeks. Interestingly, Stevie Nicks was asked before Blondie but turned it down.

 

41. The Police, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” (From Ghost in the Machine, 1981)

Sting penned “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” before the Police formed, but their familiar elements are already there. Spliced with the group’s mix of reggae and new wave, the song became their highest-charting in the U.S. at the time, sending its parent album, Ghost in the Machine, the Police’s fourth, to a then-high No. 2. Two years later the band topped itself commercially and creatively as it skidded toward an end.

 

40. Joe Jackson, “Steppin’ Out” (From Night and Day, 1982)

Stimulated by a stay in New York City, Joe Jcakson‘s sophisti-pop album Night and Day recalled Cole Porter and other Great American Songbook writers more than it did the British punk and new wave artists Jackson came up with. “Steppin’ Out” embodies this spirit more than any other song on his fifth LP, with piano and drums (live and electronic) as its most prominent instruments. It’s Jackson’s only U.S. Top 10 single.

 

READ MORE: The Cure Albums Ranked

 

39. Blondie, “Atomic” (From Eat to the Beat, 1979)

With a hit No. 1 single that fused new wave, disco and pop, Blondie returned to similar territory for the follow-up LP in the wake of “Heart of Glass”‘ success. Eat to the Beat‘s most obvious disciple, “Atomic,” also throws in some new influences, particularly a spaghetti western guitar that runs throughout the song. Debbie Harry has admitted the lyrics were stitched together and have little meaning. No matter, this is pristine pop.

 

38. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Radio, Radio” (From This Year’s Model, 1978)

“I wanna bite the hand that feeds me,” Elvis Costello declared in 1978, a year after making the Top 20 in the U.K. with a run of singles and a debut album. “Radio, Radio” – a stand-alone single at home, added to the second LP in the States – stalled outside of the Top 30, presumably due to its lack of BBC support. In the U.S., a surprise Saturday Night Live song switch facilitated Costello’s 11-year ban from the show.

 

37. Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer” (From So, 1986)

Peter Gabriel was still musically evolving when his fifth solo LP, So, made him one of the planet’s biggest stars in 1986. Since his departure from Genesis in the mid-’70s, Gabriel shifted from progressive rock to world beat to new wave to pop by the middle part of the ’80s. “Sledgehammer” finds him in less-serious tones, as he brags about his, um, manhood over super-elastic synths. A groundbreaking video helped.

 

36. INXS, “Need You Tonight” (From Kick, 1987)

Australians INXS had been on the verge of a big break since the early part of the ’80s. 1985’s Listen Like Thieves was a door opener, but Kick, which arrived two years later, was the record that elevated their status to the A-list. “Need You Tonight” helped get them there, thanks to a trance-dance groove and hypnotic vocal by Michael Hutchence. Gliding on a basic funk riff, the song wasted little time climbing to No. 1.

 

35. Til Tuesday, “Voices Carry” (From Voices Carry, 1985)

Aimee Mann would go on to an acclaimed career as a singer-songwriter of personal and sophisticated work in the ’90s; a decade earlier she was leading the Boston-based new wave band ‘Til Tuesday, whose only Top 10 song came with their debut single. “Voices Carry” hints at what is to come, though, as Mann scolds a partner in chilling terms. The song’s brittle synths complement her cold-as-ice tone.

 

34. Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime” (From Fear of Music, 1979)

A sloganeering chorus – “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no following around” – and a mainstream-swinging performance marks one of Talking Heads‘ earliest attempts at branching out from the New York City art scene they originated from. David Byrne said he wrote “Life During Wartime” as an apocalyptic vision partly inspired by his Manhattan neighborhood. A warning sign of their new wave-funk hybrid a year later.

 

33. The Cure, “In Between Days” (From The Head on the Door, 1985)

When the Cure‘s sixth album, The Head on the Door, was released in 1985, they were coming off one of their darkest and most despairing periods. Still tethered to the sulky art-pop of its predecessors, the record nonetheless shuffled enough styles that songs such as the relatively buoyantly poppy “In Between Days” had a spot. Jaunty guitars and an exuberantly charged melody make it one of the band’s all-time best.

 

32. The B-52’s, “Rock Lobster” (From The B-52’s, 1978)

Like many outside artists of the era, the B-52’s didn’t sound like anyone else and inspired others to follow their lead. Five friends from Athens, Georgia, with limited musical background and experience, the band quickly found a following with college audiences and New York’s punk scene for both its look and music. “Rock Lobster” is the one that started it, an infectious dance song caught between the garage and new wave.

 

31. Elvis Costello, “Alison” (From My Aim Is True, 1977)

In his 2015 autobiography, Elvis Costello claimed he wrote “Alison” for a woman working the checkout lane at a supermarket. It remains one of his most gorgeous ballads and a gem among the gritty backdrop of his debut LP. The Attractions weren’t formed yet, so the backing duties here fall to the American group Clover, which would become Huey Lewis and the News. Their elegant performance matches Costello’s.

 

30. The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star” (From The Age of Plastic, 1979)

As the first video aired on MTV in August 1981, the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” became the face of new wave music moving into the decade. Released in 1979, the song grazed the U.S. Top 40 but was No. 1 across Europe. By the time the cable network arrived, Buggles members Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes had been recruited to fill vacant spots in prog-rock giants Yes‘ lineup; Downes then moved on to Asia.

 

29. Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer” (From Talking Heads: 77, 1977)

David Byrne’s twitchy, nervy persona was introduced in “Psycho Killer,” originally found on Talking Heads’ 1977 debut album but written and played onstage years earlier. Timeliness with New York City’s Son of Sam killings, which ended just months before the release of Talking Heads: 77, helped stir talk and controversy, but the song has endured decades later as a high-water mark of the city’s mid-’70s punk scene.

 

28. Pretenders, “Brass in Pocket” (From Pretenders, 1980)

A U.K. No. 1 and the Pretenders’ breakthrough single in the States, “Brass in Pocket” was the band’s attempt at a Motown-like song that Chrissie Hynde said they didn’t get quite right. But its mix of ’60s pop, ’70s rock and spiky new wave anticipated the ’80s musical stew propagated by MTV, where the song’s playful video was one of the earliest aired on the network. It still sounds like the doorway to a bold new era.

 

READ MORE: Elvis Costello Albums Ranked

 

27. The Clash, “Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” (From London Calling, 1979)

The Clash didn’t intend for their breakthrough U.S. hit to be included on their third album. Tacked on to London Calling at the last minute (it doesn’t even appear in the record’s track listing), “Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” became an unexpected Top 25 hit, introducing the group to mainstream audiences. Backed by a chugging, soulful new-wave rhythm, the Mick Jones-sung track turned the punk band into temporary pop stars.

 

26. Billy Idol, “White Wedding” (From Billy Idol, 1982)

Billy Idol debuted in the U.K. punk scene as a member of Generation X, but it wasn’t until his solo career turned toward new wave that more people started paying attention. A debut EP featured the remixed band cut “Dancing With Myself” and a cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Mony Mony,” but his new image was developed on a self-titled 1982 album, which included the guitar-powered, goth-inspired “White Wedding.”

 

25. The Psychedelic Furs, “Love My Way” (From Forever Now, 1982)

Both forward-thinking (a message to gay people to be themselves) and looking back (produced by Todd Rundgren and with backing vocals by the Turtles‘ Flo & Eddie), “Love My Way” became the Psychedelic Furs’ biggest hit in the U.K. at the time and their first charting single in the U.S. Loads of MTV support certainly helped. Placement in later movies The Wedding Singer and Call Me by Your Name has kept a high profile.

 

24. David Bowie, “Let’s Dance” (From Let’s Dance, 1983)

David Bowie wasn’t exactly in commercial decline when he teamed up with Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers in 1983 for his 15th album. But the predecessor to Let’s Dance, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), was three years old (an eternity in the early ’80s) and often too thorny for radio play. But with Let’s Dance‘s title track, Bowie upped the charm, mashing pop, disco, funk and new wave into a soulful brew.

 

23. The Police, “Roxanne” (From Outlandos d’Amour, 1978)

Like many of the Police’s songs, the one that introduced the band to most of the world carries a dark message. Told from the point of view of a man who falls for a prostitute, “Roxanne” gets more despairing as it progresses, heightened by a Sting vocal that is somewhere between desperate and troubling. It took some time for “Roxanne” to burrow itself into the public consciousness, finally becoming a hit a year after release.

 

22. Modern English, “I Melt With You” (From After the Snow, 1982)

New wave had a habit of sprouting new bands that would soon fade back into obscurity after a popular song ran its course. While England’s Modern English never replicated the success of “I Melt With You” – their sixth single and not even their highest charting single at home –  they’ve continued to release records, even rerecording “I Melt With You” in 1990. But most people would be hard-pressed to name another one.

 

21. Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love” (From Tom Tom Club, 1981)

A sidetrack from the world music and expanded lineup of Talking Heads’ 1980 album Remain in Light, Tom Tom Club spotlighted the band’s married rhythm section – bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz – along with guitarist Adrian Belew and Jamaican studio pros. Inspired by Zapp’s classic funk track “More Bounce to the Ounce,” future hip-hop fave “Genius of Love” glides along slippery new wave synths.

 

20. Talk Talk, “It’s My Life” (From It’s My Life, 1984)

The title track from Talk Talk’s second album has boasted subsequent lives since its release in 1984, first a year later when it was rereleased to little notice in the band’s native U.K. and then in 1990 after it was pulled as a single from a group compilation album and then became their biggest hit. A 2003 cover by No Doubt gave the song more exposure, but the original’s soaring chorus remains the absolute version.

 

19. XTC, “Senses Working Overtime” (From English Settlement, 1982)

Few bands from the British post-punk scene of the late ’70s evolved at the pace and scope of XTC. By the time they arrived at their fifth album in 1982, the double LP English Settlement, their new wave-spiked pop had adapted more pastoral shades with acoustic instruments and intricate production. “Senses Working Overtime” features one of the group’s best hooks, played for maximum soft-hard effect in the chorus.

 

18. The Psychedelic Furs, “Pretty in Pink” (From Talk Talk Talk, 1981)

The Psychedelic Furs’ self-titled 1980 debut did little to distinguish itself from the post-punk rattle coming out of the British underground at the time. But 1981’s follow-up, Talk Talk Talk, brightened the corners and emphasized the muscle behind the group’s stony wall of sound. “Pretty in Pink” is the standout, given more spotlight a few years later when its title was borrowed for a Brat Pack film where the Furs reworked their song.

 

17. Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf” (From Rio, 1982)

When “Hungry Like the Wolf” was released as a single in June 1982, it went nowhere on the U.S. charts. Then MTV put its scenic promotional video into heavy rotation and everything changed; nine months later the song peaked at No. 3, and Duran Duran was suddenly one of the biggest groups in the world. They soon had bigger songs, in the States and at home in the U.K., but they’ve never been better than they are here.

 

16. Soft Cell, “Tainted Love” (From Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, 1981)

A decade after Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” was first released in 1964, the song was given a second life thanks to the Northern soul explosion in the U.K. Synth-pop duo Soft Cell were among the fans of the resurrected soul classic and gave the song an electronic-heavy new wave update in 1981, taking their redo to No. 1 in their homeland and Top 10 in the States. An extended version paired it with “Where Did Our Love Go.”

 

15. Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind” (From Labour of Lust, 1979)

Nick Lowe was a 10-year veteran of the British music scene when he reluctantly stepped into the role of a new-wave godfather. Production on records by Elvis Costello and Pretenders, plus a key spot in the Stiff Records roster, helped make him one of the era’s most in-demand artists. His second solo album, Labour of Lust, is a new wave tentpole; hit single “Cruel to Be Kind” is its hook-centered classic.

 

14. A-ha, “Take on Me” (From Hunting High and Low, 1985)

Norwegian synth-pop trio A-ha probably wouldn’t earn a footnote if its hit song “Take on Me” wasn’t supported by a groundbreaking video in 1985. But that award-winning clip for the song gave the springy new wave pop hit an extra colorful palette to work with, springboarding the group to No. 1 worldwide. Follow-up singles struggled in the U.S., but A-ha’s success in other areas continued well into the 2000s.

 

13. David Bowie, “Fashion” (From Scary Monsters [And Super Creeps], 1980)

David Bowie had just released a challenging but rewarding trilogy of experimental electronic albums with Brian Eno when he entered the ’80s with a streamlined version of the same aesthetic. Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) often played like a look back at Bowie’s ’70s, from direct references to songs to musical cues from the past. “Fashion,” a dance-funk-new wave cross, is part “Golden Years,” part Berlin Trilogy.

 

12. The Cars, “Just What I Needed” (From The Cars, 1978)

Nobody knew what to call the Cars when their debut album came out in 1978. Were they classic rock? Power pop? New wave? Yes to all, and that widespread checking off of genres helped make them one of the period’s most popular acts. “Just What I Needed” pairs new-wave minimalism (in the verses) with a fidgeting synthesizer that sounds like a UFO coming in for a landing. A reliable template for the next few years.

 

11. Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House” (From Speaking in Tongues, 1983)

Remain in Light was just the start of Talking Heads’ departure from the barbed punk of earlier records; by 1983’s Speaking in Tongues, the band had expanded to more than a dozen musicians, including P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell. “Burning Down the House” is mostly the core quartet with additional synths and percussion, launched from a freewheeling jam session influenced by the Parliament-Funkadelic mothership.

 

10. A Flock of Seagulls, “I Ran (So Far Away)” (From A Flock of Seagulls, 1982)

Few images from new wave’s most prominent years are as telling and representative as Mike Score’s hair. The towering coiffure worn by A Flock of Seagulls’ frontman supplied many listeners with a (mostly) superficial impression of the synth-heavy music growing in the mainstream, abetted by the underlying UFO theme of their hit “I Ran (So Far Away).” After a 1984 single, the band disappeared from the U.S. charts.

 

READ MORE: Pretenders and Chrissie Hynde Albums Ranked

 

9. Simple Minds, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (From The Breakfast Club [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack], 1985)

The Glasgow-bred Simple Minds were barely a presence in the U.S., even with some MTV support, in the first half of the ’80s. Then they were tapped to record a song for John Hughes’ teen drama The Breakfast Club and everything changed. Despite their initial reservations – unlike the band’s earlier work, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was penned by outside songwriters – Simple Minds finally made it to No. 1 in America.

 

8. Gary Numan, “Cars” (From The Pleasure Principle, 1979)

The mainstream’s perception of new wave music in the late ’70s can pretty much be summed up in the four minutes of Gary Numan‘s “Cars,” from the synth-generated hook that greets listeners from the onset to Numan’s near-robotic vocals intoning about the cozy isolation and security of his ride. Numan purposely aimed for a commercial hit with “Cars” and succeeded: The song was No. 1 in the U.K. and a U.S. Top 10.

 

7. The English Beat, “Save It for Later” (From Special Beat Service, 1982)

The English Beat (just the Beat at home in the U.K., thank you) had perfected a blend of ska and new wave on two albums before their third and last, Special Beat Service, came out in 1982 and added more pop to the mix. At first, bassist David Steele turned down “Save It for Later” as being too conventional; then the Dave Wakeling-penned, pre-Beat song became one of the group’s biggest and best-known cuts.

 

6. Blondie, “Heart of Glass” (From Parallel Lines, 1978)

Blondie never fit squarely into the punk rock scene they were often lumped in with during the mid-’70s. Combining girl-group pop, spiky new wave and, yes, a punk spirit, the group added disco to its arsenal for 1978’s Parallel Lines, which included the No. 1 “Heart of Glass,” a perfect storm of image and new genres in a pivotal year for popular music. The song – first tested in other forms – kicked off a run of hit singles for the band.

 

5. Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (From Remain in Light, 1980)

Almost better known for a groundbreaking video than as an anchor to Talking Heads’ best LP, “Once in a Lifetime” boils down the group’s melting pot of influences. A gurgling synth underlines the song as David Byrne rattles off existential crises until he reaches something close to a breaking point: “How did I get here?” It’s a crucial moment in new wave’s evolution: sound uniting with vision in a vivid display of persistent anxiety.

 

4. The Cure, “Lovesong” (From Disintegration, 1989)

Generally considered the purest distillation of the Cure’s many lives, Disintegration marked commercial and critical peaks. Robert Smith never hid his intentions with “Lovesong” – it’s right there in the title. The old-fashioned love song was a hit with a new audience, especially in the U.S., where it became the Cure’s highest-charting hit (it made it to No. 2). So tailored for the mainstream, even Adele had a hit with it.

 

3. Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (From Songs From The Big Chair, 1985)

The duo of Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal lodged themselves as the thinking man’s new wave artists with their 1983 debut. But Tears for Fears‘ 1985 follow-up Songs From the Big Chair – a concept album about psychotherapy and childhood trauma – is where they earned the title. The deceptively pop-minded “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was a surprise No. 1, detailing man’s downfall over a Beatles-worthy melody.

 

2. Duran Duran, “Rio” (From Rio, 1982)

MTV’s influence in the early ’80s can’t be downplayed. So many artists benefited from the fledgling music-video network’s heavy airplay of their videos; new wave, more than any other genre, was supported the most. Duran Duran was barely making a blip Stateside before MTV started playing the travelogue-inspired clips from their second album, Rio. The tropically themed title track raised their profile significantly.

 

1. The Cure, “Just Like Heaven” (From Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987)

From the start, the Cure never fit into the designated slots they were supposed to fit into. The goth label that’s followed them for decades is but a small section of the music they make; it’s hard to find even a glimmer of that perceived gloom in early singles “Let’s Go to Bed” and “The Lovecats.” And the hopelessness of admitted downer LPs Faith and Pornography overlie the edges of psychedelia as much as they do shades of goth. The love songs Robert Smith has written for his wife over the years sparkle in their rapturous settings, few as exuberantly blissful as “Just Like Heaven,” the centerpiece of their 1987 double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Smith once noted the song is about “kissing and fainting to the floor” – proof that this great band has defied popular opinion for years.

David Gilmour arrived at his unmistakable guitar style quite simply. “I realized my fingers were just never going to go much faster,” the Pink Floyd legend told UCR in an interview this past summer.”

“You’ve got to find your own path in this thing,” he explained. But later, he concluded his thought, “I do wish I could do it a bit better sometimes,” punctuating those last words with a wry chuckle.

The capacity crowd in attendance at the first gig (Nov. 4) of Gilmour’s five-night run at Madison Square Garden likely would collectively find no room for improvement when it comes to the two and a half hour show they witnessed.

You can see exclusive photos from the MSG show below.

The guitarist is touring in support of Luck and Strange, his first solo album in nearly a decade and is performing the whole record, with a variety of Pink Floyd songs interspersed with the new tracks, alongside a few selections from his previous solo outing, 2015’s Rattle That Lock.

READ MORE: David Gilmour, ‘Luck and Strange’: Album Review 

That ended up being a wise move from a pacing and sequencing standpoint. After one particular stretch featuring Luck and Strange’s “The Piper’s Call,” “A Great Day for Freedom” from Pink Floyd’s 1994 album The Division Bell, Rattle That Lock’s “In Any Tongue” and the Dark Side of the Moon classic ,”The Great Gig in the Sky,” an audience member shared his feedback with the person next to him. “If all of those songs are from his new album, that new album is pretty good.”

Initially, Gilmour expressed an “unwillingness to revisit the Pink Floyd of the ‘70s,” when the tour dates were first announced, something which many assumed was related to his ongoing feud with former bandmate Roger Waters. He later softened on that stance, telling UCR that there would be “one or two from the ‘70s” in the set that was taking shape. “But a lot of the music will be newer and younger than 50 years old.”

The set list — and audience reaction — proved that Gilmour wasn’t off-base in turning his focus to some of the lesser-known corners of his catalog. Fan-shot video of the guitarist’s fiery solo on “Fat Old Sun,” from 1970’s Atom Heart Mother has been making the rounds since the tour began — and with good reason. He deservedly received his first standing ovation of the night at the song’s conclusion.

Watch David Gilmour Perform ‘Fat Old Sun’ at Madison Square Garden

Material from The Division Bell, too, was a welcome Inclusion. Particularly, “A Great Day for Freedom,” has made its first significant regular appearances in Gilmour’s solo set lists on this current tour, having only been aired out a handful of times in the early 2000s. “The Great Gig in the Sky” was another stunning moment, with the legendarily emotional vocal improvisations of the original now handled as a quartet by vocalist and pianist Louise Marshall, the Webb Sisters and Gilmour’s daughter, Romany. The trio of singers surrounded Marshall at the piano, accented by candles all around them, with Gilmour off to the side, adding contemplative pedal steel parts.

Anyone who’s ever seen a Pink Floyd or Gilmour concert will know that the visuals play a huge part and that was certainly true at Madison Square Garden. There’s a particular moment in “High Hopes” that without ruining the surprise, marries what’s happening with the video on-screen perfectly with an unexpected added component inside the arena.

It’s no shock that songs like “Wish You Were Here” and “Comfortably Numb” (the latter being the encore and final song of the night) brought some of the biggest reactions with the audience singing every word with substantial volume. But the material from Luck and Strange fared equally well — and “Scattered,” which closed out the second part of the main set with yet another incredible Gilmour solo, is just one of several that made a major impact.

Watch David Gilmour Perform ‘Scattered’ at Madison Square Garden

This week’s concerts in New York are the last in a series of global residencies that the guitar legend began on Sept. 27 in Rome. Italy, where he performed a total of six shows. An additional six dates followed in London, England at the legendary Royal Albert Hall. Gilmour’s current promotional run then came to the United States for his first shows here in eight years, with nine dates spread between Los Angeles and New York City.

READ MORE: David Gilmour Performs in Los Angeles

If Gilmour has his way, fans won’t have to wait as long for the follow-up to Luck and Strange to arrive. During the conversation with UCR, he confirmed that he already had ideas for new music beginning to take shape. “I will definitely be moving onto that in the new year.”

The New York dates continue tonight (Nov. 6) at Madison Square Garden.

David Gilmour Nov. 4, 2024 Madison Square Garden, New York City Set List
1. “5 A.M.”
2. “Black Cat”
3. “Luck and Strange”
4. “Breathe (In the Air)
5. “Time”
6. “Breathe” (Reprise)
7. “Fat Old Sun”
8. “Marooned”
9. “A Single Spark”
10. “Wish You Were Here”
11. “Vita Brevis”
12. “Between Two Points”
13. “High Hopes”
14. “Sorrow”
15. “The Piper’s Call”
16. “A Great Day for Freedom”
17. “In Any Tongue”
18. “The Great Gig in the Sky”
19. “A Boat Lies Waiting”
20. “Coming Back to Life”
21. “Dark and Velvet Nights”
22. “Sings”
23. “Scattered”
24. “Comfortably Numb”

Brian May recalled Queen’s difficult early days, when many people took a dislike to Freddie Mercury – and the singer took a dislike to his own voice.

In a recent Q&A session (video below) the guitarist admitted the band had wondered if it might have been a mistake to tie up with the future star in 1970.

“When we first worked with him, it was a little unnerving,” May said. “Because he did a lot of running around the place and screaming his head off. So we thought, ‘Is this going work?’”

READ MORE: Why Every Single Drum Hit Was Changed on ‘Queen I’ Reissue

He continued: “And not everybody liked him, I’ve got to say. A lot of people found him kind of abrasive – but they all thought he was interesting and entertaining. At that point, though, he wasn’t the singer that we all got to know as Freddie Mercury.”

That started to happen during Queen’s first demo sessions in 1971. “We went into the studio, and… as soon as Freddie heard his voice coming back, he went, ‘Oh, I don’t like it. I’m gonna do that again.’

“And he would go back and back and back, until he got it the way he wanted it. So he became, instantly, very aware of what he sounded like, and incredibly quickly fashioned himself into the singer he wanted to be.”

May pointed out that he was simplifying those events, which took place over “quite a long time.” He added: “It probably went on for ever. Every time we were going to make a new album, Freddie would push himself further.

“He would hear himself come back, and he would say, ‘No, I want to do better, longer, more passion, more –’ whatever it was… He was always looking for new textures, and looking to get more out of himself.”

How Queen Pushed Each Other in the Studio

He noted that the other members of Queen had been part of Mercury’s process. “We did help,” he confirmed. “Every time one of us [were] in the studio, the rest of us [were] in the control room. So a lot of the time, I’m sitting… and Freddie’s doing a vocal, and he goes, ‘How’s that?’

“And I go, ‘Well, we kinda like that bit but we didn’t like…’ So we helped him to build what works. And the same the other way round; I’d be doing a guitar solo and so often Freddie was there, going, ‘Well, that’s alright, but…’ We’d be pushing each other the whole time.”

Brian May Q&A Session

You Think You Know Queen?

Rock stars including Dee Snider, Sebastian Bach and Ted Nugent are reacting to Donald Trump‘s presidential election victory Tuesday night in very different ways.

Trump, running as the Republican candidate, defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to become only the second person elected to nonconsecutive terms as president of the United States.

You can see social media reactions from various rock stars below. We will update this list if and when more musicians make their own posts later in the day.

Longtime Trump supporter Nugent was jubilant, posting a photo of a large wreath of flowers surrounding a Trump election sign and declaring, “Glory glory hallelujah thank God!” Former Skid Row frontman and longtime solo star Bach was clearly far less pleased, declaring “fuck America” and asking “what the fuck is wrong with you people” in a series of early morning tweets.

Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who earlier on Election Day predicted that Trump didn’t have “even close to a majority,” promptly admitted he misjudged the situation: “Well, I was very wrong. The American people have spoken. I accept their choice.”

The transition from one decade to the next is significant in more ways than just the flipping of a calendar page. For musicians, it can represent a sonic, aesthetic and ideological changing of the guard — and that transition can either be a source of excitement or dread.

All of the artists on our list of Rock’s Greatest ’70s to ’80s Reinventions made changes at the dawn of a new decade. Some of them were already in the midst of an evolution, and they simply needed to stay the course to reap the benefits. Others found themselves in a career tailspin that would require an act of God (or a record label with bottomless pockets) to fix.

Our criteria for a successful rock reinvention is twofold. For one, these changes had to yield commercial success. Secondly, the music an artist made during that period had to be considered generally good by at least some faction of fans and critics. We know a lot of our faithful readers won’t go to bat for ’80s Aerosmith or Kiss over their ’70s periods, but somebody, somewhere had to have enjoyed those records in order for them to sell millions of copies.

Also important to note: Successful reinventions didn’t always last long. Some of these artists revitalized their careers at the turn of the decade, only to make a series of baffling left turns that could qualify them for a list of the worst reinventions. That’s just par for the course in a business as ephemeral as rock ‘n’ roll.

Glenn Frey wasn’t the most prolific of Eagles. In fact, long-time partner Don Henley almost matched Frey’s total number of lead vocals in the ’70s alone.

Despite being acknowledged as the group’s leader, Frey somehow only had one such turn on 1976’s Hotel California and then only one again on 1979’s The Long Run. Frey sure made them count, though: “New Kid in Town” and “Heartache Tonight” both rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Similarly, Frey only had two prominent vocals on 1975’s One of These Nights – but one of them was the No. 2 smash “Lyin’ Eyes.”

READ MORE: Ranking Every Eagles Solo Album

The following ranking of every Glenn Frey Eagles song avoids the numerous tracks where he served as co-writer but was not featured as a singer. Material where Frey was a noteworthy duet partner made the cut, yet exploring it all still wasn’t a herculean task – not in terms of numbers, anyway.

The difficulty with deciding instead often relates to Frey’s remarkable consistency. The best of his songs are as well-made as they were popular.

25. “I Love to Watch a Woman Dance”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

This mawkish Larry John McNally track had been floating about since the Eagles first got together before 1994’s Hell Freezes Over. By the time they finally got around to recording it, however, Henley had already released a cover of McNally’s “For My Wedding” on his 2000 solo album Inside Job. That made it quite clear that “I Love to Watch a Woman Dance” was really just a rewrite of the same tune. (McNally also composed Rod Stewart‘s Top 10 1990 hit “The Motown Song,” which thankfully sounds like neither.)

24. “Chug All Night”
From: Eagles (1972)

Glenn Frey once told Cameron Crowe that “the only difference between boring and laid-back is a million dollars.” At this point, unfortunately, Eagles were only thousand-aires. In keeping, “Chug All Night” features a snoozy riff to go with an even snoozier theme. “And I’ve been meaning to tell you, baby,” Frey sings, “that it makes no sense.” He has a point.

23. “Outlaw Man”
From: Desperado (1973)

This David Blue cover represents the moment where they took this LP’s rather dubious cowboy link a boot length too far. Henley subsequently admitted that “the metaphor was probably a little bullshit.” After all, “we were in L.A. staying up all night, smoking dope, living the California life.”

22. “I Dreamed There Was No War”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

A gorgeous interlude from Frey, but still … really only an interlude.

21. “What Do I Do with My Heart”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

Frey could do this kind of quasi-R&B ballad in his sleep – and, in this case, he might actually have.

20. “It’s Your World Now”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

The sentiment became sadly appropriate in the wake of Frey’s death, but its impact will always be governed by anyone’s willingness to endure a musical setting best described as “family-restaurant mariachi band.”

19. “You Are Not Alone”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

The pretty, orchestrated “You Are Not Alone” presupposed Frey’s similarly lightweight songbook turn on 2012’s After Hours.

18. “Somebody”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

Jack Tempchin co-composes another showcase for Glenn Frey, but “Somebody” has neither the rootsy gravitas of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” nor the rumbling attitude of “Already Gone.”

17. “The Girl From Yesterday”
From: Hell Freezes Over (1994)

On the other hand, Frey and Tempchin’s “Girl From Yesterday” manages a passable approximation of the clip-clop country lament from “Lyin’ Eyes,” updated for the jet-set era.

16. “Good Day in Hell”
From: On the Border (1974)

A key moment in Eagles history arrives, as Don Felder is asked to become a session guest on slide guitar for this Frey-sung album cut. After this sizzling, Allman Brothers-inspired performance – in fact, the very next day – Eagles asked Felder to join the band.

15. “Out of Control”
From: Desperado (1973)

The Eagles’ shift away from their country influences didn’t come out of the blue. The rocked-out “Out of Control” comes smashing through the saloon doors just three songs into Desperado, even though this album defined their rootsy first era.

14. “King of Hollywood”
From: The Long Run (1979)

There’s a welcome echo of Steely Dan‘s Walter Becker here, both in the low-voiced foreboding and the track’s Los Angeles environs – but without the perverse sense of humor, of course. It all devolves into another great guitar workout.

13. “Get You in the Mood”
From: “Take It Easy” B-side (1972)

A scorching cry of love from Frey, with this menacingly dark groove. Which is why “Get You in the Mood” ended up as a B-side on their debut single rather than on the track listing of their country-rocking debut.

12. “Ol’ ’55”
From: On the Border (1974)

Sure, the Eagles polish the edges off the opening track from Tom Waits‘ 1973 debut album Closing Time. But they also uncover a heart-filling chorus buried amid his scuffed-up vagabond sensibility.

11. “No More Cloudy Days”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

With Frey gone so long, there’s just something indescribably sad about “No More Cloudy Days.”

10. “How Long”
From: Long Road Out of Eden (2007)

“How Long” was perhaps the closest this LP got to replicating the heft and feel of the best earlier Eagles stuff. Frey and Henley welcome back songwriter J.D. Souther, one of the first people Frey met after he left Detroit for California, then take turns on the lead vocal. Suddenly, everything old starts to feel new again. But not too old: They keep the band’s harder-edged Felder-era attitude, years after he left the lineup.

9. “After the Thrill Is Gone”
From: One of These Nights (1975)

Taking a rueful look back at the wreckage of a lost relationship was already becoming old hat for Frey and Henley, even this early on, and that’s likely why “After the Thrill Is Gone” hasn’t gained wider attention. This tucked-away gem is made complete by Felder’s solo, which adds a touch of simmering anger.

8. “James Dean”
From: On the Border (1974)

Eagles originally worked up an early version of “James Dean” during sessions for Desperado before fully committing to a cowboy narrative. Held over for the follow-up, “James Dean” helped introduce fans to their muscular new frame of mind. But only after driving a wedge between the band and longtime producer Glyn Johns, who liked their country-rock vibe just fine. They fired Johns, bringing in the more amenable Bill Szymczyk – and he oversaw three more chart-topping Eagles albums.

7. “Peaceful Easy Feeling”
From: Eagles (1972)

Eagles had been together just a little more than a week when Frey brought in this song from buddy Jack Tempchin. Written off and on while Tempchin was girl-watching around his hometown of San Diego, the third single from their debut is brought to life through sunlit backing vocals from early members Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner. Its timeless message about fate did the rest: “Part of the idea is when you give up looking for something,” Tempchin later mused, “a lot of times that’s when you find it.”

6. “Tequila Sunrise”
From: Desperado (1973)

One of the first songs Henley ever wrote with Frey almost didn’t happen. Seems Frey “thought that it was a bit too obvious or too much of a cliche because of the drink that was so popular then,” Henley recalled in The Very Best Of liner notes. “I said, ‘No, look at it from a different point of view. You’ve been drinking straight tequila all night and the sun is coming up!’ It turned out to be a really great song.” The phrase “shot of courage” came from real life: They’d often have a couple of drinks to work up the nerve to approach women.

5. “New Kid in Town”
From: Hotel California (1976)

“New Kid in Town” began as a discussion on aging, but ended up revealing deeper worries. “We were already chronicling our own demise,” Henley admitted to Cameron Crowe. “We were basically saying, ‘Look, we know we’re red hot now, but we also know that somebody’s going to come along and replace us – both in music and in love.'” Frey and Henley helped complete an idea brought to the band by J.D. Souther. When they were finished, the Eagles had their third chart-topping smash.

4. “Lyin’ Eyes”
From: One of These Nights (1975)

This crossover hit was written in a rush of inspiration over just two days. Yet, every element of its wry narrative about a gold digger’s empty life unfolds with a writerly knack for detail. Frey shifts points of view, never wasting a word, as he fills in the blanks around a real-life encounter he had while with Henley at their favorite ’70s-era watering hole, Dan Tana’s. They rushed back home, worked to get every word just right then headed directly into the studio, where the Eagles displayed a similar meticulousness: Nailing the vocal on the song’s deeply resonant opening line – “city girls just seem to find out early” – took six tries.

3. “Already Gone”
From: On the Border (1974)

You could partly blame “Locomotive Breath” for the split with Glyn Johns while recording this album. “We’re taking a beating opening for Jethro Tull,” Frey said in 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, “and our feeling was, ‘We gotta have some kick-ass songs.'” Eagles started with “Already Gone,” as the band and new producer Bill Szymczyk shifted to the Record Plant in Los Angeles. Newly added guitarist Don Felder then brought a sharp edge to the session. “The great thing for me about [“Already Gone”] is that I left England behind,” Frey told Cameron Crowe, “and had a much more positive energy in the studio.”

2. “Heartache Tonight”
From: The Long Run (1979)

This took forever to finish, like everything else on The Long Run. Frey’s initial inspiration was a straightforward love of old Sam Cooke records, played out as a loose jam with J.D. Souther. But then Frey got stuck. He ran it by mentor Bob Seger, who’d originally taken Frey under his wing as a teen. Henley was involved, too. Together, they’d begun piecing together a fun-sounding Grammy-winning song. Something, however, was still missing. That’s when Seger blurted out the title line. “Heartache Tonight” went on to become the Eagles’ final No. 1 single.

1. “Take It Easy”
From: Eagles (1972)

The opening track on the Eagles’ first album perfectly sums up their early country-rock aesthetic, so much so that Glenn Frey said its first few jangly guitar strums “felt like an announcement, ‘And now … the Eagles.'” The impetus for “Take It Easy,” however, came from elsewhere: Jackson Browne, a then-unknown singer-songwriter who lived next door to Frey, couldn’t finish a new song. “Take It Easy” kept stopping cold on the second verse after “Well, I’m a-standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.” Then Frey had an idea. Today, you’ll find a statue commemorating the next line in Winslow, paired with a painting of a girl in a flatbed Ford.

Six Little-Known Eagles ‘Hotel California’ Facts

It’s Election Day, and musicians on both sides of the political spectrum are busy posting on social media, encouraging their fans to vote.

That includes artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Ted Nugent, Pearl Jam, Tom Petty and Aretha Franklin. Which is great overall but a bit weird in the last two cases, seeing as how Petty died in 2017 and Franklin in 2018.

As a co-worker explained, it can easily get “weird and gross” when social media accounts that were once actually used by an artist remain active after their death without proper acknowledgment as to who is now actually writing the posts.

Things get particularly weird when the accounts post about other newly deceased rock stars. Take this recent example, where “Janis Joplin,” who died in 1970, pays tribute to Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who died just last month, 54 years later. There’s nothing in this post making it clear that it’s not Joplin saying this, and identifying who did actually write the tribute.

There’s a simple solution: Change the account names of deceased celebrities by adding “estate” or “team” or “management” or “family” or whatever is the most appropriate. And include a quick author credit at the end of each post for further clarity. (The Prince estate does this second part correctly already, as you can see in their tribute to Quincy Jones.)

If you can find a quote from Joplin about the person or subject in question, great, use that and let us know it’s her talking and when she said it. Inactive bands are a slightly different situation, but one that still requires clarity. The Doors‘ official Twitter / X account also posted a tribute to Lesh, without saying if it was one or both of surviving members Robby Krieger and John Densmore, or the estate who was paying tribute.

Admittedly, today of all days we as a nation have bigger fish to fry – deciding the future of the free world and all – but once that’s all settled let’s add this easy fix to the to-do list.

David Gilmour says he was “bullied by the record label” on Pink Floyd’s final album, The Endless River.

During a conversation with the Los Angeles Times, the guitarist reflected on how the 2014 LP came together.

“When we did that album, there was a thing that Andy Jackson, our engineer, had put together called ‘The Big Spliff’ – a collection of all these bits and pieces of jams [from the sessions for 1994’s The Division Bell] that was out there on bootlegs. A lot of fans wanted this stuff that we’d done in that time, and we thought we’d give it to them,” Gilmour recalled.

READ MORE: Ranking Every Pink Floyd Live Album

He and his bandmates obliged by compiling the material into The Endless River. The album was almost entirely made up of instrumental and ambient music, save for “Louder Than Words,” the only song to feature lead vocals. Despite excitement around the LP, The Endless River was met with mixed reviews when it was released.

“My mistake, I suppose, was in being bullied by the record company to have it out as a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record,” Gilmour admitted, suggesting that expectations for the album were unfair. “It should have been clear what it was — it was never intended to be the follow-up to The Division Bell. But, you know, it’s never too late to get caught in one of these traps again.”

David Gilmour Says It Was ‘Lovely to Say Goodbye’ to Pink Floyd’s Catalog

Elsewhere in the conversation, Gilmour expressed his satisfaction with the recent sale of Pink Floyd’s catalog.

“It’s history — it’s all past. This stuff is for future generations,” the rocker noted. “I’m an old person. I’ve spent the last 40-odd years trying to fight the good fight against the forces of indolence and greed to do the best with our stuff that you can do. And I’ve given that fight up now.”

READ MORE: Pink Floyd Sells Music and Likeness Rights to Sony for $400 Million

In the deal, Sony acquired Pink Floyd’s recorded music, name and likeness for $400 million. While the large sum is undoubtedly a boon for Gilmour’s bank account, he’s more relieved to be done with the band’s long history of business-related discourse.

“I’ve got my advance — because, you know, it’s not fresh new money or anything like that. It’s an advance against what I would have earned over the next few years anyway,” Gilmour explained. “But the arguments and fighting and idiocies that have been going on for the last 40 years between these four disparate groups of people and their managers and whatever — it’s lovely to say goodbye to.”

Alex Van Halen recalled the time he set his arm on fire during a Van Halen show – and his roadie, who had an extinguisher, didn’t help him.

It’s one reason why the drummer and late brother Eddie Van Halen didn’t like the classic movie This Is Spinal Tap, as he revealed in his recent memoir, Brothers (via LAist).

“For me, fire represents the temporariness – that only the moment counts,” Van Halen wrote about his regular trick of playing while his drum kit burned. “I mean, the flame is there and poof, it’s gone. So it’s life, right? … And there was an element of danger because we did it on such an amateur level.”

READ MORE: Hear the Full Version of Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s ‘Unfinished’

He continued: “My favorite memory of all of that was [when] we’d kind of gotten it down to a science. And as we’re doing it during the performance, the lighter fluid starts to come down my arm. And then I look over and I notice my arm’s on fire. So I’m thinking, ‘That can’t be good,’ right?

“I look at [my tech] Greg – who, in theory, [is] there with a fire extinguisher… I look at him and he’s looking at me, and he gives me the thumbs up. ‘Looks great, man!’ I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

Van Halen Brothers Thought ‘Spinal Tap’ Wasn’t Funny

Elsewhere in the book, Van Halen recalled seeing the celebrated 1984 “rockumentary” about spoof rock band Spinal Tap. “That wasn’t funny at all,” he said.

“Ed and I saw it and we said, ‘That’s what we experienced!’ That is really how things happen. It’s mind bending. The public doesn’t really have any idea what goes on behind the scenes. And I’m certainly not going to burst the bubble.

“But that movie, there were a lot of elements that were more true than they were parody.”

Some of rock’s biggest stars shared their Election Day thoughts on social media Tuesday morning, encouraging their fans to vote while expressing their hopes and fears about the results.

The vote between the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, and the Democratic nominee, current Vice President Kamala Harris, is expected to be one of the closest in history.

Musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Ted Nugent, Dee Snider and Kid Rock have been endorsing their preferred candidates online and at campaign events for much of the past few months.

You can find their Election Day or Election Day-themed posts below.

In his non-partisan video message, Sammy Hagar urged everyone to stay calm through the potentially stressful days ahead. “I just want to say to everyone, it’s gonna be OK. I know we’re all feeling the same thing. Just take a deep breath, let’s all take a deep breath and let’s just thank God that we’ve seen this movie, we’ve been here before, and everything is gonna be OK, I really truly believe that.”

You can find your local polling place by visiting Vote.org.

Read More: Michael Stipe and Jon Bon Jovi Team Up for Kamala Harris

Tyka Nelson, Prince’s only full sister, died at the age of 64 on Monday, her son confirmed.

No details were provided by President Nelson (that’s her son’s name), while other members of her family also reported the news.

She released four albums between 1988 and 2011 and announced her retirement from music in June. She’d been scheduled to appear at a farewell concert later that month, but it went ahead without her as a result of an unidentified illness.

READ MORE: Was Prince’s Famous Rock Hall Guitar Solo an ‘Act of Revenge’?

She shared parents with John L. Nelson and Mattie Shaw Nelson with Prince, who also had five half-siblings. Tyka was involved in the extensive legal disputes over Prince’s estate after he died in 2016 without leaving a will.

In June she said she’d started work on a memoir about her life and family, telling the Minnesota Star Tribune: “I really wasn’t a singer. I’m a writer. I just happen to be able to sing. I enjoy singing.”

Tyka Nelson On Prince’s Evasiveness Before His Death

She also reported that she’d been in contact with Prince up until the time of his death, but that he’d been evasive about his health. “He kept avoiding questions,” she said. “I kept getting mad.

“I felt like, ‘Talk to me for two seconds.’ He’d change the subject, make a joke and then we’d both laugh. He asked me could I find more information about our family… [he] wanted me to find Sharon’s number. I didn’t question it. It was like, ‘Send this picture to that person.’ ‘OK. What for?’”

She added: “A couple of times I said, ‘How are you really?’ He didn’t go into anything with me. That was bothering me, and he knew it was; but that was all he wanted to tell me.” She hinted that she was planning to go into more detail in her book.

Bruce Springsteen met actor Jeremy Allen White, with the actor dressed as the Boss in the ‘80s, on the set of the upcoming biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere.

White – star of The Bear – plays Springsteen during his Nebraska era in the movie, which recently began shooting and is expected to be released next year.

TMZ revealed a series of pictures that showed the pair sharing a hug before falling deep into conversation – presumably with a lot to say to each other.

READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen: ‘I’m Not a Billionaire’

Earlier this year White said he’d been deliberately avoiding Springsteen, explaining: “We’ve communicated a little bit through some other people… I’m trying to have a bit of my own process with it before meeting the man, too.

“I wanna try to have an understanding, so when I meet him, I’ll have a bit of confidence somewhere in me to stand there.”

How Bruce Springsteen Knew Jeremy Allen White Was Right for Biopic

More recently, Springsteen and longtime manager-producer Jon Landau discussed White’s casting, with Landau telling the Telegraph that the actor faced a steep challenge in “depicting a very interior person.”

He added: “There’s always a tremendous amount going on, some of which gets articulated, and some of which is held back.”

Springsteen himself said: “I only had to see him on The Bear, and I knew he was the right guy, because he had that interior life – but he also had a little swagger.”

Why Bruce Springsteen Called Killers Collaboration ‘Cathartic’

As the following Rock Star Vs. President Songs attest, over the years some of rock’s most famous musicians have fearlessly criticized the actions and viewpoints of our country’s various leaders.

Listen as presidents such as Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and both George Bushes come under heavy fire for their handling of wars, foreign and domestic affairs in the lyrics of the following classic rock “State of the Union” addresses.

Alice Cooper, “Elected”
From: Billion Dollar Babies (1973)

Unlike most of the lyrics on this list of Presidents Songs, Alice Cooper isn’t referencing or criticizing a specific leader of the free world. In fact, most of “Elected” is a tongue-in-cheek campaign pledge to get wild, during which Cooper jokes that he doesn’t care about the problems of our major cities. But his true colors and concern seems to be different, as revealed by the line “Kids want a savior / Don’t need a fake.” 

 

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, “Ohio”
Single (1970)

Shocked and incensed by the deaths of four anti-military protesters on May 4, 1970 at Kent State University, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rush-recorded and released this Neil Young-penned protest song, which hit stores and airwaves the following month. The lyrics make no bones about who the group held responsible for this tragedy: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own / This summer I hear the drumming / Four dead in Ohio.”

 

Elton John, “Postcards From Richard Nixon”
From: The Captain & the Kid (2006)

Although lyricist Bernie Taupin still denies the popular story that 1971’s Madman Across the Water was about Nixon — the only active President ever to resign from office — there’s no denying this Elton John song is about him. What can be questioned is exactly what’s being said about “Tricky Dick,” although it doesn’t seem particularly complimentary. The lyrics suggest Nixon invited the duo to use their music to help distract people’s attention from the Vietnam War: “And Richard Nixon’s on his knees he’s sent so many overseas / He’d like to know if you and me could help him in some way / A little camouflage and glue to mask the evil that men do / A small diversion caused by two pale kids come to play / And we heard Richard Nixon say ‘Welcome to the U.S.A.'”

 

Ted Nugent, “Kiss My Ass”
From: Spirit of the Wild (1995)

Our 43rd president, Bill Clinton — nicknamed “Billary” here — gets a rather direct and unpleasant invitation from the always outspoken and conservative-minded Ted Nugent. He extends the same offer to then-Attorney General Janet Reno, the IRS and animal rights activists: “I see the weenies with the dirty hair / Protestin’ on the street / They condemn the clothes we wear and the morality of what we eat, yeah / It’s gotta be a fluke / They make me wanna puke.”

 

The Ramones, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”
Single (1985)

Punk pioneers the Ramones were among the many who didn’t appreciate President Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to a German cemetery partially populated by Nazi solders accused of running World War II extermination camps. They made their feelings clear on this track: “You’re a politician / Don’t become one of Hitler’s children.” The group changed the name of the track to “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)” for inclusion on their 1986 album Animal Boy to acknowledge the Reagan-supporting views of guitarist Johnny Ramone, who understandably wasn’t pleased with the lyrical message of the song.

 

R.E.M, “Ignoreland”
From: Automatic for the People (1992)

It’s a double-shot of anti-presidential rock as R.E.M. rip both Ronald Reagan and his vice president and one-term successor George H. W. Bush for a decade of (alleged) deception and warmongering. They also save some venom for the press for failing to call the White House out properly: “The paper’s terrified to report anything that isn’t handed on a presidential spoon / I’m just profoundly frustrated by all this / So, f— you, man.” In the end, singer Michael Stipe admits his words are probably in vain: “I know that this is vitriol / No solution, spleen-venting / But I feel better having screamed / Don’t you?”

 

Bruce Springsteen, “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live”
From: Live in Dublin (2007)

Bruce Springsteen re-wrote most of the lyrics for his cover of this Blind Alfred Reed song to address President George Bush’s reaction to the 2005 disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. His feelings about the man he called “President Bystander” are laid particularly bare in this verse: “He said, ‘Me and my old school pals had some mighty high times down here / And what happened to you poor black folks, well it just ain’t fair’ / He took a look around, gave a little pep talk, said ‘I’m with you’ then he took a little walk.” 

 

Sting, “Russians”
From: The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985)

Sting reflects on the history of the war of words and military posturing between the Soviets and the Americans, referencing ’60s Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and ’80s U.S. President Ronald Reagan in this hit Presidents Song from his debut solo album: “Mr. Reagan says ‘We will protect you’ / I don’t subscribe to this point of view.” The inspiration for this plea for peace dates all the way back to the former Police leader’s college days, when he and his friend would watch the Russian equivalent of Sesame Street on illegal cable and realize that the two countries were more alike than they realized. Decades after its release, Sting would change the lyrics to “Russians” in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

 

James Taylor, “Line ‘Em Up”
From: Hourglass (1997)

The normally soft-spoken James Taylor mercilessly roasts President Nixon on this late-’90s track, accusing him of being phoney even while being shoved out of our country’s highest office in shame: “I remember Richard Nixon back in ’74 / And the final scene at the White House door / And the staff lined up to say good-bye / Tiny tear in his shifty little eye / He said ‘Nobody knows me / Nobody understands / These little people were good to me / Oh I’m gonna shake some hands.'”

 

Neil Young, “Let’s Impeach the President”
From: Living With War (2006)

More than three decades after he first showed he wasn’t afraid to call out the most powerful men in the free world by name, Neil Young does it again. This time, he’s even more direct and to the point, in a furious call to action attacking George W. Bush’s role in the war on 2003 war on Iraq: “Let’s impeach the President for lying / And misleading our country into war / Abusing all the power that we gave him / And shipping all our money out the door.”

 

Todd Rundgren and Donald Fagen, “Tin Foil Hat”
From: White Knight (2017)

Todd Rundgren recruited Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen for a 2017 collaboration called “Tin Foil Hat.” As Rundgren explained, the track was “primarily driven by our common frustration” in watching Donald Trump get elected. As you’d expect, the lyrics for “Tin Foil Hat” are aimed directly at Trump and his supporters. Among the lyrics: “He hasn’t got the time for losers / Unless they do as he commands / He’s writing checks to his accusers / With his tiny little hands”

 

Pearl Jam, “Quick Escape”
From: Gigaton, 2020

Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder was never shy about expressing his distaste for Donald Trump, at one point referring to the 45th president as “crazy like a narcissistic motherfucker.” Vedder’s criticism of Trump popped up in the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s 2020 song “Quick Escape.” The track found Vedder envisioning a world devastated by global warming and corporate greed. It included the lines, “Crossed the border to Morocco / Kashmir to Marrakesh / The lengths we had to go to then / To find a place Trump hadn’t fucked up yet.”

Quincy Jones, a titan in the world of music as both a producer and musician, died Nov. 3 at the age of 91. As news of his passing became public, many of rock’s biggest names took to social media to pay their respects.

In a heartfelt post to Instagram, Paul McCartney remembered Jones as a “great man,” while praising his incredible career.

“He was supremely talented, and I felt privileged to have known him for many years,” the Beatle wrote. “Quincy or ‘Quince’ or ‘Q’, as he was known, always had a twinkle in his eye and had a very positive, loving spirit which infected everyone who knew him. His work with Michael Jackson is, of course, legendary and he had so many other strings to his musical bow.”

“My main recollections of him were always the private moments that we shared,” McCartney continued, “and I will never stop thanking Nancy for always arranging to visit him when we were in Los Angeles. These visits were fun and inspiring.”

Elton John, Duff McKagan and Lenny Kravitz Remember Quincy Jones

Elsewhere, Elton John shared a picture of himself alongside Jones. “Nobody had a career as incredible as Quincy Jones. He played with the best and he produced the best,” John wrote in the caption. “What a guy. Loved him.”

Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan called Jones an “all-time legend,” while Daryl Hall described him as a “force of nature.” Famed singer-songwriter Carole King expressed her wish for the producer to “rest in peace and power.”

Meanwhile, Lenny Kravitz expressed “extremely deep” love for Jones. “What a life. What an expression of authenticity. What a teacher,” Kravitz tweeted along with pictures of himself with Jones. “I am humbled that I was given the gift of your openness and friendship. I am still processing… My deepest condolences and respects to the Jones family.”

These tributes — along with messages from New Order, Steve Vai and many others — can be found below.

It used to be pretty rare to find photographs of rockers with presidents, but, as the gallery below shows, that’s changing. And not just because of political alignments.

A number of these pairings run along straight factional lines – it’s no surprise that Gene Simmons was hanging out with George W. Bush, right? – but, other times, rockers prove themselves to be equal-opportunity shutterbugs. U2‘s frontman Bono, for instance, has been photographed with standard-bearers from both parties. Politics had nothing to do with appearing on Donald Trump‘s TV show, either.

Our oldest shot may be the most famous, as we find Richard Nixon flanked by Elvis Presley on Dec. 21, 1970. Among the things the King discussed that day were the Beatles, whom he had described as “a real force for anti-American spirit.” Ironically, George Harrison was later photographed with Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford.

READ MORE: Rock Star vs. President Songs

Back then, however, these visits only went so far in bridging the generation gap. Harrison was reportedly asked if Ford liked his work, after the two exchanged buttons on Dec. 13, 1974, in the White House. “No,” Harrison replied, “he’s not all that familiar with my music.”

The founding of the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007 had a profound impact. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, he led a recognition ceremony in which composers and performers were honored for lifetime contributions to music, vastly increasing the number of photo ops for rockers.

Along the way, some artists (think the Beach Boys and Ronald Reagan or Fleetwood Mac and Bill Clinton) became inextricably linked with certain administrations. But all of them came away with a treasured piece of Americana – a picture with the leader of the free world.

Michael Stipe and Jon Bon Jovi joined forces on Sunday at a Democratic get-out-the-vote rally in Atlanta, where they performed the R.E.M. classic “The One I Love.”

You can watch the performance below.

The team-up took place at the When We Vote We Win rally at the Cobb Galleria Centre in support of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (MN), and husband Doug Emhoff were both in attendance. Stipe took lead vocals on “The One I Love,” while Bon Jovi played acoustic guitar. The rockers, who have both publicly endorsed Harris, were backed by the Americana duo the War and Treaty. Bon Jovi also performed two songs from his own band: “The People’s House,” off this year’s Forever, and the Slippery When Wet anthem “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

“The One I Love” ended Stipe’s three-song set, which also included his and Big Red Machine’s “No Time for Love Like Now” and R.E.M.’s “Driver 8,” which the singer said was Walz’s favorite R.E.M. song. Stipe also mocked Republican presidential candidate (and former president) Donald Trump’s use of the Village People‘s “Y.M.C.A.” at his rallies by chanting, “It’s fun to get out the V-O-T-E, it’s fun to get out the V-O-T-E.”

READ MORE: Presidential Campaign Songs Across 50 Years

Michael Stipe Tells Georgians: ‘Get Every Single Person in Your Community’ to Vote

Stipe has been vocal in his support of Harris, and last month he broke out “The One I Love” for the first time since 2008 at a Harris-Walz get-out-the-vote rally in Pittsburgh, where he was joined by Jason Isbell. On Sunday, he once again emphasized the importance of voting as Election Day inched closer.

“Thank you for being here and thank you all for voting, or getting ready to vote,” he said. “I want to encourage everyone in Georgia because we know what it means. We’ve been here before. We know what it means when you get every single person in your community, your church, your skate club – whatever the hell it is, get them out, talk to them, get them there to vote.”

Eddie Van Halen considered hanging up when producer Quincy Jones called to ask if he’d perform the now-famous solo on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

Assuming that it was all a prank, Van Halen unknowingly unloaded on the music legend. “What do you want you f—ing so-and-so!,” he recalled yelling into the phone during a 2012 CNN interview. “What the hell do you want?” When Jones explained who he was, Van Halen quickly apologized, although he confessed that he still had his doubts.

“I still wasn’t 100% sure it was him. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll meet you at your studio tomorrow.’ And lo and behold, when I got there, there’s Quincy, there’s Michael Jackson and there’s engineers.”

Jones and Jackson gave Van Halen license to do whatever he wanted with the song, and he took full advantage, boldly instructing an engineer to re-arrange the section of the song he was meant to play over.

“I was just finishing the second solo when Michael walked in. I didn’t know how he would react to what I was doing. So I warned him before he listened. … He turned to me [after listening] and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo, but to actually care about the song, and make it better.'”

Although he was uncredited on the record, it didn’t take long for anybody to figure out Van Halen was the guitarist on “Beat It” as the song roared to the top of the charts. Van Halen even joined Jackson onstage to perform the song in July of 1984.

Read More: Eddie Van Halen Broke a Band Rule to Play on ‘Beat It’

Jones referenced the phone call incident when paying tribute to Van Halen following the guitarist’s 2020 death, thanking him for his contributions to the song, “even though it took a couple of calls to convince you it was actually me…”

Alex Van Halen Probably Wishes Eddie Had Hung Up on Quincy Jones

While promoting his 2024 memoir Brothers, Eddie’s drumming bandmate brother Alex Van Halen revealed he was still bitter about his brother’s decision to perform on the “Beat It” single, partly because it helped Jackson’s Thriller album keep Van Halen’s 1984 from topping the charts.

“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson?” he fumed in a Rolling Stone interview. “I just don’t fucking get it. And the funny part was Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”

Watch Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ Video

Art Garfunkel admits to tearing up during a brief reunion with former bandmate Paul Simon more than a decade after their last Simon and Garfunkel show. Still, it’s a memory Garfunkel says he’ll always “cherish.”

“I met with Paul Simon for the first time in years just recently. We had a lunch,” Garfunkel tells The Sun. “It was very, very warm and wonderful. There were tears. I was crying at a certain point because I felt I had hurt him – but there were hugs.”

The most recent Simon and Garfunkel album dates to 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. They notably reunited on stage over the years, producing 1982’s The Concert in Central Park, but haven’t shared a stage since appearing in 2010 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

READ MORE: Ranking Every Paul Simon and Simon & Garfunkel Album

Simon has since retired from touring. Garfunkel later battled vocal cord paresis but has recovered to produce a pending album with his son. Garfunkel and Garfunkel’s Father and Son is due on Nov. 8.

Father and Son includes an update of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends” but the elder Garfunkel said he and Simon avoided talk of their ’60s-era successes. “No, we didn’t,” he admits. “That speaks for itself.” Still, it seemed clear that a long-hoped-for reconciliation had taken place.

“I like to think I’m a man who has a lot of love. There are no relationships of mine that don’t have love at the bottom,” Garfunkel said. “I love everyone. I can’t imagine holding a position of dislike and clinging to it. It’s all meant to be resolved so we can die easy.”

Watch a Trailer for ‘Garfunkel and Garfunkel’

Art Garfunkel Discusses Everlys’ Towering Influence

Garfunkel and Garfunkel’s Father and Son also includes covers of the Beatles (“Blackbird”), Cyndi Lauper (“Time After Time”), Cat Stevens (the title track), the Everly Brothers (“Let It Be Me”), Eurythmics (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) and American Songbook favorites like “Blue Moon.”

The Everlys track has added resonance since the duo was a foundational influence on Simon and Garfunkel. They also covered “Bye Bye Love” on Bridge Over Troubled Water. “Anybody with ears knows that Don and Phil are not surpassed for harmony,” Garfunkel argues. “Nobody is as good – not even Simon and Garfunkel. The blend of those two voices is supreme.”

Garfunkel’s son, Art Jr., interrupts: “I disagree,” he said. “I think Simon and Garfunkel are equally as good or better.” Art Sr. then laughs, exclaiming: “I’ll take a pass at this point!”

Rock Feuds: Simon vs. Garfunkel

Musician and producer Quincy Jones – best known for his work on Michael Jackson’s Thriller – died at the age of 91 on Nov. 3.

His publicist Arnold Robinson confirmed that the 28-times Grammy winner had “passed away peacefully” at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles.

“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” his relatives said in a statement. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”

READ MORE: Paul McCartney Called Quincy Jones a ‘Crazy Motherf—er’ for Insulting the Beatles

In a 75-year career, Chicago-born Jones won 28 Grammys and was once described as one of the 20th century’s most important jazz musicians by Time magazine. A student of what would become the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he’d started out as a jazz arranger for artists including Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, before crossing over to work in the pop world too.

He produced Lesley Gore’s four million-selling hits of the ‘60s – “It’s My Party,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” “She’s a Fool” and “You Don’t Own Me.” In 1968 he became the first African American to be nominated for two Oscars in the same year, for his song “The Eyes of Love” and his score for movie In Cold Blood.

Along with producing three Jackson albums – Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad – he helmed the1985 charity single “We Are the World,” featuring 46 of the biggest music stars of the era. He also composed around 50 movie and TV soundtracks, and produced on groundbreaking 1985 movie The Color Purple. His 1962 composition “Soul Bossa Nova” became the theme for 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Quincy Jones’ Work Ethic Came From Hard Childhood

In a 2018 interview with GQ, Jones said his approach to work was a result of growing up without a mother after she suffered severe mental illness and was institutionalized. In addition he’d grown up in the street gangs of Chicago – once having being stabbed in the hand and neck – and wanted to remove himself from that environment.

he reported that he’d never been more focused in his life, explaining: “I stopped drinking two years ago because I had diabetes II. And it’s the best thing I ever did. My mind’s so clear now… the curiosity’s at an all-time high.”

He revealed he was fighting dementia “like a warrior” by making as much use of his brain as possible. “The muses come out at midnight,” he said of his work ethic. “No emails, no faxes, no calls… I’ll write music.

“Life’s an amazing journey, isn’t it, man? Every day I think about it. It’s just something else. I love every step… They be thinking I’m 84 and retired and all that shit. They wrong, man. Oh baby! I am never retiring!”

Willie Nelson has shared his memories of late singer Kris Kristofferson, recalling the many years they worked together.

It was 1985 when Nelson and Kristofferson joined forces with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings in the outlaw country supergroup the Highwaymen. The famous quartet released three studio albums during their decade together. Nelson and Kristofferson remained close friends afterward, regularly performing together, including a memorable appearance at the 2014 Grammy Awards.

In a recent conversation with the Associated Press, Nelson expressed reverence for Kristofferson, who died Sept. 28 at the age of 88.

READ MORE: Kris Kristofferson Dies: Rockers React

“He was a great songwriter. He left a lot of fantastic songs around for the rest of us to sing, for as long as we’re here,” the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer noted. “Kris was a great friend of mine. And, you know, we just kind of had a lot of fun together and made a lot of music together — videos, movies. I hated to lose him. That was a sad time.”

“If you just take the music part of it and go back to, you know, Waylon and Kris and John and, you know, all of us working together, the Highwaymen,” Nelson continued. “I am the only one left. And that’s just not funny.”

Willie Nelson Doesn’t ‘Worry About Dying’

While being the last surviving Highwayman offers a sobering reality, Nelson insisted he has no fears regarding his own mortality.

“I’m 91 plus, so, you know, I’m not worried about it,” the singer declared. “I don’t feel bad. I don’t hurt anywhere. I don’t have any reason to worry about dying. But I don’t know anybody who’s lived forever. I take pretty good care of myself. And I feel like I’m in pretty good shape physically. Mentally? That’s another story,” Nelson joked.

As for his own legacy, the Red Headed Stranger insisted he doesn’t get caught up with such things. “I had a good time,” Nelson explained. “And I did what I came here to do: make music.”

Things got scary during a Morrissey concert in Dallas on Saturday night when fans rushed the stage, forcing the singer to cut his performance short.

Following his initial set, the former Smiths frontman returned to the spotlight for an encore. As he began to perform “First of the Gang to Die,” the second single off of 2004’s You Are The Quarry, concertgoers began jumping on stage.

The invasion was slow to begin with – initially, a lone woman climbed up from the crowd to grab Morrissey’s hand. A man soon followed suit, then another lady jumped onstage to embrace the singer.

READ MORE: Morrissey Claims Johnny Marr Ignored Smiths Reunion Deal

Things escalated from there, as further overzealous fans flocked towards Morrissey. The rocker’s security guards, who had been carefully managing the initial invaders, quickly decided to whisk the acclaimed vocalist backstage to safety. He did not return to complete the performance. Meanwhile, TMZ reported that one bodyguard was injured in the ordeal. Footage of the incident can be seen in the video below.

Morrissey’s History of Canceling Concerts

While Morrissey is known for his engaging and dynamic performances, he also has a reputation for canceling shows. In 2018 he pulled the plug on a run of dates due to “logistical circumstances,” while an incident with Italian police led him to cancel a string of shows there in 2017. You can go further back through the past few decades to find many instances of postponed or aborted shows, with excuses ranging from medical issues to Morrissey’s refusal to perform at venues serving meat.

The former Smiths singer is in the middle of a North American tour which will conclude Nov. 23 in Waukegan, Illinois.