“You know what happens with bands. Usually it’s a woman or something. It’s usually sex, drugs or money. When the lawsuits got filed, it ended up to be money.”
That’s how drummer Bun E. Carlos sums up his recent disagreements with the other members of Cheap Trick, who threatened to send the former bandmates in front of a judge before Carlos ultimately decided to settle. In a new interview with Classic Rock Revisited, Carlos commented on his current status with the group, which leaves him out of the recording or touring lineups, but allows him to continue to hold a 25 percent stake in their shared business interests.
“In 2010, I got notified and was told, basically, to not show up for the next gig,” Carlos explained. “One guy doesn’t want me there, and the other guys were fine with that. They asked if they could use my drums. I said, ‘Yeah, go ahead and then send them back to me, please.’ That is basically what happened.”
Laughing that he “must have pissed somebody off,” Carlos maintained that everything’s technically settled between himself and the remaining members of the band, but he allowed that the way he was bumped aside — and the financial arguments that followed — have complicated his feelings regarding Cheap Trick.
“Looking back on it, the way I was treated by their people was really an insult,” said Carlos. “The music speaks for itself. You either like it or you don’t, or you’re somewhere in between. That doesn’t change whether I’m in the band or not. The legacy doesn’t change because of that. I get asked around town if I still talk to these guys and if I am still good friends with them. I just go, ‘Well, you know, good friends don’t have to sue their friends in federal court.’ As far as being good friends, well … there you go.”
These days, Carlos isn’t recording or touring with Cheap Trick, but he’s still keeping busy musically. “These days I mess around locally with a couple of bands. We play around town and that is something to do,” he said when asked to talk about his current activities. “I practice every day and that kind of stuff to maintain my musicianship. I’m still involved in the business of Cheap Trick, so I keep my eye on that kind of stuff.”
Come this fall, KISS frontman Paul Stanley will have a new gig as a soul singer. Yes, you read that right, a soul singer. Stanley has a new side project called Soul Station, which plays a mix of Sixties and Seventies soul classics, and they are scheduled to perform their first-ever concert at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theatre on September 11th.
“I don’t play guitar in the band and we don’t do a single KISS song,” Stanley said in a statement. “That’s not what this is about.”
Soul Station reportedly features a backing band that consists of musicians who have played with artists ranging from Christina Aguilera to Bobby Brown. Its drummer, Eric Singer, also plays with Stanley in KISS. The group will play a mix of songs by the Stylistics, Dramatics, Temptations, Smokey and the Miracles and Blue Magic, among others.
“We’re living in a time of being fed canned pre-programmed backing tracks and lip syncing in place of the electricity and passion of real live R&B,” Stanley said. “When I was a boy, before I ever saw the Who or Led Zeppelin, I saw Solomon Burke and Otis Redding. I saw the Temptations and all that music is part of the foundation of the music I’ve made. Soul Station is my chance to celebrate it for a night that’s real, live and faithfully recreates the sound with the respect it deserves…. These songs, arrangements and sound just blow you away.”
Tickets for Soul Station’s show at the Roxy Theatre go on sale beginning at 3 PM ET/2 PM CT/noon PT today, August 4th, at ticketfly.com.
Vocalist Udo Dirkschneider says he’s planning a 2016 tour where he’ll perform songs from his former band, Accept, one last time.
The singer co-founded the band in 1976 then left in 1987. He returned in 1992 after the band had split three years previously and exited again when the group disbanded in 2005. He declined to take part in Accept’s 2009 reunion, but now wants to give the tunes he recorded with the group, a final outing.
He told a press event in Germany, “I still love singing these songs live. The songs still are an important part of my catalog and still suit my voice very well. But at some point in your life, it’s just time to close the chapter.
There has been so much talk and speculation about Accept, so I just want to give my last definitive musical statement about it and give my fans a chance to see me perform a complete concert of these songs one last time on stage.”
He’ll play the shows under the Dirkschneider moniker and further details will be revealed when relevant.
Earlier this year, the vocalist revealed he was left “disappointed” when he saw Accept in Hamburg with frontman Mark Tornillo.
He said, “It was without any emotion. For me, there was no band on stage. Playing-wise, it was okay, but it was without any emotion. It was automatic — like, do it and then go.”
As previously reported, Bon Jovi will be releasing their album, Burning Bridges, on August 21st. The band has released a pair of lyric videos, for the songs We Don’t Run and Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning, from the forthcoming album. Listen to them below.
A spokesperson for Bon Jovi said, “Burning Bridges, which will be released August 21st, is an album for fans and will accompany an upcoming international tour. The band is hard at work on their next album, which will see a full-scale release in 2016.”
Burning Bridges track list:
1. A Teardrop To the Sea
2. We Don’t Run
3. Saturday Night Gave Me Sunday Morning
4. We All Fall Down
5. Blind Love
6. Who Would You Die For
7. Fingerprints
8. Life Is Beautiful
9. I’m Your Man
10. Burning Bridges
Spinal Tap may have been based on a fictitious band, but Jeff Suwak and Ed Pearce of Songfacts have created a list of real bands that they think are most like Spinal Tap. What follows is their criteria and then which bands made their Top Ten list.
First, the criteria:
1) Offensive Album Covers: Album covers pulled or banned because of controversial or offensive imagery.
2) Internal Strife: Core members went from best of friends to worst of enemies… and sometimes back.
3) Cancelled Concerts: Had shows cancelled by major cities.
4) Armadillos in Trousers: Spinal Tap’s audience predominately consisted of teenage boys. This is, of course, almost inexplicable, considering the talent, depth, and sexual magnetism of the band.
5) Inexplicable Outfits: Used elaborate, inexplicable, bizarre stage props and/or band outfits.
6) Girlfriend Tension.
7) Big in Japan
8) English: Meaning a band from England
9) Drummer Turnover
10) Stage Mishaps
11) Two Artistic Visionaries: A dynamic duo that were clearly the creative engine.
12) Hippie Phase: Went through a period when they embraced flower power.
And now the Top 10 bands most like Spinal Tap:
10) Nirvana:
*Hall of Fame hug notwithstanding, the tension between Courtney Love and the rest of Nirvana continues to this very day.
*During the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, bassist Krist Novoselic threw his instrument about 25 feet into the air and caught it with his face in front of a live television audience.
9) Led Zeppelin:
*The naked children on the cover of Zeppelin’s 1973 album Houses of the Holy caused enough controversy that a new version with the children’s butts airbrushed out was put on shelves. The design was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End.
*The armadillo bulge in Robert Plant’s pants was as much a part of the Led Zeppelin concert experience as the smell of reefer and the sound of John Bonham’s gong.
*Rising from the ashes of The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin comprised Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones who both hailed from the London suburbs, and Robert Plant and John Bonham who both were born and bred in the Birmingham area.
8) Mötley Crüe:
*The beef between Vince Neil and Tommy Lee kicked up plenty of dirt. When the band got back together in 2005, Neil explained: “I don’t like Tommy and Tommy doesn’t like me. Tommy doesn’t care to resolve things. I don’t care. I have no feelings about it either way. You go to work and there’s a guy in the office you don’t like. You still do your job.”
*Drummer Tommy Lee has, perhaps, the most notorious armadillo in rock history.
*At a 2005 concert in Casper, Wyoming, Tommy Lee was burned by pyrotechnics as he hung suspended from a wire above the stage.
7) Guns N’ Roses:
*The original cover for the band’s 1987 Appetite for Destruction album, a classic of the genre, courted controversy with cover artwork showing what appeared to be a robot rapist standing over a recent victim.
*Guns N’ Roses was torn apart by the egos and differing styles of its two key members. In discussing he band’s breakup, Axl Rose stated, “It was really a fight with me and Slash. Izzy [Stradlin] was doing the same thing, but the fight with me and Slash started the day I met him. He came in, popped my tape out and put his in and wanted me in his band. And I didn’t want to join his band. We’ve had that war since Day 1.”
*Steven Adler and Matt Sorum served during the golden age of GnR, but they have had four other drummers, bringing their total to six.
*One night in 1992 in Montreal, co-headliner Metallica took the stage before Guns N’ Roses. During that performance, James Hetfield was injured by pyrotechnics and had to end the band’s set, aggravating an apparently edgy crowd. Guns N’ Roses then took two hours to start playing. When they finally took the stage, they discovered that the sound equipment was improperly set up so that they couldn’t hear themselves. This, along with Axl’s sore throat, prompted them to cut the set short. The combination of both headlining bands failing to deliver sent the crowd into a riot – as in, a literal riot.
6) Gwar:
*Gwar doesn’t just have inexplicably bizarre and elaborate stage props; it could actually be argued that the entire band is an inexplicable, bizarre, and elaborate stage prop. They have even been known to occasionally decapitate a walking effigy of Prime Minister Tony Abbot. The headless figure spewed a stream of blood all over the audience. As brilliant as the sight is, it’s pretty much par for Gwar’s course.
*Gwar is so big in Japan that they even have a separate Japanese website, a fact that surprises no one. Gwar and Japanese pop culture are pretty much made for each other.
*Gwar has had six drummers, including Hans Sphincter, Hans Orifice, Nippleus Erectus and Lee Beato.
*Gwar resulted from vocalist and bassist Dave Brockie meeting movie-maker Hunter Jackson. The two visionaries came up with the concept for Gwar, and the rest is history.
5) Judas Priest:
*Their stage props have seen the whole spectrum of inexplicability. From a gigantic, monstrous head looking over the crowd to the bearded face of a man with torn-out eyes impressed upon an image of outer space, they’ve got this category nice and cinched up. Lead singer Rob Halford also wore for a time a leather jacket bristling with spikes so long and sharp that they nearly took out Steven Tyler’s eye when the two of them moved in for a photo op.
*Judas Priest hails from the English midland city of Birmingham.
*Priest has cycled through eight stickmen, including six in the ’70s. None fell victim to spontaneous combustion, however.
*Rob Halford regularly rode a motorcycle onto the stage for Judas Priest sets. In 1990, things went wrong when a misplaced stage prop knocked him off the bike, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
4) Scorpions:
*The band’s 1976 Virgin Killer album featured a nude 10-year-old girl. It was soon pulled from shelves and replaced with a different cover in some countries. The cover actually resurfaced in controversy in 2008, when the British Internet Watch Foundation tried to have its image removed from Wikipedia.
*The Scorpions’ 12 drummers earns the band TWO points for that category. Twelve drummers is just incredible.
*No other band on this list fits the “Big in Japan” qualification as well as the Scorpions. Their initial, modest sales success in Europe and the US was matched only by their inversely huge success in Japan, culminating in a 1978 tour of the country and the resulting, semi-legendary Tokyo Tapes album that followed.
3) Black Sabbath:
*Guitarist Tony Iommi fired Ozzy Osbourne from the band because of the lead singer’s alcoholism, which was pretty impressive considering the band as a whole freely admits to extreme consumption during that period of their tenure. Ozzy reunited with the band in 1978 and has been playing with them ever since in an off-and-on fashion.
*Black Sabbath had an incident with inexplicable stage props that was eerily identical to one of Spinal Tap’s own, and led to yet another prominent stage mishap. It occurred on their 1983 Born Again tour after Geezer Butler suggested (unironically) a life-size Stonehenge for their stage set. To tie in with the album cover (a demonic, red baby), a little person was also part of the act. Ian Gillan explained in a 1994 Mojo magazine interview:
We hear this horrendous screaming sound – they’ve recorded a baby’s scream and flanged it – and suddenly; we see this dwarf crawling across the top of Stonehenge, then he stands up as the baby’s scream fades away and falls backwards off this 30-foot fiberglass replica of Stonehenge onto a big pile of mattresses. Then dong, dong — bells start toiling and all the roadies come across the front of the stage in monk’s cowls, at which point War Pigs starts up. By now we can see the kids are either in stitches or wincing in horror.
*With Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and half of Zeppelin, Birmingham can lay claim as the birthplace of heavy metal music and consequently is the motherland of Spinal Tap moments. Stonehenge fails are only part of its rich history, as the city was at the forefront of worldwide developments in science, technology and economic organization, producing a series of innovations that laid many of the foundations of modern industrial society.
*The band has had seven drummers over their lifespan, including some big names: Eric Singer (Kiss), Cozy Powell (Rainbow) and Terry Chimes (The Clash).
2) Saxon:
*Saxon was a “must” for this list. Harry Shearer, probably best known (except among his family and friends, we hope) for his role as Spinal Tap bass player Derek Smalls, traveled with Saxon as research for the film. For this reason, they get a special bonus here for providing direct research material for the film.
*They have had their fair share of inexplicable and strange stage attire. In the official Rock the Nations video, lead singer Biff Byford is wearing what can only be described as a futuristic version of a Redcoat’s uniform, offset by skintight silver pants and knee-high black boots.
*Saxon was quite big in Japan, where their single “Motorcycle Man” charted for six months.
*Saxon were formed in the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley in 1976. A former industrial town centered on coal mining and glassmaking, Barnsley has a tradition of brass bands, originally created as social clubs for its mining communities. Many factories also organized employees’ bands during Barnsley’s industrial peak. An employee would work at a job in the factory and then “double in brass” in the company band.
*Since 1976, Saxon has had six drummers.
1) The Beatles:
They had one of the most infamous banned album covers of all time with the “Butcher” cover of 1966’s Yesterday and Today, which featured a photo of the band covered in doll parts and raw meat. The cover was quickly pulled, and today copies of it can earn collectors several pretty pennies.
*When Brian Epstein died in 1967, The Beatles lost not just their manager, but also their peacemaker. Forced to make business decisions, Paul McCartney and John Lennon found themselves increasingly at odds, especially when it came to running their company, Apple Records. Tony Bramwell, an Apple employee, said it was “like being in the middle of a gigantic divorce.”
*In 1966, the city of Memphis canceled a Beatles concert in reaction to Lennon declaring that the band was “bigger than Jesus.”
*The band suffered girlfriend tensions, to say the least. History has shown her to be a staunch steward of John Lennon’s legacy and a woman of considerable talent, but Yoko Ono was so vilified at the time that many Beatles fans blamed her for the group’s breakup. She unfairly became the archetype of the meddling girlfriend who poisons the well.
*Formed in the northwest English city of Liverpool as the Blackjacks in 1957, John Lennon’s skittle group became the Quarrymen, Johnny and the Moondogs, the Silver Beatles and finally the Beatles.
*Lennon and McCartney were one of the most effective, powerful songwriting duos ever, true musical visionaries whose innovations had the whole of the rock world trying to catch up.
*John Lennon might have waited until after leaving the Beatles to go full hippie, but the band as a whole had more than its share of forays into flower-child culture. “All You Need is Love” was a veritable anthem of the movement. The band members even traveled to India to meditate with the Maharishi (an experience which inspired numerous Beatles songs, including “Sexy Sadie.”
Honorable mention:
Metallica:
*They earn this honor for their group therapy sessions, which involved exercises like trust falls and scrapbooking. Not only did they participate in these sessions, they documented them in their movie Some Kind Of Monster.
So, what did you think of their list and which bands do you think they omitted? Let us know in the comments section.
On August 2nd, 1986 Cinderella released their debut album, Night Songs. Tom Keifer remembers when he shot the cover with photographer Mark Weiss. As Tom recalls, “It was shot in the historic district of Philadelphia … but the most interesting thing that I remember about that shoot was that the album was called Night Songs and Mark scheduled the shoot for day time.. and I kept saying to him..that’s not going to look right and he said I shoot day for night and I didn’t know what the f–k that meant…and I just trusted him because I kind of liked this guy right off the bat.. I thought he was a straight-up cat. And sure enough, when we got the pictures back it looked like it was nighttime.. So Mark Weiss is a f–king genius.”
Tom talks about the rock scene growing up as a young kid– and first time he saw the Beatles and then The Monkees on TV and then… “I started hearing a different sound than the Beatles or the Monkees… and it was like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith and once I heard that… and the Rolling Stones…you know I remember hearing Jumpin’ Jack Flash and Brown Sugar…and from that point on all through like my high school years that’s all I wanted to do.”
He remembers his start in the South Jersey rock scene–“It was all cover clubs.. there was a cover club on every corner because the drinking age was 18 so they were packed nightly. I’d get tired of that scene and I started to wonder why Led Zeppelin and the Stones and Rod Stewart got to make records and obviously it’s because they had their own songs. That’s when I wanted to get out of the club scene and the cover scene and started writing songs…and that’s what I did for a number of years and eventually it lead to putting Cinderella together.”
Tom talks about MTV and the image of Rock & Roll– “You know I grew up on the music of the late 60s and the 70s and you’re talking Janis Joplin and Rod Stewart and Bad Company, Free and Joe Walsh and the James Gang… and I could go on and on …from the Eagles to Fleetwood Mac to Heart to the Rolling Stones…it was an incredibly creative time for music and not only did those artists influence you in the musical way, but they influenced you image wise. You wanted to be like them so you started to emulate them…and you know all my heroes were pretty flashy… I loved Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They were cool and had a touch of glam vibe to them… and Janis Joplin did, Aerosmith did.. so you learned in the same way in your fashion sense as you did in your music sense…and I think when Cinderella came around and we were in the part of the decade in the 80s where so much importance was placed on the visual because of MTV. I think the over the top look that developed in the 80s was as a result of us taking our heroes to a whole other f–kin’ level. The 80s was all about excess and I think that’s what it was about. And I think that most of my buddies from the other bands would tell you the same thing. It came from that glam, hard rock…you know, imagery of the 60s and the 70s and trying to take it somewhere new because all of a sudden there was this new visual thing called MTV where it was as much about the visual as it was about the music. Everything in the 80s was f–king over the top! And it was cool.. It was a great decade.”
Watch Keifer’s interview below.
Tom Keifer released his solo album, The Way Life Goes on April 30th, 2013.
