ADAM LAMBERT & QUEEN HIT THE ROAD FOR SUMMER
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THE GLORIOUS CORNER
Story By: G. H. HARDING
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| Adam Lambert |
QUEEN ADAM --- Queen and Adam Lambert are getting ready to hit the road for a summer tour that kicks off tomorrow, June 19th in Chicago, but first they made a stop at the iHeartRadio Theater in Los Angeles Monday night to give fans a preview of what promises to be an epic tour.
The rock icons and American Idol alum brought down the house with favorites like "We Will Rock You," "Under Pressure" and "We Are The Champions," but it was their live rendition of Freddie Mercury's obscure solo song, "Love Kills," that got people talking. It was the first time Queen has ever performed the track, which was the first song Mercury recorded as a solo artist (but never performed live). The song was originally a solo recording produced by Giorgio Moroder for the soundtrack to the 1984 re-release of the 1927 film Metropolis. "We're going to do it in our own way,” Lambert told the crowd, "minus the disco."
Nikki Sixx hosted the event, which was broadcast on Clear Channel radio stations across the country as well as streamed live on Yahoo Screen. At the end of the show, Sixx told the audience, "I don't know about you, but I could have heard 15 more songs."
Lambert is still committed to his solo career though he refuses to label the Queen tour a side project. He told Rolling Stone, “This is a side-by-side project; I do a lot of different things. Earlier this year I did a stint on Glee. I was in Sweden this last month working on solo material and I’m actually going back soon to finish up.”
The tour hits the East Coast later this week.
STONE BLEEDS COUNTRY --- From Gus Wenner at Rolling Stone, “In the beginning, the music all blurred together. It was the sound of America starting to listen to itself – its real self, its vernacular truths, emerging from the crackle of AM radio and vinyl: Hank Williams, trained at the knee of a local bluesman, was playing something close to rock in 1947; Elvis Presley covered Bill Monroe on his first B side; Johnny Cash, as much as anyone, invented rockabilly; the rhythm guitar of Chuck Berry's first hit was pure country. Even the political rifts of the Sixties couldn't keep rock and country apart for long, and the cross-pollination never stopped, from the Eagles' influential hybrid hits to Garth Brooks' Billy Joel fandom to Eric Church's AC/DC power chords.”
“So we're proud to announce the launch of RollingStoneCountry.com, a new website dedicated to the genre – which we're celebrating in a special issue. Rolling Stone has always chronicled country: Cash, Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, Kris Kristofferson, Brooks, Shania Twain and Taylor Swift have all been on our cover. This year, we opened our first Nashville office, and we'll dive deeper than ever in our website's daily coverage and in the pages of the magazine.”
“It's a perfect time for it: Now more than ever, music is all mixed up again. Listen to country radio today, and you'll hear heavy-metal guitar solos, hip-hop rhythms and EDM flourishes alongside pedal steel and twang: Country now encompasses all of American pop, decked out in cowboy boots and filtered through Music Row. Listen to pop radio, in turn, and you might hear Swift, Carrie Underwood, Lady Antebellum or Florida Georgia Line.”
When I visited Nashville earlier this year, it felt like coming home. The first song I ever sang was "Silver Wings," by Merle Haggard. A few years later, my friend Gibby Haynes introduced me to the music of George Jones, Tom T. Hall, Parton and Junior Brown. And all the while, Bob Dylan's records opened a whole world of country influences. For all the excitement and power of computer-generated pop, it's good to know there's still a place on the charts for what Lucinda Williams called "real live bleeding fingers and broken guitar strings."
Rolling Stone has always been about storytelling, as has country music – and we're excited to have a new world of stories to tell. We will treat country the way we treat every other subject we cover: We will take it seriously, we will look beneath the surface, and we will always focus on what brought us here in the first place – the music.”
CLOSING NOTES --- Record-producer Joel Diamond in town for the G. O. D. Awards Friday at the U. N. Diamond is also releasing his new single, from Rebecca Holden and Tony LeBron, “Dreams Come True” – currently the #1 wedding song in the country. Congrats Joel …
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Comcast continues to confound. I had a brief conversation with Ann at Time Warner Cable yesterday, who informed me, when I inquired where TNT HD was on their new somewhat scrambled channel guide, that it no longer existed, as the TNT setting, now was all HD.
I asked her wouldn't it have been a smarter move to have had it listed this way on their guide so as not to confuse. She laughed a bit. Way to go TW Cable!
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