Q101 The Alternative
Q101 (formerly on Chicago radio @ 101.1 FM) The Alternative - Chicago's New Rock Alternative - Everything Alternative - Chicago's Alternative - Gen X - Generation X
Almost a decade before he picked up the guitar, a six-year-old Kirk Hammett started collecting horror memorabilia, inspired by a love of old zombie flicks. Fans will have an opportunity to peek inside his ghoulish trove with Too Much Horror Business: The Kirk Hammett Collection, the rocker’s new coffee-table book featuring over 300 images of his prized possessions.
Hammett is keeping busy with the new book and his very own toyline – KVH, based on his spooky alterego, Kirk Von Hammett. In his spare time, he plays in a band named Metallica. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Kirk was asked about Metallica’s influence on Kurt Cobain:
Is it true that the album cut “Whiplash” was Kurt Cobain’s favorite Metallica song?
Absolutely. He told me that himself. He came to one of our shows in Seattle, on the Black Album tour. I remember at one point, we were playing “Whiplash,” and he looked at me and kept punching the air with his fist, and gave me a big thumbs-up sign. I was like, “Cool. Kurt, I know you love this song. This one’s for you!” I knew Kurt kind of well, and I hung out with him quite a bit. He was a pretty big Metallica fan – I was surprised at how much of a Metallica fan he was. He loved Ride the Lightning. He loved that album.”
READ MORE
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/q-a-metallicas-kirk-hammett-on-horror-fans-hanging-with-kurt-cobain-20121001
November 13, 2012. Save the date for an auditory treat from Soundgarden, their first studio release since 1996.
The band recently posted a sparse video montage with the news online, revealing the new album will be titled “King Animal.”
Splitting apart after their last album 16 years ago, Soundgarden reunited in 2010 and recorded a single for “The Avengers” soundtrack.
Guitarist Kim Thayil told Rolling Stone: “It re-establishes that we still rock, we’re still heavy, and we’re still a little weird.”
He adds that they continue to explore the boundaries of hard rock, especially on “A Thousand Days Before,” which he called “a little Indian thing and some chicken-pickin.’ We call it ‘country and eastern.’”
http://www.nme.com/news/soundgarden/65545
“Walter White does make the cleanest rock around,” Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston jokes at the shoot for their Rolling Stone cover. “So I guess that’s as close to a rock star as Walter White will come.”
But Cranston and co-star Aaron Paul, who met up with Rolling Stone (and some baby lambs) in Santa Clarita, California, one Saturday morning for the shoot, felt very rock-star being on the cover of the mag. In fact, it prompted Cranston to break into song as you can see at the beginning of the clip.
Being on the cover of Rolling Stone isn’t the only rock-god treatment they get, as Cranston tells us. He recounted one letter from a fan in Boston who wanted to sleep with Paul while Cranston was there. She left her number, photo, everything. “So we did that,” Cranston joked.
VIEW THE PHOTO SHOOT HERE and their running commentary regarding their exuberant fan.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/inside-rolling-stones-breaking-bad-cover-shoot-with-bryan-cranston-aaron-paul-20120801
Top 50 lists always get me thinking. About what? How wrong they usually are. Rolling Stone has compiled a list of what they consider to be the top 50 greatest albums of all time by females. Once again, I got to thinking. And analyzing.
This isn’t just a list of awesome albums by awesome ladies of rock. It’s more of a compilation of albums from every genre in which a female has performed. The albums featured in Rolling Stone include hip hop, blues, country, and soul.
Maybe we should compile our OWN list of albums that rock, Q101 style. I will add Tegan and Sarah, No Doubt, Garbage, 10,000 Maniacs, the B-52s, and Skillet. Are there that few female performers who really rock? Maybe the list should should only be the top 25. Who would YOU add?
READ IT
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/women-who-rock-the-50-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120622/aretha-franklin-i-never-loved-a-man-the-way-i-love-you-19691231
In a way, Comedy Bang! Bang!, the new IFC show created and hosted by comedian Scott Aukerman began back around 2002 when the former Mr. Show writer and his partner-in-comedy B.J. Porter started Comedy Death Ray, a weekly standup show at Los Angeles’ M Bar.
It became a staple of the alternative comedy scene and paved the way to the 2009 debut of Comedy Death Ray Radio on L.A.’s Indie 103.3, which then morphed into to the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast – the spirited, surreal, completely improvised flagship show on the Earwolf Network (which Aukerman co-founded in 2010 with Jeff Ulrich).
On the subsequent TV show, Aukerman, alongside one-man-band leader Reggie Watts, navigates the worlds of podcasting, improv, variety, sketch comedy, and late night talk to create an undeniably unique and wholly hysterical show. In a recent chat, Aukerman talked with Rolling Stone about bringing CBB from podcast to TV, the joys of working with friends, and why this is the show he’s always wanted to make.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/scott-aukerman-brings-his-hit-podcast-comedy-bang-bang-to-the-small-screen-20120608#ixzz1xPQmsRUt
By the time I heard about Joss Whedon, the entire series of Firefly was in my house on DVD. Bored one day, I popped it in the player. I was sold. Firefly, and then Serenity, captured my attention and left me aching for more escapades of Mal Reynolds and the crew. To my utter dismay, there was only one season.
Joss Whedon has emerged slowly over the past 15 years as one of the great auteurs of geek culture, building an intense following for his work as the creator of cult television series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse and for his writing for comic books like the official Buffy the Vampire Slayer series for Dark Horse and Astonishing X-Men for Marvel Comics. 2012 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year for Whedon’s career – he wrote and directed the surefire blockbuster The Avengers, co-wrote the buzzy horror/comedy The Cabin in the Woods and directed a forthcoming indie film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Matthew Perpetua of Rolling Stone has a great photo list of the works by Joss Whedon. The good, the not so good, and the fantastic.
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/photos/from-buffy-to-the-avengers-joss-whedons-best-and-worst-projects-20120502
In an article by Steve Appleford of Rolling Stone Magazine, Eric Erlandson talks about “Letters to Kurt”, a prose-poem memoir to Kurt Cobain.
Nearly two decades after the 1994 suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Erlandson looks just as he did at the height of grunge: tall, thin, stringy blond hair to his shoulders. Letters to Kurt is his accounting of that turbulent time, looking back with rage and affection for an era of great creative successes and a crushing wave of heroin and death.
“We were in the middle of that creative energy that was happening,” Erlandson remembers. But at the same time, he tells Rolling Stone, “I was in the abyss. I quite literally had one foot in, one foot out. The one foot out was my anchor, which is my Buddhism. But sometimes I’d feel too clean and I’d want to get dirty. . . . There’s different forms of suicide. When you’re playing around with drugs, it’s a pretty clear suicide death wish.”
He saw the self-destruction and depression up close, not just of Cobain but also in Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died two months after the Nirvana leader. She was Erlandson’s ex-girlfriend and he was the last person to see her before her heroin overdose soon after the release of Hole’s Live Through This. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/eric-erlandson-talks-about-letters-to-kurt-20120408#ixzz1tQyGFato
Over 10 years and seven albums, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have turned their basement blues project into one of America’s mightiest bands. Weaned on Stax 45s and Wu-Tang loops, the Black Keys smeared the lines between blues, rock, R&B and soul, with Auerbach’s horny Howlin Wolf yowl bouncing off garage-y slashing and nasty body-rocking grooves. Like that other guitar and drums duo from the Rust Belt, the Akron, Ohio, guys brought raw, riffed-out power back to pop’s lexicon. On 2010′s Brothers, they found a perfect balance between juke-joint formalism and modern bangzoom. The result was a few Grammys and so many TV ad placements, The Colbert Report did a sketch about it.
El Camino is the Keys’ grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair. It’s an attempt at staying true to the spirit of that piece-of-shit minivan on the album cover – similar to their first touring vehicle – while reimagining it as a pimpmobile.
This is the Black Keys’ third meeting – following 2008′s Attack & Release and one track on Brothers – with Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton. Here, the band essentially becomes a trio, with Burton as co-producer/co-writer throughout. His brilliance, as the planet heard on Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, is blowing details of classic pop up to Jumbotron scale. Listen to the keyboard part that kicks in the door of El Camino‘s “Gold on the Ceiling”: a serrated organ growl backed up with a SWAT team of hand claps. It’s Sixties bubblegum garage pop writ large, with T. Rex swagger and a guitar freakout that perfectly mirrors the lyrics, a paranoid rant that makes you shiver while you shimmy.
The single “Lonely Boy” works the same way, launched on a gnarly, looped guitar riff whose last note slides down like a turntable that someone keeps stopping. Then a sugar-crusted keyboard comes in, along with what sounds like a boy-girl chorus, changing the swampy chug into a seductive singalong.
The Keys cited the Clash as an influence for El Camino, and that influence is evident in the increased zip of the grooves, and in the group hug between roots music and rock spectacle: See “Hell of a Season,” whose choppy guitar chords and relentless beat twists into a dubby, uptight reggae pulse. Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/el-camino-20111206#ixzz1hPrthLLq
Amidst all the excitement over the Cameron Crowe-directed documentary and 20th anniversary of their debut album Ten, Pearl Jam is still hard at work on new material.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Jeff Ament said that the band is “at least at the halfway point” on their new album. The new record will be the group’s second on their own Monkeywrench Records and their second in returning to work with Brendan O’Brien as producer.
In speaking of the new record, Ament commented that “The first handful of songs we had are a great, great start. It’s been really important for us that in the middle of all this, we got together and recorded a bunch of songs. It sort of gave us a breath to go, ‘Okay, we can go back and get ready for the show and book and movie and all that stuff.’”
The band hopes to wrap up the record early next year. This will be Pearl Jam’s 10th studio album and the follow up to their well-received 2009 record, Backspacer.
Source: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/09/pearl-jam-halfway-through-new-album.html
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