In the wake of a series of concert-postponing medical issues, Elton John and Billy Joel have finalized their upcoming Face 2 Face concert calendar. The co-headliners' late fall tour leg, minus one cancelled performance, has been rescheduled for early next year.
The new routing closely follows the original schedule, both in terms of location and date. The opening shows in Seattle, WA, are now booked for February 3 and 6 at KeyArena, while the tour leg's closing date is now March 11 at Times Union Center in Albany, NY.
The pair's November 28 concert at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, AR, is the only concert that has been stricken from the schedule completely. According to an initial announcement, scheduling conflicts prevented a new performance date for the Little Rock audience, leading to the concert's cancellation.
This is the second time John and Joel have been forced to reschedule their concerts in Buffalo and Albany. The shows were originally booked for the musicians' July tour leg, but were postponed until early December following reports that Joel was ill.
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Illness is also the cause of the latest round of concert delays for the rock pianists. The first four concerts on the November tour leg were postponed when John was briefly hospitalized with a serious case of the flu and an infection.
But once the "Rocket Man" was on the mend, his tour partner was sidelined by his own health issues. Unspecified "medical reasons" have kept Joel off the road and forced the musicians to reschedule the remaining dates on their late-year trek.
Tickets for all original performance dates will be honored at the rescheduled concerts.
Face 2 Face Tour itinerary:
(Dates are subject to change.)
February 3, 6 Seattle, WA KeyArena
February 10 Portland, OR Rose Garden Arena
February 13 Oakland, CA Oracle Arena
February 16 San Jose, CA HP Pavilion
February 19 Salt Lake City, UT EnergySolutions Arena
February 22 Denver, CO Pepsi Center
February 25 Oklahoma City, OK Ford Center
February 27 Kansas City, MO Sprint Center
March 9 Buffalo, NY HSBC Arena
March 11 Albany, NY Times Union Center
People hoping to score tickets for U2's Twin Cities concert next summer most likely still haven't found what they're looking for.
Tickets for the concert at TCF Bank Stadium went on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday. Within minutes, only single seats were available at the websites of the merged ticket brokers Live Nation and Ticketmaster. It was sold out within two hours.
Dozens of U2 fans vented their frustrations on the Star Tribune's website, most often angry at commercial ticket brokers who routinely scoop up large numbers of tickets and resell them at a premium.
They railed about the 2007 state law that legalized ticket scalping in Minnesota, saying it keeps affordable tickets out of the hands of individual buyers.
Last year, state officials tried to come to music fans' aid by creating the "Hannah Montana" law that makes it illegal to use software that allows buyers to jump to the front of the online queue to buy up huge blocks of tickets.
Although the websites operated by Ticketmaster and Live Nation employ security measures intended to block ticket-buying robots known as "bots," it's not clear how effective they were Saturday.
Tickets ranged in price from $250 to $95, $55 and $30, plus fees.
Additional tickets were set aside by the University of Minnesota in pre-sale bundles for students and season ticket-holders to all Gophers teams.
The new stadium holds about 50,000 people for football games, and thousands more will be on the field for the June 27 concert.
The Hannah Montana law was inspired by her 2007 concert at Target Center that almost instantaneously sold out; at the same time, online resellers were offering tickets for $1,000 or more.
It was followed up this year with the "Bruce Springsteen law" that makes it a misdemeanor for a ticket seller to divert tickets from the initial public sale to a secondary seller, unless authorized by the event or venue.
As Tom Petty prepares to release a career-spanning anthology next week, an attempt to determine where he falls in the music pantheon.
Tom Petty goes to work in a Van Nuys warehouse next to an auto shop and an upholsterer. His band the Heartbreakers rehearses there, still looking for ways to improve after more than 30 years together. On paper, Mr. Petty rivals other acts who have lasted for decades, such as Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young. He's sold some 60 million albums, is ubiquitous on classic rock stations and has collaborated with music legends from Bob Dylan to George Harrison. Last year, he played the Super Bowl and much of the nation knew every chorus.
But Mr. Petty is keenly aware that for some people, that's just not good enough.
"I don't know that anyone's out there waving the banner for us being the best rock and roll band there is," the singer says. "But we might be."
Where does Tom Petty fit in the rock pantheon? Musicians from Ike Turner to Aerosmith have been the subject of such debate, which rock fans conduct as if they're carving Mount Rushmores, in barroom arguments, Internet flame wars and even a Hall of Fame in Cleveland. But Mr. Petty is especially emblematic of the blurred—and highly subjective—line between skilled entertainer and timeless rock icon.
Mr. Petty's own take? While other bands are paid more lip service, he says, "we can really kick their ass, you know?"
Lately he's been examining the evidence. He spent more than a year combing the Heartbreakers' archive of concert recordings to compile his "dream gig." Exactly 169 takes of "American Girl" later, the band's "Live Anthology" box set will be released next week. Mr. Petty has looked back in other ways as he approaches his 60th birthday next year. In 2007 he reassembled Mudcrutch, the band that went belly up before the Heartbreakers formed in 1976. With Warner Bros., the singer also commissioned a retrospective film, resulting in a four-hour documentary that last year won a Grammy.
In Mr. Petty's legacy, there's much fodder for discussion.
On one hand, the laconic Florida native is a highly disciplined songsmith whose run of anthems spanned three decades, from "Breakdown" and "American Girl" in the late 1970s, to "Learning to Fly" and "Mary Jane's Last Dance" in the early 1990s. On the other hand, his commercial success was sniffed at by some critics, especially those enthralled with another earthy rocker who emerged a bit earlier: Springsteen. Mr. Petty's loyalty to the straight-ahead sound of his idols of the 1950s—Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis and other early rockers—may have deterred him from exploring experimental (and potentially fruitful) artistic territory.
"History smiles on [Iggy Pop and] the Stooges, the Ramones, Elvis Costello"—edgy acts of Mr. Petty's generation who reset the boundaries of rock, says Robert Hilburn, a veteran critic and author of the recent book "Corn Flakes With John Lennon." By contrast, the Heartbreakers first two albums "were not trailblazing in any way." Mr. Hilburn says Mr. Petty reached his peak on later albums, and ranks "Damn the Torpedoes" (1979) and "Southern Accents" (1985) among the era's strongest, but at the time most critics were too busy "genuflecting over Springsteen."
Over the course of his career, Mr. Petty has racked up at least 26 Top-10 singles, many of which still serve as the default mode of classic rock stations. Still, his knack for radio-friendly hooks may have cost him points in the long run.
"It's an inverse snobbery," says filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who directed "Runnin' Down a Dream," the recent Heartbreakers documentary. He adds, "Tom has had so many pop hits. For some reason in America that's considered not quite chic. Too many people like him."
Mr. Petty's not complaining. Like most performers, he avoids the "over-intellectualizing" of rock, the bandying of stats and rankings. But he's adamant about the respect he feels is owed to certain artists, including those in his own band, such as longtime lead guitarist Mike Campbell.
In the band's warehouse rehearsal space in Van Nuys, over the hills from Mr. Petty's home in Malibu, racks of guitars are sorted by make and model. The Heartbreakers call it their clubhouse. Sitting at a table, Mr. Petty drinks coffee and smokes Shepheard's Hotel cigarettes from Germany. He wears a vest over a striped Western shirt.
The singer is at ease discussing his career trajectory. It was around the Heartbreakers' 20th year in music that he noticed that fans and critics were more eager to talk about his old songs than his newest ones, and the past became more marketable than the future. While that did represent "a red wagon you have to drag around," he says, he also took it as the hallmark of a substantial career, one he describes with pride and bemused awe. Still, he believes that if he's underrated, it's partly because of his distaste for self-promotion.
"We were never really Boy Scouts, you know. My vision of a rock and roll band wasn't one that cuddled up to politicians, or went down the red carpet. That kind of thing you see so much of today. I felt like once that stuff starts happening your audience doesn't know whether to trust you or not."
This avoidance of the (offstage) spotlight might seem surprising for a singer whose face was one of the most familiar on MTV. His sly music videos, including the Alice In Wonderland-inspired clip for 1985's "Don't Come Around Here No More," helped the network break into the mainstream, and remained a staple of its programming into the 1990s when "we were so old it was silly." In retrospect, he says, making videos "was just about adapting and surviving."
It's one of Mr. Petty's many apparent contradictions. He was a darling of rock radio, but he has famously tangled with the industry. In 1979 he fought a legal battle with MCA to get out of his record contract, and a couple of years later he successfully opposed a price hike for his new album to $9.98, a then-unprecedented high. In that way, he's an industry outsider who has written some of the most inclusive songs in rock.
"He has more of an everyman quality than a lot of icons do. And that makes a music nerd like me think I could have a beer with him without feeling like I'm talking to some kind of deity," says television producer Bill Lawrence. His homage: In the ABC sitcom he co-created, "Cougar Town," about a fortysomething woman's misadventures in dating young men, every episode is named after a Petty song.
Mr. Petty set himself apart in other ways. While Dylan and the Stones have licensed their music to advertisers, Mr. Petty says, what for? "We don't really need the dough that bad." The singer has sought keep his concert tickets affordable. And unlike, say, Mr. Costello, who has collaborated with string quartets, Mr. Petty says he's satisfied with being a workaday auteur: "To write a good song is enough. That was the loftiest ambition I had: to write a song that would endure."
One secret to Mr. Petty's long populist streak: women. Mr. Petty has written from a female perspective on a surprising number of songs, ranging from "American Girl" to the more recent "Orphan of the Storm." Howard Kramer, curatorial director at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, says, "Every time I go to one of his shows, I marvel that his audience is one of the most diverse in rock and roll, in terms of gender and age. And that can't be said of most of his competitors."
What at first sounded like drudgery, Mr. Petty says, digging through 30 years of concert recordings for the coming "Live Anthology," turned into an "adventure." Engineer Ryan Ulyate made the first pass through the recordings in the Heartbreakers' vault, including some old analog tapes that first needed to be baked in an oven before playing to prevent disintegration. He assembled an iTunes library of some 3,500 songs, then pulled out hundreds of potential highlight tracks for Messrs. Campbell and Petty to assess. "It's amazing how the best take really shines compared to everything else," the singer says.
While the recordings prompt memory flashes from each era, Mr. Petty says, it's tough for him to recall specific concerts. One, however, stands out as perhaps "the worst gig" his band ever played, which somehow yielded the standout version of "I Won't Back Down." In 2007, at a benefit concert for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Heartbreakers performed beneath the museum's giant blue whale. The posh audience ignored the band as they performed an acoustic set, capped with the defiant song which (to Mr. Petty's chagrin) has become a perennial fight song for campaigning politicians. Mr. Petty resented the indifference of the crowd of "billionaire kinds of people, many of whom you'd know," he recalls, acknowledging that this might have fired up the band. "At least I got a good track out of it," he says
By request, Mr. Petty pulled out noteworthy instruments as he ambled about the clubhouse. One, a dark brown acoustic bass guitar, he played during the sessions for Johnny Cash's 1996 album "Unchained." By the drum set was the candy-colored Rickenbacker he held on the "Damn the Torpedoes" cover. Strumming a Dove model Gibson, he showed how its slender neck allowed him to play for hours without tiring his hand. He's owned the guitar since he was 18 years old, and wrote almost all his biggest hits on it.
In his rehearsal space, Mr. Petty is surrounded by music legends. The walls are decorated with dozens of neatly clipped photos, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix to 1940s gospel-rocker Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Mr. Petty is a believer in the you-either-have-it-or-you-don't quality of music's enduring stars. On his radio show, "Tom Petty's Buried Treasure," now in its fifth year on Sirius XM Radio, he mixes Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo and Jerry Lee Lewis with Steve Miller, Joe Cocker and Jakob Dylan's Wallflowers. On air, Mr. Petty goofs off with skits about a fictional petting zoo and sings the praises of lesser-known names, such as 82-year-old piano swinger Mose Allison. "I've never met him but I so admire his music. There's a purity," Mr. Petty says. "God, I'd love to attain that. It's hard to get it with pop music, so I've kind of turned my back on that."
As if to defy the critics, the Heartbreakers are at work on an album which is a departure for them, pursuing a style Mr. Petty says he probably didn't have the "maturity" to pull off in previous years. He describes it as a blues-based sound, with lots of open spaces and grooves inspired by those of J.J. Cale and Booker T. & the MGs. Fueling his excitement about the new material, the acknowledgment that he's no longer writing for radio. "Whether you wanted to admit it or not, that was always a factor," he says. "Letting that go, it's very freeing."
IF you're a hardcore Metallica fan from way back in the day, then you've been anticipating this album like no other. You've loved them since the classic days of Kill 'em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, ...and Justice for All. Then you stuck with the band through good -- but not great -- albums, and finally watched them disintegrating in front of your eyes on 'Some Kind of Monster'. The 2004 documentary gave us a long intimate look at the agonizing process the band went through to make one tortured album: St. Anger. But the overriding theme of the film turned out to be: is Metallica going to last until the end of the movie?
Well, James made it through rehab and counseling, Lars sold some paintings, a new bass player arrived in the monstrous form of Rob Trujillo, and Kirk remained centered and well-adjusted, which appears to be his emotional role in the group.
Death Magnetic represents their first real creative output since that time, and it is evident upon the first listen: this album is a return to form -- and then some.
Metallica sound confident enough here to allude to their own musical past - teasing with old licks in new ways, in new contexts - not tired, trite ways - more like Ownership - they can take command and revel in this material knowing NO one else makes music like this. No One. Shades of former tracks meld with the new in a completely satisfying way for the longtime Metallica listener.
On the surface, Death Magnetic is a return to a classic Metallica album structure - pirmarily the structure of the 3 albums forming the core of their greatest output -- Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, ...and Justice for All.
True to this structure, the album begins with a clean, brooding, riff in E minor, before breaking into the introductory pummeling of 'That Was Just Your Life'. Think: 'Fight Fire With Fire', 'Battery', and 'Blackened'.
In overall sound and composition -- Death Magnetic is most like ...And Justice for All. Compositions are full of intricate twisting complex parts, meters, with sudden changes lurching into new riffs and rhythm structures - some that bring themselves back around again in a track, and some that simply come, go, and are gone. The sound is very much like AJFA -- especially the percussion.
Death Magnetic feels like a new creative peak for Metallica with all of their creative freedom regained!
Hetfield impresses throughout with strength and range of voice and creativity of line. Lyrics are a highlight of Death Magnetic:
"I'll spatter color on this gray!" is the wounded cry from 'The Day That Never Comes' -- the first video release from DM. The track is remarkably similar in form to 'One' without really copying any of that songs musical material. The similarity lies more in shades, shadows and structure: The Day's intro ends with a figure nearly identical to the same moment in 'Fade to Black' - just before resolving into the arpeggiated chord progression of the verses. As in 'One' we have essentially a ballad, featuring a unique, stuttering drum pattern. After a few verses / choruses, we shift into a mid-tempo grind before James declares, "Love is a four-letter word." And finally, the track features a blistering finish with a marching band from Hell riff.
A quick note about guitar solos -- Death Magnetic has tons of great ones! If you recall, James and Lars made the ridiculous decision to have no 'old school' guitar solos on St. Anger -- thereby silencing an amazing musician in Kirk Hammet. Apparently, they have regained their senses and re-granted Kirk a lisence to TEAR.
And.... 3 cheers for Lars for being the most musical of rock drummers. Not content to simply be a speedy metronome, Lars always creates his own rhythmic compositions.
On Death Magnetic, Metallica returns in greatness and achieves something beyond my wildest hope - they finally prove again that they are the masters of a music they invented and perfected.
AND.... the boys are on Tour AGAIN!! If you have never seen Metallica Live in Concert, then you have missed an earth-shattering event. If you have - then you want to again, and again, and again. Don't miss out while they are at the peak of their form!
