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Very classy of you to dedicate enough space for your obituary about Ike Turner (“Ike Turner: Love him or hate him, the man left his mark on music world” by George Varga, Passages, Dec. 16).

I am glad that he is at rest and in peace.

He deserves credit, if for nothing else just the fact that he was a true pioneer and a hard-working musician.

And many of the stories about his “bad” behavior are probably true, but every story has two sides. Let it be known that I do not condone hitting a woman, or any woman period!

I was a bright-eyed kid from Tijuana, soaking up everything that American music had to offer in 1969. My first gig in the U.S. was at the Blue Bunny in Pico Rivera with Hayward Lee and The Marauders. On weekends, Fridays and Saturdays, this place had an after-hours jam session that started about 2 a.m. and lasted until about 6 a.m. Many times, Ike and Tina Turner showed up for these sessions as well as the Spiral Staircase and Pat and Lolly Vega also known as “Redbone.” And I can attest that Ike was a funky dude with a lot of soul.

Jose Molina Serrano
La Mesa

A special thanks to George Varga and Beth Wood for the kind and professional article on the passing of Ike Turner. It is a shame that he did not receive more tributes, as you mentioned, from the more than 1,500 newspapers worldwide.

Bad dirt can be dug up on almost any entertainer, including Bing Crosby, who has an entire neighborhood named after him in Rancho Santa Fe. As a college student in the ’60s, everyone went to see Ike and Tina Turner in concert at The Red Dog Saloon in Lawrence, Kan. All the greats came there. They were loved and admired by most everyone.

When I take my street rod to car shows, I am usually playing “Rocket 88” full blast when I arrive. It still remains one of the top 10 trademark car songs for car shows nationwide. Living in the North County, I always hoped to run into Ike at the Guitar Center in Escondido, but our paths never crossed again. I raised my daughters on his music as well as the other great black performers of the ’30s through the ’70s. White mothers raising daughters in the ’50s would have had heart attacks if their little “angels” were exposed to these same sounds. His music and all his influence will live on forever.

Artists’ Project Earth, a UK-registered charity, launched its ‘Fragile Planet’ music video featuring Sting and Rhythms del Mundo to raise global awareness on climate change issues.

The world premiere of ‘Fragile Planet’ took place on December 10, 2007 on the Indonesian island of Bali, just hours before former US Vice President Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 in Oslo, Norway. The music video premiered to an international audience of media and delegates attending the UN Conference on Climate Change.

‘Fragile Planet’ fuses musician Sting’s original ‘Fragile’ vocal soundtrack with the Latin sounds of Rhythms del Mundo. These haunting strains are set against poignant images of melting glaciers and forest fires and other visual reminders of the effects of climate change as well as messages that serve as calls-to-action for viewers around the world.

Artists’ Project Earth had produced and directed ‘Fragile Planet’, working closely with Sting and Rhythms del Mundo. This project followed an earlier musical collaboration with both parties to produce the ‘Rhythms del Mundo – Cuba’ CD which also featured other internationally renowned artistes such as Coldplay, U2 and Arctic Monkeys.

“We believe very strongly that the way to get through to people is through the mainstream, by appealing to as wide an audience as possible,” said Mr Kenny Young, director of Artists’ Project Earth.

He added: “Our aim at Artists’ Project Earth is to help create a better world through music and the arts and to support effective projects and awareness-raising initiatives to combat climate change – the most vital environmental issue of our times.”

The ‘Fragile Planet’ project was also sponsored by Global Environment Facility, United Nations Environment Programme, World Bank and Global Initiatives, who jointly hosted the world premiere event with Artists’ Project Earth.

According to Ms Monique Barbut, CEO and Chairperson at the Global Environment Facility, “This video elegantly demonstrates the growing clamour to halt climate change across the globe, where change-makers have been raising their voices in the quest for effective solutions. At the Global Environment Facility, we are pleased to join forces in this compelling reminder that we must all take action – through climate-friendly markets, policy change, meaningful spending to promote sustainable development, and personal responsibility – to tread lightly on this fragile earth.”

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/12/17/world-premiere-of-%e2%80%98fragile-planet%e2%80%99-music-video-featuring-sting/

For those rock ‘n’ roll fans on your gift list this holiday season, there are plenty of new offerings to keep their heads bopping along happily into the new year.

There are fresh sounds from Eric Clapton, Sting, Genesis, Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash and Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx.

There’s just one twist: none are on CD racks.

All are on bookshelves – part of an unusual flurry of autobiographies out this winter by aging rockers with some hair-raising stories.

Clapton’s self-titled autobiography is already a hit, having sold 525,000 copies. Joining him on bestseller lists is “Slash,” “Ronnie” and Sixx’s “The Heroin Diaries.”

Why would rockers – those near-mythical gods of sex, drugs and general excess – turn to that most stodgy of storytelling modes, the written word?

“I think there are a couple of motivations: one, they’ve lived their lives and it’s time to look back on them – the lived life is worth examining,” says Broadway Books executive editor Charlie Conrad, who worked on Clapton’s book.

“And also, from the standpoint of the public, rock figures are out there on the cutting edge – the knife edge. They live life to its extreme. And if they survived, they have a good story to tell.”

Those stories include tales of love, loss and friendship, but also nasty bouts with venereal diseases, scary strippers and mountains of controlled substances.

Clapton, who pushed aside a ghost writer in favour of penning his own book, discusses the death of his son Conor, his various addictions, and his love triangle with Pattie Boyd and George Harrison, a topic already broached in Boyd’s recent tell-all “Wonderful Tonight.”

Wood, who offers his own night bedding Boyd, also delves into his years freebasing cocaine and the time he had an armed face-off with Keith Richards, with both pointing guns at each other.

The original lineup of Genesis – including Peter Gabriel – collaborated for the first time in over 20 years for “Genesis: Chapter and Verse,” which offers polite first-person account and photos.

Sixx’s diary is a tad darker – an unvarnished look at his life on the road in 1987, when he struggled with addictions and depression. There’s the time he woke up during an earthquake and ran outside, naked and clutching a crack pipe. In another entry, he writes: “This morning I woke up with my shotgun in bed with me.”

Not to be outdone, Slash, a founding member of Guns N’ Roses who makes several wicked cameos in Sixx’s book, has his own accounts of debauchery, delivered in a straightforward, often amusing way.

He tells of one night being kicked out of a Canadian hotel, drunk and soaked in his own urine. But to his surprise, he’s not as frozen as he feared: “That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants: when you pee yourself in them, they’re more forgiving than jeans,” he writes.

Publishers say the warts-and-all profiles that emerge from these books are crucial for their success. In an Internet-fed and reality-TV soaked world, book buyers already consider themselves insiders, and successful authors can’t just phone it in.

“I’m sure they’re not telling every single crevice of their darkest soul, but they are giving you some real stuff. I think that’s a real difference,” says Elizabeth Beier, executive editor of St. Martin’s Press, which published the Wood and Genesis books.

For the less squeamish reader, there’s always “Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far” by Amy Grant, which includes the singer’s lyrics, poetry and vignettes – all of a decidedly uplifting variety.

And Sting has published a book of his lyrics, complete with his more highbrow observations. Of the song “Synchronicity II,” he writes: “I was trying to dramatize Jung’s theory of meaningful coincidence.”

Publishers say the current crop of rock tell-alls owes much to the success of Bob Dylan’s 2004 autobiography “Chronicles: Volume One,” which sold 425,000 hardcover copies.

“The Dylan book coming out and being so well received kind of showed people, ‘Your regular recording and performing career doesn’t have to be over for you to do your memoir. You don’t have to wait until the whole story is utterly completed and you’re in your dotage,”‘ says Beier.

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/12/12/rock-memoirs-on-the-racks/

When Yael Naim was a little girl, studying at the Ramat Hasharon Conservatory of Music, she saw “Amadeus” and decided that by age 30 she would write a symphony. “I’ve got one year left,” she says now. But she may not manage to fulfill the goal she set for herself then. It’s all the fault of the old vinyl records she discovered not long afterward - Aretha Franklin and the Beatles altered her plans. “I loved playing that kind of music so much that as soon as I finished my homework I would sit down and compose.”

In the first song on her new album, she sings (in Hebrew): “I ran away to another place, so fast, as far as I could go, and I’m in Paris.” Which is just what happened in real life. A few months after her discharge from the army, she came here and began to make music. Yet this doesn’t quite explain how “Yael Naim,” a record made by a young Israeli woman and sung mostly in Hebrew, instantly became the biggest-selling album over the Internet in France and is now in third place in in-store sales in stores, having sold about 60,000 copies in a month.

Naim was born in Paris 29 years ago but moved with her family to Ramat Hasharon at age four. Her father is an artist and her mother is a cosmetician. She has two brothers in Israel - one is a deejay and the other is an accountant. When she was a child, she would spend hours at the piano her father bought for her, and she began attending the conservatory at age nine. When she was a high-school student in the music track at the Yigal Allon School, she went to see the jazz great Wynton Marsalis at the Camelot Club in Tel Aviv and met a saxophone player from his orchestra who had settled in Israel. He recognized her talent and every month, when he appeared at the club, he brought her onto the stage to sing jazz standards.

The next stop, of course, was an army musical troupe. Naim sang as a soloist with the air force troupe, starting in 1996. “Even though it was the army, it was pleasant,” she says. During her service, she was sent by the army to sing at a benefit concert in Paris. The organizers noticed her voice and took note of her name.

When she got out of the army, she was sent to another benefit concert in Paris. After performing a few songs at the piano she was approached by French producers who wanted to hear more. “I always had drafts of songs with me,” says Naim. “They just happened to be looking for someone for a musical project and when they heard what I do, they were all excited and offered me a contract.” Israeli recording companies had not been very enthusiastic about the music she made with her band, “The Anti Collision,” but four days after landing in Paris, at the age of 21, Yael Naim had a recording contract with EMI.

Naim returned to Israel, packed a suitcase and went back to Paris. “I didn’t know what would happen, I had a boyfriend in Israel, I thought I’d stay for a few months to record and then return to Israel.” But the work on the album took over a year, and something else happened: The French-Jewish director Elie Chouraqui saw her perform and offered her a role in a musical production of “The Ten Commandments” that he was staging, and the show was a big success.

She continued working on her first album, with recording sessions in Paris and Los Angeles, where her producer lived. “In a Man’s Womb” was released in 2001, but despite the best efforts by her and EMI, it did not do well. The songs got no radio play and no one bought the album. “The album came out when I was appearing in the musical and the music on the record was so different that it created a dissonance,” she tries to explain. “I was also very young. I didn’t have patience and I became disappointed very quickly. It was a time of growing up, and I also was trying to maintain my relationship with my boyfriend back in Israel, which made the whole thing that much harder.”

The failure “shook me up and made me doubt myself,” she says. And then she broke up with her boyfriend of five years. “I felt awful: I’d left everything for this record and it didn’t succeed the way I wanted.”

Her Cinderella story was coming undone. She describes a time of confusion, of major success and major failure all mixed together: “On the one hand I began seeing reality as it was, but on the other I’d also tasted success with the musical that exceeded all expectations. But it’s one thing when you’re succeeding with music that someone else created, and something else entirely when you’re succeeding by virtue of something that you have created. I may have earned a lot of money and fame, but the personal-emotional element was missing, and that doesn’t bring happiness.”

So you weren’t happy with your success?

“It can also be confusing, when success comes when you’re too young, it can suddenly cut you off from reality.”

What did you do?

“As always, I wrote songs. Some people cook or play sports. This is what I love to do. Sometimes I can’t express myself that well in talk, so I write songs.”

After the failure of the first album, Naim took part in several projects with other artists, and then returned to the stage, to another musical directed by Chouraqui - “Gladiator.” For a time, she put away her ambitions of making her own music. She still played piano, but only as an accompanist to a friend who was a singer. At one of these concerts, she met David Donatien, a West Indian drummer. They began playing together and Naim got up the nerve to let him hear some of her songs. “I was very impressed,” says Donatien, 36. He tries to explain Naim’s previous failure: “Yael worked then with producers and arrangers and it blocked her music from really coming out. She didn’t find Yael in the music that she herself created. People didn’t realize what a complete artist she is: composer, writer, singer and arranger. They thought of her as just a voice that produces sounds. She lost herself in the whole thing. I told her she could do it all by herself.”

Among the 200 or so songs Naim played for Donatien, nearly all in English and French, there were a few in Hebrew. Why would someone who wants to develop a career in France write in Hebrew? “I was homesick,” Naim explains. “When I’d go to Israel, I felt like a tourist. My social and professional ties had started to dissolve, and it confused me. I didn’t know whether I should stay here in Paris or go back to Isarel, or even cut off all my ties with Israel so I could really plant roots here. Or maybe go somewhere else altogether. I felt a need to express myself during this time in Hebrew, in the language that is closest to me.”

It was these songs that excited Donatien: “I told her that this is what she should be doing. Because this is her identity, who she really is. She has to be who she is. I told her, ‘These are the songs you will sing!’”

Three years of working together and recording in the living room of her apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement led to her latest, eponymous album. Even though it bears Naim’s name and photograph, she insists that it is the work of two people and that without Donatien, her producer and artistic director, it never would have seen the light of day.

You talk about a multiplicity of styles, but actually the album is quite minimalist.

“My first album was full of ideas and attempts to go in all kinds of directions. I was young. I loved making music but I didn’t have a clear path. I also lacked in confidence. David told me to be more ‘naked,’ to expose myself in a more personal way, to build the songs around the emotion, with the guitar and my voice. He showed me that you don’t have to pile too much on, but rather just work on the really necessary things. We spent long months working just on the skeleton of the songs, and then we delicately dressed them.”

As the sales attest, the result was a success. In France, albums in exotic languages such as Hebrew are usually marketed as “world music.” But this album is surprising not only because it’s selling in the rock or pop departments of music stores, but because its songs, including the ones in Hebrew, are being played on the most popular radio stations. Since its release, over six weeks ago, Naim and Donatien have become a frequent presence on French television. The video clip for the song “New Soul” has been aired about a thousand times (and apparently gave the record its first big push), and the pair has been invited to nearly every talk show. Later this month they will be guests on the “Star Academy” program, the local version of “American Idol.”

The album contains 13 tracks that range from pop to folk to melancholy ballads. The sound is clean, without sampling or electronic motifs. Naim reminds some people (in her sound as well as her look) of Norah Jones, or Tori Amos. The star attraction: her soft and warm voice, which has won accolades across the board. Critics have called it “hypnotic,” “magical” and “of rare purity,” while also mentioning Naim’s “brunette beauty.” (Her large, bright eyes are admittedly hard to resist, as is the smile that never seems to leave her face.)

Thanks to the rave reviews and her frequent television appearances, all the tickets for a three-week concert tour that ends tomorrow sold out well over a week ago. Additional dates have already been added for March, April and May. When asked to explain her huge success among the French, she just asks: “Where are all these people coming from?”

You really don’t know?

“It’s not the success that’s making me feel like my life is changing completely. We also don’t really get the sales data that’s reported to us. At first, there was mostly a sense of relief. You say to yourself: ‘Okay, it looks like things are going to be alright.’ Since I’ve had the opposite experience, when you’ve been told before that radio stations don’t want to play your music, that you should wait a few more months, I could really appreciate the speed and ease with which this record succeeded. And from that moment, when I suddenly had this feeling of peace, this sense that evidently things are going to be fine, I’ve just felt surprised all the time and am always asking myself: How can this be?”

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/12/07/cinderella-song-yael-naim/

Akon, a Senegalese-American, R & B and hip hop singer had made the charts since his debut in 2004. He had made two albums entitled “Trouble” and “Konvicted” respectively. He had released singles that reached the number one place at the Billboard Top 100 list, and the songs are “Smack That” and “Don’t Matter”. He also popularized the songs “Lonely”, “I Wanna Love You” and “Sorry, Blame it on Me”.

Akon have spent 5 years in jail long before his career because of a grand auto theft charge and also had been on several controversies. He had received a lot of criticisms from fans and critics alike because of these scandals.

In fact, Akon had made some of his singles from his experiences like “Sorry, Blame It on Me” for a girl he supposively molested in public. Akon had been nominated to a number of awards. He is also a record producer now and attend to a lot of gigs with known artists like Gwen Stefani. Akon’s real name is Aliaune Damala Bouga Time Puru Nacka Lu Lu Lu Badara Akon Thiam.

He`s new video - concert live in Cancun, Mexico is available.

Nearly a decade after the band’s demise, Led Zeppelin’s musical influence lives on and on

The Word Was Out About Kingdom Come. Even before the band’s debut album was released, the record-industry buzz was that it had the potential to be a smash hit. And there’s a good reason, say the buzzers: Kingdom Come sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin.

So it Kingdom Come hits big, nobody’ll be too surprised — because although the band may be the latest and most shameless outfit to learn that sounding like Led Zeppelin is a ticket to the top, it certainly isn’t alone. In just the past year or so, we’ve seen a slew of “New Zeppelins” of one sorr or another, including the L.A. underground thrash band Jane’s Addiction, the English reformed-punk band the Cult and the revived heavy-metal band Whitesnake.

Yeah, its been a long time since Led Zeppelin rock & rolled, but when it comes to modern mainstream rock music, Zep still has the touch of the gods. Classic-rock radio stations play the band’s music incessantly; bands from Def Leppard to Crowded House do versions of its songs; the Beastie Boys and the Cult appropriate its guitar riffs; just about every hard-rock and heavy-metal band that ever tromped onstage has borrowed something from its style and sound.

“In my opinion, next to the Beatles they’re the most influential band in history,” says Geffen Records A&R executive John David Kalodner, whose label will soon release a Jimmy Page solo album that advance reports say has a distinct Zeppelin feel. “They influence the way music is on records, AOR radio, concerts. They set the standards for the AOR-radio format with ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ having AOR hits without necessarily having Top Forty hits. They’re the ones who did the first real big arena concert shows, consistently selling out and playing stadiums without support. People can do as well as them, but nobody surpasses them.”

But if nobody surpasses Led Zeppelin, lots of people pay homage. Led Zeppelin’s ten albums — especially the string of six classics that began in 1969 with the band’s debut, Led Zeppelin, and ended in 1975 with Physical Graffiti — are reportedly one of the most lucrative back catalogs in rock, selling consistently year after year. Certainly, those sales are helped by Zeppelin’s status as the backbone of AOR and classic-rock radio, where “Stairway to Heaven” regularly ranks at or near the top of listeners’ polls and such Zeppelin songs as “Rock and Roll” and “Kashmir” get regular airings.

“Other than the Beatles, for album radio they’re the most important band,” says radio consultant Lee Abrams, who developed the superstars formar, which emphasizes star attractions like Zeppelin. “Nobody seems to get tired of them, and a lot of the new bands in that genre obviously owe a debt to them.”

If you want to start sending out bills to collect on that debt, you could start with the bands that are still using Zeppelin songs on their albums or, especially, in their live shows, where a few chords of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Rock and Roll” are a sure-fire way to ignite audiences. The latter song has become a hard-rock standard: it’s been performed lately by Patty Smyth, Def Leppard and Heart (which has been doing it for more than a decade). Frank Zappa has played “Stairway to Heaven” in some recent sets, as has the California underground band Camper Van Beethoven. Another California band, Lawndale, threw a few bars of “Whole Lotta Love” into a version of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” on its last album. On its tour last year, Crowded House would occasionally perform “Dancing Days” and “Whole Lotta Love.” And jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who patterned one of his album covers after the cover of Plrysical Graffiti and says that even his purist brother Wynton has a fondness for Zeppelin, performed a pair of Zeppelin songs on Late Night with David Letteman.

“We’ve tried to drop ‘Rock and Roll’ from our sets,” says Heart singer Ann Wilson, a longtime Zeppelin fan, “but there’s always a place for it, and people always yell for it. They won’t let us stop, because it’s the kind of straight-ahead, no-tricks, no-nonsense rocker that people just crave.”

Crowded House isn’t quite as reverent with its own Zeppelin covers. The popsters from down under do “Whole Lotta Love” in what they call a “swing-shuffle arrangement.”

Still, they’re admirers. “Believe it or not, we are actually very, very big fans of Led Zeppelin,” says bassist Nick Seymour. “They’re probably one of the strongest influences that we have in common as members of the group. We do ‘Whole Lotta Love’ jokingly, tongue in cheek, but that’s not to say that we’re not big fans of the band.

“And I think the main reason one could find it amusing in 1988 is that there are so many bands that have supposedly been influenced by Led Zeppelin that don’t really seem to understand the soul of what Led Zeppelin were about. They just seem to have taken on the cosmetic appeal of the legacy that Led Zeppelin left around. And that’s unfortunate, because they’re taking advantage of a generation of kids that weren’t around for the original thing.”

This is the territory where Led Zeppelin’s real influence can be measured: in a way, nearly every heavymetal or hard-rock band has borrowed from one or another of Zeppelin’s innovations, whether it’s the massive, slow-paced blues sound, John Bonham’s thunderously plodding drums or Robert Plant’s posthippie visions of a land of myth and fantasy.

“So many bands have taken from Led Zeppelin it’s been quite incredible to watch,” says Ian Astbury, lead singer of the Cult, the British band whose second album, Electric, showed off a heavy quota of Zeppelin-style guitar riffs. “The whole ‘Hall of the Mountain King’ vibe was one thing for glam rockers to get into, you know? So all of a sudden you get fifteen American bands singing songs about climbin’ up mountains and slayin’ dragons and stuff, which is one of the things that Plant was into, that Old English and Celtic imagery. And then a lot of bands are into the black magic and the sorcery, which was Page’s kind of thing. And then you get other people trying to base a band around what Bonham did. It’s incredible that even as individuals they influenced differenr kinds of music.”

And so Zeppelin has made its mark on postpunk British rock (the Cult and the Mission U.K.), on rap music (the Beastie Boys, who rap to a couple of Zeppelin riffs on their album and in their concerts), on mainstream rock (Ann Wilson says she learned how to sing rock & roll by performing Zeppelin songs, and Boston has based its career on Tom Scholz’s version of Jimmy Page’s guitar grandeur) and on hard rock (everyone, including, of course, Kingdom Come).

And the band has also influenced two of last year’s biggest success stories. On “Bullet the Blue Sky,” from U2’s album The Joshua Tree, the Edge’s guitar sound is strikingly similar to the kind of churning, raw sound you’ll find in Zeppelin tunes like “The Rover.”

“I was never really interested in heavy metal or that kind of thing,” says the Edge, who has been known to toss off a Zeppelin, song during the band’s sound checks, “but Zeppelin, of all those groups, really had something.”

Whitesnake, meanwhile, became last year’s most surprising hard-rock hit at least partially because it sounds a lot like Zeppelin, Last summer. John David Kalodner, who is Whitesnake’s A&R rep, said, “Whitesnake is selling because of the quality of the record and the lack of a Led Zeppelin record in the marketplace. The kids really like records that sound like Led Zeppelin, so they’ll buy anything that’s close.” Kalodner now says that he’s unsure if the young record buyers are aware of Zeppelin’s influence on bands like Whitesnake and Kingdom Come. “Obviously it’s the same sort of music,” he says, “but I don’t know if seventeen-year-old kids make that comparison.” Nonetheless, the sound remains the same: lucrative. (White-snake singer David Coverdale declined to be interviewed for this story; a spokesman for Coverdale says the singer was irritated by a recent story in Rolling Stone in which Robert Plant called Whitesnake a “Led Zeppelin clone.”)

So why did Led Zeppelin, which seldom had its records played on AM radio and probably sounds like sludge to many casual listeners, become so influential? You could say it’s partly because of nostalgia, but in this case it’s nostalgia that cuts in different ways at once: if it’s reasonable to call Zeppelin the first band of the Seventies, the band that ushered in the heavier, gloomier, more ponderous music of that era, it’s just as easy to dub it the last band of the Sixties, the final glorious moment fora community of starry-eyed dreamers bound together by music. Led Zeppelin in many ways marked a dividing line in rock history - but with the unbearable heaviness of its sound, the often surprising finesse of Jimmy Page’s arrangements and production and the mystical yisions in Robert Plant’s lyrics, the band appealed to listeners on both sides of that dividing line.

“They balance that hard-rock edge with being ethereal,” says Lee Abrams. “And when I probe people and ask them about why they’re so into Zeppelin, it always gets to that. They have that hard edge, but they don’t drive you nuts. They’re sort of cosmic at the same time, and it’s a balance that people really like.”

Or you could ask a few fans about Zeppelin - fans like Wayne Hussey, lead vocalist for the Mission U.K. His band recently enlisted Zeppelin bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones to produce its upcoming album. “I think, essentially, they were a band,” says Hussey, “and everything they did came across as a band. They got self-indulgent at times, but they wrote great songs, and when they performed them as a band, the power of it really came across.”

Mitch Easter, the leader of Let’s Active, who is also a noted producer, became a Zeppelin fan for life around the time of Physical Graffiti. “We started this sorta crusade when Let’s Active first toured,” he says, “playing ‘Black Dog’ and stuff when we’d go to do interviews at college radio stations. It was really outrageous to do that back then, but it was good fun, and there was no denying that those records were powerful and cool. And we also did ‘The Rover’ and ‘Dancing Days’ in concert for a while. Every few shows we’d get a New Wave-diehard type who just didn’t get it, who’d say, ‘What are you doing, man?’ like it’s a sacrilege. But most people really dig it, you know.”

Ian Astbury became a fan of Zeppelin when Liverpool clubs started playing Seventies hard rock around 1980, when punk began to fade: “I think they’re probably the greatest British live rock band,” he says. “The one that had a real mystique, a real aura and presence about the band. It wasn’t like a band; it was like some kind of moving spiritual roadshow. Led Zeppelin were a major influence on the Cult - I mean, we feel like the new generation, ourselves and the Mission and other new bands. I guess we feel like the new, shall we say, golden gods.” He laughs. “If anybody reads that, they’re gonna go, ‘Oh, what an asshole.’ But it kinda feels that way, and it’s great.”

Still, Astbury admits that one event could give all the new golden gods a real run for their money. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “If Zeppelin ever did a reunion tour, that’d be the biggest challenge for any of our lot. Led Zeppelin, you can’t compete with them.”

Even though Moss Park dance punk duo MSTRKRFT believe that, as dance music artists, “there’s much better places for us to be,” (this is said right at the 4:16 mark, of all times) Toronto’s other homegrown house producers have taken the entire electro world by storm in the last few months. One needs only to point one’s browser to the website Beatport, which has quickly become the DJ world’s number one website for downloading high-bitrate dance music, and look on the “Top Downloads” panel on the lower right. In that period of time, there has been at least one track by a Toronto-based artist on the Top 10, and in the last five months, at least one Ontarian (if you include Windsor-raised Richie Hawtin, a.k.a. Plastikman.) Here is a brief look at three Toronto artists who have been conquering dancefloors around the world with their popular tracks on Beatport:

Multiple Juno Award-winning Hatiras’ breakthrough track “Spaced Invader” was hardly the beginning, but since then, Hatiras has been jamming in the studio, running Hatrax Records and Blow Media, showcasing brand new music with his weekly radio show Hatiras Presents, and selling dance chart topping tunes on Beatport like a machine. At least one of his latest smash hits “Bass Monkeys,” “Gutter Music,” or “Poppin’ Beats,” whose launch party was A.D/D.’s RANDOMLAND at CiRCA less than two weeks ago, will be playing on a soundsystem near you in the near future, guaranteed.

The eyes of the world turned to Toronto late last year when they began to watch the rising star Deadmau5. This summer, in the week of August 26, 2007, Deadmau5 had five tracks in the Top 10 on Beatport, making him one of the singularly most successful Beatport artists of all time. Through his label mau5trap, he has released banging tracks like “I Thought Inside Out” (with Chris Lake), “Complications” and “Desynchronised.” While it seems like Deadmau5 would have trouble keeping himself in the city for long enough to record new chart toppers with his frequent appearances in Europe and Japan, there is no shortage of his new techy beats for DJ’s to devour.

Jelo has been a mainstay of Toronto’s club scene for over a decade, with residencies at some of the city’s most famous hotspots. A few months ago, Los Angeles-based DJ Dan, sometimes called the world’s number one house DJ, spun an unreleased track by Jelo and Deadmau5 called “The Reward is Cheese” to kick off his set at Opulent Temple, the largest soundsystem camp at Burning Man. Cue November 19, 2007, when the track was released on the label Rising Trax. “The Reward is Cheese” instantly soared to number one on Beatport. His latest tune “Darke,” featuring a remix by D.A.V.E. The Drummer, is poised for party domination.

It is incredibly rare for any artist in their lifetime to record a Top 10 track, but even rarer for them to be from Toronto. These tunes are currently blasting out of speakers somewhere in the world, bringing the sound of our city to the ears of millions.

The Spice Girls got a rapturous reception in Vancouver as they started a world tour with their first major concert in almost 10 years.

The five-member U.K. group, which has already sold 55 million records, sported lingerie and leather onstage and had male dancers on their knees in dog collars during an almost two-hour show.

More than 16,000 screaming fans showed many were prepared to overlook criticism of the band for reuniting in their 30s. Ticket sales for the tour so far total more than $60 million. The reunion follows others by the Police, who raised more than $171 million and also started in Vancouver, the Eagles and the Who among others. Fans of Led Zeppelin, which plays in London on Dec. 10, hope the lucrative returns may make them tour again.

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/12/03/spice-girls-pose-strut-pout-at-start-of-world-reunion-tour/

Masi Oka can. The NBC hit’s happiest hero promised it to reporters on a recent conference call promoting the series’ first-season DVD (released today), second-season TV premiere (Sept. 24 on NBC) and current Heroes World Tour, a global promotional jaunt by three different clusters of the show’s actors and producers.

(The World Tour hits New York Tuesday for a 9 a.m. “Heroes” DVD signing at The NBC Experience store in Rockefeller Center. Expected are cast members Noah Gray-Cabey, James Kyson Lee, Zachary Quinto and new arrival Dania Ramirez, plus artist Tim Sale and co-executive producer Jeph Loeb.)

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/08/30/heroes-on-ice/

Campbell Webster admits it’s a daunting task to bring a new chapter in the life of Anne Shirley to the stage in the shadow of a musical that’s still enjoying worldwide success more than four decades after it was first produced.

But “Anne and Gilbert”, which picks up the story of the iconic, red-haired orphan where the original “Anne of Green Gables” musical ends, has enjoyed two years of packed theatres and glowing reviews in Summerside, P.E.I. It’s now set to move beyond the Island next year.

“It’s one of the most successful musicals in the world, so there is something to live up to,” says Webster, the show’s producer. “There is some heavy lifting in the idea of musicalizing it on stage.”

Read full story: http://blog.mp3adrenalin.com/2007/08/30/anne-and-gilbert-tour/