Watch us on TV Wednesday night!
Metallica has revealed they will be the featured musical guest on this Wednesday’s (Dec 14th) edition of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! As with most of Kimmel’s musical guests, the band will perform a mini-concert on the show’s outdoor stage on Hollywood Boulevard, with the street likely to be closed for several blocks in either direction to accommodate thousands of fans. A portion of the performance will be aired on that night’s show, which starts at 11:35 p.m.
The band said in a statement, “As you may have heard, we’re off to Los Angeles next week for some more shenanigans and while we’re there we’ve been invited to shut down a few streets and throw a massive block party with ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’” The statement noted that the group will sit for an interview with the host before playing.
As previously reported, Metallica will also play a special intimate show this Thursday (Dec 15th) at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood, CA. All proceeds from the sale of tickets to this show will be donated to Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. Fans are also encouraged to bring canned foods and non-perishable items to the show for donation as well.
Meanwhile, the band posted another MAKING OF….here it is!
In other news, Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett has slammed President-elect Donald Trump in an interview with Billboard, saying he’s ready to get into a “personal Twitter war” with the former reality TV host over Trump’s stated belief that climate change is a hoax. Hammett said, “What does that tell you about the man? What does that tell you? Any normal, educated person who has a pretty good grip on reality — evenly balanced, could even be a centrist sort of person, not left or not right, any person who I just described — upon hearing something like that would just think, ‘What the f**kin’ fairy tale did that come out of?’”
Hammett admitted that Metallica as a band has stayed out of politics, but said that he is personally ready to speak out. He explained, “If anything happens that I’m not okay with, I’m going to be super vocal about it for the first time in my life . . . I — not Metallica, but I — will take it upon myself to get involved, if there is something I see that is seriously wrong, and I really feel that it’s my job to say something, and to call out people who need to be called out.”
Metallica did play at the Live Earth concert in 2007 and Hammett told us a while back why this issue was important to the band: “We all have young children, we all have families now, and I want my son to grow up in the same sort of environment that I grew up in when I was a kid, you know. I want him to see blue skies, fresh running water, trees. I don’t want him to, like, have to say, ‘Hey, dad, what was it like to have forests and, you know, beaches?’ I mean, it really means a lot to me.“
Metallica is doing all these interviews, TV appearances and concerts in support of its latest album, Hardwired…To Self-Destruct, which debuted at Number One on the Billboard 200 album chart last month. An extensive world tour is in the works for 2017.
Oh no, not COREY, too! The Pulse Of Radio says Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman Corey Taylor has making a country music album on the list of things he wants to do sometime in the next few years, according to Loudwire. Taylor noted he would like to record a country set in an interview with Metal Hammer, also revealing he wrote a song for British pop singer Robbie Williams. Taylor explained, “I just love Robbie Williams. He’s f**king amazing. He cracks me up, he’s a great entertainer, he’s an amazing singer. And, I just love the energy that he’s got. I know that I’ll probably f**king lose cool points with a few people for that, but I just f**king love him.”
Taylor added that he is at a “really good point in his life,” saying, “I want to f**king go above and beyond and really do it all. All these new dreams are coming out for me.” He listed writing another book, working on a screenplay, doing country, spoken word and acoustic albums, writing more for other musicians, opening a club in his hometown of Des Moines, IA and doing more film roles as among his goals for the future.
Taylor, who has already written three books plus done some acting, told us how he manages to balance his different projects: “The thing that I found with myself is that I can juggle a lot of stuff, but if I’m doing too much at the same time, I can’t really put that Taylor energy into it, you know — whatever that means, usually not a good thing — but the thing I noticed is that if they’re not all due at the same time, I can focus on one, get that as close to completion as I can, and then jump to the next one.“
Taylor’s fourth book, titled America 51: A Probe Into The Realities That Are Hiding Inside The Greatest Country In The World, will be published on Jul 11th, 2017. Taylor said that the book will deal with “just how bats**t crazy my country is right now, in good ways and in bad ways.”
The singer recently revealed that Stone Sour has written and demoed 18 songs for its sixth studio album, with plans to hit the studio next month for a likely mid-2017 release.
Things about Corey that might surprise you: Corey Taylor was homeless for a while as a teenager, living a self-described “Bohemian” lifestyle, sleeping under bridges and on friends’ floors and couches. This changed after joining Slipknot and when the band achieved success, the singer found himself abusing alcohol heavily and engaging in debauchery until getting sober more than 10 years ago. Love that guy!
Here’s an insane statistic. Guns N’ Roses sold more than one million tickets in 24 hours on Friday (Dec 9th) when seats for the 2017 Canadian and European legs of the band’s “Not In This Lifetime” tour went on sale. Tickets for the next round of U.S. dates, also in 2017, went on sale Saturday (Dec 10th) and at press time the final tally of how many of those tickets were sold had not been determined. Even without the next U.S. leg, the trek has now sold more than three million tickets in 2016, making it the year’s most successful rock tour.
The Canadian and European legs account for 25 shows in total, resulting in an average of at least 40,000 tickets sold per show. Guns N’ Roses confirmed last week that they are coming back to North America next summer for at least 15 stadium dates. The new North American run will kick off on Jul 27th in St. Louis, ending on September 8th in San Antonio. It includes half a dozen dates in Canada.
The group’s European jaunt will begin on May 27th in Dublin, Ireland, ending on July 12th in the Netherlands. Guns N’ Roses also has shows booked in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand and United Arab Emirates between January and early March.
The band kicked off its reunion trek last April with a club show in Hollywood and appearances in Las Vegas and at California’s Coachella Festival. The first North American leg of the tour kicked off in late June and included 25 concerts, grossing a staggering $117 million.
Maynard Keenan, Danny Carey, Justin Chancellor, Adam Jones. In case you forgot who’s in Tool.
Tool bassist Justin Chancellor told Bass Player in a new interview the band is “pretty deep into the writing process now” for the long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s 10,000 Days album. Chancellor explained, “We’ve narrowed things down to big groups of ideas. For the past few months, we’ve been working on one of the newer songs fairly exclusively. We get the gist of it and find the main themes that make up the skeleton between verses and choruses. Then we explore different ways we can depart from that and come back to it and flip it upside down, and take the time to see what else is there.” (editor’s note: See, they are anal. They can’t just take the song for what it is. They PAINFULLY go over and over and over and over the same song. THIS IS WHY IT’S TAKING THIS BAND SO FREAKING LONG TO MAKE A RECORD! Argh! I can totally see why Maynard doesn’t like talking about Tool. It’s gotta be very very frustrating to overthink everything you do!)
It’s been so long, Justin has changed, eh?
Chancellor added, “Everyone knows we take our time. We’re really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven’t been discovered before. It’s kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.”
Addressing the decade-long gap between the last Tool offering and this one, Chancellor remarked, “Writing is a grueling process for us, and once we finish an album, we go on tour for a couple of years. Plus, we’re always very involved in our own business, so we need a break when we come back. We’ve also been through a lot of difficult lawsuits, which we deal with ourselves, and they’re a bit of a bummer and not inspiring creatively.”
He continued, “We’re our own worst critics. We’re doing our best to find something that blows us all away, and we want each other to be completely happy with what we produce. I’m excited that there’s going to be another album and the material will be very inspiring. So why rush it now?”
The instrumental members of Tool have reportedly been working three days a week on new material, although to date singer Maynard James Keenan has not joined them for those sessions. (Mainly because he likes to wait for the song to be done!)
Keenan has been touring with his other act, Puscifer, and has been on a book tour in recent weeks to promote his newly released memoir, A Perfect Union Of Contrary Things. Keenan said not long ago that while the perception is the other members of Tool are waiting for him to make a new album, he is in fact the one who ends up waiting around for the rest of the group. He explained, “They take a long time, they’re very tedious, very meticulous and I get bored. So I have to go do things in between.”
Read the full story at Bass Player.
In Maynard related news, May 7th, A Perfect Circle has booked at date at the Hollywood Bowl. The band is also gearing up for appearances at all of the spring U.S. festivals. New music is also in the works. Stay tuned!
The Pulse Of Radio also reporting Green Day is behind a new documentary chronicling the early days of the East Bay punk scene the band came up in. According to Spin, the movie, called Turn It Around: The Story Of East Bay Punk, will feature footage from hundreds of shows, thousands of photos and scores of interviews with musicians who played a pivotal role in creating that Bay Area punk scene. The documentary has been in the works since 2014, but is now slated for release in 2017.
Iggy Pop will narrate the movie while the members of Green Day and their manager, Pat Magnarella, will be executive producers. The film will contain appearances by Green Day, Rancid, NOFX‘s Fat Mike, AFI singer Davey Havok, Dead Kennedys‘ Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray, plus many more.
An official synopsis stated that the film “explores Northern California’s pivotal role in evolution of punk rock — the loud, intense and anti-authoritarian philosophy of music and politics that arose in the late 1970s. Early San Francisco Bay Area punk pioneers like Dead Kennedys, Avengers, and Flipper, as well as the MaximumRocknRoll fanzine, helped take the punk underground global.”
In other news, Green Day performed in their hometown of Oakland, California on Saturday night (Dec 10th), where a fire took the lives of 36 people one week earlier at the Ghost Ship artists’ collective.
Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong dedicated “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” to the victims of the fire, telling the audience, “My heart just goes out to all the people that perished in that warehouse. Because these are people just here, looking for themselves. Just trying to have a moment where they can all just celebrate just being artists and being weird and having fun . . . we have to cherish all the freaks and the weirdos. People need a place.”
Meanwhile, speaking of bands making documentaries, I hear second time Grammy nominees Highly Suspect have been hard at work over where they started things off, in Cape Cod. I don’t have any other details, but I am hoping to get with the band once they return to NYC.
Have a great day!