"The videos feature McMahon wearing a tracksuit, being chauffeured around Los Angeles in a Cadillac Escalade golf cart and waxing lyrical about his very public financial troubles."
You can catch the videos in October.
I for one hope that the 85-year-old man with the infamous intro rocks it out.
Actor Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Iron Man) is poised to release his debut album next week, on Sept. 2. Although one might think that his resume on screen and stage (on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) would get fans excited for the actor's newest creative outlet, it seems everyone's already hating on Howard's upcoming album, titled Shine Through It.
Mostly in reaction to Anthony DeCurtis' New York Times article "An Actor Makes an Album, His Way," music and entertainment blogs are leaping at the chance to rip on Howard, and by extension any actor who dares to make music, before they even listen to it.
I agree that new shows like In the Heights and Passing Strange have helped revitalize the musical, but these are the only true examples of what Holden seems to think is a sea change on Broadway.
Holden himself must recognize this fallacy, as even in the opening lines of the article, he says "a surge of oxygen pours through" these two cast recordings, but you can only "feel that breeze" in the cast album of the Off-Broadway show Adding Machine. The "quiet cast album of A Catered Affair" is described by Holden, using the same metaphor, as a "faint puff of fresh air."
It is telling that Holden cannot evaluate In the Heights without comparing it to Cole Porter, West Side Story, and other Broadway musicals past, even as he extolls the score's revolutionary use of rap and other "uptown" music. And Passing Strange, he writes, features a "sarcastic Kander and Ebb spoof."
Holden also cites albums of the revivals of Gypsy and South Pacific as somehow relevant to the conversation, even though they may be the antithesis to his thesis, and are most assuredly your mother's original cast albums.
Never mind that Holden's reviews of the albums are well-written and insightful. By presenting this collection as something remarkably new, he's only showing his age. And didn't everyone say the same thing about Rent a decade ago, anyway?
Read the full story here, and let me know if you think I totally missed the point, or if Holden missed the mark.
People tend to get mad when artists get all uppity and try to have opinions about serious things, like politics and causes and other things we should probably all care about anyway (or, in the case of David Mamet, why he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal"). But at the same time that we should listen when George Clooney tries to end genocide in Darfur, do we really have to take Bruce Willis or Robert Downey, Jr. seriously when they record an album? It's not easy, that's for sure.
Why is it that a successful actor can't also be a respected musician? With the rarest of exceptions, performers like Keanu Reeves, the Bacon Brothers, Eddie Murphy, and Don Johnson have all tried and failed to turn their screen careers into multi-platinum CD sales.
(We all know David Hasselhoff is huge in Germany. No one in America cares. But it does give me the excuse to post this video again:)
New York Mag's entertainment blog, Vulture, has valiantly listed the ten best albums recorded by actors. Former Blues Clues host Steve Burns makes the list at #10 (and I can tell you after hearing his album a few years ago, I'd have to agree, if only because his Flaming Lips-style atmospheric rock is a far cry from the brightly-colored world of Nick Jr.'s children's TV series.) So does Zooey Deschanel, whose new album Volume One, recorded as She + Him with singer-songwriter M. Ward, is #8 and has been receiving suprisingly positive buzz thus far.
I'll leave numbers 1 through 7 a surprise, though...
The Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, the former hippie-fest that has simply become another fest, has announced its most diverse lineup yet, and music fans should be pretty excited: Metallica, Pearl Jam, Kanye West, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, The Allman Brothers Band, The Raconteurs, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Broken Social Scene, M.I.A., Aimee Mann, and Vampire Weekend will be among more than 100 bands at this year's fest.
The Bonnaroo Comedy Tent will also feature comedians David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Zach Galifianakis, Mike Birbiglia, Jim Norton, and Brian Posehn.
The four-day camping and music festival will be held June 12-15 on a muddy farm in Manchester, TN. Tickets go on sale Feb. 16 at noon exclusively at www.bonnaroo.com.
And in other festival announcements news, the SXSW Film Festival has unveiled its 2008 schedule of films. This year's festival will feature 64 world premieres, including Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light and Kimberly Pierce's Iraq War drama Stop-Loss.
The rock and R&B musician, songwriter, bandleader, producer, talent scout, one-time DJ, and abusive ex-husband of Tina Turner is acknowledged by many music historians as the man behind the first true rock ’n’ roll record: "Rocket 88." Turner won a Grammy in February for Best Tradition Blues Album for Risin’ With The Blues.
But he was best known for discovering Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage singer from Nutbush, Tenn., whom he renamed Tina Turner. Tina's career and allegations of domestic abuse would later overshadow Ike.
But Ike Turner was also a violent man, according to his ex-wife and others including Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who said he saw him pistol-whip a fellow musician.
"Ike acted like a goddamned pimp," Richards told Vanity Fair in 1993.
Tina Turner's memoir, I, Tina and a 1993 biopic What's Love Got to Do With It turned Ike Turner into one of the most notorious villains in the music industry.
The singer said her ex-husband regularly abused and humiliated her for 16 years, and drove her to attempt suicide in 1968. He cracked her ribs, threw hot coffee in her face, burnt her with a cigarette and punched her in the nose so often she had to have surgery, she said.
Tina Turner said that she had not had contact with Ike for 30 years and refused to comment, People reports.
We don't give nearly enough attention to singers and musicians here at Blog Stage, it seems. But those oft-neglected performers deserve a little love now and then.
Or even a "Whole Lotta Love." For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few months, Led Zeppelin played their first full concert since 1980 at London's O2 Arena on Monday night, with John Bonham's son Jason filling in for the deceased drummer. The group's first full show since Bonham's death (an appearance at Live Aid in 1985 and at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert in '88 are regarded as brief, sloppy, and not at all representative of the band's full power and glory) was part of a night in tribute to late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun.
Monday night's 16-song, two-hour-plus show has already become legendary, spawning rumors of a full tour, or at least a few shows in NYC next year. But we obviously couldn't be there to see it for ourselves, so we'll trust the transcendent reviews, of what was apparently the greatest show ever, to speak for us:
The band that played underneath those memories last night was not the
one that misfired at Live Aid in 1985 or again in New York in 1988.
This one was rehearsed, ready and out to kill. This band was Led
Zeppelin in every way.
Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham the Younger opened their two-hour show
with the confident wit and colossal nerve of “Good Times Bad Times,”
the first song on Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album. Even before Plant
opened his mouth, the original fury — a surprisingly lean, dub-like
crossfire of cannonshot chords, frantic, gulping bass runs and
polyrhythmic swagger — was in order and in force.
Thanking all the people who had come from more than 50 countries, Plant
declared, "This is the 51st country" and commenced "Kashmir," which was
the song most Led Zeppelin fans said they wanted to hear in a music
magazine poll. It left the singer in tears and the audience, which had
been long on its feet, hollering for more.
Back onstage, the
encore inevitably took the form of "Whole Lotta Love." At the end,
Plant saluted Ertegun and Atlantic Records and said good night. It
looked like it was all over, but then, Led Zeppelin burst back for a
resounding version of "Rock and Roll," leaving the packed house
celebrating the extraordinarily good fortune that allowed them to
witness it.
"For Your Life," from Presence, is unfurled for the
first time in the band's history. Anybody who relegated it to the lower
echelons of the Zep workbook are quickly shown how badly mistaken they
are. A highlight of the evening.
But what do you think? Are the three surviving band members too old and gray to stage a full tour together again? Or do you still want one more chance to see them live?
As reported by Derrik J. Lang over at AP, Ed McMahon is going to appear in a series of online videos -- wait for it -- rapping. Oh yes. Rapping. 
