He is on his way to Pittsburgh to play a show. He is smoking cigarettes and telling me exactly how he feels about the music business. He does not hold back. If you haven’t heard of Livan yet, you need to check him out. He spent some time recently opening for Alice Cooper yet he is not metal nor alternative nor straight-ahead punk.
What a difference a year makes. When Gregg Allman brought his band to Biloxi last year he was fully recovered from a 2010 liver transplant and with a brand new rip-roaring blues album hot off the presses. And his guitar player Scott Sharrard was his secret weapon. One year later, Gregg and his band are smoking hot, playing with a youthful vitality that was just a wee-bit lacking before, and Sharrard is no longer a secret.
As children, we all rode bicycles and climbed trees and had a jolly good time just being a kid. Seether’s frontman Shaun Morgan wasn’t that different from you and me … except he grew up in a turbulent South Africa. Calling in before a show in northern Mississippi, Morgan talked at length about his childhood, his influences, his band’s latest CD Holding Onto Strings Better Left To Fray, and how it was actually a song in a movie that showed him the power of music.
Five bands, one ticket price: Now that is the way to enjoy a Friday night; especially in today’s messed-up economy. And on this night a quinary of bands from the harder-rocking sector of music came out to play for a house full of fans, young and old. It is always good to see music not having an age limit and I’d like to think when I am 60, bands will still lure me into the bowels of a mosh pit. As Todd Kerns told me last year, "we are just now experiencing our rock & roll idols growing older, and as they age so does the majority of their long-time fans. And those fans are the ones bringing not only their children but their grandchildren to concerts now. With this kind of die-hard loyalty, rock & roll will never die."
JD DeServio is a fun guy. He loves to talk and he loves to laugh and when he gets a big ole nasty looking blister on his finger from playing his bass, he just has to show it to you. Black Label Society had just played a sweaty kick ass show in New Orleans when DeServio comes up to me outside the venue to show me his war wound with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
Formed in 2001 by Connolly and his neighborhood buddies in British Columbia, Canada, Theory Of A Deadman is one of those bands that can rock & sock you one moment and then touch a raw nerve the next. Where does all this mixture of Tabasco rock come from? Try the early days of Connolly, an admitted bad boy from day one.
“Who said we were wild? Did people say that? Oh no, I didn’t know we had a reputation”. Tavis Stanley is stretched out in the back lounge of the tour bus, relaxing before the start of the Art Of Dying concert at a little hole-in-the-wall club in Jackson, Mississippi. I seem to have caught him off guard when I ask if he and his bandmates were as wild as some rumors going around insinuate. “We have a lot of fun, we like to drink our beers and just party and have a good time like everybody else but I wouldn’t say we’re too wild”.
Playing at least twenty songs from their career, they covered all their favored albums: Stained Glass, Screaming For Vengeance, Point Of Entry, Defenders Of The Faith and Rocka Rolla. With the medieval growling of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” echoing from the speakers, prepping the already highly eager fans, the curtain dropped and the gods began rumbling through “Rapid Fire”, “Metal Gods”, “Heading Out To The Highway” and “Judas Rising”.
Ewan Currie is a very down-to-earth young man. Even though his band made the cover of Rolling Stone as winners of a recent contest, he appears to be unfazed by all of the hullabaloo. He is soft-spoken, witty and devoted to the band he has called home since 2005: The Sheepdogs, a Canadian rock and roll band with deep 70’s southern roots.
Steppenwolf may have famously sang that we were born to be wild, but on a hot late November night in New Orleans the band sitting with me upstairs at the House Of Blues looks just a little frayed around the edges, as if they could stretch out on the couches and go soundly asleep. It is the official last show of their long tour and Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights are feeling mixed emotions.
