EDMONTON RADIO: Melissa Wright more than just a Rock Chick
K-97 midday host Melissa Wright has a tacit agreement with her mother – she won’t talk about her mom on the air, and her mom won’t listen just in case she does. As it happened, one afternoon both mom and grandma were in the car and flipped on the radio just in time to hear [...]
Blue Oyster Cult headlines Edmonton Rock Music Festival in August
Don’t fear the reaper – make a song about the original Man in Black that generations of classic rock fans will sing and laugh in the face of same. That’s how it works. We expect plenty of laughing and singing in the face of Death when Blue Oyster Cult comes to town this summer. The [...]
Heaviest winter on record as Deep Purple comes to Edmonton Feb. 21
Slowhand Walter, fire in this guy? No, it’s just one of the most famous misheard lyrics from one of the most famous rock classics ever pressed into service – Smoke on the Water – and soon we’ll get a chance to mishear it again live when Deep Purple comes to Rexall Place on Tuesday, Feb. [...]
TRUE TALES OF THE ROAD: Harlequin blows up good
One of the most powerful figures in the Canadian music business was once arrested for trying to bring explosives on an airplane. Oh, my, that doesn’t sound good, does it? Just imagine if that had happened today – and not in 1978, when airport security wasn’t so serious. “He’d probably still be in jail,” says [...]
Is classic rock really the best music ever made?
The best answer to the question of why classic rock is something that deserves preservation is found in Joe Queenan’s hilarious generation-bashing book Balsamic Dreams: “Baby Boomers have deluded themselves into thinking that what once mattered to them should now matter to others.” Or maybe this is too much deep thought for what was, after [...]
EDMONTON RADIO: K-97 billboard banned for ‘gratuitous’ use of breasts
All the racy billboards K-97 has gotten away with over the years and “Pray for More Rain” is the one that gets banned?! That’s the scoop from Advertising Standards Canada (ASC), which has deemed the image of a large-breasted, fully-clothed woman as “offensive” and “gratuitous” and in violations of clauses 14C and D – heh, [...]
WHO’S IN THE BAND: Bachman & Turner tonight at the Jube
It’s all well and good if you’re Pearl Jam and stay together 20 years before some bigshot Hollywood director makes a movie about you. That’s easy. Twenty? Try 20 DIFFERENT bands over 50 years, Sonny Boy, when you’re actually entitled to be called “classic rock” and you argue about who was in the room when [...]
TONIGHT: Chamber of Commerce Prez’s alter ego drums for Jefferson Starship
Classic rock fans ought to be used to that vague feeling of confusion seeing a favourite band that’s been around since the ‘60s – man, who the HELL is in the band now? The surprising answer for Jefferson Starship, playing Saturday at the Edmonton Rock Festival in Hawrelak Park, is this: the PRESIDENT OF THE [...]
TRUE TALES OF THE FISH: Country Joe and the F***
Country Joe McDonald does not over-estimate his place in the pantheon of Voices of a Generation, as a leader in the Peace Movement of the 1960s, as a martyr for the cause of free speech in America, as a counter-culture hero for the great censorship debate that would lead us into a new golden age. [...]
TRUE TALES: Sex with Janis and the Edmonton Rock Music Festival
The question must be asked: What was it like making love to Janis Joplin? Her one-time creative partner Sam Andrew replies, “Feathery, light and very feminine – way more feminine than I would’ve thought. I knew her really well. It wasn’t surprising, though. She was definitely all woman.” It was just the one night of [...]
Gene Simmons shoots his mouth off at the River Cree
As a member of Generation Nothing – that awkward demographic group who came of age between Generation X and Baby Boomers and had naught but KISS and Peter Frampton to soothe them through the horrors of disco – I can keep silent no longer. Gene Simmons: Please shut the f*** up. You used to be [...]
PREVIEW: Blue Oyster Cult bring the classics to Capital Ex
It has to be noted that, in a number of respects, BLue Oyster Cult are a band that succeeded in spite of themselves. The band’s very name was contentious from the start, with founding manager Sandy Pearlman naming them after a line in a poem he’d written — very hippy stuff, and not exactly a [...]
