Rock
Phil Collins has shared an update on his health — which has for years made playing drums difficult — and unfortunately, the 73-year-old Genesis icon still isn’t in fighting shape. In a snippet from a recent interview with Mojo, Collins disclosed that he’s thought about getting back behind the drum set, but hasn’t been able […]
The dream of the ’90s (and early 2000s) is alive and well in East Troy, WI. Rockers Nickelback and Creed will be joined by a host of fellow rockers for this year’s edition of the Summer of ’99 and Beyond Festival at Alpine Valley Music Theatre on July 18 and 19.
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The lineup for the second edition of the nostalgic fest will also include: Live, Daughtry, Tonic, Our Lady Peace, Lit, 3 DoorsDown, Sevendust, Mammoth WVH, Hinder, Vertical Horizon and Fuel. Two-day tickets for the event will go on sale at 11 a.m. ET on Friday (Feb. 21) here, with promoter Live Nation noting that they are a single ticket to be used for both shows; the ticket cannot be broken up into transferrable single-day tickets.
The shows will mark the first time Creed and Nickelback have shared a stage since 1999. Nickelback released their Live From Nashville album in late 2024, recorded during their “Get Rollin’ tour show at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena in August 2023, where they were joined by such Music City stars as Ernest, Josh Ross and Brantley Gilbert (on a cover of Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road”), Daughtry, Bailey Zimmerman and HARDY.
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In the windup to the Wisconsin fest, Nickelback will play a series of festival dates in April and May on the Rock the Country tour, which will also feature Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., Lynyrd Skynyrd, Travis Tritt, Aaron Lewis, Big & Rich and more.
Creed will warm up with an appearance at the Stagecoach Festival in April, followed by arena dates in Kentucky, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.
Check out the official poster below.
Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival is an upcoming oral history about the Lollapalooza festival, from its genesis as a farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction in 1991 to becoming a counterculture touchstone by the end of the decade. The book comes out March 25 on St. Martin’s Press. Written by veteran music journalists Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour, it includes interviews with more than 200 people, including the fest’s organizers, bands, stage crews, promoters and more.
Excerpted from LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour © 2025 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
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Lollapalooza by Richard Bienstock & Tm Beaujour
St. Martin’s Press
TED GARDNER (manager, Jane’s Addiction; cofounder, Lollapalooza) The genesis of it all was that Perry decided that Jane’s Addiction was gonna break up.
GREG KOT (music critic, Chicago Tribune) It was well known that they were not loving each other as a band at that point.
STUART ROSS (tour director, Lollapalooza) I don’t believe that Perry felt that the trajectory of the band versus the extracurricular activities of the band were sustainable. And when Perry decided to break the band up, he was very specific that he wanted them to go out on a high note, rather than fade into obscurity.
NIKKI GARDNER (assistant to Ted Gardner; special groups coordinator, Lollapalooza) Lollapalooza would be their big farewell, with a bunch of bands getting together to celebrate the end of Jane’s Addiction.
STEVE KNOPPER (editor at large, Billboard magazine) It’s actually a canceled appearance at the 1990 Reading Festival that sparks the whole thing. Which is kind of funny to think about—that a show that doesn’t even happen leads to something so much bigger.
MARC GEIGER (agent; cofounder, Lollapalooza) Jane’s is playing the Reading Festival, and they have a warm-up club show. It’s a tiny club. Can’t remember the name of it. It was about 180 degrees inside. The walls were sweating. Simon Le Bon’s in the club. Everybody who’s somebody made it to that show for Jane’s Addiction. It was an amazing show.
CARLTON SANDERCOCK (owner, Easy Action Records; Jane’s Addiction superfan) It was a club called Subterania, underneath a flyover in West London. Jane’s Addiction, prior to that point, were cult in the UK, but by summer of 1990 they were a big band, and for our small group of people who were crazy about them, to see them in a club like Subterania was a f-cking big deal.
DAVE NAVARRO (guitarist, Jane’s Addiction) I totally remember that show at Subterania, and I’ll tell you why. I was a big heroin user back then, and the day before, I had hooked up with a bunch of street kids that knew where to cop. We got ahold of a bunch of dope and ended up going to a squatters’ flat in an abandoned building.
So me and a couple of these street kids were getting high, and somewhere along the line, I overdosed. And then all the kids that were living there, except my one friend, split, because they didn’t want to have a body on their hands. They all ran away, and my friend called an ambulance and dragged me down a flight of stairs to put me on the street corner to hopefully have an ambulance come and pick me up. And he said that when he pulled my body up to lean against a street sign, I started coughing. I had come back. So he had to pull me back up the flight of stairs and watch through the window as the paramedics were looking for whatever it is they were looking for. And they never found it and they went away.
I remember coming to the next day, somewhere in the afternoon. And my friend was perched over me, saying, “Dave! Dave! You were dead! You were dead last night!” I was completely confused. And the first thing I said to him was, “Is there any more dope left?” So my next move was to get high again, which is insane.
Then I realized that the Subterania show was that night. I looked at the clock, it was at four or five in the afternoon, and I think I had missed sound check. And this was before cell phones and computers. So I had to somehow find the venue, and I think I made my way there maybe twenty minutes before we were supposed to go on. Just before the show I was completely asleep, and someone had to tap me on the shoulder and say, “It’s time.” So I went from an immediate drug-induced sleep to being onstage. And then we played, the show went great, and everybody had a good time.
STEPHEN PERKINS (drummer, Jane’s Addiction) I tell you, man, nothing is better than playing to a roomful of people that want your music. They know the lyrics, they’re there for you. There’s a union. And Perry, he’s a shaman when he’s up there. You can go into the room and let him take you somewhere.
CARLTON SANDERCOCK I just remember the f-cking heat.
MARC GEIGER It was cool outside, hot in the club. Perry went outside after the show, caught a cold, lost his voice. Perry wakes up in the morning, the band cancels because he can’t sing.
PERRY FARRELL I got too f-cked up. So I didn’t make it to Reading. My voice was just shot.
DAVE NAVARRO I felt bad for Perry, of course, because no one wants to get injured like that. But I remember a sigh of relief coming over me that I could just go back to my hotel room instead of to Reading.
MARC GEIGER Stephen and I go, “F-ck it. We’re going down to the fes- tival anyway. We’re going to have a good time.” We went all three days. There’s a thousand bands: The Pixies, who were friends and my client, and were ruling the UK at the time. Inspiral Carpets were my client. The Fall was a client. And we had such a good time hanging with all of them. Stephen and I said, “This is what we should do in America.” A camara- derie of all these cool alternative bands.
STEPHEN PERKINS We knew the music was growing. We knew X and Black Flag and the Minutemen, all the bands that inspired us, they had hit the ceiling. But when we saw what was happening at Reading, there was the sense that there’s something about this music that’s not being shown or heard yet. And we knew the audience was there and ready for it. To have that eclectic day, eclectic night, that experience where the genres kind of just melt together and the fans are there.
MARC GEIGER They didn’t have this in America. So we went back to the hotel, and we described our day at Reading. With Jane’s, Perry had said, “We’re breaking up the band. We want to do something magical for our last tour.” So at that point, I described what I thought a format should be, and I said, “I think we should bring seven bands. Everybody should pick a band.” I literally just threw it out there, and everybody started picking bands. I was like a waiter taking orders, including my own. I think Dave picked Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Eric picked the Butthole Surfers . . .
ERIC AVERY (bassist, Jane’s Addiction) I was a huge Butthole Surfers fan.
MARC GEIGER . . . and Perry picked Ice-T, and I picked the Pixies and Nine Inch Nails, and Stephen picked Rollins, I want to say.
DON MULLER (agent; cofounder, Lollapalooza) They came back from the UK and said, “What do you think? Can we do this?”
MARC GEIGER When I went to contact the bands, everyone said yes. Except the Pixies.
JOEY SANTIAGO (guitarist, Pixies) That probably sounds like something stupid that we would do. I mean, we should have done it. Because we worked with one of the founders—he was our agent. So it’s like, “F-ck, why didn’t we do it?”
MARC GEIGER So then the Pixies choice eventually evolved into Living Colour. Great rock band. And they had the only hit record out of the whole bunch.
DAVE NAVARRO My first memory of hearing about the festival was in our rehearsal space. I wasn’t very coherent for the days prior, but that conversation didn’t happen until we were well back in Los Angeles. We were in this dingy little studio, and we kind of threw names around of who would be good to be on it. I just thought it was going to be another festival gig. I had no idea what it would become.
DON MULLER I’ll be brutally honest with you, we didn’t have a clue about what the hell we were doing. Zero. If anybody says differently, they’re lying. Because it was like, Okay, we’re going to put all these bands together, and we think we can move it around the country . . . but what do we do with it?
RICK KRIM (executive, MTV) This was 1990, 1991, way before festivals were really a thing over here. These days you have three festivals every weekend. There’s nothing unique about it. But at that time, and in this musical lane, no one had done it on that kind of scale.
GINA ARNOLD (journalist, author) Marc Geiger told me, “Oh, we have this great idea. We’re gonna do these festivals, just like in England . . .” And I was like, “That’s never gonna work.” I mean, think about the difference between those festivals and America. The size of America . . . it’s just too big. Also, I told him, “There’s no market for those bands.”
MARC GEIGER But the key point was it wasn’t about creating an alternative tour to represent the time. Jane’s was looking for ideas to go out with a bang, something different, okay? This is true. They’ll tell you they were splitting up. They were fighting, da, da, da, da, da. I think Eric was trying to be straight and the other guys were not. That was causing some frictions.
Now, it turned out that the right thing was reflecting alternative culture in a package that could get to a lot of people and be presented with force. But it wasn’t the front burner. Reading and England was the front burner. The back burner was the hair-band sleeve. MTV in England wasn’t showing Faster Pussycat and Winger videos every thirty seconds. England was Inspiral Carpets. Madchester. The BBC and Pete Tong and John Peel and Nick Cave. America was still scared of that. At Reading, the Pixies were headlining an eighty-five-thousand-person festival. Here, they were a club act. You’re trying to get that culture and that mindset over in America, which is still promoting Winger videos.
DAVE NAVARRO I wasn’t really aware of it being a farewell tour, just because we were on the verge of every show being a farewell show. I think that’s what Perry had in mind, but I don’t know that he shared that with us. Although it was pretty obvious to me that we weren’t going to be doing much after that.
PERRY FARRELL I told Marc, “I’m out of here after the tour, so let’s do something good.” And he looked at me and said, “Perry, you can do whatever the f-ck you want.” And I said, “I’m going to hold you to that.”
STUART ROSS Perry called us all in for a meeting and told us what was going to happen and what his concept was. I remember it as being Ted Gardner, Marc Geiger, Don Muller, and Peter Grosslight, who was one of the partners at Triad. Tom Atencio, one of Jane’s Addiction’s managers. Bill Vuylsteke, also known as Bill V., who was the business manager. I think it was at Bill’s office. And Perry sat us all down and said, “Guys, I’m breaking the band up. I want to go out on a high, good note. And for the last tour, we’ll get six other bands. We’ll get the promoters to provide crazy food like giant burritos, and we’ll do politics. We’ll get the NRA to set up a booth next to PETA. And we’ll get crazy art. And I’ve got a name for it, we’re going to call it Lollapalooza.”
PERRY FARRELL I do remember coming up with the name. Because everybody always wants you to title a tour. In all truth, it was a very humble moment. I was on a dirty carpet in an apartment in Venice. It was a shag carpet, I think it was green, it was kind of ugly, and there were crusty things on the carpet. I had books, like old secondhand books, and I picked up a dictionary. It’s kind of a rarity to have a real dictionary, but we all had them in those days. I used to like to use the dictionary for words when I would write songs, because you might run across a word that’s so amazing that it sparks something. And then sometimes I would read the dictionary just for fun. But I came across “lollapalooza,” because I was up to L.
TED GARDNER No one could pronounce it. No one could spell it.
STUART ROSS Nothing like this had been done before. There were a few festivals like WOMAD, which was the Peter Gabriel event that started in Europe that traveled a bit. And I believe there was one other smaller festival . . .
DON MULLER I don’t want to throw water on our fire, but there was a show down at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa called A Gathering of the Tribes, I think that was 1990. And that pretty much was a model, even though nobody wants to talk about it, of how to put something like this together. It was the vision of Ian Astbury from the Cult. I was a huge Cult fan, and I went and saw the show and I thought, F-ck, this is amazing. But then again, living in Southern California, it works, right? But not in Cleveland.
STUART ROSS But none of us ever said, “How are we gonna get these bands on and off the stage? We should reach out to the Gathering of the Tribes people.” I don’t think we even called those things traveling festivals at the time. They were kind of “multi-act packages.” None of them were considered operations where we could just use their playbook. This was a much larger scope.
MARC GEIGER This was a presentation of this music and culture in a format that could get to everybody. Because it wasn’t England. It wasn’t a small country. You already had some culture in pockets, right? You had KXLU and KCRW and 91X and KROQ in Southern California. So those people benefited compared to others. You had to take this around.
This is where Stuart Ross and the whole team need their credit. Those guys made it work. They were killers. They figured out how to mobilize an army. That’s a little different than setting up base camp, which is today’s festival model, right? “I’m going to build a big village, and we’re not going to move for three days, and then I’ll tear it down.” That’s a very different product, massively. There were tons of logistical challenges.
STUART ROSS We were creating something that literally had to be redone every day. None of us had experience in putting together a seven-act traveling concert package with a ton of extra activities going on. And so we leaned on the promoters. We said, “Okay, you’re going to book Jane’s Addiction, and you’re going to book six other opening acts, and here’s who the acts are, and here’s what you’re gonna pay them.” They weren’t offered separately, but they were contracted separately. The promoters were told who the bands were going to be and what their guarantees were going to be. But there was no, “Oh, I don’t wanna pay that much for this band.” That was not an option.
And then we said, “And we need you to find alternative food”—not just the hot dogs and hamburgers and pretzels that were kind of prevalent as venue food in those days—“and if you can invite any political groups that want a table, that would be great.” And we got, obviously, varying results.
T. C. CONROY (front-of-house coordinator, Lollapalooza 1991) It was my job to make that field turn into Perry’s dream. And he was ethereal about it because he’s an ethereal guy. He was probably really high, too. But what they did was they gave me an office at Triad: “Here’s your desk, here’s your telephone, here’s your legal pad, here’s your Yellow Pages.” And I would go into Triad every day and work on organizing that front of house. And it was not easy because nobody knew what Lollapalooza was. I mean, it was a cold call . . . the coldest of cold calls. Because if you think about it in context, even the word “Lollapalooza” was weird. “Lolla what? Can you spell that?”
MISSY WORTH (marketing consultant, Lollapalooza 1991) Perry was very insistent on making sure that we represented the alternative world, both onstage and off. For instance, I remember having a big discussion with him, and I’m just using examples, I’m not saying they were on the tour, but it was, “If you’re gonna have the ACLU, do you also have the NRA?” Like, “You have to represent the world, not just our point of view.”
PERRY FARRELL I wanted to have a debate booth where the Republican and the Democrat and the Independent each gets up there and says their thing. Because doesn’t that seem, like, fair?
T. C. CONROY He asked me to get pro-lifers and then get the abortion clinics, and to get the military and then get Greenpeace. He had this concept of, “It all goes on the field.” The liberal side was more open to the concept. On the other side, I just remember them all saying no.
GARY GRAFF (music writer, Detroit Free Press) In the US we didn’t have the culture of the midway with all the booths, whether it was merchants or social causes or whatever else. It was an unusual thing.
STUART ROSS When we talked to promoters and said that we needed art, they pretty much all passed on that. Because they couldn’t figure out how to do it. So Perry found an art gallery owner in West Hollywood. Didn’t really work out well, but he curated it for us.
DON MULLER Stuart and I did most of the work putting the actual deals together, and it was literally going out and talking to people and saying, “Hey, do you believe in this?” “Can we work this?” “Do you need backing?” Because a lot of the promoters just didn’t have the wherewithal or the resources to do a show of this magnitude. But we needed them on the ground. We needed them marketing. We needed to hit all the clubs. We needed to work radio. There needed to be cohesiveness in getting the message out. Also, the idea was to be able to play a GA [general admission] place, so the kids could come and go as they wished.
STUART ROSS We’re talking about 1990, going into 1991, and amphitheaters were the new cool thing. They’re not the shopping centers that they are now. And everybody wanted to play them. They were brand-new buildings and they held eighteen thousand people, and there was a big general admission component. So that’s where we wanted to play.
DON MULLER It was one of those situations where we were, in a weird way, creating promoters in different cities as we went along. Seth Hurwitz is one that comes to mind. He had the 9:30 Club in D.C., and he grew his business off alternative music and things like Lollapalooza. We go to Toronto and there’s a guy named Elliott Lefko who gets it, breathes it, understands it, and likes it. Great Woods in Boston, same thing. But then we had people like Belkin Productions in Cleveland, which, for all intents and purposes, didn’t know what this was at all. I’m not certain if I sold that show or Geiger did, but we sold the show.
STUART ROSS Danny Zelisko, who had Compton Terrace in Phoenix, an alternative venue, was one who got it. As did Andy Cirzan with Jam Productions, who had the World Music Theatre in Chicago and Harriet Island in St. Paul, another unusual venue.
DANNY ZELISKO (promoter, Evening Star Productions) Festivals at that time were kind of passé—Woodstock happened twenty years earlier, and it just wasn’t something that was going on. Lollapalooza was a brand-new thing that we had to explain to the market and to rock audiences everywhere.
ANDY CIRZAN (promoter, Jam Productions) I’d already been working with Don and Marc, because I had relationships with a number of their bands, like the Beastie Boys. When they started talking about this, all I was saying was, “I wanna be involved. Okay? Please let me be involved!” It wasn’t a question of, “What are you guys doing?”
STEPHEN PERKINS I think promoters and everyone realized that this music is bigger than we thought it was.
DON MULLER We were also smart about our ticket prices. We knew we needed to be realistic about what we were doing.
STUART ROSS Our tickets were $27.50 the first year. And these were the days before Ticketmaster charges cost more than the ticket, so there might be $2.75, $3.00 on top of it. That was it. In 1991, that was a moderate price.
DON MULLER Some of these promoter guys we had to browbeat, but we were going, regardless. If you wanted to be a part of it, great. If you didn’t, you didn’t. But we were gonna make this thing happen.
BOB GUCCIONE JR. (editor, publisher, SPIN magazine) Lollapalooza came along and was a natural organic invention. I look at so many of the music festivals today, and they’re such total sh-t because they’re trying to re-create a blueprint from other times. You know, there’s no point in replicating Woodstock. You can’t re-create that spontaneity or authenticity. But Lollapalooza was purely a product of the imagination of the people of its time.
GARY GRAFF It was Brave New World in a lot of different directions, because festival culture in the United States really didn’t exist in ’91.
PERRY FARRELL It was early years. Do you know that 1991, that was the year Michael Jordan won the NBA title? Also, the World Wide Web was formed that year. And for mystics—if you speak to the sages—the rebbe, his greatest writings came in 1991, when he was talking about Mashiach and the era of redemption, ushering it in. It was all in 1991. So I look at that period as all the strong things that happened at that time. And that made Lollapalooza possible.
Imagine Dragons scored their fifth billion-view YouTube video this week when their 2017 single “Whatever It Takes” crossed the 10-digit rubicon. The beat-inflected rock anthem that topped-out at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of that year is spotlighted in the water-logged visual co-directed by the band’s frequent collaborator, Matt Eastin (“On Top Of the World,” “Believer,” “Roots”).
It opens with singer Dan Reynolds swimming through a flooded room past curios from the Overlook Hotel, the infamous site of the murderous action in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. It then smash-cuts to Reynolds launching into the song’s rapid-fire first verse in the same, now bone-dry, room, singing, “Falling too fast to prepare for this/ Tripping in the world could be dangerous/ Everybody circling, it’s vulturous/ Negative, nepotist.”
As the rest of the band joins him and the lights come up, things appear to be progressing toward a typical performance-style video. Then, all hell breaks loose. The ceiling begins to cave in and debris rains down all around, even as the group soldiers on and Reynolds leans into the chorus: “Whatever it takes/ ‘Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins/ I do whatever it takes/ ‘Cause I love how it feels when I break the chains.”
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Cue the rain. As a downpour drenches the men mid-song, the gentle shower turns into a torrent, with the water slowly rising to their knees, then their chests, as a pair of spooky sirens dive into the now chin-high flood. Struggling to hold their instruments high enough to avoid the deluge, the men finally submit, slipping under the waves, with Reynolds continuing to sing, fully submerged while the women pull at his sleeves.
After a silent scene of the rockers floating listlessly in the water, Eastin (and co-director Aaron Hymes) switch up the elements and transport the guys to a desert scene in which the contents of the room are aflame, including Reynolds’ mic stand, as well as the drum kit and Dan Sermon’s guitar. The clip from the group’s third album, Evolve, went on to win the best rock video award at the 2018 MTV VMAs.
Watch the “Whatever It Takes” video below.
02/20/2025
The North Shields’ third LP is stacked with massive anthems and lyrical greatness.
02/20/2025
Ozzy Osbourne was once invited to audition for a role in Pirates of the Caribbean—but the opportunity was shut down by his longtime manager and wife, Sharon Osbourne.
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During a recent appearance on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast, Sharon revealed what she considers the “biggest mistake” she ever made on the legendary Black Sabbath frontman’s behalf. “He got offered to go and read for Pirates of the Caribbean, and I’ve never said this to anyone,” she admitted to the Smashing Pumpkins frontman. “And I said no. Now wouldn’t he have been perfect?”
Corgan immediately agreed, responding, “He would have been perfect! Maybe it’s not too late, but God bless.”
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While it remains unclear which character Ozzy was being considered for, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has a history of casting rock legends. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards famously played Captain Teague, the father of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, in At World’s End (2007) and On Stranger Tides (2011).
Paul McCartney also made an appearance in Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) as Jack Sparrow’s uncle, Uncle Jack. Given Ozzy’s unmistakable persona and theatrical stage presence, it’s easy to imagine him fitting right into the swashbuckling world of the blockbuster franchise.
Beyond his near brush with Hollywood, Ozzy has remained active in music despite ongoing health struggles. In recent years, he released Patient Number 9 (2022), which earned a Grammy for Best Rock Album, and announced his retirement from touring due to health concerns. Meanwhile, Black Sabbath’s final reunion show is set to take place on July 5 in Birmingham, featuring appearances from Guns N’ Roses, Tool, and even actor Jason Momoa.
While Ozzy never got his shot at the high seas, his legacy as the Prince of Darkness remains untouchable—onstage and, perhaps, in an alternate timeline, on the big screen.
Opening less than two weeks ago, Becoming Led Zeppelin is already nearing $6 million in international box office gross. In an era where most documentaries head straight to streaming, the rock doc’s box office run – not the mention the fact that it’s playing on IMAX screens – is a small coup. “I must say that feedback from fans is just humbling and inspiring,” lead guitarist Jimmy Page wrote on social media.
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It’s also a source of great pride for co-directors Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, who were told the film wouldn’t make four bucks by one skeptical studio. According to MacMahon and McGourty, all the major studios except Song Pictures Classics passed on Becoming Led Zeppelin. That’s more than a bit surprising given the legendary band’s cross-generational popularity and the fact that the directors scored extensive interviews with the band’s elusive surviving members. But it’s fitting, too – it wouldn’t be the first time Led Zeppelin faced indifferent (or outright hostile) critics and proved them wrong.
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While Zep’s career spans nine albums and 12 years, effectively ending when drummer John Bonham died in 1980, this film focuses on the band’s early days, using interviews, rare archival footage and an unbeatable soundtrack (just try to resist headbanging in the theater) to tell the story of how four British boys from divergent backgrounds created an alchemic mixture of blues, hard rock, R&B and folk that changed the way rock bands played, recorded and toured.
Billboard sat down with co-directors MacMahon and McGourty to learn how they locked in interviews with Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, why the film stops after Led Zeppelin II and how some of the band’s contemporaries reacted to screenings of the movie.
You both worked together on American Epic, a wildly impressive and comprehensive 2017 documentary about the first recordings of blues, country and folk music in the United States. Did that help you land the surviving members of Led Zeppelin for this documentary? That series is very much their kind of music. Bernard MacMahon: It’s the fundamental reason why this film exists. Allison McGourty: There wouldn’t be Becoming Led Zeppelin without American Epic. MacMahon: Allison had this idea to do American Epic and tell the story of the first blues, gospel, country and Cajun records made in America and the 1920s and ‘30s. So she got a filmmaker friend of hers, Geoff Wonfor, who had done The Beatles Anthology films, to meet with me to persuade me this was a good idea for a movie. We made it under Allison’s leadership, and afterward, I came to her and said, “You know what would be a great follow-up film? When I was 12 years old, I read this little paperback book about Led Zeppelin. It’s long out of print, it was published in the ‘70s, and it’s the early story and it contains all this information that has been lost. It’s not part of the Led Zeppelin lexicon, it’s been replaced by all these tabloid books in the ‘80s written by a bloke who went on tour with them for a week.” This book was by a guy, Howard Mylett, who really had access to them. I read it when I was 12 and I found it inspirational, these four kids from different parts of Britain trying to make their way in music. McGourty: That was unusual. Two were from London, two were from the West Midlands. Normally that would never happen: The Rolling Stones were all from London, the Beatles were all from Liverpool. It’s hard for people from the West Midlands to break into the music scene so it was a bit of a miracle they got together at all. And their own back stories are entirely different. Jimmy Page had the support of his mom; John Paul Jones came from a showbiz family, his mom and dad were vaudeville performances; John Bonham, his parents didn’t mind what he did as long as he looked after his family; and Robert Plant got thrown out because he wouldn’t become an accountant. He became homeless. The part of the film where he talks about being homeless is pretty emotional. And then of course when they did get together, it was still an uphill battle. MacMahon: Peter Grant couldn’t get them a record deal in the U.K. No one got [their music]. People wouldn’t book the band. They had to go to America and did it on their own terms. Vanilla Fudge were the only group that took them under their wing and supported them. How did you manage to land Page, Plant and Jones for sit-down, on-camera interviews about Led Zeppelin? That’s rare.MacMahon: We had done months and months of preparations, including tracking down every interview of John Bonham. A couple people who knew what we were doing said we were absolutely mad (since the band) had said no to every film. But we believed and carried on doing the work. This is a message to the readers: work hard and follow your dreams. There’s nothing special about me – I’m not Francis Ford Coppola’s son, I’m not sitting with a pile of Academy Awards, but we did do this movie, American Epic, that we worked really hard on for 10 years, and we did not take short cuts. That meant when we got to (the band) and they happened to have seen (American Epic), they knew there were no short cuts in that movie — no stone was unturned — and they thought, “Well, they’re gonna apply that to us.” Which we did. It was a five-hour meeting with John Paul Jones, something similar with Robert Plant and Pat Bonham and a seven-hour meeting with Jimmy Page. There’s a lot of stuff about their pre-Zeppelin days in the film that I bet a lot of fans didn’t know. MacMahon: I remember, I said to (Page), “This is the point where you see Robert singing for the first time.” He goes, “What was the name of the group?” “Obs-Tweedle.” He was testing you?MacMahon: Yeah! When we got to the end he said, “This is a great film and we’d be honored to have you make it.” He gave us artistic freedom. They let us make the movie, they did not edit the film. That never happens. (With most) successful groups, they control everything. McGourty: They did come in with additional photographs and recordings that had never been released before. MacMahon: Stuff we’d never seen before. After intending to never do it, when they did agree to do it — and we were honored — they turned up full throttle, in the way Led Zeppelin does on stage. They came with bags of stuff. They came intending to be candid and honest. It’s so emotional watching them is because the additional material made it more emotional. When John Paul Jones is talking about this priest who said, “You can be organist and choir master” to him at 14 years old, I’d been showing him pictures of that church. That church was bulldozed two years after he was there. It’s completely lost to time. So he’s looking at this and remembering this wonderful guy, so the emotions are fresh. You talk about how Led Zeppelin owned the recordings of their first album in the film. They were pretty savvy about their publishing as well. Was there anything about the band’s business strategies, or Grant’s business practices, that you learned in the interviews that didn’t make the film? MacMahon: I wanted to make a film that when I was 13, I would have seen in my local cinema and would want to watch three or four times. What we put in the film was what we thought was useful if you’re a kid starting out. There’s a point where you stop with the minutiae and go, “Maybe for a later day.” What we wanted to get across with big brushstrokes emotionally that would resonate with a kid was that these guys never sat on their hands. Whether they were struggling like Robert Plant and John Bonham in the Midlands, or part of the session music scene like Jimmy and Jonesy were, they were studying every single thing. Jimmy was coming in to do a session and he’s leaning over to see what the engineer is doing, as well as playing his part. And Robert was trying everything. Before Led Zeppelin he was singing with Alexis Korner, the father of the British blues scene. They were putting themselves out there and trying everything. And that’s the message. All the things (people are) being told they need to do now: TikTok, Instagram, you don’t need all that stuff. You just need two or three of you, and ideally as broad of tastes as possible to make it as colorful as possible, and then follow what your gut is telling you to do. But you gotta be out there and you gotta work and you gotta be studying. Let your response with the audience – even if it’s 10 people, then 15 people – inform what you’re doing. But don’t let those people tell you what to do. And that’s the message we as filmmakers found when we were getting to the rough cut. We brought it to every studio and every major studio apart from Sony Pictures Classics was like, “No one will ever watch this movie. Nobody will watch full Led Zeppelin songs in a cinema.”McGourty: Someone told us we wouldn’t get four dollars for this film. We carried on anyway. It paralleled (the story in the film). MacMahon: The Led Zeppelin story was a lesson to us as we were making this film. The film doesn’t get into any of the more salacious rumors about the band. Was that part of the feedback from studios — they wanted more scandal in the film? MacMahon: Some of that, yeah. They thought people would only sit and watch films about debauchery. McGourty: Led Zeppelin became the biggest band in the world because of their music. That’s what people love and what fans want to hear. MacMahon: This film allows you to hear the music in the purest way possible. This (movie features) the original lacquer cut done by Bob Ludwig in ’69. It’s a journey in sound — the exact sound it was meant to have. There’s no compression in the audio on this film. This is huge high peaks and troughs. It’s dynamics, which is what Led Zeppelin traded in. And that’s why audiences are responding to it – they’re getting the pure, high-quality stuff with no compression, no butchering. Were there any archival bits that were painful to cut?MacMahon: Nothing. McGourty: Peter Grant, if he caught someone filming at their gig, he would rip out the film, smash the camera, physically eject them. And they were not doing media. We’ve got every fragment known to exist. MacMahon: I just found out that some clip was (recently) discovered, but fortunately it was a song we already have a mind-boggling performance of in full-color and that (new one) was in black and white. The Beatles did insane amounts of publicity all the time, so there’s an endless supply of photo sessions and TV interviews. Zeppelin is the exact opposite. There’s so little. McGourty: In a way it made the film harder, since you have very little footage to work with, but it forced us to be creative. We’re very inspired by films of the Golden Era, Singin’ in the Rain, Frank Capra. We used lots of techniques from old movies like montage work. You see newspapers, contracts, tickets – we had over 6,000 artifacts digitized. (Everything you see in the film) is the real thing. MacMahon: We screened it for Bob Weir and Taj Mahal, who were kings of the counterculture in the Bay Area. They were there when Zeppelin broke through. Weir went over to me at the end of the film and said, “You know, this is game-changing stuff. Every kid should watch this to see this is what their grandparents did and how they did it. You know what I was thinking as I watched these guys? They reminded me of the John Coltrane trio with a singer. Or Pharoah Sanders with a singer.” That from Bob Weir, that tells you the level of musicianship he’s seeing. Taj Mahal saw it and said – McGourty: “That film re-arranged my molecules.”MacMahon: A guy who has been aware of this group for 55 years has his opinion expanded and changed from his preconceptions of the group.The film concludes after their second album, which I think is wise, as it allows you to really dig into their origin story instead of feeling beholden to tell the whole tale. Was that always the intention when you started this project?MacMahon: Yeah. In the story of Led Zeppelin, as in the story of anything that’s a great achievement, there’s a moment where you come from childhood with nothing, and you land on the moon or climb Everest. This is where the film ends – they’ve landed on the moon, they’re the biggest band on the planet and they finally have recognition in their home country. That is absolutely the conclusion of a two-hour cinematic film.
On the heels of his first book, Dark Days: A Memoir, in 2015, Lamb of God frontman Randall Blythe did not want to follow it up with another non-fiction book. But he was counseled otherwise.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I never want to write non-fiction ever again,’” Blythe tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Richmond, Va. “But my literary agent was like, ‘No, you need to write another non-fiction book to prove to publishers that you’re not just a one-trick pony, contingent on this very kind of bizarre and unfortunate story.’ And I was like, ‘OK, he’s the literary agent, so I’m gonna follow his advice.’ But I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about. This book was more difficult to write than my first one.”
Dark Days focused on Blythe’s legal battles in the Czech Republic, where he was arrested in 2012 and hit with manslaughter charges over the death of a fan at a 2010 Lamb of God show in Prague; he was acquitted in 2013. “(Dark Days) had a classic three-act narrative structure provided by that unfortunate even in my life. This one it was more, ‘Here’s an idea. Let’s see what happens.’ So it was a different experience.”
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In Just Beyond the Light: Making Peace With the Wars Inside Our Head (Grand Central) — which published Tuesday (Feb. 18) – Blythe offers a series of essays about what Blythe calls “perspective” on mortality, sobriety, creativity, mental health, the environment and other issues. “I knew I wanted to write about death. I knew I wanted to write about surfing — that’s another thing that has broadened my perspective in life and really made my life better,” Blythe says. “So death and surfing, which I thought would be a good book title. And I just kinda went from there.”
Just Beyond the Light begins with a chapter devoted to Blythe’s relationship with Wayne Ford, a Lamb of God fan dealing with terminal leukemia who passed away at 33.
“The ultimate fear of every human is our mortality, really,” Blythe explains. “I befriended (Ford) during the last month or two of his life, and the way he handed his mortality was extremely…I hate to use the word inspiring, but it was. I had this honest, open sort of relationship with him when we were talking, and to see this young man handle it with such grace and dignity, it really altered my perspective.
“I’m almost 54 years old now. Mortality is staring me more and more in the face, and it’s something I think about a lot. And it doesn’t freak me out; I view it as something not to be afraid of because it’s going to happen to us all inevitably. But I knew I wanted to write about that.”
Mortality provides a thread throughout the Just Beyond the Light, as does discourses on sobriety, which Blythe achieved more than a decade ago. “I wouldn’t have these perspectives if I wasn’t sober now,” he notes. “I wouldn’t have any perspective, period, because I think I’d be dead by now — to bring it back to mortality. My drinking, it got in the way of everything because I bought into the sort of cultural mythos of the hard drinking, hard drugging, hard partying artist for awhile.
“I didn’t become an author until I got sober. I talked about being a writer. I did all the things that (Charles) Bukowski and (Ernest) Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson did. I drank and partied and womanized, got in a few fights. I did all the things those great writers did — except writing. I was practicing to be a writer I suppose, but when I got sober I was able to become the writer I’m supposed to be.”
In other parts of Just Beyond the Light, Blythe uses a stay at the Chelsea Hotel in New York to ruminate on songwriting and other forms of creativity, while the chapter before laments the epidemic of school shootings in the United States and the lack of effective measures to prevent them. There are plenty of viewpoints in the book that may butt up against social and political sensibilities that have surfaced in the country during the past month, but Blythe (acknowledging that “I’m strapped in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”) is ready to have those conversations when he begins a 15-date speaking tour to promote the book.
“I’m very much interested in conversations,” he says. “I think that is a problem within our culture now, that lack of dialogue. And for me, I think that dialogue can only effectively occur in a face-to-face setting, because I think that within the confines of the Internet there’s a tendency towards tribalization…and to view others almost as less than human. It’s us and them, and our common humanity is lost and people are just typing slogans at each other — from both the left and the right, as far as I can tell. There’s no discourse, and that’s extremely distressing to me.”
Those appearances will be anything but rote, Blythe promises.
“I’m not gonna be reading; they could just stay home and do that,” he says. “I’m gonna get up there and tell stories from outside the book. I want all the stories to service the main theme of the book, which is perspective. I’ve never done it before, so it’s gonna be an interesting experiment for me. We’ll see what happens.”
Beyond the book, Blythe says Lamb of God — marking its 30th year since he joined the band, then known as Burn the Priest, and independently released its first demo tape — is headed for a “light” year after heavy touring in the wake of 2022’s Omens album. Guitarist Mark Morton also wrote a memoir, Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir, for which Blythe provided assistance as well as a cover photo. (“His book is more of a Lamb of God retrospective,” Blythe says, “which I think is cool ’cause I don’t want to write that. I’m glad he did the heavy lifting.”) Blythe also made guest appearances on recent albums by P.O.D. and Lacuna Coil.
The band, meanwhile, will be playing festivals — Inkcarceration in Ohio and Louder Than Life in Kentucky — but Blythe and company are most excited about being on the bill for the Back To The Beginning on July 5 in Birmingham, England, where Ozzy Osbourne and the original lineup of Black Sabbath will play its final show supported by a who’s who of heavy metal and hard rock acts.
“It’s an incredible honor to be asked to do this,” says Blythe, adding that Lamb of God will be performing one of its own songs and one Black Sabbath song, which is already chosen, though he won’t reveal what it is. “Black Sabbath was the first metal band, and we are going to their home town, which is the birthplace of heavy metal, to give them the best send-off we can. And it’s awesome it’s going to charity. I think all the bands are pretty emotional about it. All of us have Black Sabbath’s DNA in our music. They are the tree from which we have all fallen. And this is the last one; Ozzy has Parkinson’s, so it’s not like the endless Kiss farewell tour. This is it. So we want to go and give them the best send-off as possible and just show respect and thank them.”
Just Beyonce The Light
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The dates for Blythe’s book tour supporting Just Beyond the Light include:Feb. 19 – Philadelphia, Pa, Underground ArtsFeb. 21 – Harrisonburg, Va., The Golden PonyFeb. 23 – Somerville, Mass., Arts at the ArmoryFeb. 25 – Montreal, Quebec, Théâtre FairmountFeb. 26 – Toronto, Ontario, Red Room at The Concert HallFeb. 28 – Lansing, Mich., Grewal Hall at 224March 01 – Joliet, Ill., The ForgeMarch 03 – Nashville, Tenn., The Basement EastMarch 04 – Dallas, Texas Granada TheaterMarch 05 – Austin, Texas, ParishMarch 07 – Denver, Colo., Meow WolfMarch 09 – Seattle, Wash., El CorazonMarch 12 – San Francisco, Calif., The IndependentMarch 13 – Los Angeles, Calif., El Rey TheatreMarch 14 – San Diego, Calif., House of Blues
Pantera’s latest stop on their European tour came with a legendary surprise when the metal heavyweights were joined on stage by none other than Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson for a rendition of their 1992 classic “Walk.”
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The metal legends took over Adidas Arena in Paris on Feb. 15, treating fans to a career-spanning set. Before launching into “Walk,” frontman Phil Anselmo addressed the crowd, noting that Dickinson was in attendance. Midway through the track, the Iron Maiden vocalist stormed the stage, mic in hand, to sing the song’s iconic chorus alongside Anselmo. The Pantera frontman even bowed in front of Dickinson in a moment of mutual metal respect.
Fan-shot footage of the moment quickly made waves online, with fans praising the crossover between two of metal’s most influential ac
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The surprise guest appearance came just days before Pantera kicks off their first U.K. and Ireland headlining tour in 20 years, with shows in Glasgow (Feb. 18), Leeds (Feb. 19), Dublin (Feb. 21), Birmingham (Feb. 23), and London (Feb. 25). The band will also return to the U.K. this July, supporting Black Sabbath at their final reunion show alongside Metallica, Slayer, Gojira, and Mastodon.
Pantera’s reunion tour, featuring core members Anselmo and bassist Rex Brown alongside Zakk Wylde and Charlie Benante filling in for the late Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul, has been a point of both celebration and controversy. While the tour has been met with strong demand, the band faced backlash in 2023 over Anselmo’s past actions, leading to festival cancellations in Germany and Austria.
Despite the controversy, Pantera has continued to sell out major venues across the globe, and Dickinson’s unexpected cameo only added to the excitement surrounding their current run.
Beyond their dominance on the live stage, Pantera’s legacy is solidified in the charts. The band made history in 1994 when Far Beyond Driven debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, making it the first extreme metal album to ever claim the top spot. The record, fueled by tracks like “I’m Broken” and “5 Minutes Alone,” marked a turning point for metal’s mainstream acceptance.
Their follow-up albums continued their chart success, with The Great Southern Trendkill (No. 4, 1996) and Reinventing the Steel (No. 4, 2000) reinforcing their standing in heavy music. Meanwhile, their seminal 1992 release Vulgar Display of Power—featuring classics like “Walk” and “Mouth for War”—remains a defining album of the genre, certified double platinum by the RIAA.
You know how it is when you’re lost in the riff, head banging so hard that you unleash a torrent of embarrassing white flakes. No, not that kind. That’s the dilemma facing Saturday Night Live cast mates Bowen Yang and Sarah Sherman in a new CeraVe shampoo ad in which they portray the lead singers […]