Rock
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Melissa Etheridge is forever thankful for the gift of life that late friend David Crosby bestowed on her and ex Julie Cypher when he agreed to be a sperm donor for the couple in the 1990s. In an interview with People to promote her new docuseries Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken — which premieres on Paramount+ on July 9 — Etheridge, 63, says that in addition to being the biological dad to her daughter Bailey and late son Beckett, Crosby “really taught me about generosity.”
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“The situation was special with my partner at the time because she had been adopted and she wanted her children to know who their biological father was,” Etheridge says of Cypher. “So we weren’t going to go to a sperm bank because she wanted them to know.” That led them to Crosby, who died in 2023 at 81 and seemed up for the task with no strings attached.
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“To me, I didn’t want someone who wanted to be a father,” the singer said of Crosby, who was also a father to sons James and Django and daughters Erika and Donovan. “I didn’t want all of a sudden my children to have… ‘Oh, there’s dad.’ And who am I? That sort of thing”; Bailey is now 27 and Beckett died of an opioid overdose in 2020 at 21.
In fact, it was Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance, who suggested he help the couple out, and according to Etheridge, they weren’t the only ones who were subject to his generosity.
“They had just had help having their son and they appreciated that. They wanted to pay it forward,” Etheridge said. “We’re still finding kids from David Crosby out in the world. My daughter’s like, ‘I have another half-sister.’” The key, she said, was that Crosby was happy to donate sperm, but did not need to be a hands-on father to Etheridge’s kids, which is why the relationship worked.
“That’s what really made it clear for me, was that he was willing to say, ‘Yeah, I was the biological father,’” Etheridge said of Crosby. “And my kids call him bio dad, so he’s the biological father, but they didn’t need a relationship with him.”
When the Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash founder died Etheridge paid loving tribute to the rocker. “I am grieving the loss of my friend [and] Beckett and Bailey’s biological father, David,” she wrote at the time. “He gave me the gift of family. I will forever be grateful to him, [son] Django, and [wife] Jan. His music and legacy will inspire many generations to come. A true treasure.”
Ron Chapman thought making a documentary about the 1969 Toronto Rock and Roll Revival concert in 1969 would be “a no-brainer.”
It certainly had the provocative goods to make for a great movie, from a stellar lineup of rock legends to John Lennon’s first full-blown concert appearance outside of The Beatles to Alice Cooper‘s infamous chicken-killing incident. And there was footage of it all, shot by no less than the legendary D.A. Pennebaker, then of Monterey Pop and Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back fame. It seemed like a slam dunk.
But “it was much harder than I thought it would be,” Toronto-based Chapman tells Billboard. Financing took a good six years, during which Pennebaker as well as performers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis passed away. “This festival had been passed over by time and history,” explains Chapman (Who the F**k is Arthur Fogel?, The Poet of Havana, The Forbidden Shore). “One, because it happened in Canada and nobody paid much attention to Canada. Secondly, because Woodstock had just happened and everybody was festivaled out. It got bookended between that and Altamont and was somewhat forgotten.”
The Revival has been revived, however.
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Chapman’s Revival69: The Concert That Rocked the World — which was shown at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival and won the audience award for best international feature at the Florida Film Festival — comes out Friday (June 28) via Apple TV, on DVD and in theaters. That night, music critic Robert Christgau — who covered the concert and appears in the film — will moderate a Q&A with Chapman at New Plaza Cinema in New York City.
It will, Chapman and others associated with the project hope, give the festival the prominent place in rock n’ roll history they feel it’s been denied. “You were always playing this festival or that festival back then…but this one had John Lennon. That’s kind of a big deal, right?” says Cooper, whose band performed on its own — between Lennon and the Doors, in fact — and also backed up Gene Vincent. “If that doesn’t make it historic, what does?”
“If it had happened in Buffalo, it would’ve been a movie in the ‘70s,” adds John Brower, who co-promoted the Sept. 13, 1969, event with partner Ken Walker. “Up here in Canada things take a long time to get figured out or acknowledged. No U.S. media was here (except Christgau). And it was such a desperate struggle to put it on. How could we imagine it being historical at the time? But it’s very powerful for me to remember Jim (Morrison) and John (Lennon).”
The Toronto festival’s story was as epic and epochal as any of the others that dotted the rock landscape at the time. Brower and Walker originally planned to celebrate rock n’ roll OGs like Berry, Little Richard, Lewis, Vincent, Bo Diddley and others. They were also partly financed by a local motorcycle club, the Vagabonds, and alarm bells sounded when ticket sales were slow. The Doors, in need of shows after Morrison’s arrest in Miami six and a half months prior, were added to the bill but didn’t provide the expected boost. Brower and Walker planned to cancel, but when they told Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer, who’d been flown in from Los Angeles to emcee, the former had a different idea.
“(Fowley) went into hyper overdrive bordering on rage that we would even considering canceling the show,” Brower recalls. “His brilliance was to realize John Lennon lived and breathed Chuck Berry and Little Richard and the Beatles had opened for Gene Vincent at the Star Club (in Hamburg, Germany). He just said, ‘You need to call John Lennon and tell him you’ve got all these bands.’ He was smart enough to say, ‘Don’t tell him about Chicago, the Doors, Alice Cooper. Tell him about the old rock n’ rollers.’”
So on the Tuesday before the concert, Brower put in a call to Apple Corps in London and managed to not only get a hold of Lennon but convince him to come. Lennon put together an ad hoc Plastic Ono Band last minute, with his wife Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton on guitar, future Yes drummer Alan White and longtime friend Klaus Voormann on bass. They rehearsed on the plane ride over and later in the dressing room before going on stage for a performance preserved on the album Live Peace in Toronto 1969, released three months later.
“It was a joke,” Voorman remembers. “How dare somebody like John Lennon get out there with a band that had never played together, didn’t know the songs, didn’t know what microphone or what amplifier or drum kit would be there. That was real, how can I say…scary in a way for John to do this. It was fun to play, yes, but we played the wrong notes and played the wrong things. It was…crazy.”
The Lennon booking did succeed in selling out the concert’s 20,000 tickets. Brower calls it “the Hail Mary pass we threw because nothing else would win the game.” He ultimately let in another 1,500 fans who were pushing at the gates as the show went on.
Revival69 documents the myriad machinations that went into the concert, even beyond luring Lennon and company — and including the Cooper chicken incident, when he hurled a live chicken his manager Shep Gordon had let loose on stage into the crowd, which promptly tore it to pieces. “I’m from the Midwest; I didn’t know chickens don’t fly,” says Cooper, whose unwitting stunt ironically made more international news than Lennon’s performance.
“John and Yoko loved what we were doing,” recalls Cooper, who didn’t become friendly with Lennon until some years later in Los Angeles. “We were doing street art with the pillows and the CO2 and the chicken and the whole thing. Yoko and John Loved all that. It was primitive, sort of guerilla theater that we were doing, and that’s what they liked about it so much.”
Chapman “wanted to take the viewer back and feel like they were there at the festival. So much of this was the essence of rock n’ roll and everything that was so great and so wonderful about it. I think a lot of that has been lost — and that’s okay, because progress is progress. But the music industry and the culture in that moment in time was so special and so different in so many ways.”
Revival69 includes interviews with Brower, Cooper, Gordon (who helped the organizers put things together), Voormann, Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger and other participants, as well as members of Pennenbaker’s film crew and even Rush’s Geddy Lee, a friend and tennis partner of Chapman’s who attended the festival. Ono and Clapton were on Chapman’s wish list but were unavailable.
The linchpin for the film, of course, is Pennebaker’s footage, which surfaced briefly in 1971 as Sweet Toronto and has been used for subsequent video releases of the Berry, Lewis and Little Richard performances. “He barely got the financing to do it,” Chapman says, “but his instincts to go and shoot the festival and that it would be worth documenting were good.” That Pennebaker was not able to release a successful film, according to Chapman, “was his greatest disappointment. After Don’t Look Back and Monterey Pop he was riding a wave. He really thought this film was going to be his greatest success; it was, in fact, his greatest failure. D.A. spoke very rarely about this film. I really was looking forward to interviewing him. I was really looking forward to being able to stand with D.A. when we launched it.”
Filmmaker Chris Hegedus, Pennebaker’s widow, says he “loved the film” footage that he shot. “The performers were legends, and they gave amazing performances in it, so that aspect of having it as history is really precious.” She and their son, Frazer Pennebaker, worked with Chapman in reviewing the footage, using an old Steenbeck editing table. In the boxes of the film reels they also found some of the Super 8 cameras that Pennebaker had given to crew members and performers to shoot whatever they wished.
“That was a huge find,” Chapman says. “I was so excited. Here was great backstage footage that had never been seen, and all kinds of audio I was able to use. It was fantastic.”
Hegedus considers Revival69 to be “Ron’s version of what happened, which is a fantastic concert story.” But she makes clear that it’s different than what Pennebaker would likely have done if he’d had the opportunity. “Really what Penny was trying to do was memorialize the performances of this particular time in history and what happened there,” she explains. “You can see this festival fell between Woodstock and Altamont in a certain way. it starts out as this kind of, ‘Let’s have a good time rock n’ roll,’ and ends with this (Lennon) performance that’s really about revolution and what’s happening in the world. I don’t think those concertgoers were really ready for that kind of end statement that happened because of John and Yoko’s political beliefs,” Hegedus notes. “(Chapman) started wanting to make the film when Penny was alive, so he would have had a lot to contribute about that aspect of the film, and his point of view. Sadly he died (in 2019) before Ron got the money, so it proceeded as it is — a riveting film and a real tribute to somebody like Penny who really had documented so many cultural and political moments that were incredibly important.”
“I think (Lennon) would’ve loved this movie,” Brower says. “I think (Morrison) would’ve loved this movie, even though he chose not to be on film. In the movie you see people having the greatest time — not of their lives, maybe, but a great time. They’re screaming, they’re laughing, having a fabulous time watching all the rock n’ rollers. Bo Diddley said, ‘I’ve never heard an audience scream or cheer for me like that, ever.’ It almost brought me to tears.”
Revival69
In the rock history, the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival in 1969 is legendary. But for Klaus Voormann, who played bass in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band, it was something of “a joke.”
The story of the band’s ad hoc first concert on Sept. 13, 1969, at the University of Toronto’s Varsity Stadium has been oft told, and is the subject of a new documentary, Ron Chapman’s Revival69: The Concert that Rocked the World, out now via a variety of platforms.
Using footage shot on that day by legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, it chronicles how festival organizers, fretting over low tickets sales and indebted to a motorcycle gang financier, put in a last-minute call to England and convinced Lennon to agree to fly from London to Toronto on short notice and play on the same bill as his rock n’ roll heroes — Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent and more — as well as the Doors and Chicago.
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Lennon, however, had no band, so he rounded up a crew that included Eric Clapton (after Beatles mate George Harrison declined), Voormann — a friend from the Beatles’ early Hamburg days who designed the album cover for Revolver and was playing in Manfred Mann — and fledgling drummer Alan White, whom he saw play in a London club (and who famously hung up on Lennon’s first phone call). With minimal rehearsal — a bit on the plane ride over and backstage — the troupe played a rough and tumble set of covers, The Beatles’ “Yer Blues,” Lennon’s not-yet recorded “Cold Turkey” and “Give Peace a Chance,” as well as two Ono songs, including the lengthy, free-form “John John (Let’s Hope For Peace).”
As Lennon’s first full-scale concert performance since the Beatles’ last show on Aug. 29, 1966, in San Francisco, it was a bit loose, and it’s preserved on the Live Peace in Toronto 1969 album released three months later. With Revival69‘s release, Billboard spoke to Voormann — who also appears in the film and played on the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album that followed in 1970 — to recount his memories of the auspicious event.
An Unexpected Call
“John called me, and he never called me before, not so much. He’d seen me play bass and he knew I played for Manfred Mann, but I had never played for him or anything. So out of the blue he called me and said, ‘I’m putting a band together. It’s called the Plastic Ono Band. You want to play bass in the band?’ And I said, sort of, ‘What’s this Plastic Ono Band?’ I had no idea what was gonna happen, and I’d never met Yoko, so it was really very strange.
“So he said, ‘Well, Eric Clapton is going to do it, and we’ve got a little drummer in mind called Alan White.’ I didn’t know who he was, just a kid. ‘That’s it, just the four of us and Yoko and we are the Plastic Ono Band.’ I said ‘OK, let’s do it’ and (Lennon) says, ‘Great. I’ll see you at the airport tomorrow!’ (laughs)
“He just jumped into the cold water, not knowing what was gonna happen, no rehearsal. We didn’t know what we were going to play…but here’s the Plastic Ono Band and we go to Toronto to this festival tomorrow. We didn’t have any stage performance. We didn’t know what songs John was gonna do. He said, ‘Well, there’s Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and all these great (artists) and we are just playing rock n’ roll.’ And I thought it was a little far-fetched. This is John Lennon, who played in the Beatles, and this is the first time he’s gonna be out there and presenting something new, and…we just go on stage and play? How does somebody like John Lennon get out there with a band that never played together?
“So we went to the airport, and before we got onto the plane we stood there and we were waiting for Eric Clapton and nobody could find Eric. It was getting really close to (boarding); John said, ‘Well, if he isn’t here in 10 minutes, we’re gonna go home,’ and then Yoko says, ‘No, no, no, let’s do it. It’s for peace. We’ve got to do it.’ So Terry Doran, who was sort of the road manager, he actually got a hold of Eric. He was asleep. I don’t think he realized that this thing is really going to happen. So he came and we all got on the plane, and the plane was very full. It was packed.”
The Friendly Skies
“We were lucky; they arranged for us to sit in the last row of the plane, which was right next to the engines, and it was really loud back there. John and Yoko were in first class, but he came back and we tried to (rehearse) a little bit. It was just hilarious, just a joke, trying to rehearse the songs. I played an electric bass, no amplifier. John had a semi-acoustic guitar, Eric had a semi-acoustic guitar. It was maybe a little bit of John singing “Money (That’s What I Want)” or something like that. But there was no rehearsal. We all knew the songs, yes, of course. We could play any rock n’ roll — I could, Eric could, Alan White had no idea if he could. (laughs) It was just a joke, really. Just a joke.
“We all didn’t know Yoko at all — Eric didn’t, I didn’t, Alan White didn’t. John did, of course, but I don’t know if he knew exactly what Yoko was gonna do. So when we were on the plane and rehearsing for maybe an hour, Yoko came down the aisle, ‘Can we rehearse my song now?’ And John stood up: ‘Come on, Yoko, let’s have a cup of tea.’ He didn’t even let us hear what she had in mind. He didn’t tell us what song we were gonna do, what noises we were gonna do. We had no idea.
“We came off the plane, got into the cars, the limousines, and the motorbikes were escorting us to the stadium. We went in the stadium and went back into the dressing room, and we had one amplifier for the three of us, and the drummer. There was no bass drum, just a snare and a hi-hat and a cymbal. That’s all there was. So it was another Mickey Mouse attempt to have a rehearsal. So had a bit of rehearsal and one person who came in I recognized — that was Gene Vincent. But apart from him I just walked up to the stage, went up on the stage, did the whole concert, went back to the dressing room, got my clothes, packed the bass into a case and got back into the limousine and we were off. I didn’t see anybody. I can’t tell you about any conversations with other musicians or anything. I didn’t see any of those. John, of course, they were all getting on his case, but I was completely out of that. People were not interested in Klaus Voormann. It wasn’t important to me, either, so I was happy to get out of this place.
“I think (Lennon) only really realized what he was doing when we were there, just about to get up on stage. He had his lovely white suit on and we were walking (to the stage) and he said, ‘Wait a second’ and went in the corner, and he puked. He threw up. He was very, very nervous. He didn’t even have a very good voice. HIs voice was nearly gone. So there we were with a singer, John, going up there and not having a strong voice and we just walked on the stage and played.”
Rock n’ Roll Revived
“I felt sorry for John. He really felt out of place on stage, when I see it now. John never was a frontman on stage. People don’t realize (that) when you’re with a band you may do a little bit of saying, ‘Here’s the next number…’ He was never the frontman who was actually organizing a stage persona. He never had that. He was doing ‘Cold Turkey,’ and it was such a stupid version, the way we played it. When I heard the song I was so excited; ‘We can go in the studio and make a great version of this song!’ And later on we did. I loved the record but what he played on stage was just terrible…and the audience didn’t applaud. John was dreaming, ‘Wake up!’ Telling people to wake up and participate.
“And then, of course, the big surprise came when suddenly…we had no idea if Yoko was singing classic opera or what she was gonna do. Suddenly this screaming started. ‘What’s this?!’ We couldn’t believe it. It was just…ridiculous. John said, ‘Well, when Yoko’s number comes we kind of play an E chord,’ so we played in E and just fiddled around on our instruments. We had no idea what was gonna happen. So we were just improvising, making strange noises on the guitar, on the strings. And I had flat-wound strings, so I couldn’t do many noises. If I would’ve had a flute or any crazy instrument I could’ve improvised something, but with my bass there was not much I can do.
“I knew that Yoko very much wanted to come to spread the message of peace, which is a very nice thing to do. So you had her lying there (on the stage) and she was really like a dying bird. She was croaking, making all these noises. I was standing behind her, and I could really see this woman was really trying as hard as she can out of her little body to let the people know there’s a war going on and people are dying and bombs are falling, and that was the feeling I got out of it. The audience didn’t quite get it, of course. They wanted to see John and they didn’t care about Yoko, and suddenly there was this woman making these noises.
“And Yoko is amazing. She had no…how can I say it? At that particular time she had no feeling for an audience. The charisma that comes across if a Little Richard gets up there or a Chuck Berry, they have their tricks to get the audience, and she had no idea what stage presence really was. She learned that much later, but at the time, no. And of course you had a rock n’ roll audience, not an artistic type of audience. People wanted to hang out and have a party, and then there’s Yoko trying to spread that message. It was really tough. I’m really proud of her that she actually did this. When you see the documentaries you can at least see the effort she was making to tell the people, ‘Please make peace.’ That’s what she was trying to do.”
No Encore
“I think we pretty much soon forgot about it and didn’t even talk much about it. All I remember is after (the show) we drove a long drive in a limousine to a huge mansion of some guy, it must’ve been the guy who put the concert together. He had a golf course in his garden, and I remember Terry Doran driving a golf cart and said, ‘This f–king thing doesn’t pull the d-ck off a chocolate mouse!’ (laughs) It was so slow and he wanted to ride pretty quick on it. I remember sitting at a swimming pool and somebody took some photos. We had fun. We were laughing. But there was no talk about the concert or anything. We were just ready to go back home.”
The cause of death for Shifty Shellshock, the frontman of rap rock band Crazy Town, has been revealed. The star, who was born Seth Binzer, died of accidental overdose, according to People. “Seth Binzer, after struggling with addiction and Crazy Town’s rapid success with ‘Butterfly,’ never was able to reach out on a more successful level to deal with […]
Grammy award-nominated singer-songwriter Tayla Parx has always been country. Hailing from Dallas, the 30-year-old multihyphenate became just the fourth Black woman in history to write a Country Airplay No. 1 with Dan + Shay’s “Glad You Exist” (2021), and a few months ago, Parx moved to Nashville.
There, she has been developing a sustainable ranch while prepping her forthcoming third album, Many Moons, Many Suns (out on her TaylaMade Records), which explores the unexpected end of her engagement and combines country, rock, house, soul and contemporary pop. “I’m buying goats, sheep and cows,” she says of her new home. “I’m already excited about the songs that I’ll create just being here.”
Below, Parx previews her new album and reflects on queer pop stardom.
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What’s the first thing you did when you woke up today?
The first thing I did when I woke up today was load a tractor. I got a tractor to live in and my friend just dropped it off. I’ve been working on my little ranch.
What drew you to Nashville?
I started to come down here last year, but maybe three or four months ago, I officially was [here] full time. I’m still in Los Angeles once or twice a week, but this is my home.
What was a key moment on the journey to your new album?
Being able to take four years, I finally was like, “I feel new again.” [We] go through these feelings of breaking down and building up and breaking down your new version of yourself … I’m in that moment now. [That’s] when it’s the right time for me to create, or finish, the album.
Last year you co-wrote on Troye Sivan’s “Got Me Started” and Janelle Monáe’s “Water Slide.” Did you carry any inspiration from those sessions into your own?
We have a problem in the songwriting world where you’ll see a queer artist and they have only straight writers on the project, and that’s a bit weird. Or we see a woman artist and they only have straight men as writers, and that’s also a bit weird. I’m not saying we can’t have that perspective, because I’ve written for a lot of different people and I haven’t experienced their version of life. However, it’s always important to have at least somebody be a part of the project that can see you in a very different way — and maybe that’s because they’re queer. So I’ve been choosing to write with a lot of artists [with whom] I can write from that perspective. I’ve been a lot more selective these days.
“Era” has heavy ballroom energy, as does “10s.” How did examining your relationship affect your influences while recording?
We have that ballroom energy, New Orleans energy, all the things that I’ve experienced in my life that are such a huge part of queer culture. With “10s,” I played a lot with pulling from my community, the different sounds that inspire us and make us move. I really wanted to go to the extreme. A lot of the music that is the most groundbreaking is ballroom. We’ve been forced to be out of the boundary, or seen as that, for so long that it was like, “F–k it. Well, I might as well be the best version of me — and do me to the max.”
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When you were coming up, who were the songwriters that made you feel most seen?
I feel like I’m just now having an opportunity in the past few years to have artists that actually make me feel seen. Around 2015, I was listening to Marika Hackman’s “Boyfriend,” and it’s a queer song and I had never heard something lyrically like [that.] That’s not to say that there [aren’t] any queer artists that have been out there being very forward, I’m just saying what spoke to me. Being born in ‘93 and a teenager in the 2000s, it’s a very different thing.
If you had to pick three essential tracks from the new record, what would they be?
I would say, “Standing Up to the Wind,” “Gentlewoman” and “I Don’t Talk About Texas.”
Beyond the album, what are your plans for the rest of the year?
We are getting back on the road. I’m super excited because it’s been a minute since I’ve been on the road. I went from consistently touring to taking a break and really allowing the music to come. We got some crazy sustainable and biodegradable merch coming, which is really cool. And more behind the scenes of the process — I’m making sure that everything within the TaylaMade world reflects [my] values.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Wake us up when June ends, because Good Morning America‘s annual Summer Concert Series is returning in July, and the ABC morning show is sharing the lineup exclusively with Billboard first. This year’s genre-spanning lineup includes rockers Green Day celebrating the 30th anniversary of Dookie and the 20th anniversary of “American Idiot,” country star Carrie […]
Shifty Shellshock, the frontman of rap rock band Crazy Town, has died at 49, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. The musician died at home on Monday (June 24), and the cause of death is still pending investigation.
Shellshock was born Seth Binzer on Aug. 23, 1974. He met Crazy Town co-founder Bret Mazer in 1992, and the band went on to add various members, including Adam Goldstein (better known as DJ AM, who died from an accidental overdose in 2009), Rust Epique, Antonio Lorenzo Valli, James Bradley Jr., among others. The band released its debut album The Gift of Game in November 1999. It peaked at No. 9 on the all-genre Billboard 200 on the chart dated March 3, 2001, and remained on the tally for 34 weeks.
The set’s first two singles, “Toxic” and “Darkside,” failed to chart, but the third time was the charm for Crazy Town. “Butterfly” — which sampled the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Pretty Little Ditty” — arrived in October 2000 as the album’s third single and climbed to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, where it held the top spot for two weeks with its catchy chorus: “Come my lady, come come my lady / You’re my butterfly, sugar baby/ Come my lady, you’re my pretty baby/ I’ll make your legs shake, you make me go crazy.”
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In all, the track remained on the chart for 23 weeks and is the group’s biggest hit to this day. (The track made Billboard‘s One-Hit Wonders of the 2000s list in 2014; the band did not land another song on the tally during its career.)
Sophomore album Darkhorse was released in November 2002 and debuted at No. 120. It failed to reach any higher, and fell off the chart after one week. The band broke up shortly after.
Binzer was open about his struggles with substance abuse. He appeared on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew in 2008, and VH1’s Sober House from 2009 to 2010.
He is survived by his kids Halo, Gage and Phoenix.
It’s a circus out there! Corey Feldman has dropped a colorful ’80s inspired music video for his latest single, “The Joke,” and Billboard is premiering the visual directed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst.
“‘The Joke’ is more than just a song — it’s a statement. For years, I’ve faced criticism from those who want to undermine my dedication to music. This single is my way of reclaiming the narrative and showing that my commitment to my art is unshakeable,” Feldman tells Billboard. “Fred and I have a long history of working together. We originally recorded ‘Seamless’ as a feature in 2016 on my Angelic 2 The Core album, which will be re-released digitally on July 4th weekend. We co-wrote and co-produced that song, but working with Fred Durst as a director on the music video has been an incredible experience. He had a clear concept in mind and I relinquished the creative to him, and although it wasn’t how I saw it, his version surprised me and delivers the laughs. I can’t wait for my fans to see the energy and vision we’ve brought to life”
The video kicks off with actor-singer on stage bouncing around to circus music, his dancers and band behind him, everyone dressed in the decade’s brightest duds. The tune then takes a creepy turn as Feldman laughs like a maniac before the band — complete with headbands and hair inspired by the likes of Robert Smith and Alice Cooper — begins to jam.
The video slows down during the bridge, when The Lost Boys actor rips open his multicolored tracksuit’s jacket to reveal the Goonies T-shirt underneath, paying homage to the 1985 Steven Spielberg-directed classic in which he starred as he sings, “Maybe there are times, I second guess myself/ The pain outweighs the wealth?/ Maybe it is time, to crawl back in my shell, contemplate farewell?/ Well …”
A familiar “hee hee!” is heard as the former child star covers his eyes, then re-emerges dressed as his late friend Michael Jackson. “Let’s give ’em hell!” Feldman sings as he busts out some moves by the King of Pop.
The Limp Bizkit frontman makes a cameo at the end, clapping as the video ends and Feldman — still dressed as Jackson — joins him on the set. “Fantastic!” the rocker praises, but the actor has a few concerns about the video they just filmed.
“Listen, I love that you’re directing this. I think it’s gonna be amazing; everything looks great,” Feldman starts before gesturing to his sequined Michael Jackson outfit. “I really don’t know about this whole thing, though.”
The rocker assuages his fears by saying, “Brother, look at me. It’s not going in the video.” Guess “The Joke” is on Feldman!
Ahead of the video’s premiere on Billboard.com, the singer-actor performed the song on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast and talked to the host about his music and influences. “I grew up studying from Michael. I learned from Michael,” he shared. “So a lot of the stuff I design musically … has gotta have that same kind of drive, it’s gotta have that thing that makes me dance, that makes me want to move so that it comes alive when I perform it.”
Watch the music video for “The Joke” above, and check out Corey Feldman when he joins Limp Bizkit on the Loserville tour, which kicks off July 16 in Somerset, Wis.
“I’m trying to get you hyped and excited,” exclaimed theater director Lileana Blain-Cruz at the Minnesota State Theatre in Minneapolis on Saturday (June 22). “I’m trying to get a motorcycle on stage!”
Hot off directing a visually extravagant, emotionally stirring production of John Adams’ El Niño at the New York Metropolitan Opera (she’s the resident director at Lincoln Center Theater), Blain-Cruz has proven she’s adept at helming massive, complicated productions. But in spring 2025 at the State Theatre, she’s facing an audience even more passionate and exacting than New York City theater critics – Prince fans.
On Saturday, a theater full of the “purple fam” were treated to the first public preview of an upcoming stage musical adaptation of Prince’s Purple Rain film as part of the five-day Celebration 2024 event in the Purple One’s hometown. And with Blain-Cruz – who repeatedly hopped out of her chair and solicited audience feedback while flaunting a flashy purple blazer – directing, it’s clear this stage musical has an advocate who can match the enthusiasm of Jerome Benton hyping up Morris Day during a performance by The Time.
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Joining Blain-Cruz during the preview – a panel discussion that boasted a work-in-progress look at three of the musical’s stage numbers – were book writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, fresh off a Tony win for Appropriate; music director Jason Michael Webb, whose credits include the Broadway hit MJ The Musical; and Bobby Z., who drums in The Revolution and recently joined the production as a music adviser alongside fellow Prince associate Morris Hayes. (Tony-winning producer Orin Wolf appeared at the tail-end of the hour-long panel, too.)
“This is not Hamilton,” joked Jacobs-Jenkins, who assured the audience of diehards that his book will draw on the 1984 film’s screenplay (written by Albert Magnoli and William Blinn) without radically reworking it. Even so, he said he intends to further develop the character of Apollonia and make some necessary pacing changes to fit a stage production: “A play is a play, and a movie is a movie.”
While the director is hellbent on getting that motorcycle on stage (she says the image of Prince “staring into her soul” on the Purple Rain bike is one of her earliest memories of the genius), she acknowledges some limitations of the medium. “I can’t get a Lake Minnetonka that isn’t actually Lake Minnetonka on stage,” she jested, while still promising to bring the “epic” nature of a Met Opera production “to something as sublime as Purple Rain.”
“It is an opera — it’s a tragedy and a triumph,” agreed Bobby Z. “I got to see Prince build a revolution from 1977 to the Parade album [in 1986].” Similar to many operas that have stood the test of time, Purple Rain comes complete with an unforgettable villain – Morris Day, Prince’s real-life friend and colleague who played a deliciously narcissistic version of himself in the 1984 film. For the world’s first musical preview of the Purple Rain musical, attendees of Celebration 2024 got to see performers portraying Day and Benton preen and camp it up in character before playing a solidly grooving version of The Time’s “Jungle Love” and “777-9311.” (Morris Day himself hit that same stage later on Saturday to perform an assortment of The Time classics and bust out some dance moves.)
“There only so many of these Black icons that we have,” mused Webb. “Working with the Michael [Jackson] legacy prepared me for the one I really wanted — which is this one.”
Explaining that he was looking to present some of the songs through a different lens, the multi-talented Webb brought out a performer (introduced only as Rachel) to portray Apollonia and duet with him on “Take Me With U.” The song is bombastic and string-drenched on the album, but this teaser version – which started out in an elegant, stripped-down vein before working up to a full-band sound – demonstrated that these songs can soar in a variety of stylings (something hardcore Prince fans already well know).
Acknowledging that the soundtrack’s nine songs are not enough material for a Broadway musical, they also revealed that the Purple Rain stage musical will draw on Prince’s full catalog, including songs that didn’t even appear in the film. Case in point: Before the event wrapped, the Apollonia performer returned to the stage with two others to perform “The Glamorous Life” as Vanity 6. While that Prince-penned song is certainly well-suited to the time period – it came out in 1984 and reached the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 that fall – it’s not a Vanity 6 number at all, but rather a hit performed by Sheila E.
But why not take some creative liberties? The team behind this production is openly gunning for a Broadway run after debuting Purple Rain in Minneapolis, so the bar is high. As long as the songs are a sonic and thematic match for the realm of Purple Rain, who cares whether a tune appeared in the film? Broadway is a tough market, and success is far from guaranteed for musicals based on the works of pop hitmakers (though that isn’t stopping plenty of artists from trying). Prince’s rich, rewarding catalog deserves a wide audience, so it only makes sense for the team behind this production to put their best high-heeled boot forward as they reimagine his magnum opus for the stage.
Dave Grohl may be getting himself into hot water with Swifties.
The Foo Fighters frontman poked fun at Taylor Swift‘s blockbuster The Eras Tour while onstage with his rock band at London Stadium on Saturday (June 22). The Foos’ concert happened to coincide with the pop superstar’s nearby show at Wembley Stadium.
“I tell you, man, you don’t want to suffer the wrath of Taylor Swift,” Grohl told the crowd after mentioning that Swift’s tour was also passing through London. “So we like to call our tour the ‘Errors Tour.’ We’ve had more than a few eras, and more than a few f—ing errors as well. Just a couple.”
The rocker jokingly added, “That’s because we actually play live. What?! Just saying. You guys like raw, live rock ‘n’ roll music, right? You came to the right f—ing place.”
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Saturday also marked Swift’s second of three sold-out concerts at London’s Wembley Stadium as part of her record-breaking Eras Tour. Some the “Anti-Hero” hitmaker’s fans didn’t take kindly to Grohl’s comments on social media.
“I love Foo Fighters but that was very bad out of Dave Grohl to say that and so unnecessary?” one fan wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “I’ve seen both them are Taylor live and both do equally as good of a live show in their own genres. Completely out of character for him to act like this, disappointing to see.”
Another user added, “ngl dave grohl is the last artist i expected that from, he’s usually so kind, positive and a good force in the music industry, feeling dissapointed.”
Others online observers came to the Grohl’s defense and dismissed his words as playful onstage banter.
“I’ve loved Dave Grohl essentially my whole life. I don’t agree with what he said, however Foo Fighters and Taylor have two completely different music shows. Rock and Roll shows are very different than her incredible pop shows. I dont think he meant to be rude,” a fan wrote on X.
Another added, “After watching the video, I don’t think Dave Grohl was saying Taylor didn’t sing live. I think he was just making a joke about how when you sing live there will be errors.”
Grohl, who is known for his humor and down-to-earth personality, has been a champion of Swift in the past. In 2016, he told a story of the time the 14-time Grammy winner saved him from utter embarrassment in front of Beatles legend Paul McCartney at a party. He also previously praised her decision to re-record her entire catalog in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone.
Watch Grohl’s onstage remarks about Swift’s Eras Tour on TikTok here.