Music News

Rod Stewart kicked off his "Live the Life" tour with Steve Winwood on Thursday, October 17 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The first part of the trek runs through October 26, pausing in November while Rod does his Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. He and Winwood will pick things up December 4, continuing on the road for the next couple of weeks.

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Luke Bryan is featured in Nashville Lifestyles magazine after being named one of the city's 25 Most Beautiful People. On the inside, Bryan said that his favorite part of being a country star is getting to perform on stage. "There's a lot of work that goes into every day, but that 90 minutes I get to entertain my fans is the best part," he told the mag.

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Mary J. Blige has released "The First Noel," featuring the Clark Sisters. The new track is taken from her debut holiday album, A Mary Christmas. The Clark Sisters are just one of a handful of guest appearances on A Mary Christmas. The album also features Barbara Streisand ("When You Wish Upon a Star") and more . . .

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Steven Tyler has been named the head judge at the upcoming Miss Universe pageant. The ceremony goes down at Moscow's Crocus City Hall on November 9. Ninety women from all over the world are competing to take the crown from Olivia Culpo, who was crowned Miss Universe last year. Tyler is not expected to perform at the event.

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Prince shared video snippets of his "Breakfast Experience Pajama Dance Party" show, which was held in the early hours of Saturday morning in Minneapolis. The clip shows the Purple One, who wears a robe and high-heeled silver boots, along with his band, 3rdEyeGirl, rocking out in pajamas to a crowd also attired in pajamas.

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94.7 WLS: Exclusive interview with Chicago

Chicago's Lee Loughnane, Robert Lamm, Lou Pardini and Jason Scheff join Danny Lake in the 94.7 WLS studio for an exclusive, extended interview. The band talks about the new single "America," how Robert Lamm conceived and wrote the classic hits "Beginnings" and "25 or 6 to 4" and more!

Pink has canceled three dates in Canada on doctor's orders to rest her vocal cords. Dates in Winnipeg (October 23), Saskatoon (October 24) and Edmonton (October 26), have been rescheduled for January 14-16. "It became clear after further consultation with her doctors today that more rest is required for her to fully recover from inflamed vocal cords and laryngitis."

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Ne-Yo has released "Luxurious," featuring Future. On the cut, the two singers croon about spoiling a lucky lady with Hermes purses and diamond necklaces: "Girl, let me show you what you ain't never seen/ 'Cause I'm all about realizing expensive dreams." Jesse "Corporal" Wilson produced the new cut.

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Jennifer Hudson, Kelly Rowland and Patti Labelle have all been confirmed for performing slots at the upcoming Black Girls Rock! 2013, taping on Saturday, October 26 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Organizers have been tight lipped regarding possible duets and performers from its headliners.

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How Amnesty International Rocked the World: The Inside Story

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had been all over the planet with Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and Youssou N'Dour by the time the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now tour touched down on Africa's Ivory Coast. However, they'd never seen a crowd like the 50,000 fans at le Félicia soccer stadium. "It was a stadium of entirely black faces," Springsteen recalled recently. "Clarence [Clemons] said to me, 'Now you know what it feels like!' There were about 60 seconds where you could feel people sussing us out, and then the whole place just exploded. The band came off feeling like it was the first show we'd ever done. We had to go and prove ourselves on just what we were doing that moment on stage."

Check Out All the Hottest Live Photos of 2013

The concert was one of the final stops on the Human Rights Now tour, the second of two all-star tours that Amnesty International staged in the mid-1980s to spread awareness of human rights atrocities across the globe. They were herculean efforts that made all previous benefit concerts – Live Aid included – seem like a minor undertaking.

Human Rights Now featured once-in-a-lifetime performances by U2, Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Sting, the Police, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams and many others. However, for the past two-and-a-half decades, they've only been available as low-res VHS bootlegs and YouTube videos. On November 5th, they are finally coming out in Released: The Human Rights Concerts 1986-1998, a six-DVD package with remastered audio/video and hours of unseen footage from backstage, including new interviews (which you can watch first here).

Amnesty International began plotting the first tour just weeks after Live Aid raised millions for famine victims of Ethiopia and made hundreds of millions of people around the planet aware of their plight. "We realized it wouldn't be sufficient to just do music on one day," tour organizer Martin Lewis told Rolling Stone. "[Human rights activist] Jack Healy had the idea of doing a tour. It helped immensely that he went to Bill Graham, who we couldn't have done the tour without."

One of the first calls they made was to U2. "It couldn't have been worst timing," the Edge said in the book U2 by U2. "We were building up to go into the studio [to record The Joshua Tree] and I was worried all the focus and concentration would be lost." But it was an offer they couldn't refuse, and they agreed to not only delay the recording of their album but actually lobby other artists to join the tour. "We rang everybody we knew," said Bono. "Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Prince…"

None of those people agreed, but Amnesty wound up with a lineup guaranteed to pack stadiums around America: U2, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams, Lou Reed and Joan Baez. The six-show national tour inspired great moments; for the final three shows, Sting made a last-minute decision to reunite the Police, who hadn't performed anywhere since they broke up in early 1984. "I hadn't seen my drums in months," Stewart Copeland told Rolling Stone. "I've always been very fond of Amnesty, but if it had been for Exxon, I would have been there. Playing with my old band was an exciting prospect."

Every show ended with all of the evening's performers gathering onstage to sing Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released." At the final show, the Police handed their instruments to U2. "It's been called a symbolic passing of the keys to the musical kingdom," said Copeland. "But since we had been defunct for a number of years, I'm not sure we had any keys in our possession. We joked around that Andy [Summers] should de-tune his guitar before handing it over to the Edge."

The tour was a huge success. Amnesty International raised their profile among young Americans in a huge way and their numbers swelled, but soon after it ended, the organizers began plotting out something significantly more dramatic than a mere six American concerts. "In October of 1986, I sat around the pool of the Sunset Marquis with Jack Healy," said Lewis. "He alerted me to the fact that 1988 was the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said it was the Magna Carta of human rights and we have to do something spectacular."

"His first idea was a literally insane idea of taking over Madison Square Garden for 24 hours, a rock & roll marathon," said Lewis. "I said to him, 'I thought we were trying to abolish torture. That sounds like a new definition."

They ultimately plotted a six-week tour that would take Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and Yossou N'Dour to North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. "You can't go around the world and play countries outside of the U.S. and developed Europe without practically taking the entire stadium with you," said Lewis. "I thought we could put people on commercial flights. It never occurred to me you'd have to take two DC-10s around the world."

The Human Rights Tour was one of the most logistically complicated undertakings in rock history, and it traveled to countries that rarely see these type of shows – including Hungary, Costa Rica, India, Greece, Zimbabwe and Argentina. The artists spent six weeks sharing busses, hotels and cramped backstage facilities. "At one stadium in Africa, there was a moat around the entire stadium," Nils Lofgren of the E Street Band told Rolling Stone. "It ran though the dressing rooms and we started to complain about it. We realized it was going to get much worse because it was the friggin' bathroom. There were no toilets and people were pissing and dumping into the moat. It just turned into a river."

The musicians formed tight friendships while traveling the world together. "Branford Marsalis and I played a lot of basketball," said Lofgren. "We had two ping-pong tables and had a spectacular tournament with about 30 players. [E Street pianist] Roy Bittan and [Peter Gabriel drummer] Manu Katche came in the top three. . . It's still one of my favorite tours I've ever gone on. There was so much camaraderie and I was in a close proximity with so many great musicians for such a long time."

Much like Live Aid, the shows – which also included a later, one-off show in Paris in 1998 with Radiohead, Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant – were filmed for television, but no thought was given to ever releasing them in an official capacity. But in 2005, Bob Geldof decided to break his pledge and release Live Aid on DVD, partially to combat the bootlegs that were beginning to pop up all over the Internet.

Inspired by the move, Lewis convinced Amnesty International that releasing the concerts would be a great way to raise money for the organization. "The Amnesty tapes were spread to the four winds, the five winds," said Lewis. "Oh, the things I had to go through to find them all. MTV shot a lot of footage and lost them all. I know they have hundreds of hours of Menudo and Wang Chung up the wazoo. They probably have hundreds of hours of Mr. Mister, but nobody knows where the Conspiracy of Hope footage is."

After years of work, and painstakingly efforts to transfer the footage (often taped in archaic European and South American video formats), Lewis had to go to each artist and get permission to release the film. They all agreed, and Peter Gabriel even told him he filmed much of the tour on a camcorder, but he lost the footage. "We tracked some of it down to a farm in upstate New York," said Lewis. "What we found there was incredible."

Bruce Springsteen is extremely picky about which live footage he releases to the public, but he ultimately signed off and granted Lewis an extensive interview. "This was the mid-1980s and the E Street Band was still very much a provincial band," he said in it. "It was an eye-opening tour and a tremendous adventure for us. It opened our minds to the world as one big place. It was also a tremendous adventure."

For more information on the Human Rights Concerts, check out this comprehensive tribute site The Human Rights Concerts