Famous

Bob Dylan revealed that he has launched his own signature line of whiskeys called Heaven's Door. The legendary singer-songwriter teamed with bourbon makers Angel's Envy to create a trio of small batch whiskeys: A straight rye, a double barrel whiskey and a Tennessee bourbon.

"We both wanted to create a collection of American whiskeys that, in their own way, tell a story," Dylan said in a statement to the New York Times. "I've been traveling for decades, and I've been able to try some of the best spirits that the world of whiskey has to offer. This is great whiskey."

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Lady Gaga, Paramore, Dolly Parton and more will auction off musical equipment and signed memorabilia to support the Girls Rock Camp Alliance.

The sale launches May 10th on Reverb with all proceeds benefiting the GRCA. The nonprofit organization supports programs all over the world that host summer rock camps and other music education programs for female, transgender and gender non-conforming kids.

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There was a joyful mood inside New York City's Hard Rock Café where a giant collection of Prince's belongs was being sold off as part of Julien's Auctions' presentation Music Icons: Property From the Life and Career of Prince on Friday. When a ceramic Mardi Gras–style doll that was featured as a prop in Purple Rain went up, it was expected to fetch between $2,000 and $4,000. But a bidding war quickly broke out.

"It's the only one I've ever seen," says auctioneer Daniel Kruse, "don't lose it."

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When Snow Patrol released their last album, Fallen Empires, Obama was still in his first term, Justin Bieber was 17 years old and Game of Thrones had just aired its first season. The thematically ambitious follow-up, Wildness, is finally out, but where have they been for the last seven years? Frontman Gary Lightbody explained the struggles behind that delay, his experiences working with Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, and much more, in an in-depth interview on the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, hosted by Brian Hiatt. Here are some highlights from the conversation. To hear the entire discussion, press play below or download and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.
"A lot of the reason why it took seven years to make this record was because for the first five of them I was hammered," Lightbody says. "And then, you know, two years ago I quit. And lo and behold, as if by magic, we started working in earnest with gusto. I got to a stage with drinking where it wasn't fun anymore. It was creating too many problems for me and my health. I would go out and get drunk every every day and sometimes just be sitting in a bar by myself drinking and I always promised myself that I would never do that that."

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Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, whose work in the spoken-word group the Last Poets helped earn him the title of the "Grandfather of Rap," died Monday. He was 74.

"It is with extreme sadness and a heavy heart that the family of Jalal Nuriddin announce the passing of this great pioneer of the recording industry," his family said in a statement. "Jalal slipped quietly away this evening into the arms of Allah." No cause of death was revealed.

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Chris Cornell's daughter Toni shared a recording of her and her late father covering Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U" to mark Father's Day.

"Daddy, I love you and miss you so much. You were the best father anyone could ask for. Our relationship was so special, and you were always there for me. You gave me courage when I didn’t have any," 13-year-old Toni Cornell wrote in the caption of the song, which was posted on Chris Cornell's YouTube page.

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Paul McCartney has announced the first dates of his Freshen Up Tour, which begins with four concerts throughout Canada this September.

The trek, McCartney’s first opportunity to perform tracks from his upcoming new album Egypt Station, begins September 17th in Quebec City and then visits Montreal and Winnipeg before the current set of dates concludes September 30th in Edmonton, Alberta.

Each concert marks the first time in at least five years that McCartney has played the respective Canadian city.

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David Bowie‘s mid-Eighties career will be explored in the new box set Loving the Alien (1983-1988), a massive collection that gathers the late icon’s albums, live LPs and more from the era.

Also exclusive to the box set is a 2018 reworking of Never Let Me Down with new production and instrumentation overseen by Bowie producer/engineer Mario McNulty. Longtime Bowie collaborators including guitarist Reeves Gabriel and drummer Sterling Campbell, Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and composer Nico Muhly also contributed to the project, which was born out of Bowie’s desire to rerecord the 1987 LP that he called “a bitter disappointment.“

In early January, the musicians involved entered New York’s Electric Lady Studios to fulfill Bowie’s wish and remake Never Let Me Down, which now features a guest appearance by Laurie Anderson on “Shining Star (Makin’ My Love).” The 2018 reworking also boasts “newly ‘remixed’ artwork reflecting the album's subject matter and features unseen images from the original cover photographic session from the archive of Greg Gorman.



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Big Brother and the Holding Company were a band before the summer of 1967. They had gigs, fans and even a full-length record ready for release. But all that early history was eclipsed after they took the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival in June for a pair of performances that transformed Janis Joplin & Co. from San Francisco scenesters to cultural giants. Joplin herself would describe the weekend as “one of the highest points of my life.” The lonely and misunderstood young woman from Texas proudly wrapped herself in her newfound fame — a substitute for the love she was denied during her lonely and painful adolescence.



Monterey was a gold rush for the recording industry, and major labels flocked to stake out their claim. For Big Brother, their trajectory would become the quintessential overnight success gone awry. Within a year, the searing spotlight trained on Joplin would cause the band to come unglued. But during its brief big-league run, Big Brother assembled their first and only true artistic statement for a global audience. Issued on August 12th, 1968, Cheap Thrills is undeniably a masterpiece of the psychedelic age, a set of top-shelf electric soul. Yet it also reflects the commodification of the fading hippie dream. Presented as a document culled from wild, spontaneous San Francisco nights, it was actually crafted in a studio run by one of the largest record manufacturers on the planet. To say Cheap Thrills is inauthentic would be false, but there’s a premature melancholy to the production, as though it were a Gatsby-esque exercise in re-creating good times that had already passed. Joplin’s mournful version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” seems only to underscore the shift in mood from the Summer of Love to the Summer of Violence that greeted the album. A week after its release, police would beat up demonstrators at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention. A month later, Joplin and Big Brother parted ways for good.

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John Lennon, George Harrison and the Plastic Ono Band record “How Do You Sleep?” together in the studio in never-before-seen footage from the upcoming Ultimate Collection reissue of Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine.

The video for “How Do You Sleep? (Takes 5 & 6, Raw Studio Mix Out-take),” a “looser, funkier” rendition of the biting track aimed at Lennon’s former Beatles band mate Paul McCartney, features Lennon and Harrison performing the song at Lennon’s Ascot Sound Studios in May 1971.

The massive Imagine reissue, due out October 5th, boasts “Raw Studio Mixes” from the recording sessions that promise “no reverb or echo, no effects, no strings, just live, unvarnished and raw.”

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