Hardcore Rendered
By Jenna Croyle

This week we will be shining the spotlight on a band that might be flying under the mainstream radar, although they hail from a small suburb of Erie, their brawny sound has New York written all over it.
 

Linden along with his uncanny vocal resemblance to some of the Heavy Metal greats. There's no doubt Linden has gotten much of his style by listening to the classics but his hooky and passionate performances are too dedicated to deny. While their sweat and blood music is founded in true hardcore, Linden’s vocal tone tempers it with a melodious edge.

The Faded Fallen has their engine firing on all cylinders with songs that are a tribute to the most vital parts of punk, hardcore, and even seemingly at times, alt-rock.

With many influences such as Metallica, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Motorhead, Korn and Black Sabbath that the band members bring to the stage, The Faded Fallen’s face pounding metal performances never seem to fail to fill venues and leave the crowds beaten, broke down and begging for more.

The Faded Fallen’s bare-boned approach to hardcore is a refreshing change from the overproduction and Pro-Tools or the commonality of just banging out the music just to play the song that so many bands today have the habit of doing.

With all the talent, timing, precision and expert ear for detail, Steve Kerr is exactly the type of person who should be drumming in a hardcore band as his stick work is always spot on.

The Guitar licks of Emerson and Donoghue have a tone, and sound that is talent packed and pours off the stage in a thick and gritty feel that comes down on songs like a ton of bricks, always in perfect harmony.

For all those people who complain about the lack of New York City styled hardcore in Erie’s Metal scene, The Faded Fallen have answered their prayers. The band’s reminiscent sound of hardcore's golden days mixed with their big city edge and modern hardcore in your face attitude and full-blown powerhouse stage presence drowns you in pure Metal like an experience you have never had.

The Faded Fallen is a band not to be ignored and well worth checking out their next show.

For more information on The Faded Fallen and their show dates, please visit their Facebook Page

"Buddy Holly" Tribute Album Lacks Spark

Buddy Holly never lived to see his 23rd birthday, but that isn't stopping anyone from celebrating his 75th this week, with the rather belated installation of a star on Hollywood Boulevard and the release of yet another all-star tribute. Maybe now he'll finally be recognized by the youth of America for something other than stealing Elvis Costello's look, right?

"Listen to Me: Buddy Holly" is the second Holly tribute to come out in two and a half months, so you'll be forgiven if you need someone to sort out the confusion -- especially since each one features a Beatle. The first was "Rave On Buddy Holly," released in late June and leaning toward indie-rock types like the Black Keys, Florence + the Machine, and Modest Mouse, though Paul McCartney put in a screaming appearance.

This week's unrelated follow-up sticks almost entirely to mainstream elder statesmen, with Ringo Starr as the requisite Fab on duty. Peter Asher served as executive producer, which is significant, since he set the first real posthumous Holly renaissance in motion in the mid-'70s by recording Linda Ronstadt's reputation-reviving versions of "That'll Be the Day" and "It's So Easy."

Ironically, perhaps, the two albums suffer from opposite problems. The alterative artists on "Rave On" were apparently encouraged to retool Holly's songs so considerably that the melodic life sometimes got snuffed out of them. As for the new "Listen to Me," Asher's sensibility isn't exactly what anyone would call edgy, and there's stodginess to a lot of the contributions that could have benefited from a bit of the other album's adventurous approach.

Two highlights come early: Jackson Browne was born to sing the ballad "True Love Ways," and British rockabilly queen Imelda May finds the fire in "I'm Looking for Someone to Love." Most everything else counts as either boomer-safe or in the bizarre curio category.

A couple of newish groups make their way into the mix. The Fray do an outright U2 impersonation on "Take Your Time," so if you ever wanted to hear Bono sing Buddy, here's your chance (sort of). The weirdest choice is Cobra Starship, whose mixed-gender lead singers do a sort of contempo-Human-League take on "Peggy Sue" that almost clicks, in the corniest possible way.

But Brian Wilson's "Listen to Me" and Ringo's "Think It Over" are just the kind of passable, going-through-the-motions efforts you might expect from their latest recordings. Ronstadt reunites with Asher to remake their remake of "That'll Be the Day," sans the spark of their 1976 recording.

Shorn of her usual studio tricks, and letting her voice go nearly punk-rock-ragged, Stevie Nicks sounds unrecognizable on "Not Fade Away" -- almost like a distaff Billy Corgan! -- which might have been rewarding if the slick backup track were half as rough as she is. Sticking closer to vocal type, Train's Pat Monahan gives "Maybe Baby" an overly sweetened modern spin that isn't just maybe but definitely dullsville.

The album ends with a couple of wan contributions from actors, including an "It's So Easy" that has Zooey Deschanel playing it overly straight. That's followed by Eric Idle doing "Raining in My Heart" in a variety of comic voices -- complete with goofy sound effects -- that not even the most hardcore Python fan could find funny.

Even with all-star friends like these, Holly still needs better buddies.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards: The Last of the Delta Bluesmen
‘He understood that this music can’t be separated from the culture in which he was born and grew up’
By Howard Reich

He was the son of a sharecropper, the grandson of a slave and — for an extraordinary 80-plus years — the voice of the ­Delta blues.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards picked cotton and pulled corn on Mississippi Delta plantations from age nine, living the hard life that the blues were created to address. As a young man, he hoboed across the South with a guitar on his shoulder, rode the rails, was thrown in prison for vagrancy and various trumped-up charges and, along the way, made music with the founders of the art form: Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Tommy McLennan, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Joe Williams — virtually everyone, really.

Edwards died Monday in his South Side home at age 96, said Michael Frank, his longtime manager.

Edwards’ death effectively closes the book on a genre of music.

“Honeyboy — that’s the end of the line,” said veteran Chicago blues musician Billy Branch, who recorded and performed with Edwards. “He’s the last of the bluesmen from his generation. He was that direct connection with the fabled Robert Johnson, and with (Edwards’ death), it is the end of that particular style.”

Bruce Iglauer, founder of the Chicago blues label Alligator Records, said, “Honeyboy was one of the very last links to the real world of the Delta blues, a crucial world in the development of American popular music. He was a truth teller.

“He understood that this music can’t be separated from the culture in which he was born and grew up. It can’t be separated from the reality of the racial situation in the South at that time, and what black people were and weren’t allowed to do.”

To listen to Edwards was to hear the field hollers and laments, the work songs and hymns of a black underclass and, equally important, to hear that music performed just as it was roughly a century ago.

“I always considered him a walking jukebox of the blues from the 1930s through the 1950s — he just had so much music stored up in that memory of his,” said manager Frank, who worked with Edwards for 39 years.

“To me, he was the living embodiment of the quintessential Mississippi bluesman of lore, but there’s nothing fictitious about his life or music. It’s the stuff of legend, only it’s not legend. It’s real.”

Edwards told his remarkable story in snippets onstage, in anecdotes during uncounted interviews and in a 1997 memoir that has become a landmark of American musical history, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. In it, Edwards detailed the brutality of life on the plantations around Shaw, Mississippi, where he was born June 28, 1915. He told of lynchings that dotted the landscape and of being picked up and sent to the penitentiary for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But he also spoke eloquently of how blues music gave outlet to the pain experienced by those who created it, heard it and needed it.

“You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing — it was a feeling,” he said in a 1998 Chicago Tribune interview. “The blues is nothing but a story. ... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing ... what they all went through. It’s not just a song, see?”

Edwards first picked up a Sears Roebuck guitar at age 12 and was working as a musician by 14. Though he collaborated prolific­ally with the first-generation creators of the music, he was perhaps most famous as one of the last musicians to visit Robert Johnson as the seminal bluesman lay dying near Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938.

“I talked to him, but he wasn’t able to talk,” wrote Edwards in his memoirs. “He was bleeding at the mouth, heaving up and going on. There was nothing I could do for him. ... Some people say that (his death) had something to do with Robert selling himself to the devil. ... It may be.”

Edwards travelled north to Chicago in the mid-1950s to get work. He toiled in factories as a machine operator and on construction sites on anything that was needed. At night, he played the blues.

He recorded for Chess Records, the primary Chicago label of the day, but he never attained a fraction of the fame of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon or other blues contemporaries.

The rediscovery of the blues in the 1960s made Edwards a desired attraction and he performed steadily — if not busily — nearly through the end of his life. He last performed April 17 in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Edwards won a 2007 Grammy Award for Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Blues Musicians: Live in Dallas and a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

Lady Gaga Wants You to Do Good on 9/11
By Marina Galperina

Lady Gaga, Nas, DJ Pauly D and other celebrities have come together with MTV's parent Viacom to take part in a series of public service announcements in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. "Ten years later, what will you do to remember?" asks the I Will commemoration campaign, which runs today through Sunday.

"We were in disbelief," a comparatively modestly-dressed Lady Gaga says in the video promo, "We all watched the second tower fall together."

The celebrities are hoping to shed light on the day overshadowed with massive loss and tragedy, hoping that fellow Americans will channel their emotions into something positive by doing good deeds and participating in charity and volunteer service.

The I Will commemoration campaign is brought to the public by the organizers of this year's September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance.

Earlier this year, for the first time, Lady Gaga had opened up about being in New York City during the terrorist attacks to Hot 99.5 "I watched the towers fall with all my girlfriends from the roof of our school ... And the whole city was covered in ashes ... I remember my dad picked me up and we couldn't reach my mom for 10 hours because my mother worked right across the street from the World Trade Center."

Glen Campbell's Musical Farewell
Facing Alzheimer's, the artist shares star-studded memories
By Melinda Newman

On "Strong," a track from Glen Campbell's superb new - and final - album, he plaintively sings to his wife: "This is not the road I wanted for us, but now that it's here, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. All I want to be for you is strong."

Like many other cuts on the stirring "Ghost on the Canvas," out Aug. 30, the song directly addresses Campbell's battle with Alzheimer's disease, as well as his abiding faith and gratitude during this troubling time. "You gotta believe. There's no ifs, ands, and all that other stuff," says Campbell. "I believe that I was created by the Lord God, and I've tried to live my life that way. I've failed from here to there, but, you know, I get up and start again."

Despite the devastating diagnosis, which he and his wife of 29 years, Kim Woollen, announced earlier this year, Campbell is relentlessly upbeat during a recent interview in the living room of his spacious Malibu home. Tanned and relaxed after a round of golf earlier in the day, he is just as likely to burst into a Daffy Duck impersonation as he is to answer a question. Mention a song and he starts to sing it, rather than talk about it. Even when he forgets a question just asked, he remains jovial and undaunted.

Recorded over two years, Campbell and producer Julian Raymond wrote several songs together for "Ghost," plus a number of artists, including Paul Westerberg, Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard and Jakob Dylan, provided tracks for the set. The multiple-Grammy winner vetted each contributed tune. "If the lyrics don't speak to him, he's not interested in the song," Raymond says. "If he's in, then the changes start happening. It's fun, but you've got to be ready to work because he's fast. I don't think we were ever in the studio on any vocal we did for more than an hour."

Many of the songs contain lilting guitar riffs, soaring string lines or unforgettable melodies that recall such iconic past Campbell hits as "Wichita Lineman" or "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." That's no coincidence. "This [album] was almost like an autobiography in a way, the way the songs connect to each other," Raymond says. "It has to do with what he's been through in his life all the way up to the current-day stuff."

Campbell's guitar playing on the album remains remarkably clear and sharp, especially on the swaying "In My Arms," during which he performs a lightning-quick solo. "He did that solo on the third take," Raymond says. Even more surprising, Campbell recorded the solo on a guitar he'd never played before. "I pulled a guitar off the wall for sonic reasons," Raymond says. "He just picked it up and whipped it out like he'd been playing it his whole life."

Campbell attributes his still evident dexterity and muscle memory to his early years as a member of the legendary Wrecking Crew, an elite league of studio musicians from the ''60s, and playing on records for everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Monkees. "You had to learn those songs, the progressions, what they were singing," he says of his session years. "It made it so easy to play any kind of song."

However fuzzy his short-term memory may now be, the former Arkansas farm boy generally recalls those early years in Los Angeles with clarity. But when needed, Woollen, who serves as his unofficial historian of sorts, prompts him, even when the recording mentioned took place long before they met.

He so closely studied Sinatra when he played rhythm guitar on "Strangers in the Night," that Ol' Blue Eyes joked that he thought Campbell was trying to pick him up. "I was just admiring his singing," he says, adding that he learned to be prepared from Sinatra. "He would get up and sing it and go," Campbell says. "He didn't have to sit in the studio and hem and haw around. ... 'Strangers in the Night,' oh, boy, I was in high cotton then."

Campbell also played on Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas," and the pair used to pal around in Sin City. "He was a very, very, very nice man. I miss Elvis, I really do. ... People didn't realize what an incredible singer he was," he says. Prompted by Woollen, Campbell goes into a spot-on imitation of The King singing "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear," and then rips open his shirt and pumps one of his well-developed pecs.

When asked how old he is after that impressive display, he replies, "48 today! What am I?" Woollen softly reminds him that he's 75. "Wow," says Campbell. "It doesn't seem like it."

Campbell says his favorite song he ever played on is the Righteous Bros.' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," produced by Phil Spector. He and Spector didn't talk much. "He was shy," says Campbell, before naughtily adding, "He was actually shy because I think he was probably so high he could poot in a Martin [birdhouse]. ... I tell you, he was a hell of a producer."

Most famously, Campbell played guitar on the Beach Boys' 1966 classic album, "Pet Sounds." He recalls being in the studio for days while Brian Wilson struggled to get the tone just right on "Good Vibrations." "Brian was determined to get it the way he wanted to. I'm glad. We were in the studio a long time. I got paid every day, so [I was like] 'Let's give it another week, man!' You can go put that album on and it's fascinating what you'll find."

Prior to recording "Pet Sounds," Campbell toured with the Beach Boys, filling in for Wilson. "I was ready for anything after that, I can tell you."

Playing live remains a great joy for him, as he nudges toward the start of The Goodbye Tour on Sept. 2. His band contains four of his children, including eldest daughter Debby, from an earlier marriage, and 23-year old Ashley, both of whom gently keep him on track when he loses his way while telling a story or when he strays too far from the teleprompter he now needs to remember the lyrics.

Asked if he feels sad about touring for the last time, he says, "Well, if I had to, I would, but I'll probably sing here and there, especially with the kids."

Campbell appreciates that, just like life, a concert moves in only one direction: ahead.

"I love playing live because you can't go back and mess it up twice," he says. "It only moves forward, if you don't get it right the first time."

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Benefit Concert Raises More Than $1M for Minot

Preliminary figures show a concert featuring The Black Eyed Peas as the headliner raised at least $1.3 million to help with flood recovery efforts in the North Dakota town of Minot.
Minot Area Community Foundation president Ken Kitzman said in a news release that Saturday night's initial count of 15,800 people in attendance at the benefit concert breaks a previous record set for a KISS concert in 2010..

Kitzman said concert officials are still adding up donations, but at least $1.3 million has been raised so far..

Hollywood actor and Minot native Josh Duhamel spoke at the concert, which also featured Minneapolis-based rockers Charlz Newman. Duhamel is married to Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie.