Fun With Rolling Stone

Back To The Wall

Sadly, we are only given an excerpt on the website, but soon, in a store near you, I will be reading the rest of this, and not giving Rolling Stone my money:

The former Pink Floyd leader has just ducked his still-gangly six-foot-three-inch frame into a town car for a ride to a midtown Manhattan restaurant, and it is immediately clear that the driver is way too excited to see him. Waters braces himself. "Been a fan all my life, man," says the driver, a baseball-capped, middle-aged dude named Fred, with a broad New York accent. " 'Wish You Were Here' — I was backpacking in Europe when I got turned on to it. I was like, 'This is the best album evvuh!' It must be an unbelievable feeling to know what an impact you made on my generation."

"Normally, we don't know until we get in your car," Waters replies in his crisply British tones, buckling his seat belt. As usual, it's hard to read his chilly blue-gray eyes — color-coordinated these days with his longish, silvery hair and professorial beard — but it seems he's decided to be amused. It helps that Waters just shared an excellent bottle of Montrachet, in celebration of the end of a long workday: After driving into Manhattan this morning from his house in the Hamptons, he endured a biceps, triceps and abdominal core workout ("It nearly kills me, but I need to get a little stronger"), sang scales with the vocal coach who's been helping him reclaim the high notes of his youth, met with a stylist to select stage clothes in various shades of black (rejecting one pair of leather boots as "very Bruce" and another as "too Pete Townshend") and spent hours in a downtown production studio, making minute tweaks to lighting and digital animation.

"The high notes of his youth"? What, you mean "If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat"? It must be interesting to wake up in the morning and be Roger Waters. You've made your contribution to the human race and there are no expectations of you contributing any more. You can just sit around and bask in your impact - and money. I'm glad he's doing these Wall shows, but I don't think I'll be attending. However, I would have liked to have been in the audience to see Waters and Gilmour's impromptu appearance at an English fundraiser for Palestinian refugees:

Gilmour and Waters were originally planning to play three songs. But one attendee, British financier Arpad Busson, was so taken with the performance, he donated £50,000 to get them to play "Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2." "Some other people were also saying they'd give £200,000 for them to play one more song," Freud adds. "People were crying — really! I know it sounds corny, but it was magic. David and Roger — they looked so happy up there and they made something so beautiful happen."

So, are they like charity whores or something? "Here's another 100,000 pounds - play 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene" - immediately!"

Julian Lennon On His New Photos Of U2, Kate Hudson

Speaking of touchy British rock reconciliations, How about Julian Lennon and Yoko Ono:

Midway through the evening, Yoko Ono, Sean and Julian Lennon themselves emerged into the room for a tour, laughing together and pausing to look at intimate shots of U2...Julian's mother Cynthia Lennon, Patti Boyd, George Harrison’s first wife, and Sid Bernstein, 92, the promoter who first brought the Beatles to the U.S., also came to see the exhibit, Lennon’s first. May Pang, Lennon's girlfriend during his eighteen-month “Lost Weekend” between 1973 to 1975, also attended — making it the first time she, Cynthia Lennon, Yoko Ono, Sean and Julian have all been in the same room together.

Anyone have a knife? Because the tension in this room is so thick, I could cut it with one. All in all, Julian seems like a pretty cool guy, especially considering that the first thing anyone automatically thinks of when they see him is probably, "You're John Lennon's son!" and Julian barely knew his father and didn't really feel that close to him anyway. Recently I listened to some of Julian's music, and it's actually quite good, if you like well-crafted but somewhat lyrically generic Beatlesque pop. Let's say this: he's a better songwriter than Ringo. Here's a really interesting, but non-Rolling Stone interview from last year:

“If Dad was to walk through the door now, we’d hug and cry, and get rid of all that pent-up emotion and anger. I have nothing but love for him now.”

Over the past two decades Julian has himself bought John Lennon memorabilia, much of it to be displayed in the exhibition in Liverpool, which will run until the end of the year. It has been, as he accepts, his way of “re-connecting” with his father. Yet he has had to spend more than £1m of his own money to gain possession. “It is, in a way, horrendous and very sad that this is what I have needed to do. Yet I’m blessed too that I have had the money to be able to do this.”

Julian ‘lost’ his father when he was five at the time of the divorce though he did get back on reasonable terms with him in the mid 1970s when John split from Yoko Ono for a couple of years after meeting May Pang. It was she who encouraged a rapprochment. “Dad and I got on a great deal better than,” recalls Julian. “We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general when he was with May Pang.” This relationship was initially known as ‘the lost weekend’ though it lasted a good deal longer - 18 months in fact - before John and Yoko Ono were reconciled in 1975. “My memories of that time with Dad and May are very clear - they were the happiest time I can remember with them.”

His relationship with his step-mother is well documented. There has not been a lot of love lost on either side. But now, again with the passing of time, Julian and Yoko Ono are on better terms. He saw her earlier this year in New York for dinner while she was recording her latest album. “But it was no more than a brief dinner with her and Sean.” Sean, of course, is his half-brother, and, like Julian, has carved out a musical career. “The fault with Yoko is as much mine. I unleashed Hell on her. Now I’ve made my peace with her and put the past on the backburner. We talked over things at that dinner. There is no point in further animosity as I’ve had enough of anger. It is a waste of time and energy.” Julian makes it very clear though that his relationship with Sean could not be better even if he was clearly John’s favourite while he was alive. “We’ve got a fabulous friendship. The issue was never with him; it was with Yoko.”

Sacha Baron Cohen To Play Queen's Freddie Mercury

What do you think?

Springsteen Talks Darkness With Ed Norton

Although I may have outgrown my Springsteen phase, I always did like Darkness On The Edge Of Town and for the nice price of nothing, I might actually want to hear this upcoming box set, which includes "21 unused songs from the sessions" and a documentary with concert footage. Although I have to say, the following lyrical samples give me pause:

On the light, rollicking “Gotta Get That Feeling,” Springsteen sings, “Hey girl, won’t you come out tonight?” There’s also “Ain’t Good Enough For You” (“you criticize about me endlessly/Logic defies how you got stuck with me”); “Someday (We’ll Be Together),” which is a romantic ballad with a bit of a ‘50s feel; and “Talk To Me,” about a guy pining for a girl whose “dad won’t ever let me in.”

Oh my God! That girl's dad won't ever let him in! What's a poor working-class Jersey boy to do? This is the future of rock and roll!

The Best Record Stores In The U.S.A.

You guessed it: Amoeba is listed first. But that's probably because the list is in alphabetical order.