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One of the biggest (if not the biggest) heavy metal festivals in the world — Wacken Open Air — has just concluded this year run and has announced that next year lineup will include a headlining performance by Deep Purple. In 2013 the festival will run on the weekend of August 1-3. Weekend passes are […]
Read more »Total Abandon will be released on vinyl by Back on Black label some time in September this year. So far, we have not been able to obtain any further details on packaging, bonus tracks (if any), etc.
Read more »Steve Morse and Joe Lynn Turner both took part in the Supertramp tribute album Songs Of The Century due for release on August 14 via Cleopatra Records. Steve contributed for The Logical Song (together with the original Yes keyboard player Tony Kaye), while Joe sang on Bloody Well Right. Other guests on the album include […]
Read more »Japanese blog Muse on Muse has two interviews with both Steve and Neal Morse of the Flying Colors project: Muse On Muse: All of your guitar solos, especially the one on “Kayla”, are very beautiful and match the songs perfectly. Are your solos improvised, or do you make them prior to recording? Please tell us […]
Read more »Tommy Bolin Memorial Fund has opened a new official website dedicated to Tommy: tommybolin-official.com. It has much of what one would expect from it (an RSS feed for updates would be nice though) and is well worth a visit. The Tommy Bolin Memorial Fund is a charitable foundation in memory of Tommy run with active […]
Read more »429 Records is preparing a Tommy Bolin box set The Definitive Teaser — a three-CD collection featuring a remastered version of his classic album along with two CDs of outtakes and alternates. The project is produced by Greg Hampton and Johnnie Bolin. Along with the three-CD Teaser box set, 429 Records will release a five-CD […]
Read more »Classic Rock Magazine has a new interview with Ian Gillan focusing on his Ian Gillan Band years: Why the jazz-rock-fusion direction? I don’t know exactly, it was all a bit chaotic. To start off with we didn’t really have any direction at all, because nobody knew what they were doing. Of course, my hero Johnny […]
Read more »Eddie Hardin: JON LORD – THE GENTLEMAN OF MUSIC My first encounter with Jon, well, I must have been 16! He was playing with THE ARTWOODS and I was rehearsing in a room nearby; I was immediately struck by the growling sound of his Hammond. I tried my best to be inconspicuous, though Jon spotted […]
Read more »Jon Lord’s home town newspaper Henley Standard also did a tribute to him which puts his character in quite a unique perspective: Lord was a close friend of author, playwright and barrister Sir John Mortimer, who died in 2009, and they performed together at the Kenton Theatre in Henley. Nansi Diamond, an amateur actress and […]
Read more »British radio station GTFM did a special on Jon Lord in the wake of his death. It is one of the better done ones and covers his whole career in and outside of Purple. You can listen to it online (sadly, sans the music, due to licensing restrictions). Listen to the second half of the […]
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Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing