Larry Goes To The Beach
Former Beach Boys star Brian Wilson will speak for the first time on television about his nervous breakdown, drug addiction problems and the voices he still hears inside his head.
Tune in Monday night at 9 p.m. EST.
CD Sales Up in 2004
Norah, Usher lead first sales increase in four years
Record sales rose 6.9 percent in the first half of 2004 -- the first period of growth for the ailing business in four years. But even some top music executives are skeptical about the significance of the rising sales numbers, especially in a year of massive layoffs, budget cuts and record-store closings. "I remain cautiously optimistic," says Antonio "L.A." Reid, the chairman of Island Def Jam. "But I still believe that we're deeply in the woods, with a long way to go before we can see clearly."
Reid's explanation for the sales increase is simple: big records. Usher's Confessions (4.5 million sold in 2004's first half) and Norah Jones' Feels Like Home (3.1 million) have performed similarly to blockbusters by 'NSync, Britney Spears and Eminem a few years ago. "The stars line up and you sell records," says Reid. "Without those things, the industry would still be in the toilet."
From 2000 to 2003, CD sales plummeted 16.4 percent, from 785 million to 656 million -- so the increase from 286 million in 2003's first half to 306 million this year is hardly a dramatic recovery. Some music-industry experts even wonder if the new numbers are misleading; Universal, Warner Bros. and Sony have recently dropped prices on many releases, perhaps leading to some sales increases but a proportional decrease in revenue.
Still, many executives see reasons for optimism. Jordan Katz, executive vice president and general manager of BMG Distribution, says Usher's Confessions (on the BMG-owned Arista label) shows that quality CDs can remain in the Top Ten for months. He says that while Top Ten albums have been selling at the same level as a year ago, sales of releases ranked from 11 to 200 are up this year. "It appears we're heading into a really healthy cycle of great artists," Katz says. "Certainly the improvement of the economy has helped."
This hasn't improved the labels' bottom line -- so far. Earlier this year, the new Warner Music Group announced layoffs of 1,000 employees, and the EMI Group announced plans to lay off 1,500 people and cut twenty percent of its "niche and underperforming" artist roster.
Perhaps the most tangible effect of the sales uptick is that labels are able to put a positive spin on the layoffs and cutbacks. "Painful as this period has been, we're a better, smarter company for it," says Will Botwin, Columbia Records Group president, whose parent company, Sony Music, is working out a merger with BMG. "The best of the best are who are at the record companies right now. It's a leaner, more creative, fast-footed business overall."
liveDaily Interview: Neil Peart of Rush
Rush is currently headlining its 30th anniversary tour, the band's first outing since the trek supporting 2002's "Vapor Trails."
Although the group--bassist-keyboardist-vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer-percussionist Neil Peart--doesn't have an album of new material out, it recently released "Feedback," an EP of covers that includes The Who's "The Seeker," Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" and The Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul."
Over their three-decade career, the Canadian rockers sponged musical influences from progressive rock and fusion to funk and reggae, and persevered through a cloudy period after the well-documented tragedies of the late '90s, when Peart lost his daughter in an automobile accident and his wife to cancer less than a year later. The band hung tough and released "Vapor Trails," and the subsequent tour was documented on the Juno-winning CD/DVD "Rush in Rio."
St. Catharines, Ontario native Peart actually played piano before he took up drums at the age of 13. Besides being something of a drumming icon today, he also is Rush's lyricist.
liveDaily: So did you get your first drums when you were 13?
Neil Peart: No, no drums. For my 13th birthday, I got a pair of sticks and a practice pad. My parents said, "Once you show that you're going to stick with it for a year, then we'll get you some drums." That's the way that went down. Fair enough. I'd do the same thing.
Once you got that first pad, was it a galvanizing thing right away?
Oh yeah, it was before that, really.
When did you say to yourself, "This is what I'm going to do"?
Well, I was never that sweepingly unrealistic, but it certainly was what I wanted to do. And even without drums, I would take magazines and lay them out on my bed, and pretend they were drums and cymbals, and beat the covers off them. It became total obsession.
What was the idea behind "Feedback?"
Our vision was 1966, when we were teenagers. We just decided to pick songs from our youth that we liked and make a tribute album to the people we grew up on. For instance, we did "Summertime Blues" and kind of combined the arrangements of Blue Cheer and The Who, and did Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," and this other obscure '60s band called Love, a song called "Seven and Seven Is." All of us loved being freed from the material--in other words, not being responsible to think it up. And we did it our own way, of course, but we paid a little due respect to the times. We called the project "Feedback" because when Geddy and Alex were working on demos, they decided to have feedback and backwards guitar on every song.
After seeing the "Rush in Rio" DVD, it seems amazing those shows happened at all. Explain how they came together, the weather, and everything else.
We went there with the wide-open expectation that it would be out of our control, basically, and that we wouldn't have our usual tight reign on everything, technologically and personally, as we can in the United States or Canada. So we went there very much open-minded, with an attitude of: whatever happens, we'll deal with it along the way. There were three shows, all outdoors in big soccer stadiums, and it constantly rained.
The first day they couldn't get the monitor board working at all, and they were figuring out how to move the house mixing board down beside the stage so our front-of-house mixer could mix live sound and the monitors from the side of the stage. It was about problem solving. The electronics went out on the second night in Sao Paolo, where we were in front of 60,000 people and it had been raining off and on, and blowing rain right in our faces--it was surreal. It was something you might see in a video, but not in real life.
How did you deal with that?
That night in Sao Paolo--when all of the electronic drums and MIDI marimba and everything were gone--immediately my mind was thinking ahead, not only getting around the parts that night, because it was like, "Okay, what am I going to do tomorrow night? How am I going to play my solo without those things?" I'd be thinking ahead to the next song, "What do I do? Okay, I won't have that sound. Here's how I can imitate it or get around it or whatever." I was already starting to orchestrate a new solo that wouldn't have those things, because that's what you have to do.
And the next day in Rio, the trucks were late and didn't arrive until late afternoon, and we're filming and recording the last night of the tour, our one and only chance that we really wanted to capture on that tour. So this was the last and final chance under the most … impossible is not too strong a word. No sound check. Minutes before we went on, [drum tech] Lorne [Wheaton] came up to tell me the electronics were actually working. They had no sound check for the recording truck, no test for the cameras, everybody had to adopt that attitude of, "Okay, here's what we do." And did.
One telling anecdote that I love, the carpet that we used on stage got so soaking wet during those days that we had to leave it behind. It was too heavy to ship home. It was so waterlogged that it would have cost way more than it was worth to ship it home, so we just left it there. It's in some Brazilian guy's living room. [laughs]
Without naming names, there are a lot of veteran bands putting out product that don't look like they're having near the amount of fun you were having on the DVD.
It was one of those magical nights, despite all. I not only remember that show now, I knew at the time it was going really well. And, yeah, in retrospect I really like the way the video came out. Alex spent a lot of work on the audio trying to rescue all that went wrong in that truck during the course of the show. There was a lot of technical fixing up to do that took him a lot of work. But in the final analysis it was a piece of work I'm proud of.
Tour Dates
July 2004
30 - Tampa, FL - Tampa Bay Amphitheatre
August 2004
1 - Atlanta, GA - HiFi Buys Amphitheatre
3 - Bristow, VA - Nissan Pavilion
4 - Camden, NJ - Tweeter Center at the Waterfront
6 - Hartford, CT - ctnow.com Meadows Music
7 - Scranton, PA - Montage Mountain Amphitheater
9 - Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center
11 - Wantagh, NY - Jones Beach Theater
12 - Mansfield, MA - Tweeter Center
14 - Holmdel, NJ - P.N.C. Bank Arts Center
15 - Darien Center, NY - Darien Lake Six Flags P.A.C.
21 - Montreal, Quebec - Bell Centre
22 - Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre
I'm Waiting For Room Service!
Bryan Adams will release his new studio album, "Room Service," internationally the week of Sept. 20, although an official American release isn't penciled in until early next year. According to the Canadian singer/songwriter's official Web site, the new studio effort will be followed up by a 14-track acoustic album, "Stripped," which will also include acoustic demos of songs that appear on "Room Service."
Both albums were recorded in hotels and backstage at concert venues while Adams was on tour in Europe last year. Adams was in Toronto yesterday (July 29) filming a video for first single, "Open Road."
"Room Service" will be Adams' first studio release since 1998's "On a Day Like Today." That A&M set debuted at No. 3 on Billboard's Top Canadian Albums chart and No. 103 on The Billboard 200.
PARIS IMPERILED?
Paris Hilton's reps refusing to comment on the hotel heiress, who has been spotted around Hollywood with bruising on her face and arms. However, one source tells E! Online's Ted Casablanca that the Hilton family is trying to get Paris to go to police and report the person resposible.
BOND-ING?
The British tabloid News of the World reporting Sunday that Aussie actor Eric Bana, best known for his roles in The Hulk and Troy, is in negotiations to take over the role of James Bond from departing 007 Pierce Brosnan.
No official word yet from MGM.
'Village' Scares Up Over $50M in Debut
LOS ANGELES - Fright maestro M. Night Shyamalan scared up his latest No. 1 debut with "The Village," a tale of an isolated town menaced by bogey men in the woods that had a $50.8 million opening weekend.
"The Village" bumped off the previous weekend's top movie, "The Bourne Supremacy," which slipped to No. 2 with $23.4 million, bringing its 10-day total to $98 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
Denzel Washington's remake "The Manchurian Candidate" opened at No. 3 with $20.2 million. The update of the 1962 assassination thriller co-stars Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber.
The weekend's other wide releases flopped. "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," about two stoned pals on a comic quest for burgers, premiered at No. 7 with $5.15 million. The family sci-fi saga "Thunderbirds," featuring Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton in an update of the cult TV series, debuted at No. 11 with $2.7 million.
With a budget of just $9 million, "Harold & Kumar" poses no financial hardship for distributor New Line. "Thunderbirds," which cost $57 million to make, could present a hefty loss for distributor Universal.
Overall revenues rose, with the top 12 movies taking in $140.4 million, up 6.5 percent from the same weekend last year. Hollywood's domestic grosses are running at about $3 billion since early May, $200 million ahead of the pace of last year's record summer of $3.9 billion, according to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
The industry enters the summer homestretch on a solid run, with three straight movies — "I, Robot," "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Village" — debuting with more than $50 million. Coming Friday is Tom Cruise's thriller "Collateral," and the following weekend brings the sequel "Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" and "Alien vs. Predator," a potential sleeper success on the order of last year's "Freddy vs. Jason."
"We're on a pretty good roll right now," said Paul Dergarabedian, Exhibitor Relations president. "This is a very strong way for summer to wind up. Usually, by August, things are really slowing down."
"The Village" was writer-director Shyamalan's second-best debut behind the $60.1 million opening weekend for "Signs" in summer 2002. Shyamalan's top-grossing film, "The Sixth Sense," debuted with an unremarkable $26.7 million but gradually climbed to blockbuster status with $293.5 million.
The movie, whose ensemble cast includes Joaquin Phoenix, William Hurt and Bryce Dallas Howard, broke a string of duds for distributor Disney, whose 2004 releases include the bombs "The Alamo" and "Around the World in 80 Days."
"It makes it so much more fun. I'm sitting in the office right now, and I can't tell you how thrilled I am," said Chuck Viane, Disney head of distribution. "Sometimes, you come in and it's not as much fun."
The romance "Garden State," from writer, director and star Zach Braff, opened strongly in limited release with $185,000 at just nine theaters. The movie expands into nationwide release through late August.
"Shrek 2" took in $1.3 million to pad its total to $432.4 million, passing "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace" to become No. 4 on the all-time domestic chart.
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "The Village," $50.8 million.
2. "The Bourne Supremacy," $23.4 million.
3. "The Manchurian Candidate," $20.2 million.
4. "I, Robot," $10.05 million.
5. "Spider-Man 2," $8.5 million.
6. "Catwoman," $6.1 million.
7. "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," $5.15 million.
8. "A Cinderella Story," $4.7 million.
9 (tie). "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," $3.1 million.
9 (tie). "Fahrenheit 9/11," $3.1 million.
Fahrenheit 9/11 hits DVD
The controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 is hitting DVD this fall – not surprisingly just in time for the elections. Columbia TriStar is distributing the disc.
No word on any supplements as of yet. The DVD will be released on October 5th with a suggested retail price of $28.95.
American Idol Castoff to Make Christmas Album, Film
MACAU (Reuters) - American Idol's most famous castoff is making a Christmas album and starring in a Cantonese film.
William Hung, whose hatchet job of Ricky Martin's "She Bangs" catapulted the ethnic Chinese engineering student to fame, said he expected the album to hit the shops shortly before Christmas. He did not give details.
"Singing and entertainment are now my first priority," Hung told reporters in Macau during a publicity gig Saturday.
In January, Hung became famous for his less-than-stellar performance of the Ricky Martin song in an audition for the Fox reality TV series "American Idol."
With his bad singing and stiff dancing Hung became a pop culture icon and has since released music videos and an album.
Hung said Saturday he was also shooting a Cantonese movie about a mother who was "crazy about her son," co-starring veteran Hong Kong actress Nancy Sit Ka-yin Sit who is well known among the Chinese-speaking community worldwide.
About 100 fans cheered the flamboyantly dressed Hung, who had drawn dozens of journalists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.
"He has kept his silly style," said a young woman, who identified herself as Iris.