Zevon Saluted With Album, Reissues, Book
Late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon, who died of cancer in 2003, will be the subject of a double-disc rarities collection, three expanded reissues of vintage albums and a book in the coming weeks.
First up are new editions of the albums "Excitable Boy," "Stand in the Fire" and "Envoy," due March 27 via Rhino. Each album sports four previously unreleased bonus tracks. The 1981 live album "Stand in the Fire" had been out of print for years, while "Envoy," released the following year, has never been made available on CD until now.
On May 1, the new label Ammal Records will release "Preludes -- Rare and Unreleased Recordings," culled from 126 pre-1976 tracks found in a road case after Zevon's death by his son. In addition to demos and alternate versions, the album sports six previously unreleased songs: "Empty Hearted Town," "Going All the Way," "Steady Rain," "Stop Rainin' Lord" "Studebaker" and "The Rosarita Beach Cafe."
The second disc blends 40 minutes of music with segments of an interview between Zevon and KGSR-Austin, Texas' Jody Denberg.
Finally, Zevon's life and times are chronicled in the book "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," which is told through interviews with family members and musicians such as Jackson Browne, Lindsey Buckingham and David Crosby.
Here is the track list for disc 1 of "Preludes":
"Empty Hearted Town" (solo piano)
"Steady Rain" (full band)
"Join Me in L.A." (solo guitar)
"Hasten Down the Wind" (solo piano)
"Werewolves of London" (full band)
"Tule's Blues" (solo piano)
"The French Inhaler" (solo guitar)
"Going All the Way" (full band)
"Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (full band)
"Studebaker" (solo piano)
"Accidentally Like a Martyr" (full band)
"Carmelita" (solo guitar)
"I Used To Ride So High" (full band)
"Stop Rainin' Lord" (solo guitar)
"The Rosarita Beach Cafe" (solo piano with backing vocals)
"Desperados Under the Eaves" (full band)
And they're 'Dancing' ...
When ABC's Dancing With the Stars returns March 19 (8 ET/PT) for a fourth season, it'll be with a slate of celebrities aimed at raising both eyebrows and heartbeats.
Heather Mills, estranged wife of Paul McCartney, headlines the list of 11 celebs. It includes two singers, three athletes, a former supermodel and an ex-beauty queen.
As Dancing's first amputee performer — part of her leg was lost after a motorcycle accident — Mills could burnish an image severely tarnished by the messy divorce proceedings with McCartney.
Says Dancing producer Conrad Green: "People will definitely be interested in how Heather copes."
Brian McDonald, a former U.S. dance champion and ballroom dancing judge, says Mills won't have an easy time. "She could gain a lot of sympathy from viewers and (the show's three) judges," he says. "But these dances can be very demanding and require a great deal of footwork."
The show, patterned after British hit Strictly Come Dancing, matches celebrities with pro ballroom dancers. Routines are rated by judges and viewers. Putting B-list celebs into ballroom costumes helped ABC draw an average 20 million viewers for last season's competition shows and 27.5 million for the finale, won by NFL all-time rushing leader Emmitt Smith.
Other competitors:
•Former 'N Sync singer Joey Fatone, 30, who says he had been courted for the show since Season 1. He says the large audience is part of the attraction of competing. "After seeing the show, I have no problem making (a fool) out of myself," he says.
•Vincent Pastore, the season's oldest competitor at 60, best known for playing mobster Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on HBO's The Sopranos. Though he has no formal dance training, after three lessons, "call me Fred Astaire," he says. "I like to do competitive things, so I'm not going to fall on my face."
•Shandi Finnessey, 28, Miss USA 2004 and co-host of Game Show Network's Lingo. She says rehearsals are already taking their toll: "The first day, I got extreme blisters all over my feet. Yesterday, all the blisters broke."
•Laila Ali, 29, undefeated boxing pro and daughter of heavyweight legend Muhammad Ali. "She's a great athlete," Green says. "Smart, beautiful and driven. She could be the surprise" of the competition.
•Billy Ray Cyrus, 45, actor and country singer, who co-stars on the Disney Channel hit Hannah Montana with daughter Miley.
•Clyde Drexler, 44, the 6-foot-7 former Houston Rocket and Portland Trailblazer and one of the NBA's all-time top 50 players.
•Leeza Gibbons, 49, former Entertainment Tonight co-host.
•Apolo Ohno, 24, two-time Olympic gold medalist in short-track skating and the youngest competitor in Dancing history.
•Paulina Porizkova, 41, a supermodel in the '80s.
•Ian Ziering, 42, a Beverly Hills 90210 heartthrob
Winners will be crowned May 22.
Grey's Doc Spins Off
The good doctors at Seattle Grace may be focused on resuscitating Meredith Grey, but it's another female character who's moving to a better place.
According to the Wall Street Journal, ABC is attempting to duplicate the juggernaut success the network has achieved with Grey's Anatomy by moving forward on a spinoff centering on Kate Walsh's character of Dr. Addison Montgomery-Shepherd.
A spokesperson for the network told the paper that a series title has not yet been determined, nor has a general plot—whether Walsh's character will remain in Seattle, move back to New York or do something else entirely is still up in the air.
ABC Television Studio, the series' producer, confirmed to E! News that a possible new series is in the works.
"We are producing an enhanced episode that has a potential for an afterlife," a rep said, declining to comment beyond the details in the Wall Street Journal report.
Walsh and Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes are said to be under contract for the new series; neither would comment Wednesday.
The show will apparently give plenty of screen time to Addison, who has emerged from hated third party in Grey's Anatomy's central love triangle to become one of the most popular characters on the show.
The spinoff would allow Rhimes to be able to focus on a single character, something that is hard to do on the current show, where story lines and screen time are divvied up among 12 regular characters, something Rhimes herself has said is hard to juggle.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Rhimes only recently broke the news of the spinoff to the cast, and it's not expected than any other characters will jump ship along with Walsh to the new series—potentially disappointing (and spoilerish) news for fans of the budding Addison-Alex love connection.
The castmembers will, however, be involved in the set up for Addison's sendoff.
Per the Wall Street Journal, Rhimes is writing a special two-hour episode of Grey's Anatomy that will effectively serve as the Addison-centric series' pilot.
The episode is expected to air during May sweeps, allowing time for the network to decide whether or not to pick up the show for placement on its fall schedule. (In other words, ABC is waiting to see if the premise is more Rhoda than Joey.)
As it is, Grey's Anatomy, currently in its third season, has routinely topped the Nielsen ratings and just last week averaged 26 million viewers. Even a portion of those figures for the new show would make it a success.
Rhimes has reportedly put on hold another of her anticipated projects to move quickly on the spinoff. It's unclear when she made the decision to pursue the new show, but last fall she postponed work on another drama series that was expected to debut midseason.
That show was due to chronicle the lives of four female journalists and also had Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey's Anatomy's late Denny Duquette, on board to star. That project will now be pushed back even further.
Fall Out Boy downplays antics on CD
NEW YORK - Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz is far more recognizable than the average rock band bassist.
With jet-black asymmetrical bangs, slightly smeared eyeliner and a toothy grin, Wentz certainly makes for a memorable image, but it's his public antics that have created such an unforgettable impression.
"I honestly don't care what the perception is of me to the world," says the 27-year-old, while sipping on a Starbucks' vanilla latte on a rainy day in New York City. "It's a weird thing to have come to, but after you've gone through the ringer so many times you don't care. But I do care how people think of my band so that becomes problematic."
Since emerging from suburban Chicago, Fall Out Boy has sold an impressive 3 million copies of their major-label debut, 2005's "From Under the Cork Tree," received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and secured their place as rock stars: their latest album, "Infinity On High," debuted at No. 1 on the album charts this month.
The four-piece band's singer/guitarist Patrick Stump is a seemingly reserved guy often credited as the band's musical mastermind — the Edge to Wentz's Bono. But their celebrity bassist has resumed duties usually reserved for frontmen. He's been linked to Hollywood starlets like Lindsay Lohan and Ashlee Simpson, and even underwent a media maelstrom after naked photos he took of himself with his Sidekick were leaked on the Internet.
"The first 48 hours I just like quit my band and wouldn't talk to anybody," says Wentz of Sidekickgate. "It's like a footnote now, like how Michael Jackson set his hair on fire in a Pepsi commercial."
And though he's been accused of releasing the photos himself, Wentz shrugs it off, understanding why people might pin such an allegation on him.
"It's this bizarre thing where you can kind of control your own destiny," he says of the Internet age. "People are able to kind of guide their own press and create this wave behind it."
Stump says the attention on Wentz made the band more focused as a unit.
"It basically forced us to make an album quickly because I wanted to make sure people remembered that we're a band and not a sideshow," says Stump. "People always want to see Pete in this 'I'm-a-crazy-rock-star' light and it's a shame because they lose so much about him in the fine print. And more than anything, they lose so much about the music. It's horribly frustrating."
"People only want to hear about drama and bad stuff," adds guitarist Joe Trohman. "No one wants to know that things are good."
And things are good for Fall Out Boy. Their new album's instant success came as a happy surprise to the band.
"It was strange," says Stump. "It's still one of those things where you're waiting to find out you're on 'Punk'd.'"
The album reunites the group with "Cork Tree" producer Neal Avron and, in an unexpected move for a young rock band, pop and R&B producer-extraordinaire Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds on two tracks.
It also finds the band taking more chances, including a Coldplay-inspired "piano song," a nod to Jeff Buckley (and ultimately Leonard Cohen) with a chorus of "Hallelujah" within a song, a guest rap by their boss, Def Jam President Jay-Z on the opener, and whispers of bad reviews they've received on another track.
"It's easy to hide behind conventions you've used before, a certain chord progression or melody that you know is going to be safe," says Stump. He says he pushed himself not to fear the musically unknown when writing "Infinity On High" because of the media misconception of his band.
"You don't get that much time in the public eye, and if that's what people expect ... all these sensationalized ideas about us ... if that's who you think we are, I'm going to make the best record I can possibly make to dispel that idea because I don't think that's who we are."
The result has been a critically acclaimed album, and a hit single, "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race," that both mainstream and indie radio stations are supporting.
"Fall Out Boy has done everything right on their climb to the top of the next wave of commercially successful punk bands," says Joe Escalante, morning show host of Indie 103.1 FM in Los Angeles. "They earned a following by performing well, not by hustling kids with hype. And they paid their punk rock dues."
Fall Out Boy makes no bones about their joy of creating anthems for the masses, they maintain that commercial success is not their end goal.
"We're not denying that we want to be the biggest band and want to sell records, but we're not about moving units," says Trohman.
These guys have other interests. Wentz, for one, has self-published a book, "The Boy With the Thorn In His Side" (named after the song by his beloved Smiths), created an affordably priced clothing line, Clandestine Industries, that has partnered with DKNY for a line out this Spring, and even helped catapult the career of FOB's kid-brother equivalent Panic! At the Disco by signing them to his Decaydance label. He also recently bought a home in Los Angeles and acquired a roommate: his English bulldog Hemingway.
"Everything about my life was pretty narcissistic," he admits. "And now with him, there's this kind of love that you can't get from anything else."
The babble over how to pronounce `Babel'
NEW YORK - An Academy Award contender that no one's sure how to pronounce? "Babel" has seven Oscar nominations, meaning the name of the film will be read at least seven times Sunday night. But its pronunciation has stumped even its biggest star.
"Thank you for honoring our film `Babble.' Or `BAY-bel' or `Bah-BELL,'" Brad Pitt said after the film received an earlier award at a film festival in Palm Springs, Calif. "We're still arguing how to pronounce it."
The uncertainty over something as basic as the title is fitting, since the movie percolates with cultural confusion. It takes place over three continents in four different languages, five if you count sign language.
Robin C. Barr, the linguist-in-residence at American University in Washington, studies the phenomenon called folk-etymology — speakers' incorrect reinterpretations of, and anecdotes about, words — and notes that the name of the city first pops up in the texts of Sargon, an Akkadian king about 2300 B.C.
Which leaves us, oh, about 4,300 years for those reinterpretations and anecdotes to develop.
Such as the Tower of Babel story in Chapter 11 of the Bible's Book of Genesis. It tells of how, when humans all spoke the same language, they determined to build a tower up to heaven. Alarmed, God ended the project by confusing their language: They couldn't understand each other and couldn't work together anymore.
"The ancient storyteller of Genesis 11 is using the name in a satirical word play in the story," says Wayne T. Pitard, a religion professor at the University of Illinois.
Both Barr and Pitard offer that the word is actually a form of the name of the city of Babylon, and it has nothing to do with the Hebrew verb "balal" (confuse) in the Bible; it derives from the Mesopotamian Akkadian language and means "gate of the gods." The longer form of the ancient word "bab ilani" (hence, Babylon) is an alternative form that means the same thing.
Barr says the English word "babble" is not at all related etymologically to the Hebrew/Akkadian "Babel."
It's onomatopoeic, like boo or hiss.
"There are words for `babble' in many languages that have arisen independently via the imitation of children's speech or other unintelligible language," Barr says. She adds that the ancient Greek word for "barbarian" originally simply meant anyone who didn't speak Greek — "their language sounded like `bar-bar-bar-bar' to the Greeks, apparently."
The Middle English "babelen" (the source of "babble") is unrelated, but is also imitative of child language or flowing water (the common "babbling brook"), she says. And the Sanskrit word "balbala" means "stammer."
But before we all get tongue-tied, Barr avers that none of the pronunciations can be held up as the sole "correct" one.
And, really, does it matter?
George Orwell once wrote: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
Or as two other deep thinkers of the 20th century, George and Ira Gershwin, wrote (and Fred Astaire sang):
"You like potato and I like potahto,
"You like tomato and I like tomahto;
"Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
"Let's call the whole thing off!"
Best-picture Oscar is anyone's guess
LOS ANGELES - The Academy Awards usually are like one of those high school popularity contests where all the other contenders show up, but there's that one girl everybody just knows is going to be crowned prom queen.
Not this time.
For the first year in longer than anyone in Hollywood can remember, the best-picture category is so wide open that any of the five films could come away with the big prize.
The typical Oscar ceremony has a clear front-runner or two, with the other best-picture nominees lumped into the thanks-for-showing-up crowd.
The main trophy for the 79th annual Oscars this Sunday is up for grabs among the far-flung ensemble drama "Babel," the crime epic "The Departed," the war story "Letters From Iwo Jima," the road comedy "Little Miss Sunshine" and the British-royalty tale "The Queen."
A final look at the five nominees going into the homestretch:
"BABEL" — A shot fired in the African desert is heard 'round the world as the wounding of an American tourist holds stinging repercussions for families in North America and Japan.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's tale had the grandest of coming-out parties, premiering at last spring's Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaker winning the best-director prize there the same weekend as the publicity frenzy over the birth of a daughter to Angelina Jolie and "Babel" star Brad Pitt.
Though not a universally beloved film, "Babel" has ridden a wave of admiration over its intricate structure, which weaves passionate stories in multiple languages, the action flitting back and forth among characters on three continents.
"Always through the whole process, I was very conscious of how I was going to put in four stories, three continents, five languages, and translate that into a visual grammar, a visual language in one single film that makes sense," Inarritu said.
Anchored by great performances from Pitt, Cate Blanchett and supporting-actress nominees Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi, "Babel" leads the best-picture field with seven nominations. It's the sort of heavy, ambitious drama academy members historically have anointed as best picture.
Yet despite its Golden Globe win for best drama, "Babel" is a film that may resonate more in the head than the heart. In keeping with the global expanses that separate the film's characters, some Oscar voters may appreciate it more from a distance, rather than holding it close to their breasts.
"THE DEPARTED" — If you haven't heard someone say that Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar, you haven't been paying attention to awards season this year — or two years ago, when his "The Aviator" was in the running, or four years ago, when his "Gangs of New York" was nominated.
Revered as he is, Scorsese has been a perpetual bridesmaid, somehow trekking through one of the most eclectic, ambitious careers of any American filmmaker without winning a thing on Hollywood's big night.
After going oh-for-five on past nominations, Scorsese looks like a lock to finally win best director. With its ferocious action, macabre humor and snappy wiseguy patter, "The Departed" also could bring home the best-picture trophy, a prize his films have never won.
"To be in a movie when he finally gets his due would be awesome," said "The Departed" co-star Mark Wahlberg, a supporting-actor nominee for playing a distrustful, foul-mouthed cop. "I would just kind of look around at the surroundings, being on the set with all those talented people and Marty, and I really felt like wow, I arrived. It was the best experience of my career."
Many Scorsese fans think "The Departed" was not the best of Scorsese's career, though it's his biggest box-office hit. Critics welcomed the film as a return to the blood-soaked crime epic he has done so masterfully in the past, yet the sense among awards watchers is that "The Departed" falls a few notches below such Scorsese films as "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas."
"LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA" — The results of his half-century-and-counting career are in: Clint Eastwood can do anything.
His far-flung World War II saga "Flags of Our Father" came out in October, greeted with solid critical acclaim but relative indifference from audiences, who were not all that interested in the ambitious account of the raising of the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima.
As "Flags" faltered, Eastwood's companion film "Letters From Iwo Jima," chronicling the lives of the Pacific island's doomed Japanese defenders, was moved from its 2007 debut date to a December release to qualify for the Oscars.
And Eastwood, a two-time best-picture and directing winner, scored his fourth nominations in both categories for the film that even he had viewed as the "smaller brother" to the more expansive "Flags."
"The whole thing was just to tell a story of what it must have been like to be defending this little island that had no significance when you look back at it now, but it did back then," Eastwood said. "The irony is I talked to many Iwo veterans who were very supportive of the idea of making `Flags.' They couldn't wait to see `Letters From Iwo Jima.' They were all still curious about what it was like for the other side."
The Japanese-language "Letters" was a surprise best-picture nominee, and a win would be even more unexpected, especially considering academy voters may figure they've already given Eastwood his due for past Oscar champs "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby."
Then again, this is Eastwood, so anything's possible.
"LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE" — The little film that could holds many parallels to "Crash," the surprise best-picture winner a year ago.
Both were low-budget independent films shot outside the Hollywood studio system, "Crash" costing $6.5 million to make, "Little Miss Sunshine" $7.5 million. Both were film-festival acquisitions, Lionsgate buying "Crash" at the Toronto fest, Fox Searchlight snapping up "Sunshine" at Sundance.
Both are ensemble flicks, "Crash" following a broad range of intersecting characters over a tumultuous day in Los Angeles, "Sunshine" focusing on a feuding family on the road trip from hell, including supporting-acting nominees Alan Arkin and Abigail Breslin. Both went into Oscar night fresh off a win from the Screen Actors Guild for best performance by an ensemble cast.
And both came out fairly early in the year, well before the fall onslaught of awards contenders, becoming critical darlings and big indie successes, each finishing with $55 million to $60 million at the box office.
"There's something about our film that truly connected with audiences in a very real way. A little bit of magic happened," said "Little Miss Sunshine" producer David Friendly. "Everybody can relate to the dysfunctional family. What's actually unrelatable is the functional family, which I don't know if it exists."
Directed by husband-and-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the film is all about learning to make peace with your lot in life and gracefully accept the notion that you may be a loser. Come Oscar night, "Little Miss Sunshine" could be a winner.
"THE QUEEN" — For the second straight year, director Stephen Frears delivers a movie centered on a British dame of a certain age.
In 2005, it was Judi Dench as an upper-crust socialite in "Mrs. Henderson Presents." This time, it's Helen Mirren as the uppermost of the upper crust in "The Queen," a fiercely intelligent, surprisingly saucy drama about Elizabeth II's worst week on the job, the aftermath of Princess Diana's death and the public's criticism that the royal family bungled the period of national mourning.
Still alluring in her 60s, Mirren gleefully cloaks her sexiness beneath Elizabeth's frumpy, shapeless wardrobe and presents a truly profound glimpse into the psyche of a leader who has been uncompromising in her propriety and respect for tradition.
"I love the fact that she has never changed, and there's a consistency there that's admirable and so extraordinary. If her hairstyle one minute was a beehive in the '60s and then it was a shag cut or mullet in the '70s," Mirren joked. But "it's always been the same, and as one gets older in life, you realize the power of that consistency. ... You realize that consistency now has been there for 40, 50 years."
As good as the film is, Oscar voters may feel they've done loyal service to "The Queen" by giving Mirren the best-actress prize, leaving best picture to another contender.