'Sopranos' box set on sale in November
NEW YORK - A 30-disc box set with every episode of the HBO series "The Sopranos" goes on sale Nov. 11 with a list price of US$399.99, HBO Video said Monday.
Besides seven seasons worth of episodes, the set has two bonus DVDs that include an interview with creator David Chase by Alec Baldwin. The set will have two "Supper with the Sopranos" features, sit-down dinners (food not included) with Chase and various actors discussing their favourite scenes, auditions and other aspects of the show.
Chase also discusses how the show was cast and the evolution of the characters. He includes three music soundtrack CDs that he curated and were previously released, and 16 scenes that were filmed but never made it on the air. The set includes a recording of a New York seminar on cast members who were whacked and various spoofs on other TV outlets.
Four hundred dollars won't buy you Tony Soprano, however. James Gandolfini didn't participate in any of the "extras."
Diva Dion's AC/DC cover deemed worst ever: guitar mag
Céline Dion has a dubious distinction to add to her myriad awards and achievements: world's worst song cover, according to a popular European guitar magazine.
British-based Total Guitar conducted a poll that named the French-Canadian singer's rendition of You Shook Me All Night Long the No. 1 "worst cover song," editor Stephen Lawson said, according to Agence France-Presse.
Performed about six years ago during her hit Las Vegas run, the diva's version of the classic AC/DC anthem was sung as a duet with U.S. pop singer Anastacia. The magazine dubbed the cover "sacrilege" and an "offence."
Other cover songs the magazine scoffed at include:
British girl groups Sugababes and Girls Aloud performing Walk This Way, made famous by Aerosmith and Run DMC.
British boy band Westlife's rendition of rock ballad More Than Words by Extreme.
Pop Idol winner Will Young's version of Light My Fire by The Doors.
Oasis hit Wonderwall as performed by easy-listening lounge act The Mike Flowers Pops.
Flops aside, the poll also highlighted a handful of the most successful song tributes.
"The best covers are unlikely choices and they do something radical," Lawson said.
Electric-guitar legend Jimi Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower came in first, followed by the Beatles version of Twist and Shout — originally recorded by U.S. R&B group The Top Notes.
Rounding out the best five were:
The Guns N' Roses cover of Live and Let Die, by Paul McCartney and Wings.
Nirvana's rendition of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World.
British rock band Muse's version of Feeling Good, written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1965 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd.
Total Guitar, touted as the bestselling guitar magazine in Europe, is known for regularly carrying tablatures (guitar-music notations) of popular music, reviews of guitar equipment and interviews with prominent guitarists.
The Beatles Reportedly Heading to “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band”
Following the success of two weeks of the Beatles‘ music on American Idol, the Fab Four’s catalog may be branching out again: Reps for the band are reportedly talking to both Activision and MTV Games about possibly releasing a Guitar Hero or Rock Band based around Beatles’ tunes.
According to a source close to the negotiations, the final deal could be worth millions, but first must get the approval of both Apple Corps. and EMI. Apple Corps’ tight grip on the Beatles catalog has loosened since Jeff Jones became the company’s chief executive, as evidenced by the band’s music appearing in American Idol, Cirque du Soleil Love show and the film Across the Universe.
“To my view, it’s only a matter of time before we see Beatles songs that are the original recordings in motion pictures, in television work, and yes, maybe even one day in a commercial,” said Sony/ATV chief executive Martin Bandier, who holds more than 200 Beatles copyrights.
Whichever video game company wins the battle to release a Beatles-themed game, a source says a deal “could be reached in a matter of weeks.”
New CD Releases, June 24: Motley Crue, Amos Lee, Sigur Ros
Motley Crue "Saints of Los Angeles"
These veteran head-bangers are set to release their first new studio album since 2000's "New Tattoo." "Saints of Los Angeles" was recorded by the band’s original lineup: drummer Tommy Lee, guitarist Mick Mars, bassist Nikki Sixx and vocalist Tommy Lee. The previous record to feature that cast was 1997's "Generation Swine."
The first single from "Saints of Los Angeles" is its title track, which includes backup vocals from Buckcherry's Josh Todd, Papa Roach's Jacoby Shaddix, Sixx:A.M.'s James Michael and Trapt's Chris Brown.
The Crue will support the record this summer by headlining its own touring festival, dubbed Crue Fest. The road trip, which also features Buckcherry, Papa Roach, Crue bassist Nikki Sixx's side-project Sixx:A.M. and alt-rockers Trapt, kicks off July 1 in West Palm Beach, FL.
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Amos Lee "Last Days at the Lodge"
The Philadelphia-born singer/songwriter returns with a follow-up to 2006's "Supply and Demand," which was produced by Natalie Merchant's bassist, Barrie Maguire, and peaked at No. 76 on The Billboard 200 chart.
"Last Days at the Lodge" was produced by legendary studio presence Don Was (Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones), and features a veteran cast of back-up talent, including Doyle Bramhall, Jr (Eric Clapton) on guitar, Spooner Oldham (Neil Young, Aretha Franklin) on keys, Pino Palladino (The Who, John Mayer Trio) on bass and James Gadson (Bill Withers) on drums, among others.
Lee will support "Last Days at the Lodge" with a tour that begins July 8 in Kitchener, Ontario, and stretches into late August.
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Sigur Ros "Med Sud i Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust"
These Icelandic alt-rockers never make things easy on their listeners--especially not those who speak only English. The title of their latest album, "Med Sud i Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust," won't be attempted by many DJs on air. The English translation of the title is "With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly."
This disc, the band's fifth studio album and its first since 2005's "Takk...," does include one song performed in English ("All Alright"), which is a first for the band. "Med Sud i Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust" was co-produced by the band with veteran producer Flood (U2, Smashing Pumpkins) and recorded in New York City; London; the band's hometown of Reykjavik, Iceland; and Havana, Cuba.
The group recently finished up a short North American tour, which included a set at the giant Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, TN.
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Alejandro Escovedo "Real Animal"
The popular singer/songwriter/guitarist is ready to unleash "Real Animal," which follows 2006's "The Boxing Mirror." Wasting no time, the road warrior is already on tour in support of the album.
The 13-track "Real Animal" was produced by legendary studio hand Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T Rex). Escovedo's previous album was helmed by another great producer, The Velvet Underground’s John Cale.
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Shinedown "The Sound of Madness"
The platinum-selling hard-rock troupe is back with its third album, which follows 2003's "Leave a Whisper" and 2005’s "Us and Them." The lead single from "The Sound of Madness" is "Devour."
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More new releases:
Gerald Albright, "Sax for Stax" (Peak)
Eric Darius, "Goin' All Out" (Blue Note)
Jon Foreman, "Spring and Summer" (Credential)
Hercules and Love Affair, "Hercules and Love Affair" (Mute)
Billy Idol, "The Very Best of Billy Idol: Idolize Yourself" (Capitol)
Edwin McCain, "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (Time Life)
Reckless Kelly, "Bulletproof" (Yep Roc)
Thalia, "Lunada" (EMI)
Three 6 Mafia, "Last 2 Walk" (Sony)
Walter Trout, "The Outsider" (Megaforce)
Steve Tyrell, "Back to Bacharach" (Koch)
Various artists, "Big Blue Ball" (Real World)
Soundtracks and scores:
"Into Great Silence: Office of the Night" (Jade)
"Wall*e" (Disney)
Dody Goodman, stage and TV comedian, dies at 93
NEW YORK - Dody Goodman, the delightfully daffy comedian known for her television appearances on Jack Paar's late-night talk show and as the mother on the soap-opera parody "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," has died at 93.
Goodman died Sunday at Englewood (N.J.) Hospital and Medical Center, said Joan Adams, a close family friend. The actress had been ill for some time and had lived in the Actors Fund Home in Englewood since October, Adams said.
Goodman, with her pixyish appearance and Southern-tinged, quavery voice, had an eclectic show-business career. She moved easily from stage to television to movies, where she appeared in such popular films as "Grease" and "Grease 2," playing Blanche, the principal's assistant, and in "Splash."
It was on "The Tonight Show" when Paar was the late night TV program's second host in the late 1950s that Goodman first received national attention. Her quirky, off-kilter remarks inevitably got laughs and endeared audiences.
"I was just thrown into the talking," Goodman said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. "I had no idea how to do that. In fact, they just called me up and asked me if I wanted to be on 'The Jack Paar Show.' I didn't know who Jack Paar was. They said, 'We just want you to sit and talk."'
After a falling out with Paar, other chat shows took up the slack, including "The Merv Griffin Show" and "Girl Talk." And there were roles on TV series, too, most notably her appearances as Martha Shumway (Louise Lasser's mother) on "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," starting in 1976, and guest shots on such shows as "Diff'rent Strokes," "St. Elsewhere" and "Murder, She Wrote."
In later years, Goodman was a regular in "Nunsense" and its various sequels, appearing off-Broadway and on tour in Dan Goggin's comic musical celebration of the Little Sisters of Hoboken. She started out playing Sister Mary Amnesia, later graduating to the role of Mother Superior.
"Dody had the most impeccable comic timing," Goggin said. "When we had her in the show, she was the only person on Earth who could walk on stage, say, 'Are you ready to start?' and bring the house down. Within seconds, the audience was eating out of her hand."
The actress was born Dolores Goodman on Oct. 28, 1914, in Columbus, Ohio, where her father ran a small cigar factory. She arrived in New York in the late 1930s to study dance at the School of American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, and later graduated to Broadway musicals.
The actress performed regularly on stage in the 1940s and early '50s as a chorus member in such musicals as "Something for the Boys," "One Touch of Venus," "Laffing Room Only," "Miss Liberty," "Call Me Madam," "My Darlin' Aida" and "Wonderful Town," in which she originated the role of Violet, the streetwalker.
"I had to make so many transitions into other things," Goodman said in the AP interview. "When I first came out of dancing, I did revues."
It was the early to mid-'50s, when small, topical nightclub revues flourished. Goodman, a natural comedian, thrived in them. She performed in shows by Ben Bagley and Julius Monk, and in Jerry Herman's first effort, a revue called "Parade."
In more recent times, she appeared on David Letterman's late-night talk show.
"He understands my sense of humor. I will do a dumb thing for fun. That's how I got the reputation for being dopey and dumb. I don't like dumb jokes but I will do dumb things for a laugh," she said in the AP interview.
Goodman, who never married, is survived by seven nieces and nephews, 11 great nieces and nephews and 15 great-great nieces and nephews, Adams said.
A memorial service is planned.
George Carlin mourned as counterculture hero
LOS ANGELES - Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. Some People Are Stupid. Stuff. People I Can Do Without.
George Carlin, who died of heart failure Sunday at 71, leaves behind not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive language.
The counterculture hero's jokes also targeted things such as misplaced shame, religious hypocrisy and linguistic quirks — why, he asked, do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.
"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin "a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats."
Carlin constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 — noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" — and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a few TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 — a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
He won four Grammy Awards for best spoken comedy album and was nominated for five Emmys. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.
"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs, including carnival organist and marketing director for a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with $300 and Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. His first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."
Carlin said he hoped to emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade Carlin grew up in — the 1950s — with a clever but gentle humor reflective of the times.
It didn't work for him, and the pair broke up by 1962.
"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."
Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look and changed to his trademark beard, ponytail and all-black attire.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."
Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.