Music News & Notes

Sam Cooke Biopic Being Developed By ABKCO

ABKCO Music and Records is said to be working on a biopic of the late singer Sam Cooke based on the Peter Guralnick biography Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.

Jody Klein, president of ABKCO said:

"In the next couple of months, I should be able to make an announcement on the film."

The company owns the rights and master recordings to Cooke's music, something that has been a major obstacle in other company's attempts to bring musician's lives to the screen. Jody Klein is the son of Allen Klein who founded ABKCO and was able to amass a large catalog of music by artists like the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Who.

There have been no discussion on who would play Cooke, who was shot to death at the age of 33. A younger star without singing experience could be used for the role as the original recordings could be used on the soundtrack.

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U2 Sets Record

U2 couldn't let Giants Stadium be demolished with out setting one more record. Their Thursday night show last week had 84,000 in attendance, breaking the record held since 1995 by Pope John Paul II. Bono even gave Bruce Springsteen a shout out, acknowledging the size of the crowd, saying "Sorry Bruce. We know it's your birthday and all."

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Springsteen To Play Classic LPs In Concert

Bruce and the boys will perform one of their classic albums in full each night during the Rock Hall legend’s five-show stand at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium from September 30th to October 9th. The shows are also historic because they’ll mark the last-ever gigs at the stadium that has played host to so many great concerts; the venue will be demolished at the end of this football season.

Springsteen will open up his five-night stand with a full performance of Born to Run, which the band performed in its entirety on September 20th at Chicago’s United Center. “Chicago convinced us that this was really worth doing,” Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau said in a statement. “The audience was so supportive of the concept that it convinced us to go ahead with this at Giants Stadium.”

The October 2nd show will feature Darkness on the Edge of Town, with Born In the U.S.A. on the set list the following night. For their last two Giants Stadium shows, the E Street will once again perform Born to Run and Born in the U.S.A. on October 8th and October 9th, respectively. Last year, at a fundraiser at New Jersey’s Count Basie Theater, the E Street Band performed both Born to Run and Darkness in their entirety.

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Lucy's In The Sky Now

Lucy Vooden, who will forever be known as the inspiration for the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," passed away last week from lupus. She was 46.

Per legend, John Lennon's son Julian brought home a drawing of Lucy, who was one of her classmates. The drawing inspired Lennon and Paul McCartney to write the song which would go on to be one of the group's most controversial. Some said the song was about LSD, but this story is what Lennon reported the song to be about, and I believe him, heck, he wrote the material, he should know what it was about.

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Yorke Puts Together New Band

Thom Yorke has recruited Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck drummer Joey Waronker and percussionist Mauro Refosco for a new live outfit that will make its debut this Sunday and Monday, October 4th and 5th, at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre, the singer announced on Radiohead’s Dead Air Space Website this morning. The news ends weeks of rumors surrounding the usually reticent Radiohead frontman, who has been seen out gallivanting in Los Angeles recently, DJing at the Roosevelt Hotel and being snapped by paparazzi outside Nobu.

“In the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting a band together for fun to play The Eraser stuff live and the new songs etc. to see if it could work,” Yorke writes. “We don’t really have a name and the set will not be very long cuz… well… we haven’t got that much material yet! But come and check it out if you are in the area.” We here at Rolling Stone love Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, but the prospect of Yorke collaborating with Flea, one of the best in the game, is exciting. Yorke also recently called his new song “The Hollow Earth” a “bass monster,” so Flea should help in bringing songs like that and Eraser’s “Harrowdown Hill” from the studio to the stage.

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The Octopus Project Reissues First Two Albums On Vinyl

On the heels of a new EP and recent North American tour, Austin group The Octopus Project are returning to the studio to record their next full-length. To tide fans over in the meantime, the band's first two albums have been reissued on vinyl and are available in stores now. The band's haunting debut, "Identification Parade," was originally issued by Peek-A-Boo Records in 2002, and deftly combines the experimentation of progressive post-rock, the blips and bleeps of electronic music and the raw, human ROCK of rock. Recorded and assembled over several years while the band was still mostly a recording project, "Identification Parade" has been best described as "ambidextrous equipment failure junk-tronica."

Several years and many tours later, the 2005 sophomore album, "One Ten Hundred Thousand Million," captured the barely-controlled chaos of The Octopus Project's live performances in a rich, surround sound, 3-D, technicolor studio amalgamation injected with the wild energy they felt in noisy, tightly-packed clubs. It was this album that caught the attention of Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke, who described the band's sound as "an outtake of the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations' with Mogwai as the studio band" and "tightly composed bundles of synthesized whoop and circus-calliope cheer... like Stereolab with happy feet."

"Identification Parade" has never appeared on vinyl until now. "One Ten Hundred Thousand Million" was originally released on vinyl in a very limited edition of 500 copies with alternate hand-screened cover artwork. Peek-A-Boo Records is very excited to finally make both of these stellar albums available for vinyl enthusiasts.