Two murals have been painted in the Haight-Ashbury District depicting Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia wearing masks in San Francisco. SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Although mandatory mask-wearing was not a thing during San Francisco’s Summer of Love, we now know what 60’s rock icons Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia might have looked like in masks. Their likenesses are being used to spread the word about how important wearing a mask is to beat COVID-19. The Moving the Lives of Kids Arts Center (MLK Mural) sponsored these works in the Haight-Ashbury District. “We haven’t gone, we haven’t beat it yet. The vaccine is out. We’re almost there. But we have to keep social distancing. We have to keep wearing our mask. And let’s do that in solidarity together to beat this virus,” said executive artist Kyle Holbrook. The arts center made the murals happen with a grant and with special permission from the owner of the building where the art was painted. For more information about Moving the Lives of Kids and their mural projects, or to donate to the organization, visit...
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Pete Townshend performing live with The Who in 2019. Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images. “If the moment comes, I’ll go in and start” By Will Richards The Who‘s Pete Townshend has said he’s ready to record a new album with the band post-lockdown. The band, who released their last album ‘WHO’ in 2019, this month cancelled their upcoming UK and Ireland tour due to ongoing coronavirus concerns. Speaking to Uncut, Townshend said he’s been working on new music during the pandemic and “wants to make another” record after lockdown if it makes financial sense. “There’s pages and pages of draft lyrics,” he said, adding: “If the moment comes, I’ll go in and start.” Order the new issue of Uncut here. Pete Townshend. Reviewing ‘WHO’, the band’s first album in 13 years, NME wrote: “‘WHO’ either recaptures the band’s root ferocity or explores new territory with style: the smoky tango of ‘She Rocked My World’, with Daltrey growling like Tom Waits on Viagra, or ‘Break The News’, a folk rocker with a contemporary Mumford crunch. “Keep denying that curtain, boys, we’ll tell you when you finally get old.” Cancelling their upcoming 10-date jaunt around the UK and Ireland, which was due to kick off in Dublin on March 5 and end in Manchester on March 29, Townshend and Roger Daltrey said: “We are very sorry that we have to cancel our planned March 2021 UK and Ireland shows. “Please excuse the delay but we wanted to wait as long as possible to see if we could indeed play them. However, as you can see the current situation makes this impossible. Thanks for all your wonderful support and we hope to see you in the future when conditions...
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(L-R) Questlove, Sly Stone and CommonAP; Sundance; Mega By Dominic Patten As Sly and the Family Stone’s 1971 tune says, it’s a family affair, Less than two weeks after his directorial debut Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) was picked up in a multi-million dollar Sundance Film Festival deal, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is heading back behind the camera for a documentary on Sly Stone – with some long time collaborators on board. “It goes beyond saying that Sly’s creative legacy is in my DNA….it’s a black musician’s blueprint….to be given the honor to explore his history and legacy is beyond a dream for me,” the Roots drummer and musicologist said in a statement today on MRC Non-Fiction project. Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Stone formed and fronted the genre and culturally defining Family Stone. This latest film on Stone is expected to focus not just on his successes, but also the consequences and cultural expectations of that rise in an era of expanding media, shifting societal norms in the Sixties, the Black Power movement and the backlash that followed. The one-time Bay Area DJ and his multi-racial and multi-gender crew spawned a plethora of iconic hits like 1969’s “Stand!” And “I Want to Take You Higher” and the previously mentioned and much covered “Family Affair.” The psychedelic soul band was immortalized on film by a Woodstock performance that was merely one highlight of a distinctly contrarian career. The still living Stone has been a major influence on almost everyone else in contemporary hip hop, soul, funk and rock’n’roll. From Thompson and now Tonight Show house band The Roots, to The Temptations, George Clinton and Funkadelic, Aerosmith, Prince, Guns’n’Roses and many more, the reach of the Family Stone remains long and deep. An infrequent and often unreliable performer in recent decades, the eccentric Sly has pretty much stayed out of the public eye of late except for a prolonged court battle with his former managers over royalties. “Sly’s influence on popular music and culture as a whole is immeasurable, and what his career represents is a parable that transcends time and place,” MRC Non-Fiction chief said Amit Dey declared Friday. “Questlove’s vision, sensitivity and reverence brings the urgency that Sly’s story and music deserve, and we’re excited to be working with him to bring Sly’s story to life.” This new focus on Stone is also a return to form for Questlove coming off Summer of Soul. A stunning performance...
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By DAVID BROWNE Looking back on a troubled period for the fabled roots rockers, the guitarist-songwriter explains why he needed to right old wrongs on a new 50th-anniversary reissue “There was severe drug experimenting going on, and I was herding cats,” Robbie Robertson says of the lead-up to the Band’s third LP, ‘Stage Fright.’Norman Seeff* Ahead of a new 50th-anniversary reissue of the Band’s Stage Fright, Robbie Robertson would like to apologize. “I made a mistake,” he says from his L.A. office. “And now I’m so thrilled that I could undo that mistake and make this record what I thought it was, and the experience I thought it was.” Recorded in their home base of Woodstock, New York, and released in 1970, Stage Fright was the Band’s third album, home to future concert staples like the title song and “The Shape I’m In.” But the running order of those songs, Robertson says, never sat quite right with him. At that point, the Band were in a fragile state — the moment “when everything changed for us,” Levon Helm wrote in his memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire — and for the sake of unity, Robertson says he began pushing the others in the group to collaborate on songs with him. They did, to varying degrees, and when Stage Fright was finished, Robertson put together a track sequence for the album, which would open with a rollicking tribute to traveling tent performers, “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” and end with the slinky, late-night “The Rumor.” “When I first sequenced this record and listened to it, I thought, ‘What a journey, what a fucking ride this is,’” he recalls. “And I loved it. They were really doing justice to the songs I was writing.” But according to Robertson, the other members of the Band weren’t as enthused and demanded that some of their collaborative efforts — like “Strawberry Wine,” his co-write with Helm, and the two Richard Manuel–Robertson songs, “Sleeping” and “Just Another Whistle Stop” — be moved up in the track sequence. In fact, “Strawberry Wine” became the opening song. “The guys were like, ‘Man, you know, some of the songs you were really pushing us for our part, they’re buried in the sequence,’” he says. “So I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to push all of that way up front.’ And it was a mistake. We weren’t falling apart, but we were wrangling and we never had to wrangle before.” This Friday...
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