Akron homer and Rock Hall inductee Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders will be releasing a new album called Break Up The Concrete to be released on Tuesday, September 23 through Shangri-La Music

But just as other veteran acts such as the Eagles, Madonna and Earth Wind & Fire, are embracing the future of the music business so are The Pretenders and Shangri-La.

How?

Free music.

From now until the release date, the Pretenders and Shangri-la will be giving away a one song/mp3 download a week through varioius media partners. This week the song is Boots of Chinese Plastic an uptempo rock-a-billy rave up that recalls the sneering attitude of Tattooed Love Boys and is available through AOL's Spinner.com.

There are a bunch of other media partners but since you likely don't care with whom they've partnered it's easiest to just go to www.thepretenders.com each week and check out the songs one week at a time.

The album will be the band's first since Loose Screw in 2002. The album was recorded in 10 Days and reportedly a stripped down affair that will remind fans of also finds Hynde working with a brand new group that includes UK guitarist James Walbourne, pedal steel guitarist Eric Heywood, and the rhythm section of bassist Nick Wilkinson and legendary drummer Jim Keltner.

Original drummer Martin Chambers will perform at the next Pretenders show on July 30 in London, according to a spokesperson.¶

When singer/songwriter/guitarist John Mayer played Blossom in 2004, he seemed to be a conflicted artist. Between songs he kept ripping of searing guitar licks, stopping himself and then returning to his groovy, adult alternative pop tunes as if he was afraid to unleash his inner guitar hero for fear of alienating the folks who just wanted to be told their body was a wonderland. Eventually, his inner guitar hero escaped and he played a seemingly off the cuff and credible take on Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child (Slight Return).

Since then Mayer has given that inner guitar hero plenty of room to breathe, particularly on Try! his 2005 live trio album with drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino and his recent multi-format Live album Where The Light Is.
In 2008 the pop star and the guitar hero have merged and Thursday night at Blossom in front of a large, multi-generational, multi-cultural crowd he successfully channeled both sides of his artistic nature, and with his natural stage charisma and enthusiasm Mayer held fans in the palm of his fretboard fondling hands for nearly two hours.

Mayer's setlists are usually similar in content with a few surprises thrown in and wildly variant in sequence. At Blossom, sporting tank top that showed off off his tattooed arms, he opened the set upbeat and funky with the bluesy riff of Good Love Is On The Way quickly followed by Bigger Than My Body.
Fronting a septet that featured two horn players, former Pretenders guitarist Robbie McIntosh and singer/songwriter/ex-Follow For Now frontman David Ryan Harris, Mayer was a constantly moving ball of energy playing many guitar solos invoking the styles of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray and some Eddie Van Halen style pyrotechnics and the crowd gave their energy right back to him by singing along and shimmying in their seats.

For listeners who find the grooves on Mayer's studio albums to be a bit to mannered, in concert everything his cranked up to 11 (well, maybe more like 9 and 1/2). The laid back Jack Johnson like beat of Belief became actually funky and he and the band turned Vultures into an extended funk jam with Mayer whistling harmony to his own guitar solo and dropping in a couple verses of Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler). He also took his R&B flavored ballad Gravity and extended it with a tasteful and lengthy slow building solo and a monologue on the power of love.
While Mayer is no longer shy about his love of leaning way back, scrunching up his face and wailing on his Stratocaster, he still appeared a bit surprised that his audience will pretty much allow him any and all musical indulgences.
"Let me tell you why you're so great," he said to the audience after a slow, 12-bar blues take of the classic Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do featuring a flashy solo, filled with tremolo bar theatrics.
"People talk about the death of pop culture, but I just played you guys one of the oldest R&B songs there is, thanks for letting me do that."
He peppered the set with other covers including an acoustic Free Fallin (yep, it was a sing-a-long) and bits of Daryl Hall's Every Time You Go Away and Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer.

Mayer is apparently comfortable enough with the pop star/guitar hero to delete a few of his breakthrough hits Daughters, and You're Body Is A Wonderland from his set entirely and only sometimes bothers with No Such Thing which he didn't play at Blossom but the crowd didn't seem to mind.
If Mayer ever decides to bring that energy and spontaneity to his studio albums he might work his way out of the (multiplatinum) mellow ghetto his detractors place him in alongside Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews.

But though Mayer is very much a 21st century, hyper self-aware pop star (like his Fallout Boy buddy Pete Wentz) and has referred to himself as "insufferable" and "kind of a "douchebag" (and later blogged about the word and its meaning, naturally), the 30 year-old seems to have a pretty good handle on his music and career.

Where The Light Is, is a live recording of a December 2007 concert for various Los Angeles charities and covers all of his current artistic bases. It features an acoustic set, another with the John Mayer Trio and a third set with his tour band debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200 and was released on 2CD, DVD, 2LP, Blu-Ray and download, so he appears to also have his financial bases covered as well.

Hopefully, opener Colbie Caillat is spending her summer on the side of the stage watching Mayer nightly work an audience, because while the young singer/songwriter's tunes from her debut album Coco are pleasant enough and she sang them well, her stage presence is lacking, a fact to which she made reference.
Singer/songwriter/Brett Dennan also performed.

John Mayer's Blossom Setlist

* Good Love is On the Way
* Bigger Than My Body
* I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
* Belief
* Stop This Train
* Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
* Free Falling
* Waiting on the World to Change
* Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do
* Why Georgia
* Vultures/Makes Me Want To Holler
* Gravity

* Encore
* Something Missing/Every Time You Go Away
* Get Out My/Sledgehammer
* Say

For the first time in more than a decade Cleveland rap crew Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are a quintet.
Stanley "Flesh N Bone" Howse, 34 who has spent the last 10 years in prison for brandishing an AK-47 at a friend was released Monday, July 13 from a California penitentiary.
All hiphop.com reports that Howse was greeted by friends and family including crew members Krayzie, Layzie (a.ka. his brother Steven Howse), Bizzy and Wish Bone.

“It feels amazing, refreshing, exciting [and] I'm so happy for him to finally come home to his family and friends and fans,” Bone Thug’s longtime manager Steve Lobel told AllHipHop.com. “Flesh is a very great, loving, talented, creative individual. We have a lot of memories together. Hopefully we can have more.”

The group which recently reunited with troubled member Bizzy Bone is now back to full strength and is already in the studio working on their follow-up to the gold selling Strength & Loyalty from 2007 which featured only Krayzie, Layzie, and Wish Bone.

The album is expected to be released on Interscope through hip hop producer Swizz Beatz's Full Surface label.

After being ousted from rehab/rock supergroup Velvet Revolver, troubled singer Scott Weiland fell back into the waiting arms of his former bandmates in 90's Grunge kings Stone Temple Pilots and the band hit the road.

As expected the reunion tour has been quite successful but also met with its share of bumps without including Weiland's November DUI arrest.

So far the tour has been met mostly with good reviews for the rest of the band, Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass, vocals and guitar respectively and drummer Eric Kretz. As usual Weiland has been the wildcard with both critics and fans noting nights when he mumbled incoherently and seemed disinterested and/or impaired and other nights when prowls the stage as the golden grunge god of yore.

Monday night at U of A's stately E.J. Thomas Hall, both the band and Weiland were in a happy place as they played a two hour set filled with the band's many 20th century hits.

The band played Cleveland a scant two months ago, so their quick return to Northeast Ohio is a bit of a surprise and surely had the folks at Live Nation quietly gnawing their collective fingernails wondering if they had saturated the local STP market. While their worst fears were allayed as the crowd was healthy, there were chunks of empty seats on all three levels of the venerable concert hall but the folks that showed up were definitely not feeling saturated.
Weiland sporting a burgundy fedora, jeans, two scarves, sport jacket, sunglasses and Rolling Stones T-shirt (most of which would eventually come off to reveal his still very thin, wiry frame) started the show of a bit slowly with a low energy take on the power ballad Big Empty which like much of the set became a group sing along.

Weiland whose early set banter suggested that he thought he was in Cleveland made several references to his childhood days spent in Chagrin Falls and even briefly wore a jersey from the Kentston school district he attended as a teen. Weiland whose banter, like his singing got better as the evening progressed also admitted he was a Notre Dame fan (drawing many boos from the crowd) and praised former Fighting Irish/Browns quarterback Brady Quinn(drawing a mixed reaction).
Local references always help warm up a room. But the crowd, a mixture of folks who were probably flying the flannel during the band's hey-day and younger fans who were likely dipping into their older siblings CD collections, didn't need much encouragement to sing/shout along to the string of hits that included Wicked Garden, the churning Big Bang Baby and the still taut single Vaseline.

During their commercial heights S.T.P. got a bad critical rap and was lumped in with the wave of grunge also-rans such as Candlebox (also reunited), Bush, Seven Mary Three and others that would pollute the airwaves for the next few years and make piles of money for their record companies. Truthfully, STP's massive selling debut Core still sounds too much like a Mainstream Grunge Blueprint when compared to the Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains records by which it was preceded (not to mention the Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Melvins, Tad and others that proceeded the Seattle stars).

That album also contains many of the band's most enduring hits and almost half of its contents made the set list.

But the band also dipped into personal favorites such as Lounge Fly and Lady Picture Show and Too Cool Queenie from the band's last and least popular album of new material Shangri-La Dee Da . There were also few apparently spontaneous and seemingly out-of-place funk jams between tunes, perhaps a preview of the band's possible recording future.
Playing in front of a huge video screen showing mostly abstract images save a car chase from Bullitt, the 40 year old Weiland's patented stiff, herky-jerky stage movements have gained a bit of extra stiffness but he was pretty energetic, using the entire space and even walking into the crowd during the metal-flavored Down. A few times his vocal fastball seemed to have lost a bit off its top end, but mostly his Vedder/Morrison-esque growls and wails were intact as was his trusty bullhorn and he seemed to empty his lungs on Plush despite having most of the audience singing the song just as loud as he.

Tim McGraw has been a country music superstar for more than 15 years and mainstream pop star for a decade taking the mantle of crossover king from the semi-retired Garth Brooks and racking up a string of country and pop chart topping albums and sell out tours alone and with his crossover superstar wife Faith Hill.
One of the ways McGraw has topped both charts is he’s not afraid to cross-pollinate his music mixing in crunchy rock, slick soul and big pop ballads with his neo-traditional country and contemporary honky-tonk.

Wednesday night at Blossom McGraw and his longtime band the Dancehall Doctors wowed and wooed a near sellout crowd of screaming women who wish they could touch his chiseled body and urban cowboys who would love to drink a beer with him.
McGraw’s superstar status doesn’t stop him from bucking the fairly codified country music system by using his touring band in the studio and recording tunes with rappers and rockers. While many artists have stopped playing soon to be released songs in concert because of camera phones and Youtube, McGraw opened the Blossom show with a solid new song, Still from his next album due in the fall and played three more new songs.

McGraw isn’t a particularly animated performer preferring to let his (usually) tight pants and tighter shirt carry much of the visual load. But the singer, wearing loose cargo pants and a tank top, and oozes charisma and gives his nine band mates-some who have been with him for 20 years- plenty of room to elicit their own screams from the audience.

McGraw whipped out hit after hit, spanning his career from 1993’s still politically incorrect Indian Outlaw through to his recent hit If You're Reading This, about fallen soldiers.

In between he hit showed his soulful side with a cover of Eddie Rabbit’s Suspicion, revisited his daddy issues on the new ballad You Had To Be There and on the new rootsy rocker Southern Voices he named checked a slew of southern icons including Dale Earnhardt, Hank Williams Sr., Rosa Parks and Billy Graham.

Blossom is one of the final stops on McGraw’s Live Your Voice tour, but given their energetic performance it seems neither he nor his band seem ready to leave the road.

A: We are DEVO.

McDonald's had made an enemy of D-E-V-O and their L-A-W-Y-E-R-S.
The Akron born band is suing the Burger Behemoth over a happy meal toy given away last spring as part of an American Idol related promotion. The toys were little plastic figures with outfits that correlated to various musical genres including Disco Dave, Rockin’ Riley, Soulful Selma and this little slice of copyright infringement dubbed New Wave Nigel.

Gee, that little guy's hat sure looks like one of DEVO's patented (and copyrighted and trademarked) Energy Domes, doesn't it?
The band sure thinks so and are turning loose their legal team on Mickey D's

Gerald Casale, Devo bassist and energy dome creator had this to say about the suit:

“This New Wave Nigel doll that they've created is just a complete Devo rip-off and the red hat is exactly the red hat that I designed, and it's copyrighted and trademarked," Casale told the Australian Associated Press.

"They didn’t ask us anything. Plus, we don’t like McDonald’s, and we don’t like American Idol, so we’re doubly offended,” he said.

The doll also sports an orange jumpsuit and plays a song that Club Devo.com says sounds like a mutated version of Doctor Detroit
( which is a crappy song)

I have to appreciate the love Alicia Keys showed a few of the R&B girls groups the early 90s at the '08 B.E.T. Awards held Tuesday night.
After performing her current hits Superwoman and Teenage Love Affair (with a band!) Keys brought out SWV. to perform their hit ballad Weak followed by a fully reunited Envogue who performed Hold On and then the surviving members of TLC (Chili & T-Boz) came to give us a little bit of Waterfalls out and get a little love from an artist and from the crowd, most of whom actually seem to remember the groups.

I'd embed the Youtube video here but Viacom doesn't play when it comes to copyright infringement, so instead you'll have to go to B.E.T.'s web site and search around a bit. Conversely, you could just wait a couple of days because I'm sure there will be several "encore" presentations of the show.

They all looked and sounded pretty good (though T-Boz who suffers from Sickle Cell Anemia seemed less energetic than usual) and it was a nice flashback and show of respect, especially for us Gen X-ers who used to dance to their music in the clubs back in the day.

Ahh, memories…

In a recent Saturday Night Live skit, resident goofball Andy Samberg plays singer/songwriter Jack Johnson as host of a talk show called “The Mellow Show” where he talks about being mellow to fellow mellow artists Dave Matthews and John Mayer and laments the passing of his many pets including a mini-gortex wearing iguana who died of neglect and “extreme mellowness.”

It’s the kind of silly/funny parody of the Hawaiian-born, ex pro-surfer’s image and music that should make both his detractors and fans chuckle and obviously Johnson has a sense of humor, as the skit is the featured video on his web site.

Tuesday night at Blossom, though his two hour set of tunes drawing from his five full length albums was very, very mellow, the near capacity crowd was in no danger from the (surely mellow) Grim Reaper. The mostly 18-30 crowd with a healthy heaping of older yuppies danced, sang a long and generally worked harder on having a good time under the pavilion and on the overstuffed briefly rain soaked lawn, than the object of their musical affection.

Johnson's triple platinum and counting Curious George soundtrack is officially named Sing-a-longs and Lullabies For the Film Curious George, but the first three words could be the title and description of just about all of Johnson's albums and concerts. His music is fairly narrow in range with unhurried tempos, gently rhythmic guitar strumming, gentle melodies that never reach for highs or lows but simply float around in a comfortable midrange so anyone can sing. Johnson seldom raises his voice above a friendly speaking level and his occasional guitar solos are like his singing, smooth, melodic and unfussy.

Johnson’s four piece band took the stage casually, looking like they had just stepped out of the audience (dude, it’s part of the appeal, he’s a regular cat just like you and me!) opening with the lightly funky groove of Hope from his 2008 album Sleep Through The Static, arguably his most musically mellow and lyrically serious collection to date. Switching between acoustic and electric guitar Johnson’s setlist bounced back and forth between two basic song formats. There is the midtempo, gently funky and/or reggae flavored groove found in songs such as Good People, Sitting, Waiting, Wishing and the crowd favorites Bubble Toes, Banana Pancakes and Staple It Together which featured a fun melodica duel between keyboardist Zak Gill and opener Money Mark. On the other end of Johnson’s (mellow) musical spectrum are the (more) soothing slower songs such as Losing Keys, Go On and Breakdown.

Through it all Johnson swayed (gently) back and forth keeping the banter to a minimum. Easily the hardest working man onstage was Gill whose grandmother drove up from Columbus to see him. Gill danced, frequently stood and body jammed, provided vocal harmony, animated accordion and added some swing to Johnson’s reserved grooves with his comping on the keys.

On the Blossom grounds fans could register to vote and volunteer and environmental organizations such as Surfrider Foundation and Climatecounts.org where fans could learn about the three “R's” (reduce, reuse, recycle) and other environmental concerns.

On and offstage Johnson comes across as a truly groovy, caring and yes, very mellow dude. The kind of guy who, if you walked up to him on the street, called him an expletive and kicked him in the nethers, he’d probably ask if you felt better and offer to talk about your anger issues and ways to channel your negative energy over a cup of chai tea at the nearest coffee house.

And, even if one finds Johnson’s music boring-as many folks do- it’s difficult to actively dislike the guy. His music is so inoffensive, safe and polite that a nonfan is more likely to forget their actually listening to it than be upset by his soothing sounds.

American Idol's biggest winner to date and budding country music superstar Carrie Underwood is bringing her slick country sounds to CSU's Wolstein Center on Tuesday, September 23 with opening act Little Big Town.

Tickets for the really big show go on sale Saturday, June 21st and will cost you $55, $45, $35.

P.S.
So Carrie Underwood, one of the hottest country/pop stars in the country is headlining the 10-15,000-ish seating Wolstein Center, but New Kids On The Block who haven't been the hottest anything in 20 years are banking on filling the 20,000 seat Quicken Loans Arena?

I'm not hatin' on the NKOTB reunion, I'm just saying….20,000?

Bad news for lovers of 80/90's hair rock,

The concert by Cinderella (whose look was more hair metal than their straight-forward rock sound), Warrant and Lynch Mob at the Time Warner Cable Amphitheater in Cleveland on July 19 has been canceled.

Aparently Tom Keifer, Cinderella's gravelly voiced lead singer (finally) had a hemorrage in his left vocal chord that has made it impossible for him to sing anytime soon.

‘‘Consequently, and most regretfully, the upcoming Cinderella tour has been cancelled.’’ quoth the presss release.

Yikes! Get better Tom.

Refunds are available at point of purchase.