The AP reports:

LeRoi Moore one of the founding members of the Dave Matthews Band has died from complications from injuries suffered from an all-terrain accident he had in June.
He was 46.

The DMB who have had Jeff Coffin of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones filling Moore's spot during their 2008 tour have as of yet not cancelled or rescheduled any dates, but honestly if you're going to see them in the next couple days it's likely going to be just a little less groovy then usual.

Back in the early 90's when Matthews was a bartender in Charlottesville, Va., it was Moore to whom he gave his demo tape and it was Moore who enlisted his buddies and fellow classically trained jazz lover Carter Beauford to play drums.

R.I.P.

Super Bowl XLII will feature Bruce Springsteen, whom SB officials said they've been wooing for years, who will perform on Feb. 1 at Phoenix Stadium in Glendale when the Cleveland Browns face off against The Oakland Raiders.

….(hey, A fan can dream, can't he?)

Anyone want to take odds on the Boss' 3-5 song set list?

Born To Run?
Dancing In the Dark?
The Rising?
Kitty's Back?
Jungleland?
Girls in Their Summer Clothes?

First comedian Bernie Mac dies on Friday and now soul legend and 2002 Rock Hall inductee Isaac Hayes.

For many folks under 30 Hayes was known for two things, asking folks "who is the man who would risk his life for his brother man" in his academy award winning theme from Shaft and his stint as Chef on South Park.

If you're a bit older you may recall that he was once "DUKE OF NEW YORK..A number 1!" in the 80's Kurt Russell vehicle Escape from New York.

Go back to the previous decade and you may recall him starring in the blaxploitation flicks Truck Turner and Tough Guys (and their funky soundtracks), of his recurring role as Gandolph Fitch on the (still underrated) cop show The Rockford Files.

Or perhaps you recall his show stopping performance in the 1973 Watts Stax documentary which every fan of soul/R&B music and/or truly impressive afros should see.

Then of course there was his fruitful association with Stax Records and former production/songwriting partner David Porter which produced many of that legendary labels classic tunes such as Hold On I'm Comin You Don't Know Like I Know, When Something Is Wrong with My Baby, Ain't That Lovin' You (For More Reasons Than One) and Soul Man.

But although Hayes was a fine songwriter in his own right who favored big horn charts and orchestral accoutrements in his own tunes, he also covered other artists/songwriters songs like no one else.

Hayes was a fan of Burt Bacharach's music and like many artists in the 1970s he covered Bacharach's music quite a bit, there was no mistaking that for those few (or several) minutes that song, be it the funkiest version of Walk On By, ever recorded or the sexy groove and punchy horns underneath The Look of Love was for those 11 minutes or so, belonged to Hayes.

Likewise his 18 minute plus jam on Jimmy Webb By The Time I Get To Phoenix with one of his signature Ike's Raps as it's intro. It's the kind of extended jam that coupled with Hayes soothing baritone that you put on the record player (ha, ha), sit back and simply let yourself sink into the steady groove while Ike takes his time to explain the vagaries of love.

If it takes the death of an artist to get you interested in their music than here's a list of Hayes albums into which you can sink.

Hot Buttered Soul (1969) - Features both Walk On By and By The Time I Get To Phoenix plus the heavily sampled, slow burning funk jam Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic

…To Be Continued (1970) - Contains the first of Hayes monologues aka Ike's Rap along with the long full version of Walk On By and the soulful and much sampled take on Medley:Ike's Mood I/You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling.

Black Moses (1971) - Contains his boudoir warming cover of Never Can Say Goodbye and nice version of Curtis Mayfield's Man's Temptation and Gamble and Huff's Never Gonna Give You Up all funked up.

Shaft (1971) - Duh, it's got Shaft plus Do Your Thing another extended funk jam awash in wah-wah guitar craziness.

Joy (1973) - The main reason to buy this album…CD…digital download is for the 15 minute title track, a big, over the top jam that has also been pretty popular with hip hop producers.

Branded (1995) the first and better half of two simultaneously released comeback albums (the other was the mostly instrumental Raw and Refined) that found Hayes hooking up with old buddy David Porter and a few of the session guys from the Stax days for a surprisingly satisfying, slightly updated take on his classic sound.

At Watt Stax (2003) - This is Hayes' set from the Watt Stax concert at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on August 20, 1972 and he's in full control of all of his powers and the crowd. Backed by an hard grooving band, Hayes lays down some of his raps, gives you a Shaft the socially conscious Soulsville and a smoking medley of Bill Withers Ain't No Sunshine (with Hayes on alto sax) and Lonely Avenue.

R.I.P. Black Moses…

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.¶

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

“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.

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.

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.

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)