NEWS/FEATURESARAB TIMES, FRIDAY-SATURDAY, JUNE 30-JULY 1, 2017

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Guitar player The Edge and singer Bono of the band U2 perform during U2 ‘Joshua Tree Tour 2017’ at MetLife Stadium on June 28 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (AFP)

This 2017 photo provided by Pro-fi les in History shows an R2-D2 droid pieced together over serveral years from different props used in the fi rst fi ve Star Wars movies. The droid has sold at auction for $2.6 million. (AP)

Adele Prince

LOS ANGELES: London native Adele has been a visible supporter of the relief efforts around the disastrous Grenfell Tower fi res that killed an estimated 80 people — and at the fi rst of a four-night stand at London’s Wembley Stadium on Wednesday night, she announced to the crowd that she is using the shows to raise money for Grenfell relief efforts. She dedicated her song “Hometown Glory” to the victims of the fi re.

The singer is asking fans to donate 5 pounds to Unite for Grenfell relief efforts.

“It’s been two weeks since the fi re, and still the people who were affected by it are homeless”, she said in a video mes-sage before the show. “I promise that the money we raise together will go directly to the people who are living in that block”. (RTRS)

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LOS ANGELES: Dave Rosser, guitarist for the Afghan Whigs, died Tuesday. He was 50.

“It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to our friend, brother and inspira-tion”, the band confi rmed on Facebook. “Dave Rosser passed away peacefully last evening surrounded by love. Thank you to all who kept him in their hearts. He is forever in ours”. Rosser’s death follows a battle with colon cancer.

While not a founding member of the band, Rosser joined the Afghan Whigs on their 2014 album “Do to the Beast” after the depar-ture of original guitarist Rick McCollum. The album marked the band’s fi rst material in 16 years and a return to the Sub Pop roster. (RTRS)

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NEW YORK: One of Elvis Presley’s biggest hits is the latest song to be turned into a picture book, and part of an effort to introduce the King to a new generation.

Dial Books for Young Readers told The Associated Press on Wednesday that a book based on “Love Me Tender” is com-ing out Nov 13. “Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender” will be illustrated by Stephanie Graegin and include an endnote by Pres-ley’s widow, Priscilla Presley.

Dial Books is calling the new release “a heartwarming ode” to the parent-child bond. Presley died 40 years ago this sum-mer, and representatives for his estate are planning a merchandise program for infants

Variety

This fi le photo taken on March 23, 2015 Steve Earle performing during The Music Of David Byrne & Talking Heads at Carnegie Hall in New York City. (AFP)

and toddlers. (AP)

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NEW YORK: A new song from Prince’s late father, produced at Paisley Park, is being released Thursday to celebrate what

would have been his 101st birthday.Prince’s half-sister, Sharon Nelson,

produced the jazzy “Heart of Mine” by John L. Nelson and said it is the fi rst single from the album, “Don’t Play With Love, The John L. Nelson Project”, to be

released Oct 27.The new song will be available for

streaming and for sale at digital retailers on Thursday. (AP)

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NEW YORK: Edward James Olmos has a message for pet owners on the Fourth of July: Stay home.

Noisy fi reworks on America’s birthday can startle animals and cause them to run away. Olmos has teamed up with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to urge owners to comfort their pets or at least leave a TV or radio set on to mask the blasts so they don’t get as scared.

“Many animals have actually broken through glass windows and doors to get out of the house”, the veteran actor told The As-sociated Press in a recent interview. (AP)

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LOS ANGELES: Queen and Adam Lam-bert, who recently kicked off their US tour and played two nights at the Hollywood Bowl, will offer fans a virtual reality con-cert experience.

The band has teamed up with VRTGO, Universal Music Group’s VR platform, for “VR The Champions”, a 360-degree 3-D performance, the footage for which was fi lmed at Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi in May 2016, and includes the Queen classics “Radio Ga Ga”, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”. (RTRS)

Country outlaw turned Renaissance man

Steve Earle refi nds his rootsNEW YORK, June 29, (Agencies): Steve Earle is a country rocker who has distinguished himself far beyond music, a Texan who long ago left the state, and an artist whose passions drive him to left-wing activism.

Yet for his fi rst album since the shock of President Donald Trump’s election, the now 62-year-old singer and guitarist has returned to Texas, and, for now, is keeping down the vol-ume on politics.

His 16th studio album, “So You Wanna Be An Outlaw”, reaches into country roots with stripped-back guitar and storytelling, while still preserving Earle’s characteristic hard edge.

The album marks the fi rst time Earle has recorded in Austin, Texas’s capital and now a major music hub. He moved to Nashville — a longtime top country music center — at 19 and later settled in New York.

“Austin just seemed too close to home as I was from San Antonio. The girls were too pretty, the dope was too cheap, and I knew I would never get anything done there”, the seven-times-married Earle told AFP with a laugh.

Earle headed to Austin in part to commune with local legend Willie Nelson, the most visible face of outlaw country — the subgenre known for its lyrical introspection, unvarnished production and strong-willed person-alities.

Nelson sings with Earle on the title track of “So You Wanna Be an Out-law”, although, in a scheduling quirk, they recorded not in Texas but in Nel-son’s other home base in Hawaii.

Earle dedicated the album to late Texas-born outlaw and mentor Way-lon Jennings, whom Earle channels by playing an old Fender Telecaster gui-tar, known for its clear, steely sound.

Outlaw country “is about a moment when Willie Nelson and Waylon Jen-nings had discovered that rock acts had freedom they didn’t have”, Earle said.

“That’s why they were called out-laws. It didn’t have anything to do with lifestyle”.

The most powerful pieces on the al-bum include “News from Colorado”,

a morose tale written with Earle’s daughter Emily about the struggles to turn the page on hardship, and “Good-bye Michelangelo”, a metaphor-rich tribute to another late Texan singer, Guy Clark.

References“Fixin’ to Die”, which references the

song by blues great Bukka White that was covered by Bob Dylan, evokes a prisoner condemned for shooting a lover in a hotel.

“I’m a post-Bob Dylan songwriter. I write songs that are intended to be a form of literature”, Earle said.

As for Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Earle said he was “surprised, but I think he absolutely deserved it”.

Earle is spending late June running his latest camp in New York’s Cat-skills for emerging songwriters before he starts a tour, in Texas, on Saturday.

The salt-and-pepper bearded artist won fame with his 1986 album “Gui-tar Town” and “Copperhead Road” two years later, but has increasingly branched out.

His works include a novel that delves into abortion, a play on capital punishment — of which he is an ada-mant opponent — and acting credits from Broadway to the popular televi-sion series “The Wire”.

“I’m a way better songwriter than I was because of the other stuff I do. It just gives you other tools”, he said.

“And as a performer, since I’ve been acting, I’m way better at connecting with audiences”.

Initially a supporter of left-wing candidate Bernie Sanders, Earle like so many others expected Hillary Clinton to defeat Trump.

“I went on stage that night in Ot-tawa, Ontario, believing I was going to come off to the fi rst female president of the United States. And I came off and it’s the fi rst orangutan president of the United States”, he quipped.

Earle recorded “So You Wanna Be an Outlaw” weeks after the election and initially thought to rewrite up to half the album to refl ect the political moment.

He decided to keep the album as is,

considering it “something that I per-sonally and musically wanted to say” and declaring he had the best back-up band of his career.

But he also wants more conversa-tion. Earle fears the left is failing to make its case to its working-class tar-get audience.

“These folks voted for Donald Trump because they felt no one was listening to them”, he said. “I’m going to listen rather than just talk as I write this next album”.

“I imagine the next album will be just as country as this — and way more political”.

Also:LOS ANGELES: “BANG! The Bert Berns Story”, the documentary about “Twist and Shout” songwriter, pro-ducer and label pioneer Bert Berns and the music industry’s early entan-glements with the mob, is headed to Apple Music in the fall. Brett Berns, the director and Bert Berns’ son, cred-its the platform with having “always been fair to the artist”, in announcing the exclusive pick-up.

Narrated by longtime Bruce Springsteen guitarist and “Sopranos” star and Steven Van Zandt, “Bang!” explores Berns’ close relationships with New York City wiseguys Car-mine “Wassel” DeNoia and Tommy Eboli. The fi lm features Van Morri-son, Paul McCartney, Keith Rich-ards, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, and many more.

As Variety wrote in April, “It was a long time coming, but after a book, a musical, and a 2016 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the story of Bert Berns — genius songwriter, skilled producer and record label hon-cho — was a documentary that simply needed to be made”.

A global offering by iTunes Movies is slated to hit after an exclusive stream on Apple Music. The fi lm, which ex-ecutive produced by Sid Ganis and co-directed with Bob Sarles, who also edited, was released by Abramorama for theatrical audiences during and af-ter a North American Film Festival run in the spring.

Music

‘Be yourself’

‘I avoid preaching to old audience’say “We’ve got this idea” and it was in the paper the next week. It was like our own personal broadcast to the nation. It wasn’t underhanded, it was because they knew we were onto something and we knew they were onto something. So that gave us an enormous advan-

tage over the straight record labels and their press depart-ments, where it would take a month to arrange an interview: We could talk over a pint of beer at the Lamb and Flag and it would be in the paper, in front of that huge readership, in a week.

Q: Where do you feel the ’80s albums that are being reissued fi t into your body of work?

A: That was a tough period for me, because I’d had a couple of pop hits but, as inevitably happens, the public were tiring of my schtick and looking elsewhere for fresh talent. I didn’t have either the talent or the energy to stick with it like an Elton John or Neil Diamond or Cher (laughing). I knew I wasn’t one of those people, so I was drinking and taking too many drugs in a bid to try and get inspired, but tastes were changing and the phone wasn’t answered quite so rapidly when I called people up. So I thought, “Right, enough is enough, it’s time to take stock. First of all, I’ve got-ta get myself cleaned up and then have a think about how I’m going to carry on”. That’s when I decided to explore what I was just saying about trying to use the fact that I was getting older as an advantage. At that time the business had no use for people in their 40s, let alone their 50s and 60s.

Q: And that helped turn things around?A: That, and ... It’s so hard to put into words, but

Johnny Cash once said to me, “Nick, you know what the secret is? The secret is: You’ve got to be yourself”. And I thought, “Man, is that the best you can do? ‘Be yourself’?! Every clapped-out old has-been in show business says that!” But the older I get, that tired old cliche is actually true. Once you realize that you don’t have to try to hide your flaws, it’s much easier if you admit you are who you are instead of trying to be ... you know, I always thought ‘People don’t want to see me, they want to see something magnificent so I have to be that’ — and it’s exhausting keeping that up. So I suppose that was it. The ’80s was when one world stopped and another world started.

Q: You must have spent a lot of time with Johnny Cash. What do you remember best about him?

A: He was absolutely great, I miss him still — and June, she was an absolute darling. They were so kind to me. And one of the things I liked about John was that he was sort of hopeless — he was quite a fl awed person, but fl awed like my best friends are fl awed. My best friends … all the time, they’ll let you down occasionally and you row and then everything’s fi ne. And that’s one reason I liked him so much. He’s por-trayed as a rather stern, father-of-the-nation type, and I never saw him like that at all. When I knew him he was on prescription drugs and drinking, we used to get sloshed together, but he was under an enormous amount of pressure because he was lugging around this enormous sort of Johnny Cash revue with a huge cast of characters, and it was really past its sell-by date. It was extremely square and he knew it, and it was costing him fortune, but the poor chap was sup-porting all these families and if he stopped then these families were really going to suffer, so he had to keep going. He was revered but was being taken for grant-ed. And he was in a lot of pain, certainly physical pain and probably emotional pain.

We used to listen to records together, he’d be like “Oh — listen to this, listen to this! Wait, it’s not that track, THAT one! Sh-sh-shh! Listen to this!” Most of the stuff he played I’d never heard of — lots of old folk stuff, but also Waylon Jennings and Kris Krist-offerson. He’d pick a guitar up and be like “Do you know this song by so-and-so?” It was unbelievable, we’d be sitting in this little house [Lowe and Carlene Carter] had in a not-very-nice part of London — he and June used to come and stay there with us. They did their best to be unobtrusive — which of course they couldn’t possibly be. I’d get up in the morning, go down to get a cup of coffee and there he’d be, sit-ting in his pajamas with his guitar in this little tiny kitchen! It was absolutely brilliant. It’s always a bit odd when a person’s mother and father-in-law come to stay, but because it was Johnny and June ....

Q: Each one of the albums you did with Elvis Cos-tello sounds very different from the one that came be-fore it. How did you keep that up?

A: Well I was also a real music fan, and because I had listened to a lot of records, I could make a guess at how to achieve a sound. So when Elvis said “I want to get this rattley old Stax Records sound” or some garage-rock thing, I’d say “Okay, we’ll take all these microphones off the drums” and so on and so forth. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

Q: Do you own the publishing on “Peace Love and Understanding”?

A: We’re not involved with each other anymore but Jake really was a fantastic manager, and one thing he did was to make sure I owned my pub-lishing and my recordings. With “Peace Love and Understanding”, I’d signed a publishing deal in a sort of haze of marijuana smoke at the age about 20, and the company was owned by a guy who wasn’t a publisher at all, he pioneered the transmission of boxing matches to cinemas around the world. Any-way, our manager went to America to raise money for the groups he managed [and came back with this deal]. But because he wasn’t a real publisher these songs sat in a file cabinet, he never worked them or anything, and when I grew up a bit, that deal ran out and I got another publisher. By this time my for-tunes had changed, I’d had a few hits, and my new publisher said, we’ve gotta get those songs back. I said there’s some really awful songs in there, how much is this gonna cost? He said it depends on how much he wants to fight, it could cost a lot but it’ll be worth it. I said they’re not that great I don’t know how much I want to spend. He said I think you should. Anyway, it was very hard and it cost me a six-figure sum, but we got our day in court and I got all of my songs back — and the songs from our former manager’s other groups — and the only one that was worth anything was “Peace Love and Un-derstanding”. And after that, Elvis recorded it and the rest is history.

The song is a standard. Whenever I hear people do it now it’s almost like I had nothing to do with it!

Cash

Music

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