Weekend Edition

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND KICK OFF FINAL LEG OF 'MAGIC' TOUR SUNDAY NIGHT

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off the final leg of their Magic tour on Sunday night (July 27th) at New Jersey's Giants Stadium.

Nils Lofgren says that the band's recently wrapped European leg finds the band at the peak of their abilities: ["Europe was incredible. We probably did the best run we've ever done. I mean, the audiences over there kind of have a zeal and passion for Bruce that we haven't seen anywhere else. There's a whole new generation of young people discovering his entire body of music as we're doing the Magic tour, and it's just pretty remarkable. So, it was a great run. You know six weeks is a long time, and did some great shows, and the band musically is in the best shape we've ever been, I think."]

Lofgren went on to add that new keyboardist Charlie Giordano has done his best to fill the late Danny Federici's shoes, following him stepping down from the tour early on, and seeking treatment while battling melanoma: ["It's been brutal navigating Danny's loss, and we couldn't have asked for a better guy offstage and onstage. You know, to step in and pick up that musical challenge. But nevertheless, I'm glad that we have these shows to work through the grief, 'cause I've stood in front of Danny's riser for 24 years, and would regularly run up and visit him and play with him. You know, that's one of the reasons the band is great -- they're not interchangeable parts really. So we couldn't have asked for a better guy to step in to those shoes."] 

Out now is Springsteen's new digital EP called Magic Tour Highlights. The four-track digital EP features both audio and video tracks recorded live in concert during the E Street Band's current Magic tour. The collection will be available at all digital download outlets including the iTunes store.

The film, which Young directed, was filmed in 2006 as Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young toured behind Young's heavily anti-Bush album Living With War.

Young says that in the film, he went the extra distance to showcase the fans that don't agree with the band's liberal views concerning the state of the nation following 9/11: ["So we actually used a greater percentage of the negatives than we did of the positives that we had on hand, to make it so that it was closer to 50-50. And I think that if you look at it from that perspective, and check out the reviews we used -- the ones we chose to use -- and the interviews that we chose to use, we tried to be balanced. I don't want to use the term 'fair and balanced,' it's a little over-used (laughs)."] SOUNDCUE (:24 OC: . . . little over-used)

Young went on to say that he wasn't interested in alienating or embarrassing anyone who appeared in the film, which he feels, if nothing else, promotes toleration: ["You know, we've got a lot of Democrats and Republicans in our audience, and we don't want to abuse them because of their political beliefs, whether it's one way or the other. We are who we are, but you know, you gotta respect people that disagree with you. That hopefully is what this country is based on."]

During a Grammy Foundation event that included a forum with Nashville college students, the 46-year-old singer/songwriter added, "I'm a huge fan and have a great relationship with Stevie (Nicks), and actually with all of them... I think their next album may be while I'm on the road. Hopefully in the future we'll have some kind of collaboration, but not at this time."

Copeland says that when an act as big as the Police hits the road, the band almost becomes yet another thing that needs to be lugged around: ["The Police is this huge monster that we can't even control. It's this huge monster, this huge 100, 200-people crew. The trucks, the timing, the coordination, the synchronization of all these resources and people, require that pretty much every hour of my day is controlled to get me on stage for that show. And my body doesn't even belong to me anymore, it belongs to the Police, and I gotta deliver it to the stage in working order. And that's a lot of responsibility."]

According to the suit, Lil Wayne's "Playing with Fire" is actually the Stones song with the original lyrics and music altered in a recognizable way. Abkco also says the altered version uses "explicit, sexist and offensive language" and could lead the public to believe the company and the Rolling Stones authorized the new version. Representatives for Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, and his record company have not commented on the suit so far.

Lennon and Yoko Ono had signed the catalogue for the art exhibition for American journalist Sandra Shevey in 1972 when she interviewed John and Yoko for over 12 hours in their New York City apartment.

Lennon's Bag One exhibition was Lennon's most notorious showing, and featured eight erotic lithographs containing Lennon's renderings of Ono posing nude. On the second day of the art exhibition -- which also featured other non-erotic drawings chronicling the couple's 1969 honeymoon and first Bed-In for peace -- the original drawings from the catalogue were seized by Scotland Yard officers, who branded them obscene.

In other Beatles-related news:

Less than a week after rocking Shea Stadium, The New York Post reports that Paul McCartney and Billy Joel were spotted together in the exclusive enclave of East Hampton, New York at a movie theatre catching the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight.

Lennon's battle for residency began almost immediately upon landing in the States in the fall of 1971 with wife Yoko Ono. Due to the couple's outspokenness about the Nixon administration's escalation of the Vietnam war, Lennon and Ono were targeted by the FBI, which had them followed and bugged their phone, in an effort to track their political activities.

By March 1972, Lennon and Ono had befriended counter-culture icons and Chicago Seven defendants Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who soon told Rolling Stone that Lennon would take part in a demonstration outside that summer's Republican National Convention in San Diego. Although Lennon went on record stating that he had no intention of doing so, it was then that the U.S. Government began stepping up their deportation hearings against him, using his 1968 conviction for marijuana possession as the basis for his deportation.

Among the items up for sale are: