This is a treat. James McCartney, who flies below the radar, visited the Beatles’ old record factory recently. The result is this video clip of James playing the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” with two buddies. James’s voice sounds terrific. A few years ago he came to the US for a mini tour and released an album. It’s time to do it again!
RIP Robbie Robertson, Founder of The Band, Dies at 80 After Short Illness, Trailblazing Music Star
Heartbreaking news: Robbie Robertson has died at age 80. The founding member of The Band, I’m told, had a short battle with aggressive cancer. It’s almost hard to believe since just recently scored Martin Scorsese’s movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Robbie and Scorsese had a long, close relationship going back to the 1970s when Scorsese filmed “The Last Waltz.”
I was lucky enough to know Robbie, we shared a mutual friend. He was such a great musician and a gentle soul. I was there when he debuted his documentary about The Band at the Toronto Film Festival, which some said erred a little too much on his side. But even with the various machinations of being in a band of geniuses, the combined efforts of Robbie, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson produced a body of work that has never — and will never — go out of style.
Of course, The Band was known sort of as Bob Dylan’s backup group thanks to “The Basement Tapes.” But they stood out on their own with albums like ‘Stage Fright” and “Music from Big Pink” and songs like “The Weight.” I always loved Robbie’s solo records, too, especially this one below, “Broken Arrow.” What a sad day. Condolences to his family.
Broadway: Ariana Grande’s “Wicked” Boyfriend Joins “Spamalot,” Angelina Jolie Will Be An Insider for “The Outsiders” Musical
I never heard of Ethan Slater before he allegedly dumped his wife for singer Ariana Grande. The two of them star in the coming movies of “Wicked,” whether we like it or not.
Now Slater has joined the cast of Broadway’s “Spamalot’ revival. He’ll play the dual roles of The Historian and Prince Herbert, originated by Christian Borle in the premiere production years ago. More importantly, Christopher Fitzgerald has been announced as Patsy. James Monroe Iglehart and Leslie Kreizter are also featured, along with Michael Urie. They don’t have a Lancelot yet.
Previews begin on Halloween and the show opens two weeks later. Will Slater and Ariana still be a thing by then? Who knows? One of them may say, “Thank you, next.”
Elsewhere, the classic teen film “The Outsiders” is being made into a musical. Danya Taymor, niece of Julie, is the director. The show already had a run this winter at the La Jolla Playhouse. No dates or casting yet but Angelina Jolie is sticking her name on it as a “producer.” This means she’ll come to opening night. Maybe. Will she be finished with her divorce from Brad Pitt by then? Who knows? The tabs say it won’t end until all her children are 40 or older.
Lizzo Continuing Scandal Not Only Tanks Her Own Career But Takes Down Jay Z Philly Music Festival
Lizzo’s ongoing scandals have not just tanked her own career, but also caused a big problem for Jay Z.
The body positive singer was supposed to headline Jay Z’s Made in America music festival next weekend in Philadelphia. But the lawsuits and accusations against her have caused the festival to be cancelled altogether.
Apparently just removing Lizzo wasn’t enough to keep the festival going. It would have been too quick a time to find a replacement. Other artists on the fest included SZA, Miguel, and Ice Spice. But Lizzo would have been the draw if her dancers weren’t suing her for sexual harassment and weight shaming. (According to reports there are new accusations, as well.)
Lizzo was on top of the world, with best selling records, sold out shows. She even hosted and was musical guest on “SNL” this past year. But the response to her possibly being completely hypocritical has wrecked her career in less than two weeks. I told you last week that her record sales collapsed. Since I wrote that article, whatever was left is gone. Radio play has stopped, and so has streaming. Lizzo has gone cold.
Lizzo, of course, denies all accusations and will litigate with the dancers. But she needs a team of crisis doctors to help rebuild her image. And fast!
— Made In America Festival (@MIAFestival) August 8, 2023
Broadway: Britney Spears Musical “Once Upon a One More Time” On Death Watch with 12% Drop
Last week I told you two Broadway musicals were in trouble. They were the Neil Diamond musical, “A Beautiful Noise” and the Britney Spears jukebox musical, “Once Upon a One More Time.”
Now the new numbers are out for this past week. One improved, and one show nosedived.
Neil Diamond fans rallied a bit, sending “A Beautiful Noise” up $50,000 in receipts. So maybe they’ll be singing “Sweet Caroline” a little longer.
But the Britney Spears show should now be on death watch. “Once Upon” fell another 12% to just $514K. The show played at 52% of capacity. This means half-empty houses.
Spears, who has nothing but time on her hands, has yet to show up at the theater or even mention the production to her millions of social media followers. If she doesn’t want to see it, why would anyone else?
Most everything else was up in receipts and capacity last week. “Back to the Future” overcame mixed reviews and played to full houses. Only Tony winner “Kimberly Akimbo” is a little soft, which isn’t surprising since it’s not a mainstream crowd pleaser. But over all, Broadway is having a good summer and waiting for new shows this fall.
Does Anyone Know What Donald Trump is Talking About? Latest Post Is Off the Wall: Is He Going to Plead Insanity?
Donald Trump’s latest post on social media suggests he may be losing it. Is he going to please insanity or diminished capacity in the January 6th case?
Around 10:30pm tonight, Trump wrote this:
“So now that I have full Subpoena Power because of the Freedom of Speech Sham Indictment by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and the DOJ, it has just been reported that the Unselect January 6th Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs has illegally destroyed their Records and Documents. This is unthinkable, and the Fake Political Indictment against me must be immediately withdrawn. The system is Rigged & Corrupt, very much like the Presidential Election of 2020. We are a Nation in Decline!”
He’s going around the bend. That may be because on Friday both sides are ordered to court to take up the protective order. Trump wants to be able to publicize all the “discovery” in the case. The US government is arguing that, as a matter of the law, this is not possible. Which side do we think the judge will take?
Under/over on Trump in a strait jacket soon? And it will fit a lot better than the suits he already wears.
Monday Cable News: MSNBC Powerhouse Duo Maddow-O’Donnell Squash Fox News Hannity-Gutfeld in Prime Time
If it’s Monday. it’s time for Maddow.
Two nights ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow handed Sean Hannity’s hat to him at 9pm. Then Lawrence O’Donnell did the same to Greg Gutfeld at 10pm. Maddow took Hannity by 500,000 viewer. O’Donnell had Gutfeld by 250,000.
It turns out Gutfeld is best used with The Five earlier in the evening, when they win their time slot. But on his own, he can’t draw against the erudite and on-point O’Donnell. Also, 750,000 fans of the Five are probably asleep by 10pm when Gutfeld’s solo show airs.
After O’Donnell, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle took Fox’s Trace Gallagher to the cleaners at 11pm.
Also of note: MSNBC’s Ari Melber came very close to Fox’s Bret Baier, the only reasonably sane person on the cuckoo semi-news channel.
If the Florida indictment comes through this week, watch Maddow return and eviscerate Fox, which will no doubt be reporting on Hillary’s emails.
Barbra Streisand’s Hotly Anticipated Memoir Cut Back to Less Than 1,000 Pages, But Not By Much
The biggest book release for the fall will be Barbra Streisand’s hotly anticipated memoir.
“My Name is Barbra” comes November 7th from PenguinRandometc and you know the two weeks leading up to that drop will be full of leaked items and interviews and so on. “60 Minutes” has to be working on a piece. People mag? Front page, fuhgeddaboutit!
When the book was announced in February, Penguin said it was going to be a stunning 1,040 pages. Maybe that included photos and an index in the back so everyone could look up their names. Don Johnson, Andre Agassi, Jon Peters, and Elliott Gould had their assistants ready to go!
But now Amazon and Barnes & Noble list “My Name is Barbra” at only 992 pages! Much lighter to carry around! That’s 48 fewer pages. Was the index cut? Did legal vetting cause a condensation? What was in those missing pages? We may never know!
“My Name Is Barbra” will on Amazon for $35, by the way. The list price is a whopping $47. Penguinetal can’t take any chances. They just fired hundreds of legacy employees after taking a $200 million charge on their failed takeover of Simon & Schuster. “My Name is Barbra” has to be number 1 from release through Christmas, at the very least. It must be the gift book of the year!
So start saving now. But you have to think “My Name is Barbra” is going to be more than just color swatches from La Streisand’s homes, and sheet music to “Evergreen.” Streisand is a witty storyteller. And she’s got stories to tell! I can’t wait to hear about her meetings with studio heads as she was trying to get her directed-movies made, like “Yentl” and “Prince of Tides.” She was a trailblazer.
Trump Lawyers Trumped by Special Prosecutor on Protective Order, Who Claims “Defendant Intends to Litigate Case in the Media” (Read Here)
Where were we?
Special prosecutor Jack Smith filed for a protective order with the court to stop Donald Trump from talking about details of his case in public.
Trump retaliated by posting a bunch of crazy messages on his social media deriding Smith, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, and the US Women’s Soccer Team. Then Trump’s lawyers filed a response to Smith saying his First Amendment rights would be hurt if Trump couldn’t blab about every single piece of material being prepared for the trial.
Smith has now made mincemeat of Trump’s lawyer’s response to the protective order. Filed tonight, Smith writes:
“The defendant’s proposed order would lead to the public dissemination of discovery
material. Indeed, that is the defendant’s stated goal; the defendant seeks to use the discovery
material to litigate this case in the media. But that is contrary to the purpose of criminal discovery,
which is to afford defendants the ability to prepare for and mount a defense in court—not to wage
a media campaign. The Court should instead enter the Government’s proposed order.”
Now we wait for Judge Chutkan’s response.
(Read) How Elon Musk Made a Human Relationship with Singer Grimes, Who Likes to Listen to An Hour of War History Before Bed
The great journalist Walter Isaacson has a big biography of Elom Musk coming out next month. It’s called “Elon Musk,” just to make things easy. Walter’s written thick bios of Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger, and was once the editor of Time magazine, among other things.
On Twitter or X today Walter offers a little excerpt about how Musk met the singer Grimes after breaking up with Amber Heard. Just hearing about Musk having human relationships is odd, but this is kind of sweet in its own bizarre way. I’ve edited it in paragraph breaks just to make it easy to read.
Simon & Schuster is the publisher. They’re being sold this week to New York billionaire Henry Kravis’s legendary finance group, by the way. KKR did a good job when they owned New York magazine years ago, I hope they do the same for S&S.
from the book:
“Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots. And thus into Musk’s life in the spring of 2018, amid the emotional tsunami caused by his breakup with Amber Heard, came a waiflike weaver of sounds, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, a smart and spellbinding performance artist whose appearance would lead to new children, on-and-off domesticity, and even a public battle with an unhinged rapper.
Born in Vancouver, Grimes had produced four albums by the time she started dating Musk. Drawing on science fiction themes and memes, her mesmerizing music combined sonic texture with elements of dream pop and electronica. She had an adventuresome curiosity that led her to become interested in eclectic ideas, such as a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk, which posits that artificial intelligence could get out of control and torture any human who had not helped it gain power. These are the types of things that she and Musk worry about. When Musk wanted to tweet a pun about it, he Google-searched to find an image, and he discovered that Grimes had made it an element of her 2015 music video “Flesh without Blood.” She and Musk got into a Twitter exchange that led, in the modern way, to direct-messaging and texting.
They had met before and, ironically, it was when Musk was in an elevator with Amber Heard. “Remember that elevator meeting?” Grimes asked during a late-night conversation I had with her and Musk. “I mean that was super weird.” “Of all the times to meet,” Musk agreed. “You were staring at me very intensely.” “No,” she corrected, “you were the one giving me a weird stare.” After they met again through the Roko’s basilisk exchange on Twitter, Musk invited her to fly up to Fremont to visit his factory, his idea of a good date. “We just walked the floor all night, and I watched him try to fix things,” Grimes says. The next night, while driving her to a restaurant, he showed how fast the car accelerated, then took his hands off the wheel, covered his eyes, and let her experience Autopilot. “I was like, oh shit, this guy is fucking crazy,” she says. “The car was signaling and changing lanes by itself. It felt like a scene out of a Marvel movie.”
At the restaurant, he carved “EM+CB” on the wall. When she compared his powers to those of Gandalf, he gave her a rapid-fire trivia test on Lord of the Rings. He wanted to see whether she was truly a faithful fan. She passed. “That mattered to me,” Musk says. As a gift, she gave him a box of animal bones she had collected. In the evenings, they listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and other history podcasts and audiobooks. “The only way I could be in a serious relationship is if the person I’m dating can also listen to an hour of, like, war history before bed,” she says.
From https://t.co/7JGHd10lOC on Musk meeting @Grimezsz:
“Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new… pic.twitter.com/knXFrmjVEq
— Walter Isaacson (@WalterIsaacson) August 7, 2023