It’s been a bountiful forty-five-year run for MINISTRY – if one’s willing to discount the gap between 2008 and 2011 – but now Al Jourgensen is ready to fulfil his promise and bring the ensemble to a glorious end by … Continue reading
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Lenny Kravitz, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and more stars are set to make the 2026 Global Citizen Festival one to remember in New York City.
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Steve Earle has never been just a country singer. Throughout his life has read like a rock’n’roll parable: the bacchanalian rebel with a taste for booze, bad drugs and run-ins with the law.
From his rural Texas childhood through a career in Nashville (and now New York City), Earle has survived six tumultuous marriages, heroin and crack addiction, jail, rehab and near-death. He’s also produced a stream of genre-defying records – welding honky-tonk to rockabilly, bluegrass to punk and, as on 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, country to trip-hop.
He’s also a novelist, playwright, DJ, political activist and, with his role as recovering drug addict Waylon in HBO’s The Wire, a TV actor. “I didn’t have to act,” Earle quipped.
Earle began playing guitar at 11. By 14, he’d left home for Houston, where he met like-minded rebel Townes Van Zandt, another hard-living songwriter. Earle later called him “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”
Earle landed in Nashville in the early 70s, taking blue-collar jobs in the day and playing bass with Guy Clark at night. After years of aborted record deals, MCA picked up the free-spirited 30-year-old in 1985.
His sensational debut Guitar Town marked him down as a workingman’s troubadour à la Bruce Springsteen / John Mellencamp. 1988’s anthemic Copperhead Road was an international success, yet Earle was already heavily into a self-destructive lifestyle.
By 1994, he was arrested for drug possession and landed a jail sentence. Post-rehab, he returned stronger than ever. Both the all-acoustic Train A Comin’ and I Feel Alright were raw, thrilling albums that sounded, literally, like a man reborn. Earle’s gift for rousing narratives and driving rock’n’roll, tempered by artful ballads, were fully to the fore on 1997’s El Corazon, a record that also captured his catch-all appeal.
Recent years have found him railing against the death penalty, attacking America’s “war on terror” and calling for a tolerant new kind of patriotism. The resulting albums, particularly Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts…Now, are as impassioned as anything he’s ever done.
He’s also paid tributes to fallen friends: 2009’s Townes celebrated his old buddy Townes Van Zandt, while 2019’s Guy did the same for former boss Guy Clark. In January 2021 he released J.T., a collection of songs written by his late son, Justin Townes Earle, and followed it a year later with Jerry Jeff, celebrating the music of folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.
His art, it seems, still lives in extremis. “I’m into pain and joy,” he once said, “and the in-between doesn’t interest me.”
Earle’s post-Vietnam LP alienated Nashville but drew in a whole new rock audience. Copperhead Road was equal parts hillbilly-roots and bullish rock’n’roll, hitting hard with the title track and seething anti-gun song The Devil’s Right Hand.
The compelling drama of war veterans and illicit moonshine raids came heightened by stadium-sized guitars and booming drums, while Johnny Come Lately, recorded with The Pogues on St. Patrick’s Day, was a roar of invigorating folk-punk. Copperhead Road did brisk business in the US, suggesting Earle could do a Springsteen, but his life was beginning to slide.
Post-smack and post-clink, Earle stormed back with this charged masterpiece that was both political and intensely personal. Nothing summed this up more than Christmas In Washington, a killer acoustic ballad that sniped at Capitol Hill policy-making while taking stock of his own life.
The blustery Taneytown was a harrowing anti-racism song from the standpoint of a 22-year-old retarded black man. Earle flitted across styles too, from bluegrass and country to the thumping biker-rock of Here I Am and NYC, the latter featuring Arizona miscreants The Supersuckers. The closing Ft. Worth Blues was a teary tribute to old mentor Townes Van Zandt.
A thrilling debut that supposedly took Earle from boy-from-nowhere to hottest thing on Nashville’s block. In truth, it was a desperate last toss of the dice. Earle was already 30 with three marriages and 10 years of fruitless song-hustling behind him.
This was blue-collar country with a literate edge and a raised middle finger to the conservatism of Music Row. Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA tour had given Earle the impetus to kick things off with the barnstorming title track: “Well, I gotta keep rockin’ while I still can/Got a two-pack habit and motel tan”. Rolling Stone voted him Top Country Artist that year.
I Feel Alright (Warners, 1996)
Earle’s first album on release from prison was 1995’s acoustic Train A Comin’, but the follow-up feels like the real comeback. His demons were hung out to dry on CCKMP, confessing that “Heroin is the only thing/The only gift the darkness brings”, but I Feel Alright sounds more private new manifesto than meditation on a reckless past.
The production is spare, Earle’s voice is never less than impassioned and there’s everything from rollicking rock (The Unrepentant) to gorgeous 12-bar heartache (South Nashville Blues). There’s even ambient noise, courtesy of Earle’s giant buddy Dub, slapping his palm on the studio stairwell.
The Mountain (E-Squared, 1999)
This was Earle’s attempt at “high-tech, low-risk” bluegrass, recorded with country legend Del McCoury and his band. The instrumentation is bluegrass but the feel is rock as Earle unfurls his tribute to mountain music pioneer Bill Monroe, aided by a dizzying roll call of guests: Cowboy Jack Clement and Emmylou Harris among them.
Fans may have balked at Earle’s confession that bluegrass was his favourite music, but even diehards would surely approve of Carrie Brown, his “real-live-bad-tooth-hillbilly murder ballad”. Connemara Breakdown, meanwhile, was his bluegrass fantasy camp.
The Revolution Starts Now (E-Squared, 2004)
A scathing state-of-the-nation address that sealed Earle’s reputation as Nashville’s foremost radical. Home To Houston carried the lines: “Great God A’mighty what was wrong with me/I know the money’s good but buddy can’t you see/You can’t take it with you and that ain’t no lie/I don’t wanna let ’em get me I’m too young to die”.
Like all things Earle, it’s tempered by humour and warmth, at work here on the questionable lust for Condoleeza Rice (Condi, Condi). “For Johnny Cash and Warren Zevon,” wrote Earle in the album’s liner notes. “See you when I get there, brothers.”
The follow-up to Guitar Town was a rougher, tougher affair, with Earle ditching Nashville session pros for his own band, The Dukes. Much of it – The Week of Living Dangerously, Sweet Little 66, Number 29 – had already been road-tested across the US for the best part of a year, aligning Exit O closer to the Rolling Stones in their strutting pomp than anything out of Tennessee.
Nowhere Road would prove to be a signpost for Earle’s own life a few years down the line, while I Ain’t Ever Satisfied wound up as the closest thing to his own calling card. Needless to say, it was all far too rowdy for the powers-that-be at conservative country radio.
Shut Up And Die Like An Aviator (MCA, 1991)
By 1990, Earle’s refusal to comply with country norms, allied to a worsening drug habit, led MCA to free him from his contract with that old fallback: the live LP.
Recorded over two nights in Ontario, Shut Up and Die… finds Earle in gloriously ragged form. Guitarists Zip Gibson and Bucky Baxter drive things along, piling meat on the bone of Earle’s gruff, sometimes shot, vocals. The sizzling intro to Billy Austin is a real highlight, as is an unhinged Copperhead Road. And for proof of Earle’s unclassifiable nature, look no further than two covers: Jimmie Rodgers’ Blue Yodel No.9 and the Stones’ Dead Flowers.
Earle’s sensitive study of Californian Taliban sympathiser John Walker Lindh gave the US press free rein to vent all manner of post-9/11 prejudice. John Walker’s Blues prompted the New York Post to run a story titled “Twisted Ballad Honours TaliRat”, while the rest of Jerusalem was nearly as provocative.
Sifting through the paranoia, Earle’s plea for a nation to pull back from the brink of moral chaos was driven by some mighty tunes. Ashes To Ashes and The Truth are as gloves-off as he’s ever been. Curiously though, the most powerful moment is the broken love song I Remember You, an immaculate duet with Emmylou Harris.
Steve Earle just doesn’t do duff. As fellow outlaw Waylon Jennings once observed of him: “He didn’t write no bad songs. And if he did, he hid ’em.” That said, some of Earle’s output is decidedly patchy. Recorded in the midst of his cocaine and smack addiction, 1990’s The Hard Way veers between smart and sluggish. “I defend The Hard Way to the death,” he said in 2000, “because I almost died in the process of making it.”
But most worthy of a wide berth is Early Tracks, a compilation of rockabilly sides cut between 1982-85, a clueless Epic selling their unruly new charge as the lost link between Ricky Skaggs and Gene Vincent.
My doctor calls me a young seventy-five,” Peter Frampton says with a smile. “Which is better than an old seventy-five, right?”
For an artist who’s lived many lives – prodigy, teen idol, guitar hero, global superstar, forgotten man, comeback kid, survivor – Frampton wears it all lightly. Sitting in a sunlit room in his house, with trimmed white beard, wearing a blue denim work shirt and a Late Show With Stephen Colbert baseball cap, he looks fit and happy.
He’s surrounded by guitars of all shapes and sizes and framed family photos, and on a couch just behind him is his beloved black goldendoodle named Bigsby. He’s a service dog who has helped Frampton navigate his inclusion body myositis, a degenerative muscle disorder he’s been living with for the past seven years.
Defying the odds – and diagnosis – Frampton has continued to tour, and this spring he returned with the aptly titled Carry The Light, his first album of new material in more than a decade. “Carry the light means learning from our elders and learning from our own past,” Frampton says. Which is an ideal segue into him joining Classic Rock to reflect on various pieces of wisdom he’s picked up over the decades.
A few years ago, I had a progression in my IBM that was making me feel as if I might not be able to physically play any more. After the finale tour in 2024, we went straight into the studio and recorded three albums – two blues albums and an instrumental album. Because I wanted to keep playing as much as I could. But then I realised that if we went out for shorter times, I could actually do some touring again. And it was, and still is, okay! I fully believe that playing music, writing music, loving music, all the joy that comes from that, has helped keep me young. I’m very lucky to have been born this way, with a lust for music that never ends.
There are all these clips online of Tibetan monks sitting with their dogs. In one, the monk says: “In the west, you call dogs your pets. We call dogs our teachers.” Dogs live in the present moment. They don’t dwell in the past or worry about the future. They offer gratitude and unconditional love without expectation. Good lessons to learn.
My dad was a stickler for good posture. He always used to say to me: “If you hunch over your guitar, you’re going to get stuck like that. Sit upright, son!” He’d been a lieutenant in the army, so posture was important. I would look at him and roll my eyes. Then when I was in my early forties, and I’m starting to notice I’m slightly bent over, I thought: “Dad, I hate you, you were right [laughs].” So I started working out and paying attention to my posture.
I never think I’m good enough, and that’s why I push myself to become better all the time. But I also know how good I am, in that same regard. I’ve been knocked down so many times it’s ridiculous. But I believe in the old saying: ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.’ That’s my nature, my makeup. I’m pugnacious. I don’t care what they say about me. I get up, move on and get back into my own thing. I’ve always been a believer that I can write a better song, play a better solo. But I never thought I was as good as I should be, in the same breath.
When I was eight, I wanted to be Hank Marvin. I got some horn-rimmed sunglasses and knocked the glass out. I wore them everywhere, just like Hank. I don’t know what it was, but he had this incredible sound on his Stratocaster through his Vox AC-30 amp, and it was just the right thing at the right time for an eight-year-old. It absolutely set me on my path. Years later, Hank and I recorded together. We’re still great email buddies to this day. And I can still play every song by The Shadows note for note!
Being chased and having your clothes ripped off by girls is all very exciting, but it gets old pretty quickly. All that ‘Face of 1968’ stuff felt terrible, because in The Herd we’d been playing blues and jazzy stuff and had a serious following. And, as I was to experience later in life, a teenybopper vibe in the band can rid you of your credibility. My guitar was now slung behind my back most of the time. I probably was enjoying it at the time, but being screamed at by girls didn’t mean anything once I realised that they weren’t even listening to the music.
If I had stayed in Humble Pie, various things could’ve happened. I could have become very ill, for one. Honestly, I’m not sure how I would have been able to handle it going forward. I don’t know how long it would have lasted, even if I’d have stayed, because unfortunately drugs and drink were playing a much bigger part than I had seen before. That was one reason why I left. But it was more motivated by musical differences, and me wanting to pursue other directions and sounds.
As a solo act, I opened for everybody. I’d play my twenty minutes, go back to the dressing room, have a quick sip of something, then stand on the side of the stage and watch every move all these other bands did – what they played, what they said, what worked, what didn’t work. I learned how to steal the best stuff from the best bands [laughs]. Peter Wolf of the J Geils Band, Ozzy, Ray Davies… they all taught me so much in how to deal with an audience, how to build a set-list. When you start, you have your music. But there’s so much else involved in building a career and touring. For me, being an opener was like going to college.
The song Buried Treasure on the new album is a tribute to Tom Petty. It was named after his Sirius XM radio show. Once a week, Tom would go to this tiny studio and bring an hour’s worth of music from his personal collection of albums, CDs, singles, this rare and out-of-print stuff. I went to class every day listening to this station, because his musical library up here, mentally, is off the charts! The amount of different music he loved is still with me every time I play.
People didn’t upset other people so readily back then, because normally they were either talking to each other on the phone, or over the fence in the backyard. Now they’re behind a keyboard being rude, and trolling each other. I remember when the internet first started, David Bowie was asked what he thought about it, and he said: “It will have a lot of good. But there’s going to be so much bad, and it’s only going to get worse.” He was right.
I absolutely did not want to record I’m In You [fifth album, in 1977]. I knew that you’re only as good as your last record. I wish I had taken my time. But I had to sift through everyone’s agenda. I was twenty-six years old. My brain hadn’t finished growing. And I started making bad decisions, by going along with what everybody thought. “You’ve got the biggest album ever, so you want to follow it up as quickly as you can, otherwise people will forget you!” I could’ve waited three or four years. Other artists have.
I love a good Indian. It always makes me feel better. I don’t know why exactly. But a good curry really does appeal to me. And obviously, being born in England, I’ve had my fair share of ultimate Indian meals.
Some of my favourite solos have been because I didn’t think about them at all. My mind wasn’t working, but my heart and soul were. You get to the end of the solo and say: “Let me listen to that. What did I just play?” And that’s when I know I’ve done a good solo – when I get to the end of something, and I feel really good, but I can’t remember what I just played.
Many times people come up to me after a show and say: “On Do You Feel Like We Do, you didn’t play the same talkbox solo as on the record.” And I say: “Well, the day before we recorded the live album, I didn’t play the same solo. And the day after, I didn’t play it either.”
I think it was that zen thing of a repetitive activity relaxing your mind. Also, I had read that Eric Clapton would iron before a show, so I thought I’d try it. I’m fairly fastidious about having no wrinkles in shirts, so it would always be the shirt I was ironing. Later on I graduated to a steamer [laughs].
It’s your responsibility, as a human being. It just happens that when musicians take a stand, other people get jealous of the reach we might have and how our words might affect more people than theirs. And that’s when they say: “Shut up and play.” But in our current situation in America, I feel the obligation to speak out. I want to help, for my granddaughter’s sake. I think if we stay silent, democracy will die in that silence. But we’re starting to make a lot of noise, thank God.
My mum used to say: “What is to be, will be sure to come true.” I don’t know what it means, but I’ve always lived by that [laughs].
Carry The Light is out now via UMC
At the end of 1974, Kiss were in trouble. Their self-titled debut album had shifted just 75,000 copies. The follow-up, Hotter Than Hell, had stalled at No.100 on the US chart. Kiss needed a hit, and they needed one fast.
Their label boss, Casablanca Records owner, Neil Bogart told frontman Paul Stanley, in precise detail, what kind of hit this should be, using Sly & the Family Stone’s euphoric I Want to Take You Higher” as a model. “He said, ‘You need something that your fans can rally behind – a song that embodies what you’re about,’” recalled Stanley.
The singer chose the right place to write it – in his room at the famous Hyatt House hotel on Sunset Boulevard. This joint became known as ‘The Riot House’ after all the wild parties that had been staged there, one of which involved Led Zeppelin’s hard-drinking drummer John Bonham riding a motorcycle along the corridors. Paul took out an acoustic guitar and within a few minutes he had it.
“Right away I had the lyrics: ‘I wanna rock and roll all nite and party every day,’” he said. ‘It was very primal in that it really wasn’t anything that I pondered. At that time I don’t believe people talked about wanting to party. It was just a one-word description of a way of getting loose. Rocking and rolling all night and partying every day isn’t so much a physical action as much as it’s an attitude. It’s a way of looking at life. It’s a mindset – a mindset about liberation and celebration of the individual.”
The song was completed with a verse from a work-in-progress Gene had, Drive Me Wild. “I never had the chorus,” Gene said, “but I had this notion of a car as an analogy to a woman, the idea of, ‘You drive me wild, I’ll drive you crazy.’ So the pieces were basically stuck together. Take my verse and attach it to Paul’s chorus and you’ve got a song.”
When Neil Bogart heard Rock And Roll All Nite, he was ecstatic. But for all its populist genius, Rock And Roll All Nite, only made it to No.68 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in April 1975. But it took on another life when a live version was extracted from the blockbusting Alive! album later that same year, reaching No.12 in the US. Just as Neil Bogart had instructed, it was the anthem that defined the band. For the members of Kiss – and for rock’n’roll partiers everywhere – things would never be the same again.
“Rock and Roll All Nite is astounding, in that every night we play it, it brings on a euphoria and a feeling of abandon in the crowd, everything that it was supposed to do,” Stanley told Classic Rock. “It was meant to be a rock anthem that would sum up the philosophy and common point of view between Kiss and our fans.”
It’s done more than that. Rock and Roll All Nite has become part of the cultural furniture, referenced in everything from The Simpsons (in the famous Homerpolooza episode, Homer says, “I used to rock and roll all night and party every day, then it was every other day. Now I’m lucky if I can find half an hour a week in which to get funky.”) to the Winter Olympics (where Katarina Witt and Kristi Yamaguichi skated to it at the closing ceremony of the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City).
It’s also become a soundtrack staple, featuring in the movies Dazed And Confused, Why Him?, The Nice Guys, Gulliver’s Travels, Role Models and Less Than Zero (where it was covered by Poison), and in the TV series Family Guy, Friends, The Dangerous Book For Boys, Ugly Betty, Dharma & Greg and Full House.
Tellingly, it was also referenced by Kiss themselves, on their 1976 album Destroyer. During the intro to Detroit Rock City, after a newscaster (played by producer Bob Ezrin) reports a tragic automobile accident, Rock And Roll All Nite can briefly be heard playing on a car stereo. Kiss needed to set the scene for what would become their first platinum album, and they knew just how iconic the song had already become.
Members of Nails and Thirdface also guest on this new record.
The post Lockslip Launch “Gray World” Video Featuring King Yosef, Debut Album “The Conversation” Due In November appeared first on Theprp.com.
Slipknot have officially ended their association with Sid Wilson. On Friday, August 14 — exactly two weeks after TMZ first reported his removal — the band posted a one-sentence statement saying that effective immediately they would no longer be associated with Wilson, and wishing him the best in his future endeavours. Then they deleted it. Wilson, 49, joined in 1998 and spent 28 years as #0.
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That’s what it amounted to.
The statement said that effective immediately, Slipknot would no longer be associated with Sid Wilson, and that they wished him the best in his future endeavours. No reason. No thanks for the nearly three decades. No mention of the debut album he joined just before, or the fact that he’s been part of that band longer than a lot of their audience has been alive.
And then it was taken down.
Whatever the internal thinking was on posting it, deleting it hours later isn’t the move of an organization that had this rollout planned.
LIVE & LOUD: Stream the World’s Hardest Radio Station 24/7Here’s how we got here, because the sequence is the story.
July 31. TMZ reports that Wilson has been permanently removed from Slipknot. According to TMZ, the band had been planning to announce it themselves during the first week of August, but lost control of the rollout when the report landed first.
The same day. Guitarist Jim Root posts to Instagram Stories, soundtracked by “‘Til We Die” — telling people not to believe everything they read, to stop, think, take a breath, sit with it, and maybe wait until there’s more information.
Which a lot of fans read as a denial. Two weeks later, it reads more like a man asking for patience while something messy got sorted out.
August 3. TMZ follows up, reporting that the exit was a long time coming and that the decision came after the band had had enough of Wilson’s behaviour — specifically, per that report, how he treated his bandmates. That’s TMZ’s characterisation. Slipknot have said nothing of the kind, then or now.
August 12. Wilson co-hosts the World Scratch Invitational and introduces himself, on a microphone, in front of a crowd, as Sid, DJ Starscream, number zero, from the world famous Slipknot. Present tense. We covered it on Thursday’s show.
August 14. The band confirm he’s gone.
Two days. That’s the gap between him publicly claiming the seat and the band publicly removing it.
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Worth stating plainly, because “the DJ” undersells it enormously.
Wilson joined in 1998, just before the self-titled debut, and became #0 — the only member with a zero, the one at the bottom and the top of the numbering at once. His job was the texture: the sound effects, the background noise, the scratching, the atmosphere underneath everything. It’s the layer people don’t consciously notice until you take it away and the songs sound smaller.
He was also, live, the most physically unhinged member of a band full of unhinged people. The guy climbing the rig, jumping off things he shouldn’t have been on, catching fire more than once. If you saw Slipknot in the early 2000s, some of your most vivid memories of that show are Sid doing something genuinely dangerous in a gas mask.
Away from the band he toured for years as DJ Starscream, taking the name from the Transformers character, and built a real reputation in the turntablist world independent of the metal audience.
Twenty-eight years. Nine members, numbers zero through eight, and he was one of them for almost all of it.
Slipknot haven’t played live since Inkcarceration in Ohio in July 2025. There’s been no announcement about a replacement, no comment from Corey Taylor, and no statement from Wilson himself.
He’d been promoting a new merch store in the weeks after the TMZ report and dodged questions when approached about his status. Given how he handled Wednesday’s introduction, it’s hard to imagine he stays quiet about this.
Slipknot have absorbed departures before — Joey Jordison, Chris Fehn, the deaths of Paul Gray and Joey — and every time the question is whether the machine still sounds like itself. This one is different in kind, though. Losing a founding-era member to a public falling-out, confirmed in a sentence that got deleted, is not a clean break.
For a band whose whole identity is built on nine people being one thing, that’s a hell of a way to end it.
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No. On August 14, 2026, Slipknot posted a statement confirming that effective immediately they would no longer be associated with Wilson, and wishing him the best in his future endeavours. The statement was later deleted, but the departure stands. He had been a member for 28 years.
Slipknot have not given a reason. Their statement was a single sentence with no explanation. TMZ reported on August 3 that the decision followed the band having had enough of Wilson’s behaviour, specifically how he treated his bandmates — but that is TMZ’s reporting, and neither the band nor Wilson has confirmed or addressed it publicly.
Twenty-eight years. He joined in 1998, shortly before the release of the band’s self-titled debut album, and was known as #0 — handling sound effects, scratching and background textures. He also toured separately as DJ Starscream.
On July 31, the day TMZ first reported Wilson’s removal, Root posted to Instagram Stories with Slipknot’s 2008 track “‘Til We Die” playing, telling people not to believe everything they read and to wait until there was more information before reaching conclusions.
July 2025, at Inkcarceration, a music and tattoo festival in Ohio. No tour dates have been announced since, and there has been no announcement regarding a replacement for Wilson.
Twenty-eight years, ended in a sentence that didn’t even stay up. What’s your reaction — and can Slipknot be Slipknot without #0? Tell us below, and keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.
The post Slipknot Confirm Sid Wilson Is Out, Then Delete The Statement appeared first on Loaded Radio.