Levon Helm, the former Band drummer who died from cancer last Thursday [April 19], is to be buried next to his former band mate, Rick Danko.
Last night [April 26], 2,000 mourners attended a wake for Helm at his Woodstock home, according to Associated Press. Helm's closed casket, in the second-floor studio of the barn where Helm hosted his Midnight Rambles, was surrounded by flowers and flanked by his drum kit and a piano.
Blur are set to celebrate the 21st anniversary will a comprehensive reissue campaign.
All seven of the band's studio albums are to be re-released on July 30 in expanded Special Edition formats, each featuring a bonus disc of previously unreleased material, booklets, and more.
As guitarist Lee Ranaldo is in Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes in this month's new issue (April 2012, Take 179), we thought we'd share a Sonic Youth piece from our archive. In this feature, published in 2009, Marc Spitz finds the band (who've just finished what we now know could be their final album, The Eternal) ageing with more dignity than most, but still finding time to lash out at Oasis, Madonna and U2, and order a baby pig with a donut in its mouth… Picture by Pieter M Van Hattem.
It is a sad fact of life that a man from any walk of life – even the often preposterous world of music – will struggle to be taken seriously if he wanders about wearing a beard the size of Gibraltar, decorating his face with white stars and red war paint, growing his hair down to his waist, then dying it yellow on one side of the parting and blue on the other. So it is with Roy Wood, still best remembered for his terrifying dayglo clan chief appearance than the succession of superb pop songs he wrote for The Move, ELO, Wizzard and – perhaps most impressively - as a solo performer.
