Live Entertainment Blog

The story behind the story behind the song. “Ruby Tuesday” is one of those songs that doesn’t really fit in with a lot of other songs in the world. It’s a great song that might shock you. I heard it recently and was very surprised, first at the sound of it and then at the fact that it was the Rolling Stones. It has a very informal sound and is kind of strange. Keith Richards and Bill Wyman play the bass together, with one bowing and the other one pressing down the strings. Where did this song come from? The official story is the Keith Richards wrote it about a groupie that he was fond of. It has also been claimed that it was one of his girlfriends at the time. More recently, there is someone who says that it wasn’t written by Richards at all. Either way, it’s about a rather loose girl who left the narrator in the song. It would be nice to know the real story for sure though.

If you’ve been looking for information about U2’s most recent album, “No Line on the Horizon”, this is the place to look for it. The album was released last Friday on their MySpace page, due to a mistake by an Australian distributor. The group has been having trouble with their distributors confidentiality in recent years, but they’ve been very adept at releasing parts of their album accordingly well. They should be proud of their system of responding to crises like that. The newest album has been deemed very good by a variety of sources, particularly their commitment to making a completely new sound compared to some of their other recent outings. Read a full U2 review here.

Rihanna seems to have been put into a very difficult situation since the Grammy Awards this year. It’s getting to be a problem for the whole bunch of people involved. Yesterday, tmz.com released a picture believed to be Rihanna’s face with many injuries to her face. The LAPD has started an investigation of the release and it will be important to see what happens to that. Now Rihanna herself has said in public that she wants to stay with him, despite what he may or may not have done. The LAPD is looking to put charges forward. Chris Brown himself is looking like she’s in some big trouble right now and now they all have to suit up for a real battle.

M.I.A. gave birth to a boy last Wednesday in an undisclosed location, according to a press release posted on her MySpace page this weekend. She performed Sunday, 8 days ago that is, at the annual Grammy Awards show, and it has been reported that she was experiencing labor pains at the time, though others reported that she started going into labor just after the show. In any event, she had claimed at the time that she was feeling the baby “get his swagga on” while she was performing. M.I.A, 31, is actually named Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam and was raised in Sri Lanka where her father agitated for a free and independent Tamil state. The father of her new child is the Canadian singer Benjamin Brewer. The baby’s not yet been named in the press but congrats to the family!

James Taylor is going to be performing again later this year. You remember him, right? He’s one of my favorite performers. He came out of the big singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s, along with Paul Simon, Don McLean and several other musicians back then. Songs like “Fire and Rain” and “Lonesome Road” are very characteristic of his style of music that he’s been honing in for over 30 years. This Grammy Award-winning singer has been recognized again and again as one of the best performers around and he has been honored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame. This is your chance to see one of the legends of rock playing all his best songs! Get some James Taylor tour tickets today!

Allison Krauss and Robert Plant got a lot of awards last night. They won 5 Grammys last night at the ceremony and it appears to have been very well deserved. Their album is a kind of unexpected combination. I mean, how many times do you see a Bluegrass singer join up with the frontman of Led Zepplin to make something beautiful that works out well. It’s a very nice album and it beat out a lot of other worthy contenders, including Coldplay, Radiohead and other similar groups. Krauss is a little bit less known than Plant, but she has won 26 Grammys in her career, including in the album O Brother Where Art Thou. Congrats to both of them!

Make sure you see the Rent travelling musical if you get the chance. This version combines a lot of the original cast so you can see the musical more or less the way it originally was. But the review I read about it doesn’t seem to think that it’s that great a show anymore. What was once edgy and touching is now just kind of irrelevant. The cast has brought the show back to parts of the country that have never had the chance to do it before. But AIDS isn’t as big as it was, and the poverty that New York district is completely inaccurate now. It’s just completely different now. But here we are, and you might want to see it anyway.

When 1776 first came out, it was in the turmoil of the 60s and 70s and it is through that prism that you have to think about the actual meaning of the work. 40 years later, times may not be turbulent in the same way, but it is still turbulent. It’s a complicated world that we live in, but 1776 is supposed to bring us back to the meaning of the whole project of America. Performances of this show vary depending on where you see it. The cast of almost all men, besides two women, I believe, is hard to get. But when you get the right people, especially in key parts, like Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Dickenson and Rutledge, then you are all set for a great show. This production that is reviewed here is good, but not great. Check it out.