On this date April 24, 1998 The Big Lebowski was released. The independent crime comedy film was written and directed by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.

The film starred Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, a Los Angeles slacker and avid bowler. He is assaulted as a result of mistaken identity, then learns that a millionaire, also named Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), was the intended victim.

The millionaire Lebowski’s trophy wife is supposedly kidnapped, and millionaire Lebowski commissions “The Dude” to deliver the ransom to secure her release. The plan goes awry when the Dude’s friend, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), schemes to keep the ransom money for the Dude and himself.

The film is loosely inspired by the work of Raymond Chandler.

Since its original release the film has become a cult classic with ardent fans calling themselves “achievers.”

Dudeism, a religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the film’s main character, was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude (a name parody of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the organization has ordained over 220,000 “Dudeist Priests” all over the world via its website.

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Gregg Allman’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Marked a Devastating All-Time Low Instead of a Career High.

Allman was deep in the throes of alcoholism when his band accepted their induction into the prestigious Hall of Fame in 1995.

Wobbly on his feet and with his hat pulled low across his brow, Gregg Allman approached the podium, intently staring at a small notepad in his hands.

The musician had written down ideas for whom to thank in his speech: his mother, concert promoter, and lifelong Allman Brothers fan Bill Graham, the fans. Instead, Allman slurred out a single thank you to his late brother, Duane Allman.

“Thank you, folks,” Allman slurred. “In honor of the greatest friend, brother, guitar player, and inspiration I’ve ever known. My brother, Duane. He was always the first to face the fire. He was my greatest motivation. Thank you.”

Allman later wrote in his memoir, “It should have been the greatest week of my life. The Allman Brothers Band, the band my brother started, the band with our name on it, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I flat-out missed it. I was physically there, but otherwise, I was out of it—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Struggling under the weight of grief and fame, Gregg Allman began taking pills, chain-smoking, and drinking a fifth of vodka every day. Gregg went to rehab nearly 20 times, but none of them stuck.

Allman hired two live-in nurses to stay with him round-the-clock. The nurses supervised the rock icon for 12-hour shifts while he quit drugs and alcohol cold turkey.

Allman died from complications from liver cancer in his Richmond Hill, Georgia, home on May 27, 2017. He reflected on his overwhelmingly successful, albeit tumultuous, career in his 2012 memoir.

“Music is my life’s blood,” he wrote. “When it’s all said and done, I’ll go to my grave, and my brother will greet me, saying, ‘Nice work, little brother. You did alright.’ I must have said this a million times, but if I died today, I have had me a blast.”

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On this day April 23, 1976 @therollingstones released their “Black and Blue” album.

“Black and Blue” acted as a transitional album for the band as it was the first record recorded after former guitarist Mick Taylor quit in December 1974.

As he had done previously when the Stones were between second guitarists Keith Richards recorded the bulk of the guitar parts himself, though the album recording sessions also served as an audition for Taylor’s replacement.

Among the hopefuls were Steve Marriott, Harvey Mandel, Wayne Perkins, Peter Frampton, and Ronnie Wood (although only Mandel, Perkins and Wood’s guitar work would appear on the finished album).

Guitar heroes Rory Gallagher and Jeff Beck both went over for a jam with the band “just to see what was going on,” but both declined interest in joining the group, happy with their solo careers.

Beck’s jamming with the Stones remains unreleased to date, but is available on bootleg recordings.

Wood had previously contributed to the title track from the It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll album, and became a temporary touring member of the Stones in 1975 and official member in 1976.

Stylistically, Black and Blue embraces hard rock with “Hand of Fate” (solo by Wayne Perkins) and “Crazy Mama”; funk with “Hot Stuff” (solo by Harve Mandel); reggae with their cover of “Cherry Oh Baby” (Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards weaving guitars); and blues with “Melody,” featuring the talents of Billy Preston – a heavy contributor to the album.

Musical and thematic styles were merged on the seven-minute “Memory Motel,” with both Jagger and Richards contributing lead vocals to a love song embedded within a life-on-the-road tale.

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New-look Asia announce Heat of The Moment US tour

Keyboard player Geoff Downes has unveiled a brand new Asia line-up featuring John Mitchell (It Bites, Lonely Robot, Kino, Frost* and more), Planet X drummer Virgil Donati and Harry Whitley, who performed with the Asia line-up at last year’s John Wetton An Extraordinary Life tribute show.

“And so it was that the John Wetton tribute last August really reminded me how much Asia’s music belongs on the stage,” says Downes. “The response to it all was literally…spine-chilling. We were accompanied by some amazing musicians on the night, and I’m delighted that both John Mitchell and Harry Whitley, from the Asia segment, will be joining me for this tour. It promises to be a great evening of music and furthers the legacy of all our founder members, in particular the incredible contributions of John Wetton to the Asia canon.

“With the addition of Virgil Donati and John Mitchell, two of the finest musicians in the world in their respective classes, this is almost going full circle bearing in mind their previous close collaborations with John. Completing this circle is also the amazing Harry Whitley who absolutely floored the audience with his incredible vocal interpretation of the Asia songs that John W and I so lovingly wrote over the years.”

The new-look band have announced a North American tour with prog legends Focus and Curved Air.

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On this day April 23, 1971 @therollingstones released “Sticky Fingers” widely considered one of the band’s best albums.

The album was the band’s first release on their new Rolling Stones Records label.

“Sticky Fingers” introduced the tongue and lips logo of Rolling Stones Records where it quickly became the most famous logo in the history of popular music.

The original cover artwork was conceived by Andy Warhol and showed picture of a man in tight jeans, with a working zipper that opened to reveal underwear fabric.

The cover was expensive to produce and damaged the vinyl record, so the size of the zipper was adjusted. Later re-issues featured just the outer photograph of the jeans.

The album featured a return to basics for the Rolling Stones with most songs featuring drums, guitar, bass, and percussion as provided by the key members: Mick Jagger (lead vocals, various percussion and rhythm guitar), Keith Richards (guitar and backing vocals), Mick Taylor (guitar), Bill Wyman (bass guitar), and Charlie Watts (drums).

Additional contributions were made by long-time Stones collaborators including saxophonist Bobby Keys and keyboardists Billy Preston, Jack Nitzsche, Ian Stewart, and Nicky Hopkins.

As with the other albums of the Rolling Stones late 1960s/early 1970s period, it was produced by Jimmy Miller.

“Sticky Fingers” also contains some of the band’s most popular songs including “Wild Horses,” “Dead Flowers,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “Bitch.”

On May 20th 2015 The Rolling Stones performed the entire Sticky Fingers album live in concert for the first time at Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, California.

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@thebeatles’ “Rocky Raccoon” and the Real-Life Drunken Doctor Who Inspired The Fourth Verse.

The story behind the Beatles’ 1968 track “Rocky Raccoon” might seem as simple as Paul McCartney’s fictitious take on a spaghetti Western saloon shootout. But there’s more truth behind this tongue-in-cheek song than one might think.

But according to the Liverpool native, one figure present in the song’s rolling narrative could be traced back to a fateful doctor’s visit McCartney had in 1965.

By the fourth verse, McCartney introduces the last character of the story. The doctor came in, stinking of gin, and proceeded to lie on the table.

But as the singer later explained, it was based on an actual doctor’s visit he had after busting open his lip in a moped accident.

As McCartney explained in The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present, he first met the man who would inspire the fourth verse of “Rocky Raccoon” in the early 1960s. McCartney fell off his moped while driving from his father’s home to his cousin, Betty, who also lived in Liverpool. Upon seeing McCartney bruised and bleeding, Betty rang for a doctor who could stitch the musician’s lip.

“They got this guy, and he arrived stinking of gin,” McCartney explained. “This guy was so drunk. He brings his black bag, and now he’s got to try and thread a little needle, a curved surgical needle, but he’s seeing three needles at least.” McCartney said the doctor didn’t give him any anesthetic, but “I might have had a slug of scotch or something. He just put the needle in and pulled it round. And then the thread came out, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I have to do that again.’

“So, he had to do it a second bloody time,” the Beatle continued. “I was trying not to scream. To be honest, he really didn’t do a marvelous job. I had this bump in my lip for a good while after. I can still feel it.”

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The Story Behind “Friday on My Mind” by The Easybeats.

We’re all trying to get to Friday. If we can just make it to the end of the week.

The Australian quintet The Easybeats burst onto the worldwide rock scene in 1966, led by guitarists Harry Vanda and George Young, with singer Stevie Wright, drummer Gordon “Snowy” Fleet, and bassist Dick Diamonde.

George Young was the older brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young. Harry Vanda and George Young produced the first six albums for the heavy-metal icons. Those albums included the hits “High Voltage,” “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll),” “T.N.T.,” “Jailbreak,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” and “Highway to Hell.”

The Easybeats were one of the first Australian rock bands to have success with original material. The five founding members all migrated from England and met at the Villawood Migrant Hostel in Sydney in 1964.

They had their first success with “She’s So Fine,” which reached the Top Five in Australia but failed to chart in the rest of the world. They built a rabid following, and the press compared their crowds to those of The Beatles. The band relocated to the UK in 1966.

Vanda and Young wrote the song. The working class could completely relate to it as it yearns for the weekend, but Young told journalist Debbie Kruger in 2005 that it had “more to do with their outlook on the world than any class statement.”

In 2006, Vanda spoke on a Dutch radio station about the inspiration for the opening guitar figure. A film appearance by The Swingle Singers provided the inspiration. “It went tudutudutudu, which made us all laugh,” he said. “In the train back from the gig, we were imitating them, and suddenly, it sounded good. They became the first notes of ‘Friday on My Mind.’”

Unfortunately, the band was never able to equal the success of their big breakout hit. Drug abuse, problems with management, and band disagreements caused delays in releasing a follow-up single.

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Happy birthday to guitarist, singer and songwriter @mrpeterframpton born on this day April 22, 1950.

Frampton rose to prominence as a member of the rock bands the Herd and Humble Pie before achieving superstardom as a solo artist.

After four studio albums and one live album with Humble Pie, Frampton left the band and went solo in 1971, just in time to see “Rockin’ the Fillmore” rise up the US charts.

Frampton had little commercial success with his early solo albums. All this changed with the release of his best-selling live album, “Frampton Comes Alive!,” in 1976.

The album spun off the hit singles “Baby, I Love Your Way”, “Show Me the Way”, and an edited version of “Do You Feel Like We Do.”

The latter two tracks also featured his use of the talk box guitar effect.

The album was recorded in 1975, mainly at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, California, where Humble Pie had previously enjoyed a following.

“Frampton Comes Alive!” became the top selling album of 1976 and spent more than four years on the Billboard charts eventually going on to sell more than eight million copies.

In 1991 after a successful tour of playing guitar on David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour Frampton looked to recapture the band experience and rejoined his old Humble Pie bandmate Steve Marriott for some shows in London.

Frampton and Marriott laid down some tracks in preparation for a “Frampton-Marriott” tour. However, Marriott abruptly returned to England in April and he died in a house fire less than 24 hours after his return.

At least three songs, and possibly a fourth, from the ended Marriott-Frampton partnership were subsequently recorded; two ending up on Frampton’s “Shine On” compilation, a third on his subsequent solo album.

Broken up by Marriott’s death, Frampton went off the road for a time before reforming his “Frampton Comes Alive!”band.

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On this day April 22, 1967 Buffalo Springfield headlined a show with Moby Grape at UC Davis Freeborn Hall.

Buffalo Springfield previewed “Mr. Soul” and “Bluebird” from their upcoming album “Buffalo Springfield Again,” while Moby Grape showcased cuts from their forthcoming debut album.

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@heartofficial kept themselves from starving in their early days by stealing Bachman Turner Overdrive’s food.

After nearly five decades as a headliner, Heart haven’t worried about backstage catering for quite some time. But that was not the case early in their career.

One of the bands opening for the Wilson sisters’ Royal Flush Tour this year is Bachman-Turner Overdrive featuring Randy Bachman, who Heart opened for in Canada during the mid-70s. at the very start of their career.

And BTO unwittingly helped keep the then-fledgling group from Seattle fed during those hungry years.

“We opened for them right off the bat, one of our first good gigs,” Ann Wilson tells Classic Rock. “I just remember going into their dressing room after they had left and it was all OK to go in and pilfer stuff, food out of their dressing room. They had a Thanksgiving spread in there every night; they were living the high, those guys, and it impressed us so much ‘cause we were just these little starving musicians. We would go in there and eat the turkeys and whatever else we found.”

The Royal Flush tour is Heart’s first since 2019 runs into December in North America and during June and July in Europe, will be a reunion of friends for the Wilsons and their current incarnation of Heart.

In addition to BTO they’ll be supported by Cheap Trick and Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening, while Heart have the opening spot on three stadium dates with Def Leppard and Journey after the European run. 

“We just felt it,” Ann says. “We thought, ‘We’re talking, we’re fine together, why not?’ So we just basically put it together and said, ‘Let’s go!’” 

For Nancy, the new Heart tour is “the coolest possible outcome. The playing on stage is worth all of it. That it means so much to people is everything. It’s worth every inch of pain you suffer and exhaustion you experience and all the drama that you have to navigate.”

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@officialthewho album Pete Townshend called “perfect for its time”

Although not every album came together the way Townshend would have liked, he still considered “Who’s Next” as one of the best records to come out of the early 1970s.

That’s interesting, given that the project was less than half as good as what Townshend heard in his head. Considering that he had just knocked it out of the park with “Tommy” and taken to the road to record “Live at Leeds,” the stage was set up for Townshend to return to the studio to do it again.

The idea was to take the crux of what he had done with “Tommy”and put it in a different scenario, using the main character of Bobby instead to tell a story about music becoming artificial in a dystopian future.

According to Roger Daltrey, most of the storyline of the project didn’t connect with them, telling Classic Albums, “What I remember was Pete gave us a script which was like a film script, which didn’t make any sense, but it had some good ideas in it. Like one that I remember is that if we find a meaning to life, it would be a musical note.”

Since the band were up against a deadline, Townshend didn’t want to bother finishing it, eventually just shoving his best material into “Who’s Next.” If this was the table scraps of those sessions, they didn’t have to worry about a thing, giving birth to anthems like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’

While no one would say that something that they never finished is their best work, Townshend was still proud of “Who’s Next,” telling VH1, “I knew that album, which appears to be a bunch of songs about nothing in particular are so cohesively tied together by the “Lifehouse” idea. “Who’s Next,” in a way, was the perfect record for then. It had humour, it had aggression, it had energy and it had colour, and it was beautifully recorded.”

Townshend may have been calling his shot about the new bosses as well, considering the bands of his generation were about to be swallowed by the sounds of punk, prog, and new wave within the next few years.

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When was the term ‘heavy metal’ first used?

Before metal had a proper name, though, the closest the genre had come to congealing was in the realm of garage rock. After getting used to the sounds of bands like The Beach Boys playing fun-in-the-sun music, artists like The Stooges and the MC5 were taking rock back to its origins, creating tracks that felt like the primal version of what the British Invasion had been doing years before.

It was in this scene that Steppenwolf first came into the equation, playing songs that resonated with the biker mentality on tracks like ‘Born to Be Wild.’

While not known as a heavy metal band in style just yet, vocalist John Kaye would utter the two words that predicted a new genre of music, featuring the line “heavy metal thunder” when talking about the sounds of the motorbike.

Bands like Led Zeppelin were popping up, warping the blues into something feral, with Jimmy Page coming up with the genesis of the metallic guitar riff.

Off the back of Zeppelin, a young band out of Birmingham, would come to unintentionally define heavy metal. Looking to make scary music, Black Sabbath had the world of metal awaiting at their feet, with the group practically starting the mentality of what a metal band should be with every lick that came out of Tony Iommi’s guitar. 

Once the group got on the road, Geezer Butler remembered the ‘metal’ tag as an offensive term for them, recalling to Metal Evolution, “The only time I had ever heard us called ‘heavy metal’ was being derogatory about us.

While Sabbath may have identified as a hard rock band, the first band to truly embrace the term heavy metal was fellow Birmingham heavyweight Judas Priest. Although they may have started out playing hippy-adjacent hard rock, Rob Halford would end up adopting the look that would become synonymous with the genre, clad in different leather and bondage gear whenever he stepped out onstage.

After years of optimistic rock music, metal was about to come in to give the genre a dark makeover.

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