Supersuckers: "Rock-n-Roll Records (Ain't Selling This Year)" Video

Video description: Throughout this entire time, our sole mission has been to create and perform timeless, quality music and get as many people as possible to hear it. That goal has never changed. The pursuit of that perfectly imperfect rock-n-roll moment is all we?ve ever been after. We?ve been doing this for well over a decade now and we?re just getting started.

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Kasabian: "Shoot The Runner"

Tom Meighan / Sergio Pizzorno / Chris Edwards / Ian Matthews Stardate: Summer 2006. As these words are being written, Kasabian are jetlagged, but happy. Three days ago, they returned from Mexico City, where a disused supermarket full of saucer-eyed devotees treated them like returning heroes. "They even sang along to the keyboards in Processed Beats," exclaims Serge Pizzorno. And then when we did the new stuff. It was..." Pizzorno is rarely lost for words. When he is though, here's Tom Meighan to pick up the baton "...legendary. I've never felt a force like it." Can a record be legendary before it has even come out? You might think you know Kasabian. After all, the dissolute Glimmer Twins of the post-Britpop firmament made no secret of their sources on that eponymous first album. A couple of years after Meighan and Pizzorno met in Leicester, aged 11, it was 1993 and Oasis were making the rock'n'roll dream seem like a goal attainable to a generation of schoolkids. Recorded at the now-mythical farm where they arrived for a party and never got around to leaving, Kasabian's eponymous debut bypassed most critics and connected dramatically with an audience that recognised them as one of their own just as Oasis had done with Meighan and Pizzorno in 1993. Kasabian sold over 700,000 in the UK and the band were the undisputed victors of last year's festivals, putting in bristling performances at Glastonbury, Reading/Leeds and T In The Park. But if a debut album is all about showing your influences, this is the point where Kasabian truly show us who they are. The first thing you'll notice about Empire is that no other band in the world could have created it. The confidence is perhaps understandable given the lack of fanfare with which they managed to instantly shift 8000 tickets for their Ally Pally show last year. But the scale of its vision though is something else entirely. Asked a while back to describe the album's eponymous opener, Meighan's instant response was, "Marc Bolan smoking crack with Dr Who." "No other band apart from Radiohead would have the balls to put in a tempo change like that," adds Pizzorno. Under the circumstances, you decide it's impolite to tell him that Radiohead didn't get actually around to it until their third album. This time around the demonic amyl throb of Serge's electronic soundscapes feed into the very core of Kasabian's music. The flood of ideas is unstoppable. Propelled along by handclaps and Ian Matthews' inspired Studio 54 style drum fills, the filthy analogue glambience of Shoot The Runner will be inescapable between now and Christmas. Last Trip, appropriately, comes on like a postcard from the furthermost outpost of a 4am bender Meighan's brittle, anxious exhortations leading the way over an arrangement which recalls a beefier version of Suicide's primitive electro-pulse. Three songs in and Empire already sounds like an index of rock'n'roll possibilities. When it comes to taking the credit for their music, Kasabian rarely need to be encouraged. In this case though, they're swift to acknowledge the invaluable input of producer Jim Abbiss who, according to Meighan, "was very good at dealing with situations in the studio." Was that necessary? One imagines that when a double act like Meighan and Pizzorno disagree, they must really disagree. "Actually, we bicker," says Meighan, "But it's only ever when we're drunk. You know that Hot Chocolate song, It Started With A Kiss? Well, with us, it ends with a kiss, but starts with a bottle. But Jim kept our heads clear, so that there was no anxiety, like 'what the fuck are we gonna do next?'"

Jerry Lee Lewis and Kid Rock: "Honky Tonk Woman"

From Jerry Lee Lewis' album "Last Man Standing," which features mythic rock'n'roll pioneer duets with pop's biggest superstars including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Toby Keith, B.B. King, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Kid Rock, Rod Stewart and more.

Corrosion of Conformity: "Stone Breaker"

We really try hard to be true to what our hearts tell us to do," says New Orleans-bred Pepper Keenan, guitarist and songwriter for the band. "We do what we feel and we don't want to get caught up in any '90s-style production bullshit, 'cause when we look back at what we've done we want it to sound timeless. So many bands are gonna laugh at themselves in ten years. We don't want that." COC has been hurtling towards a "timeless" rock sound since their humble-but-turbulent beginning as a hardcore band way back in 1982. Back then, the band -- guitarist Woody Weatherman, bassist Mike Dean and drummer Reed Mullin (Keenan didn't join until 1990) -- searched desperately for a voice, an identifiable way to vent the spleen that has continued to haunt them through a full six records: 1983's vociferous Eye For An Eye, '85's phlegmatic rant Animosity, '87's drop D-tuned barrage Technocracy, '91's awesome, menacing Blind, and the album that serves as WISEBLOOD's most direct sonic ancestor: '94's breakthrough platter, Deliverance. "We began carving our niche with Deliverance," says Keenan with a hint of the South in his voice. "Now that we have that niche we should stay in it. I often wonder what makes good bands take sudden left turns. Why would you work hard to develop a sound and then just abandon it? It makes no sense." "We've always tried to make albums that have highs and lows and midpoints," says Keenan, "records that you can listen to from beginning to end. We've got no interest in ramming ten songs in the same key down your throat.

Pela: "Lost To The Lonesome"

Pela is an American rock & roll band. At a time when the word 'America' has never been more fraught with meaning, songs that speak to our basic feelings and emotions about life could never be more resonant. Lost amongst all the geo-political tumult are the stories of every day America; the aches and pains and the beautiful possibilities. Yet amidst all the turmoil and uncertainty, new stories are being written and told by a new generation of American bands. Pela is clearly one of those voices.

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Big time rock and roll

Silk: "Secret Garden"

SILK'S "ALWAYS AND FOREVER" CD TAKES "BABY-MAKING MUSIC" TO THE NEXT LEVEL "Always And Forever" is not a phrase usually associated with a fickle music business, especially in recent times when one-hit wonders and manufactured artists have been especially prevalent. But for Silk, one of the few vocal groups to breakthrough in the hip-hop era, the phrase applies not only to their own longevity--seventeen years and counting with the current line-up featuring the four original members who have been together throughout--but also to the quality of their music which features finely crafted harmony singing and lyrics that deal with timeless issues of love, romance and sex. With the release of their seventh album "Always And Forever", their debut release on Shanachie Entertainment on October 17th, Silk brings their vocal artistry to a hand-picked selection of songs that have inspired them as simultaneous homage to artists who they respect and musical statement of the ultimate quality of Silk's music. "It all comes full circle on this album," relates Gary Glenn. "A lot of these songs were ones we were already familiar with so it was easy for us to step in and emulate people we have a lot of respect for. It's a chance to show off our own artistry. If someone has the audacity to do a Michael Jackson number or a Prince tune and do it well, or to really do justice to"The Secret Garden" , then they walk away with respect from the audience. That's what we want." The album, which features Silk's interpretations of major hits by Blue Magic, Switch, Shalamar, Prince, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Heatwave and others, simply builds on something Silk had already been doing. ""We've done a re-make on almost every album anyway so it was like time to do this--a full serving of what we've been doing throughout. Like (Blue Magic's classic) "Sideshow", we've been doing that in our shows and people love it. We were doing (Switch's) "There'll Never Be" at shows and people start to "step" when we do it...and it's a beautiful thing. It even happened in Aurora, Colorado, which is the last place I thought people would be steppin'!" The young men who formed Silk grew up in Atlanta. Three of them met each other in the late Eighties in the course of working at a particular McDonald's. Soon --Gary "Big G" Glenn, Jonathan "John John" Rasboro, Tim "Timzo" Cameron and Jimmy Gates (Tim and Jimmy were cousins)--got together around their mutual love of singing. They sang whenever and wherever they could ("I don't think there's a church in Atlanta we DIDN'T sing at," laughs Gary) at talent shows, clubs, churches and in the streets. Louise Ferguson, who is their manager today, was determined to get them a shot with Keith Sweat who didn't particularly want to audition the unknown wanna-be's. So when Keith came to a barbeque at Louise's house, she invited Silk to come over and they discreetly went down in the basement and started singing for the kids there. Keith heard them and liked what he heard enough to make Silk the first group signed to his Keia label in 1992 and they were featured on "two of Keith's tracks on his "Keep It Coming" album. Silk's first single, "Happy Days" was garnering radio play but then "Freak Me", another cut from their first album, starting generating radio play spontaneously and when released a single became a Number 1 R&B hit and Number 1 pop hit. It was quickly followed by two Top Ten R&B hits--"Lose Control" and "Girl U For Me, which grew into a string of hits throughout the Nineties including "Hooked On You", "I Can Go Deep", "If You ("Lovin' Me")and "Meeting In My Bedroom". Their signature sound was dubbed "baby-making music." "At the time we came up," Gary Glenn notes, "producers were putting groups together but when Keith met us we were already Silk. That may be part of the reason why we have been able to stand the test of time. We didn't just get together to get a deal; we got together to sing. We had to find our own niche. You had Boyz II Men with their harmonies and Jodeci with their "from the gut" sound, so we were kind of in the middle. We went from high school stages to arenas very quickly--that was due to Keith." Silk's audience has grown up along with them and some of the children who were the result of "baby-making music" are now teenagers. "People are always telling us," John adds, "I made my first child to your music." That's just a blessing! That someone created a child with our music. We know what people are looking for from our music so as long as we honor and respect that we can keep going in that vein, like The Isley Brothers and Keith Sweat." It's a difficult challenge for even a solo artist to survive in the cut-throat music industry and even more so for a group to stay together. Fourteen years together since the release of their first single, what's Silk's secret? "I think a lot of prayer, patience and understanding," says Gary Glenn. "We don't always realize how important our commitment to each other has been. It's like being in a marriage that you REFUSE to leave. It's like "I got this ring and I ain't going NOWHERE!" But we all bow down to what's important to Silk. And in the end, we just love singing together."

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Music business revolutionary Bill Graham's archive is home to rare and never-before heard music from rock's most famous artists. Now, Wolfgang's Vault CEO Bill Sagan takes you through a meticulous collection of rock and roll's rarest memorabilia and how it will be revealed for the first time in the digital era.