FILE UNDER “BITTER EX-SINGERS”:
Last week’s news that Chester Bennington and Stone Temple Pilots had begun working on new material seems to have missed STP’s former singer. In an interview with iChill.ca, Scott Weiland said his old band’s partnership with Bennington “didn’t work,” and took a dig at the new version of the band for its lack of commercial success.
Weiland pointed out, “They made an album and it sold 35,000 units. That’s kind of unbelievable considering STP sold over 40 million and I’m sure Chester’s band Linkin Park has sold pretty much the same amount.”
Of course, Weiland’s accounting is a bit skewed, since album sales in general are fractions of what they were in the ’90s, STP’s heyday. But the singer still attributes the drop in STP’s album sales to Bennington’s presence. “[The new partnership] didn’t work, though,” he said. “People weren’t buying into it.”
No one in the STP camp seems to be paying Weiland much mind. Chester Bennington recently revealed that he and the Pilots had just written some new material “and that was a lot of fun, so we’re planning to record some music as soon as possible.”
Though Bennington says he doesn’t know exactly when the STP recording sessions will start, he says it’s a priority. “We want to do it as soon as possible. So we’ll make that happen with the time that we have, when I’m not on the road with Linkin Park.”
Bennington and the rest of Linkin Park play Charlotte, NC tonight on their Carnivores tour with Thirty Seconds to Mars.
FILE UNDER “COURTNEY LOVE KILLED KURT FOR THE MONEY”:
As the widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love is sitting on a pretty sizable rock and roll fortune — but it’s a bit smaller than it might have been.
Love tells the the Sunday Times of London that she burned through a substantial amount of Nirvana money, in large part through settling lawsuits. “I lost about $27 million,” she tells the paper. “I know that’s a lifetime of money to most people, but I’m a big girl, it’s rock ‘n’ roll, it’s Nirvana money, I had to let it go.”
She also tells the paper that she credits — of all things — her use of cocaine with helping her learn to keep better track of her money. “I had to run very fast to look after my money and I felt cocaine helped me do that,” she says. “So I started taking cocaine and that turned into nine months of crack.”
Still, despite the losses, Love says she’s not looking to milk the Nirvana catalog for everything it’s worth. The Hole singer says, “I make enough to live on, I’m financially solvent, I focus on what I make now.” She adds that as a member of the Nirvana board of directors, she has turned down lucrative deals for the use of Nirvana’s music.
“I’ve protected it from everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials to movies about board games,” she says. “We’ve been offered $6 million for 18 seconds of one Nirvana song and I turned it down.”
As to when her daughter with Cobain — Frances Bean Cobain — will get control of the Nirvana catalog, Love says that won’t be for a while.
“There’s this myth out there — put out by Frances’ lawyers — that Frances runs the catalog, which is absolute nonsense,” Love says. “When she’s 40, she becomes a member of the board and she has a vote, but not now.” Frances is 21.
FILE UNDER “DAVE GROHL IS A ROCK GOD”:
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl last week teased some “big news” scheduled for today, and now he’s delivered: the band’s finally sharing details with fans about their new album, Sonic Highways. The disc will be released globally on November 10, and the cover art, plus a snippet of a new song, are now available at FooFighters.com.
The album was recorded in eight different cities, including New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, L.A., Nashville, Austin, TX and Chicago. Frontman Dave Grohl says in a statement, “This album is instantly recognizable as a Foo Fighters record, but there’s something deeper and more musical to it. I think that these cities and these people influenced us to stretch out and explore new territory, without losing our ‘sound.’”
You can pre-order both the CD and 180-gram vinyl LP now at SonicHighways.Foofighters.com. The vinyl album comes with nine different covers: that’s one primary cover, which is an artistic representation of all eight cities, and eight additional covers, each reflecting a specific city.
Here’s the track listing for Sonic Highways:
“Something from Nothing”
“The Feast and The Famine”
“Congregation”
“What Did I Do?/God As My Witness”
“Outside”
“In the Clear”
“Subterranean”
“I Am a River”
