Them Crooked Vultures to release CD by end of year, Josh Homme says in forthcoming interview

Kudos to the folks over at Antiquiet for being the first to get some important details out of any member of Them Crooked Vultures regarding their upcoming album.

Singer and guitarist Josh Homme said he's not quite sure when to expect a CD release by his new supergroup with Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones. As a matter of fact, none of the band members knows! Says Homme:

"We’ve been doing a lot of stuff real kind of secretive, and we actually made a pact to not know when it’s coming out, the band guys. I’m betting… Well it’s going to be before the end of the year… We kind of have a little running bet on what the date is. And I intend to win that bet, because I’m going to cheat."

Josh, I invite you to cheat by visiting TheCrookedVultures.info for that information as soon as I learn it, hopefully, before you do.

Also of note is Antiquiet got Homme to break the band's silence on whether or not it is signed to a record label. Here's the discourse:

Antiquiet: Any idea as far as an agreement on a label, or how that’s all going to work out distribution wise?

Josh Homme: Yeah… It’s going to come out on Interscope in the states, and Sony/BMG internationally.

Antiquiet: How do you feel about that? You’ve been pretty outspoken in the past about not feeling so hot about Interscope anymore…

Josh Homme: Well, you know… If it was up to me, I’d just get a real big hot air balloon, and put ‘em all in the basket of that, and just (miming) pull the cord and let it drop over places, you know?

But, you know, it’s not up to me always.

Again, kudos to Antiquiet. You can read the full interview with Homme there.

Robert Plant to join Buddy Miller onstage in San Francisco tonight; John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham also gigging in U.S. this evening

Boz Scaggs is hosting the second of two charity gigs in San Francisco tonight, and word was released only hours in advance that Robert Plant would be making an appearance.

Plant will be sitting in on a song with Buddy Miller, a Nashville native and recent recipient of multiple Americana awards. Miller was part of the touring band that accompanied Plant and Alison Krauss worldwide last year.

Plant really seems to have caught the Buddy Miller bug. Last July, they recorded a track together backstage at one of their gigs. It appeared this March on Buddy's latest album with his wife, Julie Miller. But before that, on Sept. 18, 2008, Plant and Buddy Miller played their song together in front of an audience during their first onstage appearance without Krauss.

The only other times Plant has graced a stage this year were on April 25 at a Womad concert in Abu Dhabi and on Sept. 11 at a charity concert in London, both times with Justin Adams, formerly Plant's guitarist in the Strange Sensation, and Adams's latest touring companion, Gambian musician Juldeh Camara.

Buddy Miller has been doing a lot of things too. The poor guy, who had a heart attack last year, is said to be pulling long hours working every week and suffering from the affliction of not knowing how to say no to people.

But judging from the vacant touring schedule currently shown at www.buddyandjulie.com, he hasn't had anything scheduled since July. This may mean Miller's date book is wide open if Plant suggests they do something a little more permanent together than just tonight's one song at the charity gig.

The other possibility is that Miller simply hasn't gotten his scheduled gigs up on that site and he really is booked. For instance, in addition to assisting Boz Scaggs this week, he's booked to appear at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival tomorrow. There, just as tonight and last night, Miller's part of Boz Scaggs & the Blue Velvet Band, which also features blues harmonica player James Cotton among others. They play at the Rooster Stage at 2:30 p.m. tomorrow, and the festival is a free three-day concert at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park. Who knows if Plant may show up there too!

Plant's impromptu appearance in San Francisco tonight could not have come on a more interesting night, which is also seeing Jason Bonham at the Mirage in Las Vegas with Slash and Friends, plus John Paul Jones playing twice in one day at the Austin City Limits Festival in Texas: first with Sara Watkins (as confirmed by LedZeppelinNews.com in advance of the set) and second with Them Crooked Vultures. I have been following all three of these events on Twitter tonight.

Study into the trend of rock reunions includes Led Zeppelin's 2008 no-go

Led Zeppelin's will-they-won't-they saga of 2008 has become the stuff of legend. The news of yesteryear has become the history of today.

Financial Times reporter Ludovic Hunter-Tinley reports from a rehearsal of the pop group Spandau Ballet, the focus of the article's introduction is on the band's collective decision to mend its wounds in favor of a long-awaited reunion tour. A few paragraphs after this focus is established, Hunter-Tinley shifts the thrust of the article to concentrate instead on other groups that have been under pressure to reunite.

Enter Led Zeppelin, along with fellow classic rockers Pink Floyd, the Police and Genesis, as well as Blur, Spinal Tap, and pop acts like the Spice Girls and Take That.

The writer says the Led Zeppelin show in December 2007 was a success:

"... [T]he sense of history was extraordinary. From the moment they opened with “Good Times Bad Times”, it was clear that the sexagenarian hard-rockers still had the old magic. On the train afterwards, fans compared the distances they had travelled to be there: one had flown in from New Zealand."

The writer then details what can happen "when a reunion fails to spark." One member of Spandau Ballet, singer Tony Hadley, offers how "embarrassing" it is to see "49-year-old guys trying to look 25."

When the writer approaches the subject of "questions of authenticity," Led Zeppelin comes up again. The band that headlined the Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert on Dec. 10, 2007, was Led Zeppelin but with Jason Bonham on drums instead of John Bonham, Hunter-Tiney asserts, making exception for "purists" who "insist" that the band was not Led Zeppelin.

The writer turns it into an issue of expendability: It's OK to replace John Bonham, but it wasn't OK for Robert Plant to be replaced when he didn't want to participate in a tour at his age. There's even a quote from Plant on the subject: "The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it's all about."

As for Jimmy Page, last year he said it best: "If you're going to have a reunion, you need four members." It was the perfect thing to say at the time. It was September, and Plant had not yet issued a statement leaving himself out of the running. Page's spare words on the subject resounded in the following months as it was suggested he, Jones and Bonham would carry on with another singer. Maybe Page never meant Plant had to be involved; maybe he was intentionally being ambiguous because he thought somebody else could be the singer if Plant wouldn't step up to the plate! It sure got me thinking.

Ultimately, it was revealed that they didn't want to call their band Led Zeppelin, and Plant once even made the point of saying Led Zeppelin would not exist without him. (Perhaps he knew they wouldn't because he'd filed a craftily worded preventive injunction or a demand of excessive royalties should they replace him and use his songs! Theories, people! Theories!)

Regardless of anyone's best intentions, a large segment of the press insisted on using the Led Zeppelin name when referring to a potential grouping of Page, Jones and Bonham, even with another singer. The public at large saw it the same way, and the outcry against a Led Zeppelin reunion without Plant even prompted other notable people -- Jeff Beck and his manager, promoter Harvey Goldsmith, to name a few -- to speak out against dishonoring the Led Zeppelin name with another singer.

It was much the same for the members of Yes last year, when they first attempted to go on the road with a singer other than Jon Anderson to play concerts under a name other than Yes. The only name promoters wanted to use was Yes, and so it became another Yes tour.

One has to think that Page, who was spotted at one of the early concerts with Journey's latest Steve Perry clone, paid careful attention as last year's situation with Yes unfolded. Perhaps it's one factor that led him to decide against going out with three-fourths of the band that played as Led Zeppelin and use another singer.

Nobody has disclosed publicly exactly who made the decision last year to halt singer auditions and call off whatever project had potentially been in the works even after Plant had withdrawn from Led Zeppelin reunion considerations. It seems likely that Page made himself aware of what else was going on in the musical landscape enough to know even a new band with Jones and Bonham could affect Led Zeppelin's historical image.

Hunter-Tinley notes, "A full Led Zeppelin tour would ... have done stratospheric business."

One obvious end result of this is the way John Paul Jones has quickly bounced back, emerging in the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. He's at another point in his career when he's earning all sorts of praise, not the least of which comes from drummer Dave Grohl. Jones was spotted at the Austin City Limits festival this afternoon playing mandolin on three of Sara Watkins's songs, when he'll later take the stage with Them Crooked Vultures. Grohl is going to make certain that Jones holds a reputation of being a versatile musician who can rip on mandolin "and just blow your head off."

Another end result is the way Jason Bonham has also bounced back. He quit his steady gig last year, touring with Foreigner, just in case he might be called into the prospective project with Jones and Page that never materialized. However, 2009 has already seen him sitting in with a number of acts and making other appearances. He's billed to show up at a Slash and Friends gig in Las Vegas tonight (Update: This did not come to fruition as he had apparently dropped out of the lineup at some point), and then there are some other gigs coming up, including one just announced today.

It's Oct. 11 at the Roxy Theatre in Hollywood, Calif., "Rockstar Karaoke" featuring singer Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath, Kelly Hansen of Foreigner, Lemmy from Motörhead, Trevor Rabin of Yes, and others. Proceeds are to benefit the Painted Turtle, a camp for seriously ill children. Tickets are on sale here.

Page has been making the movie "It Might Get Loud," and he's been busy promoting it and saying he has something else planned that he has to start on in 2010. Apparently, it's not an autobiography; this much he revealed last month while he attended a book launch by -- who else! -- Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. But a new musical project, Jimmy? I hope so. I really, really hope so.

Plant, when he's not talking about a new album with Alison Krauss, has been collecting awards and occasionally singing Led Zeppelin songs onstage without Page, Jones and Bonham. We'll see what else the future may hold for him!

But meanwhile, specific details of the recent past remain no clearer.

Dave Grohl, as drummer, loves his new band with John Paul Jones and Josh Homme

Dave Grohl's back on drums! That's what a lot of the buzz is that's currently surrounding Them Crooked Vultures as the band sets off to cruise across North America.

In the Foo Fighters, Grohl's talents behind a drum kit were hidden away in a bushel basket so that he could be the frontman, screaming indelicately into a microphone with a guitar strapped to his back. But the former Nirvana drummer has consistently returned to the drums whenever he's linked up with Queens of the Stone Age founder Josh Homme, himself an ample guitar player, singer, songwriter and frontman.

So it's long been Grohl's dream -- and probably fans of his -- to be able to return to the drums in a tight-knit group. Grohl envisioned himself forming a band with Homme years ago -- and who better to play bass than John Paul Jones? But who among us wouldn't desire to recruit Jones to join a rhythm section in much the same way we draft reliable running backs for fantasy football? Grohl probably never seriously thought he could form a band with both Homme and Jones.

Until he got that unexpected phone call.



As Grohl explains in his backstage interview with radio station KUT 90.5 Austin:

"I'd worked with John on a Foo Fighters record and asked him. I guess it was about a year ago. I bumped into him in London, and I said, 'Hey, I got this project I think might be kind of fun. Me and my buddy Josh are gonna do something outside of our bands.' And he kind of went, 'Oh, yeah, right.' And then I didn't hear from him for a while, and then a month later, he called and said, 'Hey, when do you think you're gonna do it?' So I called Josh, [and I'm] like, 'F***, man, I think he actually wants to do it! This is amazing!'"

Grohl says that when he, Jones and Homme all started jamming together for the first time, it took him only as much as two or three minutes to realize it was the best band he'd ever been involved with.

"John, I mean, you know, John is ... he's ... he's an incredibly gifted musician. Anything that he picks up, he plays with feel, he plays with passion. He's ... he's a ... you know, he's a classically trained f***ing genius. But he rips on anything! He'll pick up a mandolin and just blow your head off! You know? And ... and everybody knows what he can do with a bass guitar, and watching the two of them go at each other, you know. I get to sit there and watch those two every night, and it's awesome."

It was presumably Grohl's first interview about Them Crooked Vultures since the band's formation early this year, and so he gushed over the fact that he was finally able to talk freely about the band.

"Nobody knew; we kept it a secret for eight months. Nobody knew. And that was the best part. I'm actually relieved now that I can talk about it because I used to -- you know, I had to keep it a secret. It's like I had a secret lover for eight months and I was trying to hide her away from everybody. You know? I couldn't tell anybody!"

The only remaining secret with the band that neither Grohl nor Jones was at liberty to address in their interviews with KUT 90.5 Austin was when Them Crooked Vultures will be releasing any of their studio recordings. When Grohl was asked if he could reveal anything about their record, he clammed up, reverting to the tight-lipped nature of the band since its public debut in August. Grohl simply told the reporter:

"No. You'll see."

While some media outlets are still reporting the band's debut album will be titled "Deserve the Future" and released late this month, it's really not even certain there will be an album release in the traditional sense. As I said one month ago yesterday:

For all we know, Them Crooked Vultures may forego an in-store physical album release altogether. Too passé!

Why not drop the entire album free of charge over the course of a month, hiding uncompressed digital files on different Web sites. We'd have to follow the social networking accounts of a couple dozen different henchmen affiliated with the marketing scheme and click incessantly on suspect links to various indistinguishable vultur.es URLs. Most would reveal comical images of crooked vultures, while only a handful would be those proverbial needles in the haystack, unleashing track by track the powerful music created for fans of loud rock.

Truly, then, only the most patient and ardent fans would deserve the future.

Myles Kennedy takes to the stage one year after his brush with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones

Throughout much of 2008, a Led Zeppelin reunion tour seemed possible. During the months that followed the band's December 2007 concert in London, encouraging words were coming from Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Jason Bonham and even, at times, Robert Plant.

That changed about this time last year. As Robert Plant's tour with Alison Krauss was soon coming to a close, he issued a statement saying he was not going to be participating in any kind of recording or touring project involving Page, Jones and Bonham. Plant wished them well on whatever they were going to be doing.

For a time, there remained a distinct possibility that Jones, Page and Jones would still collaborate on a tour and even an album without Plant, in a new band other than Led Zeppelin. They were said to be jamming with various singers, even including Steven Tyler, but the one name that hovered around them as a distinct possibility for a singer was that of Myles Kennedy, of Alter Bridge. This year, as Alter Bridge's other band members hooked up with their former singer for a Creed tour and even a new album, Kennedy acknowledged he had been jamming with Page and Jones in 2008. While the rest of his Alter Bridge bandmates are on the road, Kennedy has been using his songwriting abilities and his guitar chops and vocals to work on a solo project this year.

This Sunday night at 6 p.m., he'll take the stage at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Md., for a one-night charity event benefiting the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Kennedy tells LedZeppelinNews.com he won't be unveiling any of his new tunes. "I would like to roll out some of my solo stuff," he says, "but with the advent of YouTube that isn't an option." He'll opt instead for a combination of cover tunes plus perhaps material from Alter Bridge and his previous band, Mayfield 4.

In addition to Kennedy, the concert lineup is to include the Johnny Hiland Band, Orianthi, the Paul Reed Smith Band, and Davy Knowles & the Back Door Slam. VIP tickets, which include an open bar, run for $50 apiece. General admission tickets are $10. They are available here.

John Paul Jones to sit in with Sara Watkins in afternoon set at Austin City Limits

Over a three-day stint in Austin, Texas, John Paul Jones is playing the Austin City Limits festival and the TV show of the same name as well as a great local venue for live music, all with Them Crooked Vultures, plus making a special guest appearance at the festival sitting in with Sara Watkins.

Watkins, who first became known as the sultry female vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in Nickel Creek, became solo star earlier this year with a debut album produced by Jones. They first played together on the road in 2004 as members of Mutual Admiration Society. Watkins now spends many of her days on the road, splitting her gigs between solo events and gigs with her latest group project, the Works Progress Administration.

Update: Footage from her performance with Jones added

During her solo set at 1 p.m. today, Jones will join her onstage again, just as he last did joining her on the set of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in April. Around that time, Jones was hinting of a new project of his, something secretive that eventually became revealed to be Them Crooked Vultures.

On Wednesday night, a small crowd entered an Austin TV studio to witness Them Crooked Vultures' first performance in America since its debut show in August. Amid the studio audience, champion cyclist Lance Armstrong snapped cell phone pictures despite a prohibition on cameras inside. The next day, Armstrong wrote on Twitter, "Them Crooked Vultures put the hurt on me last night. Ouch.." The episode of "Austin City Limits" is to air on PBS early in the new year.

Them Crooked Vultures played at Stubb's BBQ last night and is scheduled to play an hour-long set beginning at 7:30 tonight.

John Paul Jones gives first interview since debut of Them Crooked Vultures; bassist compares band's onstage improvisation to that of Led Zeppelin

John Paul Jones has given his first interview since the debut of Them Crooked Vultures. In his interview for KUT 90.5 in Austin, Texas, he commented on a number of topics all related to the new band.

There were no questions about the status of a Led Zeppelin reunion.



How Them Crooked Vultures got together:

"It's all Dave's fault. It's all Dave's fault. He came up to [the] GQ Awards in London last year to present us with, um, Men of the Year, I believe it was, with Zeppelin. And we got to talking, and he says, 'Well, you know, if you're ever not doing anything, I want to get a little band together with Josh singing, and give you a call.' You know, so, I found out I was doing nothing after a while. ... I just came over in February, met with Josh for the first time, went pretty much into the studio, and just started having fun basically."

On the fact that the band got together despite none of the three members needing to have another band at this time:

"It's got to be fun. It really has."

On the blues-based groove present in the band's songs:

"Yeah, yeah. There kind of has to be. Josh is pretty bluesy too, and I suppose my history is blues-based. Blues-based rock. And it all comes from the blues for me. I just like the sound of it, I like playing it, and we're doing basically what we want, you know."

On releasing their studio recordings:

"Yes, it is hard to come by, but ... There will be music ... real soon now, as they say in the computer world."

On the method of release:

"I can't really comment on that, but it'll be everywhere soon, don't worry."

On the band's ambitions and longevity:

"We're still a young band hoping to go places. It is, yeah. They're all still growing. We all play 'em fine, of course, but this is again one of those bands where different things happen onstage and you take the songs from different places and discover new stuff about bits. It keeps the interest, and it's good fun to do. ... Yeah, I think it's going to go for a while. Honestly, you know, their respective bands will call them back eventually, but I think we're going to get a good run of it before anything like that happens."

In a separate interview for 90.5 KUT, Dave Grohl discusses the status of the Foo Fighters and explains what it is like playing in a band with John Paul Jones.