Blog Posts by Andy Greene

Pete Townshend's long-awaited memoir Who He? is finally going to see the light of day. The Who guitarist has inked a deal with HarperCollins to release the book, which the publisher says will hit shelves in the fall of 2012. "In the 1970s, Pete Townshend famously asked the musical question 'Who are you?'" Harper Collins executive editor David Hirshey said in a statement. "Now, in his autobiography, generations of fans will finally get the answer they've been waiting for."

Townshend began working on his autobiography in the mid-1990s. When he was cautioned by the British Police in 2003 for accessing child pornography on the Internet, Townshend explained that he was researching material for the book. "I have been writing my childhood autobiography for the past seven years," he said in a written statement. "I believe I was sexually abused between the age of five and six and a half when in the care of my maternal grandmother who was mentally ill at the time. I cannot remember clearly what

In an unprecedented move, Bob Dylan posted a message on his official website this morning addressing the controversy surrounding his concerts in China last month. Unconfirmed reports had circulated that Dylan had allowed the Chinese government to censor his setlist. Some pundits took shots at Dylan over the allegations, particularly New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "The idea that the raspy troubadour of '60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout," she wrote in a widely mocked column. "Even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi's family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh's fourth wedding."

She went on to chastise him for not playing "Hurricane" (which he hasn't played anywhere since 1976) and wrote that Dylan "sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left."

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Earlier this month

The surviving members of Pink Floyd reunited onstage tonight at London's 02 Arena during a stop on Roger Waters' Wall tour - marking only the second time that Nick Mason, David Gilmour and Waters had played together in the last 30 years. Waters and Gilmour performed "Comfortably Numb" as the crowd at the arena went absolutely insane, and during the finale of "Outside the Wall," Gilmour returned to the stage alongside Mason, who played a tambourine.

As he did on the original 1980/81 tour, Gilmour played his epic solo on the top of the Wall. Last July, Waters promised that Gilmour would play the song during one show on the tour, but drummer Nick Mason's involvement was kept a secret. They last performed together at Live 8 in 2005. Original keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008.

Confirmation of Gilmour's appearance hit the web hours before the reunion on Gilmour's official fan blog. "I should also remind you that tonight is most definitely a one-off," the blog notes. "David is not

Everybody, just relax: Bob Dylan is still, hands down, the most gifted and original songwriter of the past century. But yes, he did poach some stanzas from 19th-century Confederate poet Henry Timrod for Modern Times. He's been lifting lines from other people for his entire career - for one, huge chunks of his 1985 disc Empire Burlesque were based on Humphrey Bogart movies. It's part of the whole folk music thing, as well as the whole "geniuses steal" thing, and Dylan did name his 2001 album, um, Love and Theft. Here are a half dozen of Dylan's greatest "appropriations" - can you think of any more?

Dylan:
"Go 'way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed."
-"It Ain't Me Babe" (1964)
Source:
"Go away from my window
Go away from my door."
-John Jacob Niles, "Go 'Way From My Window" (1958)

Dylan:
"A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four-letter word."
-"Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word" (1967)
Source:
"You don't know what love is. To you it's just another four-letter

Common has never been seen as a particularly controversial hip-hop artist, but his recent invitation to the White House has caused the right-wing perpetual outrage machine to kick into high gear. After the Chicago rapper was invited to a poetry event Wednesday night at the White House organized by Michelle Obama, Fox News labeled him a "vile rapper" on their website. But as Media Matters points out, Fox didn't always feel that way: In a 2009 interview, a Fox News reporter told Common, "Your music is very positive...you're known as the conscious rapper."

At issue is a 2007 rap-poem by Common called "A Letter To The Law" in which he wrote, "Why they messing with Saddam? Burn a Bush cos' for peace he push no button." The brouhaha began when Tucker Carlson's conservative website the Daily Caller transcribed Common's work and mocked his intelligence, with blogger Neil Munro writing, "You'll get extra credit for counting death threats. There is no extra credit of identifying spelling

U2 and Muse officially wrapped up their South American stadium tour on Wednesday night, but hours after the show ended they headed over to the Sao Paulo nightclub Bar Secreto and continued  playing on a considerably smaller stage. You'd think anything that happens super late night at  Bar Secreto remains a secreto, but thankfully somebody brought a camera and uploaded some of the songs to YouTube. Click here to watch Bono cover "Psycho Killer" with Larry Mullen Jr. and Muse's Dom Howard on drums. Click here to watch bits of every song, including The Edge singing "Miss You" and "Let's Dance" and Mullen take a rare turn at the mic with "The Wild Rover." It's unclear if Adam Clayton and the rest of Muse were in the club. Maybe they were playing next door at Bar Super Secreto.

(h/t ATU2)

Photo by Marcos Alvez/Globo via Getty

Click to listen to Jimi Hendrix's "Cat Talking To Me"

The Jimi Hendrix vaults are seemingly endless. Posthumous releases have flooded the market ever since the guitar legend died in 1970, and yet 41 years later amazing stuff continues to surface. This month the rarities collection Soul Southern Delta is hitting shelves, alongside a new DVD of Hendrix and the Band of Gypsy's Live At The Fillmore East. For Record Store Day tomorrow, Sony Legacy is releasing a vinyl single containing an alternate version of "Fire" with the previously unreleased 1967 song "Touch You." The CD version will have another 1967 track, "Cat Touching You" - which you can exclusively stream here. The Jimi Hendrix Experience cut the song in June of '67 at London's Olympic Studios. Twenty years later Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell added additional bass and drum parts.

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By all logic The Kinks should be on the verge of a reunion. "I'm seeing Dave next week," Ray Davies tells Rolling Stone in a new interview. "I hear that Dave is saying stuff in the press like, 'I'll do it, but Ray doesn't want to do it.' This is me saying, 'Ray will do it if Dave does it.'"

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With both Davies brothers on board a reunion should be imminent, but Kinks fans have been teased like this for the 15 years and it never seems to happen. They came close to reuniting with the original line-up in the early 2000s, but that was derailed when bassist Peter Quaife started to develop severe kidney problems. "It's all water under the bridge now," Dave Davies told Rolling Stone shortly after Quaife died in June of 2010. "There was talking of doing weekends in New York with the four of us, but now we shall never know."

Exclusive: Ray Davies on His New Disc, Hanging With Bruce and (Maybe!) Bringing Back the Kinks

The Davies