Blog Posts by Patrick Doyle

On a recent friday night in Memphis, 75 people gathered on a hotel rooftop overlooking the Mississippi River for a party hosted by Eddie Ved­der. As the guests of honor - Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, who had just been released after spending 18 years in prison - arrived, they were mobbed by friends and supporters for hugs and photos. Vedder gathered the crowd for a champagne toast - and then, joined by the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines, grabbed a guitar and sang Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."

It was the end of a nearly two-decade nightmare for the West Memphis Three - Echols, Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. - who as teens were convicted of killing three eight-year-old Cub Scouts, whose bodies were found in an Arkansas creek in 1993. Misskelley, diagnosed as mentally disabled, confessed to the murders during a questionable 12-hour interrogation, and the trials regularly disregarded evidence in the teens' favor. Instead, prosecutors focused on their outcast reputations

Lady Gaga was "really devastated" to learn of Amy Winehouse's death on July 23rd, she told Rolling Stone on Sunday while taking a break from recording a jazz duet of "The Lady is a Tramp" with Tony Bennett at a New York studio.
 
"It really affected me quite deeply," she said. "Isn't it strange to say 'She is,' and now I have to say 'She was?' I'm just really glad that we got to admire her and tell her how much we loved her when she was alive. I hope she knows now in Heaven, where she is, how much we all loved her."

Bennett was the last to record with Winehouse, a duet of the 1930 classic "Body and Soul" in March at Abbey Road Studios in London. It will appear on his upcoming Duets II LP, out September 20th. "Everybody was apprehensive as to how it was going to go," he said. "But she was really the best of all the young artists that I met in the current scene in the last 10 or 15 years. She was really singing true jazz. It's just too tragic. I wanted to talk to her and tell her that if

Last summer, Gregg Allman was confined to his Savannah home, recovering from a transplant that became immediately necessary after his doctor found cancer on his liver. "It's a painful thing," he told Rolling Stone last night at the Beacon Theatre, where the Allman Brothers Band played a rare, off-tour, three-hour show. "While I was healing, I kept wondering what it's going to be like a year from now."

Last night, one year and one month later, he got his answer - with help from friends Natalie Cole (who slayed "Whipping Post") David Crosby and Graham Nash (who lent their timeless harmonies to several of their classics and rarities), and Phil Lesh (who jammed with the band on a string of Grateful Dead classics). It was that kind of night.

Photos: Allman Brothers and Friends Rock New York

The show was a benefit for Tune in to Hep C, a campaign to raise awareness about the virus, which Allman (who believes he contracted it at a tattoo parlor in his twenties), Lesh (who had a liver

Coheed and Cambria bassist Michael Todd was arraigned yesterday in Massachusetts on charges of armed robbery and drug possession after police say he robbed a Walgreens pharmacy on Sunday, hours before his band was set to open for Soundgarden at Mansfield's Comcast Center.

The Boston Globe has new details on the robbery. When the pharmacist told Todd she didn't have any OxyContin, he allegedly responded, "I'll take your Perc 30s,'' 30-milligram pills of Percocet. She gave him several bottles of oxycodone, the main ingredient in OxyContin.

Soon after he fled, four police officers arrived at Walgreens and interviewed the pharmacist. A police officer noticed a fresh path on the grass behind the building; a witness told police they saw someone running, and then jumping into a brown minivan taxi. Police discovered the name of the taxi company, which directed police to Todd's tour bus at the Comcast Center, where he was arrested. At his arraignment, the judge raised his bail from $10,000 to

"Everything seems to be dialed in right now," Phish front man Trey Anastasio told Rolling Stone while on the road with the band. They're currently on a massive summer tour, and they're having a blast: At a recent gig, they lost themselves in a blissful 25-minute spin through 1994's "Down with Disease," and have been breaking out stellar covers of Beatles, Stones and Zeppelin songs (on Sunday, they paid tribute to E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road"). We spoke to Anastasio shortly after the tour kicked off about the band's three-day Super Ball IX festival, which starts July 1st in Watkins Glen, New York; his love of the band Beach House; and Phish's next studio album.

How does it feel to be onstage again after the break? 
It feels great. The sound onstage is killer, partially due to some fine-tuning we've been doing over the last two tours, and partially due to this badass new sound system we broke out in Bethel. I always try to listen to

The Strokes aren't taking much time off after the April release of their fourth album Angles and subsequent festival dates. According to bassist Nikolai Fraiture, the band are planning "a very long tour this fall," while also working on a follow-up to Angles. "We're trying not to lose momentum by taking time off and then having to reboot the whole system," Fraiture tells Rolling Stone. "Hopefully, we keep that up."

Guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. says it's likely that the band will tour the U.S. after summer dates overseas. "You're wondering about America, as are we," says Hammond. "It seems like something is lining itself up, but it's hard to tell right now what exactly we're going to do. We all want to do it, so we're gonna find a way." The band currently has two late-summer shows already scheduled, playing Pearl Jam's 20th anniversary concerts at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, WI September 3rd and 4th.

Exclusive Video: Elvis Costello Joins the Strokes On Stage

Fans last

At 10:30 p.m. last night, Sleigh Bells arrived onstage at Bonnaroo - the epic four-day musical festival in Manchester, Tennessee that kicked off yesterday - to the blaring riff of "Iron Man" in front of a wall of Marshall amps. Frontwoman Alexis Krauss extended her arms to the crowd while strobe lights flashed, and the band kicked into "Crown on the Ground," with its thudding, hand-clapping beat, fuzzed-out guitar and a synth that sounds like a siren. It was clear: Bonnaroo has officially begun.

The Brooklyn duo -Krauss and guitarist Derek Miller - were a perfect group to help launch the festival, whose 10th anniversary is this year. Thousands of festivalgoers who had just endured long drives and tent setups were eager to let loose, dancing as Miller unleashed earsplitting guitar riffs and Krauss wailed intensely in a Sleigh Bells basketball jersey. Their hit song "Tell 'Em" was a raucous, machine gun blaze of rhythm while "Infinity Guitars" lived up to its title (even though there was

Click to listen to Foster the People's Torches

Los Angeles trio Foster the People - led by commercial-jingle writer Mark Foster, 27 - have been together for less than two years, but they've already scored a Top 10 album. Thanks to the hypercatchy hit "Pumped Up Kicks" - which has sold 300,000 copies and scored more than three million YouTube views - their first LP, Torches, debuted at Number Eight on the album charts last month. "It's one of those perfect storm type situations," says Foster. "The song just resonated with people."

Pump You Up: "Pumped Up Kicks" mixes sunny harmonies and a throbbing dance beat with chilling lyrics about a school shooting. When Foster cut the song, he thought he was just making a demo - but that version, in which Foster plays all the instruments, ended up on Torches. "I was trying to get inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid," says Foster. "It's a 'f**k you' song to the hipsters in a way - but it's a song the hipsters are going to want to dance