Ronnie Wood Revisits His Lost Sixties Tour Diary

Before Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones in 1975, he made his name as an ace guitarist with the Faces and the Jeff Beck Group – and before that, as a teenager in West London, he played in a bluesy group called the Birds. Wood, 68, recently discovered his personal road notes from a 1965 tour with that band. “It’s the diary of a 17-year-old rock & roller,” he says. “It was leather-bound, with gold edging to the pages, and I used to keep it quite diligently. I’d forgotten all the details!” Wood fleshed out the diary – which features cameos from Eric Clapton, the Who, and more – with new reminiscences and illustrations for a book, How Can It Be? (available now in a signed, limited edition of 1,965 copies, with a wider release due this fall).

Check out the interview at RollingStone.com!

First new Stones album in a decade may be coming.

The longest stretch of their career without releasing a new studio album may be coming to end. Keith Richards has said he is ready, and the band may be headed to the studio. They’re possibly planning South American shows to follow their current 15-date trek across North America on the Zip Code Tour which is underway now.

Despite several reissues containing “new” material, and a few songs cut for greatest hits packages, there hasn’t been a new Stones album since 2005’s A Bigger Bang. As a HUGE Stones fan, I liked Bigger Bang quite a bit, and would love to hear another full studio record by The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.

Get more from Keith Richards at radio.com

Inside The Rolling Stones ZipCode Tour.

The setlist is definitely heavier on the Hot Rocks than it is the deep album cuts, but when you’re playing stadiums I suppose you have to expect a lot of people to be there for the first time. Plus, when it’s the Stones, it’ll be good no matter how deep or shallow they dig into their 50-year catalog.

I’m catching this tour when it hits Pittsburgh in a couple of weeks at Heinz Field. It

ll be my 8th Stones show, and we’ll have three generations of fans in attendance with my 9 year-old son seeing his first.

For an in-depth look at the ZipCode tour click to Rolling Stone Magazine.

AC/DC threaten legal action against brokers selling tickets that don’t yet exist? Angus!

My how the times have changed. Having recently gone through the hassle of buying concert tickets to 2 major stadium tours this Summer, I discovered just how convoluted the whole process has become, and also how shady it now is to try to score good seats to a big show.

My history of buying tickets is fairly limited. I spent years with free tickets to many shows, and my experience with buying premium seats was somewhat limited. However, those limited experiences were quite successful without ever paying outrageous prices to get seats from a sleazy broker.

Basically, I never had to find this guy at the mall to score Blue Oyster Cult tickets. Damone is selling tickets all over the net now.

Less than 20 years ago I was able to land front row tickets to the HORDE Festival by sending a money order and self-addressed stamped envelope to Blues Traveler and then waiting and hoping I’d get tickets in my envelope and not my money order returned. Sat front row for a full day of well-known acts for about $25. As recently as 1997 I scored seats in the 13th row to a Rolling Stones concert at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia for about $50 simply by switching the long distance on my home phone to Sprint, who was sponsoring the tour. That was the beginning of the end for fans getting equal treatment in the concert ticket game. The internet was in every home and it’s where all the tickets were sold.

Enter 2015, and the brokers have already taken over. Not only are they selling premium seats for thousands of dollars, but they’re selling those seats before the show has even been announced. Rock legends AC/DC are in the midst of their Rock or Bust Tour, covering parts of Europe, Canada, the United States, and their home turf in Australia and New Zealand. The promoter of an upcoming AC/DC show in Auckland, New Zealand is threatening legal action against ticket reseller Viagogo (a rough equivalent to StubHub and similar broker sites), sending them a cease and desist, for offering tickets on their site before the tickets even exist. Viagogo claims it’s due to pre-allocation programs (what that actually entails is a mystery), and says it’s all perfectly legal. But is it fair? Can anything be done to change it? Remember Pearl Jam’s attempt at a boycott of Ticketmaster? Noble? Yes. Effective? Nah. Nothing changed in the Ticketmaster monopoly on the ticket business. Will AC/DC’s threat make a difference? Maybe, but it’ll be awhile to see any change.

But even when going through legit (or close to legit) sources like Ticketmaster, you’ll have to figure out when the pre-sales are, which pre-sale you can use, which pre-sale actually gives you a shot at good seats and not a block of seats in a urinal or behind a wall with no view that a small-time sponsor might get for their “Exclusive luxury super premium pre-sale seats”. While buying AC/DC tickets in February (for a show at the end of August), it was relatively pain-free, but still pricey, to score some floor seats at Met Life Stadium in the Meadowlands. However buying Rolling Stones tickets was like an obstacle course. Four different pre-sales with different start dates and different passwords, followed by special packages with names like Diamond, Sapphire, Ruby, Emerald, etc. Am I supposed to know the order of preciousness of these gems to decode if I want to spend $2,800 on a ticket or $3,100 for a ticket, and do I want a special tour laminate or am I good with just the special limited edition lithograph? Actually, all I wanted was a decent ticket. Which I got for a much higher price than 15 years ago for a much LESS desired seat. The confusion is actually a nice tactic to make me forget about how lucky I’m gonna feel when I can buy some decent seats for a hand and a foot instead of an arm and a leg.

Put Fans First, a UK movement that has the support of rockers like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden is making some headway in changing the laws in the UK regarding the reselling of tickets, but again, the effectiveness of these campaigns remains to be seen. The bands and management involved in the biggest tours have to be more pro-active in the process. I understand that if someone is going to pay $3000 for a ticket to see The Stones, then The Stones should get the cash instead of the Cyber Damones of the world. The problem is that now the bands price 99% of their fans out of the best seats by selling the $3000″Diamond Package” themselves instead of selling it for $150 to a broker who will make the $2,850 profit.

Is there a solution to it? Probably not, unless they want to reserve a few rows up front and let the hardcore fans send in some money orders and pray to the rock Gods they get those coveted seats, just like bands such as The Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, and even The Stones themselves did back in the day. Wayyyyy back…in the 90’s.

More details on AC/DC’s legal threats at Classic Rock.

Two cheap end tables become a Music Geek’s dream vinyl cabinet!

Kicking off the blog with an upcycling project for the Music Geek in me.

I found these 2 old (but hardly antique) end tables on one of those Facebook “Meet me at Walmart and buy my crap” pages. I was lucky to even see them, and the person just wanted them gone and sold them for $10 total. I had no idea what I would do with them, but I knew I could do SOMETHING with them. So I stared at them for a week or so. Double-decker cat beds for my furballs Tuxedo and Rigby? Meh.

Then I realized they held vinyl perfectly. Vinyl, AKA records, for all the kids out there. Before your evil MP3 player came along, the old folks jammed out to their golden oldies on vinyl. Not that I’m QUITE that old. I’m from the CD generation, but my appreciation of music makes me one of those guys who use to sift through old vinyl at every record store and flea market I could get to.

Anyway, here is what I started with.

Like i said. Old, but hardly antique. Badly in need of some paint, or new stain, or ANYTHING other than that old laminate.

Now, how to geek it out? For me The Rolling Stones cast a shadow over all other music. You can disagree, that’s just my personal taste. However, I like pretty much every kind of music, so long as I find it good. No science to it. so I hit the web and started looking for Stones photos, and good scans of their album covers. I also started grabbing scans of other albums as I went, thinking I might use the others for this project somehow.

I sat and worked out a fairly massive collage in Photoshop, and broke it up into pieces that would fit to print on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper.That’s all it is. Plain old paper. It’s laser-jet prints simply put down like stickers using Mod Podge (the miracle product), sealed with more Mod Podge after they’re applied, and a bunch of poly. After the pieces were down, I put the tongue on separately. I actually messed the tongue up quite a bit, so after I dried I just put another one down on top of it, and it looked perfect. It actually made it pop out a bit (3D effect mannnnnnnn), as it was three sheets of paper for the tongue instead of one, so it was a mistake that improved it. Being a fan, the collage was a lot of fun (though also a lot of work). Turned out nice.

All laid out, before correcting a few mistakes (like the small tear on the tongue).

I really loved how the top turned out, and decided I wanted to do a collage of other famous album covers wrapped around the tables done the same way. However, after I had put together a collection of about 300 albums, I realized a collage of all of these photos would be a hideous mess of hot chaos. So I did the math, and realized I could do two “grids” of covers that would cover each table, with 144 album covers on each one. So i had to painfully, and geekily, cut the fat and came up with 288 albums that I would make these wraps with. It was fun for this geek to tediously put these together trying to spread any colors or specific artists around in the most specifically non-random (is that an oxymoron) arrangement possible. They turned out well. Kinda like the greatest wall paper of all time. My tastes are all over, so you get Howlin’ Wolf and BB King to Motorhead and Frank Zappa. From Ray Charles and Miles Davis to Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and NWA. Straight Outta Compton!!!!

Each cover is 2″x2″, and the extra space at the bottom was filled with a keyboard I found. I cut it into chunks that would fit onto standard 8.5×11  printer paper. It’s kind of a pain to cut them all and get them as close to perfect as possible, but a little roughness here and there was fine, as it matched the spirit of an old record collection.

I painted all the trim, doors, and spots I thought might be visible after they’re stacked and wrapped. Black made everything really pop. After putting on all the 8×8 pieces as straight as I could get them, I slathered on a lot of Mod Podge and let it dry, then I put 5 or 6 coats of poly, allowing it to dry between coats. I may put more coats on, but it will be for the look, and not because more are needed. I also considered using some leftover epoxy resin I have on the top of this, but I don’t think I want to do it.

The wraps turned out great!

I considered a few thins for the 4 door panels on the tables (only 2 of them actually opened). But I ended up deciding to come up with a mic, guitar, bass, and drum graphic for the doors. I also considered doing the outside of the door panels with an amplifier graphic, but decided it would work the way I wanted. So I just painted the door panels black, and it all turned out exactly as I envisioned. That doesn’t happen with enough projects, even when they turn out great.