U2 had a very successful year on the road, and have been named as 2009’s most popular touring act. The band’s 360° tour brought in $123 million, according to data released by Pollstar on Wednesday. U2 brought the 360° world tour to the U.S. in September to promote their latest release, No Line on the Horizon. They played to 1.3 million people at 20 North American shows, and charged an average of $93.77 per ticket.
U2 had a very successful year on the road, and have been named as 2009’s most popular touring act. The band’s 360° tour brought in $123 million, according to data released by Pollstar on Wednesday.
U2 brought the 360° world tour to the U.S. in September to promote their latest release, No Line on the Horizon. They played to 1.3 million people at 20 North American shows, and charged an average of $93.77 per ticket.
The tour was the fifth most successful tour ever held in North America, according to the BBC. The Rolling Stones currently hold the record for a 2005 tour that made $162 million.
John Mellencamp’s musical theater collaboration with Stephen King, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, is putting together a cast in preparation for its debut in September.
Some of the stars who have been cast in the production include Kris Kristofferson, Rosanne Cash, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Neko Case and boxer Joe Frazier, according to Fire Wire.
Mellencamp and King have been working on the musical – which Mellancamp says “centers on the deaths in 1957 of two brothers and a young girl and the legend that grows out of the tragedy” – since 2000.
“What has happened is that the father had two older brothers who hated each other and killed each other in that cabin,” the singer said, according to Consequence of Sound. “There’s a confederacy of ghosts who also live in this house. The older [dead] brothers are there, and they speak to the audience, and they sing to the audience.”
The soundtrack for the musical was produced by T-Bone Burnett and will be available as a three-disc package. One disc will contain only songs, and the other two will include the entire production of the spoken script and songs performed by the cast.
Ghost Brothers of Darkland County is scheduled to premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in September 2010. The soundtrack will be released before the debut.
Rolling Stone has compiled this list of albums chosen by more than 100 artists, critics, and industry insiders. Do you agree?
Albums of the Decade
1 | Radiohead: Kid A
2 | The Strokes: Is This It
3 | Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
4 | Jay-Z: The Blueprint
5 | The White Stripes: Elephant
6 | Arcade Fire: Funeral
7 | Eminem: The Marshal Mathers LP
8 | Bob Dylan: Modern Times
9 | M.I.A.: Kala
10 | Kanye West: The College Dropout
11 | Bob Dylan: Love and Theft
12 | LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver
13 | U2: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
14 | Jay-Z: The Black Album
15 | Bruce Springsteen: The Rising
16 | OutKast: Stankonia
17 | Beck: Sea Change
18 | MGMT: Oracular Spectacular
19 | Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
20 | The White Stripes: White Blood Cells
21 | Coldplay: A Rush of Blood to the Head
22 | Green Day: American Idiot
23 | D’Angelo: Voodoo
24 | Bruce Springsteen: Magic
25 | Radiohead: Amnesiac
26 | Cat Power: The Greatest
27 | The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
28 | Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell
29 | Sigur Rós: Ágaetis Byrjun
30 | Radiohead: In Rainbows
31 | My Morning Jacket: Z
32 | Lil Wayne: Tha Carter III
33 | Daft Punk: Discovery
34 | OutKast: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
35 | PJ Harvey: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
36 | U2: No Line on the Horizon
37 | 50 Cent: Get Rich or Die Tryin’
38 | Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker
39 | Kings of Leon: Aha Shake Heartbreak
40 | Kanye West: Late Registration
41 | Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
42 | Elliott Smith: Figure 8
43 | The Killers: Hot Fuss
44 | System of a Down: Toxicity
45 | Kanye West: Graduation
46 | Justin Timberlake: FutureSex/LoveSounds
47 | Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
48 | TV on the Radio: Dear Science
49 | Fiona Apple: Extraordionary Machine
50 | Bright Eyes: I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
51 | Spoon: Kill the Moonlight
52 | M.I.A.: Arular
53 | Kings of Leon: Only By the Night
54 | Norah Jones: Come Away With Me
55 | Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: Raising Sand
56 | Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
57 | Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism
58 | Danger Mouse: The Grey Album
59 | Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights
60 | Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
61 | The Shins: Oh, Inverted World
62 | Johnny Cash: American III: Solitary Man
63 | Kanye West: 808s and Heartbreak
64 | Gillian Welch: Time the Revelator
65 | Manu Chao: Próxima Estación Esperanza
66 | Antony & the Johnsons: I Am a Bird Now
67 | Björk: Vespertine
68 | U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
69 | Missy Elliott: Under Construction
70 | Sleater-Kinney: The Woods
71 | Bright Eyes: Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Eart to the Ground
72 | Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand
73 | Coldplay: Parachutes
74 | Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium
75 | Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
76 | Sigur Rós: ()
77 | Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
78 | Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
79 | The New Pornographers: Electric Version
80 | Kings of Leon: Youth and Young Manhood
81 | Ryan Adams: Gold
82 | Queens of the Stone Age: Rated R
83 | The Black Keys: Attack & Release
84 | Eminem: The Eminem Show
85 | Coldplay: Viva La Vida
86 | The Postal Service: Give Up
87 | Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere
88 | Brian Wilson: Smile
89 | Radiohead: Hail to the Thief
90 | Amadou & Miriam: Dimanche a Bamako
91 | The Hives: Veni Vidi Vicious
92 | Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
93 | Johnny Cash: Unearthed
94 | The Libertines: Up the Brackett
95 | Alicia Keys: Songs in A Minor
96 | The Streets: Original Pirate Material
97 | Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
98 | TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
99 | The Hold Steady: Almost Killed Me
100 | Leonard Cohen: 10 New Songs
The results are in! Transformers: The Revenge of the Fallen is the #1 Box Office Hit of 2009. Even though Avatar just opened on 12/18, it made it all the way up to #7 for the year. This weekend’s Top 5 were: #1 Avatar with $75,000,000, #2 Sherlock Holmes with $65,380,000, #3 Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel with $50,200,000, #4 It’s Complicated with $22,114,000, and #5 Up in the Air with $11,755,000. View Avatar photos
Every airline traveler has a horror-story of being held captive in Coach awaiting departure. Some are 15 minutes late, some spend hours. My personal horror story involves 8 hours of my life that I will never get back waiting at the gate in Chicago as they seemed to rebuild the entire plane.
Well, he might not be able to get us universal health care, but President Obama will be damned if us Americans have to wait on the tarmac. The Transportation Department ordered new 3-hour restrictions enforced on all domestic airlines where they have to either take-off or return to the gate.
Of course, a three hour wait on Air Force One is probably a little nicer than the middle seat between this guy and McScreams-A-Lot.
Front page of ChicagoTribune.com right now focusses on the weather… primarily on how much it will suck the next couple days.
Apparently this morning’s rush-hour snow was just a “taste” of what Mother Nature has up her sleeve as the Holiday week continues. Starting midday Wednesday, Chicago will be hit by storm system boasting “every kind of bad weather”. Sleet, freezing rain, snow, locusts… Chicago will see it all as we attempt to be ‘jolly’.
Tonight, we’re looking at as much as 3 inches of the white stuff. Thursday, expect rain. And when you’re packing up the car to head to Grandma’s on Friday, expect uber-cold temps changing to snow as the sun goes down. Talk about awesome!
We just hope Santa doesn’t experience the same delays you’re sure to see at Midway and O’Hare over the next couple days.
Maybe there was something to that whole Y2K panic after all.
There were warnings our wired world would crash the moment we flipped from 1999 to 2000. “It didn’t happen at the stroke of midnight, as the Y2K alarmists feared,” Alan Murray noted in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. But soon after “the millennium turned, reality set in,” he said.
The market plunged when the Internet bubble burst in early 2000, and this ended up being the worst decade ever for U.S. stocks. In 2001, there was 9/11, followed by two wars, recession, corruption, scandal, natural and man-made disasters, political polarization and the proliferation of reality TV. As Michael Hirschorn portrayed it in “The 00’s Issue” of New York Magazine, this was a decade in which it seemed no one was in charge — when the bottom fell out of just about everything. Or, as the cover of Time magazine described it: The Decade From Hell.
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll quantified the general sense of gloom about the ’00s. Nearly 6 in 10 people surveyed said the decade was either “awful” or “not so good.” Only 12 percent rated it “good” or “great.” The rest picked “fair.”
Three-quarters said economic prosperity declined, and two-thirds said America lost ground on moral values during the decade.
A Pew Research poll came up with similar results — and didn’t find a whole lot of nostalgia for recent decades, either.
There were a few bright spots in the NBC/WSJ survey. Nearly half of those polled said we’ve made advances in science and technology. Take the Internet, for example. In 2000, high-speed access was a rarity. Now, it’s the norm. AOL itself went through revolutionary changes. Sphere is the next generation of AOL News, debuting just in time for the end of the decade.
But is this really the end? After a decade marked by discord, people can’t even agree on when it’s over. One camp says it’s the end of this year. The other insists it’s not until Dec. 31, 2010. If that’s true, it could mean another year like the ones we’ve just lived through. (Not to mention another round of wacky “decade lists.”)
Judging from the poll results, most of us can do without one more year of the ’00s.
Artist Info
Band: Blondie
Origin: New York, NY
Top Songs: In the Flesh, Heart of Glass, One Way or Another, Call Me, Rapture
Genre: New Wave, Pop Rock, Punk Rock, Disco Music
Years Active: 1976–1982, 1997–present
Current Members: Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, Clem Burke, Leigh Foxx, Paul Carbonara, Matt Katz-Bohen, Jimmy Destri
Website: http://www.blondie.net/index.php
Band Bio:
Blondie was the most commercially successful band to emerge from the much-vaunted punk/new wave movement of the late ’70s. The group was formed in New York City in August 1974 by singer Deborah Harry (b. July 1, 1945, Miami), formerly of Wind in the Willows, and guitarist Chris Stein (b. January 5, 1950, Brooklyn) out of the remnants of Harry’s previous group, the Stilettos. The lineup fluctuated over the next year. Drummer Clement Burke (b. November 24, 1955, New York) joined in May 1975. Bassist Gary Valentine joined in August. In October, keyboard player James Destri (b. April 13, 1954) joined, to complete the initial permanent lineup. They released their first album, Blondie, on Private Stock Records in December 1976. In July 1977, Valentine was replaced by Frank Infante.
In August, Chrysalis Records bought their contract from Private Stock and in October reissued Blondie and released the second album, Plastic Letters. Blondie expanded to a sextet in November with the addition of bassist Nigel Harrison (born in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, England), as Infante switched to guitar. Blondie broke commercially in the U.K. in March 1978, when their cover of Randy and the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise,” renamed “Denis,” became a Top Ten hit, as did Plastic Letters, followed by a second U.K. Top Ten, “(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear.” Blondie turned to U.K. producer/songwriter Mike Chapman for their third album, Parallel Lines, which was released in September 1978 and eventually broke them worldwide. “Picture This” became a U.K. Top 40 hit, and “Hanging on the Telephone” made the U.K. Top Ten, but it was the album’s third single, the disco-influenced “Heart of Glass,” that took Blondie to number one in both the U.K. and the U.S. “Sunday Girl” hit number one in the U.K. in May, and “One Way or Another” hit the U.S. Top 40 in August. Blondie followed with their fourth album, Eat to the Beat, in October. Its first single, “Dreaming,” went Top Ten in the U.K., Top 40 in the U.S. The second U.K. single, “Union City Blue,” went Top 40. In March 1980, the third U.K. single from Eat to the Beat, “Atomic,” became the group’s third British number one. (It later made the U.S. Top 40.)
Meanwhile, Harry was collaborating with German disco producer Giorgio Moroder on “Call Me,” the theme from the movie American Gigolo. It became Blondie’s second transatlantic chart-topper. Blondie’s fifth album, Autoamerican, was released in November 1980, and its first single was the reggae-ish tune “The Tide Is High,” which went to number one in the U.S. and U.K. The second single was the rap-oriented “Rapture,” which topped the U.S. pop charts and went Top Ten in the U.K. But the band’s eclectic style reflected a diminished participation by its members — Infante sued, charging that he wasn’t being used on the records, though he settled and stayed in the lineup. But in 1981, the members of Blondie worked on individual projects, notably Harry’s gold-selling solo album, KooKoo. The Best of Blondie was released in the fall of the year. The Hunter, Blondie’s sixth album, was released in May 1982, preceded by the single “Island of Lost Souls,” a Top 40 hit in the U.S. and U.K. “War Child” also became a Top 40 hit in the U.K., but The Hunter was a commercial disappointment.
At the same time, Stein became seriously ill with the genetic disease pemphigus. As a result, Blondie broke up in October 1982, with Deborah Harry launching a part-time solo career while caring for Stein, who eventually recovered. In 1998, the original lineup of Harry, Stein, Destri, and Burke reunited to tour Europe, their first series of dates in 16 years; a new LP, No Exit, followed early the next year. After more touring, this was followed by another studio set, The Curse of Blondie, in 2003, and a DVD of the Live by Request program from A&E was released in 2004. In 2006, Blondie celebrated their 30th anniversary with induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the release of Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision, a best-of collection that contained all their classic videos as well. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
