New mega-festival hears rock history – Solange earns first No. 1

This news has been read 5034 times!

INDIO, United States, Oct 10, (Agencies): The Desert Trip mega-festival of rock greats is meant to be historic and Paul McCartney on Saturday served as a willing instructor, presenting a musical journey from pre-Beatles fare to hip-hop collaboration.

Tearing through a three-dozen song set that enraptured a 75,000-strong crowd in the California desert, McCartney welcomed to the stage fellow rock elder Neil Young — the day’s other performer — for a mash-up that built into the anthem “Give Peace a Chance.”

Desert Trip, forecast to be the most lucrative music festival in history, is bringing together six of the biggest names in rock over back-to-back weekends with identical lineups.

The festival opened Friday with the Rolling Stones who, in their signature blues rock style, played an unexpected cover of “Come Together” by The Beatles — the fellow British rock superstars often viewed as the Stones’ rivals.

The former Beatle returned the favor a day later by performing the early Stones single “I Wanna Be Your Man” — which was written by McCartney and John Lennon.

The still lissome 74-year-old turned his set into a retrospective, reaching back to 1958’s “In Spite of All the Danger,” an early and often forgotten song by The Beatles’ early incarnation, The Quarrymen.

Collaboration

McCartney — whose audience appeared younger than the Stones’ baby boomer-dominated crowd on Friday — quickly swung back to the present. He summoned his raspiest voice for “FourFiveSeconds,” his 2015 collaboration with rap and R&B mega-stars Kanye West and Rihanna.

The ex-Beatle also paid tribute to his late bandmates Lennon and George Harrison. For Harrison, he played the deceased songwriter’s “Something” off the “Abbey Road” album — on ukulele, with McCartney trying twice after finding the instrument out-of-tune.

“At least it proves we’re live, right?” he said.

McCartney said he still heard nervousness in his own voice in the recording of The Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” and dedicated the song to producer George Martin, who died in March.

“It was George who signed us to a record contract, so without him there wouldn’t be any Beatle recordings,” McCartney said. “So we love him and we thank him.”

McCartney brought out a fireworks show and perilous-looking on-stage pyrotechnics for “Live and Let Die,” reinforcing the spirit of celebration at the festival.

Young, playing his own set before McCartney, put on a more politically engaging show as the folk rocker pressed his environmental activism.

A banner on an Indian teepee set up on stage read “Water Is Life” — a pertinent message for a festival taking place in a parched but populous desert — and Young played before a backdrop of an oversized bag of seeds labeled as local and organic.

Young, a staunch critic of genetic modification, brought environmental questions symbolically to stage, with actors planting seeds and later dressed in protective gear as if cleaning chemical or nuclear waste.

Casting the aura of a folk rock church service, Young performed triple duty on organ, harmonica and vocals for “Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)” as he asks the planet in hs powerful yet warbling voice, “How long can you give and not receive?”

Jamming

But Young showed that his appeal extends beyond political allies as he put on a musical tour de force, with marathon jamming alongside his band Promise of the Real and hard-driving guitar solos on his signature hits “Down by the River” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Young, who earlier denounced Donald Trump for playing “Rockin’ in the Free World” at campaign events, said that the sex scandal-plagued Republican candidate had a new campaign theme in Young’s song “Welfare Mothers,” with its ironic refrain, “Welfare mothers make better lovers.”

Roger Waters made his feelings about Donald Trump and Israel abundantly clear during a politically-charged performance at the Desert Trip music festival Sunday night.

The 73-year-old singer-songwriter also denounced war and addressed the Black Lives Matter movement in his 2-1/2-hour set that closed out the three-day classic rock concert in Indio, California.

Waters blasted the Republican presidential candidate in music and images. Trump’s face appeared on the massive video screen above the stage with the word “Charade” across it as Waters performed the Pink Floyd song “Pigs (Three Different Ones).” Subsequent images showed Trump wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood.

Waters followed up with “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” during which 15 school-age children came onstage wearing T-shirts that read, “Derriba el muro” — Spanish for “Take down the wall.”

Also:

NEW YORK: Solange, the funk singer who has long endured comparisons with superstar sister Beyonce, on Sunday earned her first number-one album with an innovative and introspective work she surprise-released.

“A Seat at the Table,” in which Solange examines both the role of African American women and her own despair, debuted at number one on the US Billboard album chart for the week through Thursday, tracking service Nielsen Music said.

“A Seat at the Table” is Solange’s first full-length album since 2008, and she said she spent years working on it, starting with extended sessions in which she would experiment to bases of sound effects.

The 30-year-old singer is believed to have a warm relationship with her older sister but has resented the constant comparisons, saying she is pursuing her own path.

Solange has infused her music with electronica, psychedelica and dark New Wave and has been a frequent performer at alternative rock-dominated festivals.

“A Seat at the Table” is interspersed with spoken word, including a snippet in which her father Matthew Knowles recalls his anger at being roughed up by police and the Ku Klux Klan as a child.

Solange segues into “Mad,” a track featuring rapper Lil Wayne that reflects on African Americans’ struggles when faced with accusations that they are too angry.

Solange explores her self-doubts on “Cranes in the Sky,” in which she explains how she turned to drinking, shopping and other vices in her quest to heal inner wounds.

The singer found a unique way to announce “A Seat at the Table” — she mailed a hardcover book with the lyrics to 86 fans picked off her website, releasing the album four days later on Sept 30.

Beyonce is also a master of surprise releases, with her latest blockbuster album “Lemonade” paired with a made-for-television movie.

“A Seat at the Table” sold 72,000 copies or the equivalent in downloads and streaming during the week, Nielsen Music said.

It edged out by just 1,000 copies a more anticipated release — Bon Iver’s “22, A Million.”

Best known for sorrowful folk rock, Bon Iver went in a more oblique and complicated direction with its latest album, which is filled with synthesized loops and symbolic messaging that reflects on the nature of the universe.

Bon Iver previewed the album — whose titles all cryptically involve numbers — in July at the Eaux Claires festival run by frontman Justin Vernon in his native Wisconsin.

This news has been read 5034 times!