You know the 4th is just around the corner when you see the TNT Fireworks stands popping up in the neighborhood.  Legal fireworks are NOW on sale..until July 4th.  What’s cool about the TNT Fireworks stands, is that they’re great fund-raisers for so many local groups in our community–helping everything from Little League teams, to school band programs.  This year, TNT has introduced a number of new products…with my personal favorite being Star Voyager. Combine that with Delirium, and you’ve got a tremendous grand finale for your neighborhood celebration!  Plus, TNT has a chance for ya to win a new truck, and free fireworks.  Find out more at www.tntfireworks.com.

If you are a fan of live theater, there is no better community theater than the B St. Theater right here in Sacramento. I love this theater. It’s small and in the round. You are only a few feet from the actors during the performance and I find that fact alone, worth the experience. To be that close to actors who are great at their craft is fascinating to watch. The play I saw this week was called “Collapse”. It is brilliant. The production is so original, the acting superb and the story is amazing. Collapse is a contemporary play by Allison Moore, who has a personal stake in the plot. The four actors in this production are Jason Kuykendall, Elisabeth Nunziato(amazing actress), Amy Resnick and Adrian Roberts. Again, I just love being this close to these people and see them really sell these characters. I got swept away, and that’s what good theater can do. Especially satisfying because of the intimacy of this little venue. Soon, the B St. Theater will be moving to bigger digs. I hope they maintain the up close feeling that we have now. Better go see this excellent play soon, while it’s still the “little” experience that it is now. It runs through July 24th. You can call them at 916-443-5300.

Download the gorgeous new Lindsey Buckingham track “Seeds We Sow” from the forthcoming album, out 9/6.

We’re inundated with information about healthy eating… better nutrition, low sodium and fat free choices… Okay, we get it.   Still, many of us have a fascination with this Fourth of July tradition… Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.  Yeah, it’s overindulgence to the max, and I can’t explain why I’m drawn to this “quease-fest” each year.    World Champion Joey “Jaws” Chestnut ate 54 hot dogs in ten minutes last year, and he’ll return to defend his crown.  But the superstar eater  (competing in the new Women’s Division this year) who always fascinates me is Sonya Thomas, known affectionately as The Black Widow.  The woman weighs 98 pounds!  Last fall she set a world record by eating 181 chicken wings in 12 minutes, besting Joey Chestnut.  She’s also the World Oyster Eating Champion, once downing 46 dozen oysters in 10 minutes.  I can’t even walk by a cheeseburger without gaining 4 pounds, but she can consume the contents of a buffet, smile about it and still look petite.   I tell you, life isn’t fair. 

dj0ser photo

By Andrew Vaughan

Special thanks to This DayinMusic.com.

Dave Davies, guitarist and songwriter for legendary British rock group The Kinks, suffered a severe stroke on this very day in 2004.

The former Kink had been playing concerts across Europe and was now was promoting a new album, Bug, throughout June and had just been interviewed by BBC radio presenters Phil Jupitus and Danny Baker when he fell ill.

He told the Daily Mail: “The morning had been hectic, crammed with interviews. I was already feeling stressed because I’d recently finished live dates in Europe and was now on a publicity tour.

“I’d just done a couple of BBC radio interviews and had stepped into a lift to leave. Suddenly the right-hand side of my body seized up and I couldn’t move my arm or leg. Although I didn’t lose consciousness, I couldn’t speak.”

Davies’ son Christian was with the rock star and he and the record company publicist carried Davies outside the studio and waited for an ambulance. Davies was taken immediately to hospital where doctors at the National Neurological Hospital in London realized he’d suffered a cerebral infarction, or more commonly, a stroke. Davies later explained that there was “an area of dead tissue and there was a patch of it on the left side of my brain, the bit that controls movement on the right side of my body.”

Doctors put the stroke down to Davies’ high blood pressure, typically a sign of a bad diet. But Davies had been a long-time practitioner of yoga and meditation and had eaten a healthy diet since his mid-20s. He thinks it was more to do with his younger years living the rock and roll lifestyle.

“Today, my intuition tells me that all the amphetamines I used as a young man played a role in my stroke,” he said. “You can’t abuse your body for so many years and not expect it to have an effect, although the doctors have never confirmed this.”

Initially Davies’ right side was completely paralyzed and his spokesman issued a concerned, but optimistic, statement: “He is paralyzed on the right-hand side of his body but he retains some feeling and he can still hold a guitar plectrum.”

Such was the nature of his stroke that Davies’ recovery was by no means guaranteed and involved a lengthy process of recuperation and rehab. After a couple of weeks, his son brought a guitar to the hospital. Davies remembers: “Two weeks after my ordeal, I finally plucked the courage to pick up my guitar. I held it across my lap, pressing on the strings. I could feel everything but the hand itself was virtually immobile.

“I knew I was going to have to work very hard if I was going to get better, and I started using meditation and visualization. I thought if I could visualize myself running, walking and playing the guitar, it might prompt my brain to remember how I used to be.”

With lengthy physiotherapy sessions, Dave Davies did indeed recover, but the incident completely derailed plans he and brother Ray had been discussing for a full-blown reunion for the 40th anniversary of The Kinks’ first #1 single, “You Really Got Me.”

Plenty of time to get ready for the 50^th, in 2014 then!

By Ted Drozdowski

Some things are indelibly associated with the state of Texas. Among them are the desert, cattle, the prairie, Lone Star Beer, George W. Bush, barbecue, cowboys, honky-tonks and ZZ Top.

Even the state government agrees with the latter. In February, the band were awarded the 2011 Texas Medal of Arts, an award that honors creative excellence and outstanding contributions in various disciplines, including music. The Texas legislature awarded the same honor Lone Star Beer, which is the official state brewski. But we digress.

Now the band’s totemic frontman, Billy F. Gibbons, has been proclaimed the Texas State Musician for 2012 by the Texas Commission on the Arts. The 61-year-old Houston native, whose first guitar was a 1962 Gibson Melody Maker he received on his 13th birthday, is a perfect choice for the honor. The career-defining tone he created with the 1959Les Paul Sunburst he dubbed “Pearly Gates” on ZZ Top’s early albums still sounds big as Texas, and his songs often namecheck cities, rivers, slang and other characteristics of the Lone Star State.

Although ZZ Top proclaimed itself “That Little Old Band from Texas” decades ago, here, in celebration and preparation for Gibbons’ upcoming stint as Texas’ official git-picker, is a rundown of the group’s 10 Most “Texas” Tunes:

10. “La Grange”
This ode to a den of ill repute in “that Texas town” presents one heavily bearded guitar player’s view of his home state’s old school frontier mentality. The song, from 1973’s Tres Hombres, is also the jewel in ZZ Top’s heavy boogie crown. “How, how, how, how.”

9. “1962 Gibson Melody Maker”
Geographically, this number’s plotline about bad girls, good times and a faded dream of Hollywood sits squarely in southwest Texas. It’s also got the kind of shimmering ambiguity that floats over hot stretches of rural Lone Star State highways in the dead of summer. Think of it as an aural mirage from ZZ Top’s First Album.

8. “Asleep in the Desert”
Gibbons’ instrumental blends electric and acoustic guitars to create images of midday cantinas and the stillness before afternoon gun fights. It’s a theme for a western movie that doesn’t exist, except in his imagination and within the tracks of 1976’s Tejas.

7. “Tush”
This big, brash breakthrough single with a ripping slide guitar break pushed 1975’s Fandango! up the charts and, according to the band’s Dusty Hill, immortalized the Dallas slang term for a woman’s backfield in motion.

6. “Arrested for Driving While Blind”
Okay, the story is universal, but the slow throb of Gibbons’ Gibson Les Paul and his lazy, slow squeezed solo evoke the pace of the Texas backcountry, where the sheriff could be hiding behind any pile of sagebrush. Is it too obvious to mention that Tejas, the title of the album that holds this pre-hangover gem, is Spanish for Texas?

5. “Heaven, Hell or Houston”
Hey, it’s not sunny all the time… not even in Texas. This story from the seamy underworld of Houston’s skid row is sliced into the seriously adventurous El Loco from 1981. Die-hard guitar fans hate this album, but Gibbons deserves credit for using electronics to push ZZ Top out of its comfort zone. Plus, there’s some epic six-string playing under the wall of effects – especially on this tune.

4. “Mescalero”
The title track from ZZ Top’s 2003 album is an exercise in rhyme and grime, packed with lyric non-sequiturs and juxtaposing images from the Wild West and custom car culture. “Mescalero” is the name of an Apache tribe that was once spread across west Texas that, while diminished in population, still keeps its traditions alive today.

3. “Broke Down on the Brazos”
Okay, so this isn’t really a ZZ Top track. But the tune’s a meeting of great musical minds – Gibbons and fellow Gibson Les Paul legend Warren Haynes – that opens Gov’t Mule’s 2009 album By a Thread. It’s a hard-bottom blues packed with six-string burn that evokes Texas as a sanctuary from troubles, with the name of the state’s longest river in its title.

2. “My Head’s in Mississippi”
“But I’m shuffling through the Texas sand,” Gibbons sings. And he means “shuffling” literally. This song, from 1990’s Recycler, is a stone shuffle with layers of grinding chords, nasty as a sand storm.

1. “Bar B-Q”
A pleading boogie blues about desire – for barbecue. Now that’s Texas. And for extra sauce, the song from 1972’s Rio Grande Mud is chock full of Gibbons’ signature false harmonics.

By Russell Hall

At the time of his death, John Lennon had largely moved beyond the radical spirit of his early years, his former personal assistant has revealed. As reported by Jam!Showbiz, Lennon assistant Fred Seaman says that, by 1980, Lennon enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

“John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan, because he was really sour on Jimmy Carter,” Seaman says in a new documentary titled Beatles Stories. “He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the ’70s at some sporting event. Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young [peace] demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that.”

Seaman went on to say Lennon retained his provocative nature, but that he was “a different person” in 1980 from the artist who wrote “Imagine.” “By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete,” Seaman said.

Brought to you by ThisDayinMusic.com

Born on this day:
1943, Florence Ballard, vocals, The Supremes
1951, Stanley Clarke, jazz bass player
1962, Julianne Regan, vocals, All About Eve
1979, Andrew Burrows, drummer, Razorlight

1966, The Beatles played the first of three concerts at the Nippon Budokan Hall, Japan. The concert was filmed with The Beatles wearing black suits. The following day’s first performance was also filmed; with The Beatles wearing white suits. There was a strict police presence with 3,000 police observing each concert played in front of 10,000 fans.

1973, George Harrison knocked Paul McCartney from the top of the US singles chart with “Give Me Love, Give Me Peace On Earth,” his second U.S. #1, a #8 hit in the U.K.

1975, The Jackson Five announced that they were leaving Motown Records for Epic Records. The brothers were forced to change their name to The Jacksons since Motown owned the other name.

1976, Stuart Goddard, (Adam Ant), placed the following ad in the classified section of the Melody Maker, “Beat on a bass, with the B-Sides.” Andy Warren answered the ad and the pair went on to form Adam and The Ants.

1977, Marvel Comics launched a comic book based on the rock group Kiss.

1978, United Artists released The Buzzcocks single “Love You More’,” at 1 minute 29 seconds it was the second shortest single ever released. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs 1960 hit “Stay’”was the shortest hit at one minute 28 seconds.

1984, Huey Lewis and the News went to #1 on the U.S. album chart with Sports.

1989, The Stone Roses played at Leeds Polytechnic in England. The gig almost didn’t take place after a security man wouldn’t let singer Ian Brown into the gig.

1995, American soul singer singer Phyllis Hyman committed suicide by overdosing on pentobarbital and secobarbital in her New York City apartment aged 45. She was found hours before she was scheduled to perform at the Apollo Theatre, in New York.

2001, American guitarist and producer Chet Atkins died in Nashville aged 77. Atkins recorded over 100 albums during his career, produced records for Perry Como, Elvis Presley, Don Gibson, Jim Reeves and Waylon Jennings and was a major influence on George Harrison and Mark Knopfler.

2004, Kinks founder member Dave Davies was left paralysed on the right-hand side of his body after suffering a stroke. The 57-year-old guitarist and brother of fellow Kinks star Ray Davies had been promoting his solo material when he collapsed.

By Anne Erickson

Former Van Halen bass player Michael Anthony seems to have found new life in the hard rock supergroup Chickenfoot; and if you ask Anthony, he’ll whole-heartedly proclaim Chickenfoot are “like how Van Halen was in the early days.”

“It’s four friends getting together and having a good time,” Anthony told Ultimate Classic Rock about the band, which includes his former Van Halen bandmate Sammy Hagar, as well as guitarist Joe Satriani and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. “I guess a lot of that has to do with, you know, we’ve all had our own careers and done really well. So, it’s not like we have anything to prove, and we don’t need to do it for the money, so we can do it just purely for the enjoyment of making music.”

He added that Van Halen’s ’04 reunion was more than a little uncomfortable because, “the way that turned out, Eddie didn’t want me on that tour anyway, because I was a ‘traitor,’ because I sided with and was jamming with Hagar…”

As for Chickenfoot’s sophomore album, the men hope to release the new single in July (“Why wait?”), adding the new tracks are “maybe a little darker” than the last release.

“I think we’ve really evolved as a band. The first CD, we just had so much fun jamming, we had some ideas and we put it together kind of quick, because everybody else had their schedules to keep,” he said. “Even though we actually kind of did it the same way this time, we were a lot more comfortable jamming with each other, and I think we dug a lot deeper. There’s a lot more meat to these new songs.”

He also promises Chickenfoot will tour this year, hopefully in the fall. Meanwhile, Van Halen are plugging away on their new album, and according to Alter Bridge’s Mark Tremonti, it rocks.

By Anne Erickson

Get ready for lots of “Sweet Emotion” on the new season of American Idol, as Fox has confirmed that Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler will make an encore appearance in the judges’ seat on season 11 of the reality series. Producer and bass player Randy Jackson also will return to the show, but whether pop star Jennifer Lopez will be back remains in question, reports Entertainment Weekly.

Tyler recently announced that Aerosmith would perform on the finale of the past season of “American Idol,” but guitarist Joe Perry denied that in an online post (via Blabbermouth.net), explaining the group was “never asked by producers” to perform at the event and that Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford had “a gig that night” with Experience Hendrix, and therefore, it was “not logistically possible.”

Perry added that Aerosmith are hoping to play American Idol next season, when their new CD is out. Aerosmith plan to hit the studio next month to work on the new release.

Meanwhile, Steven Tyler will release his latest solo single, “(It) Feels So Good,” which features ex-Pussycat Dolls vocalist singer Nicole Scherzinger, in July.