Rolling Stone: Features
The Clean Teen Machine With a wildly popular tour and a new record expected to sell millions, the Jonas Brothers have gone from Disney novelty to phenomenon. All they want is for you to see them as a real band • Gallery: A Short History of the Jonas Brothers • Video: Behind the Scenes at the Jonas Brothers' Cover Shoot It's nearing 8:00 on a sweltering night in Phoenix, and as the temperature mercifully dips below 100 degrees, a trillion swelling hormones have collected at the Cricket Wireless Pavilion to experience the Jonas Brothers. Among the undersize pilgrims in attendance are Jordan and Jackie, a pair of blond preteens from nearby Scottsdale. Moments ago, they met the...
Without a Prayer John McCain can't stand sucking up to the Christian right. Is this the end of the GOP's unholy alliance? Phoenix, July 13th, Sunday morning. Thank God John McCain has declared that he wants to wallpaper the continent with new nuke plants, because now the chances are better that this wretched slab of hot, birdshit-covered asphalt they call a state will be blown to hell in an accident someday. I hate this place. Once the sun comes up on an Arizona weekend, nothing moves except the occasional elderly-piloted Buick floating boatlike in the direction of some hideous megachurch. This morning...
Rock Games Battle for Bands Guitar Hero, Rock Band sign Hendrix, Aerosmith, G n' R and the Who Aerosmith don't have a new album out, but the band still scored the biggest sales week of its 38-year career in early July, thanks to the fastest-growing new business in rock: video games. The new Guitar Hero: Aerosmith — which lets fans use the franchise's familiar plastic guitar controller to play 25 songs from "Sweet Emotion" to "Love in an Elevator" — sold over 567,000 copies in its first week, grossing more than $25 million, at $50 a game. In contrast, the band's last studio alb...
Rock & Roll Refugees: 10 People Who Escaped the Music Industry Layoffs and the business' decline have scattered thousands of employees ? so where are they now? The major record labels have laid off more than 5,000 employees since CD sales began plunging in 2000 — and that's not counting all the people who ran screaming from the music business on their own. All asked themselves the same question: Now what? "When you've spent 20 years in the music business, you don't have that many real-life skills," says Debbie Southwood-Smith, a laid-off Interscope Records A&R executive. The answer: teacher, nurse, financial consultant, door captain,...
Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" Resurfaces A new reissue of the Beach Boys drummer's late-'70s album serves as a reminder of Wilson's talent and torment Hours before an early 1970s Beach Boys concert, the band?s musical director Jim Guercio remembers drummer Dennis Wilson fooling around on the piano during soundcheck. "I heard these amazing changes and I said, 'Dennis, is that one of Brian's songs?' " Guercio says. "He said, 'No, It's one of mine.' " By 1977 — just six years before he died — the Beach Boys' drummer had released Pacific Ocean Blue, a stunning, painful solo album that's widely considered the best Beach Boys project...
Quick and Dirty With... Billy Ray Cyrus Host, "Nashville Star" (NBC) So is Miley still grounded? [Laughs] In which way? There's two definitions of grounded. One is that your head's on straight. And the other is that you're in trouble. I mean the second one. No, she's not grounded. She never ceases to amaze me. She's made a great album. People are gonna look at Miley Cyrus and go, "Wow, I didn't know she could do that." Going back a few months to that hurricane over the Vanity Fair photo — how did you get through it? I had to just kind...

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