Kid Rock and his Rock 'N' Roll Revival Tour, which includes special guests Peter Wolf, Reverend Run, and legendary Southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd, headed into Yankee territory last night as the roving rock and roll spectacle took over New York City's Madison Square Garden.

Hard to believe, but it was Skynyrd's first time ever playing the Garden in their nearly 40-year career, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers didn't disappoint, playing an 80-minute set layered with many of their greatest hits, including "Sweet Home Alabama," "That Smell," "Simple Man," and their epic final song "Freebird." Singer Johnny Van Zandt even dueted via video with his deceased brother Ronnie on the encore song "Travelin' Man."

Kid Rock started his set with the title track to his new album Rock and Roll Jesus, and performed many of his hits and several cover songs throughout the evening, including duets with Wolf on the Motown classic "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" and the J. Geils Band classic "Must of Got Lost." He closed out the four-hour rock and roll marathon with his first hit "Bawitdaba," backed by an enormous wall of 1970s-era pyrotechnics.

For full coverage of the concert, including pictures, click here.

Each week British humor website B3ta issues an image challenge, asking visitors to manipulate photos to fit a specified theme, like "If Band Names Were Taken Literally" or "Album Covers Gone Wrong."

We just discovered a really great one (the challenge is from awhile ago, but hey it's news to us!)—"Extending Album Art"—wherein "artists" of varying talent have stretched the boundaries of famous album covers to hilarious and sometimes creepy results. There are especially a lot of reinterpretations of the Beatles' Abbey Road, Pink Floyd's The Wall, and Nirvana's Nevermind ...

Check it out here!

In the May/June issue of Death + Taxes magazine, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe was questioned about his influence on and relationship with Kurt Cobain, and Stipe revealed that he finds it difficult to listen to Nirvana since Cobain's death.

"In the '80s I went through every kind of awful—I don’t want to sound hyperbolic or self-pitying—but it was awful," Stipe said. "And I went through it alone. But it was when we didn’t have the focus or the spotlight of the media. All people paid attention to was what was going on on-stage.

"And Kurt—the great tragedy of his death is that, as an artist, as someone pushing things forward, he was really pushing himself. And he had reached a point where he was about to push through to something that was so phenomenal and so beautiful. It was all written, it was all right there, and it was so obvious where he was going, and then he didn’t make it. I still have trouble—I can’t listen to an entire Nirvana record."

Kurt Cobain died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1994.

Billboard reports that during a conference call regarding Pearl Jam's headlining spot at Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival on June 14, founding member Mike McCready revealed that the band is at work on new material with longtime producer Brendan O'Brien.

"We've had one session of writing and it has yielded about five ideas so far," McCready said. "Some of it's kind of poppy and some of it's a little hard. We want it to grow up a little bit. We have to revisit it a few times."

As for whether Pearl Jam will debut any of this new material at Bonnaroo or during their 10-city tour this June, McCready said, "We might get into some sort of jam. We have about 200 songs to pull from, so we'll do that and maybe do some obscure B-sides. For new stuff, I don't know if we have it refined enough to want to play it in front of an audience yet. We don't want to hack in front of everybody."

In 2006 the band released their eighth album, Pearl Jam, which debuted at No. 2 on the charts and is certified gold.

A recent copy of the Foo Fighters' tour rider has been leaked, punknews.org reports.

Posted in full on thesmokinggun.org, the rider lays out some hilarious specifications at length. One passage reads, "Please try to make [the soup] a vegetarian selection. Meaty soup make roadies fart," while other sections praise bacon as "God's currency" and show disdain for "island after tiny island of chicken boobs, floating in a mercury like sauce that gets pawned off as a thirteen dollar entree."

Click here to view all nine pages of the Foo Fighters' rider!

Death Cab for Cutie are forecasted to take the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart next week with their sophomore album Narrow Stairs. In its first day of release (Tuesday, May 13), the album sold 54,000 copies, while Jason Mraz’s album We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things moved 21,000 copies in its first day.
 
Billboard reports that Death Cab will likely sell 135,000 – 145,000 copies of Narrow Stairs this week, plenty enough for them to secure No. 1 placement.
  
Death Cab for Cutie’s last album, 2005’s Plans—their first major label release—won a Grammy, was certified platinum, and peaked at No. 4 on Billboard 200.

“I feel like the same things a lot of people like about [Narrow Stairs], a lot of people will take issue with—and that’s totally fine,” frontman Ben Gibbard told MTV this month. “I’m really at peace with anybody’s take on this album, because we had such a great time making it. I feel like there is an honesty and inspiration on the album that’s undeniable. And even more undeniable is the fact that nobody can come at us and say that we didn’t try to do something different.”

Check out the video for Death Cab's first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart":

Ashlee's sister Jessica has confirmed she'll be maid of honor in the Wentz wedding.

It was announced yesterday that Ozzy Osbourne's namesake festival has been pared down to a one-day "stadium spectacular" this year, and will be held at Pizza Hut Park in Dallas, Texas on August 9.

Put on by AEG Live and Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, this year's Ozzfest will be headlined by Ozzy himself, Metallica, System of a Down's Serj Tankian, Korn's Jonathan Davis, Hellyeah, and more. There will also be an all-star tribute to "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, the Pantera guitarist who was slain on-stage in 2004.

In a statement, Sharon Osbourne said, "Ozzy just finished an 11-month world tour, so I think he deserves a summer off. We're going to be a stadium destination festival for now—we have gone past doing the sheds every summer. We've given everyone else the blueprint, and we have to keep evolving Ozzfest. This is just the beginning. Ozzy has great relationships with all of the bands that have played Ozzfest. We're the only real festival for harder-edge bands, and these artists have been very loyal to us—there is lots of love on this lineup."

Tickets will go on sale Saturday, May 31 at www.ozzfest.com.

According to Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess, actor Joaquin Phoenix has been in the studio with him and Charlatans manager Alan McGee working on tracks that Burgess calls "brilliant" but that he doubts will ever be released to the public. The actor's perfectionism may cripple the album's future release, Burgess reports.

Burgess told Billboard that Phoenix was inspired to write songs after learning to play guitar for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, of which he was the star. "Once [Joaquin] learned guitar, he found that he had quite a lot of demons inside himself that he wanted to expel through music," Burgess says. "All the tracks that me and Alan worked with him on were brilliant, but I think he just keeps scrapping everything or redoing everything. I'm sad to say that I think it's one of those records that may never come out, to be honest with you. It's an ongoing thing. I'm trying to get Alan to force him to put it out at the moment, but I don't know whether it will [get released]."

The Foxboro Hot Tubs, the not-so-secret sideband of Green Day, have announced a small club tour of eight U.S. cities, beginning next week.

The band will release their debut album Stop Drop and Roll, a collection of 12 punchy garage rock anthems, on Tuesday, May 20.

Tickets will be a flat $20 each, and must be purchased at the box office on the day of the show. There is a maximum of two tix per person.

Foxboro Hot Tubs Club Tour

05/19 - Little Rock, Arkansas - Juanita's Cantina
05/20 - New Orleans, Louisiana - One Eyed Jack's
05/21 - Dallas, Texas - The Loft
05/22 - Austin, Texas - Emo's
05/25 - Phoenix, Arizona - The Brick House
05/26 - San Diego, California - Soma (Sidestage)
05/27 - Los Angeles, California - The Roxy
05/28 - Long Beach, California - Alex's Bar