After a number of tries, well, this is F&%#@ing hard! I ended picking songs that I could relate to. These are songs that have meaning for me. They are not the necessarily the best musicians or best lyrics or any of that. Just good classic rock songs that I like.

So here’s my top 10 best classic rock songs:

1. Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
2. Freebird (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
3. Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
4. Purple Haze (Jimi Hendrix)
5. Stranglehold (Ted Nugent)
6. Back in Black (AC/DC)
7. Dream On (Aerosmith)
8. Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
9. Baba O’Riley (The Who)
10. Hotel California (The Eagles)

Here are some different versions of these songs that you may have never heard, some great, some just funny. Listen and see what you think!

So obviously your top ten best classic rock songs will be different than mine, right? So tell me! Leave your Top Ten list in the comment form below…

Pink Floyd fans are an optimistic lot. A year ago the band’s blogging followers were talking up a putative tour in 2009 that would reunite the so-called “classic” 1970s line-up — the one responsible for their 40m-selling magnum opus The Dark Side of the Moon — for their first proper concert since 1980.
To a large extent, this represented the triumph of hope over experience. Of the many attempts to get the four members of Pink Floyd back on stage together, only Bob Geldof’s had come off. After the fractious foursome re-convened for an historic 18-minute slot at Live 8 in 2005, the world’s largest concert promoters, Live Nation, offered them a record $250m — pure profit, net of all production expenses, which the promoters would cover separately — to tour North America. This figure valued Pink Floyd as a bigger live draw than the Rolling Stones, and was more than twice what Live Nation shelled out to sign Madonna to an inclusive concert-and-albums deal in 2007.
True to form, the Floyd declined, mainly at the behest of David Gilmour. The band’s guitarist, who compared their Live 8 performance to “sleeping with your ex-wife”, was planning his most ambitious solo tour yet, to run from 2006 until the end of 2008. Prominent in Gilmour’s band was the Floyd’s keyboard player, Rick Wright, whose ejection from the group in 1979 led to years of discord in which the three remaining squabbled over who owned the band’s name.
It was Wright’s rehabilitation as Gilmour’s new buddy —coupled with the conciliatory noises emanating from drummer, Nick Mason, and the previously hostile bassist, Roger Waters — that helped to raise hopes of a 2009 Floyd tour. Once Gilmour’s solo tour had wrapped at Gdansk in November 2008, the feeling among the Floyd faithful was that the long-awaited reunion might be back on the cards.
Sadly, it wasn’t. Rick Wright died of cancer last September, a tragic loss which, like the death of Pink Floyd’s prime mover, Syd Barrett, in 2006, inspired an avalanche of obituaries unusual for the passing of a pop musician. It also brought to light aspects of the shifting alliances that have characterised the career of Pink Floyd, one of rock’s most complicated soaps.

Read the rest here.

Good band, that was.

This giant pig cake was built built for the 40th birthday of an avid Pink Floyd Fan. The cake was built resemble the pig balloons flown at Pink Floyd concerts. The party was at the Great American Music Hall

Nike, which purchased Converse for $305 million plus debt six years ago, is hoping the line continues Converse’s good run. While Converse makes up just a small piece of Nike’s total business, it has posted revenue gains of 29 percent and 20 percent the last two fiscal years, filings show.

Numbers for their most recent campaign cannot be complied as of yet considering the Osbourne collection was released only a couple of weeks ago and the Pink Floyd products won’t be available until early March.

“We’re planning another line of sneakers that will feature Metallica and AC/DC that will be available in the fall,” says Cottrill, whose Converse brand first made the scene in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. “We’re always looking to do more collaborations with bands and this one should be just as creative as the previous ones.”

via The Daily Swarm

This is a new quarterly magazine from the Classic Rock stable and hits the stores on March 25th.

The Reasoning will also be on the cover cd as well!

“Classic Rock presents Prog” is edited by Jerry Ewing, who is, as many of you will know, one of the UK’s forefront rock journalists and DJs.

This new magazine offers prog rock fans a wealth of coverage of their favourite bands, artists and music.

Issue one will be covering stalwarts such as Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, and ELP, and modern-day bands such as Dream Theater, Steven Wilson, Demians and The Reasoning, taking in the likes of Marillion, Asia, Queensryche and Rush along the way.

www.thereasoning.com

www.classicrockmagazine.com

via The Classic Rock Society