Word: guitarists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Crowe's 15-year-old alter ego, boy reporter William Miller (Patrick Fugit), gets his first assignment from Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres (a real person, played by Terry Chen) to profile an up-and-coming (fictional) rock band called Stillwater. Trying to get an interview with Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), young Miller finds himself traveling with the band and falling in love with the guitarist's pet groupie, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), all the while remaining bound to the apron strings of his mother (Frances McDormand), a liberal crusader who sees rock 'n' roll as nothing...
...rock heavyweights are reflected in Stillwater, a band that slides into discord (shades of the Allman Brothers, though no one in Stillwater dates Cher), takes a bumpy plane ride (like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Who) and performs a song called Fever Dog, written by Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson, with a nod to Zeppelin's Black Dog. "There's also a lot of the Eagles in there," says Crowe. "They craved the spotlight, saw it coming, got scared, ran from it, all that stuff...
Janie Hendrix, the guitarist's half sister and president and CEO of Experience Hendrix, says the family hopes to do its own movie at some point and that a proper film can't be done without his music: "Jimi's music...
...swamped in advice: from his musical mentor, the rebel critic Lester Bangs (another off-kilter, on-target tour de force by Philip Seymour Hoffman); from his muse, the knowing groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson, with the soft, curly haired charisma of a Woodstock Botticelli); from Stillwater's lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup, who has finally found the movie role to fit his questing intelligence and almost-too-hunky features); and from his protective mom (fierce, nattering Frances McDormand). William's task is to sift all this good, or at least plausible, advice and make his own choices...
...Hendrix was a terrific vocalist, with a gift for phrasing and interpolation. But he was above all a guitarist who created a new vocabulary of noise. Hendrix in his day was sometimes criticized for making music that was too "white" (i.e., too rock- infused), when in reality he was reaching past the pop-soul styles of his time and drawing on African-American blues traditions. The new boxed set features a blues rocker called "It's Too Bad" that touches on the subject. "They say until you come back completely black," Hendrix sings, "go back where you came from...