• Phil Spector Guilty in Murder Retrial
• The Dead Rise Again at Tour Kick-Off
• Aerosmith, ZZ Top Announce Tour Dates
• Eminem to Perform at MTV Movie Awards
• Outside Lands Lineup: Pearl Jam, DMB
• Levon Helm’s New LP Due June 30th
• Chickenfoot Supergroup Set for Tour
• Readers’ Rock List: Nirvana Songs
• Billy Bob Thornton Cancels Tour Dates
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs Shine on SNL
• Fricke’s Picks: Capsula
• News Ticker: Fergie, Nugent, Metallica
• Guns n’ Roses’ Democracy to Hit Rock Band
• Jenny Lewis Hopes to Be “Intimate” on Tour
• Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Heads to Film
• Billy Corgan Blogs About Future of Pumpkins
• Random Notes: Bono, Eminem and More
• Ex-Cop Admits to Peeing on Metallica Fan
• Britney Spears Delays Gig Over Weed Smoke
• Kanye Blogs About South Park Ego Slam
• Watch Metallica’s Rock Hall Set
• Beck Reveals One Foot Reissue Track List
• Breaking: The Airborne Toxic Event
• Remastered Beatles Catalog Due 9/9/09

Scroll down for full news stories, commentary and much more in Rock Daily.

Last week, to honor the music of Nirvana on the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, we asked our readers for their favorite songs by the Seattle trio. After Remembering Kurt Cobain, we counted the votes, and the band’s breakthrough single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” off 1991’s Nevermind grabbed the most votes ahead of a pair of In Utero tracks, “About a Girl” and many classics:

1. ”Smells Like Teen Spirit”
2. ”Heart-Shaped Box”
3. ”All Apologies”
4. ”About A Girl”
5. ”Aneurysm” (more…)

The jury hearing Phil Spector’s murder retrial found the music producer guilty today of charges of second-degree murder in the death of actress Lana Clarkson. Clarkson died of a gunshot wound at Spector’s Los Angeles mansion in February 2003 under dubious circumstances. Spector’s first trial began in April 2007 and concluded in September 2007 when the jury failed to reach a verdict. Deliberations for Spector’s second murder trial stretched 32 hours over nine days. The 69-year-old Spector faces a minimum of 18 years of prison; he’ll be sentenced on May 29th.

Photos: Spector Before the Fall

Spector was arrested on February 3, 2003 after his limo driver called police to report a dead body in the foyer of the producer’s mansion. Spector’s chauffeur testified at the initial trial that Spector said to him, “I think I killed somebody.” Spector met Clarkson at the House of Blues, where she worked as a cocktail waitress, and invited her back to his home for a drink; it was the first time the pair had met. Clarkson was found shot in the mouth with a gun next to her body. Police later testified that Spector was uncooperative at the crime scene and had to be tasered for refusing to obey orders. (more…)

Chickenfoot, the supergroup featuring former Van Halen members Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony, the Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ drummer Chad Smith and guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani, have announced their first tour dates. The live gigs will lead up to the June 9th release of their self-titled debut album. While the band formed during jam sessions and performances at Hagar’s Cabo Wabo venue in Mexico, the dates reflect the first time the group has hit the road.

“We spent a lot of time together in the recording studio working long hours to make Chickenfoot live up to expectations,” Satriani — or as his lawyer jokingly called him, the “little guitar player” who is suing Coldplay — said in a statement. “We really feel like we’ve mastered it and recorded a great album but now we’re especially excited to take the show on the road and see how the fans react to it live. I think we are really going to feed off of the fan’s energy. We’re really that type of band.” (more…)

Photo: Davis/Getty

Attending Dead shows is like riding a bike: you never forget how to do it, you try to remember enjoying the ride, but you also hope not to crash and burn (always a possibility). So, as a veteran bicyclist Deadhead (somewhere around 170 shows, though none since Jerry Garcia’s 1995 passing), it was interesting to look out at the sold-out crowd gathered for the opening of the Dead’s reunion tour at the Greensboro Coliseum on Easter Sunday and see how the novices took in the scene.

Photos: The Dead’s Tour Opener

They were hardly a majority, but they stood out — sometimes by their age, more often by their ears (a delayed recognition of songs, only passing attention to the jams that are the Dead’s raison d’etre). They’d sing along heartily to “He’s Gone,” which inevitably evoked the late great Garcia, whom they may never have spent time in an arena with; but when it came time to the ensuing blues groove, on which erstwhile Allman Brother and Gov’t Mule Warren Haynes proved himself far more than just Jerry’s stand-in, they’d be back to chatting and basking in the smells and colors.

The newbies could be forgiven their sensory overload, though. The energy of the occasion howled “Welcome Back!” with a wonderful insistence. (more…)

Levon Helm will release his new album Electric Dirt, the follow-up to 2007’s Dirt Farmer, on June 30th. Electric Dirt comes a mere two years after Dirt Farmer, which won the 2008 Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy and was Helm’s first solo studio album since 1982. Multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell once again serves as producer.

Dirt Farmer will feature the Band drummer covering the Grateful Dead’s “Tennessee Jed,” Randy Newman’s “Kingfish” and “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel To Be Free,” made famous by Nina Simone. “Our objective here was to take the honesty, innocence and purity of the Dirt Farmer record which represents a true element of what Levon is all about but also expand on that and explore deeper the goldmine of Levon’s musical artistry,” Campbell said in a statement. He also told Rolling Stone that Electric Dirt “will have a little bit more of the spirit of the Midnight Ramble,” a reference to the drummer’s all-star concert series that he hosts at his Woodstock, New York studio (RS named it Best Jam Session). (more…)

Before last weekend, it was safe to assume that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would go through their entire career without ever receiving an introduction from tween heartthrob Zac Efron. But the High School Musical star did indeed intro the band’s two performances on Saturday Night Live, as Karen O and Co. performed “Zero,” the shimmering first single off their new album It’s Blitz, followed up by their sentimental Fever to Tell hit “Maps.”

While Rock Daily usually criticizes SNL for their sound problems — which climaxed for YYYs’ Brooklyn buddies TV on the Radio — the YYYs had no problem with their set. Nick Zinner’s guitar made “Zero” explosive live and Karen O’s constant smiling signaled that the rockers were actually happy to be there. Plus, check out their new touring keyboardist/guitarist: that’s David Pajo, formerly of Slint, Tortoise and Billy Corgan’s Zwan. (more…)

Photo: bcoredisc.com

It was only 9 p.m. on opening night when I hit my first pay dirt of this year’s SXSW in Austin: Capsula a kinetic trio from Bilbao, Spain — singer-guitarist Martin Guevara and bassist Coni Duchess, the band’s founding couple, are originally from Argentina — who were supposed to be obsessed with the Velvet Underground (according to a newspaper preview) but were actually a high-velocity union of the Cramps and the Who, coated in corroded glam. Guevara attacked his guitar with a serious case of Pete Townshend, and drummer Alberto Diez was an improbable mix of Keith Moon and the Velvets’ Maureen Tucker: flash with heartbeat. In the last song of the set, a furious space-out that sounded like the Who doing Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” Guevara swallowed his mike Lux Interior-style and scraped his guitar strings along the edge of the stage. You don’t get those visuals with Capsula’s new album, Rising Mountains (BCore), but you get the idea — and everything I heard.

Photo: West/WireImage

Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters canceled their last two dates opening for Willie Nelson in Canada just days after Thornton’s awkward interview on CBC’s Q show made headlines and led to a Toronto audience booing the Boxmasters’ performance. “Special Note: April 10 and April 11 tour dates canceled. Boxmasters musician and crew down with the flu,” a note on Billy Bob’ official site read after the Boxmasters ducked out of shows in Montreal and London, Ontario.

BBT were booed in Toronto after making a comment on Jian Ghomeshi’s Q show that Canadian audiences were like “mashed potatoes without gravy.” “Canadian audiences seem to be very reserved,” Thornton said on air. “We tend to play places where people throw things at each other. Here, they just sort of sit there. And it doesn’t matter what you say to ‘em.” Thornton later apologized to the Toronto audience, but by then the damage was done, with one audience member yelling out mid-show “Here comes the gravy.” (more…)

Photo: Lovekin/Getty

After making his MTV comeback last week with his celebrity-baiting “We Made You” music video, Eminem will return to the stage on May 31st. The rapper has just been named the first performer recruited for this year’s MTV Movie Awards, MTV News reports. The performance will come just 12 days after Em releases Relapse, his first of two new albums this year, on May 19th. SNL and the Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg will host the event, with more performers expected to be announced shortly.

MTV didn’t reveal what song Slim Shady will rap at the awards show, but it’s safe to assume it will be a new track — and considering Samberg’s fondness for hip-hop, it’s possible the two could pair up for some R-rated hilarity, too. “We Made You” will be a bit old by the time of the Awards, but Rock Daily is hoping Eminem performs that track because it will result in awkward cutaways to Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears and whoever else in the audience was lampooned by the rapper in his new video. Plus, MTV awards shows and Eminem are a combination that always generates memorable moments — who could forget when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog confronted the rapper at the 2002 VMAs, and when Em mocked Lohan as a faux-Triumph at the 2005 Movie Awards before performing “Ass Like That”? (more…)

Photo: Mazur/WireImage

Aerosmith and ZZ Top have announced the dates and cities they’ll visit on their joint tour this summer. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers‘ jaunt will kick off June 10th with a show in St. Louis, Missouri, and run through the entire summer, covering most major markets before concluding — as of now — with a September 16th show in Detroit. Live Nation is handling the ticket onsale, and venue information is slowly emerging on the service’s Website.

When Rolling Stone caught up with Joe Perry backstage at last week’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the guitarist said he was pumped about touring with world’s most famously bearded band. “That’s just amazing to be able to play with them because it’s going to be a kickass show,” Perry said, adding that Aerosmith would reinvigorate their set lists this time around. Perry also told RS that Aerosmith’s new album has been delayed, but they’re aiming to finish it after the tour wraps. (more…)

Photo: Simon/Getty

• Fergie and Ziggy Marley will perform for more than 30,000 people at today’s White House Easter Egg Roll. The South Lawn festivities will be broadcast over the Internet, Yahoo! reports.

• Ted Nugent will reunite the Amboy Dukes on April 17th to receive the Distinguished Achievement Award at this year’s Detroit Music Awards. It will be the first time the band have performed together since Nugent left the group for a solo career in 1975. ”I got the word about [the award] and said, ‘Well, of course it must be done,’ ” Nugent told Billboard.com.
• A flood of forged Metallica autographs have flooded the Web since the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Blabbermouth reports. “The number of Metallica forgeries being offered rivals the number of forged Barack Obama autographs peddled after he was elected president,” said Steven Cyrkin of Autograph magazine.
• Hannah Montana: The Movie exceeded opening weekend expectations, raking in $34 million to grab first place at this weekend’s box office, Variety reports. What did Rolling Stone movie critic think of the film? His first impressions are on the Travers Take.

Photo: Kambouris/WireImage
Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band and the Beastie Boys will headline this year’s Outside Lands Festival on August 28-30th at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. M.I.A., Modest Mouse, the Mars Volta, TV on the Radio, the Dead Weather, Mastodon, Ween, Thievery Corporation, Incubus and Jason Mraz round out the fest’s initial lineup. Pre-sale tickets start Wednesday, April 15th. Get the entire lineup after the jump.
Barring an unexpected tour announcement, the headlining set will mark Pearl Jam’s first U.S. concert since their July ‘08 show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, and their first major festival appearance since Bonnaroo ‘08. The opposite can be said for the Beastie Boys, who seem to be playing every major summer festival this year, including Bonnaroo, All Points West and, reportedly, Lollapallooza. Dave Matthews Band’s involvement at Outside Lands comes as no surprise, as the group’s August 29th show in San Francisco was listed as “TBA” when his summer tour was announced in mid-February. (more…)

Every week Poison frontman Bret Michaels searches for a worthy life partner on Rock of Love Bus, while Rock Daily searches for ways to reference “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” in our recaps. Here’s our take on episode 12, the grand finale:

Sixty Minutes of Rockin’ Reality in Two Sentences: The battle of the Penthouse Pet vs. the Girl Next Door came to an end as Bret Michaels flew his two final women — Taya and Mindy — on a “private jet” to the “Dominican Republic” (his quotation marks for some unknown reason, not ours) for two final dates and one big decision. Bret tangoed with a mostly mute Mindy and Ziplined with a suddenly demure Taya (yes, he shouted “Hey-oh!” as he plunged through the jungle) and the girls got fitted for engagement rings … (more…)

Photo: Getty

• Rolling Stone was all over last weekend’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cleveland, catching all-star performances and speeches by Metallica, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Flea, Ron Wood and many more. For all the news, photos and video from the red carpet, ceremony and backstage, check out our Rock Hall hub.

• Fourteen of the Beatles’ remastered albums will be re-released on September 9th, 2009, the same day The Beatles: Rock Band is out. Also, the Fab Four’s Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr reunited onstage during a benefit concert.
• Everyone was a target as Eminem unveiled the hilarious, celebrity-dissing video for his new single “We Made You,” off his upcoming Relapse. One of the Slim Shady’s biggest targets in the video, Britney Spears, had a little run-in with some marijuana this week, too.
• Billy Bob Thornton threatened to crush Joaquin Phoenix’s monopoly on awkward interviews after having an on-air hissy fit when a Canadian radio host accused the actor of being, gasp, an actor.