So Music Threaders. Coz I'm bored. I'm going to come up with my Top 20 albums of the last decade (say from 12:00 January 1st 2000). Have some ideas of what I'm going to choose, but it'll be a bitch.

Feel free to join me.

Is DM number 1 or number 20? Funnily enough with your "yeah, yeah... ssh" St. Anger is probably my favourite album off that list. :lol:

I've almost got my top 50 done (figured 20 was too short), just figuring a few of the positions better.

Ronnie James Dio, Rock Vocalist, Dies at 67


By BEN SISARIO
Published: May 16, 2010

Ronnie James Dio, a singer with the heavy-metal bands Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio, whose powerful, semioperatic vocal style and attachment to demonic imagery made him a mainstay of the genre, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 67.

His death was announced by his wife, Wendy, on his Web site, www.ronniejamesdio.com.

No cause was given, but in recent months Mr. Dio had spoken about suffering from stomach cancer, and his band Heaven and Hell canceled its summer tour because of his health.

A heavy-metal purist, Mr. Dio was known as much for his vocal prowess as for his Mephistophelean stage persona. He sang about devils, defiance and the glory of rock ’n’ roll with a strong, mean voice that rose to a bombastic vibrato, and he is credited with popularizing the “devil horn” hand gesture — index and pinky fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist — as a symbol of metal’s occult-like worship of everything scary and heavy.

Ronald James Padavona was born in Portsmouth, N.H., and grew up in Cortland, N.Y. He took his stage name in tribute to the gangster Johnny Dio, and he began his career in rockabilly bands in the late 1950s. By the early 1970s his group Elf became a regular opening act for the British band Deep Purple, and Mr. Dio gained his first wide exposure when Ritchie Blackmore, Deep Purple’s guitarist, recruited him in 1975 to sing for his new band, Rainbow.

When Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, Mr. Dio replaced him, staying until 1982. By then he had his own group, Dio. Its first album, “Holy Diver,” was released in 1983, and its cover art was typical of the band’s style, with a cartoonish painting of a red-eyed demon whipping a drowning priest with a chain. In various lineup configurations, Dio released material into the mid-2000s.

Mr. Dio briefly rejoined Black Sabbath in the early 1990s, singing on its 1992 album “Dehumanizer,” and in 2006 he began playing again with members of that band, naming the group Heaven and Hell after the title of the first Black Sabbath album on which he had appeared. Heaven and Hell toured widely and released one album, “The Devil You Know,” in 2009.

Other than his wife, who was also his manager, he is survived by his son, Daniel, his father, Pat Padavona, and two grandchildren.

Over the years Mr. Dio became a symbol of the glories and the silliness of metal, and sometimes both at the same time. In the 2006 film “Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny,” a boy whose father has forbidden him to play metal prays in his bedroom to a poster of Mr. Dio sitting on a hellish throne; Mr. Dio, holding a medieval-style goblet, comes to life and urges the boy to forge his own way.

“You will face your inner demons,” Mr. Dio sings. “Now go, my son, and rock.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/arts/music/17dio.html?ref=music

Former Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead tour manager writes memoir

Sam Cutler needed the ‘clarity of time’ to write about shocking events like Altamont

At 68, Sam Cutler is now a practising Buddhist who, aptly enough for someone so famously tied to the road, lives out of a van in Australia.

On the morning of Dec. 5, 1969, Sam Cutler woke up in a hotel in San Francisco and realized it hadn’t been a dream. Altamont, the free concert featuring the Rolling Stones that Cutler had helped ‘organize’ — a loose term, under the circumstances — had indeed taken place. A gun-toting teenager had been killed by Hells Angels just feet from the stage, and Cutler had watched it happen. The Stones had hightailed it back to Europe within hours of leaving the stage, leaving Cutler, who had begun his gig as the band’s tour manager little more than a year before — a service he’d subsequently provide for the Grateful Dead — alone in the aftermath.

In his just-published memoir You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Cutler writes: “The following morning, I turned on the TV and every channel was full of the Altamont concert: the fact that four people had been killed and many others injured, the damage to the farmers’ livestock and the missing miles of fences, the wrecked and abandoned cars littering the highways, the missing, the injured.”

He knew he had to do something, and fast. And he did, observing tried-and-true rock ’n’ roll tradition: “My first decision was to sneak out of the hotel without paying.”

More than 40 years later, Sam Cutler grins over coffee and scrambled eggs in a Toronto breakfast joint. He knows the city well, or once did, having organized The Grateful Dead’s participation in the legendary Festival Express’ tour of 1970. That began here, and it did not end up well. Not quite so disastrously as Altamont perhaps, but a notch or two short of glorious. (The tour, which took a trainload of artists like the Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin and Buddy Guy from Toronto to Winnipeg in 1970, was plagued by poor ticket sales and negative publicity.)

At 68, Cutler is now a practising Buddhist who, aptly enough for someone so famously tied to the road, lives out of a van in Australia. And he is not only reconciled to such events— he was also rather unceremoniously bumped to the curb by the Dead, and never got a penny of the promised post-Altamont support from the Stones — he’s positively beatific. There is no rancour or resentment in his book, no determination to settle accounts or get his back. Instead, You Can’t Always Get What You Want is marked by a tone of wry acceptance, as though written by someone lucky enough to have had such a terrific front-row centre seat for the spectacle of his own life.

“I don’t mind going back to anything,” he says in a voice that itself sounds like several thousand kilometres of well-worn blacktop. “I don’t make a distinction between happy and unhappy memories, or sad or glad memories. I view everything that’s happened to me with a sense of a kind of bemused wonderment. One of the beauties of being an author is that you can choose the position you take in terms of your point of view. I think you can do the same thing in life.”

The reason it took Sam Cutler, who studied history in university in England, 40 years to provide his own account of what happened at Altamont, was this: the calming clarity of time. He needed to get the proper perspective on events, to divorce himself from the madness of the moment so that he might not only understand what really happened, but what it meant to him and why it had to happen. Although decades have intervened, he believes he can see more clearly now than ever.

“That comes about with the beautiful benefit of the time frame, you know what I mean?,” he says. “You don’t have that when it was only two days ago and you were watching somebody being f-cking murdered in front of you. You tend to be slightly hyper about the whole thing and it’s just too intense to be to absorb and process.

“It’s a bit like old love affairs,” he muses between forkfuls of egg. “Sometimes it takes a long time to get over them — if you ever do — and to learn from them.”

There was a time when Sam Cutler was held responsible: The debacle at Altamont had happened because he’d hired the Hells Angels for security — not remotely true, incidentally — and everything would have turned up Woodstock-rosy, if only Cutler hadn’t let the devil seep in through incompetence and mismanagement.

If those charges hurt, and they must have, Cutler now looks back on them as part of a necessary growth process. Altamont wasn’t his fault. Or anybody’s really: not the Stones, not the Angels, not the so-called ‘organizers,’ and certainly not the thousands of kids who simply indulged in their generational entitlement to get as wasted as possible. But maybe that’s where we might find some kind of accounting, not in a generation but in the myths that deluded it.

On this, as in many things in his book, Cutler is especially thoughtful and eloquent. Here he writes about that day and what it was like to witness it unfold: “The ‘peace and love’ my generation had so assiduously promulgated as the antidote to the violence and hypocrisy of ‘straight’ society was a hollow miasma. This was not a community intent on caring for and loving one another. Before me was the ugly truth of what we had collectively wrought, manifested in greed, blood, drug overdoses, spilled guts, and hatred. The peace and love generation was busy smashing itself to bits.”

Nevertheless, Cutler believes his world has turned exactly as it should. He has made his peace with all and everything – including the Stones, who he would not encounter for more than 30 years after that day — history has largely vindicated his role at Altamont, and he is now free to be what, in his heart of hearts, he always wanted to be: a writer. “I’ve seen everything that’s happened to me as a great kind of gift,” he says. “The gift of life. You know what I mean?”

Before excusing himself for a cigarette, Cutler extols one last time on the issue of making peace with the past. “The fact is,” he says, “You can’t always get what you want. Truer words were never spoken. Good old Mick.”

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/809381--the-one-time-tour-manager-of-the-rolling-stones-and-grateful-dead-publishes-memoir

Ageing rockers Rolling Stones to thunder Down Under in 2012 world tour

* Nui Te Koha
* From: Sunday Herald Sun
* May 23, 2010

THE Rolling Stones are spearheading a galaxy of rock 'n' roll superstars set to tour Australia.

The ageing rockers, led by Mick Jagger, are making plans for a world tour that will reach Australia by 2012.

Other big names tipped to be here this year or next include U2, Bon Jovi, the Eagles, Peter Gabriel, America, Leona Lewis, Chicago, Roxy Music, Billy Joel and Elton John.

"The Stones are coming - and they want crazy money," a respected tour promoter told the Sunday Herald Sun.

The Stones will play stadiums and have already rebuffed other overseas offers of $2.4 million a show.

A local promoter who pitched $14.4 million for six shows in three cities was told by agents for the Stones: "You are not even in the ball park."

People in the Stones camp say US drummer Steve Jordan will stand in for Charlie Watts, who has vowed to quit world touring.

And they say guitarist Keith Richards has reconvened the band to make a new album and take a show on the road.

"This has been rumbling for the last 18 months. Offers are on the table," a source said. "An announcement and dates are imminent."

Influential singer Peter Gabriel and classic rock acts America, Chicago and Peter Frampton are rumoured to tour in the same month.

Singer Leona Lewis is also planning shows at the end of the year.

Californian supergroup the Eagles are planning to hit Australian shores early next year, US rockers Bon Jovi plan to be here in January and seminal art rock band Roxy Music is slated to tour in February.

The line-up will include singer Bryan Ferry but not Brian Eno.

Superstar Neil Diamond is set to do a national run in March and U2 will be here in 2011.

U2's new world tour has been delayed by a back injury to singer Bono.

The Pretenders, Blondie, Hall and Oates and John Farnham are strongly tipped to do winery shows this summer.

Teen pop star Justin Bieber hinted at shows in summer but no dates are set.

Promoters are keen for singing spinster Susan Boyle, but she is yet to create a show.

The Rolling Stones' media handlers, US firm Rogers and Cowan, did not respond to email inquiries about tour plans.

But a source within the Stones said: "Keith has put the call out for a new album and a world tour."

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/entertainment/ageing-rockers-rolling-stones-to-thunder-down-under-in-tour/story-e6frf96f-1225870036113

There's a few albums there that I'd have included, Funky, but what's your reason for saying that Gallows was in the top ten releases of the last decade?