On the Charts: Jimi Hendrix Earns Highest Chart Debut Since 1969

WINNER OF THE WEEK: Jimi Hendrix. What appears to be the late guitar hero's final studio album, consisting of unreleased tracks recorded with a variety of musicians between 1968 and 1970, sold 72,000 copies and made its debut at Number Two. It's a little creepy to have to report this, but People, Hell & Angels is Hendrix' highest-charting album since 1969. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be a physical-CD phenomenon – it reached only Number Five on iTunes Top Albums chart, with Luke Bryan's Spring Break . . . Here to Party, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' The Heist, Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox and Imagine Dragons' Night Visions placing higher. It's not often these days that the iTunes and Billboard 200 charts suggest such a clear-cut dichotomy between older-artists-equals-physical-sales and younger-artists-equals-download-sales.

LOSER OF THE WEEK: New music. Luke Bryan's Number One album Spring Break . . . Here to Party makes its debut with 145,000 copies – impressive since almost none of these tracks are new. They came out between 2009 and 2012 via four online-only EPs. (This business model, putting out a bunch of online music then later packaging it as a physical CD, doesn't often happen in country music – it's associated with alternative-rockers such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. It'll be interesting to see if Bryan's contemporaries head down the same path.) Following Bryan in the Undead Top 10 are Jimi Hendrix (see above), Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox (51,000 sales), Mumford and Sons' Babel (35,000), Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' The Heist (29,000) and Rihanna's Unapologetic (29,000). The latter four albums came out last fall. When will this new-release dead zone end? Well, Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience arrives Tuesday, it's streaming via iTunes and is Number Seven on Apple's Albums Chart as a pre-order.

ROCK IS DEAD – LONG LIVE TOP 40 BANDS WITH GUITARS: Chart-followers should keep an eye on Imagine Dragons, whose sprightly pop-and-rock sound is in the same wheelhouse as Maroon 5 and fun. The band has been touring steadily and doing all the right TV appearances (notably Letterman in late February). The reward this week is cracking radio's Top 40 as well as 26,000 in sales, an increase of 8 percent and a jump from Number 15 to Number Eight; the rise on iTunes is from Number Seven to Number Four. The band's latest single "Radioactive" made its move on the Ultimate Chart, which measures Internet criteria, two weeks ago, and is holding at Number 14.

LAST WEEK: Bruno Mars Discount Keeps Atoms for Peace From Top Spot

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On the Charts: Jimi Hendrix Earns Highest Chart Debut Since 1969

WINNER OF THE WEEK: Jimi Hendrix. What appears to be the late guitar hero's final studio album, consisting of unreleased tracks recorded with a variety of musicians between 1968 and 1970, sold 72,000 copies and made its debut at Number Two. It's a little creepy to have to report this, but People, Hell & Angels is Hendrix' highest-charting album since 1969. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be a physical-CD phenomenon – it reached only Number Five on iTunes Top Albums chart, with Luke Bryan's Spring Break . . . Here to Party, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' The Heist, Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox and Imagine Dragons' Night Visions placing higher. It's not often these days that the iTunes and Billboard 200 charts suggest such a clear-cut dichotomy between older-artists-equals-physical-sales and younger-artists-equals-download-sales.

LOSER OF THE WEEK: New music. Luke Bryan's Number One album Spring Break . . . Here to Party makes its debut with 145,000 copies – impressive since almost none of these tracks are new. They came out between 2009 and 2012 via four online-only EPs. (This business model, putting out a bunch of online music then later packaging it as a physical CD, doesn't often happen in country music – it's associated with alternative-rockers such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. It'll be interesting to see if Bryan's contemporaries head down the same path.) Following Bryan in the Undead Top 10 are Jimi Hendrix (see above), Bruno Mars' Unorthodox Jukebox (51,000 sales), Mumford and Sons' Babel (35,000), Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' The Heist (29,000) and Rihanna's Unapologetic (29,000). The latter four albums came out last fall. When will this new-release dead zone end? Well, Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience arrives Tuesday, it's streaming via iTunes and is Number Seven on Apple's Albums Chart as a pre-order.

ROCK IS DEAD – LONG LIVE TOP 40 BANDS WITH GUITARS: Chart-followers should keep an eye on Imagine Dragons, whose sprightly pop-and-rock sound is in the same wheelhouse as Maroon 5 and fun. The band has been touring steadily and doing all the right TV appearances (notably Letterman in late February). The reward this week is cracking radio's Top 40 as well as 26,000 in sales, an increase of 8 percent and a jump from Number 15 to Number Eight; the rise on iTunes is from Number Seven to Number Four. The band's latest single "Radioactive" made its move on the Ultimate Chart, which measures Internet criteria, two weeks ago, and is holding at Number 14.

LAST WEEK: Bruno Mars Discount Keeps Atoms for Peace From Top Spot

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Academy Award Ratings Best Since 2007

Adele performs during the 85th Academy Awards.

Seth MacFarlane can breathe a sigh of relief: Sunday night's telecast of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony ratings were up, according to early reports.

The MacFarlane-hosted awards show on ABC garnered a 26.6 overall rating with households and a 41 share, a four percent gain over last year's show. In the coveted adult 18-49 demo, the telecast fared even better: up 19 percent over last year by earning a 12.1 rating.

Those overall numbers make it the most-watched Oscars telecast since 2007 (27.7/42 overall rating), when Ellen DeGeneres hosted and Martin Scorsese's The Departed won Best Picture. In 2012, the show nabbed a 25.5/38 overall, with veteran host Billy Crystal stepping back into his role and the black-and-white silent film The Artist winning five awards.

The year-over-year improvement could be attributed to the fact that six of the nine Best Picture nominees – which included winner Argo, Lincoln, Les Misérables and Silver Linings Playbook – have earned more than $100 million at the box office to date – as opposed to The Artist, which only banked about $45 million when all was said and done. Also, high-profile stars like Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway walked away with the night's top acting prizes.

Other ratings-boosting factors could include general interest in first-time host MacFarlane, best known for creating raunchy comedies, including the movie Ted and the animated TV series Family Guy. The ceremony also had a theme, "Music in Film," for the very first time.

In the spirit of the theme, the night was chock full of musical performances, including ones by Adele, who won Best Original Song for the title track from Skyfall; Barbra Streisand, who sang "The Way We Were" as part of the In Memoriam segment; Jennifer Hudson, whose rendition of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" helped nab her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2007 for Dreamgirls; and Shirley Bassey, who capped off a tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of the James Bond films.

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Rolling Stones Plan First Shows Since 2007

Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

It's shaping up to be a major fall for the Rolling Stones. In addition to recording new music in Paris last week, the band will play its first shows since 2007 later this year to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Rolling Stone has learned the band is planning two shows at Brooklyn's Barclays Center to happen before the end of the year. "This was accomplished in a Navy SEAL-like operation," a source familiar with the deal tells Rolling Stone. "No one I knew whispered a word of this before yesterday."

Billboard reported yesterday about the Brooklyn shows and added the band will also play two shows at London's O2 Arena in November with Virgin founder Richard Branson and Australian promoter Paul Dainty promoting the gigs. A spokesperson for the Stones declined to say the London and New York shows were confirmed.

The band gathered to record two new songs for an upcoming box set last week at Guillaume Tell Studios near Paris, where they also recorded new tracks for 2002's 40 Licks set a decade ago. "Had fun in the Paris studio this week!" Mick Jagger tweeted with a photo surrounded by Telecasters, Stratocasters and harmonicas. "I'd love to get some tracks down and see what songs we've got," Keith Richards told Rolling Stone before the recording sessions. "And that goes along with part of getting the band back together and getting things moving. So I'd love to cut some tracks, yeah." Asked if he saw himself writing one-on-one with Jagger again, Richards said, "I have no doubt."

The Stones also rehearsed songs from their entire catalog in the New York area in April. "That was a great time," Richards said. "I thought I'd be quite rusty, after all we hadn't done it for a while, in five years or something. And amazing to hear it sounded as fresh as you could hope for. It was a great week."

The final day of those rehearsals were filmed for Crossfire Hurricane, a film spanning the band's entire career to premiere November 15th, directed by Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays in the Picture). "Nobody has put the story together as a narrative," Morgen told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "We've been looking under every rock going through their archives. It will be music never heard before, and I've conducted 50-plus hours of interviews so far. By the time we're done, they will be the most extensive group interviews they've ever done." At the time, Richards told Rolling Stone, "He told me 80 percent of the footage has never been seen before, which amazes me. I didn't know there was that much around."

Additional reporting by Steve Knopper

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Beyonce Announces First Live Dates Since Giving Birth

Beyonce performs at the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles.

Beyoncé has announced plans to return to the stage for the first time since giving birth to her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, earlier this year. The singer will play a series of three concerts over Memorial Day weekend at Revel Resorts, a new casino in Atlantic City. The shows will be fairly intimate for the arena-packing star, as the venue only has 5,000 seats.

Beyoncé's last run of live dates was a residency at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom in August. Those gigs, which featured the singer performing her most recent album 4 in its entirety along with a long medley of hits, was released late last year as a DVD.

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Beyonce Announces First Live Dates Since Giving Birth

Beyonce performs at the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles.

Beyoncé has announced plans to return to the stage for the first time since giving birth to her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, earlier this year. The singer will play a series of three concerts over Memorial Day weekend at Revel Resorts, a new casino in Atlantic City. The shows will be fairly intimate for the arena-packing star, as the venue only has 5,000 seats.

Beyoncé's last run of live dates was a residency at Manhattan's Roseland Ballroom in August. Those gigs, which featured the singer performing her most recent album 4 in its entirety along with a long medley of hits, was released late last year as a DVD.

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Exclusive: Stream 'Relief,' Death's First New Single Since 1976

Click to listen to Death's 'Relief'

In 1973, three young brothers in Detroit stopped playing R&B and started making punk rock in their bedroom before anyone really knew what punk was. They recorded several in-your-face singles that music mogul Clive Davis liked and wanted to release, if they would just do him the favor of changing their band name, which was Death. Guitarist David Hackney said hell no, man, and he and his brothers Bobby and Dannis walked away. The band dissolved in 1977, and the brothers moved to Vermont shortly thereafter.

Fast forward three decades, when the pioneering Death masters were rediscovered and issued by Drag City as …For the Whole World to See, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2009. David passed away in 2000, so Bobby and Dannis, with new guitarist Bobbie Duncan, reincarnated the band and have played a handful of head-spinning shows over the past two-plus years. Now they’re beginning a new chapter, releasing their first new single since 1976, "Relief," which you can hear first exclusively on RollingStone.com.

"The message of the song is rock & roll brings on relief," says bassist and bandleader Bobby Hackney. "Relief from the mundane, relief from the ordinary and definitely rock & roll has always been associated with relief from work. You know, when you come to the end of the workweek, and let’s say it's Friday morning, and you’re starting to feel that relief. I mean, who can’t relate to that?"

Death will release the song officially on February 27th, when they launch an overhaul of their website DeathFromDetroit.com. They’ve also recently become active on Twitter (@Worldwide_Death), where they’ve been known to stress loyalty to their band name by retweeting any mention of "death," regardless of context. 

The band is also nearly finished with a full-length, hopefully out this year, which will be "a mixture of songs from the Death archive of the Seventies and new and current songs," says Bobby. "We wanted to put ["Relief"] out first because we really wanted to give Death fans and those in the public who love us a taste of what we’re doing today, exactly who we are today, and what we sound like."

Death hasn’t confirmed tour dates, but they are working on booking shows throughout 2012, including possible festival appearances and a stint in London. They’re also nearly finished with a documentary about the band’s rediscovery called Where Do We Go From Here, made with filmmaker Jeff Howlett. 

"The Death thing really caught us," says drummer Dannis, who says he and Bobby had to put an album with their longtime reggae band Lambsbread on hold when their old music was suddenly in the spotlight. (The two brothers turned to reggae when David moved back to Detroit in 1982 – "We were just a bass and drums when David left," says Dannis, "and reggae is all about the bass and drums.") But now they’re embracing the challenge of rebooting a defiant musical past.

"We have a lot of really good things going on," says Bobby. "We’re kind of taking everything at a measured pace, but people seem to love the Death story, and I think the Death story is going to continue to unfold. We’re just telling everybody to stay tuned."

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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Exclusive: Stream 'Relief,' Death's First New Single Since 1976

Click to listen to Death's 'Relief'

In 1973, three young brothers in Detroit stopped playing R&B and started making punk rock in their bedroom before anyone really knew what punk was. They recorded several in-your-face singles that music mogul Clive Davis liked and wanted to release, if they would just do him the favor of changing their band name, which was Death. Guitarist David Hackney said hell no, man, and he and his brothers Bobby and Dannis walked away. The band dissolved in 1977, and the brothers moved to Vermont shortly thereafter.

Fast forward three decades, when the pioneering Death masters were rediscovered and issued by Drag City as …For the Whole World to See, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2009. David passed away in 2000, so Bobby and Dannis, with new guitarist Bobbie Duncan, reincarnated the band and have played a handful of head-spinning shows over the past two-plus years. Now they’re beginning a new chapter, releasing their first new single since 1976, "Relief," which you can hear first exclusively on RollingStone.com.

"The message of the song is rock & roll brings on relief," says bassist and bandleader Bobby Hackney. "Relief from the mundane, relief from the ordinary and definitely rock & roll has always been associated with relief from work. You know, when you come to the end of the workweek, and let’s say it's Friday morning, and you’re starting to feel that relief. I mean, who can’t relate to that?"

Death will release the song officially on February 27th, when they launch an overhaul of their website DeathFromDetroit.com. They’ve also recently become active on Twitter (@Worldwide_Death), where they’ve been known to stress loyalty to their band name by retweeting any mention of "death," regardless of context. 

The band is also nearly finished with a full-length, hopefully out this year, which will be "a mixture of songs from the Death archive of the Seventies and new and current songs," says Bobby. "We wanted to put ["Relief"] out first because we really wanted to give Death fans and those in the public who love us a taste of what we’re doing today, exactly who we are today, and what we sound like."

Death hasn’t confirmed tour dates, but they are working on booking shows throughout 2012, including possible festival appearances and a stint in London. They’re also nearly finished with a documentary about the band’s rediscovery called Where Do We Go From Here, made with filmmaker Jeff Howlett. 

"The Death thing really caught us," says drummer Dannis, who says he and Bobby had to put an album with their longtime reggae band Lambsbread on hold when their old music was suddenly in the spotlight. (The two brothers turned to reggae when David moved back to Detroit in 1982 – "We were just a bass and drums when David left," says Dannis, "and reggae is all about the bass and drums.") But now they’re embracing the challenge of rebooting a defiant musical past.

"We have a lot of really good things going on," says Bobby. "We’re kind of taking everything at a measured pace, but people seem to love the Death story, and I think the Death story is going to continue to unfold. We’re just telling everybody to stay tuned."

To read the new issue of Rolling Stone online, plus the entire RS archive: Click Here

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