‘A Grammy Salute to the Beach Boys’ Review: A Special That Gets Around to Performances Fit for a Wilson

Salt Lake City’s Kilby Block Party.Taking place May 12-14 at the Utah State Fairgrounds, some of the hippest bands from the ’90s, ’00s, ’10s and today are dropping into SLC for three days of music, art, food and more.But for now, let’s talk music.Just a few of the mega headliners on the bill include The Strokes, Pavement, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pixies and Run The Jewels.That’s not all though.Dominic Fike, Japanese Breakfast, Deerhoof, Goth Babe and Lucius are also set to perform at the three-day extravaganza.Plus, recently reunited rockers The Walkmen and rising star Ethel Cain will grace the fairground stages as well.Still not sold?Well, what if we told you affordable last-minute tickets are still available?Yes, at the time of publication, we found three-day passes going for as low as $200 before fees on Vivid Seats.While that may sound a tad bit pricey, make sure to take into consideration that single-day passes all start at $147 before fees.Thus, if you attend just two days of the music fest, you make out like a bandit.Don’t forget how many incredible bucket list acts you’ll get to see too.Take our word for it — the Kilby Block Party is truly a can’t miss event. Festivals just don’t curate lineups this good.Need more information?Keep reading — we’ve got all the pertinent details below.A complete calendar including all multi-day and single-day pass options can be found right here.(Note: The New York Post confirmed all above prices at the publication time.

George R.R. Martin has no patience with mini-rooms and how they make it impossible for new writers to succeed.

Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of A Strange Loop, is sinking his choppers into a stage musical adaptation of the 2007 cult horror-comedy film Teeth, set for an Off Broadway debut next year.

The Directors Guild of America has released a new video outlining its bargaining position on the eve its contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which get under way Wednesday. The video features Jon Avnet, chair of the DGA’s negotiating committee, and co-chairs Karen Gaviola and Todd Holland.

Erica Herman is speaking out about the end of her relationship with Tiger Woods.

Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle Editor Joe Russo is sounding the alarm about artificial intelligence. Six days before the Writers Guild of America (WGA) called for a strike, I spoke to Joe Russo at the Los Angeles premiere of “Citadel” about his concerns regarding AI. The use of AI has become a major point of contention between the guild and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTA). “I think everyone should be scared of AI,” Russo said. “I don’t know if you’ve heard any of the Drake ‘songs’ that have been dropping on social media, but it’s here. It’s not going anywhere.” The “Avengers” director said in order for AI to work, it must be a “tool servicing us rather than us servicing the tool.”

Thania Garcia Rita Lee, one of Brazil’s top-selling rock artists and an original member of the tropicalia band Os Mutantes, died on May 5 after struggling with lung cancer. She was 75. The news was confirmed on Tuesday morning via Lee’s official Instagram account which, translated from Portuguese, stated: “We announce the death of Rita Lee, at her residence, in São Paulo, capital, late last night, surrounded by all the love of her family, as she always wanted.” The post also made note that Lee’s body will be cremated, according to her wishes, and included a public invite to attend her wake on May 10.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor Hadley Gamble, a CNBC reporter who ended up as part of the headlines involving the business-news outlet’s corporate parent and the ouster of its most recent CEO, is departing the company herself. “CNBC today announced that Hadley Gamble, Anchor and Senior International Correspondent, is leaving the company,” the network said in a statement. “Gamble has been a distinguished journalist for more than a decade for CNBC, undertaking highly visible and challenging assignments, and developing deep expertise in the Middle East and beyond. Her initiative and drive have secured valuable interviews with several world political leaders. We wish her every success in her future endeavors.”

Checking in. Andy Cohen revealed what he and Kim Zolciak-Biermann have communicated in the aftermath of her split from Kroy Biermann.

Avengers, assemble! Jeremy Renner’s Marvel costars Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson visited him after his near-fatal snowplow accident — and are grateful he survived.

Shocking footage has shown a sickening attack on a man as he was battered by three thugs in East Kilbride.

Hamilton Accies have announced the signing of young Hearts goalkeeper Liam McFarlane on a seven-day emergency loan after first choice goalkeeper Ryan Fulton was ruled out through injury.

A man has been jailed for life after murdering a neighbour who him called a 'nonce'.

This week on Coronation Street, there's unfortunately more trauma on the cards for Amy as she spots Aaron's ex Mia at the garage and tells her that he raped her. Mia is shocked but accuses Amy of lying and making it up.

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A TMI moment. Mark Consuelos got his wife, Kelly Ripa, to cry from laughter on air — and for the most hilarious reason.The Riverdale alum, 52, showed off footage of his recent trip to Campobasso, Italy, on the Tuesday, May 9, episode of Live With Kelly and Mark. While taking a tour of the soccer stadium Stadio Nuovo Romagnoli, Consuelos injured his leg while shooting goals on the field. In footage of his treatment from a physiotherapist, the actor’s crotch was pixelated, leaving Ripa wiping her eyes with a tissue.

Labour constituency party members in Lanarkshire have threatened not to campaign for the party in two vital Westminster seats after sending a "formal complaint" about the selection process.

Offscreen love. In addition to his prolific acting career, Robert De Niro has welcomed six children and adopted one more with several different partners over the years.

Putting in the miles. When Andrew McCarthy set out to travel across Spain by foot, he was “shocked” that his son, Sam McCarthy, was interested in tagging along.

Victoria’s Secret has put a lot of thought into their rebrand. After announcing the return of the label’s fashion show, the retailer has revealed that the “reimagined” presentation will be a feature-length film. 

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Bob Dylan made a performance film, “Shadow Kingdom,” that streamed via the Veeps platform for one week in July 2021, Variety reviewed the special, writing that it had “new arrangements so good that pretty much everybody who was watching Sunday was clamoring for a soundtrack to the event, preferably on LP.” That wish is coming true, two years later. (But not just on vinyl.) The music from “Shadow Kingdom” will be released in album form in June. The album version shall be released June 6 on streaming platforms and as a CD and double-LP. The film itself, out of circulation since that initial one-week pay-per-view window, will become available for rental and download for the first time in June, as well.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Country star Brad Paisley visited Ukraine with a bipartisan delegation of centrist U.S. senators and sang in front of destroyed Russian military equipment in Kyiv’s Mikhailovsky Square, and on a nearby sidewalk. He performed solo acoustic versions of his own recent Ukraine-themed single “Same Here” as well as well as a Ukrainian-language folk song. Paisley was part of the trip undertaken by Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, all of whom attended a news conference in the square. “I’ll bet you’ve never heard Brad Paisley sing in Ukrainian,” tweeted former presidential advisor Igor Novikov, posting video of the singer performing in the rain as reporters looked on.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It may take a greater elixir than anything Dr. Feelgood has to offer to elicit positive vibes in the war of words — and writs — between Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars and the other three members of the group. Following a headline-making lawsuit filed by Mars against the band last week, lawyers or managers for both sides have spoken with Variety at length about the positions they are doubling down on. If you had to sum it up in a hard-rock song, it might be: “Grievances Grievances Grievances.” Until now, the Crue camp had only issued brief statements and a frustrated tweet from Nikki Sixx. But the band’s manager of 29 years, Allen Kovac, was so angered by an interview Mars gave Variety after the suit was filed that he agreed to go on record addressing what he believes are the musician’s most scurrilous accusations — including whether or not the group’s performances are largely on tape. “I have a lot of regret that I’m having to do this,” the attorney says, pointing out that he talked Nikki Sixx, the group’s unofficial leader, out of talking to the press himself, wanting the bassist to keep “taking the high road.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Amazon has come on board this month’s Stagecoach Festival in California to provide a livestream of the country music gathering. Live action from the April 28-30 festival in Indio will be streamed on both Prime Video and Amazon Music’s Twitch channel. It marks the second year that the festival will be extensively streamed, albeit the first involving Amazon. In 2022, Stagecoach livestreamed most of the main attractions on its own YouTube channel. In some years prior to that, Yahoo had had exclusive rights to stream select artists’ sets. Coverage from the festival will begin at 3 p.m. each of the festival’s three days. Stagecoach and Amazon did not immediately reveal how many or which sets will be streamed from the festival; a press release promised that performances from the Mane Stage will be seen.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Brandi Carlile has been added as a participant in the NAMM Show in Anaheim, Calif. Thursday, where she will be interviewed about the insights she has gleaned into record production over her career. The biggest annual conference for musicians is taking place at the Anaheim Convention Center Thursday through Saturday. Her session, “Brandi Carlile on Producing and Uncovering the Artist in the Studio,” will take place Thursday from 1-1:50 p.m. and will have the singer-songwriter-producer being interviewed by producer/engineer/mixer Dave Way, who has worked on Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” and “Extraordinary Machine” as well as albums by Ringo Starr, Pink and others.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Muse was making its eighth visit to downtown L.A.’s Crypto.com Arena, frontman Matt Bellamy reminded the audience, shortly into the trio’s return engagement Thursday night — except rather than call it by its current name, he said the venue would always be Staples Center to the band. He added a joking, mumbled reference to “weird fucking con artists,” presumably a reference to his lack of faith in the state of cryptocurrency. Digital assets are fleeting, but office supplies are forever, right? There is some kind of loose analog there — no pun intended — to the situation with Muse, which is forever using futuristic imagery in its shows but reigns as one of rock’s best bands by its rootedness in a slightly pre-digital past.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A touring production of the stage version of “The Bodyguard” was brought to a halt and canceled in Manchester, England on Friday night after patrons would not stop singing along with the musical’s songs, leading to house lights coming up during the climactic number “I Will Always Love You.” Two women were forcibly pulled out of the theater by security, and several police cars arrived to oversee the evacuation of the theater after what patrons on social media described as “fights in the aisles” and even “a mini-riot.” According to news reports out of Manchester and tweets from those inside the Palace Theatre, the show — based on the hit 1992 film — had already been temporarily halted once during the first act because of the disruptive audience sing-alongs, but was resumed. Later, though, with only about 10 minutes to go before the end, it was put on pause again while its star, Pussycat Dolls member Melody Thornton, attempted to sing the climactic song made famous in the movie by Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You,” over the sound of semi-tuneless howling coming from audience members. Thornton’s mic was cut mid-song, the house lights came up and offenders were evicted — struggling against being pulled out by their shoulders, in video footage captured by attendees — and the show was officially called off.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic In 2002, director Sam Jones made what is widely considered a benchmark for 21st century music documentaries with “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco,” a movie that lucked into just about all the subject matter that could make B-roll footage of the making of an album into A-list material. It had conflict within the band, between an auteur and another member of great talent; conflict with the soon-to-be-ex-record label, over the basically unwanted classic-to-be “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel”); and said auteur doing his own demon-wrestling, outside foils notwithstanding. Now, it’s easier to see that Jones’ good fortune in happening upon all that wasn’t all luck. More than 20 years later, Jones has come up with another gold-standard music doc, in the form of “Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed,” newly streaming on HBO Max. This time, as the creation of another amazing record — Isbell’s “Reunions” (recorded in late 2019 and released a few months later) — is put under the filmic microscope, there are no record-company bookkeepers as unseen baddies in the backdrop to a making-of. Major labels and the conflicts that come with them are so 2002, right? But one common thread is intra-band tension… as it probably will be in most good rock docs now or 20 years from now. It gets more interesting than that, though. In this instance, the difficult vibes are between bandmates who double as a married couple — Isbell and his fiddler-spouse, Amanda Shires. Here, unlike the by-now iconic beefing between Jay Tweedy and Jay Bennett, we know no one’s ultimately going anywhere, right?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “I carried those bastards for years,” says Mick Mars, telling Variety how he thinks his 41-year history with Motley Crue should not end with him facing off with the other three members in the halls of justice. The veteran band, now down by one original member, has sued to force Mars into arbitration, looking to get a ruling that he is officially a member or shareholder, with any of the rights that confers. They contend that when he announced he was quitting touring, that amounted to a resignation. Mars, 71, counter-sued on Thursday morning, contending that he didn’t give up anything, at all, by announcing last fall that effects of his longstanding arthritic disease made him no longer fit for the road. His legal filing was full of provocative assertions about the others, and so was the response Thursday afternoon from Crue’s lawyers, who believe he gave up all rights by putting away his touring suitcases — and further, the Crue camp maintained, Mars had become an instrumentally erratic drag on the band.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Motley Crue has responded to Mick Mars’ lawsuit alleging that the band is trying to force him out after 41 years, with the group’s attorneys contending that Mars already is out — having resigned, effectively, in their view, when he announced he was halting touring for good. Motley Crue’s attorneys also provided Variety with signed declarations from seven members of the touring crew that was out with the band when they toured with Mars for the last time on 36 stadium dates in 2022, alleging that his performances at the shows were under par and created problems for the entire group. “After the last tour, Mick publicly resigned from Mötley Crüe,” said Sasha Frid, the band’s litigation attorney. “Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything — and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back — the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band.  Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Mick Mars, Motley Crue’s guitarist of 41 years, has filed legal papers bringing deep and apparently hostile divisons between him and the other three members of the band out into the open. The suit only demands that the group hand over relevant documents about their businesses in advance of arbitration. But the wealth of details in Mars’ filing offers a provocative look at the tension between him and the others, in what he says has been a pattern of “gaslighting” in an attempt to kick him out of the group. The paperwork was filed in Los Angeles County’s Superior Court Thursday filed through Mars’ attorney, Edwin F. McPherson, and says the band has deliberately withheld information about the various Motley Crue businesses that he has a 25% ownership share in. Mars says the band has demanded he sign a severance agreement that would divest him of those and other future interests, in return for a 5% stake in the group’s 2023 tour, which is going on without him.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic During the opening monolog at Sunday night’s CMT Music Awards, broadcast from Austin on CBS, there was a comedic bit in which Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown exchanged anniversary presents to celebrate their cohosting of the show for the third consecutive time. Brown gave Ballerini a cowboy hat, and she reciprocated by giving him a pink hat to put on in return. At least a few audience members shared a joke about the exchange: By wearing pink, would Brown be breaking Tennessee’s recently passed law that some believe would ban most drag performances in the state, if they were back home? Viewers whose minds went there during that silly opening were just kidding — but Ballerini really went there later in the three-hour telecast, when she chose four “RuPaul’s Drag Race” queens to perform with her as she sang “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too).” That song, off her 2022 album “Subject to Change,” is Ballerini’s anthem of female friendship — and, with the way the CMT Awards routine played out, she very much seemed to be counting drag performers as among those friends. The performance was playful and ostensibly non-political, and in a different year might not have raised very many shaved or unshaved eyebrows. In spring 2023, it was hard to read it as anything other than a statement of: If drag queens are brought down, the rest of us will be dragged down with them.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A couple of members of a fresh generation of country music — Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson — came away as the top victors at Sunday night’s CMT Music Awards, broadcast live from Austin for the first time. But the biggest winners may have been CMT and CBS, putting the three-hour telecast on the map as a show packed with enough performance firepower that it does merit having made the move from a cable platform to major broadcast premiere as of last year. However much the official winners may delight a core country crowd happy to see young radio and streaming favorites get rewarded, the big draw for the CBS audience was likely a series of collaborations between country stars and their pop or rock counterparts, as has been the custom for years on the rival CMA Awards. Most notable were the all-female collabs that had Carly Pearce dueting with Gwen Stefani on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” or Alanis Morissette trading lines with a slate of young female artists that included Lainey Wilson, Ingrid Andress, Morgan Wade and Madeline Edwards. The all-star teamings spread to those who presented, too, with Megan Thee Stallion providing the most enthusiastic introduction imaginable for “my new besty,” Shania Twain.

Joni Mitchell was honored in Washington D.C., presented with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, and celebrated by her peers and famous fans, including Cyndi Lauper, James Taylor, Marcus Mumford and Brandi Carlile. Walking the red carpet with a cane, the Canadian singer-songwriter said that the honor was "very exciting." After an evening of performances in her honor, Mitchell, 79, took the stage and paid homage to the Gershwin Prize's namesake, George Gershwin, performing "Summertime" from "Porgy and Bess." Performers Graham Nash, Ledisi, Herbie Hancock, as well as Lauper, Taylor, Mumford and Carlile later joined Mitchell on stage to perform her hit song "Circle Game," bringing the crowd to their feet.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The vibe surrounding Joni Mitchell being bestowed with the Gershwin Prize in Washington, D.C. earlier this month — as seen in a new PBS special — couldn’t have been more harmonious, from all accounts. And that’s a good thing, because under less loving circumstances, there could have been a turf war over who would get to sing “Both Sides Now,” the song that was Mitchell’s first hit in 1967 and might still stand as her signature song, if someone had to pick one with a gun to their head. The victor, in this quiet, bloodless battle: the inimitable Annie Lennox, who performed at the tribute to Mitchell just months after being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Eurythmics.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When an all-star cast of musicians came together to rehearse their salute to Joni Mitchell for a Washington, D.C. tribute concert in February, in honor of her being the latest annual recipient of the Gershwin Prize for songwriting, executive producer Ken Ehrlich had an early epiphany about where Marcus Mumford’s cover of “Carey” should go. “During the rehearsal, it was obvious to me: that was the opening number.” As you watch the remainder of “Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” though — as it premieres on PBS tonight, and is available thereafter for streaming on PBS.org and the PBS app — you won’t see Mumford disappearing from the stage for very many extended periods. Mumford has been part of the parties at Mitchell’s home the last couple of years, and participated in the “Joni jam” at the Newport Folk Festival last summer, so he is well familiar with her and her catalog at this point. And so, as Ehrlich explains it, “When I reached out to him, it probably wasn’t a half hour before he got back to me and said, ‘Of course I’d love to do this.’ And then he quickly followed with: ‘Can I play with the band?’ And he became the resident percussionist, which I didn’t have.