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The debut album by Chickenfoot — the supergroup featuring Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony, Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Joe Satriani — will be released exclusively at Best Buy stores on June 7th. The packaging will be heat sensitive, so when you touch the C-D inlay, photos of the band will be revealed behind the Chickenfoot logo.

The album contains 11 songs with titles such as “Avenida Revolution,” “Soap on a Rope,” “Sexy Little Thing,” “Oh Yeah,” “Runnin’ Out” and “Get It Up.”

Chickenfoot will tour Europe in June and July with U-S dates in the fall.

Former KISS guitarist Ace Frehley is getting ready to release his first album in 20 years. Anomaly contains 12 songs, and Frehley says he approached it the way he did his first album in 1978, with a little bit of everything. Among the song titles are “Outer Space,” “Foxy and Free,” “Sister,” “Too Many Faces,” “It’s a Great Life” and a cover of Sweet‘s “Fox on the Run.” The album was mixed by Marti Frederiksen who has worked with Aerosmith and Def Leppard. There’s still no release date. –

It is one of the most sought after pieces of Beatles memorabilia on the market – the infamous “Butcher” cover that adorned the face of the Beatles “Yesterday and Today” album from 1966!  This was the height of Beatlemania, a juncture where the Beatles no longer had to “sell” their image to the world, and more importantly nobody could ever again tell the Beatles ”no”!  Frustrated with their public perception as loveable “mop tops”, the Beatles countered with a photo session that yielded that now infamous pose wearing the bloodied butcher smocks with slabs of raw steak and appendages of decapitated baby dolls.  The numbers vary…some say 8000…others 80 000…with respect to the number of copies released to the retail market.  So inflamed was the public’s outrage that Capitol decided to “recall” the album just days after its release because of the notoriety.  A cost-effective decision to simply “paste over” a different cover slick – rather than destroy the existing stock – would result in the album’s rerelease with the safer “trunk cover” pose.  Record buyer’s aware of the label’s gaffe would learn to discover they had a Beatles collectable by virtue of spotting Ringo’s black turtleneck on the trunk cover underneath ”bleeding” through the white wash of the paste over trunk cover slick.  These copies (referred to as 2nd state butcher covers) occasionally surface on ebay and usually command a premium ($300-$1 000) given that the butcher slick underneath is completely intact and undamaged.  Professional collectors have attempted to steam off the paste over to reveal the butcher cover – some with more success than others.  These copies are referred to as 3rd state versions of the album and depending on the carnage of the peel job, maintain a comparable market value ($150-$1 000).  While it’s hard to determine the existing number of collectables that remain in circulation via ebay and collector shows, only first edition pressings with the “rainbow” color band Capitol label are potentially the holy grail.  Subsequent pressings with the green, red, orange or purple labels had by then been legitamately reissued with the trunk cover exclusively. 

A bonofide “1st State” (as is with no paste over) edition of the “Yesterday and Today” album - still in original cello factory wrap recently went up for auction on ebay.  Starting bid??  $21 000.00 U.S.!   Of course if you’d like to actually see what the butcher cover looks like…

Nirvana‘s Nevermind, In Utero and Unplugged in New York will be re-issued on vinyl this year.

Paul McCartney and his girlfriend, Nancy Shevell, were in London Monday night for the premiere of The Boat That Rocked, starring Emma Thompson and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Set in 1960s London, the movie is about the staff of a pirate radio station and its stance against a government that preferred jazz. The soundtrack is packed with classic rock acts — including The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Jeff Beck, The Who, The Hollies, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Procol Harum, The Moody Blues and David Bowie. It’s scheduled to open in U-S theaters in August.

Neil Young will now release his Archives collection on June 2nd. His manager, Elliot Roberts, made the announcement Saturday at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. This collection, which has been delayed countless times, will be available as a 10-disc Blu-Ray edition for 399 bucks, a 10-D-V-D box for 199 dollars, and a C-D version for 99 dollars. Also on Saturday in Austin, director Jonathan Demme premiered his second Young concert film, Neil Young’s Trunk Show. The film, which, like most things associated with Young, is a work in progress, was filmed in December 2007 at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia.

John Mellencamp‘s website has listed the five things he’s working on. The biggest news is a summer tour of minor league ballparks with “two other major artists.” This tour will start in early July and run through August. (Bob Dylan, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams have done the minor league ballpark circuit.)

Mellencamp hopes to record a new album during the tour. The post on his site says, “To be produced again by T-Bone Burnett, the album will be recorded at old hotels including the famed former Statler Hilton Hotel in downtown Dallas, where legendary bluesman Robert Johnson recorded 13 blues songs during the summer of 1937… The building has long since fallen into a sad state of disrepair, [and] John hopes to re-focus attention on it and other such buildings within quick travel distance during his summer tour.” All the sessions will be filmed for a documentary.

Mellencamp is also putting the finishing touches on the video for his song “A Ride Back Home,” assembling a four-C-D box set that will include some early demos and unreleased songs, and putting together a C-D and book project for Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the musical he’s been working on for 10 years with Stephen King. For more details log onto Mellencamp-dot-com.

The gentleman pictured on the cover of Mellencamp’s 1987 album, The Lonesome Jubilee, died last week. Woody Baker, a World War Two veteran, welder and metal fabricator was 94. The photo was taken at the Midway Tavern in Elnora, Indiana. The bartender was asked if he knew an older, working class guy who might be willing to sit at the bar next to Mellencamp, and Baker was the guy.