Dave Grohl, as drummer, loves his new band with John Paul Jones and Josh Homme

Dave Grohl's back on drums! That's what a lot of the buzz is that's currently surrounding Them Crooked Vultures as the band sets off to cruise across North America.

In the Foo Fighters, Grohl's talents behind a drum kit were hidden away in a bushel basket so that he could be the frontman, screaming indelicately into a microphone with a guitar strapped to his back. But the former Nirvana drummer has consistently returned to the drums whenever he's linked up with Queens of the Stone Age founder Josh Homme, himself an ample guitar player, singer, songwriter and frontman.

So it's long been Grohl's dream -- and probably fans of his -- to be able to return to the drums in a tight-knit group. Grohl envisioned himself forming a band with Homme years ago -- and who better to play bass than John Paul Jones? But who among us wouldn't desire to recruit Jones to join a rhythm section in much the same way we draft reliable running backs for fantasy football? Grohl probably never seriously thought he could form a band with both Homme and Jones.

Until he got that unexpected phone call.



As Grohl explains in his backstage interview with radio station KUT 90.5 Austin:

"I'd worked with John on a Foo Fighters record and asked him. I guess it was about a year ago. I bumped into him in London, and I said, 'Hey, I got this project I think might be kind of fun. Me and my buddy Josh are gonna do something outside of our bands.' And he kind of went, 'Oh, yeah, right.' And then I didn't hear from him for a while, and then a month later, he called and said, 'Hey, when do you think you're gonna do it?' So I called Josh, [and I'm] like, 'F***, man, I think he actually wants to do it! This is amazing!'"

Grohl says that when he, Jones and Homme all started jamming together for the first time, it took him only as much as two or three minutes to realize it was the best band he'd ever been involved with.

"John, I mean, you know, John is ... he's ... he's an incredibly gifted musician. Anything that he picks up, he plays with feel, he plays with passion. He's ... he's a ... you know, he's a classically trained f***ing genius. But he rips on anything! He'll pick up a mandolin and just blow your head off! You know? And ... and everybody knows what he can do with a bass guitar, and watching the two of them go at each other, you know. I get to sit there and watch those two every night, and it's awesome."

It was presumably Grohl's first interview about Them Crooked Vultures since the band's formation early this year, and so he gushed over the fact that he was finally able to talk freely about the band.

"Nobody knew; we kept it a secret for eight months. Nobody knew. And that was the best part. I'm actually relieved now that I can talk about it because I used to -- you know, I had to keep it a secret. It's like I had a secret lover for eight months and I was trying to hide her away from everybody. You know? I couldn't tell anybody!"

The only remaining secret with the band that neither Grohl nor Jones was at liberty to address in their interviews with KUT 90.5 Austin was when Them Crooked Vultures will be releasing any of their studio recordings. When Grohl was asked if he could reveal anything about their record, he clammed up, reverting to the tight-lipped nature of the band since its public debut in August. Grohl simply told the reporter:

"No. You'll see."

While some media outlets are still reporting the band's debut album will be titled "Deserve the Future" and released late this month, it's really not even certain there will be an album release in the traditional sense. As I said one month ago yesterday:

For all we know, Them Crooked Vultures may forego an in-store physical album release altogether. Too passé!

Why not drop the entire album free of charge over the course of a month, hiding uncompressed digital files on different Web sites. We'd have to follow the social networking accounts of a couple dozen different henchmen affiliated with the marketing scheme and click incessantly on suspect links to various indistinguishable vultur.es URLs. Most would reveal comical images of crooked vultures, while only a handful would be those proverbial needles in the haystack, unleashing track by track the powerful music created for fans of loud rock.

Truly, then, only the most patient and ardent fans would deserve the future.

Myles Kennedy takes to the stage one year after his brush with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones

Throughout much of 2008, a Led Zeppelin reunion tour seemed possible. During the months that followed the band's December 2007 concert in London, encouraging words were coming from Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Jason Bonham and even, at times, Robert Plant.

That changed about this time last year. As Robert Plant's tour with Alison Krauss was soon coming to a close, he issued a statement saying he was not going to be participating in any kind of recording or touring project involving Page, Jones and Bonham. Plant wished them well on whatever they were going to be doing.

For a time, there remained a distinct possibility that Jones, Page and Jones would still collaborate on a tour and even an album without Plant, in a new band other than Led Zeppelin. They were said to be jamming with various singers, even including Steven Tyler, but the one name that hovered around them as a distinct possibility for a singer was that of Myles Kennedy, of Alter Bridge. This year, as Alter Bridge's other band members hooked up with their former singer for a Creed tour and even a new album, Kennedy acknowledged he had been jamming with Page and Jones in 2008. While the rest of his Alter Bridge bandmates are on the road, Kennedy has been using his songwriting abilities and his guitar chops and vocals to work on a solo project this year.

This Sunday night at 6 p.m., he'll take the stage at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Md., for a one-night charity event benefiting the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. Kennedy tells LedZeppelinNews.com he won't be unveiling any of his new tunes. "I would like to roll out some of my solo stuff," he says, "but with the advent of YouTube that isn't an option." He'll opt instead for a combination of cover tunes plus perhaps material from Alter Bridge and his previous band, Mayfield 4.

In addition to Kennedy, the concert lineup is to include the Johnny Hiland Band, Orianthi, the Paul Reed Smith Band, and Davy Knowles & the Back Door Slam. VIP tickets, which include an open bar, run for $50 apiece. General admission tickets are $10. They are available here.

John Paul Jones to sit in with Sara Watkins in afternoon set at Austin City Limits

Over a three-day stint in Austin, Texas, John Paul Jones is playing the Austin City Limits festival and the TV show of the same name as well as a great local venue for live music, all with Them Crooked Vultures, plus making a special guest appearance at the festival sitting in with Sara Watkins.

Watkins, who first became known as the sultry female vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in Nickel Creek, became solo star earlier this year with a debut album produced by Jones. They first played together on the road in 2004 as members of Mutual Admiration Society. Watkins now spends many of her days on the road, splitting her gigs between solo events and gigs with her latest group project, the Works Progress Administration.

Update: Footage from her performance with Jones added

During her solo set at 1 p.m. today, Jones will join her onstage again, just as he last did joining her on the set of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" in April. Around that time, Jones was hinting of a new project of his, something secretive that eventually became revealed to be Them Crooked Vultures.

On Wednesday night, a small crowd entered an Austin TV studio to witness Them Crooked Vultures' first performance in America since its debut show in August. Amid the studio audience, champion cyclist Lance Armstrong snapped cell phone pictures despite a prohibition on cameras inside. The next day, Armstrong wrote on Twitter, "Them Crooked Vultures put the hurt on me last night. Ouch.." The episode of "Austin City Limits" is to air on PBS early in the new year.

Them Crooked Vultures played at Stubb's BBQ last night and is scheduled to play an hour-long set beginning at 7:30 tonight.

John Paul Jones gives first interview since debut of Them Crooked Vultures; bassist compares band's onstage improvisation to that of Led Zeppelin

John Paul Jones has given his first interview since the debut of Them Crooked Vultures. In his interview for KUT 90.5 in Austin, Texas, he commented on a number of topics all related to the new band.

There were no questions about the status of a Led Zeppelin reunion.



How Them Crooked Vultures got together:

"It's all Dave's fault. It's all Dave's fault. He came up to [the] GQ Awards in London last year to present us with, um, Men of the Year, I believe it was, with Zeppelin. And we got to talking, and he says, 'Well, you know, if you're ever not doing anything, I want to get a little band together with Josh singing, and give you a call.' You know, so, I found out I was doing nothing after a while. ... I just came over in February, met with Josh for the first time, went pretty much into the studio, and just started having fun basically."

On the fact that the band got together despite none of the three members needing to have another band at this time:

"It's got to be fun. It really has."

On the blues-based groove present in the band's songs:

"Yeah, yeah. There kind of has to be. Josh is pretty bluesy too, and I suppose my history is blues-based. Blues-based rock. And it all comes from the blues for me. I just like the sound of it, I like playing it, and we're doing basically what we want, you know."

On releasing their studio recordings:

"Yes, it is hard to come by, but ... There will be music ... real soon now, as they say in the computer world."

On the method of release:

"I can't really comment on that, but it'll be everywhere soon, don't worry."

On the band's ambitions and longevity:

"We're still a young band hoping to go places. It is, yeah. They're all still growing. We all play 'em fine, of course, but this is again one of those bands where different things happen onstage and you take the songs from different places and discover new stuff about bits. It keeps the interest, and it's good fun to do. ... Yeah, I think it's going to go for a while. Honestly, you know, their respective bands will call them back eventually, but I think we're going to get a good run of it before anything like that happens."

In a separate interview for 90.5 KUT, Dave Grohl discusses the status of the Foo Fighters and explains what it is like playing in a band with John Paul Jones.

In Hulett and Prochnicky's photo book, Led Zeppelin history compacted into vignettes

In a series of three black-and-white shots taken by James Fortune in 1973 straight-on in front of center stage, we see Robert Plant in full performance mode onstage at the Los Angeles Forum. With his legs positioned in pyramid formation, his face bobs from side to side, his hair bouncing a beat behind. The microphone in his left hand points outward, not to himself or to anything in particular. His opposite hand bears a tight grip of the microphone cord, allowing him to give the cord a good stretch. Behind him, a barely visible Jones plays his bass while standing next to the symbol-adorned drum set of a shadowy Bonham keeping time. The body that shifts the most in this series of shots is that of Jimmy Page, who starts off by bending impossibly backward from the knees up, his guitar extended courtesy of an outstretched strap from his shoulders. Page's face changes in each photo to demonstrate three separate looks of anguish as he cuts his chops high on the fretboard.

Any one of these three images could suffice as the quintessential image of Led Zeppelin at its peak. In fact, precisely this thought has crossed a lot of minds, inspiring quite a few imitators. "Many heavy metal groups, such as Heart, Van Halen, Guns n' Roses, and Metallica, to name but a few, borrowed from Zeppelin. But, as seen in these images taken at the Los Angeles Forum, no one could rock harder than the original," acknowledges a photo caption accompanying these photos as printed in "Good Times Bad Times: A Visual Biography of the Ultimate Band," a new book by Jerry Prochnicky and Ralph Hulett published by Abrams Press.

These are only three of the 200 photographs on 216 pages in this hardcover coffee table book, and "Good Times Bad Times" presents so much more than the usual photos of Led Zeppelin onstage. In fact, some of the book's highlights take place far from the road. Rare glimpses of Jimmy Page inside his fancifully decorated yet modestly lit Pangbourne boathouse depict the guitarist lounging at home, always looking away from the camera, even in close-ups. Elsewhere, John Paul Jones, in bell bottom trousers and sandals, embodies the posture of a serenading Dave Matthews as he plays a mandolin outside his Hertfordshire estate with two of his daughters and his wife dancing and clapping along. In others, Robert Plant enjoys the company of a horse and a goat at his farm in Kidderminster, England. In some backstage shots scattered throughout the book, the text notes that Bonham looks particularly bored to be away from his home and family, whether it's conveyed by his body language or the words on his shirt -- one such shirt has an image of the dog Snoopy on the front and, on the opposite side, the words "I wish I could bite somebody ... I need a release from my inner tensions!"

The California-based writing team of Prochnicky and Hulett, who previously turned out the paperback "Whole Lotta Led: Our Flight with Led Zeppelin," provide a general overview of the band's history in the first few pages of the book. This text definitely takes on the theme of the "Good Times Bad Times" title, as any written history of the band's 12 years should, but the authors dedicate an inordinate amount of column inches to the ups and downs of the 1977 tour, whereas the 1973 tour that the authors posit was the "peak" warrants a single paragraph. The real point of the book is to showcase the band pictorially, and that is achieved. The group is often serious, often silly, and the text provided alongside the photos reflects that always in an appropriate manner. Their appropriateness is no better exemplified than on page 179, which shows all four band members squeezed into a choreographed shot via a rather goofy pose during a Manticore Studios rehearsal in January 1977, above a separate image of a nervous Page at the Swan Song office in London, biting his thumbnail and retaining a near-worthless cigarette butt in his two fingers as he dares explain to members of the press on Oct. 28, 1977, that Led Zeppelin was not going to split up and not responsible for "bad karma."

From the band's tragic end in 1980, the story completes itself with a tidy four-photo recap of events that have followed. Jason and Zoe Bonham join Led Zeppelin's surviving members in a photo taken at Led Zeppelin's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. A slimmer and distinguished version of manager Peter Grant stares at Martyn Goodacre's camera in a rare shot taken in the early '90s, prior to his death in 1995. The book closes with two shots of Led Zeppelin in action again, with Jason Bonham on drums, at the O2 arena on Dec. 10, 2007. Of the future, the authors say, "There may be a few more reunions or perhaps a limited tour, but the remaining members wisely decided that it was best to leave the legacy intact by not launching any huge world tours." And with that, one supposes, the story seems fittingly ended.

There are so many striking images in this book, some of which were never published before or have rarely been seen. Instead of concentrating on the usual suspects of Led Zeppelin photography, the book draws from a number of sources who either had access to the group in its formative days or just happened to catch up along the way. Some of the photographers earned their own rightful mention inside the book, such as the bespectacled and mustachioed Chuck Boyd, who catches John Paul Jones rehearsing on an electric bass while seated on a folding chair in a daylighted lounge on Sept. 4, 1970, hours ahead of the now-legendary "Blueberry Hill" concert. Back in December 1968, this photographer is said to have "lobbied intensely" for the L.A.-based company Sunn Amplifiers to start an endorsement deal with a band based solely on the strength of a test pressing of that group's first album. The company's promotions person said Boyd was "certain they would sell more amps than any [other] artist on [Sunn's] roster" but declined.

With each flip of the page, a new surprise lies ahead. In all probability, the reader looks just like a kid on Christmas -- or the bright-eyed Robert Plant smiling on page 111. In a black-and-white photo credited to Koh Hasebe / Shinko Music Archives, we see Plant's left hand cradling the first few frets of the six-string portion of Jimmy Page's double-neck guitar. Out of sorts with the equipment, he sits on a crate and supports the guitar's heavy body on his right leg. Behind Plant's back, only a few onlookers all facing the stage wander this empty indoor arena in Japan, where Led Zeppelin is sure to pack in thousands of screaming fans a few hours later, while the band is on its first tour of the country, in September 1971. What speaks volumes in this photo is that Led Zeppelin had even the power to bring that joy even to themselves.

Following are three images from the book used with the permission of the publisher, Abrams Books, along with the photo captions and credits as they appear in "Good Times Bad Times: A Visual Biography of the Ultimate Band."

Led Zeppelin explored Japan's culture with great enthusiasm. All the members bought cameras and had a field day with them. Here, Page and Plant are totally engrossed in the task at hand. "Led Zeppelin: Good Times, Bad Times"; Abrams, 2009; photo credit Koh Hasebe / Shinko Music Archives

May 12, 1969. When he heard Led Zeppelin play for the first time in California, photographer Robert Knight was blown away and quickly helped them secure a gig in Hawaii. When the band got off the plane in Honolulu, Knight took pictures of them clutching reel-to-reel boxes that no doubt contained the works-in-progress that would become Led Zeppelin II. Knight recalled, "I met the band at the airport, with a VW and camera bag. I got some terrific shots of them at the house they rented at Diamond Head -- learning to surf, strolling the beach, and other very mad behavior." "Led Zeppelin: Good Times, Bad Times"; Abrams, 2009; photo credit Robert M. Knight

Photographer Ron Raffaelli worked with Led Zeppelin mostly in 1969, accompanying the band on several European and U.S. tours and documenting sessions for Led Zeppelin II at Quantum Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Primarily, though, he's known for his striking images of Zeppelin taken at his Hollywood studio. Here, he was able to bring out the spontaneous individuality of the band members while also illustrating the group's unity. "Led Zeppelin: Good Times, Bad Times"; Abrams, 2009; photo credit Ron Raffaelli / www.mobiusgallery.net

Want your chance to watch Them Crooked Vultures tape 'Austin City Limits'?

Before the North American tour by Them Crooked Vultures starts in October, the band is to take the stage next Wednesday, Sept. 30, for a taping of the TV program "Austin City Limits." Click here for your chance to attend the taping in person and enjoy the new tunes from John Paul Jones, Dave Grohl and Josh Homme.

In other news, a new Foo Fighters track called "Wheels" is now getting some radio airplay. It is going to appear on the band's Greatest Hits, scheduled for a Nov. 3 release.

Also, Grohl was spotted earlier this week playing drums for a new song by Slash, who's been busy making a solo album. The former Guns N' Roses/Velvet Revolver guitarist was also joined on the track by Duff McKagan, who was bassist in both of those bands. Slash wrote on Twitter after their Tuesday night recording session:

"Great jamming w/Duff & Grohl tonight, the track is a killer intrumental [sic], very heavy."

Slash's solo album is also said to include some work by drummer Jason Bonham, who accompanied him on a festival date this June and now is scheduled to appear with him again next Friday, Oct. 2.

Former Quiet Riot drummer honors John Bonham on 29th anniversary of his death

When Frankie Banali, former drummer of Quiet Riot, was booking his gig at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, Calif., he must have had John Bonham on the brain. The promotional material for tonight's gig says:

"I am particularly excited about performing a set of Led Zeppelin music with a group of musicians that know how to deliver this music. Joining me for the set will be Chas West (The Jason Bonham Band) on vocals, Mitch Perry (Edgar Winter Group) on guitar, Sean McNabb (Great White) on bass and Edward Harris Roth (Glenn Hughes) on keyboards.

"September 25, 2009 will be the 29th Anniversary of the passing of Led Zeppelin's mighty John Henry Bonham (31 May 1948 – 25 September 1980) and the Led Zep Set will be performed in his memory and dedicated in his honor."

Another site of mine, "On This Day In Led Zeppelin History," today marks Bonham's passing.

Also tonight is an act that has been touring for some time. I caught a show in South Florida last December. Randy Jackson, who was singer of the rock group Zebra, along with a rock band and arranger-conductor Brent Havens, join the Virginia Symphony at the Harbor Center in Portsmouth, Va., tonight at 8 to perform Windborne's Music of Led Zeppelin.