Vince Gill's Father Dies - NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE) via Individual Inc. -- Stan Gill, father of country music artist Vince Gill, died unexpectedly early Sunday morning in Columbus, Ohio. Gill, a retired Federal judge, had recently undergone major surgery for pancreatic cancer. However, the tumor had been diagnosed as benign. The actual cause of death has not been determined.

Vince Gill's next four concert dates have been canceled. They are: 7/30 - Ionia, MI; 8/1 - Detroit Lakes, MN; 8/2 - Duluth, MN; 8/3 - Milwaukee, WI.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Sheryl Crow- Sheryl Crow Begins 30-city Tour in Support of New Album -- Los Angeles, CA - Seven-time Grammy winning songwriter/recording artist Sheryl Crow began her North American tour beginning July 26. The tour will take her through 33 U.S. cities, where she will play New York's Jones Beach, Harbor Lights in Boston, the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Denver's Red Rocks and the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.More Here

Photo Courtesy A&M Records

Marty Stuart and Connie Smith — Country music newlyweds to open, close fair concerts

In case you missed earlier reports, it was confirmed that country musicians Marty Stuart and Connie Smith were married on July 8 in Pine Ridge, S.D.

That means that the Panhandle-South Plains Fair stumbled into booking what many are calling the Grand Ole Opry's ''new first couple'' - but the two will not be performing together. Story here

Fleetwood Mac are Back- Fleetwood Mac Home Video/DVD/Laser Disc to Coincide With Release of New Album, MTV Special and National Tour
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Garth Brooks, The Road out of Santa Fe - By Mark O'Meilia University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95, 202 pp., 1997 This is the story of Garth Brooks before he became a household name and megamillion selling artist in Nashville. In fact, he was only well known around Stillwater, Okla. where he attended Oklahoma State University and was honing his skills as a performer with the band Santa Fe in 1986-87. The story is told by Mark O'Meilia, the drummer with Santa Fe. The quick read is told more from the perspective of an aspiring country band (well, at least Brooks certainly aspired to bigger and better things than playing the local dives where drunken brawls seem to be the norm) than a biography of Brooks.See Country Standard Time Book Review

Net pirates plunder the high Cs

By Larry Lange

WASHINGTON --(EETimes) A little-known extension of an audio-compression technique, MPEG-2 Audio Layer-3 (MP3), has opened the door to sending large volumes of CD-quality music over the Internet or packing the equivalent of several commercial compact disks onto a single CD platter. It has also opened the gate on a flood of pirating activity by an underground community of students and hackers. Hundreds of MP3 Internet sites have sprung up on which digital music--everything from Mozart to Marilyn Manson--is being illegally reproduced and distributed free.

See Story Inside

A WARPed
Point of View

Liquid Audio and Global Music Go Head to Head in a Debate Over the Latest in Internet Music Technology

by Paul Barrow, Editor

Warp recently had the opportunity to engage two experts, also serious competitors, in the emerging field of downloading records, an alternative to buying them in a music store, in a debate via email on some of the issues related to their differing philosophies concerning this technology.

Since the technology promises to have a significant impact on the way we buy music, on the way in which artists market their music, and on the way in which popular music is measured and identified, this debate has historic significance in that we can visualize the process through which decisions are being made about the direction it is taking. Check out my rap with technology.

Time Out of Mind

Bob Dylan

The First Album of Originals in Seven Years

“It has a dirt-floor feeling, with loose ends and fraying edges in the songs, songs that sound both unfinished and final. The music seems more found than made, the prosaic driving out the artful.

It all comes to a head with "Highlands," a flat, unorchestrated, undramatized monologue, wistful and broken, bitter and amused, that describes both a day and a life. The song, as I heard it one afternoon this spring in a Sony records office in L.A., is about an older man who lives in one of Ed Kienholz's awful furnished rooms in the rotting downtown of some fading city - Cincinnati, Hollywood, the timeless, all-American Nowheresville you see in David lynch's Blue Velvet - getting up and going for a walk, maybe for the first time in weeks.Greil Marcus in Interview Magazine

IBM Hosts Web Site for "Sessions at West 54th" on Public Television —

July 29, 1997 NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE) via Individual Inc. -- IBM is the host of the on-line version of a new weekly public television music series, "Sessions at West 54th," airing nationally Saturday nights from 11:00 p.m. until midnight (check local listings).

The IBM-designed and hosted website at http://www.sessionsatwest54th.com (ED Note: See the link in our left column) will feature a live chat session with Wynton Marsalis on Thursday, July 31, 7:00-8:00 p.m., EDT. Marsalis performs his Pulitzer Prize-winning Jazz at Lincoln Center Production of "Blood On The Fields" by Wynton Marsalis with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra in its television debut on "Sessions" this Saturday, August 2, at 11:00 p.m., on public television. Story here

Artist Agreements
Some Basic Outlines