Music News 10-17-12: Billy Corgan Gives Good Q&A, Duff McKagan Reloads, Joan Jett Hooks Up With Dave Grohl, and MORE!

Anybody catch Monday's Late Show with David Letterman?  Musical guest was the supposedly broken-up Foo Fighters backing future Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Inductee Joan Jett on the Blackhearts classic "Bad Reputation".

This wasn't the first time that Jett had jammed with the Foos, though.  Back in April, she joined the band in Brazil for a spirited version of "I Love Rock & Roll".  Little known fact: Joan Jett and Belinda Carlisle go to the same clinic for their botox injections.



Johnny Depp has inked a deal with Harper Collins for his own book imprint, Infinitum Nihil (translation: "nothing is forever").  The first book to be published by Depp under this agreement is The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Douglas Brinkley, who has penned memoirs on Walter Cronkite, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ronald Reagan, to name but a few.  Don't hold your breath waiting for this book to be published, though, as the tentative date for release is 2015.  That's right, 2015.

While Axl Rose takes his Guns 'n Roses tribute band to Vegas for an extended residency, Duff McKagan has published the book It's So Easy...And Other Lies and will be hitting the road to promote the book by doing a string of book readings/live gigs with his new band Loaded.  If that weren't enough, he's also writing a weekly blog for the LA Weekly/Reverb.  You can catch this week's rant on being a "rocker" HERE.

Like Axl Rose, Billy Corgan is the lone remaining original member of his band, Smashing Pumpkins, who are set to hit the road to promote their new album, Oceania.  Whether you dig Corgan's music or not, you gotta give Corgan props for at least being an interesting interviewee - and a busy one at that.  In an interview with Carson Daly, Corgan admitted to considering suicide "three, four, seven times".  In a Riverfront Times interview, he claims that "a good artist is willing to die many times."  And, last but not least, in an interview for Denver's Reverb, he says that, if released in 2007 instead of 2012, the band's new album would sell a million copies.  Hmm, if you say so, Willie!

A few weeks back, Muse singer Matthew Bellamy lashed out at US right-winger Glenn Beck for using the band's music during his radio show.  Glenn Beck responded by proiclaiming that he will continue to not only enjoy the band;s music, but to play it during his show.  In a bizarre letter to Bellamy, Beck wrote, "You seem to have a pretty good grasp of comparative US and European politics, but maybe there's a pattern that you're underestimating. Throughout history, leaders have used music to lull young people into a sense of security and euphoria. They've used artists to create the illusion that they can run a country that keeps all the good and wipes out all the bad. Think Zurich 1916. Think artists getting behind guys like Lenin and Trotsky. Think of pop culture's role in the Arab Spring. The youth rises up, power structures crumble, and worse leaders are inserted."  Hey Glenn, bipolar much?

Who says local ABC affiliates can't do surprisingly respectable rock documentaries?  Eye On LA reporter Tina Malave does a bang-up job straying beyond the well-worn footage and storylines of perhaps the greatest period in American pop music, the Laurel Canyon scene of the late 60s and early 70s.  Check it out!