• Random Notes: Weezer, Madonna, Pearl Jam
• The Guide to the Chinese Democracy Tracks
• Q&A: Phish’s Mike Gordon
• Weekend Rock List: Calendar Songs
• Bjork, Sigur Ros Playing Iceland Webcast Show
• John Oates’ Mustache Cartoon Nears Existence
• Alejandro Escovedo Tears Up Intimate Club
• Ringo Starr Selling Art For Charity
• Death Row Sale Reveals New Tupac Tracks
• The Toadies Return With Riffs, Hangovers
• Devo Delight Die Hards in Brooklyn
• Ted Nugent Attacks Supreme Court, Obama
• News Ticker: “American Idol,” Franz Ferdinand

Top stories from the last three days:

• Up All Night With Amy Winehouse
• Gordon “Optimistic” About Phish Reunion
• Peter Travers Video Review: “Wanted”
• Video: The Black Lips Hit the Streets
• Weak Economy Hurting Summer Tours
• Snoop Dogg Says Dr. Dre’s “Detox” Is Done
• Prince Sues Label Over Covers Album
• Coldplay Seek Opening Acts Via YouTube
• Barack Obama: Stevie Wonder Geek
• On the Charts: Coldplay
• Breaking Artist: Lykke Li
• Bach Says Axl Penning Autobiography
• Gadget Envy: Guitar Hero On Tour
• Kanye West Blogs About Bonnaroo
• Chinese Democracy Blogger Gets FBI Visit

Scroll down for full news stories, commentary and much more in Rock Daily.

• While Coldplay was ruling the charts with Viva La Vida, the band’s label EMI started laying off employees. The band also turned to YouTube to recruit opening acts and played to the cheap seats at a free show at Madison Square Garden.
• Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama graced the Rolling Stone for a second time. In addition to the complete cover story, we also revealed what’s playing on the huge Stevie Wonder fan’s iPod and explored Obama’s life in pictures.
• Sebastian Bach came clean about the mysterious Axl Rose, telling us that Axl has a (funny) mean streak, that Sly Stone could be the key to a GNR reunion and Rose may be penning an autobiography. Meanwhile, the guy who leaked those Chinese Democracy tracks had a sobering week.
• We pulled an all-nighter with Amy Winehouse, as the part-time singer/part-time train wreck opened up to us about her crack use and the rocky relationship with Blake Incarcerated. We also documented the Winehouse’s wild year in a photo gallery.

This week, the number of band members in Weezer increased fifty-fold when the band met up with 200 contest winners who scored the opportunity to jam with their favorite band. In fact, stars spent a lot of time in crowds this week, what with Madonna hanging out at Yankee Stadium and Mötley Crüe rolling through the streets of New York. Click below for these shots plus the rest of the week’s news in photos.

• Random Notes: Weezer, Pearl Jam, Madonna and the Week in Rock

Bassist Mike Gordon’s solo album The Green Sparrow might not have come to fruition if it wasn’t for some advice from Sting, Twyla Tharp’s self-help book or Phish’s 2004 split. With a possible Phish reunion and a tour with his new band on the horizon, Gordon spoke to Rolling Stone about breaking rules, his relationship with his old bandmates and why fans are so addicted to calling him on the phone. Click here to read the full Q&A.

For this week’s Rock List, we pay our respects to that wonderful instrument that lets us know when it’s Friday: the calendar. You’ll notice all of our picks have something to do with a specific day of the week, a certain day of the year, holidays and all other calendar-based vernacular. Tell us your picks and on Monday we’ll tally the lot and reveal the Readers’ Rock List. Here are our picks:

Jay-Z — “December 4th”
The Cure — “Friday, I’m In Love”
Guns N’ Roses — “November Rain”
Ice Cube — “Today Was a Good Day”
Boomtown Rats — “I Don’t Like Mondays”

There was all kinds of legal news this week, but the juiciest bit of litigation came care of Devo, who sued McDonald’s because a Happy Meal toy wore a copyrighted energy dome. An anonymous commenter delivered the pithiest, most fan-friendly response of the week:

“We are not men. We are McNuggets.”

The Beatles’ Ringo Starr will sell his own artwork starting tomorrow at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida. Each item is hand-signed by the drummer, with all of Ringo’s proceeds benefiting the Lotus Foundation. Additionally, Ringo and his All-Starr will perform at the Hard Rock on July 3rd. Buyers who purchase $2,950 worth of artwork will receive a free ticket to the show as well as the opportunity to meet Starr at a VIP reception earlier in the day. Starr began creating art while on tour in the late 90’s. The collection that will be appearing at the Hard Rock is titled “Abstract Face.”

When we first reported that John Oates of Hall & Oates was coming out with a cartoon about his superpowered moustache, we thought “No way does this ever get on television.” Well, we might be wrong, as J-Stache is currently be shopped to stations and it sounds incredible. The premise, according to the two-minute trailer, is that Oates plays a family man who is lured back to the rock star life by his moustache. His moustache also happens to be voiced by comedian Dave Attell. “In a cartoon setting, the mustache has its own personality,” Oates tells Billboard. Wait, it gets weirder. In the storyboarded pilot episode, Oates’ moustache seeks to open up a new wing of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dedicated only to rockers with moustaches (Congratulations, Brandon Flowers!). However, David Crosby warns Oates that a pack of moustache bearers, led by a murderous Tom Selleck, are trying to snuff out other moustache bearers. We change our previous prediction: This show will be Adult Swimming in no time.

It’s been a week since the supposedly finished Chinese Democracy tracks surfaced on the web, and much has been made of the songs. If you’ve been lucky enough to hear them, or if you are just curious about what’s out there, click below for the full guide to some of the songs that are supposedly on one of the most anticipated rock records of all time. Also check out the rest of the story of the tracks (including an interview with the FBI-targeted leaker) below.

• The Guide to the Leaked Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy Tracks

• Fresh G N’ R Tracks Leak: Is Chinese Democracy Finally Coming Out?

• Chinese Democracy Leaker Gets FBI Visit

In what is expected to be one of the biggest concerts in the country’s history, Icelandic superpowers Bjork and Sigur Ros will play the open-air Nattura tomorrow in Reykjavik. The concert is being held to raise awareness about the impact aluminum smelting is having on Iceland’s landscape. Can’t make it to Reykjavik on such short notice? Thankfully, Nat Geo Music, the musical offshoot of National Geographic Entertainment, will webcast the concert live. The concert kicks off at 7pm Iceland time, so tune in at 3pm if you live in Eastern Standard Time. If Sigur Ros’ set is anything like the show they recently played in New York, you won’t want to miss it. Says Bjork about the concert, “Too often battles being fought for nature turn into something negative and into mudslinging. We will not go that way, we are not saying that this and that is forbidden, we are rather asking ‘What about all these other possibilities?’ The 21st century is not going to be another oil century but rather a century where we need to recycle, think green and design both power plants and our surroundings in harmony with nature.”

“Everything feels even better this time around — except the hangovers,” says Vaden Todd Lewis, frontman for post-grunge comeback kids the Toadies, during an early-morning conversation. “Those still feel the same.” He’s jokingly referring to his band’s reunited form, which has spawned a sold-out tour and a new album No Deliverance due in August. The group, most notorious for its hit “Possum Kingdom,” splintered several years ago after a struggle with their label over their second album and the departure of bass player Lisa Umbarger. After the occasional reunion show, Lewis finally got the band back together after the departure of two of the members of his other band Burden Brothers. “They just got burnt out,” Lewis explains. “So did I, really. I started to write songs that I realized were Toadies songs, and the other guys were into it, so we had to do it.”

The group also got a load of support from their rabid Internet fan base — impressive considering the band broke before the Internet age really kicked in. (more…)

It felt like the summer of 1981 last night as Devo and the Tom Tom Club played to a packed, sweaty crowd at the McCarren Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Both New Wave groups are known to the public at large for a single song from the extremely early 1980s (”Whip It” and “Genius Of Love”), but have managed to sustain extremely long careers with devoted fanbases and a catalog of beloved albums. First up was the Tom Tom Club, composed of Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads. They played an energetic, well received set consisting of “L’Elephant,” “She’s Dangers” as well as a cover of Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing.” The crowd didn’t become fully engaged until they busted out their dance classic “Genius Of Love,” which sounded just as good as it did in Stop Making Sense a quarter century ago. They closed with the only Talking Heads moment of the night, a cover of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River.” It brought the house down, but it was hard not to wish David Byrne had driven his bike across the Williamsburg Bridge to sing with his former bandmates.

The sheer amount of red energy domes and “De-Evolution Is Real” t-shirts in the crowd made it quite clear people were there for Devo. (more…)

Every Tuesday Single Minded highlights new tracks hitting stores (or the Web) this week. On Fridays, come back for rarities, remixes, mash-ups and more.

Al Green, “Love & Happiness” [Live]
Al Green apologized that his vocals here are a bit rough, claiming he was nervous. On a related note, to everyone we’ve ever done karaoke with: We were just nervous. And totally, totally off-pitch.

Spoon, “Panic” [Smiths Cover]
Respect your elders: today’s indie sweethearts pay note-perfect tribute to yesteryear’s.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, “Gbeti Madjro” [Live]
This is a bit of a cheat, because we’re not sure it’s 100% live — but how do we not post this? There’s a section in the middle where the vocalist just starts screaming in ecstasy. We know exactly how he feels. (more…)

Alejandro Escovedo’s Thursday CD-release show at the venerable Continental Club in Austin was as much about celebrating the 57-year-old Hep-C survivor’s career-defining album Real Animal as it was about honoring the Continental, a 51-year-old venue that just this week gained designation as a historical landmark.

Soon enough, Escovedo showcased what the people came for: (more…)

Following the bankruptcy of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, the famed label hit the auction block Wednesday. Ultimately, Nashville-based Global Music Group won the rights to Death Row’s catalogue for $24 million and taking ownership of albums like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and, perhaps most lucratively, twenty unreleased tracks by Tupac Shakur. Odds are that a new, posthumous Tupac album could hit shelves by the end of the year, though one obstacle is that new Tupac releases must be approved by Evergreen Copyrights and Shakur’s heir. Evergreen and Warner Music Group were both in the running to buy Death Row, but the label’s deep pool of unpaid debts scared away both companies from offering more money. Suge Knight was forced to sell off Death Row Records after falling into bankruptcy following a $107 million judgment leveled against Knight by a former partner.