News Ticker: Lady Gaga, Forecastle Festival, Steve Miller Band, Herb Ellis

• A pair of old songs featuring a pre-Fame Lady Gaga will appear on an upcoming childrens' audio book titled Portal in the Park. Idolator reports the tracks, recorded with Melle Mel, accompany Cricket Casey's story about a boy who has crazy adventures after falling through a portal in Central Park.

   

   

• The Flaming Lips, Spoon and Widespread Panic are all confirmed for Louisville, Kentucky's Forecastle Festival. The ninth annual fest goes down July 9th.

   

   

• The Steve Miller Band plan to release two new albums — both sets of covers — Billboard reports. Bingo!, due this year, includes tracks by B.B. King and Jimmie Reed that Miller calls "a party record."

   

   

• Jazz guitarist Herb Ellis has died at 88 of complications from Alzheimer's disease, the AP reports. Ellis performed with the Oscar Peterson Trio and contributed standard "Detour Ahead" to the jazz canon with his Soft Winds trio.

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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