Latest news with #AmoebaMusic
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Legendary '70s Band Celebrates 50th Anniversary of Iconic Album With Hollywood Walk of Fame Ceremony
On June 5, 2025, the legendary band WAR was honored with the 2,814th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, commemorating both their 55-year music legacy and the 50th anniversary of their iconic 1975 album, Why Can't We Be Friends? Present at the ceremony were original and longtime members, including Lonnie Jordan, Lee Oskar, Howard E. Scott, Harold Ray Brown, Jerry Goldstein, and Laurian Miller. Percussionist Marcos Reyes, who has been with the band for 25 years and hails from Lamont, Calif., also attended, expressing gratitude for being part of such a historic moment. The star-studded event took place on the famed Hollywood Boulevard, adjacent to Amoeba Music, the world's largest independent record store. Emceed by music producer and Walk of Famer Jimmy Jam, the event featured actor and comedian George Lopez as a guest speaker. Lopez, a longtime fan of WAR, notably used their hit "Low Rider" as the theme song for his self-titled sitcom, George Lopez, which aired from 2002 to 2007. In a nod to their cultural roots and the enduring popularity of "Low Rider," the band arrived at the ceremony in six custom low-rider vehicles provided by local car clubs, making for a memorable entrance for the special occasion. Formed in 1969, WAR is renowned for its eclectic fusion of funk, soul, jazz, Latin, rock, and street music. Their socially conscious lyrics and distinctive sound have resonated with audiences for decades. The band's impressive achievements include over 50 million albums sold, 20 gold, platinum, and multi-platinum records, three Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominations, and an entry into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. The ceremony also celebrated the 50th anniversary of their seminal album, Why Can't We Be Friends?, which features the titular track that became an anthem for unity and was famously transmitted into space by NASA during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Related: Fans Declare Aging Has 'Nothing on Him' as Legendary Actor Celebrates 88th Birthday "The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce is honored to welcome the iconic band WAR to the Hollywood Walk of Fame," Ana Martinez, producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, noted of the inclusion, per the press release. Following the ceremony, the band held a signing event at Amoeba Hollywood, allowing fans to engage with the musicians and celebrate their enduring impact on music and culture. The full ceremony is available to watch online: Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Express Tribune
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
From Boulevard of Broken Dreams to Hollywood Walk of Fame, Green Day honored with a star
Green Day, the iconic punk rock trio, were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on May 1st. The unveiling ceremony, which took place at 6212 Hollywood Boulevard near the famous Amoeba Music store, marked a significant milestone in the band's illustrious career. The trio, consisting of frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tré Cool, received their 2,810th star, cementing their place among entertainment legends. The event was emceed by TV presenter, DJ, and music executive Matt Pinfield, who made his first public appearance since suffering a stroke earlier this year. The ceremony saw several notable guests, including hip-hop icon Flava Flav and actor Ryan Reynolds, who shared a heartfelt tribute to the band. Reynolds notably referenced Green Day's song "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," which was famously featured in the end credits of Deadpool and Wolverine. During the event, Armstrong expressed his gratitude, saying, 'This is kinda like being at your own funeral.' He thanked fans and supporters for their dedication, adding, 'We love you guys so much.' Armstrong shared his personal reflections on Instagram, reminiscing about the band's journey from their early days in 1987 and their humble beginnings in 1992. He also mentioned his mother, Ollie, who used to make spaghetti while the band jammed at his house in Rodeo, California. Green Day's honor coincides with the upcoming release of their deluxe edition of Saviors on May 23rd, which includes new tracks like "Smash It Like Belushi." The band, who recently celebrated the anniversaries of American Idiot and Dookie, will also headline Download Festival 2025 in England.
Los Angeles Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
L.A. Affairs: I was over dating in L.A. Then a charming co-worker came along
Before I met Tony, I had written off the idea of falling in love in Los Angeles. Dating in this city felt like an exhausting game I didn't want to play anymore — one full of superficial encounters and people more interested in networking than connecting. It always felt like everyone was chasing someone just slightly more impressive than the last. Or rather, someone with more followers. I was trying to finish law school and keep my head above water. Romance? That felt like a luxury for someone with more free time, more energy or less on their plate. Tony was the last person I ever expected to fall for. We met while working at Amoeba Music, the iconic Hollywood record store that feels like a dusty cathedral for audiophiles and aging punks — or at least the old location did. At the new store on Hollywood Boulevard, I was there for a job, not a love story. Tony had just returned to the store, freshly sober, needing what he called a 'get well' job. He'd worked at Amoeba Music on and off for 15 years while touring with his band — his life seemingly a chaotic swirl of sound checks, dive bars and reinvention. He was a lot older than I was and outgoing, wild, beloved by everyone. I'm reserved, shy, focused. It felt like we were from different planets. But slowly something shifted. Between shelving records and clocking in for shifts, we started to talk. Then joke. Then laugh. I realized that beneath his boisterous surface was the kindest, most caring man I had ever met. We connected over our mutual love of movies and how we both felt more alive in the soft hush of a dark theater than anywhere else in the world. We'd spend our nights off catching double features at the New Beverly, taking in moody indies at the Vista or planning our weekends around midnight screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse. Our first 'non-date' date was a midnight showing of 'Kill Bill' at the New Bev. Sitting beside him in that tiny, red-velvet theater, watching Uma Thurman's character slice her way through betrayal and heartbreak with a katana, I felt something unexpected stir in me. It was violent and stylized onscreen, but underneath it all was a woman reclaiming her power — and maybe that's what I felt too. It felt like the beginning of something. Tony and I didn't always like the same films. He loved big, bold movies like 'Aliens,' and I leaned more toward grounded dramas, the kind of emotionally messy stories Paul Thomas Anderson tells. But we both loved the experience of going to the movies and talking about them afterward, breaking them down scene by scene over late-night coffee or fries at Swingers. The moment I realized my feelings were more than friendly came a little later. Tony was supposed to see Iggy Pop at the Hollywood Palladium one night. But earlier that day, he casually asked me, 'If my plans fall through, would you want to hang out?' I said sure, not thinking much of it. According to him, when he told me that he couldn't get a last-minute ticket, I said, 'Good.' It was a quiet, telling word. Good. Because I wanted to see him. Because I liked him. We ended up at Lily's Bar at the Adler a Hollywood Hills Hotel — just up the street from Amoeba. It's the spot where so many little moments between us had accumulated. The bar was dark, intimate, tucked into Hollywood in a way that almost feels like a secret. We talked for hours. At some point, I told him I had feelings for him. We kissed. I couldn't believe that kiss happened. He was everything I wasn't — bold, unpredictable, magnetic in a way that made people orbit around him. Falling for someone like him felt like stepping off a ledge without knowing what was below. I was scared of what it might mean. What if we were too different? What if I lost myself in his potential chaos or he got bored with my quiet corners? Despite every warning bell in my head, I couldn't deny what was pulling me toward him. And when we finally kissed, it wasn't just a kiss. It was a surrender to the idea that love doesn't always show up looking as you imagined. I wish I could say I walked away that night feeling certain and secure, but I didn't. I was terrified. I was still in law school, still trying to find my place in a city that often felt like it was chewing me up. I felt like a kid. How could I be ready for something serious with someone so much older and so seemingly different? But here's the thing: He didn't have it all figured out either. We were two people from different worlds who happened to crash into each other in the same corner of Hollywood. We had no road map. Just this strange, beautiful thing growing between us and a mutual willingness to see where it might lead. Two years later, we're still figuring it out. Together. We live in Hollywood, not far from where it all began. We'll walk past Amoeba sometimes and remember that version of ourselves: me, burned out and bracing for more disappointment; him, trying to heal and rebuild. We'll pass the Adler, and I smile at the thought of that first kiss and the girl who almost talked herself out of taking a chance on something real. Or we'll drive past the New Bev, check out what's playing and wonder if it's worth staying up until 2 a.m. again. I never thought love would look like this: a guy who's been everywhere, knows everyone and has stories tucked into every bar and theater in L.A.; and me, someone who has mostly kept her head down, trying to just get through it all. But somehow, we found a rhythm. A quiet, steady beat underneath the noise of this city. Love didn't arrive in Los Angeles the way I expected it to. But it arrived anyway. The author is studying for the July California bar exam and is a certified Pilates instructor. She lives in Hollywood. She's on Instagram: @ehhhriqua L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@ You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Even Your Hobbies Aren't Safe From Trump's Tariff Chaos
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Perhaps you're tired of the nonstop flow of bad news since President Donald Trump's second inauguration, and you're unplugging a little with some hobbies. That might mean reading more novels or comics, collecting vinyl records or Blu-Rays, getting into knitting or art, or finally cracking that Wingspan board game that's been gathering dust on your shelf. Sadly, I have bad news: Even your hobbies can't escape global politics. Trump has been quite erratic in his trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China this year. Yet even with all the confused delays and exemptions, the fact remains that the tariffs he's imposing on those three countries are universal. These import taxes are meant to attack every single product that originates from our bordering neighbors and our East Asian rival. Yes, there are loopholes, but the overall effect is clear: These countries are to be punished, and our dependence upon them means we'll be shouldering lots of pain as well. Our politicians are straight-up admitting that! Most urgently, the constant wavering on tariffs fosters a climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and scrambling that makes it so much harder for smaller businesses and more precarious industries to navigate the chaos. Plenty of attention has rightly been paid to the most necessary goods that reside in the crosshairs (fresh and frozen foods, energy, toilet paper, apparel). Less noticed are the resultant impacts on everything that gives joy and fulfillment: physical pages, artistic recordings, objects for creation and play. If you work in those very sectors, you've likely been on edge for a while now. Jim Henderson, a co-founder of the iconic California record store Amoeba Music, told me that he and his fellow indie-chain executives had been 'dreading Trump's tariff bonanza' since the 2024 election. Amoeba is best known for its ample vinyl and CD stocks, but its three locations sell a little bit of everything: books, DVDs and Blu-Rays, audiophile gear, and customized merchandise. 'Several vendors—from turntable manufacturers to apparel companies, on through some of our label partners—have either posted price increases or warned us of their imminence,' Henderson wrote in an email. 'With the doubling of the China tariffs, we can count on them revisiting the new cost and pricing structures that were presented.' Executives aren't the only ones feeling the peril. Scour the online spaces where niche hobbyists gather to chatter about their interests, and you'll find months' worth of casual questions and creeping fears. One Blu-ray forum post from the day after the election asked whether enthusiasts should 'Start hoarding now?' Reddit's vinyl community featured a postelection question about the 'potential tariff effect on vinyl,' which earned a grim reply: 'If tariffs are instituted on a grand scale in the States, you likely won't have money for hobbies anyway.' Blogs devoted to tabletop games have long been fretting about the tariffs, with one executive straight-up telling the media last month that 'board games are about to get more expensive.' (Grim timing, since we're coming off a couple of boom years for that sector.) The CEO of Blick Art Materials told Hyperallergic that the company had 'purchased more inventory than normal for a few product lines to hedge against higher costs,' such as paints, inks, and utensils. Bleeding Cool founder Rich Johnston has likewise been documenting comics-industry jitters for months on end. These have manifested in publishers' proclamations that cheap single-issue comic books are a thing of the past, as well as in a panic-sales spike for a new Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel that occurred just before the original tariffs were set to go into effect in February. The tariffs come during a rough patch for the comics industry in particular. Johnston told me in a phone conversation that late last year, the comics industry had mostly been 'reliable' and that 'people were very happy' with how things were chugging along—until Diamond Comic Distributors, once the top comics distributor in the world, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Publishers hurried to switch distribution systems and request emergency donations from concerned fans, while others (like the famed imprint Dark Horse) chose to preemptively cut costs through mass layoffs. Now the tariffs threaten to exacerbate these issues even further. 'Usually it's those component parts that go bust: the actual printers, the actual distributors,' said Johnston. 'The delay has helped, especially since the biggest publisher, Canada's Transcontinental,' has offered to absorb the cost burden of the tariffs instead of surcharging its clients. Part of the reason these tariffs hit these industries the hardest is because Canada is a leading supplier of paper products. 'It's not down to paying Canadians less or slave labor or having different governmental incentives,' said Johnston. 'It's literally cheaper to cut down a tree and turn it into print, because they've got huge forests that are very easy to access, and they have a lot more experience and skills.' There are American printing presses, of course, but those 'only have so much capacity, which makes their prices already higher,' Johnston explained. 'But now the Canadian advantage is being tariffed away, and it's all more expensive.' (And yes, the printing extends far beyond comics or even standard bestsellers. As Johnston cheekily informed me: 'Canada prints a lot of Bibles.') For Amoeba, the physical media industry has already been weathering headwinds, as media companies like Sony decide to stop producing blank minidiscs and Blu-Rays for personal recordings altogether, and studios like Warner Bros. dump a bunch of back catalog on YouTube instead of prepping any new video releases. The tariffs have not helped, due to the fact that both vinyl and video discs tend to be pressed and processed in bulk from Mexico, with the plastic boxes for DVD and Blu-ray sets manufactured in China. There are, however, some local saviors for music and movies. 'Over the last few years, a little bit more of our new vinyl has been pressed in the United States because of a few pressing plants that have opened,' said Jim Henderson. 'But by and large, so much of what we get from the labels is being pressed outside of the states.' With only a few major pressing plants out there for both discs and vinyl, and with all sorts of tangled relationships between labels and manufacturers and suppliers and distributors, it's also hard for Amoeba to change things up preemptively in anticipation of cross-border tariffs. (One hedge available to Amoeba: the used and secondhand vinyl and movies markets, on which the tariffs have little impact.) However, even if the temporary tariff reprieves may soften the blows, there is still the major question of China, where so much manufacturing of cheap goods and materials is based: toys, component bits, machinery, colors, and more. One raw-materials retailer told Hyperallergic that certain pigments, colors, and brushes that are offered for a wide variety of crafts, much like musical instruments, are largely sourced from China and will be subject to the price hikes. Tabletop gaming enthusiasts who want to use 3D printers to home-manufacture minis and figurines may find themselves stymied by the fact that 3D printers are largely produced in China, which also provides us with the large majority of our board games. When it comes to yarn and textiles you can use to knit and sew your own clothes, forget about it; China has even that on lock. Craft retailers stateside that already started to phase out China-made goods since the tariffs from Trump's first term and Biden's succeeding one may just be encouraged to further embrace that trend, though they won't be able to replicate China's manufacturing prowess by any means. The overall effects won't be limited to just these four countries, either. Since 'a lot of goods come to the world from America and then get distributed elsewhere,' Rich Johnston said, Canada might be inclined to set up its own global export facilities in order to get around the inevitable tariff—which will, of course, force a rethinking of Canadian trade relations with other nations, for all kinds of products. Mexico, the largest exporter to the U.S., will be eyeing such diversion tactics as well. Perhaps they'll both look to China as an example, which has long outsourced certain factories and parts to Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia) in order to sidestep other nations' trade barriers. At the heart of it, though, what worries Jim Henderson most is that 'all this noise around tariffs has created an economic reaction and tension that is not easily unwound,' he wrote to me. 'People start talking/tweeting/commenting and hearing about inflation and the price of eggs or whatever and it causes many to pause or scale back on recreational spending, and that ripples on through retail and restaurants and all the different ways one would expect it to.' In lean times, 'people turn to selling more of their collections and private items' to stores like Amoeba—instead of buying more from them. Put it another way: Even with the delays, the damage has been done. Trump can pull back his tariff orders altogether, but consumers are already feeling the instability and distrust in the broader economy. If there's one bit of relief from the storm clouds, it's that these businesses have a deep and passionate community to lean on. 'We generally tend to try to accentuate the positive as well as the deep variety we have,' Henderson explained. 'People come to Amoeba for a variety of reasons: We do live shows, and we have sales and community events.' Everything's going to become a little more local, now.
