Soundgarden will release its first live album, “Live on I-5” on March 22, and has headed into the studio to record new material, Rolling Stone reports. The live album consists of tracks recorded on their West Coast tour of 1996.

“We brought Adam Kasper out on the West Coast leg of our headlining ’96 tour,” guitarist Kim Thayil tells Rolling Stone. “We wanted him to record it for a number of things – as a way to appraise and review the performances, we were hoping to maybe provide content for B sides for foreign releases, and …

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Pearl Jam’s 20th anniversary celebration will continue with newly restored and expanded versions of the band’s “Vs.” and “Vitalogy” albums. They’ll be released on March 29, the band announced today.
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Tickets for the Sonics’ New Years Eve show at Olympia’s Capitol Theater go on sale at 8 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 22, and will be available through Brown Paper Tickets, Olympia Film Society announced.
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Here’s some big news manager Buck Ormsby wasn’t quite ready to announce yesterday: The Sonics will play Olympia’s Capitol Theatre on New Year’s Eve, only the legendary Tacoma garage-rock outfit’s third local performance since the classic lineup broke up in 1967.

The show will support the Sonics’ forthcoming EP “8,” featuring the band’s first new songs since the ’60s (see previous blog item.) The band also plans to shoot video footage during the Olympia performance for a future DVD release.
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By now it’s a given that the Sonics take their own sweet time doing things. Tacoma’s garage-rock heroes disbanded in 1967 and – an early ‘70s reunion gig in Seattle aside – didn’t get around to their comeback bid for four decades.

Then, last October, lead howler Jerry Roslie revealed the names of four new cuts his band had been working on, “Bad Attitude,” “Vampire Kiss,” “Cheap Shades” and “Don’t Back Down” (interview audio posted here.) And now, band manager Buck Ormsby expects those new songs to finally see the light of day on a new EP that’s simply called simply “8.” Ormsby speculated that copies of the new disc could be in stores by the end of this month.
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CBS-TV has a big hit with its rehash of “Hawaii Five-O,” the popular cop show that originally starred Jack Lord from 1968 to 1980.

Alex O’Loughlin is at the helm as detective Steve McGarrett in the new version. September’s pilot episode is the most DVR’d program of all time, and the show drew a not-too-shabby 6.9 million viewers last Sunday, according to the latest rankings released by Bloomberg News.

Needless to say, the Ventures will give their version of the show’s iconic theme music a little extra emphasis on Saturday during a rare U.S. performance at the Snoqualmie Casino.
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Pearl Jam will release a new live compilation to celebrate their 12th anniversary, the band announced today. “Live on Ten Legs” will be released through Pearl Jam’s Ten Club and select digital and independent music retailers on July 18. A Ten Club pre-sale of the CD and vinyl versions began today on the band’s web site.
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Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum announced a major Nirvana exhibit this week. “Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses” will run from April 16, 2011 to April 22, 2013, and here is a list of a few of a few artifacts that will be on display, excerpted from the announcement on EMP/SFM’s web site:

• Kurt Cobain’s never-before exhibited, high school painting of two aging, Reagan-era punks in the post-apocalypse, informally known as “punk American gothic.”
• The Teac reel-to-reel tape machine owned by Mari Earl, Cobain’s aunt, on which a young

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It’s hard to believe Alice in Chains v. 2.0 has been around for half a decade now. And on Friday, the resurgent Seattle metal gods returned home for the third time in just over a year, an event that market the latest phase in their improbable comeback.

In 2005, the band’s surviving members resurfaced for a star-studded South Asian tsunami benefit at Seattle rock club, the Premier (a venue since renamed Showbox SoDo.) Later that year, they tapped singer-guitarist William DuVall to fill in for fallen front man Layne Staley, who died in 2002 of an apparent drug overdose.
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Around the time “The Runaways” hit movie theaters earlier this year you would have thought just Joan Jett and Cheri Currie were planting the seeds of grrl powered rock revolution back in the ‘70s. But Saturday night at the Puyallup Fair, Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson reminded the sold-out grandstand who the hardest rocking chicas from that decade really were, between the tough-as-nails riffs of “Magic Man” and “Barracuda” and Ann’s still potent banshee wail.
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