Roy Trakin Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Roy Trakin Lowry Mays, the San Antonio entrepreneur who turned Clear Channel Communications, the predecessor to iHeartMedia, into the largest broadcasting conglomerate of the post-consolidation era, died on Monday (Sept. 12) at 87 in his hometown. Said iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman: “We built this company on the foundation and vision created by Lowry Mays. He started it all from a single station in San Antonio — and look at iHeart today.” Mays was an investment banker sporting a Harvard MBA when he founded the San Antonio Broadcasting Company in 1972 with local car dealership owner Red McCombs (who went on to own stakes in the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets and Minnesota Vikings), acquiring a single station, KEEZ, and adding WOAI in 1975. The latter was dubbed a “clear channel” station because no other operated on its frequency and its 50,000-watt signal could be heard thousands of miles away on a “clear” night.

Roy Trakin “Live from Daryl’s House,” the Webby Award-winning musical performance show co-hosted by Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Daryl Hall, is returning to the web after a five-year halt in production. The long-running program will be seen on a dedicated YouTube channel starting Wednesday (Nov. 1) with an episode featuring Squeeze singer/songwriter Glenn Tilbrook.

Roy Trakin The son of Canadian country dance instructors “Sheriff Norm” and “Down the Line Sue,” in a way, MNRK Music Group president-CEO Chris Taylor was destined to become one of the most legendary executives in the country’s music history. He his start in the early ‘90s as lead singer for the reggae-ska-funk band One, which signed with Virgin Records while he was still in law school. Opting for the latter as a career, Taylor opened his Toronto-based law firm in ’97 and went on to represent some of the country’s top acts — from Drake and Avril Lavigne to Nelly Furtado and Sum 41 — and launched the influential Last Gang indie label (Metric, Death from Above 1979, Mother Mother, Crystal Castles and more). When he sold the label to Entertainment One in 2016, he also shuttered his legal practice to head the eOne Music Group, which was rebranded MNRK Music Group after parent company Hasbro sold the company to Blackstone in 2021 for a reported $385 million.

Roy Trakin When Varietychose to honor Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS) founder Raúl Alarcón with its Legends & Groundbreakers Award at its Miami Entertainment Town event on April 13, it picked the perfect person to fit that definition.  Among SBS’ 22 stations in the leading eight Latin markets are New York’s WSKQ-FM (Mega 97.9), the most-listened-to and streamed outlet in the U.S. in any language, Miami’s No. 1 station WXDJ-FM (El Nuevo Zol 106.7) and WCMQ-FM (Zeta 92.3) as well as L.A.’s top-ranked KXOL-FM (Mega 96.3) and KLAX-FM (97.9 La Raza), the first FM station to program regional Mexican music such as Norteñas and Banda, which once famously beat out an incredulous Howard Stern in morning ratings on KLSX. 

Roy Trakin “What the Hell Happened to Blood Sweat & Tears?” is the question filmmaker John Scheinfeld (“Chasing ‘Trane,” “The U.S. vs. John Lennon”) asked the band’s co-founder and industry acolyte Bobby Colomby over lunch just two months before COVID. The story Colomby told him that day turned into a compelling documentary that serves as the perfect glimpse into the roots of today’s cancel culture in an incident that took place 53 years ago. It was a reasonable query about a band that, as the summer of 1970 approached, was the hottest entity in rock ‘n’ roll, with a self-titled sophomore album for Columbia Records that topped the chart for seven weeks, spawned three massive Top 5 hit singles (covers of Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and Brenda Holloway’s “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and the novelty-like “Spinning Wheel,” penned by the band’s newly minted vocalist David Clayton-Thomas), while taking home an album of the year Grammy over “Abbey Road,” “Crosby, Stills & Nash” and “Johnny Cash Live at San Quentin.”

Roy Trakin Depeche Mode, the pioneering ‘80s U.K. technopop band, has long had a strong following in Los Angeles — thanks to their exposure on local alternative stalwart KROQ — and now they’re proving a favorite of film and TV creative executives. The group, consisting of co-founders Martin Gore and vocalist Dave Gahan after the death of keyboardist Andrew Fletcher in May 2022, is on a roll following its 2020 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where they were introduced by Charlize Theron, who called them “the soundtrack of my life.” Depeche Mode’s new Mute/Columbia Records album, “Memento Mori,” comes out March 24, their first since 2017’s “Spirit” and 15th overall, which will be followed by a year-long tour that launches March 23 in Sacramento and includes a show at L.A.’s Kia Forum on March 28 and four concluding area shows in December, two apiece at Kia and Crypto.com Arena. 

Roy Trakin Luis Felber’s life changed in January 2021 when a mutual friend set him up on a blind date with Lena Dunham. The Winchester, U.K.-born son of a North London Jewish businessman father and Peruvian painter mom, Felber was at first hesitant, having been in lockdown for most of the year, writing love songs on his iPhone for his group Atttawalpa. “I wasn’t in a place where I was looking for love,” the 36-year-old musician explains, revealing he’d never seen an episode of “Girls,” though his mom and sister were big fans. “Covid wasn’t exactly the sexiest time to meet someone. We texted for two days before we hung out. We’re not one-word types… we throw our emotions at the phone and our fingertips

Roy Trakin “I’ve been fighting with my demons so long, they’ve become my friends,” sings Billy Idol on “Cage,” the title track of his upcoming four-song EP.Outside the realm of personal demonology and in the court of pop culture, Idol has a lot of other pals in 2022. You can hear his “Rebel Yell” on national TV spots for T-Mobile, and he licensed “Dancing with Myself” for the prime-time NBC competition show that borrows its title.

Roy Trakin Judy Henske, a fixture of the ‘60s folk-revival scene, died on April 27 in hospice care in Los Angeles after a long illness, according to her husband, Craig Doerge.The imposing, six-foot-plus-tall Heske commanded the stage, combining traditional material like “Wade in the Water” and “Love Henry” with an onstage act marked by frank, witty on-stage banter. Her 1964 single “High Flying Bird” anticipated the psychedelic blues of emerging rock singers like Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.Dubbed “The Queen of the Beatniks” by producer Jack Nitzsche, Henske’s sarcasm was reportedly channeled by Woody Allen for Diane Keaton’s title character in “Annie Hall,” who not coincidentally also came from Chippewa Falls.

Roy Trakin “Pretty insane, huh?”That was Wolfgang Van Halen’s reaction when he learned of his nomination for rock song at the 2022 Grammy Awards — for “Distance,” the tribute to his late father, Eddie — in a category alongside Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters, Weezer and Kings of Leon.Indeed, it culminated a whirlwind year for the 30-year-old’s Mammoth WVH, which first released the song, along with a heart-wrenching video spliced together from home videos with his mother, Valerie Bertinelli, and

Roy Trakin “Let It Be” director Michael Lindsay-Hogg couldn’t be happier with Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” the three-part, nearly eight-hour miniseries made up of outtakes from his original Beatles documentary, which arrived on Disney Plus two weeks ago to much fanfare.Now 81, living in Hudson, NY, with his wife and three dogs, and mostly painting, Lindsay-Hogg is hoping Apple Corps will make good on its promise to re-release “in some form” his oft-misunderstood original, which had always been

Roy Trakin John Fagot, a legendary and popular promotion executive at Columbia, Capitol and Hollywood Records over the course of a four-decade career, has died.

Roy Trakin “They say that rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay… but where?” asked Max Arloft, the music critic played by Jeff Goldblum in “Between the Lines,” Joan Micklin Silver’s 1977 film about an alternative newspaper in Boston.

Roy Trakin On a cool, fall October night, the Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) held its third annual “Ambassadors of Peace” fundraising event to a backyard full of smiles.

Roy Trakin 300 Entertainment CEO/founder Kevin Liles is making a sizable investment in Vancouver-based cannabis lifestyle company Burb as it closes a $4 million Series A funding round led by Connecticut-based private equity group KarpReilly.For Liles, the combination of cannabis and music is a natural fit.

Roy Trakin Dell Furano, a pioneer in rock merchandising as the founder of Epic Rights, an entertainment agency and brand management company, has died. He was 69.

Roy Trakin Walter Yetnikoff, a colorful record label executive who led CBS Records as president/CEO from 1975 to 1990 — when its roster was stacked with superstars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones — died Sunday night at age 87.  He would have turned 88 on August 11.A cause of death has not been given, although he had been battling several illnesses in recent years.

Roy Trakin Jim Bessman, a music journalist whose work appeared in Billboard for more than a quarter-century, as well as in Cashbox and Variety, died Tuesday morning at age 68 in New York City. The cause of death was an aneurysm.Beyond the byline, Bessman may be best known within the writing community for his 30-year friendship with Bob Merlis, former Warner Bros.

Roy Trakin When the pandemic hit in early 2020, veteran music business headhunter Tom Truitt — a chief partner in the entertainment/media practice of Nashville-based executive search firm Buffkin/Baker — had his own lightbulb moment.Since 2015, Truitt had been hosting a live event, “Who Knew,” a monthly get-together Truitt dubbed “Ted Talks for the music industry.” Scheduling eight per year, six of them in Nashville, the storytelling-oriented gathering allowed the speakers to open up and reveal

Roy Trakin MRC Non-Fiction is announcing the production of a new documentary, “Girl You Know It’s True,” about the quick rise and faster fall of Milli Vanilli, the late ’80s pop duo that won the best new artist Grammy and sold more than 10 million records before losing it all amid a musical scandal.The documentary about Fab Morvan and the late Rob Pilatus will be directed by Luke Korem, who directed and produced the SXSW award-winning non-fiction film “Dealt.” Korem will be a producer on the

Roy Trakin Rabbi Sharon Brous, the charismatic spiritual leader and founder of the trendy, progressive IKAR congregation — whose members include both Steven Spielberg and Mayor Eric Garcetti — remembers the first time she heard Hillel Tigay perform his song “Alive” during Rosh Hashana services at the Los Angeles temple.“I was completely floored,” she says of the tune, which shares the singalong spiritual vibe of Arcade Fire.

Roy Trakin Don Zimmermann, the former President/COO of Capitol/EMI Records, died on Dec. 11.

Roy Trakin It was December 8, 1980, and I was sure I was going to meet John Lennon.I had just interviewed Jack Douglas, producer of John and Yoko’s comeback album, “Double Fantasy,” for Musician magazine. The album had been released just three weeks earlier; a cover story called “Yoko Only” written by Peter Occhiogrosso, my editor at the Soho Weekly News, was on newsstands.

Roy Trakin Carlos Santana has joined the ranks of stoner icons like Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson and Wiz Khalifa with his own cannabis brand. Mirayo is a line of premium products in partnership with Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Left Coast Ventures, the company that also produces such brands as Marley Natural and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s Mind Your head.

Roy Trakin When the album “Deadicated: A Tribute to the Grateful Dead” was initially released by Arista Records on April 23, 1991, no one could have predicted, in a little more than four years, the band’s iconic guitarist Jerry Garcia would be gone.

Roy Trakin Stu Cohen, a longtime head of promotion for Warner Bros. Records, died on July 20 from esophageal cancer.