Hard Rock

Make the Blackberry Peach Bramble your next cocktail...

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 10:49:30 -0400

Make the Blackberry Peach Bramble your next cocktail inspiration.

Ingredients/Steps

Muddle fresh blackberries
Combine into shaker with gin, peach real/peach puree and homemade lemonade
Top with raspberry liqueur
Garnish with mint sprig and lemon wedge.
Enjoy

We’ve partnered with Discovery for an epic ride to the...

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 11:07:00 -0400

We’ve partnered with Discovery for an epic ride to the upcoming 3 night miniseries, “Harley And The Davidsons.” Enter now for your chance to win! Details: www.discovery.com/hardrocksweeps

Here’s to sun bleached threads and casual...

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 10:00:25 -0400

Here’s to sun bleached threads and casual wear. https://rockshop.hardrock.com/

LA GROUPLOVE concert. Photo: Pooneh Ghana

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 11:12:59 -0400

LA GROUPLOVE concert.

Photo: Pooneh Ghana

Our LA GROUPLOVE concert. Photos: Pooneh Ghana

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 11:10:31 -0400

Our LA GROUPLOVE concert.

Photos: Pooneh Ghana

CHANGING OF THE GUARD Prince Rogers Nelson: 1958 – 2016

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 16:19:57 -0400

While you’re sifting through all the “man, 2016 sucks” posts in your social media feeds, take a moment to put the shocking death of Prince in a larger context. We’re living in a transitional time. A time of real change. The old guard is gone. The template of rock ‘n’ roll that lasted for over 50 years is gone. Those of us whose souls are largely defined by that sound are in a panic.

Lemmy, Bowie, Maurice and Prince all died in the span of five months. That ain’t fair.

We’ve experienced something akin to what music fans lived through in the very early ‘70s - Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison all died within 18 months of each other back then and it seemed as if rock music as art would die with them.

Here’s some good news: it didn’t then and it won’t now.

We tend to try and place artists in a generational timeframe, but Prince wasn’t a once-in-a-generation artist. Prince was a once-in-a-century artist. He was like Hendrix, Mozart, Cole Porter, James Brown, Salvador Dali and John Lennon rolled into one pint-sized funk machine from the frozen wilds of Minnesota.

Dissecting Prince’s career and music is a pointless exercise. It’s been done to death and anyone who’s musically savvy doesn’t need a self-appointed “expert” to tell them what made him so singular. He was quite simply the greatest natural musician of the 20^th century. Does anyone else even come close?

Creating impossibly great music for Prince was like breathing; it was effortless. It was something he couldn’t not do. That level of creativity, the sheer weight of communing with the muse that directly, must have been a serious burden for Prince. How do you live your life when every little jam that pops into your head is so amazing that you have a social responsibility to share it with the world? How do you brush your teeth, go to the store, eat dinner or participate in everyday life when there’s an endless river of Earth-shattering art running through your brain 24/7? How do you sleep? What do the rest of us do when that tap is turned off?

Between 1978 and 2015, Prince released thirty nine studio albums, five soundtracks, four live albums, five compilations and twelve EPs. That’s the mark of an artist so prolific, so full of ideas that it’s a personal burden. His celebrated “weirdness” was quite possibly just a defense mechanism for someone whose entire sense of self was deeply internalized. If he was less aloof, less insular and less weird, we almost certainly wouldn’t have the incredible body of work he released. The man had mystique.

Mystique in popular music is a dying art and it really is a crucial part of the elusive “cool factor”. Contemporary artists who find a way to take today’s instant access, always-on-camera reality and forge a true mystique from it will be the artists we’re talking about in 20 years; while flavor-of-the-month, fame-obsessed groups for whom art is product will be forgotten before the last reverberations of their derivative drivel fade from the 2017 homecoming dance. Prince was a master at creating that mystique.

With his incredibly wide-ranging gifts for songwriting, production, singing and image manipulation, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Prince was also one of the greatest lead guitarists who ever lived. His phrasing, his chops, his sense of reckless abandon – it all came together in a guitar style that was uniquely his own. The Hendrix influence was always apparent, but Prince was one of the few guitarists whose Hendrix fixation was a starting point rather than a goal.

And holy moly – that tone.

Prince’s guitar tone was a true thing of beauty. It was a thick, saturated, harmonically-complex noise full of overtones and lower-octave girth. In less capable hands it would have been a total mess, but Prince’s note placement and overall command of the instrument turned it into a joyous voice.

And now he’s gone. The architects of the classic rock era are aging out and, yes, dying off. It’s powerfully sad, but it’s also the way it’s supposed to be. Prince’s musicality wasn’t rigid and yours shouldn’t be either. The loss of Prince, Bowie, Lemmy and Maurice is the natural order of things. It makes room for the younger artists who have to struggle to survive in the streaming era – artists who are worth your attention. It’s a changing of the guard.

When change is real, it hurts. Birth is painful, death is painful. Change equals growth; it equals evolution. You’re not going to find an artist to replace Prince in your heart because such an artist simply doesn’t exist. Fill the hole created by the passing of Prince Rogers Nelson with a new favorite guitarist, a new favorite songwriter, a new favorite producer, a new favorite singer and a new favorite mystical pop guru. The death of Prince leaves all of those spots vacant. Go fill them.

JEFF NOLAN –Hard Rock International 4/21/16

Standing out >Neon Sweatshirt

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 10:00:32 -0400

Standing out >

Neon Sweatshirt

rollingstone: See a gallery of rare Kurt Cobain images, his...

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 16:38:12 -0400

rollingstone:

See a gallery of rare Kurt Cobain images, his artwork and journal entries.

Inspired by the April 10 festivities, we’re showing off...

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 16:34:57 -0400

Inspired by the April 10 festivities, we’re showing off one of our favorite awards. This MTV Tongue award is from the 2008 Latin VMAs that were held in Guadalajara and it is signed by various artists who won awards that night.

The award is one of countless outrageous pieces of music history found in the Hard Rock Memorabilia Collection - we’re not sure if we can even describe the way it feels.

Florals for spring? Groundbreaking? Yes. Tee

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 08:53:21 -0400

Florals for spring? Groundbreaking? Yes.

Tee

Photo

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 08:49:22 -0400

We’re channeling one of our favorite advocates for social...

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 08:47:22 -0400

We’re channeling one of our favorite advocates for social change today and rocking our Bob Marley shirt.

All we want is to hang out in a tank and do music things with...

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 08:35:55 -0400

All we want is to hang out in a tank and do music things with our friends.

A day digging through the Memorabilia Vault? You just...

Tue, 09 Feb 2016 16:28:39 -0500

A day digging through the Memorabilia Vault? You just can’t Beat It.

Pictured: Michael Jackson’s Beat It jacket

rollingstone: In defense of the CD. Our kind of classics.

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 17:37:08 -0500

rollingstone:

In defense of the CD.

Our kind of classics.

From the 27th floor of the historic Carbide & Carbon...

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 09:41:18 -0500

From the 27th floor of the historic Carbide & Carbon skyscraper.

He’s been called the King of Pop Culture and the raddest pug of...

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 10:46:05 -0500

He’s been called the King of Pop Culture and the raddest pug of them all…

Say hello to Doug the Pug, who stopped by our global headquarters this week for some lovin’.

REMEMBERING SCOTT WEILAND

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 14:47:02 -0500

SCOTT RICHARD WEILAND 10/27/67 – 12/3/15

Ain’t the same for you and me
Comatose commodity
The superhero’s dyin’
All the children cryin’

Sell more records if I’m dead
Purple flowers once again
Hope it’s sooner, hope it’s near
Corporate records’ fiscal year”

- Scott Weiland “Adhesive” by Stone Temple Pilots

I woke up today to 17 missed calls and 43 text messages.

“Scott’s gone.”

It’s cliché to say that bad news is like a punch to the gut, but that’s exactly what it felt like. Scott Weiland was more than the deeply talented frontman for Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver; more than the poster child for ‘90s rock ‘n’ roll excess; more than a rock star – the man was a bona-fide, once-in-a-generation ICON.

In the coming days, there will be formulaic recaps of his career, tasteless Twitter jokes about his lifestyle, weepy elegies to the lost promise of ‘90s rock, brainy think pieces and a lot of “I told you so”. All of that is okay. It’s human nature. It’s what people do when someone famous dies young.

But for some of us, it’s much deeper. Scott’s music touched us the way only the best art can. It resonated with us and helped form who we are. I’m firmly in this camp.

I’m in the latter camp not only because I loved his music, but because I was his guitarist and friend in the ‘90s.

I met Scott shortly after STP had their first really big hit with “Plush”. At the time, all of us oh-so-cool rock ‘n’ rollers dismissed him as a weak Eddie Vedder clone. People forget that this was a common attitude about STP at the time (of course, he went on to make us jealous haters eat our words). Scott came to see a band I was in at a small club in Los Angeles. After the set, I was hanging out with a bandmate in the parking lot and we see Scott approaching. “Ugh, that’s the dude from that Stone Temple band – what the hell does he want?” Scott came up to us gushing about our set and being so charming, so funny and so intelligent that we felt like asses for our stupid, uninformed opinion of him. I liked him immediately.

A few months later he invited me to join his side project, The Magnificent Bastards.

Working with Scott was a revelatory experience. The man was so effortlessly talented it seemed supernatural. Scott could take the most boneheaded, 2-note riff and put a vocal on it that turned it into an instant classic. That’s the mark of the truly gifted. Creating unbelievably powerful rock music was like breathing for him. Make no mistake – as a frontman, Scott Weiland is in the same league as Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. The man was simply that good.

We did some recordings for various albums, jammed a lot, wrote some songs – but mostly we had a great time. He’d laugh about the dumbest stuff and had a lust for life that was absolutely infectious.

He also had a drug problem. A serious one.

Scott Weiland’s struggles with drugs are well-documented and I’m not going to recap them here. Suffice to say that he could be surrounded by a drug-induced wall that prevented him from connecting with those around him. If I was annoyed by it as one of his musician buddies, it must have been absolute hell for his family and those who were truly close to him.

Even with this crippling addiction to contend with, Scott’s kindness was always evident. He was an extremely big-hearted, generous guy who would show up unannounced and take you to a restaurant you could never afford or surprise you with a gift of incredible vintage clothing that just happened to fit perfectly (I found out later that Scott had my girlfriend send him all my sizes).

When my grandfather died, the first visitor to show up at my house was Scott Weiland. He didn’t simply call to say “sorry man” – he drove to my house to give me a hug. This was at the height of his fame. That’s the sort of person he was.

I’ll never forget when he showed up to rehearsal in a pristine, cherry red 1965 Mustang convertible. He had just bought it as a surprise gift for his first wife. Scott was in drag that day, but that’s a tale for another time…

I lost touch with Scott in the ‘90s. Our lives were on very different paths, but I followed his career with special interest. I was so happy for him when Velvet Revolver formed, but by then it was apparent that he was still unable to kick his demons. That thought is almost too depressing to contemplate. Mostly, I hoped that the fun-loving, music-obsessed guy I knew was still inside him. I’m positive it was.

As I write this, Scott’s cause of death has yet to be publicly disclosed. It really doesn’t matter what killed him. Will his loss be more or less meaningful if he overdosed? He’s gone and we’re left with his music as his permanent legacy.

All I know is that when I knew him, he desperately wanted out from under his drug addiction. It’s crazy the way we lionize drug use among the creative class and especially rock stars. It’s a passé attitude for the 21^st century. Let’s leave the image of the “elegantly wasted” rock star in the dustbin of history with leisure suits and 8-track tapes.

If you want to honor the legacy of Scott Weiland, commit to a deeper understanding about the nature of addiction. If you need help, seek it. If you don’t, help someone who does. But don’t forget to crank up some classic Stone Temple Pilots jams while you’re doing so.

Farewell, Scott. The world is much less interesting without you in it.

-Jeff Nolan

Music and Memorabilia Historian

Hard Rock International

You Had Me at Modelo - the pursuit of a burger on Bourbon Street

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 09:02:31 -0500

We’ve rolled out a new burger and beer pairing this winter – and it’s not your momma’s burger. To create this pairing, we had to take a trip down South and bask in the classic Louisiana flair and flavors of our Modelo Especial Burger and Beer duo. To help us along the way, we brought semi-biased but seasoned burger eaters Rosco Bandana – our friends and legitimate musicians.

Based out of the swamp land of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Rosco Bandana has transcended into something much more complex, containing elements of old school Rock n’ Roll combined with newer Indie Rock sensibilities as well as sprinkling in elements of Blues, Bluegrass, classic and alt Country, Gypsy, Psychedelia, and even some Funk.

But back to the food.

The burger, our Modelo Especial Bacon Cheeseburger, celebrates the city’s larger-than-life culture. To know what a burger that embodies New Orleans would even look like, we turned to cooking expert and New Orleans native, Chef Aaron Burgau.

Chef Aaron and Rosco Bandana cruised the Crescent City Farmers Market (known for cultivating community markets that utilize local resources to bolster authentic local traditions) early morning to learn more about the agriculture of New Orleans and select seasonal ingredients that make up this tasty burger.

The team made their way to the heart of the world-renowned French Quarter in Petite Bourbon Street, past the courtyard and holed up a cozy niche that gave off intimate vibes. Perched on a 40s balcony, overlooking the street that never closes, Chef Aaron, Raul, super cool Modelo Brand Ambassador, and Rosco Bandana were able to chat more about the Hard Rock’s legendary burgers and unique culinary flair.

Thus, they were inspired.

Leaving Rue Bourbon Street, the group put their cooking hats on and took their knowledge to the Hard Rock Cafe New Orleans kitchen, where they accompanied Chef Aaron behind the line and learned how to create this Modelo Especial burger, with Modelo Especial-infused beer cheese and light heat of the grilled poblanos. Oh yeah.

The Modelo Especial Bacon Cheeseburger features a Certified Angus Beef® patty drizzled with Modelo Especial-infused beer cheese and topped with applewood-smoked bacon, grilled poblanos, garlic aioli, lettuce and a tomato slice served on a brioche bun. The burger is served with seasoned fries and a side of Modelo Especial-infused beer cheese, which punches you in the face (gently) with clean and crisp flavors.

The day wasn’t complete without taking a bite of this mouth-watering creation before hitting the stage. With a belly full of goodness and inspiration in their hearts, Rosco Bandana ended their day with a live performance at the Cafe, while local folks treated themselves to the complimentary burger and beer pairing.

Where to next?

“Now, why you wanna try to classify the type of thing...

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 11:53:07 -0500

“Now, why you wanna try to classify the type of thing that we do?/Cause we’re just fine doin’ what we like, can we say the same for you?”

Thanks to Chris Kirkpatrick of *NSYNC for stopping by to see his jacket in the Memorabilia vault at our global headquarters.

Memorablia piece: featured in *NSYNC’s “Gone” music video