Monkees/Badfinger/Nazz Supergroup Gets Back to ’68 by Touring Beatles’ ‘White Album’

From Variety.

Micky Dolenz, Todd Rundgren and Badfinger’s Joey Molland answer the musical question: “White” don’t we do it on the road?

The 50th anniversary re-release of 1969’s “Abbey Road” may be just days away, but that doesn’t mean Beatles fans have been there and done that when it comes to celebrating ’68. Todd Rundgren, the Monkees’ Mickey Dolenz, Badfinger’s Joey Molland and several other name musicians of a certain vintage are teaming up to go out on tour playing one of the Fab Four’s most controversial projects, the two-LP, four-sided White Album.

Starting Sept. 21 at Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget Casino, “It Was Fifty Years Ago Today — A Tribute to the Beatles’ White Album” will spend a month barnstorming across the northeastern U.S. under the watchful gaze of Joey Curatolo, the musical director of “Rain: A Tribute to The Beatles,” and Flower Power Concerts.

Sure, there’s the fact that the tour’s title paraphrases from 1967’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and that the White Album is now 51 years old as opposed to 50. Maybe the messiness of the tour’s title is meant to reflect the schizophrenic (or, rather quadrophenic) nature of the White Album itself and the fractured manner in which it was devised. All quibbles must pass when members of such contemporaneous late ’60s groups as the Monkees, Badfinger and the Nazz are united in the salute.

Rundgren has some impeccable cred with Beatles fans. He and George Harrison did the production duties on a Badfinger album for Apple Records in 1971, “Straight Up” — featuring current tour mate Molland, of course — even if the “collaboration” had more to do with Rundgren taking over after Harrison split. In 1997, Rundgren wrote and recorded “Up Against It!,” an album of his demos for the musical theater adaptation of a stage show originally written in 1967 by Joe Orton for the Beatles. Most famously and recently, Rundgren appeared as part of the drummer’s All Starr Band for a number of tours.

Continue reading on the Variety website.

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