Elton, Costello, Mellencamp Join Burnett for Concerts
Elton John, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, and Gregg Allman will all take the stage when producer T Bone Burnett‘s Speaking Clock Revue comes to Boston (the Wang Center, October 16th) and New York (Beacon Theatre, October 20th). The concerts will raise money for the Participant Foundation, which supports music and arts education in public schools. My Morning Jacket’s Jim James will join the lineup in New York, and Neko Case will perform in Boston. Tickets for both shows go on sale September 27th.
Burnett says Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue — a 1975-76 tour in which Burnett, Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn joined Dylan — inspired the Speaking Clock Revue. “The first tour I went on, my first job in show business, was on The Rolling Thunder Revue, and I’ve come back to that type of collaborative and extraordinarily rewarding experience from time to time,” Burnett said in a statement. The two shows will also include Leon Russell, Jeff Bridges, Ralph Stanley, Punch Brothers, Karen Elson and the Secret Sisters.
Burnett’s interest in the cause of art education was stoked by the upcoming documentary Waiting For Superman, in which the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) studies the innovative methods some U.S. public school teachers are using to keep students in school. “This film deals most powerfully with the troubling state of public education in the United States, and offers solutions and the opportunity to be part of those solutions,” Burnett said.