Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed a special fundraiser on Wednesday night (May 7th) at Red Bank, New Jersey's Count Basie Theatre and for the first time performed Springsteen's 1978 album Darkness On The Edge Of Town and 1975's Born To Run back-to-back and in their entirety, according to backstreets.com.

Proceeds from the fundraiser went to the refurbishing of the 82-year-old theater. Springsteen's wife Patti Scialfa currently serves on the Board of the Basie Foundation.

The band was introduced by NBC news anchor -- and longtime Springsteen fan -- Brian Williams who touched upon the recent death of E Street Band keyboardist Danny Federici by saying, "Great families endure. And great, great bands endure. The netting is just to keep the larger pieces of debris from falling down, and if there's an entity that could cause the big ones to fall, it's this group here... Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band!"

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's setlist:
Darkness On The Edge Of Town -- "Badlands," "Adam Raised A Cain," "Something In The Night," "Candy's Room," "Racing In The Street," "The Promised Land," "Factory," "Streets Of Fire," "Prove It All Night," and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town."

After an intermission the band returned to perform Born To Run with the periodic help of a horn section Springsteen called the Mighty Max Horns featuring Mark Pender on trumpet, LaBamba on trombone, Jerry Vivino and Ed Manion on saxes.

Born To Run -- "Thunder Road," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," "Night," "Backstreets," "Born To Run," "She's The One," "Meeting Across The River," and "Jungleland."

The show's encores included the Darkness On The Edge Of Town outtake "So Young And In Love, "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," and a cover of Eddie Floyd's Raise Your Hand."

The benefit raised money for the theater's renovation, which will begin this summer. Money raised at the show will also go towards various other programs though the theatre, including the Cool School which includes "workshops with seasoned professionals for aspiring actors, musicians and dancers of all ages."

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off their European tour on May 22nd in Dublin, Ireland. The band will be back in the U.S. on July 27th to kick off a three-night stand at New Jersey's Giants Stadium.

An enterprising and talented fan has created a virtual Beatles reunion album and posted his results on youtube.com, according to the Beatles fan website Abbey Road Best (abbeyrd.best.vwh.net).

A man identified as Octavio has taken rare Beatles and solo demo tracks and added appropriate "Beatlesque" sounding instrumentation to essentially create the album that never was. One of Octavio's "outfakes" of the third unfinished mid-'90s Beatles reunion track "Now And then" recently duped some longtime fans into thinking that they were actually hearing an unreleased Beatles reunion performance.

Among the demos that have been overdubbed are such rarities as Paul McCartney's 1968 version of "Goodbye" which morphs his 1968 demo with Mary Hopkin's 1969 version; George Harrison's All Things Must Pass-era demos of "Nowhere To Go" and "I Don't Wanna Do It"; John Lennon's late '70s and 1980 demos of "India," "You Saved My Soul," "Help Me To Help Myself," "Grow Old With Me," and others.

All of the tracks are created to sound very much like the Beatles' Anthology reunion tracks "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love," which were produced by ELO's Jeff Lynne.

Octavio has started his own blog virtualbeatles.blogspot.com which provides the audio to the tracks. The videos, which mainly consist of photo montages, can be accessed by logging on to youtube.com/user/gaius476.

Bon Jovi has a documentary in the works to coincide with its 25 year anniversary. The band has recently brought a film crew out on the road to shoot interviews and other footage. Award-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple is behind the new film. Singer Jon Bon Jovi says he hopes to dig up some archived footage as well, but tells us he doesn't know exactly what to expect from the film: "I'm not sure. And I think that's partly the beauty of it and the fear that's driving it. I was interested because people have been offering us boatloads of money to write a memoir. And I'm not ready to write a biography yet because it's too soon. This story is half told. I'd like to catch the moments while the moments are happening. And look back on the 25 years while the moments are fresh. With this because I'm making it and it's either going to tell the truth or it's not coming out."

There's no word on when the DVD will come out.

Bon Jovi plans to announce a show at Central Park this summer.

Bon Jovi will tour Europe in May and June and then return from some U.S. dates in July.

Bryan Adams recently kicked off a solo acoustic tour, which stops in Albany, New York tonight (Friday, May 9th). He's playing a mixture of hits and tracks off his upcoming album, called 11. During the brief tour, Adams tells us he's stripping down the tunes and playing them acoustically: "They all work acoustically because they were all written on an acoustic guitar. The album started out as an acoustic record and we halfway through I sort of switched gears and decided to make sort of an acoustic rock record. When I play the songs live, it actually sort of led me into the path into this next tour -- my first North American acoustic tour. And I feel confident enough with these songs -- and songs in the past -- that the show is going to be more interesting. Just hearing the songs stripped down completely myself and the guitar."

Adams' new album will come out next Tuesday (May 13th). The set will be available exclusively at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores nationwide and on WalMart.com in CD and MP3 format.

Adams recorded 11 -- named for its chronological order among his releases, as well as for the number of tracks it has -- in hotel rooms and backstage concert venues throughout Europe over the past two years.

It was 43 years ago tomorrow (May 10th, 1965) that the Rolling Stones began recording their signature tune "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" at Chicago's legendary Chess Studios.

Co-writer Keith Richards began writing the song in the early hours of May 7th, while the group was on tour in Clearwater, Florida. In the middle of the night, Richards woke up with the distinctive eight-note riff in his head and recorded it on a portable tape recorder he traveled with. According to Richards, the actual tape contains 15 seconds of the song's riff and "40 minutes of him snoring."

The next morning, Richards played the demo to Mick Jagger with the simple instructions that, "The line that goes with this riff is 'I can't get no satisfaction.'" Jagger immediately wrote a set of lyrics that were considered risqué for 1965. He recalled to the BBC that, "The lyrics to this were truly threatening to an older audience. This song was perceived as an attack on the status quo."

When the group began sessions for the song on May 10th at Chicago's Chess Studios -- where their idols Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howlin' Wolf had recorded their classic hits -- Richards experimented with a new Gibson Fuzz Box for his guitar. He had originally intended for a horn section to supply the song's introduction, but it was the rest of the band -- which then included the late Brian Jones on guitar, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts -- that convinced him to keep the "fuzz guitar" on the track despite Richards' fear that it sounded "too gimmicky."

Years later, Richards said that he originally thought the song would only be good for use as an album track, admitting to author Phillip Norman that, "I never thought it was commercial enough to be a single."

"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" debuted on the Billboard Top 40 on June 19th, 1965, and on July 10th it hit Number One, topping the charts for four weeks. Over the years, the song has been covered by artists as diverse as Otis Redding, Devo, and Britney Spears.

Although the song would remain a live staple for the group until 1972, it was retired from live performances until 1981. The group opened the majority of their 1997-1998 Bridges To Babylon Tour with "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," marking the first time the song was not performed as a concert's closing number or as an encore.

Happy Birthday to singer-songwriter Donovan, who turns 62 tomorrow (May 10th). Donovan, whose last name is Leitch, is best known for his string of '60s hits including "Mellow Yellow," "Hurdy Gurdy Man," "Jennifer Juniper," "Atlantis," and the 1966 Number One hit "Sunshine Superman."

Donovan recently published The Autobiography Of Donovan: Hurdy Gurdy Man, which shed new light on his early life and his friendships with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Rolling Stones. The book also revealed Donovan's part in collaborating on several Beatles songs, including "Yellow Submarine" and "Rocky Raccoon." Donovan also released the career-spanning box set Try For The Sun: The Journey Of Donovan, played a series of live dates with rocker John Mellencamp, and appeared on stage with Beach Boys' Mike Love at a recent lecture on Transcendental Meditation.

Donovan says that he has always defied genres, using different instruments and song structures to create his own unique style: "The rejection by the British folk world over me popularizing folk music and wanting to fuse different elements -- even on the first record, putting strings. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. What socialism were they involved with, as if folk music could only be listened to (by) the folk world, to the folk world audiences, is a very elite kind of way of looking at things. That, I couldn't deal with that."

Donovan is currently compiling two multi-disc box sets of outtakes from both his '60s and '70s albums for release sometime in the near future.