Gibson Guitar plant in Nashville raided by feds…

An international crackdown on the use of endangered woods from the world’s rain forests to make musical instruments bubbled over to Music City on Tuesday with a federal raid on Gibson Guitar ‘s manufacturing plant, but no arrests.

Agents of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service made a midday appearance and served a search warrant on company officials at Gibson’s Massman Drive manufacturing plant, where it makes acoustic and electric guitars.

Gibson issued a statement saying it is “fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood.” The company said it did nothing wrong.

Federal officials declined to say whether anything was removed from Gibson’s plant or what specifically the agents were trying to find. But some exotic hardwoods traditionally used in making premium guitars, such as rosewood from the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil, have been banned from commercial trade because of environmental concerns under a recently revised federal law.

the rest of the article is here:

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091118/BUSINESS01/911180400/1003/BUSINESS

Vince Neil on “The Dirt”

Heather Muse from Lemondrop.com spoke with MÖTLEY CRÜE singer Vince Neil recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Lemondrop.com: Is the movie version of The Dirt ever going to get made?

Neil: “I guess it’s just sitting on somebody’s desk right now collecting dust. It’s always been out of our hands. So if it happens, it’s great. If it doesn’t, [laughs] I’m not going to sit around and wait for the trailer to come out, you know. One thing about [the movie], I never even agreed that the movie should be made because how can you really put those lives – our lives and the stuff that we’ve done – into a two-hour film? There’s so much stuff. What do you leave out? What do you put in, and how do you actually capture it on film without it being rated X, really, because of all the excesses: girls and drugs and drinking and all that stuff? I’d rather you leave it to your imagination and picture it in your mind when you read the book. To me, that’s cooler.”

Lemondrop.com: What’s different about touring solo?

Neil: “It’s looser. It’s a lot of fun because it’s not so structured … But my band, we just go out and we don’t have a set list or anything.

We just go out that night and we sit down and we go, ‘Well, what do we want to play tonight?’ And we throw down some songs and just go and play. It’s everything from tons of cool cover songs and classic Mötley stuff and stuff from solo records and everything in between. You can’t do that in Mötley. I just go out and have a lot of fun. It’s fun being in Mötley, but this is a lot of fun too. I enjoy playing the smaller places too. You never get a chance to do that in a band like Mötley Crüe. So I get kind of the best of both worlds.”

Read the entire interview here.