Kasim with Todd and Elliot.

It seems that Kasim stopped using the headphones after a while!

Just Kasim!

Kasim having fun with Prairie Prince!

Many thansk to ocsheri for the heads-up about these photos.

The New Cars - Walker, MN
Pollstar.com are now listing The New Cars playing at MoonDanceJam in Walker, MN on Friday 14th July. Previously The New Cars official website TheNewCars.com had announced that they would be playing on Saturday 15th July. However there is no space on the schedule for the Saturday and the only available vacancy on the Friday is as the headliner act at 11.00pm.

The New Cars - Lancaster, PA
Tickets for the concert on Sunday 2nd July at the Clipper Magazine Stadium go on sale tomorrow at 10.00am. Click here for the direct link to purchase tickets. Tickets vary in price from $40 to $60 (plus charges). The concert starts at 7.00pm and according to this article "The concert will follow the team's afternoon game against the Newark Bears, which will begin at 1:35 p.m."!

This concert has not yet been confirmed by Meat Loaf's management.

The concert tonight is at The Grand Casino in Hinckley, MN (about 90 miles north of Minneapolis / St. Paul) which is described as "a Native American Casino that is open daily 24 hours. The 54,800 square foot casino features 2,170 slots and forty-seven table games. The property has five restaurants and four hotels with 855 rooms". Click here for the official website of the venue.

The New Cars will be playing in The Grand Amphitheater at the venue. The website states that it is "a gun-free facility" and "video cameras and recording devices are not allowed. Still cameras are generally permitted, however, it varies on a show-by-show basis".

It appears that this will be another outdoor concert as it's advertised as "Come rain, come shine" and the forecast is that it will be 76 degrees and partly cloudy for the soundcheck and 65 degrees with scattered showers for the concert itself. There is a 30% chance of precipitation during the concert but the wind which has affected them badly at other venues is only expected to be 2mph tonite.

According to the only note that I've been able to find on the Internet, the capacity at this venue is supposed to only be 1,088 (which would make it the smallest venue that they've played on the tour so far). Yesterday tickets could be bought in the fifth row (probably due to either high-rollers not taking up their offered seats or the VIP packages not being sold). Tickets for this concert vary between $32 and $48 (plus charges) which also makes it one if the cheapest concerts on the tour so far.

The concert tonight starts with Blondie playing their opening set at 8.00pm so Kasim is expected to take the stage at 10.00pm.

Click the Cars Radio section of the website to hear the interview and performance.

Many thanks to Vicki Pearson of RepublicOfLoafdom.com for the recording.

Englewood, CO to Hinckley, MN - 1,079 miles.

Total Tour Mileage - 6,391 miles.

(As the circumference of the Earth at the Equator is 24,901 miles it mean that the tour has now travelled over a quarter of the way around the planet!)

Many thanks to gnordenstam for posting about this.

Many thanks to Michael MacLauchlan for this review.

On Tuesday 21st March The New Cars recorded both Not Tonight and Just What I Needed for the show. On the night of 27th / 28th March Not Tonight was aired but they still have Just What I Needed to be screened at some point (although Cynic Sulton said "Now, they "promised" us they would air both songs on separate days but personally I think there was a certain amount of lip service involved. One thing about Los Angeles, there will always be someone telling you what you WANT to hear.").

Previously The New Cars were listed as appearing on the airing of this show on Friday 5th May and this appearance was pulled quite late.

Many thanks to Jennifer Salyer for the heads-up regarding this.

"Rundgren expertly drives band
By Steve Knopper, Special to the News
May 31, 2006

When the '80s pop band INXS needed a lead singer for a reunion tour, the band started a reality show, found a hunky guy who could sort of sing and took this hodgepodge on the road. When another '80s pop band, The Cars, needed a lead singer for a reunion tour, they took the opposite approach - they called in Todd Rundgren. He turns out to be a ringer.

Rundgren, the pop mastermind who wrote the '70s hits Hello It's Me and Bang On the Drum All Day and produced influential bands like the New York Dolls and XTC, wore a red velvet jacket and a floppy blonde-on- top haircut and commanded center stage like some kind of skinny ostrich.

He had the rubbery voiced detachment to recall original Cars singer Ric Ocasek (who refused to participate in this reunion) and the confidence to tinker with the script. Rather than mimicking Ocasek's deadpan delivery in You Might Think, Rundgren ad-libbed a shriek during the classic "you - kept it going" bit toward the end.

With Rundgren as the ringmaster, these New Cars drew on their new-wave weapons - a fiercely tight rhythm section, with bassist Kasim Sulton (of Rundgren's old band, Utopia) and drummer Prairie Prince (of The Tubes) and bleeping, blooping, boinging, unforgettable hooks from original keyboardist Greg Hawkes.

The Cars are one of the few big-synth '80s bands whose hits sound barely dated. And while Tuesday night's show was essentially a greatest-hits exercise, Shake It Up, Hello Again, My Best Friend's Girl and especially the explosive You're All I've Got Tonight came across less like nostalgia than reinvention.

The New Cars - with Sulton replacing the late Ben Orr and Prince replacing original drummer David Robinson, who also declined - indulged Rundgren with Bang On the Drum All Day and I Saw the Light. (The band's fifth member is original guitarist Elliot Easton, who grinned pretty much the whole time.)

Opening the rainy show - which drew a paltry 6,200 fans, making the lawn seem big enough for a baseball game before the sun went down - were recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Blondie.

Singer Debbie Harry, wearing a fluorescent light-green hoodie and striped sweatpants, gained power as the hourlong show went on, and the closing one-two-three punch of classics Rapture, One Way Or Another and Heart Of Glass almost redeemed the set.

"I'm gonna win ya!" Harry declared, of course, in One Way Or Another - and she pretty much did."