The Rolling Stones’ upcoming No Security tour is giving fans a couple new reasons to get excited all over again. It’s the band’s first arena tour in more than 20 years and a good percentage of the tickets are down-right affordable — in Stones terms, at least. Tickets are ranging from about $40 up to around $150. In a great marketing strategy, the first 10 rows of seats and many other prime seats were a bargain at around $75 a pop. In some cities, the gold circle seats set ticket price records but no one seems to be complaining. Fans who saw the band on the Bridges To Babylon and/or the Voodoo Lounge tours will find something new with No Security. Obviously, the arena setting offers a different atmosphere (it’s amazing how many arena shows are suddenly touted as "intimate"), but the tour also boasts an entirely new stage production allowing tour promoter TNA International to sell 360-degrees around the stage, maximizing every venue’s capacity.

  Flood victims in New Braunfels, Texas, have a friend in Willie Nelson. Nelson will play December 3rd at Gruene Hall on the outskirts of New Braunfels. The 100-year-old dance hall is located along the Guadalupe River, an area that saw extensive damage during last month’s flooding.

  The late, British folk-artist Sandy Denny may not be well-known to fans of contemporary music, but at a tribute honoring her last month in this city’s Brooklyn borough, it was clear her influence reaches places she may never have dreamed. Take singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, for instance, who used the event — organized by ex-dB’s leader Peter Holsapple — to bounce up and down onstage, his whitish hair whirling, as he sang a captivating, revelatory version of Denny’s "Mattie Groves." "In this day and age, it’s great that Peter [Holsapple] and the extended Continental Drifters are playing this music and that you all are here to listen to it," Hitchcock said to open his performance. Reading from a lyric sheet, Hitchcock led Denny’s take on the traditional folk tale — from Fairport Convention’s 1969 LP Liege And Lief — toward a wicked harmonica coda. He ended the tale in a loud revelry of instruments that recalled the Who’s rock-classic "Baba O’Reilly."