August 2007 News Archive (Page 4)

Gina Glocksen may have finished ninth on this year's American Idol, but the 23-year-old singer is first int he heart of longtime boyfriend. Joe Ruzicka.

In fact, he proposed to her onstage during a performance on Tuesday as part of the American Idols Live tour in Rosemont, Ill.

After Gina finished a duet with fellow Idol hopeful Phil Stacey, her boyfriend was ushered onto the stage where he declared he was the "biggest Gina Glocksen fan of all," People magazine reports. Then, Ruzicka proposed amid cheers from the hometown crowd.

(See the YouTube video of the proposal below.)

Glocksen's response? She accepted – with a kiss.

Before getting voted off the April 4 episode of American Idol, Glocksen frequently talked about her boyfriend who cheered her on from the audience. During an early episode, Glocksen dedicated her performance of Heart's "Alone" to her beau.

She praised Ruzicka for his support – and thanked him for encouraging her to audition again after being rejected from the show the year before.

"He has been my rock throughout this whole process," she said on the show. "He's absolutely the best thing that's ever happened to me."

No, the headline above isn't a comparison between this American Idol finalist and what Antonella Barba does in her free time.

We're talking literally: Katharine McPhee is blowing in the photos seen here. Or her dress is, at least.

On the set of her upcoming movie, this beauty can at least take pride in the fact that she's wearing underwear. It's a concept Britney Spears is still trying to master.

Lots of guys wanna see Katharine McPhee nude. This could be as close as they get to it...

Remember Chris Sligh?

We certainly do. He made last season entertaining any time he opened his mouth for a song or a one-liner. TV Guide caught up with this crazy-haired talent during the American Idols Tour recently...

TV Guide: How is life in Omaha?
Chris Sligh: Omaha is actually pretty cool. We've got two days off here, the first time we've had two days off while on tour. I did a lot of scouring [to learn] more about the city and I bought a skateboard, so I've been skateboarding. It's great.

TV Guide: Where have you been skateboarding?
Chris: Just all over. Like, up to the old market here in Omaha, and back down to the hotel. It was a lot of fun. My legs are tired.

TV Guide: Are you a big skater? Do you do that at home, too?
Chris: I used to. I think the last time I skateboarded I was 16 or 17. I used to do a lot of half-pipe stuff.

TV Guide: Did your wife get worried when you told her you bought a new board?
Chris: No. She was just like, "How much did you spend?" I was like, "It was only $120. Come on!"

TV Guide: You should take her out with you next time.
Chris: Yeah. I'm going to pick her up and skateboard while I'm holding her. That won't scare her at all!

TV Guide: You could go on America's Got Talent with that trick.
Chris: I actually thought about going on America's Got Talent this year but the auditions happened too early.

TV Guide: Did you really think about it?
Chris: No. I don't feel like I want to whore myself out to another reality show. But my cousin was actually on America's Got Talent. He made the top 10. He was the guy that did the female impersonations with the dummy. We're a talented family, I'll tell you that much right now. [Laughs] We've got ventriloquists and OK singers. It's pretty awesome.

TV Guide: I heard you have a whole recording studio on tour with you. Is that true?
Chris: I do. I take it around with me mostly just to annoy everyone else. No, I'm working on demos and writing some songs and everything like that. I'm writing some songs for Phil [Stacey]'s album and I'm obviously writing songs for my album. It's going really, really well. I've written some stuff that I'm really excited about and getting ready for when we're actually allowed to record again.

TV Guide: You have to wait to record again?
Chris: We can record demos but we can't record for real until after the tour is over.

Continue Reading...

Standing outside Texas Stadium with thousands of other “American Idol” hopefuls Monday, LaCondra Davies knew she was bound for Hollywood. Again.

“I know the game now,” said Davies, 29, to MSNBC who was booted from the show last season after making the first cut. “You can’t give them everything at once.”

At they resumed auditions Monday for the seventh season of American Idol, producers from the Fox ratings juggernaut gave about 15 seconds to each of the of would-be singing stars who turned out. Last week in San Diego, more than 12,000 people showed up when the show kicked off its seven-city casting call.

Producers shied away from estimating the size of the horde that ascended on Texas Stadium, but the line stretched as wide as 30 people and snaked around a fourth of the building.

They sang (though not always well), stood and sometimes wilted under a stifling morning sun in the parking lot as they waited to get inside. Ice packs were given to some who struggled with temperatures that climbed past 90 degrees.

Dallas has proven fertile ground for Idol talent before. Kelly Clarkson, the first and most successful winner, is from the neighboring suburb of Burleson. Nikki McKibbin, who finished third to Clarkson, is from nearby Grand Prairie.

Patrick Stephens, 23, said he auditioned in Birmingham, Ala., last year only to file out “like a loser.” His approach Monday was more laid back as, like scores of others, he fiddled with an iPod — not rehearsing songs but instead watching videos of standup comedy.

“I don’t have an interesting back story if I get picked,” said Stephens, a technical recruiter from Plano.

The new single from Carrie Underwood, So Small - the lead track from her second album (due Oct. 23) - makes its debut on the Radio & Records/Billboard country chart at No. 20.

That's the highest debut position for a solo country female singer in Nielsen BDS history... as well as the highest debut for any song this year.

American Idol will be honored as part of the creative arts ceremony at the Emmys for its fundraising effort, “Idol Gives Back.”

As part of the off-air portion of the Emmy program, our favorite reality TV show will be presented with a special governors award for the innovative effort that helped to around $70 million for societies struggling with poverty.

The effort was billed as a star studded mid-season surprise by the $26, 3 producers. It proved to be a wild success. Co-hosted by Ryan Seacrest and Ellen DeGeneres, the special ran during the April 23 and April 24 timeslots for American Idol.

Seacrest and Simon Cowell toured areas - in Africa and across the nation - stricken by the horrors of poverty. They called on the American Idol audience, one of the largest television audiences in the world, to pitch in to help. The results were nothing short of amazing.

Frenchie Davis was hesitant when she was offered the title role in Mahalia: A Gospel Musical because, as she said: "Well, Mahalia Jackson is a legend."

It's true.

Mention Ms. Jackson's name, and there's a reverent hush in respect for the woman who brought gospel music to a wide audience beginning in the 1930s and continuing until her death in 1972 at 60.  Jackson's inspirational singing and spiritual presence was also an iconic part of the civil rights movement.

In late spring, Davis was winding down her run in the Broadway musical Rent and was considering a range of options – not the least of which was a long vacation after playing eight shows a week for four years.

"My grandmother loves Mahalia, and she cried when I told her that they offered me the role. She said to me, 'If you don't take that role, I'm going to slap you.'"

Besides Rent, Davis appeared in off-Broadway's Monica! The Musical and played Effie (the role made famous by Jennifer Hudson) in a national tour of Dreamgirls. But to many people, she's best remembered as the powerhouse singer who was an audience favorite in the second season of TV's American Idol.

Davis has mixed feelings about her Idol fame. She won some notoriety – and support – following her disqualification in 2003 after topless photos of her appeared on the Internet. She says she had been upfront about that part of her past when she was selected, only to be disqualified as "inappropriate" later in the season.

(In season six, racy pictures of Antonella Barba surfaced on the Internet. She remained on the show but was voted off before the field narrowed to 12 contestants.)

"After what I can only describe as a double standard, I can't even pretend to be OK with them [American Idol producers] anymore," Davis says. "I'm done being diplomatic about my experience with the show."

She says she doesn't watch the show any longer, distressed about the number of people who have been humiliated by the process and how winners are chosen.

"Every time someone calls me Frenchie Davis from American Idol, I cringe," she says. "I think there's more than enough to me now to [stop putting] that after my name."

That goes for other former Idol contestants who have found success in Broadway shows or films based on Broadway musicals.

In New York, Fantasia is starring in Broadway's The Color Purple, Tamyra Gray was featured in Bombay Dreams, and Constantine Maroulis is in The Wedding Singer.

SOURCE: The Dallas Morning News

Nikki McKibbin thought her dreams for stardom were about to come true when she won a spot on the 2002 inaugural season of American Idol.

Each week, millions of viewers watched as the 23-year-old Grand Prairie singer made her way to third place, right behind winner Kelly Clarkson and runner-up Justin Guarini. But for McKibbin and many other American Idol contestants, being successful on television and even signing a recording contract didn't bring instant stardom in the real world.

After the show, McKibbin, who had established herself as a rocker during the TV competition, was given a recording contract with a major label, RCA Nashville. But she refused to record the country-pop songs pitched to her, and, for the next three years, she made a living waiting tables and participating in five other reality programs, including Fear Factor and Popstars.

Finally, in 2005, with the help of a lawyer, she got out of her RCA contract and went the independent route.

Her debut CD, Unleashed, was released in early July on California's small Chenoa Records.

"As far as the show goes, and building an incredible fan base, of course it was a blessing," the 28-year-old said last week. "I wouldn't be able to do that without the show. The curse was not letting me musically do what I wanted to do and not letting me be what I am as an artist. I wasn't going to sell out and not do what I wanted to do."

New American Idol Auditions
Today, thousands of hopefuls will descend on Texas Stadium for the same shot that brought McKibbin to households across the country.

Ironically, American Idol, the gargantuan franchise that attracts about 30 million viewers per episode, isn't always a foolproof star-launching machine. Even for the show's winners, success has not come easily, especially where album sales are concerned.

Just consider the numbers behind the two biggest Idol sellers, Clarkson and Oklahoma's Carrie Underwood. Ms. Clarkson has sold about 9 million discs combined for her three albums, while Ms. Underwood's one CD has moved 5.8 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

So where is the fan disconnect with those 37 million votes each week? And why doesn't such a rabid pop-culture phenomenon, which leads to everything from water-cooler talk to widespread wagering on potential winners, translate to CD sales? This is, after all, a show designed to crank out popular music sensations.

Continue Reading...

The following is a review of a recent Carrie Underwood concert in Canada, courtesy of The Edmonton Journal...

The longer Carrie Underwood performed, the younger the crowd got at the Big Valley mainstage Saturday night.

No one since Shania Twain has perfected the country crossover as well as the 2005 American Idol winner, who drew scores of teenagers to the Jamboree grounds.

But her country-pop style didn't do it for everyone - Underwood's success has largely come thanks to the strength of her pipes, which let her sing just about any genre well, be it country, rock, pop or even gospel.

And while her vocals were impressive, older traditionalists who prefer pure honky tonk dispersed soon after getting what they wanted from cowboy crooner George Canyon, who finished playing his set half an hour earlier.

Still, the concert bowl remained packed for Underwood, who put on a good show but was still very much an American Idol, wanting to please everyone by being everything. The show became a rock concert halfway through her set, with Underwood stamping her feet to a cover of Guns n' Roses' Sweet Child O' Mine.

Peculiar.

No matter, though: from there, Underwood segued into the song everyone was waiting for: her hit single Before He Cheats. When she finally performed the girl-power anthem, thousands of fans sang along.
But the minute the song ended, even more concert-goers filed out, not bothering to see what would come next. It was only a little bit past 10 p.m. - still very early here on Jamboree Time.

It's not that Underwood isn't talented.

The music was all there, but when the guitars quieted down between songs, fans got little of Underwood, the sweet girl next door they met on TV.

She said little and when she did, it was barely audible. Her smiles were rare and she looked more like a diva than someone having a good time.

Diehard Underwood fans didn't care - it was enough just to see their idol. But for those who don't care for reality television, it was hard to find reason to stay.

Underwood just wanted to get offstage. They just wanted to warm up back in their campers and put on some Johnny Cash.

USA Today played a fun game with its readers: the American Idol section of the newspaper asked people to write it about what order they would now place season one contestants in.

Six years later, the results are telling (actual results from the whoa re in parenthesis)...

1. Kelly Clarkson (1st): Kelly didn't win in a landslide, but the result was clear. She has done the franchise proud and we don't know that anyone else in this crop could have come close to equaling her subsequent achievements.

2. Tamyra Gray (4th): Clearly the feeling is that Tamyra got robbed by the original voters. She was far and away the No. 2 vote-getter in this poll, a lot closer to Kelly than to the No. 3 finisher. Maybe she did make the right decision in gravitating toward acting and songwriting, but it would have been nice to have seen what she could have done as a singer with a big push.

3. Justin Guarini (2nd): Justin's fast fade from the public eye is reflected in his loss of standing retrospectively. He was the clear No. 3 choice, but was way behind Tamyra in the voting, and only a couple of people cared enough to vote him No. 1.

4. Christina Christian (6th): Substantial support for Christina. It'll be interesting to see where other African-American singers like Kimberley Locke, Trenyce, Jennifer Hudson, La Toya London, Nadia Turner, Vonzell Solomon and others wind up in the revisionist vote.

5. RJ Helton (5th): A bit of a surprise, not that he equaled his actual finish but that he beat real-life third-place finisher Nikki McKibbin to do it (by the slimmest margin between any two finalists).

6. Nikki McKibbin (3rd): Biggest gap between actual finish and revised vote, and well-deserved if you ask us. Always thought Nikki was overrated, and her claim as a "rock chick" quite dubious; Gina Glocksen could probably sing rings around her.

7. Ryan Starr (7th): Fairly substantial gap between Nikki and Ryan, who struck us as substantially more bogus than Nikki, although she was arguably better than her piano-climbing male namesake on Rockstar: Supernova. She was kind of the Haley Scarnato of her day (in terms of teenage boy appeal), but less wholesome.

8. E. Jay Day (9th): E Jay carves out a small triumph by getting voted a notch higher than his actual finish.

9. A.J. Gil (8th): The boy-band-esque A.J. was the victim of E. Jay's success, falling to ninth in the revisionist standings. No great loss.

10. Jim Verraros (10th): And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be for eternity (or until the next poll comes around). Coming out didn't gain Jim a lot of retroactive support, it appears.