E Street Band

Steven Van Zandt's gig on "Not Fade Away" began with a disappointment. The first feature from "Sopranos" creator David Chase, the film follows a group of New Jersey high-school kids as they put together a garage band in the wake of the British Invasion. Chase hired Van Zandt, whom he'd cast as Silvio Dante on HBO's mob series, to oversee the film's music - "to design what the band sounds like as they go from 1962 to 1968, and to have that be authentic," as Van Zandt put it recently in an interview at Hollywood's ArcLight Cinema.

A source familiar with this season's Super Bowl told the Associated Press that Beyonce will be the performer at the halftime show on Feb. 3, 2013, at the Superdome in New Orleans. The official announcement is expected Wednesday. Beyonce has won 16 Grammy Awards and sang the national anthem at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004. Madonna performed at halftime of last season's Super Bowl in February with guests CeeLo Green, Nicki Minaj, LMFAO and M.I.A. Her performance was seen by 114 million people, a higher average than the game itself, which was seen by an estimated 111.3 million people, according to the Nielsen Co. The Black Eyed Peas performed at the 2011 Super Bowl, with The Who singing in 2010.

If you are a Dodgers or Angels fan, you may be dreading the playoffs since both teams are currently out of the running. However, if you are a Bruce Springsteen fan, you do have something to look forward to. Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that one of his songs will be the  2012 playoffs theme song. No, it's not "Glory Days. " It's "Land of Hope and Dreams. " A commercial spot featuring the song will show highlights of the 2012 season interspersed with live Springsteen footage.

Those who missed Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band on the first wave of their “Wrecking Ball” tour may have another shot with 16 new dates across North America that have just been added to the tour, including a return to Southern California for a Dec. 4 show at Anaheim's Honda Center. The Boss has just wrapped up an extended trek through Europe, during which he and the band notched some of their longest performances in years, edging toward the four-hour mark. The new batch of shows starts Oct. 19 in Ottawa and runs through Dec. 6 in Glendale, Ariz., adding to 14 previously slated Wrecking Ball stops starting Aug. 14 in Boston and running through Sept.

When it comes to strict music curfews in London's Hyde Park, it's apparently less a case of who you are than who you're playing for. Less than two weeks after concert promoters cut short a performance by Bruce Springsteen and his guest Paul McCartney for playing past the established 10:30 p.m. curfew on concerts in the park, Westminster Council officials have extended the curfew until 1 a.m. for British rock group Snow Patrol, which is playing Friday...

Sir Paul McCartney or no Sir Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and the ex-Beatle were told “you can't do that” when they ran past the curfew time imposed on concerts in London's Hyde Park, causing organizers of the festival they were playing Saturday to pull the plug  on the closing minutes of their performance. Springsteen and the E Street Band were headlining the Hard Rock Calling Festival at Hyde Park, where Springsteen played in 2009 in a show released last year on DVD, and after a three-hour set, he called  McCartney up for an encore of “Twist and Shout/La Bamba” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” Here's some video footage before the audio was cut. But before they could finish, festival officials cut the power, citing a 10:30 p.m. curfew on Hyde Park events.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Monday. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are releasing a new album (the first since the saxophonist Clarence Clemons died) and will tour in 2012. ( Bruce Springsteen.net ) "Breaking Dawn -- Part 1" made a lot of money, but not as much as "New Moon. " Twihards are growing up. ( Los Angeles Times ) Taylor Swift won the American Music Award for artist of the year, but aren't we really talking about LMFAO and David Hasselhoff in his underwear?

Saxophonist Clarence Clemons, an indispensable part of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band both for his full-throttle tenor sax work and his larger-than-life onstage persona as "the Big Man," died Saturday. He was 69. Clemons, who put his stamp on such Springsteen staples as "Born to Run," "Jungleland" and "Rosalita," died in a Palm Beach, Fla., hospital of complications from a massive stroke he suffered June 12 at his Florida home, a spokeswoman for Springsteen and the E Street Band said.

It's a funny thing in the world of rock music, but for some artists to get creatively amped up, it's necessary to pull the plug. It worked for Bob Dylan, who returned to the wellspring of acoustic folk music in a couple of early-'90s albums before reasserting full command of his songwriting mastery in 1997's "Time Out of Mind," a musical renaissance from which he's never looked back. It worked for Bruce Springsteen when he put the E Street Band on hiatus and assembled the Sessions Band to mine the richness of American folk and gospel influences in "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" album in 2006.