George Strait Shocks Fans By Bringing '80s Rock Icon on Stage: 'When Legends Collide'
Anyone who had the opportunity to catch on tour this summer was incredibly lucky, as he's one of the most iconic artists in country music. From "Ocean Front Property" to "All My Exes Live in Texas," to ballads that make you want to cry like "The Chair" and "I Cross My Heart," his song lyrics are truly unmatched.
He played the final show of the summer tour on July 19 at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, and fans were shocked when he brought out a true rock icon to perform alongside him.
The crowd went absolutely wild when Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers came out on stage for "You Wreck Me." As the person who recorded the moment so perfectly stated, "When legends collide."
Strait sounds amazing on this tune, though there honestly isn't anything he can't sing.
People who watched the clip were clearly impressed, with one fan saying, "Tom would dig this! ♥️" Oh, he definitely would have.
Another person added, "The cover that I never expected but I absolutely love!! 🥰"
Someone else said, "Hard to beat!"
And one fan noted, "He's been playing Tom for years. His son introduced him to Petty, he dug it, and has played ever since. Put it in his set prior to his death."Campbell was a founding member of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, and he co-wrote many of their greatest hits, a lot of which were popular in the 1980s.
In an interview with Tape Op, he once said, "Before Tom came along, to show how old I am, I wrote several songs, including 'Refugee,' 'Here Comes My Girl,' and 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around.' Several of those songs I wrote with tape loops, which I learned in the studio."
Having Campbell join him on stage was such a fitting way to end Strait's incredible tour. We can only hope that this wasn't his final run and that he returns to the road next summer so more people have the chance to witness a living legend.
There's truly no one quite like the GOAT!
🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬
George Strait Shocks Fans By Bringing '80s Rock Icon on Stage: 'When Legends Collide' first appeared on Parade on Jul 21, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 21, 2025, where it first appeared.
Solve the daily Crossword
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Iconic ‘60s Singer and Satirist Dies at 97
Iconic '60s Singer and Satirist Dies at 97 originally appeared on Parade. The year is 1967. The black-and-white TV screen reveals an impeccably dressed, bespectacled academic in his late 30s. His fingers fly over the ivory keys of a baby grand piano. The first words out of his mouth are 'when you attend a funeral.' What follows is a familiar narrative about loss making you think of your own relatives weeping for you at your funeral, sung with appropriate pomp and circumstance. Then… something shifts. 'Don't you worry,' the singer knowingly smiles at his audience. 'For if the bomb that drops on you/ gets your friends and neighbors too,/ there'll be nobody left behind to grieve.' The song, 'We Will All Go Together When We Go,' picks up as he merrily continues to sing of the likelihood of impending nuclear destruction. The audience is unabashed with their delight, for the man on the screen is not your average run-of-the-mill entertainer. He is, instead, the legendary satirist Tom Lehrer, 97, who passed away in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday, according to Variety. Born in Manhattan in 1928 to a Jewish family, math prodigy Lehrer started his higher education at Harvard when he was 15. Known for his razor-sharp wit and darkly funny, politically savvy songs, the Harvard-educated mathematics professor had a surprising entry into entertainment, and an even more unexpectedly short tenure there. In a 1997 interview with Elijah Wald, Lehrer described what led him to write satirical songs in the first place. He had no yearn for fame or even any real love of performance, despite his natural stage presence. Instead, 'I would listen to the radio and think, 'I can write a song as good as that,' and the problem is, they already have people who can write songs 'as good as that' so what do they need one more for? What is necessary is somebody that can write something different.'' Lehrer was certainly different from anyone who came before him, and his unique blend of musical wit would inspire generations of entertainers to come. In the wake of his death, his fans – including the famous ones – flocked to social media to pay their respects. 'My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living,' Alfred 'Weird Al' Yankovic, 65, posted to Instagram. 'RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.' Fans filled the comments section with 'RIP's and condolences aplenty. 'I'll miss him forever,' wrote one distraught fan. In the early '50s, Lehrer self-released a few albums while still a professor by trade, with teaching posts including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, according to The BBC. 'I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living,' Lehrer deadpanned to one live audience in discussing his academic roots. 'I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching.' After the release of his first album, 'the word spread like herpes,' Lehrer quipped to Wald, describing how his self-released record went old school viral, selling a shocking 10,000 copies according to Variety. Before long Lehrer was performing in nightclubs, concert halls, and recording live concerts for television, his next record rising to number 18 on the American charts. In his songs, Lehrer explored socially taboo subjects with his signature light tunes and unabashedly frank lyrics. Along with exploring nuclear conflicts in the aforementioned 'We Will All Go Together When We Go,' Lehrer took on sexuality in 'The Masochism Tango' and 'Smut,' racism in 'National Brotherhood Week,' and addiction in 'The Old Dope Peddler.' He also made time for some lighter subjects, like mocking classic spring ballads in his own ode to the season, 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.' He was in the height of his career in the '60s and '70s when, abruptly, Lehrer left the entertainment industry, eschewing fame in favor of a quiet life as a math teacher one quarter of the year, and a 'cheerful layabout' for the rest of the time. "I learned 25 years ago that you didn't have to shovel snow,'' he told Wald in the 1997 interview. "You didn't even have to see snow, and that was a great revelation to me.'' After his retreat from the public eye, Lehrer's popular satire returned to the press in 1980 when they were put together in the musical revue 'Tomfoolery.' Now, despite his passing, Lehrer's songs and his signature wit will live on forever, if the overflowing comments section of Weird Al's Instagram post is any indication. One fan perfectly mimicked Lehrer's signature sense of humor with a reference to his song 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park' in the comment, 'The pigeons are safe, BUT AT WHAT COST.' Another fan commented with a reference to Lehrer's aforementioned song about bereavement, 'We Will All Go Together When We Go.' 'I thought we'd all go together,' the fan wrote along with a crying emoji. Iconic '60s Singer and Satirist Dies at 97 first appeared on Parade on Jul 28, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 28, 2025, where it first appeared. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Horror's middle class is vanishing – and that's bad news for all film fans
Does no one want to watch people get butchered any more? Horror, long recognised as one of Hollywood's most reliable cash cows, is in a panic: few scary movies are breaking through financially in 2025, many more are cratering completely, and questions are being asked about the future of a genre that once seemed as durable as Jason Voorhees. Forget the death of the archetypal movie star: if sassy psycho-cyborg M3GAN can't open a movie, who can? Back in 2022, the first M3GAN – about an artificially intelligent doll with a bloodthirst – grossed $182m (£135m), including $78m of pure profit for its backers at Universal Pictures and the micro-budget horror studio Blumhouse, off a production budget of just $12m. Thanks to smart marketing, which turned its leading lady's incongruous dancefloor skills into a spooky meme, M3GAN ended up exemplifying the dream outcome of the modern studio horror film: low-cost, big-brain thrills with such inescapable dazzle that audiences couldn't not seek it out. Why, then, did last month's M3GAN 2.0 go so badly? In four weeks, the more action-oriented sequel has grossed a measly $38m worldwide, a result so mortifying that the head of Blumhouse put his hands up within days of its release and admitted to having totally missed the mark. M3GAN 2.0 isn't alone, either. This year has seen a staggering number of horror films die at the box office, among them Blumhouse's reboot of Wolf Man ($34m gross on a production budget of $20m), the Ayo Edebiri horror comedy Opus ($2m gross/$10m budget), Jenna Ortega vehicle Death of a Unicorn ($16m gross/$15m budget), the well-received adoption chiller Bring Her Back ($23m gross/$15m budget), and last week's revival of the Nineties hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, which opened to a flat $13m in the US. Yes, these films' production budgets are lean (though the extent of marketing budgets is largely kept under lock and key), and many of the above titles will ultimately break even once video-on-demand grosses are factored in – but none of their respective backers will be happy with what amounts to loose change. On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, are this year's handful of out-and-out horror smashes, most significantly the Michael B Jordan vampire film Sinners, which cost a reported $100m to make but has grossed $365m. There's also been Final Destination: Bloodlines ($285m and counting on a budget of $50m) and Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, which has so far grossed $145m on a budget of $60m – not wildly profitable, by any means, but decent enough. So people are still going to see horror on the big screen, but – echoing the Western world as a whole – horror's middle class is evaporating. The genre seems to either go big or collapse entirely. Any kind of financial in-between is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. All this leaves a film such as next week's Weapons carrying undue levels of pressure. A missing-persons thriller starring Julia Garner and Josh Brolin, it revolves around the disappearance of a class of children in small-town USA, and serves as filmmaker Zach Cregger's follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit Barbarian. Promotion for the film has been strong – lots of abstract and eerie imagery in trailers, and attempts at virality via the publishing of two hours of 'surveillance footage' from the night of the children's 'disappearance'. But the stakes feel particularly high. Weapons sparked a bidding war between rival studios when Cregger first unveiled his script, with Warner Bros so eager to get the up-and-comer on side that they coughed up a $38m budget for the film, and allowed him final cut. If Weapons underperforms, this kind of investment in a young, ambitious filmmaker's original ideas may become even rarer than it is already. Why this is bad for everyone is that, in the last decade or so, horror has been one of the few genres to wholeheartedly embrace fresh ideas and fresh voices. The likes of Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), Ari Aster's Hereditary (2018) and Robert Eggers's The Witch (2015) proved that audiences will turn out in droves for intriguing new concepts, no matter how wild they might seem on paper – and in the process, an entire generation of buzzy new filmmakers developed fanbases, industry clout, and (relative) name recognition. Speaking to The Town podcast shortly after M3GAN 2.0 bombed, Blumhouse head Jason Blum suggested that there is simply too much horror being released for many films to break through, and that the cheap-to-produce movies that were Blumhouse's bread and butter (their biggest hits have included Get Out, Us, The Invisible Man and the Purge franchise) no longer cut it. 'We need to up the budgets,' he insisted. 'People need theatrical events.' Which is, I suppose, accurate. This year's most successful horror films had heavy promotional spends behind them, while even the most financially lucrative horrors of 2024 – meaning the low-cost, high-return likes of The Substance and Oz Perkins's Silence of the Lambs pastiche Longlegs – were transformed into must-see 'events' via relentless and effective marketing. But just as important is the actual quality of material on offer, with far too many modern horror movies settling for tedious mining of intellectual property and repetitive premises (Knives Out and Midsommar have created an unfortunate cottage industry of star-studded, eat-the-rich, religious-cult disappointments). Blumhouse have been particularly guilty of this over the last 18 months, tossing out a raft of movies that felt as if they were formed backwards from an already unimpressive elevator pitch: Night Swim (haunted pool!); AfrAId (haunted Alexa device!); House of Spoils (Ariana DeBose!). Things may, however, be looking up. As much as it pains me to slander a film that made smart use of Nineties stalwarts Freddie Prinze Jr and Jennifer Love Hewitt, it is something of a relief that I Know What You Did Last Summer couldn't get people in cinema seats last week. A largely serviceable but poorly directed slasher pastiche, the film may have lifted the story beats and faces from the 1997 original, but it failed at the things that truly matter: character development, suspense, memorable chase sequences. It seemed to prove that, when it comes to horror, box-office success in 2025 requires far more than just dusting off some old IP and hoping for the best. Hollywood does have a knack for taking all the wrong lessons from its success stories. (Just look at how Barbie's gargantuan box office has led to the development of loads of other movies about toys.) But wouldn't it be lovely if the triumph of Sinners sparked an influx of expensive, original horror movies moving forward – and not, well, Sinners 2. 'Weapons' is released 8 August
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
How Happy Gilmore 2 subtly honors Adam Sandler's late co-star Cameron Boyce
Adam Sandler managed to sneak in a subtle, yet heartwarming, tribute to his late Grown Ups co-star Cameron Boyce in the new Happy Gilmore sequel. Happy Gilmore 2, out now on Netflix, follows Sandler's titular retired golfer, Happy Gilmore, as he returns to the sport in order to pay for his daughter to attend a Parisian ballet school. It comes nearly 30 years after the original 1996 classic sports comedy. In one scene, Happy is seen walking up to a golf course check-in booth with a bag of clubs on his shoulder. As he nears the desk, the attendants inside are watching what appears to be an episode of Disney Channel's sitcom Jessie. The screen quickly flashes to show Boyce's character Luke Ross, whom he played throughout the show's entire 2011 to 2015 run. The brief nod to Boyce — who starred as Sandler's on-screen son in the 2010 family comedy Grown Ups and its 2013 sequel before his sudden death in 2019 — has left fans overcome with emotion. 'Adam Sandler honoring Cameron Boyce in Happy Gilmore 2 melts my heart,' one said on X, while a second added: 'Excuse me while I sob.' A third commented: 'Adam Sandler subtly including Cameron Boyce in this scene from #HappyGilmore2 hits different.' 'Happy Gilmore 2 was great,' another praised. 'The honoring of Cameron Boyce was such a cute and awesome Easter egg. Bottom right of the screen they're watching them on TV. Adam Sandler you killed it. Family is very happy.' Someone else on TikTok wrote that the tribute 'is hurting and healing my heart at the same time.' Boyce was only 20 when he died after experiencing a seizure in his sleep. At the time, his family released a statement, explaining the seizure 'was a result of an ongoing medical condition for which he was being treated.' 'The world is now undoubtedly without one of its brightest lights, but his spirit will live on through the kindness and compassion of all who knew and loved him. We are utterly heartbroken,' they added. Sandler was among many celebrities to honor Boyce after his death, posting on X: 'Loved that kid. Cared so much about his family. Cared so much about the world. Thank you, Cameron, for all you gave to us. So much more was on the way. All our hearts are broken.' Boyce isn't the only celebrity to make a surprise cameo in the new movie. Dozens of other cameo appearances from professional golfers, athletes and celebrities — some of which were announced when the film was in production — are also featured. Happy Gilmore 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
