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Ice skating legend Scott Hamilton’s annual fundraiser for cancer research, Scott Hamilton and Friends, is coming to Nashville on Nov. 23 and for this year’s event, he’s putting together a total supergroup of ’70s and ’80s rockers.
“It’s going to be a big old rock and roll show,” Hamilton, 67, tells PEOPLE. “We’re getting six lead singers or performers from six bands that were just iconic in the late seventies, eighties.”
Taking center stage to perform their biggest hits are Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon, Wally Palmar of The Romantics, Mike Reno from Loverboy (performing with his wife Catherine St Germain), Jason Derlatka of Journey, Jason Scheff — the longtime lead singer of the band Chicago — and John Elefante, formerly of Kansas.
“So many of these guys are my heroes,” Hamilton says. “Back in the day, I would’ve killed to get a backstage pass to see or meet or to be in the same proximity as these guys, and now I’m producing them in my show. It’s like, are you kidding me?”
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Hamilton continues to explain what the rest of the event will look like this year.
“We bring together skaters and musicians to put together a night of entertainment that not to be believed. We turn Bridgestone Arena in Nashville into a theater — we take out the glass, we bring the seats all the way down to the ice, so there are two rows of seats on the ice. It’s so intimate. There are no barriers. There’s nothing that’s going to prevent them from seeing and feeling the skater right in front of them.”
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He adds, “You’ll hear songs you’ve heard a million times [like ‘Almost Paradise’ by Mike Reno] being performed by the artists that created the music. It’s Nathan Chen skating to REO Speedwagon. It’s Maxim Naumov skating to Loverboy, as well as Keegan Messing skating to Loverboy. It’s Gracie Gold skating to Chicago.”
Scott Hamilton CARES Foundation
He adds that every year the show, gets more and more amazing.
“People, I’ll tell them all this and they’ll come to the show and they’ll say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life?’ And I’m like, ‘I did tell you!’”
The funds raised at the event will go to cancer research centers — something that is deeply personal to Hamilton, a cancer survivor, who founded CARES, as well as the foundation The 4th Angel, which pairs newly diagnosed patients with survivors.
“I wished I’d had someone who had been there, done that, who could speak to me about what to expect,” he told PEOPLE in 2024 about The 4th Angel. “I wanted to change people’s experience with cancer.”
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Hamilton adds that raising money to help find cures for cancer is his true calling, and he believes that it’s working.
“Everything I’ve learned, everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve witnessed, everything that I believe to be true says that there’ll be a time, probably in my lifetime — and I’m 67, so it’s not like I’ve got decades and decades left — is that there will be a day where no one dies of cancer.”
