So it was gratifying when Who vocalist Roger Daltrey announced that his own Tommy tour would follow the album as faithfully as possible. At the Nokia Theatre on Wednesday, Daltrey and his band of young American players, along with Pete’s brother Simon Townshend on guitar, gave the work life as a raw, bloody piece of rock and roll once again. more ›

“NO NO NO NO NO!,” hollers Neil Young, bolting from from the piano, running up to take his mic. “I don’t wanna hear any jokes about being old!” He doesn’t sound like he’s kidding. For the last hour, this band of sexagenarians has been whooping it up like a bunch of ambitious and rabidly competitive teenagers, and Young doesn’t want to kill the buzz by being reminded what year it is. more ›

Prince is now at roughly the halfway mark of his planned “21 Nights” stint, with eleven shows at the Forum and two sets at the Troubadour under his belt. We thought we’d check in on That Skinny MF With The High Voice once again and see how his extended LA residency is progressing. more ›

During Devo’s set at Club Nokia on Saturday, bassist Jerry Casale at one point asked the crowd for a witness: “You all know now that De-Evolution real, don’t you?” As the screams of affirmation came roaring down from the balcony, Casale briefly resembled a mutant Oral Roberts basking in the glow of his congregation. “Are we not men?” “WE ARE DEVO!” more ›

I’m not sure if anyone but me had images of the workers in Wisconsin in their heads while Gang Of Four was in the middle of a steaming version of “To Hell With Poverty” at the Music Box, but there sure were a lot of fists in the air for the lyric “In this land/ right now/ some are insane/ and they’re in charge.” Sometimes, a coincidence of timing can make a performance of a thirty year old track positively zeitgeist-capturing. more ›

When the band finished their version of Love’s “Along Again Or” aided by a mariachi horn section I was pretty sure we’d seen the highlight of an already strong show. Then, front man Joey Burns called out “Here’s one for D. Boon!,” and burst into the Minutemen classic “Corona,” taking a gringo punk rock imagining of Mexican music and sending it straight back to Mexico with a straight face. It was perhaps the finest only-in-LA moment... more ›

Boston based synth-pop outfit Passion Pit came through Los Angeles for what seemed to be the 100th time on Tuesday, December 7. Yet devotees of their 2009 release, Manners, packed into the Palladium ready to hear their keyboard-heavy tunes as if it were their first show. This performance was a victory lap of sorts as the band winds down and prepares to do it all again sometime next year when their sophomore LP is released. more ›

I was twelve years old when The Wall came out, and while the theme of desperate alienation was familiar enough to any pre-teen kid, the way the thing ended - with the lead character turning into a fascist dictator - didn’t make a lot of sense at the time. It was years later, when I heard Roger Waters tell a story about the night when he spat in the face of a fan who was trying to climb onto his stage at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, that the whole concept came into focus. It’s a dark, personal piece of music about about the part of himself that Waters would ordinarily address to his analyst, that dark corner of his soul that secretly wanted to see barbed wire fences across his stage to keep his customers from getting within spittin’ distance. more ›

Ever since her Fluxus days, Yoko Ono’s art has often revolved around the challenging of her audience’s assumptions, specifically about the nature of art, social mores, gender roles, and the nature of celebrity. The live show she brought to the Orpheum last weekend continued this tradition, bringing together a collective of first-rate musicians and famous guests for a show that held enormous emotional impact. It was a surprisingly diverse (where else are you gonna get RZA, Iggy, Vincent Gallo and Carrie Fisher on the same bill?) and even accessible package for a woman whose music is often thought of as difficult and anti-rock. But anyone expecting a Yoko show to be two hours of oi-yoi-yoi-yoi warbling hasn't heard her records, especially the new one, Between My Head And The Sky, which made up a good part of the set list. We heard a lot of different kinds of music, some of it simple, gentle and lovely. Some of it was tense and funky, some of it joyous and rocked-out. And, yes, some of it was dissonant, and she did break out the oi-yoi-yoi every so often. But the most discordant moments added texture, some of them loud and powerful, some quiet and fragile. more ›

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Rush, whose current lineup solidified in 1973 with the addition of drummer Neil Peart, are now # 2 in the running for longest-lasting famous rock band that never broke up or changed their lineup. That’s a four year gap from ZZ Top (formed Texas, 1969), who are also showing no signs of going anywhere - in fact they played the Pacific Amphitheater just a few days after this show. But they’d better keep eating right and exercising if they don’t want to be overtaken. more ›

Brazillian maestro Sergio Mendes has made the Hollywood Bowl something of a second home ever since his 1968 debut. On Friday night, midway through his set, he declared it “my favorite place in the world.” And the love is reciprocated almost annually; in the past five seasons alone, he’s been on three of them. It’s easy to see why the mutual love affair continues; Mendes’ breezy bossa nova sounds are the perfect soundtrack for a summer evening involving a bandshell, a picnic dinner, and a glass of wine. more ›

Number one among auto mechanics nationwide, Steve Miller is one of those American institutions whose songs will forever be identified with the age of Classic Rock. In contrast to some of the outsize personalities that emerged in the late sixties and early seventies, Miller never wore capes or hosted fireworks shows. He might be rock’s ultimate everyman; while he hasn’t had a hit since 1981’s “Abracadabra”, he’s got enough juice in his catalog to spend every summer putting on his Casual Friday duds, hoisting his Bud to the sky and finding the feel-good groove in any style he tries on. Not even the cretins wearing “Disco Sucks” buttons in 1978 could resist “Swingtown”, whose beat, bass line and lyrics could have been ripped straight from the Commodores, yet sits easily alongside the straightahead cowbell rockers, blues vamps, mariachi ballads and spaced-out hippie meditations that make up his greatest hits. In Miller’s hands, it’s all as American as Creedence. more ›

Photo of Femi Kuti at Glastonbury Festival June 2010, courtesy of Luke Robinson via Flickr. more ›

Englishman Bert Jansch, for nearly fifty years considered one of the world’s great practitioners of the acoustic guitar, has been spending an unusual amount of time in the United States this year, much of it as the guest and opening act of Neil Young. Young not only acknowledged Jansch’s “Needle of Death” as the source of an untintentional/ subliminal rip in his own “Ambulance Blues” years ago, he’s brought Jansch on stage to perform as a duet, as if to erase any lingering doubts: even I rip off some stuff once in a while, and some of it was from this guy. (One only wishes Jimmy Page might be as generous with the acknowlegements.) more ›

The Buzzcocks’ Saturday night appearance at Club Nokia, featuring a scheduled run-through of their first two albums in their entirety, reached its emotional climax about fifteen minutes into their set, as guitarist Pete Shelley led the band through the military/ waltz beat of “Sixteen” and intoned the lines: “And I wish I was sixteen again/ Cause things would be such fun All the things you do and that are said/ Well they’re much more fun than when you’re twenty-wa-wa-wa-wa-one!” more ›

The little-barroom-band-that-could, did, this week in Los Angeles. On the eve of the release of their fifth album in six years, Brooklyn-based The Hold Steady occupied L.A. Live's rin gong of acoustic perfection, taking to the confines of the Grammy Museum's intimate, 200-person theater for a moderated interview, audience Q&A, and rare acoustic show including songs from the new record, "Heaven is Whenever" (Rough Trade/Vagrant). more ›

It’s a good thing the Specials made it into Los Angeles before the volcanic ash cloud grounded all flights from the UK, or there would be a squadron of California boot boys swimming across the ocean to beat the crap out of Iceland right now. The atmosphere inside an unusually tightly-clamped Club Nokia fifteen minutes before showtime was tense and hot, as hundreds of patrons were ushered up to the balcony due to overcrowding downstairs, only to find that every seat had been filled. Lots of them looked like they might have a go with the security, or each other, as they roamed the aisles, ready to eat someone alive in order to take their spot. But as the band took the stage and hit the opening notes of “Do The Dog”, all the tension diffused as the balcony began to bounce up and down and people partied where they stood. more ›

Paul McCartney came to the Hollywood Bowl with a stacked deck. Certainly the man’s written an improbable number of memorable songs on his own in the last fifty years. But advance news that he’d expanded his horizons to include a John song AND a George song among his selections (sorry, Ringo) suddenly increased the possibilities for the set list to near-infinity. Would he stick to the tried and true piano ballads that have anchored his live shows for twenty years? Would he blow all our minds and break out weird favorites from the catalog like “I Want To Tell You” and “Sun King”, or garage stompers like “I’m Down” and “Bad Boy”? Revive his saccharine MTV staples like “Spies Like Us”? more ›

Even though Kinks headmaster Ray Davies had traded a loud electric band for an intimate, acoustic duo format, and found himself in this moment performing for a crowd of dinner patrons still finishing their chicken pot pies, the singer made it clear that this night was not going to be a classical recital demanding their silent attention... more ›

“Hi folks, I’m Randy - the lead singer of the Residents! Over here is Chuck, and that’s Bob over there on the guitar.” Well what do you know? The world’s most famous anonymous musicians have just outed themselves on stage at the Music Box… kind of... more ›

At this point in their career, Sonic Youth present a paradox: they’re radicals that are also reliable entertainers. However far out they might go, they eventually come back to something that sounds vaguely like 1987’s “Schizophrenia”: fast, strummy guitar lines, a hazy vocal track, a driving rhythm section, harmonies twisting like vines, a colossal racket wrapped around a deceptively catchy tune that threatens to explode at any moment. The intent is to expand the number of possibilities - see their “serious music” side projects for an example of how far they’re willing to go in this pursuit - but truthfully, they’re not that far off from AC/DC when you look at the big picture. more ›

Forty horrifying years into his career, Alice Cooper is still sacrificing himself to audiences on a nightly basis. Not content to give his life for show business just once, in his current Theater Of Death tour, which stopped at the Nokia Theater, he endures a beheading, a hanging, and a blood-spewing run-through with a dozen swords. If it gets a raised fist and a “woo!”, he will spare himself from nothing. more ›

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment it occurs, but at some point while watching John Fogerty run through the highlights of his career at the Kodak Theater, one gets the distinct sensation of tapping the source. Though the songs he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival were mostly conceived roughly forty years ago, they seem to be as old as the mountains. They’re so ingrained in the collective consciousness, so deeply embedded, that it’s easy to take them for granted, to assume they’ve just always been around. Not for nothing were they Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski’s favorite band; they’re a signifier of righteousness. more ›

I hate crowds. Rather, I hate being in the middle of them. At most shows, I prefer to be the boring one who likes to hang in the back and just listen. more ›

“Did I dare to wear my tightest gown tonight?” Not having access to Aretha Franklin’s wardrobe closet, we can’t say for sure, though after checking out the figure-hugging rhinestone-studded black number she’d just changed into, it seemed likely. Why not, it was a night for bold moves. A short time later, she’d dare openly lust after our President (“Brother is fiiiine… mmmm!"). Judging from the rapturous response generated by her every word, Franklin could have dared to do just about anything. Who can complain when the singing’s this good? more ›