Bobzilla

With the arrival of the Beach Boys’ Smile Sessions on Capitol Records today, rock’s most famous unfinished album is finally on shelves in close-to-complete condition. It’s an occasion that many feared would never come, due to the decidedly Bad Vibrations evoked in the mind of Brian Wilson every time he heard those tunes.

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.

LA resident Mark Oliver Everett -- perhaps familiar to you as E out of the EELS -- is calling me from the middle of Pennsylvania, most of the way through an extensive world tour, in the midst of a serious jones...

Attention to detail is what sets Rush apart. That guy in the ninth row who’s frantically air-drumming along with startling accuracy would be thrown for a loop if Neil Peart decided to throw one more or less snare hit into the monstrously complex sequence.

“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.

Head Lip, Wayne Coyne, shares his thoughts on mentally preparing for a double album, the ultimate stage show, the power of the PC to enable music-making weirdos, and why completist collectors’ angst doesn’t faze him one bit.

In the middle of the 1980s, Neil Young was having what many people perceived to be a mid-life crisis. Instead of getting himself a red sports car and a mistress, he’d show up one day with a new band and a new persona - one day embracing edgy German electronica, the next turning into Carl Perkins with a slick fifties haircut and sideburns and and the whole bit. Finally around the time he put a cowboy hat on and started jamming with Willie Nelson - “Willie Neil”, his associates called him - Geffen Records decided to stop financing what they saw as a hopeless, self-destructive binge and sued him for not sounding enough like himself, right around the same time that Fantasy was suing John Fogerty for sounding too much like himself. The eighties were a big decade for midlife crises (and lawsuits) among sixties rockers, but Young took the desire to mutate with the times and head into unpredictable territory much further than any of his peers.

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....

Revolver Magazine brought its third annual Golden God Award ceremony to an extremely sold-out Club Nokia this week, in a black-tie free affair that paid tribute to multiple generations of metal musicians, including the latest one. Performances from Volbeat, Asking Alexandria, Devildriver and the headlining, multi-award-winning Avenged Sevenfold brought the younger bands directly in contact with their elders, while an exceedingly rare appearance from the original Alice Cooper group gave the crowd a taste of...

A little after midnight, more than three hours after Prince had first taken the stage at the LA Forum, after the house lights had been turned back on for the second time and most of the audience were already on the freeway headed home, about three thousand people stayed in their seats, refusing to call it a night. Throats ravaged from hooting for four encores in a row, they banged on their chairs and stomped their feet until, unbelievably, the lights went back out as the band re-took the stage for the fifth time and burst into a jaw-dropping version of Billy Cobham’s funk-metal-fusion standard “Stratus.”