Bobzilla

Looking for an appropriately festive way to send off our lame-ass-duck Commander In Chief on Monday night? Harry Shearer's throwing a party for your kind of people at Largo. Shearer - host of the nationally syndicated radio program Le Show, voice of numerous Simpsons characters, and the one in Spinal Tap with veggie-enhanced trousers - will be presenting songs from his Grammy-nominated Songs For The Bushmen, a thorough and enthusiastic skewering of the entire...

Ain't no party like a P-Funk party Cuz the P-Funk party don't stop! By the time they had us chanting this last Friday, it was at least forty-five minutes past the 12:30 curfew posted by the doors. The band looked unsurprised as the PA went dead, followed by the monitors, followed by the amps. But the drummer wouldn't stop, and they couldn't turn him off, and George Clinton was still up there, hollering at us...

The annual House Full Of Toys benefit has been a holiday destination for folks in Los Angeles for the last thirteen years. For many of those years, it was just about the only chance anyone on earth had to see Stevie Wonder doing his incredible thing, as he'd apparently settled in to a long retirement from the road. Typically, the roster would be filled with up and coming R&B stars (I caught my first...

Chrissie Hynde is so cool, she can get away with talking to her audience like a cranky old man without losing their affection. "I don't like having my picture taken...surprised?" she remarked after having interrupted the previous song to chastise a gaggle of fans for getting overeager with the cell phone cameras. Hey, it's a cell phone company's club you're playing at, and they presumably want to sell more of those phones that take nice...

Even if you don't actually believe in it, you really do owe it to yourself to sing Christmas songs in a room full of people at least once this year. And Hanukkah songs too, as well as non-denominational carols about snowmen and sleigh rides and lots of things that may or may not have any particular relevance to your life in Los Angeles. Come on, it's okay. The words are on the paper, everyone else...

About three-quarters of the way through Motley Crue's set at the Palladium, Nikki Sixx paused for a moment to address the crowd. "Hollywood! It's crazy just thinking about all the crazy shit that went down right here! We started a band here... signed our first record contract here... got real fucked up here... we crashed some fucking cars here..." Now, forgive me if the first part of that sentence isn't 100% accurate, I wasn't...

Southern Californians with a taste for the ballsy, beery hard rock sounds of the seventies have already bought their tickets for AC/DC's long-awaited return to LA this coming Saturday and Monday. (We hope so, for your sake, because they've been sold out since around the time they went on sale.) The Forum, the site of many historic metal gigs, seems like the perfect venue for their special brand of mass gathering, and according to the...

The latest in a line of major artists to walk away from the music industry without walking away from music, Van Morrison launched his new career as Record Company Head with a two-night recording session at the Bowl. To kick-start his new Listen To The Lion Records, he revived his 1968 album Astral Weeks, bringing back original session guitarist and Mingus sideman Jay Berliner (bassist Richard Davis was also scheduled to appear but a...

Vocalist Roger Daltrey capped a non-stop four-day weekend of Who activity on Monday at the Arclight Cinema in Sherman Oaks, taking fan questions at the big-screen premiere of the Who's Live At Kilburn 1977. Curious fans overflowed the theater, one of a small handful of screenings before the film's release next week on DVD. This concert film, unseen since it was filmed for possible use in Jeff Stein's documentary The Kids Are Alright and...

Who fans in major cities have been trained to keep their ears very close to the ground when the band goes on tour these days, as Pete Townshend's partner, singer-songwriter Rachel Fuller, has found a unique way to keep herself occupied while tagging along: a live web program called In The Attic, in which Townshend and Fuller's invited guests get together for spontaneous acoustic jam collaborations, often involving someone's favorite rarely-performed Who song. They revived...