Bobzilla

Van Morrison fans have gotten used to a fairly dependable routine when the man comes to town: a main set made up of primarily brand-new material, a perfunctory couple of hits for an encore, and out. That tendency makes this weekend's appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, at which he will re-create the legendary album Astral Weeks in its entirety, all the more special. For this occasion, Morrison is splitting the show into two parts,...

Photo courtesy of Patricia Fripp Guitarist Robert Fripp would like it to be known that his forthcoming appearance at the Sheraton Los Angeles on Sunday, November 9 will not feature any guitar playing whatsoever. He's not bringing a guitar. He will instead be talking at length about how to give more effective business presentations. Under most circumstances you might think a punch line was coming up. But Fripp, the only original member of King...

"Skin Deep" Nissan Live Sets has been doing a great job filling the void left by Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and ABC In Concert thirty years ago ('bout time too), sating our need for footage of musicians doing their thing on stage, uncut, raw. Brian Wilson and the Pretenders used it as an excuse to debut their new albums for American audiences, and Weezer seized the opportunity to jam with a room full of fans....

Bob Gruen is a stealth artist. He's one of those people that's had a tremendous impact on rock and roll culture, produced work that's been seen and loved by virtually everybody, whether they knew the name of its creator or not. His first solo exhibition in town, Rockers, now on display at Morrison Hotel, provides a sidelong glance at the decadent 1970s from one of its most illustrious observers. Certainly, among those of us who...

The case of Frank Zappa is a strange one indeed. Part rock and roll guitar hero, part pointy-headed atonal composer, part potty-mouthed class clown, he straddled the line between high and low art like no other figure in modern music. Perhaps because of the severe technical demands on the people who try to play it, performances of his music today are fairly rare. Apart from a handful of groups containing Zappa band alumni (The Grandmothers,...

It's an LA tradition to send out summer with a fireworks spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl and this year, they may have found their most ideal co-host and honoree in Brian Wilson. As leader of the Beach Boys, he created the closest thing we have to an Original Soundtrack for the city, and last night, we got to see it played out in front of us, complete with fireworks. While he's never been a...

Californians like to sing songs about California. Actually, so do non-Californians, just ask the Ramones. Even they know Rockaway Beach is a dump. Call it civic pride or just common sense, a song about the sun shining and the top rolled down is never a bad thing in this town: you can look out the window and sing along about three hundred and fifty days out of the year. The great songs about So...

The Pretenders treated a group of lucky fans and invited guests to a sneak preview of their new lineup and material, performing an 11-song set for Yahoo Music's Nissan Live Sets on Monday, August 11. Chrissie Hynde has kept this band going for nearly thirty years, with a regularly shifting alliance of musicians. The band found its most stable lineup between 1993 and 2006, with original drummer Martin Chambers, bassist Andy Hobson and guitarist...

Photo by Kevin Estrada/Used with permission Richard Meltzer, reviewing the Germs' G.I. album for the LA Times in 1979, declared the band heirs apparent to the Doors. So perhaps there's poetic justice in the way the two bands' late-period careers mirror each other almost exactly; their lives have both been reenacted in Hollywood movies, and they've both returned to the concert stage with a celebrity ringer in place of a defining, iconic, dead lead...

We want drugs. Admit it, folks. They work. There may be a million practical reasons why we DON'T do them. It doesn't mean they don't work. What if you could be really high, right now? Blissfully unaware of life and death, floating in space, feeling just like Jesus' son. Would you do it? Hmmmmm... oh but no, of course not, that's awful even to think about. The consequences are just too great. But just for...