Bobzilla

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!”

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.

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...

It was an interesting year for fans of the old guard. As time passes, our beloved dinosaurs are being forced to adapt or die, in an environment in which their only property of value - material recorded a long time ago - can no longer be sold for a profit. They have responded by creating box-set packages large and gaudy enough to appear to be worth something.

“I don’t like hypnotics. I’m doing a non-hypnotic music, to break up the catatonic state. And I think there is one, right now.” - Don Van Vliet to Paul Moyer, 1980 Trying to explain the world of Captain Beefheart to the uninitiated is a fruitless task. The music that Don Van Vliet and his shifting crew of dedicated accomplices known as the Magic Band unleashed between 1965 and 1982 defies description and confounds any attempts at drawing a valid comparison. The phrase “Beefheart-like” has come to be used as shorthand by music writers trying to describe any old thing with a bent toward oddball beats and dissonant chords, but it’s impossible to get a sense of what Beefheart is about by listening to any or all of the bands trying to live up to that description.

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.

It is almost impossible to overstate the effect that Ornette Coleman had on the world of American music in the late 1950s. Coleman’s early records for Atlantic - using a band formed in LA, with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, trading the drum seat with Ed Blackwell - declared complete freedom from jazz convention, including the restrictions of tonality itself, while remaining rooted in the blues at its deepest level...

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.

John Cale’s return to Los Angeles for the first American performance of his landmark 1973 album Paris 1919 includes a reunion with the UCLA Philharmonia, the same group that gave the original recording its lush, expansive orchestration. While the evening promises guest appearances from alt-rock heartthrobs Ben Gibbard and Mark Lanegan, the real treat on offer is the rare opportunity to hear some of rock’s most incredibly ambitious, grandly realized songs performed properly. And...

To anyone who’s spent enough time there, the sound of New Orleans music always evokes memories of instant parties breaking out where you stand; you’re just hanging around on the street and all of a sudden, there’s a band playing and people dancing for no apparent reason. Last week, the Bowl brought three of Louisiana music’s foremost living contributors to one place at one time and gave LA a taste of the real deal, played old men the likes of which they don’t make any more. It proved to be a funky evening indeed, a masterclass in drumming, in making the most complex ideas flow like water.