Bobzilla

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!”

Roky Erickson and Okkervil River’s appearance at an after-school ice cream party for kids reached its peak of surrealism at the moment when the band stopped to ask the youngsters packing the Eagle Rock Arts Center if they had any questions. “Does the drummer get splinters from playing so fast?” “Naw, I don’t think he does,” answered Erickson, “but hopefully it don’t have a taboo on it, like in Louisiana they call it a gris-gris.” Another wanted to know, what did he think about the ukelele? “I like it, and I like that music… I should get me a statue of one.” As to “why is the vampire song so loud?”, Roky reasoned “When it’s cold, and people are wearing all their scarves and neckerchiefs and everything, you have to make it loud enough to sink in.” After that last exchange, the band picked their instruments back up and slammed into the 13th Floor Elevators classic “You’re Gonna Miss Me”, and the entire room began to bounce. Some of the kids plugged their ears, others jammed out on air guitar and danced in the aisles. It was the parents, though, that looked downright ecstatic. Finally, thanks to the kind folks of FYF Fest, a real rock show that you can experience with your children, without having to stay up late or pay for a sitter. Watching the whole thing unfold, taking in the looks of wide-eyed wonder on faces young and old, was one of the most pleasantly bizarre experiences of my gig-going life.

Roky Erickson, one of the most crucial contributors to the American canon of garage rock, pyschedelia and proto-punk, will be in Los Angeles this week for two rare appearances. Tuesday night he’ll be at the Music Box (moved from the Mayan), and Wednesday, in what promises to be a supremely unique experience, will be playing an afternoon set at the Eagle Rock Center For The Arts, a free show and ice cream party at which all adults must be accompanied by a child. This trip to California is in support of his excellent new album True Love Cast Out All Evil (read our full review here.) He’ll be backed by Austin band Okkervil River, whose leader Will Sheff produced the album and selected the material from Roky’s entire history of un-released or under-released material, dating back to the mid-1960s. While much of Erickson’s work following his departure from the 13th Floor Elevators in 1969 was deliberately fearsome and disturbing, True Love brings out a side of his music that has been under-represented till now: his ability to be hauntingly beautiful.

Just out from Shout! Factory is a reissue of a classic midnight movie that doesn't feature Jimmy Page ascending into ancient castles. As part of a series of films produced by B-movie king Roger Corman, Rock "n" Roll High School hits the shelves this week. The cult classic didn’t start life as a punk rock vehicle - the script was written under the working title of “Disco High.”

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.

Devo, those plucky avant-garde populists, will be closing Coachella’s Mojave stage this evening at 11:45 (if you’re home bound, you can stream the live show here), and signing autographs for Record Store Day at the Zia Records tent at 3 p.m.

Make no mistake: the eight songs at the core of this reissue are required listening for anyone more than casually acquainted with rock and roll, a declaration of total freedom that has hardly been equalled in the thirty-five years of punk rock that followed it. (And if that sounds like feverish praise, the album that came before it, Funhouse, is...

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”?

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...

About a third of the 82-minute running length of Neil Young’s latest Jonthan Demme-directed concert film is taken up by just two songs, “Ambulance Blues” and “No Hidden Path”. The former is played as a serene meditation performed solo on acoustic guitar and harmonica, while the latter serves as a springboard for eighteen minutes’ worth of frantic, explosive guitar soloing. Placed together in the middle of the film, they paint a picture of the subject at his most extreme. These aren’t songs that had any hope of finding their way onto radio, but to a certain part of his fanbase, they’re what makes him the real deal. There’s a certain fearlessness about doing a song for that long, a confidence that audience should be willing to follow wherever you want to go, which is what lets you go where no one else does.