Music

The New York Fire Department delayed the first of Neil Young's six shows at the United Palace Theatre, in Washington Heights, by about 90 minutes. But it ended up being a scorcher anyway. Built in 1929 as one of movie baron Marcus Loews five "Wonder" theaters, the United Palace's elaborate detail work reflects "ancient pagan glories," according to a contemporary advertisement.

The 3,300-seat theater is best known as the home of Rev. Ike, to whom Young dedicated "The Believer," a song from his latest album, "Chrome Dreams II." Just like these church bells ringing," he sang, "I'm keeping my faith in you." The reverend, formally known as Dr. Frederick Eikernenkoetter, bought the theater in 1969 during a showing of "2001: A Space Odyssey," as Young noted after performing "Sad Movies," an unreleased song.

The night was like that. Even though Young has performed virtually the same set each night of his tour, which concludes with these shows, he made it seem tailored to the room and audience. Canceling wife Pegi Young's solo set in the interest of time, Neil settled among a circle of fine acoustic instruments for an 11-song solo acoustic set. It began with "From Hank to Hendrix" and included such relative obscurities as "Ambulance Blues" and "A Man Needs a Maid" as well as perennials like "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold."

Young brought the heat during an electric second set focusing on material from "Chrome Dreams II." He has a genius for musically illuminating the warm, safe places that shelter us from cold, dark nights. And his hearth blazed hottest during his electric set's closing song, "No Hidden Path," which he rendered in more than 10 minutes of electric thunder and lightning. Combining that number with the equally turbulent "Like a Hurricane" (the evening's final encore), Young again proved himself a guitar-punishing force of nature. Young had earlier suggested putting the evening's inconveniences behind us, and then paused before adding, "unless I happen to burst into flame." I'd say he came thisclose.

Modest stars of rock's flourishing, independent backwater, Yo La Tengo delivered another religious experience Sunday night. For five of the past seven years, the New Jersey trio has performed each of the eight nights of Hanukkah at Maxwell's, an illustrious indie-rock club in Hoboken, N.J.

YLT's Hanukkah shows are always completely different, yet ritualistically formulaic. Night six, for example, began with an appearance by reunited Los Angeles punk rockers Red Kross (all this year's openers were reunited YLT favorites), continued with comedian Heather Lawless (every YLT Hanukkah show includes a comedian—an excellent programming concept that more bands should embrace), and was highlighted by some hundred minutes of pure Yo La Tengo magic: romantic soft rock; smart economic hard rock; a couple of extended guitar freakouts; and cognoscenti-pleasing covers. Each night benefits a different not-for-profit endeavor, with Clean Ocean Action of New Jersey being Sunday's recipient.

Yo La Tengo is a family affair. Guitarist Ira Kaplan (whose mother concluded the evening with the frequent YLT cover, "My Little Corner of the World") and drumming spouse Georgia Hubley formed their band in 1984. It now embodies all the mostly unspoken connection and occasional (musical) flare-ups of any long and essentially harmonious relationship. Ira and Georgia both sing soft, unassuming, and beautifully nuanced songs, such as "Autumn Sweater" and "Sometimes I Don't Get You," whose simmering uncertainties make extended one-chord raveups such as "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" sound all the more gloriously abrasive. YLT began their set with the Beatles' "Eight Days a Week" (get it?), and encores included Red Kross-assisted covers of the Hollies' "Bus Stop" and previous guest Alex Chilton's "September Gurls." It was a party and a history lesson at once.

You can watch Chilton and YLT play the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" on Saturday night right here.

"Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who" has a familiar, if unfortunate, story arc: A great band arises from humble beginnings, loses a couple of members to "misadventure" along the way, yet returns with older and wiser surviving members who are newly able to fill arenas by delivering the hits of their heyday. But something great occurs during the end credits of this rockumentary, following the obligatory freeze-frame of surviving members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend alone onstage (John Entwistle and Keith Moon having died in the saddle, as it were): The group grows progressively younger over the stuttering course of a thrilling collage consisting of many different Who performances of "My Generation." It's the coolest thing in a sometimes brutally honest documentary loaded with rare archival footage.

Something equally cool can be found on the package's second disc, subtitled "Six Quick Ones." The Who originated as film subjects: In search of a group to feature in a movie about England's "mod" scene, future Who managers, Kit Lambert and Christ Stamp, discovered the quartet, then known as the High Numbers, performing R&B covers at a North London pub called the Railway Hotel. Lambert and Stamp filmed the teenagers bashing away, more than creditably, at "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" and "I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying" in April, 1964. Lost for four decades, this beautiful snapshot of youth culture at a certain stylish apex was rediscovered in the attic of a Dutch television producer and can be enjoyed in its entirety here. "Six Quick Ones" also includes four informative short films exploring the artistry behind each member of the volcanic, and somewhat tragic, pop-art project known as The Who.

Old wine in new bottles indeed. The Grateful Dead is discontinuing their long-running Dick's Picks series of warts-and-all complete-show releases in favor of a new archival series, Road Trips. Volume 1 will consist of musical gems from the band's fall 1979 East Coast tour, which introduced keyboardist Brent Mydland to the hordes, on two CDs (and, for a while, a limited-edition bonus disc). In addition to the usual beautifully designed packages containing an essay and hitherto unseen photographs, each release will spin off a Web site with enough articles and reviews from the tour to make Ken Burns proud. The band promises "killer versions of 'Dancing in the Street' > 'Franklin's Tower,' long exploratory jams on 'Playing in the Band' and 'Terrapin,' a rattle-your-brain 'Shakedown,' and lots more, all pulled from the master tapes in the vault and expertly mastered in HDCD for maximum power and clarity by Jeffrey Norman."

"Rock and roll is dead," art-folk revivalist Sufjan Stevens declared to New York magazine recently, adding for good measure: "There are great rock bands today, but you're watching the History Channel when you go to these clubs. They're just reenacting an old sentiment." This weekend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Stevens offered some bracing new sentiments in "The BQE," a new work commissioned as part of BAM's annual Next Wave festival.

Raised in Michigan and living in Brooklyn, Stevens is known best for his semi-serious long-term goal to memorialize each of the fifty states on an album, with richly detailed tributes to Michigan and Illinois already released. Following Thursday evening's performance, Stevens described his latest geographically specific work as a "bizarre and beautiful ode to one of the world's ugliest expressways" (the BQE, or Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is 11 and a half miles of bad roadway connecting two boroughs). Stevens functioned as both director and composer for the work, which combined a cinematic triptych projected above a 36-piece ensemble with a quintet of both off- and on-screen hula hoopers, whose spinning tubes offered a childlike visual parallel to the barreling vehicles onscreen. "The BQE" began with the sounds of electronic shrieks and ended with a triumphant explosion of fireworks over Coney Island. Inbetween, the work's several sections explored arrangements that evoked classical music, musical theater, and even rock music. You could hear echoes of "Over the Rainbow" early on and, later, the small-town hurly-burly of Charles Ives's marching bands. Among his many talents, Sufjan Stevens makes you feel at least a little proud to be an American.

For the even more entertaining second half of the evening, Stevens performed some of his more popular earlier works. Songs such as the yearning "Seven Swans," "Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head," "Chicago," and the shockingly sensitive "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." sounded majestic in their orchestral arrangements. Anyone not yet convinced that Sufjan Stevens was on to something that justified his anti-rockist sentiments would have had a hard time remaining a nonbeliever.

Guitar freaks take heed of the Experience Hendrix Tour, which pays tribute to Jimi via a six-city, seven-show tour that begins Oct. 16 at Washington D.C.'s Constitutional Hall and concludes with the second of two shows at New York's Beacon Theater on Oct. 22. Gibson Guitar is sponsoring the tour, which is curious insofar as Hendrix was a noted Fender Stratocaster man, but whatever.

Though Hendrix, who died in 1970, will obviously be in attendance only in spirit, the rhythm section that performed this version of "Fire" with him at Woodstock, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox, will be on hand, as will an impressive lineup of guitarists. Chicago's Buddy Guy and Howling Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin will tap Hendrix's blues roots. Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger will represent Hendrix's acid-rocking peer group. Hendrix acolytes will include gospel pedal-steel wizard Robert Randolph and Living Colour's Corey Glover. And bluesmen Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Doyle Bramhall II, and Eric Gales will likely be backed by the late Stevie Ray Vaughan's Double Trouble rhythm section of Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon. Gales is a left-handed African-American who, like Hendrix, also plays his guitar upside-down; and he seems directly connected to his source in this take on "Little Wing."

My current Wolfgang's Concert Vault playlist consists of a 1966 Jefferson Airplane jam at San Francisco's Fillmore Ballroom, blues guitarist Rory Gallagher performing "Do You Read Me" at New York's Bottom Line in 1978, the Kinks' celebration of "Alcohol" at Waterbury, Conn.'s Palace Theater in 1972, and the Allman Brothers Band—joined by guests Jerry Garcia and Boz Scaggs—unwinding a long, languid "Mountain Jam" at San Francisco's Cow Palace in 1973. I fashioned the playlist from four concerts added this week to the Vault, a.k.a. the Bill Graham Presents archive, which was purchased by Minnesota businessman William E. Sagan in 2003 for $6 million. Sagan is currently streaming 665 concerts produced by legendary promoter Bill Graham (born Wolfgang Grajonca) between 1965 and 2002 via the Vault, with more being added on a regular basis. Many of these concerts can also be purchased as downloads.

This could all be a temporary arrangement, however. Several of the musicians whose performances and images are on sale at the Vault—including Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, and the Doors—filed a federal lawsuit in December accusing Sagan of copyright infringement and bootlegging, among other charges. As the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We have never given permission for our images and material to be used in this way." Sagan's attorney, however, insists that the rights "were acquired in a series of transactions and can't be challenged." Graham's employees, who purchased his company following Graham's death in a 1991 helicopter accident, sold it to SFX Entertainment in 1998. In 2000, SFX was acquired by Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel subsequently sold Graham's archive to Sagan with the caveat, according to former Bill Graham Presents president Greg Perloff, that much of the licensing was incomplete. Just how incomplete will eventually be determined in court. Until then...

If the amazing Young@Heart Chorus has a star, it's probably Steve Martin. No, not that Steve Martin. This Steve Martin is a robust-voiced 80-year-old with the sharp-tongued spirit of a rocker a quarter his age. When Martin complains about being "just tired and bored with myself" in Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," you believe him. And when he sings about heaven (in David Byrne's Talking Heads song "Heaven") as "a place where nothing ever happens," you're convinced he has pondered this idea more than once. Lyrics take on new meanings as they grow up, and the Northampton, Mass.-based Young@Heart Chorus, which ranges in age from 68 to 88, is there to pick up the pieces. Members have arrived and departed (dearly) since the group was formed in 1982. They've toured internationally, too, yet didn't deliver their first full-length New York performance until Sunday afternoon at the Paris Bar in Gramercy Park's National Arts Club. The show was part of the group's Road to Nowhere tour (another Talking Heads reference), as heralded by the 21 singers' stylish matching black T-shirts.

Accompanied by a five-piece band that included a couple of thirtysomethings, and led by chorus founder Bob Cilman, the Young@Hearts bookended their show with the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." They mixed classic-rock hits like the Zombies' "She's Not There" and the Velvet Underground's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" with alternative-rock hits such as Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" and Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." But unlike Mrs. Elva Miller, these seniors singing rock were way beyond shtick. Their material resonated with experience, loss, and even hope. After joining Steve Martin onstage in the middle of "Heaven," Young@Heart fan David Byrne led the group in a beautiful, possibly new, gospel-tinged song. "Even though a man is made of clay," Byrne sang, sneaking reading glasses up to his face to peak at the lyrics he held in his hand, "everything can change on one fine day."

Like a family bonded by the death of one of its members, Pink Floyd was for most of its career a band with an absence at its center. That absence would be Syd Barrett, the charismatic singer who wrote most of the band's first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which has just been reissued as a three-CD album. The group's longtime art associate, Storm Thorgerson designed the handsome package, which celebrates the album's fortieth anniversary. The first two CDs present Piper in its original mono version and subsequent stereo remix; the third contains all of Pink Floyd's 1967 singles, included non-album tracks "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play." It's still a great and wonderfully weird sounding rock album, and Eric Szulczewski wrote a terrific essay in Inside Pulse about how Piper producer Norman Smith created such a rich sound in mono. Anyone who's only heard Dark Side of the Moon and later Pink Floyd ought to give it a read. And a listen. Syd Barrett's eventual slide into pharmaceutically enhanced instability and eventual seclusion, prior to his death by pancreatic cancer in 2006, is chronicled in The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story DVD.

Barrett's mental dissolution inspired some of Pink Floyd's greatest music, especially the album (and track) Wish You Were Here and "Shine on You Crazy Diamond." Versions of both can be heard on Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's remarkable new concert DVD, Remember That Night: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. Gilmour, who was brought into the band in 1968 as Barrett's replacement, gradually evolved into its co-leader, along with Roger Waters; their clashing personalities eventually led to the group's split, although they both continued to play much of the same Floyd material in their solo shows. Gilmour's is a humdinger, too. There's a clear, cool magisterial authority to all his Pink Floyd music. David Crosby and Graham Nash provide sweet backing harmonies on a few songs, and David Bowie makes Dark Side's "Comfortably Numb" and "Arnold Layne" his own. Much of the show consists Gilmour's elegant 2006 solo album On an Island in its entirety. Pink Floyd's reputation for excess is reflected in a second DVD containing hours of extra music and documentary footage. Roger Waters even makes a brief surprise appearance, although no one appears particularly delighted by the encounter. Gilmour discusses the falling out in an interview with Rolling Stone's Rock & Roll Daily and, in this case at least, absence has apparently not made his heart grow fonder.

Not to wax overly sentimental, but it wasn't until Nick Lowe strummed the first few chords of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" that I realized why I'd wanted to hear him sing outdoors at the base of the New York's towering World Financial Center One, a block away from Ground Zero. Has a better antiwar anthem come along since Lowe first released the song in 1974 on The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz? The most familiar version of the song is Elvis Costello's seething take on Armed Forces, which Lowe produced. And Curtis Stigers sang the most profitable for The Bodyguard, a hit movie whose hit soundtrack reportedly made Lowe a millionaire and allowed him to pursue his current solo trajectory.

Lowe has matured with enviable grace. Among the eleven solo albums the fifty-eight-year-old has recorded in addition to his work with pub rockers Brinsley Schwartz and rockabilly revivalists Rockpile, his three most recent are especially wonderful. Lowe reinvented himself in middle age as a deceptively mellow country crooner and marvelously expressive barroom balladeer in the tradition of say, Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Johnny Cash (to whose step-daughter, Carlene Carter, he was once married). From 1994's Impossible Bird through this year's At My Age, Lowe has written and sung material of increasingly dark wit and knowing maturity. The sardonic ire of "I Trained Her to Love Me," about a cad who attracts women only to break their hearts, is balanced by the redemptive modesty of "Hope For Us All," in which the singer reckons that if even a "feckless" man such as he can find love, anyone can. Having written "Cruel to Be Kind" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" back in his own feckless youth, you know Lowe knows whereof he speaks.

Tom Petty's version of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" (listen here) is part of Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, due out Tuesday. John Lennon, Elton John, Dr. John, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, and others perform Domino's bumptious R&B on a double-CD set benefiting the Tipitina's Foundation, which purchases instruments for New Orleans school children and funds other community programs.

Joni Mitchell reworks "Big Yellow Taxi" for Shine, her first release since 2002's Travelogue. Mitchell's 1970 hit fits her politically engaged new album perfectly, and you can hear it here.

Michael Jackson's famous "Thriller" video, directed by John Landis, was great creepy fun when it hit MTV in 1983, and many still consider it the best video ever. But you're in for a shock if you still haven't seen the version performed by inmates of the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines, which has been racking up millions of views on YouTube. The inmates have also performed "Sister Act" and "Jailhouse Rock," but "Thriller" is their masterpiece. Watch and read more about it here.

Grateful Dead fans will swoon over this intimate onstage seven-minute version of "Dark Star" from 1970.

Listening to Easy Living this morning while running reminded me how much I love the quintessential cool playing of saxophonist Paul Desmond. Watch him perform his beautiful ballad "Emily" at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1975.

Directed by Julie Taymor, of Broadway's Lion King fame, Across the Universe at first looks like a glossy, PG13/High School Musical repackaging of music and sentiments deeply embedded in our generational DNA. Fortunately, it's far better than that. The uncomplicated story about a visiting Liverpudlian named Jude (Jim Sturgess, looking far more like Paul than John) who falls for a Midwestern blonde, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), while sharing an East Village apartment with her draft-bait brother, Max (Joe Anderson), is driven almost solely by thirty-one Beatles songs, with the possible exceptions of Bono's trippy "I Am the Walrus" and Eddie Izzard's Monty Python-esque "Mr. Kite." Across the Universe begins with Jude sitting on a beach, head filling the screen, singing a slow, dreamy version of "Girl," which segues to Lucy at her high-school prom, dancing a last dance with her boyfriend who is on his way to Vietnam. Antiwar politics, along with sex, drugs, and rock and roll, are all treated as nonjudgmentally as they were in certain large circles at the time.

A couple of dance sequences are particularly wonderful. An Asian lesbian named Prudence (T.V. Carpio) drifts dreamily and untouched through a football team in full scrimmage while crooning "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to her object of desire. Joe Cocker changes from a panhandler to a pimp to And an Uncle Sam recruitment poster's "I Want You" sets off an inventively choreographed, if frighteningly machinelike, journey that ends with a group of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty through the jungles of Vietnam. (A Joplin-like singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and her Hendrix-like boyfriend (Martin Luther) help bring a tougher musical edge to this unabashed Boomer nostalgia fest.) Across the Universe isn't subtle, but it doesn't need to be when you have Joe Cocker transforming from a panhandler to a pimp to a street musician over the course of "Come Together." If anything, the movie is the closest thing in years to the epic and gleefully excessive Hollywood musicals of the forties and fifties, the kind people think they don't make anymore. Well, think again.

Or at least download the free track "Radio Nowhere" from Springsteen's forthcoming album Magic, which will be released October 1. Springsteen and his E Street Band will begin a thirty-city tour of the United States October 2 in Hartford, Connecticut and wraps up November 18 in Boston. [via Guardian Unlimited]

Compare and contrast Dolly Parton's demure original with the White Stripes' histrionic arena-rock cover.

Elvis Week peaks tonight at Memphis's FedEx Forum with "The Thirtieth Anniversary Concert" at 8 p.m. and "Midnight in Vegas" at midnight. Each event blends film and video footage of you-know-who with an orchestra, singers, and lots of musicians—most notably guitarist James Burton, bassist Jeffy Scheff, drummer Ronnie Tutt, and the Sweet Inspirations vocal group—who worked with Presley prior to his premature death while at home in Graceland on this day thirty years ago.

I'm not the world's biggest Presley fan. I've always found it too much of a struggle to hear beyond the big vulgar icon far enough to really enjoy his music in and of itself. But I try to appreciate his legacy, especially when it's conveyed as elegantly as Peter Guralnick did in his August 11 New York Times Opinion piece, "How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?"

When a reporter referred to him as the "king of rock 'n' roll" at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, "one of my influences from way back." The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

Ever wonder what became of groups like the Weads, the Vi Dels, Lonnie and the Legends, the Tasmanians, Cryan Shames, Chaos Incorporated, and the Beavers? Me neither. But I've been obsessing over the extremely under-the-radar careers of these and a few hundred other 1960s garage bands thanks to Garage Hangover, an amazing collection of data, images, and mp3s, I discovered via Portland, Oregon, nostalgia trove Stumptown Confidential.

Categorized conveniently by both state and country (don't miss the Confusion and the Dinosaurs, paired on a single released by an India cigarette company), Garage Hangover is a wiki-like cooperative affair. Today the site features the Vistells, the Cobras, and other bands from the late-sixties Santa Cruz scene, copiously illustrated with photos, business cards, posters, and the precious vinyl itself. The music, reflecting an era, is a naïve and often-charming blend of surf rock, English pop, and psychedelia.

At a time when releasing a 45 was somewhat more complicated than producing an mp3 track on your iMac with aptly named Garageband, many of these recordings involved the assistance of radio DJs, parents, and other sponsors for labels no one has heard of before or since. They weren't always purely commercial, either. A single released by Montreal's bilingual Les Harmonicos was given away as a souvenir at "Canada Family Day," with the same song sung in French on one side and in English on the other.

Garage Hangover's collection represents merely the tip of its stylistic iceberg, of course. But I imagine it becoming the center of a scene that has to date been documented mainly in the pages of equally obscure low-budget, long-out-of-print, barely circulated books and zines. This is posterity.

Jackie Greene, who I caught at Joe's Pub (NYC) Sunday night, is a great-looking twenty-six-year-old Californian who could pass for a decade younger. Greene's claim to fame these days is his recent recruitment in Phil Lesh & Friends, a Grateful Dead repertory band led by its former bassist, and the club was a little loopy with assertive Dead fans eager to hear Greene's version of the canon. And while Greene, accompanied by guitarist Tim Bluhm, delivered perfectly adequate renditions of "Friend of the Devil" and "Sugaree," the problem was that his original material, which he performed on guitar, piano, and harmonica, was equally adequate except not, you know, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Songs like "About Cell Block #9," "Farewell, So Long, Goodbye," and "The Rusty Nail" sounded unlived-in even as Greene cranked up the passion for these old-fashioned verses featuring jealous rages and do-wrong mamas. His records are a little more convincing, and he'll definitely make a certain type of Deadhead happy.

Same venue, following night, completely different story. My admiration for violinist Jenny Scheinman grows with every Tuesday she performs at her usual hangout, Barbès. But tonight she was enjoying a bigger stage and better sound system with a quartet, performing an unusually personal form of jazz-rock definitely in the spirit, if far from the letter, of the early ultraexperimental Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd, in the case of one spacious epic). Scheinman was accompanied by her own low-key rock star, guitar experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco, along with the nervously urgent rhythm section of bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black. And verily these cats did smoke. Scheinman has performed country, jazz, pop, and samba with the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell, and the Hot Club of San Francisco. All these experiences appear to blend together in compositions both serenely pastoral and anxiously urban. Yet it always sounded intensely intimate, of the moment, and resolutely nostalgia-free. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

Twenty-seven-year-old Doors singer Jim Morrison was found dead in his Paris bathtub on July 3, 1971. French authorities didn't perform an autopsy on his body because no signs of foul play were detected, but his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, later told Doors biographer Danny Sugerman that Morrison died of a heroin overdose. And now former New York Times writer Sam Bernett claims in a new book titledThe End—Jim Morrison, to be published in France, that the bloated singer actually overdosed in a bathroom at the Rock 'n' Roll Circus nightclub, on Paris's Left Bank, and that his body was moved back to his apartment as part of a coverup by the club's owners.

Bernett, who was interviewed recently in England's The Mail on Sunday ("The Shocking Truth About How My Pal Jim Morrison REALLY Died"), claims that singer Marianne Faithfull, like everyone else in Rock 'n' Roll Circus that night, was sworn to secrecy about Morrison's overdose. Why is he talking now? "I want to get rid of my heavy load," Bernett says. "At least everything is now out there to be discussed. I've said what I have to say." [via Rock & Roll Daily]

This fall Universal Music will reissue Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True in a "Deluxe Edition" two-CD set, making it the disk's third reissue since its original 1977 release. Meanwhile, fans of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds have had a total of nine different opportunities to buy that album in different configurations since 1965. As Ethan Lee wrote in the April 20 Wall Street Journal:

"Improved sound quality and previously unreleased tracks are usually the selling points for the endless recycling of classic albums. The primary target is die-hard fans, who are suckers for buying the same beloved music over and over just to get versions that sound a little bit better, or have one or two additional obscure oddities."

"Suckers," eh?

A couple of days later in The New York Times, Ben Ratliff discussed bands that are essentially "reissuing" themselves. He argued that groups like Rage Against the Machine, the Pixies, and Iggy Pop's Stooges often sound more mature and musically rewarding today than they did in their so-called prime. And, as he notes, there is a lot of "high-profile reuniting" going on, with the Police, Genesis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Squeeze, Smashing Pumpkins, and maybe even Van Halen all hopping back on the tour bus.

I wish I remembered who recently noted that bands don't break up anymore; they just take more time off between tours.

Among the 2,314 or so shows the Grateful Dead played between 1965 and 1995, according to Deadbase, few loom larger in their legend than a springtime 1977 gig at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It looms so large, in fact, that the city has declared the gig's thirtieth anniversary to be Grateful Dead Day, proclaiming that,

"Whereas, on May 8th, 1977 the Grateful Dead performed in Barton Hall on the campus of Cornell University in the city of Ithaca New York, a concert that is widely acknowledged and regarded as a defining and transcendent occasion and example of the art of contemporary musical improvisation, collaboration, musicianship, and performance,[...]"

The show itself is indeed fairly spectacular both in terms of performance and, you know, vibe. Moreover, a finely recorded and widely disseminated tape would be responsible for countless converts in ensuing years. Viral marketing? The Dead invented it. And today you can listen to the whole glorious shebang right here.

The theme song to "Clatterford," the brilliant current BBC America sitcom created by Jennifer "Absolutely Fabulous" Saunders, is the Kinks' 1968 masterpiece, "Village Green Preservation Society":

"We are the Village Green Preservation Society. God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety. We are the Desperate Dan Appreciation Society. God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties."

Sung by Kate Rusby (the Kinks themselves perform it here), "Village Green" captures the essence of the West Country village of Clatterford and its church-based Women's Guild (in England the show airs as "Jam & Jerusalem"). Like its theme song, the show is a perfectly pitched and gently amusing look at the centuries-old rural friction of old and new, past and present, young and old.

The Kinks themselves experienced a similar culture clash when singer Ray Davies began writing music that rocked softer than "You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night," and the group's other early sixties chart toppers. His guitarist brother, Dave, preferred the harder stuff and the brothers' infamous sibling rivalry was fueled when Ray began writing more personal and socially observant songs such as "A Well Respected Man" and "Sunny Afternoon" in 1965 and 1966. The tension between Ray's more personal, theatrical, and observational writing and Dave's preference for hard rock created nearly constant tension until the band finally broke up in 1996. Anyone curious about the (almost literally) gory details of the Davies brothers' sad dysfunctional relationship won't want to miss this British documentary on the group.

The country's best rock band is the biggest underground sensation you've never heard of.

Still mostly in their twenties, the six members of Chicago's Umphrey's McGee have been shuffling and re-dealing rock history at thousands of live shows over the past decade. Most rock groups tend to have about one good idea or, if they're really ambitious, two. Umphrey's McGee, on the other hand, contains multitudes. Their music is anthemic, melodic, witty, and danceable; it's also virtuosic, experimental, complex, and emotionally fulfilling. Guitarists Jake Cinninger and Brendan Bayliss shred with seemingly effortless authority. Keyboardist Joel Cummins is a rocking jazzbo with a knack for analog electronics. Drummer Kris Myers and percussionist Andy Farag can swing as hard as they pound, while bassist Ryan Stasik holds everything together with movie-idol poise.

What Umphrey's McGee do best, as they demonstrated Friday night in Times Square's Nokia Theater, has everything to do with accessible complexity in the name of pure pleasure. During nearly three hours onstage, they took advantage of a thousand different sounds ranging from quiet and meditative to head-banging ecstatic. Tunes like "In the Kitchen" and "Divisions" begin with emotional Bayliss vocals reminiscent of Sting before launching into composed sections marked by turn-on-a-dime beats, immaculate guitar shredding, irresistible dance beats, and improvised rave-ups before returning home. Instrumentals like "Jajunk" and Atmosfarag" can go almost anywhere. They covered Ozzy Osbourne's "No More Tears" because it was Friday the 13th, oozed out a psychedelic instrumental cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and concluded "Mulche's Odyssey" with a coda borrowed from Zep's "Moby Dick."

Umphrey's McGee played only three songs from their new album, The Bottom Half, which is about par for improvising rock bands like UM, who mix things up at every show to the mutual benefit of both the musicians and their loyal fans. Released as sort of a B-sides sequel to the Umph's 2006 album Safety in Numbers, The Bottom Half stands solidly on its own. It also contains an entire bonus disk's worth of demo versions, alternative takes, and inside-baseball banter. It's nothing like seeing them live, of course, which is why you should find out where they're playing soon here.

Anyone who's seen the Who perform in recent years knows exactly how much weight the "My Generation" line "hope I die before I get old" has acquired over the decades. And watching ninety-year-old singer Alfie Carretta snarl it in this amazing video of his band the Zimmers ups the irony behind pop music's most overused, yet eternally renewable, epitaph even further.

Assembled for an upcoming BBC documentary, according to England's Daily Mail, the Zimmers consist of forty senior citizens with a combined age of, well, 3,000 years. Their average age of "the oldest gigging band in the world," though, is seventy-eight. "My Generation" was recorded in Abbey Road studio two, where the Beatles used to work, by producer Mike Hedges, who has worked with U2. With its smashed instruments and sloganeering (handheld signs state "I'm bored in old people's homes" and "I've not left my flat in three years"), the video is obviously more a political than a musical statement. And why not? The original may have been, too.

The Zimmers' MySpace page includes biographies of such Zimmers as ninety-nine-year-old Winifred Warburton, who "wrote a few ladybird books on how to crochet," and sixty-nine-year-old Gillian Davies, who "has been campaigning about quality of life for elderly people ever since her friend was badly treated in a care home."

The Zimmers will be touring Europe in October. Please don't try to put them down just because they get around.

Rock goddess Patti Smith taps directly into the pleasure principle on her forthcoming album, Twelve, a decadent dozen cover versions of her favorite songs. A true rock shaman, Smith renews such generational touchstones as Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?", the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" as well as tracks by the Allman Brothers, Beatles, and Nirvana. The biggest surprise, though, is probably her tender psychedelic recasting of Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble." (And she's not the only artist to find contemporary significance in eighties mop heads Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World.") Smith and her band will launch the album with three shows on April 24 at New York's Bowery Ballroom.

The Roches made it sound as though it were nearly impossible to get a hometown gig, but a few nights ago the New York Society for Ethical Culture on the Upper West Side was packed with loudly appreciate fellow travelers. As well they should be. Sisters Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche are wise and witty songwriters, genetically enhanced harmonizers, nimble guitarists, and proudly eccentric. And Moonswept, their first album as a trio in eleven years, proves it.

Roches songs are often autobiographical, which means that on Friday, nearly thirty years after the release of their eponymous debut, the sisters sang about aging, regret, optimism, and simply struggling to get by in post 9/11 New York. Terre's "Gung Ho," which opened the show, pins mild irony ("Everybody said I would be OK/ Not one of them is standing to this day") to a perky melody the Andrew sisters might have harmonized closely, while Suzzy's "Huh" is a goofy series of non sequiturs (It's a no go, bad boy, I'd like to be a nice old, duh") suggesting a stalled love affair. The former Paul Simon back-up singers slipped into past tense with their a cappella version of "The Hallelujah Chorus," their chiming ode to another doomed relationship ("Ing"), their perfect band introduction ("We), and two secular prayers collected and set to music for their Harvard-sponsored Zero Church project. The Roches cover a remarkable amount of emotional territory in an evening and should seriously consider playing here more often.

Afterward I subwayed down to the Bowery Ballroom, where my (full disclosure) eMusic.com colleague Reid Genauer was leading his crackerjack Assembly of Dust band. The audience was considerably younger, and no less enthusiastic, for the AOD's neoclassic country-rock (some songs resemble a genetically engineered hybrid of the Band and the Dead) punched up with moves from the great underground improvised-rock scene that swept the Northeast during the nineties. The AOD's new Recollection practically defines gung-ho.

With his white gold-rush beard and supersized 'stache, Bob Weir currently resembles a cross between Merle Haggard and the Smith Brothers. Except for the shorts and sandals, of course; onstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York Friday night, where he was performing the second of three shows with his 11-year-old band, Ratdog, Weir was the first man I'd seen wearing shorts in several weeks. And because has hasn't been the cute Grateful Dead member for a while, it's both disconcerting and kind of cool to see a thoroughly seasoned musician play satisfying and often sophisticated rock while dressed like a second grader.

These days Ratdog is the looser-goosier of the Grateful Dead's two primary spin-off bands. While bassist Phil Lesh curates his Phil and Friends shows like a German conductor, barking instructions into the ear monitors of his temporary sidemen, Ratdog is a laid-back, loose-vibed, but no less musically ambitious version of a Dead repertory group. And why shouldn't Weir play the Dead's music, having written a substantial chunk of it?

Friday night began with "Truckin'" and concluded with heartbreaking a cappella encore version of "Attics of My Life." In-between we heard more or less familiar versions of "Playin' in the Band," "Tennessee Jed," and "Foolish Heart." Lead guitarist Mark Karan sounds remarkably like Jerry Garcia at his most buoyant while saxophonist Kenny Brooks kept things jazzy and conversational. The rest of the band remained solidly on the same improvisatory page for nearly three and a half hours of loose-limbed playing. For better or worse, they're the best Dead cover band around.

Beyond being one of the world's most inventive rhythm guitarists, Weir continues to write great new material at something of a snail's pace. Dark and moody as they were, "Even So" and "October Queen" were arguably the show's highlights. With lyrics like "I wish you were naked/ I wish you were wholesome and sincere" ("Even So"), they were written from the points of view of a couple of men who seem outside of their respective elements due to the demands of desire. Not unlike, say, a sixtyish California dude in shorts and sandals laying down venerable acid-rock truth in the middle of a New York winter.

Montreal's Arcade Fire, the flaming apex of greater North America's indie-rock scene, asked their audience to forget they were in church Tuesday night at the start of the second night of five shows at Manhattan's Judson Church on the southern edge of Washington Square Park. That was easier said than done, however. A gorgeous green John La Farge stained glass window glowed above a flickering literal representation of the title of the band's forthcoming album, Neon Bible, which happened to have been recorded in a church outside Montreal. The music consisted in large part of vigorous anthems concerning faith, doubt, and hope.

The ten-member group includes a pair of French horns, a pair of strings, a Moog synthesizer, and a lot of instrument swapping, with echoes of pomp rock ranging from ELO to the Polyphonic Spree. "There's a big black wave in the middle of the sea for me," sang songwriting bandleader Win Butler in a voice pitched halfway between David Byrne and Bruce Springsteen. Butler, who hails from Texas, introduced one song with a wry comment about living in "hard times" when "things can go either way." (Arcade Fire's universally lauded 2004 debut, Funeral, was the group's surprisingly positive method of mourning passings close to the group.) "But isn't there a smidgen of hope?" he inquired later in the show.

After stating that he and his wife don't celebrate Valentine's Day, Butler sweetly dedicated the following song to band member-spouse Regine Chassagne. "My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love," he sang in hymn-like phrases as church-organ chords moaned behind him, crescendoing to a climax. "Set my spirit free!"

New dates were just added to The Who's North American tour, which begins February 23 in Reno, Nevada. Get the full itinerary here.

Endless Wire, the Who's first album since 1982's It's Hard, was a stinker, one of the great disappointments of 2006. The mini-opera "Wire and Glass," recycled from guitarist Pete Townshend's dusty notebooks, sounded like a collections of demos. Yet anyone who's seen the group in its more recent incarnations – minus drummer Keith Moon, and then bassist John Entwistle – has to appreciate the undiminished muscle, style, and intelligence Townshend still brings to a stage. Moreover, as this recent Jambase Q&A suggests, he'll likely always be one of rock's top-10 interviewees, even via email:

"We all adored show business for its own sake, too. We liked stunts, tricks, gimmicks, ideas and special effects. But, deep down I think a lot of our power may have come from frustrated anger – a sense of impotence. Other artists didn't seem to share this in quite the way we did. Our music was quite vengeful in a way. The uplifting subtext came from a mixture of humour and a genuine belief that music could set us all free. It seems trite - and I think we knew that if music could do anything at all it would do it only for a short period - but that is what we believed."