Lady Gaga's "Fame" Attracts Kanye West, Perez Hilton to L.A. Show

Lady Gaga didn't wait until she was famous before writing an album about the pleasures (and perils) of fame. But Friday night at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, on the second night of her first headlining tour, the dance-pop diva made it clear just how much she's enjoying stardom now that her hit 2008 debut — it's called The Fame — has bestowed her with the real thing. "I love you, and I will never, ever leave you," Gaga told the capacity crowd (which included Kanye West), before Perez Hilton came onstage to anoint "the new princess of pop" and present her with a plaque commemorating 3 million sales of her single "Just Dance." Lady Gaga has launched an assault on the charts the past few weeks, leaping from Number 10 to Seven to Four, where she sat last week, just below Taylor Swift.

Accompanied by DJ Space Cowboy, Gaga offered up plenty of pounding disco beats, but she also seemed intent on proving that she's not just the latest in a long line of lip-sync Lolitas: Midway through the hourlong show she sat down behind a piano and belted out a surprisingly bluesy version of "Poker Face"; it wasn't Amy Winehouse, but it was far closer than Gaga's bubble-wrap mini-dress might've led you to expect.

The tongue-in-cheek tabloid-victim shtick that provides some laughs on The Fame grew somewhat tiresome at the Wiltern, especially when the singer started spewing half-baked media-studies nonsense like, "Some say Lady Gaga is a lie, and they're right: I am a lie, and every day I kill to make it true." Fortunately, this is a woman who knows how to lighten a mood: Within 10 minutes or so, she'd donned a flesh-colored leotard and a bedazzled admiral's cap and was rhyming "boys in cars" with "buy us drinks in bars."

Set list:
"Paparazzi"
"LoveGame"
"Beautiful, Dirty, Rich"
"The Fame"
"Money Honey" "Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)"
"Poker Face"
"Future Love"
"Just Dance"
"Boys Boys Boys"
"Poker Face"

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES 'Great Gatsby' Is a Crushing Disappointment
• 
  TV Why You Should Watch 'Happy Endings'
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter