Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg Join Rock the Bells Festival

This year's four-city Rock the Bells tour added three more headliners to its already stacked lineup of hip-hop acts: Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest and, for three of the dates, Lauryn Hill will all be joining previously announced performers like the Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim, Slick Rick and Tom Morello's Street Sweeper Social Club.

Snoop Dogg, along with Warren G and Tha Dogg Pound, will be performing the entirety of his 1993 masterpiece Doggystyle, while A Tribe Called Quest will revisit their own 1993 classic Midnight Marauders. But the biggest news is the addition of Lauryn Hill, who will bring a set that culls from both her Fugees years plus songs off her landmark 1998 LP The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Hill's involvement has been rumored for several weeks, but she was left off the initial lineup announcement. Hill will join Rock the Bells August 21st in Los Angeles, August 28th in New York City and August 29th outside Washington, DC. Hill is skipping the fest's August 22nd date at San Francisco's Shoreline Amphitheatre because she'll be performing in that market on June 13th at the Harmony Festival in Santa Rosa, California.

For more on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, check out our oral history on Hill's landmark debut.

As Rolling Stone previously reported, this year's Rock the Bells will include full-album performances by Wu-Tang Clan (Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers), Rakim (Paid in Full), Slick Rick (The Adventures of Slick Rick) and KRS-One (Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded), plus slots by Clipse with Wiz Khalifa, Murs and 9th Wonder, Tom Morello's Street Sweeper Social Club and DJ Premier with a "Tribute to Gang Starr."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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