Voodoo Experience ‘09 annexed New Orleans’ City Park last weekend for three days of music and festival madness, and people partied hard. They rocked out to the interstellar grooves of the Flaming Lips, the ballsy arena rock of Kiss, the brash rhymes of Eminem, among many others. They rode around naked on bicycles. Yes, naked. And that’s just the bands in these exclusive interviews we’re talking about. (For much more from Voodoo, stop by Fuse.TV.)

Check out the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne as he explains why people in his upcoming video for “Watching the Planets” are biking around the cold woods in Portland, Oregon, wearing nothing but smiles. Oh, and if you listen closely, you can hear Coyne’s Flaming “Nips” Freudian slip. Nippy indeed! Plus, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro talks about “closing” the Le Ritual stage for Kiss, and Kiss explain that they were thinking of going onstage dressed as “normal people” for Halloween — we’re glad that idea got nixed.

Be sure to tune in Friday, November 6th at 10 p.m. EST for a Fuse-tastic take on the Voodoo Experience.  

But for now, enjoy the interviews and photos of Voodoo’s biggest moments and Rolling Stone’s recaps of big sets by Eminem, as well as Lenny Kravitz with the Flaming Lips.

Photo: Gardner/Getty

“You don’t mind if I play a little music?” Lenny Kravitz asked as he closed the Voodoo Music Experience Sunday night in New Orleans. After a weekend of costume and spectacle, his two-hour set was almost old school in its focus on songs and musicianship.

Voodoo ‘09 in photos: Eminem, Kiss and more.

The show was a homecoming for Kravitz, who bought a house in New Orleans in 1991 after visiting to see Aretha Franklin play Jazz Fest. (He performed alongside the Queen of Soul Friday night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary concert in New York.) Little in his two-hour show seemed specifically geared for a New Orleans audience until the encore, when he called local musician Trombone Shorty to the stage to rave up the extended encore of “Let Love Rule.”

Read about Eminem’s return to the stage at Voodoo fest.

The set was part of Kravitz’s 20th anniversary tour for Let Love Rule — an album he recently reexamined for Rolling Stone — but he didn’t make it halfway through the album. Instead, he sprinkled songs from his debut through a hits-oriented show that periodically stretched songs including “Believe” and “Blues for Sister Someone” into lengthy, funky jams that walked the fine line between exploratory and meandering. His only concession to showmanship as a bank of neon tubes on the back wall that evoked an American flag during “American Woman,” which marked him as a yang to the Flaming Lips’ yin. (more…)

Photo: Flanigan/FilmMagic
Trying to resolve Eminem’s contradictions is a loser’s game. How do you reconcile the artist who asked the men in the audience at Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans Friday night to yell, “Fuck you, bitches” (and the women to answer, “Fuck you, assholes”) with the guy who encored with the encouraging “Lose Yourself”? The scabrous pop culture critic with the MC who penned murder fantasy “3 a.m.,” which opened the set with a bloody, Saw-like trailer? The audience at Voodoo didn’t try; they were just thrilled he was there.

See photos from the Voodoo Music Experience 2009

This year’s Halloween weekend festival includes Kiss, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips, Lenny Kravitz and Justice, who chain-smoked their way through a DJ set on a damp, biting Friday night. A downpour soaked the grounds of City Park and dropped the temperature 20 degrees, which cut down any walk-up traffic for one of Eminem’s only 2009 shows, but it didn’t hurt the gig. For the occasion, Eminem had a live band dressed in skeleton costumes that added muscle, particularly in the closing “Without Me.” To further beef up the sound, he was joined onstage by a hype-man throughout, and D12 for part of the show. He took time out to salute the late Proof, “the real leader of the group” in one of the set’s few tender moments. (more…)

Photo: Flanigan/FilmMagic

This past weekend the Flaming Lips, Decemberists, Passion Pit and more acts invaded San Francisco for the Treasure Island Music Festival. Rolling Stone has some hot shots from the big event right here:

• Treasure Island Music Festival 2009: Flaming Lips, Decemberists, Passion Pit and More

Photograph by Jay Blakesberg

Warren Hellman is the kind of billionaire investment banker who makes it hard to hate billionaire investment bankers. Every year, Hellman — a successful venture capitalist and an amateur banjo player — organizes something called the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a three-day celebration of picking and strumming in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It’s open to all and 100 percent free — and every year, Hellman picks up the tab. Since its inception eight years ago, with two stages and nine bands, HSB has grown into perhaps the largest free festival in the country: Over the weekend an estimated 500,000 fans crammed into this year’s installment, more than Coachella, Lollapalooza and All Points West combined.

Tom Morello, Emmylou Harris with Robert Plant and more: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in photos.

Emmylou Harris was the fest’s very first headliner back in 2001, and Hellman named the thing Strictly Bluegrass hoping to guilt her into playing some. (She didn’t, so they had to add the “Hardly” later.) Now the lineup is a cross-section of almost every kind of American roots music — from R&B legends like Booker T. and Allen Touissant to NPR folkies like Steve Earle and Aimee Mann to young indie-rock Turks like Okkervil River and Dr. Dog. And, of course, banjos, banjos, banjos. (more…)

Photograph by Candice Lawler for RollingStone.com
With fat dark clouds lurking overhead, there was a sense at the beginning of Day Three of the Austin City Limits Festival that, if it rains again, we’re all doomed. It didn’t rain. But we were all doomed. By mid-afternoon, when the clouds had cleared for good the festival grounds metastasized into a fetid swamp, with a layer of mud on top of the mud, and a layer of lost or abandoned flip-flops on top of that.

And yet, somehow, we survived, muddier, of course, but no worse for the wear. Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears had plenty to do with that. The first set of the afternoon found Lewis, an R&B showman of the old school, blending grizzled blues riffs with Motown horn blasts for a set that at its best recalled Otis Redding or the old Stax Revues.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

The B-52s‘ Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson emerged in matching teal dresses, which clashed nicely with Pierson’s supernaturally orange hair. They stuck to a series of low-impact sock-hop dance moves, looking like twin Martian queens out of some old ’50s sci-fi movie. Fred Schneider mostly kept behind the microphone—he delivered his lines sternly, like an angry schoolmaster barking directions. (more…)

For the last 17 years, the going story on Pearl Jam was that they were a band that prided themselves on a willful disregard for expectations. The bullet-points are so frequently recited they can almost be announced in unison: their repudiation of the music video, their now-legendary tussle with Ticketmaster, their insistence on releasing their records on vinyl a week before they came out on CD. Lately, the group shucked the whole major label system, releasing their latest album, Backspacer, on their own, with exclusive distribution in Target and several small independent outlets. Commercial fallout be damned, Pearl Jam built their reputation on a stubborn insistence to follow their own muse.

All of which only served to make their crowd-pleasing festival-closing set Sunday at Austin City Limits that much more astonishing. Abandoning any impulse to confound or to frustrate, the group instead delivered a jaw-dropping, white-hot two-hour cavalcade of hits, one that served to aggressively reassert their relevance while casting a clean light on their past. It was — by any measure — the best show of the weekend. “We’ve been here three days,” Eddie Vedder said early in the evening, “and in those three days we’ve received many, many gifts. So we’re going to do our best to return the favor.” (Check out video from the band’s set, plus footage of the Dead Weather, above.)

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos. (more…)

At the end of the day, and especially at the end of this day at Austin City Limits, the crowd wanted the Dave Matthews Band they’ve known for the past 15 years or so. After slogging through an insistent downpour and the resulting thick, oozing mud, the guys trading chest bumps and girls woo-hooing with the regularity (and irritation) of a snooze alarm would have accepted the DMB on auto-pilot. They needed no spectacle. (Watch footage from their set above).

Dave Matthews Band, for certain, are not about spectacle. The closest they came was when a handful of red balls bounced over the crowd during “You Might Die Trying,” as the stage was bathed in matching red light. That was pretty much that. Matthews took the stage one song earlier looking, more or less, like he always has forever (gray button-up with sleeves rolled up, black pants); daring stage wear for him is a T-shirt and jeans. The band looked the same, too, or at least the same as it has been since saxophone player LeRoi Moore’s death last year: horn players Jeff Coffin and Rashawn Ross and guitarist Tim Reynolds, joining stalwarts Boyd Tinsley (violin), Carter Beauford (drums), and Stefan Lessard (bass). But the Dave Matthews Band was different on Saturday night. Or, at least it tried to be. And, at its most successful, it was.

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos. (more…)

There was a tie for Most Significant Special Effect on Day Two of the Austin City Limits Festival. The first contender was Austin’s own Ghostland Observatory, whose agitated dance music took a back seat to a breathtaking light show. The stage shot sharp, endless beams of green light over the heads of festivalgoers, occasionally filling in the spaces between the eerie beacons with cloudlike LED patterns. The stage itself was almost entirely obscured by smoke and bathed in neon purple lights, frontman Aaron Behrens (in a cowboy hat, hair in pigtails) and instrumentalist Thomas Turner (in a lit-up vampire cape) often hidden completely. The group sent up multicolored cubes and triangles, and endless series of neon-brite colors that made Zilker Park feel like the inside of a nightclub in the early ’90s. It was like if Tool suddenly cheered up and went day-glo while simultaneously discovering Daft Punk records. (Watch footage from their set above).

Experience Austin City Limits in our best live photos.

The second contender for showstopping spectacle, unfortunately, was Mother Nature. Saturday was plagued by insistent, often torrential downpours, which rendered much of the day a muddy and, occasionally, miserable mess. (more…)

Photo: Miller/FilmMagic

There was a large eyeball suspended at the rear of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ stage setup Friday night, a fitting prop for a band that prides itself on spectacle. The band’s Austin City Limits show was the second for which they stepped in as a replacement for the ailing Beastie Boys (the first was Lollapalooza), and if some of their typical razor sharpness had been blunted from all the subbing, that just meant that they were merely the fourth best live band around.

See Day One of Austin City Limits in photos.

In fact, the greatest casualty of the YYYs’ rigorous schedule is O’s voice. Normally a shrill and vibrant shriek, on Friday it was shocking in its bluntness — more grunt than tone. But O used the gruffness to her advantage, scuffing up some of the prettier numbers from the group’s largely electronic It’s Blitz! to lend them a kind of violent power. (more…)

Photograph by Brian Birzer

The Austin City Limits Festival, held in Austin’s Zilker Park and currently in its seventh year, boasts a bill that roams the stylistic spectrum, but its first day proved a fine opportunity to get a good, long look at the changing face of country.

See Day One of Austin City Limits in photos.

Cool breezes won out against the blazing sun on Friday, which was the perfect complement to the afternoon’s more tranquil music, like fiddler Sara Watkins, late of Nickel Creek, who played an early afternoon set as long on charm and good manners as it was on winsome, airy country. She sounded positively bereft singing “I didn’t lie, but I withheld the truth,” on the quietly aching “Same Mistakes.” This wasn’t music for singing along — it was music for sighing along.

See backstage photos of Phoenix, the Avett Brothers, Blitzen Trapper and more from Day One of ACL.

If Watkins was reserved and traditional, the Avett Brothers were a thrilling study in contrasts, pitting spare and simple instrumentation — acoustic guitar, banjo — against brothers Scott and Seth’s hoarse, violent hollering. Their aggression wasn’t just vocal: the band pogo’d like young punks during “Paranoia in Bb Major” while “Salina” built to a panicky conclusion. If Scott is the sturdy frontman, Seth is the jack-of-all-trades. He moved effortlessly from guitar to piano to drums, and attacked his vocals on “Distraction #74″ with an actor’s intensity, miming out the lyrics with his hands.

(more…)

Photo: Miller/FilmMagic
Austin City Limits 2009 is happening right now, and Rolling Stone is already on the ground in Texas, soaking up barbeque sauce and getting ready to catch some of the last big festival sets of the year (we’ve even provided you with a handy guide to 30 of them). Stick with RS all weekend for live reports, photos of all the action, video from the hottest bands and a look behind the scenes as Kings of Leon, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam bring the noise.

But wait, there’s more: look back at all of 2009’s great fests from Coachella and Bonnaroo to Lollapalooza and All Points West in our Essential Summer Festival Coverage.

Rock reminder: Dave Matthews Band, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Pearl Jam and dozens more megastars are shipping down South this weekend for Austin City Limits. Rolling Stone will be on the ground with live reports, backstage photos, interviews and video — but before we touch down in Texas, we’ve plotted out the ideal schedule, hour by hour, for each day of the festival. It’s our way of ensuring you don’t miss Them Crooked Vultures and still have enough time for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Check it out here:

• Austin City Limits 2009: Ultimate Schedule Guide

Plus, get pumped for this year’s fest by looking back at last year’s ACL:

• ACL 2008: Beck, Foo Fighters and More

Phish’s massive Festival 8 in Indio, California, October 30th through November 1st won’t just find the Vermont foursome resurrecting their Halloween tradition of covering another artist’s full album: For the first time in Phistory, the jam quartet will perform an all-acoustic set on the morning of the festival’s third day. According to Phish’s official Website, “the set will take place at the crack of noon on Sunday morning.” Saturday night, or Halloween, promises to be an all-night party, so to help the Phans out of their sleeping bags and shake off their hangovers, Phish will provide coffee and donuts to those who make it up in time for the acoustic set. We’d recommend guzzling down the coffee, as Phish will also play two more sets on Sunday. Phish also revealed the schedule for Festival 8, and as promised, eight sets will be spread over the course of the fest’s three days.

As for “The Halloween Set,” the middle of three sets on Saturday night that finds Phish assuming a “musical costume” and performing a classic album, Rolling Stone is still betting on Purple Rain, while our readers are hoping for Radiohead’s OK Computer. The dark horse pick: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Past albums that Phish has covered on Halloween include the Beatles’ White Album, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, the Who’s Quadrophenia and the Velvet Underground’s Loaded. We’ll find out what Phish has in store in just over a month from now. Until then, check out the Festival 8 schedule below: (more…)

If you’ve been following our All Tomorrow’s Parties coverage all weekend long, you’ve heard about Boris’ bone-rattling set and the Flaming Lips’ epic psych-porn set. But in the spirit of the VMAs, Rob Sheffield has decided to bestow honors on the dozens of bands who made the trek to the Catskills to revel in the kitschy Kutsher’s Country Club and throw down at private card games. Check out his awards for Best Nick Cave Sighting, Nastiest Bass Explosions, Most Valiant Attempt to Play Harmonica by Somebody Who Clearly Has No Idea How and much more — plus look back at all our reports from ATP and our special video footage:

• All Tomorrow’s Parties 2009: Who Rocked the Catskills the Hardest?