Photo: Kisby/Getty

Early on in Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s final gig of their two-year world tour, Bruce began telling a familiar story: the night of a wicked nor’easter in Asbury Park, New Jersey, circa 1971, when a gigantic saxophone player walked into a club and asked to sit in with the band. “We got into a Cadillac at the end of the night and drove out to the outskirts of town,” Springsteen said as he called Clarence Clemons to the center of the stage to thunderous applause. “We got very sleepy and we fell into this long, long, long, long, long dream. And when we woke up, we were in fuckin’ Buffalo, New York!”

Springsteen’s Dream tour: photos from the epic two-year trek.
 
Coming into the show, many hardcore fans — who traveled to Buffalo from across the world like it was a pilgrimage to Mecca — worried that after this show the 38-year dream of the E Street Band might be over. During a marathon, three-and-a-half-hour, thirty-four-song concert Springsteen seemed determined to quell those fears by playing a ferocious set that proved the remarkable strength and vitality of the band as they approach their fourth decade. “The E Street Band has come thousands of miles tonight to be here one last time — for a little while,” Springsteen told the crowd, emphasizing the world little. “It’s been just about the best time in our band’s work life. We want to thank you for supporting our old music, our new music, our tour.”

Exclusive: what’s next for Bruce — Dream Tour DVD, Darkness on the Edge of Town box set. (more…)

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty
The golden-pop aura that New Yorkers saw hovering in the night sky on November 18th was from a rare local landing, at Brooklyn Masonic Temple, of the Memphis Beatles, Big Star: singer-guitarist Alex Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens with their reunion associates since 1993, guitarist Jon Auer and bassist Ken Stringfellow of the Posies. You can still count on one hand Big Star’s New York visits since 1974, when Chilton and Stephens (with a touring bassist) appeared at Max’s Kansas City to promote the hard-jangle classic Radio City. The Brooklyn show also coincided with a recent release, Keep Your Eyes on the Sky, a four-CD history of the three years, 1972-74, in which Chilton, Stephens, singer-guitarist Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel fused, right as they were falling apart, American garage rock, Southern R&B and the British Invasion on the historic pop-adventure albums, #1 Record, Radio City and Third.

Chilton and Stephens now lead a strong performing enterprise, even if it comes around with the frequency of a comet. Auer and Stringfellow, who built their own band on a deep love and study of Big Star, carried with seasoned enthusiasm their half of the treble-guitar tangle and fallen-angel harmonies of “In the Street” and “The Ballad of El Goodo,” from #1 Record, and the Radio City crackle of “You Get What You Deserve.” Auer sang the late Bell’s solo single “I Am the Cosmos” with ethereal poise; Stringfellow got a long ovation for his bright anguished vocal atop the bittersweet charge of #1’s “Feel.” (more…)

Photograph by Matt Salacuse

As John Mayer strummed the opening riff of his 2003 hit “Why Georgia” at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, last night, he reassured the crowd of several hundred, “If you were afraid of me ever evolving away from you… if you were afraid that I could never be the guy who still wondered what the hell was going on sometimes like you do… I play this for you as the kid in his mother’s 1991 Plymouth Voyager living in Atlanta, Georgia, trying to figure it all out — and I play it for whoever you were back in 2000.”

With his fourth LP, Battle Studies, hitting stores today, Mayer’s come a long way since the quarter-life crisis he wrote about in “Why Georgia.” Even as his lyrics and banter track his journey to figuring it all out, Mayer’s live persona has settled into a confident blend of his identities: relatable singer-songwriter, nimble-fingered axeman, blues-pop player and stand-up comic. In his first time playing Studies‘ songs at last night’s MySpace Music secret show, Mayer removed the smooth-around-the-edges sound of the recording and let the tracks develop their more gritty (his take on Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads”), funky (album opener “Heartbreak Warfare”) and soulful (relationship anthem “Friends, Lovers or Nothing”) elements.

Get more John Mayer in our Essential Guitar Coverage. (more…)

Photo: Walter/Getty
During their late-’70s and early ’80s heyday, Devo managed to be both extreme and mainstream: The Akron, Ohio quintet’s 1978 debut LP Q: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo remains one of the most lyrically and musically radical records to ever crack the Top 100, while their 1980 release Freedom of Choice helped pioneer and popularize both synth pop and dance rock with the breakthrough hit “Whip It.” But as trailblazing as these New Wave sociologists were in the studio, they were more severe onstage. So it’s no small feat that 30 years later they’re now presenting both albums in full during a seven-city tour, not only with their live intensity intact but their theatrical savvy as well.

While performing Friday and Saturday at San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, Devo’s original members resembled senior chemistry professors with strange double lives. Singer Mark Mothersbaugh, guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, and guitarist Bob Casale are now in their late 50s; bassist Gerald Casale is 61, yet all four had the stamina of their considerably younger drummer, Josh Freese of A Perfect Circle, and managed to replicate their original choreography. After a pair of vintage videos, the musicians took the stage Friday night in their iconic yellow plastic suits for Are We Not Men’s opening track, “Uncontrollable Urge,” pivoting rigidly to the beat and peaking the song with the same robotic bunny hop they did in 1978. Their maturity made their movements even more surreal, and the demographically diverse crowd went nuts. (more…)

Photo: Webber/WireImage

There are drawbacks to performing an entire album live in concert — even for the Pixies, who unfurled 1989’s groundbreaking Doolittle on Wednesday in the first of three sold-out nights at the Hollywood Palladium. “You can’t skip it if you don’t like any of the songs,” bassist-singer-chatterbox Kim Deal noted onstage with a blissful grin. “You have to listen to all of them.”

The reunited Pixies began a nine-city U.S. Doolittle Tour this week in Los Angeles, marking the 20th anniversary of their alt-rock classic. Its intense mix of sonic dementia and soaring pop melody was brought to life in a 90-minute set filled out with memorable, if overlooked Pixies B sides from the same era, beginning with the heavy thump of “Dancing the Manta Ray,” the thrashing Spanish guitar of “Weird At My School” and the blistering, spooky surf sounds of “Bailey’s Walk.”

Before stepping onstage, the Pixies began with an unexpected screening of the 1929 surrealistic silent short Un chien andalou, with its notorious images of a sliced eyeball, severed hand, a man in nun’s clothing and other provocative visuals to warm a Pixie’s soul. It was directed by Luis Bunuel, the subject of the band’s raging “Debaser,” which opens Doolittle with a shriek of madness and release from singer-guitarist Black Francis: “Got me a movie / I want you to know/slicing up eyeballs . . .!” (more…)

Photo: Noam Galai
It was a chant that hadn’t been heard in Manhattan in more than two years, and it started a little after 9 p.m., as the anxious crowd who packed out the Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom started growing more and more impatient: “EVAN-ES-SCENTS, EVAN-ES-SCENTS.” And though the last time Amy Lee floated across a stage George W. Bush was in office, you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the band’s adept, hard-charging performance.

But as the Evanescence frontwoman explained to the audience at last night’s extremely intimate secret concert, the one-off performance was quite necessary. After all, on November 8th, Evanescence will be performing before 40,000 screaming fans at the Maquinaria Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the band needed a little limbering up before heading south. “Thanks for being our guinea pigs,” Lee joked to the mostly female crowd.

Check out our collection of Evanescence photos.

With Evanescence hard at work on the follow-up to 2006’s The Open Door, it’ll be another year before they’re back in New York, making last night’s concert a one-of-a-kind experience for the band’s rabid fans, who sold out the show in five minutes. (more…)

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: Crothers/FilmMagic

Free breakfast has become a hotel staple, but how can Phish fans be sated while camping in the middle of the scorching California desert for Festival 8? A Sunday high-noon acoustic set with gratis coffee and donuts, shaped fittingly, like the number eight.

Check out photos from Festival 8.

Most of the 40,000 in attendance (many still buzzing about the band’s Halloween monster take on the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street) straggled in to enjoy the band’s first-ever full-length unplugged set Sunday morning. The band — playing under eight red-and-black banners that hung from the lighting rig to the stage — kicked off with “Water in the Sky” and the chugging “Back on the Train.” Befitting the mellow mood, not to mention the punishing SoCal sun, fans dutifully obeyed singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio’s request to sit down because “we’re gonna play a lot of mellow tunes.” (more…)

Photo: Crothers/FilmMagic

Combining two of their most beloved traditions for the first time — the multi-day festival and the Halloween album “costume” — Phish got their rocks off at their Festival 8 in Indio, California, during the second of a three-day set with a crushing start-to-finish version of the Rolling Stones‘ classic Exile On Main Street. Just a day earlier, Stones frontman Mick Jagger took the stage himself 3,000 miles away, joining U2 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert in New York.

Under pristine conditions at the Empire Polo Field and in front of a devoted Phish crowd of 40,000 fans, the Vermont foursome rollicked in Exile’s swamp blues and roadhouse country, extending several songs with their own jams, highlighted by a spacey interlude between “Ventilator Blues” into the gospel-esque “I Just Want to See His Face.” Special guests Sharon Jones and three horn players (one, trumpeter David Guy is a Dap King) added their own flourishes (horns to “Sweet Black Angel”), and each band member took lead vocal turns. Incredibly, four of the double album’s songs made their big-stage live debut —”Soul Survivor,” a scorching “Casino Boogie,” “Turd On the Run” and the flickering ballad “Let It Loose” — having never been performed by the Stones themselves. The set clocked in at nearly a 100 minutes, 33 more than the actual album. (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: Kane/WireImage

As the second night of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary came to its climax, after nearly four hours of jaw-dropping musical collaborations, almost anything seemed possible. By this point Metallica had played with Ozzy Osbourne, Ray Davies and Lou Reed; Jeff Beck had jammed with Sting and Billy Gibbons; and U2 brought out Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and the Black Eyed Peas for their closing set. Yet, few people were prepared for what happened when U2 began playing the intro to “Gimme Shelter” with Will.i.am at the keyboard and Fergie recreating Merry Clayton’s apocalyptic vocal intro. Without a word of introduction by Bono, surprise guest Mick Jagger sprinted onstage as the capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden let out one of the loudest cheers I’ve ever heard.

Relive the Rock Hall’s second giant night in live photos.

The show began, as it did on night one, with Jerry Lee Lewis alone at the piano. This time he did “Great Balls of Fire” — concluding with the 74-year-old legend violently kicking over his piano stool. A short film about gospel and soul music preceded Aretha Franklin’s entrance, who looked radiant in a bright red dress. Backed by a huge band that featured her son Teddy on guitar and a horn section, Franklin’s set featured a cover of “New York, New York” and her 1970 hit “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied),” which she dedicated to the song’s co-writer, Ahmet Ertegun. Annie Lennox, who bowed down to Franklin as she took the stage, dueted on “Chain of Fools” and Lenny Kravitz joined the Queen of Soul for “Think.” An encore of “Respect” had the entire crowd singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” (more…)

Photo: Mazur/WireImage

It was well past 1:00 a.m. when the first night of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary celebration began winding down. For six hours, a capacity crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden had been dancing in the aisles to a superstar lineup only the Hall of Fame could produce: Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Dion, Sting, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, John Fogerty, Jackson Browne and many others. It seemed like Springsteen and surprise guest Billy Joel swapping verses on “Born to Run” was the finale, but then many of the night’s acts took the stage with the E Street Band and kicked into Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher.” Nobody seemed to want the party to end, curfews be damned.

See the Rock Hall concerts’ most epic moments and special guests.

The evening began with a speech by Tom Hanks, whose production company is turning the two concerts into a four-hour HBO special that airs November 29th. “When we were confused, rock & roll gave us purpose,” he said. “Hail, hail rock & roll.” Jerry Lee Lewis then kicked into his 1957 hit “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin On” — a track he played at the first Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1986. After a five-minute film highlighting American bands of the 1960s, Crosby, Stills and Nash began their set with “Woodstock,” which featured incredible guitar work by Stephen Stills. Other highlights of their 10-song set were “Almost Cut My Hair,” and the Buffalo Springfield classic “Rock and Roll Woman.”

CSN’s first guest was their longtime friend Bonnie Raitt, who Crosby called “my favorite singer in the whole world.” (more…)

Photo: Mazur/WireImage

The first of two massive Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary shows at Madison Square Garden isn’t even over yet, and the monumental moments just keep coming on the stage of the storied New York venue. [Update] After six hours — that’s right, six hours — Bruce Springsteen brought the show to an end with a soul throwdown on “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” Check back tomorrow for our full reports, but here’s a taste of the action (follow along in our Rock Hall Concerts photo gallery):

• Jerry Lee Lewis reminds the crowd of rock & roll’s ’50s roots by settling in at a white baby grand for “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

• Crosby, Stills and Nash add another layer of perfect harmony when James Taylor joins in on “Love the One You’re With.” The capper: one of many awe-inspiring guitar solos by Stephen Stills.

• Bonnie Raitt joins CSN for her own “Love Has No Pride,” and later tells the press, “To go back in my catalog and do something I rarely do live was angelic for me.” (more…)

Photo: Flanigan/FilmMagic
Rivers Cuomo loves his job. It wasn’t always so for the Weezer frontman, who was visibly wary of the spotlight in his earliest days on the Los Angeles music scene, even after he became a consistent craftsman of modern rock. But just weeks ahead of their newest album, Raditude, Weezer delivered a high-energy concert of flash and warmth at the Hollywood Palladium Saturday night, emerging onstage in resplendent white, hooded track suits, equal parts hip-hop and retirement colony, to thunder through 70 playful minutes of alt-rock and pop.

From the opening roar of “Hash Pipe,” Cuomo both toyed with and reveled in the frontman role, hopping in place or muttering in German before “Pork and Beans” and then punching the air to shout a defiant lyric: “I don’t give a hoot about what you think!” As the dreamy opening guitar from 1994’s “Undone – The Sweater Song” unfurled in the old dance hall, the singer lifted a slogan from his heroes in Kiss to announce: “You wanted the best? You got the best. Weezer!” (more…)

Photo: Brecheisen/WireImage

The 23rd Bridge School Benefit, the annual concert organized by Neil Young and his wife, Pegi, to raise money for the Northern California school for kids with severe speech and physical impairments cofounded by the latter, demonstrated how beautifully old can blend with the new this weekend. In addition to long-toothed fans and young ears sitting side by side on a beautiful Indian-summer Sunday in Mountain View at Shoreline Amphitheatre, new groups like Fleet Foxes could be heard mimicking old sounds, newish band Wolfmother showed off an even newer version of itself and the alt-rock vets in No Doubt proved that they’ve been reborn.

Bridge School ‘09 in photos: Gwen Stefani, Wolfmother, Sheryl Crow and more.

Following a pre-show performance by the Dennis Alley Wisdom Dancers, who then joined Young for his first version of “Comes A Time,” Mr. Gwen Stefani, a.k.a. Gavin Rossdale, got the nine-act, seven-and-a-half-hour show on the road with a set that included covers of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” as well as old Bush hits. Next up was frontman Andrew Stockdale and his reconfigured Wolfmother, which had no trouble keeping its energy level at 11 despite the Bridge School concert’s unofficial rule to go acoustic. Even the students, who sit on the stage during the show, felt the jolt from Australia’s answer to Led Zeppelin, with some of them seen rocking out in their wheelchairs.

Fleet Foxes wunderkind leader Robin Pecknold talked about sitting on the Shoreline lawn with his dad during the 2000 edition of Bridge School, then proceeded to give audience members their own great memories with a heavily harmonized set that included “Your Protector” and “Sun Giant.” The band’s timeless choral-folk sound has been compared to My Morning Jacket, whose Jim James arrived onstage next with his Monsters of Folk supergroup, which also features M. Ward and Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis. (more…)