... but never called

My bad.

p.s. Could somebody in the events-promotion trade please bring this band, Pink Martini, to South Florida? I don't think you have to book the entire orchestra; they probably travel in smaller ensembles, and the core group is two: a singer named China (Forbes) and a pianist named (Thomas) Lauderdale.

Thank you.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

There's no South Florida date, or U.S. dates, as yet for the reunion of My Bloody Valentine. But these cross-ocean pioneers of dreamy, pretty, dissonant, melodic, sound-scraping co-ed pop are planning to release a new CD and tour for the first time since 1992.

How big a development is this? As Wired blogger Eliot Van Buskirk notes, "Something like 30 percent of all music reviews contain a comparison to My Bloody Valentine."

He might not be joking. Approximately 30 percent of all indie bands invite the comparison.

As The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll describes MBV, "The band's approach on stage - motionless and reserved - popularized the phrase 'shoe gazers' to describe their (and those who followed in their footsteps) passive, introspective demeanor."

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

AP says:

Evel Knievel and Kanye West have worked it out.

The 69-year-old iconic motorcycle daredevil said he and West met at his Clearwater condo recently. They settled a federal lawsuit over the use of Knievel’s trademarked image in a popular West music video.

Knievel sued West and his record company last year. He took issue with a 2006 music video for the song “Touch the Sky,” in which the rapper takes on the persona of “Evel Kanyevel” and tries to jump a rocket-powered motorcycle over a canyon.

Story here and video here.

UPDATE Dec. 4: Knievel, you know by now, died last Friday. He had settled one dispute. But another, older one lingers, and it occasioned this eye-catching lede:

Of all the bones Evel Knievel broke over the years, the costliest may have been the left arm of a PR man by the name of Shelly Saltman.

I was trying to find video of the excellent CBS Sunday Morning obit, narrated by Charles Osgood. No luck. But here's Knievel's almost-made-it jump at Caesar's Palace. I wouldn't call the wipeout a "failure," because that's not the correct word for any jump that didn't kill him. Knievel practically invented the concept of the motorcycle stuntman, and he pretty much invented himself.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

This is pretty amusing. I can't decide what's less essential, Wavy Gravy renting himself or the Osbournes' charity estate auction.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

File this under "I'm old". Dave Grohl has been in Foo Fighters longer than
Nirvana. I bet more people under a certain age know him as the guy who sings Best of You than as the guy who drummed In Bloom. Foo Fighters also have made more albums than Nirvana. Just out, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace gets an airing on a tour coming here, 8 p.m. Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise. Tickets go on sale 10 a.m. Friday (Nov. 30) through Ticketmaster and the BAC box office for $25-$45. The floor ($45) will be general admission.

Here's what I wrote about the Foos on a visit to BAC in September 2005:

Dave Grohl came out of a band that was desperate to understand the world. His current band has no such ambition.

Maybe Grohl left Nirvana numbed by the suicide of band leader Kurt Cobain. Maybe he thinks meaning is wasted on the medium of rock 'n' roll. Whatever the motivation, Grohl has spent 10 years constructing in Foo Fighters a band that is impervious to thought. It exists only to rock. And in rocking for rock's sake, Grohl, 36, has no doubt made himself and his fans happy. But the abdication of everything Cobain's Nirvana stood for is odd, to say the least.

Paired on the road this summer with their soul-baring opposites, Weezer, Foo Fighters played the big, concussive arena set on Saturday night in Sunrise that Grohl's songwriting all but requires. Several trailers' worth of sound, light and video were going off simultaneously inside BankAtlantic Center throughout a 90-minute set, and about 10,000 people were there to soak up a rock show that also felt like a tribute to rock shows.

Singer-guitarist Grohl handled his other leading role, as the enthusiastic curator, capably. At one point he told the crowd to go ahead and download the band's new double album, In Your Honor. "I've got enough ... money already," he said. "I don't need any more. All I want is for everyone to sing the songs with me." Because no rock show is complete without a sing-along.

The songs themselves were marvels of methodology: Learn to Fly, with its shimmering chords and vague invocations of home; The Last Song, all reverberating majesty and finality (placed in the middle of the set); Best of You, in which Grohl screamed, "I've got another confession to make" without actually confessing anything; There Goes My Hero, perhaps a song about parental abandonment except that its real priority was the pure thrill of its shuddering arrangement.

Most of Grohl's words were just strings of rock-appropriate phraseology: -- "It's times like these/time and time again," for example, on Times Like These -- concerned with evoking sensation, not sense.

Everlong offered the rare example of a lyric with an identifiable subject: a break-up. Standing at center stage under a smoky curtain of laser lights -- a visual scheme borrowed from the Who's rock documentary, The Kids Are Alright -- Grohl sang it and strummed it unaccompanied by his bandmates. The show's designated quiet moment was just that. "Ah, enough of that sensitive..." he said, revving back up for a stretch that included Creedence Clearwater's Born on the Bayou, which the band had played at Friday night's televised benefit concert for Gulf Coast disaster relief.

I haven't heard the new album yet, so if the Foos - a good-borderline-great rock band - are now officially preoccupied with meaning (and with a name like Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace ... ), let me know how that's working out for them.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (2) | Share:

SoFla singer-songwriter Brendan O'Hara got this fine writeup for a recent performance in Los Angeles.

O'Hara BTW is an occasional tour mate of another far-flung SoFloridian, Shawn Snyder, who I wrote about in Showtime this month. Snyder said he and O'Hara are looking to put together another co-headlining tour. That'll be two people on one bill carrying news of homegrown music that's not like the Florida most people know.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Share:

If any singer summed up the glitz, glory and unavoidably short run of L.A. metal in the '80s, it was Quiet Riot's Kevin Dubrow.

Known, or faulted, for abetting that scene, Quiet Riot became the first metal band to take an album, 1983's Metal Health, all the way to No. 1. How "metal" Quiet Riot actually was, might be subject to debate. Try drawing a straight line from Judas Priest to 3 Inches of Blood with Quiet Riot somewhere in the middle. It doesn't look right.

In any case Metal Health and a high-charting cover of Cum On Feel The Noize (#5 Billboard Hot 100), by British rock band Slade, made Dubrow's buzz-saw vocal style a household sound.

Dubrow sang loud, struck poses with relish and wore every spandex-anchored getup without apology. I seem to remember him reveling in his stature with an almost lordly air of entitlement. This failure of proportion earned him mockery even within the West Coast pop-metal playpen that begat Dokken, Poison, Ratt, Motley Crue and a pair of Ozzy Osbourne guitarists (Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee).

But the fortunes and the perceptions of Quiet Riot and its peers were intertwined. Grunge, Seattle's punk/metal hybrid, proved toxic to the whole lot. Those L.A. bands that didn't break up fell into a hitless routine of package tours. The city moved on to more exotic monsters of rock: Guns N Roses, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane's Addiction.

Pop metal's big moment looks more and more like a holiday, given metal's ever-heavier bent. But the glam hasn't totally worn off. Anyone playing the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games is busting a few moves from the '80s air-guitar repertoire.

Some of the singing lessons stuck, too. Listen to The Darkness's One Way Ticket to Hell ... and Back, and you'll hear more than a little of the classic Dubrow power chorus.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

Tickets for Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 18, 2008 at BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, go on sale 10 a.m. Saturday (Dec. 1) through the usual outlets.

Tickets are $67.75 and $97.75 (plus the usual fees) if you get them before they hit the much-discussed secondary market. I'm reminded of a recent story in The Washington Post, which began:

After attending Bruce Springsteen concerts for more than 20 years, Ron Collins is facing the music: He can no longer afford to see the Boss.

Fat man sitting on a little stool
Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you
Hands me the ticket, smiles and whispers good luck

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (10) | Share:

By now you’ve heard that face-value Hannah Montana tickets were scarce, and that brokers were mostly to blame.

The popular story is that brokers — using phone banks, proxy buyers, dubious software and other methods — got tickets by the bundle when they went on sale to the general public in September. True fans of Disney’s Hannah Montana, standing on lines or sitting at phones and computers, didn’t stand a chance. They were shut out, or reduced to dealing with greedy brokers, who scalped their unfairly-gotten ducats to desperate moms and dads at five, ten or fifty times the tickets’ original asking price.

This version of events, repeated over and over in the media, has stuck. It figures into a Florida legislator’s plan to strip brokers of some of their operational tools. At last night’s concert at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, I listened to several people express contempt for brokers, and blame them for the heartbreak that befell many Hannah Montana fans.

“We boycotted all scalpers,” said Laura Pascotto of Naples.

That was a polite rebuke. There are much harsher words for brokers in the comments posted below this story and this story.

But after weeks of immersion in Hannah-mania, I’ve decided all that fury is somewhat misplaced. It’s not wrong to dislike what brokers did with tickets for this tour, but if you have to be mad at someone, there are other deserving candidates.

They are, in no particular order: Disney (which owns the Hannah Montana franchise), AEG Live (which is promoting the tour), Ticketmaster (the designated retailer of seats) and any number of venues that hosted Hannah Montana concerts.

That would include our own BankAtlantic Center.

Heck, blame Miley Cyrus, aka Hannah, for not playing more shows. Blame your fellow Hannah fans for contributing to the feeding frenzy.

A lot of parties contributed to the scarcity of face-value Hannah Montana tickets. Below the fold, I’ll explain how.

As AEG Live’s senior VP, Debra Rathwell, told me, between 650,000 and 700,000 tickets were minted for the entire 54-date Hannah Montana tour. Assuming the higher number, 700,000, (for the sake of easy math, and because more tickets were released for sale as the tour rolled on) that’s an average of almost 13,000 per show.

Now cut that number in half, since half is how many disappeared right away from the pool of tickets to be sold to the general public. Disney and AEG set those aside for sale to members of Hannah Montana fan clubs (and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy fan-clubbers' demand, as this lawsuit suggests).

So now we’re down to 350,000 tickets, or fewer than 6,500 per concert, available at their original asking prices (in the $25-$60 range) to the ordinary, would-be ticket buyer who’s not a member of a fan club, or who is and still can’t get tickets.

And we’re not done shrinking the pool yet.

Ticketmaster, with permission from AEG and Disney, set aside some tickets for first-run auction on their Ticket Exchange. How many? I don’t know. But these were tickets that Ticketmaster decided would reach their “true value” through bidding. Another entirely fair way to say it is that, in this case, Ticketmaster scalped its own product. The company took tickets with a pre-set price and let bidders bid them up. That's not exactly what brokers do, but it's awfully close. Brokers ask for a particular price - based on past experience, gut instinct, or whatever - and then see what the market will bear.

And guess what? Legal, fully authorized price speculation for event tickets is on the rise. Put every broker out of business tomorrow, and outlets such as the Ticket Exchange, StubHub, and other entitites including pro sports teams and venue operators, are going to do what brokers have traditionally done: have bidders decide what is the “face value” of a ticket.

Increasingly, “face value” will be replaced by “minimum bid.”

“We’re bringing the industry closer to a market-value pricing, where the ticket reaches its true market value at the orginal point of sale, rather than the secondary market,” said Ticketmaster spokesperson Bonnie Poindexter.

In other words, Ticketmaster - already the biggest ticketer on the block - wants to be your broker and auctioner, too.

Now back to that incredible shrinking pool of publicly available tickets ...

Ever heard of a “seat license”? It’s another way for venue operators to make more money from their building. A seat license is a fee that you, the preferred VIP customer, pays not for actual tickets to upcoming events, but for the right to buy choice tickets to upcoming events - such as a Hannah Montana concert. Seat licenses mean a certain number of tickets are held back from the general public and offered first to the licensees.

Obviously, not every one of those tickets is going to be bought by licensees, and some will presumably make their way back to the box offfice. But for an event like Hannah Montana, it’s probable that a lot of licensees exercised their first right of refusal, and bought tickets that never circulated through Ticketmaster.

(Does the BankAtlantic Center have seat licenses? Last week I asked a BAC spokesperson to tell me about the venue’s seat licensing arrangements and, specifically, how many such “licensed” seats were set aside for the Hannah Montana concert. I wanted to know if we were talking about dozens, hundreds, or more.

The spokesperson never got back to me. But a local broker, Michael J. Lipman, President and CEO of Tickets of America, said he knows for a fact that BankAtlantic Center has seat licenses.

Also, I know of at least one Florida Panthers season ticket holder who was offered a chance to buy Hannah Montana tickets without having to go through Ticketmaster. So assuming other season ticketholders got the same consideration, there’s another block of seats possibly withheld, or delayed, from general sale.)

Back to the pool ... Still other Hannah Montana tickets were held for promotional use in sponsor contests, radio giveaways and the like. Some tickets also were set aside for the media. (Present company included. I bought one ticket at face value from the co-promoter of the BAC show, Fantasma Productions in West Palm Beach.)

Now, add all of these up - the Disney/AEG fan club sale holds, the Ticketmaster auction holds, the seat license holds, the sports season-ticketholder holds, the promo holds, the media holds, the comps (freebies) for friends of the band, friends of the venue, and friends of anyone else with connections.

Taking my best semi-educated guess, we’ve gone from just under 6,500 tickets at the traditional, open-to-all "box office" for each Hannah Montana show, down to maybe 4,500 tickets. That's out of nearly 13,000. A little over a third.

Our numbers vary, of course, because the BankAtlantic Center had at least 15,000 people in the building on Tuesday. But the math is about the same. I’m comfortable guessing that of the 15,000 or so ticketed seats for Tuesday evening at the BankAtlantic Center, somewhere between 5,500 and 7,000 - again, about a third - actually went on sale through the box office at their advertised asking price.

And I’m not even sure those all went on sale at once, back in September. That’s because two Mondays ago, about 2,000 tickets materialzied and quietly went on sale for the Sunrise show. I found out about this development the next day, while talking to AEG Live’s Rathwell, who said the release was the result of revisions in the seating arrangements, based on a better understanding of how much room the tour production takes up. So that opened up more seats (some of them obstructed view).

Were those in addition to my guesstimate of 5,500-7,000, or part of that total? I think there's some overlap, but I don’t know for sure. The people I’ve spoken to (or not) were only willing to divulge so much, so the math gets a little fuzzy here. To further confuse me, a few hundred more BAC tickets were freed up for sale yesterday, just before the show. I mean, when does sold out finally mean sold out?!

But don't miss the larger point, which is that you shouldn't blame everything on brokers. The arrangements for ticketing to a tour this in-demand are more complicated, and there are more things eating away at the supply of face-value seats than Joe Broker and his speed-dialers.

True, by going after a shrunken pool of tickets with methods not available to the general public, brokers magnified, and profited from, the scarcity of face-value tickets. But to say they caused it is an oversimplification. Brokers are not the biggest reason that so many people aren’t able to see Hannah Montana. Raging demand for a limited supply of shows is.

I say all this as someone who has a) never bought anything from a broker and b) thinks that the broker is, like a lot of very profitable and longstanding business models, parasitic in nature. At their most benign, brokers are like pilot fish cruising alongside the big shark. At their worst? Pick your metaphor.

Besides, you can argue Disney/AEG/Ticketmaster have the right to auction tickets. It's their party. You can argue that venues have the right to give first dibs to their best customers. It's their building. Where do brokers get off inserting themselves into other people's work product?

I wouldn’t disagree. But keep in mind that a lot of these parties - performers, promoters, venue managers - have historically profited by the activity of brokers. Some work directly with brokers, in fact, because brokers will take risks the other businesses can't or won't.

And brokers, over the long term, have shown the trade how much people are really willing to pay to see a show. If you don’t think the live-events industry has noticed, then you haven’t been paying attention. Showbiz has rushed into the gap between face value and the broker's price, and we're all paying through the nose because of it.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (6) | Share:

I've got a story in today's print and online editions about Hannah Montana mania in South Florida.

If you read it, you may find yourself asking, how do brokers get their concert tickets before you do? Thank Hannah Montana for making the question so much fun to ask.

Hannah, to recap, is the eponymous hero of a Disney channel TV show that has five million viewers each week. When tickets went on sale in September for a string of Hannah Montana concerts, they seemed to vanish. The 54-date tour sold out, including Tuesday’s show at BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, and at some tour stops every seat in the building was gone literally within minutes.

Parents and kids were bewildered and upset. Where did the tickets go? One answer came in the form of a media storyline that emerged in October, not long before the tour hit the road. The headline on an article posted last month to CNN’s Web site may have phrased it best: “Brokers snatch joy from Hannah Montana fans.”

The article explained, “Ticket brokers swooped up thousands of tickets within minutes of them becoming available online and shut out legitimate Hannah followers. Desperate fans found they would have to pay brokers $350 to $2,000 for the $63 concert tickets.”

Price-gouging brokers. Disappointed kids. What a great story.

I’m not saying it’s just a story. Brokers, those “evil scalper monkeys,” as my colleague Sherri Winston dubbed them, clearly did get their prehensile paws on tickets. Probably thousands of tickets, all told, using various methods, some old-fashioned, some ingenious, some diabolical but possibly quite legal (pending the outcome of certain court proceedings). And in their earnest desire to resell those tickets to you, their suggested markups have been dramatic, to say the least.

At the Web site for a brokerage called Front Row King, the “King,” thangyaverymuch, was asking $2,999 for a front row seat and $13,500 for a 20-person luxury suite on Tuesday at BankAtlantic.

The tickets retailed for about $25-$60.

It’s tough, of course, to put a price tag on love. As any broker might ask, what’s it worth to you to keep your child happy? But I’m not here to discuss Hannah Montana tickets as a measure of parental caring. (I don’t have kids.) Rather, I want to tell you what I know about how brokers have come by blocks of tickets while you’re still trying to get a Ticketmaster operator on the phone. And in another blog post or two over the next few days, I’ll look at a question that’s more complicated than CNN and other news outlets might have led you to believe: How much responsibility do brokers, and other parties, bear for a scarcity of Hannah Montana tickets priced at face value?

I’m hoping to give people some idea of the odds they face when they’re trying to get into a concert, any concert, that can be legitimately described as a “hot ticket.” Don’t ask to define the term; you know a hot ticket when you covet one.

So if this interests you, read on.

How do brokers get tickets? Let us count the ways.

They and their minions sit at banks of phones and speed-dial Ticketmaster. They flood Ticketmaster.com — a practice that may change, if not disappear, if Ticketmaster manages to outlaw software that speeds up the process of buying tickets online. Last month, Ticketmaster won a cease-and-desist order against the maker of one such computer program. But that only means the software company, RMG, can no longer sell or service its product to anyone.

Getting the software out of the hands of the brokers who already have it, assuming that’s Ticketmaster’s long-term plan, will take more time and more lawyers. And there are thousands of brokers out there.

Brokers go low-tech, too. They buy tickets from people who have them but, for whatever reason, have decided they can’t attend the show. Brokers hire homeless people to stand on lines at box offices and other designated outlets and buy as many tickets as possible. They hire people, homeless and otherwise, to stand on lines for the number lotteries that sometimes precede actual ticket sales — such lotteries being one strategy designed to thwart ticket brokers and increase the breadth and fairness of ticket distribution.

Some brokers — and this may be the scary part — also have had discreet arrangements with the actual promoters of concert tours and, in some cases, with individual venues. The Los Angeles Times ran a story a few years back about a concert venue that had, in effect, invisible seats. These seats were never sold to the general public; the venue’s owner-operator sold access to them directly to a broker at something more than the face value for publicly available tickets; the broker marked them up another few notches for sale to people with serious money to spend on concerts.

Because such insider arrangements are thought to stink to the sky, promoters and venue operators don’t generally like to discuss them in public. I did, however, ask an executive with AEG Live, the promoter of the Hannah Montana tour, whether the company worked directly with brokers.

“Not in this case,” said Debra Rathwell, senior vice president at AEG Live.

So, no private pipeline for Hannah Montana tickets from AEG to brokers. For some other tours? Draw your own conclusions.

AEG (and Disney) can set rules of conduct for itself, for the venues handling tickets and for the co-promoters that AEG is working with in various markets. (For the Sunrise show, that’s West Palm Beach-based promoter Fantasma Productions.) What AEG cannot do is account for the behavior of every person in the chain of distribution. In the case of a show that anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 people will attend, tickets leak out. They fall into other hands. Things happen. And when they do, brokers — to the annoyance of most — stand ready to make a buck.

“Whenever tickets to premium events sell out too fast or the ticket price is too high, ticket brokers become an easy target of public scorn,” said an Oct. 30 statement from the National Asssociation of Ticket Brokers, a trade group upset at being portrayed as the Bad Guys in the Hannah Montana saga.

(Even brokers have a trade group. According to a statement at the NATB Web site, theirs “was formed in 1994 by a group of concerned ticket brokers who desired to establish an industry-wide standard of conduct and to create ethical rules and procedures to protect the public and foster a positive perception of the industry.”)

That scorn may wax and wane, depending on who’s touring, but it never goes way. Consider the promoter of the upcoming Led Zeppelin reunion concert, Harvey Goldsmith. He decreed that Zepp tickets would be sold via Internet lottery and that any ticketholder, upon arrival at the show in London next month, will have to produce ID and proof of authorized purchase before being let in.

These were broker countermeasures. Of brokers, said Goldsmith, “I have no interest in supporting parasite businesses who prevent fans from supporting their artists by the increased price of the tickets and who ultimately put nothing whatsoever back into our business to support it.”

Brokers, being human, dislike being thought of as parasites.

“We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re providing a service. Otherwise, the people with broken hearts, how are they going to get tickets?” said Julie Matos, marketing manager.

Of course, brokers have a role in causing shows to be officially sold out. But who else figures into the equation? And what is “sold out,” really? The more you learn about ticketing, the more meaningless the term becomes.

I’ll take a run at those issues in my next post.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

Punk-rock forbear Iggy Pop, fronting his original band, the Stooges, will play a free concert on Dec. 5 at South Beach's Collins Park. The park is at Collins Ave., between 21st and 22nd streets. The Stooges show is a warmup to Art Basel Miami Beach, the art world's winter to-do, Dec. 6-9.

Update: Showtime is 10 p.m.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (8) | Share:

How smart was Leonardo Da Vinci? Well, as my colleague Emma Trelles notes, he basically had the first Blackberry - well, OK, it was a notebook on a rope. And it didn't make calls. But I'm betting his copious scribblings were more complex, detailed, interesting and computational than the bar photos and text-message blast-lists in your average PDA.

Now comes word that Da Vinci, ahem, encoded the score for a song that he himself wrote into one of his most famous paintings.

I pass this along advisedly, since it may encourage more Da Vinci Code mania. But still, it's a remarkable finding. Da Vinci apparently used the position of the hands and the loaves of bread in "The Last Supper" to spell out the notes of a slow, sad, dirge-y musical composition honoring the Bible's biggest celebrity roast. He gave his painting a soundtrack, in other words.

From reading the article, I don't get the sense that Da Vinci the songwriter would have eclipsed Da Vinci the painter. What I'd like to see now is someone turn the feat around, and write instructions for a painting into the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic components of a song.

And no, this doesn't count.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) | Share:

Tickets for the Feb. 12 Van Halen concert at BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise will not - repeat, not - go on sale this weekend as tour promoter LiveNation originally said. Instead, tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster at 10 a.m. Dec. 8 (a Saturday), according to a revised on-sale schedule announced today.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (2) | Share:

Indie rock's first arena band, R.E.M., headlines the sixth annual Langerado festival, March 6-9 at Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation (Mile marker 49, Alligator Alley). It's the first R.E.M. show in South Florida since the Athens, Ga., group, played Miami Arena on Sept. 8, 1995 with Radiohead opening.

Tickets go on sale noon Friday at 1-800-594-8499 and online at www.langerado.com. Four-day general admission passes, with camping included, start at $169.50.

Also playing Langerado's expanded four-day lineup: Beastie Boys, Phil Lesh & Friends, 311, Matisyahu, Ani DiFranco, Ben Folds, The Roots, Thievery Corporation, Les Claypool, G. Love & Special Sauce, Gov't Mule, Built to Spill, Disco Biscuits, Umphrey's McGee, Ghostland Observatory, The National, !!!, Minus the Bear, State Radio, Citizen Cope, Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood, The Wailers, Of Montreal, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, and more TBA.

The move to Big Cypress, where the jam band Phish rang in 2000 with more than 75.000 concertgoers, marks Langerado's "transition from day festival to a camping event," said a statement from the tour's publicist.

UPDATE: Single-day tickets for Langerado will go on sale in January, said a publicist for the festival. Stay tuned for details and prices. The publicist also said that re-entry will be allowed to festivalgovers who want to "commute" to and from Langerado, and there will be day parking available in addition to camping.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

Teen-aged r&b crooner Chris Brown leads a caravan of hitmakers to BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise for a day-after-Christmas concert, Dec. 26. Tickets, $39.75 - $69.75, go on sale 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster. Also playing are rappers Bow Wow and Soulja Boy, young singer Sean Kingston, rap band Shop Boyz, lady rapper Lil Mama and more performers TBA.

Note: Sean Kingston also sings at the Y100 Jingle Ball, Dec. 15 at BAC.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

The Van Halen reunion tour with original lead singer David Lee Roth plays the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise on Feb. 12. Tickets, $49.50 - $149.50, go on sale 10 a.m. Dec. 8 (and not this weekend, as the promoter first announced), through Ticketmaster, said a statement from tour promoter LiveNation. Besides Roth, who has not toured with Van Halen since the 1980s, the revived Los Angeles rock band features brothers Eddie Van Halen and Alex Van Halen on guitar and drums, respectively. Eddie's 16-year-old son, Wolfgang Van Halen, plays bass.

Cynical me, I said this tour would last two weeks tops. But Roth and the brothers Van Halen seem to be getting along, and I've heard that young master "Wolfie" is impressing people, not just as a stand-in for founding VH bassist Mike Anthony, but as a scary-good musician in his own right. Apparently, the kid can play. And with a positive role model like Uncle Dave involved, what's not to approve of? The band plays Madison Square Garden on Tuesday.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

You may remember this:

He's the bulbous mascot/cover model for Primus' knuckle-dragging classic, Pork Soda.

Well now we have this:

That would be the Jones Soda Company's carbonated Christmas pack, complete with ... ham soda.

As a commenter on the beverage maker's site notes, "Primus would be proud."

(First spotted on CNN, under the excellent headline, "Enjoy a refreshing ham soda.")

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

A rarity down here, The Gourds came to Lake Worth's Bamboo Room on Thursday night bearing a sound you might call Tex Americana. Cagey and crammed with allusions, the music of this Austin five-piece radiated heart and soul, too, plus some sort of stimulant pressed into the grooves. The Gourds turned the Bamboo Room into a dance hall, and tables close to the stage were at risk of being toppled by exuberant two-steppers. (Only one got knocked over.)

Their set ranged from revved-up barroom bluegrass to spaced-out honky tonk, and everything in it, including their superb cover of a rap track (more on that later), seemed to carry a Lone Star gene. The Gourds' take on music from the flatlands held traces of Doug Sahm's garage rock, Joe Ely's picturesque Tex-Mex, Freddie Fender's heart-broke ballads and Robert Earl Keen's porch poetry.

Of course, the most glaring point of reference on Thursday was Compton, California, home of rapper Snoop Dogg. The Gourds' cover of Snoop's Gin & Juice has become a small phenomenon, a variation that floats up at bars, house parties and Web sites to catch people by surprise and make them like the song all over again - or at least reappraise it. It might not body-snatch the source material, like Johnny Cash did to Trent Reznor's Hurt, but it will be hard to shake. The Gourds' version drafts on Snoop's slick original like a pickup truck shadowing a limo.

And they can't not play it live; people would revolt. So singer and instrumentalist Kevin Russell led the West Coast tribute, flaying his mandolin and handling Snoop's self-satisfied lyric ("So much drama in the L.B.C./It's kinda hard bein' Snoop-D-O-double-G") with a big, melodious drawl. Bandmates Jimmy Smith, Claude Bernard, Keith Langford and Max Johnston kept the uptempo, hillbilly-gangsta jam rolling.

Fun as Gin was, a better measure of the Gourds' easy virtuosity was My Name is Jorge, a mandolin-y amble through the 20th Century as witnessed by one of the little people: an itinerant fruit vendor selling his goods off of a wagon. This odd, pleasing song, sung by Smith, undercuts the idea of historical "sweep" by never letting go of its modesty: Jorge recounts his no-big-deal encounters with the likes of Henry Ford and Lee Harvey Oswald. They were all just customers to him.

The Gourds' interest in history is more musical. They're the kind of band that reminds you how deep the songbook goes, which they do without sounding like pedagogues. The asides on Thursday -- bits of Molly Hatchet, Lou Reed, Santana, Bob Marley -- fell into the mix naturally, though noticeably, like hiccups.

Russell was less offhanded breaking into a verse of a Looney Tunes classic, Michigan J. Frog's Hello My Baby. But when he performed The Image of Me, made famous by Conway Twitty, he wasn't quoting anything. He was just enjoying a pearl of a song.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

Apropos of the last post, here's a pesky lounge singer taking revenge on the coffee chain, which apparently rejected one of his songs.

Be sure to check out the comments underneath the screen at YouTube. One says the singer is now engaged to a barista who was fired for playing along. A few entries down there's also a sharp rebuke for this publicity hound: He makes store employees look bad for enforcing workplace rules. The commenter does have a point. As we know from Michael Moore and Borat, guerrilla video is almost always lose-lose for the unwitting participants.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (1) | Share:

I've been collecting "song of the day" cards at Starbucks outlets for a few weeks, and today I went to the iTunes online store to redeem my swag (if not myself). I had 14 cards, each bearing an illustration of the artist or group along with the title of the giveaway song. On the back was an access code: Type in the code, and there you go.

Almost. While I had the iTunes software, it turned out I needed an iTunes account.

E-mail address, password, and ... done. I logged in to claim my loot. But now they wanted a payment method, an address and a phone number. This was beginning to feel invasive, considering I wasn't actually buying anything. I complied, anyways, and soon had my 14 tracks.

The standout was a Latin swing dynamo, Sacala Bailar (Take Her Dancing), by Spanish Harlem Orchestra. Consider Me Gone, by Boca Raton native Hilary McRae, was interesting for the deep, almost masculine quality of McRae's pop-soul singing style.

Less distinguished was the work of several young, photogenic female singer-songwriters who seem to be the coffee chain's preferred style of pop-music artistry. Very quickly, it got difficult to tell a McRae from a Sonya Kitchell from a Brandi Carlisle from a KT Tunstall from an Alice Russell from an Alice Smith from an Emily King. All that learned, capable, Jonesian (Norah) songcraft started to blur.

Do some of these musicians need to rethink the corporate partnership? On the one hand, Starbucks has proved it can sell CDs by newcomers and established players alike. McRae, for one, has signed a deal with Hear Music, Starbucks' record-label partner, and as a "song of the day" pick she's already benefiting from the company's considerable power to promote.

But there are downsides to inclusion in the Starbucks catalogue, with its safe, quiet concept of salable music. As far as I can see, you will not be purchasing Lady Sovereign or Soulja Boy CDs at your nearest Starbucks anytime soon. The "Most Relaxing Coffeehouse Music Ever" compilation would come first.

Don't get me wrong: I've had a few "Hey, what is that?" moments standing on line at Starbucks. The place has introduced me to songs that I made a point of tracking down once I heard them in the store. I love the Trojan Records classic ska and reggae compilation I bought there.

And among the cards I picked up were enjoyable tunes by people who have thrived without superior-blend coffee tie-ins: Dave Matthews with Tim Reynolds; Angie Stone; and Bebel Gilberto.

There were guys besides Matthews & Reynolds in my group of 14, specifically the bands Rogue Wave and Band of Horses. Starbucks also picked a winning remix of Heaven, by the L.A. club-pop duo Bitter:Sweet. But there's a predictable, distaff bias to Starbucks' official taste in music, especially in the giveaway program. (The next two cards I've picked up since are Suzanne Vega and a single-named songbird named Sia.) I'm not sure how well the favoritism serves the artists over the long term.

Until the chain becomes less stuck on Lilith Fair 'tude, and branches out beyond self-consciously tasteful pop - i.e. nothing too unhinged or startling - the women in particular risk being thought of as mere accessories to somebody's grande soy latte order, or just pretty faces on trading cards.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

I love this record label site. It's the home of the Sao Paolo-based Trama, which specializes in all kinds of Brazilian music (Elis Regina, Tom Ze, Gal Costa, Max de Castro, Rappin' Hood). The front page has a light, airy look that improves my mood every time I see it, and in the upper right hand are some freebies before you buy.

I'm just wondering what happened to SambaLoco Drum & Bass, a new-meets-old Brazilian club music compilation that looks like a blast. It's listed on an earlier verison of Trama's homepage, which is still posted here. But the CD info link appears to have expired, and I can't find SambaLoco in the catalog listing at the current version of the site.

On the other hand, the old Trama page has a handful of free songs still available for download, so I'm not totally gripped by saudade.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

My colleague Gail Gedan Spencer tossed me this ember of smoldering retro-soul. It's 100 Days, 100 Nights by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, filmed in what looks like mid-1960s TV-Cam.

Thanks to Jezebel.com.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share:

... and they're a lot like us.

I have a theory that Australians are becoming more American than Americans. It's not just that Aussie bands such as AC/DC and INXS have prospered over here, that Aussie film stars play American roles by the bushel, or that one such actor, Nicole Kidman, married an Australian-born star of American country music, Keith Urban.

There's also a shared sensibility that may come out of similar histories. Both people settled a sprawling continent - irking Brits in the process - and both have a romantic attachment to wide open spaces. Both cherish the hardy, self-reliant individual. Both cultures also have complicated relationships with the original inhabitants of the land.

Australia's a little wilder, a little more undeveloped and untamed (See: Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe). Their vegemite is like a feral version of our Cheez Whiz. The Australians I've met here tend to be more than just at ease in the U.S. of A.; they go at their time in America ravenously.

Now, it's not Australia's role to remind America of what a swell country we have. But often that's what visitors - from anywhere - do. They reacquaint us with our own surroundings.

All this is a roundabout way of mentioning this weekend's Australian Festival at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines, and one of the musical performers on tap: Kate Russell. Like Mr. Urban, she's Aussie and she's country. She's got a video for Powerful Stuff, the title track of her debut CD, playing on CMT. She sounds a bit like Bonnie Raitt. And her band is from Nashville.

Russell performs 2 p.m. Sunday at the park. The festival runs Friday through Sunday. Details at http://www.australianfestival.com/.

p.s. The strongest sign of the Aussie-American bond? Classic cute-critter TV shows. We had Flipper, the "precocious pet dolphin" who frolicked and splashed his way into our hearts from 1964 to 1967. In Australia, they had Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the trusty marsupial who was a friend to man from 1966 to 1968.

As you'd expect, both shows had annoyingly hummable theme songs.

> Discuss this entry

Permalink | Comments (0) | Share: