Paul Rogers

Photo by Wild Don Lewis BAD ACID TRIP At the Troubadour, January 7 Art-metal – that almost oxymoronic cocktail of headfeeding and headbanging, challenge and tradition – is a delicate alchemy. Archmasters of the craft – System of a Down, Tool – use melody and musicality to lube their perverse......

Top: photo by Loni MashkeBottom: photo by Flaco In smaller towns, rock bands organically congeal into "scenes": Corralled into the same handful of venues, bonded by common histories, they get enough cross-pollination so that their individual strands of artistic ambition can weave into a musical community. But in the vastness......

Photos by Wild Don Lewis SLAYER, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, MASTODON, FIREBALL MINISTRY at the Universal Amphitheater, December 17 It was Slayer’s bleak über-metal that pummeled Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega into surrender by blaring outside his palace, and that later propelled Bush Senior’s battalions when they swarmed across the Kuwaiti border. Slayer’s......

Photo by Ryan Murphy BEASTIE BOYS at the Universal Amphitheater, September 13 “I went to school with your uncle? That hurts!” groans diminutive Beastie Adrock, bending to catch comments from the front rows. But, yes, it’s been 23 years, over which Beastie Boys have morphed from the most flippant of......

Photo by Bruce Malone Legend has it that Ross Golan’s grandmother, on her deathbed, clutched his hand and urged him to “find Molehead.” So four years ago, Chicago native Golan, then 20, began his bemused odyssey to L.A., where he and Bryan Head (who’s also in Abandoned Pools) played a......

Photo by Marty Temme Perhaps original rock & roll is dying. Maybe songwriting — the very essence of the art — is being marginalized by a tidal wave of cover tunes. It’s as if listeners, faced with soulless “original” bands who’re but thinly veiled clones of their influences, are revisiting......

Photo by Chris Cuffaro NO DOUBT at Universal Amphitheater, June 30 No Doubt are the greatest live pop band on Earth, and in Gwen Stefani they have a heroine who’s honed moderate gifts into a relentless, peerless entertainment machine. If you’ve never witnessed No Doubt’s semichoreographed, reggaefied new-wave master class,......

Photo by John Shearer It’s rare to get more than one shot at a rock & roll career. So it took biggie-size balls for the five members of Abloom to walk away from established outfits (drummer Roy Mayorga, guitarist Mikey Doling and bassist Marcello Diaz were three-fourths of hard-touring metallers......

Photo by Yelena Yemchuk It’s one thing for the singer from a successful band to launch a solo career, quite another for the bass player — particularly one who’s stood in the shadow of two larger-than-life rock icons. So for Melissa Auf der Maur — who spent five years next......

THE MARS VOLTA at the Wiltern LG, May 12 After a stint of restricted sets on their recent arena jaunt with fellow progsters A Perfect Circle, the Mars Volta were ready to stretch out and make us wait tonight. Indeed, aside from the Daltrey-on-ice showmanship of front-twig Cedric Zavala, this......