Adam Yauch

Could it just be that the weekend Tibetan Freedom Concert is a sign that the times are truly a-changin' again in rock? It certainly felt like a turning point on Saturday at Golden Gate Park when you saw such unlikely scenes as Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys seated with '60s activists Yoko Ono and Richie Havens at a press conference condemning human rights violations in Tibet.

The best thing the Grammys telecast attempts to do is also its most tricky feat to accomplish: the artist pair-up. For every Elton John and Eminem, there's a Stevie Wonder and the Jonas Brothers. For every Mumford & Sons and Bob Dylan, there's a record-scratcher like Taylor Swift and Stevie Nicks.  Yet these collaborations are one of the main reasons we watch the Sunday telecast, which will be broadcast live except for the West Coast on CBS. Rare is it to see legends from one genre working with today's pop celebrities.

Never follow a dog act. If there's a golden rule of showbiz, that's it. But the Beastie Boys threw caution to the wind at the Universal Amphitheatre on Monday. The hip-hop trio booked Bob Moore's American Mongrels to open shows on its first full tour in six years, and the vaudevillian pooches were in fact a hard act to follow, with their endearingly cornball mutt acrobatics winning over the early arrivals.

The Grammys, live . . .  8:55 p.m.: The Grammys saved the most fascinating performer for one of its final performances, and the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch finally received a Grammy tribute, albeit a brief one. First, to introduce Frank Ocean, Juanes declared him one of today's “more compelling singer-songwriters.”  He gave a performance that lived up to that bill, although it may not widely expand his fan base. Ocean's “Forrest Gump” began with a striking guitar solo, which gave way as Ocean appeared onstage.

It's tougher than ever to lower the common denominator in pop music, but Sugar Ray is doing the job with gusto. The quintet may be best known for the swooning summertime groove of "Fly," the hit single from its second album, "Floored." The single remains near the top of the charts and has sparked the album to sales of 850,000.

"Park City, Utah, in the house, yo!" hip-hop turntablist Mix Master Mike hollered from his DJ perch at the Legacy Lodge, a nightclub at the bottom of a ski run here. A roiling crowd of 1,200 responded to this hip-hop roll call by bellowing back at the DJ during the event sponsored by Gen Art and Myspace.com to celebrate the Sundance Film Festival. Electronic beats began to boom through the cavernous space.

You might say the Beastie Boys were in the right place at the right time--much like another famous white boy, Elvis Presley, in an earlier era. The Beasties, who started out as a punk band in New York, saw that hip-hop was the future of pop music and embraced the sound. The surprise is that the hip-hop community embraced them back.

EVER since the French New Wave and the auteur theory arrived simultaneously on our shores in the early 1960s, there have been attempts to promote, as equivalent wavelets, succeeding generations of gifted American directors. The 1970s emergence of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Rafelson, William Friedkin, Michael Cimino and Hal Ashby is often celebrated as the golden age of the maverick filmmaker, able to make exciting, personal works within the studio system.

The early scenes of the documentary look like some lost reel from "This Is Spinal Tap," spanning what seems like half of rock history -- complete with hem lengths and haircuts. But the protagonist is not a metalhead but a Zelig-like figure: Here he is as a squeaky-clean pop idol in the Frankie Avalon mode, gazing bashfully. He shows up on L.A.'s Sunset Strip at its wildest. Next he's part of a mop-topped boy band in swinging London.

The 16-year-old boy with the faded Run-D.M.C. T-shirt stared at the large airport-style metal-detection device at the entrance to the Memorial Coliseum arena. Like most of the nearly 5,300 at the Run-D.M.C./Beastie Boys concert Monday, the teen-ager seemed amused by the elaborate security precautions. "What gives?" he asked sarcastically. "We're just going to a concert, not trying to catch an airplane."