Haggard

Laughing as they killed, two youths clad in dark ski masks and long black coats fired handguns at will and blithely tossed pipe bombs into a crowd of their terrified classmates Tuesday inside a suburban high school southwest of Denver, littering halls with as many as 23 bodies and wounding at least 25 others.

It's been a good month for Merle Haggard. Two weeks ago, the legendary country songwriter was celebrated with a Grammy lifetime achievement award, and on Tuesday, 10 of his classic 1960s and early-'70s albums are set to arrive in stores in richly archival fashion. The man they call Hag could rightly be basking in the attention -- but Haggard remains as much iconoclast as he is icon and, like his old anthem, he's never shy about showing the "Fightin' Side of Me."

There is no more popularly satisfying tale than the fall of the self-righteous. Politicians, pundits and preachers, how we gasp in horrified delight as their secrets are revealed, their drug addictions and gambling issues, their sordid secret sexual lives. So it is not surprising that "The Trials of Ted Haggard," which premieres tonight on HBO, has been publicized within an inch of its life.

"KERN RIVER." Merle Haggard. Epic. Haggard's umpteenth album for his third major label finds the Lonesome Stranger in an upbeat mood. "Big Butter and Egg Man" is the up-tempo track that sets the tone here. It and several cuts like it are long on swinging horn arrangements and Tommy Duncan vocal chops that separate Haggard's Western music from everybody else's country. He shows his downbeat flip side in the title track, a memorable tale of a drowned lover that he sings with trademark conviction.

Merle Haggard made his third visit this year to Orange County on Saturday at the Coach House. With almost any other artist, you'd worry about overkill. But so deep and rich is Hag's songbook that he could play once a week for a year without repeating himself. Of course, he did repeat himself in several songs that are fixtures on his latter-day set list.

Citing a lack of time, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson withdrew from the team overseeing counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard, the evangelical pastor embroiled in a scandal involving a male prostitute and illegal drugs. "Emotionally and spiritually, I wanted to be of help -- but the reality is, I don't have the time to devote to such a critical responsibility," Dobson said in Colorado Springs.

Merle Haggard's record label is rush-releasing his new single, "That's the News," a song critical of the media's handling of the continuing U.S. military involvement in Iraq. The 66-year-old country singer and songwriter's music has been heard infrequently in recent years on youth-oriented commercial country stations, but the new song has generated significant interest following a piece that aired Monday on Fox News Channel in response to a July 15 story in The Times.

David Bowie, Cream, Merle Haggard, Robert Johnson, Jessye Norman, Richard Pryor and the Weavers have been named recipients of the Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors "lifelong artistic contributions to the recording medium," the academy said Tuesday.

In Whittier, behind an 18-foot chain-link fence topped by triple coils of razor wire, stand historic landmarks that make up the Fred C. Nelles youth prison, which opened when Benjamin Harrison was in the White House. For 113 years it has educated and disciplined delinquents and young felons, sometimes steering them into more productive paths.

The Colorado Springs mega-church founded by the Rev. Ted Haggard, who was fired over drug and sex allegations, has laid off 44 people amid falling income following the scandal. The cuts, announced during services, amount to about 12% of the church's workforce, associate pastor Rob Brendle said. He estimated that the income of the 14,000-member church had fallen 10%, forcing layoffs including pastoral staff, support staff and nursery workers.