Rock Band

Allan Rouse and Guy Massey beamed confident smiles recently in Capitol Records' Studio C in Hollywood, where the senior studio engineers for Capitol's U.K. parent company, EMI Records, supervised a preview of the top-secret project they've been working on for the last four years. Massey punched "play" on a CD containing portions of 14 Beatles songs and watched three visitors' faces light up as they first heard tracks as they sounded on the 1987 CDs that brought the Fab Four's catalog into the digital age, then listened to spruced-up CD remasters the rest of the world will get to hear when they're released Sept.

After spending some quality time playing the Beatles: Rock Band this week, my empathy for Pete Best has gone way up. He was the drummer the Beatles fired -- making way for Ringo Starr -- just as Beatlemania was about to erupt, at least in part because he didn't have the musical chops to keep up with John, Paul and George. I know the feeling in a whole new way now: These guys were good. That's hardly a news flash. But one consequence of actually attempting to replicate their words, melodies, harmonies and rhythms in Rock Band is a more visceral sense of just how inventive their music was -- and remains, even 40-plus years down the long and winding road.

You don't typically see "cellist wanted" listings in the classified sections of rock magazines, but perhaps Richard Barone and his band can start a new trend. With Jane Scarpantoni wielding the bow, Barone's show Tuesday night at the Coach House benefited from shadings and textures seldom encountered on a rock concert stage.

Rock band Tonic spends an awful lot of time fending off assumptions as well as detractors. The first, and most persistent jab, is that the guitar-driven quartet plays only '70s-era classic rock. For the record, Tonic, which plays tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana, does play music that can recall such classic rockers as Led Zeppelin, Bad Company and the Eagles.

Collective Soul, a small-town Georgia band, hit the Big Time big time in 1993 when their song "Shine" garnered substantially more airplay than "Marching Through Georgia" ever would at William T. Sherman High School. The five long-haired Georgians plus label-mate Rusty will perform Wednesday night at the Ventura Theatre.

Nine cops in a rock 'n' roll band? Nine cops in uniform in a rock 'n' roll band? If the idea catches you off guard, or even amuses you, they don't mind. Mutual Aid--whose members are Southern California police officers from Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Monterey Park and elsewhere--is based on a simple premise: If kids see cops booming on drums and guitars, kids will think cops are cool. It's hard to measure the band's success by record sales--it hasn't cut one. At least yet.

The rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of the Allman Brothers band is one of the tawdriest in rock-music history--real tabloid stuff. Among the seamy elements: drugs and alcohol excesses, deaths by motorcycle crashes, a turbulent breakup, a stormy Hollywood marriage and divorce, not one but two descents into obscurity, drug trials, a financial scandal, courtroom battles and constantly feuding members.

If you think "Lollapalooza" was the ultimate underground rock festival, you're not digging deep enough. Last year's "International Pop Underground Convention" in Olympia, Wash., was much more like it--six days of music and related arts by maverick performers from around the United States and abroad. "It was pretty great," says the convention's organizer, Calvin Johnson, perhaps the West Coast's key underground entrepreneur. "Everything worked the way it was supposed to.

The next candidate staggered in for his evening audition. He carried a drink, and an attitude. "Oh, I can play everything," he boasted to the trio from Headlines, an Encino-based rock band searching for a lead vocalist. "Springsteen, Seger, whatever. My voice doesn't get tired." The Headlines shook their heads. The candidate, a 29-year-old musician from Arleta, had forgotten to bring his song sheets. He mumbled his words. He looked like a mess.