Rock Music

Alex Ebert could easily double as some kind of indie-rock messiah. Fronting his new band, the 11- or 12-member strong Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Ebert appears onstage shirtless and barefoot, strands of shoulder-length hair tied back in a faux crown as he conducts his smiling, face-painted ensemble like a giddy choir director.

Four decades ago, Bay Area artists filled their posters with raging flames, extravagant skeletons and bare, engorged breasts. This overstuffed style became the visual symbol not only for many late-'60s English and American bands but also a recognizable signature of the entire psychedelic era.

Despite its long-held reputation as the most aesthetically minded nation in the civilized West, Italy has never been able to produce a decent, well-known rock band. With (H)itweek L.A., Rome-based music promoter Francesco Del Maro is hoping to change that. "My main goal is to show the world we're not just about the mandolino," said Del Maro, 37, who is behind the Italian music and culture festival that comes to town this week and concludes Sunday. "We have very successful artists, from rock to heavy metal to reggae to world music.

Davis Guggenheim calls himself a "Behind the Music" junkie, watching every episode of the VH1 show chronicling famous rock stars' rise and fall and rise again amid triumph and self-destruction. He loves it, he says, but the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth" had other ideas for his own documentary on the electric guitar.

There's something about Jimi Hendrix's confident grin -- so ingenuous and inviting -- that disarms the observer and plays against stereotype, as do so many of the images in "Hendrix Revealed," a new exhibit of Hendrix photographs that opened May 29 and will continue nearly a month, the largest display of them ever mounted in the U.S. The website Celebrity Vault in Beverly Hills is hosting the collection in association with U.K.-based Raj Prem Fine Art Photography.

Jenny Lewis no longer calls Silver Lake home, but she hasn't moved to Laurel Canyon. The woodsy bungalow she shares with her companion and musical collaborator, Johnathan Rice, sits in an obscure corner of the San Fernando Valley, not too far from either of the neighborhoods favored by L.A.'s rock elite, but on its own ground. "I feel like this is an undiscovered area," said the 32-year-old singer-songwriter on a recent Friday afternoon.

Given the Dodgers, USC and UCLA games, a Neil Diamond concert at Staples Center, a fundraiser for Barack Obama featuring Hillary Clinton at the Edison, and the third annual L.A. Weekly Detour Festival, the traffic advisory for downtown on Saturday was somewhere between "suicidal" and "apocalyptic." One was probably better off at home stocking up on canned goods and waiting for "Mad Max" to seem like a documentary. The market for music festivals of late feels a bit like that too.

Brian Howes gets a little hot under the black-leather collar when asked who listens to his kind of rock music. Speaking on a BMI-sponsored songwriter's panel before last year's Grammy Awards, the Vancouver-based producer, who has co-written hits for Hinder, Chris Daughtry, David Cook and Puddle of Mudd, sent an emotional shout-out to the common fan. "I call it the hosers in Canada, the rednecks," he said. "The flyover zones. The people in Middle America seem to still buy records . . .

He didn't have to cobble together a show when he decided to turn his shoe repair shop into an art gallery. All Greg Papazian had to do was reach into the shoe box that for 35 years held a one-of-a-kind photographic record of Los Angeles in its glittery rock 'n' roll heyday. He was a high school junior when he turned a visit to an Allman Brothers concert at the Sunset Strip's Whisky a Go Go into a gig of his own -- as club photographer for the legendary hub of Los Angeles' rock scene.

When the Killers' singer Brandon Flowers crossed the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood before a recent taping of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," he displayed the first sign that the band was beginning anew: He lacked a mustache. Around the time of the Killers' 2006 second album, "Sam's Town," Flowers grew a thick push broom worthy of that record's grandiloquent Americana. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci one-upped him with a fearsome Fu Manchu, and bassist Mark Stoermer let his blond scruff run wild.