Rock Music

Welcome, Oscar, to the rock 'n' roll era. Forty years after the recording debut of Elvis Presley, a best song Oscar was awarded to a pure rock songwriter--Bruce Springsteen--for the first time. Too bad they didn't have a second Oscar for Neil Young.

After hobnobbing with the fine arts upper crust by composing an opera, "Holy Blood and Crescent Moon," that the Cleveland Opera premiered last month, Stewart Copeland has his pop shoes on again. The former Police drummer now devotes time to his new pop-rock band, Animal Logic, which features famed jazz-rock bassist Stanley Clarke and a newcomer, singer-songwriter Deborah Holland. The trio's debut album, "Animal Logic," has just been released by I.R.S. Records.

For a while in the late '80s, INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence seemed destined to be remembered as one of rock's most celebrated figures. Instead, his apparent suicide Saturday in Sydney, Australia, means he will probably go down as another of the music's more tragic ones. Hutchence, 37, was found dead in his fifth-floor room in the plush Ritz-Carlton by a hotel worker shortly before noon.

Ever since the Beatles made rock music safe for the middle class, there hasn't exactly been a dearth of books on the subject. A few are still landmarks--in the States, Robert Christgau's smart and nervy "Any Old Way You Choose It" and Greil Marcus' passionate "Mystery Train," for two. But otherwise, during rock's countercultural heyday, its possibilities seemed so limitless that even the most serious attempts at analysis made wild claims for both...

Around 1:30 a.m. last Sunday morning, Toast Boyd took what may have been the last stage dive at Al's Bar. Boyd, the music booker for the seminal West Coast punk club, had jumped on stage to play bass with the Warlocks, a garage rock band whose bassist hadn't shown up. She didn't know the song, so she faked it, then departed the stage in classic Al's Bar style--with a flying leap. "It's tragic that Al's is closing," Boyd said later.

It might be difficult to imagine today, but there was a moment in the pre-Khomeini Iran of the mid-1970s when miniskirts and rock music reigned, where a female pop balladeer wowed crowds of thousands and a man named Kourosh became a guitar hero on a par with Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Since the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the subsequent censorship of many of the country's artists, Iran's pop cultural past has taken on a dream-like quality -- more than 30 years of constricting government bans having had a dramatic effect on the country's creative output.

If there is a rock 'n' roll god, this was his altar. Jerry Lee Lewis played piano. Tina Turner and Marvin Gaye sang a raucous duet. Go-go dancers frugged in the background, except when the stage grew dark and silent and James Brown stepped to the microphone for a gospel-drenched ballad. In 1964, when "Bonanza" and Andy Griffith ruled the airwaves, an upstart show called "Shindig!" had the audacity to broadcast rock 'n' roll during prime time. It was loud. It was frenetic.

Rock 'n' roll is in the hot seat again. Call it media hype or justifiable outrage, but an acrimonious debate is raging over whether hard-rock heavyweights Guns N' Roses--as well as rap idols Public Enemy and speed-metal kings Slayer--are promoting bigotry and hatred. Guns N' Roses has been under fire for a host of inflammatory lyrics in its song "One in a Million," which uses derogatory epithets to describe blacks and gays.

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.

When the responsibilities of being a young father and the pressures of college course work begin to weigh on Frank Agnew, he sometimes finds himself taking the long way home. It leads him to a place from his past--a nondescript, concrete apartment complex in a quiet neighborhood of Fullerton, across a narrow street from a schoolyard.