Tours

Judging by the title of his new tour, Bob Dylan's droll self-awareness remains intact. The singer-songwriter is joining younger acolytes Wilco and My Morning Jacket on what Dylan is deeming the AmericanaramA Festival of Music. The exciting triple bill connects the lines between generations of American acts who use folk as a starting point to explore the full range of American music. Dylan, of course, needs no introduction. But teaming up with the experimental Chicago act Wilco and the Southern-soul explorers My Morning Jacket instantly makes this package tour one of the year's must-see shows.  PHOTOS: Iconic rock guitars and their owners The tour starts June 26 in West Palm Beach, Fla., and ends Aug. 4 in Mountain View, Calif.

At the L.A. Times Festival of Books, Molly Ringwald sat down with L.A. Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg to discuss her book of short stories, “When It Happens to You,” surprising tour encounters and the new book she's starting. VIDEO: AUTHOR INTERVIEWS FROM FESTIVAL OF BOOKS In honor of our new interactive map of literary L.A., Ringwald also talked about her favorite L.A. author, Joan Didion. "She was a definite inspiration...all of the car stuff [in “When It Happens...”]

This year alone, Beyoncé sang for the president, headlined the Super Bowl, scored her 17 th Grammy, debuted a highly rated HBO documentary and was named half of pop music's first billionaire couple (with hubby Jay-Z). So what does such an accomplished woman wear to launch her latest world tour? The answer, in a gold-plated nutshell, is whatever she wants. And she did. Beyoncé kicked off “The Mrs. Carter Show" tour Monday in Serbia, and the pop diva donned some daring attire.

Sparks, the long-running L.A. pop-dance-rock band consisting of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, has long pushed at the boundaries of pop music. The quirky outfit created humor-laced operatic rock in the early 1970s that influenced Freddie Mercury and Queen, cooked up influential electronic dance music in the late '70s and flirted with pop stardom in the snappy techno-rock of its 1983 hit single "Cool Places. " The Mael brothers have since explored other quirky niches of the pop music world, abandoning the rock band format entirely for a trio of albums built on electronic and orchestral sounds.

The 50th anniversary of t he Rolling Stones' birth in 1962 has had no shortage of commemorative activities: Last year the group was the subject of a retrospective film documentary, a triple CD survey of their recorded output and a handful of celebratory concerts in England and northeastern U.S. The celebration extends into 2013 with a slate of shows on the 50 and Counting tour due to get underway May 2 at Staples Center in Los Angeles -...

A Yosemite National Park tour bus crashed Saturday evening after it went off the road and over an embankment, leaving 16 people hurt. None of the injuries are life-threatening. The victims were recovering at local hospitals, the Fresno Bee said. According to Associated Press, the bus was about 40 miles south of the park when it went off Highway 41 and over an embankment about 6 p.m. Saturday. The patrol's Merced dispatch office described it as a minor injury crash, and said the 16 people were taken to local hospitals.

Clive Svendsen doesn't get rattled easily, but the neurobiologist couldn't help sweating when Stephen Hawking paid a visit to his lab this week. Hawking is one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists. He pioneered groundbreaking research into how particles behave around black holes and deduced that black holes spit out radiation as they swallow up matter. He's also credited with teaching millions about the mysteries of the cosmos through his books, including the bestseller "A Brief History of Time.

Here are things you may not have known about Prince: In high school, he was a decent basketball player. "Amadeus" was at one point his favorite movie. And he may not have believed that Ronald Reagan suffered from Alzheimer's disease. These tidbits, and others, emerge in Touré's new book about the enigmatic pop star, "I Would Die 4 U. " But if the author (and MSNBC host) presents them with a hunter's pride, he is mostly chasing bigger game here, bypassing the minutiae of biography on his way to figuring out, as his subtitle puts it, why Prince became an icon.

When Arlo Guthrie was a boy, he sat in the backyard with the guitar he'd gotten for his fifth birthday and listened to his father, Woody, teach him "This Land Is Your Land. " The verses decrying hunger and espousing equality didn't strike Arlo as political back then. Today, though, he sings for the dissenting and downtrodden, as his father did for so many years. In 2011, he joined Pete Seeger, his father's old comrade, to serenade Occupy protesters in New York. In 2005, he rode a train from Illinois to Louisiana to perform for Hurricane Katrina victims.

A hefty mountain lion was sleeping off tranquilizer darts Thursday afternoon after roaming in a La Crescenta neighborhood Thursday. Officials had to use at least three tranquilizer darts on the mountain lion Officers with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife were called in after the lion was spotted just before 2 p.m. and didn't appear to be disturbing anything at the home in the 4500 block of New York Avenue, according to ...