Trey Anastasio

“Hands on a Hardbody,” a musical about cash-strapped Texans competing for a shiny new pickup truck, pulled into Broadway on Thursday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in Manhattan. Based on a 1997 documentary of the same name, the show sets recession-era issues to song as a cast of 15 performs with a hand firmly fixed to a Nissan. (The last contestant touching the truck takes it home.) The production, which premiered last year at the La Jolla Playhouse, has an experienced trio at the wheel: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”)

Welcome to Spin City. That's the scene at any concert by Phish: young neo-hippies twirling and flailing in that distinctive dance associated with Grateful Dead concerts. And the Phish show Sunday at Pauley Pavilion was no exception. The Pavilion is a smaller setting than the quartet from Vermont generally plays in other parts of the country, but with an audience of 10,000 or so, the concert still marked the band's emergence as a major headliner here.

As he sits and talks on the shaded commissary patio at NBC Studios in Burbank, Dave Matthews seems every bit the Tom Hanks of rock -- an approachable, unaffected everyman who's managed to stay unsullied while rising to the top of a rough-and-tumble profession. And like the actor, Matthews is widely viewed as nice-guy bland.

LA JOLLA - From Florenz Ziegfeld's synchronized showgirls toAndrew Lloyd Webber's roller-skating actors to aSpider-Man who flies, musical theater has often encouraged dance and movement extravaganzas. So imagine the anxiety of the team putting together the new musical, "Hands on a Hardbody," which has its premiere Saturday at the La Jolla Playhouse. The story's 10 characters are tied - figuratively - to a Nissan pickup truck. How do you take that reality and turn it into a show-stopping number?

Bad Religion "The Empire Strikes First" (Epitaph) *** With a Republican president in office and a war on, you'd expect Bad Religion to turn up primed for a fight. The veteran punk band's 13th album doesn't disappoint, unleashing the kind of unbridled fury that used to define punk before it was co-opted for sneaker commercials and lust-struck teens with the hots for their neighbor's mom.

After 17 years, nine studio albums and countless tours, Medeski, Martin and Wood are, in a sense, a band without a country. And they couldn't be happier. Dedicated to what keyboardist John Medeski calls "the spirit of jazz" through a fierce devotion to improvisation, the trio nevertheless has struggled to find a place within the jazz community -- despite having recorded with established players like John Scofield and signing with iconic label Blue Note in 1998.

I saw the future of rock 'n' roll Monday night, and it sure sounded a lot like 1974. Hearkening to rock's past--as the group Phish did at the Coach House on Monday--usually is a piece of bad news, since typically it just means that a band is bereft of its own ideas and so is donning the superficial garb of some justly dead era.

A cult band is by definition one that is fervently admired by a few and virtually ignored by everyone else. The Vermont quartet Phish is a strange anomaly: a cult band that's beloved by millions--America's biggest cult band, according to a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story.