Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax made thrash-metal history last year when they performed on the same bill in a string of European shows, and now they will bring their blistering sonic collective to the U.S. on April 23 in a most unexpected venue -- the Empire Polo Field in Indio.

The seven "Big Four" shows were major music moments, with a Bulgaria date yielding a bestselling boxed set (bundling CDs with DVDs or Blu-rays) and an HD satellite broadcast that reached fans in hundreds of movie theaters. Tickets for the one-night show go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Ticketmaster.

The metal extravaganza will be staged the Saturday after the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, and the organizers of that California festival are behind this surprise booking. 

The show came together quickly. Promoter Paul Tollett, the founding figure behind Coachella and its country cousin, the Stagecoach Festival, found himself with an empty weekend between the two massive multi-artist shows and, after a casual conversation with Metallica manager Peter Mensch, the two came up with a bold way to fill the calendar gap.

-- Geoff Boucher

Photo: James Hetfield of Metallica. Credit: Jason Merritt / Getty Images for Activision

Twenty-five years after the all-star recording of "We Are the World" became a signature moment in celebrity altruism and pop-music history, a new collective of stars came together Monday at the same Hollywood recording studio to record a new version for Haiti earthquake relief.

Just as Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan descended on the A&M Studios on La Brea to sing for famine relief in Africa, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, Kanye West and Keith Urban turned up at the same soundstage (now called Henson Recording Studios) to join an all-star chorus that was 100 voices strong.

The 1985 effort, called USA for Africa, raised  $63 million and became a template for famous-face fundraising. The new single will premiere Feb. 12 on NBC during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics with the hope that the download single can help funnel aid into the ravaged island nation.

The anniversary project had been quietly planned for months and was scheduled for the day after the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards to maximize celebrity availability. The plan veered sharply, though, after the Jan. 12 temblor in Haiti: Instead of more relief for Africa, the organizers switched gears and turned their cause to the Caribbean.

The scene on Monday, like the original session, was a fascinating mix of star confluence.

Performers including Pink, Jamie Foxx and T-Pain are put through their paces in the lead-up to Sunday's extravaganza.

In this era of award show proliferation, it's hard not to smirk at the "once-in-a-lifetime" advertising campaigns for shows such as the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards on CBS Sunday night. Beyoncé is up for 10 Grammys this year and you have to suspect that back at the home, the trophy room is the most cluttered corner -- well, except for the walk-in shoe closet.

Still, there is something about the scale, history and reach of the Grammys stage that stirs undeniable emotion in the artists who step on it for the first time. On Thursday, at rehearsals for the broadcast, that was clear in the voices of two artists, Zac Brown and Leon Russell, who are on opposite ends of their careers but will step into the spotlight together Sunday night to sing to the largest audience of their lives.

Brown is the 32-year-old leader of the Zac Brown Band, which is nominated in the prestigious best new artist category for its grits-and-guitar sound. Russell is the 67-year-old Oklahoma piano man who left a hospital bed last week and used a wheelchair to reach his keyboard on the Staples Center stage. "It's an honor," Russell said in a hushed voice backstage. "And it's one I never expected."

The acts were put together by Grammys executive producer Ken Ehrlich, who said despite the generational gap, their "music was born in the same barn." The haystack suits Brown's band, which aspires to be musical kin to the Charlie Daniels Band or the Allman Brothers; the group arrived for rehearsals in battered denim and belt buckles tested by their country-bear physiques, and sang their hit "Chicken Fried," an ode to America, its soldiers, cold beer and a mother's love.

"We never expected to be here," said Brown, whose wife is handling the band's show wardrobe and taking care of three daughters younger than 3. "It's a lot to take in. We're looking forward to the opportunity to show our musicianship."

Other scheduled performers are the Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, T-Pain and Jamie Foxx with Slash, Eminem teamed with both Lil Wayne and Travis Barker, Lady Antebellum and Green Day performing with cast members from the "American Idiot" stage production. Bon Jovi will perform a song to be determined by viewer votes. What number might steal the show?

Well, at Thursday's rehearsals, the most gripping performance was by Pink, who sang "Glitter in the Air" while suspended -- spinning -- from the Staples Center rafters with a trio of body-painted dancers who looked like gilded, hard-bodied angels. During the number, Pink wore an outfit that is little more than strategically placed bandages, and took a dip in a tub of water placed in the center of the venue.

"It's something she did during her tour and we loved it and brought it in for the show," Ehrlich said. "The song isn't a hit but it's a good song and she's happy to be doing something besides 'So What.' Going with the hit is the easy thing but it's not always the best thing."

 
"Sing along," Thom Yorke told the audience at the Henry Fonda Theater on Sunday night, in case "I forget the words." He didn't, and he and Radiohead proceeded to give the crowd an incandescent version of "Fake Plastic Trees," the rousing second song in a show that was the hottest ticket in town -- and a noble one at the same time.

One of the most esteemed bands in the world has been in Los Angeles recording new music (their presence has been one of the worst kept "secrets" in recent music history), and after the staggering calamity in Haiti, the band was inspired to stage an impromptu benefit show.

"You'll be catching us on the fly," read a post late-Thursday on the band's website announcing the show, a performance that offered fans the rare opportunity to see Radiohead in an intimate club. Sunday's tickets could be bought by auction-only, and the closing minimum bid was $475, with the band pledging to donate all proceeds to Oxfam. 

The spare stage and unvarnished show (Visual effects? Well, the band did have purple lights) fit the occasion, and the band was mostly crisp and chipper -- not that this is a review. That would be rude amid the motivation and spirit.

"It's for charity," Yorke said after a mid-show false start, and right he was. At one point he also answered a fan's bellow with a decidely British aside. "Luck yeah, as you say," he muttered, although that first word was a different word that just sounds lucky. 

See the full lineup below...

The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival will bring a youth movement to the low desert this year. After several years of graybeard headliners, California’s signature festival is going back to the future with younger acts including Gorillaz, Muse, Jay-Z, Thom Yorke, MGMT, Hot Chip, Spoon, Vampire Weekend and LCD Soundsystem at the very top of the bill for the three-day concert that begins April 16 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio.

There are some flashback acts, including Woodstock icon Sly Stone and the Family Stone, 1980s alt-rock group Echo and the Bunnymen and reconstituted college-rock outfit Pavement, but they're not leading the bill as Paul McCartney, Prince and Roger Waters did in past years.

The presence of rap superstar Jay-Z will raise the eyebrows of those fans who like to think of Coachella as an indie oasis on today’s live-music landscape; hip-hop stars such as Kanye West, the Beastie Boys, Lupe Fiasco and Kool Keith have performed at Coachella in the past but none of them tap into the same street imagery and conspicuous consumption ethos that defines the $150-million mogul.

Jay-Z is also a somewhat unexpected booking because he has a performance -- for which tickets are still available -- at the Staples Center on March 26. The hip-hop star will close out the opening night of the fest on Friday, when other performers will be LCD Soundsystem, rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Specials and John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols experimental outfit Public Image Ltd. 

Saturday night will be headlined by Muse, Faith No More, DJs Tiesto and David Guetta, MGMT, Hot Chip and Jack White's The Dead Weather. Sunday will close with Gorillaz, Yorke, Spoon, Parisian electronic rockers Phoenix and dance veterans Orbital.

The desert event has won a reputation among fans for showcasing artists on the comeback trail, and rock acts such as the Pixies and Iggy & the Stooges made splashy returns at Coachella. Pavement, a staple of the '90s alt-rock scene, has been an expected Coachella headliner since announcing its reunion at the end of 2009.

This is a longer version of a story that appears on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times.

With the exception of James Dean, who made only three films, there might be no pop-culture icon who has done more with less than the late Jimi Hendrix. The ultimate guitar hero released just three studio albums before his death in 1970, but new generations of music fans keep plugging into his amplified legacy.

The volume of Hendrix’s music is about get turned up. Today, the Hendrix estate and Sony Music Entertainment will announce the March 9 release of a “new” Hendrix album, “Valleys of Neptune,” which will feature a dozen unreleased recordings.

The late star’s sister, Janie Hendrix, calls the material a “major revelation” about her brother’s musical directions at the time of his death, but the project and Sony’s intense interest in it also reveal plenty about the modern music marketplace — namely that proven stars of the past, even the dead ones, are growing more important to an industry facing an uncertain future.

At last week’s massive 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony chairman and chief executive Howard Stringer opened his company’s presentation by talking about Sony’s Legacy Recordings and its licensing agreement with Experience Hendrix, the Seattle-based company that acts as steward of the estate.

That partnership was first announced last summer, but today marks the real rollout of Sony’s venture into the Hendrix vault. The company also will re-release familiar Hendrix albums bundled with new DVD documentaries, take the star into the online sector in a more aggressive way and look for synergy opportunities with a 17-city tour of an all-star Hendrix tribute that begins March 4 in Santa Barbara.

“It’s an auspicious start in fulfilling a shared vision for the Jimi Hendrix catalog going forward,” Legacy general manager Adam Block said of the partnership.

Perhaps, but it also offers insight into the mind set at the major record labels. There was a major scramble among Sony’s rivals to land the Hendrix deal for the simple reason that icons of the past are viewed as a particularly good investment at a time when CD sales of new music are in continued decline and up-and-coming acts represent limited upside amid the shifting profit realities of the digital-download era.

In other words, the rewind button looks like a safer bet these days.

Warner Music Group has undertaken a major Frank Sinatra revival that is both archival — with the release of vintage recordings — and entrepreneurial with new ventures in advertising, film and perhaps a Las Vegas casino. Michael Jackson was the bestselling artist of last year (8.2 million albums sold in the U.S. alone), and the Beatles came in third (3.3 million); country crossover singer Taylor Swift finished between the two with music that was actually recorded in this century. The Fab Four also hit the video game market with their Rock Band game, the latest of their seemingly seasonal encores as a pop-culture force.

And now, Hendrix is warming up as a 21st century enterprise...

U2 at the Rose Bowl: Last of the really big shows?

There was an air of intense excitement at the Rose Bowl for Sunday night's concert, but there was also a sense of urgency -- the era of rock bands selling out a 95,000-plus-seat show in America is, as they say, rapidly fading.

"The days of the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd and all those stadium tours, all of that is winding down; U2 may be the last band of that type," said Dan Bell of Monrovia, one of the fans who attended the biggest concert in the history of the venerable venue. "You won't see shows this big that aren't festivals."

The worry was that the show might be too big. The Rose Bowl has had notorious problems in the past for concerts, which have traffic patterns far more condensed than, say, a college football game with its tailgate trickle-in.

The gates opened more than half an hour after the advertised 5 p.m., and there was grumbling from sunbaked fans, especially those eager to get a spot on the field, which was general admission.

The opening act, L.A.'s own Black Eyed Peas, brought along special guest Slash to play "Sweet Child O' Mine" -- this really was a stadium show flashback -- and the crowd went wild.

Maybe they'll call it the Weezer Roast? Or just a Rancid Picnic?

Weezer, Kings of Leon, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jimmy Eat World, Rancid and Silversun Pickups are among the headliners for the KROQ-FM (106.7) Weenie Roast Y Fiesta at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on May 16.

Tickets go on sale at 5 p.m. Thursday (May 7).

The other announced acts on the bill: Cage the Elephant, Asher Roth, Anberlin, Hollywood Undead, White Lies, the Airborne Toxic Event, Big B.

The Weenie Roast began in 1993 with a show featuring Stone Temple Pilots, Dramarama, X, The The and Terence Trent D'Arby, believe it or not. Last year, Metallica, the Racontuers and the Offspring led the bill, one again reinforcing the show's Mad Libs approach to live-music booking.  

The concert is a fundraiser for a number of charities, including Heal the Bay, the Surfrider Foundation and the AIDS Services Foundation Orange County.

-- Geoff Boucher

Photo: Rivers Cuomo. Credit: Bryan Haraway / Getty Images

A chilly morning wind was blowing down Sixth Avenue, but it was warm inside Radio City Music Hall even though the grand old palace was hushed and its balconies deserted. A production team was busy preparing for the night's concert, an all-star charity event, and a few dozen lucky VIPs were loitering in the back and craning their necks to see the stage. There, loose-limbed and cheery in the spotlight, stood Paul McCartney, a performer who has been in the ear of the world so famously and for so long that it's a bit startling to see him in a quiet moment and realize that he is in fact an actual human being, not just a songbook with a voice and a name.

After playing the brassy Beatles classic "Got to Get You Into My Life," McCartney sat at a piano and, without looking down, his fingers found the familiar first notes to "Let It Be." It's a song that could make a bare cinder-block building feel like a cathedral, but there, echoing in the regal hall's empty corners, it had witnesses dabbing their eyes. After the church-steeple finale, a cheer went up and McCartney acknowledged what might be one of the smaller ovations of his career: "Thank you for that ripple of kindness pouring down the red-velvet rows. . . . "

Less than an hour later, sitting backstage, McCartney mentioned that "Let It Be" sounds very different to him now than when he recorded it in 1969. "In truth, a lot of them mean new things to me, I hear stuff I didn't hear in the past," said the 66-year-old singer. Like a man thumbing through a box of old love letters, he sees unexpected between-the-lines messages, such as hints of mysticism he now detects in the simple lyrics of "Got to Get You Into My Life."

Read more Coachella: Paul McCartney finds himself in a new place

Photo credit: WireImage

As he and the E Street Band kick off a world tour, the troubadour for troubled times reflects on where he’s been and where he’s headed.

"There are a lot of ghosts in this place," Bruce Springsteen said as his boots clomped on an ancient staircase at the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was here in this old seaside venue that Springsteen, as a teenager, watched Jim Morrison prowl the stage and Keith Moon thunder away on drums for the Who. It was also in the corridors here that he brushed past a wild-child named Janis Joplin. "Our elbows, they came this close," said Springsteen, somehow still amazed that a Jersey kid could come within arm's reach of rock history.

Unlike those lost icons, Springsteen was built for the long haul. He will turn 60 in September, and he'll do so while on the road with the E Street Band supporting their latest album, "Working on a Dream." The world tour (which comes to the Los Angeles Sports Arena on April 15 and 16) officially began Wednesday in San Jose, but it was in late March, here at this creaky boardwalk venue, that Springsteen began working on "the conversation" of the concert tour, as he calls it, trying out the new songs in front of a live audience for the first time.

On a blustery Monday afternoon, just hours before the first of two charity shows, Springsteen arrived at the venue with a 155-year-old surprise for his bandmates. During sound check he told the singers in the group to line up along the lip of the stage and, looking down at the lyrics, Springsteen coached them through a late addition to their opening-night lineup, a Civil War-era lament by Stephen Foster called "Hard Times Come Again No More":

It's a song that the wind blows across the troubled wave

It's a cry that is heard along the shore.

It's the words that are whispered beside the lowly grave

When hard times will come again no more.

It's a song and a sigh of the weary.

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

The Roots, Cut Chemist, will.i.am, TV on the Radio and others take on the singer's hits. Carole Cole says her late father 'would be excited about this.'

It was 50 years ago that Nat King Cole went to Brazil and was greeted with staggering street-side ovations. "There was so much affection, it's hard to describe what it was like," said Carole Cole, one of the late singer's daughters. "It was almost like the entire population of Rio de Janeiro turned out en masse to welcome him and throw roses at his feet. He and my mother were invited to stay at the presidential palace. He was treated like royalty."

How surreal that must have seemed for the crooner who, despite his stately stage persona, was a firebrand figure in his home country, a sort of Jackie Robinson with orchestral accompaniment. Just three years before Cole met the cheering crowds on Ipanema sand, he got a very different reception in Birmingham: The slender singer was toppled from his piano bench when the North Alabama White Citizens' Council rushed the stage in a bizarre kidnapping attempt.

Cole had fame and fortune in America, but he also found malice -- that would be his last show in his native state or anywhere in the South.

"My dad was an agent of change throughout his life and career," Carole Cole said. "It's there in his music and in the way that he lived his life. That is one of the reasons we moved forward with this new project even though I knew that for the core Nat fan of a certain generation, this music was going to be really challenging for them."

Read more Nat King Cole is reinterpreted on 'Re: Generations'

The 74-year-old songwriter is touring America for the first time in 15 years. Why now? He felt the flicker.

Reporting from New York -- Bathed in the indigo light, Leonard Cohen leaned forward like a man eager to feel the wind on his face and, as the crowd at the Beacon Theatre in New York cheered, the 74-year-old singer narrowed his eyes and delivered another one of his unhurried, deep velvet threats:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Ten nights ago, Cohen performed his first U.S. concert since 1993 at the restored and resplendent Beacon, which instantly became the stuff of legend -- at least in the music circles where Cohen is regarded as one of the great living titans of songwriting. It didn't hurt, either, that the Montreal native arrived backstage with tantalizing mysteries tucked in that guitar case.

This is the man, after all, who in the 1990s walked away from show business to wear monk's robes at a Zen monastery near the resort village of Mount Baldy. Then, after returning to his old fedora, he announced in 2005 that he had been robbed blind by his longtime manager.

Either of those life experiences might have led the poet and troubadour to the Beacon stage with a humorless severity. They did not.

"It's been a long time since I stood on a stage in New York," Cohen told the adoring, star-studded crowd. "I was 60 years old then. Just a kid with a crazy dream . . . "

The marathon concert (almost three hours) at the Beacon was the 99th performance by Cohen and his supple band during their recent tour of the world, but just the beginning of a major return to America. The 28 dates now announced include an April 10 show at the Nokia Theatre (tickets for that show go on sale March 9) and, one week later, a performance in an unexpected setting -- the massive Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. There, the dapper songsmith will share a bill with Paul McCartney, Morrissey and Paul Weller, but also with bands such as the Killers, the Cure and My Bloody Valentine.

The day after the Beacon show, Cohen was clearly pleased with the warm ovations from the night before. His hotel suite at the Warwick Hotel afforded him a view of a Manhattan afternoon that was as crisp as his tailored suit and, when a visitor arrived for an interview, he turned down the twangy country music from his laptop computer and offered a cup of coffee.

"It's been a great trip, man, a lovely time," he said. "Have a seat."

Cohen had a considerable contingent of family and friends at the New York show (as well as recognizable fans such as Harvey Keitel, Rufus Wainwright and Richard Belzer) and he said that "all of us felt a sort of special edge on the night, all of us wanted to do good."

Cohen looks fantastic, trim and graceful, which is worth pointing out not just for reasons of chronological age, but because of the previous night's late labors and the long touring road that led up to it -- beginning in Canada and then going on to Ireland; Bucharest, Romania; and other European stops, before a run through New Zealand and Australia. "The next one, in Austin, Texas, in four weeks will be our 100th show," Cohen said, "and it's just grand. And then we'll do another 100."