When the stage crew set up a large screen behind the small stage at the former Carnegie library that is now home to the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, audience members might have anticipated some sweet multimedia. One Day As a Lion, the project combining the talents of Rage Against the Machine town crier Zack de la Rocha and ex-Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore, was about to play its second-ever live show. A barrage of images, maybe ripped from news sites on the Web, would complement the band's political lyrics and multi-directional avant-rock sound.

The screen remained blank, though, after De La Rocha, Theodore and keyboardist Joey Karam tromped onstage to excited applause and began a 40-minute set. It was merely there to block the sunlight streaming through the large glazed window behind the band. The late-afternoon sun still found its way in, lending a beatific glow to De la Rocha's wiry mop of hair. He looked about as happy as a restless 40-year-old rock star could be.

One Day As a Lion released an EP in 2008, but didn't play any live shows. It seemed that the project might only serve as an experiment for its two principals -- a kind of two-man retreat through which each would rethink the already challenging rock sounds they'd already developed in their better-known groups. But this set and the one ODAAL performed the previous afternoon in Pomona featured new music alongside the song from their debut -- and a new member, Karam, who freed De la Rocha from his own keyboard, allowing him to step out and stir up the crowd while delivering his rapid-fire verbal flow. This trio was fully armed for present and future assaults.

Arizona's loss is Los Angeles' gain in live music, apparently: Rage Against the Machine and Conor Oberst have just announced a one-off show at the Hollywood Palladium on July 23 to support the Sound Strike's boycott of Arizona in the wake of the controversial SB 1070.

The concert will raise funds for a number of immigrant-activist organizations, including the community organizing group Puente, Arizona and the Florence Project, which provides legal counsel and social services to immigrant communities. The show will be Rage's first in Los Angeles proper in 10 years. An on-sale date for tickets has not been announced yet.

[UPDATE: Tickets go on-sale Monday, July 19 at 10:00 a.m.]

-- August Brown

Photo by Alberto Martin / EPA

Politically charged New York rock group Outernational has enlisted Tom Morello for a new recording of Woody Guthrie’s poignant immigration ballad “Deportees” that the band is making available as a free download in response to Arizona’s recent law targeting illegal immigrants.

The group has put out the song, arranged as a accordion-driven waltz, ahead of a planned protest against the law in Arizona on Saturday, which band members say they will attend.

“We recorded 'Deportees' with Tom Morello and are going down to Arizona on May 29th to stand with all the people courageously fighting back against these unjust and immoral laws,” Outernational’s Miles Solay said in a statement issued this week. “Outernational is about a whole new world, a world without borders and nations. Todos somos illegales. We are all illegals.”

Morello, long known for his own politically provocative music with Rage Against the Machine and the Nightwatchman, said, “Prejudice and ignorance are at the core of Arizona's recent immigration legislation and Woody Guthrie's ‘Deportees’ was written to combat just that sort of prejudice."

Guthrie wrote the song following a 1948 plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon in Central California, killing 28 Mexican migrant workers and four Americans. The New York Times report of the crash listed the names of the three flight crew members and a security guard, but referred to the Mexican workers only as “deportees."

It was originally popularized by Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger and subsequently covered by numerous artists including Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Guthrie’s son Arlo and Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen, the Kingston Trio, Dolly Parton and the Byrds.

Outernational featuring Tom Morello - "Deportee" [MP3]

--Randy Lewis

The Street Sweeper Social Club's cover of M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" contains multitudes. When guitarist Tom Morello tossed off the opening riff of the song, a sample of the Clash's "Straight to Hell," it was unclear where the song was headed. Would it go to Joe Strummer's "If you can play on the fiddle" line? Or would it land on MIA's "I fly like paper get high like planes"? It was the latter, and SSSC, the rap rock super group featuring Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, and the Coup's incendiary lead singer, Boots Riley, tore into the song. Morello rode that menacing Clash riff while Riley rapped Maya Arulpragasam's words. As the song moved to the expert shotgun-cracks in the chorus, the guitarist moved his instrument like a weapon, blowing out into the audience.

The Social Club proved something important: that rap and rock, such a treacherous pairing given its history of appealing to the testosterone-heavy, shirtless frat-dudes, can be strong and beautiful, smart and angry. The band drew from the hard funk of Living Color, the rolling funk of Funkadelic, the rhythmic funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the angular riffage of the Minutemen, the global fury of M.I.A. and, well, Tom Morello. It was potent, vital, and incredibly powerful.

- Randall Roberts

Photo: Boots Riley, left, and Tom Morello of Street Sweeper Social Club performed on the main stage on Friday, the opening day of the three-day Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival on the Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio, Calif. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

The Grammy Museum has landed an impressive roster of artists for its series of question-and-answer and performance sessions in the year since it opened at the L.A. Live complex downtown. Among the participants: Brian Wilson, Smokey Robinson, Annie Lennox, Dwight Yoakam, Herb Alpert, Harry Connick Jr. and Clive Davis, Rage Against the Machine / The Nightwatchman’s Tom Morello and Dave Matthews.

But even in such rarefied company, a former Beatle commands special attention, which helped explain the star-dotted turnout for Tuesday night’s drop-in by Ringo Starr. In the house: guitarist Joe Walsh (an official member of the family since his 2008 marriage to Marjorie Bach, the sister of Starr’s wife, Barbara Bach), George Harrison’s singer-songwriter-guitarist son, Dhani Harrison, E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, rocker Edgar Winter and Roy Orbison’s widow, Barbara.

“The tickets sold out in eight minutes -- that’s a new record for the museum,” executive director Robert Santelli said during his introduction for Starr, who came as part of promotional efforts for his just-released album, “Y Not.”

Santelli quizzed Starr about serving on the new album as producer for the first time. Looking snappy and trim in a black suit jacket over an Elvis Presley T-shirt he’d just picked up in the museum’s store, dark glasses, black jeans and running shoes, Starr said he had to overcome some trepidation about taking over the production role, but relished realizing that the time had come when “I’ll tell the guitarist what to do.”

He addressed the presence of Paul McCartney on two of the new tracks: singing harmony on the single “Walk With You” and playing bass on “Peace Dream,” a song that invokes the name and longtime peace message of John Lennon. “He understands my drumming,” Starr deadpanned, “because we used to play together.”

If Rage Against the Machine's live show on Wednesday is to be believed, the only societal plague as bad as homelessness is Simon Cowell.

The "American Idol" host was the villain of a rare get-together for the Los Angeles rock group. The audio was broadcast live on BBC "Radio 5 Live." A camera crew was also present, so expect footage to eventually show up online along with a possible DVD release.

The concert was to promote the band's single, "Killing in the Name" -- which is actually a song from 1992. In a good ol' British romp, Rage Against the Machine is pitting the 17-year-old track against a single by Joe McElderry, the Cowell-backed pop singer, for the title of Britain's No. 1 Christmas single.

Rage Against the Machine's merry battleground has mostly been on Facebook, where fans are rallying for "Killing in the Name." Bad news for McElderry, who won Cowell's "X Factor" British reality TV show -- his cutesy song is trailing.

Now, we get the whole benefiting homeless thing, and sure, Cowell is a twit, but what's the big deal?

Rage guitarist Tom Morello is publicly expressing his sickness of all the manufactured ballads and the dumbing down of popular music. Yeah, we get that junk in the States, too, old chap.

Venting about Cowell, the band's frontman Zach de la Rocha told NME, "He seems to have profited greatly off humiliating people on television and has a unique position of capturing the attention of people on television, but also the airwaves."

Paul McCartney, one of the biggest pop stars of all time and one who has appeared on that "X Factor" program, chimed in, saying, "It would be kind of funny if Rage Against the Machine got it, because it would prove a point."

Funny is right. We're going to grab a cup of tea, and watch merrily as the machine gets raged against.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Photo: Kiko Huesca / EPA

It was no accident that on tax-reckoning day, the same day Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was holding a forum in downtown L.A. to address the Golden State's buckling economy, Bruce Springsteen put a decidedly California spin on his overarching musical message about holding onto hope even in the face of such hard times.

Springsteen invited local political firebrand Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine/the Nightwatchman fame, to join him on stage Wednesday at the first of two consecutive nights at the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a savage duet on "The Ghost of Tom Joad," the Boss' 1995 Steinbeck- inspired treatise on those who've been let down or forgotten in the promised land:

He pulls a prayer book out of his sleeping bag
Preacher lights up a butt and takes a drag
Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last
In a cardboard box 'neath the underpass

He and Morello traded impassioned verses, with E Street Band guitarists "Miami" Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren ceding the spotlight to Morello for a rapid-fire solo that screamed outrage. During the encore segment, Morello returned for a choir-like reading of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More."

Springsteen might have stumped for Barack Obama and played at the White House following his election, but he knows that systemic change doesn't happen overnight and that hope remains a fragile thing in troubled times.

Rifling through his ever-expanding songbook, he stitched together a set focused less on promoting his latest album, “Working on a Dream,” than on shoring up hope while acknowledging how much work still needs to be done to fulfill the American dream.

"We're here with a mighty purpose in mind!" the 59-year-old Jerseyite told a sea of cheering onlookers after the first handful of songs. "We're gonna rock the house! But we're not only going to rock the house, we're going to build a house. We're going to take fear and build a house of love; we're going to take sadness and build a house of joy; we're going to take doubt and build a house of faith; we're going to take despair and build a house of hope."

Prior to Tuesday evening, when Tom Morello was last seen on stage in Los Angeles, he was spearheading a benefit for various homeless advocacy groups at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood, performing with the likes of Wayne Krame and Slash. The one-on-one setting Tuesday night at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles was a bit more grown-up than a rock 'n' roll show, but the Rage Against the Machine member stayed on point, and even brought a little unpredictably to the recently opened nonprofit institution.

The Grammy Museum launched with a politics-in-music exhibit titled "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom," and the discussion, led by the museum's executive director, Robert Santelli, neatly tied in with the theme. With a nod to one of the artist's at the centerpiece of the exhibit, the night closed with Morello, who rose to prominence as one of the alt-rock era's most adventurous guitarists, leading the 200-seat theater through a determined take on Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land." Disregarding the nervous glances from the small security staff, the suburban Illinois-raised artist instructed the audience stand and jump through the final verse.

Before the rousing finale, however, Santelli led an engagingly thoughtful discussion through Morello's career, focusing largely on the influence of politics and activism. Everything from schoolyard racism to the music business to Morello's thoughts on President Obama were touched on. As Morello pointed out, there's more than one similarity between the artist and our nation's 44th president. In addition to ties to the Chicago area, both were born to a Kenyan father and white mother, and each did time at Harvard in the '80s.

Reporting from Phoenix -- Zack de la Rocha, lead singer of the rock band Rage Against the Machine, helped lead a rally through the streets of Phoenix today in a bid to end the practices of an Arizona county sheriff who Rocha said had “deputized vigilantes” and created a “state of terror” for local Latinos.

Thousands of people marched about four miles from the Steele Indian School Park to the U.S. District Court of Arizona on Washington Street, chanting “No more Joe” and “Arpaio escucha, estamos en la lucha” –- which translates from Spanish to “Arpaio listen, we’re in the struggle.”

At issue is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s enforcement of federal immigration law. Some activists say he has unfairly targeted the Latino community. Arpaio says he is simply doing his job and told The Times in a phone interview that today's protest would not "deter" him from fulfilling his duties.

“Without the proper warrants, he raids the homes and workplaces of janitors and gardeners,” De la Rocha told demonstrators at the end of the rally. “At routine traffic stops he detains and deports mothers, violently separating them from their children, who are left abandoned.”

Local rock activist Tom Morello has a March 31 date with the Grammy Museum. The Rage Against the Machine guitarist will appear at the institution's 200-seat, second-floor theater for an interview and a brief acoustic performance. Tickets go on sale Monday for members of the downtown Los Angeles museum. Tickets for nonmembers will go on sale Thursday (March 5).

Morello is the latest artist to sign on for the museum's "an evening with" program. The Grammy Museum's executive director, Robert Santelli, will conduct the interview with Morello, which will be followed by a question-and-answer session with fans and a short acoustic performance. Artists who have previously appeared on the Grammy Museum stage include Annie Lennox, Brian Wilson and Charlie Haden.

Morello, who also performs folk rock under the Nightwatchman moniker, ties in nicely with the museum's first major exhibit, the politically focused "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom." Morello is reported to be working on an album with Boots Riley, leader of Bay Area hip-hop act the Coup. The two performed together in Los Angeles toward the end of 2008.

And for those still in need of Saturday night plans, the Nightwatchman will perform tonight at 514 S. Spring St. in downtown Los Angeles as part of a benefit for International Women's Day. Doors open at 8 p.m., and it's $20.

Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum, 800 W. Olympic Blvd., Tuesday, March 31, 8 p.m. Tickets are $17.95 for museum members and  $19.95 for the general public; they go on sale for members on Monday. Members can purchase their tickets by calling the museum box office at (213) 765-6803. For more information, call (213) 765-6800 or visit www.grammymuseum.org.

-- Todd Martens

Photo: Sean Ricigliano /Associated Press