In the Mix

Are all the great rock song writers turning out to be thieves? First, Bob Dylan was accused of ripping off Confederate poet Henry Timrod. Now another titan has come under suspicion of larceny: Avril Lavigne, who is being sued by the '70s power pop group the Rubinoos', who allege that LaVigne's wickedly catchy "Girlfriend" is really their 1979 minor hit "I Want To Be Your Boyfriend" in disguise.

Say it ain't so, Avril. And in fact she has, in an emphatic denial on her web site where she also talks trash to fellow Canuck Chantal Kreviazuk, a former LaVigne collaborator who has suggested that the recent Blender cover girl pilfered a song title from her, and told Performing Songwriter magazine that LaVigne “doesn't really sit and write songs by herself or anything.”

(LaVigne, for her part, says "I am so over this topic" and "I am not going to sit here and defend my writing skills," and has threatened to sue Kreviazuk, who is now in a big hurry to retract all that bad stuff she inferred: "My statements and any inference from my statements, which call into question Avril's ethics or ability as a respected and acclaimed songwriter should be disregarded and are retracted," she said in a furiously backpedaling statement this morning.)

So are the Rubinoos a bunch of has beens looking for a quick payday, or do the two songs really "share the same musical DNA," as the band's Tommy Dunbar claims? To back up their claim, the Rubinoos' web site has snippets of both songs up, plus a portion of a 1996 "Boyfriend" cover by the British dreampop band Lush, who called it "I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend."

I'm pretty skeptical of most pop plagiarism claims, partly because so much of rock and roll is based on creative thievery. It's a murky gray area between influence, homage and out and out theft, and what gets called originality in pop music is often no more than stealing with style.

It's always seemed outrageous to me that Led Zeppelin could so blatantly borrow from old blues singers such as Memphis Minnie and Blind Willie Johnson and get away with it. But as George Harrison wrote in his autobiography, I Me Mine, in reference to the lawsuit over similarities, which he claimed were unconscious, between his "My Sweet Lord" and The Chiffons' "He's So Fine": "I still don't understand how the courts aren't filled with similar cases -- as 99 percent of the popular music that can be heard is reminiscent of something or other."

"Girlfriend" is certainly reminiscent of "I Want To Be Your Boyfriend." The choruses both shout out "Hey! Hey! You! You!" followed by either "I don't like your girlfriend!" or "I want to be your boyfriend!," in identical cadence, though they diverge musically once the hook is out of the way.

And as LaVigne's camp is quick to point out, that "Hey! You!" bit in the Rubinoos' original sounds a whole lot like the "Get Off My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones, those English blokes who, like Led Zep, though more stylishly, made their living pickpocketing their American forebears. And that's to say nothing of the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," which featured tall, deathly pale Joey Ramone expertly pitching woo three years before the Rubinoos used the same title (though the songs are entirely disimilar).

I don't begrudge the Rubinoos their complaint - though I wish they didn't have such a goofy name. It must be deeply galling to hear what you're convinced sounds like your own song on the radio as somebody else's ubiquitous hit.

But though LaVigne and her songwriting partner Luke Gottwald may or may not have consciously or unconsciously lifted the song - a question I'm betting will be settled out of court -as a music fan, I don't really care whether "Girlfriend" is an act of spontaneous creative inspiration or a blatantly inauthentic fraud. Either way, it's one of the best summer singles of 2007. But is it as good as Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend"? That's another question.

(Further update: celeb gossip monger Perez Hilton has this on his web site, drawing a comparison between LaVigne's "I Don't Have To Try" and Peaches' 2003 song "I'm the Kinda." Sounds like the same beat to me. No denials have yet been issued on this new sound bite front.)

I kinda feel bad for the Drive-By Truckers. Not that the post-Skynyrd Southern rockers, who play an acoustic show at the World Cafe Live tonight, find themselves in a pitiable situation. They just backed up ascendant 61 year old soul singer Betty LaVette on her new album, Scene of the Crime, due in September. Spooner Oldham, the great session man and songwriter who's played with Aretha Franklin and Neil Young, is on the road with the band for their promisingly titled The Dirt Underneath tour. The Truckers are on of the few great American rock bands alive, and in Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, they've got two formidably talented guitarist-songwriters.

But they used to have three. The one gone missing is Jason Isbell, who announced he was leaving the band (amicably) in April and whose excellent solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch, came out last week. (That's him next to last from the back in the photo above, with Cooley to his left, Hood to his right.) Isbell played the North Star this past Saturday and his lengthy set showed why he had to go. It's not that Isbell's detailed, richly evocative songs didn't fit in perfectly alongside Hood and Cooley's. And it's not just that he and Shonna Tucker, the bass player picture up front, used to be married and aren't anymore. It's that Isbell, who joined the Truckers on the tour to 2002's Southern Rock Opera, is too talented to be the third wheel in somebody else's band. That was clear from the two or three standout cuts he was writing on each of the last three Truckers albums, like the typically complicated statement of Red State identity "Never Gonna Change," which he and his Jack Daniels-swigging five piece band tore up on Saturday.

And it's readily apparent on Sirens of the Ditch, which is full of compelling narratives like the swampy "Down in a Hole," which contains about as a concise of a summation of the universality of human weakness ("She was trouble/But aren't we all?") as I can remember hearing in a pop song. Isbell writes songs with hooks aplenty, and he's a superb lead guitarist to boot. The killer cut on Sirens is "Dress Blues," a soldier's story that's not the least bit abstract, but sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows someone who's gone to war. Sure enough, the babyfaced Isbell dedicated the song at the North Star to a high school buddy who died in Iraq, before singing a chorus that observes that "Mamas and grandmas love you/You showed us what we had to lose/But you never planned on the bombs in the sand/Or sleeping in your dress blues."

For those not summoned to the command performance by the illustrious Gordon Sumner (and band) at Citizens Bank Park, it's a good night to go running around Philadelphia (and Camden) seeking out less familiar sounds.

Across the river in Wiggins Park, the Xponential Music Festival, which will be running all weekend (with a particularly strong lineup of local acts The A-Sides, Beretta 76, Bitter Bitter Weeks, plus the Fountains of Wayne, on Friday) gets underway, with Tower of Power, James Hunter and Slo-Mo featuring Mic Wrecka.

Back on the Philly side, at the Sanctuary at the First Unitarian, it's Battles, the New York math-rock, neo-prog, post-rock or whatever-you-want-to-call-it indie supergroup of sorts pictured above. Yeah, I know: all those intricate time signatures and experimental blending of organic musicianship and computer beats sounds hopelessly nerdy. But on Mirrored, these geeks make robotic music that's fanciful and almost childlike in its gleefulness. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, at the Troc, there's Gogol Bordello, the maniacally energetic gypsy punk band led by mustachoied Ukrainan born frontman Eugene Hutz. The band's latest frenetic Eastern bloc party, Super Taranta, came out last week. And Hutz has been making high profile friends lately, starring with Elijah Wood in Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and working with Madonna on her excellently tilted forthcoming short film, Filth & Wisdom, whose plot keywords, according to IMDB.com, include "dominatrix," "cultural revolution" and "poetry." And oh yeah, Hutz and GB violinist Sergey Ryabtsev joined Madge for a recent high profile gig, giving "La Isla Bonita" an extreme makeover. Take a look.

1. Nicole Willis & the Soul Investigators, Keep Reachin' Up. The retro-soul movement reaches further afield than Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings and tattoed beehive Amy Winehouse in London. Nicole Willis was raised in Brooklyn and has sung with Curtis Mayfield and Dee Lite, but didn't really get her old school groove on until she moved to Helsinki and hooked up with nine Finnish guys, plus her producer/husband Jimi Tenor. Keep On reaches back to classic James Brown, Motown and Philly soul, and feels like a vintage reissue, though it's brand new. It's out on Light In The Attic Records, who just put out the two discs by '70s funkstress Betty Davis. "Keep reaching up for the real thing," Willis sings. This is it. Check out the single "If This Ain't Love (I Don't Know What Is)" here.

2. "Kiss Kiss," Yeah Yeah Yeahs." Lead track from the Karen O led trio's terrific new IS IS EP rocks out in style and lets high haired guitarist Nick Zinner cut loose. The band plays the Electric Factory on Aug. 13.

3. You're Gonna Miss Me. Like Terry Zwigoff's Crumb and Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Kevin McAlester's documentary about 13th Floor Elevator's main man Roky Erickson tells the story of a tortured artist through the prism of mental illness and a deeply dysfunctional family. Erickson's blood curdling psychedelic rock screaming on mid-60s Elevators' classics like "You're Gonna Mis Me," seemed to mark him for greatness, but instead he wound up an acid and shock treatment casualty, convinced he was an alien and unable to get to sleep with without multiple TVs and radios blasting to drown out the sounds inside his head. The movie uses talking head testimony from Billy Gibbons, Thurston Moore and Patti Smith and focuses on the struggles of Erickson's brother Sumner, a tuba player in the Pittsburgh Symphony, to get the schizophrenic Texas back into reasonable mental health and out of the care of their seriously disturbed mother, Evelyn. Just how remarkably well he succeeds is measured by the movie's extras, which include astonishingly vital live performances from 2005 and 2006, when he ripped it up at the SXSW Music Festival. Out now on DVD.

Me either. It's comedian Zack Galifianakis, who stars, along with indie rocker and actor Will Oldham - another bearded dude who also doesn't look like Kanye West

that, these days, records as Bonnie Prince Billy and was great in Kelly Reichardt's beautifully melancholy 2006 movie Old Joy - as a couple of chainsaw wielding/tractor driving farmer types in an alternative video treatment of West's single "Can't Tell Me Nothing." It strange, to say the least.

This is another case of professional showbiz types horning in on YouTube territory. People like to post short, funny home made videos on YouTube, so Will Ferrell and his buddies got into business of making short, funny look-like-their-home-made videos on Funny or Die.

And Kanye, seen here with his feet on fire, is working hard to make sure that Graduation, his album that's due Sept. 11, the same day that 50 Cent's Curtis comes out - burns up the charts upon its release. So, having already made his own video for "Can't Tell Me" which you can watch here, makes another version just like the funny ones people make on YouTube, only you have to go to his web site to watch it.

I saw a couple of wild-eyed and wickedly intense rock bands this weekend, on opposite ends of I-95. One of them was the White Stripes in Wilmington on Friday night, which there's a review of in the Monday Inquirer.

The other was Rage Against The Machine, the rap-rock headliners at the Rock the Bells festival at Randalls Island in New York on Saturday, who were playing their second gig since reuniting at the Coachella Festival in April. (At that date in the California desert, Rage‘s first since splitting in 1999, singer Zach de la Rocha made some incendiary remarks about George W. Bush that he took time to clarify on Saturday.)

Rock the Bells is the biggest hip-hop tour of the summer 2007, though it’s not coming to Philadelphia, or D.C., for that matter. In most cities, the Wu Tang Clan, who have a new album due this fall, are the headliners. But on five dates – two in NY, plus shows coming up in Chicago and California – the reunited members of Rage (frontman de la Rocha, plus guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk, who played together in the fopgettable Audioslave) top the bill.

Along with the Che Guevara and Bob Marley shirts at the festival in which almost all the guys on stage and hardly any of the guys in the audience were black, I saw a bunch of people in the crowd wearing shirts that read Hip Hop Is NOT Dead.

That’s a response to Nas, who stated the opposite in the title to an album that came out late last year. (And who joins Rock the Bells in Atlanta on Tuesday). But while it was nice to see rap fans acting proud of their culture, a more accurate and to-the-point T-shirt would have read: Hip Hop Is OLD.

Taking a look around made that unequivocally clear, and argued that the hip-hop concert business is becoming more and more like the rock concert business: the young bands have the hits, while the old bands sell the tickets.

Everybody I saw on the main stage in seven hours at what had to be the dirtiest music festival I’ve ever been to in my life (with an absurd shortage of trash cans, fans had no choice but to toss their overpriced empty beer and Vitamin water bottles on the ground) had been around, and then some.

Most of the headliners origins go back to at least the early ‘90s – from the Wu Tang, whose first album came out in 1993, to proud pot smokers Cypress Hill, to Philadelphia’s The Roots, who sounded as vital as ever, playing a horn happy late afternoon set that was partly a show stopping display of the hyper speed rhyming skills of rapper Black Thought, and partly an old time soul revue.

And that’s not to mention Public Enemy, the once incomparable Black Power rappers whose heyday was the late 1980s. Backed by a live band plus a DJ, PE broadsides like “Bring the Noise” and “Shut ‘Em Down” still sounded potent, but their set had the perhaps inevitable air of an oldies acts rehashing its hits. Main mouthpiece Chuck D seemed a little too eager to demonstrate his continued virility as he jumped down and started doing push ups like Jack Palance. (Though with two hands, not one.) And while he went out of his way to praise sidekick Flavor Flav as one of the greatest hype men in history, that apparently wasn’t enough for the reality TV star, who took the time out to introduce his children to the crowd, demonstrate his rudimentary drumming skills and do some advance publicity for his upcoming celebrity roast on Comedy Central.

There was also a second Paid Dues stage at Rock the Bells, devoted to alt-hip-hop that , along with the Roots and Rage, provided the best evidence of creative life on Saturday. Over there, I heard the Living Legends a crew from L.A. and San Francisco unburdened by machismo who paraded six rappers each a sharper rhymer than the previous. And I also caught Brother Ali, a pale-skinned Minneapolis MC who showed himself to be impressively verbally dexterous on the mic on his Nina Simone-sampling single “Uncle Sam Goddamn.“ (He prefaced the song by calling Simone “the greatest artist in history,” an example of hip-hop hyperbole that might not seem like that much of an exaggeration to anyone who’s heard how great her music sounds in the Italian immigration art house hit movie Golden Door.)

For most of the day, calls for audience participation were met with lukewarm response, even from Method Man, Ghostface Killah, the RZA and the other Wu Tang hometown heroes. The reason for that was clear once the headliners hit: the football field sized crowd full of pumped up guys were tolerant of the other acts, but were really there to get back in touch with their Rage.

De la Rocha and Morello’s band has always shouted out from the Left. They’re ardent supporters of Mumia Abu Jamal, and back in 1993 when the Lollapalooza tour played South Philadelphia they protested against censorship in music by appearing on stage naked with duct tape over their mouths and the letters ‘PMRC’ scrawled across their chests. (If you want to find pictures on the Internet, it’s not hard, no pun intended.)

So it’s not surprising that the re-united Rage have come out swinging politically in their post-Sept. 11 incarnation. At Randall’s Island, de la Rocha said that President Bush “should be brought to trial as a war criminal and hung and shot” (which would likely seem redundant to even his fiercest enemies) and called Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney “the real assassins.” That’s one sure way to get on Bill O’Reilly’s dark side.

But whatever you think of their politics, there’s no denying the power of Rage’s music. Whether he’s making his guitar sound like a scratching-DJ or a helicopter or firing off spiraling call-the-ambulance leads, Morello - who told me in an interview in June when he was on tour as The Nightwatchman that Rage had “no plans whatsoever” beyond the Rock the Bells dates - is a genuine innovator on guitar. And his bag of tricks works perfectly with the rhythm section’s hard-rock-and-funk fusion.

In songs like “Bulls on Parade” and “Testify,” the Rage attack is all about meeting what the band portrays as criminal negligence and belligerence of the world’s haves with an equally emphatic show of musical force. The still-wiry de la Rocha spits and shrieks out lyrics that concisely condemn the militarism of the Right (“They rally ‘round the family/With a pocketful of shells”) while stalking the stage as if he’s been mainlining Red Bull, and occasionally leaping in the air like a frizzy haired Jack in the Box.

Do all the shirtless Rage fans care about the band’s politics? Some do, undoubtedly. But though the scene at Rock the Bells resembled a Nuremberg Rally in its fist-pumping intensity during Rage’s closing set, that wasn’t unified political passion on display. It was collective enthusiasm for the return of a great live band, a hip-hop infused rock powerhouse that, after eight years in exile, is back at full strength, and ready for the here and now.