In the Mix

Buying the new Radiohead album is like going to the museum on Sunday: It's pay as you wish. And it's also proof that even in the Internet age, a secret can be kept. In Rainbows, the new album by the Oxford, England outfit that stands alone when it comes to commanding a mass audience while exploring rock's experimental vanguard, wasn't supposed to come out until next year.

But in fact, it's coming out next Wednesday. And if you're hard up for cash, it's free. Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood et. al. announced today that Rainbows, their seventh studio album, will be available at Radiohead.com starting October 10 as DRM-free MP3 download. It's produced by their regular knob twiddler, Nigel Godrich, andcontains 10 songs, a bunch of which they played when they opened a U.S. tour at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby in June 2006.

You can get the music for free, or $9.99, or $1000, if Radiohead is your favorite charity. In Rainbows is available as either a download only, or as Discbox, a box set that includes the MP3s, plus double vinyl and CD versions of the album, plus a second disc with 8 additional songs. (Discboxes don't get shipped until Dec. 3 - though if you buy one, you'll be able to get get a download next week. They go for 40 British pounds, which translates to close to $80. And yes, they promise, an actual CD of Rainbows will be in stores, sometime in 2008. )

The whole enterprise is clearly designed to throw the music industry into a tizzy and spur further debate about proper pricing for music on Internet sites such as iTunes, where Radiohead refuses to make its music available. As with Prince, who gave away almost 3 million copies of his album Planet Earth though the U.K. newspaper the Mail on Sunday this summer, Radiohead is definitely an example of a band who can afford to give their music away, because of past success.

It's not a model that will work for everybody, but these guys can get away with it, because the good will the giveaway will generate will only grow their fan base. And diehard fans will cough up the 80 bucks for the Discbox to be able to hold their favorite band's new product in their hands. Plus, there's plenty of money to be made once they head out on tour, and not a penny that goes to thier record label.

In case you haven't heard, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band are at the Wachovia Center tonight and tomorrow. So maybe something magical will happen in South Philadelphia this week, after all. It's the Boss and E Streeters' first time through town since 2003, and the second stop on the tour for Magic , which came out Tuesday.

Just to give you a taste, here's a "Thunder Road" clip from back in the day, 1976 according to the nonspecific YouTube sourcing, with an excellent Jersey guy ad lib: "You ain't a beauty, but hey.. who is?" We'll have to wait until tonight to see if Springsteen is still up for sliding like this on his 58 year old knees...

Second Springsteen show at the Wachovia Center: better than the first. (A review of which is here.) Looser, smoother, more effortless. Not as rocked-out so much by the Boss' force of will as the natural momentum of the music. I heard a few complaints about the murky, too-loud sound mix after Friday's show, and it was boomy and abrasive where I sat on the left side of the stage the first night, but much better towards the back on Saturday.

Other assorted observations, from a second look. I liked the pairing of "Livin' In the Future" and "Promised Land": One about broken promises, the other about a stubborn belief that you can keep them, at least the ones you make to yourself. The introduction to "Livin'," which is Springsteen's main political speech of the night, however, weighs the song down with more baggage than it can hold. Is that jaunty, "10 Ave. Freeze Out"-ish number really about "rendition ... illegal wiretapping .. attack on our civil liberties" and "the things that are happening in the last six years" that is, under the Bush administration since Sept. 11 - "that aren't supposed to happen here"? Maybe to Bruce it is, but it seems to me he 's weighing it down with more political baggage than the song can hold. More to the point is the pithy line from "Last To Die," about the death toll in Iraq: "We don't measure the blood we've drawn anymore/We just stack the bodies outside the door."

The full band Little Walter-style roadhouse blues "Reason to Believe" is excellent, a nicely filled out and opened up version of the song that he did as an intentionally distorted foot stomp to start the Devils & Dust shows. Great Nils Lofgren slide playing, as well as Miami Steve's "Brian Jones teardrop guitar," as Stones authority Tom Sheehy put it...

All of the set list changes from the first night worked, with a surging "Night" as the opener, before "Radio Nowhere"; "Prove It All Night" in place of "No Surrender"; and "The Ties That Bind" instead of "Candy's Room." And the middle of the set got considerably juiced when, after Springsteen sang a duet with his wife Patti Scialfa on "Town Called Heartbreak," a tune from her Play It As It Lays that's got some 'Retha "Chain of Fools" energy, he gave it up for the old fans with a superb "Incident on 57th Street," one of his greatest, most sadly beautiful story songs, and, I must say, always my favorite from The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Give me an "Incident" this good, and I'll be just fine without "Rosalita." And that was followed by a ripping "Cadillac Ranch," during which Springsteen seemed to catch Steve Van Zandt unawares when he shouted out "Steve! Guitar solo!"

As for the encores, they were the same as the previous night, except for "Dancing In The Dark" replacing "Waitin' On A Sunny Day." "Thundercrack" was a goofy, good time, as always, but it's strange to me how it's attained such a mythic quality in the Springsteen catalog. I guess it's because it was never released around the time of it's conception, so it has a romantic allure. It was nice, though, that he gave a shout out to the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, though he nipped the cheers by chortling to himself "it didn't fit that many people, you couldn't have been there ..."

"American Land," it seems, is the Magic tour show closer, this year's "Land of Hope and Dreams." It's a song that represents a big, inclusive idea of America where there's room for everybody - "The Blacks, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans and the Jews/The Puerto Ricans, illegals, the Asians, Arabs miles from home" all of whom "come across the water with a fire down below." It sounds like the Pogues, and if anybody that isn't too bummed he didn't play "Thunder Road" wants to seek it out, it's a Springsteen original on the Live in Dublin CD from last year's tour with the Seeger Sessions Band.

Here's the set list:.

Night
Radio Nowhere
Prove It All Night
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
The Ties That Bind
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
The Promised Land
Town Called Heartbreak
Incident on 57th Street
Cadillac Ranch
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands

Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Thundercrack
Born to Run
Dancing In The Dark
American Land

Amy Levere She played rockabilly hellcat Wanda Jackson in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, turned up alongside Christina Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson in Black Snake Moan, and worked as a tour guide at Sun Studios. But Memphian Amy LaVere is a singer first, who specializes in a dark and dreamy country-blues-jazz blend. Her album Anchors & Anvils was produced by Jim Dickinson, who's done the same for the Replacements and Big Star and who's said that LaVere can "triple slap the double bass like Willie Dixon on steroids." She plays Milkboy Coffee in Ardmore at 7:30 tonight. Here's a clip of "Killing Him," in which a woman murders her husband of 30 years, and lives to regret it.

Sasha Frere-Jones has an argument starting essay in this week's New Yorker about the disappearing influence of black music on indie rock, in which he mourns the lack of musical miscegenation in contemporary pop and points out that acts like the Arcade Fire are so, well, white. (Not to mention Canadian.) Read it here.

Not sure how well this big idea holds up when you look at the little details on the ground, particularly indie bands such as the fabulously rhythmic LCD Soundsystem, as well as pretty darn funky electro pop acts like Hot Chip, Fujiya & Miyagi and the Rapture, all of whom are quite effective at their appointed tasks of getting (almost entirely white) audiences to dance themselves silly. Not to mention rock bands that shake their booties like Franz Ferdinand, or blog buzz bands such as Vampire Weekend, who've captured music geeks' attention by introducing African highlife guitars into the indie mix. And what about the White Stripes? Don't they play the blues, albeit with a drummer who doesn't exactly swing?

Still, there are larger points about segregation in pop music making, and the hip-hop rock divide, and the way the Internet super serves niche tastes, and the rise of Brian Wilson, as opposed to, say, James Brown, as an indie rock influence, that make plenty of sense. And I appreciated that F-J took a few shots at Wilco's overrated Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an alleged masterpiece whose brilliance has always escaped me.

And while we're on the topic, here's a sampling of a provocatively named indie band (pictured above) from Jacksonville that makes a musical counter argument. They're called Black Kids, and two of their members, Reggie Youngblood and his sister Ali, are half black, half Filipino, and two are as white as the Arcade Fire. They're unsigned, but won't be for long, and have two of my favorite song titles ever on their Wizard of Ahhhs EP: "I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You" and "I've Underestimated My Charm (Again)." Their music can he heard, and purchased, here.

Bob Dylan, Cadillac Escalade Commercial Rock and roll and Cadillacs have always gone together. They're pink in Elvis' "Baby, Let's Play House" and brand new on the Clash's London Calling. It was a long white one in which Hank Williams' spent his last night on Earth in a Dave Alvin song. Bruce Springsteen used them as a symbol of the graveyard we're all headed to in "Cadillac Ranch," and Dwight Yoakam made them as America as guitars and hillbilly music.

So I don't begrudge Bob Dylan for making a Cadillac commercial - hell, he already made a Victoria's Secret commercial. (Though the song he sold to the underthings company, "Love Sick," was satisfyingly twisted.) And really, what would be the point of begrudging Bob Dylan anything? He owes us nothing. I like his XM show Theme Time Radio Hour, and just the image of him driving a car is frankly enough to blow my mind. Never mind the leather gloves. And though I had to be told what in the world he was mumbling about - "What's life without the occasional detour?," it turns out to be. I must say that's a sentiment I heartily agree with. And I even approve of the music used as Bob barrels past cows on the side of the road: It's not a Dylan song, but Smog's scratchy, spooky "Held."

The only thing that really bugs me about Dylan's new Cadillac ad, in fact, is that slogan at the end: "Life. Liberty and the Pursuit." Shouldn't Thomas Jefferson be getting a piece of this pie? Since when did it become an inalienable American right to pile in an Escalade and blow past an 18 wheeler in the desert? And when did Dylan sign on to a materialist American Dream that reduces the Declaration of Independence to a marketing slogan?

What's that you say? It may not be an inalienable right, but its always been the American dream to put the pedal to the metal and leave your competition in the dust. That's mighty cynical of you, Bob. And that black cadillac sure does look like a hearse, riding on a lonely reaper's journey into the middle of no man's land. I guess the joke's on all those stuck-in-the-past fans of yours still hung up on thinking you're some sort of counter cultural firebrand. You get the last laugh, as always, and the check to drive all the way to the bank, in your big black Cadillac.

The Clash and k.d. lang beat him to the album cover concept, and Tom Waits goofed on on it with yellow and red instead of pink and green on his Rain Dogs LP. But none of them can play "Hound Dog" like Cyrus Chestnut. The Baltimore born jazz pianist found himself in a studio with a Chinese vocalist recording "Love Me Tender," and that set him on a path exploring the blues, country and gospel roots he shares with the King. And on Cyrus Plays Elvis, the results are more than just charming, and will make you hear the King with new ears. Chestnut is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art at 5 tonight. It's free with museum admission.

Porter Wagoner, R.I.P.