Chris Robinson News

It's not even Halloween yet, and just look at all these great costumes. Somewhere around UNLV's Sam Boyd stadium, Chris Robinson is pretending he's Mick Jagger. Jack Gillis is pretending he's someone called Jack White. Chan Marshall is pretending she's Cat Power. Trey Anastasio, 42, is pretending he's Trey Anastasio, 24.

But this is Vegas — nothing is as it seems, and there's a faux version of everything. On the strip, tourists visit Paris, New York, and Rome within the same block. At the festival's "Impersonator's Cafe," fake Willie Nelson is shooting the breeze with Elvis, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jackson. Somewhere down the road, deeper into the desert, where death hangs a bit thicker (or is it less thick?) in the air, some poor girl is probably trying to evoke some poor guy's fantasy date. Las Vegas reeks of apocalypse, and that's OK. After all, this is also a city about American possibility, however grotesque, corrupted or conflated. All of this just makes it a better place to flesh out the meaning of rock 'n' roll.

Bonnaroo, Superfly Productions' first major undertaking, began as an attempt to prove that the American rock festival was commercially viable. Now that it's survived, it's become an arena for the battle between rock's greatest dream, that it can affect people and anticipate social change, and it's greatest nightmare, that when it's marketed only to those already receptive to its messages it becomes just another form of industry. The Vegoose festival, fledgling child of the Superfly family, is an even more appropriate venue to examine the fundamental question of whether rock 'n' roll maintains any inherent value beyond being another of the myriad recreational activities that define life in America's accelerated culture.

Vegoose offered two diametrically opposed responses to that question as it landed in Vegas at the end of October. As a weekend of spectacle, one-off collaborations and inspired performances, it advertises the singularity of live music. On the other hand, with its live webcasts, Digital Music Village, sponsor tents, costume shops and cell phone advertisements, it works just as hard to collapse that claim, framing rock, as Lawrence Grossberg once wrote, as "just another moment of hegemonic leisure." The most entrepreneurial capitalists here are the hippies. But festivals like Vegoose move beyond the sentiment that capitalism crushed rock to examine a far more interesting claim: that rock has played an instrumental role in the construction and preservation of consumer society.

If rock is dying, it should probably be here — in a rhinestone-embedded jumpsuit, with a plate of fried peanut butter sandwiches, a backpack full of pills, and a head full of sweet ideas about what it used to be. But there's life in the old beast yet.

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Halfway through a charming afternoon set, the very beautiful Cat Power is informed that her guitar is broken. A minute later, she also flubs a verse. A year ago, this is precisely the type of thing that would have sent Chan Marshall into one of her famed psychological tailspins. But it's true what they're saying: Cat Power is growing up, at least as a performer, and it suits her.

The better part of her newfound poise undoubtedly owes to the Memphis Rhythm Section she's played with during and since the release of "The Greatest" — a team of Motown veterans that lay out sultry, airtight grooves in their sleep. The music they play, both laid back and precise, is about composure. By contrast, Marshall — who when she isn't engaging in a variety of self-consciously awkward kicks, poses, or gallops, is wringing her hands, fussing with her hair, or manually acting out her lyrics — continues to be defined by the discomfort she feels in her own skin. The two complement each other beautifully. The band reveals the strength, sex, and self-assurance that lurk beneath the vulnerability in Marshall's songs, and, in kind, she makes their relaxed music nervous, emotionally wrought. "There's nothing like living in a bottle," the recovering alcoholic crooned in "Lived in Bars," her voice all smoke and satin, her hands writhing just beneath her waist. Behind her, the music just seemed to blush.

When an artist creates an alternate identity, two forces, not necessarily opposed but bound by a kind of vanity, are at work: self conscious concealment and narcissistic conflation. While the traces of Jack White or Bob Dylan's autobiographical identities are largely spectral in their art, it's the competition between those two forces that makes Marshall such a mesmerizing performer. What's charming, and sad, about her is that she seems to believe in her art more than she believes in herself. But Saturday, as always, it was in the moments where Chan Marshall antagonized or threatened the Cat Power facade — when her voice broke and frayed gorgeously — that her music sublimed.

"What's your name?" a drug-addled fan shouted before her encore. "Chan," Marshall said softly. Then, shrugging, she slid into a sexy faux-Italian accent and flexed a bicep. "Cat Power, baby."

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"I have three fathers," Jack White once told Rolling Stone. "My biological father, God, and Bob Dylan." Creatively speaking, there's some accuracy to that. Like Dylan, White has, quite literally, invented himself out of his obsessions, and he makes his music the same way. Both have a preternatural feel for manipulating rock idioms, and have revealed their own unique voices through the archetypes they coolly command. Where the White Stripes strung a Stooges obsession to deep blues, The Raconteurs, his new creative outlet, deals with everything the minimalism resisted, encasing Zep-heavy, glam-kissed retro-rock within a shimmering Beatles-esque pop. The Raconteurs' special magic lies in what they evoke: an age where there was an identifiable rock and roll canon — with its own paragon of universally accepted deities — and a moment within that age, albeit short, where rock and pop were the same thing.

Before the band takes the stage Saturday afternoon, we listen to a front-row fan get interviewed for a documentary on people who wait hours at festivals to ensure security-rail position for their favorite acts. "So who are The Raconteurs?" the director asks. "Well it's Jack White," the man begins, grinning, "and, ummm, his band." This would have driven White up the wall. Since it's inception, the band has been obsessed with insisting upon itself as a democracy. That's something of a white lie (to risk a pun) but works well is explaining how good they are: Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence are as solid a rhythm section as you'll find (Keeler, floating and banging his way through the band's set, served particular notice as a great drummer), and White and Benson's songwriting sensibilities interweave as seamlessly as their vocals. Benson is a master of the meticulously crafted pop form, and White — as much a revivalist as he is an iconoclast — is about taking those forms and corrupting them. Where The Black Crowes, who came off as just another Vegas tribute act, are ultimately controlled by the classic rock ideas they engage, White's stamp is on every idiom he touches. Moreover, he can play with those conventions even within the framework of his own songs. Midway through its performance, the band spun its squealing amp-breaker "Store Bought Bones" into a slow-burn blues dirge.

Recently, though, White — truly one of the most arresting performers of his age — has been more willing to acknowledge his authority and let his Detroit tantrums invade his new band's sound. The best moments of The Raconteurs set came when he took their music and throttled it. With White front and center for the last song, the sultry Zep-vamp "Blue Veins" quivered, shook and then exploded. Just behind the man who now seemed validated by his assessment of the group as a benevolent dictatorship, a woman held up another sign: THE RACONTEURS OWE ME CAR SPEAKERS. "I love you too, honey," White said.

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It must have been nice for The Killers to get back home to Las Vegas. After all, the uber-stylish band has taken a lot of grief recently. It could be Brandon Flowers eyeliner, or his unfortunate new facial hair. It could be because of the way he picks ideological fights with other bands, or because he recently said their mediocre Springsteen suck up "Sam's Town," named after the same Oklahoma entrepreneur whose name adorns this football stadium, should be held up against "OK Computer" or "Achtung Baby." Actually, those things are more funny than irritating.

What may be most disturbing about The Killers, like Las Vegas — this beacon of self-indulgence in the middle of a desert — is the emptiness that underscores their melodrama. An idea to consider or ignore entirely: There's something to be written about the conjuncture of 9/11 and the resurgence of new-wave, a type of music where existential excess and nihilism occupy the same space. The Killers would be a good band to focus on. On "Hot Fuss," a vast undercurrent of soulessness ran beneath their tales of decadence, flirtation, and fantasy. The same is true for a new album in which they sing about Jesus and the corruption of American ideals. They seem genuinely disaffected, which is confusing, because they don't seem to believe in anything. But maybe this isn't that perplexing: Flowers makes the type of music you would expect of a boy who grew up in this city, so saturated with American fantasies gone wrong that he can't help but be obsessed with them even as they've ceased to have any real meaning. No wonder he's a Springsteen fan.

But they're just as defined by the accelerated culture their hometown also embodies: Where bands like The Raconteurs and Black Crowes drew inspiration from more antiquated sources, The Killers paint their Cure and Smiths-based canvases with indie-rock idioms which are still developing. "It's Indie-rock and roll for me," Flowers conceded in song, prancing around the stage in a slim-fitting purple suit and tilting his microphone into the crowd. I'm not sure what that means, or even that Flowers does, but somehow I've never believed him more. Also, in that exact moment, I realized that the person adjusting their skull-cap next to me was Ryan Cabrera. Ah, Sin City, where crazy things seem normal and normal things seem crazy.

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There are those, of course, that grew up regarding ol' Tom Petty as a stoned, slightly more cheesy, less relevant Bob Dylan. Though he's really one of our great songwriters, his symbolic importance, for one reason or another, has always been a little hazy. But if you're in Vegas, you should listen to Tom Petty. It's therapeutic. Dressed in a leather fringe Western jacket so psychotically out of style only he could pull it off (though it was augmented by a purportedly uber-expensive scarf, which may or may not be metaphoric), Petty seemed to unearth all the confused American optimism that still runs beneath this town — the same optimism that Vegoose and Bonnaroo drew from an embalmed Woodstock archetype. For that matter, his set managed to reconcile the two groups that make festivals like this move: Baby Boomers looking to reclaim the meaning they once held in rock's universe, and a new youth culture trying to convince themselves they can hold comparable idealistic significance in an era that relentlessly commodifies them. The Heartbreakers, spearheaded by the perpetually underappreciated guitarist Mike Campbell, remain a smoking-hot outfit.

Remember that scene in "Jerry Maguire" where Tom Cruise (of all people) flips through radio stations trying to look for the perfect song to capture his euphoria over signing Cushman, and he ultimately chooses "Freefalling"? That's what we're talking about here. Petty is that rare artist who makes music that can define a part of your life whether you care about that piece of music or not, which is quite an accomplishment. For those of us born between the years 1975 and 1982, watching him play can be one of the most intense confrontations with adolescence art has to offer. Songs like "Freefalling" and "American Girl" are so embedded in the cultural fabric they should be cliched pap by now. Instead, they were completely poignant, even thrilling in certain moments, containing something golden-hued and prelapsarian.

Las Vegas is a graveyard of American Dreams, and cynicism has been a cheap resource in rock 'n' roll since the moment Nirvana became popular (at least). But Petty, a man who sings about Elvis and the Great Wide Open and pretty girls who love their mother and Jesus as if those things still matter, embodied the sentiment that though we can apply irony to those ideals, they still maintain some intrinsic worth, meaning, and charm. "The good old days," he sang. "May not return, and the rock might melt, and the sea may burn." An inconvenient truth. You know what I say to that, Tom? Oh yeaaaaah. Allllriiggght. Take it easy baaaby. Make it last all night — make it last all night!

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I'm almost beginning to suspect that Fiona Apple has been through some bad relationships.

Backstage before her Sunday afternoon performance, Apple wrung her arms helplessly around her drummer's shoulders and buried her head into the nape of his neck. They stood there like that for minutes, swaying romantically like a sad hipster couple — it looked as if he let her go, she would wilt or crumble. Two minutes later Apple strode on stage, sat down at the piano, and launched into "Get Him Back," a snarling piano freak-out about romantic revenge. "Wait till I get him back," Apple moaned above a crowd of shirtless, bewildered hippies. "He won't have a back to scratch." Yikes. Generally, these are the type of bipolar juxtapositions that make up her music, and which fleshed out her set.

Apple burst onto the pop scene in her underwear as a teenager, and her music is still borne out of arrested emotional development, defined as much by romantic idealism as by a hefty dose of unresolved rage. She still writes smart, relentlessly self-revealing lyrics, chock full of therapy speak, and she rarely concedes to editing what she has to say for the purposes of making a song work easier. In part, it's her feel for and commitment to the eccentric shape of her lines that makes her music so complicated and interesting. She can also manufacture as chilling a one-liner as anyone. But the real psychological disruption of Apple's music is stored in her compositions and arrangements, which range from the simplest, emaciated piano ballad to morbid vaudeville that moves with the same manic unpredictability as her words. On top of those canvases, she threw her voice around impressionistically — a bit of jazzy vibrato there, a twirling Billy Holiday flight of fancy, and, more often than not, moan, a hiss or a shriek. Apple's performances are more punk than any garage rock band you'll see in a Henry Rollins documentary. She spent nearly as much time screaming to herself (or someone-off microphone) as she did singing, and threw a series of physical tantrums that jerked her spastically around the stage.

Ultimately, though, Apple was at her best when in greatest control, as well as when she was mature enough to implicate herself in her trauma. In a nice bit of duality, the encore pitted "Criminal" — the rumbling dirge of self-condemnation she wrote at age 16 — and "Parting Gift," a stark piano requiem off "Extraordinary Machine" which may be the best song she's ever written, partially because it contains the sense of closure and resolution that the rest of her music pines after. Where she sang the former through gritted teeth, the latter was almost sweet. "Oh you, silly, stupid, pastime of mine," Apple crooned to a roster of jilted lovers. "You were always good for a rhyme. But from the first to the last time, the sign said stop, but we went on wholehearted. It ended bad, but I love where we started."

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Life! Yes, life. In the 1980s the first bits of discourse began to emerge about the death of rock 'n' roll. It was, in part, a reaction to the obsolescence of punk, and, more so, emblematic of the lingering problem that rock's dialogues of "meaning" — of "integrity" and "authenticity" and "cool" — have always been white, middle-class dialogues used as instruments of difference and to exorcise anxiety about being consumers. Pop's great victory is that it can have a real, effective influence over the formation of your life. In reality, for the most part, pop doesn't create culture, it responds to and is shaped by it. Yes, contemporary music can be boring as hell. Everyone is more connected than they've ever been, and eventually, everyone has the same dreams, and, worse, the same nightmares. The real "death," however, would be if rock was compromised as a disseminator of social ideas and emotions. But look at Vegas: Rock is just as symbolic of national identity as it was in the fifties or sixties. It just reflects a changed culture — postmodern, supersonic, and just as confused about its ideals as it ever was. What's eerie, maybe, is who it reflects. (This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife ...)

They say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Yet both Penn and Teller are sitting next to me on my flight back to New York. (Teller does, in fact, speak, and he used the word "austere.") I find this somehow disturbing. Then again, when you listen to pop music, maybe you take a bit of this city with you wherever you are.