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“You don’t mind if I play a little music?” Lenny Kravitz asked as he closed the Voodoo Music Experience Sunday night in New Orleans. After a weekend of costume and spectacle, his two-hour set was almost old school in its focus on songs and musicianship.

Voodoo ‘09 in photos: Eminem, Kiss and more.

The show was a homecoming for Kravitz, who bought a house in New Orleans in 1991 after visiting to see Aretha Franklin play Jazz Fest. (He performed alongside the Queen of Soul Friday night at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 25th anniversary concert in New York.) Little in his two-hour show seemed specifically geared for a New Orleans audience until the encore, when he called local musician Trombone Shorty to the stage to rave up the extended encore of “Let Love Rule.”

Read about Eminem’s return to the stage at Voodoo fest.

The set was part of Kravitz’s 20th anniversary tour for Let Love Rule — an album he recently reexamined for Rolling Stone — but he didn’t make it halfway through the album. Instead, he sprinkled songs from his debut through a hits-oriented show that periodically stretched songs including “Believe” and “Blues for Sister Someone” into lengthy, funky jams that walked the fine line between exploratory and meandering. His only concession to showmanship as a bank of neon tubes on the back wall that evoked an American flag during “American Woman,” which marked him as a yang to the Flaming Lips’ yin.

The Flaming Lips preceded Kravitz with their full arsenal of confetti, streamers, costumed dancers and toys, and while Kravitz played a self-contained celebration of rock’s eternal verities, Wayne Coyne was a trickster, wrapping up the festival by telling tall tales from the stage. He quoted an unlikely conversation with Gene Simmons of Saturday’s headliner, Kiss, who supposedly conceded that the audience’s mind would be five times more blown by the Flaming Lips than Kiss. He also dedicated a song to Perry Farrell, and Coyne claimed the Jane’s Addiction frontman’s boots gave him powers of levitation when Jane’s played Saturday.

The set was one of the Flaming Lips’ few American dates since the release of Embryonic, and they incorporated two songs from their new double album into the show. “Silver Trembling Hands” and “Convinced of the Hex” were streamlined live, the latter taking on the feel of a psychedelic pagan ritual as the smoke-covered stage half-obscured Coyne on his knees, beating his maracas against the floor as Steven Drozd’s face contorted in a pained howl and he coaxed out wah-wah’ed guitar sounds.

It was one of the few signs of pain in the Flaming Lips’ set, though, along with “Taps,” which Coyne vows to play nightly until the war ends in Afghanistan. “Looks like we may be playing this song forever, Steven,” he said. More often, Coyne drew attention to the full moon, the recovery of New Orleans he’d seen since playing Voodoo in 2006, and “the perfect weather.” At the end of a cold, damp weekend, the night and music were a cause for celebration. “It’s just so perfect to be alive right now, don’t you think?”

Photo: Flanigan/FilmMagic
Trying to resolve Eminem’s contradictions is a loser’s game. How do you reconcile the artist who asked the men in the audience at Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans Friday night to yell, “Fuck you, bitches” (and the women to answer, “Fuck you, assholes”) with the guy who encored with the encouraging “Lose Yourself”? The scabrous pop culture critic with the MC who penned murder fantasy “3 a.m.,” which opened the set with a bloody, Saw-like trailer? The audience at Voodoo didn’t try; they were just thrilled he was there.

This year’s Halloween weekend festival includes Kiss, Jane’s Addiction, the Flaming Lips, Lenny Kravitz and Justice, who chain-smoked their way through a DJ set on a damp, biting Friday night. A downpour soaked the grounds of City Park and dropped the temperature 20 degrees, which cut down any walk-up traffic for one of Eminem’s only 2009 shows, but it didn’t hurt the gig. For the occasion, Eminem had a live band dressed in skeleton costumes that added muscle, particularly in the closing “Without Me.” To further beef up the sound, he was joined onstage by a hype-man throughout, and D12 for part of the show. He took time out to salute the late Proof, “the real leader of the group” in one of the set’s few tender moments.

The D12 segment also featured one of the more awkward moments as Em — who addresses his struggles with prescription pills openly on this year’s Relapse — recalled “when we was fucked up”. “When you was fucked up,” his bandmates corrected, then Eminem started talking about a time in Amsterdam when he was so loaded he was under the table and speaking a new language. The skit seemed designed to put Eminem’s drug problems in a “one of the boys” context, but the high-school-drama-class delivery undermined it.

That aside, Em onstage was, as usual, an electrifying presence, and he was in good voice and energy. The set’s breakdown slowed its momentum, though. There were Relapse songs, D12 songs, a hits medley — all separated by musical interludes while he changed T-shirts or took a quick break. But the audience was into the individual parts, rapping along and lost in the moment by the time he broke out “Lose Yourself.”

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“You’ve shown us what happens when people rise together, work together and dream together,” Brer Rabbit of indie hip-hop group Flobots said at Tipitina’s in New Orleans Thursday night. He was one of 10 musicians who visited the Crescent City for an activism workshop that concluded with “Musicians Bringing Musicians Home IV,” a benefit for the non-profit group Sweet Home New Orleans.

Will Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy), J. Tillman of Fleet Foxes, Nicole Atkins and Los Lobos‘ Steve Berlin were just some of the artists brought to New Orleans by the activist group Air Traffic Control and the Future of Music Coalition to explore ways to use their stature for social good. Three years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains a vital place to consider the ways that people can help, as well the ongoing need for it. Touring the city, Berlin said, “had heartbreaking moments followed by heartwarming moments as you see what people can do.”

The show started with a short, hushed acoustic set by Tillman, and included a live dub set by the Bomb Squad’s Hank Shocklee, and Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah performing his songs rearranged for the three-trombone lineup of the backing band, New Orleans’ Bonerama, along with a version of the classic “St. James Infirmary.”

“I blew a line,” he said afterwards. “Normally I could get away with it, but I felt terrible doing that here where people know the song.”

During the show, executive director Jordan Hirsch of Sweet Home New Orleans announced, “We’ve been at it since the levees broke, and we’ve put more than $2 million in musicians’ pockets.” The non-profit agency helps musicians with housing, health and work-related issues, and has worked with Air Traffic Control since the first of the retreat series in 2006. Hirsch also announced that Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard wanted to attend but couldn’t, so he made a donation of $5,000.

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