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Photo: Patrick Doyle
After a three-day trial that drew friends Willie Nelson and Robert Duvall to a Waco, Texas courtroom, outlaw country artist Billy Joe Shaver was found not guilty Friday on charges of aggravated assault for shooting a man in the face outside a Texas bar in 2007. “I am very sorry about the incident,” Shaver said outside the courtroom. “Hopefully things will work out where we become friends enough so that he gives me back my bullet.”

In a packed, sweltering courtroom, Shaver, 70, admitted to shooting Billy Bryant Coker on the back porch of Papa Joe’s Saloon, a beer joint outside Shaver’s Waco hometown. The singer pleaded self-defense, claiming Coker stirred his drink with a pocket blade, wiped it on Shaver’s shirt and asked him to come outside. “I felt he was gonna kill me,” Shaver testified. “He was a big bully, the worst I ever seen — a big bad one. And I been all around the world.”

State prosecutors argued Shaver could have left in his truck before shooting Coker. “I’m from Texas,” Shaver responded in his honky-tonk Texas drawl. “If I was a chicken shit I would have left.”

The shooting occurred March 31, 2007, after Shaver stopped into the smoky bar for a beer with his former wife, Wanda. Shaver testified Coker was rude to Wanda and told Shaver to “Shut the fuck up.” After the two went outside, witnesses testified Shaver asked Coker, “Where do you want it?” then pointed a .22 pistol at Coker’s cheek, pulled the trigger and fled in his truck. When Shaver was asked on the stand if he shot Coker because Shaver was jealous the victim was talking Shaver’s wife, Shaver laughed. “I get more woman than a passenger train can haul,” he said.

Shaver’s song “Live Forever” was used prominently in Crazy Heart, and Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan have recorded his music. In 1973, Waylon Jennings recorded nearly an entire record of Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes, and Willie Nelson says he considers Shaver the greatest living songwriter. Nelson leaned forward in his seat as Shaver testified, and told RS outside the courtroom, “I don’t think Billy Joe would do anything wrong. Whatever happened, I don’t think it was Billy Joe’s fault.”

Who: Heavy Swedish pop outfit fronted by manic 34-year-old singer Josephine Olausson, a fierce frontlady who has a fan in Karen O. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer likes the band so much it inspired her song “All is Love” on the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack.

Sounds Like: The band’s insanely catchy new disc Two Thousand and Ten Injuries combines the sound of early Nineties grrrl-punk acts bands like Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill with warm Sixties pop harmonies. “Kungen” borrows from the Turtles “Happy Together,” but drowns it in rich psychedelia. “Bigger Bolder” is buzzing garage-rock, boasting fuzzed out bass and Olausson’s Björk-like vocals. “I usually just tell people we play rock music, because it gets too complicated,” Olausson tells Rolling Stone.

Vital Stats:

• The band’s name derives from a late-night TV session. Olausson was flipping channels at home in the working-class city of Gothenburg when she saw classic Sixties spy program A Man From U.N.C.L.E. In the episode, she remembers secret agents infiltrated a Manson-like hippie sect when she spotted her future band’s name on the creepy entrance gate to the compound. “It looked perfect,” she says, but the band didn’t go for it at first — and Olausson seems to regret her choice. “People say ‘You’re in a Beatles cover band?’ ” she says. “I realize now it’s kind of a retarded name,” she says. “I think you only feel that way once a week.”

• The band has some tangled romantic relationships. Olausson used to date drummer Markus Görsch, but after they split she married to San Francisco indie artist Wyatt Cusick in 2006. Cusick co-produced their new disc, but Olausson swears things weren’t awkward with her former flame. “I think to outsiders it’s weird,” she says. “We never had a major falling out or anything. If anything, we’re more brutally honest with each other and criticize each other.”

• The band is full of klutzes, which inspired the album title Two Thousand and Ten Injuries. Olausson smashed her nose when she fell down a narrow staircase a year and a half ago in Switzerland, and she helped break Görsch’s nose while the two were playing their one and only game of catch. Bassist Johan Lindwall is just always sick. “It seems like things go wrong a lot. We’re a very fragile band.”

Get It Now: Watch the band’s clip for “Kungen” up top, and grab a free download of “Bigger, Bolder.”

Photo: Tracy Ketcher
About 30 seconds into his opener “The Passenger” at New York’s Carnegie Hall Friday night, Iggy Pop declared, “Aw, fuck this shirt,” tore off his black V-neck sweater and tossed it stage right to a waiting Patti Smith, who caught it and giddily hopped up and down while swinging like she’d just caught a wedding bouquet.

It was a rare moment even for the Tibet House Benefit Concert, an annual event that raises money to preserve the country’s threatened culture. The benefit, now in its 20th year, has hosted unlikely collaborations like Moby and David Bowie performing “Heroes” in 2003 and Ray Davies and Debbie Harry trading verses on “Lola” in 2007. This year marked the 60th anniversary of the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet, and the show kicked off with several Tibetan monks performing a haunting chant in front of a large painting of the region’s sprawling Potala Palace.

The setup was sparse: most performers shared the same drums and amps, and the Patti Smith Group acted as house band. Early in the night, composer Phillip Glass introduced Irish singer Pierce Turner, who sat at the grand piano and performed the soaring, Bowie-reminiscent “Yogi with a Broken Heart.” Regina Spektor later played an apocalyptic set including the bone-chilling “Laughing,” which featured gloomy strings. The 30-year-old Bronx singer joked about finally making it to the legendary hall. “I’ve always wanted to play Carnegie Hall,” she said. “And now I have lipstick on my nose.”

Gogol Bordello followed with an acoustic set of revved-up Eastern European punk. Soon, Smith was onstage, looking like a road-tested gypsy. In a baggy white shirt, black vest and work boots, she kicked off with a joyous sing-along of the O’Jays classic “Love Train,” and proclaimed, “Come on everybody! Join hands!” Between songs, someone shouted “Happy birthday.” Smith, who turned 63 more than two months ago, replied, “As the Mad Hatter would say, it’s my un-birthday.”

Smith closed with the epically building “Gloria,” busting out spastic dance moves as the crowd belted the chorus. Afterward, Smith thanked all of the veterans of the cause, then she introduced Pop as “One of our sacred veterans, soon to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

Pop’s three-song set will likely go down in Carnegie Hall history. During “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” he completely defiled the place. He strutted across the stage in tight black jeans, ass crack fully visible, and then dove into the crowd (nobody caught him). As the song later descended into chaos, he smashed his mike stand into the iconic, wood-floored stage repeatedly, trying to make a dent. He gave up and hurled the stand at the grand piano.

Five decades of Raw Power: Iggy Pop and the Stooges in photos.

At the afterparty, Spektor admitted, “I never thought I’d really get to play. I’m used to listening to things from the nosebleed seats. Just being there on that stage is a mind trip.” Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye was still glowing from the special night. “I got to play ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’ with Iggy!” he said. “I’ve been waiting 40 years to play that.” Later, Bordello’s Eugene Hutz added, “It was an atom-smashing experience.”

Related Stories:

• Patti Smith, Vampire Weekend Pay Tribute to Buddy Holly at 2009 Tibet House Benefit
• All-Star Sing-Alongs Abound at 2007 Tibet House Benefit in NYC
• Full Report: 1999 Tibet House Benefit

Photograph by Sarah Cass
It’s 5:30 p.m. on a frigid Thursday in Manhattan, and the members of Ra Ra Riot are standing in a cleared-out practice space on West 55th Street. Wes Miles, the band’s singer and keyboardist, in a light green sweatshirt, is holding a large white sheet of paper with several song titles scrawled in permanent marker, full of cues for the band’s gig the following night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His eyes are bloodshot, but he takes a seat at a card table with bassist Mathieu Santos to discuss the band’s progress on the follow-up to their debut, The Rhumb Line, an indie hit full of eerie, violin-seeped pop melodies that Rolling Stone named one of the top records of 2008.

The six-piece band, who formed at Syracuse University in 2006, say their second disc should arrive this summer. The as-yet-untitled LP started to come together when the band migrated to a peach farm in the small town of Penn-Yan, New York, last summer, where they spun plenty of Genesis, Elton John and Beatles solo records (especially Wings). “I think there’s definitely more Seventies influence on this album,” says Miles. The disc has more synths than its predecessor, but “It’s darker in some places for sure. That wasn’t really the intent, it just came out that way.” The group made use of its pastoral setting: Miles says everyone regularly ventured into the rural landscape and ate often peaches straight off the tree.

While The Rhumb Line was recorded in 20 days, the band has already logged five weeks of studio time on the new album and teamed up with Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, who collaborated with Miles in the group Discovery in 2008. “We had some ideas left over and we showed it to the band,” he explains. “This one in particular was well received. It sounds like another version of Ra Ra Riot.”

The most surprising new track RS previewed is a dark, untitled waltz sung by cellist Alexandra Lawn that builds slowly on an ominous keyboard progression. Lawn cries her haunting lover’s plea, “Don’t leave a note” and the song descends into a chaotic, reverb-soaked guitar solo. “Too Dramatic,” a song the band has been road-testing for a year, has single potential with its punchy, harmonious hook and spastic drums. Santos describes the strings-driven “Black Monk” as “very brooding, very uneasy,” and Miles says “Massachusetts” is “a very groove-based textural vocal song.”

“I think on the first album it was a lot of just everyone playing their instruments all the time,” Santos says. “The first album is easy. Make whatever you want and throw it out there. This is kind of the first time thinking about expectations, whatever they are. We were definitely thinking about it.”

Photo: Wargo/WireImage

More than 300 fans braved the torrential rain in New York today, perhaps fittingly, to meet the Prince of Darkness. Ozzy Osbourne signed copies of his hilarious new memoir, I Am Ozzy, at the Fifth Avenue Barnes and Noble in midtown Manhattan (Rolling Stone spoke to Osbourne about the memoir in our current issue; read bonus stories on Black Sabbath and his new LP).

Check out Rolling Stone’s collection of Black Sabbath photos.

The downpour weeded out fair-weather fans, but the line still extended outside the store and down the entire 46th street block — and the first die-hard arrived at 3:30 a.m. for the 12:30 p.m signing. Ozzy showed up on time, exiting a side elevator and ambling past the store’s graphic arts section wearing a long-sleeve black shirt and gold leaf pendant.

The first fan Ozzy met was Chris Engborg, a 17-year-old from Wilton, Connecticut, who was born with learning disabilities and gave Ozzy a handwritten letter, telling him his music — particularly his song “I Don’t Want to Change the World” — helped him through deep depression. Ozzy peered up from his circular John Lennon-style glasses and thanked him for coming.

For most of the event, Ozzy stayed quiet, but his silence didn’t dampen his fans’ enthusiasm; many walked away shaking, some crying joyful tears. “I can die happy now!” one woman shouted as she took a large leap at the exit.

When he met five-year old Corrado Mazzuca Jr., Ozzy lit up. The boy brought Ozzy an endearing portrait he drew of the singer, with title “Ozzy Rules!” Ozzy stared intently at the picture. “Who drew this?” he asked the boy. “You drew this?” before putting the boy on his lap for a photo. Later, the boy was ecstatic. “Iron Man’ is my favorite song,” he said, standing next to his father. “I have it on my radio box.”