Rock Music Report. The place for Rock and roll news.

• Pavement Rock First U.S. Reunion Show
• The Specials Return At Precise L.A. Gig
• Inside T.I.’s King Uncaged
• Announcing the New Rollingstone.com!
• Volcanic Ash May Stymie Coachella Acts
• Jay-Z Sues Red Sox Slugger Ortiz
• News Ticker: Soundgarden, Rihanna
• Type O Negative’s Steele Dies at 48
• Glee Ratings Nearly Double
• Lambert Performs, Idol Nixes Two
• Wilco, MGMT, Hole’s Record Store Exclusives
• 40 Reasons to Be Excited About Music
• Public Image Ltd. Return in L.A.
• Eminem Scraps Relapse for Recovery
• Lambert Returns to American Idol
• Bieber Tops Charts, Slash Debuts Strong
• Conan Revives Edgy Vibe at First Show
• Duff McKagan on the New Jane’s Addiction
• Faith No More Return in San Fran
• Coachella Conflicts: Jay-Z or PiL?
• Roger Waters Announces Wall Tour

Scroll down for full news stories, commentary and much more in Rock Daily.

A volcanic eruption that occurred under an Icelandic glacier on Wednesday, April 14th, has set off a series of unforeseen events that might force a few Britain-based artists scheduled to perform at this weekend’s Coachella festival to cancel their slots. The Cribs with Johnny Marr, Bernard Sumner’s Bad Lieutenant and Gary Numan are just a few of the bands affected by the volcanic ash that lingers in the skies above Europe, all but shutting down all air travel out of the continent, Billboard.biz reports.

The Cribs have already canceled their Coachella performance that was scheduled for tonight, saying in a statement, “Unfortunately, despite a Herculean effort we won’t be able to play at Coachella this year. We are pretty gutted to be frank, currently languishing in the grimmest ferry port after waiting for good news about free airspace that never came.” Numan, who is slotted to perform Sunday, was pessimistic about his chances of making it to Indio on time. “At the moment the very best British Airways are offering us, and this without any guarantee, is to put us on a Sunday flight that gets in to Los Angeles in the afternoon on Sunday,” Numan wrote on his official site. “That is one step away from useless and means that, if we are very lucky, we might just make it to the festival site (a three hour plus drive from Los Angeles) in time for our slot but without a single second of rehearsal.”

So far, nearly 17,000 flights out of Europe have been canceled as a result of the volcanic ash. According to CNN, the ash doesn’t affect the pilots’ visibility as much as it presents an actual danger to the aircraft itself, because the ash can cause jet engines to shut down. London’s Heathrow Airport was keeping planes docked until at least 1 a.m. (8 p.m. EST) Saturday morning, though flights out of Northern Ireland and Scotland were being allowed. Luckily, many of the big name British acts — Thom Yorke, Hot Chip and headliners Muse and Gorillaz — already ventured to the States prior to the volcano’s eruption and will make their Coachella sets.

For more on Coachella, including reports on all the biggest sets, stick with Rollingstone.com this weekend for our full coverage.

Related Stories:

• Coachella Reveals Set Times, Fans Consider Conflicts: Jay-Z or PiL?
• Jay-Z, Muse, Gorillaz, Pavement Booked for 2010 Coachella Fest

Photo: Melissa Moore


“I’d say it’s nice to be back,” remarked Bob Nastanovich not long into Pavement’s show last night at the Fox Theater in Pomona, California. “But I’ve never fucking been here before!”

True enough, Bobby boy. The jocks pumping their fists to “Cut Your Hair,” the chick doing the Phish-fan noodle dance to “Stereo,” the countless balding dudes diluting their beers with tears during “Here” — this was definitely new territory for arguably the greatest indie-rock band of all time. Put it this way: Yesterday a guy tweeted that he was working security at the Pavement show. Even if Twitter had existed when the group originally broke up in 1999, there’s no way that would’ve have happened; back then, bouncers were taught to ignore bands like this.

Yet if the scent of nostalgia hung undeniably heavy over Pavement’s first North American reunion show — a relatively intimate warm-up gig before their big Sunday-night slot at Coachella — frontman Stephen Malkmus and his mates seemed stoked to soak it up. Leading the group through a two-hour set packed with college-radio hits (remember those?), the singer pulled faces, flipped his hair and hopped on one leg like a bunny on his birthday. Nastanovich, meanwhile, appeared to have spent his decade away from music perfecting a court-jester routine that was pretty much perfect to begin with.

Pavement spent some considerable time earlier this year rehearsing in Malkmus’s homebase of Portland, but at the Fox — where the audience included Britt Daniel of Spoon and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox — they still sounded sloppy as hell (in a good way). Drummer Steve West motored “Shady Lane” with Sunday-driver insouciance, while “Rattled by the Rush” had a swampy blues-rock vibe complete with Screaming Trees-style harmonica solo. It’s probably time, too, that we acknowledge the importance of Mark Ibold’s bass: Last night his playing provided a weird muscularity that helped illustrate the difference between Pavement and so many of the tired-ass indie bands they’ve inspired over the years; in “Spit on a Stranger,” especially, you couldn’t not hear how crucial a part he is of the band’s attack.

Evidently enjoying themselves — “Are you happy?” guitarist Scott Kannberg asked at one point, then added “We’re happy” — Pavement did two encores, mostly of stuff from Slanted and Enchanted, their landmark 1992 debut. “I was dressed for success,” Malkmus sang in “Here,” “But success, it never comes.” He resisted changing those words last night, but only because he didn’t have to.

Set list:

“Silence Kit”
“Ell Ess Two”
“Give It a Day”
“Frontwards”
“No Life Singed Her”
“Father to a Sister of Thought”
“Rattled by the Rush”
“Kennel District”
“In the Mouth a Desert”
“Shady Lane”
“Unfair”
“Spit on a Stranger”
“Grounded”
“Two States”
“Range Life”
“Perfume-V”
“Gold Soundz”
“Fight This Generation”
“Summer Babe”
“Cut Your Hair”
“The Hexx”
“Date w/ IKEA”
“Trigger Cut”
“Starlings of the Slipstream”
“Box Elder”
“Here”
“Stereo”
“Zurich Is Stained”
“Loretta’s Scars”
“Conduit for Sale!”

Photo: Nunez/WireImage
T.I. is setting the bar high for his post-prison album, King Uncaged, comparing it to Tupac’s 1996 classic All Eyez on Me, which was released months after ‘Pac got out of prison. “This is the most significant return from incarceration that the game has had since then,” T.I. says. “Just given the enormous success of that project, everyone’s expecting the same results. I just want to meet the expectations, if not surpass them.”

The Atlanta MC says he didn’t get much work done while serving 10 months in Federal penitentiary in Arkansas on weapons charges (”I didn’t have a lot of time by myself just to think,” he says), but he got cracking on the day he was released to a halfway house in January, recording the defiant single, “I’m Back.”
He’s been on a creative tear since, recording more than 60 songs for the album, due out in August, working with the producers who have crafted his biggest hits, including Jim Jonsin, who made the beat for Paper Trail Number One hit “Whatever You Like,” Danja (”No Matter What”), and DJ Toomp (”What You Know”). 

 “Some songs talk about my time in prison — how I was affected by that, the way I’ve grown from that, things I see now that I may have not seen then,” says T.I. “Sometimes I talk about love, some songs I talk about life, some songs I talk about me being the shit on every level.”

No songs will talk about T.I. carrying a gun. “Regardless of what may happen, what circumstances may present themselves, how extreme they may be, I will not be the one carrying firearms,” says the MC, who was arrested in 2007 for trying to buy a small arsenal of weapons, including machine guns. He has said he was buying guns in a misguided attempt to protect himself after his best friend Philant Johnson was killed.

T.I. considers the new album the last chapter in a trilogy that began with 2007’s T.I. vs. T.I.P. and continued with Paper Trail, which was the eighth best-selling album of 2008. “If it was a film, the opening act would be the night that Phil got shot, and all the emotions and the sentiments that led to T.I. Vs. T.I.P.,” he says. ”From there, the schizophrenia of it all led to an unfortunate chain of events that left me incarcerated with federal weapons charges, which inspired Paper Trail, and now, people are waiting to hear the end of the story.”

Photo: Rogash/Getty(Ortiz), Trotman/Getty(Jay-Z)

The heated Yankees-Red Sox rivalry has branched into the rap game. Jay-Z, a diehard Yankees fan who even wore the team’s cap on the cover of Kingdom Come, is suing Boston Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz for allegedly using the name of Jigga’s 40/40 Club chain for his own nightclub in the Dominican Republic without permission. In a lawsuit filed yesterday, Jay accuses Big Papi of naming his Santa Domingo nightclub “Forty-Forty,” a variation of Jay-Z and Juan Perez’s line of 40/40 Clubs in New York, Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

“[Jay-Z and Perez] have accused Ortiz of trading on the fame, value and goodwill of their name through his club Forty/Forty and its website, www.fortyforty.net, which they say has caused their business ‘marketplace confusion and damage,” reads the lawsuit. Jay-Z’s suit goes on to argue that the shared name isn’t accidental, as Ortiz “has been a patron [at the 40/40 Club] on several occasions long before he opened his infringing Forty/Forty Club.”

As Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” all but soundtracked the Yankees’ World Series-winning run last season, it’s no surprise that he might take offense to someone not named Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez opening a club with the “40/40″ name. The baseball blog Big League Stew points out the “40/40″ moniker comes from when a player achieves both 40 home runs and 40 steals in one season. Only four players in history have done it — including current Yank A-Rod — but Big Papi hasn’t come close, managing only 10 steals total over the course of his entire 14-year baseball career. (To Ortiz’s credit, he has hit a Red Sox record 54 home runs in a season, but then why not the “Fifty-Ten Club”?)

No word whether Jay-Z is seeking compensation, a club name change or maybe just an apology from Ortiz for his Game Four, 12th inning, course-of-history-changing walk-off home run against the Yankees in the 2004 playoffs.

On a Jigga side note, the Blueprint 3 rapper will headline tonight’s festivities at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California. Tune into the brand new Rollingstone.com this weekend for our full report.

Related Stories:

• Coachella Reveals Set Times, Fans Consider Conflicts: Jay-Z or PiL?
• Jay-Z, Muse, Gorillaz, Pavement Booked for 2010 Coachella Fest
• Jay-Z, Alicia Keys Tour New York in “Empire State of Mind” Video