Wow, so that bro core piece really touched a nerve out there. For now though, let’s put aside our genre hair-splitting and celebrate some more good news from the punk world. The Humanist Chaplaincy, a Harvard University organization honoring cultural and scientific work by the openly non-religious, will present its Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism to Bad Religion singer/UCLA biology professor Greg Graffin. Last year’s recipient was “The Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about the dangers of religious fanaticism. Graffin will perform an acoustic set after the ceremony, so for you Harvard kids out there, here’s your best chance to yell “We’re Only Gonna Die!” in the school chapel outside of finals week.

-August Brown

Greg Graffin photo by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times

Last week, Jack White threw down a glove and ushered the music industry onto what duelers call the field of honor. A press release announced that “Consolers of the Lonely,” the new release from the Raconteurs, White’s band with songwriting pal Brendan Benson, would be issued in all formats today.

The quick turnaround was designed “to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding its availability, reception or perception.”

“The Raconteurs would rather this release not be defined by its first weeks sales, pre-release promotion, or by someone defining it FOR YOU before you get to hear it,” the statement continued.

Always a control freak, White seems to view music culture’s current anarchistic drift as both a bane and an opportunity. His enemy, the statement suggests, is anyone who engages in hype: bloggers, radio programmers, directors of Apple commercials, the publicists supposedly at his service and, of course, critics. He can’t stop every leak — “Consolers” was briefly available through iTunes on Friday, and Indie 103.1 played at least one cut Monday —  but he can try to throw the machine.

Some writers (most eloquently, Jason Gross at PopMatters.com) have wondered if good criticism will get lost in the dismantling process. But what if players in the game of promoting and contextualizing music took White at his word? What if critics got off the release-date train and imagined new ways of approaching recorded music?

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A few weeks ago, I interviewed Bad Religion founder Greg Graffin about his band’s recent string of L.A.-area dates. Bad Religion’s been through several commercial revivals, as wiseacre punks, as an unlikely radio act in the mid-’90s (”You and meee … have a diseeease …” ) and most recently as something approximating a hugely successful local band. They play large theaters and festivals and sell decently around the world, but to someone whose experience with rock radio is limited to KROQ, they must seem as big as Linkin Park. I always chalked it up as a Southern California thing, that the ’90s varietal of double-time skate punk that came to be called the “Epitaph Sound” put its claws in deep after the Offspring and never let up. All that grindable pavement, the year-long sunshine and the intraversible open space of L.A.’s mutant version of urbanity certainly helped.

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Say what you will about Herbie Hancock’s controversial Grammy win, but there is no arguing with a man who steps onstage rocking a wireless keytar.

Buoyed by the plate-shifting bottom end of his jazz-funk classic “Chameleon” (carried by the powerhouse rhythm section of Vinnie Colaiuta and Marcus Miller), Herbie began his Yahoo! Live Set with the air of a giddy conquering hero, playing with such an undeniable sense of adventure and joy that all memories of his lovely but eyelid-fluttering “Joni Letters” were wiped away in a storm of actual, head-bobbing jazz.

Granted, when your back catalog includes classics such as “Cantaloupe Island,” “Actual Proof” and the genre-crashing early MTV staple “Rockit,” there’s little chance of keeping a roof on any venue, even a vaguely production-oriented stage in Century City. Hancock even flexed his ability to stretch some boundaries by showcasing a reworked “Watermelon Man” that incorporated elements from his guitarist’s (Lionel Loueke) time signature-melting composition “Seven Teens,” which together sounded like an alien funk jam tumbling down a flight of stairs.

But the biggest ovation from the small, invite-only crowd came for who Hancock had hidden in the wings: Joni Mitchell.

Mitchell was dressed in a long, utterly insane but totally perfect dress bearing what could’ve been a scene from the Bhagavad Gita across the front, and her presence alone inspired a few audible gasps. While the set was missing the extra touch that her tiny, track-suited Jack Russell terrier brought to the rehearsal, Mitchell’s three-song collaboration with Hancock’s band revealed the biggest thing missing from the pianist’s lauded tribute album: Mitchell herself.

The years may have taken the angelic lilt away from Mitchell’s unmistakable voice, but the husky tone in its place added a new weight to “River,” sounding like a slow-moving mix of molasses, honey and regret. Mitchell has always been closer in spirit to a jazz artist than her folk contemporaries, and Hancock proved her perfect foil as each instrument delicately lapped around the edges of her lyrics with a sound that was still true to the original, but constantly shifting and evolving. If only mainstream jazz as a whole could be so lucky.

(Yahoo! will air the Herbie Hancock / Joni Mitchell Live Set on April 1.)

– Chris Barton

Photo by Mark Mainz/AP

There’s a list of usual suspects when it comes to scalping obnoxiously priced concert tickets: Hannah Montana. Radiohead. U2. Vampire Weekend?! Add the Lacoste-loving hipsters to the roster: tickets for the New York act’s sold-out headlining gig at the El Rey tonight have been selling for more than the cost of three days at Coachella. Pairs have gone for as much as $300 on eBay and it’s even worse on Craigslist, where one particularly greedy scalper was asking $400 for his tickets yesterday. Though the band’s next five shows are sold out, the skyrocketing rates seem to be an L.A. phenomenon: A pair for Neumos in Seattle, WA, are going for a reasonable $43 with 14 bids and another seller is only asking $49 for the Portland, OR show at the Doug Fir Lounge.

Which brings up a pair of questions: Is it worth it? And who’s actually paying $400 to see a Paul Simon-aping indie rock band with less than a dozen songs to their name? I can answer the first one: Having seen the band open for Clipse at Columbia University’s free (!) back-to-school blow-out over the summer, I can tell you that their recent SNL performances (embedded below, after the jump) are a solid indicator of the quality of their live show: pretty good. Clipse made them look like Werewolf Tuesday. As for the second? Raise your hands, Vampire bidders.

–David Greenwald

Photo of Vampire Ezra Koenig playing at SXSW by Jack Plunkett / Associated Press

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“For Rent.”

The sign in the front window of Don’s Music was irrefutable. A few minutes previous, strolling along Eagle Rock Boulevard, I’d counted my lucky stars at living within walking distance of a shop like this.

Although sales of vinyl are up as the CD market flounders, L.A.’s record store family has dwindled of late. R.I.P., Aaron’s, Rhino Records and House of Records, to name three. Amoeba remains the biggest game in town, although its sprawling size, surly security force and byzantine organization sap it of the modest charm contained within cozier quarters.

Don’s is the definition of snug, like the record stores I remember from childhood — cluttered, unruly spaces helmed by iconoclastic and equally unruly dudes with more eclectic vision and taste than marketing or customer service skills, where hours could be spent scouring for obscure and dusty treasures.

Housed for three years at 4873 Eagle Rock Blvd., Don’s is jam-packed with thousands of new and used records of every category, not to mention CDs, guitars and assorted music-related ephemera. Visiting is like slipping on a comfortable old pair of slippers. Regulars banter with Don about music and the state of the world and pet the store cat, 13, who is usually found napping atop a record bin.

“No,” I thought. “Not Don’s!” I was about to squeeze out a tear or two when the door to the shop next door opened and Don himself emerged into the twilight, spattered with white paint.

I gestured at the sign. “You’re not…”

“Nope,” Don replied. “Just moving. Right next door, as a matter of fact. It’s bigger.”

After I heaved a sigh of relief, he showed me around his new digs. Formerly a beauty shop, it was big, open and bare. The blood-red walls will soon display art courtesy of Don’s creative friends, and the battered floor will be painted metallic gold. Best of all, there will also be a lot more room for record bins and, hopefully, the biggest disco ball Don can find.

Eyeing empty curtain brackets above the front window, he mused, “Maybe some red velvet curtains. That might be a little too crazy.” The grand opening in the new digs is tentatively set for March 30, good news for record addicts the city over.

– Photo and post by Jason Gelt

Read more of the Magnanimous Collector here.

Remember when we wanted our MTV? For those too young to recall the heady days before the 24/7 dramarama of Lauren Conrad, the initials stood for Music Television. With the April 7 launch of the on-demand streaming video site Pitchfork.tv, indie tastemaker Pitchfork Media is hoping to do for the Internet what MTV once did for the airwaves. Inspired in part by the success of YouTube, the site has been in development since August and original footage has already been shot in New York and Chicago. In a recent IM conversation (edited for OMGs), Pitchfork founder and publisher Ryan Schreiber discussed the launch, jockeying for music’s Ebert & Roeper slot and the future of criticism in an ever-expanding blogosphere.

– David Greenwald

MTV rarely shows videos anymore – do you think you’ll be filling the niche they used to? Or is this something completely different?

Yeah, music videos will be a big part of it. We’re being selective about what we put up so there’s a level of quality control — the idea being that you can just press play and not have to skip around too much to find something that’s good. But the focus for us is the original content, documenting artists.

What kinds of programming are you planning on?

Artist interviews, sessions, documentaries and feature-length music docs and films. We have a couple of great concepts for documentary-style series we’re getting pretty close to putting together. We already have one called “Daytripping,” which is just going around with a band, seeing what they like to do, visiting them in the studio. The Man Man episode that we’re launching with was the first thing we ever shot. We drove to Philly, got a little tour of where they were staying, got burritos, then they rode their bikes to the studio, recorded for a while, and set off fireworks in the street. That actually ran in Forkcast not long after we shot it. We did one with Lee “Scratch” Perry too, which is just mind-blowing.

The press release promised Pitchfork writers in front of the camera – any chance of an Ebert & Roeper-type show with you and associate editor in chief Scott Plagenhoef?

I don’t know if that would ever happen. It’d be crazy, though – we both have pretty outspoken opinions about music and we’re comfortable enough with each other at this point that we can get into heated debates or arguments about bands or songs and both walk away happy.

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The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs… It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

Well, it may not amount to the Led Zeppelin reunion tour that a lot of folks have been hoping for, but the mighty Zep’s lead singer, Robert Plant, will be making a sojourn to the Greek Theatre on June 23 and 24, with his new musical partner in crime, bluegrass singer-fiddler Alison Krauss. Sure, the pairing seems weird, but it’s a classic concept — she’s a little bit country and he’s a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. Get your tickets on Saturday.

In more big news on the classic artist front, Sly & the Family Stone will be playing the House of Blues Anaheim on April 25 and the House of Blues Sunset Strip on April 26. If you’re a fan of funky soul — and you know you are — get your tickets to both shows Saturday.

And in less big news on the not-quite-yet-classic front, new wave icons Duran Duran will be hitting the Nokia Theatre on May 4. There may not be a new moon on Monday, but there will be new tickets for the show.

As for the winner, that has to be the Keep a Child Alive benefit show at the Roxy on April 11. And no, it’s not the winner because it’s for a good cause. It’s the winner because it’s possibly your only opportunity to see Glenn Frey share the stage with Malibu rapper Shwayze. It won’t be simultaneously — Shwayze and Cisco Adler are opening the show for the headlining Eagle along with Don Was, the Bird & the Bee, Hello Stranger and a few other cats. But it’s still weird. Run, don’t walk, for this one, because tickets are on sale now.

Lots of other good shows in country (David Allan Coe), protest folk (Billy Bragg), indie pop (Mates of State) and Afrobeat neo-soul (Les Nubians), but you’ll just have to read the column if you want to know the specifics.

So there.

– Liam Gowing

Glenn Frey photo: Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times