Pop Quiz: Travis Barker

Pop Quiz: Travis Barker

Aidin Vaziri | Since Blink-182 broke up, it seems as if all drummer Travis Barker does is throw up in toilet bowls and pick fights with wedding planners. At least that's the impression you get watching the MTV reality series "Meet the Barkers," which follows his punk-rock newlywed life with former Miss USA Shanna Moakler and their children. It turns out Barker has actually been busy finishing work on his second Transplants album, "Haunted Cities."

Travis Barker
Q: You're living in a huge mansion with a former Miss USA.
A: It's the American dream.
Q: I know. How did you get it?
A: I don't know. I'm not supposed to do s -- like that. But I was 16 and I tattooed my body so I couldn't fall back on anything. I purposely did that so I couldn't get a normal job.
Q: Is being on MTV every day a bit of an inconvenience?
A: At airports, yes.
Q: What made you decide to follow in Ozzy Osbourne and Jessica Simpson's footsteps?
A: I just said "yes" one day.
Q: So you obviously put a lot of thought into how a weekly reality show about your family would affect your life and career and the future of your children.
A: Yeah. Impulsive, like a f -- moron.

CD Reviews: The Posies & Bond

CD Reviews: The Posies & Bond

The Posies' 'Every Kind of Light': Aidin Vaziri | The Posies tentatively split in 1997, certain to gain the kind of cult status that built up over the decades around their power-pop heroes such as Big Star and the Hollies. But so far the Seattle duo has had a hard time staying apart, releasing a greatest-hits set, four-disc box and live disc, plus a couple of EPs. How do Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer expect to become fetish objects if they can't gracefully sink into indie-rock obscurity to re- emerge 30 years later as conquerors? This official comeback album probably won't help, seeing as they've toughened up their sound and ditched the runner- up routine. While this disc contains flashes of past glories, it ultimately doesn't add that much to the myth.

Bond's 'Explosive': Aidin Vaziri | Bond doesn't make classical music for people who hate classical music but for people who hate music in general. An airbrushed string quartet with long legs and short skirts, the pan-global group puts a futuristic spin on centuries-old styles. Except these women's idea of the future feels a lot like one of Siegfried & Roy's former Vegas shows: heavy on sequins pyrotechnics and fiddly bits and a little light on restraint. "Explosive" plucks the best material from Bond's three full-length albums and adds three new cuts, including "Sugarplum," their screeching take on the song from "Nutcracker." But the real entertainment is on the flip side, where the DVD contains their promo videos -- visual experiences so surreal and so synthetic that they work most effectively with the sound turned off and a My Bloody Valentine album on the iPod.

Metal Babies

Metal Babies

Metal-Head Tykes -- Cool looks for the rock 'n' drool set: Aidin Vaziri | On top of being bald and drooling uncontrollably, they can't smoke, get tattoos or even hang out in bars. So what chance do babies have of ever looking cool? Mark DeVito has the answer. Having designed concert tees for the past 20 years for the likes of Metallica, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones, the lifelong metal-head and his wife sprang into action when they became parents three years ago. Faced with the prospect of either dressing their son Aidan in onesies covered with pink ducks and yellow horseshoes or shelling out upward of $50 for trendy infant gear, DeVito, 39, chose instead to downsize his own designs. His mantra was simple: "I don't want my kid to look like an Easter egg." Metallica's "Kill 'Em All" album cover is reinvented as Maternica's "Spill 'Em All," with a baby bottle replacing the bloody sledgehammer. Motley Crue's "Shout at the Devil" becomes Naughty You "Shout at Your Mama." The AC/DC logo now reads BA/BY. "Sleep deprivation is a great creative tool," says DeVito

Pop Quiz: Huey Lewis

Pop Quiz: Huey Lewis

Aidin Vaziri | Of all the '80s bands that used the neon-light font to make their logo, Huey Lewis and the News were clearly the best. At least in the top 200, easy. This year, the Bay Area group that gave us hits like "I Want a New Drug" and "Power of Love" celebrates a quarter century of business with CD and DVD releases of "Live at 25," plus several live shows, including an appearance at the Marin County Fair . We spoke with Lewis, who starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in the 2000 movie "Duets," by phone from his San Rafael office.



Huey Lewis
Q: On this tour you're playing all kinds of venues: wineries, casinos, a few feet away from livestock.
A: That's right. We're in show business, and we'll do anything for attention. In actual fact, it's interesting to note that we used to be a beer and hot dog band, and now we're playing for the wine and cheese set. Which means fewer people, but they charge them more. So we're still able to do it economically, and the smaller venues are way, way more musical than the coliseums.
Q: Plus, the guys in Coldplay don't get free admission to the petting zoo.
A: Yeah, that's right. It's much more intimate, as they say. You can see it and feel it. You can touch the audience with the music.
Q: And if there are any hot chicks you can touch them with parts of your body.
A: I'm not into that. I'm a musician, pure and simple. I'm into the music, man.
Q: Do you have Gwyneth Paltrow on speed dial?
A: No, I don't have Gwyneth Paltrow on speed dial.
Q: Why not? That song was actually a hit.
A: It was a No. 1 record.
Q: Why didn't you make more albums together?
A: Well, I don't know. I think Gwyneth is perfectly happy without singing anymore with me. She seems to be doing great.

CD Review: Billy Corgan's 'TheFutureEmbrace'

CD Review: Billy Corgan's 'TheFutureEmbrace'

Billy Corgan's 'TheFutureEmbrace': Aidin Vaziri | Apparently, things have gotten so bad for Billy Corgan he can't even afford a computer with a working space bar. His called his new album "TheFutureEmbrace," and the songs include "The CameraEye," "Pretty, pretty STAR" and "DIA," which indicate that his shift key might have gone a little sticky as well. You would think that with all that time he put in with the Smashing Pumpkins, the singer would have at least saved up enough money to buy a secondhand TRS-80 with working letters and everything. Or maybe having his heart broken by his longtime girlfriend, photographer Yelena Yemchuck, hurt so much that Corgan could no longer be bothered with something as mundane as the English language. That would certainly explain why his first formal solo outing (everyone knows the Pumpkins' albums were solo affairs in all but name) sounds even more anguished and primitive than when he stalked around like Nosferatu singing things like "The Crying Tree of Mercury." Over a dozen tracks, Corgan obsesses over the breakup, trading in his '70s-metal-guitar onslaught for something more subdued but no less forceful. The highlight is an odd, electronically bent cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody." Sorry, "ToLoveSomebody." The song has been done many times before -- by everyone from Nina Simone and Janis Joplin to Tom Jones and Michael Bolton -- but never with the Cure's morose Robert Smith singing backing vocals. That enough is reason to think Corgan just might make a grab at relevance once again.

CD Review: Sugar Ray's 'The Best of Sugar Ray'

CD Review: Sugar Ray's 'The Best of Sugar Ray'

Sugar Ray's 'The Best of Sugar Ray': Aidin Vaziri | Five reasons why this album will make you split your pants laughing: 1) It's called "The Best of Sugar Ray" -- and it has more than one song on it. 2) You've probably forgotten that one song, "Fly," included a reggae breakdown featuring a cameo by dance-hall MC Super Cat, rendering it totally useless. 3) It's called a "best of" album, yet contains quite a bit of filler. 4) Among the filler: A tune written by Howard Stern ("Psychedelic Bee"), pre-"Fly" material ("Rhyme Stealer") and -- drumroll, please -- wonky covers (Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time"). 5) People who bought this album also bought: Hootie & the Blowfish, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Incubus.

Live Review: Keren Ann

Live Review: Keren Ann

Moody and melodic, a true chanteuse enchants: Aidin Vaziri | It's impossible to understand Keren Ann without a foldout map of the world, lots of hyphens and taking a deep breath. She's an Indonesian-Dutch- Israeli-Russian singer-songwriter who divides her time between New York and Paris and plays acoustic songs that evoke Nico and Norah Jones, without sounding close to either. She's a French chanteuse in the classic Françoise Hardy and Claudine Longet mold, complete with precisely cut bangs and a two-packs-a-day whisper. And if she hadn't torn several ligaments in her left thumb during a drunken night out while recording her fourth album, "Nolita," the songs would have never been drenched in electronic effects and would have made it truly sound like she landed here straight from 1967. In an old-world jazz club setting such as Cafe Du Nord, where she played with like-minded Argentine singer Juana Molina on Thursday, the decades seemed to melt away all the same. Backed only by guitar player Jack Petrocelli, her set wasn't so much about words and melodies as it was atmosphere. When getting swept up in the bittersweet, blue-moon mood of her songs, it was hard not to feel transported to the small Montmarte flat where she did most of her recording, with the faint smell of Gitanes and Pernod in the air.

Pop Quiz: Kelly Osbourne

Pop Quiz: Kelly Osbourne

Aidin Vaziri | Depending on how many episodes of "The Osbournes" you caught, you either can't stand Kelly Osbourne or you totally hate her. But the funny thing is, she knows she acted like a royal brat on her family's wildly popular MTV reality series. She was, after all, only 16, hooked on painkillers and seeing her face in the tabloids every week. Now 20, Osbourne, with a little help from Linda Perry, has reinvented herself as a svelte new-wave vixen on her surprisingly decent second album, "Sleeping in the Nothing." Calling from London (the week before she checked into rehab again), Osbourne tells us how she pulled it off.



Kelly Osbourne
Q: Has anyone told you that person on the album cover doesn't look much like you?
A: See, it came out really weird. I was wearing this dress, right, and these heels and this corset that tucked me in really, really tight. I wanted to look like Anna Karina from "Alphaville."
Q: I heard you wear corsets 24 hours a day.
A: I'm trying to. I want to do it so bad.
Q: Doesn't it hurt?
A: It hurts like a mother -- . I get bruises all the time. I think I've got a bruised rib, too.
Q: So why do that to yourself?
A: Pain is beauty. I don't want to get plastic surgery and I hate working out, so I'll just wear corsets under everything.
Q: Do you think you have traded your cocaine addiction for a corset addiction?
A: I never did cocaine! I was addicted to opiates, like downer drugs.
Q: I need to get my drugs straight.
A: Trust me, dude, I would be a lot skinnier if I did cocaine.

Cracker Jack With Coldplay

Cracker Jack With Coldplay

Cool Customer: Aidin Vaziri | Chris Martin probably doesn't host too many dinner parties these days, but he really should. Before an hourlong interview at a hotel room in the Clift, the Coldplay singer thoughtfully pulls back the drapes to reveal the San Francisco skyline. He pulls the chairs close together and rearranges the pillows on the sofa for greatest comfort. And when he discovers the key for the minibar is missing, he starts pulling out consolation refreshments: Toblerone bars, breath mints, Cracker Jack. Somebody missed Martha Stewart while she was locked up. He's so well-mannered, it's hard to remember he's the front man for the band whose previous album, 2002's "A Rush of Blood to the Head," sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide. By now, Green Day would have turned the TV into a trampoline and the bed into a second bathroom. Yet Martin, like most 28-year-old men who wake up and find themselves in one of the biggest bands in the universe and married to Gwyneth Paltrow, doesn't exactly know how he should behave. "With us, it's always such a fine line between extreme self-confidence and extreme doubt," he says, tapping his fingers on the coffee table and adjusting his tall, gangly frame into a ball on the couch. "Size is nothing. McDonald's has shifted billions of burgers, but that doesn't make them good."

Pop Quiz: Rilo Kiley

Pop Quiz: Rilo Kiley

Aidin Vaziri | Despite doing the whole child-star thing with cameos on sitcoms like "Growing Pains" and "The Golden Girls," Jenny Lewis doesn't display any of the usual glue-sniffing side effects. As the singer for Rilo Kiley -- the Los Angeles band whose third album, "More Adventurous," is starting to explode -- she's become a critically lavished songwriter and indie-rock pinup. And things are only getting better. The band's next stop is a summer tour with Coldplay.



Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley
Q: How are you?
A: OK.
Q: What's wrong?
A: I'm having a weird day. Kind of just mid-tour exhaustion.
Q: But you're just getting started.
A: I know, but it gets so tiring. The routine, the lack of sleep. At a certain point you kind of break, and then you get your second wind. I'm waiting for my second wind.
Q: Do you think the tour with Coldplay will be any better?
A: See, I don't think the conditions are going to change for us much. I think we'll keep it Best Western-focused, as we always do. But I do believe there will be catering, which is something we've never experienced before.
Q: What are you looking forward to eating?
A: Vegetables.
Q: Like carrots?