January 3, 2005 – EminemEncoreShady/Aftermath/Interscope In one of many surprising asides in his recent memoir, Chronicles, BobDylan says that he suffered a crisis of confidence in the late 1980s,brought on by a meeting with Kurtis Blow. After Dylan rapped--yes,rapped-- on Blow's 1986 song "Street Rock," Blow turned him on to N.W.Aand Public Enemy. Then, during the making of 1989's Oh Mercy,as Dylan struggled to create the kind of wild-mercury music that hadonce come so easily to him, he became convinced that he'd lost the"power and dominion over the spirits" that made his music possible--youknow, his flow--and that the next person imbued with that power wouldbe a rapper. "Somebody different," he remembers thinking, "was bound to come alongsooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised withit...be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and apower in the community.

November 1, 2004 – Two punks, dressed in black, get on a plane. They are famous, as punksgo. They make a very nice living at what they do. But when they have tofly somewhere to do it, they tend to fly coach, and they tend to flySouthwest Airlines, which offers nothing but coach. It's tempting toread larger implications into their preference for this mostegalitarian of carriers-things about punk principle, aboutworking-class sympathies, about a desire to breathe the same recycledair as everybody else who needs to get to Utah on a Friday afternoon.But we won't. Two punks get on a plane, and it happens to be aSouthwest plane because Southwest flies out of Oakland, California,which is close to where they live. The captain has turned off the fasten-seat-belts sign, and themiddle-aged woman next to me asks if the man sitting across the aisleis a musician.

September 3, 2004 – The LibertinesThe LibertinesRough Trade If Neil Young was right and every junkie's like a settingsun, Pete Doherty is burning some serious daylight. In the two yearssince his band the Libertines released their gloriously sloppy debut, Up the Bracket,the 25-year-old singer/guitarist has struggled with an epicsubstance-abuse problem. Last year, he burglarized the London flat ofLibertines co-founder Carl Barat, serving two months in jail. And thisJune, he fled a rehab program at a Thailand monastery; according to aBritish newspaper interview, Doherty spent the next three days holed upin a Bangkok hotel, ordering heroin from room service. At press time,the band had replaced their troubled compatriot with guitarist AnthonyRossomando. It's possible this album isn't entirely aboutDoherty's travails and the toll they've taken on his bandmates.

July 30, 2004 – Everyone'sa little punchy this time of night. Your eyelids feel gummy, like usedpostage stamps. The white line down the middle of the highway startsswinging like a pocket watch. And Isaac Brock is in his element. The29-year-old Modest Mouse frontman is a night person and a road dog, andhe likes to talk. Tonight, as he regales a captive audience from thepassenger seat of a rented SUV, he holds his Corona low, where the copscan't see it. He munches on pungent mini-mart jerky. He taps hisWinston Lights out the window, and the wind turns the ashes into tracesof orange neon against the night sky. Behindthe wheel, Juan Carrera, Modest Mouse's manager and tonight'sdesignated driver, keeps it at 70 on the dime as Brock talks a bluestreak. When Brock was younger, he was one of those kids who mostly satback and observed; now he speaks as though he's been saving up thewords for years.

July 27, 2004 – Onthe set of his band's photo shoot, Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shearspolitely requests that five mirrored disco balls be removed from thepremises. He's seen the Sisters referred to as a "gay disco band" onetoo many times, and doesn't want to stoke the, um, inferno. "Writersthrow out these references because I'm gay and we dabble in dancemusic," Shears says. "Fuck off. We're not the Village People." Indeed:The band's self-titled debut album is often campy but never kitschy.And while Shears' falsetto hits helium heights worthy of the brothersGibb, there's nothing disco about the boisterous single "Take YourMama," which evokes Elton John at his honky-tonkin'-est, or "Lovers inthe Backseat," a seamy tribute to Scary Monsters-era DavidBowie.

July 2, 2004 – PollyJean Harvey does not suffer fools gladly, especially fools with taperecorders. When questioned, she does not answer so much as reply, oftenprefacing her response with a purse-lipped "Mmm," as if she'sthinking of a way to address the query without accepting the suspectpremise behind it. When she is asked a question so poorly phrased--and,if we're being honest, so dumb in the first place--that it will not berepeated here, she says, matter-of-factly, "I'm just stunned you askedme that." See that low divan she's perched on, in this musty-by-designLondon hotel room? That's the driver's seat.

March 17, 2004 – It is a bright, crisp Sunday in Los Angeles, and Dave Grohl issurveying a room full of young, half-naked women and smiling as ifit's Christmas morning and Santa has brought him a brand-new dirtbike–and left that dirt bike in a room full of young,half-naked women. Grohl, who currently fronts the Foo Fightersand once played drums for a popular rock band from Washingtonstate, is here to shoot a video for "Shake Your Blood," the firstsingle from his heavy-metal side project, Probot. Theyoung, half-naked women are models from the indie-punk website known toone-handed Net surfers as SuicideGirls.com. They've left theirbedrooms, their webcams, and their collections of Death Cab for Cutie7-inches to come to this Hollywood soundstage and appear as backupdancers.

January 20, 2004 – Duane Allman once said that the term "Southern rock"was redundant: "Rock was born in the South, so saying'Southern rock' is like saying 'rockrock.'" But in the early 1970s, when (mostly white)down-home hippies fused soul, country, and jam blues whileaggressively embracing their knotty heritage, they invented a newmusic that forced the rest of the country to take notice. Over theyears, it's influenced everything from heavy metal to newwave, indie rock to hip-hop. THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND EAT A PEACH (Polydor, 1972)The Allmans were cosmic longhairs whose spiraling jams spun blues rockinto far-out redneck jazz. This half-live, half-studio double albumpays epic tribute to guitarist Duane Allman, who died in a motorcyclewreck the previous year. On the 33-minute "Mountain Jam," Duane &Co.

June 23, 2003 – The swish and the swagger, the glamour and the gloom, the setting imperial sun glowing through your ninthpint of Harp. British rock in the '90s offered an endless supply of star-crossed fops, dance-pop cads, and ax-slinging ironists. A. Primal Scream Screamadelica (Sire, 1991) Stones-obsessed longhairs enlist acid-house DJ Andrew Weatherall to produce their third album, and he turns their music inside out. Singer Bobby Gillespie finds in techno what he could never get from rock: a bass line that'll get him to the church on time. Classic song: "Loaded"--a sample of young easy rider Peter Fonda gets the party started, and reggae horns keep it going all night long. B. Suede Suede (Nude/Columbia, 1993) The distortion-pedal swirl of early-'90s dream pop meets the polymorphous perversity of glitter-rock giants T. Rex.

November 1, 2002 – When in Los Angeles, Dave Grohl and his girlfriend, Jordan Blum, stay in a rented Rose McGowan. For a place where Marilyn Manson may very well have slept, it's remarkably bright and cheery, and for a rock star's pied-a-terre, it's spotless—Grohl, 33, is apparently a real hot dog with the Lemon Pledge and the vacuum when journalists aren't around.On the fridge: a Polaroid of Grohl holding a pair of Queen guitarist Brian May's underwear (long story), and some Magnetic Poetry ("Thou shalt marry rank peevish vixen"). On the coffee table: a book by Los Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon, whose deadpan, macabre illustrations have graced albums by punk-rock legends Black Flag, Minutemen, and Sonic Youth.