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"Hello," John Prine said when he walked onstage at UMSL Friday night and picked up a guitar. Then he reeled off seven songs from his prodigious back catalogue before delving into his most recent collection, 2005's Fair & Square.

That was just dandy with the audience at the sold-out Touhill Performing Arts Center. Including the drunk fella sitting right behind me, in the very last row of the orchestra section, alternately hollering encouragement and singing along.

It was an interesting opening salvo. I'd half-expected Prine to introduce himself via "Some Humans Ain't Human," a topical song on Fair & Square that skewers the recently departed White House occupant with this spoken passage near the end:

Have you ever noticed
When you're feelin' really good
There's always a pigeon
That'll come shit on your hood
Or you're feelin' your freedom
And the world's off your back
Some cowboy from Texas
Starts his own war in Iraq

But Prine's never really been about the easy laugh. In fact, he didn't play that song at all on Friday night. Instead, after the iconically nutty old chestnut "Spanish Pipedream" (Blow up your TV, throw away your paper/Move to the country, build you a home/Plant a little garden, eat a lotta peaches/Try and find Jesus on your own), we got the barstool's-eye view of "The Torch Singer" (Whiskey and pain both taste the same/During the time they go down). Said Prine after that one: "I ain't sang that in about 25 years." And then, out of the blue, "Six O'Clock News," a real day-brightener about an out-of-wedlock offspring who kills himself after learning that truth via an old diary (The whole town saw Jimmy on the six o'clock news/His brains were on the sidewalk, and blood was on his shoes).

Which is not to imply the evening was a down one. Far from it. Just a little...unpredictable.

Today, Bruce Springsteen releases Working on a Dream, his sixteenth studio album. To mark the occasion, writers Steve Kozel and Christian Schaeffer had an e-mail volley over the merits of the new work.

Steve Kozel: Working On A Dream starts with the eight-minute Western epic, "Outlaw Pete," which chronicles the life of a man seemingly born on the wrong side of the law. Springsteen lays this plain in the first verse with all the hyperbole of a good ol' fashioned tall tale: "At six months old he'd done three months in jail / He robbed a bank in his diapers and little bare baby feet."

Now, Bruce has kicked off many a record with memorable bombast ("Badlands", "Born In The USA," "The Ties That Bind," "Lonesome Day"), and he's also been known to set an album's tone with some opening track balladry ("Thunder Road," "Nebraska"). But the choice to open his latest record with this hokey, overcooked, and melodramatic ode to a remarkably generic character strikes me as quite the head-scratcher. What was your first reaction?
 
"Outlaw Pete":

Repo! The Genetic Opera features a who's-who of cult actors and musicians, including Alexa Vega, Anthony Stewart Head, Sarah Brightman, Paris Hilton, Ogre, Terrance Zdunich, Bill Moseley and Paul Sorvino. The list of musician contributing to the soundtrack is even more impressive: Joan Jett, Poe, Clown (Slipknot), Sonny Moore (From First to Last), David J (Bauhaus/Love & Rockets), Daniel Ash (Love & Rockets), Blasko (Ozzy Osbourne), Melora Creager (Rasputina) and St. Louis' own Richard Fortus.

Repo! screens tonight at 9 p.m. at the Tivoli Theatre. Ticket info and such here. Below, here's a review by VVM's J Hoberman.

Movie cults are born, not made. A youthful audience discovered Donnie Darko on its own, even as another demographic transformed The Sound of Music into sing-along karaoke -- to name two of the 21st century's most notorious cult attractions. Still, no less than rocket science, show business relies on tested formulae -- hence Repo! The Genetic Opera.

Over 30 years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show first attracted press attention to the costumed, cross-dressing hordes descending each weekend on New York's Waverly cinema, Repo! arrives, wearing the cloak of midnight madness -- not to mention black lipstick, cut-rate rococo threads, and all the accoutrements for life in a blasted necropolis.

Writer Ryan Wasoba participated in the 100 Guitars performance at the Pageant last night, which also featured the world premiere of the first movement of Glenn Branca's Symphony Number 14. Here are Wasoba's thoughts on the night and an analysis of the performance. Read more about the concert here and see below for an interview with Branca himself. Photos by Annie Zaleski.

At 1:55 p.m., I stood in the Pageant's loading dock with the smokers while three guitarists jogged towards us, late for the 1:30 sound check. Glenn Branca sat by himself, smoking on the sidewalk, and yelled to them, "Slow down! Slow down! They're still putting mics up on the fucking drums!" Inside, the venue's crew frantically searched for enough power outlets to plug in 68 guitar amplifiers, moving the amps around at the request of conductor John Myers.

During the rehearsal the day before, Myers and Branca had done some seat rearranging, moving the Baritone 1 section that I was a member of from stage left to stage right. Luckily, this meant that I was no longer sitting behind the Alto 6 that practiced his Van Halen shred licks in between every take of ever song. Unfortunately, now I was placed directly behind the Tenor 5 who wore wrap-around FM transmitting headphones over his skullcap, had 3 different sets of wrap-around earplugs, and would wave his right arm in the air dramatically after almost every note he strummed. Familiarity breeds contempt, and after two long rehearsals I was starting to get pretty damn familiar with some of my fellow guitarists.

On the Pageant's stage, the sea guitarists were parted in the middle like conductor John Myers was Moses. Monitors were placed in the center aisle to project the drums to the guitarists. Like the previous day, Meyer asked which players were unable to hear the drums and a few folks raised their hands. The level was raised to an ear-bleeding level in the monitor, and the headphone-skullcap multi-earplug arm-waver in front of me still bitched/moaned about not being able to hear. I fantasized about strangling him with my Monster Cable while me and my Baritone neighbor James mocked his patented strumming flair.

Three-time Grammy award winning rapper Ludacris hosted a private election party to promote his upcoming album Theater of the Mind last night at Exo, a newly opened hip-hop venue at Locust and Compton.

The rapper introduced his new songs and stumped for Barack Obama to the crowd. He's been a supporter of Obama -- and an outspoken critic of Sen. Hilliary Clinton -- in the past. Remember this line from "Politics (Obama is Here)," released this summer? "Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant."

While at 10:30 p.m. (when video footage of Barack Obama was being projected on the wall inside), the smallish two-story club was filled to capacity, the atmosphere inside was subdued relative to the noise of surrounding streets, where people could be heard shouting and honking their horns through the neighborhood.

On Little Honey, released last week, Lucinda Williams returns to the raw roots that fed her music -- and seduced a generation -- in the 1980s and '90s. The more pointy-headed thinkers of that generation will now proceed to debate how the new disc stacks up against 1998's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, the record that transformed Williams from cult icon to Artist-With-a-Capital-A.

Let 'em.

The thing about records is you can't ever go backward, only forward. Car Wheels was ten years ago. It won't happen again.

But the thing about live shows is you can go backward and forward. And last night at the Pageant, Lucinda Williams took the crowd on a Sunday-night tour of her career, sprinkling Little Honey on a third of the 21-song set but also reaching back as far as Happy Woman Blues (1980) and sampling liberally from in between.

More after the jump, along with setlist and beaucoup videos from the show...

Here's a video clip posted by a concertgoer who had a balcony seat at Wednesday night's Robert Plant/Alison Krauss/T Bone Burnett concert at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis.

The song: "Nothin'," by Townes Van Zandt. As I recall, Plant introduced the tune by saying something along the lines of, "It's an American song -- all the good ones are."

Vantage point's nothing to write home about, but the sound is pretty solid and the performance was stellar. Kudos to "WestieMumX3," a.k.a. "Led Zep Gurl," who shot it.

More discussion of the STL show can be found on this Led Zep forum thread.

I reviewed the show on A to Z here. RFT slideshow by Kenny Williamson can be viewed here. Video embedded after the jump.

Halfway through last night's Raising Sand tour stop in St. Louis, producer-bandleader T Bone Burnett thanked an enraptured Fox Theatre crowd.

"It's good to be home," said Burnett, before delivering his only solo performance of the evening, "Earlier Baghdad." Afterward, acknowledging the song's dark subject matter, Burnett noted, "We're in a political season. And the only real politics is love."

Slide Show

Metallica released its ninth studio album today, five years after the release of its last album, St. Anger. I want to believe, but I’ve been disappointed by the last, oh, five albums and seventeen years. But it’s Death Magnetic Friday, according to Metallica, and I can’t help but be excited.