Rock + Alternative

Whats This Playlist All About? As he prepares for the release of his new solo album, The Atlas Underground, the Nightwatchman, former Rage Against the Machine guitarist, and outspoken activist continues to fight for his rights through music. His genre-spanning list hits up all types of subversive anthems and calls to action from punk icons, pop freaks, and folk heroes.What You Get: To start, youll be treated with a good chunk of Morellos new album, including a grungy, hard-rocking cut with K. Flay and a sludgy, bass-y banger with Knife Party. He then gives shout-outs to his friends and collaborators, like Skrillex, Vic Mensa, A Perfect Circle, and System of a Down, before taking many left turns, including a little Jesus Christ Superstar, a club-ready 50 Cent, and a sassy Taylor Swift.Greatest Discovery: The woozy, dreamy, twang-touched "Song for Zula" from the criminally underrated PhosphorescentWhat About Rage? Theres one radical band conspicuously missing from this list: Morellos own Rage Against the Machine. A little "Killing in the Name" would round this out nicely, right?

founder Phil Pirrone wants you to have a good time. And dammit if he isnt trying with the 2018 installment of his six-years-running fest. See, unlike some other festivals that have all but fully homogenized in recent years, Southern Californias Psych rock celebration is still uniquely its own beast, and not just because of the pinpointed approach (music thats centered on psych while exploring every corner it has to offer), but also because of the immersive experience waiting for those who take the trek out beyond LA county. While its expanding from the desert to a lake at the edge of the San Jacinto Mountains this year, headliners like Tame Impala and Warpaint ease into night 1, while full psych worship with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Ty Segall and White Fence electrifies night 2, before the weekend closes out with shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine on night 3. And the day line-ups are equally as impressive for anyone into this musical movement born of the Mojave desert, with highlights like Kikagaku Moyo, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Wand, Earthless, Deap Valley, and now that were listing them, honestly too many to list. But as for that experience we mentioned? In between sets and before and after the shows, theres no shortage of art installations, sound baths, yoga, desert and moon teachings, films, workshops, talks and anything else you might wanna trip into.Founder Phil Pirrone has been doing this since 2012 and also operates his own psych band JJUUJJUU, so when we asked him what make for the best soundtrack to take the journey out to this year, heres what he came up with.Says Pirrone: "This playlist is for you, just like . This playlist is for having a good time, just like . This playlist will brush your teeth, just like .”Listen above or go right here. takes place October 12 - 14th in Lake Perris. Gates open noon daily with late night entertainment after the headliners. For tickets and more info, go to desertdaze.org.

The rock band Ratt have said they wrote their best and best-known song, “Round and Round,” using a cassette recorder in a one-room L.A. apartment called Ratt Mansion West, where they survived on top ramen. “You can’t get much less glamorous than that,” singer Stephen Pearcy told Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman, authors of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. No doubt. In fact, you also can’t get much…rattier.See, Ratt came from a long line of rodents. Aerosmith, the band they were most often compared to, had recorded songs called “Round and Round” and “Rats in the Cellar” years before Ratt crawled out of MTV with their 1984 debut album, Out of the Cellar; they’d also covered funk progenitor and minstrel-show veteran Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog” a decade before Ratt revolved a self-titled 1983 EP around it. “I was the last child, just a punk in the street,” Stephen Tyler shriek-howled on “Last Child” in 1976, the year punk supposedly happened, though really it had been around for years. Ratt fit into that line, as well.“Out on the streets, that’s where we’ll meet”: That’s how “Round and Round” starts, a line that immediately recalls the MC5, yet is hardly the punkiest thing about Out of the Cellar. Writing about the song in The Village Voice at the time, I noted, “It’s reasonably fast [with] a simple repeating riff that serves (and works) as the hook, and no real guitar showboating to speak of.” I also praised the album’s lack of “keyboards or strings or any of that sissy stuff, and a couple cuts (‘I’m Insane,’ ‘She Wants Money’) that approach Ramones/Motörhead velocity and intensity.”Deborah Frost, writing a metal-revival roundup in Rolling Stone, went so far as to suggest that “Pearcy sounds like a great L.A. street punk who would have been at home fronting the Seeds or the Standells,” then predicted “Round and Round” might wind up someday “on a 1984 version of Nuggets.” No such compilation ever materialized, but Frost’s estimation still rings true. Jon Young, in Rolling Stone Review 1985, similarly praised Pearcy’s “itchy-throated and proud” vocals above “junky but succinct” playing. Even Creem’s John Mendelsohn, ranking Ratt among his least favorite new bands of the ‘80s, zeroed in on Pearcy’s “petulant whine.”Here’s the thing about mid-‘80s MTV metal (pop-metal, that is—later indelibly dubbed “hair metal,” since my far more evocative labels “Nerf metal” and “shag metal” tragically never caught on): As myriad more extreme meanies will forever point out, it wasn’t really all that metal. In the ‘70s, when genre distinctions were fuzzier, most of these bands would’ve been filed under hard rock, if not glam rock—the New York Dolls (via Hanoi Rocks) and Alice Cooper (whom Twisted Sister swiped their look from) and Slade (whom Quiet Riot swiped their hits from) plus The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, and above all Kiss were unmistakable inspirations, both sonically and visually. The Dead End Kids, a sort of late-‘70s suburban Jersey/Philly answer to the Dolls, more or less sired the Pennsylvania-to-Sunset Strip bands Poison, Cinderella, and Britny Fox. W.A.S.P.’s and Quiet Riot’s earliest L.A. shows, circa 1975, had them opening for Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer Kane” and Stooges (not Joy Division!) spinoff The New Order. Great White covered Ian Hunter. Ex-Runaways were everywhere. And all the pretty boys wore scarves, Spandex, striped low-cut tank tops, shiny necklace baubles, flamboyant eye makeup, and Vaselined cheekbones.But ‘70s glam didn’t beget only hair metal; it also, earlier, begat ‘70s punk. There’s a fine line, and barely a year, between The Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” (revived in ’84 by Swiss cheese-metallers Krokus) and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Poison borrowed guitar chords from the Sex Pistols, who’d in turn borrowed them from the Dolls. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider slipped into Johnny Rotten snarls over the shouty Slade stomp of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Van Halen, who made L.A. hair metal inevitable, had a song called “Atomic Punk” on their first album and one called “D.O.A.” that sleazed like The Stooges on their second. Duff McKagan banged bass for Seattle punks The Fartz and Fastbacks prior to Guns N’ Roses. And so on.Ratt, like Mötley Crüe a couple years before—and so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like glam-rock obsessives Def Leppard a couple years before that, and actual punk rockers on both sides of the pond a couple years before that—put out their first vinyl on an indie label. Punk was already speeding metal up, weeding out pomp, and making it more D.I.Y. well before thrash rewrote the rulebook. New wave magazine-readin’ super freaks in 1981, especially the type drawn to heavy-riffed hardcore bands like Flipper and the Angry Samoans, might’ve noticed an ad for Crüe’s original Too Fast for Love, on Leathür Records. Ratt’s 1983 EP came out on Time Coast, a label run by longtime rock and comedy manager Marshall Berle—nephew of Milton Berle, who wound up co-starring partly in pre-glam drag along with several actual rats in the video for “Round and Round.” Time Coast also put out a single by spoofy Malibu clan the Surf Punks and a couple releases by L.A.’s excellent (and X-like) co-ed trio The Alley Cats; Ratt seem to have been the only alleged “metal” band on the imprint.So…cats and rats, how ‘bout that? The model on the cover of both Ratt’s first EP (with a rat scaling her stocking) and first album was kittenish Tawny Kitaen, later of Whitesnake video fame. Back in the ‘70s, when Ratt were still struggling under the moniker Mickey Ratt, a similarly somewhat Aerosmith-inspired Irish band called The Boomtown Rats took out-in-the-streets tunes like “Rat Trap” to the top of British charts; by 1984, their singer, Bob Geldof, was leading charity supergroup Band Aid, trying to cure Ethiopian famine. One of the first punk albums released in England, in early 1977, was The Stranglers’ ‘60s-garage-infused Rattus Norvegicus.Speaking of thematically titled albums, it’s worth noting that Ratt’s 2010 Infestation, featuring mostly original members, was arguably their most rocking since Out of the Cellar a quarter-century before. In 2002, Austin bluegrass cow-punks the Meat Purveyors recorded a highly entertaining and energetic alt-country cover of “Round and Round.” And by 2017, hip young German speed-metal troupe Stallion were channeling early Ratt riffs on their own second album, From the Dead. What comes around goes around, as Stephen Pearcy would say. I’ll tell you why—or maybe I already have.

Third Eye Blind were huge, but they were never credited with being exactly “important.” Sales of the band’s self-titled 1997 debut might have put them in the same tax bracket as Green Day and Nirvana, but unlike those twin towers of ‘90s alt-rock, Third Eye Blind were profoundly uncool. For all their bluster about being rejects and creeps, Billie Joe Armstrong and Kurt Cobain emerged from punk microcosms in which they were already stars, and they rode into popular consciousness as kings of an undiscovered country that the rest of the world would soon try to invade. The landscape shifted, the culture morphed. By contrast, the band Stephan Jenkins built had to live and die by songcraft alone, and in a way that has made their songs all the more enduring.Kids wanted to be Kurt and Billie Joe. No one ever wanted to be Stephan Jenkins; he could never quite ingratiate himself with a scene of ostensible outcasts. Teenagers couldn’t chase Third Eye Blind’s sound backward into a hip demimonde and attendant identity that said something about the world and a kid’s place in it. The band’s breakthrough song, “Semi-Charmed Life,” was seemingly designed to keep “Two Princes” and “One Week” company in future documentaries about Beanie Babies, Super Soakers, and other ‘90s trends. It opened onto nothing more that its own fleeting moment. Just like the album it came from opened only into the worlds contained in its songs. There was no shifting, no morphing.So Third Eye Blind came from nowhere. And they came bearing beautiful music that has aged remarkably well, unburdened as it is by epoch-making cultural significance. The songs have remained pure and vital, and if time has done anything to them, it has burnished them into reflective surfaces that contain and clarify a brief span of pop history.“How’s It Going to Be” is a standout from a debut album fit to burst with hits and should-have-been-hits, one of the great ballads of the ‘90s, a gloriously simple heartbreaker that builds a bridge between Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” and Dashboard Confessional’s “Screaming Infidelities.” It was a blurry Polaroid snapshot of music’s barely noticeable pivot from one kind of unhip earnestness to another, and this in-betweenness has sustained the song through time. It can float in that indeterminate realm forever, attracted by the weakest gravitational force to the songs surrounding it, but mostly standing beautiful and alone, waiting for the future to find it again and again.Third Eye Blind’s discography teems with three-minute secret histories like this one. Jenkins’ hyperactive style—the dude will try just about anything to build an earworm—has a way of erasing the traces of anyone but Jenkins himself. But in the same way an old commercial tells us more about the past than whatever program it once interrupted, Third Eye Blind’s best songs remain shiny, hermetic wonders that were whispering to us about the future of guitar-based pop all along.A sizeable chunk of Third Eye Blind predicts Red Hot Chili Peppers’ post-horndog phase as semi-sensitive dudes who worked out how to write pop songs. Blue highlight “Anything” turned emo-inflected pop-punk into humongous arena rock two years before Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American pulled the same trick. And One Direction might have perfected a blend of Coldplay’s grandiosity and Kelly Clarkson’s epic flights, but Third Eye Blind beat them to the idea on “Faster,” one of the few bright spots on 2003’s Out of the Vein.Much of the band’s work since 2009 has been unremarkable, and at this point Third Eye Blind mostly just sound like fans of Third Eye Blind. And maybe that’s fine. They finally found their scene: Turns out they were it all along.

For a song proclaiming its desire for eternal youth, Alphaville’s 1984 signature single “Forever Young” has a way of making you feel pretty old. Certainly, the essential, inescapable ’80s-ness of the song—the sunrise-summoning synths, the slick gated-reverb drum sound, the lighter-waving chorus line, the Cold War context—has a way of making those of us who came of age in that era feel all the more attuned to the passage of time. And the song’s very lyrical conceit presents a cruel paradox: With its yearning plea to return to the innocence and ecstasy of adolescence, “Forever Young” also underscores the fact it must come to an end.At the time “Forever Young” was released, rock ‘n’ roll was reckoning with its own lost youth. Twenty years after The Who’s Roger Daltrey famously declared “I hope I die before I get old,” the original classic rockers were starting to become aware of, if not their mortality, then their fading relevance. Rod Stewart seemed particularly preoccupied with the subject: While he tried to align himself with the New Wave kids on 1981’s synth-powered new-generation anthem “Young Turks,” by decade’s end, he had fully accepted his dad-rock fate with the parentally themed serenade “Forever Young” (which shares only its title with the Alphaville song; in fact, Rod’s “Forever Young” is an interpretation of Bob Dylan’s namesake 1974 deep cut). Other veteran artists, however, defiantly embraced their inner child, like Tom Waits on “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” his ramshackle folk-punk repudiation of the adult world and all the responsibilities and disappointments that go with it.So while Alphaville’s “Forever Young” may strike many as an ‘80s synth-pop artifact, permanently frozen in the Reagan era, it really belongs to a broader tradition of pop and rock songs that celebrate the state of being young and/or recognize how fleeting that moment really is. This playlist repositions “Forever Young” in its true natural habitat, amid a set of songs that embody all aspects of being young: the feelings of invincibility (Oasis’ “Live Forever,” Skid Row’s “Youth Gone Wild,” fun.’s “We Are Young”), the celebrations of immaturity (Supergrass’ “Alright,” Wilco’s “Just a Kid”), the compulsion to live for the moment and seize the day (Japandroids’ “Younger Us,” Constantines’ “Young Lions”), and emergent anxieties over getting older (Lana Del Rey’s “Young And Beautiful”). “Life is a short trip,” Alphaville’s Marian Gold warns us on “Forever Young”—but this playlist represents a bottomless fountain of youth where you can relive and savor the best days of your life just a little longer.

Whenever you come across a list of the most influential rock bands of the ‘90s, you can easily predict the core names you’ll see on there: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and so on. Rarely will you see the name Better Than Ezra. Yet they’re arguably more emblematic of the era than any of the groups mentioned above. Because all those other bands never really went away—to this day, you still hear them regularly on the radio, you can still spot their names in headlines on major music sites, and you still see new generations of kids wearing their faux-vintage t-shirts. In that sense, they belong to 2002 and 2009 and 2018 as much as they do 1993. Better Than Ezra are likewise still a going concern—they released a new single in June—but to many people, they are a band inextricably tied to the year 1995, when their single “Good” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.“Good” is the entire ‘90s alt-rock narrative condensed into three minutes and five seconds. It’s the ultimate totem of an era when the major-label trawl for the next Nirvana was cast so far and wide, it swept up any DIY group with a distortion pedal and quirky name—even one that cut its teeth playing frat parties in the indie-rock desert of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But more significantly, it’s the song that effectively marks the end point of the ‘90s alt-rock revolution—the moment where the last remaining edges of an underground-spawned sound had been sanded off and polished into pop.With its strolling bassline triggering an earworm chorus caked in fuzz, “Good” dutifully followed the quiet/LOUD playbook established by the Pixies on their 1988 debut album, Surfer Rosa. That record’s violent mood swings were the natural sonic manifestation of a band trying to reconcile its formative loves of Peter, Paul and Mary and Hüsker Dü (the two influences that, according to legend, were listed in the classified ad that recruited bassist Kim Deal). But Surfer Rosa also represented a crucial evolutionary step beyond indie rock’s ‘80s hardcore roots, with its carnage unleashed in more controlled, strategic bursts, and Deal’s basslines serving as the cool counterpoint to Black Francis and Joey Santiago’s flesh-searing guitar onslaught. Before long, that poise-to-noise maneuver was being duplicated in all corners of the alterna-verse—most famously by Nirvana, whose frontman, Kurt Cobain, openly admitted to aping the Pixies.But if Nevermind set off the bomb that forever destroyed the barriers separating the underground and mainstream, what followed was an ongoing effort to clear the path and clean up the debris. In the hands of bands like Weezer and Bush, the spastic dynamic shifts mastered by the Pixies started to resemble carefully mapped peaks and valleys that you could see coming from a mile away. And though Better Than Ezra’s “Good”—and the album from which it hailed, Deluxe—was originally released independently in 1993, its mainstream-breaching major-label reissue in 1995 couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. By that point, the post-Pixies sound had become so familiar on alt-rock radio that Better Than Ezra could easily settle into their chart-topping position as if gliding into the ass groove on a vintage secondhand leather sofa. And while none of the band’s subsequent releases achieved the same level of zeitgeist-defining ubiquity, their less-heralded 21st-century catalog has attracted at least one famous fan, perhaps providing a clearer view of the band’s legacy: More than just the fleeting ‘90s alt-rock sensation of popular perception, Better Than Ezra are actually the missing link between Black Francis and Taylor Swift.

William Shatner began his outside-the-box musical career in the 60s, recording spoken-word versions of rock hits. In the 2000s, he resumed his recording career, and ever since it has taken him into strange, unexpected territory, with a head-scratching array of collaborators including Henry Rollins, Joe Jackson, Lyle Lovett, Sheryl Crow, Steve Vai, and many more. This year even saw the release of a Shatner Christmas album.Shatners musical moonlighting began while he was still inhabiting the role that would define him for generations of fans: Star Treks Captain James T. Kirk. His 1968 album The Transformed Man found him delivering dramatic, spoken versions (with musical backing) of some of the most popular songs of the era, like Bob Dylans "Mr. Tambourine" and The Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Was he delivering these out-there performances in earnest or with a broad wink? To this date, thats never really been determined, but that nebulousness has always been part of the fun.It took until 2004 for the always-busy actor to finally follow up The Transformed Man. His second album, Has Been, opened with his version of Pulps "Common People," and the rest of the record was occupied with original material, mostly co-written with Ben Folds, that found Shatner doing duets with everyone from Henry Rollins ("I Cant Get Behind That") to Brad Paisley ("Real"). Has Been turned out to be a surprise hit, and it earned such a rapturous reception that Shatner was inspired to embrace music more wholeheartedly than ever before. A string of albums followed over the next several years, each one demonstrating both his eclecticism and his willingness to go out on a limb. In retrospect, its hard to believe it took him so long to tackle the concept of Seeking Major Tom, an album of outer space-themed rock classics like David Bowies "Major Tom," Elton Johns "Rocket Man" (a song hed famously done live on TV but never recorded before), and Duran Durans "Planet Earth."Ponder the Mystery took the trippy themes a step further, as producer Billy Sherwood of Yes helped Shatner create an appropriately interstellar-sounding prog rock album that featured contributions from artists associated with Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Frank Zappa, and other art-rock outfits. Never one to be pigeonholed, Shatner followed that cosmic outing with a country album, Why Not Me, co-helmed by Jeff Cook of country superstars Alabama, with original tunes featuring guest appearances by Neal McCoy and Cash Creek.For 2018, Shatner took a simultaneously traditional and typically confounding turn on Shatner Claus, a Christmas album unlike any other. After all, where else are you likely to hear his old pal Henry Rollins shouting along with "Jingle Bells" or Iggy Pop crooning on "Silent Night?"

We’re supposed to be living in the age of infinite, unimpeded access to the entire history of recorded music. The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. If streaming services are the new record stores, they can be just as susceptible to supply-side issues as their brick-and-mortar predecessors. In other words: sometimes, the album you really want to hear isn’t in stock. In the streamiverse, certain artists’ discographies can resemble digital Swiss cheese, particularly if they bounced between number of labels over the course of the career, and especially if some of those labels went belly up. Historically, reissues have taken the form of lavish packages that come loaded with outtakes, rare photos and detailed liner notes, and that often still is the case. But in this day and age, “reissue” has also just become a fancy code word for “old album I can now stream on Spotify.”As such, some of the year’s most welcome new arrivals to the streaming world were technically reissues of once-lost records whose preceding reissues had also gone out of print, such as Simply Saucer’s crucial early ‘70s proto-punk document Cyborgs Revisited or pre-teen disco-punk diva Chandra’s 1980-era Transportation. 2018 also proved that there are still obscure private-pressed singer-songwriters (like Colorado-based pro-rock-climber-turned-troubadour Pat Ament), ‘70s space-rock groups (Canada’s Melodic Energy Commission), ‘80s post-punk bands (New Zealand’s Nocturnal Projections) and unsung ‘90s grunge groups (Australia’s Magic Dirt) out there waiting to rediscovered; still unsung funk auteurs deserving to be rescued from the crates (Tim Jones a.k.a. Preacherman); still no limit to the synth-fueled freakery lurking in the back catalog of late electronic-music pioneer Bruce Haack (check the proto-rap jam “Party Machine”); and still no bottom to the well of wiggy grooves emanating from West Africa in the 1970s (see: the Benin-focused second edition of Analog Africa’s Africa Scream Contest series).Among more high-profile reclamation projects, The Beatles’ 50th-anniversary White Album box set proved to be the rare classic-rock cash grab whose bonus tracks are just as mythical as the original material. (On top of providing fans with official versions of oft-bootlegged curios like “Revolution 1 - Take 18”—which connects the familiar acoustic sing-along with the sound-collage chaos of “Revolution 9”—the alternate Take 10 version of “Good Night” suggests Ringo invented the third Velvet Underground album a few months early.) In some cases, reissues transported us back to a watershed moment in rock history, be it Detroit’s mid-’60s garage-band scene (via a pre-fame Bob Seger’s band the Last Heard) or Neil Young’s infamously rowdy post-Harvest/pre-Tonight’s the Night residency at the Roxy in Los Angeles circa 1973. With others, we revisited notoriously mercurial bands at a key early stage in their evolution, like when The Flaming Lips started to dress up their psych rock with bells and whistles (on the ‘92-era gem “Zero to a Million”) or when Brooklyn bruisers The Men started to infuse their punk-rock roar with more emotional undertones on “Wasted.” And then there were reissues that gave us an intimate audience to private moments of creation—like Prince’s largely improvised Piano & A Microphone1983, Julee Cruise’s early ethereal demos, or the 25th-anniversary excavation of Liz Phair’s lo-fi Girly-Sound Tapes, which was perfectly timed to reify her profound influence on a new generation of confessional indie-rockers.But some of this year’s most notable archival projects were less about satiating completists than commemorating lives cut short far too soon. Women guitarist Chris Reimer—who passed away suddenly in 2012 at age 26—was honored with a collection of private home recordings, Hello People, that showcased his budding talents as an ambient soundscaper. The legacy of Ross Shapiro, the late singer/guitarist for Athens indie-rock hopefuls The Glands, was fortified with the release of the outtakes collection Double Coda. The free-ranging career of Chris Cornell was encapsulated by an box set featuring a handful of previously unreleased oddities—including a cover of U2’s “One” that subs in the lyrics to Metallica’s “One”—that present a more playful portrait of the brooding grunge god. And a survey of Joe Strummer’s solo career, 001, was capped with the 1988-era castaway “U.S. North,” a valorous 10-minute cavalry charge that marks a rare reunion with Mick Jones, suggesting the sort of epic rock music The Clash might’ve headed toward had they survived into the late ‘80s. It’s a reminder that the best reissues and compilations don’t just preserve history, but allow us to imagine an alternate one.

For those who get tired of hearing the same tired old versions of the same damn Christmas tunes every time the holidays roll around, this playlist offers some electrifying options to keep your seasonal soundtrack vital, and hopefully prevent you from falling asleep in your eggnog.Even those who think they know it all when it comes to the classic-rock canon might be surprised by the number of Christmas songs that have been recorded by some of rock n rolls mightiest artists over the years. The best-of collections by the Eagles and REO Speedwagon rarely, if ever, end up including tracks like "Please Come Home for Christmas" and "Ill Be Home for Christmas," respectively. And when the catalog of The Beach Boys is celebrated, how often does their "Little Saint Nick" get a mention?Even prog rockers have taken time out from their tricky time signatures and otherworldly epics to spend some time in the land of sleigh bells and roasted chestnuts. Emerson, Lake & Palmer offered up a tune that would become a holiday standard in England, "I Believe in Father Christmas," and Jethro Tull turned out a flute-tastic version of the classic carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen."The harder end of the rock spectrum is represented not only by Twisted Sister giving a new spin to a time-honored idea with "Heavy Metal Christmas (The Twelve Days of Christmas)" but also by the kings of metal satire, Spinal Tap, with their satanically seasonal "Christmas with the Devil." Beatlemaniacs are well served at Christmastime — theres John Lennons hopeful "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," Paul McCartneys jubilant standby "Wonderful Christmastime," and Ringo getting his licks in with "Come On Christmas, Christmas Come On."While some of the most popular classic-rock Christmas tunes are originals, theres also a fair number of rockers who have tackled timeless holiday standards, coming up with their own takes on the venerated tunes. Bruce Springsteens live version of "Santa Claus Is Comin to Town" is probably one of the best-known and most beloved, but dont sleep on Stevie Nicks take on "Silent Night" either.Pioneering 50s rockers left their mark on the holiday canon as well. Chuck Berrys "Run Rudolph Run" pretty much set the template for every rock n roll Christmas tune to come, and Elvis Presleys "Blue Christmas" is just about the most mournful seasonal track ever recorded.So when it comes time to crank up the holiday soundtrack this year, dont worry about drowning in worn-out warhorses. Just turn to this collection of classic-rock cuts to keep your Christmas crackling with energy.

Sometimes music is a solitary endeavor. After recording technology advanced to the point of making it possible for one person to construct an entire album all by themselves, hermetic whiz kids started turning out solo albums in the truest sense of the word, in which they played and sang all or nearly all of the parts. Some of them may have been control freaks eschewing additional musicians out of monomania, but others were studio geniuses who crafted entire worlds all on their own, and thats what were looking into here.A few are former band members who ran with the chance to operate unencumbered, such as Paul McCartney and John Fogerty, who had some of their most memorable songs sans helpmates, like "Maybe Im Amazed," from the ex-Beatles 1970 solo debut, McCartney, and "Centerfield," from the CCR frontmans 1985 comeback album of the same name. Some became famous as youthful mavens of multitracking, as Prince did with his first hit, "I Wanna Be Your Lover," as well as Mike Oldfield with his first album, Tubular Bells, known forevermore as the spooky soundtrack music of The Exorcist.More and more artists are going it alone as digital technology has drastically increased the ease and options in creating one-person projects. Sometimes theyve obscured their solitary stances by adopting aliases that could be taken for band names, such as Glasser (Cameron Mesirow), Grimes (Claire Boucher), and Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner). Whether they tip their hands or not, the next Todd Rundgren or Stevie Wonder could be out there right now, just waiting for the right time to pop up with a new, strictly solo masterpiece.