Pop music review: Wanda Jackson and Best Coast

Two far-flung generations of rock ’n’ roll — Wanda Jackson and Best Coast — ring in the New Year with spirit and sass at Club Nokia.

Rock ’n’ roll is still a lively way to begin a new year, and two far-flung generations of music and attitude in the form of rockabilly icon Wanda Jackson and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino welcomed 2012 with a loving roar at Club Nokia on Saturday night. Each led sets that were at times fiery and casual, with the two biting on words of love gone wrong and joking easily about themselves and the night ahead.

In the ’60s and ’70s, Jackson enjoyed a successful middle career as a popular country singer. But she remains best known as “the queen of rockabilly” and today is a vibrant direct link to the first generation of rock ’n’ roll. At 74, she’s inevitably a different singer than she was in the ’50s, but she’s still fired up with power and sass.

“You all look like a beautiful flower garden,” she said warmly to her crowd, adding, “with a weed here and there, of course.”

Arriving onstage barely 20 minutes before midnight, she said, “OK, I’ll bet you’re ready to rock. Why not?” and dived right into an urgent “Riot in the Cell Block #9” and “Rock Your Baby” with hardly a breath in-between.

On “I Gotta Know” from 1956, Jackson eased back and forth from rockabilly snarl to a country lament, singing, “If our love is the real thing, where is my wedding ring?” And her reading of Bob Wills’ forlorn “I Betcha My Heart I Love You” included a yodel that was full and rich with feeling.

Her husband of 50 years, Wendell Goodman, came out to help with the night’s countdown to midnight, with 30 seconds to spare, and she sang a traditional “Auld Lang Syne,” and noted, “If nothing else, you kept breathin’, which by itself makes it a good year.”

Black Sabbath promises album of new songs to go with 2012 tour

The founding members of Black Sabbath took to the stage Friday at the Whisky A Go Go to announce another reunion tour in 2012, but this time is much different: The British heavy metal originators have begun working on an album of new material, their first since 1978.

"It’s now or never for us. We’re getting along great," said guitarist Tony Iommi, sitting beside singer Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, all now in their early 60s. “We’ve got some music to play.”

As his wife, Sharon, watched from the balcony, Osbourne added, “It was just time. We couldn’t do it any earlier.”

Osbourne had long been the band member most doubtful that Sabbath could record new material to match its early classics such as "Iron Man" and "War Pigs."

"We tried, but it didn’t work," he said Friday. "This time, for some reason, we’ve written seven or eight songs that are really good. I’m not just saying it."

"It really is back to the old Sabbath sound," Butler said. "We know this time it’s going to happen."

The album will be released next year through Vertigo/Universal Republic Records, accompanied by a worldwide arena tour, including a stop as a headliner on June 10 of the multiday Download Festival in England. Veteran producer Rick Rubin, who has worked with the likes of Metallica, Johnny Cash and the Beastie Boys, among many others, is working with the band on the album.

As for the live show, Iommi said the set list will be much more than the usual hour of hits the band has performed since its first reunion in 1997.

"If you think we’ll be doing the same set as last time, it won’t be," Iommi said.           

At the news conference, Rubin predicted a "no-pressure situation" in the studio for the band. "I’ve been in the room while they’ve played, and they sound remarkably like Black Sabbath," he said. "It’s inspiring hearing what’s coming out."

Pop music review: Cyndi Lauper just wants to have fun

The offbeat ‘80s pop princess switches gears in a surprisingly smoldering show at Club Nokia that is heavy on the R&B.

Cyndi Lauper has got the blues. "Why the blues? Because I’m from Queens and Brooklyn," the singer explained to her fans gathered at Club Nokia on Friday night, between some surprisingly smoldering R&B songs from her album "Memphis Blues."

That kind of musical shift is a brave and dramatic move for any artist, particularly one still best known for singing pop songs. It risks alienating fans who might prefer that Lauper stay unusual in the usual ways. She didn’t seem at all bothered by it Friday.

The crowd looked to be a mix of fans open to whatever she wanted to sing and others impatiently waiting for the hits. A few were in the fluffy party dresses Lauper used to wear, and there were moms with little girls ready to share her ’80s version of girl power.

Lauper showed up instead in black leather and with a real blues ‘n’ soul band behind her, anchored not only by harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite but also by several veteran players from Al Green and Hi Records. Lauper lacks the gut-wrenching yowl of the greatest blues singers but doesn’t pretend otherwise and instead reinterprets the music with her own style and conviction.

She remains a charmingly quirky, bouncy vocalist, wailing "Just Your Fool" and falling to her knees for "Shattered Dreams," sometimes adding her own hiccup at the end of a line. During a bluesy revision of her 1984 dance-pop hit "She Bop," she waded into the crowd (as she would several times), and she recast the pop of "All Through the Night" like a delicate folk song, carried by the raw emotion of her voice.

Lauper told of hearing Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong as a child and later discovering the titanic R&B of Big Mama Thornton while working as a college DJ. "That was another one of my failed careers," she said. "They didn’t like the way I speak. They kept telling me to relax my mouth."

Live review: Jackson Browne with Dawes and Jonathan Wilson at the Satellite

The pop icon is backed by a younger generation of folk-rock performers during Wednesday's packed show at the popular Silver Lake venue.

 Generations don’t always mix easily in rock. A shared purpose can make all the difference, as Jackson Browne, Dawes and Jonathan Wilson demonstrated during three hours of smart, sometimes fiery folk-rock Wednesday at the Satellite.

The years between them were essentially erased at the Silver Lake club, coming just weeks after Dawes’ headline show at the Orpheum, and a short stint backing up Robbie Robertson, another classic rock hero. With Browne, they share a lineage stretching back to the ‘60s-’70s folk-rock scene of Laurel Canyon, though Dawes filters that peaceful, easy feeling with a subtle postmodern edge, much as the Jayhawks did in the ‘90s.

Ahead of a joint “micro-tour” of Spain, Browne praised his young collaborators as something more than sidemen. “It’s a pleasure to play with these guys, who are themselves some of my favorite songwriters,” he told the packed room.

As the backing band of the night, Dawes was joined by singer-guitarist Jonathan Wilson, producer of the group’s two albums, and together they were a fully integrated, inseparable unit in their half-hour opening set. The music took elegant twists and turns, shifting easily from muscular Crazy Horse guitar spasms into something approaching a countrified “Working Man’s Dead” groove.

Live review: Randy Newman at Royce Hall

Randy Newman's best, most pointed songs usually will come around again with enough time, timely once more either from history repeating itself, or mankind living up to his worst expectations.

At his concert Friday for UCLA Live at Royce Hall, his quietly wounded and defiant “Louisiana 1927” told of another generation's devastating flood, but had new poignancy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And, sadly, the biting, hilarious detail of 1972's “Political Science” may never lose its relevance: “They all hate us anyhow / So let's drop the big one now.”

His two-hour solo performance of musical storytelling and ribald character studies began with the singer-songwriter ambling over to his Steinway, a man in black and a full head of white hair plucking the spooky melody from “Last Night I Had a Dream,” a dark and funny tale. It set a tone for the night.