The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 27

LABroadsheet 05-28-2015 7 E7 LA 1M TSet: 05-27-2015 15:54 Cos Angeles (Times E7 LATIMES.COMCALENDAR THURSDAY, MAY 28, 2015 Jett's take on rock Jett, from E6 ship with singer Miley Cyrus. A longtime fan and acquaintance, Cyrus delivered an impassioned speech inducting Jett into the Rock Hall and recently performed a cover of the Replacements' "Androgynous" with Jett and Against Mel's Laura Jane Grace for the the Happy Hippie Foundation, which benefits homeless and transgender youth. Jett says "Androgynous, which she covered on her 2006 record "Sinner," represents a spectrum of gender identity that resonated with all three women. "It's not saying you're not who you are, it's that you can feel a far range of emotions; there's many in-betweens, it can be fluid," she says. "I felt like this when I first covered it: I'm a girl, I love being a girl, but I definitely feel like I have all aspects in me." calendarlatimes.com Mike Coppola Getty images THE BLACKHEARTS perform with Jett at the induction rite.

Jett began carving out a name for herself in L.A.'s rock scene in the '70s. DRAMA SERIES RAY OUTSTANDING THE WALL STREET JOURNAL THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER NY DAILY NEWS as TELEVISION ACADEMY MEMBERS WATCH FULL SEASONS AT U2 Where The Forum, 3900 W. Manchester Inglewood When: Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday Info: U2.com Dennis Sheehan Tour manager was with band almost from its start. Obituary. CALIFORNIA SECTION was a professional look-alike who plays in an L.A.

cover band called Hollywood U2. In what must have seemed like an impersonator's wildest dream, he and Bono did a duet of "Sweetest Thing." Even minus his doppel-ganger, Bono filled the room, no small feat given the debilitating bicycle crash he suffered in late 2014. Despite since-mended broken bones in his hand and face, he didn't seem any worse for wear. He was a little scratchy between songs, but the wreck didn't affect his vocal cords at all. And the Edge seemed fine after he fell off the stage earlier in the tour.

The easy metaphor is to connect the accidents to U2's controversial rollout of "Songs of Innocence," which was delivered into a half a billion iTunes accounts without customers' permission. Both hinted at a once indestructible band revealing its weaknesses. Not so on Tuesday. This table was constructed to endure, and it certainly has. U2 was hard and aggressive but nuanced, a band still open to variation and rich with the determination to pull it off.

randall.robertslatimes.com Twitter: liledit our heads not as much through radio airplay or at all voluntarily but through iPhone ad buys. That truth complicates our relationship with the music; it's a solid rock song, but considering that we first absorbed it involuntarily, it has the feel of a brain-plant, as though U2 bought its way into our psyches in the same way it injected "Innocence" into our iTunes folders. But screw that. It sounded great. The oval-shaped Forum usually relegates many to binocular views, but U2 made great use of the space and employed a circular PA system that shot out in all directions from the middle with force.

Though the main stage was still at one end of the oval, an extended catwalk connected it to a smaller stage at the opposite end. The placement allowed the band to move along the length of the arena and connect with a huge swath of the crowd. Better, above the walk hung back-to-back billboard-sized video screens that displayed images and illustrated set scenes at precise intervals throughout the night. Best, the screens were semi-transparent and held within them a second Michael Robinson Chavez Los Angeles Times BONO seems none the worse for wear after a debilitating 2014 bicycle crash. catwalk that rose and fell.

During "Even Better Than the Real Thing," the men stood on the raised stage and played while a video moved with kinetic energy around them. (Tragically, the man responsible for running this operation, Dennis Sheehan, died unexpectedly in the hours after Tuesday's concert. What effect this has on the band's extended transcontinental itinerary is yet unknown.) One surreal moment occurred mid-set, when Bono spied a look-alike in the crowd and pulled him up on stage. From a distance, the guy was a ringer. In fact, he Amid a set that also focused on the band's teenage years Clayton wore a Sex Pistols T-shirt these early anthems connected the violence outside with the music upending culture at the time.

In "Mysterious Ways," U2 sounded like dance -punk legend Gang of Four, which in the late '70s coupled exuberant beats with rants against commercialism. Where Gang of Four addressed Big Issues within its lyrics, though, U2 took another tack over the decades: It inhabited the machine, used it as a vehicle to Trojan-horse into the mainstream conversation and explore weaknesses from within. The downside of that strategy, though, is that a lot of its recent vintage songs connect first as commercial jingles. Many of us first heard "Vertigo" as part of the first-generation iPod campaign called "Silhouette." in service of a supposedly revolutionary device. "The Miracle (of Joey Ra-mone) has been drilled into U2, from E6 A band rich with optimism but born amid pessimistic times, U2 this time offered less a global history lesson than a personal history lesson, with Bono and band returning to their roots, thematically going back to violent Dublin in the '60s and '70s.

The band coupled "Sunday Bloody Sunday," its classic document of deadly sectarian violence, with "Raised by Wolves," about a series of car bombings during the same era..