Rock Concert

So you say you want a revolution? How does 3,000 angry fans sound, provoked by a rock band called Jane's Addiction and contained by 150 cops? Mix in a few flying beer bottles, add an attempt to overturn a tour bus and - presto - street-fighting men and women. It happened Monday night in Upper Darby. A capacity crowd at the Tower Theater paid at least $15.50 each to see and hear Jane's Addiction, a four-man L.A. band, play one concert in the Philadelphia area. Unfortunately, Jane's Addiction, described by some devotees as "a thinking man's heavy metal," apparently didn't give enough of a fix to their fans: The music stopped after the band played just eight songs lasting 50 minutes.

While it is usually referred to simply as Tommy, the official name of the show at the Media Theatre is The Who's Tommy. The full title says much about the piece. This is a musical-theater work with music and lyrics written mainly by Pete Townshend to be performed by his immensely popular, seminal rock band, The Who, on a concept album released in 1969. It was turned into a musical in 1993, and though it won five Tony Awards in that form, Tommy still comes across very much as a rock concert.

Danika Shinn, a pink-haired eighth grader at Andrew Jackson Public School in South Philadelphia, dreams of becoming a rock star. Though her cheeks, also pink, perhaps suggested a touch of nervousness, Shinn confidently flipped into her "head voice" last week when she and a dozen other eighth graders in the school's rock band warmed up the audience with the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black," just before a ballet performance at the Wilma Theater....

WITH AN UNUSUAL MESSAGE for the Thanksgiving season, recently paroled rapper T.I. (a/k/a Clifford Harris Jr.) spoke with Vibe magazine in the December issue about the already-forgotten Tracy Morgan anti-gay-comments controversy. "Man, I will say this, the funniest joke I ever heard Tracy say during a stand-up was, 'C'mon man, I think gay people are too sensitive,' " T.I. says in Vibe . " 'If you can take a d---, you can take a joke.' That s--- was funny to me. And it's kind of true.

HARD ROCK LIVE, 8 p.m. Sunday, VH1. Take a live rock concert. Add six video cameras - one on a crane, two on pedestals and three roaming free. Turn on the amplifiers and microphones. Then mix. And you still won't have VH1's "Hard Rock Live," unless you bring in executive producer Robert Small and his team to pull it all together. "All our people are music people," with a goal to bring out the best and show the best in their guests, Small said. Viewers can catch up on the results when VH1 presents a one-hour best-of "Hard Rock Live" special at 8 p.m. Sunday, featuring Jewel, Robert Palmer, Chicago, Lou Reed, Cheap Trick and Paula Cole.

A former city police officer has pleaded guilty to homicide by vehicle while under the influence in a 1987 accident in which his pickup truck struck and killed a mounted officer patrolling a rock concert at the Spectrum, prosecutors said yesterday. Charles Loughran, 40, of the 2900 block of East Thompson Street in Kensington, also entered a guilty plea Tuesday to driving under the influence. The plea before Common Pleas Court Judge William Manfredi came as the case was about to go to trial.

Popular music lost a good friend on Friday night, when a helicopter carrying Bill Graham home from a rock concert hit a utility tower and exploded, 25 miles north of San Francisco. Graham, 60, was the king of national rock promoters, the music industry's toughest negotiator but also the most generous in spirit. He ventured far beyond the call of duty to promote popular music's noblest causes and aspirations. Since the mid-1960s, Graham ruled the concert roost in Northern California with venues like the Fillmore and Winterland Ballroom (and also for a spell in New York City with his Fillmore East)

Given the efficiency with which commercial success trumps contradiction, it was perhaps inevitable that Pink Floyd's The Wall, an album inspired by Roger Waters' distaste for stadium shows, would find its way back into ballparks, more than three decades after its initial release. At Citizens Bank Park on Saturday night, Waters and his 11-piece band were dwarfed by a 40-foot-high "brick" wall that spanned the breadth of the field. As the ensemble played through the album in its entirety, stagehands filled in the gap in the center, oversize imitation brick by oversize imitation brick, until, at the two-hour show's midpoint, Waters and his ensemble were entirely hidden from view.

"This is not a rock concert," Midlake's Eric Pulido announced midway through its show Saturday at the TLA. "This is a soft folk-rock soiree. " Given that Pulido was one of the seven-piece band's four guitar players, the remark was more than a little tongue-in-cheek. But there's little doubt that Midlake spent much of the four years preceding the January release of The Courage of Others internalizing the sound of British folk-rock giants like Fairport Convention and Pentangle, as well as present-day descendants like Philadelphia's Espers, whose mixture of acoustic fingerpicking and electric power-chords set the scene for Saturday's show.

More than 6,000 miles separate this huge industrial city from Washington. And the distance between the pomp and pageantry of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit and the frenzy of a massive rock concert is more properly measured in light- years. Yet an announcement this week in Sao Paulo featuring some of the best- known luminaries in rock-and-roll could well have a more lasting impact on the grave issue of human rights than all the words exchanged in Washington by the two most powerful leaders in the world.

Given the efficiency with which commercial success trumps contradiction, it was perhaps inevitable that Pink Floyd's The Wall, an album inspired by Roger Waters' distaste for stadium shows, would find its way back into ballparks, more than three decades after its initial release. At Citizens Bank Park on Saturday night, Waters and his 11-piece band were dwarfed by a 40-foot-high "brick" wall that spanned the breadth of the field. As the ensemble played through the album in its entirety, stagehands filled in the gap in the center, oversize imitation brick by oversize imitation brick, until, at the two-hour show's midpoint, Waters and his ensemble were entirely hidden from view.

WITH AN UNUSUAL MESSAGE for the Thanksgiving season, recently paroled rapper T.I. (a/k/a Clifford Harris Jr.) spoke with Vibe magazine in the December issue about the already-forgotten Tracy Morgan anti-gay-comments controversy. "Man, I will say this, the funniest joke I ever heard Tracy say during a stand-up was, 'C'mon man, I think gay people are too sensitive,' " T.I. says in Vibe . " 'If you can take a d---, you can take a joke.' That s--- was funny to me. And it's kind of true.

Danika Shinn, a pink-haired eighth grader at Andrew Jackson Public School in South Philadelphia, dreams of becoming a rock star. Though her cheeks, also pink, perhaps suggested a touch of nervousness, Shinn confidently flipped into her "head voice" last week when she and a dozen other eighth graders in the school's rock band warmed up the audience with the Rolling Stones' "Paint it Black," just before a ballet performance at the Wilma Theater....

Here comes the big one. The BBC Proms at London's Royal Albert Hall, now in their 116th season and the largest classical music festival anywhere, have long been a significant platform for musicians, but never more than now - so much so that the Philadelphia Orchestra, a week after leaving the United Kingdom, will double back from Germany to perform there Thursday. It's worth the hopscotch. "You can't explain it to anybody who hasn't been to Royal Albert Hall," said the orchestra's concertmaster, David Kim. "It's like making it to the playoffs or the Super Bowl.

"This is not a rock concert," Midlake's Eric Pulido announced midway through its show Saturday at the TLA. "This is a soft folk-rock soiree. " Given that Pulido was one of the seven-piece band's four guitar players, the remark was more than a little tongue-in-cheek. But there's little doubt that Midlake spent much of the four years preceding the January release of The Courage of Others internalizing the sound of British folk-rock giants like Fairport Convention and Pentangle, as well as present-day descendants like Philadelphia's Espers, whose mixture of acoustic fingerpicking and electric power-chords set the scene for Saturday's show.

How do you distinguish the new solo music of Nick Jonas from his body of work with his older siblings as the Jonas Brothers? It was hard to tell above the insane, incessant caterwauling of his young female fans at the first of two sold-out shows at the Tower Theater this weekend. The girls started screeching as soon as the prefatory theme from Rocky began blaring from the sound system. They did not let up until two minutes after Jonas' second encore, the title track from his debut solo album, Who I Am, scheduled for release Feb. 2. He delivered the entire album Saturday night, plus a sprinkling of Jonas Brothers songs and a few covers.

Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric didn't rock out on stage during their three-hour show at Jen and Dave's house in Moorestown last weekend.... That was because there was no stage. Instead, there were two microphone stands and a couple of amps set up beneath the wood-beam ceiling in Jen Hilinski and Dave Khanlian's living room, where a full house of 50 or so in-the-know fans sat on folding chairs, sure that they were in on something special. That they were. "I'm just imagining somebody driving by," said Rigby, as the sharp-eyed indie songwriter and her pop-punk cult-hero husband bashed through Eric's "Take the Cash (K.A.

While it is usually referred to simply as Tommy, the official name of the show at the Media Theatre is The Who's Tommy. The full title says much about the piece. This is a musical-theater work with music and lyrics written mainly by Pete Townshend to be performed by his immensely popular, seminal rock band, The Who, on a concept album released in 1969. It was turned into a musical in 1993, and though it won five Tony Awards in that form, Tommy still comes across very much as a rock concert.

If this is nothing more than a cheap, sleazy publicity stunt by an attention-starved rock band - well, hey, it's working. Yesterday the city council of St. Petersburg, Fla., passed an emergency ordinance to stop hard rockers Hell on Earth from including an onstage death in a concert. The band had said it would feature the suicide of a terminally ill person during a concert this Saturday to raise awareness of right-to-die issues. The owner of the Palace Theater canceled the show and another venue turned it away.

Is America willing to spend its hard-earned cash to hear a rock star rail about how craven pop culture has become? Tom Petty is about to find out. On his acidic concept album The Last DJ, which arrives Tuesday, the famously laid-back, Florida-born rocker bemoans an entertainment industry that markets soft-porn "angel whores" and executives whose mantra is "You get to be famous, I get to be rich. " In songs plainspoken and devastatingly direct, Petty laments the corporatization of radio and the greed that stunts artistic careers, the worship of false American Idols, and the profit-at-any-cost orientation that derailed Enron and, he believes, exists throughout the business world.