Rockers

The Cleveland Rockers picked a great time to play their best game. Rookie Ann Wauters scored 12 points as the Rockers eliminated the visiting Orlando Miracle, 72-43, last night to advance to the WNBA Eastern Conference finals. Cleveland held Orlando to 28 percent shooting from the field, the second-lowest total in WNBA playoff history. "That was the best basketball game we've played this year," coach Dan Hughes said of the Rockers, who finished second in the East this season after going 7-25 a year ago. "Our ability to sustain defense was very, very important," he said.

I find Mark Randall's remarks ("Is rock-and-roll ready for a hall?", Op- ed Page, March 11) infinitely simple-minded. He feels that his "baby boomer" generation has the corner on rock-and-roll and that they alone are working for this project, not because they like the music (which evidently Mr. Randall does not) but some insatiable need for "general glorification. " Well Mr. Randall is ignorant of the true nature of rock music. It is forever progressing, encompassing generation after generation.

Usually, it's New Yorkers who get accused of being rude and pushy. Rushia Brown scored 18 points and Cleveland's defense elbowed, grabbed, thumped and clamped down on New York from the outset last night, sending the Rockers to a 56-43 victory over the visiting Liberty in Game 1 of the WNBA's Eastern Conference finals. "We did play New York's game," said Cleveland's Merlakia Jones, who had 12 points. "They're used to bullying people around. " Brown and her Rockers teammates seemed to surprise favored New York, outhustling, outrebounding, outmuscling and outplaying the East's regular-season champion from the opening tip. Susie McConnell Serio, who will retire when the season ends, added 10 points and made two key three-pointers as Cleveland won its seventh consecutive home game, before 11,686 fans at Gund Arena.

Canadian modern rock quartet Nickelback has one of the past year's most ubiquitous songs in the hot air power ballad "How You Remind Me. " But you'd have a devil of a time identifying the band in a police lineup. So goes the faceless state of modern rock these days. Nickelback did little to distinguish themselves from the Fuels and Creeds at Wilmington's outdoor venue Kahunaville Saturday night with a 75-minute set dominated by leaden mid-tempo rockers that grafted echoes of Pearl Jam's alternative rock hallmark Ten onto Led Zeppelin's riff-based machismo.

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, rock legends turned Madison Square Garden into a giant party for New York's finest and bravest. Yesterday afternoon, a lineup geared more toward the MTV generation rocked the nation's capital. Tens of thousands of music fans gathered in Washington, D.C., yesterday to see Michael Jackson swivel, 'N Sync croon and Aerosmith rock as part of a pop star marathon concert to celebrate America and raise money for victims of September's terrorist attacks. "United We Stand: What More Can I Give?"

Philly's hottest export this year isn't the cream cheese but the rock band. Consider the huge crop of regionally based acts now or soon to be breaking out with major-label albums: The Trip (Ruffhouse/Sony) - Youngest band in Philly with a deal. (Playing at J.C. Dobbs tomorrow.) Matt Sevier (East/West) - Strong singer/songwriter gets a development deal too. (He's at John and Peter's in New Hope tonight, Sam Adams Brewhouse tomorrow.) Cinderella (Mercury) - Melodic hard rockers are going for broke with latest set. The Hooters (MCA)

I DO TWO things when I take in a rock show. First, after the Rhode Island catastrophe, I scout the exits. Then I come up with a game plan in case the artist gets mouthy about the war. I had a close call when I went to see Joe Jackson last week at the TLA. It was a terrific celebration of "Look Sharp" 25 after the album's release, but he couldn't restrain himself from dedicating a song called "Real Men" to Donald Rumsfeld. Man makes a gun - man goes to war / Man can kill and man can drink / And man can take a whore Kill all the blacks - kill all the reds / And if there's war between the sexes / Then there'll be no people left And so it goes - go round again / But now and then we wonder / who the real men are. Pretty tame when compared to what other entertainers have said since the war began, but for a moment I was reviewing my options in case he continued.

You won't get intergalactic rabies from Dogs in Space. It's not about canine cosmonauts, but rather about Australian punk rockers, circa 1978, scrapping in a Melbourne crash pad that doubles as a heroin shooting gallery. This film by the promising writer/director Richard Lowenstein - Down Under's answer to Alex Cox - owes its anarchistic style and pulse-pounding rhythms to Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. But unlike the truly gifted Cox, Lowenstein chooses not to see beneath the matted locks and blanked-out expressions and into the inner lives of his alienated characters.

Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N' Roses, U2, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Yes, 10,000 Maniacs, Genesis, Pearl Jam and - Elvis! OK, so we fooled you into thinking that these musical megastars were going to appear on stage together. Well, sort of. Items owned or donated by the music stars as well as objects belonging to - or donated by - other celebrities will go on the auction block Dec. 5 in the Philadelphia Music Alliance's Rock 'N Roll Auction and Sale at the Valley Forge Convention Center in King of Prussia.

With finessed falsetto vocals and taut, glam-metal melodies, The Darkness - the flamboyant British quartet whose Permission to Land (Atlantic) is to '04 what Queen was to '74 - has become a sensation. Part of the acclaim comes from Justin Hawkins' voice, a thrill ride of highs and lows that has made the rhapsodic "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" and the dramatic power ballad "Love Is Only a Feeling" memorable. "I was always aware that I - or my voice - was better than the rest of the people I was working with," Hawkins said of his pre-Darkness career making music for British ad campaigns.

LOS ANGELES - Jeff Hanneman, a founding member of Slayer whose career was irrevocably changed after a spider bite, has died. He was 49. Slayer spokeswoman Heidi Robinson-Fitzgerald said Hanneman died yesterday morning of liver failure at a Los Angeles hospital with his wife, Kathy, by his side. The guitarist had recently begun writing songs with the band in anticipation of recording a new album later this year. He had been recovering from what was believed to be a spider bite that nearly cost him his arm after he failed to seek immediate treatment.

Loretta Lynn The Coal Miner's Daughter has come a long way from Butcher Hollow, Ky. At 80 years old, Loretta Lynn is still out touring. That seems fitting, since her legacy as one of country music's all-time greats has been built on a fiery spirit and deep independent streak. She takes guff from no one, whether it's her man ("Don't Come Home a-Drinkin' With Lovin' on Your Mind") or a female rival ("You Ain't Woman Enough [to Steal My Man"]), and she isn't afraid to court controversy ("The Pill")

When it comes to his career, Graham Parker says, he doesn't do a whole lot of planning. "I just sort of drift along, and things happen to me," the perpetually underappreciated British rocker says. So he had not originally intended to reunite his storied '70s band, the Rumour, with whom he made incendiary, R&B-laced rock as well as the 1979 classic Squeezing Out Sparks . Yet here they are, with an excellent new album, Three Chords Good , and a tour that brings them to the Theatre of Living Arts on Friday night.

WASHINGTON - The elder stateswoman of the human-rights struggle sat on stage in pearls and a floor-length traditional skirt, pink roses pinned in her chignon. The shaggy performance artist whose punk-rocker wife sits in a Moscow jail rose with the couple's 4-year-old daughter, who placed a bouquet in Aung San Suu Kyi's lap. On Thursday, 400 young activists gathered in Washington at the Newseum and applauded. A generation and a continent apart, the understated Suu Kyi, one of the world's most famous political prisoners until her release in Myanmar in 2010, briefly shared the spotlight with friends and family of the feminist culture warriors known as Pussy Riot, three of whose members are serving two years in prison for an anti-Kremlin stunt in a Moscow cathedral.

There's a song called "Funeral Dress" that's the title track to the 2005 debut album by the terrific, little-heard Ohio rock band Wussy, as well as the group's 2011 acoustic reworking of the album called, aptly enough, Funeral Dress II . "Funeral Dress" is a typical Wussy song - an even collaboration between guitarists and singers Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker that manages to turn a fairly grim subject - in this case, death - into a bracing, catchy,...

MOSCOW - Prosecutors on Tuesday called for three-year prison sentences for feminist punk rockers who gave an impromptu performance in Moscow's main cathedral to call for an end to Vladimir V. Putin's rule, in a case that has caused international outrage and split Russian society. Some Russians say the three women - who have been in jail for five months - deserve to be punished for desecrating the Russian Orthodox Church and offending believers. Others insist they are being punished for their political beliefs.

IT COULD HAVE been a scene from any of the past six decades: Contemporary, beat-heavy music blares over a sound system while dozens of Delaware Valley young people shimmy and shake, their movements captured by cameras for a TV audience. This tableau, which unfolded on an early spring morning in the Play 2 Video Arcade at Chickie's & Pete's near the South Philly sports complex, was part of the taping of an episode of "Party Rockers Tween Scene. " The dance party airs at 11 a.m. Saturdays on NBC Philadelphia Nonstop (Comcast 248, Verizon Fios 460, over-the-air 10.2)

It's Record Store Day. That means it's the day to get out and support your local independent music shop. And there are a bunch in the area, still living and breathing in this digital age, from a.k.a. music in Old City to Main Street Music in Manayunk, Hideaway Music in Chestnut Hill to Beautiful World Syndicate in South Philadelphia, Repo Records on South Street to Marvelous in University City to Siren Records in Doylestown. They're among more than 900 indie shops around the United States, and more than 1,700 worldwide, that are participating in the fifth annual Record Store Day, which provides at least two good reasons for music lovers to mingle with fellow enthusiasts at the local Mom & Pop while holding some actual physical product in their hands.

Levon Helm, the Arkansas-born drummer and singer for The Band, the four-fifths Canadian ensemble whose music in the 1960's and '70s, some of it with Bob Dylan, endures as a high-water mark of quintessential American rock and roll, has died of cancer. He was 71. "Levon Helm passed peacefully [Thursday] afternoon," according to an announcement on his official Website. "He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul.

New Multitudes , the album on which Jay Farrar, Jim James, Anders Parker, and Will Johnson set unused Woody Guthrie lyrics to music, is a work of intimate mystery, born of hours in the archives and sentiments that Guthrie himself either abandoned or left buried on purpose. But on stage at Union Transfer Tuesday night, the songs burst into the public sphere, pushing private thoughts into the open and converting whispers to a full-blooded shout. The four musicians, who took equal time at the microphone, have worked together in numerous configurations - Farrar and Parker in Gob Iron, James and Johnson in Monsters of Folk - but with disparate public profiles.