Friday

• Buddy Guy w/ Ann Rabson. The Birchmere. $69.50
• The Shirks, the Ladies, Maybe Baby, Social Problems, Electrocutions, Young and High. The Velvet Lounge. $10. +21
• Jason Aldean w/ David Nail. Merriweather Post Pavilion. $30-$45.
• Altar of Plagues, Castevet, Velnias. Black Cat. $10. All ages.
• Bomba Estereo w/ King Chango, Natalia Cavlier. Rock and Roll Hotel. $20. All ages.
• Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Shafqat Amanat Ali. DAR Constitution Hall. $37-$127.
• Thriving Ivory w/ Ponderosa. IOTA Club & Cafe. $15. +21.
• Watermelon w/ Kenton Dunson, Alex Tebeleff. The Red and The Black. $8. +21
• Carolyn Malachi w/ DJ Heat, Taratibu Youth Association, Pinstriped Rebel. U Street Music Hall. $10-$35. +18
• Washington International Piano Festival. Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Free.
• National Symphony Orchestra: Distant Worlds. Wolf Trap. $20-$52
• Michael Schenker Group, Lynch Mob w/ Baby Jayne, 15 Minutes, Kat Atomic. Jaxx. $30. +21
• Mudlark, Tall Richard. Bangkok Blues. Call for Price.

Saturday

• Diamond District w/ the Cornel West Theory, Damu the FudgeMunk, DTMD. Black Cat. $12. All ages.
• John Mayer. Jiffy Lube Live. $36-$79.50
• Paramore w/ Tegan and Sara, New Found Glory, Kadawatha. Merriweather Post Pavilion. $21-$36.
• Stella Mira, Blackbells, Fight the Lion, the Wicked Tomorrow. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10. All ages.
• The Shirks, the Ladies, Maybe Baby, Social Problems, Electrocutions, Young and High. The Velvet Lounge. $10. +21
• King Giant w/ Throwdown Syndicate, Above the Silence. 9:30 Club. $10. All ages.
• Pants Velour w/ Cayan, Belikos. DC9. $8. +18
• The U-Liners. IOTA Club & Cafe. $15. +21.
• Asylum Street Spankers. Jammin Java. $17. All ages.
• The Chuck Shaffer Picture Show w/ Conditions, Madrone. Jammin Java. $10. All ages.
• 1964: the Tribute. The Birchmere. $35
• Curbside Manner w/ Cesspool, the Honey Guns, the Weather Vanes. The Red and The Black. $8. +21
• National Symphony Orchestra: The Planets in HD! Wolf Trap. $20-$52
• Living Colour w/ Switched at Birth, One Slack Mind, From the Ashes of My Sins, Hubbub, Amethyst Heart. Jaxx. $28. +21
• One Nation, Clarence Buffalo. Bangkok Blues. Call for Price.

Sunday

• Outlaw Jam- Bad Company, Candlebox, Blue Oyster Cult. Frederick County Fairgrounds. $37.75-$198.75.
• Greta Morgan w/ Tennis System, Matthew Hemmerlein, DJ KnowBox. U Street Music Hall. $20. +18
• Lights. Jammin Java. $20. All ages.
• Brooks & Dunn w/ Gary Allan. Jiffy Lube Live. $25-$69.25
• Power Pirate w/ the Neon Rush, Ivy Rose. DC9. $8. All ages.
• Andrius Mamontovas. Black Cat. $30. All ages.
• WPAS Children of the Gospel Choir. Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Free
• As Blood Runs Black, Oceano, Arsonists Get All the Girls, The Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza, Thick As Blood, Burning the Masses, Circle of Contempt, Blind Witness, This or the Apocalypse. Jaxx. $14. All ages.

The Shirks photo via Myspace

I was slightly less irked an hour later when a media advisory arrived in my inbox. In it, Jack Johnson held forth on generational responsibility. "This generation has an opportunity to be remembered as one that confronted environmental challenges and took responsibility for the future," Johnson writes. "With that opportunity comes the responsibility to speak out."

Given the choice between soulful apathy and smooth finger-pickin' self-importance, I roll eyes and side with Johnson. (Politically, that is. Forced to choose at gunpoint, I'd probably rather listen to Mayer's music.) So I pass along news that Johnson, as well as DMB and Pearl Jam and Phish and Wilco and the Decemberists and Raphael Saadiq (Saadiq!) and plenty others have donated handpicked songs from their Bonnaroo sets to anyone who writes his or her congressman re: climate change, and the reining-in thereof. Track list, 17 strong, below the jump.

Of course, if you're lazy, or you're giving your rep the silent treatment, or you're a climate-change denier who somehow still enjoys the festival circuit, click on the "Download Without Taking Action on Climate Change" button. We won't tell anyone. And Mayer would probably approve.

• Bull Black Nova ~ Wilco
• Animal ~ Pearl Jam
• Inaudible Melodies ~ Jack Johnson
• Rapunzel ~ DMB
• Cath... ~ Death Cab for Cutie
• Fuel ~ Ani DiFranco
• Kill Devil Falls ~ Phish
• Banks of the Deep End ~ Gov't Mule
• Delicate Few ~ O.A.R.
• Not Coming Down ~ moe.
• 100 Yard Dash ~ Raphael Saadiq
• Throwing Stones ~ Bob Weir & Ratdog
• And the Ladies Were the Rest of the Night ~ The Disco Biscuits
• The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid ~ The Decemberists
• Oh! Sweet Nothin' ~ My Morning Jacket
• Happier ~ Guster
• Box of Rain ~ Phil Lesh & Friends

Fresh off detonating an n-bomb and other ordnance in an interview with Playboy, John Mayer descended into the bosom of Obama’s Post-Racial America to play a two-hour gig at the Verizon Center Saturday. In a remarkable show of restraint, the embattled musician managed to limit his word vomit to innocuous musings about how he's thinking about putting all his money toward inventing a “heli-boat.” WaPo calls Mayer’s performance self-consciously “G-Rated”—which could also describe its write-up, in which an allusion to the musician’s use of the pre-censored word “a-hole” in a recent Twitter post was redacted in favor of “[jerk].” Family paper and all.

Mayer’s been uncharacteristically reticent on Twitter since. Not so WCP alum Mike Riggs, who tweeted that the opener, Michael Franti & Spearhead, sounded worse than a nearby group of pre-teen girls howling “Happy Birthday.” See, John? It is possible to be arch without offending entire populations of people.

Speaking of racial insensitivity, you may recall a few months ago we cited a Mental_Floss item about discarded Muppets characters, which included Roosevelt Franklin, the black muppet who taught kids about the geography of Africa. Well! Taking a cue from the Potter Puppet Pals, Jim Henson’s children are now hoping to go viral with YouTube covers of classic rock numbers, WaPo reports. Happily, these videos are not racist but merely insufferable.

After the jump: Michael Jackson, Avatar, slug porn, and other words that come up on auto-fill whenever I use Internet on my roommate’s computer.

Speaking of YouTube, Idolator points out this gem from Brazil. Suck it, Daft Hands!

Speaking of sucking it, check out this slug porn! OMG, they do it just like in Avatar!

Speaking of Avatar, The Hurt Locker scored a few more pre-Oscar points against James Cameron’s phantasmallegorical masterwork by receiving copious bling from the Writer’s Guild and BAFTA. Hey, did you guys know Kathryn Bigelow and Cameron used to be married? Why isn’t the media covering that angle with sociopathic tenacity? Oh, right.

Speaking of sociopaths, Christopher Walken is tired of playing them. NYTimes reports that Walken told his agent he wanted his next role to be “a nice guy with a wife and a family and a dog and a house.” She got back to him with a script for play about a man inquisitioning various corpse dealers in an effort to locate his missing hand. Walken determined the character to be sufficiently wholesome; “A Behanding in Spokane” opens on Broadway Thursday after next.

That’s what it is, folks. Now get to workGchatting!

Photo via Flickr user kiyomi3631.

DCist notes that 94.7 FM switched from its classic rock format to its "fresh" top 40 format today. This means listeners woke up to Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay instead of Led Zeppelin. The Post writes about one DJ's fade out and the possible fade out of an entire genre (boomer rock):

"WTGB's end closes a chapter for FM radio in the Washington area. Until the rock era, AM radio was the dominant force, with narrow, Top 40 playlists. But in the late 1960s and early '70s, lured by the static-free FM sound, young people across the country turned in droves to the free-form, album-rock format pioneered by stations like WHFS. The music was introduced (and personally selected) by DJs such as Cerphe, Jonathan "Weasel" Gilbert and Damien Einstein, who became minor stars in their own right (Gilbert was let go by WTGB in October)."

Marc Fisher also seems to mourn the loss of classic rock. He also includes a potential playlist for the fresh format that should make most if not all Black Plastic Bag readers gag:

"Sugar Ray–Every Morning
Gwen Stefani–The Sweet Escape
Kelly Clarkson–Walk Away
Chris Brown–With You
Savage Garden–Truly Madly Deeply
Howie Day–Collide
Spin Doctors–Two Princes
John Mayer–Waiting On The World To Change
Rihanna–Hate That I Love You
Mr. Big–To Be With You"

This just makes D.C.'s lack of a viable college rock station that much more of a crime.

This past weekend, we learned that former Washington City Paper music critic Rickey Wright had died. I put together a tribute of sorts made from Wright's blog posts and WCP pieces, tributes from friends and colleagues and family.

On Saturday afternoon, I had the fortune of talking with Nicole Arthur. Arthur served as Washington City Paper's Arts Editor in 1994 and 1995. It was around that time that Wright began reviewing records for us. This was a time when people wanted to be rock critics, when there was space for such writing, when there was competition to review the big records. And Wright reviewed his share of the big records.

But Arthur was more than just an editor to Wright. She was a friend. The two had struck up a friendship in the '80s. Of course, it started over music.

On Sunday, Arthur e-mailed me some of her many memories of Wright:

"I met Rickey in Richmond, Va., in 1987. I had written a record review for VCU's student newspaper, which I'm pretty sure was the first thing I ever wrote for publication, and he wrote me a fan letter. He had already graduated at that point, and he was working at Peaches Records & Tapes. We met soon thereafter and were fast friends; I think it was our shared reverence for Love's "Forever Changes" that sealed the deal. But back to that fan letter — turns out it was completely in character. Rickey had an amazing generosity of spirit; he constantly encouraged other writers and he was a tireless cheerleader for his friends. If you happened to fall into both categories, you were very lucky indeed.

Unlike most critics, Rickey was not a music snob. He would gladly discuss Nick Drake for hours (and it would be hours — he *loved* to talk), but he would just as gladly discuss Def Leppard. He never wrote anything off because it was "uncool." I once complained about my daughter listening to the Wiggles, and he leapt to their defense: "They're a classic four-piece pop combo!" This is not to say that he was not discriminating, he was. He once wrote a John Mayer review so brutal, the story goes, that Mayer cited it in interviews as an example of his being eviscerated by the press.

Rickey was a master of the soon-to-be-lost art of making mix tapes; he had a great instinct for implausible-seeming combinations that somehow complemented one another. I'm looking at the list of artists on one of the tapes he made me — the Raspberries, Professor Longhair, Love and Rockets, Roger Miller, Prince, Roseanne Cash. And it's amazing; I've been listening to it for 20 years."