Shockapella report, RNC edition: Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha made a ruckus on Minnesota’s capital lawn after the fuzz 86′d their planned appearance onstage. The shenanigans went down on Tuesday; videos thereof appeared yesterday on Above the Fold.

Watch below to see what happens when a couple of scalawags get their hands on a megaphone. Oh, the impertinence!

“I’m a certified senior citizen/Got Florida on my mind/I won’t even mess/With checkers or chess/Just take me to the place where they bump ‘n’ grind….”

Though not characterized by the bump ‘n’ grind, Sunday’s 10 p.m. show at Blues Alley drew a rapt and well-dressed crowd of LP nerds, precocious twenty-somethings, and couples in search of an atmospheric canoodle to see Mose Allison, a man whom Pete Townshend once dubbed “the Blues Sage.”

Mose knows, as the saying goes. And more to the point, he still puts on one hell of a show.

It is now 50 years since Allison’s first release—the groovy Back Country Suite, with which Richard Fariña fell in love—and 80 since his birth, but heck if he ain’t still the cat of cats. His elegant blues (or is it demotic jazz?) is as sharp as ever, his swagger intact, his delivery sly but unaffected (few bluesman can pull off a phrase like “your little psychic walkabout”). Joined by Tony Martucci on drums and Tommy Cecil on bass, Allison stuck almost exclusively to originals, and his few covers tended less toward Nat “King” Cole smoothness and more toward the down-home stuff of Lefty Frizzell (”If You’ve Got the Money…”) and Muddy Waters (a fantastic “Catfish Blues”).

Punctuating each quip with a sneaky piano lick, Mose kept the interstitial passages jumping with manic rhythm in the right hand over the left hand’s open fifth/stride patterns—funky enough to make middle-aged white cats in wraparound shades convulse with (or against) the music, but not so frenetic as to threaten the breeziness of lyrics like “If silence was golden/You couldn’t raise a dime.”

There’s something tremendously boyish about an 80-year-old singing this stuff. Allison has always been an insistent naïf (with a nod, of course, and a wink), but now he seems doubly so. Sure, he occasionally finds himself a bit short of breath, and his upper register may have shriveled somewhat; but the sheer delight he takes in his own contradictions seems more exuberant, more self-evident—unshriveled, one might say, by the miles and the years. A “certified senior citizen” by his own account, Allison has broadened the facetious strain in his blues to make old age seem pretty cool.

In other words, the fellow who taught “Young Man’s Blues” to the Who certainly seems to be enjoying the fruits of his own senility.

It’s not just the ever-present half-smile, not just his private scat (which through the years has morphed from a Neal Cassady-type exhortation to a vaguely apprehensive creaking sound), not just an evergreen predilection, in both composition and interpretation, for the zippy one-liner…it’s the reactive dissonance of the old man singing the songs of youth, the wise guy playing the innocent, the white boy stealing the blues.

Parchman Farm:

Young Man’s Blues:

Set list, and recommended discs, below.

Oh, and here’s a video of “Mind on Vacation”:

Sunday’s 10 p.m. setlist:

• “Just Like Livin’”
• “Fool’s Paradise”
• “Swingin’ Machine”
• “Days Like This”
• “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”
• “Trouble In Mind”
• “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”
• “Certified Senior Citizen”
• “Ever Since I Stole the Blues”
• “How Does It Feel? (To Be Good-Looking)”
• “What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life”
• “Middle-Class White Boy”
• “That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch”
• “Hello There, Universe”
• “Your Mind is on Vacation”
• “Catfish Blues”
• “This Ain’t Me” (encore)

Recommended discography:

• Back Country Suite (1957)
• The Seventh Son (1972)
• Middle-Class White Boy (1982)

…and, of course, the totally fun Greatest Hits (Prestige), to which Christgau gives the most lukewarm A- in CG history. Though it does overlap prodigiously with The Seventh Son.

Seriously, it’s been on repeat in the office all morning and doesn’t appear to be losing steam. “Strange Overtones,” they call it, and it rocks—in the offbeat, bouncily bittersweet way that you’d probably expect. It’s tight but expansive, rhythmically impeccable and certainly not—whatever Byrne may sing in the chorus—”slightly out of fashion.”

Download it here (free and legal!), or watch the, er, video below.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is available for digital download on August 18.

Before the picks, a video courtesy of the wayback machine and, uh, John Mayer’s blog, featuring Ray Charles and a particularly swangin’ Billy Preston.

Ongoing:

• Summer Concerts at Farragut Square—with its weekly cross-section of local rock—continues tonight and the following Thursday.
• Friday Night Live! Summer Concert Series in Herndon, VA.
• Check out the Silver Spring Summer Concert Series.

Tonight: The Console War at the Red and the Black; Dean Fields at Iota; Luke Brindley Band at Jammin’ Java; Salif Keita at the GWU Lisner Auditorium;

Saturday: Columbia Pike Blues Festival in Arlington; Frog Holler & Sarah Borges at Iota; War at Carter Barron Amphitheatre; New Day Rising at Kilroy’s; The Method, The Bourbon Dynasty, Airport Boulevard, Buck Forty Nine at the Red and the Black.

Sunday: Emmylou Harris at Wolf Trap; Cloak/Dagger, Transistor Transistor, New Idea Society at the Black Cat.

And for the final video this week: Emmylou’s performance in The Last Waltz.

P.S. Curm: I left you a couple strategic openings. Have at it!

Before the picks, a special video in honor of the opening day at Bonnaroo. It’s a neat little track from the sexiest tribute band ever: Lez Zeppelin.

Ongoing:

• Step Afrika tonight through Sunday at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, with a special Father’s Day performance to cap it off.
• Summer Concerts at Farragut Square—with its weekly cross-section of local rock—continues tonight and the following two Thursdays.
• Check out the Silver Spring Summer Concert Series.

Tonight: Fink at Iota; Jamie Lidell with Jennifer O’Connor at the 9:30 Club

Friday: Alicia Keys at the Verizon Center; Robert Plant and Allison Kraus at the Merriweather Post Pavilion; Justin Jones and the Driving Rain at the Rock & Roll Hotel.

Saturday: BSO with Barry Douglas at Strathmore; Gordon Lightfoot at Wolf Trap; Monday Michiru at Bohemian Caverns; Wooly Mammoth at the Rock & Roll Hotel; Slick Rick at Love.

Sunday: Shearwater at Black Cat; Major Stars at the Velvet Lounge; Tullycraft at the Red and the Black.

And the closing video: Major Stars wailing (or is it shredding?) in a kitchen. Definitely an 11 on the face-melt-o-meter.

Before the picks, a moment of silence for Bo Diddley…and a very special video:

Tonight: The Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band with Poco at Wolf Trap; James McMurtry (son of Larry) at Birchmere Music Hall; Manhattan Transfer at the Kennedy Center; T.I. at Love; Yell County with Julie Ocean and the City Veins at Iota.

Saturday: moe and Rusted Root at Wolf Trap; Chuck Brown with Midnight Starat the Carter Barron Amphitheatre; Jakob Dylan with Luke Brindley at the 9:30 Club.

Sunday: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at Nissan Pavilion; The Wailers at the Belmont Country Club; The Cool Kids at the Black Cat.

And this week’s video: the Cool Kids on “Black Mags.”

“Who knew jazz was such a threat to the U.S.?”

This was the rhetorical question Holly Cole posed to her audience at Birchmere Music Hall last night, by way of apology and explanation for the gig in Alexandria that she had to cancel last February. In an open letter on her Web site, the Canadian singer explained:

I am terribly disappointed I had to cancel the first five dates on our US tour. I can’t tell you how upsetting this was…. This all happened because of a series of foul ups within the US Immigration Department…. Ultimately, I had to resort to canceling the shows because we simply weren’t allowed to cross the border.

Last night was Holly’s last gig of a tour that got way more complicated than anyone could have imagined, but she and her band went out in relative style. Sounding slightly strained at times—a lot of travel and battles with American bureaucracy will take it out of a person—she appeased an audience of die-hards with both big hits and new tracks. Shrieks of joy greeted the opening chords of “Cry if You Want To,” “Slow Boat to China,” “Me and My Shadow,” “Invitation to the Blues” (one of her finest Tom Waits interpretations), “Larger than Life,” and “The House is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye.”

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Tonight: The Nighthawks at Jammin’ Java; Army of Me at the Rock and Roll Hotel; the National Symphony Orchestra’s Sibelius extravaganza at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall; J. Roddy Walston and the Business with Thing-One at Iota.

Saturday: Yellowjackets at Blues Alley; Four Bettys at the Kennedy Center’s Millenium Stage; Exit Clov, Brian Scary and the Shredding Tears, and Zulu Pearls at Black Cat.

Sunday: Holly Cole at Birchmere Music Hall; Dan Bern at Jammin’ Java; the Gibson Brothers at Iota.

And this weekend’s video: Holly Cole covering Tom Waits.

Which shows did we miss? Tell us about it in the comments.

Tonight: The Hot Club of Cowtown performs at Jammin’ Java at 7 p.m. I saw these guys open for Bob Dylan in the summer of ‘04 and loved every minute of it. They swing, they lope, and they cook.

Also on Friday: The Sketches at the 9:30 Club (6 p.m. doors, 7 p.m. show) with the Dreamscapes Project and Honeychuck; Tab Benoit at the State Theatre; Fools and Horses at Iota with the Sometime Favorites and Secret Pop Band.

Saturday: Tommy Cecil at Blues Alley, 8 and 10 p.m.; KRS-One with Kokayi at the Black Cat, 9 p.m.; The National Memorial Day Concert featuring Gladys Knight and a host of others–catch the dress rehearsal on the Capitol’s West Lawn at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday: Sea Wolf at the Rock and Roll Hotel with the Jealous Girlfriends; the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience at the Birchmere.

Speaking of which: Here’s Grisman with Jerry Garcia in a freakishly noir music video for their cover of “The Thrill is Gone.” (When’s the last time you saw Jerry in a tie?)

Before Barack Obama took the stage in front of a crowd of 75,000 in Portland yesterday, the Decemberists played a stacked set concluding with a mass singalong on “Sons & Daughters,” with� its drawn-out chorus of “Here all the bombs fade away.” The song, a rallying cry for hope, peace, and…mouthfuls of cinnamon, seemed to strike an appropriate-if-predictable tone for Obama’s largest congregation to date.

But it’s worth remembering some other theme songs that have scored the candidates’ respective campaigns. In January, Obama took mild heat when his campaign included a prominent rendition of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”� at his Iowa victory bash. As the New York Post notes, the song’s refrain, famous for its assertion that of Hova’s 99 problems, “a bitch ain’t one,”� struck some as a Hillary dig.

The same Post piece gives a run-down on some other notable campaign jingles, including Hillary’s invocation of the Céline Dion turkey “You & I,” also featured in a strange and maudlin campaign video with viral intent:

…not to be confused, naturally, with the 2ge+her-worthy “hillary4u+me”:

Elsewhere, the ever-provocative RightWingNews.com offers suggestions for the DailyKos “Obama Theme Song” list, with snarky offerings from the Platters‘ “The Great Pretender” to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” to “Cocaine,” which they bafflingly attribute to ZZ Top. (Come on, guys, even Republicans should know their J.J. Cale from their ZZ Top.)

Meanwhile, Harold Meyerson’s most recent op-ed in the Washington Post puts forth a promising possibility for McCain’s theme song going into the general election:

If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there’s one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words “an Englishman” to “American” to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year…. For some, “American” is a race — white — no less than a nationality, and it’s on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

Not exactly the scathingest thing Meyerson’s ever written, but an apt choice for the whitest party (no black national politicians; blacks compose 2 to 4 percent of the Republican electorate across the board) since Alexander Kerensky got drunk with a gang of polar bears.

In short, Jackie Wilson–whose”Higher” rates only seventh on the Daily Kos list–is most likely absent from the McCain campaign’s iPod Shuffle….

…the closest thing being “Johnny B. Goode,” which (for a while) was nearly as ubiquitous at McCain victory rallies as Joe Lieberman. For a while, I dug the choice (Chuck Berry, not Joe Lieberman), until I did the math and realized that when the single came out in ‘58, McCain was already too old to think it was cool.

Next stop on the Straight-Talk Express: Perry Como.

Think you’ve got a snappy choice for campaign theme song? Tell us about it in the comments.