Sizzle & Fizzle: Highs and Lows from the Last Week in S.F. Music

Sizzle

Metallica in Indio

Jay Blakesberg

Hazel Dickens with Dolly Parton and Warren Hellman.

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More About

• Janet Jackson
• Indio
• Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival
• Metal and Hardcore
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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• After playing all over Europe, Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth finally brought their Big Four Tour to the U.S., performing in Indio a week after Coachella. But when will they give American fans what they really want, and bring this show on the road?

• Janet Jackson brought her tour of No 1. hits to San Francisco for two shows last week, and seemed like she might try to run through all 35 of them in 90 minutes. Jackson danced capably; invoked the memory of her brother, Michael; and didn't even suffer a wardrobe malfunction. But a decade or two past her prime, this top-selling artist also seemed like an underdog — and we dug that.

• President Barack Obama ended last week's S.F. fundraiser with a country song: Brooks & Dunn's "Only in America," an anthemic, if innocuous, Republican favorite. It hit the crowd like a rare porterhouse at a vegan barbecue.

Fizzle

• Last week saw two unfortunate passings: TV on the Radio bassist Gerard Smith died of lung cancer at age 36 a week after his band released its fourth studio album. And legendary folksinger Hazel Dickens, who played every single Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival since it began in 2001, died at 75.

• After announcing that he plans to call his next album I'm Gay, Berkeley rapper, provocateur, and phenomenon Lil B received death threats. Looks like homophobia is still rampant in some corners of hip-hop.

• Apple looks like it might be ready to launch a cloud-based music service ahead of Google. (Amazon is already out of the gate.) The tech world is excited, but is anyone else wondering why we should want this?

For full versions of the above stories and much more about S.F. music, check out All Shook Down, our music blog.