Free Republic

The first live show for 36 years by Eric Clapton's blues/rock "power trio" may have attracted the attentions of the media, but it has had difficulty snaring anyone under 40; young people are conspicuous by their absence from the bars and foyers of the Royal Albert Hall. The atmosphere is less like a rock concert than a corporate hospitality tent at Wimbledon. Paunchy men in sports jackets clink ice in gin and tonics, and mumsy ladies fan themselves with pricey souvenir programmes. Presumably some of them were here the last time Cream played the Royal Albert Hall, squinting at the...

(02-09) 14:58 PST Amarillo, Texas (AP) -- Authorities doubt Cupid had any part in the 9 pounds of heart-shaped candies discovered during a traffic stop. The candies, found Monday by Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, tested positive for psilocybin, a psychedelic drug extracted from a mushroom of the same name. The estimated value of the faux Valentine's Day chocolate was more than $408,000, DPS officials said in a news release. The troopers found the candy in a plastic bag after stopping a San Francisco man's 2005 Toyota Corolla on Interstate 40 about three miles west of Amarillo. Craig Allen...

PETALUMA, Calif. - Spencer Dryden, the drummer for legendary rock band the Jefferson Airplane, has died of cancer. He was 66. Dryden, who died at his home Tuesday, retired from performing 10 years ago, although he hadn't been working much before that. "I'm gone," he told the San Francisco Chronicle last May. "I'm out of it. I've left the building." A benefit concert last year featuring Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and Warren Haynes of Gov't Mule and raised $36,000 for Dryden, who was in the middle of two hip replacement surgeries and was facing heart surgery at the...

Las Vegas - Though it's drenched in decades-old feedback, the garage music that helped electrify the 1960s is still alive and brighter than the neon in this town that hosts an annual festival of all things '60s rock. The Las Vegas Rockaround, which took over the Gold Coast Casino here last weekend, is a celebration of growling guitars, vicious vocals and songs that rarely top 3 minutes. The music is where punk meets R&B, where soul meets frat-rock, where garage meets surf meets the blues meets rockabilly meets psychedelic. More simply put, it's the reason we have the Hives, the...

Roky Erickson sat at a corner table at Curra's Grill, eating carne guisada and watching a lightning storm flash above the Austin skies. He scooped up the last of his black beans and rice, sipped his saccharin-sweetened iced tea through a clear plastic straw, then nodded at a nearby waiter. "That was real good," he said. For most people, this is mundane stuff, the routine rituals of daily life. But for Roky, an Austin rock legend who has struggled for decades with paranoid schizophrenia, these small public moments are big private victories. A little more than a year ago, Roky...