• Michael Jackson Laid to Rest in L.A.
• Green Day Set Next Breakdown Video
• Beck’s All-Star Leonard Cohen Cover
• Wolfmother Rock Secret NYC Show
• News Ticker: Beatles, Bunnymen
• Stooges Reunite With Raw Power Guitarist
• NIN Cancel L.A. Gig Due to Illness
• Madonna Busts Records as Sticky Tour Wraps
• Thom Yorke Announces “Horses” Single
• Backstage With Pink: Exclusive Photos
• Pixies’ Frank Black: Q&A
• Chris Brown Talks Rihanna on Larry King
• Strokes’ Casablancas Plays Solo Gig
• Sonic Youth Report in From Gossip Girl
• DJ AM Buried in Los Angeles
• The Joy of Stephen Colbert: The New Issue
• DJ AM Had OxyContin in System: Report
• Keith Richards on Recording With Jack White
• Whitney Houston on GMA : “I Never Left”
• Crooked Vultures Tease “Scumbag Blues”
• U2 to Perform on SNL Premiere
• Eminem, Kid Rock Set for Hip Hop Honors
• Breaking: Alberta Cross
• Them Crooked Vultures Announce U.S. Tour
• Madonna Unleashes “Celebration” Video
• Kurt Cobain’s Guitar Hero 5 Nightmare
• Neil Young Announces New Live Album
• Jay-Z on Blueprint 3 Leak: “Enjoy It”

Scroll down for full news stories, commentary and much more in Rock Daily.

A boozy night out was all it took to convince Wolfmother to give up their only night off this week. The Aussie stoner-rock heroes are currently in the midst of an East Coast jaunt opening for the Killers, but last night they also made a surprise appearance at the tiny Bowery Electric club in New York.

The band admitted on stage that the idea for the gig emerged during a drinking session the night before and only confirmed the show at around 3 p.m. in the afternoon. In the end, around 150 people crammed into the sweaty venue in downtown Manhattan to see Wolfmother turn in a ferocious, hour and 20 minute set of riotous riffing and prog-rock ecstasy.

“It’s a full moon tonight,” acknowledged frontman Andrew Stockdale early on. “That means something’s gonna happen. Someone’s gonna get naked!” Though there ultimately was no nudity, there were no shortage of thrills as the newly reconfigured and more expansive sounding four-piece showcased much of forthcoming album Cosmic Egg , including a ripping version of “New Moon Rising.” (more…)

Photo: Sparrow/WireImage
Jay-Z, “Hate” [ Aziz Ansari Remix ]
The funniest thing about Ansari’s “remix” of Jay’s track is how convincingly he plays obnoxious DJ. Could it be that every annoying mixtape MC is just a frustrated stand-up comic?

Wheedle’s Groove, “Jesus Christ Pose” [ Soundgarden Cover ]
This week’s must hear — A scorching R&B cover of Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” that gets to the song’s unlikely spiritual center. Your grunge Gospel revival begins here — an absolute revelation.

MGMT, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” [ Talking Heads Cover ]
Somewhere along the line, covering this song became a requirement for all bands hoping to become the next big indie thing. Hear that, Passion Pit? Time to start working on those “Whoaah”s. (more…)

Photo: Shearer/WireImage
Green Day announced yesterday on their official Website that the next single off 21st Century Breakdown will be the album’s title track. For the music video, the band — who you can see next week performing on the MTV Video Music Awards — will once again team with director Marc Webb, who previously helmed the bullet-ridden “21 Guns” clip. The single is expected within the next month.

In other Green Day news, the response for the band’s American Idiot musical at California’s Berkley Rep has been so great that the show has already been extended before its debut performance tonight. American Idiot was originally supposed to run through October 11th, but record box office sales and an “unprecedented demand for seats” led producers to extend the run through November 1st. The stage show borrows its narrative from Green Day’s Grammy-winning 2004 masterpiece American Idiot and spice things up with a handful of songs from 21st Century Breakdown . (more…)

Photo: Harrison Funk/ The Jackson Family via Getty

Seventy days after the death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop was finally laid to rest last night, September 3rd, with a private ceremony Glendale, California’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. About 200 close friends and family members attended the evening funeral, which concluded with Jackson being entombed in Forest Lawn’s Great Mausoleum, the final resting place of Walt Disney, Clark Gable and other legendary talents.

See photos from Michael Jackson’s funeral.

Elizabeth Taylor, Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, Jackson’s ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley and Macaulay Culkin attended the ceremony, along with Mila Kunis, This Is It director Kenny Ortega, Teddy Riley, Chris Tucker, Corey Feldman and Miko Brando. According to a statement from the Jackson family, Michael’s five brothers Tito, Jermaine, Randy, Marlon and Jackie all served as pallbearers.

Look back at Michael Jackson’s life, in photos. (more…)

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty

• So many Fab Four fanatics have pre-ordered The Beatles in Mono , EMI has upped its order of the box set, Variety reports . Hit our Beatles hub for more on the band and their 9/9/09 reissues.

• Echo and the Bunnymen’s keyboard player Jake Brockman died in a motorbike accident at age 53, just a month before the release of the band’s new album The Fountain , the BBC reports . A statement on the band’s Website reads, “Our thoughts are with his wife, family & friends.”
• Mastodon are scoring Jonah Hex , reports a psyched Ain’t It Cool News . The movie, based on the DC Comic, stars Megan Fox and Josh Brolin.
• The New York tattoo shop where Rihanna tried her hand at inking small umbrellas has been fined for “operating with an unlicensed tattoo artist on site,” TMZ reports .

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty

Former Stooges guitarist James Williamson was in the parking lot of his dentist’s office earlier this year when he heard a familiar voice on his cellphone: Iggy Pop. “He asked me if I wanted to play guitar again,” says Williamson, who hasn’t performed a single gig since the Stooges dissolved in 1974. “I was about to take an early retirement from my job in Silicon Valley, so I figured ‘What the hell, let’s do it.’ ” Williamson spent time last month in Los Angeles rehearsing with the Stooges (minus Pop) — bassist Mike Watt, drummer Scott Asheton and saxophonist Steve McKay — and they just booked their first gig: on May 2nd and 3rd of next year they’re going to perform Raw Power in its entirety at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London.

Williamson joined the Stooges for the recording of their 1973 masterpiece Raw Power , while original guitarist Ron Asheton switched to the bass. When the Stooges reformed in 2003 Asheton — who died of a heart attack in January — returned to the guitar and Williamson wasn’t invited back. After the Stooges folded, Williamson and Iggy briefly continued recording together, but during the early stages of production on Pop’s 1980 Soldier LP things fell apart. (more…)

Photo: Mazur/WireImage(Pickler), Coppola/FilmMagic(Tranter)

Here’s something for the “unconventional collaborations” files: American Idol country sweetheart Kellie Pickler has found a new partner in crime in fiercely flamboyant glam rocker Justin Tranter of Semi Precious Weapons. The pair met at New York’s Bryant Park last February, hit it off and stayed in touch. “We just clicked instantly, probably because we look like gorgeous blonde twins, both wearing 5-inch heels separated at birth and raised on different planets,” Tranter tells RS . “I have the
filthiest rock & roll band in New York, and she is a Southern Belle country music princess, but we can just talk for hours like we are the same girl.”

Their initial plans involved collaborating on a necklace (Tranter has a jewelry line), writing a song and conducting “a racy photo shoot together wearing nothing but panties and heels for Rolling Stone !” The two have completed two out of the three (uh, thankfully?), and the necklace was up for sale at the merch booth when Taylor Swift’s tour swung into New York’s Madison Square Garden last week. (Check out photos and a full report from Swift’s Fearless show.) (more…)

Jackson Browne lines up a solo acoustic tour where he’ll field requests from the audience, Chicago instrumental quartet Pelican plan to blow out speakers and eardrums on a headlining trek and Soul Coughing’s Mike Doughty will hit the road in support of his upcoming album Sad Man, Happy Man . Full dates for all three jaunts, after the jump. (more…)

The Band: Joy Orbison
The Buzz: Worked-up and jubilant dance music, U.K. producer Orbison (not his real name, we’re guessing) cannily recalls the sound of mid-’90s London club music, pairing big, booming beats with yearning soul vocals, the classic sound of techno and house still sounds vital today.
Listen If: Your favorite Moby record is “Everything Is Wrong,” or you own more than one album by Underworld.
Key Track: “Hyph Mango,” which starts slow and spooky and builds slowly and assuredly, a single female vocal snatch circling a glittering tower of synths. (more…)

Photograph by Cory White for Rolling Stone
Pink’s Funhouse tour touches down in the States in two weeks, which means Americans will get their first look at the singer’s high-flying circus spectacle. It’s a physically punishing show that has the nearly 30-year-old star spinning from the ceiling to masturbation tune “Fingers,” catapulting though the air on a trapeze and, perhaps even more dangerously, covering “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Rolling Stone ’s Gavin Edwards met up with Pink (born Alecia Moore) during her record-shattering 58-date sold-out Australian arena tour, where she spoke candidly about her breakup (and reconciliation) with Carey Hart, a food fight that ended in a hospital trip, her urge to party (”The demons start talking late at night: ‘Come play with us’ “) and her enduring role as the country’s most unlikely pop star (”I’m the constant underdog in America. It’s been this constant fight to prove I have some kind of talent,” she says).

Grab our new issue for the full story, and go backstage with Pink on her Funhouse tour, plus check out shots of her show’s wild costumes and a look back at her history onstage:

• Behind Pink’s “Funhouse” Tour: Backstage With Pop’s Edgiest Star

• Pink’s High-Flying “Funhouse” Spectacle

• Pink Onstage: A Look Back

The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas and a six-piece live band performed a solo concert on September 1st at Tokyo, Japan’s Duo Music Exchange, giving fans an eight-song preview of what they’ll hear on his upcoming debut solo album Phrazes for the Young . Whereas the Strokes are known for their stripped-down throwback rock & roll, Casablancas’ solo venture finds the singer experimenting with drum machines, synths and violins. “Introducing new instruments into the Strokes would be like adding new characters to a sitcom,” Casablancas tells Rolling Stone . “With this CD, I wanted to do everything.”

The Tokyo concert opened with a performance of “Out of the Blue,” a standout track that Rolling Stone ’s Austin Scaggs described as a raucous love song after Casablancas played it for him for a recent In the Studio story. “I’m going to hell in a leather jacket, at least I’ll be in another world while you’re pissing on my casket,” Casablancas sings on the tune. All eight of Phrazes ‘ songs were performed in Tokyo, including “River of Brake Lights,” “Glass” and “Ludlow St.” that the Smoking Section mentioned back in July. (We’d embed a song or two from the Tokyo show, but RCA is smacking them off YouTube at a startling rate.) (more…)

Photo courtesy of Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth have finished filming their cameo for the October 12th episode of Gossip Girl , in which the downtown art rockers meet the uptown rich kids by guesting as a wedding band and performing their Eighties classic “Star Power.” “Kim [Gordon] and I are pretty fanatical viewers of the show,” Thurston Moore tells Rolling Stone . “It’s sort of our dose of Shakespeare every week.” One of the show’s stars, Zuzanna Szadkowski (who plays awesome Polish maid Dorota — Number #7 on our 50 Reasons to Watch TV story in the new issue ), tells RS the band was more than welcome on set. “I’m really looking forward to that episode because I think they have a cool contribution to make to that scene.”

A few weeks back, Moore himself sent us an e-mail with a photo of him kicking it with G.G. stars Chace Crawford and Ed Westwick . (His daughter Coco, who is also a huge fan of the show, took the picture.) “Ed and Chace seemed aware of who we are, but they were more interested in Kings of Leon,” says Moore. “Those are their boys.” Moore got a chance to impart some advice to Taylor Momsen, who’s got a budding music career of her own with her band the Pretty Reckless . “I asked her about her [recent] tour and she said it wasn’t exactly the kind of tour she wanted to do,” says Moore. “And I said that it never really is. Then I told her to read Henry Rollins’ Get In the Van .” (more…)

Next month the Pixies will start their celebration of 1989’s Doolittle with European gigs, and the anniversary tour hits the States in November. Rolling Stone caught up with frontman Frank Black, who candidly owned up to fears of “milking the reunion thing to death” and explained the band’s rehearsal secrets: “Kim is the quality control. She goes, ‘No, no, no — you don’t strum it like that, you strum it like this .’ She’s very persnickety. Which is a delight. It relieves the rest of us from having to do that.”

Read the full Q&A here:

• Pixies’ “Doolittle” Turns 20: Frank Black on the Band’s Return to the Road