Since their “MMMBop” 15-minutes expired and their label did the inevitable, dropping them, the band Hanson has become a walking survival guide for one-hit wonders. Taking control of their image, the brothers passed themselves off as victims, telling their side of the story in the sympathetic documentary Strong Enough to Break. They've since toured and recorded as an independent band, mining their minor celebrity...

Even those who normally have zero tolerance for cover bands have a soft spot for U2 Zoo, a local group that does a might impressive job recreating the experience of a U2 concert (it helps that their singer actually sounds like Bono). Tonight, the U2 cover group does a free 9 p.m. show at Shank Hall.

The promoters of the eccentric 7 p.m. Mondo Lucha Wrestling/Variety Show tonight at the Turner Hall Ballroom are wisely betting that Milwaukeeans won’t be able to resist its wry and lurid combination of irony, kitsch and breasts. At the top of tonight’s freak show is a Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling smackdown, complete with the requisite masks (and hopefully some semblance of cultural sensitivity), but there’s...

One of the oddest entities to make a name in the expansive jam scene, Buckethead is a masked performer with a bucket on his head who claims to have been raised by chickens. He plays difficult and dense progressive metal riffs that have earned him profile-raising collaborations with Les Claypool, Guns N’ Roses, Mike...

Maybe it runs in the family. The late Luther Allison played some of the best electric Chicago blues ever recorded, and these days his youngest son, Bernard Allison, has carried on in his footsteps. Like his father, Allison plays sweaty electric blues, but he also puts his own, youthful stamp on the genre, bringing in swatches of rock and funk into his sound as well...

Though in American they’re still known almost exclusively for their alt-rock hit “Laid,” the jolly orgasm anthem that would later become the theme for the American Pie franchise, James always had considerably more success in their native England. Early Smiths comparisons in the ’80s gave way to even loftier U2 comparisons in the ’90s...

   Our conversation is painful, marked by enough long pauses to fill an entire season of "The Office." Pharrell Williams, the singer and public face of N.E.R.D., is normally the chatty one, but right now he's so disinterested in my questions that he's making his less talkative bandmate Shay answer them from a third phone line. Though he struggles to be polite, Shay prefaces many of his short answers with a barely disguised sigh.  "Hey, P, you still there?"

Kanye West cemented his star-making reputation when he produced Common’s 2005 hit Be, a soulful, down-to-Earth album that resuscitated Common’s career after 2002’s ambitious but muddled Electric Circus. Common teamed up with West again for much of 2007’s Finding Forever, a respectable sequel that never fully captured the simple charm of Be, but for Common’s upcoming album, Universal Mind Control, the conscious...

One of the most popular of the jam scene’s barefooted, genre-hoppin’ bros, Keller Williams has, after years of being dubbed a one-man band, made the leap to touring with an actual band. Since last year’s Bonnaroo festival, he’s been playing with guitarist Gibb Droll, drummer Jeff Sipe and String Cheese Incident bassist Keith Moseley. The new set-up...

The last of the summer’s major concert series comes to a close for the season tonight, when Jazz in the Park packs it in for the year after a 6:30 p.m. performance from the fiery salsa band Nabori at Cathedral Square Park.