All grown up and rocking
Tommy Stinson began playing bass with the Replacements at age 13, which means that Stinson could be the youngest person inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To which he says: "I don't give a [expletive] about being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's one step closer to getting in the box." This is not to say he's dissing his old band -- "I've got nothing but love for the little legacy we left behind," he says. But what Stinson, who recently released his solo debut CD, "Village Gorilla Head," wants to do is rock in the present tense. He's on tour with backing from Seattle rockers Alien Crime Syndicate, and they stop at T.T. the Bear's tonight. "I'm never gonna try and reinvent the wheel," he says of the gritty, Stones-like pop-rock music he makes. "I like to make records the same way I listen to records." Aside from his solo tour, there's Guns N' Roses, the mysterious rock beast of which he's a part. "It still exists," he says. "There's a record coming -- sooner rather than later -- and six or seven of the songs are earth-shattering. We'll be touring the world the beginning of the new year." As to tonight's gig, expect two sets, one acoustic and one electric, some solos, and tunes from Stinson's former band Bash & Pop, but nothing from the Replacements. "I didn't write those [expletive] songs," says Stinson, who's now 37. "Why would I play them now?" He does credit the Replacements for giving him direction at an early age: "It kept me from grand theft auto. That's the direction I was headed at the time, and I'd be in jail or dead by now, easily." The music starts at 9 with AM Stereo. Tickets are $12.
10 Brookline St., Cambridge, 617-492-0082.
Macha men
"Macha has always been about contrasts," with elements "colliding and hanging together, maybe loosely, maybe by a thread," says instrumentalist-singer-songwriter Josh McKay. "There are no boundaries." Macha, which has released its fourth CD, "Forget Tomorrow," and plays the Middle East Upstairs tonight, has been absent for a few years. It was a period in which McKay and his brother, percussionist Mischo McKay, formed an R&B band called Tenderness. He also formed a tribute band to the all-female punk-funk '80s group ESG. McKay, on playing this music: "It taught me a lesson about how powerful a show can be when the whole room is hanging on every beat." He brought what he learned back to Macha. "We've been associated with a couple of specific genres -- Kraut rock, post-rock -- and people were taking a pretty cerebral perspective" on the group, he says. "We have all this exoticism in instruments and rhythms and melodies. But for me, it isn't a cerebral act -- music is about pleasure and sensuality." On this tour, the Athens, Ga.-based trio expands to a quintet and features, McKay says, "a hammered dulcimer raging out of a Fender amp, a vibraphone, a Javanese zither, and the `fun machine' -- a '70s Baldwin organ -- pumped through the Fender amp, and it sounds like a jet taking off." Opening the 18-plus show at 9 is Mahjongg, followed by the Arrangement. Tickets are $9.472 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, 617-864-3278.
The South's gonna do it again
Drive-by Truckers formed in 1998, but didn't really make any real noise until 2002, with "Southern Rock Opera," a coming-of-age tale/Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute boasting a triple guitar attack. Creem online said it rocked like "country-fried Stones colliding with a train filled with Jack Daniels." The group's next effort, "Decoration Day," was just as good. It turns out a decoration day is a Southern thing -- a day when church members place flowers on grave sites. Singer-songwriter-guitarist Patterson Hood has an eye for gritty detail, and bad things seem to happen in his songs: farm foreclosures, suicide, incest. The group's latest, "The Dirty South," just came out. In concert, the band's been known to cover Jim Carroll's "People Who Died." This is a whip-smart band with raging guitars. Making the bill at the Paradise even stronger is opener Allison Moorer, an Alabama-based singer-songwriter who shares the Truckers' penchant for exploring darkness on the edge of town. Her latest disc, "The Duel," is an elegiac effort that mixes country and rock. The 18-plus show starts at 8; $13.967 Commonwealth Ave., 617-562-8800.
America after Kennedy
Second grade. Webster School. Orono, Maine. That's where Go! was when Mrs. Roberts told us what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. For Lyndon B. Johnson, it was transition time. He took the presidential oath, later saying that for millions of Americans, he was "still illegitimate, a naked man with no presidential covering, a pretender to the throne." Johnson had to negotiate what was arguably the most wrenching succession in US history, and he had to decide how to proceed in the investigation of John F. Kennedy's murder. Max Holland, a contributing editor at The Nation, has assembled "The Kennedy Assassination Tapes" from conversations Johnson had with the CIA, the FBI, Jacqueline Kennedy, Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, and many others. Holland, who hosts a free discussion on his work at the Harvard Coop at 7 p.m.. told the Library Journal that Johnson was "utterly persuaded" that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot Kennedy in retaliation for a US plot to kill Fidel Castro.1400 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, 617-499-2012.
Events can always be canceled, rescheduled, or sold out; call to confirm. Go! can be reached at go@globe.com or 617-929-8257.
