Back in April, Rolling Stones fans had a bit of a scare. Mick Jagger pressed pause on the group’s No Filter tour to undergo what the band’s PR team called a “minor” heart surgery. At 76, Mick isn’t the oldest of the Stones—that title goes to drummer Charlie Watts. Nor is he the hardest living (all hail the immortal Keith Richards!). Still, any time a member of the rock & roll royal family goes under the knife, music lovers hold their collective breath. Thankfully, Jagger bounced back. He and his mates bring their perpetual search for satisfaction to Santa Clara this Sunday.

The Rolling Stones
Sun, 7:30pm, $130+
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara

The preseason is still months away, but this weekend legions of 49 Faithful will descend on Levi’s Stadium and give a toast to the health of Jimmy G. for the second annual Picnic on the Field. This year, fans will have the opportunity to make all their Instagram followers jealous, as visitors will have the opportunity to snap selfies with current and former 49ers—including Jerry Rice—collect their autographs and sip craft beer by local breweries at the Goal Line Beer Garden. A meal ticket is included with the price of admission, giving fans a chance to chow down on the gridiron.

Picnic on the Field
Sat, 1pm, $65+
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara

This week’s Thursday Night Football is a Bay Area battle royale, as the Raiders go head-to-head with the Niners at Levi’s Stadium. It hasn’t been a great year for either organization. Both teams have only one win each and are coming off yet another loss. Still, the 49er Faithful and the Raider Nation can take solace in knowing that their respective clubs have little to lose and plenty of bragging rights to gain. When it comes to water cooler banter, few things more precious than a win over one’s regional rivals.

Raiders vs. Niners
Thu, 5:20pm, $195+
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara

To say that Beyoncé and Jay Z are a power couple is a stadium-sized understatement. Each with over 20 Grammy Awards to their name, together they have sizzled across stages, studio albums and social media feeds. Their On the Run II tour will bring spectacle and complicated love into focus at Levi’s Stadium. Don’t expect the couple to shy away from the rocky road of infidelity and reconciliation that has played out across their critically acclaimed albums, but expect the reconciliation point to be driven home in high definition. So grab your bae and take in all the sensory overload you can handle from Bey and Jay.

Jay Z & Beyonce
Sat, 7:30pm, $85+
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara

With a rough few seasons behind them, the Niners are ready for their first full schedule with Jimmy G. in the pocket—and the 49er faithful are stoked. Levi’s Stadium is putting on its first-ever Picnic on the Field to say thank you to loyal fans. A ticket gets you a meal, tastings from local breweries and access to food trucks if you’re still hungry. Enjoy live music and activities, and snap a photo with Sourdough Sam. An upgrade gets attendees in an hour early for happy hour and the chance to hang out in the VIP Field Lounge.

Picnic on the Field
Sat, 1:00pm, $25+
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara

As the thin white duchess’s throne grows ever-larger, mounting with swords of slain ex-boyfriends and fellow pop stars, she hopes to have a drama-free tour, which comes to the SAP Center in San Jose on Dec. 2 as part of the 99.7 Now! Top 40 extravaganza, Poptopia.

Then again, it’s hard to actually imagine a T-Swift tour without baggage. Like any effective star or starlet in the age of Twitter, she is adept at turning bitter gossip and banter about boyfriends into fuel for her world domination. As a four-time multiplatinum singer, Swift hauls in music awards on trucks–including one MTV Video Music Award from her arch nemesis Kanye West who still probably thinks it belongs to Beyonce.

Taylor Swift’s latest record, appropriately titled Reputation, is out now, but no one can listen to it. That’s because she’s holding her music hostage from the three-headed music-streaming monster: Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal. Instead, Swift urges her faithful followers to plunk down $13 and change for a hard copy. You can get it at Target along with a Target-exclusive accompanying magazine.

Her lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” is an electroclash beat-to-beat cut reminiscent of Right Said Fred’s 1991 promiscuous “I’m Too Sexy.” After just three days of airplay the song earned the number one spot in the Billboard Hot 100.

From the tone of her album, this year’s version of Swift feels defensive and full of angst. The 27-year-old embraces her celebrity status with a vengeance. So, her reign continues.

Swift plays her second show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on May 12, 2018 and tickets are selling fast.

On the way home from Levi’s Stadium last night, my mind was swimming as I mulled over exactly what I made of everything I’d just witnessed.

Irish alternative pioneers U2 had performed to a totally stoked crowd at Levi’s Stadium, running through a litany of arena-rattling anthems like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” off of their 1987 hit record The Joshua Tree.

San Jose’s paper of record, I knew, would have a review for the following day’s edition. I couldn’t see how, in the time allotted between the end of the show and the early morning deadline, that such a review would ever serve as anything more than a surface-level recap of a performance so bombastic and run through with political implications—both overt and far more subtle.

I was right.

The performance itself served, in my mind at least, to verify the sentiment of U2’s millions of fans across the globe—they do, in fact, rock—and to quash the vitriol and dismissal of Bono- and Edge-haters. At 57 and 55, respectably, the lead singer and guitarist have still got it.

THE JOSHUA TREE: Fans were into it at U2 at Levi’s Stadium. Photo by Greg Ramar.

Bono belted out all the hits on pitch and with emotive inflection. And I was reminded that in 1987, The Edge’s shimmering, effects-heavy sound was indeed a new and innovative approach to the guitar. Using the available technology, The Edge carved out a novel sound that would go on to influence a generation of players.

And speaking of technology, when you’re the “biggest band in the world,” it makes sense, perhaps, that you would splurge on what had to have been one of the world’s biggest screens. The massive display was deployed to great, and often moving, effect—as on “Where The Streets Have No Name,” which featured a steady rolling shot of some a lonesome desert highway populated only by telephone poles, scrubby brush, wind-whipped sand and the occasional lonesome drifter.

That was the good part. But there was plenty for the bad column.

Some of it was logistical. People complained of sluggish lines and poor traffic flow inside and outside of the stadium. I personally have to wonder whether any concert that large would be able to dodge complaints like these:

@LevisStadium Did you lose the memo that you were hosting #U2TheJoshuaTree2017? Unprepared for crowds for food drink swag & exiting #fail

— Tara R Wood (@taraRwood) May 18, 2017

There was also the flubbed intro to “With or Without You.” I’d say the blame for that should be aimed at the sound team, as the introductory backing track that leads off that song was played at a drastically lower volume than the band’s instruments and it was clear that The Edge and bassist Adam Clayton were having a bit of trouble picking up the drum machine beat in their monitors.

But I have to believe that some of the most cringeworthy moments from Wednesday night’s show had less to do with technical difficulties.

After finally wading through the slow-motion queue, and walking the long way around to my seat on the opposite end of the stadium—observing the punishing concession and merch lines the whole way—I arrived in my section to find a series of poems scrolling down the massive screen looming over the stage.

Two of these verses stick out in particular: “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Puerto Rican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri, and “Wingfoot Lake” by African-American poet and essayist Rita Dove. Both poems deal with what it means live as a poor and disenfranchised person of color in America.

Now, as a white cis male, privileged enough to have been helped through college by his parents—and to have used my education to land a job that grants me free access to such in-demand entertainment spectacles as this U2 concert—I try not to act like I know what it means to be a poor, disenfranchised person of color in this country. I try not to act like I know anything about that experience because, frankly, I just don’t. But also, I do my best to keep my trap shut when it comes to topics like those addressed in “Puerto Rican Obituary” and “Wingfoot Lake,” because in the struggle for civil rights, context matters—and the speaker matters.

HUH? What was up with those poems anyway? Photo by Greg Ramar.

And even while U2 were ostensibly allowing the words of Pietri and Dove to do the talking, I had to wonder: who is really speaking here? And, furthermore, if I don’t know a damn thing about what it means to grow up poor and disenfranchised and discriminated against in America, what the hell does a group of white rock stars from Ireland know about the struggle?

I’m not here to rip U2. That’s cliché. And I’m certainly not here to rip their fans—I count myself among them. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of why some find the band so offensive.

Over the course of the last 18 hours, as I’ve rolled everything around in my head, I’ve come again and again to this: Bono, The Edge, and everyone else up on that stage are all great musicians, and their heart is likely in the right place, but it may be their overall inoffensiveness that makes them so off-putting to many.

It all seems so low-stakes for Bono to make his generalized appeals for world peace while wearing intentionally distressed designer clothing. It not only rings hollow coming from the mouth of a man of such privilege, it can even feel a bit like a commercial calculation—especially when considering how Bono hedges his political proclamations.

Sure, the band played a humorous clip from the 1950s TV show Trackdown, which featured a snake-oil salesman named “Trump” promising to ward of the end times by building a wall around an entire town. But again, context matters, and the speaker matters as well.

Bono wasn’t directly denouncing Donald Trump. He was allowing a clip from a campy Western TV show to do the talking—effectively putting at least a bit of distance between the implication of the snippet of video and the way he actually feels.

And how exactly does Bono feel about Trump? It’s hard to say. When the singer did pipe up on politics, he made an appeal for “the party of Lincoln” and the “party of Kennedy” to come together—saying that if we could just make our way to “higher ground” we might find “common ground.”

Sigh.

Say what you will about the anti-Trump rant Father John Misty made at WXPN’s XPoNential Music Fest last year. To be sure, both singers might be classified as suffering from varying degrees of White-Savior-itis, but for Josh Tillman (a.k.a., Father John), the stakes were a bit higher. He actually stopped his set, sat down and attempted to process his feelings on Trump in real time.

He called our current Commander in Chief an “entertaining tyrant,” drawing cheers as well as jeers from the audience, who had paid good money to see him and others perform. He put himself out there. And then he doubled down.

“Do we think that our hilarious tyrant is going to be met with a hilarious revolution that is won by hilarious revolutionaries?” Tillman asked the crowd.

But I’m not here to tout Tillman for asking a rhetorical question incredulously. It’s just that it leads me to what I think may be the central question:

What do we want of our entertainers? Do we want them to be thoughtful individuals, critical of groupthink—willing to challenge us to be thoughtful ourselves? Or do we want them to pacify us with pithy, meaningless aphorisms and wordless choruses, which seem scientifically designed to accommodate inoffensive stadium chant-alongs?

BEAUTIFUL DAY: Ah… we’re just salty music critics. The fans loved it! Photo by Greg Ramar.

Check out photos from the show here.

The Super Bowl is here—here being, you know, the South Bay—‘a.k.a. Silicon Valley, the global hub of technological innovation, and home to Apple, Google, Facebook, the social media and mobile revolution.

But if you were to ask the NFL exactly where the Broncos and Panthers are set to face off, they’d just assume have you believe that the gridiron is in San Francisco, a little more than 40 miles away from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.

SF is home to the official “Super Bowl City,” after all.

And yet, even as football fans across the nation take in footage of steamy clam chowder at Fisherman’s Warf; observe the beautiful, decaying relic that is Alcatraz; gawk at Coit Tower standing sentinel over the city; or marvel at that most iconic symbol of San Francisco: the Golden Gate Bridge—even while all that is happening, there will be plenty more going on in San Jose and its neighboring cities.

Pure Lounge in Sunnyvale has a week packed with celebrity appearances, beginning with electro house duo W&W on Wednesday and trance producer Andrew Rayel on Thursday, followed by a string of prominent emcees: Fabolous on Friday, T.I. on Saturday, and the G-Unit’s commanding officer, 50 Cent, on Sunday.

The downtown San Jose nightclub, Studio 8, is also getting in on the action. Travis Scott brings the “Antidote” on Thursday; the producer, singer and Trinidad James collaborator August Alsina keeps things live on Friday; and cosmic sex icon Miguel is in charge of making sure everyone feels the love on Saturday.

If you’re looking for a laugh, you may want to head to StubHub or Craigslist to try to nab tickets for one of Norm Macdonald’s sold-out sets at the San Jose Improv on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Mario Lopez of Extra TV and ’90s hit sitcom Saved By The Bell is hosting a party at Taste Restaurant and Nightclub on Friday.

While BackBar SoFa will keep things on the cutting edge with underground hip-hop performers, including Homeboy Sandman on Wednesday, Trizz & Chuuwee on Thursday and HBK Skipper, J. Stalin and Young Chop on Friday.

There is a whole lot more going on. For the entire rundown click here.

Many Bay Area Grateful Dead fans knew it wouldn’t be a proper farewell without at least one Bay Area performance, and now the band is delivering with two scheduled “Fare Thee Well” concerts at Levi’s Stadium this June.

The Grateful Dead, which earlier this year announced three concerts in Chicago this July 3-5 as their final performances, announced two additional shows at the Santa Clara stadium on June 27-28 in a letter to fans:

Although none of us knew it when we walked off the stage at Soldier Field on July 9, 1995, the Grateful Dead’s long strange trip ended in Chicago that night. As you are aware, twenty years later, we’re returning to Chicago to properly say Fare Thee Well.

But every good ending must start with a beginning. For us, it all began fifty years ago when we grabbed a bunch of instruments off the walls of a music store in Palo Alto California and began banging away on them in the back room, at night after the store had closed for the day.

Since we made the decision to go back to Chicago to say our final goodbye, it has become clear to us that we first need to return to our beginnings, where we first said hello — to each other and to all of you. [read the entire letter HERE]

And it appears that after more than 50 years in existence, the long strange trip for the iconic Bay Area band is finally winding down.

“We will not be adding any more Fare Thee Well shows,” the band wrote to fans. “The three Chicago shows will still be our final stand. We decided to add these two Santa Clara shows to enable more of our fans to celebrate with us one more time. But this is it.”

In addition to original members Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the band will also feature Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, pianist Bruce Hornsby and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti.

After problems with scalpers with the Chicago shows, the band will release 65,000 tickets for each Levi’s Stadium show via its online mail order system on Dead50.net.