Once upon a time, rock shows were long, drawn-out affairs, with two or three opening acts who could be counted on to play as if they were headliners. Magic Rock Out, an event that will be held in Kobe and Tokyo in early February, is too limited in scope to be called a "festival" (only one stage), and with at least four bands, each of whom could easily headline on their own, it's too broad to fit under the label of a conventional concert. So in many ways it's a throwback.

Originally, the event offered five headline-worthy bands, but the Vines, Sydney's answer to celebrity rock, dropped out a few weeks ago, so all you folks who think they're the only band that's giving The Strokes a run for their money don't need to read any further. The rest of us will be more than happy with the remainder of the bill, which is so varied in style and temperament as to be almost perverse.

The de facto headliner is the Foo Fighters, whose drawing power will guarantee that the promoters make back their dime. Coming off a tour as drummer for Queens of the Stone Age and feeding off his most well-received album ever, "One By One," Foo frontman Dave Grohl should be pumped. Though it's clear that Nirvana made Grohl a rich man, that band was more or less a blip in his career rather than the defining moment most people assume it was. His heart was always in songwriting, and the demos he made following Kurt Cobain's suicide started one of the biggest label-bidding wars in rock history. He claimed that most of those songs predated Nirvana, but the best thing about the album they appeared on, "Foo Fighters," was also the best thing about Nirvana: clean pop melodies and punky crunch. On "One By One," Grohl has refined this formula to a kind of hard-rock purity; thus the Foo Fighters' ascent into Rolling Stone's pantheon of genius rock bands for the new millennium.