It's so easy to see what we want to see, isn't it? Young British songwriter with a social conscience and a bit of a critical headwind plays a new open-air venue in Newcastle upon Tyne, designed (rather cleverly) for the pandemic, and it's a "whole new world" of almost universally approving coverage of venue vs. virus. "Patrons were asked to wear masks and not intermingle between sections, with a high compliance rate seen in photos," VARIETY reported in a story about SAM FENDER's gig at the VIRGIN MONEY UNITY ARENA accompanied by a short video clip of maskless attendees and a photo in which not a single mask is readily visible. "Audience members wore face coverings as they walked about the site and bought drinks," chimed in BBC NEWS below a photo in which a server's face shield is the only face covering in sight. I wasn't there and it's possible the photos aren't representative—I hope they aren't—but I thought the coverage made an interesting contrast to that given one of the easiest-to-make-fun-of bands in America when it played for a crowd of bikers in South Dakota two days earlier. That venue, too, had social distancing rules that not everybody followed, and the coverage of SMASH MOUTH's performance was vicious. Maybe justifiably vicious, maybe not—this is solid reporting by ROLLING STONE's JON BLISTEIN on how a campground called BUFFALO CHIP prepared for the arrival of Smash Mouth, BUCKCHERRY, TRAPT and several other bands this week—but it's hard to avoid the thought that the age/genre/identity of the band onstage played into what the outside world saw and heard. As if all nineties rock fans who ride motorcycles must be Covid-denying outlaws and all twenties singer/songwriter fans are responsible, rules-following citizens, no matter what our eyes tell us. But hey now, maybe there are all stars where we least expect to find them... That Newcastle venue does look pretty smart though. Square pods made out of scaffolding and spaced a couple meters apart make it appear like a flattened version of the HOLLYWOOD BOWL in which every group of ticketholders has their own private box. TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB is playing Saturday, and future bookings include the LIBERTINES and VAN MORRISON... Speaking of outlaws who coastal elites like me have rather strong feelings about, HANK WILLIAMS JR. at the MEADOWLANDS ARENA was, if my ringing ears weren't deceiving me, the loudest arena show I've ever seen. Louder than AC/DC. Louder than METALLICA. Louder than SCORPIONS. Playing some deep electric blues at lord knows how many decibels. He wrote, and has lived, this. And he's said some heinous things, and I mean that objectively. Welcome to the COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME, Bocephus. He's joined in this year's class by DEAN DILLON, best known as the writer of more than 60 GEORGE STRAIT songs (he also co-wrote the country standard "TENNESSEE WHISKEY"), and the ageless traditionalist wonder MARTY STUART... Too many notes? The SPOTIFY team behind the service's genre-bending POLLEN playlist gets 20,000 submissions a week from artists who want to be on it... BRANDY, ANTHONY HAMILTON, LEELA JAMES, RAHEEM DEVAUGHN and INDIA.ARIE are part of a mass exodus of R&B singers from major label deals, ROLLING STONE reports from behind its new subscription paywall. "Major labels are not gonna do anything for me," artist manager MICHAEL PARAN says. "The only thing I would want is for them to go work mainstream radio, but that's not gonna happen." Instead, the artists can license albums for four or five years to a label like BMG for a 70/30 or 75/25 profit split, with the artist getting the bigger share... BECK in space.