Like lots of nice boys who dig the Ramones and loud noise but not rebellion, Kip Berman once pretended he was someone else. "When I was in high school," recalls the

The bathroom isn't usually a place where a girl wants to draw attention to herself.

There's long been a tradition of ironic hip-hop covers, from Nina Gordon's lilting, folk version of N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton" to Ben Folds' melancholy take on Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit." But violinist Emily Wells' dreamlike rendering of Notorious B.I.G.'s anthem "Juicy" is no joke.

For the past eight hours, Black Joe Lewis has been driving a van around Austin, Texas, delivering fish for $9 an hour -- and he could really use a beer. Seafood delivery is better than most of the crap jobs he's had, beginning with a stint at the pawnshop where he picked up his first guitar. "If I didn't have this band," Lewis says, "I'd probably be in jail."

It's safe to say that most bands are in touch with their inner child, but Seattle indie rockers Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band have an actual adolescent keeping the beat: Marshall Verdoes, 14. "He destroyed drum sets when he was two," says bandleader Benjamin Verdoes, 27, whose mother adopted Marshall as a baby.

What Greg Kurstin recalls most about that night were the assless chaps. He was a teenager at a Van Halen concert in 1982, and onstage, David Lee Roth was rocking his rough-trade cowboy gear. "There were jeans under them, and then mysteriously, the jeans disappeared," says Kurstin, 39, now one half of the Bird and the Bee. "It was just ass."