Can’t pony up for a beer at Outside Lands, much less a tank of gas and the $89 ticket to get in?

No worries. Just kick back at home and watch live streams of select shows this weekend like Built to Spill, Silversun Pickups, Ween, Dave Matthews and Robert Randolph.

Here’s the YouTube channel and here’s the sked:

Friday
2:30 Built to Spill
3:30 Zap Mama
4:05 Midnite
5:05 West Indian Girl
5:50 Q-Tip
6:50 Silversun Pickups
7:40 Thievery Corporation

Saturday
2:05 Raphael Saadiq
3:05 Zion I
4:55 Streetsweepers Social Club
6:40 Jason Mraz
7:30 Dave Matthews Band

Sunday
2:00 Cage the Elephant
2:35 Robert Randolph and the Family Bane
3:35 Atmosphere
5:20 Autolux
5:35 Bettye Lavette
6:35 Ween
7:35 Incubus
8:05 Dead Weather

This weekend, the choice is yours: Either rock it with the Micro Wrestling Federation at the Last Day Saloon (check out my interview with the 4′6” 292-pound Meatball) – or flee south for 70 bands and a herd of bison at the Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park.

A few of the things I learned about Diana Krall in less than two hours:

- She has a microwave on her tour bus.

- Her kids are busy out in the lobby working the merch table.

- The hot-pink stilettos she strutted across the stage were a gift from some guy named Elvis. And no they’re not red.

- It happened to be Elvis’ birthday. To celebrate, he was scarfing clams casino at Carmine’s in Chicago.

- “Cheek to Cheek” was not really in her key.

- Learning music while growing up on Vancouver Island, she had fun at “band camp”.

- She’s actually shy (to prove it, she sang, “I’m shy!” after stumbling through an intro to a Tom Waits song).

- When she used to fly across the country with Rosemary Clooney, it was with a vodka tonic in one hand and rosary beads in the other.

- She likes to steal jokes from Sacha Baron Cohen (something about how she loved Buzz Aldrin in “Toy Story” and how Louis Armstrong walked on the moon – the segue being that Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was in the audience).

- Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim once played a show at Carnegie Hall while the taxi meter was running.

- She’s going to therapy next week.

In other words, when she mentioned “I got silly when I had kids,” it was more than understood. There’s always been something a little goofy on the surface about Diana Krall – kind of like a blonde tomboy in heels, kind of like a pre-bombshell Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost World.”

But when she slips in those sultry vocals, it all melts away. After all the non sequiturs and strained asides, she’ll casually start a song, just tinkering at the keys, and suddenly Jobim’s “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” is recast as a dreamy love song (only to fall away like a veil in closing) or suddenly Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon” moves with a sway instead of a grind and Nat King Cole’s “Frim-Fram Sauce” makes you actually want the french-fried potatoes along with the ausen fay and the chafafa.

It happened again and again Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa.

Regardless of that taxi meter, Jobim got his due in hushed tones that breathed a little differently and read a little differently on paper: “Quiet Nights” and “The Boy From Ipanema.”

Her surrounding cast – Anthony Wilson on guitar, Robert Hurst on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums – filled in all the blanks, especially with Hurst’s left-turn solo on “Cheek to Cheek” – a song that found Hamilton slowing the brushes down to the pace of a Zen garden rake.

By the time Krall summoned a bluesy Jelly Roll piano run through pieces of “(What’s So Funny Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and Elvis’ new song “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” somewhere Nick Lowe was smiling and somewhere her husband was digesting clams casino and waiting for a happy birthday call (after all, as she mentioned, their iChat was down all day).

Did I mention the not-red hot-pink shoes?

Photos by Crista Jeremiason

Even though one fan wanted her money back when she realized she just couldn’t stomach bluegrass, most of the crowd knew what they were getting into as Elvis Costello picked and plucked and hollered his way though a hoedown of a set Friday night at the Wells Fargo Center.

Backed by an extremely intuitive Nashville sextet of seasoned bluegrass and country players, the encyclopedic Brit singer stretched out nearly every song from his new Americana roots country album “Secret, Profane and Sugarcane.”

Flipping through the atlas, “Sulphur to Sugarcane” name-dropped every town from Poughkeepsie to Santa Rosa. “Red Cotton” charted the global scourge of slavery, going all the way back to his mother’s hometown of Liverpool. One of several historical narrative ballads, “She Handed Me a Mirror” recounted author Hans Christian Andersen’s doomed infatuation with Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind.

A song he co-wrote with Loretta Lynn yielded one of the best lines of the night: “I felt the chill before the winter came.”

And when’s the last time you heard a fiddle solo in a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale”? (Other covers included “Happy” by The Rolling Stones, “Mystery Train” made famous by Elvis, “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” by Merle Haggard and “Friend of the Devil” by the Grateful Dead).

But eventually, even the hardcore fans started yelling out for an Elvis Costello chorus they could sing along to – one woman couldn’t stop begging for “(What’s So Funny Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”

“We’ll play that on our comeback tour,” he quipped, quickly getting back to “the historical part of the show” – a convoluted story of Jenny Lind (and a quick dis of Celine Dion) and P.T. Barnum.

The response: polite laughter mixed with groans.

By the end of the night, he obliged, rolling out several of the classics – “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” “Allison” and you guessed it “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” (sealing his comeback tour) – totally reinvented with mandolin, fiddle, accordion and lap slide guitar. Turned inside out and twangy, “Every Day I Write the Book” sounded better than the original, especially layered with Jim Lauderdale’s harmonizing vocals.

But for my money, it was the haunting spell of “The Delivery Man,” falling midway through the set, that made time stand still. Starting and stopping, over and over, with an echo that reverberated through the room, he kept coming back to the irony of “In a certain light he looked like Elvis/In a certain way he felt like Jesus.”

At this point in his unpredictable career, the bespectacled Buddy Holly look-alike (who segued into “Not Fade Away” at one point) still finds that loveable hoarse rasp at the back of his throat when he stretches out a note. And these days, he doesn’t have much use for amplification. When he wants to show off his pipes, he just walks away from the microphone and belts it out.

As his father, also a singer, once told him: “Never look up to a note, always look down.”

When he mentioned it to the crowd, they fell silent.

“I have no idea what that means either.”

Photos by Crista Jeremiason

So imagine the surprise yesterday – 40 years to the day after The Who played “Tommy” at Woodstock – when a flash mob of nearly 100 dancers took over the square for a full-tilt run through “Pinball Wizard.”

After pulling 5 G’s and flying upside down for what felt like five minutes, I’m proud to say I never lost my breakfast – a good thing because I was down for cleaning the cockpit.

It’s gotta be the best 60-Second Weekend we ever shot:

‘‘How long before the cops show up?” I ask when I meet up with Aaron Milligan-Green and the Jungle Love Orchestra.

Blowing horns and banging an oil drum on the weedy tracks in Railroad Square, they’re playing everything from a New Orleans marching band number called “Ain’t My Fault” to Fela Kuti’s “Coffin for the Head State.”

I was really only half-joking about the cops, but when you consider the lively rag-tag street band has been repeatedly shut down and fined by Santa Rosa police wherever they play in downtown Santa Rosa, it’s really only a matter of time.

At issue is the Santa Rosa city code known as “Noise Ordinance: 17-16.090 Drums and other Instruments.” It reads: “It is unlawful for any person to use any drum or other instrument or device of any kind for the purpose of attracting attention by the creation of noise within the City.”

Over the past year, the dreadlocked Milligan-Green has taken the struggle to the people, collecting around 2,500 signatures on a petition to overturn the ordinance. But this weekend, he’s trying something different.

“The Renegade Art Revival in a nutshell is a critical mass of artists and performers of all types and people who support the cause, attempting to bring a bit of street life back here to Sonoma County, specifically Santa Rosa,” he says.

“It’s the largest city between San Francisco and Portland, yet the downtown is completely sterile. Someone described it as a beige aggregate city and I thought that was a perfect description. We’re just trying to bring a bit of color to the beige aggregate city.”

The celebration of arts and First Amendment rights kicks off in Railroad Square at noon Saturday, marching along Third Street to Courthouse Square for a party with musicians, jugglers, dancers, painters, poets and puppeteers.

But getting back to the show: On this evening, as the Jungle Love Orchestra plays into dusk on the railroad tracks between Aroma Roasters and the Flying Goat cafes, a couple passing on bikes stops, dismounts and dances to a couple of songs before moving on. Two hikers walking by with backpacks stop and take pictures. A guy sitting at a table outside the Flying Goat can’t stop tapping his foot.

Eventually, two Santa Rosa parking officers drop by on their beat. One of them warns the band, “If the police come by, they’ll probably ask you to move on,” later adding, “You need a permit to play music in public.”

Milligan-Green points out that they’re not actually on public property but instead private land owned by SMART – Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit.

But the band was winding down anyway. They start packing up their instruments. No use in getting fined again before the big show on Saturday.

In all her travels over the past four decades, Zora Young – the whole lotta blues mama from Chicago – had never played Sonoma County. She’d done San Francisco a few times, but nothing north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Sonoma County Blues Festival impresario Bill Bowker changed that on Saturday, bringing in the underrated, underappreciated singer for a workout of blues classics and love anthems with the Volker Strifler Band.

Legend has it she’s a distant relative of Howlin’ Wolf, but she seemed more interested in Muddy Waters and “Got My Mojo Working” – the highlight of her hour-long afternoon set at the SoCo Fairgrounds. Later, she added a simple request for the howling crowd to ponder: “I want you to love me, baby, oh yeah, make my hair stand up on my head.”

The Helmet Cam is so 2006. It might be good for riding a Big Wheel down Lombard Street or jumping around at a Scary Kids Scaring Kids show, but for the rides at the SoCo Fair, you need something you can strap on. Something low-tech and hi-def.

Behold: The Headband Cam.

It’s retro like John McEnroe and inescapable like a spycam.

And it turns out you really need two of them because once you start parading around with a camera protruding from your forehead, everybody wants to wear one.

I rode the Super Shot, which climbs five stories up and drops you in a free fall that ends with your gut in your throat. Then I handed the Headband Cam over to the screaming masses who volunteered (for your viewing pleasure) to ride the new Olympic Bobsled Rollercoaster, the Cliffhanger and the Wave Swinger, which once lived at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.

At some point, even the cotton candy swirler gets in on the action, it’s all in the latest 60-Second Weekend: