“It just goes hand in hand with rock ‘n’ roll,” the 44-year-old guitarist says with a seen-it-all laugh. “It’s a very volatile world. And I actually thrive on it — but at the same time it makes it really hard to get anything done.”

Getting stuff done was the primary motivation behind Slash’s self-titled solo debut, due April 6 in the United States on the artist’s own Dik Hayd Records via EMI Label Services.

“After the last Velvet Revolver tour, I was like, ‘I just need to do something on my own,’” says the musician, who’s also released a pair of discs with Slash’s Snakepit. “‘Something where I can make my own decisions and do whatever it is that I want to do, without having to conform to anyone else’s taste.’”

Not that “Slash” is free of other creative input: The 13-track set contains collaborations with an eclectic roster of guest vocalists, including Ozzy Osbourne, Chris Cornell, Kid Rock, Ian Astbury and Iggy Pop. Slash says the idea behind the all-star hookups was simple: “I just wanted to get different people I admired and thought were great on my record. I’d been doing that on other people’s records forever.”

BRANCHING OUT

Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows — who lends lead vocals to the hard-rocking “Nothing to Say” — insists that despite the expansive guest list, the album is undoubtedly Slash’s show. “You can tell he’s doing the record as a way to try different things,” Shadows says. “He definitely branched out, and the result is all over the place. But the guitar playing is so obviously Slash. That holds it all together.”

“Slash is a guy who appeals to everyone,” says Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, who sings “Gotten,” a bluesy ballad. “He was in Guns N’ Roses but he also wasn’t afraid of playing on a Michael Jackson record. I’ve always loved his attitude toward music, the way he embraces tons of different styles.”

Slash says the album’s stylistic diversity — where you can find Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister (”Doctor Alibi”) rubbing elbows with Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas (”Beautiful Dangerous”) — developed in an organic fashion. “Once I came up with the concept, there was no forethought as to who exactly should be on the record,” he says. “I just started writing music and compiling stuff from old tapes. Then I sat down with it and kept thinking, ‘This song would great for so-and-so.’ Once I got the songs into reasonable demo form, I’d send them out to different people and just hope they were interested.”

After contacting friends and acquaintances, he moved on to artists he didn’t know, such as Shadows, Rocco De Luca of alternative rock act the Burden (”Saint Is a Sinner Too”) and Wolfmother frontman Andrew Stockdale, who appears on the lead single, “By the Sword.” “He’s Australian and kind of hard to find,” Slash says of Stockdale. “But after months of looking, it turned out he lives right up the street from me.”

Shadows and Levine both say Slash welcomed their contributions. “Before we met he sent over a verse riff and a chorus and basically said, ‘What can you do with this?’” Shadows recalls. “At first I was just doing some vocal melodies, but after a while I was like, ‘I kind of want to make this a little more in-depth,’ so I brought in a new verse and turned the chorus into a pre-chorus. Slash was super laid-back. He wasn’t pissed that I was coming up with new things.”

TAKING CONTROL

Slash wasn’t inclined to enter a traditional record deal. “One of the things he was really keen on was full control,” says Jeff Varner of Slash’s management firm, Collective Music Group.

That led Collective to establish strategic partnerships with the likes of Guitar Center and Ernie Ball. With the former, Slash is involved in a promotion called Your Next Record, where unsigned bands can upload songs that fans vote on; the winner gets to record a three-track EP with Guns N’ Roses producer Mike Clink, with one song featuring a solo by Slash. Guitar accessories manufacturer Ernie Ball is running a Shred With Slash campaign that awards consumers who find special picks inside packs of guitar strings with attendance at a Slash-taught master class.

Varner says that every aspect of the album’s promotion is subject to Slash’s “gut check.”

“It’s this innate thing of, ‘Is this cool or is this corporate-y sellout?’” Varner says. “He knows who he is and he knows when something doesn’t pass the smell test. But he’s also said to us, ‘Look, I realize times have changed and that you can’t market records the way you used to.’”

Slash didn’t even have a MySpace profile when he started working with the Collective, so the firm set him up with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter accounts. “Within a matter of weeks he had over a million friends on Facebook,” Varner says.

“All that stuff was new to me,” says Slash, who’ll begin touring in support of his album in late May, with Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge performing vocal duties. “I mean, I literally didn’t own a computer until, like, 2002. At some point I got a BlackBerry, and that kind of opened up the whole thing for me. Now I’ve come to terms with the way things are. Social networking is great for interacting with fans and being able to talk to people in real time.”

“He thinks it’s cool, so he does it,” adds Varner, who stresses that the guitarist’s Twitter feed — which he’s used to urge Madonna to “sit on Justin Bieber’s face,” among other things — is most definitely not fake. “It’s really Slash. He’s like, ‘Love it or hate it, this is me.’”

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Yet few works in the repertory seem more modern or musically challenging than this absurdist masterpiece that came to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time Friday night.

Written when the composer was just 22, the opera is adapted from a story by Nikolai Gogol about a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg named Kovalyov who wakes up to discover his nose is missing. With the logic of a nightmare, he pursues it through the town, allowing Gogol — and Shostakovich — to satirize just about every institution of Russian life: the bureaucracy, the church, the press, the police, the medical profession.

At one point, the nose takes human form and appears as a bureaucrat who outranks the befuddled Kovalyov and haughtily snubs him.

Shostakovich set this bizarre tale to a score that is brimming with energy, a riot of atonal exuberance, filled with percussion seemingly run amok, brassy vulgarity and vocal lines that punish the singers mercilessly — punctuated by a few beautiful snatches of melody. The opera, performed without intermission, is less than two hours long, but its demands on the listener are intense.

To stage this daunting work, the Met found the perfect match for Shostakovich’s sensibility in William Kentridge, the esteemed South African artist known for his collages and animated drawings.

Even before the opera begins, the audience is greeted by a giant collage in place of the curtain. It’s teeming with a jumble of images, including political slogans and nonsense phrases in both English and Russian (”Another Kheppi Ending!” is one), street maps of St. Petersburg, a large red dot and pictures of historical figures.

Once the curtain goes up, the action takes place in movable sets that the characters sometimes drag on and off stage themselves. On a screen behind them plays a nonstop animated show, much of it featuring a grotesque oversize cartoon drawing of the missing nose, which at various times rides a horse that turns into a statue or appears superimposed over the heads of real figures from old newsreels and film footage.

One striking image occurs when Kovalyov finally gets his nose back but can’t make it stick to his face. While he keeps trying, we see a dancer — with the nose where her head should be — gracefully executing dainty ballet steps.

One aspect of the staging does seem odd at first: There is no attempt to make Kovalyov appear as if his nose is really missing. After a while, however, it makes sense to have him look normal to the audience, since his problem is not so much a deformed appearance as embarrassment at how he thinks people will perceive him — thus his constant attempts to cover up his face with a handkerchief.

Throughout the evening, Kentridge’s zany displays of visual imagination manage to enhance rather than distract from the score. No wonder the biggest cheers at the curtain call went to him and the rest of his design team.

Not that the musical side of things was undeserving. As Kovalyov, Brazilian baritone Paulo Szot — fresh from his Tony award-winning performance in “South Pacific” — made a splendid Met debut. He played his character’s ridiculous plight with utter seriousness, riding an emotional roller coaster from disbelief to desperation to depression — only to emerge with swaggering self-satisfaction once he gets his nose back in its proper place. His singing was smooth and strong, except for a couple of times in the Kazan Cathedral scene where his moderate-size voice got swallowed up by the orchestra.

Of the more than 70 other solo parts, Andrei Popov deserves special mention for coping so well with the fiendishly high-lying role of the corrupt Police Inspector, who brings Kovalyov back his nose but insists on multiple bribes in exchange. Another debuting tenor, Gordon Gietz, gave sharp utterance to the few lines written for the Nose. Bass Gennady Bezzubenkov was excellent as the sadistic doctor, and soprano Erin Morley sang sweetly as Madame Podtochina’s daughter, whose mother vainly hopes to marry her off to Kovalyov.

Valery Gergiev conducted the Met orchestra with a knowledge of the intricacies of this unique score that few if any living conductors could match.

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The British-born, New York-based Lillywhite has mounted a full-scale campaign to be considered for the job Cowell will be vacating after this season of the hit show to helm the U.S. rollout of his British TV series “The X Factor.” Lillywhite has hired an agent and publicist. He also has posted a short clip on YouTube extolling his bona-fides, and he recently filmed “a slightly more professional” video that will be out soon.

“I think I have the right credentials,” Lillywhite told Billboard.com. “I’m quite effervescent. I’m quite opinionated. I’m funny. I can do this job. If people say, ‘Oh, you’re just a rock producer,’ I’m not. I’m a pop producer, because pop music is popular music. I’d like to think a lot of the things I do are popular. Rob Thomas, Jason Mraz, Chris Cornell, Amy Lee, Morrissey — none of those are rock singers. Bono is a crooner … Frank Sinatra with electric guitars. I would like to feel I can present the public with 24 contestants that they can really help go on this journey.”

Lillywhite also promised that he can “commit 100 percent” to “Idol’s” six-month annual tenure. “I don’t run a business or anything like that,” he said, “so when I’m not in the studio I’m not doing anything. It’s not like ‘Idol’ would be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for me and then on Friday I do a day in the office to run my business. I would be perfect for just putting everything aside for six months. I would really scour the country and find some great nuggets.”

Lillywhite said he’s an avid “Idol” watcher and, not surprisingly, said that “of all the judges I tend to agree with Simon the most. But I think the difference between me and Simon is my view of what the star could be is slightly broader than his. I see the possibility of a star in wider strokes.” Lillywhite met Cowell in the early ’80s, and he used judge Randy Jackson as a bassist on Aretha Franklin’s 1986 remake of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” for the film of the same name.

Lillywhite, who’s producing the next Evanescence album in New York, said he hasn’t heard anything from “Idol” production company 19 Entertainment or Fox Television since he started the campaign for Cowell’s job.

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Wolk was to have performed with Hall and Oates Monday as part of the one-year anniversary show for NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Wolk’s age was unknown.

A Yonkers, N.Y., native, the musician played bass on Kurtis Blow’s early rap classic “These Are the Breaks” and between 1986 and 1992, served as the bassist for the “Saturday Night Live” house band, where he became familiar for his omnipresent black top hat. Wolk also collaborated and recorded with Carly Simon, Rosanne Cash, Bette Midler, Cyndi Lauper, Jewel and Shawn Colvin throughout his career.

But he was best known for his tenure with Hall and Oates, which began with the 1981 album “Private Eyes” and continued until the present day. In addition to his bass work for the duo, Wolk also served as a co-producer on several of their projects.

“To say that I am shocked is the ultimate understatement,” Hall said in a statement. “T-Bone was my musical brother and losing him is like losing my right hand. It’s not if I will go on, but how. T-Bone was one of the most sensitive and good human beings that I have ever known. And, I can truly say that I loved him.”

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Michael Blosil left a suicide note before he leaped from the eighth floor of the building on Friday night, said police Lt. Paul Vernon.

Vernon said he did not have details of the note.

“It was fairly obvious this appeared to be a suicide, based upon witness statements,” he said.

Coroner’s officials were investigating the case as a suicide, but an autopsy conducted Sunday did not officially determine the cause of death pending the results of toxicology tests, which could take up to two months, said Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter.

“He fell to his death from a balcony, eight stories,” Winter said, but officials “just want to make sure that he wasn’t drunk or something and walked out of his balcony and fell.”

“Is it an accident or is it a suicide?” Winter asked. “We just want to make sure that there’s nothing that we missed.”

Blosil was a first-year student of apparel manufacturing at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, said college spokeswoman Shirley Wilson. A floral memorial was placed in the school’s rotunda in his honor.

Blosil and other students lived at the Metropolitan apartments on Flower Street, Wilson said.

The complex, known as “The Met,” has a 24-hour doorman and a balcony for every apartment, along with a spa, pool and other luxuries.

Details of Blosil’s death were not immediately released, but Vernon said there was no indication that he had been attending a party or other event where he might have been drinking.

There have been conflicting reports about whether Blosil may have struggled with depression. Vernon said he did not have any information.

Osmond revealed in 2007 that her son had entered rehab but didn’t say specifically what he was being treated for.

“He’s dealing with a lot of issues,” she told CNN’s Larry King at the time. “I don’t feel comfortable talking for him. I think he’ll have to deal with that.”

Osmond did say one of the issues troubling him was the fact that he was adopted.

“He is the most amazing kid …,” she added before beginning to cry.

Osmond herself has struggled with depression over the years, as she disclosed in her 2001 book, “Behind the Smile: My Journey Out of Postpartum Depression.”

Blosil was one of Osmond’s five adopted children. She also has three other children from two marriages. Osmond divorced Brian Blosil in 2007 after two decades of marriage. She and her first husband, Stephen Craig, divorced in 1985.

In a statement after his death, Osmond said she and her family were in shock. Her publicist declined to provide any additional comment from Osmond on Monday.

Osmond earned fame at age 13 with the hit song “Paper Roses,” and starred with her brother, Donny, on television’s “Donny and Marie Show” during the 1970s.

The siblings perform a musical variety show regularly at the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. The hotel said the shows were canceled over the weekend and performances would resume on March 9.

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The 82-year-old singer is scheduled to attend the dedication ceremony Friday being held by the town of Barnstable and the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.

Her manager, Michael Glynn, says Page is “thrilled” and “honored” by the dedication of Patti Page Way.

“Old Cape Cod” was released in 1957. The song also mentions “lobster stew” and “church bells chimin’ on a Sunday morn.”

Page’s recording career includes the No. 1 hits “Tennessee Waltz” and “Doggie in the Window.”

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The presenters were announced Tuesday by the hall, which is based in Cleveland.

Wyclef Jean (WY’-klef zhahn) will honor Jimmy Cliff. Barry and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees will induct ABBA. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong is set to honor The Stooges. And Jackson Browne will induct David Geffen.

The induction ceremony takes place March 15 in New York and will air live on Fuse TV at 8:30 p.m. EST.

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But nowhere do celebrations carry the powerful sense of national feeling that they do in Poland, the land of his birth, where his heroic, tragic piano compositions are credited with capturing the essence of the country’s soul.

Poland is going all out to display its best “product,” as officials bluntly put it, staging bicentennial concerts and other events in and around Warsaw, the city where the composer — known here as Fryderyk Chopin — spent the first half of his life.

“Fryderyk Chopin is a Polish icon,” said Andrzej Sulek, director of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw. “In Polish culture there is no other figure who is as well-known in the world and who represents Polish culture so well.”

Perhaps nothing better conveys Chopin’s importance — literally — than his heart. It is preserved like a relic in an urn of alcohol in a Warsaw church, encased within a pillar with the Biblical inscription: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Just before his death at 39 from what was probably tuberculosis, a coughing and choking Chopin, fearful of being buried alive, asked that his heart be separated from his body and returned to his beloved homeland. His body is buried at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Chopin spent the second half of his life.

Finding it unseemly, Polish authorities have repeatedly rebuffed scientists wanting to run DNA tests on Chopin’s heart to explore a suspicion that he actually succumbed to cystic fibrosis, a disease not yet discovered in his day.

Sulek said Poland would rather have the world focus on the genius’s life, not his death.

Chopin was born in 1810 at a country estate in Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, to a Polish mother and French emigre father. Historical sources suggest two possible dates of birth — either Feb. 22, as noted in church records, or March 1, which was mentioned in letters between him and his mother and is considered the more probable date.

Since no one is sure, Poland is marking both. A series of concerts in Warsaw and Zelazowa Wola will take place over those eight days featuring such world-class musicians as Daniel Barenboim, Evgeny Kissin, Garrick Ohlsson, Martha Argerich and Krystian Zimerman.

Then, a refurbished museum opens in Warsaw on March 1 displaying Chopin’s personal letters and musical manuscripts along with a multimedia narration of his life.

Celebrations span the globe, from music-loving Austria to concerts at Cairo’s pyramids and across Asia, where his following is huge.

The astronauts who blasted into orbit on the Endeavor space shuttle Feb. 8 carried with them a CD of Chopin’s music and a copy of a manuscript of his Prelude Opus 28, No. 7 — gifts from the Polish government.

The Endeavor commander, George Zamka, who has Polish roots, told the Polish news agency PAP ahead of his trip to the International Space Station that listening to Chopin in space would enhance the majesty of the cosmos.

“Chopin is universal,” said Mariusz Brymora, a Foreign Ministry official who helped put Chopin’s music in space. “We are convinced that Chopin is Poland’s best brand, Poland’s best product. There is nothing else like him.”

In France, Chopin is valued as “the composer who ushered in the age of great French music,” according to Adam Zamoyski, historian and author of the new biography “Chopin: Prince of the Romantics.”

Chopin’s entire musical output, about 15 hours worth all together, will be played by some 60 pianists at the end of February in the central French city of Chateauroux and in Paris in an event entitled “Happy Birthday Mr. Chopin.” The program will be filmed and later shown on French television.

And the small chateau in Nohant of Chopin’s famous companion for eight years, feminist writer Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin — best known by her nom de plume George Sand — has been fixed up and will host three weeks of concerts in June. Chopin wrote some of his masterpieces at that inspirational spot in central France.

Poland’s parliament has formally declared 2010 to be the “Year of Chopin,” and officials in Warsaw feel his Polishness must be stressed because many non-Poles still associate him primarily with France.

Chopin always had a strong Polish identity. He surrounded himself with Poles in France whenever he could and never felt fully comfortable with the French language.

The matter touches a nerve in Poland, which has more often than not been controlled by foreign powers over the past two centuries — most recently during the decades of Moscow-imposed communist rule thrown off in 1989. Poles don’t want to lose credit for Chopin, a genius whose universal appeal is even greater than that of Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa — at least according to Brymora.

In Chopin’s day, Poland was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria and did not exist as a state. In 1830, soon after Chopin embarked on a tour of Europe, an uprising broke out in Warsaw against its Russian rulers. It was put down with brutality, and a period of Russian repression followed that sent many other Polish artists into exile.

Chopin never returned mainly because it would have been “regarded as a betrayal of the others who were in exile,” Zamoyski said. “Many of them couldn’t return without facing prison — or worse, death.”

Poles hear in his music a deep nostalgia for his homeland, and stress the Polish elements in his oeuvre — particularly in his Polonaises and Mazurkas, styles rooted in Polish folk music.

Halina Goldberg, author of “Music in Chopin’s Warsaw,” said that even before Chopin’s death in 1849, Poles turned to his art to preserve a sense of their nationhood.

But others have also claimed him — Germans have said his music falls into the tradition of German Romanticism; Russians call him a Slavic genius.

“There is always a question of how much Polishness is in his music,” Goldberg, a music professor at Indiana University said. “Much of it is in the ear of the beholder.”

Certainly Nazi Germany, which occupied Poland during World War II, heard something subversive and banned it. The Nazis were clearly aware of what German composer Robert Schumann, also born in 1810, called Chopin’s “cannons hidden beneath flowers.”

“As Chopin was one of the rallying points of Polish identity, it was just one more thing that needed to be forbidden and destroyed,” Zamoyski said.

After his death, Chopin was eulogized movingly by the Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, who wrote that: “In the crystal of his own harmony he gathered the tears of the Polish people strewn over the fields, and placed them as the diamond of beauty in the diadem of humanity.”

Now that Poland is again independent, it can savor that beauty without the tears.

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Even not yet a free arts, music plausibly acquired really almost as very much like it gone in these honor, through becoming created an necessity piece of the actually and striking whiz of Greece. Like that, the Greek act look like further an opera house than a act, anyway, with the music purely calmed in favor of further dramatic attracts. Maybe the easiest method of creating distinct the musical facet of the Greek dramatic event would be to tell that a Greek act was similar an opera house of which the composer inscribed the libretto and the librettist inscribed the music.

Occasionally the Greek performer, as in the issue of GEschylus, arranged the music to his possess calamities. You can go on www.mygreek.fm to more information

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That was the message conveyed Tuesday during “We Are Plastic Ono Band,” the self-generated tribute show that featured an impressive gallery of guest stars as well as the current incarnation of her and John’s famed band. Taking place at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn, it was a thrilling if occasionally ragged evening that instantly assumed historical importance.

Featuring her son, Sean, as musical director, musician and charmingly self-deprecating host, the evening featured music spanning the decades, from the original Plastic Ono Band to Ono’s solo work to songs from the terrific new album “Between My Head and the Sky.”

The show’s first half featured Yoko, her trademark yowl intact, leading the band through such numbers as the current “Waiting for the D Train” (with support by Mark Ronson) to such iconic songs as “Rising” and “Walking on Thin Ice.” Wearing a black fedora and her signature shades and dancing sinuously throughout, Ono betrayed no signs of her advanced age (she turns 77 Thursday!).

The band — featuring Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto, the ensemble known as Cornelius and such players as Michael Leonhart (trumpet) and Erik Friedlander (cello) — delivered a complex mixture of rock, funk and avant-jazz.

The big guns were saved for the second half. The Scissor Sisters delivered a typically rambunctious version of the new “The Sun Is Down,” featuring a good approximation of Yoko’s caterwauling. Gene Ween and Sean sang together on a charming version of John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko.” With Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore providing suitably bracing guitar scrapings, Yoko screeched her way through the avant-garde exercise “Mulberry.” Bette Midler sang the retro-style “Yes, I’m Your Angel,” giving the number the feel of a lost track from the 1930s. And Paul Simon and his son Harper sang low-key acoustic renditions of Yoko’s “Silverhorse” and John Lennon’s “Hold On.”

But the big excitement came with the partial reunion of the original Plastic Ono Band, with Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voormann and drummer Jim Keltner joining Yoko onstage for the first time in decades. Performing rousing if ragged versions of the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” and Yoko’s “Death of Samantha” and “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” the players relished the opportunity to relive old times.

The evening ended appropriately with the all-star line-up leading the audience on the classic “Give Peace a Chance,” featuring new lyrics written for the occasion. Still relevant decades after it was written, it was a sad reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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