Before his death, he had been planning a three-day rock extravaganza to honor his 50th birthday on Oct. 19, with appearances by dozens of bands he played in, many of them cover acts with names like the Rolling Bones and Abbey Roadkill.

Lollapalooza, the traveling rock extravaganza, draws stadium-sized crowds from one end of the country to the other as the MTV crowd scrambles to forge a collective identity.

And more conservative shows like "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Miss Saigon" use the sort of spectacular effects that would not be out of place in a rock extravaganza.

In many ways, Mr. Fisher's set is the manifestation of an approach to rock-concert design that began in 1965 when the Beatles played their first concert at Shea Stadium, ushering in the era of huge outdoor rock extravaganzas attended by tens of thousands of people at a time.

She concluded her review by saying that "ultimately, 01011001 is a hard rock extravaganza."

On 21 July 1990, ex-Pink Floyd member Roger Waters staged a gigantic charity concert of his former band's rock extravaganza The Wall to commemorate the end of the division between East and West Germany.

I have a theory that at the end of musical eras you often get the best examples of that type of music (Bach came at the end of baroque, Miles Davis at the end of jazz etc.), so who knows maybe the best destructive rock extravaganza is about to slap us in the face.

Tom O'Horgan - the director who helped transform "Hair" from an earnest Off Broadway protest play into a high-flying display of counterculture excess and, for a while at least, the rock extravaganza the whole world clamored to see - is looking curiously Buddha-like these days.

What started humbly in 1990 as an unplugged Xmas show with Dramarama, Chris Isaak, the Posies, and (2011 returning act) Social Distortion has since expanded in to a two-night, "almost" acoustic, full-on rock extravaganza, and one of the Los Angeles concert events of the year.

This is not to say music programming doesn't attract money - it does - but money tends to congregate around the celebrity-strewn rock extravaganza, which is not our line at all.