Rock’s Emerging Genderation : From Such Polar Opposites as Liz Phair to Courtney Love, Women Strike a KROQ Chord

You know you’re in good hands at a holiday rock concert when the records played between acts range from Christmas tunes by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to the latest music from Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails.

Yes, Saturday’s first night of KROQ’s annual “Almost Acoustic Christmas” benefit weekend at the Universal Amphitheatre was a winner: a frequently glorious, 5 1/2-hour survey of contemporary rock that was more revealing, on balance, than the average Lollapalooza lineup.

The heart of the 11-act affair was a parade of emerging female rock stars, highlighted by polar opposites Courtney Love and Liz Phair.

Where Phair combines a disciplined demeanor and superbly intelligent songwriting, Love surrounds her art with explosive bursts of passion. But they are both at the center of the most liberating array of female artists ever to arrive on the scene at one time--a ‘90s crop that was well represented Saturday.

New York’s Luscious Jackson, four female musicians backed on stage by a male deejay, opened the night’s series of 15- to 20-minute sets with winning tales of urban life, blending hip-hop and alternative rock with refreshing independence.

In a far more energized and impressive outing than its recent Hollywood Palladium date, Chicago’s Veruca Salt--a co-ed quartet led by singers Nina Gordon and Louise Post--operated from a widely appealing musical base that combines the bounce of the Go-Go’s and the moodiness of the Velvet Underground. The group’s lyrics reflect a strong sense of feminist independence and self-respect.

Mazzy Star, the California band guided by singer Hope Sandoval and guitarist David Roback, trades in a sort of post-Cowboy Junkies, post-Velvet Underground midnight blue melancholia. On Saturday, their music ranged from haunting to a bit remote.

Leaving her band in her Chicago hometown, Phair introduced new material and revisited songs from her acclaimed 1993 debut album, “Exile in Guyville.” For all the attention Phair has received for her flashy use of X-rated words in her explorations of love and lust, she is far from a shock-minded novelty. There is in her best work a seductive blend of intelligence and innocence, as reflected in such disarming lines as “Whatever happened to a boyfriend, the kind of guy who makes love because he’s in it?”

Next to the soft intimacy of Phair’s set, Love and her band Hole came on stage ablaze about four hours later. Unlike Hole’s recent Palladium show, where the fan intensity matched the fervor on stage, the young KROQ crowd seemed seemed more questioning than committed.

It was as if the fans were trying to figure out just what to make of the brash widow of the late Kurt Cobain. Despite Hole’s having an acclaimed album before Love ever married Cobain, some apparently still see her as an opportunist who owes her career to the Nirvana connection.

If the Palladium show dramatized Love’s ability to electrify an audience, Saturday’s performance showed just how much of a challenge she still faces in reaching a mainstream audience--despite a set that combined five of the best songs from one of the albums of the ‘90s, the current “Live Through This.”

Of the male contingent on the KROQ package (the second night was scheduled for Sunday at Universal), the most significant acts were the Jesus and Mary Chain--arguably the most absorbing band to come out of Britain in a decade--and the Meat Puppets, the veteran Arizona trio whose career got a big boost when Nirvana did some of their songs on its “MTV Unplugged” show.

The rest of the lineup went from the thunderstorm intensity of Sunny Day Real Estate to the highly animated and highly uneven Live to the frantic and likable Bad Religion and, finally, the Stone Temple Pilots.

Though the Pilots have sold more albums than the other 10 acts combined and were clearly the crowd favorites, the quartet was equally unbearable whether Scott Weiland was crooning his way through a piano-bar version of a Christmas song or dancing his way through STP’s own middlebrow tunes. Far better would have been more Elvis or Pearl Jam records.