POP MUSIC REVIEW : ‘Weenie Roast’: Medium Well Done : Psychodrama of Hole, anger of Rage Against the Machine and fun of Elastica highlight the Irvine Meadows show.

When a day in the musical life yields three very strong impressions, count it a good one.

With Hole, Rage Against the Machine and Elastica impressing the most, and a handful of others on the 13-band bill coming through with passable-to-good performances, the third annual KROQ “Weenie Roast” modern-rock fest Saturday at Irvine Meadows offered what its predecessors had not: more hot than dog.

The ineluctable psychodrama that attends each public day in the life of Courtney Love guaranteed that 15,000 fans would be looking to Hole’s prime-time slot with the fascinated expectation that something unexpected might happen--especially after Love’s latest tribulation, a brief hospitalization a week ago for a reported overdose of prescription drugs.

Consequently, it was a relief that the show was free from signs of physical or emotional debility. Love--widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain--looked good, sounded strong and performed confidently, including a closing leap into the crowd that left her momentarily dazed after a difficult extraction.

Yes, the psychodrama was there, but in the uncharted territory Love moves in nowadays as the closest-bereaved in a bereavement shared by most modern-rock fans, it can’t be avoided. Given that she already had alchemized assorted affronts, abandonments, humiliations and insecurities into two albums worth of material even before the Cobain suicide, Love presents a figure of extreme volatility.

In her singing and spoken asides, Love didn’t, or couldn’t, hide the combustive mixture of grief, anger and insecurity that fate has assigned her. But she also conducted the show with aplomb, and a salty, playful side came out in her banter with the audience (“I’m very weak, but I could still kick your ass,” she wryly cautioned somebody in the front rows, her only reference to the drug overdose). Sometimes her humorous, crusty streak jarringly abutted her sorrow. One moment, Love sounded like a stricken Ophelia as she sang a snippet of a mournful folk song that went, “Angels took him away . . . laid him six feet under.” The next, she was engaging in wry repartee with a lecher up front who wanted a peek under her satiny black mini-dress: “I’ve shown you my underwear plenty of times before. I’m getting bored with it and so are you.”

If Love’s personal situation is unprecedented in rock, Hole’s musical style follows clearly marked signposts. The band’s performance moved confidently through rock’s venerable garageland, taking hints from old Stooges and Velvet Underground and keeping in step with the newer, Seattle-grown technique of zigzagging between vulnerability and aggression, distorted surges and tension-filled ebbs. Love’s flexible sidekicks came through with supportive warmth as well as the hard kick the songs required. Bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur’s backing vocals played a substantial role, notably during an extended run through “Asking for It” and its “live through this” refrain, and on “Sugarcoated,” an unreleased ballad of mourning that ended as a valedictory anthem.

Well-fashioned psychodrama can be a path to bracing rock, and Hole’s players probably could stir it up on stage even if the band managed to find some normalcy in its day-to-day existence. Love doesn’t lack for strangers’ opinions on how she should move through the territory of famous widowhood that she finds herself in, but her own words, “live through this,” sound like a good starting point.

Rage Against the Machine’s first big-venue performance after a long layoff showed that the Los Angeles band and its Irvine-raised singer, Zack de la Rocha, have lost not an ounce of their motivating ire. Taking 48 minutes--an overtime performance that was 10 minutes longer than anybody else’s--Rage picked up where it left off during its rise to prominence in 1992-93: spouting highly debatable, far-left soapbox rhetoric, but elevating the preaching through intense, abandoned performance. The wiry De la Rocha, his dreadlocks shorn to tight curls, was a stomping, twisting dervish who didn’t so much sing and rap about his antagonists (i.e., any powers that be) as enact a shadow-boxing joust with them. The playing sizzled, courtesy of a honed and muscular bass-and-drums team equally at home with funk rhythms and Black Sabbath riffs, and a groundbreaking guitarist, Tom Morello, whose array of sound colors was as fresh as the Che Guevara banner covering his amplifier was old hat. Morello waggled a toggle-control switch on his guitar with flurrying speed while nimbly fingering notes with his fretting hand, or attacked the strings with a guitar-cord plug and other foreign objects to outfit Rage with something besides the usual metal-band armor.

The set included a few new songs along with numbers from the band’s 1992 debut album (a follow-up release is expected next year). There were no apparent new departures of style or content.

It may be too much to hope that De la Rocha and the band will make the leap from soapbox agitation to skilled song-creation. “Your anger is a gift,” De la Rocha raged at the audience. At present, it’s De la Rocha’s only gift as a musician; he needs to find others.

Rage’s set won the day’s most thunderous approval: much moshing and roaring. It’s unlikely that many in the house shared, or even cared about, the specifics of De la Rocha’s raging from the left. The band was bashing authority with rarely rivaled zeal, while banging a ferocious beat, and that was enough.

Elastica’s set reminded us that rock is also about fun, and these days, given the predominant bleakness and ire in rock, fun is a musical force more subversive of the prevailing order than Hole’s psychodrama or Rage’s rage.

The rookie English band showed no youthful jitters in the big amphitheater. Sharp harmonies, catchy tunes and the hearty, amiable, no-need-to-attitudinize stance of singer Justine Frischmann were among the band’s charms. Elastica had an edge, though. Donna Matthew’s scraping, sardonic lead guitar fills were apt companions to the cheekily dismissive content of many of the songs.

Elastica acknowledges its considerable debt to the Pretenders, Blondie, Wire and other influences from New Wave rock of the ‘70s. As it performed an unreleased song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead,” Elastica seemed to suggest that new styles may be beyond reach at this late date, more than 40 years into rock’s development. But if Elastica can succeed while playing for the fun of it all, at least rock in its dotage may get to enjoy the pleasures of a second childhood before it succumbs.

In other Weenie business:

* White Zombie’s rabble-rousing and loud heavy metal cranking pleased the crowd immensely. Everybody loves a cartoon, and that barking reprobate, Rob Zombie, leads a content-free band of the most cartoonish sort. It’s a colorful, mindless diversion, at least on its more insinuating shout-along numbers.

* Rancid, Mohawk-sprouting Bay Area compadres of Green Day, presented the Orange County debut of Clashmania; at least the jaded side of me itches to call it that. The better side of me says that the band’s nonstop energy, its comradely spirit, and its trio of tunefully husky voices in service of rousing anthems should be enjoyed in the present, even if (like Elastica, only more so) they knowingly recycle the past. A terrific punk bass player kept the music moving.

* The Ramones occupied the show-closing heritage spot previously occupied by X and Violent Femmes. The long-running New York punk band regards its new album, “Adios Amigos,” as perhaps its last. It’s the Ramones’ best in years, so if it’s curtains, they will have given themselves a fine send-off. But aside from the new album’s rocking cover of a Tom Waits song, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” and an embattled reading of “I Believe in Miracles,” the Ramones played a flat set that was hampered by murky sound.

* Soul Asylum rated the cover of the current Rolling Stone magazine, but it didn’t rate much appreciation from this metal- and punk-loving crowd. Leader Dave Pirner waxes neurotic in Rolling Stone about whether the Minneapolis band is punk enough, but its appeal lies in its ability to straddle the noisy indy-rock style of the ‘80s Twin Cities scene from which it sprang, and the Petty/Young school of mainstream rock where Pirner’s ear for hooks and sense of roots often places him. No other Weenie Roasters were about to play a folk-tinged ballad or a waltz, so Soul Asylum came out more alternative than the nominal alternatives in a well-played set.

* Sublime held its collective nose and played “Date Rape,” its KROQ hit. “That one put my dog to sleep, even,” singer Brad Nowell said upon finishing. The same could be said about most of the Long Beach trio’s set, hampered as it was by too much meandering and diffuseness. Sporadic flare-ups of good, soul-tinged reggae weren’t enough to compensate for the long dull patches.

* Matthew Sweet and Throwing Muses, both in the alternative game for a decade or more, were rewarded for years of honorable struggle with the dread, dead opening slots. Both turned in yeomanly, focused efforts. Sweet led with his more aggressive stuff as an ice-breaker, but got in a couple of soaring pure-pop choruses before he was done. Kristin Hersh continues to bury her wonderful voice in the Muses mixes, but the respected band asserted itself with a brawny but nimbly moving sound that avoided the muscle-bound, post-grunge routine.

* The rookie crop--Bush, Sponge and Better Than Ezra--was unremarkable but not without its pleasures, at least on the bands’ respective hits. Bush hails from England and plays the big Seattle sound of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, with a touch of U2 in the mix. At least they’re much better than the similarly derivative Candlebox, who last year achieved the distinction of being the worst band ever served up at a Weenie Roast.

Kudos to KROQ for adding a video screen for close-up viewing this year, but we could have done without the slow motion, freeze-frame and colorizing tricks. Concert video is supposed to give us the option of close-in viewing of a live show, not turn live music into MTV. Kudos also to Rodney Bingenheimer, whose introductions of the Ramones and Elastica emphasized his love of music--unlike some other station personalities, who emphasized buffoonery but were given mercifully brief slots in which to do it.