The Altar Stage headliners all made news recently.

This year’s Voodoo Music and Arts Festival is little more than three weeks away, and the daily schedules are online. One interesting new wrinkle this year is that two stages will be quiet while the Altar Stage is in use. That will reduce the sound bleed that has been punishing in recent years, but it also reduces the number of options available. If you’re not into G-Eazy on Friday night, your choices are the end of What’s So Not and the start of Porter Robinson, both on the Le Plur Stage, and from 8 to 8:30, there will be no live music except G-Eazy.

All of Voodoo’s headliners have been in the news in the last week. The Weeknd will close Friday night, and he performed the new “Starboy” and “False Alarm” on Saturday Night Live’s season opener last weekend. 

Saturday night at Voodoo, Tool closes on Le Plur, Recently, Tool published an eccentric meditation on positivity and negativity, apparently aimed at those who are tired of waiting for a new Tool album. In the piece, the band compares analogizes waiting patiently with an open mind for a new album to getting the wrong order at Arby’s. 

 I was about to storm the counter and get ignorant with the guy. But, I restrained myself. Realizing that Las Vegas ranks 49th from the top in school funding, I decided to cut him some slack. (Besides those glitzy casinos help pay for our well-maintained roads, and it was the soul-crushing traffic on buckled asphalt that caused us to consider moving from L.A., - the deciding factor being after noticing that the guy stuck on the 405 along side of us was reading a publication entitled, “A Guide To Potholes & Other Street Dangers.”) Just when I though that I was going to take the brunt of the Arby’s guy’s error, something rather amazing happened. It turned out that LaraLee really liked the sandwich, in fact, much more so than what she ordered! She also became a big fan of the potato cakes – right there on the spot - and said that she would order them along with the same sandwich the next time we materialized there.

For more adventures in fast food and rock ’n’ roll, visit Toolband.com.

Arcade Fire will close out the Altar Stage on Sunday night, and recently Win Butler spoke to a Red Bull Academy audience at length about Montreal, Houston, New Orleans, and the commercial wipeout that was Reflektor. “No one liked it, so it kind of disappeared,” he said. “So, we broke up.” In the interview, Butler also talked about work on the new album, the presidential election and David Bowie.

Single day tickets as well as weekend tickets are on sale now.