Johnny Marr took the stage at Southern California’s Ohana Festival today for a short set that featured a drop-in from one of the event’s organizers: Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, who sang The Smiths classic “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” with Marr and his band.  Check it out right here.

For this week’s “120 Minutes” Rewind,we present a great 20-year time capsule: It’s the full, hour-long “120 Minutes Presents: The Alternative Year in Rock” special that aired on on Nov. 24, 1992 — the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — and features host Dave Kendall in what likely was one of his final “120” appearances.

Dennis Flemion, who co-founded the cult indie-pop act The Frogs with his younger brother Jimmy in Milwaukee in 1980 and rose to minor alt-rock celebrity in the ’90s, is missing and presumed dead in a Wisconsin lake, Matador Records co-owner Gerard Cosloy announced on the label’s blog tonight.

Seattle proto-grunge rockers Skin Yard — whose members included Jack Endino, producer of Nirvana’s ‘Bleach,’ and future Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron — this month reissued most of its catalog digitally, with each record remastered and one, 1990’s ‘Fist Sized Chunks,’ remixed.

This spring, Dinosaur Jr’s frontman will release a six-track, self-titled debut from Heavy Blanket, which Outer Battery Records describes as ‘blistering psych-drenched instrumental blues jams from J Mascis and his stoner buddies.’ The album is due May 6 on CD and vinyl, plus a super-limited run of 200 purple-vinyl copies.

As part of this year’s 20th anniversary celebration, Lollapalooza has rolled out a series of videos, one of the latest of which assembles some rare, raw footage of the once-traveling festival’s first two years.

Saturday night, following an eight-year absence, MTV’s iconic alternative-music show ‘120 Minutes’ returned with a new format and a familiar face: late-’90s host Matt Pinfield. The whole show is now online; watch it here.

Just days after R.E.M. started giving away MP3s of the opening track to 2011’s ‘Collapse Into Now,’ a second song — ‘It Happened Today,’ featuring Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on backing vocals — from the album has hit the web after it was released as a single digitally in other parts of the world.

Members of R.E.M.’s fan club have begun receiving their annual holiday single in the mail, and, like last year’s, the 2010 installment features the return of departed drummer Bill Berry on a cover of Darlene Love’s classic ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ — as well as an instrumental mashup of three tracks off the band’s forthcoming album ‘Collapse Into Now.’

R.E.M. employed a decidedly old-school medium to announce the full tracklist of its new album ‘Collapse Into Now’: The band revealed the titles of the record’s 12 songs via its snail-mail fanclub newsletter.

Mike Mills revealed the first details of R.E.M.’s 15th studio album, ‘Collapse Into Now,’ on Wednesday, telling Spin.com that the record features a ‘more expansive’ sound than 2008’s hard-rocking ‘Accelerate,’ thanks, in part, to guest appearances by the likes of Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye and Peaches.

The reconstituted Public Image Ltd. today canceled the entire mid-August German leg of its ongoing reunion tour over ‘production scheduling problems,’ and said it has no plans to rebook the six scrapped concerts.

R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey joined Pearl Jam in Berlin last night to rip through the MC5’s classic ‘Kick Out the Jams’ at a concert that also featured the Seattle rockers debuting a new cover of Public Image Ltd.’s ‘Public Image.’