Real Lyrics to Great Songs

Police plan to file charges against several bouncers who were videotaped beating two men outside a nightclub co-owned by hip-hop star Jay Z.

A video was shot by a disc jockey who had just finished performing early Saturday inside the 40/40 Club and shows about nine security guards kicking and punching two men in a parking lot.

"Stop! Stop! Stop!" one of them yells. "I didn't do nothing!"

The video shows one of the two men being kicked while he was lying on the ground, and also shows as many as six bouncers swarming and punching the other man, Tyrell Durant, 26, of Neptune.

"We came down to Atlantic City to have a good time, not to have the crap beat out of us," Durant told The Associated Press on Monday. "We did not do anything to deserve this."

Durant and his friend, Leonard Clark, have been charged with disorderly conduct.

Durant said he and Clark, 25, also of Neptune, were at 40/40 to celebrate Clark's birthday. Clark was at the bar, having just ordered a $15 plate of chicken, when a bouncer who had just ejected someone else from the club told him to move, Durant said.

Clark protested, saying he was waiting for his food, and a bouncer began escorting him from the club, Durant said.

Durant said he followed Clark, asking why he was being ejected. He said security grabbed him and led the two of them down a steep staircase where Durant felt like he was about to fall and grabbed the closest person to him to keep his balance.

The club manager told police someone ripped his collar during the altercation inside the club, and police said Durant punched a security guard in the face.

The video was shot and posted to YouTube by a Staten Island, N.Y., disc jockey who calls himself DJ Zeke. It starts when security and the two patrons are outside the club in a parking lot.

Durant denied he or Clark did anything wrong, but both were charged with disorderly conduct and released pending a Dec. 11 court date. An ambulance was called for Durant, who said he was sprayed in the face by a fire extinguisher. He was treated at the scene.

Durant also said bouncers stole his watch and some cash from him.

A woman who answered the phone at the club Monday referred inquiries to a publicist who did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Jay Z was not present when the encounter took place, police said.

Detective Thomas Holton said police are reviewing the video to try to identify the bouncers who would face charges stemming from the assaults on Durant and Clark.

DJ Zeke, who declined to give his real name, said he did not see either of the men inside the club. He said he was walking behind the club when he saw what was happening and began filming.

"I was disgusted by it," he told the AP. "As a DJ, you see fights all the time. But to see bouncers lose it like this - they just lost it."

The carols around the National Christmas Tree are going to have some serious star power this year.

Entertainers Sheryl Crow and Common are scheduled to perform at the tree lighting ceremony on Thursday near the National Mall. Singers Jordin Sparks, Ray LaMontagne and Celtic Woman, and jazz musicians Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman also will join the stage.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will help light the tree between the White House and the Washington Monument.

Tom Petty has grown up, but not too much.

The 59-year-old spent a year going through thousands of hours of live concert recordings covering Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' tours across three decades.

The result is "The Live Anthology" - not a greatest hits album, but a multiple-disc set. There are no overdubs, and the notorious perfectionist can now see why his hard-driven mates were "a good little rock 'n' roll band."

Petty, who said the process was like looking at a family photo album, talks about how watching three films a day helped hone his acclaimed music videos and how his love of English as a kid helped him write some of America's most beloved rock songs.

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The Associated Press: What made you want to pull out hours and hours of tape?

Tom Petty: Well, it seemed like a good time to do it and I thought it would be a chore in a way. I started to do it and I just fell in love with the project. It got better and better. I spent a year digging out stuff and mixing it. It was great. It was like looking at a photo album, but you can all be in the picture.

AP: Did you ever get overwhelmed?

Petty: Well, you can. But we knew we had plenty of time to do it. So, we just went bit by bit and pretty soon into the project, we told them that this wasn't going to fit on two CDs. There is no way. To get an idea of what the band was and is, there is a lot of stuff you have to hear to take in an accurate document of all those years.

AP: Did you find anything that surprised you about yourself going through all that footage?

Petty: I was surprised that we were as good as we were. I really didn't listen to us when we were back in our 20s and starting out. It was a really good little rock and roll band. I see why it caught on.

AP: Any difference between that Tom Petty in his 30s and this one?

Petty: I tend now to get to what is really important. I don't let things bother me too much. One nice thing about getting older is that you don't want to fight about anything. The argument just delays the solution, because now I have to deal with this fight, too. I still care passionately about what I'm doing. But I can get it done a little easier than I could.

AP: You have an exclusive deal with Best Buy for "The Live Anthology." How does that work for you?

Petty: I've made sure that the four-disc package is everywhere. ... If you want the deluxe package, which is five CDs, you have to go to Best Buy. This is just the way it is going. I don't know what else to do. These are the people that sell records now.

AP: What do you think about John Mayer recently saying he is writing in the context of you and that he wants Taylor Swift to be his Stevie Nicks?

Petty: It is a very nice feeling that your trip is handed down. And I think it is wonderful, really - if the music touched people that way. I was the same way. I wanted to be like George Jones and Tammy Wynette. That was my picture of Stevie - George and Tammy. I wanted to duet like that. So it is just the way stuff is handed down.

AP: Did you learn poetry when you were younger? What inspires your writing?

Petty: I never was a big poem reader. I didn't study poets. I always did really well in English in school. I don't know why I could do it effortlessly. It is just something I do. I like language. I like words. ... For the longest time, I think, everything I did I wrote the music, and the words just kind of flowed in at the same time. As time went by, I started to concentrate more and more on the lyric and try to make that better and better.

AP: Your videos are iconic. Did that come from your love of film?

Petty: I probably watch three or four movies a day. ... I got into it kind of like music, kind of as a hobby. I love film. It wasn't hard to make something better than everyone else ... I was amazed at just how bad MTV was. It was terrible, just terrible. Terrible videos and terrible songs, and most people made them almost all the same. Very silly and I thought let's just get out of the box here and do something different.

AP: What do you think this all means? This album, this life that you have been handed?

Petty: It was a gift I was given and what it means I don't know. Johnny Cash once told me, he said, "It was a noble job." And I said, "Really?" And he said, "Well, it makes a lot of people happy." And I always remember him saying that, because I always remember that and it does. It makes a lot of people happy. You can lose sight of that. People come to me and stop me on the street and tell me how some song played some role in their life or how it got them through a hard time or this and that and I just think, "Damn, that's what it is about."

York Hoeller, a German composer who spent five years composing his orchestral work "Sphaeren," received the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for music composition.

Hoeller composed the piece - "Spheres" in English - from 2001-2006.

Marc Satterwhite, a University of Louisville music professor who directs the award, called it "magnificently scored, using a large orchestra to generate colors ranging from the most delicate to the most overwhelming. (It) grips you viscerally from the first bars and never lets up."

The prize was announced Monday.

The piece, among 136 entries considered for the $200,000 (euro134,066) prize, debuted in 2008. The six-movement, 40-minute piece was performed by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. It will be released on compact disc in April 2010.

The Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville awards $1 million each year - $200,000 each for works in music composition, education, ideas improving world order, religion and psychology.

Awards founder Charles Grawemeyer - an industrialist, entrepreneur and University of Louisville graduate - wanted to reward powerful ideas or creative works in the sciences, arts and humanities.

British singer Susan Boyle displays a copy of her CD, at the front door of her house in Blackburn, Scotland, Saturday Nov. 28, 2009. She will find out Sunday whether her album has reached number one in the album charts.

In the contest, she finished second. But on the charts, she's number one.

Susan Boyle's debut record, "I Dreamed A Dream," entered the British album chart in the top spot Sunday. The 48-year-old Scottish songstress famously finished second on "Britain's Got Talent," but the variety show launched a career that has seen her win success on both sides of the Atlantic.

According to the Official Charts Company, which tracks music sales in Britain, the more than 410,000 copies of "I Dreamed a Dream" sold since its release Nov. 23 make it the fastest selling album so far this year, and are the largest first-week sales for a debut album in U.K. chart history.

Millions of people have seen an online clip of Boyle auditioning for the judges. Wearing a somewhat dowdy frock and with a halo of untidy hair, Boyle told judge and producer Simon Cowell that her dream was to be a professional singer. "I've never been given the chance before, but here's hoping it'll change," she said then.

She sang "I Dreamed a Dream," from Les Miserables, and her soaring vocals earned a smile and raised eyebrows from Cowell - and a standing ovation from the audience.

"In 'Britain's Got Talent' she opened her mouth and the world fell in love with her, which is why her album has been the fastest selling of any woman making her debut," Cowell said. "She's amazing."

Since the show - in which she eventually finished second to a dynamic dance troupe called "Diversity" - Boyle has become one of the more recognizable faces of British music, both at home and abroad.

Though she was taken aback at first by her fame, Boyle has since had a glamorous makeover, been photographed by an upscale fashion magazine, and been profiled for "NBC's People of the Year" special in the United States. In Britain, she's appeared as a special guest on a wildly popular talent show, "The X Factor."

"I accept now that my life will never be the same. And I don't want it to end," Boyle told Matt Lauer on the special, according to an NBC transcript.

Of her number one album, Boyle said only, "it's fantastic" in a statement released by her record company.

"Everyone expected this to be a big record, but not as big as this," said Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company. Of the more than 410,000 copies - both physical and digital - sold in Britain, he said the majority of buyers purchased the CD. In the United States, Amazon Music it was the largest pre-order in the company's history.

Boyle's cover of the Rolling Stones classic "Wild Horses" debuted in the ninth spot on Britain's singles chart.

Gennaro Castaldo, spokesman for the HMV music store company, said Boyle's record could challenge for the top spot at Christmas - a highly coveted position in Britain's showbiz world.

He said Boyle's frequent appearances in Britain's newspapers likely helped boost her sales, along with her reality television background. Shows like "Britain's Got Talent" and "The X Factor" - which produced last week's chart-topper, Leona Lewis - help viewers bond with artists, he said. Fans follow the artist's career from the start, "so when the album comes out, quite a few of them will go out and buy the album, too," Castaldo said.

British singer Susan Boyle displays a copy of her CD, at the front door of her house in Blackburn, Scotland, Saturday Nov. 28, 2009. Susan Boyle's debut record, "I Dreamed A Dream," entered the British album chart in the top spot Sunday.