Peppers, Ice Cube in league with Snoop

There’s still a week before Labor Day brings an unofficial end to the season, but there’s little doubt that the L.A. party of the summer is in the books: It was Thursday’s concert at the Greek Theatre featuring Snoop Dogg, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Ice Cube, three headline-level attractions that joined forces in a fundraiser for Snoop’s youth football league.

This was a summit meeting of Southland renegades-made-good, three acts that have bounced through various rapids -- drug damage, criminal charges, dismissal by mainstream audiences -- and come out the other side as pillars of the city’s music world. None of the performers pushed the theme of vindication Thursday, but it still served as a subtly inspiring, unifying thread.

All three are also among the most reliable audience-rousers around, and the Chili Peppers were especially frisky in these circumstances, playing a 6,000-seat theater that’s much smaller than the arenas they’re accustomed to and escaping the extended isolation of the recording studio, where they’ve been preparing a new album.

And this wasn’t just any theater for the quartet. Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea told the audience that he and singer Anthony Kiedis received their high school diplomas on this very stage, and later in the set Kiedis recalled a long-ago night when the two pals tried to sneak into an Alice Cooper concert from the woods at the back of the Greek.

That anecdote inspired an impromptu mini-version of Cooper’s “School’s Out,” the most playful moment in an hourlong performance that concentrated the veteran quartet’s powers into a euphoric mix of melancholy reflection and reach-for-the-stars rock power.

The band focused on songs from the last half-decade that have become radio staples -- “Can’t Stop,” “Scar Tissue,” “California King,” “Californication” -- playing with a pent-up intensity and moving around with their customary monkeys-on-a-hot-plate animation. They also offered one new song, like a special taste straight from a winemaker’s barrel -- a piece of brisk, funk-accented rock with a sweetly melodic chorus.

The presence of L.A.’s preeminent rock band between two of the region’s main hip-hop forces was more than a strategy to sell tickets to a wide audience (though it did do that job -- the sold-out house contributed nearly $250,000 to Snoop’s league). It represented the kind of musical and cultural blend that picked up steam in the early ‘90s, a time when Ice Cube and the Chili Peppers played on the same Lollapalooza bill.

That made Thursday’s show something of a full-circle demonstration of diversity, and the evening’s main disappointment was the absence of a moment bringing all three acts together. The stormy Ice Cube, the acrobatic Kiedis and the languid Snoop Dogg would have made quite a front line.

Ice Cube opened the evening with his usual energy and authority, though there’s less of a scowl now than there was when he epitomized the gangster rap genre.

He was joined for most of his set by fellow rapper WC, one of his partners in the group the Westside Connection, and bantered with Chris Rock, who stepped out briefly from the wings.

In his closing set, Snoop Dogg called on his own backlog of hits, from the early Dr. Dre G-funk of “Gin and Juice” to the recent Neptunes-produced “Drop It Like It’s Hot” to keep the celebratory spirit soaring. The lanky Long Beach native also offered a tribute to the late Tupac Shakur and turned over a portion of the set to Tommy the Clown, whose troupe of children danced in the body-twisting style known as krumping.

Backed by DJs and a full band that included a horn section, Snoop let all his narratives unfold with his trademark sleepy ease, and if the performance didn’t have the special-occasion incandescence of the Peppers’, it was rarely less than richly entertaining.