Better Days
We listen to a little bit of everything, and we’re influenced by a lot of it,” says 3 Doors Down singer Brad Arnold. “It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what [influenced us], but we have a collection on the bus of probably 500 CDs right now. A lot of the stuff I listened…
War Is Hale
If the lackluster appeal of a typical weekend has you yawning, perhaps a war would be a nice change of pace. This weekend, Hale Farm and Village will host Union and Confederate troops, facing off in hopes of refreshing memories of the bloodiest war ever fought on U.S. soil. “We might do a few different…
De La Soul
De La Soul has been around for 12 years, recorded three great albums (including one undisputed rap classic in its debut), and still has more artistic integrity than the entire Ruff Ryders and No Limit posses combined. That its fifth album, Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump, deliberately plays itself out over a series of tough,…
A Finger on History
The only thing more grisly than a man murdering his wife by hacking her to bits is that the victim’s fingers were placed in a jar and have been on public display since the crime was committed in 1883. They currently reside at the Wood County Historical Center on the outskirts of Bowling Green. “We…
Shellac
Uber-producer and general pain in the ass, guitarist/engineer Steve Albini has a keen ear for abrasive sounds. During the mid-’80s, before his work with Nirvana, Bush, and PJ Harvey (and countless others) turned him into a minor celebrity among alternative rock fans smart enough to read their liner notes, he was damaging eardrums with Big…
Scabbed Over
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every cliché and every stereotype imaginable…
Tadd Dameron
Arguably the most important jazz musician to come out of Cleveland, Tadd Dameron, who died in 1965, ranks among the dozen greatest composer/arrangers in the genre’s history. Born in 1917, he attended Central High with another outstanding jazz artist, trumpeter Freddie Webster, and they played in bands together as teenagers. After leaving Cleveland, Dameron wrote…
Death in Texas
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical auto-pilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood-chippers or hula-hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen mythos lead, and what are these…
Pleasure Void
Taken from a show broadcast January 13 on WRUW-FM, Up Your Ass is the first live album from Pleasure Void, a band with a live show driven by the poses of its vinyl-clad lead singer, Lo, a self-described bad girl who’s actually a practicing dominatrix when she’s not performing onstage. While the theatrical nature of…
Fear And Bowling
No one realized it at the time, but the contemporary woes of professional bowling were summed up with cruel clarity in early 1991. The first hint of trouble came at the Fair Lanes Open in Randallstown, Maryland, where a right-handed Texan named Del Ballard Jr. needed to knock down just seven pins — the bowling…
Santana
It’s common knowledge that, in August of 1969, legendary promoter Bill Graham muscled his then unknown band Santana onto the Woodstock stage, jump-starting the career of potent, Latin-tinged guitarist Carlos Santana. Working with a cast of different musicians throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Santana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in…
Too Much of a Good Thing
Dr. Michael R. Jacobs bustles to the back of his fifth-floor laboratory at University Hospitals, past assistants staring into microscopes and computer screens, past boxes of equipment and stacks of papers. In front of the window, he holds up a small plastic tray filled with what look like tiny red and brown ice cubes. “This…
Montreux Jazz Festival
One of the venerable jazz festivals in Europe, the Montreux Jazz Festival of Montreux, Switzerland, has been around for more than three decades. As a measure of its stature, a few years ago the festival managed to coax the recalcitrant Miles Davis into performing his old Gil Evans-associated tunes after years of electronic, hip-hop experimentation.…
Home Sweet Mobile Home
Trailer-park dwellers aren’t famous for their exquisite taste. But just because you live in a corrugated-aluminum rectangle doesn’t mean you can’t be aesthetically minded. After all, there’s more to life than a hot plate and a stack of water-damaged National Geographics. To lend a hand, we’ve assembled a distinguished panel of 12×70 experts, including Teri…
Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett used to like his hair and his music big. He’s since scaled down, sporting a more spiffy and less high ‘do these days, and his last studio release, 1998’s Step Inside This House, a tribute to homeboy Texas songwriters, is a more subtle affair than the big-band, horn-and-strings records that preceded it. That…
Born Again?
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in the history of television, was…
Mike Ireland
With what passes for mainstream country nowadays forgoing any direct relation to “country,” as it dives headlong into maudlin pop-music territory, it’s ironic that Mike Ireland makes a living on the fringes of the genre by dabbling in the sounds of country music’s first accused “sell-out” era — the Nashville Sound. Popularized in the late…
Edge
Despite his attempts to endear himself to the community with platitudes about multiculturalism and goodwill, new Plain Dealer columnist Sam Fulwood III was reportedly the laughingstock of the newsroom thanks to the silly-looking photo of him that ran with his first column on July 31. Head cocked to the side and sporting a professorial-looking pair…
HOPE Springs a Leak
But Linda Womack’s involvement was commendable: I just read your article “One Slim HOPE” in the July 27 issue, and I want to tell you that this was one of the best articles I’ve read in any of the five or six local papers. It was thorough, well-researched, and unbiased. Jacqueline Marino’s story of Linda…
To Hell and Back
Tar is good for paving roads and keeping roof tiles in place, but it has another function for John Sokol. The Akron resident paints with it. Sokol has been able to create serious art with this unprepossessing material, and the proof is now on view at the Akron Art Museum. Sokol discovered new uses for…
Burgeoning Bloom
At this sultry time of year, when local theater productions invariably turn camp or senile, Violet, a plangent new musical, is eliciting a buzz among theatergoers. This vibrant off-Broadway cult hit has been the topic of conversation for everyone from the cashier at a local deli to the social arbiters who ride RTA, garnering the…
Something Old, Something New
There ought to be a law, a sort of “endangered species act,” protecting venerable restaurants like Traci’s from extinction at the hands of the avaricious chain restaurants. It certainly will be a tragedy when we lose the last of these family-run dining rooms to rampant cultural homogeneity, since they are the sorts of unpretentious places…
Mile-High Eats
You say you’re tired of subsisting on peanuts and lukewarm Sprite when you travel by air? Not to worry. Just fly BusinessFirst on Continental and dine like royalty. An alert steerage-class reader recently smuggled out several of the airline’s BusinessFirst menus, and we ain’t talking turkey sandwiches here. Among the dinner-time delicacies are a macadamia-nut-crusted…
Back to Norm
Most of the musicians you read about are trying to “make it” and become rich and famous. There are many others, however, who realize that it’s not in the cards for them to appear in Rolling Stone. Still, they persist; they’re in it for the long haul, and they feel privileged to have it as…
