Warped Priorities
There was good reason to anticipate great things from the Ernie Ball Stage at the August 7 Warped Tour. After all, well before the stop in Cleveland, promoters bombed the media with calls and e-mails. “Several local bands will get their big break this summer,” boasted one press release, emphasizing that those bands would have…
Blessed Bash
Little Italy’s Feast of the Assumption was once a quaint, one-day religious festival filled with traditions from the Old Country. There was a Mass, followed by the procession of the Blessed Mother, during which parishioners pinned monetary offerings to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Entertainment included a pole climb, in which young men would…
Sade
For Lovers Rock, her first album in eight years, Sade and her longtime band kick out the jams, relatively speaking. The smoky, late-night ambiance of her previous material (starting with 1984’s subtly sublime Diamond Life and continuing though 1992’s understated Love Deluxe) is restrained this time out, giving way to more pronounced pop components. It’s…
How Great Thou‘s Art
“I was going through a huge social anxiety disorder thing,” Chris says to no one in particular on a recent helping of his Assholier Than Thou radio program. He is Woody Allen without the budget for a shrink, so he bends the ear of his audience instead. “I convinced myself that I had social anxiety…
Shawn Colvin
Throughout her career, singer Shawn Colvin has meticulously studied her own life and then used it for songwriting fodder on her next batch of material. From insecurities and romantic dissolution to romantic bliss, her diary-like self-explorations become the illuminating truths for her listeners. Colvin, who was part of the “new folk” movement of the ’80s…
Untrue West
On the lips of many moviegoers, the name Joel Schumacher is tantamount to blasphemy. Visions of a blue-skinned Arnold Schwarzenegger and a head-bobbing George Clooney in rubber nipples instantly come to mind, inducing shudders of revulsion and indicating an oft-held view that Mr. Schumacher epitomizes the worst American directing can offer. Many folks, however, haven’t…
So Many Roads Tour
Since the death of Jerry Garcia, no artist has resurrected the festive experience of psychedelic rock more than Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. With the help of Dead drummer Mickey Hart, Weir conjured the traveling jam band atmosphere of the Furthur Festival as the main post-Dead touring extravaganza of the mid-’90s. Now, nearly six years…
Ship of Fools
The social lessons of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin are these: War is bad. Love is good. The Italians love to sing, even when they’re supposed to be at war. The Greeks are freedom fighters. And whatever you do, don’t turn your back on the Germans, because they love war, hate freedom, and never sing at all.…
Destiny’s Child
You’ve gotta wonder how many truly “independent women” will show up at the Destiny’s Child hoedown. Can these independent women drive? Stay up later than 9 p.m.? Can their allowances withstand the $18.95 it takes to rock out to Survivor, Destiny’s newest offering of bombastic, man-bashing songs? Probably not. Too bad. Destiny’s Child is a…
Race Baiting
There is one joke in Rat Race, a.k.a. Cannonball Run IV, so stunning — because it’s the one joke in the film that actually works — that it bears repeating here, if only to spare you the misery of actually witnessing this crime against humanity. Jon Lovitz, playing a character who might as well be…
Rebecca Gates
In 1997, Rebecca Gates became the last Spinane, as the departure of longtime musical partner Scott Plouf left her to craft the masterful Arches and Aisles alone. Arches and Aisles would itself become the Spinanes’ epitaph, followed only by The Imp Years, a collection of B-sides and rarities from the defunct entity. After Gates’s move…
Give Him an Inch
Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off-off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks, and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened…
Usher
Last December, when Usher’s record company halted the release of his new album, All About U, at the last minute, it was reportedly because the entire thing was prematurely leaked to Napster. Coincidentally– or maybe not so — its lead single, “Pop Ya Collar,” which was officially released, stiffed, signaling a lack of interest in…
The Bank of Jim Crow
Homegrown Charter One is a Cleveland success story. One of the nation’s 30 largest bank holding companies, it trumpets its wealth in its annual report: 419 branches and $33 billion in assets. Yet there’s another side to Charter One, contained in figures that won’t make the pages of glossy reports. They show the bank’s home…
The Clean
Along with the Bats, the Clean is the most venerable of all the New Zealand alternative rock units, having endured a history that takes us almost all the way back to the original birth of punk. Its members have been around so long, they’ve left behind a trail of hot rocks that would pave the…
Life in the Kill Zone
From inside Champions Garden Towne, the wailing at first sounds like a police siren at extremely close range — in the parking lot, perhaps, or just outside on North Ridge Road. Only after a few moments, when the tone fails to change pitch or intensity, does the situation become clear. The sound is screeching from…
Chimaira
“Why am I this way?” asks vocalist Mark Hunter on the opening track of Chimaira’s major-label debut, Pass Out of Existence. Well, take five talented musicians, lock them in a room for three years, feed them a steady diet of bad weather and good old Cleveland-style belittlement, and this is what you get. The question…
Hidden Horrors
One day in mid-June, a strangely unemotional man came to the Animal Protective League and asked the staff to put his bloody pit bull to sleep. The dog had “marks all over his face and his neck, puncture wounds from where another dog had bitten him,” remembers APL Deputy Director Matt Granito. Though the staff…
Pirates, Ahoy!
Back in the good old days — that would be 1998 — five Spanish-language pirate radio stations were broadcasting on the West Side alone. They didn’t constitute much of a threat to commercial radio, for they had only a two-mile radius; one was transmitting from an antenna atop Belinda’s Bar. The feds, of course, are…
Seeing Through the Fog
Don’t fear mosquitoes — fear pesticides: David Martin’s article on mosquito control [“The Mosquito Hunter,” July 19] omits important information on the very real dangers of toxic pesticides to human health. The Cuyahoga County Board of Health’s (CCBH) policy of fogging residential areas with these chemicals is bad risk management. According to the New York…
Barbie Abuse
In the enervating August humidity, our legitimate theaters go into hiatus. It’s time for Harvey to hibernate and esoterica to flourish. Indeed, a couple of local companies have been harvesting food for thought. Coincidentally, these are two works that savage ’70s artifacts: a revered doll and a beloved musical. The industrious mother hens that keep…
Peaks and Valleys
Besides the lustrous copper ceilings, there’s not much left inside Pucci’s in the Valley to remind diners of the late, great Maison Martel, the friendly French restaurant that occupied this space in Liberty Commons back in the 1980s. Then again, Liberty Commons isn’t what it used to be, either: The pleasant bookstores, boutiques, and card…
Heavenly Hindsight
When Henry M. Lyman was two or three years old, he’d listen to tunes on his family’s Victrola, then toddle over to the piano and play them. He was too small to sit and reach the pedal. “I had to stand and do it,” he recalls. His was one of those God-given talents taken for…
Devil With the Red Neck
It was 1974, and Abe, a recent high school graduate, was riding in a Chevy van en route to California to live among “other longhairs and freaky people.” He and his friends were approaching Nashville when he turned on the radio and heard David Allan Coe’s “Longhaired Redneck.” Abe’s been a Coe fan ever since.…
