What Becomes a Legend Most?
The Cleveland Play House seems most alive when it’s reanimating departed legends. Reincarnations of Lillian Hellman and Janis Joplin have showcased the venerable institution at its best. With Tea at Five, the Play House has, for the sadly brief spell of two weeks, imported from the Hartford stage its shrewdest enterprise since Madeline Kahn in…
Why Queers Are Not Here
Time to set Cleveland’s gay record straight: I am a gay man and a writer for a national gay magazine [“Calling All Queers,” July 31]. I wanted to relate my Cleveland experience for you, which totally affirms this professor’s theory that Cleveland needs to recruit more gays. As a young man, I lived in Cleveland…
Austin’s Powers
I admit I wasn’t expecting much from Austin’s Smokin’ Steak House, an East Side restaurant that a colleague has been urging me to try for the past several years. Crouched among dry cleaners, banks, and a Holiday Inn Express, the modest little building — home to a series of forgettable restaurants in the early 1990s…
Hip-Hopcrisy
Before she became one of the most powerful people in American radio, Cathy Hughes was the debt-ridden, world-weary owner of WOL-AM, a tiny station in Washington, D.C. It was the early ’80s, and Hughes was too broke to pay announcers. So she turned on the microphone and invited calls herself. When housewives phoned to chat…
Evil Empire
For a man whose livelihood involves scaring the pants off people, the only thing truly frightening about goth maven Ed Douglas is his love of soft-rock cheeseballs Chicago. In the office of Douglas’s plush Concord condo, you might expect a couple of skulls, assorted pentagrams, maybe a mounted raven. Instead, you’ll find a very live,…
Summer Flings
It’s not a catapult, it’s a trebuchet, explains Sam Arendec. Yeah, we know. We’ve been corrected by Arendec, his wife, and a representative of the Baycrafters Renaissance Fantasy Fayre, where Arendec will be showing off his trebuchet this weekend. And, Arendec says, if we talked to his eight-year-old son, he, too, would have set us…
Patton Pending
On a recent Saturday, Mike Patton, the former frontman for the platinum-selling rock band Faith No More, is indulging his inner collector-nerd. Record stores are Patton’s home away from home, and he mows through the CD racks of this one, in the Bay Area of his native California, with zealous concentration, occasionally bursting out with…
Highway to Hicksville
Drinking, cheating, killing, and going to hell — that’s what all the best songs are about, says Hayseed Dixie mastermind John Wheeler. “And that’s especially true for hillbilly music.” Wheeler’s Nashville-based trio contemplates these subjects on its debut album, A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC, a bluegrass interpretation of the Aussie rock group’s greatest hits, rendered…
Do the Math
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from Dallas to the home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and a very…
Safety Scissors
It’s hard to say the words “glitch electronica” without picturing some über-nerdish white guy bathing in the sterile glow of his laptop, obsessively pecking away at little clicking and gurgling noises. But Matthew Curry, who produces glitchy techno tunes under the name Safety Scissors, lets it be known right up front that he doesn’t “over-obsess”…
Taproot
It says something about the hard-rock scene that when a band refrains from sexist and/or homophobic lyrics, it’s more of a unique selling point than a given. (At this point, we’re still hopeful enough to think it wouldn’t be a sales hindrance.) But the members of Taproot seem to be nice enough guys, and they…
Interpol
Love ’em or hate ’em, you have to give the Strokes credit for cracking open the N.Y.C. music scene for all to see and A&R execs to sign. And though most outlets have called these bands followers of the Strokes, the mod men of Interpol, for one example, have been gigging at least as long…
Robert Plant
On Dreamland, Robert Plant’s first solo album in nine years, he doesn’t hit the high notes as easily as he used to, but his voice still sends chills down the spine on occasion. Perhaps he doesn’t hit those notes because he doesn’t try that hard on this CD, a mixed bag designed primarily to appeal…
Coldplay
On its 2000 debut, Coldplay sounded like a band that took Radiohead’s “Knives Out” a bit too literally, slicing and dicing that group’s sound to bits, trimming away all the ambition in favor of sheer digestibility. Ironically, it only made Coldplay that much harder to swallow — especially with a singer who sounds kind of…
Stone Sour
Stone Sour is no mere side project; this is Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor’s coming-out party as a major rock voice. He’s always been great at commanding the maggots, barking lyrics from behind his mask. But with Stone Sour, he’s unmasking himself in more than one sense. The lyrics are more vulnerable and less hate-fueled; there’s…
Dixie Chicks
Maybe the Dixie Chicks dared to undertake this acoustic, bluegrass-flavored album in order to kill the dumb-blonde image they’ve always teasingly courted and never seriously deserved. Or maybe the astounding success of the tradition-soaked O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack has finally been acknowledged in Nashville’s corporate halls. Or maybe, as their bio claims, the…
X-Press 2
On his own, London house producer Ashley Beedle has been one of clubland’s most consistently popular producers, churning out jazz- and funk-inspired tracks under the names Black Science Orchestra and Black Jazz Chronicles. But Beedle’s greatest work came in 1993, when he teamed up with the DJ duo Rocky & Diesel, and under the name…
Dispossession
Director Neil LaBute (Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) seems the unlikeliest candidate to direct the film version of Possession, British author A.S. Byatt’s Booker Award-winning bestseller. LaBute’s earlier films were resolutely tied to American culture, and Byatt’s book couldn’t be more British if it drank tea at four. One of the movie’s departures is…
New Bomb Turks / Ron House
“Ron House just told me that was the best concert he’s seen in his life,” the New Bomb Turks’ Eric Davidson remarked after last fall’s Ohio debut by the Strokes. “I thought it was good, too, but I said, ‘Ron, you saw the New York Dolls, for Christ’s sake!'” It was typical of the Columbus…
Fear the Creeper
If you’re looking for a horror movie to revitalize the genre, keep looking. If you’re looking for a horror movie with believable characters . . . yes, you’re gonna have to keep looking. But if sudden loud noises, relentless strobe lights, digital hallucinations, and mutilated corpses make you jump, and you feel that nothing more…
Punks on Parade
It is custom for the good people of Cleveland to always side with unions. To do otherwise is to secure your place in Hell, like the special wing being built for scabs at the Cargill salt mine, who will have studio apartments overlooking the Burning Lake of Fire. Ours is a tradition of gratitude, since…
Photo Opportunity
When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in such films as Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious,” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but few people seemed to…
Gravity Bites
They slipped into the city before dusk, cruising eastbound on I-90 as commuters inched westward. Rob Russell drove. The first to turn 16, he could squeeze eight friends into his parents’ Dodge Dynasty. When they reached downtown, the soldiers tumbled out of their Trojan horse and onto skateboards. It was 1990, and the boys explored…
