Dancin’ Feats
Take the most clichéd story in the last hundred years of musicals, tart it up with garish sequin-studded costumes and painted tableaux, then fill the stage with obsessive-compulsive tap dancers, creaky 70-year-old tunes, and lots of overacting. You call this entertainment? Oh my, yes! Because the mother of all backstage musicals, 42nd Street, has infused…
Lyle Lovett
Could arch Texas singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett’s latest album be meant as a tonic for the troops, a way to stay upbeat during perilous times? Or is it meant ironically, a collection of show tunes combining Lovett’s eerie ability to amuse with an unusually cutting edge? The expertly crafted, not-quite-easy-listening Smile is a little bit of…
Steal This Movie
This should really piss you off: What follows is a story about a very funny movie you will have absolutely no chance of seeing any time soon. The powers that be who distribute movies–who copy prints, print up posters, deliver them to theaters, collect receipts, split profits (well…)–do not want to distribute this one, which…
Various Artists
The music presented in this new Bill Monroe tribute CD is terrific. How could it not be, with artists like Ricky Skaggs, John Hartford, Ralph Stanley, Charlie Daniels, Marty Stuart, and others performing the songs of the man who — over his 60-year career — influenced them all ? Culled from a concert at Nashville’s…
Big Italy
“It’s just like Joe Millionaire,” mumbled a companion as she stuffed her face with my gnocchi. “You remember . . . that night they went out to eat, and Evan liked Sarah’s dinner better than he liked his own?” Good grief . . . may nothing in my life ever again resemble an incident from…
Ligion
“Have you completely lost yourself for good?” asks Ligion on his debut CD, giving voice to perhaps the biggest cliché of modern rock: artists forsaking their individuality in favor of the now-standard woe-is-me rock paradigm.Thankfully, Ligion is teeming with personality, which helps elevate his brooding rock over the output of so many like-minded bands. Like…
Still Hi, Still Dry
Bucky Cat should have as many lives as the former Hi & Dry (2207 West 11th Street), the on-again/off-again tavern in Tremont. When Jeff Eisenberg and Mike Weigand sold the place in December (for the second time, after having taken it back a year ago from a previous unsuccessful buyer), purchasers Sherman DeLozier and Dave…
The Stokes Brothers
The Stokes Brothers’ new disc is served well by its title. Alongside Blues & Beyond’s solid bar-band blues are hints at a sound in the making: an inventive blues-rock trio format that takes the occasional jazz toke. The Stokes Brothers’ potential is most evident in Jim Stokes’s lead-guitar work. His delivery and approach vary from…
King of Rock
You spend the better part of a decade clawing your way up from the hip-hop underground. You finally hit paydirt with a Top 10 album that positions you to really make some noise next time out. Then that next time comes . . . and you deliver a dense, guitar-heavy epic that has as much…
The Art of the Flip
He wasn’t always a real-estate guru. First he owned a currency exchange. He also operated a coke ring on the side, shipping hundreds of pounds of the white stuff from Miami to Cleveland. Then Leonard Brooks went to prison. When he got out seven years later, he took up a whole new game. There would…
A Punk and His Cookies
“Ah, just make the whole article about Girl Scout cookies,” John Doe says with a laugh. Doe has three daughters, and he often gets caught up in their Girl Scout cookie wars. Following a set at Largo, a Hollywood singer-songwriter haven, a few weeks back, Doe pulled in a red wagon stacked with the sweet…
O’Reilly’s XXX-Factor
It appears that conservative TV host Bill O’Reilly looks to our humble weekly for inspiration. Just weeks after Scene wrote about Ambiance, the Middleburg Heights company that hopes to franchise its sex shops across America (“The Love Buss,” January 22), O’Reilly invited Ambiance President Jennifer Downey onto his Fox News show. Anyone who’s seen O’Reilly…
And Then He Killed Me
February 3, 1967. Eccentric U.K. record producer Joe Meek, said to be the British equivalent of genius pop producer Phil Spector, takes a sawed-off shotgun and shoots his landlady down a flight of stairs before turning the gun on himself. February 3, 2003. Phil Spector, from the looks of things, becomes America’s answer to Joe…
Joke to Jewel
When Councilman Joe Cimperman drives down Euclid Avenue, his eyes fix on the benches in front of Cleveland State’s University Center. The seats face the building, a concrete slab among concrete slabs, so that their backs are turned to the street. For Cimperman, the benches have always symbolized prevailing attitudes at CSU. “It was like…
The Kids Were All Right
Maybe the faces were fresher than the music, but the 2003 Cleveland Music Fest boasted a welcome energy that’s been lacking in past years, with larger crowds and several all-star performances that offset an overall dearth of polished performers. And while A&R types prowling the scene surely kept their contracts in their pockets, this year’s…
Letters to the Editor
Cleveland sold its soul for football: Let’s turn back the clock and imagine what could have been (cue the harp music . . .) [“The Case for Debauchery,” February 5]. How about a new, modern convention center, located downtown on a spot that would have tied together North Coast Harbor, The Flats, and the Warehouse…
Battle Stars
The final-round artists of No Compromise Productions’ first battle of the bands played better than they spell. With names like Jynxt and Xpectationz crowding the bill of the February 15 Revolution show, things looked pretty dubious on paper. But the event proved to be a lively showcase of promising young acts, with top honors going…
Coaching on Fumes
The final horn sounds and the post-game handshakes begin. Rollie Massimino leads his team through the grip-and-grimace ritual with the coaches and players of Youngstown State. His face, gray as his suit, sags under weight of a weary frown. If he’s not ill, he looks like he should be. Minutes later, the Cleveland State coach…
MC Paul Barman
“I think about all the pube I got while reading the Rubaiyat,” declares MC Paul Barman on “Cock Mobster,” the first single off his debut full-length, Paullelujah!, released late last year. It’s maybe the fifth or sixth most offensive thing he says on the album, which is the best hip-hop record by a white Jewish…
Wright’s Stuff
You know ’em. You love ’em. You laugh at ’em. But not all of ’em are what you think they are. Funnyman Steven Wright’s one-line non sequiturs (“I’m addicted to placebos,” “What’s another word for thesaurus?”) are all over the Internet. Problem is, they’re not all his. “Five years ago, someone showed me a site,…
Beachland Third Anniversary Weekend
The Beachland Ballroom is celebrating its third anniversary with a stellar selection, the kind that owner Mark Leddy and company seem able to whip up with the ease that other clubs dole out lifeless jam bands. Friday showcases the genre-deflecting stylings of singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks, the blue-collar storytelling of Johnny Dowd, and a reunion of…
This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks
Thursday, February 27 Beck Center’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sets Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy in — traditionalists, hold on — ancient Greece. “It was a time when magic seemed possible,” explains director Jerrold Scott. “Also, many of the characters and references in the play are taken from this time period.” The tale of…
Sage Francis
Standing tall among the indie-rap vanguard, Rhode Island’s Sage Francis reveres hip-hop, and he remembers it fondly. “I am very indifferent to the hip-hop world today,” Sage says on Non-Prophets.com, his crew’s website. “I don’t think much about it. Bling-bling versus headwraps versus backpackers? Gimme a break. All of them are a part of the…
The Sound of Music
Ray Williams, producer and co-host of Sound Central, a local music showcase that airs four times a week on Adelphia cable, thinks Cleveland has what it takes to create a national buzz. “We have an abundance of talent,” he says. “Bands are itching to be recognized. We’re just as hungry as the people in New…
The Figgs
At a time when too many bands are channeling the more brain-dead aspects of the ’70s punk movement — safety pins, sneers, pseudo angst, et al. — it’s refreshing to have a band like the Figgs around, paying homage to the intelligent end of the scene. Energetic and scrappy, but with a melodic edge and…
Rockin’ the Cradle
Uh . . . yo. The word on the street is that the ‘Drzej is back at the helm. “Who?” you rightfully ask. Why, cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak, of course. He’s the . . . er . . . “dog” who, under the auspices of producer Joel Silver (Richie Rich, The Matrix), created the hip-hop bang-bang…
Les Nubians
Sister vocal act Les Nubians learned the meaning of the word “multiculturalism” firsthand at an early age. Helene and Celia Faussert, born to a French father and a Cameroonian mother, grew up in an interracial household influenced by both African and European traditions. They were raised in Bordeaux, France, and they lived in Chad, West…
B.I.G. Deal
After trying to dump Kurt Cobain’s suicide at the feet of Courtney Love, an utterly insane and useless endeavor, director Nick Broomfield, once more playing dumb to get his subjects to damn themselves, “solves” the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. Or does he? Hardly seems like it, in the wake of…
Turbonegro
After two early ’90s releases of decent buzz-saw punk, Sweden’s Turbonegro must have hunkered way down in some old farmhouse during one of those famously long and dark Scandinavian winters, with sheep, speed, and each other their only companions. The band reemerged in 1996 with a contender for the definitive disc of the whole ’90s…
Like Father, Like Hell
Christ is sexy. There, got your attention. But honestly, think about it: nice guy, pretty hair, carpentry skills, puts loaves (and fishes) on the table. Plus all that doing miracles and rising from the dead and being the Son of God business. Heck, He’d be a prime catch for any gal. That’s heresy for some,…
Terror
Scott Vogel has been showing up big-name hardcore bands for years. The enthusiasm and passion the Buffalo native brings to his bands (Slugfest, Despair, and more recently, Buried Alive) have caused supporting gigs to become de facto headlining showcases, embarrassing bands with bigger names and tour support along the way. Unfortunately, none of Vogel’s bands…
