We Love You Both, But . . .
It’s tough being the kid sister — especially when big sis has beauty, brains, and a brilliant track record. While Mom and Dad throw the bulk of their resources in her direction, you’re the one who winds up doing the grunt work, overburdened, underappreciated, and generally left to pick up the slack. So spoke my…
Finless Brown
Finless Brown co-MC Paulie Rhyme ends “Number Two” on his band’s latest by declaring his intent to party like it’s 1995 — and then raps like it’s 1988. And so goes The Next Caper, Finless’s full-length debut. The band’s 2003 intro, The Browntown EP, established it as one of Cleveland’s more promising acts, a funk-soul…
Pay Up, Honky
“Black people, wake up!” shouts the ad running in local black newspapers. “Do not spend your money with Kohl’s Department Stores or T-Mobile Wireless . . . Help us prove their racist stereotypes wrong.” From the hyperbolic tone, you’d think the companies had installed whites-only drinking fountains. But the outrage stems from something a bit…
Friends in Low Places
It’s a bit past nine on a Thursday night that’s as cold as the cans of Busch Clint Holley has been knocking back. Already, the bouncer-sized redhead is buzzing like a cheap TV. “I’m higher than a hippie in a helicopter,” quips his bandmate Greg Harper, a transplanted Texan who can quote John Wayne movies…
Colin Dussault
Colin Dussault may have forgotten more gigs than most local acts ever play. For a decade and a half, the husky harmonica player-singer-songwriter has crisscrossed the region, setting up shop on innumerable bandstands. His outfit has been tagged “the hardest-working band in Northeast Ohio” time and time again. The ultimate evidence of Dussault’s longevity, however,…
Wife-Beating 101
Former Browns stud Jim Brown makes for an unlikely advocate for nonviolence, given his handsome rap sheet for wife-beating. But to Mayor Jane Campbell, he’s a swell role model for inner-city youth. The mayor’s office is launching a partnership with Brown’s Amer-I-Can, a nonprofit that works to quash gang violence. Campbell will put “significant amounts…
Ice Breakers
Right now, nearly every denizen of Canada’s 10 provinces (and 3 territories) is sitting in a dim basement amid a pile of Labatt Blue cans, playing a videotape of Kirk Muller’s 1993 Stanley Cup-winning goal for the Montreal Canadiens — the last Canadian team to win the Holy Grail of hockey — over and over…
Beck’s Last Stand
After a year of fruitless talks, city negotiators brought their final police contract offer to the table. They couldn’t have antagonized union chief Bob Beck more if they’d shivved him in the neck. The deal offered no raise in the first year, a $500 bonus in the second, and a paltry 3 percent in the…
Punishing Cleveland
Thom Hazaert is used to getting fired by his friends. One of the most successful talent scouts working the Northeast Ohio region over the past few years, Hazaert was responsible for landing major-label deals for Chimaira, Switched, and Erase the Grey. But once those bands began to develop national followings, they sought to move up…
Pissed-Off Germans
Pissed-Off Germans They’re not all schnitzel-eating Nazis: Regarding the Christkindl Market article [“Krautballs!”, October 20] and Akron’s inclusion of 20 German artisans in this year’s event: Akron and the City of Chemnitz, Germany, established a sister-city agreement in 1997. Such exchanges promote peace and friendship. These relationships are important because they open the door for…
Cleveland Exports Rust
Rust Records has signed a six-album deal that makes the Cleveland-based label a boutique imprint of Universal, the largest of the four major-label music groups. The labels plan to release all six discs, including albums from three regional bands, in 2005. “It’s an experiment,” says A&R rep Corey Roberts, who works out of Universal’s New…
The Creole World
Most people’s perception of New Orleans involves little more than beads, bare breasts, and Bourbon Street. But for Nina Domingue, who grew up in N’Awlins, the Big Easy has inspired vivid, cherished memories. Domingue’s solo show about Creole women, Mo Pas Connin — or Torment, which she wrote and performs, makes its Ohio premiere this…
Made Out of Babies
“I think my tongue is on fire!” shrieks Julia, frontwoman for Made Out of Babies, early on Trophy, her band’s debut. Then she attempts to smother the flames with your face. A storm front of black humor and misanthropy that’s something like a heavy-metal take on Todd Solondz’s Happiness, the Babies come with moody, paranoiac…
Stand-Up Guy
Rocky LaPorte was waiting in the wings when Jay Leno announced his name. The Chicago comic wrung his hands, looked up, and prayed he wouldn’t screw up his four-minute spot on The Tonight Show. “I was a nervous wreck,” the 45-year-old comedian says of the October taping. “Laura Bush was there, and all these CIA…
Nelson
Despite a direct Ozzie connection, Nelson is the 12th-least metal band in the history of heavy metal, according to VH1’s Least Metal Moments, which attributes the dubious distinction not only to the band’s hits like “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” and “After the Rain,” but to its very existence. Jazz musician Ozzie Nelson…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, January 6 There’s nothing like a big-ass RV to make you feel like you’re King of the Road. More than 800 models will be on display at the Ohio RV Supershow this weekend, so chances are pretty good that there’s one of these babies with your name on it (or your wife’s name, or…
Allan Holdsworth
The biography on Allan Holdsworth’s official website claims that the 58-year-old guitarist “remains never quite satisfied in his eternal quest for the perfect tone.” No wonder you probably never heard of this guy. Holdsworth has for the past quarter of a century done his thing outside the big-label publicity machine. But devotees of jazz-rock fusion…
Shall We Dance?
1/10-3/27 At Get on the Good Foot’s free daily dance classes, Teddy Ted the Flex Master shows kids some of the moves he busts as a member of the Cavs’ Scream Team. “I was the first guy to do hip-hop [as a dancer],” boasts Ted, taking his place in line behind about five dozen other…
Joe Bonamassa
Blues provided much of the life’s blood of rock’s formative stages. It further energized the less pop-oriented flank of the British Invasion and was born anew within the rock underground of the ’60s. These days, rock appears to be returning the favor. With most of its originators gone and its ’60s-revivalist audience graying, blues relies…
Everybody Was T’ai Chi Stretching
SUN 1/9 As a master instructor of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, Dashi Hu Wei-yue thinks of his joints as hinges on a gate: If you don’t bend them, they’ll rust in place. In his four-part Iron & Silk Visiting Masters Series for beginners, Hu teaches eight stretching exercises that keep bodies fit. “The student that practices…
The Pink Spiders
Nashville’s Pink Spiders play stripped-down, sped-up rock fueled by the fading art of songwriting. Their full-length debut, Hot Pink, mashes together old-school punk and new-school garage rock, and while it’s a fine offering, you still really need to see them live.
Sweat Shop
THU 1/6 “Our music is both dark and playful,” says DJ TLR, one of the co-headliners at Thursday’s Bunker Records-Crème Organization’s Winter Tour. “It teases and pleases the dance floor, without resorting to all-out mayhem and preset trance drum rolls.” The concert features dance-friendly mixmasters from Holland’s overlapping Bunker and Crème collectives, whose continental European…
Ol’ Dirty Bastard
He was never going to be confused with Tupac while alive, but the late, great prankster Ol’ Dirty Bastard is now shadowing him in the lucrative hip-hop afterlife. Like Pac, he’s left a maternal hand on his till of posthumous product, the only question being how much of it exists. (In light of the fact…
The i Has It
FRI 1/7 Band names don’t come much simpler than this. Tony Yanni found the moniker for his prog-rock act in the alphabet, wedged between h and j: i. The ex-Trashin’ Broadway drummer pitched the lone-letter idea to bassist Eric “Big E” Reineke, who says it “was like a stray cat. It just kept coming back…
Kings of the Iron Mic
“Ajent O is a lot of things,” says MC Siege, a fellow member of the 12 Monkeys hip-hop collective and labelmate of the Buffalo rhymer. “He’s smooth. He’s got a laid-back delivery. He covers too many topics to define him as one thing. He’s polished. Everything he comes with is polished.” Ajent is just one…
Second Run
While Michael Moore and Mel garnered most of this year’s critical attention, plenty of fine films opened to little or no fanfare. Following are our reviewers’ favorite movies that didn’t draw the adulation they deserved. Consider yourself armed for the next trip to Blockbuster: Control Room — In a year of agitprop documentaries both left…
Esthero
Esthero hasn’t exactly been munching bonbons and kicking back with the daytime soaps since the 1998 release of Breath From Another, her critically lauded debut album. Besides appearing on tracks by the Isley Brothers and Black Eyed Peas, the Canadian finished an album of all-new material, Wikked Lil’ Grrrls — due out later this year…
Blade Runners
Over a three-month period in 1994, machete-wielding Hutu tribesmen in Rwanda hacked to death 800,000 Tutsi men, women, and children. News reports, including film footage of the unfolding carnage, were broadcast around the globe. In the face of such unremitting acts of inhumanity, the world community did nothing. It wasn’t the first time society had…
The Soft Pink Truth
On the surface, much of Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth? is an album of electro-pop covers of punk songs from Drew Daniel — ex-punk-rocker, present Björk collaborator and Matmos member, and button-pusher behind the Soft Pink Truth — that’s perfect for apolitical dance floors anywhere. Rudimentary Peni’s…
Mute Button
At first glance, White Noise looks like one more supernatural thriller aimed at an audience that’s easily scared and easily parted from its hard-earned cash. It will be lumped in among the Rings, Grudges, Otherses, and other gotcha creepshows inhabited by rancorous ghosts and pissed-off ghouls out to off those who done ’em wrong when…
John Frusciante & Josh Klinghoffer
Anyone who expects to hear chewy pop-rock on a solo recording from guitarist John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers is in for a shock. His music — especially on the recent, self-explanatory The Will to Death — is dark and tortured, powered by a penchant for melodic hooks you can hear jangling a mile…
On View
Dukes and Angels — This exhibition transports modern viewers to the court of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th centuries. Included are luxury objects belonging to the first Valois dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold and John the Fearless: portraits of the dukes, illuminated manuscripts (such as Aristotle’s Ethics), crowns, stone sculptures, and devotional images.…
Bettye Swann
Whereas today we have white men revealing the breasts of African American women during Super Bowl halftime shows, back in the ’60s, members of different races were seldom seen sharing a TV screen. For instance, a Capitol Records bigwig once forbade young soul diva Bettye Swann to sing a duet with Buck Owens on his…
