Customer Withdrawal
Nothing about its dirt-streaked exterior suggests that the warehouse off London Road could be a repository of good karma. That’s only apparent inside. Sofas, beds, dressers, and thousands of other household items, almost all of them donated, sprawl across 15,000 square feet. In this Age of Stratification, the goods offer reassuring proof that the haves…
The Pub in Summer
On St. Patrick’s Day, it is said, everyone is Irish. And everyone seems inclined to prove it by layering on the Donegal tweeds and Connemara caps, and cramming into the area’s friendly pubs. On the other hand, come mid-July, we all suddenly seem to think we’ve become Latino, our thoughts turning to alfresco meals of…
Mya
For what seems like the 100th time already this year, another formerly squeaky-clean teen R&B queen wants to reveal her inner freak. But oh, Mya! She was such a wholesome youngster, and wasn’t her racy turn on the remade “Lady Marmalade” just peer pressure? Guess not. Mya takes her first cues here from Missy Elliot,…
Girl Power
Kim Barry is at the wheel of her Ford Excursion with license plates that announce “Kimmy 3” — 1 and 2 were taken. This hulking truck is to Barry what the Straight Talk Express was to John McCain. As she rolls through Mayfield Heights, residents honk and wave. Barry blushes happily. She is a student…
Vina What?
For decades it was Club Isabella. Last year it became Vina Noté. And today, it’s Major’s Club Isabella. That’s a lot of baggage for this little hideaway near University Circle to haul, but chef-owner James Major (who bought out his former Vina Noté bosses in May) says the change has made life easier. “I was…
The Thrills
Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but there appears to be a gradual rock migration toward harmony and melody. The success of the Strokes, Wilco, and even Weezer demonstrates that what’s old can be made new again, that we can return to traditional rock values. Dublin, Ireland’s the Thrills do so to magnificent extremes on their debut,…
Letters to the Editor
Pinching Pennies Charity begins at City Hall: I want to thank you for writing an article [“Money Pit Park,” April 30] about DiLiberto that wasn’t afraid to speak the truth. Now, maybe you can find out why it took him three months to release “partial” payment checks to volunteer organizations that are parking cars for…
Young at Heart
Al Barr’s first child is due this November. But the 35-year-old frontman for Boston’s brawling Dropkick Murphys is already feeling like something of a punk patriarch on this year’s Warped Tour. “I feel like an old fuckin’ man,” Barr sighs from a tour stop in Texas, his New England accent as thick as clam chowder.…
Superjoint Ritual
When Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo blasted Metallica for making safe music, he wasn’t just talking shit. Unexcited at the prospect of sullying his band’s legacy with an overpolished piece of mecha-metal, he pulled the plug on his multiplatinum act, choosing instead to focus on his least commercial major project, Superjoint Ritual. Skimmed from a decade…
Chuting Bull
On the ground and also at 4,000 feet in the air, Charles Bryan is the father of free-fly skydiving as a competitive sport. The 33-year-old Mississippi native holds the speed record of 327 mph. He won the world championships in 1996. And he’ll be one of 32 “swoopers” and paragliders to compete for the $16,000…
Departing from Guyville
When Terry Wallis recently emerged from a 19-year coma, lots of things must have come as a shock. Super Value Meals. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Russell Crowe. He has a lot of catching up to do. According to Liz Phair, so do rock critics, who might as well have been taking a 10-year snooze until the…
Ugly Duckling
These three dorky white kids from Snoop’s old ‘hood don’t just acknowledge their utter lack of street cred; they wear it like a paper hat, creating a theme album not about guns or dope, but about . . . fast food? Specifically, the album centers on Meat Shake, the fictional Long Beach blended-dinner joint where…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, July 31 Who knew there was a contemporary political angle to Oklahoma!? “It focuses on the American dream,” says Terri Kent, director of Porthouse Theatre’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical comedy. “Being American [today] means something completely different than it did 50 years ago. It was about owning a piece of land and…
Strings Attached
If you were a metalhead in the ’80s, you had to take sides: You were either into Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. We were into Priest (though Maiden clearly had the better album covers — with the possible exception of Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance), until we found a copy of Maiden’s classic 1988 opus, Seventh…
Café Tacuba
With Revés/Yosoy (1999), Café Tacuba (by far the best Mexican rock group ever) got away with murder. The risky double album didn’t sell jack, but it deservedly won a Latin Grammy and was at the top of many critics’ year-end lists. Cuatro Caminos (Four Roads), their first true studio album in four years, is disconcertingly…
Ode to Bat Boy
It’s hard to believe that a play based on a tabloid story about a boy/bat hybrid found in a West Virginia cave would be, according to director Victoria Bussert, “very touching.” But she insists that Bat Boy: The Musical (which opens Friday at Cain Park’s Alma Theater) has a “very sweet center to it. And…
Lips Service
Until now, you’ve probably never heard Sade and Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne mentioned in the same sentence. But considering that the Lips have made a career out of confounding expectations, one probably should never be surprised by what spills forth from this bunch. “For this record, we thought, What if Wayne sang like Dusty…
The Mad Daddy
During the late ’50s through early ’60s, a number of Northeast Ohio’s major media heads were documenting the wild, primitive impulses that ran contrary to the prevailing rosy image of America. Alan Freed brought fucking music to Your Hit Parade. Ghoulardi cracked six-packs and frogs live on his monster movie TV show. And somewhere in…
Ear Wax
8/2-8/3 Just because your local FYE doesn’t stock vinyl doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for 12-inch LPs, 7-inch 45s, and 10-inch 78s. This weekend’s National Record Show at the Rock Hall offers thousands of reasons why antiquated slabs of wax still matter. “There’s been a resurgence of record labels releasing vinyl,” says Gregory Loescher,…
Drums Roll
It ain’t easy to attract stares on the corner of East Ninth and St. Clair, what with the brightly lit Galleria and the towering Free Stamp just up the street. At 10:30 on a Wednesday night, the few passersby keep their eyes glued to the sidewalks, the better to brush off panhandlers. And then the…
Ice Babies
7/31-8/3 You probably haven’t heard of Rebecca Hughes, Stephen Carriere, or Yount & Marron, but the whole world may know them in a few years. They’re among the top names at the North American Challenge Skate, an annual competition between American and Canadian novice and junior figure skaters who’ve proved themselves in sectional meets. The…
Countdown to Takeover
Cleveland hip-hop labels are a dime bag a dozen, but the new imprint Ill Vizion Records hopes to distinguish itself by scouting talent nationally and creating a roster that spans other genres. The first test of its success comes August 6 with a party at the Velvet Dog to celebrate its first release, the double-disc…
Double Vision
8/2-8/3 It’s not just siblings doing double takes at Twinsburg’s Twins Days celebration. “Even people who are told of the number of twins attending aren’t prepared for the actual sight of so many,” says Shelley Miller, an organizer of the annual Guinness Book-style gathering of twins, triplets, and quadruplets. More than 1,500 sibling sets march…
Type O Negative
Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele and his cohorts continue to “please” the perpetually unhappy. The band’s mutant strain of gothic woe, brazen heavy metal, and psychedelic dirge attracts both metalheads and the black-clad Prozac crowd. There’s tales of love and sex gone horribly wrong, preoccupation with bleakness, and general contempt of humanity. What’s not…
No Holds Bard
FRI 8/1 Mick Foley has spent much of his life breaking things over other people’s heads. As a professional wrestler — known at various times as Cactus Jack, Dude Love, and Mankind — Foley sustained more than 300 stitches and eight concussions. He also lost an ear. After detailing his bruising life in two autobiographies,…
Cave-In
Sometimes the best move a band can make is to sell out — at least in the sign-to-a-major-label-and-try-a-commercial-sound way that indie purists who live with their parents hate. Back when Cave In was a death-metal-influenced hardcore band, it released a highly regarded thrash opus, 1998’s Until Your Heart Stops. Two years later, the band shocked…
Will & Greta
7/31-8/23 If Greta Rothman were a gay man, she’d be the luckiest gay man on the planet. But the Cleveland native isn’t a gay man. She’s a straight female. But you wouldn’t know it by the number of gay men she’s dated over the years. “Starting with my prom date and moving forward, every male…
G. Love & Special Sauce
Summer’s the time for kicking back and letting the frosty layers of winter melt away like the ice in a margarita — the type of carefree chilling out embodied by Philly trio G. Love & Special Sauce. Mashing together equal parts blues, soul-funk, and Beastie Boys-style playful raps, such albums as 1997’s Yeah, It’s That…
Bad Asses
For a few minutes, at least, things don’t look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli (“Rhymes with really,” he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck’s eminently qualified for the role, actually — that of a low-level hood pretending to be more important and talented…
Clem Snide
One part Oscar Wilde and one part Kermit the Frog, Clem Snide’s Eef Barzalay has a voice all his own. On 2001’s Ghost of Fashion, he trod the thin line between clever and too clever, keeping on the right side of things primarily because even his sometimes wizening wit couldn’t take away from the basically…
Heaven Sent
There’s magic in Northfork — both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy, set in a netherworld where the living and dead meet on…
Grandaddy
Grandaddy’s 2000 album, The Sophtware Slump, dripped with millennial dread: Pictures of broken keyboards on post-apocalyptic dirt floors were strewn throughout the CD booklet. Tracks such as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot” spoke directly to the times: “Adrift again 2000 man/You lost your maps/You lost your plans.” Grandaddy maintains its unique view on…
From Punk to Parent
Groupies, roadies, drugs. Backstage at a rock concert, such things are expected. An infant is not — even if it’s sporting a tiny punk-rock T-shirt. As she carries this child, Kim Monroe can feel people looking. They disapprove. Ed Wille knows that feeling. In the baby seat is his 2-year-old son, Angus. And that seat…
Laurey, Curly, & Mo’
At 7:59 last Saturday evening, there were myriad reasons for not wanting to witness yet another hootenanny staging of Oklahoma! We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Our high school put it on, didn’t it? Sure, remember? The quarterback and head cheerleader starred as the lovers Curly and Laurey. Hell, who needs another load of that…
Scissorfight
Every once in a while, a band blends post-hardcore stomp with a kind of self-conscious, ironic redneckism and whomps the living crap out of everything else around. The first major group of this ilk was Tad, whose “Salt Lick” EP belongs in every red-blooded American home. More successful (and more obviously jokey) was Clutch, whose…
Dressing the part
As teens, the punk and goth crowds defined themselves in part through fashion. So it was just a matter of time till someone created punk and goth fashions for the infant. Chicago native Hillary Wentling was in the vanguard. Automatically, he came out a little rager, she says of her baby. He’s this cool little…
No Woody
Why is it that children, innocent wide-eyed Hummel figurines that they appear, are so enthralled by grisly Grimms’ fairy tales? The stories spun by those Teutonic brothers are full of death, mutilation, betrayal, and abandonment. Perhaps youngsters develop a hardy acceptance of life’s downside after sitting in their own poop for their first two years.…
Matt Pond PA
Matt Pond has a frog in his throat. It’s a slimy, bloated thing, and Pond is in constant struggle against it, twisting and contorting his voice to push his songs past the obstruction. The melodious bleating that results is instantly disarming — the sound of a man who woke one morning to find the world’s…
Wine, Dine, and Dash?
The freshest scandal in the never-ending saga of Parma — cue the Looney Tunes music — involves a fund-raiser held by mayoral candidate Deborah Lime at the Blue Moose Saloon. Owner Patrick Potopsky claims that he wined and dined Lime’s supporters on roast beef and all the liquor they could pound last October, only to…
You, Spy
David Wolstencroft moved from London to Los Angeles in November, and not only so he could rise each morning for a game of tennis–though there is that, and that might have been good enough. He made the trip, which is thus far temporary but may well prove permanent, for the same reason offered by the…
Beausoleil
Featured on movie soundtracks, TV commercials, and at countless concert and club dates, the Louisiana six-piece BeauSoleil is the greatest single reason for Cajun music’s popularity explosion. Cultural considerations aside (for a moment), the success of BeauSoleil, now in its 25th year, is due in no small measure to the band’s sheer musical prowess, regardless…
