Popa Chubby
Already an established iconoclast from a “pure” blues perspective, Ted Horowitz, aka Popa Chubby, further blurs the lines that delineate typical notions of bluesman and singer-songwriter these days. With a back catalog of material laden with the multiple influences one might expect from a born-and-bred New Yorker and a child of the late ’60s rock…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 17 The play Tuesday in No Man’s Land is set in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. Tension is exacerbated by potentially violent protesters gathering outside. “The women feel very trapped, not only by the choice they have to make, but by the fact that they are afraid for their lives, going…
On View
Capturing Cleveland: Pages from a City Sketchbook — The 200-plus works in various media by 21 Cleveland Institute of Art students all portray Cleveland scenery. Although their subjects are easily recognizable, providing opportunities to reminisce, most of the works are mere surface studies, lacking tangible mood and depth. Among the exceptions are Sarah Laing’s digital…
Vue
While former Sub Pop labelmates Hot Hot Heat went on to enjoy hot, hot success, the hardworking quintet Vue continued its sweat-soaked mission to rock small venues. Then again, maybe they have other reasons for keeping things intimate. “We want to move our pelvises around enough so that girls will notice our packages,” offers bassist…
Hillbilly Idol
If American Idol’s pop tarts represent contemporary pop culture at its most disposable, then its country cousin, Nashville Star, embodies the triumph of a good old-fashioned work ethic. With contestants typically in their 30s, married, and veterans of a roadhouse circuit that chews up and spits out hundreds of big-hatted singers every year, Nashville Star…
Blame It on Braid
“This is a scrapbook that I started keeping,” Todd Bell explains to the video camera. He’s sitting at a kitchen table, thumbing through pages with the kind of unfettered nostalgia usually reserved for high school football stories or John Mellencamp tunes. His old buddies are gathered ’round, pointing at the pictures. “That’s me, Todd, Pete…
Duke Robillard
Rhode Island-born Duke Robillard was just 19 when he cofounded Roomful of Blues in 1967. The succeeding 37 years have seen Robillard wander far from that original blue Room, but no matter where he roams, the versatile guitarist with the elegant licks always finds a welcome place to lay his ax. After walking out of…
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing Members
6/18-7/17 Hot ‘N’ Throbbing, opening Friday, is Convergence-Continuum’s latest production about a highly dysfunctional family living in the modern world. In this case, Mom writes porn for women, daughter Leslie Ann may or may not be a lesbian, and Dad is “a drunk asshole,” says artistic director Clyde Simon. “They say all politics is local,”…
Marathon Man
Dutch DJ Tiësto, who headlined what his publicists claim was the biggest show by any DJ in history — 25,000 in Holland last year — recently spun in front of a tougher audience to please, all 10 of them. They were old Vietnamese men sitting behind a table. At the other end of the room,…
Beastie Boys
The Beastie Boys’ first three albums each redefined pop music, and Ad Rock, Mike D, and MCA haven’t known what to do since. Ill Communication simply copied the sarcastic, live hip-hop of Check Your Head and wound up perfectly in sync with the Lollapalooza zeitgeist, but the electronic experimentation of 1998’s Hello Nasty was a…
Disc Drives
6/19-6/20 After 12 years of playing soccer, Frank Kearney says, he “got a little burned out.” A half-decade later, the organizer of the No Surf Tournament doesn’t regret switching to another sport: Frisbee-throwing. This weekend’s tourney will draw 25 seven-person teams from as far as Toronto and Iowa City. Competitors match skills at “ultimate” play,…
My Chemical Romance
On their major-label debut, scruffy New Jersey rockers My Chemical Romance have cleaned up their act. This is a slab of arena-ambitious punk steeped in crisp histrionics and molten chords. More specifically, the acrobatic yelps from singer Gerard Way and guitar dramatics from Ray Toro and Frank Iero are highly reminiscent of the prog-Radioheadisms of…
History Messin’
6/18-7/4 The American Revolution director David Hansen laughs when asked if Bad Epitaph Theater Company’s production of Kirk Wood Bromley’s historical play is the uncut version, which is rumored to top off at four-plus hours. “Hell, no!” he scoffs. “It was written to be adapted.” The acclaimed work — which imagines George Washington as an…
Motörhead
As heated as its namesake, Motörhead’s latest is one of its thrashiest, angriest albums ever. Track titles such as “In the Name of Tragedy,” “Fight,” and “Killers” build certain expectations in the listener — Inferno meets them, and then some. It’s a much harder, faster album than 2002’s relatively melodic Hammered, closer in spirit to…
Plastic Bubbles
MON 6/21 Sarah Strohmeyer bristles when anyone brings up her stint as a Plain Dealer reporter. She worked the Lorain County courthouse beat in 1990 until an editor berated her for not asking permission to become pregnant. She quit. “I have found that newsrooms are inherently sexist warehouses,” she says. “Ask any news clerk in…
PJ Harvey
Four years after her last album, PJ Harvey has abandoned the elegant, Mercury Prize-winning slickness that made Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea such an anomaly in her edgy and provocative oeuvre, and frightened longtime fans. Her transformation from angry young girl to elder stateswoman must have scared her, too; Uh Huh Her…
Playing on Fear
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock down a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and a little case of scarlet…
Ministry
There’s nothing like having a Republican in the White House to piss off Al Jourgensen: At least three of the most memorable releases from industrial rock’s 800-pound gorilla launched noise-driven assaults on the Gipper or the Bushes. Ministry’s latest is notable on two levels: It’s the first release that’s arrived within two years of the…
Feels Like 80 Days
You might think that with the technological advances in moviemaking since 1956, this new version of Around the World in 80 Days would at least look better than its predecessor did. You could not be faulted for believing you’d be wowed by the Rube Goldberg gadgets of inventor Phileas Fogg — the whirligigs and whatchamacallits…
State of Being
If Christopher Foldi is searching for levity, as the State of Being frontman claims early on his band’s latest album, he’s looking in all the wrong places. Haywire is SoB’s most belligerent effort yet, all bulked-up electro-rock that sounds as if this bunch has spent the last two years eating glass and doing squat thrusts.…
The World According to Ki-duk
Ever-evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants: Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while aiming toward discipline and perhaps even…
Pitchfork’s Progress
It turns out that the funniest Onionesque fake-news story penned so far this year did not spring from The Onion. No, Sub Pop Records — a concern not ordinarily known for its forays into satire and comedy writing — deserves full credit for “Pitchfork Staff Member Says ‘Hi’ to Real-Life Woman.” “This marks the first…
Clarence Bucaro
Already an experienced road warrior with extensive nationwide touring and a few European opening dates under his belt, 23-year-old Chardon native Clarence Bucaro appears poised to make a frontal assault on the music scene. Of course, it’s not likely he’d describe it that way himself. Classic folkie themes of peace, social justice, and the environment…
The Whole Truth?
Jehane Noujaim co-directed 2001’s remarkable Startup.com, about two internet whiz kids who brokered just enough big deals to wind up with broken dreams, and the audience came away understanding how it felt to invest everything in something eventually worth nothing. The headlines of five years ago came to bittersweet life in a movie that was…
Cleveland Challenge
AC/DC was wrong. Rock and roll is noise pollution, in a way. A study done in the ’90s demonstrated that rock music negatively affects mathematical and verbal performance. Uh-oh. If we get any dumber, we’ll be a Wayans brother — or maybe even start to mourn the breakup of Creed. In order to combat rock’s…
School-House Blues
The flag sags and grass grows long at Lutheran East High School. Dandelions dot the football field. Weeds sprout from the cracks in a running track overgrown with moss. The bleachers look bound to collapse under the weight of 40 spectators — if 40 people actually were to witness a game here. It’s just past…
Spellbound
Stories from the New Testament have seeped into our culture and become a part of our consciousness. Who among us hasn’t heard that it’s better to turn the other cheek when attacked, or that “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the…
Finless Town
Finless Brown’s debut was called The Browntown EP. Its next release may be called The ‘Frisco Disc. The two-year-old hip-hop outfit has left Cleveland for the West Coast. “We wanted to expand and get into another market,” says the band’s Paul “Paulie Rhyme” Richardson. “San Francisco wound up being a good place. [Guitarist] Paco’s girlfriend…
Kill Me Twice
Merle “Mickey” Mishne was a man kept alive by passion — for classic cars and more recently, for vengeance. Last November, Mickey didn’t have much time left. He was in his 70s and walked with the shambling gait of atrophied legs. His home smelled musty and was inhabited by a cat that was both deaf…
Kids in Charge
One of the major dreams of school-age kids has to be making adults and other kids say exactly what they want them to say. This is impossible for most children, but not the winners of Dobama Theatre’s Marilyn Bianchi Kids’ Playwriting Festival, an annual excursion into the richness of young minds for the past 26…
Candye Kane
Yes, Candye Kane is an ex-stripper and former adult-magazine pinup. Yes, she is also a bisexual feminist political activist who doubles as a Tupperware lady. But most important to music lovers, she can belt it out in the tradition of such powerhouses as Big Mama Thornton, Bessie Smith, and Etta James. A survivor of East…
Wordlier
Wordlier A fan flames: In response to Tim Kenneally’s churlish letter regarding “Leather & Laces” [Letters, June 2], I wonder where to start? Should we make sport of his sexism concerning female football players, his crapulence for food, or his homophobia? Mr. Kenneally avowed that Scene’s articles are provoking his irascible mind on a weekly…
On Stage
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change — The promotional material dubs this musical revue “Seinfeld set to music.” But in reality, it’s more like The Bachelor set to a metronome, with predictable book and lyrics by Joe DiPetro and a mechanically repetitive musical score by Jimmy Roberts. Just pick your courtship cliché, and there’s…
The Greenhornes
The Greenhornes are from Cincinnati, but with their pulsating blues- and soul-inspired rock and cool scruffy looks, they may as well be straight outta London circa 1964, playing alongside the likes of such bad boys as the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, and the Spencer Davis Group. Probably the most authentic revivalists on the scene today, the…
Zoned Out
Oh sure, Glenn Smith could give you his office address. But that won’t help you find it. Instead, he tells you to drive into East Cleveland on Euclid Avenue. On the left you’ll see a parking lot that’s pitted and sunken, where a patch of gravel marks the outline of the old Burger King. Pull…
Picture Too Perfect
Mary J. Blige had completed her session with iconic photographer Annie Leibovitz and was preparing to leave the studio when Leibovitz snapped one more image. Wearing little makeup and a big floppy hat, Blige appears both familiar and strange; her glassy eyes hint at her then-struggle with drugs and alcohol. It’s a portrait of the…
Wayman Tisdale
It’s likely that at 6 foot 9, Wayman Tisdale is the tallest bass player in smooth jazz. It’s also quite likely that he’s the only jazz bassist to earn an Olympic gold medal, and for sure he owns the genre’s best pension plan, having spent 12 seasons in the NBA (Indiana Pacers, Sacramento Kings, and…
Work It
Every time he bats his eyelashes, RuPaul makes a political statement. And he’s done a lot of lash-batting the past few years — particularly over the gay-marriage debate. “It started when Bush got into office,” says RuPaul, the 6-foot-4 female illusionist whose drag-queen anthem “Supermodel (You Better Work)” was a dance-club smash in 1993. “There’s…
Family-Flavored
A group of us were sitting in the Riverview Room at the Ritz the other night, nibbling on spring-tomato aspic and semolina-dusted red mullet, and sipping a fine Tuscan Sangiovese, when the conversation turned, as it always does, to restaurants. Three Birds, Fire, Classics, Lola . . . We tossed off the names of the…
Wings on the West Bank
What do chowing down on chicken wings and listening to second-tier 1990s pop-rock bands have in common? Oddly enough, at this retro celebration, the shared theme appears to be longevity: the fowl stubbornly contributing to those pesky pounds no amount of gym-going will obliterate, and the musicians tirelessly churning out the indelible hits that brought…
Strip Poker
The seven men who convened in West Park June 1 were there to play high stakes Texas Hold ‘Em. They got held up instead. Just before 2 a.m., three men busted through a side door of the home. One had a shotgun. Another put a pistol to the head of the dealer. The third scooped…
Souper Duper
Our favorite noodle shop, Pho Hoa (3030 Superior Avenue, 216-781-7462), inside Chinatown’s Golden Plaza, recently underwent a mini-makeover. Earlier this spring, owner Manh Nguyen replaced the little restaurant’s sterile fluorescent lighting with trendy halogen pendent lamps and substituted a wall of glass, with a view of the plaza’s colorfully painted interior, for the previous industrial-style…
