City Slickers
FRI 6/20 Todd Volkmer doesn’t have to report to his cubicle today. Instead of selling insurance, the Stowe artist gets to transform a downtown fire hydrant into a lush green tiki god, his memorial to disappearing rain forests. Volkmer is one of 24 winners of last month’s Cleveland’s On Fire! hydrant-painting competition, which received more…
Hard Reign
All the point-blank shootings, armed robberies, and giant explosions get the members of 13 Faces warmed up for what they really like to do. “When we got together, our goal was to be the most brutal band in the area,” says guitarist John Comprix, “to write the most violent hardcore imaginable, but to write songs…
Kevin McCarthy
The traffic-hazard sign on the cover of Kevin McCarthy’s debut CD — a car driving off the end of a pier and plunging into a body of water — is a real one County Clare, Ireland. A more appropriate road sign for McCarthy, however, would be Slow: Guitarist at Work. This 22-year-old from Mentor has…
Out and About
The Chevy convertibles creep down Euclid Avenue, with Cleveland’s most glamorous female impersonators poised atop the rear seats, waving their beauty-queen waves to thousands of spectators lined up on both sides. It’s the 15th annual Cleveland Pride Celebration parade, a rainbow caravan of cars, floats, and marching bands that weaves downtown toward North Coast Harbor.…
Punk in the Pasture
After a decade spent as a well-traveled punk, Danny Frye has swapped touring for tulips. “You should see the fuckin’ stares that I get around here when I’m out on the lawn mower,” says the tall, tattooed punk, by phone from the living room of his five-and-a-half-acre spread in Seven Hills. “This is all new…
Mall Bats
6/20 – 6/24 What’s behind your local shopping mall? Extra parking lots? A multiplex theater? The auto parts store? Behind the Eastwood Mall in Niles, there’s a ballpark: Cafaro Field, home of the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. Get to know the ground rules, then head on out for this weekend’s home-opening series: History: The ushers all…
Riding That Train
The recipe for partying down with ribald rap troupe Gravy Train: one cold, dingy warehouse in West Oakland; three bottles of cheap champagne; six 40-ounce bottles of cheap beer; four bags of salt-and-vinegar chips; five kinds of candy, including sour punch, Swedish fish, and Twizzlers; a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon (for MC Drunx); gay…
Strings Attached
SAT 6/21 Call it the Mr. Potato Head of puppetry. That’s how David Gaskell describes Puppetfest, the culmination of a marionette-making workshop at Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum, which is happening Saturday. Puppetfest includes a performance of Yi the Archer, a Chinese tale featuring handmade, Indonesian-influenced puppets, some as tall as 10 feet. A…
This Blood’s for You
The mantra of the inaugural Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles Six Pack Weekend was articulated early, in broken English, by Force of Evil frontman Martin Steene. “Can you handle a bit more heavy song?” he bellowed to the audience Friday at the Odeon. Of course they could: At this old-school metal marathon, harder was always…
The Low-End Theory
WED 6/25 Anyone who saw Howard Stern’s autobiographical film, Private Parts, is sure to remember the scene in which Stern helps one lucky female listener reach the climax of her day, using nothing more than the bass vibrations of his voice. Philadelphia’s DJ Sage, a music-school grad turned professional model turned professional DJ, must be…
Huey Lewis and the News
There’s that great scene in American Psycho where Willem Dafoe asks crazy killer Patrick Bateman if he likes Huey Lewis and the News. “No, too black,” Bateman shoots back. Despite the jab, Lewis has survived a lot more than just the critical knife of Bateman. With his everyman’s goofy hitmaking in the ’80s, he unwittingly…
Jesus Gets a Makeover
6/19 – 6/29 Fabio Polanco has modernized Jesus Christ Superstar for the Fine Arts Association’s upcoming production. “We’re having the show take place in the present time,” he says of the 30-year-old musical, a relic of the hippie era. “I wanted to find places where I can connect elements of the story to our contemporary…
Dismemberment Plan
For the next few months, the Dismemberment Plan lives on. There are a pair of North American tours to wrap up and a few August dates in Japan. And after that, on September 22, DeSoto Records will release The People’s History of the Dismemberment Plan, a remix album (mostly) culled from the work of fans…
Hulk a Maniac?
He’s 12 feet tall. He’s ripped. He’s as quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art-house director Ang Lee would have…
Lonnie Brooks
Like most self-respecting Chicago blues artists, guitarist-vocalist Lonnie Brooks has a solid Southern connection. His lineup may be typical blues-band: guitars, keys, and rhythm, but mixed throughout Brooks’s sound is a distinctively back-home R&B flavor. Alongside customary blues influences — including B.B. King — the Louisiana-born Brooks’s brawny, raucous vocals bear strong resemblance to old-school…
Crap Out
The number of boring, uninspired studio pictures hitting today’s multiplexes is getting depressing. To add insult to injury, many of these mind-numbing creations come from formerly — and presumably still — talented writers, directors, and actors. This week it’s Rob Reiner’s turn. His snoozer, the romantic comedy Alex and Emma (written by Jeremy Leven and…
Hank Thompson and the Brazos Valley Boys
Unlike country contemporaries such as Hank Williams, Faron Young, and Lefty Frizell, Hank Thompson is not only alive but still touring. What’s more, he’s in surprisingly good voice. That’s partly because, even in his prime, he was a singer of greater charm than pipes; his friendly, conversational baritone prompted listeners to sing along with such…
Stuck in Idol
Kelly Clarkson is like you and me in at least one respect: She, too, is sick of Kelly Clarkson. “My friends are like ‘If I see you on one more interview, dude, I’m going to kill you,'” says the first American Idol, sitting in the conference room of the Dallas publicity agency representing her film…
John Brown’s Body
There were a couple of really scary years for reggae music fans, when the digital age all but retired even the genre’s most gifted musicians. This sad transition also stripped from the music many of the qualities that made it so appealing to non-Jamaican audiences in the first place. How could you not miss the…
Arshinkoff Is at It Again
No sooner had we shipped out last week’s cover story about Summit County GOP Chairman Alex Arshinkoff (“The Godfather in the Closet,” June 11) than word arrived of more political firings in Akron. In May, Republicans gained control of the heretofore evenly split Akron Municipal Court, thanks to an open seat and an appointment by…
Hollow Man
Nobody can convey more while doing nothing than Billy Bob Thornton. His minimalist style is appropriate for the ironically named Levity, but what is conveyed never quite generates the emotional charge of Sling Blade or Monster’s Ball. Writer-director Ed Solomon is best known as the screenwriter of the two Bill & Ted films and, more…
Trailer Bride
Trailer Bride is one of those lightning-rod bands, like Southern Culture on the Skids or the Cramps — the kind that people either love for their frenetic, spooky weirdness or hate, the way Georgia Senator Zell Miller loathes the planned Real Beverly Hillbillies “reality” show. Either way, gangly mystic Melissa Swingle, a North Carolina native…
Come One, Come All
The Reverend Ralph Hudak of Immaculate Heart of Mary Church knows his way around a funeral mass. Recently, the Slavic Village priest officiated at five services in eight days. “That was unusual, but we average 60 to 80 a year,” Hudak says. In the same week that Immaculate Heart buried so many dead, the parish…
Camera Ready
In 1854, Japan was an isolated country of fiefdoms, headed by a 12-year-old shogun. Samurai defended their lords’ land with swords and rusty pistols, and Western ideas trickled in through Nagasaki, a port open only to the Dutch and Portuguese. Everything changed when Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his armada sailed into Nagasaki harbor that…
Liz Phair
Liz Phair’s fourth LP is an exercise in rebirth: She’s gone pop with a convert’s evangelical zeal, attempting to scuttle for good the decade-long shadow of Exile in Guyville. While it’s true that, musically, Liz Phair doesn’t invite comparison to Guyville, the lyrics are unmistakably Phair — though the years have dampened her bite –…
The Hustle
Editor’s note: All names, except those of experts, store officials, and detectives, have been changed to protect the American Dream. You get a real sense of Rudy Giuliani’s legacy when you park your car in a midtown Manhattan alley, looking for some shut-eye the way Mookie is doing this morning. He left Cleveland at 7:00…
Dance Rants
It’s amazing that any of us turn into semifunctional adults, given the signals that we get as we grapple with our first 20 years of life. On one hand, we’re told as children that we’re special and that we should endeavor to be exactly who we are. But when we try to live out our…
The Locust
Heavy-metal satanists, gangsta rappers, and childhood-damaged aggro-rockers only wish they could create the destructive racket San Diego screamo machine the Locust makes on Plague Soundscapes. With the subtlety of a sledgehammer, the quartet speeds through 23 blasts of incoherence — bearing titles such as “Anything Jesus Does, I Can Do Better” and “The Half-Eaten Sausage…
Play Dough
Call it the case of the bad handoff. As Justin Ferguson and DeLonte Hudson waited to board their flight to Nashville in January, security guards pulled them aside for a baggage search. Ferguson, 25, played it cool as a guard inspected the laptop and printer he carried. Hudson played it like what he is –…
Change for the Better
It’s been more than two years since our last supper at Sushi Rock, that hip little hideaway in the Warehouse District where we discovered sushi that went down swimmingly and trendy, upscale entrées that seemed odd, overwrought, and irrelevant to most of the raw-fish-and-martini-guzzling clientele. The place has been through at least two chefs since…
The Mars Volta
El Paso, Texas firebrands At the Drive-In were so combustible, it was probably inevitable that the band would flame out only four albums into a promising career. After ATDI called it quits in 2000, a pair of new groups formed in its wake: Emo upstarts Sparta and the much more invigorating Mars Volta. Fronted by…
Letters to the Editor
What’s with the Beacon Journal?: If Akron Beacon Journal columnist David Giffels merited Scene’s designation as the “Worst Columnist” [First Punch, April 2], couldn’t an even stronger case be made for anointing one of Giffel’s co-workers, Steve Hoffman, as the “Worst Editorial/Political Writer?” Hoffman, possessor of an inexplicably plus-sized ego, is like George Eliot’s “cock…
Like a Phoenix
Most of the time, when “dreams collapse,” the phrase is purely metaphorical. Not so for would-be restaurateur Andy Himmel. When he says plans for his Larchmere Avenue restaurant, Boulevard Blue, fell through, he’s not kidding. “It was horrible,” a still-shaken Himmel said of the June 2 disaster that destroyed the building. “I never imagined anything…
Northern State
Northern State is three suburban white girls doin’ hip-hop like the Beastie Boys, only better. With feminist shout-outs, self-esteem-drivin’ rhymes, and mad knowledge of rhythmic displacement, the delightfully named Hesta Prynn, Guinea Love, and DJ Sprout spit out rhymes that stick up for the First Amendment and extol the virtues of havin’ a good time.…
Ode to Ohio
Everybody’s doing something for Ohio’s bicentennial, but the Summit Choral Society wanted to do something special. Instead of holding a community festival or a history lesson disguised as entertainment, it commissioned Cincinnati-based composer David Howard Pettit to write An Ohio Symphony, an original, nine-movement piece that tells the story of Ohio via a symphonic score.…
Love Them Two Times
Ray Manzarek’s intuition has made him a millionaire. As the keyboard player for the Doors, one of rock and roll’s most spontaneous and impulsive bands, Manzarek possesses a jazzbo’s flair for improvisation that also aptly describes the band itself: Its raw, heedless blues was primal and instinctive, delivered with the dexterity of a gold-medal gymnast.…
Sananda Maitreya/Terence Trent D’Arby
Eight years after his spotty last album, Vibrator, sank without a trace, Terence Trent D’Arby is back in full bloom. His 19-track Wildcard! is pretentious, ambitious, and overlong — as are his other albums — yet it’s still largely engaging. The link between Stevie Wonder and Prince, the extravagantly talented D’Arby (who morphed into Sananda…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 19 The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival’s two shows, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night, are being stretched out to last the entire summer. “We used to produce both shows over six weeks and alternate nights with the shows,” explains artistic director Larry Nehring. This year the plays run consecutively, each for five weeks. All performances…
Side Streets
Sonic Youth is old. Probably older than you. But they’re also an endlessly inventive bunch of grown-ups, a band that for 20 years has been examining and reexamining guitar-rock, finding and occasionally discarding new ways into the form. Murray Street, their latest album, rocks. Probably more than you’d expect, and definitely more if you’ve heard…
Kirkendahl Voyd
After dropping an album of ghoulish garage rock with 2001’s Graveyard A-Go-Go, Kirkendahl Voyd sounds as if it’s been scared straight. On its shape-shifting new album, Dream, the three-piece band tones down the evil eccentricities in favor of more soothing sounds. Kirkendahl Voyd signals its intentions from the outset with “It’s Over,” an affecting piano-laced…
