New & Improved
The sound was good. Almost too good. Hearing a crystalline version of Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” as interpreted by former LFO singer Rich Cronin in the renovated Nautica Pavilion, was about as enjoyable as a Gilbert Gottfried karaoke jam. We won’t gripe about Nautica’s beefed-up sound system come August, when Slayer rolls in, but on this…
Rocky River Burning
After tales of Playboys and porn channels, of jealous husbands and betrayed colleagues, of blowjobs and babies, the conclusion to civil case No. 426655 arrived — to no one’s surprise — with a fitting bout of weirdness. The old courthouse on Lakeside Avenue was nearly deserted on a Friday afternoon when the jury filed into…
Ugly Casanova
Ah, the “supergroup”: In all but the rarest of cases, they’re so much less than the sum of their parts. Ugly Casanova is no different, though its lineup is a real head-scratcher: Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins and Brian Deck, and Califone/Red Red Meat’s Tim Rutili. Funereal math rock served up…
The Last Standup Politician
The last time the public eye fixed on Benny Bonanno, he wore an orange jail jumpsuit, handcuffs, and leg shackles. The date was February 2, 1996, the scene a Common Pleas courtroom. Bonanno had resigned his post as municipal court clerk two months earlier, after admitting he used his office and staff to aid the…
Electric Wizard
Electric Wizard has come to reinvigorate reefer rock, and it’s going further than any band has previously dared. Though the group seemed like little more than Cathedral’s junior cousin on its self-titled 1994 debut, the follow-up, Come My Fanatics . . ., was one of those definitive metal statements that arrives once in a decade,…
Good Guy, Bad Luck
Two seasons ago, when Matt Lawton played for the Minnesota Twins, professional wrestler Mick “Mankind” Foley presented him with a T-shirt. Lawton got a few knocks the first night he wore the shirt under his uniform, so he kept wearing it. Eventually, after repeated washings, the hits faded with the shirt’s colors. Baseball players are…
KMFDM
As one of the core groups of the seminal Wax Trax! label in the ’80s and ’90s, KMFDM, along with Ministry and Front 242, helped bring industrial rock to the attention of the masses. Long before the genre became mired in creative tedium and lost much of its assertive and confrontational edge to cheap gimmickry,…
Two Lives to Live
Being a soap opera diva is usually a full-time gig, what with plotting revenge killings, coming down with chronic bouts of amnesia, and finding the right scarf to go with a sweater. And then there’s all that running in high heels that’s required to chase down another woman’s husband. Only a professional like Tonja Walker…
Jay Bennett and Edward Burch
Before Wilco was topping critics’ lists and stirring up controversy, guitarist Jay Bennett was making waves in the small but potent Champaign, Illinois scene. While Bennett was with Titanic Love Affair, he met guitarist Edward Burch, and soon the pair began an informal songwriting collaboration that became a time-share proposition: Bennett joined Blood Kin and…
Which Hollywood Playboy?
How a Cleveland actor became Entrapped: The story on Jim Capwill [“Rogue Businessman? Mafia Poseur? Hollywood Playboy?”, May 2] knocked me off my chair. Not only was this an amazing article, but it shed some light on a guy who left me in the hole, with nothing but a badly written script and a ton…
Wyclef Jean
As co-leader of the Fugees and a wonderfully eccentric solo artist, Wyclef Jean has made a career out of disproving the orthodox notion that good hip-hop requires great flow. His third solo album follows suit, creating the illusion of casual inspiration as it meshes unlikely musical sources, from the pretty Far East flute on “Peace…
Great Scots
“The standing joke is, the last person who called it a [skirt] was kilt,” says Doug Steiger, a tattooed, 280-pound North Royalton firefighter. He is one of the, um, kilt-clad men who will be tossing around 20-foot poles, monstrous stones, and super-heavy hammers at the Ohio Scottish Games, taking place Saturday at Oberlin College. “For…
Guided by Voices
Bob Pollard is a natural. Is there anyone else with as intuitive a sense of melody or a nervier rock-god attack on the axe? Alas, the thing about being a natural is that it’s all too easy for those lucky geniuses to fall off the rails. No one — no one — can reasonably exert…
History Channeling
Ohio’s history pages are filled with notable folks: Thomas Edison, Jesse Owens, John Glenn, that cute girl on Dawson’s Creek. The planners of Ohio Chautauqua, a traveling tent show of first-person historical portrayals, are hoping their lineup of history-makers is just as compelling. “We want people to be able to learn about their own state’s…
Recloose
In their late ’80s manual on pop domination, UK acid-house producers the KLF remarked of Detroit Techno: “The creators of that music just press a few buttons and out comes a million years of pain and lust.” The fact that rave culture in Detroit replaced human archetypes with something more marketable and sanitized hardly takes…
Report Card
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director, if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders void all that’s come before it. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future where people travel by jet…
The Residents
Characteristically eerie, detached, and ironic, the Residents’ first album in four years is a collection of skewed pop. Like other Residents albums, it’s all over the place, traversing the plangent “Loss,” the dreamy “Caring,” and “Mickey Macaroni,” a ridiculously catchy kids’ song with a razor’s edge. The lyrics are often murky and unsettling, even when…
Poi Pooch
Somewhere in the world outside the Magic Kingdom, there are bored people who decide that Disney’s new animated comedy Lilo & Stitch is worth a small chunk of their hard-earned. What they discover is a very charming and funny movie, wherein a pug-nosed and pugnacious little Hawaiian girl bearing the boy’s name of Lilo (voiced…
Ether Net
Rob Cherry’s guitar sounds like it’s been in the gym the last three years, gobbling creatine and adding layers of muscle to its once-lean frame. In the past, the Achilles’ heel of the Ether Net frontman has been his tendency to take too many cues from fey Brit pantywaists like Suede and Placebo. At times,…
Duh Press
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th Century Fox whose tone of…
Overripe Passion Fruit
Let there be no doubt that the events of September 11 have colored the vision of Terri Kent, Porthouse Theatre’s earnest artistic director. “How can I plan a season? How can we even think of entertainment?” she asks in the Porthouse program. The answer, she goes on to reveal, is by unveiling “a season of…
Getting Sauced
If marinara is the measure of an Italian restaurant, Pazzo’s in Broadview Heights towers above most of its competitors. The marinara here is from an old family recipe and is light but remarkably well rounded, with a mild acidity balanced by subtle sweetness and an abundance of fresh herbs. Of course, it’s just right for…
Sweet Juniper
First-time diners stepping into Juniper Grille (1332 Carnegie Avenue, 216-771-1334) are in for a pleasant surprise: Behind the restaurant’s lackluster brick exterior waits a dining space as urbane and upscale as any in town. Chef-owner Tom Szoradi, formerly of Players Pizza and Pasta, Giovanni’s, and the Diner on Clifton, designed the 90-seat space to be…
Prick Rising
Kevin McMahon answers to no one but himself. Sitting in his Lakewood apartment, he won’t explain or write down his lyrics, and he balks at providing the barest biographical facts. “You ask me for fucking lyrics?” the Prick frontman says, referring to his dark, often impenetrable music. “It is the sound, and that’s all there…
Feelin’ It
“Disco sucks” are fighting words to the finely tuned ears of Charles Fields, widely known in the world of house music as DJ Feelgood. As a child growing up in Baltimore during the ’70s, Fields was often awakened early in the morning by his father blasting current club hits on 12-inch slabs of vinyl. “He’d…
