Stealing Home
Like so many Clevelanders, Christa Eckert-Blum arrived from eastern Europe in the 1950s, towed by her parents’ pursuit of the American Dream. She graduated from Case Western Reserve, became a lecturer there, and eight years ago bought a retirement home overlooking the Rocky River in Lakewood. It was a nice score. She purchased at Lakewood…
Washed Up
Actors’ Summit in Hudson has a line under its logo that reads “a professional theater,” which is frequently a woeful misrepresentation of the product displayed on this company’s stage. Not to mince words, the problem with the group’s current production of Suds (and with a couple other recent efforts) is the relentless omnipresence of the…
Dwight Yoakam
You get the sense that Dwight Yoakam’s still “country” ’cause he needs the hat and looks good in leather pants that end in boot points; otherwise, he might have switched genres long ago, having tapped this one bone dry. Not that Population Me, his first since parting ways with longtime home Reprise, doesn’t swing like…
Rookie Card
The first time Brandon Phillips laid eyes on a Scene, he didn’t like what he saw. “How come I’m not on the cover?” he said, frowning. Phillips, at that moment, sported a batting average of exactly .100. But that audacity, that unflinching confidence, is the reason people who know baseball expect him to be a…
Family Portrait
Two years ago, a first-time filmmaker named Andrew Jarecki paid a visit to the Concord, Massachusetts, home of a man who might draw him a road map to his future. Jarecki arrived at the house, belonging to a Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist, after already traveling a circuitous route and taking an unimaginable detour. In 2000,…
Lou Reed
Maybe it’s wrong to suggest that Lou Reed isn’t much of a musician. After all, he’s successfully played the role of an attitudinal rock star since founding cult band the Velvet Underground in 1965 and has written some of the classic pop hooks of all time (“Walk on the Wild Side,” “Sweet Jane,” “I’m Waiting…
Dragons & Drafts
Mark Silverstein doesn’t want to find another human arm floating in the Cuyahoga River. That’s what happened a couple of years ago, when he and his rowing buddies were paddling upstream. That does it, the director of the Western Reserve Rowing Foundation said to himself. This water needs a good cleaning. That’s why Silverstein, along…
Good Korma
Fans of the former Clay Oven — our 2001 pick for Best Indian Restaurant — will feel right at home inside the new Indian Café (14043 Brookpark Road). The clean, handsome, and transcendently aromatic little restaurant inside the Budget Inn is the Clay Oven’s third incarnation; the first location, in Fairview Park, was lost to…
The Von Bondies
Whether or not you’re into garage rock, there’s one inescapable fact: It’s meant to be encountered live, in a seedy and disgusting dive — not on an album played in your comfy little IKEA-furnished apartment. There’s something about that loud, scummy guitar raunch, those teetering rhythms, and every rabid scream and wail that just cries…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, June 26 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls has nothing to do with the 1967 cult classic about drug-popping showbiz gals. The 1970 campfest, co-written by critic Roger Ebert (who should give himself a big thumbs-down for contributing some of the clunky dialogue), revolves around an all-female rock group — most excellently named the…
The Next Best Thing
Foodies are a fickle lot, flitting from one new dining room to the next like gypsy moths to stately oaks. For those to whom dining is a passion, what’s new is often more important than what’s good — which explains why many worthy restaurants hit the scene with a splash, only to founder once the…
The Dreadful Yawns
Their dubbing themselves “The Dreadful Yawns” is a bit of an overstatement, but compared to this Cleveland sextet, Belle & Sebastian sound like the Ramones. Pretend is six cuts of ambient Americana: spacey indie pop in one extreme, lullabies at the other, and snail-crawl psychedelia everywhere in between. “End of Summer” kicks off the affair,…
The Lion Roars
Life as a lion isn’t all basking in the sun and starring in Discovery Channel programs. There’s also the complex dance moves and intricate staging — all while keeping those giant masks in place. That’s life for the big cats in The Lion King, the hit Broadway production that pulls into town Friday. “Everything I…
Rhapsody in Green
Larry Kirwan has a way of making you feel your inner Celt, even if you don’t owe a single strand of your DNA to the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle. “There’s magic at the root of the Irish soul,” says the leader of Black 47, the New York band that may be the richest acquired…
Hate Dies Hard
Like fellow avant-garde hard rockers Tool and Dredg, Kent’s Hate Dies Hard are more about drama than distortion. On their self-titled sophomore EP (and third release overall), the forward-thinking troupe continues to explore new avenues of extremity. Opener “Kept” is emblematic of the band’s heady approach: Nimble bass and dissonant guitar tussle behind frontman Sean…
Rumble Packs
SAT 6/28 It started with a boxing match between lead singers, but it’s led to an all-music, no-fisticuffs Rumble in the Ring for five of Cleveland’s top hard-rock bands. Last month, 92.3 Xtreme radio listeners whittled a field of more than 100 bands down to 6, who earned the chance for an opening slot at…
Entry Level
O.A.R., a five-man band from Maryland by way of Columbus, is a jam band for the Napster age. The group, which mixes reggae, folk, and agile acoustic rock into what it calls “island vibe roots rock,” arrived at Ohio State in 1997, its members having already attained a modest following as high schoolers in their…
Real Men Wear Kilts
SAT 6/28 It’s probably the only time you’ll see an ex-football player in a kilt. Former Browns center Mike Baab will take part in the 26th annual Ohio Scottish Games, an old-fashioned Highlander competition in which burly participants heave exceedingly heavy objects. Baab’s been a competitor for a couple of years, since his mother bugged…
‘Cocked and Loaded
There’s history, and then there’s what people remember — and usually, they don’t have much in common. Childhood memories often don’t match up with home-movie versions of the same events: The sets change, the wrong characters say the right words, the plot twists unexpectedly. It’s unfortunate, but it happens. Hard facts soften with age, sharp…
Easy Being Green
6/27 – 6/29 More than 20,000 Irish and Irish-for-the-day are expected this weekend at the 12th annual Ohio Irish Festival. And moving the party from last year’s site at Tower City Amphitheater to Scene Pavilion — in the heart of Irishtown Bend — is a stroke of leprechaun luck. “The area at the top of…
Cleveland Countdown
VH1 recently launched a new series of programs counting down the top 100 songs of the last 25 years (Spoiler alert: Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” edges out Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” for the top honor.) But Nevermind all the grunge granddaddies and fallen pop icons of the world; here comes a list that really…
Shear Energy
6/28-6/29 Fiberfest is Lake Farmpark’s two-day blowout, promoting natural fibers and the animals and plants that produce them. But there’s actually plenty of really fun stuff happening at the park throughout the weekend — like all of the fibrous animals that will be on hand: a menagerie of llamas, alpacas, angora goats, rabbits, and sheep,…
Road Raging
Three area acts have landed gigs on big-time concert bills, positioning themselves for a breakout summer. Riding the early success of their latest album, The Impossibility of Reason, Chimaira has been added to the Ozzfest second stage. The band will kick off a month of dates on the tour in Vancouver on July 31 –…
Lord of the Axe
SUN 6/29 Robert Randolph is the best pedal-steel guitarist ever to come out of the church. He’s also the most soulful singer to be associated simultaneously with gospel and jam-band music, and he’s something of a cult hero in the making. Now in his mid-20s, Randolph honed his chops at the House of God Church…
Jackson Browne
The rhythm of redemption pulses mightily when Jackson Browne and Steve Earle share a stage. Both are bad boys done good: Browne never quite shed the disapprobation he earned for mistreating girlfriend Daryl Hannah in the 1970s, and Earle was a poster boy for drug addiction during the ’80s and ’90s. Both, however, have moved…
Fallen Angels
As the Columbia Pictures logo looms large in frame until its torch becomes the focal point, we find ourselves in what appears to be a tent full of sweaty medieval warriors forging axes, and we have to wonder: Did they already make another Scorpion King movie and not tell us? No, apparently this is just…
Ben Harper
Whereas many artists discuss their work with little prompting, like doting parents who can’t stop talking about their children, Ben Harper maintains a sense of reverential distance. His deference to the creative process stems from his belief that he is more an instrument than a musician. “I’ve never sat down and tried to write a…
Family Affair
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans till seeing the film, which has been no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary, about a Great Neck, New York family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children, has been the subject of much backslapping…
The Apes
The Apes have stabbed out a nutty little niche somewhere between goth-metal behemoths Iron Butterfly and chameleon-like spoofers Ween. Oddeyesee, the Washington, D.C. quartet’s follow-up to its 2001 debut The Fugue in the Fog, recounts a fantastically muddled tale about a quest for a two-headed butterfly whose supernatural perceptive powers could save this imaginary world.…
Dead to Rights
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they came on conservative talk-radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for comparing turkey farming to the Holocaust.…
Metal Sludge Xtravaganza Summer Tour 2003
Anyone who’s ever caught the metal docudrama Decline of Western Civilization Part II, or a Dio gig, knows how inadvertently self-parodying headbangers can be. But for a genre that gave us leather codpieces and odes to trolls, metalheads are seldom big on having a laugh at their own expense. (For proof, take a look at…
Letters to the Editor
A canceled concert costs lots: I’m absolutely outraged at the Dixie Chicks for canceling their concert on June 1. Don’t those girls have any idea what some folks have to do to get to a concert? I mean, you had people flying in or driving in, and paying outrageous amounts of money to park. They…
The Young Girl and the Sea
Once in a while a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet, and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a boon to anyone who enjoys…
The Fall
The Fall is part of that triumvirate of early ’80s post-punk English bands (including Wire and Gang of Four) who’ve proved endlessly influential to generation after generation of collegiate coffee-shop rockers. While Wire and Gang of Four have finished dissertations, birthed future Ph.D. candidates, and periodically reunited for art-gallery openings, Fall leader Mark E. Smith…
Custom-Tailored B.S.
Someone should help Plain Dealer fashion editor Evelyn Theiss remove the fish hook from her mouth. In a June 11 story about Pen-E-Ventures, a Rocky River boutique, Theiss related that co-owner Debra Dixon, a onetime lawyer, got a taste of running the store while her mother recovered from surgery. Dixon “enjoyed it so much,” wrote…
All Together Now
The emotional, even healing, power of music is only one of the themes that interest acclaimed Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) in his beautiful new film, Together. Other, equally important concerns include father-son relationships and the way China, in its headlong pursuit of modernization, is abandoning some of its richest cultural…
High on Fire
When the epic, vehemently slothful Sleep met their demise through an album-length, 52-minute track called “Jerusalem,” guitarist Matt Pike left himself time for little more than a bong hit before founding High on Fire. Of course, Pike continues to pay homage to Black Sabbath’s crushing riffs, albeit at a tighter clip than before. But while…
False Fugitive
When a cop approaches Johnetta Crosby’s Honda Accord, she braces for the inevitable question, the one she hears every time she gets pulled over: “Ma’am, do you know you’re wanted by the ATF and the FBI?” Yes, she knows. She also knows that two more squad cars will soon show up, since the cop has…
Oy, Such a Show!
In some ways, being an actor in live theater sorta sucks. No matter how good a show is, once it’s over, it’s gone. You can tell people how great it was, and they nod, blankly, giving you that condescending, tight-lipped half-smile. If you try to videotape a performance, it’s usually unwatchable, since stage-acting doesn’t translate…
Joe Budden
Joe Budden’s self-titled debut comes to us courtesy of “Pump It Up,” a seemingly omnipresent club hit, on which producer Just Blaze turns a sample from Kool and the Gang’s “Soul Vibration” into a stop-start, high-energy raveup. Not surprisingly, the underground success of “Pump It Up” and its lesser-known predecessor, the slinky, fly-as-a-kite “Focus,” has…
