Hillbillypalooza
Today’s Raccoon County Music Festival only sounds like the most hillbilly get-together on the planet. While we’re saddened there won’t be moonshine and guys named Cooter, the jam-packed lineup of traditional and Americana musicians almost makes up for it. The Great Lakes Session will play Irish tunes, Clear Folk will perform bluegrass music, and Acadian…
He’s Innocent!
Just thought you should know that everything you wrote in that article was complete and total bullshit [“Hush,” May 17]. If Carl did what you said he did, then he deserves to be punished, but I don’t believe that he did anything that you have published. I hope you have a good lawyer, lady, because…
Band of Horses
You may never have heard of Seattle’s Band of Horses, but the group keeps good company. Its fans include Broken Social Scene, Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, and Iron & Wine’s Samuel Beam, who was enamored enough that he took the band with him on tour last fall. Singer-guitarists Ben Bridwell and Matthew Brooke formed their group…
The Long Goodbye
Like the Grand Ole Opry plopped into a fragrant barn at the county fair, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion befits its roots in frosty Minnesota soil through its worldview, Buddhist by way of Scandinavia: Life is about suffering. The wind chill is below zero and so is your spouse; bone-dry Pastor Ingqvist beats his…
No-Money Ball
In his new book, Dealing, Akron Beacon Journal sportswriter Terry Pluto takes a look at the Indians off the field. Specifically, he probes general manager Mark Shapiro’s controversial decision a few years ago to get rid of the team’s star players — Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome, among them — and replace them with unproven…
The Nine-Year War
Jack Eldridge can finally light a Cohiba on the mound of legal documents he’s amassed over the past nine years. “For as well as an old fart can party, I’m gonna be doing it,” says the 66-year-old. Eldridge, along with six others, sued Summit County for wrongfully firing them in 1997. They claimed that corrupt…
Bottle Rockets/Bobby Bare Jr.
The pairing of the Bottle Rockets and Bobby Bare Jr. isn’t just a convenient coupling of Bloodshot Records labelmates. The two scruffy roots-rock outfits are cut from similar cloth. Bare Jr. (son of a Nashville insider-outsider) and BotRox frontman Brian Henneman (onetime Uncle Tupelo roadie) are comfortable playing both clown prince and philosopher king of…
The Bad Seeds
Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist western” would surely be a cliché, if there were enough westerns to warrant its use more than every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out-to-pasture as the western is revisionist: What we need is…
Punch-Drunk Love
If tonight’s Fashion Knockout: Round 11 were indeed a brawl among fashionistas, we’d put our money on Naomi Campbell, who recently administered a Blackberry-assisted beatdown to an aide. Alas, the 11th-annual fashion show features little blood on its path to crowning the minority designer of the year. Contenders include St. Louis’ Baby Lock Design, Baltimore’s…
Library Lewdness
00:12 — Kid threat! See this poor, innocent whelp? Keep him in mind if you start feeling sorry for . . . The Library Masturbator! 00:38 — Silly library. You think book theft is your biggest problem? Just wait until Carl Monday exposes . . . The Library Masturbator! 00:48 — Cue official documents. Pornography.…
Saturday Looks Good to Me
There’s something sumptuous about great pop, like a close-up of a dewy strawberry. Ripe with sunny warmth and sprinkled with sugar, the music of Detroit’s Saturday Looks Good to Me blends the melodic splendor of the Beach Boys with the homespun innocence of lo-fi indie pop. Singer-guitarist Fred Thomas cobbled the group from a revolving…
Psycho Cowboy
The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead, and — this just in — the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like the anachronistic cowboy Kirk Douglas…
Dino Might
Frankly, the dancing, singing group of Australians known as the Wiggles frightens us more than Russell Crowe with a telephone in his hand. However, we totally dig the Wiggles’ prehistoric pal, who has her own show, Dorothy the Dinosaur’s Dance Party, in town this weekend. She brings along Wiggles regulars Henry the Octopus and Captain…
Major Release
Indie rock shows can be ascetic, Apollonian affairs, too many people too hip to move, crossed arms, feigned disinterest. But all people love to get off, whether indie, emo, or hair-swinging metalhead. Even Apollo had a mistress. Last October, two teenagers in a steel-pole cage at a North Carolina rock club relinquished ironic indifference for…
Nitty Gritty Fourth Anniversary
Virginia DJ-producer duo All Good Funk Alliance will grace the fourth-anniversary session of Nitty Gritty, one of the city’s longest-running dance nights. Partners in party mixes since 1995, Frank Cueto and Rusty Belicek shake down the walls between dance, hip-hop, and world music, smoothing over the wreckage with funk, breaks, and Latin grooves. Their remix…
What Women Want
Mother. Bitch. Saint. Whore. Once you pop into the world female, your choices for gender roles — even today — are pretty well established. Faced with this severely proscribed set of options, women either had to go mad or invent feminism, in order to grab some control over their own destiny. Of course, feminism has…
Fried Dough Alert!
The cavatelli and meatballs lure us to the Feast of St. Anthony celebration at Holy Redeemer Church every year, but it’s the fried dough that keeps us there. One of the area’s oldest festivals (it’s been around for more than 80 years), it’s also one of the season’s first. Games, kids activities, and plenty of…
Man in a Box
The release last spring of Rob Thomas’ solo debut, Something to Be, was seen by many as a sure sign that the days are numbered for Thomas’ band, Matchbox Twenty. As the group’s primary songwriter and singer, Thomas, 33, was already the most visible member of the group, whose three CDs have sold a combined…
Prog Fest
“Prog rock” is still two dirty words in most circles, but it’s come a long way since 1978. At the Jigsaw’s Prog Fest, nobody will be singing about Hobbits, though you’re likely to get a 10-minute solo or two. Cleveland’s Byron Nemeth Group can hang with the lumbering-rock big dogs — last year’s 100 Worlds…
Closeted Dreams
There is probably no character type an audience can relate to more immediately than the repressed schnook. Penned in by societal norms and intimidated by the expectations of relatives and friends, an ordinary person will often just “go along to get along,” indulging secret passions — if he even has them — only in safe…
Man on the Moon
Singer-songwriter Gran Bel Fisher’s compositions start slowly, but build to sweeping choruses. They even borrow a little from Coldplay — both the piano-driven melodies and Fisher’s Chris Martin-like falsetto. He hails from small-town Sabina, which is about an hour’s drive from Columbus. The music on his major-label debut, Full Moon Cigarette (which comes out next…
Private Parts
Private Parts We’re not quite sure what to make of Petra Kralickova’s work, opening today at the Sculpture Center. On one hand, the pieces on display in Succulence (which is part of the gallery’s Window to Sculpture series) are treated like art. On the other, they look a lot like veiny boobs and semi-erect penises.…
No Hilton, No Cry
Justice is as capricious as a rebellious teen, defying expectations because it can. Last week, largely unheralded Jamaican music pioneer Desmond Dekker died of a heart attack, news accompanied by the announcement of Paris Hilton’s forthcoming reggae single. The irony of this rich, talentless, raccoon-eyed tramp singing a style of music defined by oppression and…
The Paper Chase
Little by little, the Paper Chase keeps raising the bar for itself. Relying less on emo yelping and post-punk angularity, the band continues to carve a niche for schizophrenic pop melodies grounded in strong rhythmic sensibilities and songs filled with such staples as suicide, revenge, and fear. It’s quite a niche. “We Know Where You…
Capsule reviews of current area theater presentations.
Grease — When Grease first opened on Broadway in 1972, everyone had a pretty fresh memory of the hoods in their own schools a decade or so earlier, who were incessantly combing their lubed locks and readjusting their upturned collars, when they weren’t filching hubcaps. But the further we get from that era, the more…
For Art’s Sake
Nearly 90 artisans and craftspeople from Ohio and Michigan display and sell their work today at the inaugural Crocker Park Fine Art Fair. Artists range from painters and glassmakers to photographers and doll-makers, like the mother-daughter team of Marlene Denn and Kelly Hewitt from Michigan. “Saying the word doll isn’t enough,” says Debra “Max” Clayton,…
Going Platinum
Photographer Herb Ascherman is strictly old-school — and proud of it. In the era of the MySpace mirror shot and photo-phone captures, Ascherman presents a return to photography as painstaking art in Modern Vision, Classical Methods, opening today at the HeightsArts Gallery. The classical in the title refers to 19th-century methods for taking pictures, “before…
Rock School
It should’ve been a celebration. After selling 200,000 coies of the ominously titled Stay What You Are, Saves the Day hoped for a big commercial break with its major-label debut, In Reverie. Instead, three days after its release, the band got a call from DreamWorks A&R guy Luke Wood. “‘Well, I’ve got some bad news.…
Mojave 3
Puzzles Like You could only have been more jarring to diehard Mojave 3 fans if it had been an album of hardcore crunk. Yes, it fairly rocks at times. But the usually laconic, dreamy Mojave 3 makes the transition practically painless by contrasting uptempo beats, thick bar chords, and soaring choruses with its familiar, dusky,…
Capsule reviews of current area art exhibitions.
NEW Kanwischer x 2 — Edmund and Charles Kanwischer are father and son, but you’d have to view their work side by side to tell they have anything in common. This show provides that opportunity for the first time. Problem is, the thin conceptual threads uniting the two artists aren’t all that enlightening. Edmund, the…
Fungus Among Us
The final outing in the natural history museum’s wildly popular History of Food series focuses on our favorite fungus. After a brief overview, the Natural History of Mushrooms program culminates in a seven-course meal. “It’s all about the appreciation of fine dining,” says special-events manager Dick Heislman. Each ‘shroom-centered dish will be paired with a…
Thumb Tripping
It’s tempting to take up Elijah Wald on the first sentence of his book, Riding With Strangers: A Hitchhiker’s Journey: “Call me crazy.” Wald has hitched across the country a dozen times. Riding With Strangers chronicles his latest adventure and the businessmen, truck drivers, and conspiracy theorists he met along the way. “We have this…
Desert Isle Discs
Steve Smith is singer-guitarist for Smiley Baldazar, which released its debut, In Tents, last August. Splitting the difference between jam improv and jazzy skronk, its vibrant songs sound like Primus in a cage match with the Mothers of Invention. 1. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic. “I find this album highly motivational. It…
Liquid Soul
It may be difficult for today’s youth to get their collective head around the idea, but at one time, actual bands specialized in instrumental funk. The Meters, James Brown alumni Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker, and the Bar-Kays laid down irresistible grooves without the “benefit” of a vocal star (though sometimes there might be a…
Ford Tough
The John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Featuring the most epic pairing of director and actor in Hollywood history, this 10-disc box spews machismo all over. Wayne and Ford defined not only the western and war-movie genres, but also our culture’s image of rugged manhood. Among the highlights is Stagecoach (the 1939 film that…
Laugh Track
Lee Honeycutt learned the hard way that it’s not a good idea to piss off club owners if you want to score points at a comedy competition. The 27-year-old Grafton native entered his first yukfest (at Hilarities in Cuyahoga Falls) last year. “I waited for people to laugh,” he recalls. “As soon as somebody did,…
Clash and Burn
It’s easy to hear why Lars Frederiksen is such a fan of Los Angeles’ Time Again. The quartet sounds a lot like his band, Rancid, and subscribes to a similar musical ethos, which declares bloated any song over three minutes. On its latest CD, The Stories Are True, Time Again (which even looks the part…
Band of the Month
You wouldn’t expect local Americana heroes Roger Hoover & the Whiskeyhounds to be enveloped in mystery. But at a meeting with the band on a stormy Monday at the Happy Dog, stories emerge that would spook Dana Scully. “We may have to go off the record with some of this stuff,” laughs Hoover between sips…
Camera Obscura
After three albums, it’s apparent that Glasgow, Scotland’s six-piece Camera Obscura is fated to revolve as a satellite in the orbit of fellow Scots Belle & Sebastian. The lyrics — courtesy of singer Tracyanne Campbell — are like those of head Belle Stuart Murdoch, by turns coy (“We can find a cathedral city/You can convince…
Our top DVD picks for the week of June 6.
Black Hawk Down: Extended Cut (Sony) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Fox) Charmed: The Complete Fifth Season (Paramount) Dumbo: Big Top Edition (Disney) Entourage: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Fast and the Furious: Franchise Collection (Universal) Firewall (Warner Bros.) Garfield: The Movie — The Purrrfect Collector’s Edition (Fox) Gay…
Where the Wild Things Are
Summit County Metro Parks biologist Marlo Perdicas offers a tip on how to recognize the Indiana bat at today’s Bio Blitz. It’s not very hairy — unlike its more ubiquitous cousin, the Little Brown bat, which “has long, very bushy toe hair,” he says. “The Indiana bat has very short and sparse toe hair.” Yeah,…
Picture Purrfest
Shutterbugs will be snapping away at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo’s Photo Safari this summer. Through Labor Day, the zoo is accepting pictures of its animals and plants for its annual photography competition. The grand-prize winner will score a Dodd Camera gift certificate. “The best rule is to keep it simple,” advises spokeswoman Jo Clemens. “Get…
Look Ma, Two Hands!
Charlie Hunter is one of today’s best jazz guitarists — or at least one of the best-known. Now approaching 40, Hunter made his name for both the unique combination of guitar and bass he plays and his willingness to bridge the gap between jazz and pop. He has performed (and remodeled) songs by artists as…
First Nation
What if Animal Collective’s crew of lost boys were lost girls instead? What if the only circumstances available to record their debut, Lord of the Flies-style, were a band-camp cabin miles away from civilization, a battered pile of instruments, and their own unsteadily pretty voices? Precociously anemic and refreshingly free of tape tomfoolery, the N.Y.C.…
Golazo!
Face paint? Check. NoDoz? Check. Deep wellsprings of violent nationalistic pride? No doubt, mate. Yes, it’s time for the World Cup, that quadrennial spectacle that consumes the globe for a month of TV marathons, street parties, and patriotic gestures by men with shaved skulls. That means it’s also time for 2006 FIFA World Cup, the…
Lights Fantastic
Cedar Point’s new Hot Summer Lights: Fire Up the Night! show is like one of those flashy Las Vegas extravaganzas, but without the homeless gambling addicts hitting you up for cash. Taking place on the Iron Dragon midway, the nightly spectacle features loud music, blinding lights, and exploding pyrotechnics. The program culminates with FireWater, a…
Soundtrack of His Life
Head Like a Kite’s Dave Einmo screened a bunch of films before and during the recording of his debut album. Unlike other artists who find inspiration in big-budget Hollywood flicks like Scarface, Einmo gathered ideas while watching Super 8 movies of family get-togethers. As its title makes clear, Random Portraits of the Home Movie is…
Great Years of Fire
Years of Fire has signed a one-album deal with Toledo’s Thorp Records, a hardcore clearing house with a library that includes releases from underground sensations Madball, Northside Kings, and Slapshot. The Cleveland metalcore all-stars include Ascension singer Chris Wood and Chimaira guitarist Jason Hager. “Thorp loved the band, and they offered to put the record…
Faith No More
Faith No More ranks among the most reliably provocative concert attractions of the past two decades. Culled from a 1990 London gig and originally released on VHS, You Fat Bastards provides ample evidence of the band’s live appeal. Behaving in a playful manner befitting his clownish attire, Mike Patton refuses to consider his group’s material…
The week’s best releases from the pop-culture universe:
TV — Deadwood: HBO’s revisionist western returns for its third season Sunday (at 9 p.m.), and the town is preparing for its first-ever elections. Expect plenty of dirty politics, as sheriff, mayor, and bartender all throw their 10-gallon hats into the ring. Also, tensions rise between shifty insider Swearengen and outside businessman Hearst. It’s like…
Saturday Night Fever
Despite seven seasons on Saturday Night Live and his own sitcom, Tracy Morgan says that stand-up remains his first love. “That’s my foundation,” he says. “That’s what I built my career from.” So don’t expect the Bronx native to haul out any of his old characters — like Astronaut Jones and amateur zoologist Brian Fellow…
Believe in Cleveland!
Get a pdf of the latest Believe in Cleveland! campaign ad.
Dave Dondero/Tilly & the Wall
“Some decisions are incisions/Much too late to make revisions/Sorry’s just a suture/Leave the scarring to the future,” Dave Dondero sings on “If You Break My Heart.” Indicative of his clever wordplay, the song rides an extended mercantile metaphor (“If you break my heart/You bought it”) over a light strum. An itinerant tunesmith in the mold…
Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival
Lost in the hoopla surrounding the incendiary live shows and side-splitting preacher shtick of Uncle Scratch’s Gospel Revival is the music. The duo’s stupendous sophomore effort, North of Hell, is just as hilarious as its 2003 debut, Kickin’ the Devil in the Balls, but musically superior. Brother Ant and Brother Ed reaffirm their tongue-in-cheek mission…
Tango, No Cash
In 1999, Greg Messina stood on a New York City dock and watched tangoing couples kick up their heels. “They were dancing intertwined, with strange kicks and turns,” recalls the NEO Tango founder. “My heart rate increased as I stepped into this magical scene.” Tonight, Messina will dance as part of the free Street Beats…
Unfit for Print
For the past year, The Toledo Blade has been the Ohio Republican Party’s worst enemy. The newspaper broke the Coingate scandal — the embarrassing revelation that the state lost at least $13 million in a botched investment in rare coins. Starting in April 2005, the paper wrote hundreds of articles dutifully chronicling each new development…
ABC
It’s difficult to imagine Britain’s most dapper blue-eyed soul man (still frighteningly comfortable in gold lamé) sleeping in caves on the grueling climb to Venezuela’s fabled Lost World. But Martin Fry of ABC, who undertook the trek last February to raise money for medical research, says that crooning his back catalog helped him reach the…
To Live Is to Die
One of the area’s most promising young metalcore bands, To Live Is to Die steamrolls local groups with members twice as old. Already regulars at Peabody’s, the four teenage engines of destruction spent the past year playing at the end of seven-band bills and showing up the bigger-name acts. Produced by Ryan Pennington and Mike…
Sex Education
Erin O’Brien will talk dirty tonight when she lectures on “Writing About Sex” at the Poets’ and Writers’ League Literary Center. “I’m not afraid or embarrassed to talk about it, because it’s an intrinsic part of the human condition,” says O’Brien, sister of late Leaving Las Vegas author John O’Brien. “I think the most graphic…
Sweeps Weak
Carl Monday is on his way to becoming the internet’s next viral video. Monday’s recent sweeps-week investigation of — get this — library masturbators has become the rage of the web, circulated on popular sites like YouTube.com and already forwarded to your in-box by that really annoying friend you have. The footage, which could serve…
The Carl Palmer Band
Once upon a time — say, 30 years ago, when album rock was king and hip-hop was something schoolkids did at recess — Carl Palmer was one of the most famous drummers on the rock-and-roll planet. Palmer set the prog-rock percussion standard by banging out bombastic beats with Emerson, Lake & Palmer (no, it doesn’t…
Cyber Mex
The National Restaurant Association recently reported that about 10 percent of U.S. restaurant customers ordered meals online last year — a figure that’s predicted to explode as more spots (both chains and independents) adopt the technology. At the head of the learning curve is Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill, which launched its online service in January.…
The Art of Game Hunting
Board- and card-game fans can build up their collections today at I’m Game’s first auction. “You probably have some games in your cupboard,” says Wendy Kerschner, who co-owns the store with husband Michael. “You’ve probably played them a bunch of times, and now you’re getting tired of them.” Kerschner suggests donating your old games to…
Behind the scenes at Fashion Week, Cleveland-style.
The nude drawings at Elevation Art Gallery are supposed to be the main attraction, but the real art is wandering the floor. Women in heels as sharp as shish kebab skewers scrutinize one another through well-mascaraed eyes. Everyone seems to be dressed in expensive shades of gray, as if color-coordinated with the weather. Fashion Week…
The Damnwells/Sam Roberts
Though they hail from Brooklyn, the Damnwells traffic in a loping Americana-pop sound that seems endemic to mid-America, from the Replacements to Wilco to the Old 97’s. Not as ragged as the ‘Mats or as adventurous (if precious) as Tweedy, lead singer-guitarist Alex Dezen has a reedy tenor that recalls the 97’s’ Rhett Miller. Like…
Kickin’ the Tires
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off a Pixar assembly line that has thus far yielded nothing but spit-shined classics, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like if it had been populated entirely by, ya know, cars? If the promise of that particular premise — in which a hotshot (in this…
Cage Fright
Like The Godfather: Part II, the Gladiators Fighting Series’ Fight Nite in the Flats 2 is one of those follow-ups that packs as much of a wallop as its predecessor. More than a dozen mixed martial arts bouts will take place in a six-sided cage at The Plain Dealer Pavilion tonight. The main event pits…
Justice Is Blind
Or at least looking the other way: Scene is clearly a serious paper, with a good eye for what is important and timely. Denise Grollmus’ article on the errant Judge McGinty [“Trial and Error,” May 24] was very well written and very depressing. People’s lives should not be in the hands of a demented bastard…
Murphy’s Law
Look, dude, it’s summer, so chill with the politics, experimentation, and all that pussy shit; it’s time to drink, get stoned, and listen to Murphy’s Law — the perfect brain-need-not-apply party band. It shouldn’t seem odd that song topics tend to gravitate toward themes of marijuana and pissing off the neighbors, seeing as how Murphy’s…
Frightful Delight
Even on a crisp spring evening, a soft fog of spookiness creeps across the space once occupied by the Fulton Bar and Grill. You can feel it in the ancient crosses mounted above the front door and in the devils and angels who peer out from inside the shadows of the massive wall mural. It’s…
