David Thomas and Two Pale Boys
Based on a remake of the song “Surf’s Up” by Beach Boys genius/misfit Brian Wilson, Cleveland’s homespun hero David Thomas (a.k.a. Crocus Behemoth) provides the antithesis to surf music with this, his 10th solo album. More fitting for a groggy, gray, Northeastern Ohio winter afternoon than a sun-soaked afternoon at the beach, Surf’s Up is…
Fight Or Flight
For a decade, Brook Park Mayor Tom Coyne stood in defiance. Neighboring Cleveland wanted to raze the I-X Center for an additional airport runaway. Coyne countered by trying to seize the I-X for his own city. Brook Park, he noted, had made its “last sacrifice.” It didn’t matter that Coyne might be imperiling the development…
Robin Stone
A native of Solon, singer-songwriter Robin Stone learned to play cello at age 10. Since then, she’s taught herself to play guitar, bass, and drums, and plays all of those instruments on this, her full-length debut. Part of the locally based Modern Acoustic Music Collective, which includes singer-songwriters Alexis Antes and Doug Wood, Stone plays…
Treat Him Write
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s Batman), and one just released…
For Love of the Games
The neighborhood arcade used to be the place where you could tangle with the undead, drop the clutch of your Porsche 911, and throw down against the Knicks, all for only a few quarters. But with the advent of home entertainment systems, the public arcade has become an endangered species. “I guess you can’t help…
Unnatural Resources
A system burned by the sympathy card In a letter concerning Scene’s article on the pending Ohio bill SB 179 [“Age of Innocence,” January 4], Miriam Carter Gibson writes that “by subjecting children to the adult criminal system, we are taking a major step backward” and are “using quick-fix solutions on our most precious resource…
Matchstick Masterpieces
The thrill of dropping a couple of quarters into a machine and receiving a prize isn’t only for kids; it’s just that adults have outgrown miniature football helmets and plastic bracelets. But conceptual artist Clark Whittington of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, knows that adults never outgrow their delight in surprises, which led him to envision an…
Bernstein’s Bauble
In Man of La Mancha, a kitschy musicalization of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, there is a moment that always sends audiences burrowing for their Kleenexes: when a redoubtable tenor in painted wrinkles takes center stage and stretches his windpipe to sing “The Impossible Dream.” This glutinous ballad taps into our universal need to conquer insurmountable odds.…
Bad Spot
Let it not be said that See Spot Run is without its distinctions. For instance, it is, in all likelihood, the first movie for kids featuring comic castration. It’s also probably the first movie of any kind that subjects its leading lady to explosively ignited zebra flatulence. And then there’s the scene of the star…
The Great Escape
It was a Monday morning worse than most, with the laundry hampers overflowing, spilled orange juice drying on the kitchen floor, and a dead hermit crab lying on the bottom of his well-equipped cage. All this to deal with, and a “real” job, too — and all before a single sip of coffee. No wonder…
Gunning for Love
Leave it to Hollywood to sell us the insipid romance of a thoroughly irritating white couple as the solution to an archaic Latin American mystery. As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult relationship psychobabble and cultural significance…
Go Bleu!
Versatile staffers at the newly opened Erie Bleu (4204 Detroit Avenue, 216-651-2538) have been working hard over the past few months — not just to prepare for their duties as servers, managers, and chefs, but also to create the restaurant’s ultra-chic decor. GM Roxanne Bibeau, for example, spent hours helping install an intricate wooden “tumbling…
Only Human
There’s plenty of campaign rhetoric about working families, but whoever talks about one of the biggest problems of the working man today — massive corporate downsizing? In the era of record profits and welfare “reform,” all that matters is having any kind of job, whether or not it’s the one you were trained for, and…
Punk Positive
About five years ago, the hardcore punk trio Propagandhi was playing a show at Gilman Street, a club in Berkeley, California, that had a hand in launching the careers of bands such as Rancid and Green Day. Still run as a collective, the club is an institution of sorts and has continued to nurture the…
Satan or Savior?
It’s the year after the riots, and South-Central is still restless. The Menendez brothers are in court for the shotgun slaying of their parents. O.J. and the white Bronco are just a year away. So is a major earthquake. It’s Los Angeles, 1993, a great time to be in TV news. Bill Applegate became the…
The Song Remains Insane
If Al Johnson, singer/moaner/wheezer for the Chicago avant-grunge jazz quartet U.S. Maple, remembers nothing else about his band’s experiences in Cleveland, he’ll remember the dogs. When the band played a show on the Case Western Reserve campus, it regaled what it hoped were open-minded college kids with its freaked-out, utterly indescribable free-form rock, splintered blues…
Caveman With a Cause
God inscribed Republican ideals in Jamie Callender’s DNA. He was born into a GOP family on January 9, 1965, sharing his birthday with Richard Nixon. At age 6, Callender sent the President a birthday card; Nixon sent one back. And when Callender came of age in the 1980s, he was spellbound by Ronald Reagan, whose…
Our Gang
With scalpers working the sidewalks outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the first of three sold-out reunion shows by the James Gang functioned to cement the band’s place in rock history — at least in Cleveland. In fact, the band is so revered here that a video of a 1971 performance…
Michael Wolff’s Impure Thoughts
For the moment, jazz pianist Michael Wolff might be better known for his involvement in the film The Tic Code. Wolff’s wife, Polly Draper, wrote and starred in the independent film about a young piano prodigy who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome. Though in writing the screenplay she drew inspiration from the life of her husband…
The Prodigals
Gregory Grene doesn’t like the label “Celtic rock.” The accordion player for the Prodigals prefers “jig-punk” to describe the music of his New York City-based quartet. Despite his preference for the term, it’s still not on the mark, because there really isn’t much that is punk in the Prodigals’ music. “Jig-funk” might be a more…
Matchbox Twenty
Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas got a big boost of credibility a couple of years ago when he sang on “Smooth,” the best track from Santana’s best-selling Supernatural album. Suddenly, this faceless pop band — particularly its leader — was thrust into the spotlight, and it got us thinking that maybe, just maybe, we were…
Sick of It All
One of pop music’s longest-held principles reads thus: If you can’t say it in under three minutes, it ain’t worth saying. In the case of NYC hardcore heavyweights Sick of It All, if you don’t get the point in a minute and a half, it’s not worth explaining. The confrontational punk collective has banked a…
The Minus 5; The Young Fresh Fellows
Scott McCaughey’s been one busy guy lately. The sometime-R.E.M. sideman, music journalist, and dedicated indie music supporter recently recorded not one, but two new albums with his full-time bands the Minus 5 and the Young Fresh Fellows. Bundled together as a two-disc set, the 5’s Let the War Against Music Begin and the Fellows’ Because…
DJ Die; Fauna Flash
It’s easy to forget just how boring most dance floor drum ‘n’ bass is when it’s not being skillfully manipulated by a good DJ. Leave it to the Full Cycle posse (which includes Roni Size and all the key Reprazent players) to drive that point home with the latest installment of its Through the Eyes…
