Brothers Beyond
It’s a scenario we’re all familiar with by now: young single guys in search of hot babes, firing one-liners at each other, making pop-cultural references ad nauseam, and ultimately finding out that women are somewhat less shallow than they’ve been led to believe. At least, it’s a scenario you know if you go to the…
Fuck
Oh, Fuck. After eight years of lurking on the fringe of the Amerindie scene and boasting a direct, sure-to-get-some-publicity name (a successor of such f-word milestones as Leaving Trains’ Fuck, Big Black’s Songs About Fucking, and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck”), the Oakland quartet is giving up touring for good. To commemorate this…
Socialite Scully
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’s The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly huntress whose quest for the…
Daft Punk
With 1997’s Homework, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo ran a mainline from the subversive dance/rave scene of French clubmongers straight into the electronic oblivion of suburbanites. The group’s roguish Chicago house style not only gave adolescent mutineers something to dance to, but provided the first real bridge to the musical world…
The Steel Trap
Across from a handwritten sign that reads “Bang head here,” Danielle Tobias argues with a fellow steelworker about priorities. Focus on the petition first, she says. The thank-you notes can wait. Tobias’s stance is authoritative as she leans over the cluttered table in the Local 1098 union office. But her tone is diplomatic. On the…
Old 97s
Alt-country is a one-way ticket to Nowhereville. Most hard travelers get stuck there, resigned to playing the same ol’ dusty ballads to the equally stranded citizens. Occasionally, an enterprising group gets off at one of the exit ramps along the way, detouring through more adventurous paths of rock, pop, and alt-country (Wilco passed through these…
See No Evil
Few have seen LTV from all of the vantage points Bill Adler has. As a college student 23 years ago, he poured molten steel into test molds in the old Jones & Laughlin mill. After he graduated, he became a steel salesman and later a service technician who “autopsied” LTV’s damaged machinery. Now, as president…
Dumptruck
“Throw the money out the window/It doesn’t matter anymore/It won’t get me what I’m after/It got me running for the door” — the melancholy manifesto that opens “Stars Grow Colder” — kicks off the latest highlight in a career that could’ve been. Dumptruck’s Lemmings Travel to the Sea begins by spewing this weirdly unconventional wisdom,…
Management By Fiasco
In the spring of 1985, a little less than a year after Jones & Laughlin and Republic Steel merged to form the nation’s second-largest steel producer, Raymond A. Hay, CEO of the company’s corporate parent, LTV, announced that much of its huge mill in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, would be shut down. More than 1,200 workers would…
Cletus Black
You’ve gotta wonder what Cletus Black could have done in the late ’60s, when the media were locally owned and disc jockeys had the power to break a garage band — or at least provide it with a modest regional hit. Not that Black has much in common with those one- or two-hit wonders of…
A Stand-Up Company?
Carol McMahon can still recall that day, that sunny summer morning 15 years ago, when the letter arrived. For 30 years, her husband Jim had worked in the mill for LTV. Now, two years after he’d retired, the company was saying it wouldn’t pay his health and life insurance benefits anymore. “Effective immediately,” the letter…
No Voice, No Problem
Joe Walsh fans stand by their man Your negative remarks about Joe Walsh will never bring him down in the eyes of his devoted fans [Soundbites, March 1]. All of his little quirks are what make him so endearing to us. And there are many of “us” all over the world. As you know, he…
Three for the Road
Some theatrical traffic light has gone haywire this month. Including the shows that have already opened and those due to open within the next few days, audiences have 10 works to choose from. This thespian pile-up may be typical for Chicago, but for Clevelanders, such overstimulation could send dedicated culture vultures into nervous collapse. With…
Educated Palates
How do you outrun an alligator? Who are Thibodeaux and Boudreaux? What’s Avery Island’s claim to fame? Not your typical Northeast Ohio dinnertime conversation, maybe, but a meal at Loretta Paganini’s Geauga County cooking school is a pretty unusual experience all across the (groaning) board. Part instruction, part entertainment, and part feast, Paganini’s popular Dinner…
Sweetening the Deal
The mother-daughter team of Eleanor Newman and Stacy Twigg operate the only kosher, non-dairy chocolate store in Ohio, hand-dipping delicious semisweet chocolate truffles, fruit and nut clusters, creams, barks, and chocolate-covered strawberries in a kitchen in the rear of a former Helen Hutchley’s. Their business, The Chocolate Emporium (14439 Cedar Road, South Euclid), began as…
Right and Natural
Today’s backslide toward ever-younger demographics has created an abyss of bottom-line consumer-based artlessness. As unnerving as this current state may be to anyone with even a passing interest in music as art, it’s hardly a new trend. Just ask Frogs drummer Dennis Flemion. Complaints about the dumbing-down of music have been going on for as…
Extra Cheese
To get a sense of the role that cheap beer has played in the development of the Cleveland punk scene over the years, you need look no further than the basement of Scott “Cheese” Borger’s Painesville home. In addition to the microphones and amplifiers strewn across the space where Borger’s band, the Pink Holes, has…
Austin’s Power
If there’s anything that stands out from this year’s South by Southwest, the annual music festival in Austin, Texas, it’s the fact that the five-day event, which concluded on March 18, has attained a high degree of exclusivity. It used to be that the badge given to registrants guaranteed entry to nearly 50 clubs hosting…
Bean Counter
Youngstown native Carl Jones, who founded Arabica Coffeehouse in Cleveland in 1975, started the business because, at the time, he couldn’t find good coffee anywhere else. “It was just a hobby,” he recalls. “I liked good coffee, and there wasn’t any around.” Jones now holds court at Phoenix Coffeehouse on Superior Avenue, his second stab…
DKV Trio
Frequently, it takes decades for the public to understand the work of artistic innovators. But in the 20th century and beyond, even this slow process seems to have ground to a halt. People still don’t get the stream-of-consciousness writing of James Joyce or the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. Therefore, it’s probable that those who…
Hits From Shinola
When Columbus-based Shinola debuted in 1997 with a self-released album, the band instantly teetered on the edge of a breakthrough. In an attempt to push itself over the line on the next album, the “garage pop” foursome created a retro-robot image and changed its name to Go Robot Go. But now, after two more releases…
Crooked Fingers
Picture Neil Diamond as an aging indie rocker, drowning in sorrow, self-hatred, and Jack Daniel’s. Picture “Coming to America” reinvented as a touching ode to alcohol-inflicted suicide. Picture Tom Waits (drunk himself) singing at Diamond’s funeral. You get the idea. Crooked Fingers, a group fronted by former Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann, specializes in…
Booby Traps
We can run, we can hide, we can even try switching films, but there’s just no escaping that pesky Gene Hackman. He is ubiquitous, and revere him we must — virtually every single time we go to the movies. (There’s even a song by Robyn Hitchcock about this phenomenon, noting that “He’s in every film/Sometimes…
Split Lip Rayfield
If the concept of punk bluegrass is a viable one, Split Lip Rayfield is its poster child. On the band’s third Bloodshot album, Never Make It Home, SLR continues to splice the ideas of bluegrass with any and every rock idiom of the modern age, giving its interpretation a traditional foundation and an edgy architecture.…
