Artificial Bush
3/24-3/26 In college, Mad TV’s Frank Caliendo was planning a career in television — but not as a comedian. “I went to [school] for broadcast journalism,” he says. “But I didn’t want to make $6 an hour.” So he started doing stand-up. Today he’s best known for his many impressions of famous people, such as…
Roomful of Blues
No other musical “whole” has ever constituted more than the sum of its parts the way Roomful of Blues has. More than 40 players have come and gone from this venerable East Coast outfit, but its core sound and identity have remained the same for nearly four decades. No matter who is fronting the band,…
Who’d Guess
“Better than I thought it’d be” was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who. It neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once played by Sidney Poitier. On paper, of course, it reads like a perfect disaster: the director of How Stella Got Her Groove…
Life of Agony
Life of Agony pioneered the high-volume broken-home ballad. These days, many hard-hitting groups boast singers who croon while their compositions burn, but on 1993’s River Runs Red and 1995’s Ugly, Keith Caputo’s operatic anguish made him a total freak in the grunt-dominated hardcore scene. Troubled teens tethered themselves to these albums, which examined suicidal characters…
Ugly Duckling
Before walking out the door to see Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous, a colleague sneered, “Why do you even bother with that shit?” It’s a question one’s tempted to ask of its star, Sandra Bullock, as well. (Surely, our answers would be the same: The paycheck, pal. The woman has legal bills to pay,…
Bobby “Blue” Bland
If a man’s appeal can be measured by the degree to which his bodily functions blur the line between sensual and disgusting, then Bobby “Blue” Bland is the sexiest man on earth. This 75-year-old can sluice his forehead with a finger, spraying sweat, and purée his phlegm with rumbling snorts, and the women scream exultations.…
Out Like a Lamb
The chilling oddity of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is not limited to the fact that it’s the first mainstream German film to grapple with the subject of Adolf Hitler — six decades after his death. Set, for the most part, in the underground Berlin bunker where the Nazi dictator spent his final days, this is a…
Saul Williams
The two albums from poet, playwright, actor, and antiwar activist Saul Williams represent only an incidental part of his appeal to many admirers. Thanks to his starring role as a drug-dealer-turned-writer in the influential 1998 film Slam, which he also co-wrote,Williams became the figurehead of the poetry-slam movement that swept (and sometimes tormented) America during…
Great Clips
The small Appalachian community of Whitwell, Tennessee, boasts two traffic lights and a population of 1,600, nearly all white and Christian. Lying just 100 miles from Pulaski, where the Ku Klux Klan was founded, this now-defunct coal-mining town would seem an unlikely place to find a memorial to the six million Jews murdered by Nazis…
Backstreet Boys
The beef between 50 Cent and Game has nothing on any Backstreet Boys vs. ‘N Sync battles. Backstreet got its knickers in a twist in 1999, when J. Timberlake et al. signed to Jive — the label the Boys were on first, what nerve! Then, after the quintet sold 1.13 million copies of its ’99…
Crime Fighters Inc.
Before Mike Gustafson started running from the law, he was the law. Or so he thought. At 2 a.m. on December 17, the 50-year-old security guard packed his wife and dog into his ’95 Crown Victoria. He headed down St. Clair Avenue, checking on alarm systems manned by his company, Old Brooklyn Security Systems. As…
On Stage
Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep — Whether or not you go to church, you’ve been touched by African American gospel music in many ways. Proof of this is evident in this Cleveland Art Theatre presentation, written by Margaret Ford-Taylor and Joyce Meadows (each of whom does double duty, the former as director and the latter…
Cowboy Mouth
Cowboy Mouth has made the road its way of life. Taking little time to hang their hats in hometown New Orleans, the band members live by the creed “Have gig, will travel.” Their live shows have the reputation of being sweaty, booze-soaked affairs, with drummer-frontman Fred LeBlanc often ending up swinging from the rafters. It…
Same As Ever
That day in October 2003 started like any other for FirstEnergy employees Kevin Blaskza and Steve Coppola. They arrived just after 8 a.m. at the company service yard in Old Bridge, New Jersey, where they loaded two wooden electricity poles onto a trailer. Each pole stood 40 feet high and weighed 2,000 pounds. They secured…
Spurting Seamen
Every generation, it’s still the same: We send young men and women off to fight wars in hostile lands, then bring them back to civilization for short respites so they can hit a big city, loosen their flak jackets, and release some of that “I ain’t dead or maimed yet!” tension. Given that situation, many…
Apartment 213
Clevo legends Apartment 213 formed in the early ’90s, and the band cut a swath of destruction across the city, sweating out scraping, grinding hardcore with a guitar tone that almost made listeners bleed. Now they’re back with their first show in 10 years. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
The Unorthodox Priest
Yes, the priest says. He will open the doors to his church, but only to show how beautiful it is inside. There’s a church here somewhere — a small sign on his front lawn announces St. Anthony the Great Romanian Orthodox Monastery. There’s a cross nailed to the front of the beat-up two-story house. But…
On View
NEW March of Crimes — Dissident only in the vaguest of senses, this small exhibit feels like a rally whose participants have neither a cause nor a message — let alone much aesthetic interest. Of the four featured artists, Bob Peck is one of two worthy of consideration. His dripped-acrylic and spray-painted pictures may be…
Jazzanova
Reacting to their lily-white German motherland, the DJs in the Jazzanova collective tap disco, jazz, and every other kind of dance music they can find to make electronica with some real soul.
Black Amish
Sabra Pierce Scott is among the many Cleveland City Council members who incessantly yap about providing good work at union wages for city residents. But, naturally, this doesn’t apply when she’s doing the hiring. Scott and her husband, Randell Scott, the city streets commissioner, are building a house at East 98th and South Boulevard. When…
Fuhgedaboudit
There are two types of dining experience that linger in the memory: the astonishingly good and the unbelievably bad. So when we tell you that a recent lunch at Tower City’s Castaldi’s was a fairly forgettable affair, we can understand if your first response is “Well, it could have been worse.” Indeed — we didn’t…
Black Label Society
Except for bender-induced stupors, Zakk Wylde must never sleep. The most prolific of old-school metal’s hard-partying cavemen, Wylde records and tours as Ozzy Osbourne’s go-to guitarist and plays almost every instrument on his Black Label Society releases, which he churns out almost as quickly as he slams down shots. On Mafia, Wylde found time for…
Get a Clue
Get a Clue 50 Cent for your thoughts: I happened to pick up Scene the other day, mostly because it had Bingo Smith on the front. However, I couldn’t resist the article on 50 Cent by Dan LeRoy [“Bloody Shame,” March 9]. After I read this article, it became apparent why writers come a penny…
Side of Ham
Hotcakes, hot coffee, and a chance to ogle hostess Lynnie Sprinkles’ outfit du jour: That’s proving to be the recipe for success at Woodmere’s Original Pancake House (28700 Chagrin Boulevard, 216-292-7777), the popular East Side breakfast spot that opened last April. “She’s like performance art,” says Jane Frazin, who operates the Pancake House with husband…
Crystal Skulls
When a guitar pop band gets tagged “timeless,” it often means its members have no sense of humor. The Crystal Skulls’ debut, Blocked Numbers, has humor, if only of the deeply droll kind normally possessed by four cardigan-clad chaps who wish they were from London. It rains nearly as much in the Skulls’ real digs,…
Portrait of a Diva
By curtain time every night, Danyel Vasquez looks nothing like his early morning reflection in the mirror. In the course of an hour, he changes from a 5-foot-5 dude with shoulder-length hair to a 5-foot-9 drag dish with a bouffant ‘do. Whether it’s in a melodramatic Joan Crawford impersonation or a comedic take on the…
Her Name Is Rio
Scientists searching for a fountain of youth need only attend a Duran Duran concert. At the group’s Blossom show in 2000, the scene resembled a debauched 20th high school reunion. Minivan moms snuck tokes from a doobie with the guilty haste of teenagers; others raided their daughters’ closets and snatched up Contempo Casuals wardrobe essentials…
M.I.A.
Politics and music have always made uneasy bedfellows, but 27-year-old Maya Arulpragasam knows about unease. The Sri Lankan native’s family fled that country’s civil war for Britain more than 20 years ago, and her father — linked to the divisive revolutionary outfit the Tamil Tigers — remains M.I.A., a moniker Maya has adopted for her…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, March 24 Ernst Haeckel was a 19th-century biologist who saw beauty in the undersea world. Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision is a profile of the controversial but forgotten scientist, and it often plays like a staid History Channel documentary that’s achin’ to be hip. Proteus is caught between being a straight-up biography and an…
Book Smart
Iyan Anomolie’s mind is probably a lot like his crib. Hip-hop bumps gently in the background, and the attic apartment is covered in graffiti by some of the area’s notable graff artists — Prayer, Savage, Analog, and Anomolie himself — who have filled its walls with rainbow signatures, spray-painting bulging letters the size of basketballs.…
Magnapop
Magnapop is a relic of the time in music when ‘zines, college radio, mail-order catalogs, and late-night videos on MTV’s 120 Minutes were the only way to discover new underground delicacies. Although the band from Athens, Georgia, was never quite part of this scene — it released two studio albums in the ’90s, Hot Boxing…
Dixie Fix
It’s no secret that the Drive-By Truckers’ favorite subject is the South. It’s been the focal point of the Alabama quintet’s last three albums. In 2001, they released Southern Rock Opera, a two-disc concept record that bridged the lives of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young, and George Wallace. Decoration Day followed in 2003, and it took…
New Pollution
We begin with the greatest lyrics ever written. Somber songs of the plaid bartenders Western Unions of the country Westerns Silver Foxes lookin’ for romance With the chain-smoke Kansas flashdance ice pants. Beck “rapped” these words in 1996 — the artistic apex of “Hotwax,” the artistic apex of Odelay, the artistic apex, to date, of…
Kasabian
If you believe the British music press, Kasabian — named after Linda Kasabian, the Manson family member turned state’s witness — is the most incendiary band to emerge from the U.K. since the Stone Roses. It’s not hard to understand the critics’ enthusiasm: Vocalist Tom Meighan is a fount of quotable quips, and the band’s…
Big Pimpin’
FRI 3/25 A couple of years ago, even Demetrius Bradley was overwhelmed by the more than 1,500 costumed sugar daddies and hookers competing at the inaugural Pimps-n-Hos’ Costume Ball. “I had heard this was popular in places like Las Vegas,” says Bradley, the ball’s promoter. “We were really in awe that it could be done…
Messin’ With Texas
It seemed like a good two minutes before Alex Perekrest opened his eyes. As he let loose a wild, show-opening lead, the thick-armed Red Giant guitarist clutched his Gibson — leaning back, his legs bent at the knees, shoulders resting on his amp for support, as if he were playing in the face of a…
B.J. O’Malley
Willie Nelson wrote “Crazy,” the song that Patsy Cline made a country classic, and he’s said that it was originally titled “Stupid.” B.J. O’Malley starts In Love and Decay by picking up where Willie left off, resignedly crooning at the conclusion of “Welcome”: “Ideally, love is all there is/But really, I think love is dumb.”…
This Season’s Not Canceled
3/25-3/26 Whether you blame the owners or players, the NHL season is kaput. At the American Hockey League, however, things are just getting cool. This weekend, the Barons will meet the Syracuse Crunch twice. And in honor of the canceled NHL season, $21 tickets for both games are just $5 for fans wearing NHL apparel.…
Back From the Dead
After a brief hiatus, the Ohio Death Festival will return this summer, bringing 40 of underground metal’s most extreme bands to the Phantasy Nite Club (11802 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood) June 24 and 25. “It’s two days of brutality,” says Sandy “Metal Mom” Newton, a Michigan promoter who also organizes Indiana’s Rigor Mortis Fest and the…
The Aeronautical Legends
Aeronautical Legends main man Joshua Dennison has a voice so soft and fragile, it sounds as if it could be bruised by a stiff breeze. The only thing more tender is his heart, as evidenced by the yearning acoustic pop of his debut, Rocketeer. In a pretty, plaintive coo, Dennison sings of boxers, alchemists, and…
Honky-Tonk Man
FRI 3/25 Chris Scruggs admits that he wasn’t a very popular kid in school. Growing up in Nashville in the mid-’90s, he listened to “ragtime, Western swing, honky-tonk, and Dixieland jazz,” he says, adding sarcastically, “all the cool kids listened to that.” These days, Scruggs — the 22-year-old son of 1980s country singer Gail Davies…
Ozric Tentacles
Pioneers of the English space-rock underground, Ozric Tentacles have been rearranging brain cells since 1982, when their expansive, instrumental workouts drew comparisons to such better-known space cadets as Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. Champions of the pretentious album title (Pungent Effulgent, anyone?), the merry minstrels have nonetheless racked up an impressive back catalog since their experimental…
