Funny Business
FRI 5/13 Dave Schwensen can’t make you funny. You either have what it takes to make hundreds of people laugh, or you don’t. If you happen to belong to the former group, Schwensen claims, he can turn those hundreds of people into thousands with his book Comedy FAQs and Answers. “This is for people who…
Jukebox Heroes
John Petkovic has some good ideas about bad songs, which he makes clear as he scans one of the Beachland Ballroom’s two jukeboxes. “Hey, have you ever thought about buying some more contemporary 45s, not by underground bands, but by mainstream bands, like something from the ’80s, a Journey single or Boston on vinyl –…
Bruce Springsteen
Every decade or so, Bruce Springsteen needs to walk a different path — one that doesn’t lead to the Promised Land through electric guitars and fist-pumping anthems. He sends the E Street Band on vacation, picks up an acoustic guitar, and becomes a folksinger, with tales to tell of assorted misfits, losers, and sinners. Nebraska…
Soul Survivor
THU 5/12 Former Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty has spent the past few years lying low. His recent solo works have been modest, small-scale affairs. But on the new Haughty Melodic (released on Dave Matthews’ ATO Records), Doughty is rockin’ again with a full band. “I’m just sort of following my muse around,” he laughs.…
Capsule Not Closing?
Reports of Capsule’s demise were premature. On short notice, the Lakewood indie-rock hang held what was touted as its final night on Tuesday, May 3. Owner Cathryn Sunday had planned to sell the bar the following day. “The closing did not go through. I don’t know when or if it will,” says Sunday, who added…
Cowboy Troy
The most impressive thing about Cowboy Troy’s major-label debut is what it took to make a black country-rapper feasible. Hip-hop, the great assimilationist art, had to become the dominant musical form. A long line of experiments, from Charlie Daniels’ spoken-word songs to Timbaland’s hoedowns with Bubba Sparxxx, had to lay the groundwork for this collision…
Seeing Jane Plain
Jane Fonda used to be a pretty fair actress. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Coming Home were three of the better films of their day. So, after getting a look at herself in her first movie in 15 years, La Fonda might go straight back to the house and stick her head in…
Billy Idol
He’s been away for so long, he’s let you go for so long. But after a 12-year hiatus, Billy Idol figures it’s a nice day to start again. “Super Overdrive,” from his comeback album Devil’s Playground, summons all the essential elements from his ’80s heyday, from its sexual commands (“Ride my rocket”) to its cocky…
Limp Bizkit
The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) arrives with a lack of fanfare both noteworthy and appropriate. Rap-rock ringleader Fred Durst spends the EP grudgingly calling out people who won’t buy the disc anyway. Instead of writing another “Nookie,” “Re-Arranged,” or even “My Way,” Durst yells at his shrinking choir, dismissing the gallons of Haterade poured on…
Will to Win
Kicking & Screaming might be the most predictable movie of the year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: How many times have you gone to a movie and gotten far less than you were expecting? Here, that’s not a concern — you may not get more than you thought, but it…
Kings of Leon
Sometime between their mid-teens and early 20s, Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill fell out of their father’s traveling evangelical ministry, joined up with their cousin Matthew Followill, and formed the profane Kings of Leon (Leon is their dad’s name). Now, after one indie album, two dizzying years, and three lost virginities, this Tennessee family band…
The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
This San Diego four-piece often takes a hit from music editors who shorten the band’s name to “Eiffel Tower” to avoid possible reader offense. But the group is that serious. While the band’s cacophonous stew at times surpasses that of the Liars and others of the neo-no wave, T.P.T.B.U.T.E.T. has sprung from the post-At-the-Drive-In screamo…
Going Mental
If you’re expecting a psychological thriller out of Mindhunters and you buy a ticket for the movie, you will almost indubitably feel cheated. But break down the film’s title to its most literal sense — hunting for a mind, presumably because those involved were out of theirs — and you’ll know exactly what to expect.…
Pat’s in the Flats Benefit
For more than three decades now, Pat’s in the Flats has nursed Cleveland rock and roll on sweat and Straub. The boxy, battered, workingman’s bar is a ramshackle Rock Hall, its walls lined with snapshots of the many bands that have cut — and bared — their teeth at the place, a roster that includes…
Interfuse
With dissonant, ear-bleeding guitar set against alternately hoarse and honeyed come-ons from husband-and-wife duo Lisa and Nick Cardarelli, Interfuse initially sounds like a lean, mean Sonic Youth. But unlike the nonlinear jams of New York City’s finest, Interfuse’s raw-lunged rock and roll lunges straight for your windpipe. On Closed Doors, Open Tracks, this bunch displays…
Scoundrel Time
Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking. But any American who hopes to watch this portrait of unfettered corporate greed, cynical power-lust, and outrageous deception without going postal about an hour into the thing would do well to bring tranquilizers. Citizens of Houston are…
The Crack Pipes
The Crack Pipes waft into town from Austin, Texas, packing oodles of that humidified southern nuttiness that bands like Tyler Keith’s Preacher’s Kids, Bassholes, and Reigning Sound have intoxicated the garage fringe with the last few years. Aside from the usual 12 bars and tales of broken hearts, their shlubby swamp blues is laced with…
Lesson Learned
It was an election plagued by allegations of voter disenfranchisement, illegal campaigning, and polarization. There were even claims that an election commissioner was in bed with certain candidates — literally. Just months after the 2004 presidential election and five years after Florida’s hanging chads, the University of Akron’s student government has finally caught on. If…
Deaf, Not Dumb
The mockumentary is a tricky thing and not to be attempted by amateurs, many of whom treat the form like a joke without need of a punch line; damn the filmmaker who thinks it clever and ironic enough to “interview” “real people” “talking” about other “real people” who, of course, don’t exist, except inside the…
Mike Jones
Who is Mike Jones? That’s something the MC from Houston’s north side has been asking on mixtapes for some time — the query, along with his name and cell-phone number, are his favorite catch phrases — and now the rest of the country can play his one-question quiz. The answer: Mike Jones is a high…
Game On
The Game has been shot five times. But it was Scene Pavilion security guards who really pissed the rapper off. At a concert with Snoop in Cleveland, guards tried to wave The Game down with a magnetic baton on his way into the pavilion. Game threw a fit, or as he raps in his song,…
Dance Fever
It’s hard to feel bad when you’re dancing. From a gymnastically challenging ballet to back-and-forth swaying to “Moonlight Serenade,” movement to music has a way of connecting us to the moment, to whomever we’re sharing the floorboards with, and to ourselves. This is the epiphany a young African American woman named Marjorie Witt Johnson experienced…
Yob
Most of the time, American doom metal is significantly different from its European counterpart. The slow, depressed epics of such Euro acts as Candlemass, Esoteric, and Cathedral are more high-church than High Times. U.S. doomsters like Khanate, Grief, and Eyehategod distort their despair with feedback and howls indebted as much to the B-side of Black…
Dining While Black
Laverne Frazier had just gone to visit a friend with a new baby. It was now past 10 p.m., and she was looking for dinner. So along with her daughter, Venus, and her niece, Katrina Parker, she decided to stop by the Renaissance Hotel. It’s a glorious old joint, the kind of place where Franklin…
OK at Best
As the Wal-Martization of the country continues, with employee unions being attacked, dropping by the wayside, or losing power, it’s worthwhile to note that theatrical unions often provide a significant service. This is particularly noticeable when a nonunion production, such as Oklahoma!, now on the boards at Playhouse Square Center, tries to match the expertise…
Peter Murphy
Not even Anne Rice could have penned a character like Peter Murphy. When he and the rest of Bauhaus emerged for a one-off reunion gig at the recent Coachella Festival, the willowy frontman sang the band’s undead slow dance, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” while hanging upside down like a bat. The 47-year-old’s stunt fulfilled the vampiric…
Bad Karma
A few weeks after September 11, a bearded man in a turban and a baggy Cleveland Indians jacket walked into Best Buy in Brook Park. Weaving through the crowd, the tall, lanky young man marched to the customer-service counter. His cell phone was broken. He traded it for a new one and left. After the…
On Stage
Beauty and the Beast — Carousel’s version of the ubiquitous show features some terrifically enjoyable performances, but it lacks visual appeal. Many scenes — even intimate two-person moments — are played on the theater’s immense but essentially bare stage, sometimes in front of a painted backdrop or a silvery curtain. At times, it feels like…
Throw Rag
Any band that can nearly steal a show from rock goliath Queens of the Stone Age has cojones the size of grapefruit. And so it is with Throw Rag, last in town opening for QOTSA, when the randy Cali rockers impressed the crowd with hooks and hellfire that you don’t want to miss a second…
Dwid Did It
Dwid Did It But timing is everything: Thank you for the comprehensive and entertaining article on Dwid [“The Godfather of Cleveland Hardcore,” April 27] — truly Cleveland’s son. Does anyone out there really think that when someone thinks of Cleveland, they imagine Michael Stanley or Mushroomhead? The reason Dwid isn’t all over Headbanger’s Ball is…
On View
NEW Paint Away the Pain — The two artists featured here don’t use their real names, but their work, gritty and expertly stylized, reveals plenty about their identities. It’s immediately clear, for instance, that Daze is a male club-hopper: His silk-screen drawings on paper feature bug-eyed twentysomethings in ultra-hip clothing, shaking booties and smoking the…
Weezer
Many credit Weezer’s 1990s output for today’s Dashboard Confessionals, thanks to the group’s synthesis of naked self-pity and grungy power chords. In reality, the quartet gave suburban kids sanitized versions of Pavement and Sebadoh, along with a narcissism on par with that of the hair-metal icons that vocalist Rivers Cuomo once idolized. Perhaps that’s why…
Call of the Wild
During the Depression, Maurice Sendak spent his childhood cowering from his mother’s overbearing relatives. All Polish Jews, they didn’t speak English, never brushed their teeth, and ate everything in sight. They were “wild things,” he once said. “And how I detested them.” In 1963, a 35-year-old Sendak wrote and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are…
A Dry Heat
Pity the poor ethnic restaurateur, trying to introduce Midwesterners to his savory native fare. Give ’em the authentic, high-octane workup, and timid palates will run and hide; pull back and tone down, and experienced tabletop travelers will gripe about the lack of zest. So we feel for Sylvia and Vicente Roldán, owners of the Caribbean…
Male and Female Pole Dance Contest
Ever thought about cashing in your chips, walking away from it all, and becoming a dancer in Vegas? Before you turn in your two weeks’ notice, see if you really have what it takes at Northeast Ohio’s only coed Pole Dance Contest. Every week, some of the area’s top hardbodies (and not-so-hardbodies) compete for cash…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, May 12 Particle has picked up quite a fan base over the past five years with its nonstop touring schedule (the Los Angeles-based foursome was voted Best New Band in 2002 by Relix magazine, the jam-band bible). But it’s just recently gotten around to releasing its first studio album, Launchpad, a funkier, groove-filled version…
Home Cooking
May 14 marks the annual Evening in Ohio City shindig. One part HGTV and one part Food Network, the progressive food-and-wine event, now in its 12th year, combines great eats from six Ohio City restaurants with a peek into the restored, remodeled, and/or redecorated homes of some of the neighborhood’s most ambitious residents. This year’s…
Roué
All out-of-towners visiting for this weekend’s Cleveland Music Festival, take note: One of the city’s most promising bands that you won’t see at the fest is Roué, the city’s certified specialist in tension-and-release indie rock. The group’s live-wire debut, 2003’s Fuckin for the Future, was enough to give you goose bumps. And the new Upward…
Stolen Music
Even if they decide to pack it in and retreat to their Portland, Oregon homes for the next seven months, for the Decemberists, 2005 will be the most notable year in the life of the band. In March, they released their third and best album, Picaresque, a chamber-pop extravaganza that’s one of the year’s best…
Big-Bang Babies
“I have no idea how long we’ll be able to keep this going,” Slash says, incredulously repeating a quote that originally appeared in Entertainment Weekly last November. “That doesn’t sound like me talking. I’ve got really high hopes.” At this point, it’s easy for the surprisingly soft-spoken guitar god to muster optimism. His combustible group,…
Come Sail Away
5/14-9/5 Unlike most charter-boat captains, Jason Hall sees dollar signs in the sky, rather than in the water. The Put-in-Bay Parasail owner loads his boat with up to six customers every hour. Idling beyond the harbor, Hall straps a parasailor into a nylon harness attached to a parachute, which slowly lifts on a towline to…
Bright Eyes, Sullen Demeanor
In the great Bright Eyes biopic — Gifted, or The Ego Is at Full Boil, Keep Your Head Outta Your Ass — that will sweep the Oscars in 2015, the role of Conor Oberst will be masterfully portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio: spry, wiry, pint-sized, bright-eyed, and supremely talented — yet vain, mercurial, insolent, inelegant, intermittently…
Taylor Made
SAT 5/14 Andy LeBeau can credit a pinched nerve for getting his career off the ground with the legendary Paul Taylor Dance Company. After back surgery in 1989, LeBeau’s physician suggested that he take up ballet. “I think that most doctors would be very surprised to hear my story,” says the 37-year-old LeBeau. “My neurologist…
All Dolled Up
Yes, the New York Dolls are back together. Yes, there are only two original members on board — hell, they’re the only two still alive. And yes, it’s mostly about money. But considering that the Dolls basically kick-started punk rock back in 1973 and never got paid for such groundbreaking, the band’s current reunion seems…
