Leather & Laces
The Cleveland Fusion is outraged. The Columbus Comets have been saying all kinds of horrible things about them on their website. No one is sure exactly what the Comets were saying, but all agree it was truly horrible of them to say it. “If they have something to say, they should say it on the…
On View
Aging in America, The Years Ahead — Being old doesn’t necessarily mean living on the fringes of society, as this multimedia show proves. Ed Kashi’s black-and-white photographs demonstrate, for example, that the Marlboro Man has nothing on the 75-year-old cowboys competing at the National Senior Pro Rodeo. A leather-jacketed senior biker chick gives meaning to…
Alanis Morissette/Avril Lavigne
The homogenization of female voices in the Top 40 — thanks to ProTools, risk-averse record labels, and malleable starlets eager to conform for fame — is one of the most disturbing recent trends in music. In fact, perhaps the only thing more disheartening in mainstream radio is the almost complete absence of women on rock…
A Firehouse Divided
A Firehouse Divided Fitting quality and equality under one roof: Regarding the article “Burning Down the House” [May 5], I would like to clarify a quote attributed to me. My statement that between 5 and 10 black guys had to bust their balls to get this job is in reference to entrance exams. Every time…
Viva Corleone’s
Long before Tony Soprano, Paulie Walnuts, and Big Pussy, there was The Godfather. By any measure, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece is a twisted tortellini of a movie, stuffed to overflowing with a quirky blend of R-rated violence and idealized domesticity. And through it all, Italian food plays a starring role. Consider: While viewers are…
Lenny Kravitz
When Lenny Kravitz debuted at the tail end of the ’80s, his colorful retro soul won him the title of Prince’s heir apparent. He lacked that sort of reach, let alone grasp, but it turned out that his own genius lay in recycling old licks into new anthems that honored the big, dumb glory of…
Pot Luck
Scott Spence was relentless. For more than three years, he chased playwrights Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, begging to stage their quirky musical based on a 1936 propaganda film about the evils of smoking pot. But each time he asked, they said no. Either the show was playing to packed houses in Southern California, or…
Flower by Any Other Name
Okay, listen and try to keep up. For the first 20 years or so, the restaurant that occupies the vintage carriage house off University Circle (11401 Bellflower Road, 216-231-4469) was called That Place on Bellflower. Then, when new owners took over in July 2002, they shortened the name to Flower. And since last month, when…
Felix da Housecat/Miss Kittin
Chicago DJ/producer Felix da Housecat paid his dues for years in the underground scene before exploding like a well-timed volcano with his 2001 release Kittenz and Thee Glitz, which featured the oversexed electro-chanteuse Miss Kittin. He started off as a real house cat at 14, had hits in Europe at 17, and at 30 garnered…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, May 20 Erin Brockovich’s story is so compelling, not even Julia Roberts could screw it up. The real Brockovich talks it up at tonight’s Project Love’s 10th anniversary celebration, The Power of One — An Evening With Erin Brockovich. The organization has spent the past decade prepping teens for adulthood through community events and…
It Took Some Time
Good Charlotte is one of the biggest bands in the U.S. right now, a pop-punk quintet that’s played the MTV Video Music Awards, graced the cover of Rolling Stone, and sold over three million copies of its last disc, The Young and the Hopeless. To Good Charlotte vocalist Joel Madden, all of these achievements pale…
Carlos Jones & the P.L.U.S. Band
For 15 years, as head of First Light, Carlos Jones was a regional legend. For more than a decade now, he’s been leading the P.L.U.S. Band, whose remarkable lack of popularity can only be attributed to the fact that it’s never released a proper album. Hopefully, this long-anticipated debut will remedy that. A smart mix…
Hollow Men
The guys in My Morning Jacket are well aware of the substantial role reverb plays in their music. They’re also well aware of its reputation. The Kentucky quintet’s latest album, last year’s trippy It Still Moves, is a veritable feast of amplified echo and reverberating riffs. “It’s another member of the band,” laughs bassist Two-Tone…
Legends Live
There are few embellishments on the cover of Here I Am: Isley Meets Bacharach. There are neither gold lamé suits nor tuxedos, no silk sheets, and no flashy stage shots. Burt Bacharach and Ron Isley, clad in sweaters, merely smile in front of a chess board — a testament to their status as masters of…
The Pricks
The Pricks broke up in 1998, just after the Akron hardcore legends recorded this newly released EP, which sounds like it was written in 1984 and looks like it too: The powder-blue 7-inch lacks all the conventions that hardcore has accumulated over 20 years. With no agenda, the lyrics to “Suit and Tie” and “Lame…
Flashback Fest
5/22-5/23 When Sunflower Shea was born in 1984, her parents were still clinging to Woodstock’s idealism. “I was conceived under an LSD moon,” says Shea. Now an off-and-on student at Case Western Reserve University, Shea can relate to the hippies who organized the first Hessler Street Fair 35 years ago. “They were free spirits,” she…
Queer Eye for the Country Guys
A few years ago, many people were shocked when Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford came out of the closet. They shouldn’t have been — after all, Halford had long been roaring onstage on a motorcycle, looking like the biker guy in the Village People or one of the leather-clad macho men from a Tom…
Saddle Teach ‘Em
5/22-5/23 It’s been said that if a horse is left to its own devices, it will eat till it’s dead. So it’s good horse sense that a topic like “Is the Atkins Diet Right for Your Horse?” should dominate this weekend’s HorseFest ’04. Other modern concessions gallop into the gathering too. As coordinator Beth Florian…
Up Close & Painful
“Are you guys ready to get your fuckin’ heads torn off?” Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel asked on a recent Thursday afternoon. Thirty metalheads shouted back in the affirmative from the main studio of Lava Room Recordings. They were part of the latest installment of the Metal Show Unleashed, a new concert series put on…
Loud Town
FRI 5/21 Jakob Ward is a jack-of-all-trades in Akron music circles. In addition to fronting modern rockers Community 5 (pictured) and running a recording studio behind the vintage-clothing store Funky Hippie, Ward is hosting the DiverseCity CD Release Party at the Lime Spider on Friday. The 18-track compilation (the second in a series; the first…
Heading West
After nine years in Cleveland, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum is planning to open a second facility in Phoenix, Arizona. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Tour site will provide a temporary home to the Rock Hall’s traveling exhibits, which feature assorted memorabilia and programs. “It’s a way to…
Dimensions of Fun
5/22-9/6 Next time you’re plastered, try this: Put your index fingers together a couple of inches away from your face. Stare across them at a distant point. See the cocktail wienie in the middle? “You’ll get what they call a ‘sausage finger,'” says Jennifer Radwan, public programming director at Great Lakes Science Center. That’s one…
The Iguanas
The Iguanas have a knack for disregarding musical borders. While the quintet keeps its rock roots firmly planted in hometown New Orleans, it’s also managed to naturalize Mexican conjunto and tejano styles. Given the geography, the result goes beyond Tex-Mex. When the Iguanas mix it up, you can call it Chicano R&B. Their latest release,…
McRibbing
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan-chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to discuss such unhappiness. His blood…
X-Fest
Concerts are too long. Midtempo songs are boring live. And you don’t really want to hear new songs that you don’t know yet. That’s just three reasons why radio festivals are such good deals. Bands perform mercifully abbreviated sets, play all their radio hits, say “Goodnight, Cleveland,” and everybody’s home by midnight with a tale…
Rock of Ages
This may sound an eensy bit hyperbolic, but dig: Mayor of the Sunset Strip is the greatest rock-and-roll movie of all time. If you haven’t explored rock in film, from The T.A.M.I. Show to Woodstock to Concert for George, from Help! to Head to Hairspray, from The Wild Angels to Repo Man to Tank Girl,…
Bad Acid Trip
Venerable heavy-metal bard Rob Zombie once told us that if music critics — or, better still, fans — really hate you, you must be on to something, so stick to it. That wonky reasoning is apparently the MO of the band-of-the-week from L.A., Bad Acid Trip, which was booed offstage more than once on tour…
Nice Pussy
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thomson’s thick, rich history text New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Watching it is like sitting next to an ADD patient with access to a remote control and a hundred premium cable channels; you could try to keep count…
The Briefs
The Briefs return to ’77-era dirt punk, creating a ruckus out of hit-and-run guitars and songs about pubic lice and the cost of getting laid. Skinny ties and bleached hair aside, the Seattle band is brazen enough to have put out an EP of cover songs about spree killing, including bloody blasters from real old-school…
Kill Wil
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur, a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the sly come-on of her title to the surprise of…
Jane Monheit
Esteemed record producer Joel Dorn once said of Jane Monheit, “Jane loves jazz and loves singing with jazz musicians, but there are other chapters in her book.” This versatility may be the reason jazz purists remain skeptical of the 26-year-old phenom. It’s their loss. Whether her music is jazz, pop, cabaret, or something in between…
Must-Flee TV
In ancient times, spring was the season for human sacrifice — a bloody but necessary undertaking, if people wanted their seeds sown with the blessing of the gods. In modern times, the month of May signals the launch of sweeps, when TV reporters pay homage to their own gods — ratings — by practicing the…
Singing & Swinging
Chances are, if someone wrote a tuneful play today trying to brush off a man’s physical abuse of his wife, stating that the blows don’t really hurt if you’re in love, the composer and lyricist would become pariahs in the entertainment world. But Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein are well past that sort of judgment,…
Riverboat Gamblers
The reasons to avoid choosing the touring rocker life are numerous and well known. No money, no future, etc. But one of the less frequent reasons raised by nagging family and girlfriends is the back-of-the-brain fear of real physical harm. If it ain’t some drunk whizzing an empty at your noggin, your own bandmates could…
Sex Is Bad
Sex is not love. Sex is sex. It means really yucky fluids. It means big, stinky men. It means stolen moments in an office storage closet with Larry from payroll. It means waking up in a strange apartment where no one’s done the dishes since 1973. You should carry Lysol at all times. Men lie.…
Moms Aplenty
Mother-daughter relationships are like fertilizer bombs. Ordinary ingredients, when mixed in certain ways, can become highly toxic, even explosive. And when you multiply the moms by three and put four female generations of an African American family in one room, you’d best break out the Kevlar vests and shatterproof goggles, ’cause it’s going to be…
Metric
Any one-hit wonder or label-jilted band can tell you that the vicissitudes of the music industry work in mysterious ways. Just ask the Los Angeles quartet Metric, which found its space-age synthpop tune “Grow Up and Blow Away” featured prominently in a Polaroid commercial, even as its Stephen Hague-produced debut of the same name suffered…
Fingerhut’s Fable
If you’re looking for proof that our leaders in Columbus don’t give a rat’s ass about higher education, the numbers tell the story. Governor Bob Taft (R-Wussyville) used his executive powers in 2001 to slash state spending on higher education by $121 million. Two years later, the state legislature cut another $80 million. Incoming freshmen…
On Stage
Candide — At first thought, the idea of a hybrid community theater dedicated to musicals and a social-service mission might sound like a Salvation Army band with light cues. But Near West Theatre, under the executive direction of Stephanie Morrison-Hrbek and artistic guidance of Bob Navis Jr., clearly takes its theatrical goals as seriously as…
Killswitch Engage
Heavy metal used to be as impersonal as Ingmar Bergman flicks. During the heyday of thrash in the late ’80s and early ’90s, bands spoke in broad sociopolitical platitudes, warning of global warming (Testament, Nuclear Assault), homelessness (Anthrax, Overkill), and, uh, man-eating fish (Exodus) in generic terms. But with the rise of metalcore, bands have…
