The Conscious Reggae Tour
Three of the most important figures in early dancehall reggae hit town this week, paying tribute to the time when “consciousness” and dancehall didn’t seem like an oxymoron. Sugar Minott cut his teeth with the criminally underrated African Brothers vocal trio in the early ’70s, later linking with producer Coxsone Dodd from Jamaica’s infamous Studio…
Clive and Well
You just never know where you’re going to find a rare evening of thrilling, surprising, and oddly uplifting theater. For instance, you might not think it would happen at the western campus of Cuyahoga Community College, which is composed, at least in part, of a group of forlorn buildings marooned in a circular sea of…
A Bright, Shining Myth
The misunderstanding started more than a year ago, when Clay Uzell, the commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 7536 in Lyndhurst, visited the newly opened Target in Mayfield and asked if veterans could sell poppies outside the store. Every year, VFW members sell artificial poppies in areas with high foot traffic, such as…
Kent Stage Folk Festival, with Ralph Stanley. Friday, November 14, at the Kent Stage.
Happy is the person who appreciated the music of Ralph Stanley well before all this O Brother hype. It’s one sad commentary on the public’s taste that more than 50 years passed before he was “discovered,” and that it took a movie — albeit a low-budget one — to bring Stanley to a wide audience.…
Thoroughly Mundane
Ah, there she is again: that spunky 1920s-era flapper gal with a suitcase in one hand and a dream of Broadway stardom in her heart. She can sing! She can tap! But will she ever get a chance to show her stuff? If this sounds familiar, it was done with pizzazz in the classic musical…
Missing Amanda
She refers to Shakira frequently, speaking the name in the shifting timbre of envy and resentment. The 11-year-old girl was the concern of the city when she disappeared from a block party September 13. The stories didn’t stop until her remains were discovered in a field a month later. “This little girl gets all this…
Deicide
It’s extremely doubtful that a more audience-abusing tour will hit America this year. For fans of pure crushing metal, this is about as hard and heavy as it’s possible to get, without actually sticking your head under a steamroller. Deicide is . . . well, it’s Deicide, and it’s still around, and it’s going to…
Count on Jasper
Jasper Johns entered the New York art scene at the tail end of the abstract expressionist movement, a period characterized by its lack of recognizable figures or narrative. A fan of flat, everyday objects in his work, Johns typically employed subjects like flags and targets, maps and numbers. Derided by Willem De Kooning for detracting…
Wasted Parent
For a few days, it was no fun to be named Tom Vail. You remember Vail, once the youngest publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper. He took over as editor/publisher of The Plain Dealer at age 36, presiding over the paper for three decades. The rap on Vail was that he liked the high-society part…
Son Seals
Guitarist Frank “Son” Seals’s beginnings couldn’t be better suited for his calling. The son of an Arkansas juke-joint proprietor, Seals was doing road duty out of his teens with guitar legends Earl Hooker and Albert King. Making the obligatory northward trek, Seals hit Chicago in 1971, finding his way onto bandstands alongside the likes of…
Up With Downtown
Downtown’s independent restaurateurs feel like they’re getting the shaft. Business is down, revenues are down, and, at least during the week, their dinner hours have all the bustle of a Bombay burger joint. “There’s no question that things are worse than they were two or three years ago,” says Rick Cassara, partner in Public Square’s…
Smackdown
There stands David Roth, wearing a suit and that trademark ponytail, alone on a cliff, at the end of what seems to be a dead-end road. From this precipice, he describes his nonprofit agency, Cleveland Works, and its mission: to find work — and hope — for those who need it most. Now he stands…
20 Miles
Back in the heyday of Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion, Judah Bauer typified the white-boy guitar-honcho ideal. The perfect foil to Jon’s sweaty-wolfman-sexgod thing, Bauer was youthful and dashing. He had great hair, a pricey drug habit, and the ability to dodge flying panties in a single bound. Funny, then, that after the JSBX growled itself…
Fade to Black
It’s not easy getting into Jay-Z’s recording home at Bassline Studios, tucked away on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I have to sneak in behind a woman walking into the building, take an elevator to the eighth floor, and knock on a pair of glass doors before a security guard ushers me into the reception…
Judging the Verdict
Judging the Verdict Ignorance of the law is no excuse: After reading Kevin Hoffman’s article, “The Verdict Is In” [October 29], I think the verdict should be: Any judge who, in a year’s time, has a combination of three decisions reversed on appeal should be removed and barred from the bench. And it should be…
Blink-182
As 1999’s melancholy suicide note “Adam’s Song” revealed, the boys in Blink-182 have always been more than just pop-punk pranksters delighting in fart jokes, masturbation puns, and Peter Pan syndrome. The Southern California trio stresses this often during Blink-182, a drastic departure from previous albums that elevates the band beyond its usual sixth-grade reading level.…
Crisis Averted
For someone of so silken a voice, Shelby Lynne can turn testy pretty damn quick. Her publicist has persuaded her to dole out 20 minutes for a phone interview from her home in Palm Springs, California, and Lynne responds to softball questions with practiced poise. No problem when it comes to discussing Identity Crisis, her…
Fairy Tales
Wayne Besen caused ripples in the gay community three years ago, when he photographed John Paulk coming out of a gay bar in Washington, D.C. The scandal? As the poster boy for the “ex-gay movement,” Paulk claimed that he had married a “former lesbian” and was recovering from life as a drag queen named Candi.…
The Pleasure Club
In the late ’80s, James Hall was the frontman for Mary My Hope, an atmospheric alt-rock combo the world might have worshiped, if said planet hadn’t gravitated toward the Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish two years later. Hall recorded some solo records for Geffen that tried to reconcile his love for gritty juke-joint rock and all things…
Narrow Chutes, Wide Success
Everybody loves the Shins. No, seriously — everybody. Take Kevin, for example. All rippling muscles, tattooed arms, headbanger hair, and a hellbent-for-leather, don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, Kevin is the backstage bouncer at the Bowery Ballroom and thus something of a New York City indie-rock landmark. Generally speaking, he doesn’t like anyone, unless that someone is a member…
Christ Is Rockin’
Hero — The Rock Opera is a contemporary musical about a certain water-walking, leper-healing, water-into-wine messiah. Sound familiar? “I never saw Jesus Christ Superstar,” says Michael Tait, the superstar savior of Hero, which plays Friday at the State Theatre. Surely somebody behind this new show has. Which prompts the question: Christ, do we really need…
Pink
Pink is riding one of the steepest evolutionary curves in all of pop music. As good as it was, her 2000 debut, Can’t Take Me Home, didn’t point to Try This — not at all. On her third album, Pink’s left behind the tear-stained diary entries of M!ssundaztood and unleashed a hard-rocking, Stevie-Nicks-catfighting-Pat-Benatar roller coaster…
Cleveland Raps!
A 7-year-old boy made the rap world notice Cleveland. It started when local hip-hop promoter Tony “X” Franklin didn’t know which way to go with a new album he had been given. “I said to myself, the rhyme style is so basic, but it’s clever. I don’t know how to do this one,” Franklin recalls.…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, November 13 New Model Army has been making records for 20 years. Now the U.K. trio is celebrating with Great Expectations: The Singles Collection, an 18-track compilation of political sloganeering and punk-rock riffing. It’s also touring America for the first time in 10 years, and frontman Justin Sullivan still rages convincingly onstage. Expect plenty…
P.O.D.
The only possible surprise in the third CD from the famously pious P.O.D. would be if the bonus-disc video game turned out to be a first-person shooter. It isn’t. Everything we’ve come to expect from the band and less, Payable on Death barely gets its gentle-mosh guitar groove on before singer Sonny rhymes “Fi-yah,” “dee-si-yahh,”…
Countdown to Launch
Cleveland pre-punk legends Rocket From the Tombs are putting the final touches on their first official LP, an album nearly 30 years in the making. Rocket Redux comes on the heels of the band’s summer reunion tour, which marked its first gigs since the group disbanded in 1975, when it splintered into Pere Ubu and…
Sketch Artistry
MON 11/17 American Slander has nothing to do with Harvey Pekar — or any other grumpy Clevelander, for that matter. The new show from the Habitat for Insanity comedy crew consists of 25 sketches culled from previous shows spanning the troupe’s three years. A typical entry: “Racist Barbershop Quartet,” about a woman who hires a…
Various Artists
Hip-hop loves Scarface, the Al Pacino flick that just turned 20. The movie, about a self-made Cuban immigrant who becomes a drug kingpin, has become part of gangsta rap’s DNA. Its morally repugnant rags-to-riches narrative, explicit detail about the drug trade, and sense of paranoia, blood lust, and greed make up the genre’s de facto…
Duran Duran
People call Duran Duran many things — decadent pretty boys, ridiculous new romantics, washed-up has-beens — but often overlooked is how their sense of savvy always superseded their savoir-faire. The fab five rejuvenated disco’s slick beats with sleek Roxy Music- and Bowie-modeled art funk that made sophisticated rock palatable to teenyboppers. They also took advantage…
Beer Run
SUN 11/16 The Cleveland Hash House Harriers & Harriettes tout themselves as a drinking club with a running problem. “If you have a half a mind to join, that’s all you need,” says Nature Boy. He and fellow members — including Anal Blaster, S&M&M&M Man, and Pablo PicAsshole — meet on the first Saturday and…
Dimension Zero
Heavy metal’s historical moment continues to expand, generating increasing fun in the process. Take Dimension Zero, a band from Sweden with a heavy pedigree (In Flames, Marduk) and a John Wayne-like commitment to holding down the fort. Neither wildly excessive nor ready for radio, This Is Hell flails merrily through its 10 thrashing numbers like…
Hanzel und Gretyl
You don’t need a year of high school German to appreciate New York electrokrieg group Hanzel und Gretyl, but it helps. For the benefit of the uninitiated, “krieg” means war, “blut” means blood, and “scheisse” means poop. The rest, you can probably figure out yourself, as in “SS Deathstar Supergalactik.” The faux-Germanic motif isn’t purely…
Animal Houses
SAT 11/15 Summit County’s animal kingdom shows off its prime hillside real estate at the annual Parade of Homes. The one-mile hike takes place on a semi-steep incline that leads to an observatory deck overlooking the Cuyahoga Valley. Along the way, hikers identify the homes of the area’s furry and feathered residents. “I’m expecting to…
The Six Parts Seven
The Six Parts Seven’s sweeping instrumentals are like spider’s silk: elegant and surprisingly sturdy. The band has always left much to the imagination, its albums as beautiful and mysterious as its wooded, rural Kent home. For Lost Notes, they enlisted a handful of indie-rock luminaries to color in the wide-open spaces of their pastoral post-rock.…
Eat, Run, Repeat
SAT 11/15 Who has time for a slow-cooked meal, when there are kids to pick up, movies to see, and pea coats to buy? Turns out, it’s possible to prepare nutritious, low-cost meals and still have time for the new Matrix flick, according to Kathleen Cannata Hanna, author of Got2Go: Feeding Families Fast. “Not everyone…
Various Artists
The new compilation from the promotions company DomainCleveland is the first installment of a planned trilogy. The Little Domain That Could offers a wide range of up-and-coming, mostly midwestern acts, from the idiosyncratic rock of Chicago’s Tub Ring to the electronic-charged melodies of Cleveland’s Racermason. Elsewhere, Finless Brown funks it up with choruses of women’s…
Say It With Swastikas
11/14-11/16 Bent, the story of the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals, is at the Players Guild Theater this weekend. Tough and controversial, the show is miles away from the let’s-put-on-a-musical fluff typical of community-theater stages. “It’s an ambitious project for us,” admits director Carla Derr. “We haven’t attempted anything of this subject matter before. It’s a…
Black Like Me?
The riddles of identity that drive and disturb Philip Roth’s impressive body of fiction usually focus on contemporary Jewish characters, whose conflicts between self-absorption and self-hate remain poignantly (and often hilariously) unresolved. But in The Human Stain, the first Roth novel to be adapted as a film in three decades, the author took on an…
Shakedown Cruise
Russell Crowe, that sturdy studio staple, performs at his peak in the seafaring adventure Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Director Peter Weir takes the helm on this adaptation (co-written with John Collee) of a couple of the 20 intrepid historical novels by the late Patrick O’Brian, and it’s easy to call…
‘Pac, Man
There was a gaggle of young women sitting near me during the screening of Tupac: Resurrection. They frequently voiced their enjoyment of the movie — in particular, at three specific points. They growled appreciatively at an image of Tupac naked in a bathtub, his crotch festooned with gold chains. They cackled in delight at the…
Unorthodox
Many observant Jews in Israel and America may be outraged by writer-director Eitan Gorlin’s brash first feature, The Holy Land, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not every day you encounter a film about an uncertain rabbinical student who falls in love with a Russian prostitute, in the holy city of Jerusalem, no less.…
That’s All, Folks?
The first question that comes to mind upon hearing that the Looney Tunes are back and, indeed, in action, is the following: Back from where? Who Framed Roger Rabbit? married the Tunes to live action in 1988, and Space Jam (a 90-minute Michael Jordan commercial) featured the Tunes as recently as 1996. Meanwhile, the animated…
