Soundbites
It’s been three years since Rush released a studio album, but that didn’t stop hundreds of fans from lining up at the Brook Park Best Buy for an in-store appearance on November 16 by singer Geddy Lee, who has just released his first solo album, My Favorite Headache. Fans started standing in line at 11:30…
Rock of Aged
The National Cleveland-Style Polka Hall of Fame is a tribute to the era when an accordion and a big, blousy shirt could make your album a bestseller. “Polka’s popularity was a direct result of World War II,” says Cecilia Dolgan, president of the Euclid hall. “After the war, people needed something to smile about, and…
The Real Kids
What must have seemed like a good idea some two decades ago — mixing the gritty looseness of the Rolling Stones with the punk simplicity of the Ramones — still sounds as smart today. It works out even better when you’re a band that can just about pull it off. John Felice formed and fronted…
Christmas Carroll
When Cleveland playwright Eric Schmiedl was asked to adapt Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There for the Cleveland Play House’s children’s theater, he didn’t shy away from the challenge. He dove in headfirst, grabbed his “vorpal sword,” and attacked Carroll’s fantasy right at its heart: the “Jabberwocky” poem. “We’re using that…
Warren Zevon
Don’t be surprised if Warren Zevon’s next album is called Politics’ll Slay Ya. Were he recording this month, rock’s savviest curmudgeon would have a field day commenting on the presidential horserace, giving the U.S. body politic unprecedented and long-overdue growing pains. Ever since he began recording 30 years ago, this literate Angeleno has delivered stirring,…
Call Him “Security”
Unbreakable is such a quiet film that, whenever a character speaks above a whisper, it sounds like the shattering of glass in a monastery. It’s also a terribly sad movie; almost no one cracks a smile or a joke, and everyone wears the look of someone who’s just spent the last hour sobbing uncontrollably. As…
Carl Weathersby
As a youth, singer-guitarist Carl Weathersby was surrounded by musical talent. He’s related to Leonard Caston, pianist with Willie Dixon’s Big Three, and his cousin is G.C. Cameron of the Motown group the Spinners. But the greatest influence came from his father’s close friend, legendary blues guitarist Albert King. The story goes that King was…
Experiments in Longing
Before we get into it, a few of life’s sorrowful inevitabilities: Friends will vanish, romantic love will deteriorate, family will freak, and sooner or later, the matrix will come to claim your soul. No, no, not that matrix — not some silly, goopy sci-fi escape hatch — but the big, real one, the one consisting…
Caustic Resin
Born out of the same Boise, Idaho scene that unleashed Built to Spill, Caustic Resin takes the archetypal “scorched-earth guitar dirge” aesthetic even further, wielding a rambunctious, acidic barroom blues sensibility and a rather dour sense of humor. “Bring a Mormon to a show and receive 10% off at the door,” its website announces before…
Trail of Broken Dreams
Lucy Fragua had grown up in an ancient place where there were more sheep than people, where electricity and running water seemed like newfangled inventions. The idea of moving to a strange city like Cleveland, far from family, frightened her. She’d always been a little on the shy side, preferring to work in the fields…
Nine Inch Nails
For Nine Inch Nails, remix albums are just as important as studio releases. With Further Down the Spiral and Fixed, collections of remixes of songs from The Downward Spiral and Broken, NIN reconfigured its music to the point that it created new songs altogether. And with Things Falling Apart, NIN mastermind Trent Reznor attempts to…
The Ace of Clubs
With a passion for art and the ability to convince investors to part with their money, Terry Barbu has risen from bartender to club impresario. He is the creative force behind Trilogy, Liquid Café, Spy, and Fishbones Beer Farm. Cleveland magazine called Barbu “Mr. Nightlife” in a fawning profile. In August, Mr. Nightlife woke up…
Richard Buckner
Richard Buckner began his music career recording for a small Texas label (Deja Disc), moved on to a major (MCA), and is now back on an independent label (Chicago-based Overcoat), where he has released this ambitious conceptual piece. Here, Buckner has set to music lyrics culled from Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 novel The Spoon River…
Offensive Rebound
Keith Dambrot’s cell phone rings. For the third time in three hours, it’s his wife. He had to miss his kids’ soccer games for his St. Vincent-St. Mary boys basketball team practice, and she’s relaying winning scores. One of the nation’s top-ranked sophomores zips down from the bleachers and presses his ear to his coach’s,…
Badly Drawn Boy
Damon Gough plays right into the hands of hopeless romantics everywhere. As Badly Drawn Boy, the British folkie updates traditional troubadour avenues for the electronic age, and on his debut album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast, he explores each of them with charming dashes of naïveté, arrogance, and pretension. Still, for all the modernism he applies…
Edge
Fox 8 News brought new meaning to the concept of unintentional self-parody last week with its investigation of — get this — jaywalking. “I-Team” ace Carl Monday captured video of cops, prosecutors, and judges brazenly crossing the middle of the street on their way to the Justice Center. In the most dramatic moment, Judge Thomas…
The Cowslingers
Since forming in 1991, the Cowslingers — brothers Ken and Greg Miller (on bass and vocals, respectively), guitarist Bob Latina, and drummer Leo P. Love — have changed little over the course of 6 albums and 12 singles. The group has won awards for being the best local country act, but shouldn’t be confused with…
The Potter Blotter
Mayfield Heights leaves all pages unturned: So Mayfield Heights school district has banned the use of Harry Potter books in the classroom [The Edge, November 16]. I had absolutely no idea that Mayfield Heights was so overrun with Satan worshipers and rituals that it needed to ban children’s books so the kids are not tainted.…
From ‘Jiffy’ to ‘Jazz’
Viktor Schreckengost and 20th-Century Design , the Cleveland Museum of Art’s first large-scale exhibition devoted to a living Cleveland artist, doesn’t have a valedictory feel at all. For one thing, Schreckengost is a spry 94: He continues to teach part time at his alma mater, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and create watercolors, too. But…
Boys Will Be Girls
The moment of high tragedy in a theater lover’s life comes when, enduring yet another Christmas Carol, he feels the first flush of hardening of the arteries. Associated with sitting through too many high-cholesterol theatrical endeavors, this disorder can be alleviated only by the proper restorative, such as Beck Center’s When Pigs Fly. For here…
French Connection Connection
When one of this city’s top-rated properties undergoes a sweeping change in culinary personnel, attention must be paid. And so it is with Sans Souci, Triple-A’s perpetual Four-Diamond Award-winner in the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, where the clogs of the hotel’s former Executive Chef Claude Rodier are now ably filled by Germanic boy wonder Marco Klein,…
Countdown to Christmas
Yeah, the turkey was moist, the dressing was fluffy, and the pumpkin pie was great. Now, on to the important stuff — Christmas shopping! You can forget about the tacky ties and argyle socks: What your trendinista friends want most this year is gourmet foods and wines. Plenty of places offer upscale gift baskets, but…
Tough Love
Bill Peters has an armload of German metal magazines dog-eared to the pages that have stories about Breaker, the Cleveland hard rock band he manages. There are photos of the band performing in front of several thousand fans, on a stage the size of a runway at the Wacken Music Festival in August, and reviews…
Grains of Salt
Nina Gordon is holed up in her hotel room in Oakland on the third week of her tour. Her cell phone rings insistently throughout our conversation — an example of the demand that Gordon has experienced since the release of her first solo album, Tonight and the Rest of My Life. To say that Gordon…
