The Eyes Have It
The Eyes of Alice Cooper, the new album from the original shock rocker, is touted as a return to form. After more than a decade of recycled riffs and not-so-convincing stabs at modern-day relevance, Alice Cooper wants to rock your ass off again. He found that reason in the new-school-via-old-school sounds of the White Stripes,…
Cut-Rate Comebacks
The only thing worse than a Stryper reunion tour is Stryper’s justification for a reunion tour. “I feel that God’s hand was involved in it,” frontman Michael Sweet recently told Glam-Metal.com. Maybe so, Mike, but if the Good Lord were indeed lending a hand, it surely would be to flip you the bird. Even Christ…
Derf and The City
SAT 10/11 Cartoonist Derf has given readers a twisted, but not totally unrealistic, look at Cleveland life for 13 years. His weekly strip, The City (which is syndicated internationally), has skewered everything from latte-sipping urbanites to suburban cavemen. Derf picked approximately 200 strips for inclusion in The City Collected. “They’re the ones that still make…
Rock Aid
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will host the third annual Breast Fest Wednesday, October 15. The benefit event, for breast cancer patients in need of financial assistance, features the music of Cleveland singer-songwriters Tracy Marie, Robin Stone, Alexis Antes, and Kehri Spicel, as well as the jazz-soul group Blues on Purpose. Mary Bridget,…
Hell on Ice
SAT 10/11 When we last left the Cleveland Barons, they were immersed in the Season of the Cursed. The team had more than double the injuries of any other club in the American Hockey League last season. The result was a roster filled with scrubs, almost unwatchable games, and the AHL’s second-worst record. But with…
The Murder Junkies
With the exception of Elvis and Jesus, folks seldom commemorate an individual’s death. Unless that individual happens to be poo-flingin’ shock-rocker G.G. Allin, whose passing a decade ago is memorialized for an entirely different reason: Most people were glad to see him go. As the frontman for the Murder Junkies, Allin was known for performing…
Ghost Ship
10/9-11/1 In its former life, the steamer Sainte Claire was an amusement-park ferry boat in Detroit. But the 93-year-old wooden vessel will spend the Halloween season docked in Lorain, where it’s now known as the Nautical Nightmare. The attraction features a “Ballroom of Terror,” complete with skeletal remains, sound effects, and a cast of spooky…
The Turbo A.C.s
The music of the Turbo A.C.s isn’t nearly as varied as the crowd around them. Named after a fictitious skinhead gang from the gangland movie The Warriors, the N.Y.C. trio is equally indebted to surf guitarist Dick Dale and roots punkers Social Distortion. Blag Dahlia, the twisted and blood-splattered Dwarves singer, produced their new album,…
Queer Cheer
10/10-10/12 Out in Akron isn’t about peeking out of the closet. It’s about kicking down the door, with three days of concerts, drag shows, and movies celebrating the Rubber City’s gay and lesbian community. The “outing” starts at 7 p.m. Friday with the free Queer Shorts Film Festival at the University of Akron’s Schrank Hall…
Trailer Bride
Yes, it was primarily in the South that Beatles albums were smashed, buried, and burned in effigy back in 1966, but don’t think the states of the old Confederacy can’t rock with the best of them. Take Trailer Bride, for instance. The band calls Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home, yet it would hardly sound out…
Jokes on Us
MON 10/13 A few months back, when city officials proposed requiring downtown visitors to feed parking meters at night, the Public Squares knew they had a comedy skit in the making. The controversy died, but the comedy didn’t: “Three Stooges/Jane Campbell” is one of 18 sketches the troupe will unveil during its inaugural 90-minute show,…
Paul van Dyk
When one man gets so many people to move, he has to be considered a leader of some kind. Ministry of Sound favorite Paul van Dyk, a German producer, remixer, and DJ, must therefore be one of the biggest leaders in the electronic-sound market. After bringing traditional song structure to hard Detroit techno in the…
A Ball, Screwed
It’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following the actor around as he leads his enviable life. In film after film, he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction: Jennifer Lopez in Out…
Del Tha Funkee Homosapien
Del got his start in da Lench Mob, backing his cousin Ice Cube, but Tha Funkee Homosapien’s no common gangsta. Rocking an old-school flow notable for its speed and concision, Del brandishes humor as his weapon of choice, reminding us of the days when NWA’s “Gangsta, Gangsta” was more joke than pose. Whereas Cube helped…
Dogville
Did you hear the one about the talking dog? Well, of course you did. If you’ve ever been to the movies or watched television, then you know that our otherwise silent four-legged friends almost invariably come to verbal life when the cameras roll. We’ve had horses (Mr. Ed), mules (Francis), and pigs (Babe), not to…
C.J. Chenier
You can’t find a better bloodline in zydeco than the one posessed by C.J. Chenier. His late legendary father, Clifton, is in large part the reason the Creole folk form is a living, breathing, butt-shaking force outside of southwest Louisiana. Back in the 1950s, the senior Chenier started mixing the zydeco accordion tradition with blues…
Half Great
The opening credits insist that Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then, we’ll have to contemplate something less fulfilling and…
Dido/Travis
Labeling an artist a fluffy light-rock Muzakhead is the kiss of death for musical credibility, conjuring nightmarish visions of Air Supply and other somnolent saps. But there’s no denying that the music of Brits Dido and Travis doesn’t exactly ooze testosterone. Dido’s breezy “Thank You,” sampled by Eminem for “Stan,” floats with the transparent presence…
Brother, Can You Spare a Match?
Judge Eileen Gallagher was conducting a capital murder trial when the room fell dark. The August 14 blackout interrupted testimony against Lawrence Royster, a defendant accused of shooting an East Side drug dealer and then setting fire to his house to conceal the crime. The witness on the stand, Dennis Williams, had already pleaded guilty…
Fast Stalker
It’s hard not to feel queasy, when Sting croons, in the Police’s anthem for stalkers, “Every breath you take, every move you make . . . I’ll be watching you.” But that creepy ballad quickly delineates how one person’s unquenchable passion becomes another’s terrifying fixation. And sometimes that passion morphs into awful outcomes that destroy…
Living Colour
When a band’s been largely out of action for a decade, a comeback usually entails a restatement of themes. In the case of Living Colour, that would mean the soulful, Zeppelinesque stomp that powered “Cult of Personality” and other late-’80s blasts, opening many ears to the idea that four black musicians could shred just as…
The Gospel of James
The names — like The Show, Hot Sauce, and Pee Wee — are spoken with reverence, their miraculous feats passed on from father to son. They are the playground legends from the Book of Game, an oral history in which every streetball player wants to write his own chapter. To be included is to be…
Oral Morals
Even though the presidential election is a year away, you can be sure Republican strategists have their gumshoes on the trail of any supposed sexual misconduct among the announced Democratic candidates. Apparently, there’s something in the conservative mindset that forces them to obsess about the sex acts of others — from Bubba Clinton’s infamous hummer…
Various Artists
Every year, a ragtag caravan of musicians speeds through the California wasteland, kicking up a cloud of sand as it heads toward its remote, mystical destination. Burning Man? Nah. They’re going to Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, where Queens of the Stone Age frontman Josh Homme presides over his Desert Sessions: an ever-mutating…
Rat
Everybody loved Anthony Delmonti. But at that moment, at the Roman Gardens restaurant in Little Italy, only one opinion mattered: that of James “Jack White” Licavoli, reigning boss of La Cosa Nostra Cleveland. It was the early 1980s, and Delmonti, in his mid-30s, was known as a coarse but charming rogue, possessed of fearless ambition.…
Eternally Classic
I have a friend who insists that, when she dies, she wants to be buried beneath the marble floor of her newly remodeled bathroom. After all, as an inspired home decorator and designer, she can hardly imagine a more meaningful portal for her journey to the Great Beyond. But as for me — and I…
Death Cab for Cutie
Rock songs tend to fall into one of two broad categories: the emotional and the ones about emotion. But Death Cab for Cutie songwriter Ben Gibbard and his band straddle the two: On songs such as the title track of Death Cab’s new album Transatlanticism, Gibbard’s reedy tenor expresses both a very direct yearning and…
Scare Tactics
Tourism types worried about Harvey Pekar’s characterizations of Cleveland ought to consider what the Western Reserve Group of Insurance Companies has to say about the town. During a recent radio broadcast of an Ohio State football game, a Western Reserve Group ad warned motorists about the perils of not locking their car doors. “By the…
Second Home
We didn’t run into Sadhu Johnson during our recent Chicago dining binge. Still, connections to Greater Cleveland were everywhere. We hadn’t been in town more than a few hours, for instance, before we stumbled across former homeboy Blake Gilbert, now working as part of the polished service team at Tru. Chef-owners Rick Tramonto and Gale…
Kathy Zimmer
Kathy Zimmer grew up in rural Nebraska, listening to the old-time country music of such artists as Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash. She studied classical music as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska and earned a master’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music. But listening to her debut CD might make one think…
Letters to the Editor
False Negative Time to lose those lousy prints, already: Hallefreakinlujah! Kevin Hoffman and Tom Francis’s article “Strange Love” [September 17] nailed it. So many Clevelanders are psychologically imprinted with years of negative messages about their town and all the things they supposedly don’t have. The negativity is becoming part of our collective attitude about ourselves.…
Golden Olden Daze
If there’s an antidote to the portentous, angst-ridden self-indulgence of hard rock, it’s to be found in the anthemic blitz of pop-punk bands such as MxPx. Like Green Day before it, the Seattle three-piece mines sunny, early ’80s Cali punk, creating a yin to the yang of ponderous nü-metal temper tantrums that Nirvana inadvertently ushered…
Midnight Syndicate
Ed Douglas and Gavin Goszka have worked hard to make Midnight Syndicate notable among goths, horror-movie junkies, and haunted-house aficionados. By logical extension, the duo has moved into soundtracks, putting one together for the venerable Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. It’s even earned a stamp of approval from Wizards of the Coast, owners of the…
Tales From the Crypts
If you find yourself crossing the bridge into Kirtland’s deep, dark forest, be sure to bring along a bag of candy and a pocketful of money. Otherwise, the gang of teenage ghosts called the Melonheads will kidnap you and make you one of their own. This East Side travel tip comes courtesy of Myths, Legends,…
Change Is Good
The tangible appeal of college rockers is based on the way their musical personalities reflect the lifestyles of their core listeners. Indie, punk, and noise mavens flying high on the CMJ charts possess a scruffy, unconventional charm, much like that of their fans, stumbling to 10 a.m. class in pajamas. Singer-songwriters represent the same kind…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, October 9 Onoe Umenosuke becomes a lady tonight at Onnagata: The Making of a Woman. The Tokyo-based actor will both discuss and demonstrate kabuki, the centuries-old Japanese theater style in which males portray females. Umenosuke goes the full route, with makeup, wig, and kimono. He wraps things up with a performance that includes speech…
Cello, It’s Me
Once upon a time, there were three cellos who needed three women to play them. Since the age of nine, the girls had toiled to hold their fingers against the strings and gracefully stroke the bow across them, back and forth, just so. Nearly two decades later, the three women looked at their prodigal talents…
