Crashing Waves
The remnants are there. Visit the Undercurrents website (undercurrents.com), and you’ll find long lists of bands that played at previous incarnations of the regional music festival. Started in 1989, Undercurrents is an annual showcase designed to “connect the fans with the bands,” as its slogan puts it. Some of the acts that have played in…
Creating a Monster
As an 18-year-old composition student, Wolfgang Rihm received a handwritten note from his teacher, the uncompromising modern-music master Karlheinz Stockhausen. Dear Wolfgang Rihm, it began. Please only heed your inner voice. “It hung for years above my desk,” Rihm later recalled. “Until the green felt-tip had begun to fade. His advice was decisive: that I…
Converge
A five-man group from Boston, Converge started mutilating the distinctions between hardcore and metal on its first full-length, 1997’s Petitioning the Empty Sky. On Petitioning, it fuses the speed of traditional hardcore and punk with squealing guitar leads that might do Slayer proud and throws in a bevy of thick-riffed breakdowns to keep things moshable.…
Treasuring the Tigers
Even though its last state football title was back somewhere between the Summer of Love and Watergate, Massillon Washington High School has still managed to compile the winningest record (723-204-35) in Ohio football history. This year there’s a hot new quarterback and a kicker who regularly punches it through from 50 yards out. Having already…
Wayne Hancock
Country music, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Yet out in the margins of the hideous “new” country there exist the beleaguered hardcore faithful, who still strum and twang as though today’s babes-and-boys video-driven Nashville has all but been erased from the musical map. Wayne Hancock is an ex-Marine from Texas who harbors more…
Amused to Death
On September 13, at 11:30 a.m., Bryce Zabel was to have met with USA Network executives about a mini-series he was pitching to the cable outlet. Zabel, creator of such television shows as Dark Skies and The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, had the conference on his calendar for weeks. But, like most who peddle entertainment…
Firewater
Since bailing out of Cop Shoot Cop, bassist Tod Ashley’s musical life has been a mixed bag of genres and modes of execution. Rather than lock into an actual band, Ashley conceived Firewater with a rotating cast of alt-rock misfits who dance to his oddly satisfying tunes. On Firewater’s 1996 debut, Get Off the Cross…
Geek Love
So why is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? What’s Hollywood trying to tell us? Caucasians have a corner on the market in failing eyesight, office jobs, and undernourished physiques? Or is it legitimately a white thing — how many blacks and Latinos,…
El Vez
Just as Marcel Marceau pushed mime beyond the “Help, I’m trapped in a box” shtick, El Vez (Robert Lopez) pole-vaults ahead of the Howard Johnson lounge-act crowd with a multilayered, vaudeville-meets-CBGB extravaganza of politics, song, and theatrics. Unlike Marceau, the extent of whose recorded work is an actual hour of silence, titled An Evening With…
The Summer of Living Dangerously
As often happens in her neighborhood, Linda Flonnory heard the trouble before she saw it. It was just after 10 p.m. when the noise awoke her. At first, she didn’t realize what it was. The pop, pop, pop came so fast, so loud, she thought it might be fireworks. “It sounded like the Fourth of…
Clinic
Not many bands say as much in two minutes as Clinic, Britain’s garage rock newcomers. Practicing a punk credo of concise, sonic songwriting, the Liverpool quartet has crafted 14 wholly novel and oddly retro tracks for its 31-minute-long debut, Internal Wrangler. Led by frontman Ade Blackburn’s high-pitched howls, Clinic has created a terse compilation of…
Biggest Little Man in Elyria
Carl Taylor Jr. was an unlikely nightclub stud. The men who dominate the pubs and clubs of downtown Elyria sport heavy muscles, drive Ford trucks, and brag about the union job they inherited from Uncle Bobby. Tiny, at just 4-feet-11, disabled, and perpetually unemployed — Taylor hardly fit the type. But Taylor wasn’t one to…
Al Kooper
These two discs provide an overview of the career of Al Kooper, one of the great rock journeymen. Kooper, a spirited multi-instrumentalist and talented vocalist, is perhaps better known for his sideman and production work than for his own efforts. With 18 of 33 tracks previously unreleased, these discs set Kooper in perspective. They chronicle…
Next-to-Last Man Standing
The last day of training camp lures the faithful to the Browns’ practice complex in Berea. These are not Dawg Pounders, but parents and children who fall into mute reverence as players jog onto the field. They stare, hypnotized by the sheer real-lifeness of Tim Couch and Courtney Brown, whose jerseys are mandatory attire in…
The Verve Pipe
There’s no difference between Fuel’s “Bad Day,” Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open,” and the Verve Pipe’s 1997 hit, “The Freshman.” Like a stroll through any new housing development, where every house has the same architecture, every yard the same landscaping, and every person the same high standard of mediocrity, all under the guise of having…
Front-Door Blues
Shoes shined and shirt pressed, Elwood Clark embarks on another evening of campaigning for council in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. He rings doorbells that aren’t answered, ignores dogs that snarl at him, and hands out fliers to people on porches. “I don’t vote,” Frances Diamond, a resident of East 45th Street, tells him as he extends…
The Perfect Guy
Whether the Perfect Guy is just one flawless fellow or an actual full-on band is not very clear. Recent live performances haven’t shed much light on this enigma, either. Onstage, singer-guitarist Dave Petrovich straddles a blurry fence, with a mix of solo acoustic bits and ensemble treatments that has players coming and going. Any momentum…
All Wet
Art McKoy ticks off the names from memory. There was the man in Shaker Heights accused of killing his young daughter. The 19-year-old in East Cleveland who “went on the railroad tracks . . . and let a train run over him.” The guy who, two days after being released from a hospital, “blew his…
Novel Thoughts
Fenske pounds out a page-turner: Sarah Fenske is to be commended for the journalism she demonstrated in her article “The Mayor Who Thought He Was King” [June 21], about the downfall of Avon Lake’s ex-mayor, Vince Urbin. The story was so well written, with its mix of fact, description, and suspense, that it read like…
Mayhem and Madness
A couple of plays opened on the most horrific week since Pearl Harbor, but neither offers much in the way of frivolous distraction. Both works, taken from painful historical events, make audiences privy to a rank world of mayhem, homophobia, and class distinctions. Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project concerns the ramifications of 21-year-old college student…
Tasty Number
“I’ll tell you what that’s not,” my companion offered, as I attempted to wrestle an unwieldy pennant of leaf lettuce around a spoonful of saucy diced chicken. “That’s not date food.” Scarcely a moment later, the devilish lettuce leaf snapped in two, sending the chicken back down to my plate with a splash. “It’s not…
Hilarities Ensues
The beleaguered Gateway District, which struggles to attract diners when its sports venues are silent, is scheduled to get a major fun infusion. Pickwick & Frolic, an ambitious 27,000-square-foot entertainment complex at 2035 East Fourth Street, is expected to debut in November, with a 425-seat Hilarities Comedy Club, a 150-seat cabaret/dinner theater, a cocktail lounge…
Forever, at Last
It took five years, but singer Jon Bunch of Sense Field is both ecstatic and relieved. He’s finally holding a copy of his band’s new disc, Tonight and Forever. “It feels so good,” Bunch laughs, nearly giddy. “I just got the CD, the actual CD itself, yesterday, and I’m holding it in my hands right…
Kent State of Mind
Last year, singer-guitarist Florence Dore played one of her best shows in Cleveland. An English professor at Kent State University at the time, Dore landed the opening slot for oddball singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks at the Grog Shop — her most high-profile gig since moving here. Up until the Fulks show, she had played with a…
