“Freemdoom is an evil dog,” it is explained in the miniature comic book that accompanies Masters of the Hemisphere’s new record. “Even his fellow Mafia members know that crossing Freemdoom equals a tragic fate. In fact, they had learned this lesson so well that the mob bosses decided to band together to steal his corporate interests, thereby forcing him to…
There is something about releasing two albums on the same day that smacks of hubris. Bruce Springsteen’s ill-fated joint release of Lucky Town and Human Touch was an indication that he had been left behind by the rock music world. Guns N’ Roses, with its bloated, filler-laden Use Your Illusion albums, signaled the death knell of hair-metal grandiosity. That’s not…
In the mid-’90s, DJ Quik put Missouri on the map in a dubious fashion by suggesting St. Louis was “Jus Lyke Compton.” Back then, Quik was an up-and-coming star, with a squeaky voice like Eazy-E and beat-crafting skills that established him as one of hip-hop’s top producers. But like Dr. Dre, Quik took a “been there, done that” attitude toward…
Long before K.C. and the Sunshine Band came to prominence, the word “boogie” had another meaning. It referred to a dirty and dangerous style of the blues. The first band to help popularize boogie music worldwide was Canned Heat. Formed 34 years ago in Los Angeles, the group married swampy blues with rock. Delivering such hits as “Goin’ Up the…
The good news is that PitchWeekly got to hear Kenny Wayne Shepherd unplugged. The bad news is that for Shepherd, “unplugged” means a cell phone. “We just have to deal with it,” Shepherd says over the static of a connection decidedly more remote than any cellular carrier would like advertised. “The Black Crowes are doing a soundcheck, so I can’t…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven, but often effective, adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character known to his friends as Fuckhead (or FH), in…
Rather than asking whether this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is) or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include: a glaringly improbable shift of temperament (Harrison Ford); a recurring…
Cover Me Your cover stories are really lacking substance. Pure fluff. Stories about rich bankers (Mike Walker’s “Jerry Green: Sports Talk Empire Builder,” June 29) and inbreeds who want to be sheriff (Allie Johnson’s “Urban Cowboy,” June 8) should be left to trash papers like The Kansas City Star or something. Here’s a novel idea: Why don’t you write about…
A tangled Web: When The Kansas City Star kicked off a special promotion of its KansasCity.com site late last month, the big ads that started running in the newspaper didn’t just showcase uninspired Knight Ridder copy (“Umbrella? No umbrella? Umbrella?”). One of the ads — “Get the current news, while it’s still current” — also inadvertently directed readers to a…
When does a game show with 16 exhibitionists competing for supremacy on an uninhabited island become newsworthy? When it brings in big ratings. That’s what has happened with the CBS ratings savior Survivor, which has become as much a part of the news this summer as exorbitant gas prices and the John E. Robinson murder case. The glorified game show…
Frances Frech and Jereme Dillard share a passion. Two months before Time magazine published its July 17 cover story on Alzheimer’s, in which it pointed to “sticky plaques” of protein on the brain as a possible cause of the disease, Frances Frech had written all about “abnormal protein plaques” in her Health Information Project newsletter. The Time article went on…
Loretta O’Connor’s eyesight faded excruciatingly slowly, a result of diabetes. She lost her vision in her left eye in 1982. The things she could see through her right eye became darker and more blurry until she went legally blind in 1997. She says it’s like having seven layers of Saran Wrap over her eyeballs. O’Connor has learned to navigate the…
Everything started smoothly. It was Memorial Day, the hottest day of the year so far — nearly 90 degrees. And though this part of the country is blessed with very few beaches, that didn’t stop Chancellor Cochran from putting on the Mayday Beach Concert and Party 2000. The man’s nickname is Chance, after all, so why shouldn’t he have taken…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy turned on the television and went to the movies. Never…
Once upon a time, before the Reagan era, salad bars were something straight out of hippieville, stocked with such weird stuff as alfalfa sprouts. In the early 1970s, the idea of a “salad bar” was considered, like, far out. In America Eats Out, his history of restaurants in America, John Mariani tells the story of how a Chicago college dropout…
13 Thursday Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf may have some of the most biting one-liners to date. Edward Albee’s play was considered sadistic, shocking, and sadomasochistic when it debuted in 1962. But Albee, in the middle of the Camelot years, knew that an underlying current was about to sweep America from its bed of innocence. Albee’s play took a critical…
As television found its way into American homes during the ’50s, radio personalities found technology pulling at them to change their routines or get left behind. Torey Southwick felt the pull of this changing world and became a “one-puppet puppeteer quite by accident.” In the late ’40s and early ’50s Southwick was a radio announcer /actor in Akron, Ohio, with…
Nothing can possibly prepare you for the onslaught of cement in one of the area’s newest attractions, the Gangster Tour. Chances are that whether you have resided in the metro for a long time or are just passing through, the connection between many cement structures scattered throughout the city and the name Tom Pendergast hardly means anything to you except…
Quick-To-See Smith works with subtle irony and juxtaposition to create a humorous look at her experience as a Native American artist. The title of the exhibit itself, 40,000 Years of American Art, takes a sly jab at the academic definitions of American art, a genre that is often said to have matured only after World War II, thereby rejecting a…
The NBA and NHL seasons have come to a close, and baseball now has the major sport spotlight all to itself. As the July sun heats up the pennant races of our national pastime, die-hard football fans begin to wonder whether the cool, crisp autumn Sundays will ever arrive. Sure, NFL training camps open this month and exhibition games are…
This seems to have been the year the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival became a Certs commercial by crafting two genres in one. After the mix of farce and furor in As You Like It comes the black comedy and intense tragedy of King Lear. Directed by Bruce Levitt, Lear is set gratuitously in the 1920s and played as an…
If there’s a cocktail party where the talk doesn’t lead to speculation about the missed potential at 18th and Vine or Union Station, I haven’t been invited. Dorothy Parker’s great line “There’s no there, there” has been uttered more than once. So surprise and crossed fingers accompany the bushel of talent on display at the H&R Block City Stage at…
Categories: Music Tags: Dwight Yoakam, Echo
Categories: Music Tags: Echo, Sabrina Staires
