Tracks and Fields Death and taxes: Regarding Casey Logan’s “Dead in Its Tracks” (July 19): Great story. St. Louis and Illinois have a bistate tax. Kansas is doing a commuter train from Kansas to Union Station. Why isn’t Kansas City doing a bistate tax with Kansas? Not because Science City was a big flop with a bistate tax. Howard Carson…
When the Backstreet Boys postponed their summer tour dates because of A.J. McLean’s bout with alcoholism and depression (or, as the same cynics who accuse Dale Earnhardt Jr. of winning a fixed race might posit, because of a publicity stunt unveiled on TRL just weeks before the release of the new ‘N Sync disc), the parents of eight-year-old Jennifer Fotopoulos…
The Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival always offers a fairly comprehensive revue of the best artists currently playing within those genres, but this year’s lineup goes to new extremes. There’s a King (Clarentz) and the queen of blues, Koko Taylor (pictured); a “Guitar” (Beverly Watkins) and a “Fiddler” (Claude Williams); a youth ensemble (from Paseo Academy) and a group…
To many serious musicians, cover bands are either a pathetic punch line or, if those musicians have done time in such a band somewhere along the way to pay the bills, a mortifying skeleton in the closet to rival mullet-sporting yearbook photos. But punk is often seen as a conscious refutation of proper musicianship, so it’s no surprise that so…
Spring 2001 carried with it a mild bonanza for fans of soporific cult band Red House Painters and RHP singer Mark Kozelek, the closest thing the shoegazing set has to a sex symbol. In terms of product, there is nothing mild about the bounty of chilly strumming comprising first Kozelek’s debut full-length solo effort, then the long-delayed Old Ramon. Put…
Most of the time, Inside Out just might be the most sonically ambitious album ever to come out of Nashville. Coproducing here with Mark Wright, Yearwood corrals her ample voice within a wall of sound that’s dense, dynamic and surprisingly eclectic. She fronts gospel choirs, borrows rhythms from a Whitman’s sampler of R&B-inspired sources, swipes guitar solos and drum fills…
It’s gotta be tough being the son of McKinley Morganfield — a.k.a. Muddy Waters. For a while, William “Big Bill” Morganfield consciously avoided following in Waters’ footsteps, working as a teacher and not even buying a guitar until after his father’s death. But like so many prodigal sons, he’s wound up exactly where his father hoped he might, and he’s…
Bare Jr., a loud, melodic rock band fronted by the son of country songwriter Bobby Bare, has managed to fly under almost everyone’s radar. Nobody, including its label, seems to know what to make of a power-drive rock band with a featured dulcimer player, which is why these poor guys wound up trying to win over the world from the…
Reading titles such as “Song for Nico” and “My Suicide” on the CD cover, you could peg Angels of Light as a Velvets-obsessed New York project before breaking the shrink wrap. But though the ten long songs on How I Loved You confirm the influence of early Lou Reed on songwriter (and Young God founder) Michael Gira, the album is…
When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, much of the Western world was mesmerized by images of the aging bulwark, long a symbol of irreconcilable differences. I too sat in front of my television, but it was not the tangible collapse of a Cold War relic that held me transfixed. What I saw was far more illuminating. As the newscam…
With Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the New Theatre promises a spectacle of “Biblical proportions,” and you know what that means: Start your engines, Cecil B. DeMille! Get as many people on the stage as physically possible. Blind the audiences with color. Dazzle them with sequins. And pray that the tunes and the talent result in something besides…
When Terri Morgan posted fliers advertising a Wudang Dragon Sword workshop with Master Yuzeng Liu of China, she got a few different responses. Some people expressed genuine interest. Some knew martial arts and recognized a rare opportunity when they saw it. Then there were the people who had seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. “Part of my motivation for organizing…
When aspiring screenwriter Lauren Noble entered her senior year at Notre Dame de Sion high school in 1999, she was having an Ally Sheedy kind of moral dilemma. “I was trying to determine who to be friends with,” she says, “because the people I was running with were not from my school. Yet I was feeling like no one…
Paul Barrere has seen it all in his almost thirty years as the guitarist for Little Feat, so much so that his life reads like the quintessential script for one of VH-1’s Behind the Music episodes. When Little Feat first formed in 1969, he auditioned as a bass player more as a favor to friend and fellow musician Lowell George…
The six members of the Lawrence-based hip-hop group The Bomb Squad (not to be confused with the production team of the same name that cranked out hits for Public Enemy and Ice Cube back in the day) are hanging out at the annual Reggae Festival at Penn Valley Park. Although the rappers — especially Alrick “Ten-10” Johnson, who hails from…
Dean Fertita, songwriter and lead guitarist for Detroit-based pop group the Waxwings, might be the least career-minded musician this side of Guided by Voices’ Bob Pollard to make a great album. Fortunately, the Waxwings are signed to Bobsled Records, an Illinois-based label with a small but brilliant roster of neo-classic pop acts. And fortunately, Bobsled’s eponymous founder, Bob Salerno, personally…
A third Jurassic Park movie was of course inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records. (It also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting.) But when you have one of the hottest box office properties of all time, isn’t it…
“I know and they know what I’ll be doing , but with respect to my noncompete with Channel 9, I’d rather not talk about it at this time. The general managers at both stations are dealing with the noncompete issues. We know the ‘what’ but we don’t know the ‘when.’” — Dave Stewart, who could be forced to sit out…
Metro Sports, the local media’s slumbering titan, took the first steps toward fulfilling its tremendous potential last week when the not-yet-five-year-old cable sports channel hired Dave Stewart away from the runaway ratings leader KMBC Channel 9. Stewart has spent seventeen years in Channel 9’s on-deck circle while Len Dawson has taken his turn (and his time) at the plate. Stewart…
To Fur, With Love Call of the wild: I was a little shocked at Joe Miller’s “Critter Camp Out” story (July 5) — not at the content but that any attention would be paid to such an obscure group of people. As a furry myself, I wish he had made some clarifications. The fur suit-wearing folk at that little get-together…
The Twilight District, Episode 3: Thank God that Elma Warrick resisted calls for her resignation this past spring after the school board member foolishly lied about whether she’d railed against “rural redneck racist” Missouri lawmakers in a taped radio interview. Now Warrick may be the board’s sole voice of reason. At the July 10 meeting, when Patricia Kurtz admitted that…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question—of its impressiveness, you can make up your own mind—but about…
Members of Christ the King Catholic Church at 8510 Wornall Road were puzzled. Even as the nation rode high on one of the longest waves of economic growth in history, the church’s food pantry, which provides sustenance for the poor, was attracting more and more clients. Church members set out to understand why. “It started slowly,” says Virginia Scaletty, member…
Chubby’s on Broadway may seem an unlikely place to hatch a plan for civic warfare, but on the steamy Sunday evening of July 8, thirty or so malcontents scurried into the brightly lit diner to talk in conspiratorial tones about light rail. For three hours, the group surveyed maps of the plan, scanned the city’s 77-page proposal, scribbled notes and…
