Owen Hawkins is running out of time. It’s April 24, 2002, and a minimonsoon has just washed his press conference off the steps of the Liberty Memorial. He’d been planning to announce his intention to resurrect the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival, an eleven-year Kansas City institution organizers had just pronounced dead. Working on their feet, Hawkins and his…
If Suzi’s (see review) feels like a 1950s roadhouse — right down to the neon beer signs and the cigarette smoke — the eighteen-year-old Café Allegro — which officially closes this week — was the essence of a Reagan-era bistro. Fans of restaurateur Steve Cole’s elegant boîte would argue that the place was as timeless in its individual style as,…
What’s the difference between a roadside diner and a roadhouse? Traditionally, the latter is more about drinking than eating, often with live entertainment, a well-stocked bar and a rowdy ambience. If there is food, it’s a no-frills menu of steaks and fried chicken. In the 1940s and ’50s, Kansas City had quite a few such roadhouses on the outskirts…
Some people who were in junior high during the Gulf War remember spouting slogans that probably caused their parents to hyperventilate — or threaten to wash someone’s mouth out with soap. “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity,” kids giggled before stopping to tie their Keds. Never mind that making prank calls to classmates was about as close as…
In 1986, an overeducated Nick Currie sat in a rented room playing his acoustic guitar. Taking the name Momus from a Greek god banned by Zeus from Mount Olympus, he set out to rewrite the Bible in song. The result was his first album, Circus Maximus. The songs on Circus Maximus tell biblical tales, playing masterfully with language so that…
In Kansas City the last five years, the only restaurant to have generated a reservation-making frenzy has been Lidia’s; in its first few months, attempting to get a seat there was like trying to land a marlin without breaking a sweat. But in New York, hot restaurants pop up every other week, and the tabloids and magazines such as…
The prize-winning documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys recounts the tale of Zephyr, a crew of Southern California surfers that revolutionized skateboarding during the mid-’70s. With its ten songs spanning only forty minutes, the movie’s period-piece soundtrack aspires to emulate the running time of vinyl records from the pre-CD era. But though the trend toward shorter CDs is welcome, Dogtown suffers from…
In a young man’s mind/It’s a simple world/There’s a little room for music/And the rest is girls, testifies the Mooney Suzuki’s out-of-breath vocalist/guitarist Sammy James Junior. As so many guys can attest, that’s the truth — and that’s what the group’s second album is all about. The Mooney Suzuki, so named for Can’s first two vocalists, Malcolm Mooney and Damo…
Well, I guess this is growing up. Known primarily for prepubescent pop-punk, Blink-182 has never been a band that took itself too seriously. But bemoaning the awkwardness of adolescence can have its drawbacks, especially for musicians who are well into adulthood and looking to expand their artistic scope — risky business when their average fan still wears a training bra…
Have you ever been hated or discriminated against? Eminem inquires early into his third disc, disingenuously courting empathy from the groups he’s tormented in the past. I have, he volunteers. I’ve been protested and demonstrated against. Using several novel strategies to establish absence of malice, Eminem presents himself as contrite and innocuous. His real-life misstep — assaulting a club bouncer…
What makes Heathen David Bowie’s finest hour since 1980’s Scary Monsters? You could assume it’s because he rounded up that album’s producer (Tony Visconti, sorely missed) and special guest (Pete Townshend, laying down a “Slow Burn” here), but push past initial conjectures to the deeper revelation: Bowie, stripped of disguise and self-disgust, is at his best when playing only Bowie….
Like his buddy Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker shows signs of drifting away from singer/songwriter territory and becoming an industry. He’s released an autobiography, Gypsy Songman (in which he reveals his birth name — Ronald Clyde Crosby). He makes frequent retreats to Belize, where he recorded his latest CD, Cowboy Boots and Bathin’ Suits, which features the decidedly Parrothead-friendly tune…
Alvin “Youngblood” Hart has moments when he sounds like the second coming of Taj Mahal, a man who helped him considerably early in his career. But whereas Taj Mahal can be elegant and debonair — when he’s not completely gutbucket — Hart comes across as an impassioned protester, a blues activist willing also to have some fun. With his long,…
Otis Clay burns so brightly that it’s impossible to turn away from his shine. Immaculately dressed, his smile welcoming every person in the room, Clay rivets an audience even when he’s simply patting down his soaking-wet brow between songs. Like Sam Cooke, Clay developed his voice and stage charisma at church, and he mixes generous helpings of gospel into his…
When Natalie Merchant was a twenty-something chanteuse fronting 10,000 Maniacs, she was every nerdish schoolboy’s crush. With her unadorned voice, intelligent lyrics and librarian chic, Merchant broke a few million hearts and spawned the Lilith Fair generation in the process. Her decision to go solo in the mid-’90s didn’t change much: The music became moodier and more worldly, but the…
Having already reduced the wait between albums — after a six-year gap between 1992’s Sweet Old World and her Grammy-winning Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, she returned with Essence a mere three years later — singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams now borders on prolific. She’s written nearly a dozen songs for her seventh solo album, due later in 2002. Her voice…
When a small group of reform-minded Democrats formed the Committee for County Progress in 1964, they selected Dr. Charlie Wheeler, a 38-year-old pathologist and lawyer, for the Jackson County coroner race on their first slate of candidate endorsements. He won and in later years persuaded voters to make him a county executive, then Kansas City mayor. Now 75, Wheeler has…
We’re all fagged out after Saturday’s deep theological debates over homosexuality during the Love Won Out fest at Pleasant Valley Baptist Church. Focus on the Family has finally skipped town, leaving behind thousands of permanently cured homosexual Christians who nonetheless are, according to Shirley Phelps-Roper,daughter of Fred Phelps and mother of ten of his church members, “irreversibly doomed.” Along with…
Kemper tantrum: Regarding Mark Kind’s Kansas City Strip (June 13): Nice story. It goes to show you that the Kempers are no angels, like they seem to think. Couldn’t they have talked to the dog owner about this instead of wanting to kill it? As they are also trying to kill our area racetrack, they deserve the bad publicity. It…
Talk about trading down: Adam Sandler now stands in for Gary Cooper, Winona Ryder for Jean Arthur, screenwriter Tim Herlihy (The Waterboy, Billy Madison) for Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night, Meet John Doe) and director Steven Brill (Little Nicky) for the immortal Frank Capra. The mind reels at the possibilities hinted at by Mr. Deeds, a mawkish, ill-conceived…
What’s most surprising about Nine Queens, a wry if awfully derivative caper come-on from first-time feature writer-director Fabiín Bielinsky, is how easily it suckers you into its swindle. You’ve sniffed out this con before in the films of David Mamet and the novels of Jim Thompson, where no one is who he or she seems and nothing is done with…
An obscure bar band from the neohippie hollows of southwest Colorado that had never managed a charting single, a gold record or radio support, String Cheese Incident could’ve pulled the plug on its career years ago. Instead, it hustled to become an amazingly successful touring phenomenon. Fusing bluegrass traditionalism with urban funk, the group inspires fanatical responses from the jam-band…
Bad Religion, a 22-year-old band from Southern California with a crossed-out cross as a logo and a stern doctorate-level zoologist as a singer, headlines this year’s Warped Tour. Gametime, a group of less-than-22-year-olds from Kansas City with a penchant for rocking out in churches and an impossibly jovial frontman, will share Verizon Amphitheater parking-lot space with the melodic-hardcore heathens on…
Mary J Blige is more than qualified to be a drama queen. After growing up on the mean streets of Yonkers, New York, she landed a record deal, then struggled with depression and drug addiction. The singer also weathered highly publicized breakups with Sean “P-Diddy” Combs and K-Ci Haley, of K-Ci & Jo-Jo fame. But Blige has always turned…
