India.Arie was robbed. The husky-voiced singer earned seven Grammy nominations, including album and song of the year, but went home empty-handed. Meanwhile, Alicia Keys — whose Songs in A Minor lacked the thoughtful maturity of Arie’s coming-out party, Acoustic Soul — won five awards. Regardless, Arie should have many more opportunities to decorate her trophy case. Her insightful single “Video,”…
Sitting comfortably at the Cornbread Café with founding Bloodstone member Harry Williams, newest addition Donald Bell and longtime manager Larry Durham, it’s easy to imagine life during the group’s heyday. Best known for the single “Natural High,” which in 1973 soared into the pop Top 10 and to No. 1 on the R&B chart, Bloodstone is one of the few…
An ancient axiom maintains that “old soldiers don’t die, they simply fade away.” Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for pop stars. Like moths drawn to the flame, certain performers can’t stop chasing the spotlight, no matter what the cost. For example, Aerosmith, a once viable if nonessential group, hasn’t put out anything decent in years. (Rule of thumb: If…
Collection check: Who still has their CDs from the early ’90s British invasion that included knob-twiddlers such as the Soup Dragons, Black Grape, Pop Will Eat Itself, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine? If that’s you, Jesus Jones is somewhere in your stacks, probably represented by “Right Here, Right Now,” one of the few hits of the…
Super summer concert tours have been a staple in popular culture since the mid-’80s, when the Monsters of Rock first dared to put headlining acts on the same bill. That dream lives on through tours such as Sammy and Diamond Dave’s (sadly, postponed) and Trent Green’s Rock and Roll Fantasy (sadly, taking place on Sunday, June 23, at Verizon Amphitheater)….
Purveyors of rockabilly performance art swimming in rye whiskey, the members of Southern Culture on the Skids (pictured) live on the edge, downing corn liquor and emptying bottles of hair spray daily. Proficient at channeling the Patsy Cline-like pinings of the average doublewide-dwelling homemaker, SCOTS leaps beyond caricature and kitsch, finding the real charm that’s hidden behind the paisley Naugahyde…
The Allman Brothers Band’s story fits Behind the Music’s mad-libs approach to music history perfectly: “It was (insert year), and (insert band name) was riding high on the success of (insert album name), but little did its members know that their roughest times were just around the corner.” Yet the group has moved past the tragic loss of brother Duane…
Bob Schneider isn’t just the guy who cleaned up at last year’s Austin Music Awards, capturing both Songwriter and Musician of the Year titles, and he definitely isn’t a typical Texas songwriter. He’s fronted party bands with names such as Joe Rockhead, the Ugly Americans and the Scabs, and he’s not afraid to mingle funk with his sensitivity or to…
Offering a pearl of wisdom to young up-and-comer Junior Brown, music legend Ernest Tubb simply advised, “Keep it country, son.” Now in his mid-forties, Brown has stayed true to those sage words. Armed with his “guit-steel,” a double-necked six-string-and-steel monstrosity dubbed “Big Red,” Brown embraces everything from Dick Dale’s surf sounds to Jimi Hendrix’s acid-rock pyrotechnics. There’s little doubt, however,…
No Other Love offers some likely and appealing futures for rock-and-rollers who still give a shit about songs in this currently DJ-dominated century. The album’s creator, Chuck Prophet, has come a long way since his days as a kid guitarist for ’80s roots rockers Green on Red. His earliest solo recordings, beginning with 1989’s Brother Aldo, were fine (albeit slightly…
Stevie Wonder has spent most of the past three decades winning accolades but few disciples. Now, though, Wonder is at last seeing the props translated into real musical influence. Of the many current neosoul acts inspired by Wonder’s innervating albums from the ’70s (including, among many others, Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keyes and Glenn Lewis), none has tapped into Wonder’s strengths…
It’s hard to avoid feeling sentimental about the Blasters. In the early ’80s, the Blasters was one of only a few bands that made roots music important for young people. (Historical note: It wasn’t called “roots music” back then.) The closest we can get to a Blasters set these days is Dave Alvin’s annual Grand Emporium encores (the next of…
Moby had a number of options after the enormous success of 1999’s Play, none of which would have made all members of his growing legion of critics happy. Some argued he should throw the mainstream another curveball like 1996’s guitar rocker Animal Rights. After all, Play employed the crassest marketing strategy imaginable, selling every cut to advertisers. Moby is known…
Between flirtations with sexual politics in Oleanna and the con artists of seemingly every other script he’s written, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet has made time for the children’s play Binky Rudich and the Space Pandas. Theatre for Young America’s program for the show suggests classes in “space travel, time, astronomy, mathematics relativity.” But it might also consider a…
It’s all about give and take with Poppies 3. On the generous side, the bespectacled St. Louis-based punk-pop trio founded Artists United Through Music, an organization that holds charity concerts, works with the Easter Seals Foundation and donates part of the proceeds from every sale of Poppies 3’s debut disc, Pop This, to St. Louis Food Outreach. Take-wise, the guys…
Freedom of choice is what you’ve got/Freedom from choice is what you want. Devo’s classic chorus, perhaps the wisest couplet ever spoken by a man who wore stacked Legos as headgear, sums up summer’s quandary. An overabundance of entertainment options ensures at least one way to have a great time each evening while causing doubts about which choice is best…
Most bands’ groupies are looking for sex; RockFour’s groupies want to talk about peace in the Middle East. Such is the life of a rock band from Israel, a land often in the news, but not because of its voluminous contributions to the rock-pop pantheon. A couple of guys in Soul Coughing, Ofra Haza’s sampled voice on “Pump up the…
Truth Cell guitarist Shane Murray plays in one of the Midwest’s most deafening and aggressive bands. He also owns a gas mask. But it’s not what you think. Murray isn’t looking to become a pinch hitter for Slipknot or Mushroomhead; he’s too busy preparing for Armageddon. “I carry a gas mask everywhere I go now. It’s always in my vehicle,”…
It’s fitting that the new Margaret Cho concert film, The Notorious C.H.O., opens the 2002 Kansas City Gay and Lesbian Film Festival: Cho embodies all the traits of this year’s films. She’s gay at least in spirit (having admitted to dabblings in her last concert film, I’m the One That I Want) but has many other facets. She’s raunchy…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually in a small town. A Catholic Southern town may…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if he stops sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that voids all that’s come before it. Minority Report can barely move during its final half hour, which is a shame, because until then it’s a frenetic, engaging…
Contract labor: This is to correct misinformation reported by Joe Miller in “Secret Warrick” (June 13). He infers that Newspaper Electronics Corporation was awarded a contract due to procedural errors by the low bidder, World Wide Technology. The procedural error was actually a response by that firm which did not comply with the technical specifications of the bid. Of nine…
President George W. Bush praised Kansas City June 11 for keeping the drinking water safe from bioterrorism. “I was pleased to take a big gulp of water when I arrived,” Bush said after visiting a water-treatment plant. We’re guessing the water tour seemed a convenient way of looking presidential while making a fund-raising trip on behalf of Jim Talent’s Senate…
In about 1850, the good people of the Town of Kansas, Missouri, began hitching up their britches and scampering up the Missouri River’s south bluff to build a real city above the flood-prone village they had shoehorned into the narrow plain between the river and the ridge. Eventually, as Kansas City grew south, its residents forgot about the Town of…
