I’m always amazed by the e-mail I get from readers, who have much more scathing opinions than I do. Like the guy who sent in his 2 cents after last week’s column about tipping (“Tip Storm,” July 18). He said it should be “the responsibility of the restaurant owner to pay servers a decent wage” so that skinflint customers wouldn’t…
Here’s a revealing phenomenon: Johnson County attracts most of the city’s corporate-owned “fantasy” restaurants. People who live in this mecca of shopping malls, fast-food outlets and cookie-cutter housing developments seem especially willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to dinner. Who cares if the food at the Rainforest Café is no more exotic than the menu at Houlihan’s right…
The concept of the telephone booth was forever changed by Superman. Once just a place where a pedestrian with some spare change might stop to make a call, the telephone booth is now a mythical place where shy, bespectacled men can be transformed into muscular superheroes who wear tights with confidence. The transformation has been slow for Tim Brown, owner…
Ever since O Brother, Where Art Thou? reintroduced moviegoers to rural American music via the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys (the movie’s soundtrack has become a runaway best-seller, spending 84 weeks on Billboard’s country chart), people have been falling in love with the sound of the fiddle as though it were brand new. So the crowds at the Platte County Fair’s…
England and France have never been fond of each other, and for centuries the strain has given writers plenty to work with. One such writer was Baroness Emmuska Orczy, who created The Scarlet Pimpernel in book form, then on stage. Then, propagating like Danielle Steele, she cranked out eleven sequels. The musical adaptation by Nan Knighton and Jekyll and…
The appeal of Charles Schulz’s “Li’l Folks,” who grew into the world-renowned Peanuts characters, has always been rooted in the fact that their traits aren’t exclusive to children. Charlie Brown’s inferiority, Lucy’s superiority and Linus’ philosophical musings show up at America’s water coolers every day. As Linus tells the round-headed kid at the beginning of American Heartland Theatre’s You’re…
It seems as if just about everyone owned a copy of Counting Crows 1993 debut, August and Everything After, a melodic and mournful work that sold seven million copies. The inevitable backlash caused most listeners to move on, but the group never wavered from its sound or style, issuing two stellar followups that solidified a devoted fanbase and kept the…
In the past, Blackalicious’ Gift of Gab and Chief Excel wasted a lot of breath dissing mainstream rap, but the crew’s latest album focuses on broader themes. The current single, “Feel That Way,” works like an intimate list of meditation topics, listing concepts and actions that convey love in a personal way. “Brain Washers” (featuring guest vocalist Ben Harper) attempts…
Former Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford possesses one of hard rock’s great voices, a billion-octave banshee wail that spawned a whole generation of British heavy metal. Rightly, Crucible is built around his leathery pipes — Halford’s vocals are often tripled for maximum impact, and he dominates every number. But the singer is also smart enough to employ a youthful band…
In just under an hour, The Osbourne Family Album gives Jack and Kelly Osbourne’s burgeoning music-biz gigs a boost (dour Dillusion, the group that talent scout Jack’s been developing for Epic, appears here for that reason alone; Kelly previews her forthcoming debut with a rote rocked-up run-through of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”) while paying tribute to Ozzy (there’s a blizzard…
It would be hard to find a better example of a major-label rip-off than this 23-minute remix “album.” Containing only six uninspired rehashings of previously released tracks, Stash is practically over before it begins. Even worse, half the songs were already overhauled (in slightly different form) on Cypress’ 1996 remix effort Unreleased & Revamped. The Hill’s self-titled debut was one…
Rumbles from hip-hop’s future grumble through the Anti-Pop Consortium’s Arrhythmia, disrupt balance on Prefuse 73’s Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives and buckle knees in Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein. It’s the sound of the steady bump-thwack-bump-thwack backdrop being fucked with. In the same way Ornette Coleman challenged jazz’s steadiness, an important movement in hip-hop is questioning the notion of the…
From a distance, the usually black-clad, thin, bespectacled Alejandro Escovedo has the seriousness and intensity of a cleric from a Thomas Hart Benton painting. Maybe that’s why this town loves him so much — and the reason we get him for more than one night. His play By the Hand of the Father, a tale of his family’s struggles and…
When people hear the name Rick James, they tend to think of two things: 1) that irresistible bass line from 1981’s “Super Freak,” so good it propelled MC Hammer to the top of the pop charts nearly a decade later; 2) crack pipes. While James’ sordid history has been recounted ad nauseam, many have forgotten his mammoth musical contributions….
It would be easy to attribute the early success of Potato Moon, an acoustic bluegrass-rooted group, to the trickle down of the Grammy-winning, platinum-selling O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. But that theory fails to take into account the band’s pre-Brother beginnings — and the beverages of local coffee house the Hi-Hat, the main outlet former employee and Potato Moon…
Pegged early on as a Bruce Springsteen for the trailer-park set, John Mellencamp carved a niche for himself in the mid-’80s by embracing his Midwestern roots and playing straight from the Heartland. While alleged Americana rockers such as Springsteen and Tom Petty chilled in their coastal mansions, Mellencamp remained a committed Indiana native, refusing to sell out or make commercial…
In most ways, Pinmonkey is a relatively traditional country band. There’s singer Michael Reynolds’ amazingly pure, astoundingly high, lonesome voice at the center, equally at home with the Carter Family’s “Lonesome Pine Special” and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ mournful “Two Days From Knowing” (not to mention his own slinky “Black Train”). Chad Jeffers’ tasty dobro, lap steel and twangcentric…
Karrin Allyson continues to build on her national reputation, making each homecoming even more triumphant than its predecessor. On the strength of 2001’s Grammy-nominated Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane, Allyson recently earned a starring turn on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. With a gift for languages that helps her music stand apart from that of contemporaries such as Jane Monheit,…
Moxie, a Radiohead-worshipping post-punk quartet, has recently started experimenting with keyboards and drum machines. Its staunchly sociopolitical lyrics betray both higher education and party-weary awareness; its classically trained, jazz-informed bassist/pianist concocts complex countermelodies, and its drummer speaks only in arena-sized exclamation points. Basically, it’s the type of overqualified bar band with which music snobs would instantly become infatuated, except for…
Under most circumstances, it wouldn’t be especially newsworthy if a local group that never played an original song live in its three years of existence decided to call it quits. But when a bar band as omnipresent as Simplexity aces its founder and changes its name, someone’s got some explaining to do. For that we turn to Tyson Leslie, the…
Mac Lethal is a hip-hop hunk. Just ask Jenni, the seventeen-year-old Webmaster who handpicked the Kansas City, Kansas-based MC for a spot on her gushing site, hiphophunks.com, which has been featured in the pages of XXL and Rolling Stone. “The Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and O-Town are cute and all, but there are SO many girls who like them,” squeals…
Not much has changed in the eleven years since Mike Myers used the first Wayne’s World movies as a personal launching pad, only tipping his James Bond-spoofing Austin Powers hand when he was strong enough at the box office to reap the rewards of his licensed characters. Now those spy-movie caricatures — the major ones played by Myers himself —…
Jean slicing: If C.J. Janovy’s “Pledge Drive” (July 11) was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, it missed its mark. It will be misunderstood by many and makes it appear at first glance that Jean Carnahan and not John Ashcroft made the statement, “There is no pledge but the one ‘under God.’ Just like there is no king but Jesus.” I think…
At 18th and Vine, you’ll find empty storefronts and a couple of tiny museums on streets quieter than a muted trumpet. Soon, though, a few dozen lucky locals will take up residence within strolling distance at 22nd Street, where condos and townhouses will eventually be built. “People can walk down to 18th and Vine and see some of the greatest…
