At a Grand Emporium show a few years back, Charlie Musselwhite leaned back to jump into his first solo, then stopped for a measure to get his mustache just so — and grown men just about burst into tears of anticipation. Full of stories of playing with people like Big Joe Williams and John Lee Hooker, Musselwhite has become the…
The members of Big Head Todd and the Monsters were once Columbine High School’s most famous alumni, a distinction forever changed in 1999 by a pair of gun-toting schmucks. BHT’s season in the sun occurred nearly a decade ago with the success of its major-label debut, Sister Sweetly, which went platinum and garnered the group scads of radio play. The…
Often, artist handlers pull out the phrase classically trained in an attempt to legitimize pop hacks by pointing at their year of piano lessons or otherwise justifying the existence of overqualified bottom-feeders. (Kip Winger attended Julliard.) Occasionally, though, it’s an apt description of a vocalist who forsakes an opera career to make lush, sultry songs informed by impressive instruction. Denali’s…
In the family tree of punk, All is one of the places where the boxes and arrows become hopelessly snarled. Part of SoCal punk’s Generation 1.5, All is most of the Descendents, who got together in 1987, minus singer Milo Aukerman, plus singer Chad Price, who also works with the alt-country group Drag the River, which formed after the band…
On the cover of Angst’s debut full-length demo, a dour teen-age girl wears a plaid skirt, knee-high socks and a paint-peeling scowl. Her knees lock together, her calves form right angles in opposite directions and her ankles curl toward each other, forming an improbable diamond. She holds an open umbrella over her left shoulder, though there’s no evident rainfall, and…
Grupo Niche’s frontman, Jairo Varela, is something of a cultural hero in his native Colombia. When he started Niche in 1980, Colombia lacked a significant salsa scene. Niche played cumbia (a backbeat-driven form that combines Hispanic melodic structures with African rhythms and Native American harmonic components) at first, then evolved into one of Latin America’s top salsa orchestras, paving the…
The symmetry is perfect — so poetic it could’ve been scripted. In July 1927, the Carter Family headed down from its mountain to record for the first time. In the rear- view mirror of its borrowed Model-A Ford was Poor Valley, the rugged stretch of Virginia the group would later immortalize in “My Clinch Mountain Home.” Ahead, barely fifteen miles…
It’s daunting to hear that John Sayles’ new film, Sunshine State, is almost two and a half hours long and consists mostly of calm conversations. But don’t be deterred, or you’ll miss a study of character, class and changing times that puts Robert Altman’s stodgy Gosford Park to shame. Thanks to Sayles’ tight script, the pace never feels slack —…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as director, is another thriller in the mode of, but better than, True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (1996), two of his last three films. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Hero Terry McCaleb is another variation on a character…
Pitch in: Bruce Hibbs wrote that he lives in “sterile Johnson County and see the Pitch often” (Letters, July 4). Since I was reading a copy of the Pitch I picked up at the Sahara Café (8125 Metcalf), I can only assume that Mr. Hibbs doesn’t venture north of 119th Street in Johnson County. J. Kannard Overland Park Child Labor…
Each spring, Kansas City tax returns pile up in the mailbox that Jerald B. Wolfson rents at the post office in the federal building downtown. The preprinted envelopes mention the “City of Kansas City, Missouri, Revenue Division,” but the box number is Wolfson’s. As would any sensible Kansas Citian old enough to remember Tom Pendergast, Wolfson concludes that he’s either…
Former Kansas City, Missouri, School Board member Michelle Hensley returned to town quietly in January, but this summer she has launched a noisy campaign against prostitution along Independence Avenue. On July 23, Hensley was on television news and on KMBZ 980’s Tom Becka radio show talking about a group she has formed with another Northeast neighborhood activist, Bobbi Baker-Hughes. No…
It’s a hot and sticky July afternoon on Kansas City’s West Side. A rusty truck cruises noisily along Southwest Boulevard as men lean out to whistle at the women on the corner. A block away, families gather inside a tiny orange Mexican restaurant for a late lunch. Up 21st Street, near Observation Park, atop the highest hill in the neighborhood,…
It doesn’t matter that the most famous Cuban-born television star, Desi Arnaz (see review), died in 1986. For the price of a sandwich, diners can “become” the late Desi or his ex-wife, Lucille Ball, or John Wayne or Marilyn Monroe. At the six-week-old Celebrity’s Sidewalk Café (119th and Blackbob Road in Olathe), customers are issued a celebrity name rather than…
Long before Americans had heard of Fidel Castro, Issac Delgado, Andy Garcia or the motherless Elian Gonzales, there was only one truly famous Cuban: Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III. To ten million weekly I Love Lucy viewers, the singer-bandleader was better known by his onscreen name, Ricky Ricardo, than his stage name, Desi Arnaz. At the same…
When Sarah Heironimus-Bishop uncovers a nipple to feed her ten-month-old daughter in public, people either look at her in confused disbelief or try their best to ignore her. Most of us expect to see breasts in beer commercials, music videos and nudie bars, but seeing them perform their biological function is unfamiliar. “Our culture has become completely saturated with breasts…
No montage of movie history is complete without images from director and screenwriter Billy Wilder. From the grotesquerie of Gloria Swanson’s final descent of the stairs in the drama Sunset Boulevard to the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray spit at each other in the mystery Double Indemnity, Wilder’s wicked wit and gifted eye graced films of all genres….
“By the way, did anyone else catch Sweeney being interviewed on ESPN after the All-Star game and notice a naughty word slip from his tongue? Asked if he thought the fans had a right to be upset with the tie, Sweeney said, yes, they had a right to be ‘peeved’ — at least that’s our edited version. Michael, Michael, Michael.”…
Baseball is a voice in a box describing men you’ve never met in a place you’ve never been doing things you’ll never do. For 33 years, out across the Great Plains and back in the Missouri sticks, Denny Matthews has been that voice for Royals fans. He was in Municipal Stadium’s radio booth for the franchise’s opener in April 1969,…
Every wedding evokes something nostalgic and familiar. And that includes such fake weddings as Joey and Maria’s Comedy Italian Wedding, which just launched an open-ended run at the Park Place Hotel near I-435 and Front Street. It’s a close imitation of the original interactive play, Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, which is nearing its fourteenth year as an off-Broadway institution. One…
It would be simple to blame Puddle of Mudd’s multiplatinum success for the recent stream of bad metal coming out of KC, but it might be just as easy to point fingers at Korn and Tool. Trip Hazzard suffers from a terminal case of musical schizophrenia, eagerly mimicking big-name acts without producing anything remotely original. On “Evol,” it latches onto…
For listeners familiar with the haunting power of Cesaria Evora’s voice, the re-release of her 1988 debut (La Diva Aux Pieds Nus) and the album many music scholars consider to be her definitive work (1992’s Miss Perfumado) is obvious cause for celebration. For the uninitiated, these albums offer revelations unbounded. For starters, Evora is the voice of Cape Verde, the…
Something exciting is afoot in southwestern Missouri, and it definitely isn’t coming out of Branson. With the advent of labels such as Crane and Slewfoot and the success of bands like Springfield’s Big Smith, the state has begun to recognize its talented, rootsy southern cousins. The new generation is worth celebrating, but there are also some still-productive songwriting veterans among…
Mix tapes and compilation albums have always been hip-hop fixtures, but in recent years, adventurous producers have elevated these art forms. On the Handsome Boy Modeling School project, for example, Prince Paul and Dan the Automator strung together stylistically diverse offerings with uncanny continuity. And the Soundbombing series, an underground phenomenon, introduced up-and-coming MCs such as Eminem and Mos Def…
