I have several friends who passionately loved the Fairway Grill (2820 West 53rd Street in Fairway) but didn’t give a damn when it abruptly closed September 15 after a four-year run. “They changed the menu so many times,” complained one friend. “They couldn’t make up their minds what they wanted the place to be or what they wanted to serve,”…
In 1870, the booming young town of Kansas City was home to a large German population. Five breweries flourished, and twenty times as many biergartens, saloons and family-owned taverns served hearty dinners of juicy bratwurst and pungent sauerkraut along with those foamy mugs of lager. In fact, during the nineteenth century German food was America’s premier immigrant cuisine — helped…
Throughout a career that spans from Congo to Fargo, actor Bruce Campbell has always held fast to his belief that there’s no shame in toiling on Hollywood’s margins. “Though you might not have a clue who I am, there are countless working stiffs like me out there, grinding away every day at the wheel of fortune,” he writes in his…
When theatergoers walk into UMKC’s Performing Arts Center this weekend, they’ll step through piles and piles of Polaroid snapshots, which Joe Price hopes will feel like “an ocean of people.” Polaroids, Price notes, are instantaneous flashes that might catch something beautiful, even though most people dismiss them as throwaways. Price is the director of Polaroid Stories, which is based on…
It is a decade ago, and Neil Burger has trekked from New York to the small Texas town of Fredericksburg, where Admiral Chester Nimitz was born, where heroes gather at the National Museum of the Pacific War to reminisce and mourn, where tourists collect to pay their dues to the dead. Burger, a young man fresh out of Yale, is…
“Fortunately for the shirtless pair, the first Kansas City player to reach them was Neifi Perez, who doesn’t hit much.”— King Kaufman, on the men who attacked Royals’ first-base coach Tom Gamboa’s at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Salon.com “If you don’t want pressure, go to Kansas or go to Indiana. Go somewhere where you’re going to play and go through…
Not long ago, the drive west on I-70 through Wyandotte County offered few reasons to brake other than the occasional daring deer and the ever-present tollbooth. All that has changed. Once known as the land of abandoned cars and missed opportunities, Wyandotte County is quickly becoming the place to be if you’re young and looking for fun — or if…
Late Night Theatre initiates its new space downtown by making it a shrine — physically and artistically — to the busty charms of Dolly Parton. The legendary singer’s backwoods twang and guileless voice may seem at odds with Late Night’s brand of high-camp high jinks, like putting a Southern Baptist in a lace teddy. But the dichotomy makes sense when…
On Richard and Linda Thompson’s landmark albums together — which introduced piercing electric guitar and Cajun spice to the British folk Richard had helped define in Fairport Convention — Richard’s songs shuffled to the gallows, shadowed by Linda’s pale-alto widow’s walk. The two named the dirty street where the condemned find their survivors — then drag them down. In the…
C.E.S. Crew’s six-song Ready ‘N’ Willin’ single serves as sonic appetizer for its forthcoming full-course meal, Capture Enemy Soldiers. Though the KC hip-hop trio covers well-trodden lyrical territory, it brings exuberance and genuine mic skills to the party. The title track finds the crew pontificating on the joys of puffing ganja: You offering me some more?/No question, I’ll smoke another/Go…
This collection by one of dub reggae’s most important innovators is a frustratingly packaged retrospective. Tubby’s career spanned nearly thirty years, from the time this radio repairman started working as a sound engineer in the 1960s and devised ingenious ways to reinvent and extend hit records for the dance floor up until his murder in 1989. For that reason, this…
Sleater-Kinney isn’t for everyone. Based on a plethora of articles in the mainstream press, including a 2001 piece in Time that proclaimed the group America’s best rock band, you’d think this Portland-based trio had won over the hearts of every man and woman. In reality, the band’s music can be downright off-putting. On past recordings, its signature sound — Corin…
Newark, New Jersey’s Dälek launched his music career the old-fashioned way: The burgeoning MC blew his student-loan check on an Akai MPC-3000 synth/sampler, using it to create 1998’s Negro, Necro, Nekros with assistance from longtime collaborator Oktopus. The five-track full-length shook the hip-hop underground, which tuned in to the duo’s mixture of conscious lyrics and space-oddity clamor. During the Nekros…
Charitable souls chip in now and again to put on benefit shows for everything from AIDS research to lost dogs, but rarely do you find any sort of benefit tour. So if you’re feeling generous but still want to spoil yourself, donate at the door to the Plea for Peace/Take Action tour, at which hot hardcore, punk, and emo artists…
People who can’t make it out to see Southern Culture on the Skids can take solace in knowing that the double-wide boogie ensemble just dropped its first live album, Live at El Sol. They shouldn’t take too much comfort, though; listening to it may be a party, but the fun escalates exponentially at the shows. Recorded in Madrid as a…
Drums & Tuba’s self-explanatory instrumental attack has few current peers. But consider the brief life of Billy and the Boingers from the ’80s comic strip Bloom County, and you’ll discover there is a precedent. The Boingers augmented their lineup with penguin Opus on tuba, which he brought to the audition after mistaking heavy metal for weighty brass. Since the days…
If anyone represents the vibrant, multicultural face of today’s contemporary jazz scene, it’s Panamanian pianist Danilo Peréz. Breaking out in the early ’90s thanks to his stint in Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra, Peréz went on to release some of the most compelling and innovative Latin jazz recordings of that decade, including 1996’s Panamonk and 1998’s Central Avenue, with the…
The title “child prodigy” has often been more curse than blessing, but guitarist extraordinaire Joe Bonamassa has managed to grow comfortably into those shoes even after being hailed by B.B. King as “a legend before his time” at the age of twelve. Now 25 and a grizzled veteran of the small-club circuit as the former lead guitarist for Bloodline, the…
The embarrassingly watchable NASCAR and all of the obsessive, out-of-control hysterics that come with it are descending upon Kansas City, and that includes the Pontiac Rock ‘N Race Weekend. On Saturday night, Cheap Trick gets the motor running with timeless good-times anthems such as “Surrender” and “Dream Police.” Budweiser, the official beer of such shenanigans, will have the Clydesdales on…
No month invites moniker manipulation like October. True, people could celebrate August-a by barring women from their homes for 31 days. Or they could spring into April (Lavigne) by wearing a stupid black necktie for four consecutive weeks. But those options pale in comparison with Oculartober (great deals at the mall’s rush-job lens store), Octopustober (on the Discovery channel) and…
There’s something reassuring about seeing Rex Hobart and the Misery Boys sitting in a bar on the back cover of Your Favorite Fool, the band’s brand-new CD. The photo looks as if it were taken in a little corner of Nashville’s Music Row or maybe in a world-famous Prohibition-era Chicago dive — and then the clouds clear, and you realize…
Photographer and commercial director Sam Jones’ I Am Trying to Break Your Heart traces alt-something band Wilco’s tribulations creating and releasing its lauded 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Along the way, the charmingly awkward 16-mm black-and-white rockumentary offers an astute appraisal of Middle American musical torpor and the band’s struggle to escape it while searching for something like soul. The…
So there’s no confusion: The star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk. Witherspoon is Hollywood’s new $15 million girl, a price befitting anyone who could take a bound-for-Blockbuster, pretty-plain-even-in-pink movie like last year’s Legally Blonde and turn it into a $100…
The winner of our discontent: I deplore Kendrick Blackwood’s snide tone and disrespectful treatment of UMKC Chancellor Martha Gilliland in the September 12 issue (Kansas City Strip). Blackwood owes her belated congratulations on her receipt of a Hubert H. Humphrey Award from the Policy Studies Organization! The PSO is a 29-member-strong international association that splintered off from the 13,500-strong American…
