Jimmy Eat World was everywhere in 2002; it seemed as if the whole country was permanently stuck in “The Middle” with JEW. That song, a driving three-minute thrill ride that hung around the pop charts like someone’s annoying little brother, relaunched a career that was about as lively as nap time at an old-folk’s home in Sun City, Arizona. Of…
There are a million reasons to hate the Get Up Kids, but the band’s always-energetic live show isn’t one of them. The cozy confines of the Bottleneck should provide ample romper room for the GUKs to preview a batch of newly penned tunes. Benefiting Toys for Tots, the hometown show is part of a small Midwestern warmup that prefaces a…
When your band’s lineup includes a bassist named Gwomper and a go-go-dancing backing vocalist named Beau Beau, you know you’ve got something original. The self-proclaimed “Hickoid southern punk moshers” of Avail have offered their peculiar flavor of soccer-chanting, wagon-lagging rock for nearly a decade, resulting in a thick catalog of lo-fi joybuzzers that generally have been easier on the feet…
In some ways, Billy Joe Shaver, a much-overlooked Texas songwriter, is again using the map to the world he invented with his first record, 1973’s Old Five and Dimers Like Me. While Willie and Waylon and the boys sang his songs, Shaver all too often wound up in the shade of the Texas outlaw movement. He’s found time to do…
Though born and raised in Kansas City, jazz guitarist John Stein has been a fixture on the East Coast jazz scene for a number of years now, gigging in the New York City and Boston areas while holding an assistant professorship at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. His latest recording, Conversation Pieces, is a collection of ten original compositions…
The blues isn’t just music; it’s a lifestyle, a fact that few understand better than drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. Scrapping for work in the early ’60s, Smith — a veteran of Chicago’s bustling blues scene — hit rock bottom. Dejected and destitute, he gave up music altogether, even going so far as to lug his kit to a local…
90 Day Men’s members have been reading above and beyond the required works on the indie-rock syllabus. Taking its name from a turn of phrase in Samuel Yochelson’s The Criminal Personality, which characterizes offenders who have yet to undergo psychiatric evaluation, the group started in a St. Louis basement in 1995. After five years, a handful of singles and a…
In a recent article headlined “Garage Band Actually Believes There Is a ‘Terre Haute Sound,’” The Onion lampoons Midwest-based bands that overstate their “scenes.” The fictional Weebles play an unappealing blend of synth-pop, rockabilly and melodic punk; other outfits specialize in raunchy riot-grrrl rock or “grindcore ballads.” The Weebles’ singer is unable to name an area act that wouldn’t be…
The best cut on Tommy Womack’s latest album, Circus Town, is called “The Replacements.” These days it’s a treat to find a new song that’s still so unabashedly in love with rock and roll. For those who might have forgotten or who never knew, Womack begins his song by explaining, The Replacements played rock and roll. Then, shaking his…
In the bargain basement of the entertainment world, among the dross and dreck of failed talent and unquenchable dreams, there lurk the Elvis impersonators. These are the lowest of the low, playing out their pitiful fantasies by thieving the soul of a dead icon. But one act transcends such pathos to truly become the King, or better, el Rey….
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with, why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey, dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one of those Julianne Moore movies you like so much?” “Nah, I’d much rather see some film with no-name teen actors about college kids who walk around with drums….
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in the latest Dolce & Gabbana silks, do not talk to each other…
Elementary, Watson: I really enjoyed Greg Hall’s piece on UMKC guard Michael Watson (“He’s a Ball,” November 28). I echo his sentiment that this is the best basketball player on any of the local college hoops teams. As a UMKC student and fan, I attend as many ‘Roos games as I can. I am somewhat disappointed about the lack of…
The ink had barely dried on the city’s new downtown arena study by the time The Kansas City Star published three different columns lauding the idea. Metro scribe Mike Hendricks and sports writer Joe Posnanski both blasted arena naysayers before any naysayers could actually begin naysaying (in columns titled, no shitting, “Ignore the arena naysayers” and “Arena naysayers need to…
On the Monday before Election Day, hundreds of black voters came home from work, pressed play on their answering machines and heard a man’s official-sounding commentary on public schools. “The fact is, Kansas City Democrats like Cleaver will say anything to block parental choice,” he said. “That’s because their relatives drawing fat paychecks from the District, like Dianne Cleaver,…
Tom Lipscomb is a god, at least as salesmen go. Lipscomb’s name is synonymous with almost-magical sales techniques. “My training was to listen to his tapes, read his handouts and go sell like Tom Lipscomb,” says one salesman who used to work for the Northwestern Mutual life insurance company. “He was kind of touted as the second coming of Jesus.”…
In our observations of the rich anthropological brew that constitutes Kansas City’s nightlife, we’ve developed a pet theory about the lines outside bars. In other cities, a line might indicate that the establishment is hot; in Kansas City, the length of the line is proportional to the dork factor of the clientele. The longer the line, the cheesier the crowd….
Before the Bristol Bar & Grill (see review) moved out to the suburbs in 1996, it was a training ground for many of the top managers in the then-thriving Kansas City-based Gilbert-Robinson chain. Alumni include Mary Montgomery, currently the general manager for McCormick and Schmick’s (448 West 47th St.), which now reigns as the Country Club Plaza’s upscale seafood restaurant….
For much of the twentieth century, seafood meant one thing on the American coasts and another in the Midwest. For diners who were hundreds of miles from any ocean, fresh fish meant the stuff that came out of the rivers and streams closest to town — catfish, Missouri trout, white bass. Later, when Kansas City became a railroad hub, it…
A few years ago, as Robert Rice perused the wares of a small shop on Massachusetts Street in Washington, D.C., a stack of books with bright covers caught his eye. The books were on origami. “I pulled one out,” Rice says, “and I was like, wait a second … this says Chiyo Araki. She was my fourth-grade teacher.” If Araki…
For channel surfers who have stumbled upon ESPN broadcasts of the National Spelling Bee and felt d-i-s-c-o-m-b-o-b-u-l-a-t-e-d yet i-n-t-r-i-g-u-e-d, director Jeff Blitz and producer Sean Welch have made the engrossing documentary Spellbound. From the competitors’ endurance training and intense focus, one surmises that if these kids were using weights instead of dictionaries, they’d be gold-medalist power lifters. The eight…
Andy Richter, the man who for seven years proved himself the rare late-night television sidekick worthy of being labeled equal partner, is not given to saying nasty things about people who sign his paychecks, a rarity in a business where people are more than happy to bite, then bite off, the hand that feeds them. So do not expect…
“The world is falling, according to all Kansas fans … now that they’ve lost two games . I’ve never seen a Roy Williams team play that poorly. The thing that surprised me most was the dirty laundry that was being aired after the losses. You never, ever hear that coming out of the Kansas locker room, because they’re usually so…
Allard Baird, the Kansas City Royals’ general manager, hired Tony Peña six weeks into the 2002 season as the guy to lead the team out of the Tony Loser era and back to respectability. Much was said six months ago about how Peña and the Royals planned to accomplish this task. Many of those words now sound as hollow as…
