Not that long ago, a rock writer was allegedly at Slayer frontman Tom Araya’s house watching some of the guys in the band smoke a bowl when the doorbell rang. “Dudes, it’s my dad — get rid of the bowl!” Araya reportedly cried. The dudes scrambled to hide said paraphernalia, wave away the smoke and freshen the room with air…
Kansas City’s club scene is feeling the hot, hot heat lately, with Hot Children and now Hot Fruit scorching stages. The former gets warmer, but it’s the latter that matters to listeners who prefer ringing riffs to sizzling dance beats. Hot Fruit contains several members of Moxie, but whereas that quartet’s catchy-hooks-and-chords approach brought to mind Josie and the Pussycats,…
Ben Gibbard has made no secret of his affection for the limp, cheese-pop stylings of Hall and Oates. Now Death Cab’s frontman is foisting his own brand of literate light rock on fans. With the band’s fourth studio album, the Washington state quartet has unveiled an indiefied reconfiguration of the soft-rock genre, one that fortunately bears no references to private…
Mere days into 2004 and already one of the year’s most bizarro nights of local music is on tap. The Esoteric is globally acknowledged for its uncompromising, brutal approach to thrash metal — the band’s live show is so loud and heavy that only the brave dare tread anywhere near the stage. Fans of Kelpie’s bookish alt-rock are smart…
Growing up in Chicago is hard as hell for budding musicians. No music. No clubs. No blues. Not even the tinny sounds of Toto or Starship piping from a ghetto blaster. Just the sound of the wind. And the el. And Oprah. Luckily, there’s the Sears Tower for residents to throw themselves from when the silence gets too loud….
Did Brad Paisley get made fun of as a kid for sharing a last name with a fabric pattern? More to the point, did he get a nickname? Well, kids do have a certain brilliance when it comes to nicknaming. Take, for example, the cases of Steve “The Walrus” Wallace, Jane “Booger” Bodger and Ernst “Fat Ugly German Kid”…
Life is full of spooky, unexplainable coincidences. Like Lincoln and Kennedy both being succeeded by Southerners named Johnson. And the identical twins who were raised not knowing each other but both named their sons “Harlan Hee-haw Landers Jr.” Or the time we ate a heapin’ platter of fried gator meat just minutes before momma got tanked up on sloe gin…
It generally takes a lot fewer than thirty years for decomposition to set in. What the bugs and hyenas don’t get slowly crumbles until all we are, indeed, is dust in the wind. Ah, but if you’re the original wayward sons, you have no choice but to carry on. Apparently, the Kansas we all know and shrug about was really…
Loathed by hipsters and metalheads, adored by seemingly every teenage girl in KC, Anything But Joey cannot be ignored. The KC quartet is one of the few local acts with a large enough following to play two shows at the same venue on the same night. The early gig should be packed to the gills with ABJ’s legion of…
Weirdos. Misfits. Wack jobs. DJs. They just can’t make a music writer’s job easy. They insist on being cryptic. Obscure. Obtuse. Smarty-pants. It’s tempting to say fuck it. Screw it. To hell with Solos Records and its progeny of wax-spinning wizards. Just try to find the label’s flagship artist Roche in a quick Internet search. Ha. What you’ll find…
Jack White is a big fan of Modey Lemon. Which is nice. Detroit and Pittsburgh are both rotting industrial wastelands posing as major metropolitan cities. Which is cool. People gush about the similarities between the White Stripes and Modey Lemon. Which is fine, even if the connections are tenuous at best. Both are from blue-collar towns. Both have only two…
Fuck 2003. Don’t get me wrong. Iraq was fun and all. The whole SARS thing was hilarious. And woo-hee, did we have a good time at the Great White show in Rhode Island. But come on. It was a grim year I was bidding adieu when I arrived at the Brick with 82 minutes remaining until 2004. I had come…
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and we weren’t the least bit sorry that we couldn’t travel both. Or couldn’t we? Rather than bludgeon you into submission by figuratively waxing poetic with our critical largesse, we decided to take the moral high road and literally wax poetic. To dissect albums of the not-so-distant past and the not-so-distant future from…
Getaway Driver’s practice space has not been fully transformed from its workaday garage origins. The small room, located in the southern aorta of Lawrence, offers the typical rock clutter — stray guitar picks, empty beer bottles, broken drumheads, an array of instruments and amps — but also features accouterments one might find in grandpa’s toolshed, including a rack of neatly…
You could dismiss Chasing Liberty, in which pop star-turned-actress Mandy Moore plays a president’s daughter named Anna Foster who wants some alone time, sans Secret Service, to go clubbing in Europe, hang with friends and lose her eighteen-year-old virginity to a Brit who resembles the offspring of Hugh Grant and Alan Cumming. After all, whenever you can compare one movie…
For all of its inspired side trips down Imagination Lane (let’s call it that, because the “memories” of protagonist Edward Bloom are too majestic to be trusted and too affecting to be discounted), Big Fish is ultimately about one thing: the relationship between a son about to become a father and a father about to become a ghost. The…
Killed Bill: I found the sophomoric comments about Bill Douglas inane and irrelevant. It is obvious that the reporter was very naive and incompetent. If one is going to write about something, please learn to be objective about the subject. Sheila Rekdal Kansas City, Missouri Cheap Shot Off target: After reading, trying to analyze and finally rereading “Half-Cocked” (KC Strip,…
The Strip expects after Sunday to have a lot in common with Peyton Manning — after, that is, the Chiefs turn the Indianapolis Colts quarterback into a tenderized meat patty. However, even though this beefy football lover will be rooting along with everyone else for a Chiefs victory this weekend, it knows that the broadcast from Arrowhead Stadium will only…
Jim Tulley had survived yet another Sprint purge. In September, the telecommunications company announced more downsizing, putting the total number of layoffs since October 2001 over the 20,000 mark. But for the time being, Tulley (not his real name) had retained his job. Several of Tulley’s coworkers, workers who all outranked him and were paid accordingly, weren’t so lucky. As…
Republican Senator Kit Bond gets so much love from Kansas City Democrats, you’d think he was the second coming of Harry S. Truman. It’s a bona fide romance. Local Dems don’t just woo the senator with compliments; they shower him with gifts. Last year, major Democratic leaders hosted a fund-raiser for Bond. Mayor Kay Barnes, past and present City Council…
By all accounts, New Year’s Eve should be a good time. It involves drinking and mandatory kissing, and any holiday that sanctions two things we love to do must rank high on the holiday-o-meter. Sadly, it doesn’t. Let’s face it: New Year’s Eve is pretty fucking lame — there’s too much societal pressure to do something epic, whether you’re single…
I’m definitely in the mood to celebrate a new year when I know that restaurants are planning to open in January. That’s the plan, anyway, for two sets of husband-and-wife restaurateurs in two different parts of town. In Riverside, Annette “Toni” Cambiano Packard and her husband, Arthur Packard, are debuting Sorrento’s (2502 Northwest Vivion Road) in mid-January. Toni is the…
In 1882, the local city directory devoted no fewer than four pages to saloons. It listed more drinking establishments than churches, druggists and schools combined. Kansas City’s population at the time hovered around 55,000, and the local boozing problem was getting out of hand. Civic leaders were demanding that something be done about the taverns, gambling halls and whorehouses…
ONGOING It’s as sure as the sloping wooden floors, the red-and-white-checked tablecloths, the excess of poultry and the warmth of the buns. If you’ve eaten at Stroud’s (1015 East 85th Street, 816-333-2132) any Thursday through Sunday over the past fourteen years, you’ve heard pianist Luther Wilson. He’s a selfless performer, providing accompaniment for your mashed potatoes while you laugh, shake…
