Dale Watson plays staunchly traditional country, complete with twangy sonic backdrops and lyrics about the joys of driving big rigs and drinking your sorrows away (not necessarily in that order). Somehow it seems only fitting that the Austin, Texas, musician’s career has been pockmarked by bad fortune and misery. At the crest of his rise to midlevel fame and critical…
Take some guys from Seattle and add a bunch of guitars. Multiply the sum by casual yet convincing vocals. Divide that product by the square root of an electric edge and really fucked-up song titles, and you’ll end up with the textured indie-pop of Minus the Bear. Even if you can handle the math, things don’t get any easier. The…
Patty Griffin When was the last time you did something sweet for your favorite singer-songwriter? Not ditching your copy of Dylan’s Under the Red Sky doesn’t count. Neither does leaving a rambling mash note on Nelly Furtado’s fan discussion site. We’re talking subtle kindness, selfless gesture — something a judge wouldn’t say violates your restraining order. Take, for example,…
“I’d like to introduce my muthafuckin’ DJ Dick Chizz-eney on the beat box. Yo, yo, I said my name is G-Dub/But you can call me G-love/’Cause all the fly bitches wanna wear my glove/My jimmy hat, and you know it’s 10 gallons/Of crude, dude, I could give a fuck if Bob Dole thinks I’m rude/I may have stole the…
Oh, Canada. You shouldn’t have. You always give us such extraordinary gifts. Celine Dion. Strange Brew. Alex Trebek. Canadian bacon. A slight case of wicked-bad frostbite when we drank a half-rack of fine Kokanee beer and passed out in a snowbank somewhere in British Columbia. And now, Destroyer. The Great White North’s gift to the realm of introspective singer-songwriters that…
PD: You’ve made six albums in six years. That seems ambitious for a band known to champion marijuana. BDX: We champion personal freedom. The plant was created by the creator, and it should be up to each individual if they want to interact with the plant. For a man to tell you that you can’t interact with the plant that…
I was sitting in my boxers watching Die Hard when the call came. “A source told me that David Bowie’s band is playing Mike’s Tavern tonight,” the Night Ranger explained. “And he said that Bowie might show up. Wanna check it out?” Ah, what the hell. I knew how the movie would end. Bruce Willis would kill some dudes, blow…
Nathan Ellis is tired. He has just piloted a cramped, smelly vehicle all night from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles. He has played five shows and traveled more than 2,000 miles in five days. He is on the verge of giving up everything he has known for the past six years. His voice is cracked and raspy. His energy is…
The prophets tried to warn us. Their ancient wisdom was chiseled into stone tablets and preserved so that all humanity could read the solemn words and understand the perils of nature: Seasons change, mad things rearrange/But it all stays the same like the love Doctor Strange. OK, so it was the Fugees singing “How Many Mics.” But the words…
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thomson’s thick, rich history text The New Biographical Dictionary of Film . A From Here to Eternity joke quickly becomes a Little Mermaid punch line that immediately gives way to a Lord of the Rings nod that rapidly evolves into a Spider-Man gag….
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but the assembly-line foodstuffs of McDonald’s is not surprising. He gains nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out (one of the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan-chef girlfriend, who is only too happy to discuss such unhappiness). His blood pressure and cholesterol…
Goodwill gains: Regarding Allie Johnson’s ” Extreme Makeover” (May 13): Great article, Allie, but I’m not convinced. In February, after I had cleaned out all my closets and the basement of my home, I took my bundle to the drive-through Goodwill in Olathe to drop off my name-brand stash. Five minutes later, a young slacker came out to retrieve the…
Last week, Mayor Kay Barnes made her long-awaited downtown arena financing announcement, and The Kansas City Star wasted no time revealing whether it would get behind the effort to build the Sprint Center. The next morning’s paper reported news of the plan with a front-page banner headline the likes of which are normally reserved for natural disasters and declarations of…
Things are happening south of the Country Club Plaza. The University of Missouri-Kansas City is building a trendy residence hall along Oak Street. A public library branch will occupy the lower floors of a $70 million office building under construction at 49th and Main streets. New condominiums at 51st and Walnut streets pay homage to the Mediterranean architecture of…
The people of Kansas City have absolutely no power over what happens at Union Station — even though we, and our generous suburban neighbors, paid for its restoration. It’s run by a private board of directors whose members answer only to themselves. And over the last couple of weeks, their hired gun, Union Station CEO Turner White, had the cojones…
He took the test in January 2002. Carlos Centeno, 21, had been enrolled at the University of Kansas for just one semester. He was born in Lawrence (his dad was an international student at KU), but he’d grown up in his family’s native Venezuela and transferred from a private business school in Caracas in the fall of 2001. He…
Bacchus may have been the Roman god of drinking and revelry, but after attending Viva La Fiesta II, the Bacchus Foundation’s annual Cinco de Mayo celebration, we had doubts that the organization was living up to its name. Held on Ocho de Mayo at the Plaza Tennis Center from 7 p.m. to midnight, this benefit for the KC Ronald McDonald…
If you want to get a real index of economic conditions in Kansas City, you don’t have to turn to employment statistics or the stock market for answers. Just stop by a local restaurant on a Sunday and see how many people feel flush enough to go out for brunch. It’s not cheap escape; most area brunches average about $17,…
My father worked in the booze business and spent a lot of time in bars. He used to say that there were certain saloon names you could find in almost every town, like the Dew Drop Inn or the Y’all Come Back Tavern. His college hangout in Indianapolis, the Bulldog Lounge, was named after the football team at nearby Butler…
FRI 5/14 For the second time in two weeks, Overland Park is the site of a small independent film’s first theatrical engagement in the United States. The Last Place on Earth is the creation of triple-threat James Slocum, who wrote, directed and produced the slight yet occasionally charming film that opens Friday at the Glenwood Arts (9575 Metcalf). The film…
SAT 5/15 If we learned only one thing from Animal House, it’s that behavior of any kind, no matter how embarrassing or despicable, is permissible in the context of college. There’s no Day on the Hill to anchor this year’s end-of-semester celebration, but anyone who still has that degenerate, toga-wearing itch can blow off some steam Bluto Blutarsky-style at Saturday’s…
SAT 5/15 Remember the dudes who, 15 years ago, mounted Jet Skis to perform acts of senseless daring in the wakes of their dads’ speedboats? You know, they of the neon sunglass cords and the Ocean Pacific tank tops? Well, the latest breed of high-fiving-badass-adrenaline-junkies-on-water is converging on Clinton Lake near Lawrence. But now they come bearing kites. The 2004…
SAT 5/15 When David Macaulay, who works at the Midtown Community Recycling Center, realized how many of his customers were local artists using recycled materials in their work, he decided to celebrate their environmental efforts in the form of an exhibit. The Recycled Art Show goes up from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday outside the recycling center (48th and…
Bulletin for Homeland Security high muckamuck Tom Ridge: The Valomilk candy bar explodes at high altitudes. Just ask Steve Almond, author of the recently published Candyfreak, who, even after being apprised of the marshmallow-filled chocolate cup’s potential for stratospheric volatility during a visit to the Valomilk manufacturing facility in Merriam, flew from here to Denver with a batch in his…
