If idle hands are the devil’s playthings, then pedal-steel phenomenon Robert Randolph shouldn’t have to worry about Old Scratch knocking on his door anytime soon. Although this wasn’t always the case for the son of devout Pentecostal parents during his formative years, the Jersey native eventually discovered his instrument and has been testifying ever since alongside the Family Band…
The U.K. Subs (short for Subversives, thanks) are burly, sweat-stained veterans of the black-and-white-poster era of ’70s UK punk bands. And though the Subs’ early songs about nuclear warheads date them to the Cold War, the paranoid rants about intelligence agencies infiltrating our midst are pretty much spot-on for Ashcroft’s America. Other BBC favorites, including the Damned, the Buzzcocks…
Randy Travis has been a country hunk since before it was cool — or at least since the days when the only requirements were having most of your real teeth and being slightly younger and sexier than George Jones. Not that you ain’t pretty, Georgie. But Travis was a lean, mean, hit-making machine in the ’80s, cranking out favorites…
%{}% Badly Drawn Boy is really just some guy named Damon Gough. He’s British. He’s low-key. He always wears a stocking cap. His music is pleasant and folky, but not in a granola way. He is the kind of songwriter who sounds like that guy, the one who sits and sings in your living room at all hours of the…
%{}% The connection between karate and postpunk dates back to 1984, when a Gang of Four tune appeared in the original Karate Kid film. The kick-ass band Karate appeared more than a decade after that seminal soundtrack moment. The guys don’t sweep their legs much onstage — in fact, they stand perfectly still, as if balancing on the edge of…
%{}% Mick Collins is everything that you love about rock and roll. His I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude fuels the soul covers and gritty originals that have made the Dirtbombs one of the Motor City’s most influential and revered acts. But the band’s frontman is no new kid on the block, having served with the Screws, the Gories and Blacktop in the ’90s,…
PD: Are you sad for your last night on the Vote for Change tour? CW: It is sad. This has been great. We’re still on the Pearl Jam dime, so we’re at the Ritz-Carlton … which is kind of creepy. We’re flying on a private jet, which is lunacy … but it’s so weird. Last night, I rented a car…
%{}% “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to join together this man and this man in holy matrimony. If any person harbors any reason why they shouldn’t be wed, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” Um … padre? “Yes, my son?” I realize that I’m the one getting married here — so believe me, I have…
“Yesterday the van broke down,” Patterson Hood says in his raspy, Southern-fried voice. He sees this as an omen — but not one of ill-fortune, mind you. Quite the opposite. The singer was on his way from his home in Athens, Georgia, to a solo gig in New Orleans when his vehicle gave out at 1:30 a.m. The frontman for…
I was first exposed to the genius of Polly Jean Harvey through the gurus of the grunge generation, Beavis and Butt-head. More specifically, I became aware of her with the animated MTV duo’s commentary on her videos for “50 Ft. Queenie” and “Down by the Water.” “Hey, it’s that Mallory chick,” Beavis (or was it Butt-head?) said of Harvey —…
A parody of Gerry Anderson marionette shows (Thunderbirds, Joe 90), Jerry Bruckheimer action movies and the ’80s cartoon and toy line M.A.S.K. , Team America: World Police boils all those ingredients down to their essences, starting with the Kenny Logginsesque theme song (Americaaa … fuck yeah!). Every other line of dialogue deals with various permutations of cocks, pussies, shit…
Outside Tinseltown, not everyone may be aware of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which specializes in memorializing lives via a process the franchise owners call “LifeStories.” The century-old former Hollywood Memorial Park, retooled for the new millennium, presents carefully edited video montages of the lives of celebrities (from Rudolph Valentino to Dee Dee Ramone) as well as normal people, as part…
It would be easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie stars, looks as though it was filmed through a golden scrim; you…
Bud light: OK, am I the only one who finds your Backwash submissions idiotic, sophomoric and insultingly tasteless? I mean, is Bud, your so-called “fashion expert,” supposed to be the yin to Jen Chen’s Night Ranger yang? I like Jen Chen but not necessarily what she writes about in her column. Mindless drivel based on her exploits in the anals…
Billy Goating It’s opening night of the Billy Graham Crusade, and only the most devout have showed up at Arrowhead Stadium in a pouring rain. And that includes members of Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps’ army, who consider themselves so hardcore, they think Graham is a religious piker. “Billy in Hell,” reads one of the signs carried by Phelps’ Topeka…
The march begins at the corner of East 24th Street and Cypress Avenue, as it does every Friday evening. “No more drugs!” the marchers chant, their path lined by weeds, bars and, on one property, a stack of soiled mattresses. “No more killings!” The East 24th Street area struggles with violence and a lack of social services. The police count…
A whole lotta years ago, when the Strip was just a medallion of proteinaceous precocity, it got itself into a hellacious fight with its high school administration. One of this chuck roast’s reporters found out that Mrs. Principal had been holding secret meetings with unhappy parents of the school’s football players who wanted the team’s coach fired. The Strip, the…
Almost from the start, reporters covering the August 30, 2003, flood deaths on Interstate 35 focused more on Robert Rogers’ reaction to his family’s drowning than how he escaped the same fate. A freak rainstorm washed over the Kansas Turnpike near Emporia that night and carried away seven vehicles, including the Rogerses’ minivan and one man who had been…
10/6-10/10 The Atlanta-based UniverSoul Circus claims to be the world’s only African-American-owned circus, and its aesthetic is steeped in the black culture. Ringmaster Casual Cal Depree, often sporting a canary-yellow or cherry-red zoot suit, struts into the center ring to a James Brown classic or a Jay-Z anthem as his sidekick, Zeke, trails behind. The aerial artists, creepy contortionists and…
10/8-10/24 Among the most intriguing — and painful — questions of the 20th century are how the Third Reich enlisted otherwise good people in its bloody cause and how Hitler’s rhetoric enabled them to justify brutality and murder. C.P. Taylor’s 1982 play Good examines the Nazi phenomenon through its portrayal of a sensitive, neurotic professor in 1933 Germany who is…
WED 10/13 Rosalyn Story is one of those annoying overachievers. Not only is she a professional violinist in the Fort Worth Symphony and a successful journalist, but she’s also a lyrical writer with a successful debut novel. More Than You Know is Story’s, um, story about a struggling saxophonist whose mysterious childhood secret comes back to haunt him. The narrative…
FRI 10/8 Book readings are typically staid affairs where an author drones through a chapter or two, pausing for polite laughter and applause. For people who attend such events with trepidation (and for those who stay far away), the literary marriage hosted by the Lit 6 Project is welcome relief — plus, there’s malt liquor involved. These Minneapolis writers seem…
Jonathan Kozol’s best-selling book about the dismal state of public education in America’s cities, Savage Inequalities, came out in the early 1990s, just as Kansas City, Missouri, was trying to change things by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into dazzling new and rebuilt schools. Kozol gave a lecture here during the height of the spending frenzy, which was aimed…
Thurday, October 7 When most people hear of the Mexican Elvis interpreter known as El Vez, they probably assume he’s some kind of fleeting novelty act. On the contrary, this pompadour-topped Presleyite has been getting all shook up since 1988. And he doesn’t just recycle Elvis songs, either. El Vez — much to the delight of jaded rock critics —…
