Prewitt’s Coctails were once the toast of Kansas City, and his (well, Sam Prekop’s) Sea and Cake now outswells Sebadoh in the indie racks. But it’s these solo discs that should make the man something more than a hero to record-store geeks. With equal parts melancholy and McCartney, Prewitt here wins over the geeks’ girlfriends, too. He offers up the…
A friend says everyone needs one Ani record but nobody should bother with two. This discounts the achievement of the first half of DiFranco’s career, when she achieved power and clarity over a half-dozen discs. That she said the same shit on each didn’t matter. What did matter was that the force accumulated — the stinging pluck-strum, the dimensions of…
At least once a week, Kasey Rausch strums her rustic folk tones somewhere in the two-state area. She has regular haunts (Prospero’s, Davey’s and Rural Grit at the Brick), but she saves space for oddball outlying venues (the Pizza Shoppe in Savannah, Missouri). Like her upcoming Cup and Saucer set, most of Rausch’s concerts charge no cover. Her debut disc,…
Billy Goat originally hailed from somewhere in Texas, but Kansas City crowds loved the funkalicious outfit so much that the band packed up and relocated. The Goat ruled the Midwest in the early ’90s, regularly blazing regional stages with an over-the-top live show that featured band-member and audience nudity, topless dancers, chocolate syrup and more drums than a Ludwig factory….
In the past two years, Anne McCue has toured extensively with both Heart and Lucinda Williams. Though she speaks twang fluently, McCue shares more common ground with the Wilson sisters’ raucous riffs. McCue’s magic hands go crazy on the strings, especially during the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” that caps her recent release Roll. An Australian native, McCue played…
OK, OK, we get it: Afroman is a one-hit wonder. When your mom starts to laugh at your music jokes, it’s not cool anymore, and we won’t waste ink and paper trashing 2001’s overplayed hit single “Because I Got High.” What separates Afroman, aka Joseph Foreman, from the Quad City DJs and Tag Teams of the world is a work…
Like its metal-hardcore predecessors, Zao combines brick-shit-heavy breakdowns, scalpel-sharp riffs and wounded-griffin wails. Its most recent release pairs an ominous title (The Funeral of God) with austere, religious-themed album art (a stern statue clutching a cracked cross), a design combination that has worked well for satanic shredders. However, all misleading signs aside, Zao loves the Lord something fierce. And with…
Remember the food pyramid from elementary school? That towering totem that rose from the sands of nutrition with the glut of sweets on top (use sparingly, motherfucker) and the mound of breads (6-11 servings, ya bastard) on the bottom? Yeah, well, it’s useless. At least it is when you’re a starving musician or some similar breed of shiftless degenerate. The…
Jerry Dowell, Naked. It’s a prospect guaranteed to excite cowboy fetishists and area singer-songwriter fans alike. But those hoping to lasso lascivious nudes of local folk’s Fabio must wait; the Naked album cover reveals only Dowell’s broad shoulders and cascading curls. However, he does strip down to his soul on this sparse acoustic effort, giving fans quite a peep…
I can’t remember exactly what I did on my tenth birthday. Other than lose my virginity, of course. I probably spent the rest of the day eating cake, opening presents, watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and searching with a magnifying glass for germinating shoots of pubic hair. Which pretty much describes what has happened at each subsequent celebration of…
Dan Burton sounds like a dangerous man. But only to anyone with a well-founded fear of progressive rock, and only on paper. Like some art-prog rockers of the ’70s, the Early Day Miners frontman studied at a conservatory. He has released songs long enough to strain the typical sober attention span. And he loves “the idea of rock music being…
Nobody messes with Samuel L. Jackson — at least not at the movies. In Shaft, he’s the coolest cop on the street. He’s Mace Windu, the only swashbuckler in the Star Wars galaxy who gets to swing a purple lightsaber. Best of all, he’s Jules Winnfield, the ultrahip hit man who spouts instructive Bible verses to quivering punks in Pulp…
Paul Weitz, with brother Chris, co-wrote and co-directed 2002’s adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, in which cocky Hugh Grant learned how to act like a grown man by observing a gawky young boy (Nicholas Hoult) who was nearly abandoned by his suicidal mother. Lord knows how many men sidling toward their 30s or having just fallen…
Father knows best: In response to Mr. Joshua Harden’s letter (“Cross Training,” December 23), I would like to make five clarifications: (1) I have never preached one word contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church or the gospel. (2) I admit that at St. Francis we still respect free will and the individual conscience, the most ancient of Catholic…
Jimmy the Fetus Hey, kids, Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, showing us all that what we learned in Sunday school really matters. Dear Jimmy, I know Richard Gere and President Clinton and Leonardo DiCaprio say we should give a lot of money to help the tsunami victims. But Mom says all three of…
In Kansas, where we don’t feel comfortable discussing certain things with our children and certainly don’t want them absorbing those things in the public schools, it makes sense that a grown man might not be completely familiar with what a female human being goes through during her pregnancy. This meat patty can understand that a man might not notice…
The Seven Oaks Shopping Center is bumpin’. The squat strip along 39th Street between Kensington and Elmwood boasts a laundromat, a barbershop and salon, and a liquor store, along with its anchor, Leon’s Thriftway grocery store. Until recently, though, Leon’s and its neighboring businesses faced extinction. The Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance had proposed to tear down the whole strip to…
Sgt. Eric Greenwell, sitting in a coffeehouse on Main Street, keeps glancing over a reporter’s shoulder to scan every face that enters the place, like he’s looking for someone. But it’s a person he recently caught whom he’s here to talk about. For two months last fall, the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department’s Career Criminal Squad, which Greenwell oversees, had…
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Office parties rock. Especially office holiday parties, which, as everyone knows, are really the only occasions all year when you can get plastered on free booze and inappropriately mess around with all the co-workers you’ve had latent crushes on. The Night Ranger doesn’t think she made a complete ass of herself…
Last week I got an e-mail from reader Katy Stauffer complaining about servers who drop a check on the table, announce casually, “Pay me when you’re ready” and then disappear for long stretches of time. “Nothing is more irritating (or chips away at the tip) than being held hostage by a server who won’t return in a timely fashion to…
Thanks to Nickelodeon’s Nick at Nite programming, a whole new generation of Americans can sing the theme song to the old Patty Duke Show, including lyrics such as Where Cathy adores a minuet, the Ballet Russes, and crêpes suzette/Our Patty loves to rock and roll/A hot dog makes her lose control … What a wild duet! Well, there is…
SAT 1/8 Sacrilege and lasciviousness lead to legal entanglements for most people, but they’re stock in trade for Full Frontal Comedy. Vicariously enjoy a year’s worth of naughtiness with the improv troupe’s best-of-2004 review at 8 p.m. Saturday at Quality Hill Playhouse, 303 West Tenth Street. Admission is $15; call 816-421-1700. Love, Actually Valentine’s Day comes early this year. 1/7-1/9…
SAT 1/8 Underground MCs and under-21 music fans share common ground when it comes to local nightspots. Many club owners won’t let rappers onstage, and most bouncers stop teens at the door. At the Minor Mix-Up, however, lyricists have the freedom to freestyle, and all-ages audience members can wave their hands in the air without worrying about stage lights…
THU 1/6 Most people think of the Harlem Globetrotters as a vaudeville act, dazzling kids with 12-foot dunks, behind-the-back alley-oops and half-court hook shots to the whistled melody of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” But the team doesn’t just have a fascinating history going back to 1926 (when all pro ballers were white); it routinely gets legit by stomping top-ranked NCAA…
