With songwriters from Bela Fleck to Richard Buckner using loops for bigger onstage sounds, it’s no surprise that self-described “Afrograss folk-rock” impresario Arthur Lee Land (one man’s name, not a territory in Lord of the Rings Risk) uses layers of loopage to lift and separate. Visually, Land’s shows are like watching a mischievous soundman fiddling with the band’s stuff onstage….
For a while there, it seemed as though China would indeed adopt a system of democracy before we got a chance to hear the long-awaited Guns N’ Roses album. After 15 years and $13 million, Axl Rose (the band’s only original member) announced that Chinese Democracy would be released sometime in 2006. Will the most expensive album ever made be…
If you haven’t already heard, the Last of the V8s is back. Evidently, the world just wasn’t rocking hard enough. With the band’s live schedule filling up, the time seemed right to look back on some of the more memorable events from the band’s past. We turned to the public in search of ribald reminiscences, sure that many of…
Will Johnson likes lemonade and video games, and right now he’s furnishing a new house with his girlfriend in Austin, Texas. He’s the kind of guy who talks for five minutes at the beginning of an interview about the rotary phone he’s on, about how he likes old rotary phones, with their round-about dialing and solid connections to the wall….
One of the first things I saw at the hip-hop open-mic contest I went to last Friday night was a gun. It wasn’t a gat like boys from the ‘hood carry on TV — unless they’re fighting Charlie in the jungles of ‘Nam. It was a small, green, Howitzer-like contraption parked outside the venue, the Union Hill Veterans Hall at…
Every so often, one impromptu scenario neatly summarizes a complex situation — in this case, that of an unorthodox and dynamic band. Picture a small clapboard house just on the Kansas side of State Line Road. It’s a typical, State Line-ish kind of house with beige carpet, low ceilings and a supersized cat named Doug sprawled on the floor. Now…
Free balling: I was elated when I read your most recent Kansas City Strip, “Royal Flush” (March 30). You correctly point out that David Glass has no shame in asking the citizens of Kansas City to continue to finance his losing business venture. As a proud libertarian, I believe that this amounts to nothing more than corporate welfare. Why should…
We’re not big followers of basketball. After all, we care way more about the accuracy with which a man hits our G-spot than some silly three-point goal. But the sport got damned hard to ignore when March Madness rolled around, particularly during last weekend’s championship games. Admittedly, we weren’t terribly disappointed to see Kansas fall in the first round. Rock…
We’d rather drink steaming mugs of sludge from 100-year-old sewers than watch City Hall’s annual spring budget-passing ritual. But clicking our TV remote a couple of weeks ago, we happened upon Channel 2 and grew mesmerized by 5th District Councilman Terry Riley’s performance during a March 8 budget committee meeting. As is often the case in Kansas City, the main…
On a recent Thursday afternoon, the Strip had the distinct privilege of sipping premium coffee beverages with Iraq war vet Richard Gibson. We sat in a booth at LattéLand, and the Strip listened as he told the story of the Iraqi father he met on his way to Baghdad. Back during the start of Iraq II in early 2003, Gibson,…
On a blustery afternoon in late March, Lt. Col. George Sarabia and retired Lt. Col. Pete Boisson stand along the bank of the Blue River, a creek that cuts through Swope Park. The two Army officers are in a lush clearing that abuts a construction site filled with bulldozers. Sarabia wields a retractable metal pointer. Boisson carries a series of…
When Calvin Wainright talks about violence, his right eyelid sometimes twitches. It twitches now, for example, when the 53-year-old recalls his neighborhood on fire. In April 1968, Wainright was living in a high-rise at the Wayne Miner projects at Ninth Street and Michigan Avenue. He was 15 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and all hell…
How much does a rolling roof rock? Just ask the Roll Aways, a hotter-than-magma new(?) band that pumped up the celebration at Arrowhead when the votes came in yesterday in favor of renovating the stadiums. Our managing editor, Eric Barton, was there to catch the R-O-C-K A-C-T-I-O-N. Jason, Thought you might want to know about a band that really rocked…
As Memphis Burns, John Ferguson sings. The third Band Scramble showdown hit the Brick last Thursday night. Four bands, all of them formed by drawing names out of a hat (or perhaps an inadequately scrubbed vomit pail, or a frozen pumpkin, or a baby … I don’t know) played the three songs they had been writing and rehearsing over the…
97.3 the Planet. Yeah, I remember that station. I once tuned to it while in the Crown Center parking garage so that the smooth, reassuring voice of Jack Johnson could guide me safely to a spot near the closest entrance to the Crayola Cafe. Still, I felt the changeover, from the laid-back-sorta-freeform-hit-independent-alternative station to the soul-sucking-butt-rock-small-dick corporate shitfest that is…
After being indirectly vilified by CYHSY & co, Pipeline Productions, which books the Bottleneck, gives us the straight story. I got this candid, sincere email this morning from Julie over at Pipeline. I don’t know about you, but this softened my heart quite a bit. I move that all parties be forgiven, including CYHSY’s manager, and also the band itself…
Alec Ounsworth, Tyler Sargent, and Sean Greenhalgh, of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. We are surprised and elated — dare I say, clapping our hands saying “yeah!” — that our pal April got responses not just from the manager of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah but also a member. Read the previous post if you’re lost, then, judge these responses…
