Alert Pitch staffer Justin Kendall alerted me to a YouTube leaking of Garmin Int’l’s Super Bowl ad, which features a Godzilla-like action-hero faceoff with a campy hard rock soundtrack provided by a band led by Steve Grimmett of ’80s hair bands Grim Reaper, Lionsheart and Onslaught. Categories: Music
Our regular Spin Cycle columnist, Chris Milbourn, attended a promotional event last Thursday in Lawrence featuring Dan the Automator. Here’s his report: Dan the Automator, best known as a producer and arranger for projects with the Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Dr. Octagon and the classic Deltron 3030 was to play a DJ set sponsored by Bacardi on the night…
I was just about to go home and start making love (to a cocktail), when this landed in my inbox: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: After nearly ten years, Shiner readies to re-release their hidden gem — Making Love — on Anondyne Records. March 13, 2007 Anondyne Records In the mid- and late nineties, Midwestern indie rock was at its peak, and…
For concert suggestions this weekend, Sad Dog really is your one-stop shop. Not only do they have a kickass schedule for this weekend, they’ve highlighted a freaking awesome song in Eleni Mandell’s “Salt Truck.” I’ve been gazing out the window wistfully to that song at least once a night since the skies and ground got all messy this winter. I…
Yesterday, John Kreicbergs, proprietor of Patchchord.com, sent me a letter in response to this week’s Wayward Son that presents the KC jazz problem better than I ever could have. With his permission, I reprint it here: RE: Haddix’s response I too respect Chuck — who doesn’t — but it’s hard to respect a scene that doesn’t respect itself. I’ve been…
Anyone who spends too much time on the Internets has probably already heard of this, but since I idly posted an entry about alleged reformed gay turned gay-basher Donnie Davies the other day and all these people emailed me about it, I guess I should turn your attention to this, the latest in a series of entries on the Stranger’s…
Led by Kansas City area bandleader, composer, educator and arranger Louis Neal, this hard-swinging ensemble captures the classic Kansas City sound and style. Mon., Jan. 28, 7 p.m., 2008 Tags: kansas city, Louis Neal, Night & Day
Hey, DJs, the Winter Music Conference in Miami beckons. We can hear your Yeah, rights all the way downtown, but wait! For the third consecutive year, the Pitch is sending one talented local spinner to perform at the conference-closing Ultra Music Festival, a two-day event that takes place on March 23 and March 24 and features the legendary likes of…
Our top DVD picks for the week of January 23: Brokeback Mountain: 2-Disc Collector’s Edition (Universal) Cowboy del Amor (Genius) Crooks (Lightyear) Fiddler on the Roof (MGM) The 2006 FIFA World Cup Film: The Grand Finale (Sony) Ghost Encounters: The Queen Mary (Anthem) The Guardian (Buena Vista) Hopeless Pictures: Season One (Genius) Jesus Camp (Magnolia) John Pinette: I’m Starvin’ (Image)…
Last week, I wrote one of the most unpopular columns of my career, blasting the jazz scene, the American Jazz Museum, Down Beat magazine, Wynton Marsalis, the country of Eritrea (oh, wait, that was a different column), Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, and, meanest of all, the Blue Room — for being crusty and uninspiring. I could feel the bad…
For most of us, the closest we get to practicing medicine is telling a depressed co-worker, “Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.” But that doesn’t stop us from living vicariously through TV doctors. Now, with Trauma Center: Second Opinion, you can take your surgical dreams one step further. Thanks to the Wii’ s revolutionary control scheme, you can…
Cocaine Cowboys (Magnolia) Slam! Bang! Pow! Snort! This tawdry and giddy documentary tells the story of Miami’s transformation from a place where old people go to die to a place with so much drug money that the Mercedes dealers were constantly out of stock, where the hit men would rather throw a gun away than reload it. It tells…
Carrousel As the first and last thing that visitors will see at the disparate but satisfying Carrousel exhibit, the assertive colors and bold shapes of Marcus Cain’s vinyl-tape wall installation bracket a collection of works by past Charlotte Street Award winners as well as young local artists making their Paragraph debut. Cain also contributes a smaller abstraction that both echoes…
From Dickens to Disney, from Huck Finn to Spider-Man, the stories this culture tells itself are so often powered by the deaths of parents that we hardly mourn as our heroes are orphaned. If anything, we’re a touch impatient for the slaughter. Before a Clark Kent or a Harry Potter can seize his destiny, some lucky bloodshed must liberate…
Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ´07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells, and it hardly pays to be nice. Indeed, only the most well-insulated of parka-clad, swag-swinging players here could fail to identify…
On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street in Park City, Utah, for the 8:30 a.m. screening of Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only, I went to the wrong theater by mistake and…
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and his life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity — not to mention her vanity. This is…
Don’t turn around right away,” whispered my friend Bob, half-leaning across the table. “There’s a celebrity sitting behind you.” We were having lunch at Frondizi’s (4558 Main) the day after the Golden Globe Awards. So when I heard the word celebrity, I was thinking of someone with some star wattage — say, Beyonce Knowles or Leonardo DiCaprio. When I finally…
According to National Geographic News, a person’s chances of being hit by lightning in the United States, in any one year, are one in 700,000. For people who worry about things like that, those are pretty good odds. Lightning hits airplanes a lot more often. (Fortunately, a bolt from Mother Nature hasn’t caused a U.S. plane crash in more…
In this week’s episode of “Better Know a Neighborhood Through a Bar Tour” (to crib from Stephen Colbert), we found ourselves checking out the Historic Northeast. After drinking in a log cabin and dancing with a couple of older ladies to Prince’s “Pussy Control,” we wondered why it took so long for us to get out there. While growing up…
Since steering Paw to the cusp of grunge mania in the ’90s (and briefly reuniting for a 2000 release), singer Mark Hennessy has published a book of poetry and worked as an English teacher in Poland. Such endeavors have hardly dimmed his rock-and-roll soul, however, and Hennessy is back in the saddle with Lawrence’s Diamond Heart Club. With fellow vodka-throated…
Just after guitarist Luther Perkins died in 1968, Bob Wootton, a Tulsa guitarist, caught a ride in someone else’s pickup truck and intercepted Johnny Cash in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Wootton got a girl he knew to ask June Carter Cash if Johnny, onstage with just a drummer and an out-of-tune guitar, could use a hand, and he got the job —…
You may not have heard of Ta’Raach (pronounced just as you’d hope it would be) yet, but he has been an integral part of Detroit’s underground hip-hop scene for more than a decade. Formerly known as Lacks, the MC and producer has shared studio sessions with heavyweights Slum Village, Platinum Pied Pipers and J Dilla. And, consistent with his Motor…
Like Josh Ritter or the Avett Brothers, Langhorne Slim is a throwback artist who sounds perfectly comfortable in the new alt-folk millennium. Mr. Slim, who travels with an upright-bass-and-drums duo dubbed the War Eagles, purveys an exuberant conflation of backporch folk, hill-country blues and ramshackle indie rock. The trio is on track for a breakout LP in 2007, so make…
