BELLRAYS, MEANS 10/11, EMPTY BOTTLE The MC5 were as steeped in soul and jazz as they were in hard rock, but you’d never know it by listening to the bands who name-check them in interviews. The Bellrays reestablished this stylistic connection in 1999 with Let It Blast; on last year’s follow-up, Grand Fury (Uppercut), they took the testifyin’ even further over the top but weren’t afraid to bring it back down slow and blue....
DARK STAR ORCHESTRA 6/27 & 28, SKYLINE STAGE Though there’s an actual version of the Dead on the road again, I doubt that the fan base for Chicago’s Dark Star Orchestra will dwindle–after all, not even the Dead can play in more than one place at a time. Besides, this tribute band performs a historical function that not even the dinosaurs themselves do: each night they re-create in meticulous detail a classic set of Dead past (gleaned from the bootleg tapes Deadheads famously collect and trade), complete with solos, surprises, and even glitches....
Sun-Times: Off With Their Heads! To spur the sort of civic debate it believes appropriate to a time of crisis, the Sun-Times editorial page introduced the occasional feature “Oh Shut Up.” This recently was succeeded by “What the ‘experts’ said,” which the Sun-Times explained would be “spotlighting what the self-appointed experts had to say about the war on terrorism to show how wrong they turned out to be.” Self-appointed experts are those notorious folk who don’t wait to be asked before saying things the rest of us disagree with....
Would I find Vaudeville on a map? –P.C., Montreal Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Not unless you’re a really bad speller–although bad spelling is probably what gave us vaudeville in the first place. According to the leading theory, vaudeville derives from vau-de-Vire (valley of Vire), in Calvados, Normandy. Vau-de-Vire was the home of Olivier Basselin, a 15th-century minstrel and writer of satirical songs. A Basselin tune, and later any light popular song, became known as a chanson du vau-de-Vire, “song of the valley of Vire,” shortened to vau-de-Vire....
Luis Aguilera was starting to get upset reading a review of his memoir, Gabriel’s Fire, in Publishers Weekly. For one thing, the review said Aguilera was once a gang member, when in fact a central theme of the book is his opposition to gangs and his disappointment when they started recruiting in the electronic “hip-house” music scene that was a mainstay of his late-80s youth. In his case, he says, that category was barrio literature, which generally includes gritty tales of street life in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, and East LA....
It says something that the Wu-Tang Clan enlisted Ronald Isley to sing the hook on “Back in the Game,” one of the most defiant songs on their latest album, Iron Flag (Loud). As the silken voice of the Isley Brothers, he’s presided over the countless stylistic shifts that have kept that group a chart presence for half a century. The Wu have a long way to go to achieve that kind of longevity, but it’s clearly what they’re gunning for....
Uno fuego!” Jenny Cha calls into her walkie-talkie for the fifth time in as many minutes, requesting another flaming charcoal pot for a table at Garden Buffet. An employee in the back room is constantly stoking the blazing-hot baskets, and diners are issued one as soon as they sit down. Meanwhile Cha’s mother, 73-year-old Myung Lee, is in the kitchen making kimchi–Korea’s spicy, fermented national side dish, usually made of napa cabbage–or frying delicate tofu cakes....
Anthony Davis A quick review of particulars: In February 1974 the 19-year-old granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst was abducted from the apartment she shared with boyfriend Steven Weed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small cadre of armed lefties with code names like Teko and Cinque Mtume. Ten weeks later she helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank, and was immortalized by security cameras as the rifle-toting, beret-wearing reborn revolutionary Tania....
JASON RINGENBERG Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If Jason & the Scorchers had made their first couple records in the early 90s instead of the early 80s, their searing combination of fiery energy and aching sentiment would have already made an alt-country cult hero out of founder Jason Ringenberg. Unfortunately, as the 90s were dawning, the Scorchers blew it, turning up the slick rock and diminishing both the power and the glory....
Jim Carrane Is Living in a Dwarf’s House, at the Second City E.T.C., and The Gong Show (Freaks on Parade), WNEP Theater. Jim Carrane knows a thing or two about making people laugh–he’s a master of self-deprecating humor, whether detailing his frustrating experiences planning his grandmother’s 95th birthday party or contemplating his own future as a minimum-wage grunt. Once again he tries to pass himself off as just another misanthropic, sad-sack loser in this one-man show, cowritten and directed by Gary Ruderman, but his charm makes that impossible....
It’s been 17 years since Victoria Lautman first walked into the WBEZ studio to do a freelance art review and sent her distinctive voice out over the airwaves. You couldn’t hear it without paying attention. In those days, well before the adenoidal Ira Glass became an icon, most on-air personalities had conventional “radio voices”–resonant, buttery, modulated. Lautman, on the other hand, was pitched somewhere between a load of gravel and a snort of whiskey....
When singer Amalia Rodrigues was alive, she was practically synonymous with fado–a gorgeous, bittersweet Portuguese song form that’s roughly analogous to the American blues. Even though she rarely performed during the last years of her life, it was as though her presence alone frightened away potential heirs to her mantle. Since her death in 1999, a number of important female singers have emerged, but fado fans are a conservative bunch, and every one of these women has at some point been compared unfavorably to Rodrigues: Misia, who’s broken with the legend’s traditional approach, is considered irreverent; others who’ve stuck to convention have been dismissed as imitators....
Lambchop That’s not so much a shift as a distillation: Pianist Cramer was the right- (and left- ) hand man of the late Chet Atkins. Atkins has been held largely responsible for the death of country music; few would argue that he wasn’t a prodigiously gifted musician, but some have never forgiven him for injecting his own preternatural mellowness into the RCA country stable in the 1960s, changing the way the music was made for many years to come....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Though state tax revenues are shrinking nationwide, Kansas reported in January that its tax revenue from marijuana sales had risen 4 percent–and tax revenue from cocaine, methamphetamine, and other hard drugs was up 21 percent. The state taxes illegal drugs by selling gold-foil revenue stamps (in denominations from $10 to $1,000) that dealers are supposed to affix to their product before sale....
If you’ve got 70 bucks burning a hole in your pocket and a yen for having your childhood memories travestied, then run to the Auditorium Theatre, where director-choreographer Robert Longbottom is offering an evening of Disney’s best songs performed completely without context, heart, flavor, or even a set. The framing concept of this touring show is that four singers are performing medleys of Disney classics in a recording studio. (How a world-class performer as luscious as Emily Skinner got involved in this nonevent is anybody’s guess....
Bicycle Thief “My mom thinks I need religion,” croaks Bob Forrest. “I think I need a shower and something to eat.” That deadpan statement comes from “Boy at a Bus Stop,” a sparse, static song whose title distances it from autobiography even as its down-and-out detail drags it back again. Forrest is a denizen of Los Angeles, a 38-year-old indie rock hanger-on who hasn’t been heard from since his previous band, Thelonious Monster, breathed its last in 1992....
Nickel and Dimed The result of her mini social experiment–or, more accurately, her condescending stunt–was the ferociously praised book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In 200 breezy, self-absorbed pages, the best-selling author with a PhD (she mentions her degree three times) slogs through some particularly crappy jobs: waitress in Florida, maid and nursing home attendant in Maine, Wal-Mart “associate” in Minnesota. The hours are long, and the work is tedious and often degrading....
If in jazz “middle of the road” referred to a real stylistic space, as opposed to neither here nor there, saxophonist Rich Halley would be standing in it. On the token standard on his brand-new trio CD, Objects (Louie)–Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow”–he develops small melodic motifs in his solo much as he does on freer pieces, as if to suggest it’s all the same lane to him. On the rest of the program, rhythmic and harmonic schemes unfold as they tumble along at the players’ own pace; there are no bebop steeplechases or static screechy numbers....
I just read your vaginal discharge column in the Voice and I have to say that you have got to get some better sources of information about women. Yes, various glands in the vagina produce wetness when a woman gets turned on. That part was fine. As for vaginal “discharge,” I refer to a very good book called Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler, which is an extremely cool book about secondary fertility signs in women, how to chart your menstrual cycle, and lots of other information about the female reproductive cycle....
I’m 20, gay, and I just moved to the big city. I’m good-looking, I guess, because really hot guys are always hitting on me. I don’t actually like anal sex much, but I’m trying to learn. And that’s the problem: Most guys I sleep with don’t want to use condoms. How do I handle this? All gay guys want to have sex first before they’ll think about dating. How can I find a steady boyfriend and avoid getting infected with HIV if no one I meet will use condoms?...
