The Goo Goo Dolls are one of those unlucky bands who are a lot better than fair but not much more than pretty good. Like that of their latitudinal compatriots Soul Asylum and the Replacements, the Buffalo threesome’s output teems with hooks and swelling choruses, and boasts both dynamic song construction and an assaultive guitar […]
Tag: Vol. 24 No. 29
Issue of Apr. 27 – May. 3, 1995
Posted inNews & Politics
Painful Realities
Dear Editor: After seeing Still/Here by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, I am trying to decide whether Arlene Croce, who had the audacity to write about a piece she had not seen, or the Reader’s Terry Brennan, who had the similar audacity to provide commentary on a multimedia performance piece after seeing parts […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The City File
Gee, I was doing my laps fine until Car Talk came on and I swallowed a gallon of water. Hammacher Schlemmer’s spring catalog lists a miniature “water-resistant personal radio [with earphones] that you can actually wear while you swim, still enjoying your favorite FM radio station in the water.” And only scripts with a minimum […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Helium
Helium’s new album The Dirt of Luck sounds a lot like a horror-movie sound track: gloomy keyboards, pounding funereal drums, and lyrics that mention tombs, skeletons, and black angels. But the horror in bandleader Mary Timony’s songs is real–death pervades her music. Sometimes it’s a gradual death of the spirit that comes from growing up […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Art People: rock ‘n’ roll poster boy
Colin McFrangos “hated every minute” of an advanced drawing class he took a year ago at the School of the Art Institute. He says he’d been making “pretty hermetic” prints, “spilling my guts out in such a coded way that no one would ever care about the work.” The drawing instructor, whose own art he […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Johnny Giffin
The new album by saxophonist Johnny Griffin, Chicago, New York, Paris (Verve), celebrates his 50th year playing jazz by offering stylistic representations of the three major cities he’s lived and worked in. It sets out to collect blues-based material from Chicago, bebop from New York, and ballads from Paris, yet no half-baked concept can long […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Restaurant Tours: the Miller’s tale
Jim Gallios is as Chicago as the Wabash el, in whose shadows he’s been feeding much of the city for the past 46 years. Feeding it real food: steaks, prime rib, multiethnic specials, and some of the best barbecued ribs this side of 39th Street. Harry Truman once drank bourbon after hours at his joint; […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Family Secrets
Family Secrets, Royal George Theatre Center. Retired accountant Mort Fisher, the first of five characters Sherry Glaser plays in her hilarious and disturbing one-woman show, always believed in the American dream of assimilation and affluence: this perplexed patriarch gave his family all the happiness and security money could buy. So why is his teenage daughter […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Archers of Loaf
With their new album Vee Vee (reviewed this week in section one), Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf should put to rest the comparisons to Superchunk and Pavement that have plagued them since their first single three years ago. It’s true that the band’s rock-out enthusiasm mirrors Superchunk’s, just as their careening detuned guitars recall Pavement, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Verse in their class: Lane Tech’s prodigious poets
It’s hardly the news of headlines and front pages, but for the last few years some of the city’s most prolific and profound teenage poets have come from Lane Technical High School, a north side public school best known for producing football players and engineers. In this year’s citywide high school poetry contest sponsored by […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Snow Job
To the Editor: Forget that Mancow is a doughy, sophomoric, cowardly imp. Forget that most of his audience are impressed by that. What’s most disturbing about the March 31 cover story on Mancow Muller is not the subject, but Grant Pick’s self-serving attempt to make us feel that really, underneath it all, Mancow’s a caring […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Tish Hinojosa’s Border Tour
This lineup beautifully captures the inherent multiculturalism of Austin roots music. Country, Tex-Mex, blues, R & B, rock, conjuntos: Austin artists mix ‘n’ match ’em without a second thought. Don Walser’s new album Rolling Stone From Texas (Watermelon) covers both halves of country and western by offering rich cowboy tunes such as “Cowpoke” to counter […]
Posted inMusic
Mother’s Tongue
PJ Harvey To Bring You My Love (Island) PJ Harvey’s new record, To Bring You My Love, reminds me of the debate over the peculiar powers of the female voice that has been building over the last couple of decades in a few enclaves of critical and cultural theory. In a recent collection of essays, […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Fair Play
In “Vinyl Resting Place,” the piece I wrote profiling Raffe’s Record Riot in the April 14 Reader, I mentioned that Raffe Simonian has his own radio show on Saturday mornings from 8 to 10 on WJJG (1530 AM). Actually he is an occasional guest host on Bob Knack’s show of the same name. Bob’s show […]