Author Archive
Tunes
It’s suggestive that the quotations on the back cover of The Last Holiday: A Memoir, the new autobiography penned by writer and singer Gil Scott-Heron speak to Scott-Heron’s significance as an artist and not the importance of t...
Q&A
When Gordon Mayer first set up a shopping cart on his website where he sells his hand-made ukuleles, he initially thought it would be a “technical challenge,” but when he got an order the very next day, he knew he was onto some...
Trips
We started the day by doing a bit of gambling at the recently-renovated Tropicana. We’d been to the updated Trop on a previous trip where we took the Mob Experience tour. This time, we just played a few slots, including our new...
Trips
In the morning we got up bright and early (well, 9am—we’re not crazy) and headed downtown. We had an appointment to tour the Neon Museum Boneyard, a collection of donated signs that tell the story of glitz gone by. From the S...
Trips
Since Southwest Airlines ran one of their special vacation packages that included a discounted room and two show tickets, we decided to escape the Midwest winter and return to Sin City once again. For the first time, we rented ...
Q&A
It’s been almost 20 years since Nada Surf first came together and infused indie rock with a sensitivity that would evolve into something like what we currently consider “emo.” Not that the band was really “emo,” but its vocal h...
Q&A
Polemical though it may be, the title track to Which Side Are You On?, Ani DiFranco’s new studio release that arrives in January, finds the singer-songwriter engaging in a passionate discussion about ideology and politics as sh...
Art
Whopperjaw owns an original painting from The Sign Guy (who prefers we use his art name here). We picked this deranged bunny from the outsider artist for less than 50 bucks at a festival in the eclectic near west Cleveland neig...
Q&A
Perhaps the only woman to ever play lead guitar in an instrumental surf rock outfit, Susan SurfTone started playing guitar nearly 40 years ago. She gravitated toward surf music in the early ’90s, capitalizing on the renewed int...
Concert Recaps
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s American Music Masters Series is an annual event for which the museum assembles a cast of performers to pay tribute to one of its inductees. Past honorees have included Woody Guthrie, Hank Willi...