City Slang: Hellmouth on being bitter, old and pissed off
Not long ago, I interviewed local hardcore/metal crossover band Hellmouth for Alternative Press magazine. The piece was pretty small, so much of the interview didn’t get used. However, I saved it and I now present it to you. Hellmouth consisted at the time of Jay Navarro (vocals), Jeff Uberti (bass), Alex Awn (guitar) and Justin…
Captain America: The First Avenger
He’s been waving the flag and stomping evil for seven decades, but Marvel Comics stalwart Captain America never has had a fair deal in Hollywood; from chintzy matinee serials to cheesy TV movies and a stinky straight-to-video disaster in the ’90s, Cap just hasn’t caught a break. Finally, at long last, after such C-listers as…
Paul McCartney @ CoPa Setlist, Recap & Photos
Last night Paul McCartney brought his latest band to Detroit proper for the first time since playing Olympia Stadium during the 1976 Wings Over America Tour (something that stuck with McCartney for a while.) McCartney also came to Michigan in 2005 with this same band but brought the two-night stand to the Palace of…
City Slang: Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth remembers his Michigan beginnings
Many people aren’t aware that Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley is from Michigan and he started his career with local hardcore band the Crucifucks. He has been with the Sonic Youth since 1985, but that hasn’t stopped him working with other people as well. I interviewed Shelley for UK drum magazine Rhythm in April 2009…
City Slang: The Howling Diablos at the Park Bar
Tino Gross – Detroit’s perennial Mr. Nice Guy. It’s hard to believe that the man has ever said a bad word about anyone and yet the Howling Diablos have struggled to climb further up the ladder for at least half a decade. Perhaps that’s a good thing. The Diablos are really not a stadium band…
City Slang: Citizen Smith and Patrick Davy rock the UDetroit Café
So on Thursday evening, City Slang made it’s now-regular weekly appearance on the Motor City Special show, and the segment, though delayed by two hours, was sweet. Host Kevin Pachla and I discussed the Howling Diablos, Big Chief, Cactus and more. Meanwhile, fellow guest Mark Arminski, artist extraordinaire, talked up the forthcoming People’s Arts Festival.…
Snyder is weighing in on metro Detroit transit
No one who knows is saying what, but Gov. Rick Snyder’s quiet appointment of a longtime political adviser and administrator Dennis Schornack to work on southeast Michigan transportation seems to indicate — as one federal source put it — that the guv wants to see something done. Schornack, most recently the executive director of the…
The In Crowd: Videos
Loveland Imagination Station Robocop Painting Vs Detroit
Midsummer Meltdown: DJ’s converging on Majestic Saturday
In accordance with this week’s heat, the name is only fitting. Midsummer Meltdown goes down Saturday night at the Majestic Theatre in Detroit. P.L.U.Rfect, along with Dat Slik and Burst Audio, have gathered a healthy selection of DJ’s from around the country to spin through 150,000 watts and over 60 subwoofers. In other words, lots…
Red Baraat – Bootleg Bhangra
It seems Indian-American jazz drummer Sunny Jain put together a more-or-less traditional Indian processional band for his wedding six years ago. The ensemble slowly took a life of its own, with bookings on the Indian wedding circuit, moving beyond that in 2008, cutting their debut Chaal Baby in 2010, and now this live-recorded place-holder while…
Celebrity!
Miss Wyoming. Kidnapping. Mormons. Cloned dogs. The latest documentary from Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (Standard Operating Procedure, Fog of War), Tabloid, chronicles the fabulously deranged story of brainy, busty, beauty queen Joyce McKinney and her obsessive love for a dumpy Mormon named Kirk Anderson. Back in the ’70s, McKinney, convinced that her budding romance with…
Paradise Jazz 2012: Remembering Duke and more
Back in 1941, with the Detroit Symphony having departed two years earlier for cheaper accommodations at Masonic Temple, the shuttered Orchestra Hall came back to life with a new name and a new mission: the Paradise Theatre. What had been the home for Brahms, Bach and Beethoven was saved by big bands steeped in swing,…
MT-featured artist wins East Bay props
You may recall Bay Area artist and Powerhouse contributor Monica Canilao — she was recently featured in the Metro Times cover story “The party at the end of the world.” The 27-year-old artist brought a number of Bay Area artists to Detroit last year to help Canilao transform an abandoned house — along with such other…
Kickstarter 101
Let’s pretend we want to launch an indie record label. First we need to decide how much money we’ll really need for recording, mixing, pressing, distribution, and maybe a small PR budget. Say $6,500 total. Next, set a deadline, a realistic time frame of how many days we believe it’ll take us to achieve our…
City Slang: Remembering the White Stripes
In 2005, I was still living in London and loving Detroit with a passion bordering obsession from afar. I had visited the city but hadn’t yet sorted myself out to move here. So when the White Stripes came to London in 2005 (supported by Blanche) I was there at the front, wearing a Lions shirt…
Colbie Caillat – All of You
Colbie Caillat is just so, well, bubbly. Taking a career cue from her breakthrough 2007 hit, the California girl comes by her sunny pop naturally. Her dad co-produced Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, quite possibly the quintessential L.A. pop album. But Caillat leaves all the relationship baggage and lines of coke behind, opting instead for breezy acoustic…
David Byron – Take No Prisoners
The rock ‘n’ roll heap is piled high with never-wases, burnouts, has-beens and straight-up tragedies. File singer David Byron in the latter, his fame equal parts salve and curse. He sold 30 million albums fronting Uriah Heep in the ’70s, earned countless gold records and headlined arenas the world over. He drank himself dead in…
Wonder Twins: Thank You For Being A Friend
This past Saturday, the Wonder Twins attended opening night of Thank You for Being a Friend: The Unofficial Golden Girls Parody at the Ringwald Theatre in Ferndale. From the very first scene, they were reminded why their late Grandma Bea used to tell them that The Golden Girls was inappropriate for them to watch as…
City Slang: “Mack Avenue Skullgame – Original Soundtrack” revisited
Not only does Mack Avenue Skullgame need revisiting, but Big Chief’s entire career deserves to be enjoyed all over again. The presence of former Necros singer Barry Henssler was enough to give Big Chief some cred before they’d even played a note. When they did kick in, it was the all-too-overlooked guitar pairing of Phil…
Beyond, before and after Kickstarter
Unarguably the most popular crowdsourcing platform on the Internet, bringing in $1 million in mostly small donations daily, Kickstarter wasn’t the first or the last to launch. As Time magazine put it back in 2008: “Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from…
Building blocks
The 35-acre parcel on the southeast corner of Woodward Avenue and Eight Mile Road would seem to be valuable real estate at the intersection of two of Detroit’s main thoroughfares. Once owned by the state, over the years, developers have had plans for a campground, parking lot, hotels and various retail outlets there. About 10…
Spun
Colbie Caillat All of You Universal Republic Colbie Caillat is just so, well, bubbly. Taking a career cue from her breakthrough 2007 hit, the California girl comes by her sunny pop naturally. Her dad co-produced Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, quite possibly the quintessential L.A. pop album. But Caillat leaves all the relationship baggage and lines of…
Farewell, Western civilization
Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. —Joni Mitchell Here’s something that you should find far scarier than a whole brigade of religious nuts with explosives in their underwear: The ignorant, callous right-wing nuts in the Ohio Legislature passed a bill this month that could…
Top Shelf
It’s official: Eating locally is more popular than ever. Not only is local food fresher and better for the planet, buying local products collectively pumps millions of dollars back into the Michigan economy. And not only does that money stay in the state, it also seems to be feeding an explosion of small-scale food products…
Monster of rock
First of all, let’s get something out of the way; Cactus guitarist Jim McCarty and I have a mildly sticky recent history because back in March 2010, I wrote a feature about another of his other projects, the Hell Drivers. I called them a "bar band," albeit the "Motor City’s greatest bar band ever." Still,…
The real thing
Kai Garden 116 S. Main St., Ann Arbor 734-995-1786 kaigarden.com Entrées: $8-$14 or $5-$14 Handicap accessible I’d barely finished my sentence, telling the friendly Kai Garden waitress I’d once lived in Guangzhou, when she said, "We have a Chinese menu" and promptly brought one, filled with such delicacies as jellyfish, beef tendon, crispy fried pork…
Monogamish?
Q: You probably get this question every day. I’m a man who loves it when my girlfriend fucks me with a strap-on. Another great thing: My girlfriend ejaculates frequently and plentifully when we have sex, and she has done so when she’s pegging me. Which leads to my question: What are the possible issues from…
Pot’s new Cold War
< It was great to see my dear comrade Ed Rosenthal with Larry Gabriel in last week’s Higher Ground. One of the greatest developments in American jurisprudence, in my experience, was when the San Francisco jury that was instructed to convict Ed for growing marijuana found out after the trial had ended that he had…
Highway call
The sound of the lonely man with a guitar invariably conjures up mythical American images of forlorn highways and dusty ghost towns, The Last Picture Show and Paris, Texas. Norwegian singer-songwriter Thomas Dybdahl grew up with such snapshots; the long autumns and winters of his home country take a toll, he says, on the mood…
Food of love
$=$5-$10; $$=$10-$25; $$$=$25-$50; $$$$=$50+ Baker’s Keyboard Lounge 20510 Livernois Ave., Detroit; 313-345-6300; bakerskeyboardlounge.com; $$: Baker’s bills itself as "the world’s oldest jazz club," and, in the club’s 75-year history, almost every jazz musician of national importance has played its bandstand. Baker’s complements the music with some amazing down-home cooking, their catfish being a true showstopper.…
Food Stuff
Beer here! For the 14th year in a row, the Michigan Brewers Guild is throwing its Summer Beer Festival, the group’s oldest — and largest — celebration of Michigan beer. Slake your thirst for Mitten-made brews with more than 300 different beers from scores of Michigan breweries, enjoyed in the great outdoors in Ypsilanti’s Riverside…
Cheat Code
Catherine Atlus Xbox 360, Playstation 3 This game is a deceiver; the title art caught my eye as some kind of foreign horror platformer or somethin’. You begin playing the game as some sad emo boy who’s asleep, having a terrible dream. The quirky thing is that this sad kid’s nightmares are literally puzzles. Here’s…
Thaddeus Dixon’s reality show
Drummer Thaddeus Dixon is polite, long-winded, and grateful for all the help he’s received getting his career rolling. Going back to his toddling years, he gives props to his grandmother, who bought him a set of rummage-sale bongos, which he promptly wore out. He gives props to his parents who found a used semi-pro drum…
The In Crowd
When he’s wholly in his head, Jerry Paffendorf’s brows tell the action: "And what-ifs" are arched in wonderment — "wait but thens," are comically furrowed. And when he’s only half in his head, all 6 feet, 7 inches of Jerry become West Coast relaxed. He rolls his own cigarettes, using them to animate the arsenal…
Detroit’s Charlie Gabriel on Letterman show tonight
Reposted with correction from last week: Local jazz fans may have noticed that Charlie Gabriel hasn’t been seen much on the local scene these last couple of years. There’s a reason: Charlie, whose family roots go back to generations of Crescent City music makers, was recruited for one of the reed chairs in the esteemed…
City Slang: Weekly music review roundup
Remember – if you send it, it will get reviewed. That’s the City Slang promise. It doesn’t matter what genre the music is – as long as it has a Metro Detroit connection, it’ll get in. Preferably, we’d like to concentrate on new releases but, while we’re getting warmed up here, feel free to send…
Downtown is Taco Town?
If the owners of El Guapo Fresh Mexican Grill could visit City Hall a reported 60 times to secure their permits and persuade the city powers that a downtown taco truck was a good idea, I could walk four blocks in searing heat, wait in line for 15 minutes and another, oh, 10 to get…
