About midway through the Holmes Brothers’ opening set at B.L.U.E.S. a man shouted from the audience, “Where you guys from?” “New York,” answered guitarist Wendell Holmes, adding that he and his brother had originally hailed from Virginia. But the man who’d asked wasn’t really looking for that kind of answer; you could tell by his dazed, radiant expression that he meant something like, “Where the hell have you guys been?”...
It’s been far too long since ebullient harpist Little Arthur Duncan showed up on the north side; recently he’s been concentrating on running the Artesia Lounge, a cozy little blues bar on West Madison. Duncan’s technique is no-frills: he blows in a harsh warble and sings with ragged emotionalism. Even when his intonation falters he keeps the energy level raw and exhilarating. His trademark number is Slim Harpo’s “Baby Scratch My Back”; characteristically, he takes Harpo’s backwoods paean to relaxation and transforms it into a funky urban house-rocker....
The members of this Arizona trio are genuine postpunk hippies, a contradiction in terms that would seem impossible to sustain. What has kept them doing it for so long, however, is a search. Fundamentally, it’s a typical hippie search for “inner meaning” in private, ordinary life, and it’s evinced in their songs’ druggy meditations on personal relationships and personal surroundings (Mexican restaurants, swimming holes, the surreal Arizona landscape). But at the same time, the Meat Puppets’ search has also taken the typically postpunk form of a journey through the debris of pop history toward a style they can call their own....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Robert McClory in his article about Thomas Sheehan (Reader, 4/21/89) remarks on the books on Sheehan’s shelves as concerning “esoteric subjects like phenomenology and hermeneutics.” Then a few lines later in the very same paragraph McClory blithely refers to metaphysics and Heidegger as if they are not esoteric. Where is McClory coming from? How is he drawing the line between esoteric and exoteric?...
Like doctors struggling to cure a sick friend, director Sheldon Patinkin and composer William Russo are struggling to revive the great American musical. Working out of Columbia College’s Theater/Music Center, they have gathered writers, composers, actors, and directors in an effort to create original musicals. This season the Theater/Music Center is producing two: Talking to the Sun, now playing, and State Street, which will open in May. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
This film represented Alain Resnais’ comeback in 1974 after five years’ absence (precipitated by the commercial failure of Je t’aime, je t’aime), and like many of his other features, it looks better now than it did when it was first released. Scripted by Jorge Semprun (La guerre est finie, Z), it tells the true story of a notorious international financier (Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose ruin in 1933 led to a major political scandal and his own death....
Michael Pensack is sitting in the kitchen, planning his strategy. To hear him tell it, we are at war, the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the land barons, the have-nots their tenants. Dinner with Pensack is unlike any other dining experience you’re likely to have. There’s no talk about movies; he rarely gets out to movies. He also doesn’t read newspapers, so he’s not up on anything in “Sneed” or “Inc....
The question of what Hitler was really trying to do has long fascinated political scientist Carlos Rizowy, and he propounds his controversial insights during his frequent public-speaking appearances, largely before Jewish groups. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “As a Jew, I see the world as a fragmented thing, a collection of many pieces. “And it is my responsibility as a human being to thread the pieces together, to form a mosaic–without eliminating any of the pieces, without destroying anyone’s identity....
Gee, I still can’t get it into first gear. Letters we never finished: “Dear Editor, Enclosed please find a column on bringing life back to an old car by adding new loudspeakers.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “She is a very appealing candidate: non-threatening and articulate and well-versed in the ways of the white world, but she still has the sense of being in touch with regular black folks”–that’s community organizer Lu Palmer on would-be U....
ARCHANGELS DON’T PLAY PINBALL The atmosphere is set as soon as you walk in the theater. A very tense guy in sunglasses sits in the front row reading a tabloid, what appeared to me to be a “best of” the Star. By the time the first production number was over (“Watch Out for the Tilt,” comparing life to a game of pinball), and the shifty-looking guys singing it had dragged the guy reading the Star onstage with them, I was in a wonky state of mind and ready for anything....
Two leading lights of the postwar generations of British composers are featured in this latest installment of the Contemporary Chamber Players concerts: Alexander Goehr (b. 1932), of the influential Manchester Group, is represented by the Concerto for Eleven (1970), an extroverted number inspired by Jewish wedding music; and Oliver Knussen (b. 1952), a prodigy noted for the playfulness of his style and for his sensitive and mature treatment of the voice, whose recent Hums and Songs of Winnie the Pooh ought to be a delightful vehicle for soprano Elsa Charlston’s theatrical flair....
The sound of melodramatic soap opera dialogue blares from a TV suspended from the ceiling, ricocheting off the pink tiles, as Sha-Sha shows off the designs in her display case. They look like miniature replicas of medieval and African shields, but what they are is fingernails. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Her clients are willing to dish out serious cash to keep their nails looking sharp....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have a tax number and I collect your money for you at art fairs all over the state. I step right up and pay on time, every time. I pay state taxes every day of my life. I don’t pay to provide salaries for politicians who want to use the American flag to bamboozle their constituents into thinking they’re great guys....
When we last checked in with Minneapolis’s Gear Daddies, they’d released an indie cassette called Let’s Go Scare Al and were trying to get noticed. Since then they’ve been picked up by PolyGram, which rereleased Al and put out their new album, Billy’s Live Bait. Their first record was an inchoate but promising country-rock blend of small-town woes and a sort of laconic defiance. Bait is just terrific; the country’s still there and so’s the trenchancy, but the record is less naive, has more shape, and rocks out more confidently....
Thirteen years after he closed the doors of Chess Records, Ralph Bass still camps out in an office on South Michigan Avenue. A gaunt, sprightly figure, 80 years old as of May 1, Bass helps his wife run the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre. And for ten years he’s been working on a book, the first draft of which is at a publisher. He’s calling it “I Didn’t Give a Damn if Whites Bought It....
The 43-year-old Tony Williams is not only the most admired and imitated drummer of his generation but one of a handful of landmark drummers who have helped to reshape and redefine the instrument’s role. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » From that point on, everything Williams played had an international audience, and he was riding on the crest of one of the most significant leader-band marriages that jazz had ever produced, the legendary Miles Davis Quintet: Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Williams....
You have to admire Jules Shear’s career of the last 10 or 12 years–his work is rather inconsistent (fine-to-OK work with the Funky Kings, Jules and the Polar Bears, Reckless Sleepers, and solo) but through it all he’s remained committedly tuneful and relatively thoughtful: his insistent search for redemption through songwriting qua songwriting has given him an aura of indomitability. Which is why his near-brilliant, career-making new album, The Third Party, is such a big payoff....
At the el station at 95th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway, a teddy-bearish campaign worker is hollering through a bullhorn. “Mayor Sawyer and Jesse Jackson say good morning! Good morning! Punch eight on February 28!” “Gene, Gene,” Jackson says, a slight annoyance in his voice. He thrusts the young man toward Sawyer. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I enjoy campaigning,” he says between bites, “but it is different from running for alderman....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » One of the children of Holocaust survivors, Mr. Rizowy, admonishes Polish fathers (not German fathers!) for not telling their children about the genocide of the Jews, which “our people permitted.” If Poles “permitted” the murder of the Jews, they also “permitted” the slaughter of 3 million Christian Poles and other German atrocities, such as the forcible removal of 200,000 Polish children from their families, who were taken to Germany never to return....
OF GRAPES AND NUTS The Players have scaled comic heights before. Their Glass Mendacity was the most devastating send-up of Tennessee Williams since his last four plays, and All My Spite reduced Arthur Miller to an hour-long gut buster. But with Of Grapes and Nuts, a surefire satire on Steinbeck, they’ve struck the mother lode of comedy. Few shows nowadays–on Wells Street or off–can choke a crowd on its own laughter....
