Month: July 2002

Most of us around the office have now admitted that our first “Stadium Rock” concert experience took place at the State Fairgrounds. Not as cool as seeing Prince in the Main Room, or the Hüskers at Duffy’s to be sure. But hardly worth being embarrassed about anymore. In fact, the more we think about it the more we realize just how impressive the State Fair lineup is each year, perhaps more by accident than by design. Sure, there’s plenty of behind-the-music roadkill like REO Speedwagon (August 30) or Poison (August 31). But for every KQRS refugee, there’s an MTV superhipster like Alicia Keyes. (August 23. No kidding!) Others on the lineup for 2002 include Bonnie Raitt (August 27), Lyle Lovett (August 27), and Trisha Yearwood (August 24). There’s something reassuring about knowing that nobody is too cool for the State Fair. It’s the great equalizer, innit?

Thanks in part to the industry-wide implosion of the alt-rock genre they rode in on, Soul Asylum’s days as platinum rock gods are almost certainly behind them. We get the impression they find this to be a relief: no more snarky stories about Dave Pirner’s hair or celeb girlfriends, no more carping about the lack of a solid-selling followup to “Runaway Train.” Now the lads can just rock out at their own pace. They’ve proven wrong all the doomsayers (us included) who predicted a breakup after their long slide from the limelight. Refusing to leave without a trace, they seem to have settled pretty comfortably into their post-Big Time phase, riding the dinosaur-act circuit of state fairs and chili cook-offs alongside much grayer bands like Journey and Bad Company. This one, fronting the Capital City Days fest in downtown St. Paul, is no exception; Cheap Trick headlines the following night. New songs have been popping up in their set lists, and word is that a follow-up to 1998’s Candy From a Stranger is planned for next year. Earlier this summer Pirner, who now lives in New Orleans, came out with his first solo album, Faces and Names. Featuring high-profile guests like Billy Preston and Chris Whitley, it’s a R&B-flavored break from his past—more soul and less asylum, reminiscent of Run Westy Run’s recent transformation into Iffy. www.capitalcitydays.com, www.soulasylum.com

This could be the most anticipated album of the year among Rakish readers. Let’s refresh our screens on Ms. Mann, shall we? When we last heard from her, she had conquered the world with her brilliant album Bachelor No. 2 — a wonderful, self-produced record that provided the inspiration for (and ultimately the soundtrack to) Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-nominated movie Magnolia . (One of those nominations was for the soundtrack—go, Aimee! Alas, she lost to that wuss Phil Collins, who wrote the soundtrack to Disney’s Tarzan.) This was almost literally a Cinderella story. Mann had, of course, made a name for herself as the rat-tailed singer of “Voices Carry,” in her New Wave band of the 80s, Til Tuesday. But as a solo artist through the 90s, she was poorly managed by a couple of ham-handed major labels, despite releasing two excellent albums. In 1998, she struck out on her own, recorded Bachelor No. 2, and took it directly to the people by selling it on the Web. It was the most success and critical acclaim she’d ever enjoyed, and she deserved it. Now Mann returns a hero, and we are happy to report that she is still in fine form, continuing to write what is universally identified as “sublime pop,” with smart lyrics, lush arrangements, soaring vocals, and all the rest.

If you’re like us, you browse Amazon or Roadrunner, find great CDs to replace your classic vinyl, and suddenly get buyer’s remorse, right before the deed is done. But this is one of those collections that should break our longstanding habit of procrastination. It’s a piece of the secret history of rock ’n’ roll, the smoking gun that connects David Bowie with the Replacements, Led Zep with Spacehog. Forget “Bang A Gong,” that cheap Power Station cover from the mid-80s. This is creepy slick-rock, proto-punk from the humid threshold of the 70s. The fact of the matter is that you really only need Electric Warrior in your collection—the acknowledged T. Rex classic first released in 1971—but since you’ve already got that, and you feel the need to completely immerse yourself in the sick grandeur that is T. Rex, go ahead and tune in, log on, and drop dime.

Do you know there are prophets in your midst? Steve Tibbetts is one of the planet’s most inventive electric guitarists, drummers, and tape manipulators—has been for more than 20 years and he makes his home right here in the Twin Cities. We’ve been fans in the wilderness ever since hearing a snippet of Exploded View on Radio K back in the day (1994). That was a stunning collection of overdriven electric guitars woven tightly into a tapestry of traditional tabla and congo drumming. If Hendrix hung out with TVBC, and they did Earl Grey and Ginkgo Biloba all day instead of… well, other drugs that come to mind, this is what might go in your earholes. As the story goes, Tibbetts had a brush with mortality a few years ago when he fell off a ladder and had to have one of his hands rebuilt. Pre-op, he took the opportunity to lay down this new record, full of urgency, big beats, wailing guitars, but also moments of shining ambient serenity. Don’t expect lyrics or anything else remotely linear. These are sound paintings—but emphatically not experiments, which would imply there was something accidental or uncontrolled going on. Tempting to call it New Age Prog Rock—what with his long tenure on the arty German label ECM—but let’s lay off the cheap labels. Just turn off the lights and turn up that stereo you were bragging about 10 years ago. Don’t be afraid to fire up a stick of incense, no one is watching.

If this isn’t enough rope for you, you need to seriously rethink what you’re planning to tie up. This 900-page expanded version of 1999’s Collected Mystery Stories gathers 83 short stories spanning the career of mystery master Block. He’s also a prolific novelist, but this tome is the best showcase for Block’s command of style; he does breezy romantic comedy, cold vindictiveness, Hitchcockian irony, and Chandleresque world-weariness and he does them all damn well. As a mystery author, Block gives the lion’s share of his work over to recurring series characters, all of whom make appearances here. Seeing them together shows what a motley crew he’s created. There’s Mephistophelian lawyer Martin Ehrengraf, who goes to any extreme necessary to prove a client’s innocence, especially if they’re guilty. And there’s the far breezier Bernie Rhodenbarr, dashing gentleman thief who steals cash and hearts with a Cary Grant smile. Block’s lasting legacy as a noir author will surely be his rich and melancholy books about alcoholic detective Matt Scudder. But his stories in Rope are inessential curiosities, like deleted scenes in a DVD. (Also see 1986’s When the Sacred Ginmill Closes , still Block’s best novel, or wait for Harrison Ford’s upcoming film of A Walk Among the Tombstones .)

Alice Sebold’s first novel is the great Oprah’s Book Club selection that never was—an accessible, generous, finely observed essay on the question of what the dead want from the living. A 14-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, is raped and murdered at the outset; then commences many years of wandering, grieving, and yearning on both sides of the great divide. It was daring of Sebold to risk the potentially disastrous device of telling the story in the dead girl’s voice, from beyond, but it pays off. By dwelling ostensibly on the dead’s sense of responsibility toward the living, Sebold captures in moving fashion exactly what it is the living owe to the dead: to bear their grief—wait it out, really—and go on living while they can. The book was no doubt written before 9/11, but the vagaries of the publishing cycle have conspired to make it, for the moment anyway, the most potently evocative writing on the subject that we’ve seen.

What a strange animal is “performance poetry” or “spoken word” or the ubiquitous “poetry slam.” There was a time when, if you got up on a stage and took the mike and told a story, you were a standup comedian. If there was a podium in front of you, and you’d taken a few learned degrees, then you were a poet giving a reading. Well, the eternal frustration of youth (exacerbated by public indifference and institutional favoritism) resulted in the 80s in a real bumrush: Self-styled poets who were wiping themselves with the reams of rejections they were getting from The New Yorker and The Paris Review decided to inject the punk-rock ethos into the dying art of poetry. They stormed the stage with an egg-timer, and the poetry slam was born. Say what you will about the phenomenon—there’s no way around it, you have to take the good with the bad—there is no denying that it’s here to stay. For the first time ever, the National Poetry Slam comes to Minneapolis. Check out the schedule, including slams at Kieran’s, Seventh Street Entry, the Orpheum, Sursumcorda, and several other venues. National Poetry Slam 2002, (612) 822-2500, www.nps2002.com

As a tongue-in-cheek chronicler of Upper Midwest farm life, it’s impossible to avoid comparing Jim Heynen to that popular juggernaut over at Minnesota Public Radio. And indeed, fans of Garrison Keillor will find much to enjoy in the work of this Iowa-born storyteller, who chronicles rural life and boyhood in a voice wistful, spare, and wry. The Boys’ House , which came out in paperback from Minnesota Historical Society Press in July, collects new stories and tales from two out-of-print collections about a loose, rambunctious band of farm kids known simply as “the boys,” whose exploits Tom Sawyer would recognize with a grin. They spend their lives playing in corn cribs and on threshers that might suffocate or mangle them in an instant. They innocently plot mayhem against stray cats and ducks, and learn unpretentious wisdom from sparrows and their not-quite-grownup Uncle Jack. All the while, they slowly awaken to the strange, contradictory adult world looming around the corner. Heynen’s simple, plainspoken prose is rich in observed human nature and a bittersweet awareness of the certainty of change. These short vignettes—all clocking in at around three pages—capture life under the shadow of grain silos as a series of snapshots rather than a single continuous narrative. Heynen’s spare, Zen-like lack of specificity is worlds apart from Keillor’s highly detailed Lake Wobegon. His small town is never named and exists in no particular state or decade, and his farm folk have the anonymous resonance of characters in a fable. They could live anywhere, and so live everywhere in those small towns and states of mind that the Wal-Marts and the malls haven’t yet plowed under. Ruminator Books, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com, www.jimheynen.com

Saturday morning, curled up on the braided rug, parents still sleeping or having coffee. From the scratchy little speaker of the “wood-look” television comes the melancholy ode to the journey of legislation, “I’m Just a Bill.” We knew they were really singing about what it’s like to be a kid, trying to advance various agendas, lobby for support, and face the ultimate possibility of final parental veto. This is why we identified so strongly with Schoolhouse Rock, the zany animated series that aired through the 70s and 80s, and it’s why we were willing to sit glued to the tube for blatantly educational programming. We don’t know if it also explains why millions of us bought tickets to see the jingly grammar and math tunes brought to life on the stage in the 90s when Schoolhouse Rock: The Musical toured the country, but who said everything can be explained? This month Disney releases the TV series on DVD, a two-disc set that includes more than 50 episodes. All the favorites are here: “Conjunction Junction,” “Three is a Magic Number,” “I’m Just a Bill” (of course), and “Electricity, Electricity.” New generations of kids have already proven the timeless appeal of the Schoolhouse Rockers (or, perhaps, demonstrated loyalty to their parents’ nostalgia) by embracing the Schoolhouse Rock video series. The DVD ups the fun with behind-the-scenes footage, “play-all” and “shuffle-all” features, and games. The show’s original creators have also written a new song, “I’m Gonna Send Your Vote To College” (about the electoral college, and rumored to explain just exactly what did take place in Florida in 2000).