Cover Story
Music Issue 2014: Where Louisville music meets the world
From its humble beginning as a locals-in-Tyler-Park day to today’s big-time international attraction, the Forecastle Festival has continued to book a handful of local acts alongside many bigger touring names. LEO asked a pair of notable locals playing this year, rapper Jalin Roze and Edward Grimes, drummer/vocalist for the trippy noir-rock band Seluah, for their…
Plugged In
Readers are strongly encouraged to call ahead to verify these listings. To get your musical act listed, send email to pberkowitz@leoweekly.com with PLUGGED IN in the subject line. The deadline is FRIDAY at NOON the week before the show happens. We do not accept listings via social networking sites. Wed JUL 16 Baxter’s 942:…
Music Issue 2014: Max Moore sees a lucky tree
If you are a fan of local punk and indie, chances are you’ve already seen some of Max Moore’s work. A young filmmaker, Moore has worked with local luminaries like Coliseum and Xerxes, as well as national acts like Converge and Into It. Over It., to make stylized music videos that serve as a visual…
Inbox — July 16, 2014
Unearthing Stories I agree with Erik Martínez’s letter published in the July 2 LEO Weekly. Drag almost always dominates discussions about gay pride, but to be fair, drag queens also garnered much attention with their chorus-line kicks down Christopher Street after the raid at Stonewall. Neither side of the conversation mentioned the history, which leads…
The tipping point
Legislation to increase the minimum wage in Louisville is about to take off full-steam ahead in the next several weeks. One of the toughest battles in this #raisethewage campaign will be the effort to include tipped employees (namely restaurant servers) in a wage increase. As I’ve described in this column before, the tipped minimum wage…
Music Issue 2014: Buy the ticket, take the ride
I’ll never forget March 2, 2013, when Tame Impala played Headliners. The Australian band had been playing 1,200-3,000-capacity venues and festivals, and Louisville was seeing them in a 700-capacity room. The tickets were announced months before, and you could feel the excitement all over social media and at bars when the show was brought up.…
Music Issue 2014: Morgan Lebus’ Ribbon Music movement
Growing up in Louisville, Morgan Lebus wasn’t necessarily one of the cool kids. When he started discovering underground music in middle school, his first favorites were bands from the Washington, D.C., Dischord scene. But he found them by following other kids to shows at unconventional venues like the Another Place Sandwich Shop on Frankfort Avenue.…
Music Issue 2014: In a different groove
Dani Markham was there when elementary school teacher Diane Downs found abandoned instruments in a closet in the early ’90s. “She was, like, ‘Look what I found! Let’s do this.’ And we started a group.” The group Downs started is now called the Louisville Leopard Percussionists, and it has become known globally. In the group’s…
Harvest inspires our critic’s rant
For a change of pace this week, let’s start with a rant. A political rant! A rant about food politics! I don’t want to say Michael Pollan or Mark Bittman are latecomers to the party. But I’m sure I’m not the only Boomer who woke up to the issues of food justice a generation earlier…
Advice: Savage Love
Q: Two questions, Dan. 1. Recently, I went to a bar with my brother and encountered a friend from high school. My brother told me that, toward the end of the night, my friend followed him into the bathroom and made a drunken pass at him (which apparently involved a clumsy grab at his penis).…
Music Issue 2014: The David Geffen of Louisville?
You might call Brian Lueken the David Geffen of Louisville. Like Geffen, Lueken has merged his business acumen with his creative interests to become a stalwart of the local scene. The founder of Decibel Mastering and the live concert-recording project Coincident Pair, Lueken operates behind the scenes of many Louisville acts, from Rachel Grimes to…
The good-morning game
It’s been heartening to see the dramatic increase in bike riders and the enhancements to bike infrastructure in Louisville over the past decade. Our city still has a lot of room for improvement, especially in the areas of driver and cyclist safety awareness, but we’ve come a long way. For about eight months of the…
Union grounds
Operating out of the Old Louisville neighborhood for nearly three years, Smokey’s Bean coffee shop (1451 S. First St.) is named after the mellow chow-lab mix that is a constant presence in the somewhat uniquely dog-friendly local business. Soon the business will truly be breaking unique ground in Louisville, as it is set to become…
Video TapeWorm
THIS WEEK’S TWIN PEEKS: ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE 2013; $9.98-$29.98; UR Caitlin Stasey from “I, Frankenstein” is a lovely, if dark and brooding, cheerleader with a grudge against the local football star in this comic tale of high-school revenge, mystical orgasms, the undead, blood slurping and icky resurrections. The cast is amazing, led by hotties Sianoa…
The tainted Republican brand
In March of 1964, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. descended on the U.S. Capitol to hear Senate debates on a civil rights bill proposed by President John F. Kennedy the previous year. It is widely believed this was the only time the two iconic leaders ever met. Four years and one month later,…
Bar Belle: ’dix out
A funny thing happened on the way to a Fourth of July party, and it landed me in the hospital. It was a long, arduous journey to said hospital, as I took the road much taken by health care bureaucracy where I encountered a name-your-own-adventure style of service. More on that later. As shocking as…
Where it counts
Mark and Michelle Pruitt didn’t expect their new neighbors to attack with burning pitchforks, but they did question whether a local market existed for the philosophy they were promoting. The couple had just moved into Salem, Ind., to open Uplands PEAK Sanctuary, their 20-acre refuge for rescued farm animals that doubles as a campsite and…
Book: Words that light a fuse
The poem is printed on a single sheet. The paper is thick and the letters are set noticeably deeper than the page’s surface. The bottom half is taken up mostly by an illustration of a tree with a single bird’s nest in it, imagery from the Graham Foust piece above. “A broadside is a poem…
Comedy: Reber and Carney keep ‘The Late Late Breakfast’ cookin’
Have you ever opened your eyes on a Sunday afternoon, realizing your head feels like there’s a marching band stomping around inside? Maybe there’s dried chunks of something that may or may not be vomit plastered to your shirt, and perhaps you’re not 100-percent sure you know the name of the person lying next to…
Music Issue 2014: ‘We’ve had some tragedy’: The blessing and curse of Gwar
When Louisville metal mainstay Jamison Land got the call to join Gwar, a band he had loved since high school, he could not have been happier. But his dream soon turned into something much more tragic than anyone could have expected. Founded by vocalist Dave Brockie (who played the character Oderus Urungus) in 1984 in…
Music Issue 2014: Still just a dirty punk kid
Laura Jane Grace, the songwriter, producer and lead singer of Against Me!, says her earliest memories are of gender dysphoria, the feeling of being disconnected from her body and her gender. Grace was born and raised in Florida as Tommy Gabel, but she never felt like a boy. When she was 4, she saw Madonna…
Staffpicks
Wednesday, July 16 Jason Lescalleet’s ‘Trophy Tape’ Dreamland 810 E. Market St. dreamlandislouisville.org $10; 7 p.m. Jason Lescalleet isn’t your typical musical artist. He records and performs his bizarre, experimental songs on equipment (lots of old tape decks) that most would call archaic at this point. However, his sound is far ahead of that of…
Culture: Latrice Royale — The wind beneath her wings
“I didn’t expect to be doing no drag ever, ever, ever,” says Timothy Wilcots, who has been doing drag as Latrice Royale for two decades. The south Florida resident, 42, has seen her art form rise from the underground to the mainstream, and her own fame is due to competing on the TV series that…
