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Whooowhee! Whitey Morgan & the 78’s are playing at Sam Bond’s this week, and it’s sure to be swingin’. Superficially, it’s outlaw country just the way you imagine it — twang, drawl and do-si-do — but there’s something unique about Whitey’s songwriting that’s hard to place. Continue reading
Corsets and top hats, handlebar moustaches and suspenders, petticoats and purple hair: enter the world of Portland’s neo-vaudevillian Vagabond Opera. A popular attraction on Northwest stages, Vagabond Opera mixes gypsy-jazz, Eastern European folk music, opera and Weimar cabaret into legendary, quirky and energetic live shows. You’ll hear accordions, Arabic flavors, Yiddish tunes and memorable themes from classical music, mixed together in a big steampunk spectacle. Continue reading
“KLCC: Let Living Large Live!” is the cri de coeur of the Change.org petition by the Eugene Musicians Collective (EMC) who are urging KLCC to keep Eric Alan’s show on the air. Word is that come July 1, the station is going to cut the popular Eugene show, which features local and touring musicians, and replace it with national news coverage. EMC is hosting a sidewalk rally outside of KLCC (136 W. 8th Ave.) 11 am to 6 pm Friday, June 14, with music by Satori Bob, Sonic Bent and more. Continue reading
Fox & Woman formed at street poetry gatherings in San Francisco’s Mission District. Their 2013 release, This Side Dawn, is gentle; lilting violin and tight female harmonies from Jess Silva and Emily Halton — who occasionally sing in Portuguese — mix with intricate and delicate guitar playing. Continue reading
Local jam band Blue Lotus is about to release their third album, A Thousand Other Things — their concert at WOW Hall on June 15 will be a CD release party — and singer-rhythm guitarist Brandelyn Rose says the band will be giving listeners something a bit different this time. “The album has 12 songs, but what’s hard for us is we tend to be improvisational,” Rose says. “We usually have songs that go anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes long, so for us it was a challenge to try and capture that in a studio album.” Continue reading
I’m pretty sure truck-stop rocker James McMurtry was laughing into his dinner as he sat at Poppi’s Anatolia last time he came to Eugene. He was chilling out alone before his WOW Hall show, sitting one table over from me, and couldn’t help but to hear my friend Becky bitching me out for not putting hay bales around the bottom of my Airstream trailer in a sort of redneck insulation to keep it warm in the winter. Continue reading
Over the course of his long and storied career, maverick American director Robert Altman reeled off a handful of cinematic corkers: Nashville, M*A*S*H, Gosford Park. Among Altman’s lesser films, sandwiched between Popeye (yes, Popeye!) and Streamers, is an adapted play with the sesquipedalian title of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Folks of a certain age probably recall Cher in that one. And, like me, you may also remember it, vaguely, as a musical along the lines of Hairspray. But it wasn’t, and isn’t. Continue reading
“You show up to an audition in Eugene,” actress Emily Hart says, “and the play will have one or two women’s roles. Maybe they’re good, maybe they’re not, but there will be 30 women competing for them.” The toll this competition takes artistically is a serious one. According to Hart, “It becomes not so much about the joy of theater, but about how I beat other people out for roles.” Continue reading
Joel Pickford’s Le Monde Créole Continue reading
She showed up for a night of “sex to change the course of the world.” He locked the door behind her and duct-taped the air vents to save the human race. With a careful calculation of comet speed, fish sleep and personal hunches, biologist Jules has pinpointed the cataclysmic end of the world at about 7 minutes away, setting us up for a comedy that takes us for a philosophical swim through evolution and imagination. Continue reading