Critic's Corner
MJ Lenderman + Waxahatchee, 4/20 @ The Beacon Theater
Our newest saviors of rock ‘n’ roll, MJ Lenderman and Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) are trying their best to be Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I was lucky enough to catch their show at the famous Beacon Theater the other night, lucky because the tickets sold out almost immediately, with scalpers reselling crappy upper-balcony seats for upwards of $200. I remember the good old days when an MJ ticket cost you 30 bucks.
All I can say is that the Brooklyn hipsters lost their minds with this one. The show was a sit-down situation, which I hated. Seated shows are only okay when the chairs are a mere suggestion to be ignored and used as cupholders.
The stage was set up like somebody’s grandmother’s living room, with random lamps and end tables everywhere. MJ and Katie sat on …
Which Doobie You Be?
From biker bars to yacht rock, Jesus was there.
What red-blooded American male doesn’t want a pretty mama to take him by the hand?
Jeff Baxter sat with his ass perched on a stool for the entire concert and played like a motherfucker.
Rock ‘n’ roll is not a thing anymore. Maybe Jesus isn’t a thing, either. If you were to step up your game and insert Jesus into your music with faithful, distorted-guitar energy, and dare to claim that Jesus is your friend, it’s hard to imagine that your efforts would make a dent in the culture. Yet there was a time when this two-pronged attack could elevate a band into the limelight (and no, the recent acclaim for “Geese” doesn’t count in my book). There once was a time when you could wear a leather jacket and turn your amps up loud in biker bars, and not a soul in the grimy, tattooed, drunken crowd would raise an objection or toss empty beer bottles in your direction when you claimed that Jesus is alright.
My three teenage daughters aren’t exactly heathens, and they love rock ‘n’ roll. I’m fairly certain that they haven’t met any bikers of the well-worn-leather-jacket variety — the guys who ride …
Big Cheese
In the limestone caves beneath Springfield, Missouri, lies the Fort Knox of American cheese.
The conspiracy theorists are right: America’s cheese reserves include over a billion pounds of dairy products.
I gaze upon the wealth of cheese with my own eyes, though it is no longer owned by the US government.
Many of America’s stainless-steel tanks, like those that bring raw milk from farms to processors, and pasteurized milk from processors to production plants, are manufactured in Springfield, Missouri. Across town from Stainless Fabrication Inc, I discovered the Fort Knox of American Cheese, located deep beneath the ground at the armpit of two industrial roads east of downtown. From my rental car, I watch tractor trailers through binoculars as they ease into an archway and down a ramp blasted into the limestone bedrock on one side of the intersection; on the other, a freight train loaded with six refrigerated cars from the Kraft Heinz cheese plant across town makes its way into another entrance. In one of the rail’s subterranean unloading bays, carved into gray-green rock and built back up with concrete, I observe forklift operators as they shimmy enormous barrels of cheese through the warehouse doorway. …
