JULY 26–AUGUST 1, 2017 | VOLUME 41 | NUMBER 26
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Nathan Cooper has bee been gobbling up properties across southeast St. Louis — an and raking in federal money
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“We are all outside because we feel these residents in this facility, the St. Louis city workhouse, they deserve to have air. We don’t know if they’re guilty or they’re innocent. And even if they are guilty, they still deserve air. I mean, they’re baking like baked potatoes.
PHOTO BY THEO WELLING
“I saw on a live stream yesterday a lot of people saying, ‘Well, I work in a warehouse where there’s no air.’ But that’s different; you’re not constantly in that place. You get to go home. You get to go on breaks. You get to go to your car. Here, this is everyday life for them, 24/7. It’s every day. Every day! So I’m sweating and hot standing out here; I can’t imagine how hot they feel with closed-in windows, lights on, in an old brick building.” —PRECIOUS JONES, PHOTOGRAPHED WITH HER CHILDREN AND NEPHEWS PROTESTING THE CITY WORKHOUSE IN NORTH ST. LOUIS ON JULY 22
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NULL & CROSSBONES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DREADFUL COLLECTABLES
FEATURE
12.
Publisher Chris Keating Editor in Chief Sarah Fenske
Do Not Pass Go Nathan Cooper has been gobbling up properties across southeast St. Louis — and raking in federal money Written by
CAITLIN LEE AND CLARK RANDALL Cover by
RYAN DOGGENDORF
NEWS
CULTURE
DINING
MUSIC
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23
29
45
The Lede
Calendar
Your friend or neighbor, captured on camera
Seven days worth of great stuff to see and do
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25
The Pension Question
Yes, St. Louis County officers are paid more, but salaries aren’t everything, reports Danny Wicentowski
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A/C Comes to the Workhouse
Film
Florence Pugh delivers a chilling performance as Lady Macbeth
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Stage
The LaBute Festival ends on a high note
As American as Cevapi
Daniel Hill checks out the Motor City Madman at the Jefferson County Fair
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Side Dish
B-Sides
Loryn Nalic of Balkan Treat Box found her passion when she discovered Bosnian food
Nearly 30 years in, Deftones still doesn’t get the credit it deserves, writes Ben Salmon
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Bars
Center Ice Brewery is now open in Midtown
Temporary units arrived Monday, days after a brutal heat wave gripped the city
Better Off Ted
Lemmons by Grbic is a new American classic, writes Cheryl Baehr
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First Look
The Mad Crab brings Gulf-style seafood boils to U. City
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The Pension Factor Written by
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
W
hen it comes to the future of public safety in St. Louis, the complaints advanced by the city’s largest police union have landed somewhere between entitled and apocalyptic. Representing 1,100 city cops, the St. Louis Police Officers Association is in the midst of contract negotiations with the city, and its controversial business manager, Jeff Roorda, has spent months proclaiming that an insufficient salary increase will create a “dire” shortage of officers. Roorda and the union were also not at all pleased that the city earmarked a chunk of potential revenue from a proposed sales tax increase to fund such things as after-school groups, social workers and mental health treatment, a.k.a “programs unrelated to police pay.” But for St. Louis budget director Paul Payne, there’s one word that he wishes would get brought up more often in the ongoing debate, especially when police union reps compare city police salaries to those in St. Louis County — and that word is “pension.” “It’s not just apples to apples,” says Payne. In April, St. Louis County voters passed their own half-cent sales tax hike with the express purpose of increasing officers’ salaries. That bump now puts an average county officer’s starting salary at about $52,000. A brand-new city cop currently gets about $43,000. Yet the city still has its benefits — some big ones. Citing the most recent pension data reports, Payne notes that the city contributes 45 percent of payroll to officers’ pensions, while the St. Louis County Police Department’s pension runs at only 20 percent. “You’re looking at different structures of how people are compensated,” Payne explains. “Basically, it’s more than just salaries.” While St. Louis County cops make more now, city cops have negotiated much Continued on pg 10 fatter retire-
Police union spokesman Jeff Roorda is campaigning hard for raises. He seldom mentions the city’s great pension plan. | DANNNY WICENTOWSKI
Relief in Sight for Workhouse
P
ortable, industrial-sized air conditioners finally arrived Monday at a St. Louis jail where inmates have been begging for relief from the heat. The five units, weighing between 25 and 50 tons, should all be online by the end of the week, says Mayor Lyda Krewson. They’re expected to drop temperatures from more than 100 degrees to 78 at the Medium Security Institution, better known as the workhouse. “Once my administration determined that temporary air conditioning was a viable solution, I ordered that temporary air conditioning units be installed as soon as possible,” Krewson said Saturday in a statement. City officials have been under pressure to find some kind of solution for the overheated inmates since July 18 when a video posted to Facebook showed detainees screaming out of the windows for help. “Help us!” cried one man. “We ain’t got no A/C!”
The video quickly went viral, leading to protests Friday night outside of the workhouse on Hall Street along the north riverfront. About 150 people, some banging pots and pans, demonstrated at the jail. Police with riot shields tried to used a chemical agent to disperse protesters, a few of whom lifted up a chain-link fence and crawled under, the station reported. Krewson said two police officers were injured during the confrontation and urged “our fellow citizens to remain calm.” Heat is only one of the 51-year-old jail’s problems, critics say. State Rep. Joshua Peters (D-St. Louis) toured the facility recently and said there was mold in dining areas and an infestation of mice and insects. Peters has called on the house speaker and director of the state health department to investigate the jail’s conditions. Kennard Williams of Decarcerate St. Louis told the Riverfront Times on Friday that problems with the workhouse are nothing new. “This facility has been there since 1966,” he says. “Where was all this [interest] last summer and the summer before?” Still, he’s happy to see a spotlight on problems at the jail. Aside from the riverfronttimes.com
heat, he says inmates have reported mold, guards denying inmates showers and a lack of hygiene products, especially for female inmates. Decarcerate and others have long argued the building needs to be shut down. “What is it actually going to take for them to say this facility doesn’t need to be open?” Williams asks. “Is someone going to have to die?” The workhouse, like the majority of correctional facilities of its era, was built without air conditioning. Williams says the only long-term option to keep people safe is to permanently close the facility. The workhouse is one of two detention centers in the city. Built in 1966, it has a capacity for 1,138 and held 770 in June, according to the most recent monthly report. All but 27 of the people there were awaiting trial because they hadn’t been able to post bail. A second facility, the City Justice Center, is downtown at 200 South Tucker and can hold 860 people. It held 630 in June. A trio of organizations — Arch City Defenders, St. Louis Action Council and Decarcerate — have been raising money to bail out detainees. They had reportedly posted bail for fifteen people as of Friday evening. — Doyle Murphy
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ment payouts. Still, the salary imbalance has provided leverage to the police union in its contract negotiations with the city, and the union’s always outspoken business manager hasn’t missed an opportunity to flex it. “What we want the city to do is pay a fair, competitive wage,” says Roorda in an interview. Earlier this week, he made the media rounds to promote an in-house survey that featured responses from 301 union members, producing results that Rooda extrapolated into a hellish scenario in which a St. Louis desperately short on cops becomes a crime-ridden “bloodbath.” More than 70 percent of the officers who responded to the survey said they had either applied to other departments or were planning to do so. “If the pension benefit is as wealthy and lucrative as Paul Payne asserts it is,” Roorda says, “then it’s still not lucrative enough to keep those officers from applying at higher-paying departments.” There’s also a matter of commitment. Although the bill to place the tax hike on the November ballot stipulates that its annual revenue — estimated at $19 million — would be used “solely for the purpose of providing revenues for the operation of the department of public safety, including hiring more police officers, police and firefighter compensation, and enhanced law enforcement services,” it doesn’t include specific earmarks. Last month, the city’s released its own estimated breakdown of the revenue: $13 million would go to the police department, encompassing $8.2 million for salary increases and $3.4 million reserved for the pension fund. If the city voters do approve the sales tax increase in November, officials say, city cops would see their salary increase by $6,000 annually, and their pension would grow each year by $4,000. That’s not good enough for the police union. In a letter to its members sent earlier this month, the union’s executive board excoriated the city for signaling that it would send $3.9 million of the tax hike’s potential revenue — coming from an automatic increase in the use tax — to fund social programs that wouldn’t raise cop salaries. Those programs, the city argues, offer substantial contributions to public safety. The union’s letter derisively called these “pet projects.”
And despite the strong language of the bill, Roorda maintains that until the city formally hammers out a contract or adds specific guarantees, the union will consider the city’s estimated allocations as just that — estimates, nothing more. “It’s not too late to fix this before we decide what we’re going to do when it comes to endorsing this sales tax proposal or not,” Roorda says. “We need to have some verifiable agreement that our officers are going to get their fair shake out of it.” It all depends on your definition of “fair.” And while the city and police union seem to be tangled in a tense match of hardball negotiations and flanking maneuvers, the police department has apparently resorted to pouring overtime dollars down the drain to make up for a staffing shortage of about 100 officers. (That’s even though the city still has more officers per capita than just about any department in the country, according to FBI statistics.) It’s not a sustainable situation, says University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist and policing expert David Klinger. In a high-crime city, with resources already stretched, “it makes perfect sense that there are serious concerns among police officers about being able to do their jobs and promote public safety,” says Klinger. And sure, that pressure can also come in handy at the negotiating table. Case in point: the union’s survey. Klinger cautions that report’s conclusions run the risk of presenting an overly broad picture. Although the survey covered about one-quarter of the officers on duty, the union’s final report includes charts and data extrapolating its members’ answers to the entire department. Granted, Klinger says the fact that the majority of respondents are looking at other jobs should worry city residents, but “that’s a dangerous step to generalize from 25 percent to what the entire group is thinking.” We may know the mindsets of the union’s disgruntled members, but for individual officers, it’s not clear whether the city’s pension program is generous enough to stem Roorda’s doomsday scenarios. Klinger suggests that all the money the city is pouring into pensions may be less attractive than if the department increased pay in the short term. “Most people have a short-time horizon. Some officers will look at that pension and other officers won’t,” predicts Klinger. “Some officers will only look at ‘What is my paycheck now?’” n
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DO
NOT
PASS GO
Nath an Cooper h as b e e n g o b b l i n g u p properties acro ss s o u th e a st St. Lo u i s — an d rakin g in fed e ra l mo n ey BY CAITLIN LEE AND CLARK RANDALL “Take the elevator to the fourth floor for the tax sale!” a deputy calls out as a line forms inside the Civil Courts Building in downtown St. Louis. It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday in the middle of May. “Check your belongings in the basket and let’s keep it moving,” he continues. On the fourth floor, outside the courtroom, a cork board holds four pages of newsprint, listing properties for sale. The parcels are being repos-
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sessed by the city of St. Louis after three years of missed property tax payments. Every so often a court clerk comes over to the newsprint with a red marker in hand. A large “X” is drawn through a property, indicating that the owner has paid at least one year of back taxes — retaining the parcels to their name in the nick of time. The rest go up for auction. In the courtroom, a crowd of more than 150 people grows as the tax sale begins. Newly elected Sheriff Vernon Betts takes the microphone and addresses the crowd. Applause breaks out. Betts is charismatic. “If I were in church I would say — you can do better than that!” The crowd responds accordingly. Just a few minutes before, a man in his early forties entered the court-
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room, holding a bid card with the number “94” written on it in black. His name is Nathan Cooper; he’s no stranger to land tax sales. He wears a short-sleeve light green plaid button-up, neatly tucked into tight dark jeans. Cooper sports thick black frame glasses and a combover. He walks to the first row of chairs in the courtroom and sits in one of the few remaining open seats, shuffling through his papers. Cooper holds three lists in his hand. The first is the city’s roster of all properties for sale, the same one posted outside the courtroom. The second is his list of addresses that overlap with his target area — the southeast side of St. Louis. The third lists the sixteen addresses he is willing to bid on, with the few that he finds most compelling bolded. By the time Betts is done introducing himself, more than 200 people fill the room: parents with their children, recently graduated former fraternity boys in sandals, baby boomers in corporate attire, a heavily tattooed couple in Thrasher t-shirts and tight jeans. All have their lists of properties and bid cards. The energy in the room escalates as the auction
starts. “Order in the court — no more talking!” a deputy raises his voice. “Men take your hats off — clear the doorway!” His instructions work momentarily, but the crowd soon starts buzzing again. “Only cash, cashier’s check and money orders are accepted. There are no exceptions,” announces Deputy Laina Favazza. Deputy Favazza started running the tax sales in the past year, and keeps the room in check. “Bids will be taken in increments of $100. I will now begin the auction.” She begins, “186-008.” “Stop!” Nathan Cooper is the first to stand and shout, casting the opening bid at $1,963. Several others stand up to join Cooper. “Twenty-four hundred” — the second bid. “Twenty-five hundred,” Cooper calls out. “Twenty-six hundred.” “Three thousand.” “Thirty-two hundred.” “Thirty-five.” “Four thousand.” “Five thousand.” “Fifty-four hundred.” That’s when Cooper takes his seat. He’s dropping out. Eight bids later, the property sells for $10,000. When the second property is called, Cooper again stands to bid. The starting price is $1,143. Cooper goes back and forth
early, then takes a seat when bidding passes $5,000. The property eventually sells for $7,000. A few properties pass, then Cooper checks back in. This time, after a short but intense round of bidding, he drops out when his bid of $9,000 is countered with ten. Zero for three. But he is unbothered, still flipping through his papers, as he waits for the next address on his list to come up for auction. Cooper’s strategy is different from many of his peers at the tax sale. It can be easy to get swept up into the competitive trap of trying to win a bid-off, but Cooper will take a loss if the bidding heats up. He has no problem bailing when the price exceeds his pre-set value estimation. “I try to be all-in for $25,000,” Cooper explains. “If you buy a house and it only needs $5,000 in work, it gets done quicker. A house that needs $20,000 in work, you could be working on it a lot longer, tying up more time and man hours. I only have so many men to work.” Going through real estate agents, properties in the city’s 20th ward can cost $10,000 to $25,000, pre-renovations, he
explains. His goal at a tax sale is to acquire only properties that will come in lower than that. “OK, I could spend $50,000 fixing up this house,” he says, referring to homes in another neighborhood. “Or I could buy this one over here for $15,000 and spend $2,000.” Cooper’s calculated approach likely comes from experience. Records show he’s been picking up properties in St. Louis since the foreclosure crisis in 2007. Continued on pg 14
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His acquisitions — many of which have cost him less than a typical used car — have made him one of the most significant property owners on the southeast side of St. Louis. In the process, he’s become a go-to landlord for many of the city’s most desperate tenants. Yet that role has come with serious controversy. Elected representatives in several city wards chafe at the extent of Cooper’s holdings, saying his tendency to do only minimal repairs places renters and the surrounding neighborhoods in harm’s way. Even as developers across south St. Louis are buying older buildings and fixing them up — some keeping rent affordable, others not so much — Cooper has been content to do just enough to pass inspection and then let the federally subsidized rent checks just keep coming in. And he’s still purchasing more houses, as his presence at the tax sale makes clear. Buying in this setting, however, puts him at a disadvantage and he knows it. Potential buyers are only allowed to view properties from the outside and must gamble on the conditions inside, including the structural integrity of the building. By Cooper’s calculation, buying at the land tax sale offers him the opportunity for a slim few thousand dollars off the open market rate in exchange for that risk. “Is it worth it? No, I don’t think so,” Cooper says. Yet over the course of the morning, Nathan Cooper places bids on sixteen properties. In certain cases —when, for example, he already owns properties on the same block — the tax sale is still worth it to Cooper. He successfully bids on three properties, all of them within Gravois Park. As the auction wraps up, Cooper takes the elevator up to the 8th floor. Once there, he opens up a backpack and begins flipping through a thick wad of bills. He slides a pile of cash under the Plexiglas window to the clerk on the other side. Nathan Cooper was drawn to St. Louis after a short-lived political career. An immigration and labor attorney by trade, the Republican was elected in 2004 to represent Cape Girardeau in the Missouri
House of Representatives. “He was kind of a rising star; they were giving him leadership roles in the party,” recalls St. Louis Alderwoman Sarah Martin, who was working in Jefferson City as a field organizer with ProVote at the time. During his second term, however, Cooper was charged with two felonies: H2B visa fraud and lying to the Department of Labor. Cooper was accused of running an immigration scheme for his clients in the trucking business using fraudulent shell companies. He pleaded guilty in December 2007 and was sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison. He was disbarred shortly thereafter. Following his release from prison, Cooper began acquiring properties in the city of St. Louis. Tracking Cooper’s footprint is not easy. According to records from the Missouri Secretary of State and the city’s Recorder of Deeds, Cooper is a member of a variety of limited liability companies, or LLCs, meaning he is one of their owners. By October 2012, LLCs in which he was publicly listed as a member held no fewer than nineteen properties. The following year, that number jumped to 105 properties. Cooper had begun to cluster his portfolio within the neighborhoods of Fox Park and Gravois Park, but the properties spanned the entire southeast side of the city down to its southern border. By the end of 2014 the LLCs had acquired more than 150 properties in St. Louis, the vast majority of which are located south of Interstate 44. Over the next two and a half years, Cooper’s LLCs continued to buy — and sell — properties within the same general area, loosely bordered by South Grand Boulevard and South Jefferson Avenue, hugging the river further south. Today, Cooper is a member of nine LLCs, which own 209 properties in the city of St. Louis as of June 2017. The majority of these holdings are through just two limited liability companies, Gateway Residences LLC and Teamo LLC. On top of owning properties, Cooper also manages properties he does not own directly — leasing units, collecting rent, coordinating maintenance and submitting tenancy and reappraisal applications to the St. Louis Housing Authority and city Assessor’s Office. Cooper is the property manager for at least 11
companies with 136 current holdings in the city of St. Louis. The common denominator across all these real estate investments is Cooper — tenants name him as their landlord, city staffers keep lists of LLCs they associate with him just to keep things straight and utility workers and developers in the area know his name well. (In an email to the RFT, Cooper says, “I assist a small number of individuals with their properties in St. Louis.” He adds, “Some of the individuals have their properties under multiple LLCs. I am a member of less than ten business entities. I do not personally own
any properties.”) Cooper himself used to live in a house on a hill on a well-kept block of California Avenue in Fox Park. He owns seven properties on the block, which he regularly rents to fellow members in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one tenant says. He firmly believes real estate investors should live close to their properties. Still, he moved his family out to the county within the past year, saying he had suffered a break-in. In an email, he says he remains a consistent presence in the neighborhood. “My time devoted to the properties discussed above has not changed over the
last couple of years, and I am in the neighborhoods virtually every day for extended periods of time,” he writes. Cooper initially boasted about his business model to a reporter who sat down beside him at the tax sale. When Cooper left the courtroom to go pay for his properties, the reporter asked to follow. Cooper obliged, seeming to enjoy the opportunity to show off his knowledge of the process. When paying for his properties, Cooper asked which publication the reporter was with, answered additional questions and allowed the reporter to approach the counter with him. The reporter also riverfronttimes.com
interviewed other attendees at the tax sale in front of Cooper. Cooper provided his phone number for follow-up questions at the end of the interview, but noted that he didn’t want the story to be about him. Cooper then did not respond to multiple follow-up phone calls. Finally, at the end of May, he answered the phone and acknowledged the reporter, but quickly hung up, promising to call back. He never did. In late July, the RFT reached out by email with specific questions about Cooper’s business model. He then responded in writing to those questions. At the tax sale, Cooper says that he does not think highly of the city. He believes a crackdown by law enforcement would solve many of what he sees as the city’s problems — crime, trash, loiterers, loud people and louder music. Even so, Cooper’s model focuses on holding properties in the city long-term, not flipping them. His maintenance team fixes up a property just enough to allow it to be rented out. Over the past decade, Cooper has taken measure of the area’s housing stock. He understands the gaps. Recent census data shows that fewer than twenty percent of renter-occupied structures within the 63118 ZIP code have three or more bedrooms; only three percent have four or more. Larger families are often underserved by the market, a gap Cooper is willing to fill. Tenants and local developers who have tried to purchase properties from him attest that he often converts two family units to singles and four-family units to two, thereby maximizing the bedroom count. Of the parcels he buys at the tax sale, Cooper estimates in conversation that they will rent for approximately $800 per month. At the tax sale, he suggests, his “all-in” number — purchase plus improvements — is $25,000, explaining through hypotheticals that he tries to limit both man hours and rehab costs. Under that scenario, with a $25,000 total outlay and $800/ month rents, the property could pay for itself in as few as three years. (Of all the properties held by Cooper’s LLCs, only twelve have had recorded mortgages, according to an analysis of records from the city Recorder of Deeds — less than six percent of these companies’ total property acquisitions in St. Continued on pg 16 Louis.)
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That’s even though the property he’s purchasing is no one’s idea of turnkey. Most homes in the 20th ward were built before 1940. Each of Cooper’s purchases at the May tax sale were built more than a century ago, with one dating back to 1873. Like the rest of St. Louis’ old brick housing stock, that makes it much more costly to update than, say, Kansas City’s mostly wood-frame housing. To put those numbers in perspective, a local developer with close to $500 million in city neighborhood development experience says that buying a single-family home in the area and getting it to the point of being safe and habitable is far more costly than Cooper suggests. “If we could do something for $150,000 we would consider it low-cost,” the developer says. “At $25,000 you wouldn’t even be putting lipstick on a pig, maybe some chapstick.” An executive director for another local non-profit working in affordable housing and community development agrees. Speaking about rehabs in general, he says that $25,000 would be an extremely low number. “That would be astounding, to my knowledge of the neighborhood, I don’t know how that would be possible,” the director says. “Either they have developed a business model I can’t begin to understand, or they are providing truly substandard housing.” In an email, Cooper claims that he didn’t mean that the
expense of purchase plus renovations should total less than $25,000. “Other developers are correct — the number is absurd,” he writes. “At the tax sale, I was simply telling you how it was decided what amount to bid on a property — a tax sale property had to not require more than $25,000 total investment to be equivalent to [a property sold through real estate agents]. Further rehab expenses would follow.” Asked what his actual all-in number would be, Cooper writes, “There is no ‘all-in’ number. It depends on the property — regardless of how purchased.” Pressed for a range, he says, “It all depends on the property. For a small single family home in great condition, it could be a few thousand dollars needed. A larger home in worse condition could be tens of thousands.” Alderman Shane Cohn chooses his words carefully when speaking about Nathan Cooper. Cooper owns property in Cohn’s ward, a swath of south city that includes Dutchtown, Carondelet and Mount Pleasant. Cohn moved to the neighborhood before it was ravaged by the housing crisis — and witnessed the impact of many foreclosures firsthand. And the impact of what happened almost a decade ago continues to ripple today, he suggests, with investors who seek foreclosed properties in the area not to fix them up, but to profit from them.
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“ E it h er t h ey have develo ped a bu s in ess m o del I c a n ’ t begin to u n der st a n d, o r they a re prov idin g tru ly s u bst a n da rd h o u s in g.”
Asked about the relationship between Cooper and foreclosed properties, Cohn says, “Folks like Nathan will buy them and perpetuate the decline.” The alderman continues, “Has it contributed to the stagnation in terms of properties rebounding and what not? Yeah, I would say to a certain degree it has, especially when you have a large number of properties that aren’t being managed and maintained.” (In an email, Cooper disagrees with that assertion. “Most, if not all, of the homes discussed above were vacant, foreclosed, and/or abandoned on purchase,” he writes. “They have now passed inspections and are occupied which prevents the homes from further deterioration, vandalism and theft.”) As a metropolitan area, St. Louis does not top the list of cities with the highest foreclosure rates since the crisis. But due in part to regional hyper-segregation, some neighborhoods were still left reeling. In St. Louis County, inner-ring majority-black suburbs like Pagedale, Normandy and Ferguson bore the brunt of foreclosures, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in 2008, even while areas like Clayton and Ladue were relatively unscathed. The 63118 ZIP code experienced the most severe effects of foreclosure within the city limits, the newspaper reported. The tract is a majority black area that includes parts of Tower Grove East, Gravois Park, Benton Park and Dutchtown. Majority black tracts made up each of the top twelve ZIP codes with the highest foreclosure rates within St. Louis city and county, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure tracking firm based in California. “It was really a matter of timing,” explains Glenn Burleigh, a long-time fair housing advocate and resident of 63118’s Marine Villa neighborhood. “Black families were moving to the south side because of the dilapidated housing conditions in north city.” Between the 1990s and the early 2000s, Burleigh says, these families on the move — and others already in the area — became the targets of subprime and adjustable rate mortgage practices by predatory lenders. A subprime loan offers higher interest, costing tens of thousands of dollars over the life of a longterm note. Furthermore, such loans sometimes include adjustable rates — and unexpected elevations in interest rates can cause monthly payments to soar. Falling property
values can leave mortgage holders under water, owing far more than their house is worth. In the boom years of the 1990s, subprime loans began being bundled into mortgage-backed securities. The idea was to group high-risk mortgages alongside more stable ones to offset the risk. Banks were now incentivized to sell as many mortgages as possible. With this new model, black and brown people in particular, who had historically been barred from the mortgage market, became highly sought-after customers. According to a 2005 study by University of Notre Dame sociologist Richard Williams, subprime lending accounted for 43 percent of the increase in black home ownership during the 1990s. In many cases, that’s even when they would have qualified for traditional mortgages. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported, 60 percent of all subprime borrowers should have qualified for prime loans. Instead they were steered into exploitative, high-profit products. And when the market crashed, the effect on areas like Gravois Park was catastrophic. “You’ve got to remember, half of the wealth in black families in the United States was wiped out in 2008 — we’re talking generations of savings,” says Burleigh. Homeownership gains that black people made since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 vanished in the years after 2008, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. And after banks foreclosed, the homes they once owned often fell into the hands of loose networks of opportunistic real estate investors. Each of the properties Cooper bought at the tax sale in May had a history of multiple foreclosures. An analysis of city records at the Recorder of Deeds shows that more than 60 percent of property purchased by Cooper’s companies came from financial institutions rather than individuals — almost half from HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The properties at these auctions aren’t going, in many cases, to people looking for a place to live. The rules basically ensure it. Since bidders have to pay cash, only the professionals — the Nathan Coopers — end up playing the game. But once they acquire property, they are likely to find plenty of tenants. Since 1980, median incomes for renters in St. Louis have stag-
nated, even as median rents are up between 25 and 30 percent, according to census data. A landlord willing to cater to low-income residents can find an especially hungry market. Writes Matthew Desmond in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, “Nationwide, vacancy rates for low cost units have fallen from sixteen percent in 2004 to six percent in 2011.” The largest income bracket in 63118 makes under $15,000 annually, census data shows, and 36.9 percent of residents are living below the poverty level. That’s even though renters need to make $15.58 an hour to afford to rent a two-bedroom unit in 63118, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Despite this landscape, the city’s minimum wage was struck down to $7.70 an hour by Governor Eric Greitens and the Missouri legislature — tightening poverty’s grasp. In unguarded moments, Cooper seems to enjoy the influence he has over the southeast side of St. Louis. At the tax sale, he explains to a reporter, “You can’t be a master of everything. Just be a master of one area instead.” But many housing advocates and city officials worry that Cooper’s mastery has destabilized the neighborhoods where he owns so many properties. “There will always be a set of people within our community who are allowed to be preyed upon for other people’s investments,” says Amanda Colón-Smith, acting executive director of the Dutchtown South Community Corporation. “Someone will reach this extreme level of ‘how can I extract the most for myself,’ and that promotes a predatory environment.” And some city officials say Cooper’s low-cost approach to renovation and maintenance is victimizing his tenants. Alderwoman Cara Spencer says, “Substandard housing is the biggest problem I see facing my ward.” She says she’s been dealing with the effects of Cooper-owned properties since she came to office in 2015. Alderman Cohn says he has to deal with Cooper not only as a city official, but as a neighbor: Cooper owns the property next door, he says, as well as several others in his ward. Infestation problems on Cooper’s property have spilled over into other homes on the block, Cohn claims, saying Cooper represents a public safety problem riverfronttimes.com
within his ward. Cooper “does not maintain the interior of [his homes] until it becomes unhealthy for folks that are living there,” Cohn says. “He really is preying on vulnerable people,” says Alderwoman Sarah Martin. “Say you’re a single mom with two kids, making minimum wage. They are renting from him because they don’t have the funds available to rent from a better landlord and live in a better living situation.” Cooper denies any negligence. Of his tenants, he says, “All properties were chosen by the tenant, passed city of St. Louis Housing Conservation District inspection process, and any other government-required inspections. We make repairs as requested by tenants.” But the quirk of the market that Cooper is serving is that, in many cases, it’s not just his tenants paying him rent checks. It’s also the federal government. Data produced by the housing authorities of St. Louis city and county in response to a public records request shows that 103 of Cooper’s units were filled in July 2017 with families who hold Housing Choice Vouchers, formerly known as Section 8. Thirty-one additional units housing families in exchange for federal funds are held by companies or individuals for which Cooper serves as a manager. Over the past few decades, subsidized low-income housing has shifted away from government-constructed public housing projects. Now local housing authorities provide vouchers for low-income individuals and families to use on the open market. They contract with landlords to ensure minimum standards of health and safety are upheld. With a voucher, a large portion of a tenant’s rent is paid for each month by federal funds funneled through the local authority. (In St. Louis, a regional exchange makes voucher use across city-county lines possible.) However, some neighborhoods see a disproportionate number of vouchers. In 2016, the census tract that includes Gravois Park hosted 238 vouchers, the highest concentration south of Interstate 64. For Cooper, vouchers mean reliable income on the first of every month. In Continued on pg 18
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2016 alone, businesses in which Cooper has ownership received more than $908,000 from the city and county authorities, according to housing authority records. If companies under his management are included, the number grows to more than $1.1 million. Asked about that total, Cooper again suggests that the RFT’s analysis of his holdings is incorrect, writing, “I do not believe that you have the correct delineation between properties managed and properties of which I am a member.” He adds, “We do our best to provide a quality product for tenants. All properties in federally subsidized housing have standards that must be met or rent is terminated.” Asked how much of his business plan is dependent on U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) money, Cooper ignores the question. Dana Williams knows Nathan Cooper well. He is her landlord, and her small single-family home on St. Louis’ southeast side is not the first property she has rented from him. (Williams is not her real name; the RFT agreed to use a pseudonym to spare her and other tenants from any repercussions.) “Did you say landlords?” Williams exhales after nudging the door halfway open to see who is knocking. “Well, honey, my house is a story. I been staying here years and this man ain’t never did nothing for this house.” W i l liams and her family expe-
rienced homelessness for months before receiving a Housing Choice voucher. Her time on the voucher waitlist was expedited by the seriousness of that situation. Locally and nationwide, the majority of people who qualify for housing assistance across the country will never receive it. Today, in St. Louis, more than 23,000 families are on a waitlist for 7,042 vouchers. The housing authority has not accepted a new application in three years. Even with a voucher in hand, finding housing was not easy for Williams. Most apartments require security deposits or credit checks, or were not big enough for her family. And many landlords, even though it is illegal in the city limits, avoid housing voucher holders all together. In St. Louis, black people account for 94 percent of voucher holders. More than 80 percent are women-headed homes, most with annual incomes between $5,000 and $10,000. A $50 application fee, even if the rent is affordable for a voucher holder, can prevent a move to better housing. That’s where landlords like Cooper come in. Voucher holders are given 120 days to find housing. For lowincome families, who often have restricted transportation, longer work hours and less day-to-day stability, four months can go by fast. One of Cooper’s tenants says that the St. Louis Housing Authority directed her to Cooper as the voucher approached its expiration date and her anxiety increased. Tenants say Cooper is willing to house people on the same day he meets them. One of his listings on www.gosection8.com is for a six bedroom, two-bathroom townhouse renting at $1,100 a month. “Criminal Check: No, Credit Check: No,”
the listing reads. Nathan Cooper is flexible. With no other viable options, Williams agreed to lease from Cooper despite holes in several walls the size of a shoe, a broken shower and moldy carpeting. The home had been vacant for more than five years prior to her move-in, according to William’s neighbors. “When I found it, it was worse than how it is now,” she says of her home. “But you know how when you have a vision for something, especially if you’re a quirky person and your art is everything? I envisioned this house.” She pauses. “And he sold me on the dream, basically, ‘I’ll work with you,’ you know what I’m saying?” Housing authority inspectors signed off on the house with minimal repairs, she says. “[The inspector] just came, did a little walk through, asked about the holes and stuff like that,” she says. Cooper and his maintenance team patched up the holes and fixed the downstairs plumbing to pass the inspection. “The carpet is the same as when I came in the property,” Williams says. Williams leans up against the door frame and gestures toward loose wooden panels beneath her. “Any day now, the porch alone — it could fall through, and I have kids in the house.” She says she’s taken matters into her own hands, nailing wooden planks into the base of the porch for support. But with each alteration, tenants have to weigh the health and safety of their families against the possibility of retaliation. “I have a house full of asthmatics,” Williams says. “We got mold on the wall, mold under the carpet, and we can’t do nothing about it because [Cooper] hasn’t given us the ‘OK’ to. But I don’t want to have the ‘OK’ after one of my kids is in the hospital for it.” Williams continues, “Ain’t no safe side when it comes to this.” Williams’ concerns about her home are echoed by Cooper’s tenants
“Any d ay n ow, t h e po rc h al o n e — it co u l d fal l t h roug h , an d I h ave ki d s i n t h e h o u se.” across the city’s southeast side. Eight of Cooper’s tenants tell similar tales of poor living conditions and little, if any, help from their landlord. One tenant describes a leaking roof that puddles inside each time it rains. Maintenance requests were made on multiple occasions to Cooper with no resolution. Another tenant describes a mice infestation, requiring children to sleep with the parents. Cooper, the tenant says, failed to respond to their communications requesting assistance for more than a month. Says Williams of Cooper, “He will respond…but he don’t respond.” Two tenants thought highly of Cooper. One explains, “He’s never around.” Of the 40 properties the RFT doorknocked up and down southeast city, allegations of paint-overs and patch-ups to mask larger, structural issues are recurring. Tenants claim that Cooper’s maintenance men hide lead paint in units, with a single coat of paint that lasts around three months. One tenant alleges that her children were found to have levels of lead in the bloodstream more than two times what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls toxic. Asked about these allegations, Cooper writes, “We attempt to handle all tenant maintenance issues in an expeditious manner. Much of the maintenance performed is caused by tenant abuse of the properties.” Williams has stopped washing the walls in order to avoid further peeling of lead paint. On the subject of lead paint in
particular, Cooper writes, “In the few circumstances each year that a property tests positive for lead, we work with the city agency dealing with it to make sure it is properly abated. Most instances involve tenant created damage to the property that has chipped the paint. There is never chipped or peeling paint in any property upon move-in.” Some of Cooper’s tenants find ways to move out of the homes. Neighbors of Cooper’s properties say they have observed a short-term cycling of tenants through his buildings — a few weeks to a few months — attributing their move to the conditions of the units. Yet for tenants like Williams, there seem to be few choices. “I don’t like that man,” she says. “But I don’t think there’s another landlord in the city that will accept me.” When her last lease was up, she began to look elsewhere. After she viewed four apartments, she fell in love with one. “It had all hardwood floors, a clean basement and a backyard,” she recalls. It also had a security deposit she could not afford. Janie Oliphant is the lead housing counselor with Ascend, a local nonprofit that supports voucher holders in their search for housing in low-poverty areas. She notes, “If [families] do not have the money for a deposit, it’s unlikely they would be able to move into a new unit. It’s a common occurrence and barrier for families who might otherwise be able to move.” Cooper and his properties can be hard to escape. riverfronttimes.com
Renting to Housing Choice tenants requires that landlords pass not one, but two inspections: one from the city, and another from the housing authority. “With Section 8 you have another set of eyes, so you have the city inspectors from the building division, but then you also have these inspectors from the housing authority, conducting Housing Quality Standard (HQS) inspections,” explains Molly Metzger, a professor at Washington University who researches vouchers. “The idea behind the additional inspection is to prevent spending federal dollars on slumlord properties.” HQS inspections are performed to ensure “minimum health and safety” of the unit, says Cheryl Lovell, executive director of the St. Louis Housing Authority. Basic security is required: doors, windows, locks, smoke detectors, fire escapes. But inspections are strictly visual. “So if there is not peeling, cracking or chipping paint, that is the end of the inquiry,” Lovell says. “There are landlords that know what they have to do as a minimum, and they do that.” Still, the goal is not to reject units and their landlords, but to work with them. Speaking to the initial inspection, Lovell says, “A fair number of them fail.” Landlords are given chances to address problems, and if they do, applications are approved — and funds start flowing. Up until the second-year inspection, she says, it is then on the tenant to alert the Housing Authority if negotiations
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for repairs are not successful. Some tenants, though, say they fear complaining — they don’t want to upset their landlord, risking retaliation or the loss of their voucher. Lovell agrees that tenants might be in compromising situations that make it risky for them to call for support. But she says the housing authority has no responsibility to these tenants unless they call. She takes a deep breath. “We used to do annual inspections, but with the new budget we’ve had to change.” She adds, “Well, really, it has been like this since 2013” — referring to sequestration cuts to domestic spending that went into effect in March 2013. HUD, the source of housing authority funds, absorbed a disproportionate amount of cuts. The sequestration knocked $1.4 billion off the Housing Choice Voucher program. “And we haven’t even seen the budget for fiscal year 2018,” Lovell notes. Those numbers, and the promise of even steeper cuts under President Donald Trump, seem to have the director worried. Asked directly, Lovell would not comment on Cooper’s performance as landlord. As for the city, it requires all rental properties to pass inspection. But two years ago, it eliminated the requirement for an additional set of inspections for properties applying to host voucher holders. After hearing that landlords were rejecting voucher holders to avoid the extra inspection, making it harder for low-income ten-
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ants to find good housing, a 2015 bill approved by the Board of Aldermen removed that additional hoop. (The bill was championed by Metzger and Alderwoman Christine Ingrassia.) Now city inspections treat Housing Choice properties like any other rental. Whenever utilities change names, a Housing Conservation Inspection is triggered. But inspections do not always ensure safe, habitable homes. Many residents, city officials and developers agree: City inspectors’ work can vary widely. Beyond that, if violations are found, only the landlord is informed; the housing authority is not copied on violations in units occupied by voucher holders, says Mary Davis, secretary of the building commissioner. Even if the building division finds violations, they do not directly threaten the landlord’s stream of rent checks from the housing authority. In 1967, more than 60 public housing tenants, primarily black women, picketed in front of the St. Louis Housing Authority, demanding
policy changes, lower rent and better services. At that time, the local housing authority did not base rent prices on income, but on the unit’s square feet. Mothers who were unable to work full-time routinely could not afford their rent. The protesters’ demands also arose from the housing authority’s failure to address rodent infestations, lack of heating, poor infrastructure and widespread exposure to lead. One of those residents was Jean King, a young mother, who refused to move from public housing until the inequality was addressed. “Somebody’s got to do something — I’m ready to go!” King said at an early meeting of tenants. After the meeting, King was elected president of the newly formed Citywide Rent Strike Committee. After further organizing, in February 1969, public housing tenants began what would become the nation’s longest, largest and most successful rent strike to date. Tenants demanded rent no more than 25 percent of their income, improved building maintenance and greater representation on the housing authority’s board of commissioners. By the fall of 1969, more than 2,400 tenants had withheld more
than $600,000 in rent. The strike drove the St. Louis Housing Authority to near-bankruptcy. “When we get our demands, the housing authority will get its money. And not a minute before,” Jean King told reporters. After nine months, the rent strike wore down Mayor Alfonso Cervantes and the housing authority. They agreed to the tenants’ demands. King went on to testify to the U.S. Senate, recommending that rent for publicly assisted housing be income-based. Her suggestions were included in the Brooke Amendment of the Housing Act of 1969, which limited rent to 25 percent of income. Federal subsidies for public housing were increased nationwide. Decades have passed since the historic strike of St. Louis, yet few channels exist to hold landlords accountable. Keeping tenants safe from slumlords often conveniently falls just outside the jurisdiction of the housing authority, just outside the building division, and just outside the health department. Amanda Colón-Smith, who works with Dutchtown South, calls the issue “under-investigated, or, under-prosecuted.” Yet if housing conditions are to be addressed, Colón-Smith asserts, “The tenants have to be the center of the conversation, not just the properties… the actual people that live there.” She says, “It’s not a short-term thing, it’s a long-term thing. You have a whole community that has to grow up, experiencing problems that [these landlords] bring into the neighborhood.” Today, the city’s enforcement mechanism fails to address large-scale neglectful landlords and protect tenant
health, notes Alderwoman Ingrassia. “The fines of up to $500 are not incentivizing upkeep or investment in the area. It’s either pocket change, part of an owner’s business model, or they avoid paying it.” Enforcement of building stock conditions has long been a problem. In 1969 tenants successfully pushed for a citywide ordinance, requiring landlords to remove lead paint. However, the Real Estate Board of Metropolitan St. Louis refused to comply, gambling that the city would not prioritize funding. Later that year the mayor agreed, calling the ordinance “unenforceable” and citing a budget deficit. Like Ingrassia, Alderwoman Spencer believes there is room to improve. “We have to figure out how to empower the neighborhood to make the most of these properties,” Spencer says. Given the funds, Spencer would invest in tenants’ rights education and outreach. “It’s a problem of resource allocation; we need to allocate money to take care of this.” In the city’s balkanized system, each of its 28 wards are allotted equal resources for inspections and staff to deal with property. That means wards like Spencer’s, which includes Dutchtown and other areas with a high number of underinvested properties, are stretched thinner than wards with high homeownership rates. “It is a system designed to fail,” Spencer says. Both Spencer and Cohn advocate for a “coordinated effort by the city” to deal with landlords like Cooper. “But inevitably things like policing become the priority over the building division,” Cohn notes. “This is an instance of a pervasive problem in St. Louis city,” adds Martin. Some local developers on the south side have offered one idea: They’ve attempted in some cases to buy properties from problematic landlords, including Cooper. But they worry that only gives him more money to increase his holdings on other blocks. And a change in ownership is not a solution in and of itself. Often developers, elected officials and neighbors call for landlords to inriverfronttimes.com
crease practices like tenant screening, instituting credit checks and application fees, reviewing eviction histories or arrest records. These same practices, however, would deny many of Cooper’s current tenants housing. To Burleigh, promoting these practices is in effect saying, “‘For all these people that are being taken advantage of, what we really want is for them to just to go away.’” Over time, screening practices can have a systemic change on a neighborhood’s complexion, income level and access to resources, whether intended or not. Recently, south-side neighborhoods like Tower Grove South and Shaw have seen large decreases in their black populations after instituting stabilization practices, census data shows. “In this way we move poverty around our city. They blight one area, moving people to the next,” says Colón-Smith. “If we don’t focus on wealth-building — quality rentals, rebuilt credit, low-income homeownership — for families that are being taken advantage of, I don’t see how we are really looking at systemic poverty.” Alderman Dan Guenther, who represents the ninth ward, worries about what would happen if the city tried to take a heavier hand with Cooper. He says, “I’m concerned for the residents potentially displaced if the city were to respond by boarding up all his buildings at once.” For Cooper, the concerns are different. At the tax sale, he tells a reporter, “The city is a horrible place to live, absolutely, the city is so messed up. And nobody wants to do anything to straighten it up, unfortunately... It’s sad.” Still, the city seems to have made him a lot of money. Projecting considerable returns and no shortage of low-income tenants, this year Nathan Cooper celebrates ten years of property ownership in the city. Cooper’s model of concentration — of being a master of one area, no matter how horrible he finds it — has served him well. How well it’s served anyone other than Cooper, of course, is a question many people in the city are talking about these days. “I’m concerned about the actual families who are here now, and I think the whole rest of the city should be concerned too,” says Colón-Smith. “Folks got to live somewhere. And if you’ve got multiple evictions, where you going to live?” She pauses. “We got to live ton gether in this city.”
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W E E K O F J U LY 2 8 - A U G U S T 2
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It’s a nice night for a film under the stars. | COURTESY SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM 3RD ANNIVERSARY PARTY SAT. AUGUST 12 AT 1PM-1:30AM
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FRIDAY 07/28 Carousel Billy and Julie are a star-crossed couple in small-town Maine. He works as a barker at the town’s carousel, and she’s a mill worker. But he’s fired when he defends Julie and mocks his boss, and she loses her job for being on the streets late at night with Billy (1873 was tough on women). The two are soon married and expecting a child, but things aren’t going well — Billy expresses his frustrations about being out of work as violence toward Julie. In desperate straits, he agrees to commit a robbery, even though murder is the likely outcome. Rodgers & Hammerstein’s
Carousel is a haunting musical in more ways than one. Its presentation of the afterlife, of a man who can’t get along with anyone, and of the ramifications of closing yourself off from the human race will stick with you long after the show is over. Union Avenue Opera presents Carousel at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (July 28 to August 5) at the Union Avenue Christian Church (733 North Union Boulevard; www. unionavenueopera.org). Tickets are $32 to $55.
To Catch a Thief The Saint Louis Art Museum (www.slam.org) has gone mad for fashion — perhaps you’ve noticed. With an ongoing exhi-
bition about the Paris millinery trade’s influence on Degas and Mucha’s art, and another that explores the work of modern haute couture hat designer Stephen Jones, the museum has clothing on the brain. That thread is further worked in this year’s Art Hill Film Series, with four films that feature Academy Award-nominated and -winning fashion. Tonight at 8:30 p.m., you can see Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. This 1955 classic stars Cary Grant as John Robie, a retired jewel thief who now lives peacefully on the French Riviera. Grace Kelly plays opposite Grant as Frances Stevens, a young beauty with a fabulous jewel collection. When a rash of high-profile thefts are pinned on Robie, he and Frances team up to trap the culprit in the act. Food trucks and concesriverfronttimes.com
sion stands will be set up at the top of the hill and ready for business from 6 to 8:30 p.m., and local bands will play while you eat. Admission is free.
SATURDAY 07/29 Comic Con at Central Library San Diego Comic Con is the big daddy of all cons, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone. If you’re looking for something a little bit more manageable (not to mention closer to home), the Comic Con at Central Library has
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what you need. Today from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Central Branch of the St. Louis Public Library (1301 Olive Street; www.slpl.org) you can sample virtual reality, take pictures with Voltron, make projects in Star Clipper’s Craft Corner and even go to a con-within-the-con at PokéCon Central. Food trucks will be parked near the Olive Street entrance to deal with your hunger pangs, and the Shake Ups perform music inspired by Steven Universe during the lunch hour. Comic Con at Central Library is an all-ages event, and admission is free.
[REVIEW]
The Lady Killer Florence Pugh delivers chilling intensity in a quiet, vicious role Written by
ROBERT HUNT
Mamma Mia! The Fox Theatre (527 North Grand Boulevard; www.fabulousfox.com) has apparently hosted Mamma Mia! more times than any other city during the show’s fifteen-year tour. But this weekend is the last time the touring production will play its home away from home — at least for the foreseeable future. Can you live happily without seeing the musical one last time? Could Sophie live happily ever after without knowing who her father was? Of course not. “Take a Chance” on Mamma Mia! one more time. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday (July 28 to 30). Tickets are $39 to $115.
SUNDAY 07/30 Grove Criterium We know, we know: You haven’t watched a bicycle race since Lance Armstrong was exposed as a cheat. But there’s a huge difference between watching a bike race on TV and standing on a sidewalk as 41 hard-charging cyclists throw Planning an event, exhibiting your art or putting on a play? Let us know and we’ll include it in the calendar section or publish a listing on our website — for free! Send details via e-mail (calendar@riverfronttimes.com), fax (314-754-6416) or mail (6358 Delmar Boulevard, Suite 300, St. Louis, MO 63130, attn: Calendar). Include the date, time, price, contact information and location (including ZIP code). Please submit information three weeks prior to the date of your event. No telephone submissions will be accepted. Find more events online at www.riverfronttimes.com.
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Lady Macbeth
Mamma Mia! visits St. Louis one more time. | MAMMA MIA! FAREWELL TOUR 2016 BY KEVIN THOMAS GARCIA themselves into a sharp corner just inches away from you. The Grove Criterium is a challenging 1.2-mile course with six turns that takes cyclists through and around the Grove neighborhood. In fact, the race starts and ends in front of Urban Chestnut Brewing Company (4465 Manchester Avenue; www. thegrovecrit.com). Imagine spending a warm summer day observing athletes in peak physical condition compete for your amusement — while you enjoy Urban Chestnut’s amazing french fries. Nice, right? Races start at 10 a.m. today and continue all day until the Men’s Pro racers take the course at 3:45 p.m. Admission is free for spectators.
MONDAY 07/31 A Chorus Line Seventeen dancers have survived the audition, but the toughest round — the final cut — is still to come. All of the remaining dancers are desperate to book this job, but the director’s line of questioning gives them pause. He wants them to share something personal, even though they’re auditioning for the chorus line, where their individuality will be masked by identical costumes and dance steps. A Chorus Line reveals the people behind the sparkling costumes and shows
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Directed by William Oldroyd. Written by Alice Birch. Based on the novella by Nikolai Leskov. Starring Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis and Naomi Ackie. Opens Friday, July 28, at the Landmark Tivoli Theatre and the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
I These Pussycats are mad, bad and dangerous to know. | © EVE PRODUCTIONS the passion that drives them to be the best — even if it requires them to disappear into the ensemble. A Chorus Line returns to the Muny in Forest Park (www.muny.org) for a one-week run. Performances start at 8:15 p.m. Saturday through Friday (July 29 to August 4). Tickets are $15 to $95.
WEDNESDAY 08/02 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Writer/director Russ Meyer captured something primal in his 1965 flop-turned-cult-favorite, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Three go-go
dancers commit crimes and race through the desert in a Porsche in search of thrills. When they encounter a young couple on a date, they kill the man and kidnap the girl, taking her deeper into the wasteland in search of a rumored hidden stash of cash. Local film fanatic Tom Stockman hosts the Webster Film Series’ screening of Faster, Pussycat! tonight at 8 p.m. at the Schlafly Bottleworks (7260 Southwest Avenue, Maplewood; www.webster.edu/ film-series). After the film, Stockman will share his 2008 interview with star Tura Satana, which he conducted on-stage at the Way Out Club shortly before his death. A selection of Stockman’s Russ Meyer memorabilia will be on display. Tickets for this extravaganza of cleavage and carnage are $5. n
n the first scene of Lady Macbeth, we see the young Katherine (Florence Pugh) passively watching as she is sold into marriage with an older man. As she takes her place in her husband’s rural estate, ruled over by his severe and ancient father, it soon becomes clear that she is not going to conform to an obedient life as mistress of the house, though the early scenes offer no hint of just how dark a form her rebellion will take. William Oldroyd’s new film is a dark companion piece to other recent films about female repression (Terence Davies’ Sunset Song and A Quiet Passion and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled). But where the heroines of those films temper their rebellion with discretion, Lady Macbeth goes on a rampage. It’s a genteel period drama rewritten with the perversity of Hitchcock or Chabrol. What begins as a drawing-room drama slowly reveals a few impolite secrets. Katherine’s husband Alexander keeps his distance from her in their bedroom, while his father harangues her about her failure to produce an heir. When Alexander is called away from home on business, his curious wife finds solace — loads of it — in the arms of one of their workers, Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), whom she quickly and unashamedly brings into the house, flaunting her behavior before the silent house staff while
Florence Pugh is a decidedly ruthless Lady Macbeth. | LAURIE SPARHAM, COURTESY ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
It’s a genteel period drama rewritten with the perversity of Hitchcock or Chabrol. still trying to hide it from her fatherin-law. Under ordinary norms, Katherine’s reputation would be destroyed, but just when it looks as if her impropriety is about to be exposed, things turn very grim. The world of solemn domesticity is torn apart by violence and deception, yet the characters try to carry on, keeping up appearances. If this sounds more like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley than Shakespeare’s hand-washing heroine, it’s because the inspiration for Alice Birch’s understated screenplay comes not from the
legendary Scottish play but from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (adapted as an opera by Shostakovich in 1934 and filmed by Andrzej Wajda in 1962 as Siberian Lady Macbeth). Birch’s version streamlines the action, eliminates Leskov’s moral perspective and goes straight into the center of Katherine’s icy soul. If it’s not Shakespeare’s Lady, it’s what she might have become if she hadn’t married well. It’s also a film of great simplicity and economy. Long quiet stretches are interrupted by sudden bursts of passion and punctuated by simple country landscapes. The tedium and oppression of Katherine’s existence are summed up in everyday details, so that even the sound of a chair being pulled across a floor suggests a life continually spent on edge. Even her clothing, a massive hoop skirt with whalebone undercarriage, worn only after a great struggle, becomes a symbol of the false appearances of domesticity. When she sits with the vast garment covering nearly the length of a small sofa, it’s as if she’s created riverfronttimes.com
a private safety zone in the midst of the household. Lady Macbeth is at times so sharp in its depiction of society and morality that it comes close to satire, and so bleak at others that it becomes almost hard to watch. (A subplot in which Katherine discovers that her husband has already fathered an heir leads almost casually into near-horror.) What holds it together, even more than Birch’s skillful twists or Oldroyd’s calm direction, is the extraordinary performance of Florence Pugh at its center. Only nineteen when Lady Macbeth was filmed, she dominates the film as shrewdly and self-assuredly as her character exercises control over those around her. Even though Katherine is silent or passive for much of the film, Pugh conveys the wide scale of her inner life, mischievously disrupting some conventions, manipulating others and eventually revealing her true ferociousness. It’s a great, mature performance that turns Lady Macbeth’s deceptive pastoral beginnings into a harrowing psychological drama of great force.n
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THE ARTS
DID YOU KNOW:
1.3 MILLION
Jaz Tucker and Reggie Pierre pontificate in “Sin Titulo.” | JOHN LAMB
Reggie Pierre, Spencer Sickmann and Ryan Lawson-Maeske get tangled in code phrases in “How’s Bruno.” | JOHN LAMB [ S TA G E ]
Second Verse, Same as the First The LaBute Festival ends on a high note Written by
PAUL FRISWOLD LaBute New Theater Festival
Presented by St. Louis Actors’ Studio through July 30 at the Gaslight Theater (358 North Boyle Avenue; www.stlas.org). Tickets are $30 to $35.
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he second half of the LaBute Festival always faces something of an uphill battle. If you enjoyed the first half, you invariably end up RIVERFRONT TIMES
comparing the later plays to their predecessors. If you didn’t like the first half, the second round of plays has to redeem the whole festival. But William Roth, artistic director of St. Louis Actors’ Studio, clearly knew what he was doing when he divided his bounty, because this back half of the festival stands on its own merits. There are only two new works debuting this time. Neil LaBute’s “Hate Crime” premiered in the first half, and here it’s joined by “How’s Bruno” by Cary Pepper and Tearrance Chisholm’s “Sin Titulo.” Pepper is an old hand at the LaBute Fest, with his hilarious “Mark My Worms” one of the highlights of last year’s festival. “How’s Bruno” is in the same vein — a fast-paced comic romp that requires verbal dexterity, a dancer’s timing and a trio of stone-faced actors. Spencer Sickmann is our disheveled Everyman, who’s working on his laptop in a coffee shop when he receives a cryptic text from an unknown sender
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that simply asks, “How’s Bruno?” He fires off a nonchalant answer, thinking the sender will realize his or her mistake. Instead, he receives a barrage of pointed questions in response. Then two hoods in leather jackets and sunglasses show up (Reggie Pierre and Ryan Lawson-Maeske) and begin a more threatening line of questioning, all in code phrases. Sickmann’s answers throw them into a state of panic, and soon our beleaguered hero realizes he’s in over his head. When the guy they call the Gardener (Chauncy Thomas) shows up to further interrogate our man, it’s almost more than he can take. Pepper’s script is mostly nonsense, but it’s sensationally entertaining nonsense, and director Nancy Bell has her cast of four play it very broadly. “Sin Titulo,” by playwright Chisholm (a St. Louis native), is more grounded in reality, but no less entertaining. Naomi and Damascus (Patrice Foster and Reggie Pierre) live in a St. Louis home
cluttered with Clinton/Kaine signs and fliers. He ran the local campaign office, and Clinton’s defeat has not just crushed his spirit — it’s sent him into a depressive spiral that has the two formerly happily-married people bickering about talking to Uber drivers (he’s against it), the possibility of children in their future (he’s against it) and the unexpected arrival of her brother, Lloyd (shockingly, he’s for it). Lloyd is played by Jaz Tucker, and he almost steals the show. He’s homeless, he’s mentally ill and not taking his medication, and he’s working on a plan to take down the secret society that he believes controls the world, Sin Titulo. (It means “without title,” and Lloyd often mispronounces it, despite his brother-in-law’s correction.) Damascus sees Lloyd’s delusion about how the world works as a means of getting him to take his medication, so he plays along with the early stages of Lloyd’s plan. The two make an engaging pair as they get high together and discuss
The characters deal with the casual racism of St. Louis and their own perception of how they’re seen — or not seen — by white America. how the world works, how to start a revolution and how to maintain a successful relationship. Naomi is frustrated with her big brother’s unpredictability, his lack of boundaries and his constant disrespect. She’s also willing to give her husband the space he needs to work through his problems, whatever they may be. It’s a thankless role, one that could be reduced to the scold/good-womansupporting-her-man dichotomy. Chisholm thankfully gives Naomi a rounded personality, while Foster gives her a backbone. When it
comes time to fight for what she wants, you’re not surprised that she gets it. Chisholm’s script is a window into a world that’s not often seen on a stage. Naomi and Damascus are a middle-class black couple who are able to navigate the white world and still have real-world problems. They deal with depression, mental illness, the casual racism of St. Louis and their own perception of how they’re seen — or not seen — by white America in the Trump era. Damascus lays things out clearly when he says, “I always thought the world hated us, but it’s different when it’s been diagnosed.” The bitterness in Pierre’s delivery is unmistakable; the sentiment is not just words on a page. If “Sin Titulo” has a flaw, it’s that it feels too long by ten minutes or so, but I couldn’t swear to it. Chisholm has a strong, welldefined voice, and director Linda Kennedy channels it beautifully on stage. The final scene of Damascus and Naomi huddled together, cradling each other and their future, lost in the possibilities tomorrow may bring, is both uplifting and inspiring. n
PEOPLE READ
SAINT LOUIS ORCHESTRA ROBERT HART BAKER Conductor The Big Band Theory
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Duke Ellington Medley A Salute to the Big Apple Meredith Willson: Seventy Six Trombones from “The Music Man” That’s Entertainment - A Salute to MGM George Gershwin: An American in Paris Suite Henri Mancini: The Pink Panther & Peter Gunn Theme Frank Loesser: Selections from “Guys and Dolls” Cy Coleman: Sweet Charity Medley W.C. Handy: St. Louis Blues Leroy Anderson: Fiddle Faddle Cole Porter: I’ve Got You Under My Skin Tribute to Frank Sinatra: Come Fly With Me & Fly Me To The Moon Swing from Dick Clark to Brian Setzer: Bandstand Boogie & Jump, Jive an’ Wail Glenn Miller Hits: Chattanooga Choo Choo, In The Mood, Opus One A BEAUTIFUL QUILT, HANDMADE BY VIOLINISTS CAROL LODES AND MELANIE MURPHY,
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Table Seats - $30; Gallery Seats - $15
FOR TICKETS OR INFORMATION
(314) 421-3600
www.stlphilharmonic.org riverfronttimes.com
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Highlights at Lemmons include, from left, cevapi flatbread, the “Balkan Dipping Board” and the “King’s Kabob.” | MABEL SUEN
[REVIEW]
SATURDAY, JULY 29TH
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As American as Cevapi Lemmons by Grbic combines St. Louis tradition with Bosnian flavors for a wonderful new classic Written by
CHERYL BAEHR Lemmons by Grbic
5800 Gravois Avenue, 314-899-9898. Tues.Thurs. 4-11 p.m.; Fri.4 p.m.-midnight; Sat. 11 a.m.-midnight; Sun. 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Closed Mondays.
G
rowing up in St. Louis, the Grbic siblings — Senada, Erna and Ermin — were spoiled by home-cooked Bosnian cuisine, lovingly prepared by their mother. It wasn’t that she just knew how to cook well; every Saturday morning, she would rise at 4 a.m. to begin preparing a feast that would last them throughout the week. She began by baking traditional Balkan bread, then moved on to a host of authentic specialties, like chicken soup with spinach noodles, cabbage rolls stuffed with ground beef and rice, cevapi, goulash and everything in between. The spread was so good, it later became the basis of the family’s successful Bosnian restaurant, Grbic. And yet all the kids wanted were some tacos. For the Grbic kids, the sensation of growing up with a foot in two different worlds was most
pronounced when it came to food. Though gourmet Bosnian cuisine was a daily occurrence, they longed for the food their classmates were eating — pizza, burgers, tacos. They got their wish twice a week, on Thursdays and Fridays, when their mom would allow them to decide what was for dinner. But while she obliged, she’d always add her own twist. Burgers were served atop Balkan bread, and taco meat was seasoned with Bosnian spices before being garnished with a cucumber and green onion salad. It was the American food they wanted, but still solidly rooted in the cuisine of their family’s homeland. Though the Grbic siblings didn’t realize it at the time, that BosnianAmerican style of cooking would set the stage for what would become Lemmons by Grbic, their two-month-old restaurant in Bevo riverfronttimes.com
Mill. The Grbic operation is massive, consisting of both a large restaurant and a banquet hall. It’s kept the family plenty busy for twenty years, but their father could not resist purchasing the old Lemmons when it went up for sale in 2014. Sulejman Grbic had always dreamed of having a place where people could go to watch a game and drink cold beer. His family thought he was crazy to take on another venture, but the patriarch promised he’d keep it simple and not sink any money into it. An old music venue, Lemmons was supposed to be turnkey. It should have been as simple as just changing the signs and opening the doors. It wasn’t. Once the Grbic family realized its condition, they decided to gut the place. Over the course of their renovations, however, their
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LEMMONS Continued from pg 29 father developed health problems and could no longer lead the project. Handing over the reins to his children, he told them to take over and do with Lemmons whatever they wanted. Hearing his words was like a light switch, and they immediately knew what to do: They’d turn Lemmons into a culinary representation of their experiences growing up both Bosnian and American. If you ever went to the old Lemmons, in the moment you walk through the front doors of the newly minted Lemmons by Grbic, you’ll realize that the Grbic family changed much more than the food. The place could be a contender for Extreme Makeover: Restaurant Edition. Once a typically dingy (yet beloved) south city dive, the new Lemmons is so bright, stylish and clean, you’ll feel like a guest in Martha Stewart’s home. Beautiful, grey-toned hardwood floors, exposed brick, a modern stone accent wall, and yellow décor (yes, there are lemon references everywhere) create a soft atmosphere, while small touches, including quaint mismatched salt and pepper shakers and wooden window shutters with carvings of St. Louis iconography, add a touch of whimsy. It’s shocking to think this was once a place for Busch beer and pool. The siblings have a natural affinity for different aspects of the business, which makes it easy to divide the workload. Ermin is the front-of-house guy, with a penchant for hospitality evident to the family since the Grbic days. Erna does the marketing, the styling and the social media, and keeps the place running. The kitchen, however, is Senada’s home, and judging from
at e r G
The chuck sandwich offers braised chuck roast, caramelized mushroom and onions and smoked provolone on a Balkan-style hoagie. | MABEL SUEN what’s coming off her line, it’s clear she’s in the right role. Senada has been developing recipes with her mother since she was eight, and her talent in blending Bosnian and American food is on display throughout Lemmons’ menu. Balkan chicken wings present as traditional, sweet and sticky American-style wings, but a bite of their plump meat reveals the distinct plum sweetness of rakija, a Bosnian brandy. The liquor imparts a fruit-forward flavor that balances out the bracing heat of her chile-based seasoning
s! e c i Pr
blend. They’re fiery but so flavorful you can manage the heat. On separate visits, every table in the dining room had the “Balkan Dipping Board.” Why wouldn’t they? The appetizer consists of golf ball-sized fritters of ustipci, or Bosnian bread, with three sauces. The recipe is by Mama Grbic, who would often say that if you had a ball of ustipci dough in one hand and a feather in the other, the feather should be heavier. Senada has heeded her advice, producing the addictive, doughnut-like bread balls that serve as a base
for the accompanying feta butter, mushroom duxelle and roasted red pepper dip — that is, if you can refrain from popping them in your mouth the second you lay your hands on them. Flatbreads again show the chef’s prowess with dough. Homemade flatbread, about the thickness of naan, serves as the base for Lemmons’ riff on a sausage pizza. Instead of American-style pork sausage, however, Senada uses cevapi, a mild Bosnian beef sausage, placing it atop the feta butter and
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Continued on pg 34
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LEMMONS Continued from pg 32 double play
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Greek Restaurant
Great Food, Great Price, Everything Handmade!
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The bar at Lemmons has been transformed. | MABEL SUEN mozzarella-covered crust. It’s the satisfaction of cheese bread and beefy breakfast sausage wrapped into one wonderful dish. A light pasta called cresta de gallo, or rooster crest, is paired with chicken, zucchini, blistered tomatoes, feta and fresh oregano, its sauce simply made from the cooking liquids of the components. It’s a pleasant, summery dish, as is a simple yet well-cooked chicken kabob, skewered with onions and red peppers and glazed with sweet chili sauce. When the original Lemmons opened decades ago, it made its name with its fried chicken. Each subsequent owner kept up the tradition, and Lemmons by Grbic is no exception. Though Senada admits that she knew nothing about frying chicken before realizing it had to be on her menu, she’s developed her own unique take on the Southern staple, dubbing it the tongue-in-cheek “Not Lemmons Fried Chicken.” Her version has a thick, black-peppery coating akin to what you’d find on a country-fried steak. She double-fries the meat so the exterior is extra-crispy but the meat stays succulent. The star of the dish, however, is her signature carrot and potato mash, which subs in brown butter for gravy. Sweet,
The cheekily named “Not Lemmons Fried Chicken” has a thick, blackpeppery coating akin to what you’d find on a countryfried steak. nutty, savory, this side is a standout. Lemmons’ chuck sandwich succeeds where other roast beef sandwiches fail in that the meat itself is juicy. Usually, on something like a French dip, the meat is on the dry side and the accompanying dipping sauce provides moisture. Here, the accompanying jus is not necessary; the fork-tender meat has the consistency of pot roast. The beef is piled onto a crusty Bosnian bread, then accented with sautéed mushrooms, onions and melted provolone cheese. Call it a cross between a French dip and a Philly cheesesteak, but whatever the shorthand, it’s the roast beef
Lamb ($8.95), Chicken or Pork ($7) Souvlaki Grilled Chicken Sandwich - $6.25 Beer Battered Tilapia - $7 Cod Sandwich - $7
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The “Modern Krempita” is topped with whipped cream and strawberry coulis. | MABEL SUEN sandwich we’ve been dreaming of. While some will drift off thinking of that chuck sandwich, many will have their thoughts occupied by the “50/50 Burger,” equal parts combination of ground beef and beef bacon. The meat comes from the Grbics’ uncle, who has a nearby slaughterhouse and provides the restaurant with all its meat. His beef tends to be leaner, so Senada created the blend as a way to give the burger a little more fat. The byproduct, however, is a juicy patty that has a gentle essence of smoke. The meat is topped with provolone, jalapeño sauce and an over-easy egg that’s been seasoned with Vegeta, a mild Bosnian spice blend. The burger is so good, the man next to me whipped out his phone mid-burger to post an on-thespot, five-star Yelp review. Though it may seem like an impossible feat at this restaurant, saving room for dessert is a must. If you can’t get enough of that fry bread, it makes an appearance in sweet form as part of the “Dessert
Dipping Board,” this time paired with whipped cream, chocolate and strawberry sauces. If the kitchen’s bread is light, the dough for the “Modern Krempita” is barely more than air. Two pieces of the flaky, square-shaped puff pastry are layered with strawberries and cream like a sandwich. It’s a masterful blend of upscale European pastry and down-home strawberry shortcake. It’s no surprise that Senada, Erna and Ermin have mastered this balance — they’ve been doing it their entire lives. What is surprising is that, after we’ve enjoyed decades of rich Bosnian traditions in St. Louis, it’s taken us this long to realize a place like this one. But no sense bemoaning the lost time. Lemmons by Grbic is well worth the wait. n Lemmons by Grbic
Balkan Dipping Board ........................$9 50/50 Burger .................................. $13 Not Lemmons Fried Chicken ........... $11
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She Fell for the Man — and His People’s Food Written by
CHERYL BAEHR
L
oryn Nalic, chef and owner of Balkan Treat Box (314-6679926; www.balkantreatbox. com), thanks her lucky stars that she learned how to cook at such a young age — it got her out of trouble with her parents. “I wasn’t the best student, so when I got my report card, I would play restaurant for my parents,” Nalic recalls. “I’d turn the whole house into a restaurant — cook dinner, put out flowers, dim the lights, everything. Food was always something I used to get myself out of situations.” For Nalic, though, food wasn’t just a way to get out of things. It was a way to get into them, too. The daughter of a busy working mother, Nalic would spend time with her mom in the kitchen, learning how to cook as they watched Saturday morning PBS shows together. “She was a fantastic cook, and this was my way to be close to her,” Nalic explains. “Anytime she was in the kitchen, I was right there with her.” In addition to being a great home cook, Nalic’s mother worked in restaurants. Naturally, her daughter picked up the love of the business, so when it came time for her first job, Nalic was hired on as a busser at the old Lemmons. A subsequent job at Yemanja Brasil gave her her first cooking break. “Yemanja was my first real taste of the professional kitchen. They really showed me around and taught me so much,” says Nalic.
Loryn Nalic learned to cook as a child. As an adult, she discovered Bosnian food — and her calling. | SARA BANNOURA “However, that’s also where I first learned about the foods of different cultures. The chef was a joyous man who taught me about all of these foods that were different than what I grew up with.” Though Nalic thrived in the kitchen, she took some time off from the business to raise her kids. When she was ready to go back to work, she found herself back on the line, this time doing pastries at Turvey’s on the Green. That led to gigs with a few bakeries around town, as well as stints with Frazer’s and the Del Pietro restaurant group. In search of a more family-friendly schedule, Nalic took a 9 to 5 food sales job — an opportunity that ironically set the course for her to return to the kitchen even as she’d been trying to get out of it. While calling on one of her accounts, she met Edo Nalic, the manager of south city’s Taft Street Restaurant and Bar. “It was love at first sight,” Nalic recalls.
“Both of us say it was like a bolt of electricity.” Edo, a native of Bosnia, took Nalic to all of his haunts in the Bevo neighborhood and introduced her to Balkan food, a cuisine she fell in love just as quickly as she had with her husband. Nalic instantly knew that if she was going to open a restaurant, it would be this style of food. She learned a lot from Nalic’s family, even going over to Bosnia and working in restaurants and home kitchens to soak up as much information as she could. Before branching out on her own, however, Nalic took a job with Pappy’s Smokehouse as its catering and events manager, a job that introduced her to some of the city’s top chefs. As her idea for what would become the food truck Balkan Treat Box took shape, she sought training from the likes of Josh Galliano (previously the Libertine, now Companion Bakery), Kevin Willmann (Farmhaus) and Qui Tran (Mai Li and the soon-toriverfronttimes.com
open Nudo), who augmented her self-taught skills. In December 2016 she opened Balkan Treat Box as a roving purveyor of her beloved cuisine. Though she’s not a native, Nalic insists that her food is every bit as authentic as if she’d been doing it her entire life. “I’ve watched Edo’s family, and it’s beautiful to see the way everything comes together,” Nalic says. “The things they do have been passed down from generation to generation and they were starting to die out. That’s why it was important for us to learn everything, so we could preserve it.” Nalic hopes to have a brickand-mortar one day, but in the meantime, she’s busy on the truck, stoking the wood-fired oven and making every last item from scratch. She took a break from the business to share her thoughts on the St. Louis culinary scene, how cooking is a lot like dancing and why two chefs are better than one.
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
Continued on pg 30
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LORYN NALIC Continued from pg 37
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What is one thing people don’t know about you that you wish they did? I have been a dancer all my life and performed for the majority of my adult years as a professional, and was a co-owner of a St. Louis dance troupe. We taught, performed and choreographed Turkish, Middle Eastern and Hawaiian dances. I still continue to teach on occasion to connect with that creative expression. While performing at restaurants and cultural institutions, I expanded my knowledge of food. I would always end up in discussions with people about what type of food they grew up on and how they cook it. Being a cook and dancing are very similar — the similarities are dedication, practice, creativity and a level of vulnerability. They also require you to keep moving, learning and growing, which I need to stay stimulated. What daily ritual is non-negotiable for you? Between running the truck right now and our family life, it’s easy to get preoccupied. I make sure to check in with my husband, daughter and son to keep ourselves grounded. I am working towards having those daily rituals again. I need them to feel balanced. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? The ability to to fly. Everyone needs a change in perspective for a little reality check. I also would travel everywhere! What is the most positive thing in food, wine or cocktails that you’ve noticed in St. Louis over the past year? Growth. I love that there are so many choices and new places opening. If only we could have more culinary professionals to staff them to keep it growing. I also love seeing St. Louis (Seoul Taco, Pastaria) repping in other cities. That feels good. What is something missing in the local food, wine or cocktail scene that you’d like to see? I’d like to see more food stalls or a place for them around St. Louis where there is prominent foot traffic. Who is your St. Louis food crush? Oh man, I’m going to take this in a different direction. I have three solid duo crushes in St. Louis. I want to be a little like all of them. One duo in particular that
I hope makes a comeback someday is Josh Squared: Galliano and Poletti. Theirs is still some of the best food I can remember here. Josh Galliano has mentored some of the best chefs in St. Louis. He lives and breathes his work and is extremely helpful. I respect that. Another pair is Qui Tran and Marie-Anne Velasco. Not only are they extremely knowledgeable and savvy, they remind me that we can be professional and still have fun. These two are seriously local celebrities to me. There is also nothing Marie-Anne doesn’t know, culinary-wise, and there is nothing Qui won’t do to help someone out. Finally, there’s Ermina and Senada Grbic. Wow. These women. They are the hardest working ladies in the business. They have grown a little local empire, and their talent and ability to make everyone feel like family is admirable. Some of my favorite foods come out of their kitchens. And you always listen to everything Mama Grbic says — well I do! Who’s the one person to watch right now in the St. Louis dining scene? It’s another team for me, because one person can’t do it alone — Kevin Willmann’s line over at Farmhaus: Jake Sciales, Michael Frank, and Traviss Smelser. It’s simple, yet creative, food done the right way that tastes damn good. The four of them make up a dream team. Farmhaus is on fire! Which ingredient is most representative of your personality? I’m a big personality, so I will say cilantro. You either can’t get enough — or I taste like soap. If you weren’t working in the restaurant business, what would you be doing? Some sort of starving artist in the entertainment business. You know, like the restaurant business — ha! Name an ingredient never allowed in your kitchen. None. I am very inclusive and see that there is a place for everything. What is your after-work hangout? Lemmons by Grbic and my backyard. What’s your food or beverage guilty pleasure? Anything sparkling and anything sweet. What would be your last meal on earth? Anything my mom, Linda Pucci, cooks! n
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enter Ice Brewery (3126 Olive Street), the new hockey-themed brewery and bar that opened in Midtown last Friday, owes its life to a dream — and a one-year plan. Local entrepreneur Steve Albers quit his job in bank management on July 3, 2015. He told his wife Olivia that he needed to start working full-time toward the goal of opening his own brewery. He made a deal with her: He would raise the capital, get the equipment and find a proper location in one year or go back to work. It took the entire year, but Albers did it. And two years later, as he’s ready to open the doors to the public, the wave of emotions could not feel any bigger. “It’s every emotion,” Albers says. “It’s stress, it’s exciting, and it’s heart-wrenching. It’s going to really come full circle on Friday.” Albers dreamed of owning a business since 2008, when he was a student at Webster University, participating in its entrepreneurship program and studying successful entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk. Albers noticed that few breweries had a sports theme. Himself a hockey player and Blues fan, he sought to tap into that potential. He began home brewing in 2010, starting a garage-based brewing company called Hat Trick Brewing with two other partners. But it fizzled out a couple of years later; Albers says he wasn’t able to deliver on the capital. But even though Albers turned to banking, the thought of running his own brewery never left his head. “I wanted to become an entrepreneur,” he says. “I love that word. Even that word makes me smile.” He continued home brewing, putting a bar, ten taps and a tengallon system in his basement and brewing for two years. He brewed
618-307-4830 WWW.CLEVELANDHEALTH.COM 106 N. MAIN | EDWARDSVILLE, IL
Steve Albers, owner of Center Ice Brewery. | BILL LOELLKE
an estimated 100 recipes, even as he consulted experts at local titans Schlafly and Urban Chestnut to learn the trade. Then he started to look for investors. Olivia Albers, an occupational therapist, says she never doubted him. “I always knew he would make it one way or another, I just didn’t know at what cost,” she says. “He’s a very persistent person.” Albers credits his wife with making sacrifices along the way to ensure that he would meet his goal. “I couldn’t have done this without her,” Albers says. Albers looked at more than 100 venues, nearly landing in Chesterfield, even as the clock ticked. He was three months from his deadline and still without a location — and with a second child on the way — when he found the building on Olive. Since then his life has been constant phone calls and texts, lots of construction and long hours each day to get his dream up and running. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re brewing beer, you’re cleaning toilets, you’re drawing up blueprints with your architects, you do everything,” Albers says. Albers is going for an authentic experience for both craft beer enthusiasts and the hockey-loving community. The bar top, bar wall and tabletops are all made from wood salvaged from the old St.
Louis Arena. The other walls in the tasting room hold art pieces from various local artists that Albers will be selling. Starting out, the brewery will feature ten rotating taps. Albers hopes to expand to twenty in the future. The room that houses the seven-barrel brewing system serves more than one function. In the very corner of the room is a constructed “penalty box” featuring an original door from the old arena where guests can get their photo taken, and an area for private functions such as birthdays and corporate meetings, complete with its own rotating taps. Center Ice doesn’t serve food, but guests are welcome to bring in takeout from outside providers. The brewery’s digital media manager Kyle Olivarri credits Albers’ determination for bringing the project this far. “His passion is so radiant that it spreads to everyone around him,” Olivarri says. “He makes great craft beer, he’s super knowledgeable and he’s super personable.” Many factors could have held Albers back from pursuing the project and going back into banking. But he never wavered because, for him, the brewery was not a “want.” “I needed to do it,” he says. Center Ice Brewery’s regular hours will be Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.n
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TAI KE
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Specialties at the Mad Crab include, clockwise from top left, crawfish, mussels and head-off shrimp, and Atlantic snow crab legs. | SARA BANNOURA [FIRST LOOK]
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OPEN WEEKDAYS AT 3PM, WEEKENDS AT NOON • 8080 OLI VE BLVD. • 314-801-8698 42
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SARAH FENSKE
T
he new restaurant that opened last week on Olive Boulevard will seem familiar to food lovers who live in Texas or California. But for St. Louis diners, it may be something new entirely.
CRAB • LOBSTER • SHRIMP CRAWFISH • CLAMS MUSSELS • SAUSAGE
what’s your flavor?
Written by
WWW.BRASILIASTL.COM • 314-932-1034 3212 SOUTH GRAND BLVD
Mad Crab (8080 Olive Boulevard, University City) focuses on seafood — simple, boiled fruits of the sea, as tasty and as spicy as you want it. Customers choose oyster, lobster, crab, shrimp (head on or head off!), crawfish, clams or mussels. Then they pick a flavor — options include “Rajun Cajun,” lemon pepper, garlic sauce or a
combination — and a spice level. The kitchen shakes it all up, then deposits it on your table, which is covered with paper. You dig in, no utensils necessary. You can also incorporate corn, potatoes or rice, or order sausage if you’re not into seafood. Or, if you’re not feeling the whole boiled-by-thepound option, you can choose from a variety of fried baskets — Cajun fries plus your choice of fried catfish, fried shrimp or chicken tenders. Prices are reasonable ($9 to $11 for those baskets, with by-thepound seafood starting as low as $6 for the crawfish option). Higher-end options, which include blue crab, Dungeness crab or King Crab legs, are priced seasonally; you’ll need to ask your server. The place is the brainchild of Victor Ho, a Vietnamese immigrant who made his name in the nail supply business (his family owns Max Beauty Source, also on Olive). After his children were grown, Ho sold the beauty business to family members and moved to Dallas. But after seeing the seafood spots there, he knew he was on to something. He’s now involved with the business from Dallas and will be flying regularly to St. Louis to assist; his brother Nam Ho will be the manager.
At heart a businessman, Victor Ho loves the simplicity of the concept. “We boil and put the sauce in, put it in a bag, shake it, pour it out on the table,” he says. “No silverware. You don’t need plates, because you have paper on the table. The way it’s run is so easy.” And, he notes, quite popular. In Texas, he observes, “They stand in line to get in.” He’s confident the Mad Crab will have the same success. The business is located in the former home of Kim Son Vietnamese Bistro, which closed its doors in May after ten years of business. The Ho family moved quickly to give the space a new gloss, adding a host of nautical touches fitting its seafood theme. Wooden boards that evoke a weathered boat cover the back walls, while decorative posts give the feel of a dock on the Gulf of Mexico. In one corner, a net holds plastic representations of the sea’s bounty. Victor Ho says University City hustled to help them get open in just a few months’ time, but there’s still one thing they’re waiting for — a liquor license. They are working to obtain one, and hope eventually to serve beer and wine. n riverfronttimes.com
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The outspoken rocker recently called for more civility in political discourse, after years of inflammatory remarks. | PHOTO BY JAMES AND MARILYN BROWN [REVIEW]
UPCOMING SHOWS 10/4 ANGEL OLSEN
9/1 & 9/2 UMPHREY’S MCGEE 9/11 BEN HARPER & THE INNOCENT CRIMINALS
10/5 UP AND VANISHED LIVE
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9/18 APOCALYPTICA
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10/14 KREWELLA
9/25 RHIANNON GIDDENS
10/15 AL STEWART/YEAR OF THE CAT SHOW
9/26 TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB
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Better Off Ted In Jefferson County, Ted Nugent stops threatening his enemies and just plays music Written by
DANIEL HILL
I
had thought I was going to a Ted Nugent show. I thought I was going to see the man who wrote “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang,” a song about a woman with a “clean” vagina who Nugent claims is “so sweet when she yanks on my meat.” The guy who tried to use a
photo of a shapely naked woman, bound at the wrists and holding a grenade in her mouth, as the cover of his greatest hits collection. Most importantly, the man who wrote “Stranglehold,” the one truly fantastic song in a dumpster-fire of a catalog. So why the hell must I first sit through a moment of prayer? I’m seated in the shade on some covered bleachers at the Jefferson County Fair on one of the hottest days of the year — the mercury peaks Friday at a blistering 104 degrees — awaiting the start of the evening’s four-wheeler races when the announcer asks us to stand. “Heavenly Father, we pray,” he begins. “Tonight we’re gonna ask, if you would please, to look down upon us and watch over each and every man, woman and child here at this fairground. ... We ask you to look over the pit crew members of
each and every racer here tonight. We ask you to ride alongside, or ride with each of our riders as they make it around the track. And if that’s what you’re doing, we ask you to hold on tight, because it’s gonna be a fast one. We ask that you look over each and every person here as they leave so they can make it home safely and sound and join us again tomorrow, and the next day and the next. We pray for this in your name. Amen.” To me, the dichotomy is beyond bizarre. But the crowd is into it. To my right is a young man wearing a sleeveless shirt, arm-holes cut down to his hips, and a baseball cap with a curled brim accented with three large fishhooks. To my left is a man with an American flag hat, brim also tightly curled, who spits the juices from the dip wedged in the side of his mouth onto the ground every 30 seconds or so. riverfronttimes.com
Like most men I’ve seen here, both guys are wearing work boots. And like the others, they too fall into a hushed silence with heads bowed. Ted Nugent has a long history of outspoken remarks in support of his extreme conservative views. In 2007 he suggested that then-Senator Barack Obama “suck on my machine gun.” At a 2012 NRA Convention in St. Louis, he said, “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” That one was enough to attract the attention of the Secret Service, and even got Nugent disinvited to a scheduled performance at Fort Knox. But that was then and this is now. Nugent made headlines recently for entirely different reasons, by calling for civility in the wake of the June shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise by left-wing activist
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BETTER OFF TED Continued from pg 45 and Belleville native James Hodgkinson. “At the tender age of 69, my wife has convinced me I just can’t use those harsh terms,” Nugent said in June on a New York-based AM radio program. “I cannot and will not, and I encourage even my friends-slash-enemies on the left, in the Democrat and liberal world, that we have got to be civil to each other. I’m not going to engage in that kind of hateful rhetoric anymore.” This change of heart was interesting to me on a personal level, as I have my own history with the Nuge. Last August I wrote an article for the RFT titled “Reminder: Ted Nugent Is a Festering Garbage Person,” in which I ran down a list of hateful things he’s said and done in recent years. Nugent shared it on his Facebook page, referring to me as “Saul Alsinky [sic] America hating scum” and encouraging his fans to write the paper. (I was positively inundated with death threats and insults in the days that followed.) A kinder, gentler Ted Nugent, huh? This I had to see. And what better place to see it than the Jefferson County Fair? Jeffco is only 45 minutes or so away from the city of St. Louis, but in many ways they are worlds apart. Jeffco is more rural and working class than St. Louis — “real America,” if you were to ask a clueless journalist from one of the coasts. Here, Donald Trump garnered 65.1 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 29.8. Nugent would be among like-minded folks. My friend Rob Ruzicka, singer for the St. Louis punk band Cardiac Arrest, soon shows up at the track with a woman from Germany named Jennifer, whom he refers to facetiously as his “mail-order bride.” He grew up in this area, and wanted to bring her to the fair simply “for maximum culture shock,” he says. It is working. “This is how you imagine America would be,” Jennifer says with a thick accent as a group of four-wheelers race by. “I mean, not in the big cities. First, only white people — and they look trashy. If you think of the countryside, this is exactly what you sometimes see in movies, you know? Wrong Turn. Where they all get killed.” Aside from being reminded of a horror movie whose protagonists are murdered and eaten by backwoods cannibals — a bit harsh, in 46
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A young racer tears around the track at the Jeffco Fair. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI this man’s opinion — Jennifer notes another difference: the proud patriotism. “In Germany no one wears USA or German flags or whatever,” she says. “We have a special thing with it, because of our history.” She’s talking about the nationalistic furor that gave rise to the Nazis. It is something of an uncomfortable comparison, all things considered. Night falls and we make our way to the stage where Nugent will be performing. Dissuaded by the lines, Rob and Jennifer decide not to watch the concert — Jennifer has never heard of the Nuge anyway. “Republican rock,” she says, wrinkling her nose after we explain his schtick. We part ways and I make my way to the front. Ted Nugent opens his set with a guitar-based rendition of the national anthem.“God bless America baby!” he shouts. “God bless Jefferson County! God bless the shitkickers out there, c’mon baby!” Ted Nugent sure says “baby” a lot. But at least he’s being civil. “Uncle Ted reporting for duty, Jefferson County! Happy summertime barbecue season, baby,” Nugent continues. “I know exactly why you came here tonight: You wanna hear the ultimate guitar licks of all time. You wanted to hear nothing but the best guitar licks you ever heard in your life. And since I wrote all of them, allow me to show you what happens after a good hunting season!” I’ve never seen Nugent perform live before, and, as noted, “Stranglehold” is his only song that I particularly enjoy. But I gotta hand it to the man: He is a showman. He’s fast-talking and self-confident, and a phenomenal guitar player. His
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band is a three-piece affair with Greg Smith on bass guitar and Jason Hartless on the drums. Nugent is wearing a headset microphone, and he’s the only member of the band who says anything between songs. “I’ve been coming to the heartland of Missouri since 1967 with the Amboy Dukes and you’ve always made me feel right at home,” Nugent says. “I appreciate that. Thank you, thank you very much. And to prove that you’re working-hard, playing-hard shitkickers who have no political correctness, you invited Ted Nugent back to the Jefferson County Fair! Which means you’re real Americans and you were already making America great again, I know you were.” The crowd’s applause is deafening upon mention of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, but there’s nothing particularly divisive here, and no threats or mention of violence — it seems as though Uncle Ted is proving himself true to his word. He powers through the hits: “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang,” “Cat Scratch Fever,” “Gonzo,” blues standard “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” He even plays a cover of “Johnny B. Goode,” urging the crowd to “never forget” Chuck Berry. “Chuck Berry is god,” he says. “The god of rhythm and blues and rock & roll. God bless Chuck Berry forever, baby. Never forget where we come from. There would be no get down like this, there would be no real music without Chuck Berry, you know what I’m saying? Never forget.” He’s putting on a damn good show, and I start to ponder the separation of art and artist that comes up whenever someone with talent turns out to be less than entirely honorable. Is Ted Nugent one of
these artists? Can you really enjoy his music without seeing it as intertwined with his political views? Toward the end of his set he dedicates his last song to the armed forces, going on a protracted tirade. “I want you to join me, now more than ever, now that we have a commander-in-chief in the White House that actually deserves to be there,” he says to thunderous applause. “A commander-in-chief that sides with law enforcement instead of the thugs. A commander-in-chief that will let the military be the warriors they dedicated themselves to be. So I want to say thank you for the ultimate inspiration every night. I got my buddies here from the United States Army — say thank you. Say thank you to the U.S. Army warriors here. Got the Air Force. Got some Navy, got some Navy, got some Coast Guard. Got some Missouri National Guard here tonight. Say thank you to the U.S. military warriors and their families. Freedom is not free. Got the U.S. Marine Corps here tonight, say thank you. Badass! Badass! And here’s the theme song. Here’s the theme song for kicking ass. This is the warrior theme song. Kick ass every day!” It’s “Stranglehold.” I wince as he starts the song — there’s no separation of art and artist here. Nugent has retrofitted his oeuvre to include and celebrate his political views. After all, the man who just fell over himself to praise the military is the same man who famously avoided the draft in 1967, telling High Times that he ceased using the bathroom the week before his Army physical and instead just did his business in his pants, wearing them when he showed up to be tested. “I did it in my pants. Poop, piss the whole shot,” he said in the 1977 interview. “My pants got crusted up. See, I approached the whole thing like, Ted Nugent, cool hard-workin’ dude, is gonna wreak havoc on these imbeciles in the armed forces. I’m gonna play their own game, and I’m gonna destroy ’em.” If we weren’t trying to be more civil now — Ted came through on his end, so I suppose I’m honor-bound to follow in kind — I’d probably have a lot to say about that kind of bald-faced hypocrisy. I suppose it’s kind of similar to the hypocrisy of inviting a man like Nugent to a socalled family affair, kicked off with a solemn prayer. I probably would have a lot to say about that, too. As it stands, though, I guess I’ll just never listen to “Stranglehold” n the same way again.
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$3 RAIL DRINKS $5 APPS Frank Delgado, far right, says the Deftones will press on until it’s “no longer fun.” | FRANK MADDOCKS and what we do is we tour. It’s the shows. The shows have consistently stayed good. People still buy tickets. And people come to our shows and the shows are great, and we still enjoy playing. So I guess when that starts hurting, that’s when we’ll know there’s something up.
The Deftones are slated to open for Guns N’ Roses at the Dome at America’s Center this Thursday. | PHOTO BY FRANK MADDOCKS [PREVIEW]
Shoving It Nearly thirty years in, Deftones still doesn’t get the credit it deserves Written by
BEN SALMON Deftones
With Guns N’ Roses. 6 p.m. Thursday, July 27. The Dome at America’s Center, 701 Convention Plaza St. $35 to $250. 314-3425201.
C
onsidering the exhaustive way music-focused publications covered the twentieth anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer, you’d think they’re all gearing up to go big in October, when Deftones’ ground-
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breaking Around the Fur turns twenty. Right? Anyone? Hello? Is this thing on? Don’t count on it. Deftones has never rated that kind of respect among the rock-critic cognoscenti. Such is life when your earliest works contain traces of heavy metal and hip-hop, and you happen to emerge from an uncool hometown (Sacramento) right around the same time that bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn and Slipknot are becoming MTV staples. Yes, Deftones were at one point lumped in with the nu-metal surge of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s a tag that has been hard to shake ever since, even as frontman Chino Moreno and his bandmates have explored various styles and expanded their sonic palette into shoegaze, art-rock, heavy pop and beyond. It began with Around the Fur and continued in earnest on 2000’s White Pony, whose third
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track, “Elite,” earned the band a Grammy. Indeed, Deftones’ two most recent albums — 2012’s Koi No Yokan and last year’s Gore — were so grand and complex and thunderously majestic, even the cool kids couldn’t resist: Taste-making website Pitchfork called Gore “texturally luscious” and compared the band to unimpeachable critics’ darlings Sigur Ros and Deafheaven. On Thursday, the Deftones will roll into the Dome at America’s Center to open for hard rock legends Guns N’ Roses. We caught up with keyboardist/turntablist Frank Delgado for a chat about all the above and more. Here’s that conversation, edited for space and clarity. RFT Music: In recent years, it seems there’s been a shift in how people — critics especially — view your band, and that shift came into
clear focus with the release of Gore. Basically: Deftones weren’t “cool” back in the day, but now you all are cool and it’s OK to like you. Is that something you’ve noticed? Frank Delgado: I wouldn’t say I go out of my way to notice it, but when it comes up it’s like, “Hey, well, that’s cool.” The more the merrier, honestly. And the cooler you are, I guess that’s even cooler. I don’t know. Who the fuck even knows what’s cool? Well, I did put “cool” in quotes for a reason. (Laughs.) You know, we’ve had brushes with that in other ways over the years. Like when we won a Grammy award years ago. That’s crazy. That’s kind of like the ultimate right there, and that came out of left field. We certainly weren’t trying for it. It wasn’t ever a goal. It wasn’t even on our radar. I think what we do notice are the things that we live every day
Have you noticed a change in who’s showing up to Deftones concerts over the years? Oh yeah. Oh God yeah. I’m old now. You see young kids at shows with older people. So it’s like there’s generations there. So that’s completely obvious now, and it’s really crazy. And there’s people who are into different records for different reasons. We haven’t really been this linear band with one sound. We’ve been a little bit all over the place and there’s different types of people who are into different songs and different moods. I think those kinds of dynamics are what makes it special. Is it hard to put together a setlist that appeals to everyone? It’s about making a really good mixtape, honestly. There’s gotta be peaks and valleys. Luckily, we have a lot of fuckin’ records to choose from. You guys are closing in on 30 years together as a band. Does hearing that number take you aback? It does when you say it to my face! (Laughs.) No, it does, but it feels good that we’re still doing this and we’re doing it at a level that’s respectable. And we’re smiling and we’re having fun and enjoy-
ing what we do, so I think that’s the most important thing. Once it’s no longer fun, why do it? And it just so happens that we’ve been doing it a long time. Has there been a time in the band when everyone wasn’t smiling and you weren’t having fun, and you thought Deftones might come to an end? Oh yeah. Of course. There was a time when we weren’t the most pleasant people to be around. It’s hard getting five people all on the same page when five different lives work at different speeds. And when [former bassist] Chi [Cheng] got in his accident, I think that’s one thing that would kill most bands. [Editor’s note: Cheng was badly injured in a 2008 car wreck, spent years in a coma and died in 2013.] So it’s just about dealing with situations and talking them out and luckily as a band we’ve been able to do that. How did Chi’s accident affect your guys’ outlook on being in a band? I can imagine that kind of thing would give you a new perspective. It was just kind of unsaid … especially right when that happened, we didn’t know what to do. I think our only concern was with Chi and what was going to happen with him. And then we all just gravitated to our instruments. And it just kind of snowballed. There was no plan. Eventually we were like, “Hey, there’s something here if you all wanna keep going forward.” And since then we’ve just been going forward. n
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WA LT E R W H I T N E Y Science & the Unprovable Theory walterwhitney.bandcamp.com
T
he last time we caught up with local synthesist and instrumental musician Walter Whitney, in January 2015, he had just released Phantom Worlds, a catch-all collection that gathered more than a dozen tracks from the past 30 years. Whitney made his mark in the early ‘80s as a programmer in the group Delay Tactics, which straddled ambient, techno and fusion tropes. That archival release gave a clue as to Whitney’s proclivities outside of the band — and they often sounded like soundtracks to long-lost sci-fi and horror films, driven by analog synths and robotic rhythms. “Well, just about everyone who is an electronic music composer is likened to a soundtrack composer,” Whitney says. “And rightly so, even if that was not their initial intent.” Part of his motivation for making often eerie, slow-building instrumental music stems, he says, from his “love of science fiction and films that drag out the mysterious plot and keep you engaged ‘til the end.” With the recently released Science & the Unprovable Theory, Whitney is still chasing phantoms and exploring the unexplained, but this time he’s using more modern technology to craft his sonic landscapes. He credits the proliferation of the Eurorack model of modular synthesis — small boxes of chips, diodes and oscillators that easily interface with one another and help the synthesist shape his or her sound. “Things are changing at a rapid pace and employing these new possibilities is exciting,” he says. Anyone who was caught by the spell of the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things can attest to the power of a well-tuned soundtrack. That show’s soundtrack was made by the Austin-based synth quartet SURVIVE, and the show’s success has turned the group from a little-known instrumental band to a choice booking on the summer festival circuit. The synth’s place in soundtracks has both textural and financial factors, Whitney says. “The use of synths in modern production of soundtracks is obvious,” he says. “They are fast and effective. I also feel that smaller budgets have a bit to do with it as well. This is a question best answered by someone like Jeff Rona or Hans Zimmer, who are masters at getting the job done for film.” And though he did not create these songs with any film in mind, Whitney has offered up his work to any filmmaker in need of a mood-enhancing sonic backbone. “If any filmmakers are interested in using my stuff all they have to do is ask,” he says. While many of the tracks on 2015’s Phantom Worlds were quick-hit sketches, more than a few tracks on Science & the Unprovable Theory stretch beyond the ten-minute mark. Opening track “The Self Correcting Time Continuum” blooms and modulates in an almost granular fashion, taking its time to let the character
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EVERY FRIDAY & SATURDAY
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of the sound fully develop. “Believe it or not several of the tracks were originally fifteen to twenty minutes each!” Whitney says. The listening experience for this album is, by design, different than traditional albums, he notes. “It is light on melody and heavy on mood and feel. These works are mood-setters meant to be listened to at a low to medium volume. It is music to think by; it doesn’t do the thinking for you.” To date, the bulk of Whitney’s recorded output has been instrumental, but he has designs for a slew of varied releases in the coming months. He refers to one as “kind of a Thomas Dolby thing called Techno De Facto,” as well as a collection of ambient compositions that is a bit lighter in tone than this current release. Whitney has also reunited with Carl Weingarten and David Udell of Delay Tactics, and the group hopes to release its new record — its first in about three decades — as soon as possible. “It strives to retain the sound and feel of the previous two records from the ’80s and hopefully outdo them in every way possible,” Whitney says. In all, it’s a full slate of music for a composer who, for a long time, seemed content to write and record songs for only himself. For a musician who has engaged with technology since the days of pre-MIDI keyboards through the advent of digital audio workstations, Whitney’s music is able to take the long view of composition, where the music, not the gear, is paramount. “I love to experiment until I hear what it is I want to pursue and complete. I may use old vintage gear and process the signal with anything from guitar pedals, modular synths or plug-ins,” Whitney says. “The results can be quite interesting and sometimes magical. Never underestimate the possibilities of that silly old yard sale Casio when it’s mangled and polished by modern tech.” –Christian Schaeffer
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2001 Menard (corner of Menard & Allen) 314-833-6686 Facebook: dukesinsoulard riverfronttimes.com
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
RIVERFRONT TIMES
53
54
OUT EVERY NIGHT
THURSDAY 27
SOUTHSIDE JAZZ: 6 p.m., free. Howard’s in
RYAN ADAMS: 8 p.m., $40-$60. The Pageant,
BRUXISM #28: w/ Gristle McThornbody,
Soulard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-
6161 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-6161.
Chelsea Gray, A/V Plug, 9 p.m., free. Schlafly
2850.
ST. LOUIS SOCIAL CLUB: 8 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz,
Tap Room, 2100 Locust St., St. Louis, 314-241-
TOM HALL: 7 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups,
Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
2337.
700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222.
314-436-5222.
lard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-2850.
SUNDAY 30
WEDNESDAY 2
GREEN MCDONOUGH BAND: 8 p.m., $5.
BLOODCLOT: w/ Negative Approach, The
BOB “BUMBLE BEE” KAMOSKE: 8 p.m. Beale
Hammerstone’s, 2028 S. 9th St., St. Louis,
Stranger, Lumpy & the Dumpers 8 p.m., $15.
on Broadway, 701 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
314-773-5565.
Blueberry Hill - The Duck Room, 6504 Delmar
314-621-7880.
GUNS N’ ROSES: w/ Deftones 6 p.m., $35-$250.
Blvd., University City, 314-727-4444.
BRICK + MORTAR: 7:30 p.m., $12-$14. The Fire-
The Dome at America’s Center, 701 Conven-
THE CONCRETE MARY: w/ Spatula 2 p.m., free.
bird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, 314-535-0353.
tion Plaza St., St. Louis, 314-342-5201.
Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis,
ELEVATOR BATH RECORDS TOUR: w/ Sheffield/
JOE PASTOR TRIO: 9:30 p.m., free. The Dark
314-773-3363.
Rippie, Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill, NNN
Room, 3610 Grandel Square inside Grandel
THE DARRELLS: 2 p.m., free. Howard’s in Sou-
Cook, Raglani 8 p.m., $6. The Luminary, 2701
Theatre, St. Louis, 314-776-9550.
lard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-2850.
Cherokee St, St. Louis, 314-773-1533.
KIM MASSIE: 10:30 p.m., $10. Beale on Broad-
GIRLS NIGHT OUT THE SHOW: 7 p.m., $20-$28.
THE GREEN MCDONOUGH BAND: 7 p.m., $5.
way, 701 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-621-
The Firebird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, 314-
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
7880.
535-0353.
Louis, 314-436-5222.
THE KINGDOM BROTHERS: 4 p.m., $10. National
JASON COOPER BLUES BAND: 10 p.m., $5. BB’s
St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050.
Blues Museum, 615 Washington Ave., St.
Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
PUBLIC: 8 p.m., $10-$13. The Monocle, 4510
Louis.
Louis, 314-436-5222.
LAUREN ANDERSON BAND: 6 p.m., $10. BB’s
JOSH RITTER: 8 p.m., $35-$45. Off Broadway,
Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, 314-773-3363.
Louis, 314-436-5222.
TONY HINCHCLIFFE: 8 p.m., $25-$30. The Ready
LOVE JONES “THE BAND”: 9 p.m., $10. BB’s Jazz,
Room, 4195 Manchester Ave, St. Louis, 314-
Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
833-3929.
314-436-5222.
WEDNESDAY NIGHT JAZZ CRAWL: 5 p.m. contin-
SOUL REUNION: 10:30 p.m., $7. Beale on
ues through Dec. 27, free. The Stage at KDHX,
Broadway, 701 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-
3524 Washington Ave, St. Louis, 314-925-
621-7880.
7543, ext. 815.
DAN HUBBARD: 8 p.m., free. Howard’s in Sou-
[CRITIC’S PICK]
PEPPERLAND: 8 p.m., $10. Fubar, 3108 Locust
Ex-Cult. | PHOTO BY DENEE PETRACEK
Manchester Ave, St. Louis, 314-935-7003. SEPTEMBER MORNING: w/ Cycle Of Ruin, QueenLotus 7 p.m., $10-$11. The Firebird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, 314-535-0353. SEXUAL THUNDER!: 9 p.m., $7. Broadway Oyster Bar, 736 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314621-8811. SHARK DAD: w/ DinoFight, Biff K’narley and the Reptilians 9 p.m., free. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, 314-773-3363. STAIRWELL HUMOUR: 8 p.m., $12-$15. The Stage at KDHX, 3524 Washington Ave, St. Louis, 314-925-7543, ext. 815. TORREY CASEY & SOUTH SIDE HUSTLE: 9 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222. WARD DAVIS: 8 p.m., $15. Off Broadway, 3509
Ex-Cult 9 p.m. Thursday, July 27. The Sinkhole, 7423 South Broadway. $10. No phone.
Memphis’ Ex-Cult specializes in fuzzed-out, punk-indebted explosions of rock & roll, as high-energy as they are instantaneously catchy. It makes sense, then, that the group has found a home with In the Red Records for its latest release, September’s Negative Growth LP. The L.A.-based label also releases the work of garage-rock luminaries including Jay Reatard, the King Khan & BBQ Show and Ty Segall — the latter even handled recording duties for Negative Growth, and performs in a group with Ex-Cult frontman Chris Show
called GØGGS. If you are familiar with even one of those groups, you have a rough idea of what to expect from Ex-Cult: hard-charging punk rock intensity, psych-rock weirdness and precious little pretension. Standing Room Only: The Sinkhole is one of St. Louis’ smaller venues, making a relatively small audience of people feel like a tightly packed crowd. The flip side of that, though, is that when a band capable of drawing a larger crowd performs — like, say, Ex-Cult — the room fills up considerably. Be prepared to sweat all over the person standing next to you. —Daniel Hill
Lemp Ave., St. Louis, 314-773-3363.
UNCF EVENING OF STARS – CONCERT GALA: w/ Chante Moore 7 p.m., $45-$120. Grandel Theatre, 3610 Grandel Square, St. Louis, 314-
THIS JUST IN
534-1834.
1ST ANNUAL CITRAPALOOZA: W/ Funky Butt
MONDAY 31
Brass Band, Feel Good Inc., Sun., Sept. 24, 2 p.m., $10-$40. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St.,
7 MINUTES IN HEAVEN: w/ The Millenium,
St. Louis, 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com.
Bearings 6 p.m., $12-$15. Fubar, 3108 Locust
3 OF A PERFECT PAIR: Fri., Aug. 11, 7 p.m.,
St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050.
free. Hwy 61 Roadhouse and Kitchen, 34 S
ANGEL PRESENTS SOUL SEARCHING: 8 p.m.,
Old Orchard Ave, Webster Groves, 314-968-
FRIDAY 28
$5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway,
Hall, 6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-
Backwash, Cree Rider Family Band, Family
$15. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broad-
0061, hwy61roadhouse.com.
BILLY BARNETT: 6 p.m., free. Howard’s in Sou-
St. Louis, 314-436-5222.
6161.
Medicine, Morgan Nusbaum, The Daisy Ad,
way, St. Louis, 314-436-5222.
ANGEL PRESENTS SOUL SEARCHING: Mon., July
lard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-2850.
MISS JUBILEE AND THE HUMDINGERS: free. The
GATEWAY JAZZ FESTIVAL: w/ Najee, Maysa, Nic
Monkh, Squircle The Destroyer, DJ SayWord,
LAMB OF GOD: w/ Behemoth 8 p.m., $37.50-
31, 8 p.m., $15. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700
BUTTERCUP: w/ Separer, Superfun Yeah Yeah
Weingarten, 1780 E State Rte 15, Belleville.
Colioinne, Pieces of a Dream, Chieli Minucci,
Old Capital 1 p.m., TBA. Atomic Cowboy, 4140
$42.50. The Pageant, 6161 Delmar Blvd., St.
S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazz-
Rocketship, Subtroplolis 9 p.m., $7. The
SANCTUARY & FRIENDS: 8 p.m., $17. Old Rock
Brian Simpson, Steve Oliver, Julian Vaughn,
Manchester Ave, St. Louis, 314-775-0775.
Louis, 314-726-6161.
bluessoups.com.
Heavy Anchor, 5226 Gravois Ave., St. Louis,
House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, 314-588-0505.
Steve Cole, Chris Strandring 2 p.m., $65.
JOE METZKA BAND: 10 p.m., $10. BB’s Jazz,
SOULARD BLUES BAND: 9 p.m., $5. Broadway
ARKELLS: W/ Irontom, Sat., Nov. 4, 8 p.m.,
314-352-5226.
STILL ON THE STREETS: A VAGRANT RECORDS
Chesterfield Amphitheater, 631 Veterans
Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
Oyster Bar, 736 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-
$15-$18. Blueberry Hill - The Duck Room,
JOEL MCHALE: 7:30 & 10 p.m.; July 29, 7:30 &
TRIBUTE NIGHT: 8:30 p.m., $10. Off Broadway,
Place Drive, Chesterfield.
314-436-5222.
621-8811.
6504 Delmar Blvd., University City, 314-727-
10 p.m., $35-$45. Helium Comedy Club, 1151
3509 Lemp Ave., St. Louis, 314-773-3363.
GREEN MCDONOUGH BAND: 6 p.m., free.
JOEL MCHALE: July 28, 7:30 & 10 p.m.; 7:30 &
St. Louis Galleria Saint Louis Galleria Mall,
SWAMPS: w/ Eat Me Fresh, Souls, Rhythm Of
Lafayette Park, Park & Mississippi avenues,
10 p.m., $35-$45. Helium Comedy Club, 1151
TUESDAY 1
Richmond Heights, 314-727-1260.
Fear, Capitol Offense, Dissention 6 p.m., $10.
St. Louis.
St. Louis Galleria Saint Louis Galleria Mall,
DIGITOUR: GOODTIMES: 6 p.m., $25-$30. Old
The Ready Room, 4195 Manchester Ave, St.
JOSHUA RADIN: w/ Rachael Yamagata, Bran-
Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-
ITS A BENEFIT TO HELP CUVI SEE BETTER,
Richmond Heights, 314-727-1260.
Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, 314-
Louis, 314-833-3929, thereadyroom.com.
don Jenner 8 p.m., $25-$28. Delmar Hall,
9050.
GOSH!: w/ Skyline In Ruins, The Faded Truth,
MONICA: w/ Dirty Muggs 8 p.m., $25-$50.
588-0505.
BIG RICH MCDONOUGH & RHYTHM RENEGADES:
6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-6161.
TELA: w/ Shana B., Lil Ryan, Raph Derty 8
Facing Infamy, Cuvi, Austin Estrada, Cody
Ambassador, 9800 Halls Ferry Rd, North St.
INCUBUS: w/ Jimmy Eat World 6:45 p.m.,
Wed., Aug. 9, 9 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues &
LEROY JODIE PIERSON: 7 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz,
p.m., $15-$20. The Ready Room, 4195 Man-
Pratt 6 p.m., $5. The Firebird, 2706 Olive St.,
Louis County, 314-869-9090.
$29.50-$99.50. Hollywood Casino Amphi-
Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-
Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
chester Ave, St. Louis, 314-833-3929.
St. Louis, 314-535-0353.
NEOROMANTICS: w/ Luxora, jusTed 6 p.m.,
theatre, I-70 & Earth City Expwy., Maryland
5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
314-436-5222.
WE SHOULD LEAVE THIS TREE: w/ Tyler Sam-
JACKAL FEST 2017: w/ Brother Lee & the
$10-$12. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis,
Heights, 314-298-9944.
BILLY BARNETT BAND: Thu., Aug. 3, 7 p.m., $5.
LIL PANTZ: 8 p.m., $10-$15. Fubar, 3108 Locust
uels & The Bad Haircuts 8 p.m., $8-$10. The
Leather Jackals, Miss Molly Simms, Rover,
314-289-9050.
JAMAICA LIVE TUESDAYS: w/ Ital K, Mr. Roots,
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050.
Firebird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, 314-535-
Dubb Nubb, Sister Wizzard, The Maness
SHIVER: 9 p.m., free. Nightshift Bar & Grill,
DJ Witz, $5/$10. Elmo’s Love Lounge, 7828
Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
LYLE LOVETT AND HIS LARGE BAND: 8 p.m.,
0353.
Brothers, Cara Louise Band, Breakmouth An-
3979 Mexico Road, St. Peters, 636-441-8300.
Olive Blvd, University City, 314-282-5561.
BLUES CITY SWING: Fri., Aug. 4, 7 p.m., free.
nie, The Old Souls Revival, River Kittens, The
SMOOTH HOUND SMITH: w/ Christian Lopez 8
KIM MASSIE: 10:30 p.m., $10. Beale on Broad-
Hwy 61 Roadhouse and Kitchen, 34 S Old
Death, SWEETTALKER, Elliot Pearson, Apex
p.m., $12. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St.
way, 701 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-621-
Orchard Ave, Webster Groves, 314-968-0061,
Shrine, Son Daze, DIBIASE, The Vigilettes,
Louis, 314-588-0505.
7880.
$39.50-$129.50. Peabody Opera House, 1400 Market St, St. Louis, 314-241-1888.
SATURDAY 29
MARCELL STRONG & THE APOSTLES: 10 p.m.,
THE BOY BAND NIGHT: 8 p.m., $12-$20. Delmar
54
RIVERFRONT TIMES
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
riverfronttimes.com
BIKES WELCOME
4444, blueberryhill.com. BEACH SLANG: Sat., Nov. 25, 8 p.m., $15-$18.
FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK: GOODTIMES.PATIO.BAR
200 N. MAIN, DUPO, ILLINOIS
Continued on pg 56
riverfronttimes.com
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
RIVERFRONT TIMES
55
OUT EVERY NIGHT Continued from pg 55
[CRITIC’S PICK]
$29. The Sheldon, 3648 Washington Blvd., St. Louis, 314-533-9900, thesheldon.org. THE NTH POWER: W/ Ghost Note, Wed., Nov. 8, 8 p.m., $14-$16. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th
hwy61roadhouse.com.
St., St. Louis, 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.
BOO BOO DAVIS & THE BUMBLE BEE TRIO: Sat.,
com.
Aug. 5, 10 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups,
OLD WEBSTER JAZZ & BLUES FESTIVAL: Sat.,
700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222,
Sept. 16, noon, free. Old Webster, W. Lock-
bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
wood Ave and Elm St, Webster Groves.
THE BREVET: Wed., Aug. 16, 7 p.m., $10-$12.
RINGS OF SATURN: W/ Summoning the Lich,
Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050,
Silence the Witness, Anima / Animus, Mon.,
fubarstl.com.
Aug. 28, 7 p.m., $15. The Firebird, 2706 Olive
BRUXISM #28: W/ Gristle McThornbody, Chel-
St., St. Louis, 314-535-0353, firebirdstl.com.
sea Gray, A/V Plug,, Thu., July 27, 9 p.m., free.
SEAN MCCONNELL: Thu., Oct. 5, 8 p.m., $10-
Schlafly Tap Room, 2100 Locust St., St. Louis,
$12. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis,
314-241-2337, schlafly.com.
314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com.
BUD SUMMERS: Fri., Aug. 4, 8 p.m., $12. The
SILVER SNAKES: Sun., Aug. 27, 6 p.m., $12.
Stage at KDHX, 3524 Washington Ave, St. Lou-
Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050,
is, 314-925-7543, ext. 815, thestagestl.com.
Chris Smither. | PHOTO VIA MONGREL MUSIC
CAYETANA: W/ Hemming, Fri., Sept. 29, 8 p.m., $10-$12. Blueberry Hill - The Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Blvd., University City, 314-7274444, blueberryhill.com. COLD SPECKS: Thu., Nov. 9, 8 p.m., $10-$12. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, 314588-0505, oldrockhouse.com. COOL MUTANTS: W/ Name It Now, Sat., Sept. 2, 7 p.m., $10. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050, fubarstl.com. THE CREEPSHOW: W/ Opposites Attack, The Red Handed Bandits, Sat., Oct. 14, 8 p.m., $12-$14. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314289-9050, fubarstl.com. CROWBAR: Thu., Sept. 7, 7 p.m., $15-$17. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050, fubarstl.com. CRYPTIC WISDOM: W/ DJ Michael Foxx, C The Gray, Mix Foxx, Mon., Aug. 21, 6 p.m., $12$15. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-2899050, fubarstl.com.
fubarstl.com. SINBAD: Thu., Oct. 12, 8 p.m.; Fri., Oct. 13, 7:30 & 10 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 14, 7:30 & 10 p.m.,
Chris Smither 8 p.m. Saturday, July 29. The Focal Point, 2720 Sutton Boulevard, Maplewood. $35. 314-560-2778.
Chris Smither’s originality as a bluesman owes less to any return to sources and more to the way he infuses the blues with post-blues forms, a kind of reverse alchemy that transforms solid-gold rock & roll and burnished folk into sounds and feelings that are as primal as they are philosophical. He’s not just one of Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan’s best interpreters; he’s a boot-stomping, fingerstyle-guitar wiz-
$30. Helium Comedy Club, 1151 St. Louis
ard who deserves more recognition than he’s ever sought or received. He recently titled a double-disc retrospective Still on the Levee, but he roams farther and wider than the Delta blues. Some 50 years into his career, Smither remains one of the great seers of the visionary style of American music. Survival of the Fit test: Smither’s “Origin of the Species” is the wittiest rewriting of Darwin and the Old Testament that Dylan never wrote. Don’t let him leave town without playing it. —Roy Kasten
Galleria Saint Louis Galleria Mall, Richmond Heights, 314-727-1260, st-louis.heliumcomedy.com. ST. LOUIS SOCIAL CLUB: Tue., Aug. 1, 8 p.m., $5. Tue., Aug. 8, 8 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-4365222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com. THIRD SIGHT BAND: Mon., Aug. 7, 8 p.m., $10. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com. TIM BARRY: W/ Roger Harvey, Gallows Bound, Wed., Oct. 11, 8 p.m., $12-$15. Blueberry Hill - The Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Blvd., University City, 314-727-4444, blueberryhill.com. TITANIUM BLUES BAND: Thu., Aug. 10, 8 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups. com. TOM HALL: Sat., July 29, 7 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz,
DANITA MUMPHARD TRIBUTE TO WHITNEY HOUSTON: Sat., Aug. 5, 7 p.m., $12-$15. Jacoby Arts
firebirdstl.com.
Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis,
Center, 627 E. Broadway, Alton, 618-462-5222,
THE GREEN MCDONOUGH BAND: Wed., Aug. 2,
JOEY OSCAR PROJECT: Fri., Aug. 4, 7 p.m., $15.
314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
jacobyartscenter.org.
7 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S.
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
TONI SAPUTO: Thu., Aug. 3, 7:30 p.m., $10-$12.
THE EARLY NOVEMBER: W/ The Movielife,
Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazz-
Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
The Stage at KDHX, 3524 Washington Ave, St.
Heart Attack Man, Wed., Sept. 27, 8 p.m., $25.
bluessoups.com.
LAUREN ANDERSON BAND: Sun., July 30, 6
Louis, 314-925-7543, ext. 815, thestagestl.com.
Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050,
HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER: Mon., Oct. 23, 8
p.m., $10. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S.
TONY! TONI! TONE!: Sun., Sept. 10, 8 p.m.,
fubarstl.com.
p.m., $15. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St.
Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazz-
$22.50-$42.50. The Pageant, 6161 Delmar
ELEVATOR BATH RECORDS TOUR: W/ Sheffield/
Louis, 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com.
bluessoups.com.
Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-6161, thepageant.
Rippie, Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill, NNN
HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD: W/ Butcher Babies, Fri.,
LEROY JODIE PIERSON: Fri., July 28, 7 p.m., $5.
com.
Cook, Raglani, Wed., Aug. 2, 8 p.m., $6. The
Dec. 1, 8 p.m., $29.50-$32.50. Delmar Hall,
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
TORREY CASEY & SOUTH SIDE HUSTLE: Thu.,
Luminary, 2701 Cherokee St, St. Louis, 314-
6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-6161,
Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
July 27, 9 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups,
773-1533, theluminaryarts.com.
delmarhall.com.
LOVE JONES “THE BAND”: Sun., July 30, 9 p.m.,
700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222,
EMILY SALIERS: Fri., Oct. 6, 8 p.m., $25-$28.
HUSH GROOVE: 30 4 30: W/ DJ G Wiz, DJ
$10. Sun., Aug. 6, 9 p.m., $10. BB’s Jazz, Blues
bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
Delmar Hall, 6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis,
Needles, DJ Alejan, D-Ex, DJ Furious Iceman
& Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-
VQM BLACK CARPET AFFAIR: W/ Mine Ene-
314-726-6161, delmarhall.com.
Stylz, Fri., Aug. 25, 8 p.m., $30. Old Rock
5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
mies Fall, Enslaved By Fear, Love the Hate,
FERRY CORSTEN: Sat., Nov. 11, 9 p.m., TBA.
House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, 314-588-0505,
LUCKY DUTCH: Fri., Aug. 4, 10 p.m., $10. BB’s
Conquest, Maximus, Skinbound, Sun., Aug.
Ameristar Casino, 1 Ameristar Blvd., St.
oldrockhouse.com.
Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Lou-
6, 5:30 p.m., $10. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St.
Charles, 636-949-7777, ameristar.com.
IRON MIKE NORTON: Thu., Aug. 3, 10 p.m., $5.
is, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
Louis, 314-289-9050, fubarstl.com.
A FOUR STRING BANJO REVUE: Sat., Aug. 19, 7
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
MARCELL STRONG & THE APOSTLES: Fri., July
WHEELER WALKER JR.: Mon., Oct. 16, 8 p.m.,
p.m., $10. The Stage at KDHX, 3524 Wash-
Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
28, 10 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700
$18-$20. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St.
ington Ave, St. Louis, 314-925-7543, ext. 815,
IVAS JOHN BAND: Sat., Aug. 5, 7 p.m., $5. BB’s
S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazz-
Louis, 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com.
thestagestl.com.
Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Lou-
bluessoups.com.
XANDRIA: W/ Kobra & The Lotus, September
GENESIS JAZZ PROJECT: Sun., Aug. 6, 5 p.m.,
is, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com.
MBZ LIVE: Thu., Aug. 10, 7 p.m., $15. The
Mourning, Sat., Oct. 7, 6 p.m., $10-$20. Fubar,
$10. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broad-
JASON COOPER BLUES BAND: Wed., Aug. 2,
Ready Room, 4195 Manchester Ave, St. Louis,
3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050,
way, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzblues-
10 p.m., $5. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S.
314-833-3929, thereadyroom.com.
fubarstl.com.
soups.com.
Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazz-
MONOPHONICS: Thu., Sept. 14, 9 p.m., $13-$15.
XEB: Sun., Sept. 17, 8 p.m., $20-$25. Blueberry
GLENN BISHOP: AN EVENING OF HYPNOTISM AND
bluessoups.com.
Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, 314-
Hill - The Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Blvd.,
MAGIC: Tue., Aug. 22, 8 p.m., $6-$8. The Fire-
JOE METZKA BAND: Sat., July 29, 10 p.m., $10.
588-0505, oldrockhouse.com.
University City, 314-727-4444, blueberryhill.
bird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, 314-535-0353,
BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St.
MOUNTAIN GOATS: Mon., Sept. 11, 8 p.m., $26-
com.
56
RIVERFRONT TIMES
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
riverfronttimes.com
THIS WEEK
7 MINUTES IN HEAVEN: W/ The Millenium, Bearings, Mon., July 31, 6 p.m., $12-$15. Fubar, 3108 Locust St, St. Louis, 314-289-9050, fubarstl.com. ANGEL PRESENTS SOUL SEARCHING: Mon., July 31, 8 p.m., $15. BB’s Jazz, Blues & Soups, 700 S. Broadway, St. Louis, 314-436-5222, bbsjazzbluessoups.com. BILLY BARNETT: Fri., July 28, 6 p.m., free. Howard’s in Soulard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-2850. BLOODCLOT: W/ Negative Approach, The Stranger, Lumpy & the Dumpers, Sun., July 30, 8 p.m., $15. Blueberry Hill - The Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Blvd., University City, 314-727-4444, Hey, Dan: I’m a reader in Kansas blueberryhill.com. with two teenage daughters, sixteen BOB “BUMBLE BEE” KAMOSKE: Wednesdays, 8 p.m. on Broadway, 701 S. Broadway, St. a andBeale eighteen. My girls recently met Louis, 314-621-7880, bealeonbroadway.com. boy where they work and both took an THE BOY BAND NIGHT: Sat., July 29, 8 p.m., $12interest inHall, him. The eighteen-year-old $20. Delmar 6133 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, 314-726-6161, delmarhall.com. was devastated that he was more inBRICK + MORTAR: Wed., Aug. 2, 7:30 p.m., terested in her younger sister. I spoke $12-$14. The Firebird, 2706 Olive St., St. Louis, to the sixteen-year-old 314-535-0353, firebirdstl.com.about it, which BRUXISM W/ Gristle McThornbody, Chel- to is when#28: I found out this boy is going sea Gray, A/V Plug,, Thu., July 27, 9 p.m., free. be a sophomore in college. The fact that Schlafly Tap Room, 2100 Locust St., St. Louis, he’s interested in a sixteen-year-old is a 314-241-2337, schlafly.com. BUTTERCUP: Separer, Yeah Yeah to red flag. I W/ asked the Superfun sixteen-year-old Rocketship, Subtroplolis, Fri., July 28, 9 p.m., keep her distance. She agreed, but I saw $7. The Heavy Anchor, 5226 Gravois Ave., St. a shirtless photo theheavyanchor.com. he sent her. I immediLouis, 314-352-5226, THE CONCRETE MARY: Spatula, Sun., July 30, ately removed allW/ photo apps from her 2 p.m., free. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Ave., St. phone. The girls have had public fights Louis, 314-773-3363, offbroadwaystl.com. about this boy. They’ve DAN HUBBARD: Thu., July 27,made 8 p.m.,peace free. with Howard’s in Soulard, 2732my S 13th St, St. Louis, each other, but now eighteen-year314-349-2850. old wants to date him. I can’t control THE DARRELLS: Sun., July 30, 2 p.m., free. the actions of an eighteen-year-old but Howard’s in Soulard, 2732 S 13th St, St. Louis, 314-349-2850. (1) it seem likely this guy is a complete DIGITOUR: GOODTIMES: Tue., Aug. 1, 6 p.m., $25creep and (2) isn’t her relationship with $30. Old Rock House, 1200 S. 7th St., St. Louis, her sister more important? 314-588-0505, oldrockhouse.com. ELEVATOR RECORDS TOUR: W/ Sheffield/ KnowingBATH A Numbskull Stalks Adorable Rippie, Alex Keller and Sean O’Neill, NNN Sisters Cook, Raglani, Wed., Aug. 2, 8 p.m., $6. The Luminary, 2701 Cherokee St, St. Louis, 314-7731533, theluminaryarts.com. 1. I’m not ready to pronounce this guy GATEWAY JAZZ FESTIVAL: W/ Najee, Maysa, Nic a creep — at least not for the age differColioinne, Pieces of a Dream, Chieli Minucci, ence.Simpson, It sounds like he met your daughBrian Steve Oliver, Julian Vaughn, Steve Cole, Chris Strandring, Sat.,working July 29, 2 this ters some place they’re all p.m., $65. Chesterfield Amphitheater, 631 summer, which is a lot less icky than Veterans Place Drive, Chesterfield, chesterfielsome college boy creeping on highdamphitheater.com. GIRLS NIGHT OUT via THE SHOW: Sun., JulyAnd 30, 7 you school girls Instagram. p.m., $20-$28. The Firebird, 2706 Olive St., St. say this boy is going to be a sophomore Louis, 314-535-0353, firebirdstl.com.
CREEPERS
BY DAN SAVAGE
in college, KANSAS, but don’t give his age. If this boy went straight to college from high school, that would make him nineteen. If your sixteen-year-old is closing in on seventeen, this guy could be “older” by two years and change. I
SAVAGE LOVE think you are overreacting to the age difference. 1.5. You know what is creepy? Pursuing a pair of sisters. The possibility of conflict was so predictable, it was likely a motivating factor for him. Getting off on drama and public fights isn’t a crime, but it is a red flag. 2. You ordered your sixteen-year-old to stop seeing this guy and deleted apps from her phone. You should warn your daughter about the risks of sexting — it may be legal for her to have sex (sixteen is the age of consent in Kansas), but she could face child porn charges for sending photos and this boy could wind up on a sex-offender registry for receiving them. (Laws meant to protect young people from being exploited are routinely used to punish them.) But don’t attempt to micromanage your daughters’ love lives. Parental disapproval has a way of driving teenagers into each other’s arms, KANSAS. If you don’t want your daughters having a fuck-you-mom threesome with this guy before the summer is over, you’ll let them work through this on their own. Hey, Dan: I’m a straight guy married to a wonderful woman. She has a daughter. This girl’s bio dad is a checked-out deadbeat, so I have played “dad” since I met her mom five years ago. The girl who used to be a gangly, awkward eleven-year-old is now sixteen, and there’s no other way to put this: She is hot. I’m not supposed to notice, I know, and I have ZERO interest in being creepy with her, and she has ZERO interest in me. But she has always liked to cuddle with me and still does. I believe safe closeness from a dad figure helps girls make good choices when it comes to boys. (If not
for me, she might seek attention from douchebag teenage boys trying to take advantage.) I want to continue to play this role for her. But when she comes in wearing tiny shorts and puts her legs over my lap, I get rock hard. I’m not trying to be creepy, but I’m a guy and she’s a perfect female specimen. I can’t say, “We can’t be as physically close as we used to be,” because that itself would be creepy and it would make her sad. Insert Dad Acronym Here Obviously Sometimes children grow up and get hot, and bonus adults in their lives can’t help but notice. The onus is on the adult in that situation to suppress that shit. That means setting boundaries and, if necessary, keeping your distance. No, you shouldn’t go to your stepdaughter and say, “You got hot, and I get boners when you put your legs on my lap, so stop.” But you should put an end to the cuddling. When she plops down on the couch, go take a walk or a shower or a shit. Better she’s sad over the end of snuggle time than she notices your boners. She’s most likely plopping down on you out of habit, IDAHO, not out of a need for affection from a trusted male. I promise you, she’s not going to start blowing bad boys in back alleys if she can’t get close enough to give you a boner anymore. Hey, Dan: My college-student daughter lives in an apartment over our garage. She has a boyfriend, age nineteen. After many loud “discussions,” he is allowed to sleep over. My daughter got an IUD without informing me, so I assume they’re sexually active. Two days ago, I crept into the apartment to check on something and found bondage items on
57
her bed — a set of formidable leather restraints. I’m worried she’s being pressured to do things someone her age wouldn’t be interested in. We agreed not to go into the apartment when she wasn’t present, and I know there will be a loud “discussion” if I tell her what I saw. The mental image of my bound daughter distresses me and I worry for her safety. What do I do? Offspring Has Incriminating Objects You stay the fuck out of your offspring’s apartment when she isn’t home, OHIO, per your agreement. And you keep these things in mind: Just as there are young queer people out there, there are young kinky people out there too. For all you know, the restraints were her idea and her boyfriend is the one getting tied up. And a scary-to-mom set of restraints is a lot safer than nylon clothesline or cheap handcuffs. Leather restraints distribute pressure evenly, making them less likely to pinch a nerve or cut off circulation. Formidable bondage gear is a good sign that she takes her safety seriously. Finally, OHIO, it’s perfectly understandable that you don’t like the mental image of your adult daughter tied to the bed in her apartment (her apartment, not the apartment), but I’m guessing you don’t like the mental image of your adult daughter with a dick in her mouth, either. Just as you don’t torment yourself by picturing the blowjobs your adult daughter is almost certainly giving her boyfriend, don’t torment yourself by picturing whatever else she might be doing with, to, or for him. mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter
STREAK’S CORNER • by Bob Stretch
riverfronttimes.com
JULY 26-AUGUST 1, 2017
RIVERFRONT TIMES
57
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