Reader issue #678

Thursday's concert at the Capitol Theatre featuring Spoon, White Rabbits, and the Walkmen represents the fulfilled potential of Daytrotter.com for the Quad Cities.

 

  Spoon

   When Spoon was finishing its 2001 album Girls Can Tell, the band didn't know what to do with "Chicago at Night," which would close the record.

 

In an interview last week, drummer and co-founder Jim Eno told this story about what he and guitarist, singer, and chief songwriter Britt Daniel decided to do: "I never would have tried this, but Britt and I were so young, and we were just like, ‘Oh yeah, let's do it.' We had to turn all the mixes in for mastering. ... We have these two versions, and we like different things about each version ... . So Britt says, ‘Why don't we use the left side of this mix and the right side of this mix?'"

 

  White Rabbits

   For a band with one independent recording under its belt, the White Rabbits have a lot going on. They appeared on Letterman in July - "Maybe U2 cancelled," joked bassist Adam Russell - and a feature-film documentary is in production. (See http://www.whiterabbitsdoc.com.)

 

Russell credits the band's publicist with the Letterman gig, and filmmaker Andrew Droz Palermo is a friend of the band dating back to some members' high-school careers.

 

But Russell said these early successes are a sign that people believe strongly in the band. "Having close friends that work with you does pay off sometimes," he said.

 

  The Walkmen

   The Walkmen have built enough of a legend that it would be easy to overlook their original material.

 

   Tomy Temerson

   For contemporary American audiences, the zither begins and ends with the soundtrack to the 1949 film The Third Man - which famously featured the instrument in its opening. (See the credits at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4JpDUMXBqo.) The tune was a number-one hit in the United States in 1950.

 

But the stringed instrument has a rich history in Europe and Asia and dates back more than two millennia.

 

Edgerton Women's Health Center has opened a new family-planning clinic located at Friendly House, 1221 Myrtle Street in Davenport. With two Edgerton locations in Davenport, women in the Quad Cities area will now have more access to low-cost or no-cost birth control, the newest long-term, reversible contraception methods, pregnancy testing, and emergency contraception. Theses clinics also offer the Women, Infants, & Children (WIC) program as well as obstetrical care. To learn more about Edgerton Women's Health Center, visit (http://www.qcwomenshealth.org).

 

Reader issue #678 Sean O'Harrow, the Figge Art Museum's executive director for the past seven months, sounds diplomatic. He says all the right, polite things about collaboration and about serving the community.

 

"I'm very keen on building bridges," he said last week.

 

Throw Me the Statue Throw Me the Statue's debut album, Moonbeams, was largely built by one man, and you can hear it in the synthesized beats, the emphasis on front-loaded keyboards, the occasionally oddball instrumentation, the aggressive processing, and a complete disregard for the concept of "enough."

 

Cowboy Junkies The Cowboy Junkies first made a name for themselves with The Trinity Session, recorded live with a single microphone in a Toronto church in one night for a couple hundred bucks.

 

To mark its 20th anniversary this year, the Cowboy Junkies did it again.

 

Patrick J. Buchanan, three times contender for U.S. president ('92, '96, and 2000) and syndicated columnist seen in the Quad-City Times, in his December 2007 book Day of Reckoning identifies the great illusion that is fatally eroding the USA's economic strength and world economic leadership: free trade.

 

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