Alice CooperIt's a safe bet that most everyone is familiar with the heavily made-up shock rocker Alice Cooper, who brings his latest stage project, "The Psycho-Drama Tour," to Davenport's Adler Theatre on August 23.

Perhaps less familiar is the Alice Cooper who finds the time to play golf nearly every day - even while touring - and who hosts the Alice Cooper Celebrity Golf Am, now in its 11th year.

(Editor's note: The August 20 show has been cancelled.) Paul Rishell & Annie Raines

 

"Little" Annie Raines, 38, is from the Boston area, so she didn't learn how to play harmonica at the knee of anyone in the cotton fields.

"I started playing the harmonica when I was 17 just for something to do," she said in a recent phone interview. "I was looking for a book on juggling - called Juggling for the Complete Klutz - and the bookstore was out of it. But they had Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless, so I got that instead. And that's how I got started playing harmonica."

Corey Wilkes When was the last time a Quad Cities venue featured a performance that included a jazz band with a dancer? I have lived in the Quad Cities for 30 years and have never heard of anything like that happening here.

That will change on August 19 at the River Music Experience's Redstone Room, when acclaimed 27-year-old trumpet player Corey Wilkes and his Abstrakt Pulse band will conduct a workshop at 3 p.m. and a matinée performance at 6 p.m.

Justin Morrissey, A War of WillsIf Chris Isaak traded in his rockabilly shtick for some country duds, the result would probably sound a lot like Justin Morrissey's new CD, A War of Wills.

Tim StopulosIn his biography, Bettendorf native Tim Stopulos lists influences that range from Beethoven to Maroon 5, a bit of youthful overreaching that you might expect from a 23-year-old.

Yet there's a quote in the bio that strikes a chord, and puts Beethoven and Maroon 5 in a context that makes sense in light of his second album, The Long Drive Home. Music, Stopulos says, "definitely became an emotional outlet for me, but I also fell in love with the mathematical and logical side of the music as well."

The Holmes Brothers The Holmes Brothers have always had an eclectic style. Wendell, the guitar player and raspy-voiced singer, once told me that so many hours touring in the van acquainted them with all kinds of music. I can just hear them, all three singing along to whatever they happen upon on the radio, trying it out later live and then in the studio with their own gospel spin.

Don Vappie and the Creole Jazz Serenaders Don Vappie knows about boring music.

In the late 1970s, boring music prompted him to sell most of his instruments and give up playing. And while some people consider traditional jazz dull, Vappie begs to differ.

"I got really bored when disco came out," the New Orleans native said last week, talking about his time in a Top 40 group. "I always remember when I quit the band - I was playing bass - I said, 'You could teach a chimpanzee to do this,' because it was so repetitious.

G. Love Some things are too embarrassing for public consumption, so the man born Garrett Dutton and known as G. Love exercised some control over the content of his new documentary and concert DVD, A Year & a Night with G. Love & Special Sauce.

When the director showed him his initial cut of the documentary portion of the DVD, coming it at roughly two hours, G. Love demanded that some material come out.

The running time was one concern, but image was another, G. Love admitted in an interview last week to promote his July 12 appearance at the Redstone Room. "You've got to take this shit out," he told the director. "I don't want to come off like this."

Head Held High The MySpace page profile for the Quad Cities trio Head Held High includes upcoming shows, the band's influences, and a response to the prompt "Sounds like." The group has written "a rock band."

It's a fair description, and therein lies a problem.

2007 IH Mississippi Valley Blues Festival - Reader issue #639 In an interview, pedal-steel guitarist Robert Randolph once suggested that somebody would come along and be the instrument's Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix.

When I asked him where that put him in the pedal steel's development, the singer/songwriter/guitarist appeared to backtrack a little. "Somebody has to put me there," he said of the class of guitar revolutionaries that includes Hendrix. "I wouldn't put myself there."

But based on his own criteria, that class is probably where Randolph belongs.

Pages