Classic rock

by Mary Poletti

St. Louisans like classic rock. But don’t take my word for it. Scroll through the FM dial around here sometime. We have four — count ’em, four — classic rock stations.

Spoiler alert: This guy has a lot to do with it.

There’s the grandaddy of them all, KSHE 95, with its iconic pig & its love of sweet electric guitar riffs, toeing a hard-rock line; a former coworker in Quincy who grew up in West County once referred to it as the official radio station of 55-year-old dudes who still have garage bands. There’s KHITS, with its broad format & well-known local voices like the smoky-toned Radio Rich. There’s Oldies 103.3, which plays pretty much everything from the ’60s into my lifetime. With all that saturation in the market, the debut of 100.3 The Brew a few months ago was the facepalm heard ’round the region, although it’s since become the soundtrack to many an afternoon in the garage and/or backyard BBQ in some southerly parts of the County. And we’re not even counting 106.5 The Arch, where it’s not unheard-of to hear Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You” & Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” back to back (I know, because I did on my way home from work today).

Seriously, who really needs four classic rock stations?

A million classic rock fans who will listen to all four of them, that’s who. St. Louis has shown plenty of loyalty to classic rock. Shows like Boston, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith — the mainstays of ye olde Riverport (and it’ll always be Riverport to many of us) usually sell the place out. To say nothing of the insane amount of money we’ll shell out to see the really good stuff at Scottrade. (The Dome, meh.)

St. Louisans reserve a special place in their hearts for a certain former Van Halen frontman, mostly because vice versa. Sammy Hagar loves him some Gateway City. He decided some 32 years ago, when he was greeted with a raucously devoted crowd while headlining a show at the old Busch Stadium, that he owned St. Louis & would always hold it dear. (Frankly, if my first experience of St. Louis were the old Busch circa 1980, I’d fall in love, too.) As much as we love our homegrown celebrities, we go completely ape-crap if someone not from St. Louis starts extolling the virtues of our fair city & adopts it as his own. Not solely because of his athletic achievements do we so deeply love Pennsylvania native Stan Musial, although I must make it clear here that there is no comparison between the Redbirds’ perfect knight & the Red Rocker.

If Hagar is emblematic of Van Halen & Van Halen is emblematic, in so many ways, of the brand of classic rock most likely to be heard on St. Louis airwaves, no wonder we love classic rock around here.

We have our philosophical reasons, too. St. Louisans like classic rock because it’s down in there with the people, just like them. We’re an unpretentious bunch, and classic rock is an unpretentious genre, even if a lot of its surviving stars are still eerily reminiscent of the guys from “This Is Spinal Tap.” It’s music for grilling in your backyard, cruising in your car, working on your car, enjoying the weekend. It lends itself really well to cracking open an ice-cold beer. St. Louisans live for that kind of thing.

Too, St. Louisans like classic rock because it is, by definition, nostalgic. It encapsulates better, simpler days for many of us. A lot of outsiders, and a lot of locals as well, argue that St. Louis has seen better days. Around here, we like to remember the past fondly. Classic rock is the soundtrack to such memories.

Perhaps as much as anything else, classic rock has endured. And so has St. Louis. That’s as good a reason as any for St. Louisans to like classic rock.

Mary Poletti is a marketing professional in the financial industry & a resident of the City’s St. Louis Hills neighborhood. She grew up listening to Steely Dan cassettes in her dad’s Escort, so she’s not really in a position to judge.

John Goodman

by Trisha Peplinski Harvey

John Goodman (Fox News)

As stated in an earlier post, John Goodman is from St. Louis.  The world knows him from his role in Roseanne.  However, before he was Dan Conner he was just another St. Louisian.

John was born in Affton in 1952. He attended Affton High School, where he played football. With his football scholarship, he attended Southwest Missouri State University (SMS) in Springfield. That school is now called Missouri State University. He pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon but did not get initiated until after he was a star. In fact, in the ’90s, he would go back to SMS and party with his fraternity friends.  I have seen pictures of this from some of my sister’s friends’ Facebook pages, as she attended SMS in the ’90s. Anyway, he suffered a football injury and decided to become an actor, leaving Missouri in 1975.

St. Louis is proud to have an Emmy award-winning actor (Guest Star in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) in our arsenal. He is also a Golden Globe winner for his work on Roseanne. Plus in 1997 he received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, which we all know is way more important than the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Gooman is not afraid to jump the borders between movies and TV and will take on so many different roles from comedies, dramas to even children films. Americans love him as Dan Conner because he was an average working-class guy. He comes off as a real guy and not superficial, but maybe that is because he comes from a real, hardworking family from middle America.

I do not really pay attention when I am at the fabulous Lambert airport, but apparently his voice is on one of the automated messages.

Now I love movies and TV and basically anything in that category, so to end my post about John Goodman, I am going to say which is my favorite work he has done.  It is hard to choose because he has been in 72 films and countless shows, but I am a girl, so I am picking Coyote Ugly.

John Goodman & Piper Perabo in Coyote Ugly (Touchstone Pictures via IMDB.com)

In Coyote Ugly, he plays a concerned dad from New Jersey just wanting the best for his daughter.  He raised her without a mom and is very worried when he finds out where she is working.  John plays a father figure really well.  He is a father, but also, his own dad died when he was a toddler.  He is just very believable.

So here’s to you, John Goodman.  You might not live in St. Louis anymore, but St. Louis will always be proud to be your hometown.

Trisha Peplinski Harvey is living in Texas with her husband and two dogs but still calls St. Louis home.  She has never met John Goodman, but she has been on the SMS campus quite a few times.

The City Museum

by Kurt J. Pankau

“It’s that building over there, with the bus on the roof.”

The City Museum (Wikipedia - GNU Free Document License)

Nestled in Washington Avenue Loft District, hidden behind a deplorably boring name, you can find one of the hidden gems of St. Louis: The City Museum.

The Museum was/is the brain-child of artist Bob Cassilly who bought an old shoe factory and turned it into a surreal/industrial funhouse chock-full of interactive attractions — a place that is virtually impossible to describe without slashes and semi-colons and em-dashes. There is no rhyme or reason to the building and its layout; there is, however, a giant praying mantis on the roof next to the ferris wheel.

Now you will pray to MEEEE!!!!!!

And there are slides.  And I don’t mean slide-projector slides or vacation slides; I’m talking about physical ride-from-the-third-story-down-to-the-ground slides, the largest of which is ten stories and deposits you next to a Wurlitzer pipe organ. There are caves; there’s a bank vault; there’s a wall made out of empty Coke bottles. There are giant sculptures of fish that you can crawl around in.  Out front you’ll find MonstroCity, a metal network of caged paths that connect towers, catwalks, a tree house, two airplanes (side note: you haven’t lived until you’ve climbed off the wing of an airplane through a metal cage two stories above a parking lot), more slides, and two ball pits. That’s right, two ball-pits.

If awesomeness were measured in ball-pits, The City Museum scores a 2.

Don’t be fooled by the kid’s stuff (did I mention slides?) — The City Museum is a fun for anyone who likes to run and jump and climb, and you’ll find a surprising number of adults in and on the attractions. The Museum hosts numerous wedding receptions every year and if you absolutely have to get some culture in you, you can find actual museum exhibits inside if you look hard enough.  You can also visit the log cabin that was owned by Daniel Boone’s son (where they serve alcohol). Alternately, there is a kids-only section indoors that includes a rideable train. And for the more Bohemian types, there’s a vintage clothing store.

Bohemian types enjoying the City Museum. Also, slides.

The City Museum draws over half a million visitors yearly, many of them locals.  They keep coming back because of the freshness, the fun, the humor, and the singular uniqueness.  And they bring their friends, because the City Museum is the kind of thing that really has to be experienced to be believed.

Regular admission is $12 per person (plus $5 for roof access–and believe me, you want roof access).  This may seem steep-ish for a “Museum” or a family weekend outing, but there’s lots to do so go early and plan to stay for a while. Group rates are available, check their hours before you go. For more information, their home on the web is conveniently located at www.citymuseum.org.

Kurt J. Pankau is a professional programmer and amateur musician.  He lives with his wife in Creve Coeur where they have two staircases but, alas, no slides.  His band and his blog should be avoided at all costs.

“Up in the Air”

by Mary Poletti

Remember how we said St. Louisans especially like shout-outs to St. Louis from homegrown celebrities? Well, St. Louisans will take them pretty much anywhere we can get them. And that’s why St. Louisans like — no, LOVE — the Oscar-nominated 2009 film Up in the Air, great swaths of which were filmed in our fair hometown. The St. Louis media was all over this film like a cheap suit before filming even started. Sure, other great movies had been filmed in St. Louis — Planes, Trains and Automobiles featured some scenes at Lambert Field, and hello, Meet Me in St. Louis? — but had any of them starred GEORGE FREAKIN’ CLOONEY? And had any of them cast legions of St. Louisans as extras? And had any of them treated St. Louis as their own personal soundstage without actually mostly taking place in St. Louis? Not in this generation, bubba.

Hey, that's OUR airport! And...and that's George Clooney! (Paramount Pictures via TheInsider.com)

So we rubbernecked in our own streets during filming, hoping to catch a glimpse of Clooney, and we waited with bated breath for Jason Reitman’s inadvertent love letter to our fair city to drop. And when it did, we hurried into theaters, oohing and aahing over the gratuitous shots of St. Louis — the ones we had anticipated like Lambert (which gets a serious shout-out in the film) and the Cheshire Inn, but also the unexpected ones like Mansion House Apartments, the Renaissance, Affton High School, Lafayette Square, a little Methodist church in Maplewood…the list goes on. (In fact, the Post-Dispatch visualized the whole list.)

And when Up in the Air succeeded, critically and financially, and began to generate Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, we were euphoric — and disappointed when it failed to follow through on most of the buzz. Much of the day-after coverage of the Golden Globes and now the Oscars in the St. Louis media has led with something to the effect of “Avatar and The Hurt Locker score big; Up in the Air does not.” We were INVESTED this year, man. Compared to the rest of the field, Up in the Air never really had a shot at the Oscars. Not when Best Picture was the duel of the director-exes between Avatar and The Hurt Locker; not when Jeff Bridges and Mo’Nique had Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress sewn up (Clooney said he’d even voted for Bridges himself); not when Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire was pretty much guaranteed Best Adapted Screenplay, perhaps as a consolation prize for losing out on Best Picture and Best Actress. But in St. Louisans’ minds, Up in the Air just had to score big. It just had to. It already had with us.

For in our hearts and minds, St. Louis is the real winner with Up in the Air‘s Oscar buzz. We get to feel a little better about the city we love, which obviously many others have now seen and loved too, even if it’s disguised as a host of other cities. A friend who was gunning for Avatar for Best Picture scoffed earlier that Precious was poverty porn; when Up in the Air came up in the same conversation, I responded that it qualified as St. Louis porn. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. Congratulations on your achievement, Reitman and Clooney and friends, and thanks for bringing us along for the ride.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She lived a block away from that little Methodist church in Maplewood, and her sister lives within walking distance of the Cheshire Inn. Neither one ever saw George Clooney.