Scene & Herd - The art of the deal

A little over a year ago, I wrote a droolingly complimentary piece about the Strokes after seeing them play the Cotton Club downtown. At the time, they were the critics' darling with a large cult following. After writing that piece, the Strokes went on to become the critics' darling with a slightly larger cult following. A combination of bloated ego and willful ignorance has thus led me to the following conclusion: I am responsible for the success of the Strokes during 2002.

Well, not really. But it is fun to write about a band that you really like and then see them get big. With that in mind, I'd like to tell you about a great band I saw play Smith's Olde Bar last Thursday called Kings of Leon. The band is made up of three brothers, Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill. They get their band name from their father and grandfather, both apparently named Leon. I just thought of something — does someone in the band Queens of the Stone Age have a parent named the Stone Age?

Kings of Leon's sound is sort of Southern Strokes — like a garage rock band fronted by a pissed-off sounding Gregg Allman. To throw off the geography a bit more, one of their most memorable songs is a yearning-sounding song called "California Waiting." That's one thing that these guys have on the Strokes. The Strokes can sound pissy and disaffected, but I've never heard them yearn.

According to the doctor I heard speak at a Botox seminar last month, image is everything. Therefore, it's my duty to describe the band's appearance to you as well as its music. They're very shaggy-haired, and whatever shampoo they use gives their hair great body. Their outfits adhere strictly to current garage rock requirements: vintage T-shirts and jeans. Singer Caleb Followill has put his own twist on things though by growing a beard that makes him look like the indie-rock Dennis Wilson. For you fellow music geeks, think Badly Drawn Beach Boy. For you non-music geeks, I swear that the previous sentence is really funny.

All brows: When I die, I want to have the world's best collection of comically bad art. I already have a framed, painted reproduction of a mid-'80s High Society magazine centerfold that I bought from a homeless guy in Little Five Points who pointed out that the model's ankle jewelry was "pure gold ... 14 karat!"

Not a bad start, but if I want a legacy, I have to get in gear. So on Saturday night, I headed over to Fay Gold Gallery for Atlanta artist Tony Hernandez's opening. Unfortunately, Hernandez screwed up my whole "bad art" plan by being excellent. Hernandez's art is already in a few million homes, cars and pawn shops because his paintings adorn the covers of the past two CDs by Train (you know, the group that gave us Drops of Uranus, I mean Drops of Jupiter).

If you're familiar with those CDs, then you've seen the main theme of Hernandez's art. He paints a lot of lonely looking children with evocative props like crowns or dunce caps. The paintings are done on enormous pieces of wood (some 60-by-60 inches), but the images themselves are small, leaving a huge amount of blank space on the wood that accentuates the loneliness of the figures depicted. If I had 12 grand to spend, and a taste for good art, I'd be on it.

Unfortunately, I don't even have $12 to spend and I have a taste for bad art. Last weekend though, I was in luck, because the Starving Artists sale was in town. Held at three hotels around town and advertised relentlessly on TV (no paintings more than $49!!!), it was the freakin' motherlode of affordable bad art. I went to the one in the Crowne Plaza in College Park, near the airport. The sale was held in the Bogart Room (the sign on the door said "Welcome Starving Artists"), down the hall from a Department of Defense Emergency Preparedness Course. Starving Artists is a family-owned business that tours the country offering decorative oil paintings for cheap. Most of the paintings are of nature scenes. Many depict lighthouses. In fact, there are more lighthouses in a room full of Starving Artists paintings than ever existed in real life. Another popular theme is to depict homes with bright orange/yellow light emanating from every window. It's meant to be idyllic, but the light is always so bright that it looks as though the house is on fire. There's no risk of injuries though, since none of the paintings have any people in them.

Drunk and blue? If you're an entertainment columnist, a raging alcoholic or don't have to work on Monday morning, it's hard to find a good bar with live music to hang out in on Sunday nights. I'd like to recommend Northside Tavern. I'm not sure why it's called Northside Tavern since it's A) not on Northside Drive and it's due west of Midtown. But then again, Atlanta is a place where you get from the West End to East Point by driving south.

The music? Oh, yes. Judging by the blues musicians whose pictures decorate the walls, it's a bluesy sort of place. Last Sunday, the band was a bluesy outfit called Stephen Talkovich and Friends. They weren't exactly blues purists though — they played the Turtles classic "Happy Together" and George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care." Their biggest crowd pleasers though were bluesy tales of heartache. Every time they sang about love lost, this one really drunk guy in the crowd would either get up and put money in the tip jar while pointing at the band, or else he'd simply point at the people around him.

a href="mailto:andisheh@creativeloafing.com">andisheh@creativeloafing.com