Word: tonks
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Whether Disney spent $12 million mounting Beauty, as its moguls claim, or a more beastly $20 million, as some theater insiders assert, it has bet big on its belief in a vast untapped stage audience yearning for family entertainment -- even in the honky-tonk heart of Manhattan, even at a $65 top-ticket price, even at a 10:30 p.m. curtain-call time, when much of the target audience should be in bed. So far, business has been good. The day after Beauty opened, it set an all-time Broadway record for a single day's ticket sales...
...perverse and influential graphic designer Tibor Kalman. Incredibly, they have persuaded the state and city to get behind an authentically populist spectacle, a potential mix of tourist traps and hip outlets, mom-and-pop shops and name-brand superstores. The goal is not a "themed" simulacrum of honky-tonk diversity but the real thing. Such a splendidly oxymoronic turn: a municipal code for discouraging tastefulness, a quarter-billion dollars spent to conjure a trashy Damon Runyon spirit. The Bizarro-world rules call for, among other things, giant loudspeakers blasting onto the street, commercial signs noticeably out of alignment with their...
...Garth Brooks has become a sort of Ross Perot of country music. First he suggests he may quit performing. Then he says he's back in. Now, on his new album, In Pieces, Brooks has made one of his worst decisions by recording a misguided anthem titled American Honky-Tonk Bar Association. In this song, over a beat as rambunctious as a mechanical bull, this most favored of country stylists asks listeners to join with the "hardhat, gunrack, achin'-back, over-taxed, flag-wavin' fun-lovin' crowd," especially if they're upset when their "dollar goes to all of those...
American Honky-Tonk Bar Association is all the more unfortunate since the rest of this album is so well conceived and executed, covering country, blues and full-out rock. Standing Outside the Fire, a song about living life to the fullest, begins with a catchy guitar riff that would be at home on many noncountry pop albums. "Life is not tried it is merely survived/ If you're standing outside the fire," sings Brooks over a percussion break that sounds nearly African. In concerts and in interviews, Brooks is an intense, full- throttle performer, and the song manages to captures...
...huge bass line and bottomless saxophones back up Richards and the unidentified female vocalist who sings the high notes. Standing in for the honky-tonk harmonica from the original studio version is a gut-wrenching menace that can barely shriek loudly enough to be audible over the constant pounding of the bass, drums and Richards' amazingly continuous guitar choruses...