Electric Factory

The Philadelphia stagehands union has targeted the Electric Factory with pickets for a week to get better pay and benefits for workers at the popular venue, union officials said. However, union members will be working - sort of - at two sold-out shows Friday and Saturday nights by the Dropkick Murphys as part of a deal reached with the Boston band. It's all about pro-union solidarity, Michael Barnes, business manager of Local 8 of the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees, said Thursday.

Like Shania, Celine and Whitney, matchbox twenty is emblematic of the tidal bland-out of contemporary Top 40 - a zone where all the songs sound the same, all the sentiments are paper-thin, and every coo and growl is a market-researched contrivance. Together, this crew constitutes what is probably the most popular genre today: music for people who don't like music too much. Despite not having released an album since 1996's 10 million-selling Yourself or Someone Like You, matchbox twenty remains modern-rock radio wallpaper.

On Friday night, Erykah Badu, who wore her elaborate orange turban and surrounded herself with Eastern accoutrements, ankhs and burning incense, looked like a cross between an ancient Egyptian goddess and Afrocentric interplanetary traveler of the future. She sang like an angel. In an Electric Factory packed with people of melanin, Badu, throughout her loping, stylistically liberated (and liberating) set maximized the potential of her minimalist setup - drums, bass, keyboards, and three singers - by focusing her energies inward.

The old adage "you can't go home again" could be proved false by concert promoters Larry Magid and Adam Spivak when the new music venue dubbed the "re-opened" Electric Factory opens tonight at 7th and Willow streets. Female blues- and folk-tinged rockers June Rich, hard-edged Solution A.D. and bone-crunching Dandelion, plus Strapping Fieldhands and the Headlong Dance Theater, are booked for the all-local-act opening. And there's a lot more diversity where that came from - including important imports like the New Orleans jam band knockouts the Radiators on Sunday, edgy Sonic Youth next Wednesday, Pittsburgh's heartland rocker Joe Grushecky with his unbilled special guest Bruce Springsteen on Oct. 19 (an instant sellout)

Even in a holiday season, or maybe especially then, you can have too much of a good thing. Five guys named "moe. " proved this Tuesday night to a capacity crowd of folks in their 20s at the Electric Factory. Measured in minutes, the band played 66, rested 41, played 99, rested 2, and played 20 more. And that after opener Antigone Rising filled 50 minutes with hard-rock cliches. No live recording ever really captures the incarnate moe. For $20, you could have bought Tuesday's show, well-rendered on three compact discs, on your way out the door.

Amy Ray wants to put one thing straight: "No causes," she says. "The only cause is towards us. " So don't go to the Electric Factory on Wednesday expecting to raise your awareness, pledge your support or register to vote; the Suffragette Sessions Tour doesn't benefit this or spotlight that. "No," Ray says, "it's basically just performance the whole time. " She and fellow Indigo Girl Emily Saliers conceived of the SST five years ago while sharing a stage with Siouxsie Sioux and Ferron.

ZED'S DEAD is an electronic band that took its name from the Quentin Tarantino thriller "Pulp Fiction. " The film includes a grisly overdose scene - and at the band's performance Saturday night at the Electric Factory, fact mirrored fiction when at least four people overdosed, causing the gig to be canceled, according to the fire department and social media. Police responded to the Electric Factory, at 7th Street near Callowhill, about 8 p.m. and found nine concertgoers passed out from possible overdoses, the Associated Press reported.

The fight over a billboard on the Electric Factory building - perhaps the most litigated sign in the city - has returned. After a decade of legislation and lawsuits over whether the owners could throw a "wall wrap" advertisement over their building at Seventh and Callowhill Streets, the proposal was thought dead when chief patron Frank DiCicco retired from City Council this year. But DiCicco's successor, Mark Squilla, resurrected the proposal on Thursday with a twist. Under his bill, 20 percent of the advertising revenue would go to three local elementary schools and possibly several community groups.

Eric Miller felt he had waited his whole life for Carolina. "She was exceptional by every measure," he said, "smart, full of life, beautiful. " When she died, suddenly, from an epileptic seizure in August 2011, at age 26 and not even two years after their wedding, he was driven to do something in her memory, to find meaning in his grief. So he set out to try something a tad crazy, arranging 50 concerts in 50 states this weekend - including by guitar great Eric Clapton - all to raise epilepsy awareness.

Despite a weeklong picketing effort at the Electric Factory, members of the Philadelphia stagehands union will work at two sold-out shows Friday and Saturday by the Dropkick Murphys as part of a deal reached with the Boston band. The band will pay two union members to unload its equipment outside the venue at 421 N. Seventh St., said Michael Barnes, business manager of Local 8 of the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees. Stagehands working for Electric Factory will handle the equipment inside the building.

The Philadelphia stagehands union has targeted the Electric Factory with pickets for a week to get better pay and benefits for workers at the popular venue, union officials said. However, union members will be working - sort of - at two sold-out shows Friday and Saturday nights by the Dropkick Murphys as part of a deal reached with the Boston band. It's all about pro-union solidarity, Michael Barnes, business manager of Local 8 of the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees, said Thursday.

THE TALK-RADIO AUDIENCE was becoming "too old, too white, too male and too angry" for syndicated host Michael Smerconish . On Wednesday, he announced that he's leaving terrestrial radio - including local affiliate 1210 WPHT - and heading for SiriusXM, where he'll appear on the nonpartisan POTUS station. The "Michael Smerconish Program," as it will be called, will begin April 15 and run weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon. A rep from WPHT says that Smerconish has no official end date at his home station but that the station wishes him the best.

Thankfully, the promised inflatable rat courtesy of Philadelphia's IATSE Local 8 stagehands' union didn't show up at Saturday night's Erykah Badu show at the Electric Factory. Last week, Local 8 claimed on its Facebook page that Electric Factory's stagehands were underpaid, and that neither audience members nor Badu should cross their line. Yet there was no trouble at the Factory (and no indication whether the issue was resolved); only a sold-out crowd roused by the good vibrations of a woman who, in 1997, released two albums - Baduizm, Live - that midwifed the then-burgeoning new music brand of neo-soul.

Erykah Badu Back in 1997, Erykah Badu released Baduizm , a stellar debut partly recorded at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia that was the breakout commercial success of the then-nascent neo-soul movement. The album remains a high-water mark of latter-day black music bohemianism, a snakily soulful melange of subtly plotted R&B, jazz, and funk, and an introduction to Badu - then known for her trademark head-wraps - as a psychedelic earth mother who learned a thing or two about song phrasing from Billie Holiday records.

Going to see an artist who has had the words paralyzing stage fright written next to her name as many times as Cat Power - the stage name of the singer Chan Marshall - can be a perilous proposition. Would Marshall make it through the show? How was the 41-year-old indie chanteuse coping after being dumped by Giovanni Ribisi and canceling a number of fall shows (including one at the Electric Factory) due to financial and medical troubles? Did she really cut off her long, dark tresses, dye her hair blond, and fashion it into a Mohawk?

In a musical world where Adele is all-singing and all-selling, every British female vocalist in the last five years is held up to compare with 007's new favorite. Whether they're vintage soul (Duffy), operatic (Florence Welch of the Machines), or annoyingly pop-hop (Jessie J), Adele's name comes into play. Then there's Ellie Goulding, who sold out the Electric Factory on Friday. Since her 2010 album debut, Lights , the soprano with the piercing vibrato has sold records. Her reserved cover of Elton John's "Your Song" (performed in grand, soppy fashion Friday)

This morning on 94 WIP, cohost Al Morganti introduced "the man responsible for Wing Bowl being in the Big House" - Ed Rendell. "How prominent in my obituary is it going to be that I moved Wing Bowl to the big stadium?" Rendell asked, referring to what is now called the Wells Fargo Center. The popularity of the annual event - scheduled for Friday - has exploded since its debut in 1993 featured just competitors in a hotel ballroom. By Wing Bowl IV, people were being turned away from an overflowing Electric Factory, while the area was beset by parking nightmares, Morganti recalled.