The Best Shows in St. Louis This Week: January 9 to 15

Each week we bring you our picks for the best shows of the next seven days! To submit your show for consideration, click here. All events subject to change; check with the venue for the most up-to-date information.

The Radolescents
8 p.m. Thursday, January 9. Fubar, 3108 Locust Street. $15. 314-289-9050.
Considering its ubiquity and outsize legacy, it can be easy to forget that the members of the Adolescents were just teens when they recorded the band's debut LP, the self-titled record also known as the Blue Album, released in 1981. As one of the first hardcore punk albums to see wide distribution in the U.S. it quickly became one of the genre's best-selling, and the record is credited with cementing the southern California punk sound and influencing countless bands of similar geography. That record gets a proper tribute from the Radolescents, a group comprising past members of the Adolescents’ deep bench (including two Agnews, naturally, in Rikk and Frank Jr.), who will play it in its entirety at this show.
Stupid Science World: The Blue Album was home to the Adolescents’ most well-known songs, including the impossibly catchy earworm “Amoeba” as well as the genre-bending “Kids of the Black Hole.” Be prepared to sing along.
—Daniel Hill

Jack Grelle
8 p.m. Friday, January 10. The Focal Point, 2720 Sutton Boulevard. $12 to $15. 314-560-2778.
These days it seems like many of the acts that made Big Muddy Records a safe haven for dirt-rock weirdos and ragged country vagabonds have grown up and gotten respectable. The musical Swiss army knife Ryan Koenig has continued releasing acoustic recordings made live at Maplewood’s Focal Point, and this week Jack Grelle returns to that beloved listening room for a varied and intimate set. Grelle has long been one of the city’s best purveyors of honky-tonk music, and along with his full-band performance, the singer-songwriter will perform solo, as part of a duo with violinist Sarah Vie, and backed by a string quartet.
Prime the Pump: Grelle will be previewing songs from his forthcoming LP, If Not Forever, which is due out in March.
—Christian Schaeffer

Heart Like A Wheel: A Tribute to Linda Ronstadt
8 p.m. Saturday, January 11. Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp Avenue. $12. 314-773-3363.
On the occasion of awarding the 2014 National Medal of the Arts, our last sane president confessed to his boyhood crush on Linda Maria Ronstadt. Though she can no longer sing, her voice lost to progressive supranuclear palsy, Ronstadt is still eminently crushable. She remains a fierce activist for the environment and immigrant rights, and she continues to defend multicultural and musical education. Of course her music, spanning five decades and over 30 albums, will always provoke wonder, and a tribute concert in St. Louis (overrun with such events) is long overdue. Enter “Heart Like a Wheel,” a tribute to Ronstadt featuring Jenny Roques, Beth Bombara, Sam Golden, Cheryl Rider & the Poneys, Cara Louise, Kit Kellison, and Devon Cahill. It’s a worthy lineup to honor an artist of boundless talent and inspiration.
Dream Stream: If you’ve yet to see the 2019 documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, a pre-show watch party is in order.
—Roy Kasten

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