#ClePunk

[weneverlearn]

This should be a cool one! Longtime Cleveland graphic artist, Aaron Lange, has finally wrapped up his book about the early-mid-70s Cleveland proto-punk milieu, so keep an eye out for it -- it comes out in October!

And here's a great Please Kill Me oral history piece from 2019 about graphic novel cover boy, Peter Laughner. I didn't write it, but I've posted a bunch about Laughner before.

[blacklighttemple]

Long, but a must read if you have any interest at all in Pere Ubu. And if you don't, why are you even reading this blog - ?

[theunderestimator-2]

The Pagans (Tim Allee, Mike Hudson, Mike Metoff & Brian Hudson) on the edge at the legendary Independence Day party on July 4th 1978 at Peter Ball’s family mansion, Bratenhal, Cleveland, which also included The Cramps and Pere Ubu, as captured by Randy Meggitt.

The bands performed on a concrete ledge built into a cliff face overlooking Lake Erie and the audience, various hippies and members of Cleveland’s underground scene, watched from the lakeside 15 feet below, while others were twisting on boats and yachts moored in the lake, later on enjoying the 4th of July fireworks.

The mighty Pagans started out as a Rolling Stones cover band became a punk powerhouse led by the formidable Mike Hudson, releasing four 45's between '77 and '79 that still influence punks.

"Mike Hudson could be a piece of shit. He could be the coolest guy you ever met. He could be the guy you wanted to be. He could sucker you out of your last nickel. He could laugh so hard he would throw up and his dental plate would ride the puke stream like the best California surfer. He could make you wanna kick his cocky drunk ass. I was lucky to know that fucker for 40 years”. Scott "Cheese" Borger, clepunk veteran.

(via)

[cyanidetooth]

Tune in here if you wanna catch well-photographed depictions of life in a Cleveland, Ohio punkhouse circa 2002. Lotsa drugs & fucked-up looking people. Oh yeah, and bands. Also, bands.

Joint was called The Black Eye & many late nights were had at said joint.

Also, many joints were smoked at said joint.

Over the course of a couple years, at least 100 bands spent the night here. 

And shit in the toilet.

I also just remembered that one of the first “shows” here was Devendra Banhart playing a few songs acoustically in the “family” room. 

Folk as fuck, motherfolker.

[blow-blood]

I don't think I've ever had as much excitement about a release as THE SIGHT "NITE VISIONS" DEMO CS which is out now! . . Four power pop tracks from Cleveland Ohio to get you out of bed and put a spring in your step! Another classic band and release to add to Cleveland and Ohio's long history of amazing Rock n Roll. Listen to it on the bandcamp, email for distro enquiries! It will be available in Cleveland and directly from the band around mid October. Give it a listen at blowbloodrecords.bandcamp.com ! . . #thesight #clevelandpunk #clepunk #powerpop #cassettes #rocknroll #blowbloodrecords #blowblood #qualitytimerecords (at Cleveland, Ohio)

[camdenleisurepirates]

I was poking around online, looking for a pic of the old punk bar I used to hang at in the 80s. Decided on a whim to see if clepunk.com was still up, which it is (albeit in drastically reduced form - FB killed it pretty dead) Happened to leave it open while I was onto something else, only to look up and see this.. This is the lead singer & bass player for the Idiot Humans, about whom I could say much. Not today, tho. Guggi, on the right, was my partner at the time; I made the t-shirt he's wearing, painted his face, took the picture. I don't remember uploading it to the site, and may not have access to the original anymore - because of the Evol Wizard there on the left. Long story. Guggi's brother, Magick Bob (or Bob Hopeless) played guitar for them.. we just lost him last week. Guggi's been gone a while now. Ride in a stutz bearcat kids - those were different times.

[clangoring]

Another full on bad ass GROOVE from Obnox. Stoked to have them playing in my town at the end of August.

[weneverlearn]

Death of Samantha and the Blizzard Drive

Death of Samatha, 1988, on the shores of Lake Erie, most definitely not in the wintertime

Among the many fun-if-maddening things about YouTube is the odd ways in which fanatical nabobs post things. Let's just say they're not all SEO experts.

While anyone who has followed this blog, read my book, or spent more than 25 minutes talking to me at some point knows, I 'm a huge Death of Samantha fan. So I recently stumbled on these YouTube clips that do not list DoS at all in their titles, and hence were a treat to discover.

I was actually at the February 26, 1990 show in these live clips. New Bomb Turks guitarist Jim Weber drove up from Columbus, OH, to Cleveland with me and our roomie pal, Brian Duran. It's about a two-hour trip, but well worth it cuz DoS were always good, and hadn't been down to Columbus in awhile. Hard to tell from the dark, somewhat static film work here, but believe you me, it was a great show.

Nothing to do with snow, but gives you an idea of the pretty good local TV we had in Cleveland at the time that informed Death of Samantha's sense of the absurd...

The club was the Babylon a-Go-Go, a small, narrow joint tucked into an alley off W. 25th St., then a fairly desolate area (except for the excellent Great Lakes Brewing Company, where Eliot Ness used to hang out at the end of his career; it's still there). The "stage" was just the area right next to the bar, so you sort of sat on stools craning your neck at the band, or stood around.

As per usual with such wonky joints, it nonetheless made for a great place to see a band. Dates escape me at this point, but as the club gained a lil' following, they knocked down a wall, added a proper stage, and continued on as a solid club for I think about 4 more years. I saw an amazing L7 show there, Jonathan Richman, lots of good local bands, and they held Stiv Bators' official wake there in June, 1990, a monumentally interesting and fun event I have previously written about here -- check the bottom here and see the video tribute John Waters sent that was played at the event (along with ones from Iggy Pop and Lydia Lunch).

Bloated with fine rock'n'roll and craft beer (then a new trend in Cleveland), we hit the road home -- only to drive right into a huge blizzard. As traffic stops got increasingly packed, we tried a couple side road exits that got us nowhere, and ended up back on I-71 into more scary, slippery two-mph slogs.

Death of Samantha, 1988

At one point, while sitting in a miles-long jam, it was decided that getting out to pee on the side of the road would no doubt coincide with the traffic starting to move, and one of us chasing the car; but more pertinently, it was just cold and blistery as hell out. Then suddenly, the empty Pringles can (that night's dinner on the way to the show), smiled up from the car floor, offering relief.

Let's just say that that moment, in that dark backseat, with the strains of the Replacements wafting out of the tape deck, I learned the rough volume size of my bladder, as did the floor of that back seat.

It took us nearly seven hours to get back to Columbus, finally bounding out of the car with no regrets. That's how good Death of Samantha was. (Easy for me to say though, I didn't do any of the driving.)

The infamous blizzard of '78 in Cleveland

Climate change has added another layer of nostalgia to this tale, as it seems we just do not get big snowstorms like that anymore. Yeah, it still snows in Cleveland, but not in those massive pile-ups that remain stuck on the edges of sidewalks and mall parking lots gaining smog and car exhaust veneers until they gamely try to ward off the late-March melt...

[theravingknaves-blog]

Some "sweaty bar rock" with an Ohio flavor...

Midwest Queen

  She dances like she’s seventeen

Stops to love me in between

Black lace garters so pristine

Tell me, have you seen my Midwest queen?

  High tops, white shirt denim jeans                                                    

Long hair short pants sight unseen

            Have you seen

            My Midwest queen?

Have you seen

            My Midwest queen?

  Took her down to the bowling lanes

With Pabst Blue Ribbon and white sweat stains

I’m one cat that don’t dig Hanes

Guess that’s why our love sustains

  High tops, white shirt denim jeans                                                    

Long hair short pants sight unseen

            Have you seen

            My Midwest queen?

Have you seen

            My Midwest queen?

  Cuyahoga River rolls so slow

Behind our house in the valley below

We dive in where the crowds don’t go

When she swims she lets it show

  High tops, white shirt denim jeans                                                    

Long hair short pants sight unseen

            Have you seen

            My Midwest queen?

Have you seen

  ��         My Midwest queen?

[weneverlearn]

I’ve always thought the people of Cleveland had a remarkable resilience in the face of national jokes, declining industry and job base, dilapidated housing stock, losing sports teams, you get the picture. It definitely contributed to the yeah-but-we’re-still-here mentality, but also a constant background noise of, “What’s the next bad thing that’s going to happen?”

Pretty great interview with Mark Edwards, main man behind the dark chime post-punk Cleveland act, My Dad Is Dead. It focuses a bit too much on the band name -- I never really thought of it as potentially offensive, just very Cleveland matter-of-fact --  and since it was done on the occasion of the Scat Records expanded reissue of his debut, it’s mainly about the early stuff. My Dad Is Dead has a long rich catalog worth exploring. 

There’s some talk about his earliest shows where Edwards played solo with a drum machine, usually wearing a drab suit. I saw a number of those shows, and as this was right as I was starting to go to shows, it was fun to see the way ostensible “punk” shows in Cleveland challenged any quickly settling in notions of what that meant or was supposed to sound like. The jumbled mix of alt-bands that would play Cleveland underground shows was not weird to me, just the situation, making noise up there to make you figure out what fit in your head or not. It really wasn’t until later, when I moved to Columbus and especially when New Bomb Turks started touring, that I got a sense of how truly oddball, unique, and inspiring that late-80s Cle scene was.

Overall, there’s some excellent insight in this interview into a still kind of mysterious man whose band is one of the most criminally underrated of the end of the 20th century.

[weneverlearn]

My Favorite Record Store

Ah, the things you find on old laptops...

While recently seeing if my previous laptop could still breath, I found some old writings. This one, below, is a piece I did about 10 years ago when asked to write about my favorite records store for a compendium the now defunct Get Bent website was putting together. My particular fave rave store didn't just rest on a good used selection, but ended with an appearance from the FBI!

Then last week, Record Revolution in the Coventry section of Cleveland, closed - I frequented that place a few times over the years; then I tripped across the Other Music documentary last weekend on Night Flight, and that seemed like another cosmic nudge to post this.

So check it out if you care, and go visit your local record store today!

If memory serves, the first album I bought at Wax Stax...

************************************************

Wax Stax, Parma, Ohio, 1985 – Eric Davidson

My hometown of Parma, Ohio, was a suburb (the largest in the nation in the later 1970s; not anymore), on the west side, about 15 minutes from Cleveland proper. That’s where the great record stores were, on the far east side of Cleveland specifically; or in Lakewood, the slowly hip-morphing near west side suburb that had cool things like neat old homes, vintage stores, dusty dives, rusting diners, even gay people. But that was still about 15 minutes away from no-drivers license me.

         So I made do with the weak mall chain store (yeesh); and a surprisingly worthy shop, Record Revolution, that sat on the far, old, outdoor strip of that mall (my first lesson in learning how most of the things I appreciate in this world will be shoved to the margins). I got my first Velvet Underground record there (White Light, White Heat). There was a huge Peaches Records & Tapes (one of many of the disappearing non-mall, self-standing chain stores, though this one oddly survived under different names until just a few years ago). And then a good used joint, Record Exchange, opened in a small retail strip within walking distance. (It moved a few years later, after adding racks of video games, an ocean of used VHS tapes, and metal tees, and changed its name to “The Exchange,” no doubt to divorce itself from the dying music market.)

And before that even, there was always The Shoppe, a quirky, incense-stunk, flared pants-era cobble of curiosity shops in a big old house in kind of nearby Berea. They always touted that their new vinyl was only $5. Like I wanted a new copy of The Nylon Curtain! It was only worth bothering a friend to drive me there for the selection of “imports,” which at that time in the ‘burbs meant anything not on a major label; or even lame-lier, a German Red Lorry Yellow Lorry 12” single. But I did find some of my early favorites there. I remember, in 1983, sitting in the car outside The Shoppe, the heater on, snowy outside, waiting for my friend to finish his purchase, looking over the Murmur liner notes, thinking “Man, I can’t believe they had a copy of this!”

         So all things considered, I guess I didn’t have it that bad. But the Parma-approachable record stores always had that patina of “west side” to them, which if you lived in Cleveland then, you’d understand. No cool fliers on a board near the door. (“Baby sitter Needed!” doesn’t count.) No piles of weekly newspapers and more fliers flopped around the windowsill near the door. No endless racks of dirty plastic-sleeve 7’ singles. And no crotchety “old” 29-year old at the counter making fun of/informing my purchasing habits. Not that the local stores didn’t have their charms, but let’s put it this way – in 1985, you don’t want Scorpions and Heart posters on the walls of your indie record shop. You want Cramps and Smiths.

         So oh the joy when Wax Stax opened! Tucked away in an even more remote, crumbling, and weird little strip, behind another nearly as old strip, next to a barber shop and nothing else, to me it was the Taj Mahal. With Cramps posters. On the way to/from Wax Stax, I had to pass the Catholic church I was weekly hauled to. And pondering the contradictions between the church rooftop cross and the Stooges, Ramones, Prince, and Rodney Dangerfield albums in my hand did more to form my morality than 1,000 confirmation classes. At least it felt like 1,000!

         But back to the real place of worship…Wax Stax was great! Smaller than any of the previously mentioned stores in town, it was packed with a much higher percentage of cool shit. The thing is, there was a Wax Stax on the east side, and this was an attempt to expand into white flight-ville. So when they opened, the place was already packed with lots of great used and new goodies sent over from the other store on the cool east side. They had actual imports, bootlegs, fanzines, and the #1 sign of any great with-it record store of that era – promo copies. Lots and lots of promo copies.

         See, back then record labels did not just email out, via publicists, a mp3 to blog writers who won’t even take the time to download them. No, record labels sent out finished copies of their albums. (While I wrote for the Cleveland Scene magazine in the late-80s/early-90s, I probably accumulated 33% of my collection via the “freebie box” in their offices, or trade-ins of said freebies.) And labels sent promo copies to record stores too, often more than one. Made sense, right? You want to make sure the employees can hear the new shit, talk it up to the customers, and hopefully order more. Ha, right! What the hell do the employees care? They would’ve ripped open a new one to hear it. But whatever, it was a wealthier time. (Or is that wasteful-er?)

         Bad Moon Rising, Zen Arcade, Tim – probably paid no more than $4 for each of them. Promos all! (Not to mention all their used records rarely rose above $5; new, $8.) The lone female clerk/manager was not only from the east side too – and hence knew what “Pere Ubu” meant – but was not surly and condescending in the traditional indie record shop sense, and pretty cute, too-boot! And she gave great trade. So I was bringing in Bobby Brown and Guadalcanal Diary promos, and a few of these fledgling “CDs” I was getting from the Scene, and trading them in for cheap-ass copies of Death of Samantha, Buzzcocks, and the Volcano Suns. It was as close to mafia accidental back of truck falling off shenanigans as I was likely to get in my life. Or so I thought.

         One day, a little less than two years after Wax Stax opened, I was sifting through the “B” section (“Well, “All That I Wanted” is a good song, but a whole Belfegore album?!” Nah…), and in walked two guys wearing – and I am not embellishing here – long trench coats and fedoras. They flashed a badge at the manager, said a few things to her, then looked over: “Hey buddy, yer gonna have to take off for awhile.”

         Yup, fucking FBI guys, I shit you not. It was one of those mini-moments at the end of the ‘80s where major labels decided to throw a bone to “Cracking down on unlawful sale of promotional copies.” Read the stamps on those old things. It says some nonsense about those being the property of the label. (The labels never tell you that they write those promos off on their taxes, right after subtracting them from the artists’ future royalties.) The preponderance of bootlegs might’ve had something to do with the flat-foots storming the gates too, and maybe some grass passing through the back door. But who knows.

         Wax Stax only closed for about two weeks. Once reopened, it didn’t seem much different, though the scare worked, as there were never again as many promos or bootlegs in the racks. But the two new managers were really nice guys – one a tall, skinny, bespectacled collector geek; the other a black guy in tattoos and dreadlocks who was into Ministry – in Parma! Cool. (Yes, for about a month in my life I thought Ministry fans were sort of cool. Especially black ones. Hey, it was 1987!) Then about a year and a half after that, some really odd older drunk guy (or maybe a hop head – my inebriation radar wasn’t as well-calibrated back then) bought the place, added more t-shirts, posters, video games, cassingles, and those expensive CD things, and, well, you can see where this is going. The place sucked…and closed about a year later.

         But by then I was going back and forth to school at Ohio State University in Columbus, soon to move there permanently. And for my purposes, Wax Stax had done its job exceptionally well. My standards for a cool used record store had been diamond-cut, and as I toured the world with the New Bomb Turks, stopping first at every town’s indie record store, I could make like General Patton surveying the far hills.

         The other day I was scanning down my iTunes list. I didn’t feel like Patton.

         Come to think of it, Used Kids Records in Columbus, Ohio was probably the most important record store in my life. But that’s another story…which you can read about in my book, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 (Backbeat Books).

[weneverlearn]

Just thought I'd repost this interview from last March, as I think it's a fun read and gives a good overview of my book and it's intentions.

The way expanded reissue is available, grab it here:

eBook

Trade Paperback

Signed Copies!

Your's truly doing a We Never Learn reading in Brooklyn, 11/18/22.

[weneverlearn]

Prisonshake, original lineup, circa 1987(?)

Prisonshake was one of my favorite bands in my late teens -- and lucky me, they were a local Cleveland band too. Still love them.

Doug Enkler is one of my favorite singers and frontmen. Their song “Fairfield Ave. Serenade” was one of the first songs Jim and I ever tried to cover when New Bomb Turks were starting up.

Click on the headline there, and that’s an article I wrote about the band for the Columbus-based website, Done Waiting. It features lots of stuff on the band I had to cut out of my book, We Never Learn. 

Prisonshake leader/guitarist/singer Robert Griffin went on to run the great Scat Records label. He’s been uploading nearly all the Prisonshake stuff, check it out here. 

“And ya just can’t go wrong if you always make sure you have nothing to do, and plenty of time to do it in.”