Cleveland musician, writer, poet, catalyst, and proto-punk cult figure Peter Laughner was born in Bay Village, OH on August 22, 1952. He is best known for being a co-founder of Cleveland’s legendary “avant garage” band Pere Ubu and a significant member of both proto-punk trailblazers Rocket From The Tombs and the Mr. Stress Blues Band, a Cleveland musical institution that existed for nearly five decades.
However, Peter had a musical career that stretched back to the mid-1960s and continued through to his untimely death at age 24 in 1977, doing a little bit of everything in the process. Laughner played rock, blues, folk, punk, jug band, bluegrass, and even jazz fusion, drawing on influences as diverse as Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Richard Thompson, Patti Smith, Robert Johnson, Brian Eno, Michael Hurley, Bob Marley, Tom Verlaine and Television, and above all else Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground.
Peter was also an accomplished writer who wrote reviews and features for several local and national magazines and newspapers throughout the 1970’s, among them Creem, Exit, Zeppelin, and Star. By himself and in collaboration with his then wife, Charlotte Pressler, aka Stella Rayon, he also wrote and published poetry as a visible participant in Cleveland’s vibrant literary scene. Peter’s love of music and literature defined his life and his mission.
As he stated in an article he wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in October 1974 (after extolling the virtues of Cleveland area acts 15-60-75, the Mirrors, and Jimmy Ley): “I want to do for Cleveland what Brian Wilson did for California and Lou Reed did for New York. I’m the guy between the Fender and the Gibson and I’m singing about you . . . I want a crowd that knows a little bit of the difference between the sky and the street.”
Peter also sought to chronicle the Cleveland scene, writing once to a friend in 1975 that he wanted “to create a folklore of the present and future.” True to his word, Peter helped out various local bands with gigs, recording assistance, and/or plugs in the media. “Of all the people in Cleveland," Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys said, "Peter was the most hip. Peter made me believe in myself. I thought what I was doin’ was too far-fetched, and Peter said, ‘No – you’re right, do it, that’s what it’s all about.’”
Unfortunately, Peter died before he could realize his ambition of putting Cleveland on the map of rock and roll during his lifetime. Laughner only released three records before his death: the two singles he recorded with Pere Ubu in 1975 and 1976 plus the 1970 private press LP Notes On A Cocktail Napkin done in collaboration with Terry Hartman of which only a limited number of copies were pressed.
Nick Blakey
Jamie Klimek - Vocal (lead), Guitar
Michael Weldon - Drums
Craig Bell - Bass, Vocals
Jim Crook - Lead Guitar, Vocals
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"...not as bent as the Electric Eels...nor as throttling as Rocket from the Tombs."
– Mark Murrmann, Mother Jones
Mirrors formed in Cleveland in 1971, were "ferociously loud," according to guitarist and frontman Jamie Klimek, and heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground. The rest of the band included Jim Crook (guitar), Mike Weldon (drums), and Craig Bell (bass), with appearances by Paul Marotta (bass and keyboards) and Jim Jones (bass guitar).
During the band's heyday, they only released one single on Hearthan Records, "Shirley"/"She Smiled Wild"(1977).In 1991, Marotta recorded the limited-release album Another Nail in the Coffin. This was followed in 1997 by Scat Records' Those Were Different Times: Cleveland 1972-1976, which included songs by Mirrors, the electric eels and the Sytrenes, and includes Klimek's recollections of Mirrors in the liner notes. Mirrors then released Hands in My Pockets in 2001, a collection of material from the 1970s, studio tracks, home recordings and some live material. Another Nail in the {Remodeled} Coffin, (ROIR 2004) was a reissue of the 1991 album plus a second disc of demos, live tracks, and alternate takes. Then in 2009, Violent Times Records issued Something That Would Never Do, a limited edition album of previously- released material from 1974-1975.
Says Craig: "I was drafted into the Army in 1972 and was away for two years. While away, Jim Jones replaced me in the lineup and upon my return in 1974, he stepped aside and I was again the Mirrors' bassist. Jamie, Michael, and I moved into an apartment on Lorain Avenue and we continued playing gigs and rehearsing. In April of 1974 we went to a studio on the eastside of Cleveland to make our first 'official' recordings. Earthman Studio was owned and operated by Brian Reisner, another high school friend, who would later work with Weather Report. Craig's song, "Annie," along with other songs recorded at this and later sessions were featured on the Scat release. A few Mirrors shows were recorded and some of those songs, along with other studio recordings, including songs from the above mentioned Earthman session, appeared on Overground Records' (UK) Hands In My Pockets (2001). Some of these same songs, as well as others, appeared on vinyl in 2013 with the Violet Times/Hovercraft LP Something That Would Never Do. (All these albums are, unfortunately, out of print and might require some Internet searching to find.)
After Mirrors broke up, Klimek, Jones, Marotta, Anton Fier, and others formed the Styrenes. Craig had left the band in early 1975 and joined Rocket from the Tombs. Weldon began publishing Psychotronic magazine, followed by two Psychotronic film and video books, and now has a record and memorabilia store by the same name. Jones joined Pere Ubu, and formed many other bands, most notably, The Easter Monkeys and Home & Garden; he passed away in 2008. Mirrors reunited in 2008 to play The Beachland Tavern. This show was followed by a couple of appearances in Cleveland, Studio-A-Rama @CWRU (2013) and The Beachland Ballroom (2014). Jamie Klimek continues to perform as Mirrors with different band members.
Craig Bell
Peter Laughner - Guitar, Vocals
Cheetah Chrome -Guitar, Vocals
Crocus Behemoth (David Thomas) - Keyboard, Vocal (lead)
Craig Bell - Bass, Vocals
Johnny Blitz (John Madansky) – Drums
Richard Lloyd - Guitar
Don Evans - Drums
Wayne Stick - Drums
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Best known for being Cleveland proto-punk trailblazers,...
Rocket From The Tombs were quite a different band when they formed and started gigging in the spring of 1974 by David "Crocus Behemoth" Thomas of the former musical comedy/parody act The Great Bow-Wah Death Band along with jokesters and Funn Bunns members Charlie Wiener (born Kim Zonneville) and Glen “Thunderhand” Hach. Drummer Tom “Foolery” Clements and later on teenage guitar wizard Chris Cuda completed the initial line-up, with Peter Laughner joining on guitar and vocals in late August or early September of 1974.
The six-piece RFTT's only show was opening for the British heavy metal act U.F.O. at Cleveland's Agora on October 21, 1974. Wiener, Hach, Clements, and Cuda all departed the group following this gig and guitarist Eugene “Cheetah Chrome” O’Connor, along with drummer Johnny “Madman” Madansky, joined around November. Bassist Craig "Darwin Layne" Bell, then still a member of the Lakewood band Mirrors, joined soon afterwards.
The “new” RFTT made its debut at what was dubbed the “Special Extermination Music Night” at the Viking Saloon on December 22, 1974 where they were joined by Mirrors and electric eels. Owing to his obligation to Mirrors, Bell did not play with RFTT at this gig or the second “Extermination Music Night” at the Viking on January 19, 1975, which again included Mirrors and electric eels. Following his termination from Mirrors, Bell finally made his onstage debut with RFTT opening for the semi-reformed Iron Butterfly at the Agora on February 10th.
Just over a week later on February 18th, RFTT would tape nine originals along with one Rolling Stones and two Stooges covers at the group’s loft rehearsal space for broadcast on the WMMS-FM program "Local Color" on February 23rd, 1975. Many of these recordings would later appear officially on the Smog Veil Records release The Day The Earth Met Rocket From The Tombs.
RFTT played three more shows before Madansky quit, and was subbed for by Pictures drummer Don Evans at their next show at the Agora on May 5th.
After 18-year-old Wayne Strick, an acquaintance of Bell's, became the group's drummer, what would become the final RFTT line-up did four shows in one week in July, playing the Viking on the 20th (with Mirrors) and 27th (with Tin Huey) and at the Piccadilly Penthouse on the 24th and 25th with a New York band Laughner had grown quite fond of: Television. Significantly, these were Television’s first shows outside of New York.
After the breakup of RFTT at the end of July 1975, two new groups emerged from the split:
Chrome and Madansky (now calling himself Johnny Blitz) formed Frankenstein with Jimmy Zero, Jeff Magnum, and former Mother Goose vocalist Stiv Bators (born Steven John Bator) who was considered at one point to replace Thomas as lead vocalist of RFTT (although this did not come to fruition). Frankenstein made their debut at the Piccadilly Penthouse on October 31, 1975.
Thomas and Laughner formed Pere Ubu with sometime RFTT soundman Tim Wright on bass and guitar, Tom Herman on guitar and bass, former Hy Maya synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine, and ex-Cinderella Backstreet/Fins/Hy Maya drummer Scott Krauss. Ubu would release their debut single in December of 1975 which included RFTT's "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" as its "A" side. Ubu made their debut on a joint bill with Frankenstein at the Viking Saloon on December 31, 1975.
Not long after this show, Frankenstein would change their name to Dead Boys (after a line in the RFTT song "Down In Flames" which they were now playing) and move to New York where they found considerable success. They continued to do "Down In Flames" along with other former RFTT songs including "Ain't It Fun", "Never Gonna Kill Myself Again" (re-written as "Caught With The Meat In Your Mouth"), "Sonic Reducer", and "What Love Is". Stiv Bators died in Paris, France on June 4, 1990, aged 40, due to injuries sustained after being hit by a car.
Pere Ubu would release the former RFTT song "Final Solution" as interpreted by Pere Ubu and become the "A" side of their second single, self-released in April of 1976, and would also perform a version of Laughner's "Life Stinks", first done by RFTT. Laughner was fired from Pere Ubu in May of 1976 and died from pancreatitis on June 22, 1977, aged 24.
Craig Bell would move to Connecticut in the fall of 1976 where he would lead several bands, including Saucers, The Bell System, and The Plan. After moving to Indiana in the 2000s, Bell would lead The Down-Fi as well as playing solo shows. Bell has also served as bassist with The Gizmos, Simply Saucer, and X__X.
Nick Blakey
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7 Questions with Cheetah Chrome
(Regarding Pete Laughner)
How did you two meet?
I met Peter through an ad in the Plain Dealer for, I believe, a guitarist and drummer. I remember the ad specifically mentioning the Stooges, and so I called up and we arranged to hook up at some little bar on W. 6th St. that was near the infamous loft (and had excellent chili). By the way, the RFTT tapes and that Frankenstein "eve of the DB's" EP were both recorded in the same room in that loft. Anyway, we got on all right,so we decided to have a jam.
Do you remember the first time you jammed together?
I believe me, Blitz, his cousin and a case of Rolling Rock made it down to a jam one night. Also present may have been Tony Maimone and Tim Wright, possibly Pete's wife Charlotte.
You wrote "Aint It Fun" together, right?
Yep, sure did.
Who wrote the words, who wrote the licks?
I had the music written before I met Pete, one of a couple of songs I brought to the party when we hooked up (also What Love Is, Transfusion, Never Gonna Kill Myself Again, Down in Flames, the basics for Amphetamine and of course, Sonic) Pete came up with these amazing lyrics, I'm not sure if he had them before or not.You wrote "Aint It Fun" together, right?
What did ya think of the Guns & Roses version?
A little polished for my taste, but they can cover any of my songs they want to anytime. Slash and Duff are real gentlemen.
What is your favorite memory with Peter?
We hadn't hung out in quite some time, and after the famous incident where Patti Smith threw him offstage, I was hanging out after hours at CB's, smoking a joint with Cosmo and Charlie, the light and sound guys at Cb's. We hear this banging at the front door, and when we open it, it's Pete. We ended up at my place drinking, playing records, shootin the shit, all that good happy crappy, just like the old days when we were still in Rockets. He went back to CLE the next day. The next time I saw him was a little over a month later, at his wake. Before we left I put a little guitar ear ring of mine in his hand, and I hope it's still there.
What is your funniest Peter Story?
When Charlotte threw a platform shoe at him for licking beer off of a local groupie's tits and broke his nose. He was throwing up blood all the next day.
Dave E. - Vocal (lead)
John Morton - Guitar, Vocals
Brian McMahon - Guitar
Dan Foland - Drums
Nick Knox - Drums
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Right after, just a few years after, no more than 5 years after Julius Caesar conquered the Gauls, seeing is that he had an affinity for splitting things up, he set his military might upon the Western Reserve...
There, he defeated the armies of Moses Cleaveland (thankfully, he had left the Ten Commandments tablets in the hands of Charlton Heston), and divided the city into two: the east side and the west side.
No one to this day knows why the west side was even settled. It was and still is a place of wild, disparate, and isolated clans and tribes. People were so pissed at its founding that Brutus took a knife to Julius so that the mistake would never again be repeated, although, from time to time, throughout America, people honor Julius by downing a flaggard of orange-ish slush in food courts that dot the land.
So, sometime around 1972 or 1973, no one is quite sure when, John Morton, a tall lad with a shock of blonde hair and a guitar, decided he had nothing better to do so he invented the electric eels. Whatever day it was, it also marks the invention of punk rock. Now, you may fret and disagree, it was The Ramones or Television or Talking Heads. Yeah, blah blah blah. You know how easy it was to be a weirdo in New York City in the early to mid 1970s? Real easy. The place was full of them. It was hard to be normal there, not weird. Anyone and everyone was weird in New York. Big deal.
You try pulling that shit in the Midwest in 1973. Dead meat is what you’ll be, dead fucking bunny meat. Then add to that 3 other musicians: Dave E on vocals, Brian McMahon also with a guitar, and Nick Knox on drums, and you have a locker full of dead meat. Dead fucking meat.
How they even survived to play 5 or 6 gigs is unknown. The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t have a category for “ the first time 4 people trying to impersonate a band in 1973 playing aggressive free jazz influenced punk rock tried to get a gig at a Top 40 bar in Cleveland.” If they did, it would read: electric eels. You ever walk into one of those places on the west side? Yeah, bullshit, they’d slice and dice your ass for even walking through the door. For a second, I just thought maybe David Byrne was singing about Cleveland: “this ain’t no CBGB’s”. The fuck it wasn’t.
In any event, that is what we have: 5 or 6 gigs, and rehearsal recordings made in near-complete isolation from any other scene. Listen to Agitated or Jaguar Ride and then go to your local butcher and listen to them make ground meat. It is the same fucking sound. No one in New York was attempting that in 197-the fuck-whatever. All they did was sing about girls on the beach and sniffing glue, or god forbid, Television sang about their feelings, and applied a couple power chords.
This is Cleveland, people. Cleveland in all its sarcastic fuck you revelry. This is the electric eels.
Frank Mauceri
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The eels’ gigs were always some sort of disastoplex (to use Johnny Dromette’s (John Thompson)) self explanatory term for such things. The very first electric eels gig August 1974 in Columbus, Ohio being a sterling example. Dave E.’s stage clothes were finished off with white Painter Pants in front of his jeans attached by looping his belt through the loops and he had attached several rat traps using the pressure power of the springs. John D Morton was wearing a totally ripped jean jacket that he had “fixed” by using several packs of assorted safety pins.
After the plug was pulled about 20 minutes into the set by the club owner, (an oft repeated occurrence) Dave and John decided to finish out the evening by drinking as much as possible, declining the offer of a ride from band mate, Paul Marotta mostly because they didn’t want to be seen in a Volkswagen Mini Bus.
When they left the Moonshine Co-op at the 2 am closing, John tried to hail a cab on High Street. What pulled up was a white Police Van.
"You’re drunk!" said cop #1. to John. "No, I am not!" He had John walk the white line which John did rather perfectly. Then cop #1 said, "It doesn’t matter, you’re still drunk!" He handcuffed Morton and tossed him into the van where he hit his head on the door. Being the good Catholic that he was, Dave went into the van willingly.
They arrived at 3 a.m. at a dark "cop" parking lot behind the jail where they had to wait for an elevator to take them to the cells some floors above. Two other officers joined the crowd. “What do we have here? Inquired one of the new arrivals.
"We got ourselves Ratman (alluding to the traps) and Bobbin . . ." (alluding to the safety pins). 3 a.m. in a dark hidden cop parking lot with nothing but 4 mean of Columbus Ohio’s finest John made the perhaps regrettable decision to take a stand and knee-ed the cop that tossed him in the van headfirst in the testicles. We should remember that John was handcuffed. John wound up facedown on the tarmac being beaten by the quartet of blue with billy clubs till they broke a finger on his left hand.
Two weeks later and on the second only eel’s gig, John played with a slide taped to his hand, earning his well fought sobriquet, "Broken Hand." By the time this went before a Judge the charges of "Drunk and Disorderly" and "Resisting Arrest" were dropped as the Court Appointed Attorney pointed out that Mr. Morton had suffered enough by brandishing the x-rays of the broken finger. Luckily for John, the judge agreed and John was released only loosing his initial $150 bail money that had been graciously supplied by Jamie Lyons (You know, that guy from "The Music Explosion" that sang "Little Bit O' Soul" The eels had opened for Jamie’s band "Hard Sauce").
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Dave E. and I were driving around one day. You know . . . just to drive around . . . like a joy ride like. Out of utter boredom, we picked up a young couple hitchhiking and Dave insisted that they tell a joke. The guy told a horrible jape about rubbing your dick with lard to make it bigger, the punch line of which was "I said lard . . .not shortening!" Dave grimaced, paused, then asked, with a great straight delivery while I am driving in my hulky scariness, "Did you hear the one about the two hitch hikers that were found murdered?" He scared the piss out of them.
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In the aforementioned (or perhaps aftmentioned, I am not posting this story) emerald doored eels enclave, there was always a red plastic dishpan full of soapy water in the kitchen sink on the theory that when a various eel would use a plate to eat (and yes we used plates to eat, sometimes) said eel could then dip it into the soapy water, rinse and voila! A clean dish! Fait a-fucking-ccompli!
The de facto was, the dishpan was always full of soapy water and dirty dishes. (I always thought Dave E. would get to them seeing as he was a professional).
One very very very fine proto-day, Brian had cause to usurp the sink (I think he dyed his hair) so he took the dishpan (full of course) and placed it on the back porch. When he terminated his task, he dutifully went to retrieve the dishpan and was met with three thirsty neighborhood dogs, hideously grinning at him from over the dishpan. Very scientifically, he evinced the curs were rabid, as foam was issuing from their mouths I later found him cowering in the kitchen where he related me the tale.
And oddly enough this incident is not where he got his nickname.
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Master, Master, this was recorded through a fly's ear . . .
When in Columbus, the entrance to the Eels enclave . . .( wait . . . I'll make it better ) . . . When in Columbus, one evinced that egress into the erstwhile eel's enclave, was through an elegant and evocative emerald-colored door, fenestrated its full length with plate glass in the manner of doors to the "olde shoppes" and "conveyance stores" that one would find along the breadth of quaint North High Street.
One particularly mournful spring morning, Dave E. decided he needed a break from the monotony of drinking infinite long neck Rolling Rocks and watching monster movies on Paul's black and white Zenith with the rest of the eelings. So he ventured out on to the boulevard for a constitutional.
Unbeknownst to us, that very afternoon the totally poncified "Ohio State Fuckeyes" were to engage in a competition with another school (If I had known, I would have proudly held aloft my thyrsus). The game was deemed of such import that the Goodyear Corporation had sent aloft their aerial ambassador, the USS Shenandoah, in order to commemorate the event.
I had just expressed my desire (for the fifth time) to have sex with both Emi and Yumi Ito, the diminutive chanteuses of the cine we were watching, when, after a deafeningly loud crash, Dave E. appeared in front of us covered in blood. thrashing his arms about yelling, "The Blimp! The Blimp! . . . It's the Blimp!" (it should be noted that there was only one zealous zeppelin in the entire world in 1973)
In the extreme urgency of his mission to appraise us of the flying behemoth (not to be confused with Crocus Behemoth), Dave had neglected to open the door. And being the stalwart soldier he was, he would not allow us to minister his wounds till we went out and saw the semi-rigid airship for ourselves.
Stiv Bators - Vocal (lead)
Jeff Magnum - Bass, Vocals
Cheetah Chrome - Lead Guitar, Vocals
Johnny Blitz - Drums
Jimmy Zero - Lead Guitar, Vocals
Driving north into downtown Cleveland you’ll notice to the east a number of large factories, some belching fire from the furnace smokestacks. To the west is the city’s gritty shipping transportation hub known as The Flats. Both of these places represent the birthplace of The Dead Boys...
There is a bit of myth, legend, rumor, truth, and falsehood regarding the start of the band. After all these years, it really is impossible to figure out the true story, everyone involved I’m sure has a different telling of events and some of those involved are no longer walking this earth. But, this much is certain: in 1974, the core lineup of Rocket From The Tombs, which was always in flux, came to be David Thomas, Cheetah Chrome, Craig Bell, Peter Laughner, and Johhny Madansky. At some point, after recording some demos, playing a few gigs, and achieving some radio airplay, the band split into 2 camps: Pere Ubu and the pre-Dead Boys band, Frankenstein. They also split up the songs, some of which are a canon of American independent underground music.
Cheetah, Johnny, and a crazed 99 pound singer named Stiv Bators formed the nucleus of the initial lineup of Frankenstein. The original band name was soon dropped and with the addition of Jimmy Zero and Jeff Magnum (along with the rechristened Johnny Blitz), the Dead Boys were born.
While that may sound a bit convoluted and I’m sure that the facts as described above are subject to interpretation, there is no doubt about this: The Dead Boys were the wildest, craziest, raunchiest, and incendiary of all the first generation punk rock bands emerging in the United States. Gigs in the Cleveland and Akron area were truly events: playing The Crypt, an Akron bar co-opted by members of The Rubber City Rebels, the gig ended as if it were a pro wrestling match as a scuffle between Cheetah and Mark Mothersbaugh erupted.
Sometime in early summer, 1976, the band decided to relocate to New York City, and I don’t suspect that the band members thought they were too big for Cleveland’s britches. Apparently, Joey Ramone convinced them to do so and as with all rock and rollers looking for an elusive recording contract, heading east or west is almost always the only choice. The Dead Boys went east to find their fortunes, Pere Ubu went farther east enjoying their successes mostly in Europe, The Rubber City Rebels and Devo went west to see what Los Angeles could offer. That’s just the way it was done in the 1970s.
And, success they did find. The band became one of the de facto house bands at CBGBs, sharing bills with all the big American punk rock names of the day. A sort of Cleveland night CBGBs gig with Devo ended in another scuffle between the bands, as to be expected. The Dead Boys soon caught the eye of a growing label, Sire Records and proceeded to put the craziness to tape.
Managing two studio records for Sire, both are must haves in any record collection showcasing the era. The first record, Young Loud and Snotty, is allegedly demos recorded in anticipation of a deal. Nevertheless, the record screams with punk rock anthems, some of which the band grabbed as part of the initial Rocket From The Tombs split. Of those, Sonic Reducer is the most well known and represents the best punk rock anthem ever produced by a band from Cleveland.
Hoping for larger fame, the label had the band take on a more glam appearance for the second record, hired a top producer who never produced a punk rock record before or since, and shipped the band to Miami to record. Some consider the effort to be inferior, I don’t. The record itself is full of high speed screamers, especially 3rd Generation Nation, Catholic Boy, Calling On You, and one last song from the Rocket From The tombs cache: Ain’t It Fun.
Things burned out quickly after the release of the second record. That’s how lots of bands end up: money, drugs, everyday stress and pressures: these things add up to create a demise that befalls nearly every great band. One of the band’s final gigs was a benefit for Johnny Blitz, held at CBGBs of course. Johnny had been stabbed in a street fight and needed money to recover, the ranks of the band filled out by a few members of the New York Dolls and none other than John Belushi.
But, otherwise, that was it, an incredibly bright but short lived flame. The members went their separate ways, playing music and seeking the greater fame they certainly deserved. Stiv found it with Lords of the New Church and made his way into a film or two, most notably a John Waters flick, Polyester. His life was sadly cut short after being injured while crossing the street in Paris. Cheetah played in numerous lineups, later reforming Rocket From The Tombs to great attention and then later reforming The Dead Boys with Johnny Blitz.
“Alright you animals in this rock and roll zoo…Sire Recording artists from Cleveland Ohio, the incredible and phenomenal, Dead Boys!”
Frank Mauceri
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It wasn't until after that spectacular Dead Boys concert at the old Agora where Stiv Bators hung himself from a ceiling crossbeam that I realized that drummer Johnny Blitz was John Madansky, the guy who'd sat next to me in study hall at Benedictine High School. John was an upperclassman and I didn't know him, and therefore had no idea of what musical projects he was involved in after classes. But it just goes to show you that some pretty cool stuff can come out of a Catholic education.
Tony Morgan
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Floyd and Mallchok were hangin' an' slummin' at Pirate's Cove. Dead Boys were playing every friggin' Friday or was it Saturday nite that July or was it August summer? Pere Ubu held court Sunday evenings.
Stiv threw his mic into the crowd and it landed at someone's feet. He unhooked it and pocketed the SM57. Stiv reeled the mic cable back up to the stage only to find his "favorite" 57 mic ripped off. Pouty boy left the stage. Show over for Stiv, much to his bandmates dismay. After all another mic had been readily made available to the lad, but noooo0... Cheetah strummed a few bars of something and we all drank minus pouty boy. Post Script: Floyd your memory is stellar. We too were at the Dead Boys show when Ig showed up for the finale. It was too hard to pry ourselves away from the bar but we viewed from afar.
Before I describe the Dead Boys, let me wander back to the beginning of seventies punk, for me...
Living in Providence, Rhode Island, where my two best buds were attending Rhode Island School of Design, I was in a musical crisis....
Sated on the overblown pomposity of "art rock" that I had been soaked in for the last decade, I was looking for a way back into rock & roll. Bruce Springsteen had helped; but I wasn't real pleased with the direction he started in with Born To Run.
In the meantime, my fellow art rock friends - and the great majority of the art students at America's most sophisticated college of art, I might add -- had drifted now into the "fusion" jazz that was so popular in the mid-1970s, among the "musical sophisticates" of the time. Man, was that stuff bad. Super-over-indulgent instrumental masturbation by a bunch of preening middle-aged former high school marching band members who were regretting that they had never rocked....
BUT: Something was happening. I remember reading a brief paragraph in the Providence Journal about an incident in England, where some guy named "Johnny Rotten" had "gobbed" at an airport and told a journalist on television that the queen was a "f***ing rotter." Evidently, he had a rock & roll band that was shaking up the scene in London, home of the aging dinosaurs of the British Invasion and their bastard stepchildren.
Well, one fine day I strolled into the local record shop, as usual on the prowl for something new, and there it was: The garishly colored, graphically vomitous, first record by England's "Sex Pistols." $3.98, it was, and an hour later I had a whole new music scene to play with.
One purchase led to another, and soon I had a growing collection of "punk rock" records.
Live rock & roll came alive for me once again. Seeing bands like Elvis Costello & The Attractions, the Ramones, the Clash, the Stranglers, the Damned, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, the Jam, Devo, Blondie, etc. in small clubs was a joy.
And then, home for Christmas (1977? 1978?), I caught note of a show scheduled for Christmas eve (?) at Cleveland's world-famous (?) Agora nightclub.... A twin bill of Northern Ohio bands: DEVO and the DEAD BOYS.
I can close my eyes and smell the sweaty, smoky, acrid stench of a packed nightclub on a very cold night... Entering, I saw a couple of moronic bouncers ejecting a girl from the club. In tears, heavy mascara running every which way like a prescient Tammy Faye Baker, she proceeded to vomit at the curb in front of the place... Something was up here.
Devo blew the place away. Now HERE was art rock.... Dressed in their classic flowerpot hats and industrial yellow jumpsuits, Mark Mothersbaugh at one point sang from a playpen laid out on the plastic-covered stage. Ah, alternative rock is alive and well in Cleveland, thought this observer...
And then: THE DEAD BOYS. Dark, glowering, focused like a razor, they came out and proceeded to pump through the material on Young, Loud & Snotty. No politics, no socialism, just furious Stooge-like energy and a sound like bombs exploding onstage.
These weren't disaffected New York art intellectuals; no sir. These were Cleveland boys. The only thing they were serious about was wringing every possible watt out of their marshall stacks. And they weren't pretty, either. Jimmy Zero looked just like the kind of guy who every mother was terrified that her daugher would come home with. Cigarette dangling dangerously from the corner of his mouth. Half in, half out of the dark. Cheetah equally menacing. Johnny "Blitz" Madansky literally thug-like.... Soon to meet the blade of a knife in his adopted hometown of New York City... I picked up some fills that night that I would carry into the tail end of the Backdoor Men's brief history...
And Bators. As in command of that small stage as Mick Jagger had ever been of any stage, anywhere. At the end of the last encore, he pulled his trick. Looping the microphone up over a beam in the low Agora ceiling, he then wrapped its cord around his neck and proceeded to hoist all (maybe) 120 pounds of himself into the air. Yes, he was hanging. FOR REAL???? We can never know, though his roadie seemed to panic and rushed to cut the cord and bring him down.
Maybe NOT real... He had enough presence of mind to conclude the act by dropping his drawers and thrusting his skinny a** to the audience, balls dangling, and a schlong that was SURPRISINGLY BIG waving between his bony knees.
This was punk, Cleveland style. Brutal, humorous, unpretentious, apolitical.
This was John Belushi's favorite band.
Of course, both Belushi and Bators are together somewhere now, I suppose. Most assuredly in a place that's very, very hot. Kind of like the Agora on that winter night, almost a quarter of a century ago.
Crocus Behemoth (David Thomas) - Horns, Keyboard, Sax, Vocal (lead)
Scott Krauss - Drums, Keyboard
Tony Maimone - Bass, Guitar, Vocals
Peter Laughner - Bass, Guitar, Vocal (lead)
Tom Herman - Bass, Guitar, Vocals
Tim Wright - Bass, Guitar
Allen Ravenstine - Keyboard
Mayo Thompson - Guitar, Vocals
Jim Jones - Guitar, Vocals
Garo Yellin - Cello
Anton Fier - Drums
Wayne Kramer - Guitar
In 1979, there were some interesting works of graffiti around town.
Everyone remembers, the pair of giant red lips, on the base of the support column, of the Detroit-Superior Bridge; back in the day, before they turned the flats into "The Flats". But, there was a shorter lived, but nonetheless, monumental piece of work, over on my end of town.
It coincided with a Salvador Dali exhibit, that was going on, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, at that time; and quite unrelated, I'm sure some miscreants, had done a job on the cement wall, that protects the trailer park, adjacent to the defunct, Euclid Beach amusement park. I don't remember the the exact content, but it was seven feet high, and eighty feet wide, and was comprised of at least three different colors of spray-paint.
It was at this time, that Gene and I, who were drinking beer, tripping on purple micro-dot, and listening to the D.O.P.E. weekly radio program, at my apartment on the corner of E.140th street; that we decided to go take a look at this esoteric vandalism. Down six flights of stairs and into Gene's VW Beetle, we did go; the sounds of THE MODERN DANCE by PERE UBU emanated from the speakers which serviced the automobiles tape deck. And, those songs were a gas!
We parked at the Ponderosa Steak House on Lakeshore Blvd., and headed east, on foot; and happened to run into Scott and John, of THE DISSIDENTS, who were walking the opposite direction. We exchanged pleasantries, and then continued with our psychedelic sojourn. A few minutes following the appreciation of the outdoor art, we found ourselves climbing the the inside of the western tower, of the archway that welcomed visitors to Euclid Beach for most of that century.(The arch remains standing to this day.)
Somehow, I lost my grip, and my footing, and plummeted nine feet, to the hard cement floor; landing on my backside. I could not fully realize, until the next afternoon, that I was not seriously hurt, but, needless to say, it sure ruined a good buzz on THAT Saturday night.
Lenny Hoffman
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Circa '77-'79, I forget the exact year, Crocus/David apparently made a visit to Schoolkids' Recs in Chapel Hill, NC, and either sold or consigned a stack of Hearthan 45s. My friend Robert Keely (of the H-Bombs) got the word and hustled down there, called me to tell ME to hustle down there, and we bought all we could afford. This, to us, was a major find -- local record stores did NOT stock "punk" 45s at this stage.
We subsequently started our own zine, Biohazard Informae, which was an outgrowth of a punk newsletter/propaganda sheet of the same name that Robert, Peter Holsapple, Chris Chamis and Mitch Easter of the H-Bombs had started to publicize their gigs. Meanwhile, Robert had written Crocus and lo and behold, we wound up receiving Ubu communiques along with promo Hearthan recs, and we had a major Ubu feature, complete with cribbed Ubuesque grafix for the artwork, in our first big issue of Biohazard. I still treasure my copy of "Jeffrey I Hear You", as much for the delicate sounds as for Crocus' hand-inscribed promo "stamp" that read something to the effect of "for promotion only, not for resale unless for big bucks."
Fred Mills
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The first time I was made aware of David Thomas he was introduced to me as Crocus Behemoth. We witnessed PERE UBU as they played a short set at the Pirates Cove, opening for the Akron girl band CHI-PIG. Leaving the flats that night I drove too fast up the hill by the double railroad tracks on Superior Ave. and totally bent the frame of my 1969 Chevy Malibu; that was the end of that car.
One of the more enjoyable Pere Ubu shows occured on a hot summer night in 1980, in the basement of the old Cleveland Agora. Playing guitar with them at the time was Mayo Thompson from the Texas band RED CRAYOLA. A short time later a contest was held to rename that downstairs club. The prize was a private party for twenty-five of your freinds in the newly renamed bar. Inspired by that memorable Ubu show I submitted a proposal to call it the DADA GO-GO. The winning entry?: the Pop shop; how lame! Scott and Paul of the DISSIDENTS agreed that I was ripped-off.
Lenny Hoffman
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There was me, that is me, Floyd, and my three droogs, sitting in my friends basement tripping our asses off trying to decide what to do with the night, when a drunken Bill F. Bash informed us that the Buzzturd was sponsoring the "rock around the clock orgy weekend". So high on acid at around 3am, we flew over to the old Agora. As we made our way to the stage, we fell to our knees and crawled to the front. It was total chaotic bliss for our young impressionable tripping minds. We thought it was Hawkwind at first. I'll never forget - there was Crocus Behemoth in a yellow raincoat pounding on an anvil with a hammer, it sounded like an airplane crash with drums. We were hypnotized. I don't think we spoke for like an hour, our brains had experienced a meltdown. We had seen and felt the wrath of god. About a month later, I was at the Viking saloon, when i accidentally threw a full pitcher of beer at the band Dragonwick. Suddenly, a powerful arm from behind put me in a headlock, guided me to the door and threw me to the curb. I looked up. Apparently, God was a bouncer in his spare time!
Floyd
Dan Cook - Vocal (lead), Guitar
Terry Hartman - Guitar, Vocals
Chris Cook - Guitar, Vocals
Al Johnston - Bass, Vocals
Karl Cecil "Casey" Meers - Drums, Vocals
Wild Bill Hagan - Guitar, Vocals
Byron Hahn - Bass, Vocals
Paul Nickels - Drums, Vocals
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The Backdoor Men: They came, they played, they drank, they went home to bed.
The Backdoor Men were first envisioned in the mid-1960s by the childhood friends Dan & Chris Cook (yes, brothers) and Terry Hartman, all of Fairview Park and all in the throes of an obsession kicked off first by the British Invasion and later fueled by the Byrds, Bob Dylan, and both urban and country blues. By the time the boys launched themselves onto Cleveland's original music scene in 1977, they had twisted these influences into a repertoire of a couple dozen originals in the "nuggets" psycho-garage mode to go along with their selection of British Invasion, American Psychedelic, and New York/Detroit "underground" covers.
Initially, the boys in BDM found it difficult to crack the Pirate's Cove, which was the center of a scene that included contemporaries such as Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, and others. Their solution was to start their own alternative showcase just down the street in a dingy bar called Fitzpatrick's Rainbow. Soon the lads were booking a slew of acts to accompany them in their weekly appearances in the small but perfectly-vibed venue.
Bands like the Kneecappers, Lepers, x-blank-x, Heironymous Bosch, Public Enemy and more suddenly had a new place to play, albeit mostly to friends and fellow musicians, and to develop their material in a friendly setting.
The boys were also among the inhabitants of cheap rehearsal space in Cleveland's then-moribund Warehouse District. First they shared space with associates of the Dead Boys on West Sixth St.; later, after suffering through numerous break-ins, they took over a huge loft on West Ninth St., which they sublet to several other bands and was the site of much drunken revelry. (It also featured on its first floor a small tavern called the Lakefront, where they would play a few years later.)
Soon Dan Cook, a journalist by the harsh light of day, had launched a publishing venue with the notorious VELAND magazine, his answer to the sporadically published (though informative) CLE. VELAND took the piss out of virtually EVERYONE, from the rotund David Thomas to the geeky Andrew Klimek, and fueled a good battle between Fitzpatrick's and the Cove, which eventually relented and began to book the Backdoor Men.
The Backdoor Men played virtually every venue available between Youngstown and Toledo and all points in between in 1978 and 1980. Never particularly sophisticated as musicians, they compensated with tons of material. Cook and Hartman were extraordinarily prolific. From the neo-psychedelia of Hartman's "Bomber's Moon" and Cook's "Neutralizer," the boys progressed through offbeat pop takes like Hartman's "Handicapped Kids" and Cook's "Bad Girl" to such timeless gems as Hartman's "Life" and "Literary Tradition," and Cook's "Ain't No Magic" and "Club Madrid."
In all, Cook and Hartman, occasionally aided by Chris Cook, generated more than 100 originals, a number of which were covered by other area bands in need of material.
As 1980 drew to a close, Terry Hartman - a man who took songwriting VERY seriously - was chafing to take full control, and parted amicably with the Cooks to form Terry & The Tornadoes. The Tornadoes were short-lived but critically acclaimed, and were indeed the Cadillac Fleetwood that finally realized fully the extent of Hartman's songwriting abilities. During this period, Hartman teamed with Jimmy Zero and Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys to record two of his originals for a single on Bomp Records, "Man with the X-Ray Eyes" b/w "Down with the Lonely Boys," but Bomp foundered and the single was never released.
The Backdoor Men soldiered on, working under a variety of names, self-releasing a 45 under the moniker of "Bomber's Moon," and generating even more material. Hartman eventually did return, and with the Cook Brothers and BDM drummer Paul Nickels, formed the band that was to be their swan song, Napoleon in Rags. Cook and Hartman put together a fresh batch of material, honed it to perfection, played out for a year, and then, like so many others of the era, appeared to disappear into the mists of time.
What's left - for better or worse - is the music. The boys in BDM were fortunate to have a great soundman in Dave Lach, who recorded virtually everything they and the bands they played with on reel-to-reel tape. BDM have been hawking three cd's - "Ride the Cerebral Surf," "One Two Ready Go (Time Space Electric Beer)", and "Laughner's Jukebox" - on their website, and are currently putting the finishing touches on a new record that will be issued sometime in 2003.
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No bands ever made any money on the Cleveland punk circuit, of course. Backdoor Men, who probably played out as much or more than anyone, kept financial records, and $1,000 was a good year, much less a good gig. But one summer night in 1980, they really hit gold.
Joe Charboneau was busy burning up the American League, soon to be rookie of the year. Dan Cook, the boys' resident promotional genius, got the brilliant idea to call Super Joe's agent and see if HE WOULD APPEAR WITH THE BAND. Unbelievably, the answer was YES. And the fee? A grand total of $100!
The lads got a nice picture of Joe made up by an artist, holding a guitar instead of a bat. Charboneau winds up hitting a home run to beat the Yankees, and damn if he doesn't show up half an hour later with his wife at Fitzpatrick's. The line is out the door and around the block. Backdoor Men, playing with Heironymous Bosch, rake in a grand. Charboneau clowns around on stage with the boys, signs a few autographs, and splits. Might've even drank some beer through his nose; can't remember.
Of course the windfall was not used to get some decent equipment; instead, it was quickly spent on the finest alcohol money could buy, of course.
Paul Nickels
Mike Hudson - Vocal (lead)
Mike Metoff - Guitar, Vocals
Tim Allee - Bass, Vocals
Brian Hudson – Drums
Bob Richey – Drums
Bill Digiddio - Bass, Vocals
Chas Smith - Keyboards
There was a moment in 1978 when time stood still in Cleveland. The “moment” was defined by the Pagans, a band that was so in the moment it became their end...
Looking back, you’d like to carp about the music gatekeepers of Cleveland during the mid-late 70s, WMMS and Scene Magazine. Their complete disregard of punk music was well known and in retrospect you can't blame them. Cleveland was and always will be a prolific music consumer so why would they waste air time and ink on the Sex Pistols, let alone the Cleveland underground, when their listeners wanted to hear Pink Floyd and read Rush and Bob Seger concert reviews.
For punks though, being in a consumer town had its advantages. In the golden age of 1977-79 I can think of five record shops from Mentor to Lakewood that had decent import sections. Those places were where you cut your teeth on the shit and the 45s were the bread and butter. Considering there were generously one hundred punks in Greater Cleveland there was plenty of vinyl to go around, especially if you were on the ball.
Every few weeks we’d trek to the coolest of all the record shops, Hideo’s Disco Drome. Record Rendezvous downtown had great stax, but the staff were aloof, artsy and standoffish. Record Revolution was OK, Record Exchange had some decent shit but were fucking pirates, and of course there was the misfit store at Great Lakes Mall in the front of Newberry’s, next to the lunch counter, that was the home of the two crabby guys that ran the joint. There was something genuine about the Drome though and it became our go-to store if for no other reason they had a cool vibe and always seemed glad to see us.
At the Drome we found singles by local bands like the Dead Boys, Electric Eels, Devo and Pere Ubu and we gobbled them up like Black Beauties, Mr. Natural and Viceroys. Quickly it sunk in that the Eels were dead, Devo had split for an artsier and more profitable locale and Ubu, who hadn’t permanently relocated, seemed haughty and for shit sake had more dudes in the band than Tower of Power. Of course we thought it was cool that The Dead Boys were “one of the ones” in punk, but those guys split for NYC, so they were Nettles and Chambliss to us. There was a Cleveland connection, but they were no longer a Cleveland band.
There was buzz at the Drome about another local band. The Pagans. On one of our visits I saw their single, “Six and Change” and bought it. My pal did too. When we got home and played it we had questions… “Who is Freddy and why did he hit one of the regulars at Traxx?” “B-Side? Holy shit it’s the same fucking song.” “Recorded live? Where? In the wrestling room at Mentor High?” “What’s with all these fucking cymbals?”
There was nothing that grabbed us musically, nonetheless we kept spinning it and by the time we smoked two cigarettes we knew it was the best thing we’d ever heard. Forty plus years later there is even less that musically grabs me, and it’s far from the best thing I’ve ever heard, but “Six and Change” might very well be the most important and influential record in ClePunk history.
The Pagans didn’t have Chris Thomas or Nick Lowe in the booth manning the board. Hell, the booth was a bong water and beer stained recliner in some Mentor shithole. “Raw” is an overused punk adjective that really indicates a lack of funds rather than a recording intention. “Six” was raw in that sense, but to us it was simply, “in your fucking face,” and it was from a band that was in our backyard.
And unlike the shit bands that Cleveland so proudly trotted out in the late 70’s (you remember, the fucks in hip huggers, gold coke spoon chains and feathered hair) you knew the Pagans didn’t make this record to get laid. They made this record because they had to. And though they didn’t really have anything to say, in 150 seconds they spoke volumes. That’s why “Six and Change” was and still is important and influential.
Soon after purchasing “Six and Change” another 45, “Street Where Nobody Lives” b/w “What’s This Shit Called Love” was released and it was then that we knew these guys were for real. Then, one Friday that Fall we got wind from someone at St. Joe’s that the Pagans were playing an impromptu gig at the Drome that night, so off we headed to Lakewood to sort out what these guys were all about.
I bet there weren’t thirty people in the Drome. Johnny put painting tarps over the records and pushed a few of the bins off to the side. We were standing around smoking butts and shooting the shit when the moment began, that seminal moment.
Mike Metoff, Tim Alee and Brian Hudson came out and started to fiddle with their instruments, then Mike Hudson brazenly strode through a makeshift curtain from the back room, grabbed the mic and said “This is a song about…” He started most songs with that phrase. Then, “one, two, three, four…”
For twenty minutes I was in some weird-assed setting, totally unprepared for what was happening. We were about 10 feet from the band and watched a sneering Brian carelessly bang away on the drums, yet keeping perfect time. Tim was up and down the fretboard with those salient bass lines that defined much of the Pagans sound. Mike rammed power chords and riffs down your throat. If Brian's bashing and Tim’s bass lines provided the foundation, then Mike framed, sided and roofed it. As performers, Metoff and Alee were badass, stoic as hell, no “rock” faces, no pretense, no poses; to me their image was their cool.
And then there was Mike Hudson. He was wearing wraparounds and sang leaning over a mic stand in a contortedly prone manner. He was what we knew punk to be but he didn’t entice the scant crowd to react to him by hurling insults or spitting beer. Nope, he just belted out one after another, smoking like Sinatra, and being totally in the moment. When their hell-fire set ended he exited by pushing his way through the curtain without so much as a glance behind. That’s pure fucking legacy.
Once the dust settled, we blew out of there, got in my pal’s VW Bus, lit a joint and headed east not saying a word until maybe E. 185th St. and even then, there wasn’t much to say. We felt the vibe, and whatever strata we thought punk was on an hour earlier was gone. It had just been redefined. This was a new game, a local game, a visually and audibly rebellious game, a game just for us and a few others. Fuck ‘MMS. Fuck Nazareth. Fuck that fraud Kid Leo. Fuck the idiots in their World Series of Rock t-shirts. We now owned this shit and it was a ’69 GTO revving its 366 and had a full tank of gas.
Sadly, neither of us had any idea that the summit had just been reached, that we saw the “moment” and that it was gone.
In late December the Pagans were slated to headline a show at the WHK Theater over on Euclid Ave. We didn’t realize at the time that Art Blakey and Monk had both played there in the early 1960’s, but that’s cool history in retrospect. Johnny Dromette was the show's promoter and was selling advance tickets at the Drome so we shot out to Lakewood to grab some. We found out later that the two crabby guys at Newberry’s had them for sale too.
The show, Distasto 3, had a start time of 9:00 and I reckon we strolled in sometime after. This wasn’t like a bar or club where you could stand around a dance floor or hunker near a high-top and be close to the shit; this place had proper theater seats. There was a balcony section and we figured that would be as a good place as any to get high for the next few hours so up we went. Relative to what ensued it was the best possible seat in the house. We were in the Enola Gay.
Most of the crowd had yet to show up as we suffered through sets by the insipid Chi Pig and the somewhat forgettable Wreckage. At least these were short sets and with the D team out of the way, notwithstanding the few Stroh’s cans that were heaved at Wreckage, the show was finally going to heat up.
As the remaining of the nearly 200 folks that showed up that night arrived I saw the smattering of local punks that were always at shows or the record shops. For the life of me I can’t remember if the rest were paste eaters, Bondo boys, Cars fans, or the curious, but there was a new bunch in the mix and a good number of them appeared ready for a scrum.
By the end of 1978 the Pistols had come and gone and mainstream piles of shit like Rolling Stone had written stories that glamorized the mob violence at punk shows. I’m not saying the hacks at Rolling Stone alone set the table for this new bunch of pre-Ritalin shit for brains, but the shit they and other rags wrote slowly began to shape the punk scene into a wider arc. This new bunch wasn’t a “let’s watch the train wreck” crowd, they were a “let’s derail the mutherfucker” crowd.
I’ve lived in many cities since leaving Cleveland 40 years ago and no shit, Cleveland is a tough sonuvabitch. Mind you, not a fake “chip on your shoulder” Boston tough, Cle is a genuine lunch pail, “let’s throw down for the fuck of it” kind of town.
Disasto 3 was suddenly defined by lunch pail meet punkers. “You wanna be punks mutherfuckers? We’ll show you punk.”
Things remained cool though while Bernie came out and did his thing. Even with the WHK percolating the idiots couldn’t act foolish towards Bernie. He was the puppy that belonged to the kid next door. He was the Herb Score of local punk. Honestly though, with all the newbs in attendance, most really didn’t know what to make of him, and to be real honest, at times, neither did we.
Then the Lepers took the stage. We had seen them a few times by then and I was so fucking in love with Barb it hurt. So much so that two years later I took my Lepers pin with me when I left for boot camp. At Disasto 3, they nailed their set. And in a rare treat Pie even slung a guitar around her leather clad body suit and played chords John Morton had yet to invent. As the Lepers exited the stage gangs of thugs were assembling at the gate, but they had yet to cross the moat.
To this day I have no idea why Styrene Money was on this bill, not because they sucked, which they did, in spades, but like Chi Pig, the shit they played, and I mean shit, just didn’t gel with the rest of the bands in the lineup.
The whole affair was now running about an hour behind schedule, consequently the crowd was an hour ahead of their “let’s get as fucked up as we can” pace and as such were as fucked up as they could be.
When the Pagans came on all hell broke loose and the thugs breached the moat. You’d have thought there was an “applause” light flashing that now read, “throw shit”. Beer cans rained from on-high pelting the boys but they didn’t miss a beat. And as they plowed through maybe a song or two, Hudson, flanked by Tim and Mike, began losing his footing as he slipped on the beer that had by now flooded the stage. This is when the set went FUBAR.
The “applause” light had now switched to “all bets are off, everything overboard!” and with that chairs flew on stage, a couch came flying out of the balcony from just to the left of where we were sitting, and if that doesn’t take the cake, as if on cue, stage lights randomly began to short out, popping with mini explosions everywhere.
While beer continued to pour down on the stage like the hammers of hell, fights broke out everywhere. Local posers of the day Swasti and Scruffs were acting like their usual imbecilic selves. The stage and lighting crew seemed to be instigating a brawl with the paste eaters when a roadie for Styrene Money, a real gem most likely wearing a Daffy Dan t-shirt, broke from his gang, ran across the stage to an amp and unplugged Mike. This was a major league dumbass move but you had to admire this guy’s pluck. Hudson was livid, and I thought he was going to kick the mother-lovin’ fuck out of this dude and he may have, because that last 10 minutes of wilding had made everything after a blur.
I’d like to say that we were intellectually above it all, and if not throwing shit at the band counts, well, I guess we were. But we didn’t react in a manner that would have indicated our displeasure at the dicks. Hell no, we were laughing like fuck, kind of like when someone starts honking their horn at the drive-in and in 30 seconds the entire grounds start doing the same.
Nearly twenty-seven years earlier Leo Mintz sponsored the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena, an event that history considers to be the first rock and roll concert. The legacy of that show was the integration of black and white audiences. There are conflicting accounts of that night and the scope of the turmoil, but at the end of the day the event brought people together.
Disasto 3 did anything but that. It polarized punk in Cleveland. For many the music was the rebellion and there was no need to wreak havoc on the world with tough guy bullshit. We weren’t dweebs from Shaker Heights, we were ‘burb kids over 6’ tall that played sports and could hold our own. But instead of brawling, being on the "X" to us was all about watching the few bands that could really pull it off, bands like the Pagans that could intimidate us by their sheer presence. Gnarling guitars, vocals with no comprehensible words, crashing drums and that “stick it in your fuckin' ass if you ain’t liking it,” attitude. That was punk. But the paste eaters fucked that all up, and if the Meltdown of ’78 lit the fuse, Disasto 3 was pure Tannerite.
Johnny Dromette didn’t intend for this to happen. I’m sure he didn’t bask in the aftermath thinking he had just brought punk to the Cleveland map. Shit, no one wanted to be him that night. The place was a shambles and someone was going to catch holy hell.
And sadly, we had no idea as the Pagans exited the stage with instruments being tossed and Mike wildly swinging at the roadie, that it was over and that the “moment” had come a few months prior on a Friday night at the Drome, and the “moment” was defined by it now being gone.
The Pagans sparingly played in 1979. They were famously snubbed a month or so after Disasto when the dumbass Agora booked even dumber ass Alex Bevan to open for the Clash, after announcing the Pagans would be on that bill.
At some point the boys went to NYC without a pot to piss in and played CBGB’s and Max’s, the Louvre and Prado of punk venues. These gigs paid the band nothing and were days apart. They were broke, starving, getting fucked over by Dromette, yet were met with positive New York reviews. Regardless, the NYC gigs and a few other Midwest stops in the ensuing months became their Waterloo.
By the end of 1979, NY had scrapped the artsy frauds like Patti Smith, Lou Reed, and their fake, smack booting moppet hangers on, and now harbored the credible Heartbreakers, Ramones, Richard Hell and Cle's Dead Boys. The Cramps split the city sometime around ’79 and went to Cali, which by then had acts like the Bags, Germs, Dickies, and Fear. Detroit had the ghost of Iggy and the cool as shit Destroy All Monsters. Amazingly, cities like Chicago and Boston had their enormous heads in their collective asses and had yet to yield any local punk. This was payback for the audible chum known as Styx and Aerosmith I reckon.
And then there was Cleveland in ‘79. I’d argue from 1974 to 1979, Cle was as prolific as any punk town in the US and yielded plenty of seminal music. We were right in the wheelhouse yet were too fucked up to contextualize that the best of them all, the Pagans, had left the yard quicker than a Dan Spillner change up and after their breakup the punk scene in Cle would never be the same.
I was gone from Cleveland by 1982 when the Pagans reformed with bassist Robert Conn (the vocalist on “Six and Change”), Bob Richey on drums (who for my money was the best punk drummer the ClePunk scene ever had) and the late Chas Smith on Keyboards. This lineup was dubbed “the Pink Pagans” by some, I’m not sure if Mike and Mike ever endorsed that, I guess it doesn’t matter. If nothing else it does discern the reincarnation from the original lineup.
This re-birth was absolutely as viable as the original Pagans in many ways, most notably to me was their adherence to their image. Hardcore punk was knocking on the door and even then was a mixed metaphor. A nameless friend, recently stated through another nameless friend, something to the effect of, “the dudes you hated in high school were suddenly at punk shows, fucking it all up.” Nonetheless the Pagans didn’t move in the direction of hardcore whatsoever. They held their ground, while retaining their roots, and though I was gone so can only go by recordings, if anything they became more rhythm and bluesy at times while retaining their grit, energy, songwriting ability and cool.
When it was all said and done, the Pagans were mismanaged, they drew the short straw of being in the wrong town (but at the right time), they no doubt found themselves to be big fish in a small pond and as such they succumbed to the temptations of the day. All of these contributed to their end, and in the end the legacy of the Pagans can be remembered by a definitive moment that Cleveland had never seen before and will never see again.
Mark Vocca
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Fuck..... the Pagans. These stories are gonna come, but man they are buried way deep inside. They dig down into what the fuck I became and believed in and they are numerous and crazy.
It is a fucked up tale I guess, to look back and think the Pagans, Mike Hudson, Bill DeGidio, Johnny Rotten and John Belushi were the beacons of light in my boy turns to man years! I turned 18 in late '78 and it was a great time to do so, especially from a musical point of view.
Everything in my gut was raging and my world was spinning inside out. I feel that Alice Cooper's song "Eighteen" is a masterpiece. It totally captures that moment in a young male's life.
There is no way to understand it at the time of being 18 but as you age and then think about the lyrics, they paint the truest picture of what I can remember feeling back then.
So where the hell am I anyhow in this self revealing moment? I think somewhere around the time in early '78 that Randy Primozic brings the Ramones "Rockaway Beach" 45 over along with the Pagans "What's This Shit Called Love" 45. After that, it was over.
I had something like 150 albums of WMMS influenced buying habits (Zep, Fleetwood Mac, J. Geils, Nugent...you get the picture) and realized I could never again listen to them. I piled them all into the back of Randy's old Skylark and we headed to the Record Exchange in Coventry. Naturally, they fucked me on the trade.....I think I ended up with about 20 LP's in return, but I didn't give a shit.
Now I had things like the Damned and Patti Smith and the Dolls and the Stooges and more. Then it just kept washing over me like a raging sea....Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks.
I had this girlfriend around that time, I am living in Painesville. I find out the Pagans and Dead Boys are playing the Painesville Agora. There was a great pizza joint next to that Agora, called Angelos. We went up there around 5pm to get a pie and I was gonna pick up some tickets for that nights show. I remember seeing the Pagans unloading equipment from a car, it's broad daylight and it's Painesville. Their look blew my mind.
I ate that pizza with that girl and then we broke up. She wanted nothing to do with people that looked like that. Myself.....I wanted nothing more to do with people that didn't. That night is still one of the best shows I ever saw.....Pagans/Dead Boys...late '78.
Cheese
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It's four o'clock in the morning, and the Pagans are pissed off.
"Chicago is a great city," lead singer Mike Husdon tells me as our train inches through a steady drizzle into the South Canal passenger station, "but we've been playing at home every night for the past week, and we really thought we'd get to rest for a couple days before going on the road."
I nod sympathetically and glance over to the nearby seats, where the other band members, unable to sleep, squirm in various degrees of restlessness. There's Hudson himself, prim and dapper as ever in his usual white plastic-rimmed punk sunglasses, gold-and-black smoking jacket, and straight leg jeans; guitarist Tommy Metoff, who allegedly has never smiled once in his entire life; tall, lanky bass player Tim Allee; and Brian Morgan, one of the most crazed drummers in all of punk rock.
Manager Johnny Dromette, bundled up in a gray and white fur coat, comes down from the front of the car and precedes his charges off the train. He waves away a contingent of local fans, most of them female, who've gathered in the pre-dawn rain to welcome their Cleveland faves.
"No pictures, please," says Dromette, as someone whips out an SLR upon which is mounted a flash gun the size of a cigar box. "The Pagans are very tired; please, no pictures."
Now, see, what I've just done is demonstrate the power of well-executed (ahem) rock journalism. Most of you are probably on the edge of your seats, wondering what the Pagans did to Chicago. Well, they didn't do anything on this particular trip, because they never went. The above scene was how it would've gone, except that another band that was supposed to play pulled out, causing the whole gig to fall through, along with most of the riffs I was gonna use for this article.
In fact, many of my efforts to hang around with the Pagans and thereby interview them have been frustrated by circumstance. Before concerts they're busy psyching themselves up; afterwards they're too worn out. Finally, though, the group and I met at Hideo's Discodrome (the most well-known new wave nerve center/record store in northeastern Ohio) after closing time to shoot the proverbial breeze.
The Pagans are one of Cleveland's most impressive success stories. In a little more than a year, they have clawed their way to the top of this area's "second wave" of new music bands. Hard core fans now speak in awed tones of "Paganmania" (a very real phenomenon if you've ever been to one of their concerts). It has become de rigeur for the fashionable punk rocker to be "seen" in the general area of Mike Hudson and Co. as they hold court before their show at a dimly lit corner table (with Johnny Dromette, as always, lurking watchfully in the shadows).
But the Pagans' rise to their present level of popularity can in no way be termed meteoric. They accrued more than their share of scars on their way up, as has virtually every new wave band struggling to make a name for itself in a world ruled by the creaky, bloated neo-fascists of dinosaur rock.
The original Pagans, driven to action by the boredom then casting its clammy shadow across their native Euclid, came together in July 1977. Only three months later they cut their first tune, the liver-than-live "Six and Change," which was released as a double A-sided single on Neck Records.
"That song wasn't exactly one of our better moments," explains Hudson, doubtless referring to his own gut-sizzling two-chord axemanship, which dominates, if not totally smothers, the rhythm section and vocals (at the time, an aluminum siding worker named Robert Conn was handling singing chores). Most Pagan fans would agree that "Six and Change" is a sloppy song at best, but many also maintain that even so, in its own way the tune is every bit as vital and important as some of those equally unprofessional Stooges demos.
In January 1978 the group's regular guitarist quit after a gig at the Pirate's Cove, and Tommy Metoff was recruited to replace him. Metoff's entrance completed the evolution of what is now known in punk rock circles as "the Pagan sound."
If forced to describe this "sound" with a minimum of adjectival spew, I would say that it is 1) heavy, 2) dense, and 3) fast. Listening to the Pagans is a lot like getting bashed across the skull with a lead pipe. For several days after one of their concerts you go around saying "huh?" because your ears are so decimated all you can hear is a painful, high pitched whine that lingers like a bad hangover. But, of course, you love it so much that the next time they play you're right up there next to the P.A. again, screaming and puking and getting drunk like all the other truly decadent punkoids.
Anyway, last March the Pagans came under the entrepreneurial wing of Clevo new wave cult hero Johnny Dromette, who bought up the "Six and Change" single and offered the band his services as manager/producer. They accepted, and recorded their second 45, "Street Where Nobody Lives" b/w "What's This Shit Called Love?" that same month on Dromette's own Drome label. In October it was released, and the Pagans went back into the studio to lay down four more tunes ("I, Juvenile;" "I Don't Understand;" "Not Now, No Way;" and "Boy Can I Dance Good"), this time with David Thomas of Pere Ubu producing.
Before their formation and later, during their rise to the top, the Pagans kept a close eye on Cleveland's new wave scene and the music industry's reaction to it. They've been considerably less than pleased with what they've seen.
"It kills me how Cleveland radio handled Devo," Hudson says. "They ignored them until the last possible moment, and now that they see Devo will be big whether they help or not, they jump on the bandwagon. About the only radio station here worth listening to is WRUW, which has supported us and other local new wave bands from the beginning."
The response of some bands to what they see as music industry closed-mindedness has been to "buddy up" to the "system." When I point this out, Hudson laughs.
"Not the Pagans, man," he says. "We'd like to see the entire rock establishment in this city destroyed. And if enough people, like Devo and the Dead Boys, can make it without the help of this establishment, it will be destroyed.
"Everybody says punk is dead," he continues. "Actually, it's never been better. There's Pere Ubu on Chrysalis, the Cramps on Columbia; Devo, the Dead Boys...All these are Cleveland-Akron area bands, but they've had to get out of Cleveland to make it."
What about the possibility of the Pagans having to leave?
We'd rather not talk about that right now," Hudson says carefully. "We've built up a pretty good following here, so let's just wait a while and see how things turn out."
The Pagans have also built up very dedicated followings in Minneapolis and
Chicago, and the possibility that they may have to split to one of these cities in order to survive as a musical unit has cast a pall over Cleveland's new wave community, resulting in an "enjoy them while we can" sort of fatalism.
As a final note, I'd like to offer my own critic's appraisal of the Pagans. The guys claim they're influenced by the Stones, the Velvet Underground and the Animals. But I don't think they're giving themselves enough credit. They may have inherited the spirit and attitudes of these groups, but Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Eric Burdon have never conducted themselves onstage with the spectacular pent-up paranoid fury of Mike Hudson. And, to track down any precedents for that unique "Pagan sound," one would have to turn to biblical descriptions of the Apocalypse itself. Rolling thunder. Gloom and doom. Throbbing machismo, encased in black leather with the volume cranked up to ten.
The Pagans are not urban, they are post urban. When the nuclear missiles have all been launched and human civilization reduced to slag, the Pagans will be the only band left, standing waist-deep in corpses to whip up "I, Juvenile" amid the rubble of our cities. I'll be right there, slamming my forehead into Tommy's amp, blood streaming from my ear-holes, bellowing out the words to each and every song. Will you?
(Author's note: This is the "lost" Pagans article that I wrote in November 1978 for Scene Magazine. I intended for it to be the "breakthrough" article that would bring the band to the attention of a much wider audience, but the powers that be filed it away without comment. I eventually took it to the Cauldron, a student paper at Cleveland State University, to which I was a frequent contributor.
Tony Morgan
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I had the good fortune to catch the Pagans many times in the late 70's. The show that sticks out in my mind most was when Patti Smith made an appearance at the Drome. Patti was in town to play the Palace Theatre that night, and was doing an in store appearance. However, while in our fair town, some evil Clevelander stole her beloved clarinet. She took the opportunity to rant and whine about the loss of said clarinet, condescending to us poor dumb Clevelanders, begging for its safe return or for someone to give her another. She left the pedestal a seemingly emotional mess.
Enter the Pagans, Mike Hudsons first words "Ugh, someone stole all our equipment, we cant play with no equipment, someone please give us some amps." I loved it. After her "you poor dumb Clevelanders" tirade, Hudson gave it back like "you sorry ass New Yorker." Ahh, Punk bands from Cleveland, no apologies. The Pagans then proceeded to rip and roar thru a chainsaw set, Hudson's whiskey and cigarettes voice wailing over the top. Twenty minutes of mayhem - no thank you, no goodbye. Guitars crashed to the floor and they were gone. In case you're wondering what happened to that clarinet, I hid that uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for 22 years. I'm putting it up for sale on e-bay tomorrow if you're interested.
Floyd
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The one time I can remember going to a Pagans show it was a riot. It was Disatodrome3 at the old WHK auditorium on Euclid Ave. Me and Gene had been drinking beer all evening and smoking too! (controlled substance). He had ordered some black capsules through an ad in the back of Rolling Stone magazine that were loaded with caffeine designed to keep the users alert.
We sat through Chi Pig,a band from Akron with two chicks and a boy drummer, and Bernie and the Invisibles (a lone guy playing electric guitar; I had thought then I had gotten the joke) among others.
Perhaps exacerbated by the sunglasses I was wearing that night, in an effort to look "Punk", and by the ingestation of the cheap "drugs", at some point I passed out. When I finally came to I asked Gene if the Pagans had played yet. He said yes and it was really cool because there was a riot. I had slept through the best part of the show!
Lenny Hoffman
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I was thrown off the safety patrol in sixth grade, for using excessive force on a kid changing in one of the lavatory stalls.
I'd lobbed a sneaker at him, after he'd tossed it out the door, protesting my verbal abuse, as he was late for class.
It was fine to stand around before homeroom, saying "single file" or "against the wall" in a surly mantra. We'd been chosen, after all, because we were precocious, the leaders. It was our job to boss the other kids around, especially the younger ones. If they sassed us, we checked them off for a "violation." We kept small notebooks in our pockets for this.
We wore a silver badge, just like a junior cop, but it was on an orange harness , a kind of sash. The orange, under car headlights in the early morning hours, would show the crossing guards, working the main streets in the snow and rain. The hall guards, we'd just come in early, hang out; amuse ourselves with activities like throwing tiny superballs around the gym. The balls, inevitably, would end up somewhere behind the polished wooden stage, subdued by the plush curtain, cornered by some 2X4s or a stray theatre prop. We would carry them in a pants pocket and bring them out when we got to school. If you didn't have one, you could usually rummage around backstage, until you found one where it had bounced the day before. . . stuck in a corner, or under an overstuffed chair.
We were on the safety patrol, of course, to let the students know that somebody, even one of their own, was always watching them. We were narcs, before anyone used drugs. We were the collaborators. Norway had its Quislings; Wickliffe had hall guards.
"Turn in in your badge", was all Mister Davis said when I entered his tiny office, strewn about with weights and equipment. The captain of the safety patrol, phys ed teacher, never without his aviator shades. Real tough-talkin' guy, wiry, muscular, hair slicked straight back. I felt disgraced merely by his curtness, as was intended. No longer worthy of his time, even for a lecture, I wasn't one of his boys anymore. On the outside.
From then on, the role of outsider beckoned to me. The loners in Jack London books, the misfits in space operas; soon, a growing alienation would allow Sisyphus and Kierkegaard into my world.
Randall Vogt
Intro by Bernie
Yes, I formed a band a few years back called Bernie and the Invisibles. It all happened when this slush started seeping into the holes in my shoes as I waddled down the Avenues of the East Village. It occurred to me that no one in NY was interested in forming a band with me. So, as I was on the verge of pneumonia due to the seeping slush, I said, "Aha! I will call my band Bernie and the Invisibles!"
I got an audition at CBGB's on January 23rd, 1978. Despite the great audience reception my "band" got, I was not asked to come back. The door-man told me my act "still needs work". So, when I was almost broke, I went back to Cleveland and met a drummer (Peter Ball) who lived in a Bratenahl mansion. Soon we were able to be a backup band for the Pagans after a very productive meeting with their Mgr. Johnny Dromette.
We got to play a bunch of seedy bars around town, which got us some exposure. Now, it must be said that half of what is written in my bio is true and half of it isn't. (I'm not going to tell you what is and what ain't.)
And, yes, I'm still alive despite almost having given it up due to a car hitting me on foot in late March of 2003. Now, I am not too disappointed that my band never "made it" by signing a big record contract or playing in football stadiums.
I was never in it for the money. I was in it because so many bands are/were both lame and have almost nothing worthwhile to say. I hope people found the Invisibles to be an alternative to all that. I was happy that I met the Pagans because they struck me as having an attitude. I like that. I wanted to prove that I could play on the same bill as they did. I hope I succeeded.
My most enjoyable concert was my debut at the Pop Shop borrowing drummer Linda from the Easter Monkeys. My least enjoyable concert was my debut at Swanky's in Athens Ohio. I saw a Beyond Bizarre program recently that said that Ohio U. is haunted with all the tortured souls of those who were lobotomized. It was creepy as hell, so yes, I hitched back to my beloved town of Cleveland! I was not and still am not angry about it. I just needed to skedaddle! I am also not too bummed out that I did not get too much wax out with Bernie and the Invisibles songs on them.
I thank Mike Hudson for putting my band on two Cleveland Confidential sampler albums. If someone wishes to put out a bootleg Invisibles album that's fine with me. But as I said, I was never in it for the money. And if this album ever occurs, and you are thinking of listening to it please remember that there are many bands who have a better singer than I am, there are many bands who have a better guitar player than I am, there are many bands who have better musicians than I did, but very few bands that have had the magic my band had when we were at our best. You either loved us or you hated us. Either way, I appreciated it all...
Thank You!!! Truly,
Bernie
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Bernie Joelson, quite out of the blue, submitted the above story to ClePunk.com back in 2005. Recently, I was preparing to write a ClePunk bio for the Bernie & The Invisibles.
I was going over questions in my head, mentally readying for the get together, when I remembered the bio Bernie had submitted all those years earlier. It occurred to me right there and then, that would be the one to use, as no one could tell the story better than Bernie himself...
I thought about cancelling the meeting, knowing the task at hand had already been completed, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I had to go. I'd seen Bernie & The Invisibles, many many times in fact, opening for the Pagans back in 1979, yet I had never met him. I knew I'd forever be kicking myself in the ass if I passed on a chance to sit and talk with him.
So on a brisk, end of summer Sunday morning, we meet at Peace Park in Cleveland Heights. There is a small brick circle at the Coventry end of the park, with four blue benches. It sits completely shaded under a group of short trees. Bernie has arrived first, and as I approach I notice a Hennessy box next to him on the bench. He looks up from his book and we exchange simple pleasantries.
We talk for a good ninety minutes and conversation flows easily for the most part. There are sudden moments of confusion and silence however, when we just seem to be in two different worlds. Bernie is naïve and charming. He's still the guy I remember on a stage all those years ago fascinating me, so different than the rest, and Bernie is still a genius. I would later recount the meeting to Charles Abou-Chebl (My Mind's Eye) and he would say to me, "we're just mere mortals Cheese, he's Bernie."
Bernie tells me he was born in Florida in 1953, the son of a military man. He tells me the family moved a lot. He tells me the 1974 New York Dolls' album was the one that blew his mind. "So bold, the attitude!" he says and then breaks into song, "and now you're walking, just like you're ten foot tall..."
Recalling gigs he did prior to starting Bernie & The Invisibles, Bernie tells of one that he did with David Thomas on drums. "He was Crocus then. Croc O' Bush. He just flailed his arms, wildly. There was another guitar player and there was a bass player. I was on guitar and vocals. David said it was so bad that it was good. I think it was at some Slovenian Workmen's Home over by Lakeshore."
He gets philosophical a lot. And this is when he transcends to the stratosphere. One tale he tells me is of a mirror, broken into a million pieces, and each piece reflects the same image of when it was one piece and it's all just one piece, one truth. How each leaf on the tree is the whole tree. He has the aforementioned Hennessy box with him and tells me that he found it on his bus ride to the park. He ties it in with playing at Hennessy's. He has a paperback book, recently found as well, regarding the afterlife and relates it to his cut "Eventually", which appeared on the infamous Cleveland Confidential 7" EP.
Bernie comes alive at moments, talking about certain songs, and freely belts out the lyrics. A group of teenage girls walk by while he is singing and they don't blink an eye. A fit couple in their 40s, trotting past with their golden retriever, are also oblivious to the guy on the bench singing. It's a surreal moment for me. I think about the oblivion Bernie's music and Bernie himself has lived in, but it feels so natural and it takes me back. It's Bernie, full of confidence like he was 40 years ago, on a stage, joined by visible or invisible members, entertaining a crowd with joy, no matter the size of it. He's naïve, he's charming, he's genius and he's just singing his songs.
He has me drop him off, at a busy intersection, away from his residence. My guess is he likes to keep the location a secret. I watch Bernie cross the street at the light and head back in the direction we just came from. I've got the windows down and I'm feeling pretty good. I think he had enjoyed our time together as much as I had. I take another glance in the side view mirror and Bernie has vanished from sight. Something about that breaks my heart. Cheese Borger
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"And then there were Bernie and the Invisibles. I toured with this guy one time and he got mad at us and walked all the way home from Columbus to Cleveland, Ohio which is about two hundred miles.
His mercurial nature was responsible for the fact that his only commercially released tracks were the live cuts on the two Cleveland Confidentials. When he first started playing out at CBGBs with the Talking Heads or in our home town with us and the Cramps, it was just him and the electric guitar, hence the band name Invisibles.
Later, he got a couple of guys to play bass and drums and in fact recorded an entire album with Tony Maimone of Pere Ubu producing, featuring such classics as "Chinese Church" and "PCP". Maybe somebody will have brains enough to put it out someday.Somebody told me Bernie was dead a couple of years ago. And then I heard he was washing dishes at the YMCA at 105th Street. I live far away now and haven't been able to check it out."
Mike Hudson - Liner notes from Cleveland Confidential Overground Records UK
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Well let's see... I have a Bernie story.
My sister Laurie and I met Bernie in I would say end of 1978 or very early 1979. (My memory is a bit fuzzy too.) My story is so relative to this site because after our initial meeting where I gave Bernie a big Birthday Kiss...
He then out of the blue came over to my parents house one Friday evening.(this was March of 1979). I was somewhat exhausted from working my mail room job at Motch and Merryweather Sawblade Mfg. Inc., but there was the knock on the door and low and behold it was that Bernie guy.
Well we hung out in the basement of the house for a while just talking, I probably gave a swift introduction to my parents for Bernie but at the time they were like glued to their Lazy Boy Recliners and not much interested in anything except making sure we were not smoking pot, of course all the siblings definitely were, and their were six of us.
Anyway there was no way we were going to hang out at my folk's house so I assembled my needs for the evening which included a warm bottle of beer hidden in the rafters of the basement and whatever was left from my stash of smoke. ( Bernie did not partake in any of this) So, he suggests we take a bus to Mike Hudson's house which we did and I think that was around East 200th street in Euclid somewhere, Or did we walk? ( it was a very rainy evening I might add.) I think we were a surprise visit there but never the less we all pile into this car and drive to a party in Richmond or Highland Hts.
The Party was in honor of David Thomas's girlfriend Lynn who was going back to England. I remember being quite high and fascinated at all the guest... Band people and all. People I had seen around but too shy to really talk to. I am left somewhat alone because Bernie had been talking to some friends. I ended up talking most of the night with Tony Maimone and his buddy Mik Melon. (Does any one remember this party?
Ties were handed out and a single played constantly which was Tv O.d. Tv O.d.) The evening was pretty good but I was a bit ruffled when Bernie tells me he is leaving with Johnny Dromette and asks Tony if he would drive me home...I hardly knew the guy but I thought his friend Mik was kinda cute.
So Tony drives me home. Very gentle man like I might add. The next day he calls and asks me if I would join him for a film at the Art Museum. and I did. We went to the Plaza later and their was his friend Mik, in the parking lot passed out from the evening before. Good thing there was a matress by the dumpster.
Well after that Tony and I hung together for about eight years got married and the whole bit. Now he lives in Brooklyn. So maybe this story encompasses more of the people in the scene of the day, and living at the Plaza was one of the most rewarding times of my life. I miss alot of the people there, some have passed on too.
But thanks to Bernie whom I still see once in a great while and always has some words of wisdom to share, my life had taken a turn on a path that has been filled with many a great time. I have been really lucky in some ways and I am still learning about alot of the twists and turns of that path and all it's avenues.
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I first met Bernie at a restaurant where we both worked, myself a busboy and he a dishwasher. I'd first heard of him five years earlier from my dorm friends/bandmates (at ohio U.) who'd worked/hung at the Drome record store. We started to talk a bit about music, and at one point he told me something that I will always remember, that dishwashing had taught him him everything he knew about rock 'n roll (maybe it was vice versa, no matter). If you've ever really washed dishes, then you've seen the connection. Not too long after this, my group had a gig at the Pop Shop and we could choose our own opening band. I asked Bernie and he agreed to do it. The set was a treat - Bernie singing and playing one of our guitars and Linda Hudson from the Easter Monkeys on drums. It was great, someone was heckling Bernie, but his comebacks made it seem like the heckler was a plant (example: "Hey Bernie, where are the invisibles? Bernie's answer: "in New York" at which point he launched into his tune "In New York". Perfect. I still see him around every once in a while; it's always good to see him.
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