cleveland

The ballooning spate of hard rock and slight psych groups at the end of the ‘60s and into the ‘70s yielded such a huge catalog of useless dreck that it, often times, isn’t really worth the time to wade through the resultant products. It’s not the fact that these folks weren’t talented, but how many variations on the James Gang do you need? Probably none. But that Cleveland band, while probably only impacting the world at large by giving us Joe Walsh was pretty big in its home town. So big, in fact, that they were able to drag a few other Northeastern Ohio acts along to the national stage. One of these groups was the Damnation of Adam Blessing. Read more

Clevo, 1978Anyone that grew up in the mid-west, outside of Chicago at least, has imagined what life could be like if only they lived somewhere else. David Thomas obviously imagined such things, as he currently resides in France, which recalls the mass exodus of black jazzbos to Europe in the ‘40s. But the music that Pere Ubu creates is uniquely mid-western. And even more specifically, it’s an aural representation of the inner-city of Cleveland.

While Cleveland often enough gets a bad rap, there are now innumerable opportunities for unique avenues of expressions. Not so thirty years ago. When Pere Ubu began, they presaged post-punk, which seems ridiculous considering that in 1975 the tag punk didn’t really resonate yet. Even beyond that, the relative isolation of original music in Cleveland seems to have given rise to something that couldn’t necessarily have been attained in NYC. Read more