It Has a Skyline

After a few years in Florida, my mom moved back to the west side of Cleveland in the mid-2000′s. I’m glad she’s closer to me, of course, but I’m also grateful to have an excuse to visit my home town every now and then, to see how things have changed. Like this past weekend, when I went back for Thanksgiving, visiting the old stomping grounds and stirring up a familiar cross between warm nostalgia and sharp vertigo…

I’ve been surprised, over the last couple years, by how many songs I’ve written about where I come from. There’s “From Cleveland to Eternity” from my last CD, and for the Record Club there’s “Lisa Pruett Will Have Her Revenge on Coventry” and one I’m either going to call call “Hi in the Middle” or (gulp) “Another Song About my Home Town.” There’s also an unfinished number called “The Shape of Ohio,” and I’m contemplating something about an area songwriter (which will probably not be recognizable as such by the time it’s done). I think anyone who moves away from their home state ends up wondering what might have been if they’d stayed. But in the case of Ohio, and Cleveland in particular, there’s an especially stark contrast between what it seemed to be when I was growing up, and what it’s become to me in the last decade or so.
When I was younger, I actively hated Cleveland. First as a kid absorbing mistake-on-the-lake jokes, then later as a musician, working my way into a scene that felt supportive, yet somehow stifling. I remember in particular having a conversation with the manager of the Babylon A-Go-Go, a club in the Ohio City neighborhood that was closing down. I’ll never forget him exclaiming that “if you’re the best band in Cleveland, that’s all you get. You get to be the best band in Cleveland, PERIOD.”

But I don’t want to give the impression that Rotary Ten was deep into the Cleveland music scene or anything. Truth is, we all grew up in the sleepy suburb of Fairview Park, and only started venturing into town for gigs once we were seniors in high school. To me, Cleveland was just a dark, gritty landscape dotted with the occasional club. It was as unimaginable a place to live as any big city, and my feelings didn’t really change through college, or during time spent living in Ithaca or Raleigh. It was only when I settled in another hulking Great Lake town (Chicago) that I started to pick out similarities, to slowly begin to recognize Cleveland as a place I could have ended up eventually.

But happily? This is the question I can’t help pondering whenever I go back and drive those streets. I spent so much time generically hating on Cleveland in my younger days that I never gave it much of a chance. Now, whenever I see Facebook posts from high school friends who stayed there, they all seem to enjoy it immensely. And during visits over the years, they (along with my Collinwood friends Mike and Danielle) have introduced me to cool bars and restaurants, to the Beachland Ballroom and the Happy Dog — sturdy music venues whose owners, I’d imagine, are proud to host Cleveland bands every night, regardless of whether or not they they “break out” or whatever. And did I mention the West Side Market? And my beloved Great Lakes Brewing Company? There’s no doubt that Cleveland is, in reality, a happening town.

But oh my, it can be awfully quiet. Still, in the streets between the hubs of nightlife, and especially on the west side. And even the most positive booster would admit that Cleveland has its ugly parts. My friend John, who lived in Ohio City for a few years, once claimed Cleveland as “the ugliest city I’ve ever loved.” I think this ability to embrace both the immediately charming and the endearingly homely aspects of your surroundings is a uniquely Cleveland trait. It’s certainly a piece of That Whole Cleveland Thing I carry around with me to this day And that apparently won’t let me not write songs about it.

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"Bury, burn the waves behind you..."

I was a tad nervous and extremely honored to be one of the readers at last night’s “The First Time” event. I heard amazing, hilarious, life-affirming stuff from Matt Priest (Canasta), Gerald Dowd, Dag Juhlin, Leah Jones, Amy Hayden and Karl Klockars. Not only that, but the theme-weaving band of Gerald, Liam Davis and Steve Frisbie killed it on each and every number. Here’s what I brought to the party.

Cuyahoga Savings

[Presented as part of “The First Time: First Concert,” a spoken word and music event sponsored by CHIRP Radio and hosted by Jocelyn Geboy which took place at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago on May 18th, 2011.]

By the time we were freshmen in high school, my twin brother Scott and I were proudly sensitive arts kids – jazz band, literary magazine, drama club. By contrast, our brother Brian, older by five years, had been on the football team and chewed tobacco. Of course, Brian was already off to college by this time – Baldwin-Wallace, twenty minutes further west from Cleveland than Fairview Park, the suburb we grew up in. Sometime between his last season as a Fairview Warrior and his first as a B.W. Yellowjacket, Brian had switched positions from lineman to field goal kicker. But while his face mask might have lost a bar, Brian remained essentially a jock, living in a frat house with sticky floors and couches on the front lawn and everything. (I saw this all with my own eyes at Little Sibs’ weekend.)

But here’s how cool college was: Even Brian “Bri-gor” Phillips could go there and get immediately turned on to music that Scott and I had zero exposure to in those crazy pre-internet days. These were bands it was difficult to imagine Casey Kasem mentioning, let alone playing: Let’s Active, Guadalcanal Diary, Camper Van Beethoven. They had guitars, just like the bands on MTV, but it sounded like they actually played them. Brian brought home tapes of this stuff – usually on TDK cassette, a brand to which I remained faithful for the rest of my own dubbing life – and Scott and I would borrow them, gratefully but also basically permanently. (Brian was always cool about this. So thanks, Bri.)

The best and most quickly worn-out tape of them all was this 90-minute Hi-Bias cassette. (Always go Hi-Bias, Chrome if you can afford it, but NEVER Normal bias.) It had R.E.M.’s Murmur on one side and Reckoning on the other. On the handwritten tracklisting, Brian had faithfully followed the strange capitalization of Reckoning‘s song titles – “Seven Chinese Brothers” was the number 7, the word “ChineSe” with a capital S, and the abbreviation “Bros.” “Little America” was appropriately all lowercase, and so forth.

It feels strange to recall that R.E.M. used to have this lighter side. From those first two albums, there was one song in particular whose wackiness was in a way responsible for getting me to sing in public for the first time. Scott had put together a sort of jokey jazz trio that played a rockin’ version of “Three Blind Mice” and some Weird Al tunes, and they’d landed a gig at a Halloween party. I suggested it might be fun if I could harmonize with Scott on “Don’t Go Back to Rockville.” It seemed like an appropriately goofy pick. I mean, it was practically a country song, how hilarious! The band agreed, I did pretty good, and after the show they asked me to be their permanent lead singer. Within six months, half our repertoire was R.E.M. Within a year, we could fill a whole set with our own songs. (So thanks, R.E.M.)

I knew they came from the south, but I preferred to think of R.E.M. as part of the family, an Ohio band at heart. The kudzu on the cover of Murmur (which I did buy a proper copy of eventually, because that’s how file-trading has always worked…) looked an awful lot like the weeds overtaking the telephone poles lining the highway that cut through Fairview Park. Michael Stipe’s mumbling and Peter Buck’s rainy guitars seemed to mirror my endlessly flat surroundings. And it did turn out that R.E.M. was a “North Coast” band, after all. Or at least that Northeast Ohio had a special place in their hearts. After 1985′s mostly pastoral, acoustic Fables of the Reconstruction, R.E.M. released Lifes Rich Pageant, an album that was not only more sonically in tune with the rock ‘n’ roll capital, but whose fourth song was an ode to the county in which both Cleveland and Fairview Park sat, and to the river that ran through it: Cuyahoga.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River grew so polluted that it caught fire, an event that made headlines well outside the state, and pretty much sealed Cleveland’s fate as a national punchline. I’d grown up with this story, and with the Cleveland Browns, so it was no secret to me what a joke most people considered Cleveland to be. But here was R.E.M., restoring the literal name of Cuyahoga by featuring it as the gloriously bellowed chorus of this song. Meanwhile, the verses seemed to paint an alternatively proud picture of Ohio — not lame at all, but rich in history, resilient in the face of its own eco-unfriendliness. It shook up my imagination, making me both anxious for the future (“Let’s put our heads together / and start a new country up”) and mournful for what little past I had at the time (“This is where we walked, this is where we swam.”) I needed this stuff, this kind of story. I needed the backdrop to my impending adolescent melodrama to be a little less pathetic, and a little more…nobly tragic.

As you can probably guess by now, this has been something of a cheat. Truth be told, for a musician, I’m not much of a live music fan, and I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about that. But R.E.M. did tour behind Lifes Rich Pageant, and I went to see them, and it was my first concert. About the show itself, I don’t remember much. I’m sure they played a bunch of songs I knew by heart, and that I sang along to every line. But what I seem to remember most vividly are the peripheral things. Like how I recognized the smell of clove cigarettes for the first time that night. Or how rudely everyone (including me) sort of ignored the opening act, this old British dude named Richard Thompson. Or how Scott and I weren’t old enough to drive yet, so when Brian parked the car downtown, I looked up through the skyscrapers towards the stars. I could see the neon lettering at the top of a bank building, but the words “Savings” and “Bank” were blocked from my view by an intermediate structure. This left just the first word exposed to me, and I’m telling you now, it gave me shivers.

Oh, I also remember what song they opened with that night. I’ll give you one guess.

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I sure wish I was going to Cleveland next weekend. Not because my former classmates will be celebrating a 20th high school reunion. (Thanks to the magic of Facebook, I feel more than up to speed with anyone I’d care to be…up to speed…with.  Ahem.) No, the reason it’d be cool to be near the North Coast next Saturday 8/1 is because, by sheer coincidence, the Jehova Waitresses are ALSO reuniting that night at the Grog Shop.

Back when Rotary Ten was just graduating from talent shows and getting “real” gigs “in the city,” our favorite band to play with was the Jehovas. (Or the Waitresses. We called ‘em both.) If memory serves, Linda and Kevin Roy moved to Cleveland from New Jersey, to form a new band and to see what would happen. Between us, the Walk Ins and the Waynes, a semi-scene coalesced — more of a shared attitude than a shared sound. Non-chest-thumping rock had a hard go of it in early-90′s Cleveland. (Like Christian Slater said in Heathers, “This is Ohio. If you don’t have a beer in your hand, you might as well be wearing a dress.”) So even though they had a violin and Rickenbackers, and we had a Moog and actually liked Nine Inch Nails, our shared comparative bookishness made us allies.

This was the first musical “scene” I’d ever been a part of. What a total kick, to be barely out of high school and hanging around with all these serious songwriters. They were rock stars to me — only when I met them, they were all exceedingly nice. One particularly memorable night we played a multi-band benefit at the Cleveland Playhouse, and the Jehova Waitresses actually had Scott and I guest with them on their rendition of the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight.”

The Jehova Waitresses went through a couple lineup changes, and for a few years they recruited the crazy-talented songwriter Alan Grandy (previously of Terrible Parade, now of Sputnik) on bass guitar. After college, we moved to Ithaca, then Raleigh, and I sort of lost track of what they’d been up to, how they’d eventually moved back East. Just a few months ago I was wandering through Amazon, and I dug up a used copy of a CD they’d recorded long after we’d left town. Less than a month later, Linda messaged me (again, the magic of FB), saying they were returning to the scene of the crime.

So I must say. If you’re in Cleveland August 1st, head on over to the east side and check out some fine multi-harmony folk-rock. And if you think of it, yell out “Opportunity” for me.

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The thing looks absurd on my desk, but maybe that’s because it’s got my 2004 iBook flanked to the left, while I try to keep track of what needs moving over, and figure out how. Many questions remain, but what I’m sure of is what I’m most psyched about: that everything on it, including my iTunes library, Garageband files, and AIF’s for burning Zapruder Point CDs, will fit EASILY, and it will ALL back up onto a single external drive.

Even before I got the iBook, I knew I’d have to play storage games, knowing my music would never fit on the 40 (really 30) GBs. Lately it was getting even more headachey (!!!), with me offloading some musical stuff onto thumb drives, etc. What a relief to say goodbye to all of that, even if my dreams of wireless keyboards and mice are deferred. (Hey: If “settling” for a slightly less shiny-and-new computer is how the economic crisis trickles down to me…then I have a lot to be thankful for.)

In other news, while I was driving around Cleveland, I borrowed a more-80′s-than-70′s John Denver mix I’d made for Mom about a year ago. I was floored not just by how many words I still remembered, but by how perfectly within my range all the vocal lines fit. Singing “Some Days are Diamonds” at the top of my lungs while cruising 480 was a blast.

Now that I write that, it occurs to me that whenever I put on John Denver at home, I can’t resist singing either. Makes sense, even if it’s not the coolest thing to admit to. I was raised on this stuff. Aww yeah:

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