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Peter Laughner: Lost rock star gets the box set treatment
08.09.2019
07:47 am
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Peter Laughner early 1976. Photo Credit: Mik Mellen
 
Peter Laughner was a singer-songwriter-guitarist and apparent force of nature who has been credited with jump-starting the underground music scene in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1970s. Laughner was perhaps most famously a founding member of Pere Ubu—you might say he was their Syd Barrett—and before that Rocket from the Tombs, the legendarily bonkers Ubu predecessor with David Thomas and three soon-to-be Dead Boys. He had a group with future Contortion Adele Bertei called Peter and the Wolves. Laughner was involved in many different combinations of Cleveland musicians, all of them short-lived. He was a Dylan-imitating folkie (although a very good Dylan-imitating folkie to be sure), in a jugband blues combo and he went to New York to jam with Tom Verlaine when Richard Lloyd briefly left Television. He was also a memorable writer for CREEM and various local Cleveland alt-weeklies. His biography makes it seem like he was trying several musical directions simultaneously and enlisting others to his various causes, and volunteering for theirs in turn, creating sparks and willing a scene to happen by sheer force of personality.

The new Peter Laughner box set from Cleveland-based Smog Veil Records is a very, very unusual pop culture product. It’s also a difficult thing to “review,” resistant to any sort of standard approach to that task. Many box sets celebrate a lifetime’s musical achievements, greatest hits, but Peter Laughner died at the age of 24. He had no hits, in fact he was apparently only ever in an actual recording studio once, with Pere Ubu to record their first single. This is a scrapbook of memories, newspaper and magazine clippings and a box of old tapes that had been made by a dead friend that have been fashioned into something at once a highbrow rock collectible fetish item and a sincere tribute to someone who died over 40 years ago, but is still fondly remembered. The target audience for a box set (five CDs or albums and a hardback book) of amateurishly recorded live performances, 4-track recordings made late at night in his bedroom at his parents’ home and so forth is going to be very, very small, consisting mostly of Pere Ubu fanatics, rock critics, otaku rock snobs, people who actually knew Peter Laughner and other curious Clevelanders. Or maybe you, who knows? (If you are intrigued, I suggest acting quickly as 80% of the run—which will not be republished—has already been sold according to the label’s website.)
 

 
For someone who died so young, he actually left behind a helluva lot of stuff. Over the course of Peter Laughner‘s five discs, you see this young guy’s talent forming and it’s sad to think what he might’ve gone on to do had he not been so self destructive. (Even his one-time partner-in-crime Lester Bangs stopped seeing him near the end.) Obviously (and I do mean very obviously) the original material is highly derivative of Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine, indicated even by his song titles—take “Amphetamine” or “Baudelaire” for two pronounced examples. This is not to say that these songs are bad, not at all, but merely to indicate what the listener is in for. There are a lot of cover versions, some of them very good, but ultimately they are just cover versions, and made from lo-fi sources at that. Repeat plays are not something I anticipate, frankly.

For such a young man Peter Laughner had pretty serious talents as a poet/lyricist but as a guitar player, holy shit, get the fuck out of here. He could go from playing something that would have tied John Fahey up in knots to his utterly astonishing flamethrower guitar work in Rocket from the Tombs, a band that left behind a live tape made at a loft party in 1975 that became a legendary bootleg. (That crazed performance, released by Smog Veil along with two other live shows as The Day Earth Met The Rocket From the Tombs in 2002, was rhapsodized over lovingly for an entire chapter in Julian Cope’s Copendium, and deservedly so. It sounds like early KISS being tasered as they sing and play and manages to be far, far more violent than anything Pere Ubu or the Dead Boys would ever record. RFTT songs have been covered by Guns n’ Roses, Peter Murphy, Mission of Burma and others.)
 

Handwritten note and photo booth photo of Peter Laughner, October 1976,courtesy of Carol A. Aronson.
 
For me, the star of this set is the book (designed by longtime DM contributor Ron Kretsch) which features reminiscences by friends and associates, an explanation of the ten-year-long project’s gestation, and crucially, Laughner’s own writing clipped from local papers and CREEM magazine. The CREEM pieces I recall vividly as they were published in the very first issues of that magazine that I would buy (or rather my innocent mother would buy for me at Kroger) in 1976 when I was ten. Seen in hindsight, he had extremely good taste in music.

This is how Laughner’s CREEM review of Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby album began. As I read it again decades later every word came back to me:

This album made me so morose and depressed when I got the advance copy that I stayed drunk for three days. I didn’t go to work. I had a horrible physical fight with my wife over a stupid bottle of 10 mg. Valiums. (She threw an ashtray, a brick, and a five foot candelabra at me, but I got her down and sat on her chest and beat her head on the wooden floor.)

I called up the editor of this magazine (on my bill) and did virtually nothing but cough up phlegm in an alcoholic stupor for three hours, wishing somewhere in the back of my deadened brain that he could give me a clue as to why I should like this record.

I came on to my sister-in-law “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out.” I cadged drinks off anyone who would come near me or let me into their apartments. I ended up the whole debacle passing out stone cold after puking and pissing myself at a band rehearsal, had to be kicked awake by my lead singer, was driven home by my long-suffering best friend and force fed by his old lady who could still find it in the boundless reaches of her good heart to smile on my absolutely incorrigible state of dissolution…I willed her all of my wordly goods before dropping six Valiums (and three vitamin B complexes, so I must’ve figured to wake up, or at least at the autopsy they would say my liver was OK). Well, wake up I did, after sleeping sixteen hours, and guess what was running through my head, along with the visual images of flaming metropolises and sinking ocean liners foaming and exploding in vast whirling vortexes of salt water…

A line like “C’mon over and gimme head while I’m passed out,” first read at such a young age, well, tender poesy like that stays with you, doesn’t it? And who knows how much of it really happened? With Laughner’s reputation as a world class wastrel, I’d wager that all of it probably did, exactly as described.

In summation, Peter Laughner is certainly not for everyone, but if it sounds like it might be for you, then it most probably is. I prefer to think of it the way I approach Robert Johnson’s music. Lo-fi though it might be, it’s all we’ve got of him. It’s worth it to ignore the tape hiss and scratchy 78 rpm record sound to get to the heart of the blues. And that’s what we have here, but it’s the blues channeled through the voice and mutant guitar of an immensely talented middle class white kid living in Cleveland who burned out at the age of 24, but never completely faded away.
 

 
More from the ‘Peter Laughner’ box set, after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.09.2019
07:47 am
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I survived the most ridiculous and righteous conflagration of rock in human history, Part 4
04.18.2016
02:15 pm
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Problemo Man, one of 39 bands that existed for just 10 minutes last Saturday in Cleveland. Photo credit: Ken Blaze
 
In the city of Cleveland there exists an ambitious musical project called Lottery League. The project has happened four times since 2008. It involves hundreds of local musicians; it is both an index of the city’s tight-knit musical scene and a mechanism fostering continuation of the exact same quality. It has become a key part of the fabric of the musical life of the city.

For those who don’t know, here’s how it works. Every couple of years the self-anointed “Council of Chiefs” (originally Jae Kristoff, Mike James, Edward Ángel Sotelo, Nate Scheible, and John Delzoppo) do their damndest to secure commitments from roughly 150 musicians who agree to get their names tossed into a literal hopper—in front of an audience of hundreds on a chilly February evening, the names are drawn in a random order and somewhere around 35 new combos are created from the list of 150 musicians. No band can include members that have been in a band together before (lengthy musical CVs must be submitted beforehand) and every band has to have a drummer. Aside from that, you get what you get. If your band has three bassists, then that’s your Iron Chef menu of ingredients to work with.

All 35 bands are then sent away to convene, rehearse, compose, and so on. All bands must come up with a a concept and a name, compose exactly 10 minutes of original music (no covers allowed), and generate a handbill that serves as a statement of identity. All bands are given roughly 10 weeks to hone their material in preparation for a vast omnibus concert in mid-April, in which every single band struts their stuff, one after the other. The massive event is aptly called The Big Show, because it lasts around 12 hours.
 

Lottery League 2016 poster. Art by Jake Kelly. Click for a larger view.
 
The Lottery League has gone down in 2008, 2010, 2013, and—just a couple days ago, on April 16, 2016. The first two iterations of The Big Show took place at the venerable Beachland Ballroom in picturesque Waterloo neighborhood of Cleveland, but in 2013 the Lottery League secured the spacious confines of the Agora Ballroom Theater and Ballroom near Downtown.

An autobiographical word at this juncture. I used to be a resident of New York, and I’m now a resident of Cleveland, and the 2010 version of Lottery League played a key role in my decision to relocate. It should go without saying that I have strong feelings about Lottery League. I love Lottery League.
 

Queen of Hell or actually, Heavenly Queen
 
It’s my perception that the people in the rock scene in Cleveland know each other tolerably well—some of them have been slogging it out together in the indie rock underground for some years now. It’s an advantage of a city of Cleveland’s size over, say, New York, which has so many more musicians working in it that, paradoxically, an event like Lottery League either wouldn’t work or would lack the same salience, as there are 30 different “scenes” that aren’t connected to each other in any way. In Cleveland you can conceive of an event that successfully involves a significant cross-section of a specific rock scene, the punk/hardcore scene and the experimental rock scene.

If you’ve done the math, four years of Lottery League have resulted in the creation of roughly 140 short-term, mostly temporary, bands, and something about the allotted time of 10 minutes and the unlikelihood of a repeat performance has resulted in some marvelous conceptual creations that only happened a single time, a bit like a surprise party for a friend. There’s an emphasis on shenanigans, mayhem, and showmanship. The curious nature of the project has led to unusual band names that would never get chosen for a project of longer duration. Examples include: Swayze All Over, Gandhi SS, Hot Dignity, Dehumidifier vs. Humidifier, Mohammed Cartoon, Jean-Claude Goddamn, Snuggle Prophet, Melted Face Constitutional, Fuck Is the New Black, Waaaaay Better Than Ezra, 38% Special, World War V, Sausage Pilot, Robosexual, Hut Hut Hike, and SCMODS.

In Cleveland, among certain circles, if a phrase with a curious ring by happenstance materializes, it’s always a defensible rejoinder to say, “Hey, that’s a Lottery League name.” Someone in the group will get the reference. The idea of a Lottery League-sized name or, more to the point, a Lottery League-sized idea, has entered the city’s particular musical ozone layer.
 

Good. Photo credit: Jen Hearn
 
It’s worth noting that although Lottery League is conceived as a one-off, a handful of bands have leaped from that confined space into, erm, “real life,” most notably Hiram-Maxim, who put out an album last year from Aqualamb Records (and were written up in VICE), but also Queen of Hell, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, Dinosaur Coffin, and Isle of Eyelids, among others.

In past years the opinion has been voiced that Lottery League was a touch too insular, a touch too GenX, a touch too focused on rock. In fact, the turnover within LL has been impressive, and I know for a fact that the Chiefs have worked to broaden the profile a little bit, and it was noticeable that the 2016 iteration was a little younger and a little more diverse in musical terms than in previous incarnations. Among the instruments seen onstage were an accordion, two cellos, two trombones, a harp, and a koto (I may have missed some) and even if the majority of the bands hewed to an austere Kraftwerkishness or a funky/jazzy groove, there were instances of the opposite as well, with acts bringing their most jaw-dropping versions of rap (These Swords Are Real), opera (Fugitive Howler), gagaku (Way of the Warrior) and Kurt Weill-esque tomfoolery (High Class Carnival).

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.18.2016
02:15 pm
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Milwaukee resident messes with airline passengers by painting ‘Welcome to Cleveland’ on his roof
06.15.2015
09:02 am
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Sometimes the really deadpan pranks are the best ones. Waaaay back in the 1970s an artist and photographer named Mark Gubin, living near Milwaukee Airport and realizing that his abode was situated on a common approach path for landing airplanes, painted the words “WELCOME TO CLEVELAND” in huge white letters on his building’s flat and entirely black roof. For the geographically illiterate out there, Milwaukee is in Wisconsin, which does not even border Ohio, the state that contains Cleveland. (Full disclosure: Cleveland is the city in which I currently live.) The two cities are 335 miles apart as the crow flies—roughly a seven-hour drive.

Gubin painted the sign after his assistant casually remarked that, given his location, it would be nice to welcome incoming passengers to the city. But Gubin had an even better idea….

According to a 1985 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there used to be a Northwest Airlines route from Denver to Cleveland that used Milwaukee as a layover, and the airline was obliged to pre-emptively reassure passengers via the PA system that they should not worry—the plane had not skipped the intermediate destination.

Gubin’s quotations in that article are priceless. One of them goes, “There’s not a real purpose for having this here except madness, which I tend to be pretty good at.” He also said, “It was all tongue-in-cheek, just for fun. Living in the world is not a dress rehearsal. You better have fun with it.” That’s for sure.

Lest you wonder whether a prank painted on a roof that appeared in a 2005 edition of a Milwaukee newspaper is still in force, worry not, according to Google Maps, the prank is still in full effect, as this screen shot (with a 2015 copyright) establishes (click on the picture for a better view).
 

 
via GQ

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.15.2015
09:02 am
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Never before seen photos of Stiv Bators and the Dead Boys, 1976. A Dangerous Minds exclusive
05.19.2015
08:12 am
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This is the good stuff, good people, a genuine once-in-a-blue-moon recovery of a lost treasure trove. You, Dangerous Minds’ readers, are literally the first people in the word to see these photos, apart from the photographer and a tiny handful of others.

In 1976, Dave Treat, a student at the now defunct Cooper School of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, lived in a Lakewood apartment building that also hoveled the members of a rock band that had just re-christened itself from Frankenstein to the Dead Boys. As he was both the nearest accessible art student who owned a camera and a close friend to singer Stiv Bators, Treat was recruited to shoot publicity photos of the band, and while one of them may have been used (it remains unclear, but we’ll get to that), the rest have sat unseen since then. They became obsolete quickly, as Jeff Magnum would be added as the band’s bassist shortly after these were shot. In the last year, their existence became known to art historian Brittany Mariel Hudak and photographer/gallery owner Bryon Miller, who are working to release them in a book, and preparing them for exhibit in Cleveland, with the possibly of a New York exhibit later in the year. What the photos reveal is a band unknowingly on the cusp of achieving legendary status, and a sensitive, vulnerable Stiv Bators very, very unlike his self-consciously bratty public persona.

From Hudak’s introduction to the forthcoming Stiv 1976: Lost Photographs of Stiv Bators & The Dead Boys:

This is not about the onstage, very public Stiv or his antics – you can visit that guy on YouTube, read about his New York shenanigans in Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me, or watch him wield a baseball bat as tough guy “Bo-Bo Belsinger” in John Water’s film, Polyester.  In contrast, these photographs taken by his neighbor Dave Treat in 1976 capture a different Stiv altogether – what they capture is “Stiv” in the making.  They offer a rare glimpse into the private life of a young man on the brink of something, with a marked sense of unfettered opportunities and grand plans. There’s an unquestionable eagerness in his eyes, a what-do-I-have-to-lose attitude – and even hints of the onstage Stiv being built. He poses quite consciously for the camera, wearing the soon to be comfortable guise of the seductive rock star – lanky, languid, oozing sex appeal and confidence, complete with outrageous platform boots.

But if you look closely you can detect another, more vulnerable side of the performer. Crouched in a corner or staring off into the distance, at times there’s a palpable sadness – a peculiar malaise. This too could be a pose – the tortured artist suffering for his art, another familiar component of the rock-star myth. But one gets a sense that this side is genuine, and for Stiv rarely seen, which makes these photos all the more special.

The negatives for these amazing photos were buried in a closet for almost 40 years, and most have been printed for the first time this year by Miller, a gallery proprietor and photographer for High Times and Billboard, who, out of respect for their origins and provenance, actually printed them old-school gelatin silver style. In an actual darkroom. Some of those still exist. The photos will be exhibited at Miller’s Gallery 160 in Cleveland beginning on Friday, June 5th, to mark the 25th anniversary of Stiv’s death from injuries sustained when he was hit by a car, with an opening reception beginning at 6:00PM. Apart from Treat, Hudak, Miller, myself, and the Dead Boys’ Cheetah Chrome, nobody has ever seen these images before you, right now. Clicking on an image spawns an enlargement in a new browser tab.
 

 

 
More unseen Dead Boys, after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.19.2015
08:12 am
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Pere Ubu, DEVO and more seminal Ohio punk on two new compilations
02.13.2015
02:24 pm
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I’m in my mid ‘40s, and I’ve lived my entire life in Cleveland, OH. Go ahead and fire up your jokes, I’ve heard ‘em all, and frankly, if you still think it’s a punchline, I’m perfectly happy for you to keep your uninformed pierogi-hole on lockdown and stay far the hell away so as not to pollute my zen (OR: if you want to check it out with an open mind, I know a ton of very cool people who’d be glad to point you in all the right directions). I’ve traveled plenty, though obviously one can never travel enough, and I’ve had opportunities to live elsewhere, but so far I’ve taken none of them. Part of that was because until a few years ago I had enviable job security in an industry I loved, and I still have a crazy low cost of living, but the REAL magnet that’s kept me here? The music scene is and always has been beyond utterly fucking brilliant. I have never wanted for gifted mutants to rock with, and while everybody steeped in punk and New Wave lore knows what a musical atom bomb Northeast Ohio was in the ‘70s, and while the success of the Black Keys, indie champs Cloud Nothings, and garage/soul shit-fucker-upper Obnox are attracting attention here nowadays, the rarely-told stories of the ‘80s, ‘90s and oughts scenes are doozies, as well. Almost every time I’ve pondered a move, it’s been a band that’s kept me around, even though nary a one of ‘em has ever made a dent, and I while I abidingly love a lot of other cities, I’ve yet to seriously regret sticking it out here. A close-knit music scene teeming with talent is just that strong an attractor for me.

Recently, the excellent archival record label Soul Jazz have, as part of their ongoing PUNK 45 series, released two excellent compilations documenting the ‘70s/early ‘80s roots of that music scene, one each for Cleveland and Akron, both with extremely generous liner notes. They cover all the stuff I missed out on by being not being born 10 years earlier, but obviously these bands still weigh heavily on the region’s underground musical legacy. Both are assembled from early, independently-released 7"s, and both accordingly feature some previously compiled material AND some serious treasures.
 

 
The Akron comp, Burn Rubber City, Burn!, has the early DEVO single “Mechanical Man” and the rarity “Auto Modown,” the Waitresses’ early single “The Comb,” and Tin Huey’s awesome “Squirm You Worm.” (Versions embedded in this post may not be the same as what’s actually on the comp; they were the versions I could find online. )
 

The Waitresses, “The Comb”
 
Plenty more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.13.2015
02:24 pm
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Smashing Pumpkins, live acoustic in Cleveland, 1991
08.04.2014
08:54 am
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I wish I could give you any kind of deep background on how this came to be. A friend shared it on Facebook yesterday, and it caught my eye not just because it’s Smashing Pumpkins in the worthy Gish era, well before Billy Corgan became an insufferable, bloated ego making insufferable, bloated albums, but because it was taped in my neighborhood.

I moved to Cleveland’s Tremont district a few years after this was shot, when it was still a cheap rent haven well on its way to becoming a hip arts district. It’s now neither, particularly. The gazebo they’re playing in still stands in Lincoln Park, where it’s now MUCH more difficult to get murdered than it used to be. (Also, some self-referential trivia: sometime Dangerous Minds contributor Jason Schafer got married in that gazebo.) The band sings “Blue,” from the 1991 Lull EP—the song later turned up on Pisces Iscariot—before they goofily riff on BÖC’s “Godzilla” while guitarist James Iha thanks the academy. An edited version of this exists, but I much prefer the raw footage.
 

 
Many, many thanks to Alan Madej for this find.

Previously on Dangerous Minds
Literal version of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today’
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins wants to sell you furniture

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.04.2014
08:54 am
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Insane illustrators to invade Cleveland this 4th of July weekend, leave trail of bleeding eyes
07.03.2014
10:20 am
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NYC-via-Moscow painter Dimitri “Dima” Drjuchin and Indianapolis’ Jason “Homeless Cop” Fennell will be the subjects/stars of a two-man show, “Mutually Assured Destruction,” at the newish gallery BUCKBUCK in Cleveland, OH, bringing all the colors at once to that fabled grey city. The show’s opening reception is on Saturday, July 5th.
 

 

 

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of high-yield weapons of mass destruction by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.

Summer is here, but nuclear winter has just begun! Celebrate your independence (again), and come watch the heavens open up as we blast BUCKBUCK into oblivion with an arsenal of paintings and music by Dima Drjuchin and Homeless Cop. If you haven’t been reduced to a shadow on the sidewalk, crawl your ass home with a piece of history (and I’m not talking about radiation poisoning). We’ve been waiting longer than the second coming for this show, so cram your gullet with leftover potato salad and fold up your star-spangled vinyl lawn chair, because if you’re not at this show, you’re probably messing yourself in a concrete bunker.

Fans of Reggie Watts, Marc Maron and Eugene Mirman will recognize some of those comics’ album covers as Dima Drjuchin illustrations. His best-known cover was the piece done for Father John Misty’s Fear Fun album. The Brooklyn-based painter also boasts a large portfolio of concert posters, all on view at his Tumblr.

“My work channels different points of reference from my Russian background, to pop culture, to comic books, to fine art, to spirituality, to the occult. I can’t truly say that it’s a commentary on anything, because I am not interested in judging anyone or anything. I believe it’s more of a reflection of multiple influences that get filtered through my mind and come back out all at once on my canvas redefined to my own liking. That said, I also try not to take anything too seriously and on some level I believe I still paint in a similar mind set I did as a child scribbling on a piece of paper. Most of my ideas are on the spot and I let how I’m feeling at that moment guide me to what happens next in the piece. I think ultimately I’m just trying to entertain myself.”

 

 

 

 
Homeless Cop’s work is likely best known to most of us from his bump animations on the Adult Swim cable network. His paintings strongly resemble vector illustrations, but are in fact rendered in oils.

“I’ve always painted things I like. People, places, and things. My whole life I’ve been drawing and painting, and I really feel like I was born to do this. I think my work evolves in terms of subject matter, but the execution just stays true to my style. My paintings look look like a robot made them, and I get a lot of pleasure being able to say I made them with my hands. My favorite artist is Jean-Michel Basquiat, and my favorite band is Nirvana. I also like pizza.”

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.03.2014
10:20 am
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The new Obnox video might get you really really baked just from watching it
05.14.2014
10:23 am
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Ohio garage/soul band Obnox is kicking up a hell of a ruckus this year. On the heels of his latest LP Louder Space the band’s only full-time member Lamont “Bim” Thomas has been on tour damn near constantly, and has been racking up rave review after rave review.

(Here’s a big pile of disclosures: Thomas is an old friend of mine. I’ve played guitar on one of his E.P.s, and written two promotional bios for his label, and was, in all cases, compensated in Irish whiskey. I’m not even going to pretend to be an objective voice here—Bim’s a beautiful cat and Obnox fuckin’ rocks.)
 

And I’m hardly alone in thinking so.

Thomas was previously known—to the degree that he was known at all—as a drummer in Columbus and Cleveland punk and garage bands like The Bassholes, Puffy Areolas and This Moment in Black History. He began dabbling in writing his own songs very recently, as the stay-at-home dad of a school aged girl, and in the mere three years since he released his uncommonly headstrong and passionate debut LP I’m Bleeding Now, the absurdly prolific 42-year-old has released two more albums of his remarkable skillet-to-your-damn-face R&B/punk hybrid, including the acclaimed 2XLP Corrupt Free Enterprise, and well over half a dozen singles and EPs. His recordings tend to be heavily layered and drenched in lo-fi filth, almost recalling the “Shitgaze” “movement” that emerged in Columbus about a decade ago. This was partly a consequence of his extremely direct recording process—everything was done quickly, on an elderly 16-track tape machine set up in the living room of a punk flophouse. Somehow, instead of obfuscating his ideas, all that grime imbues his recorded work with a remarkable depth, an earthy quality Thomas has retained despite using a proper recording studio for Louder Space.
 

 

 
A couple of weeks ago, he released a video for the songs “Molecule” and “How To Rob (the Punk Years).” In it, he does the laundry, gets high, smashes records, does the dishes, gets high, raps, gets high on the stairs, shaves his head, gets high in a recording studio, dances, and gets plenty fuckin’ high.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.14.2014
10:23 am
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The Dead Milkmen: Punk rockacapella and live on the radio, November 02, 2013
11.20.2013
06:44 pm
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For the past several years, WCSB 89.3 FM, one of Cleveland By God Ohio’s toweringly excellent college radio stations, has thrown an extremely cool Halloween party. They’ve hit upon a winning formula for booking it: the headliner is invariably a beloved classic punk band - past bill-toppers have included The Dickies, The Avengers, and The Angry Samoans. Second on the bill would often be a classic Cleveland underground band reunited for the occasion, then the rest of the bill would be filled in with contemporary worthies. It’s free of charge, and always a very popular night out, with the best, brightest, and weirdest of CLE’s freak-scenesters doing their best to outdo each other in insane costumery and irresponsible drinking.

So OK, I wasn’t present for this, so some of the “specifics” of this post are cobbled from Facebook reportage shared by party-goers during and after the event. If I screwed up any of these pieced-together details, that’s all on me. This year, the party apparently got too popular. After the venue had already hit capacity, there were still hopeful revelers lined up around the block, waiting hours to get in, in costume, in frigid Ohio winter weather. This could be due to the booking of The Dead Milkmen. That band famously went, in a mere 5 years, from being the smartass Philadelphia maestros behind THE surprise underground hit album of the ‘80s with Big Lizard in My Backyard to the 120 Minutes darlings who came astonishingly close to achieving actual mainstream success with Beelzebubba and Metaphysical Graffitti. This would have been a hotly anticipated show even if it wasn’t an admission-free bacchanal. BUT - in Cleveland there always seems to be a “but” - right before they were to take the stage, the power went out in much of the city’s Near-West Side, including the newly-chic Gordon Square neighborhood where the party was being held. The Milkmen attempted a drums-and-a-capella singalong to mollify the capacity crowd - some of whom, being, you know, punks and everything, had reflexively jumped to the conclusion that the police had shut off the power to stop the show and were getting all pissed off - but it really didn’t work, and sadly, the theater was cleared out.

But for all their bird-flipping, wiseass posturing, The Dead Milkmen are clearly some damn cool guys:

Hello Loyal Listeners,

As you all probably know first-hand or have heard, the Gordon Square community of Cleveland was hit with an untimely and unfortunate power outage in the Gordon Square and Ohio City neighborhood on November 2 just before The Dead Milkmen were to take the stage at the 2013 WCSB Halloween Masquarade Ball at the Cleveland Public Theater – something WCSB and The Dead Milkmen felt completely terrible about for everyone involved.

The Dead Milkmen being class acts drove themselves and their equipment up to the WCSB studios and did their ENTIRE SET (encore included) live over the CSB airwaves for the entire city to enjoy. They even stuck around and answered some questions after their inspired performance.To make sure no Dead Milkmen fan missed out on this historic (and odd) evening, we have extracted the audio and posted it here for all to enjoy.

The whole set is posted here. Enjoy.
 

If you don’t love this, I don’t want to know you.

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.20.2013
06:44 pm
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Harvey Pekar’s ‘Cleveland’ is a splendiferous American masterpiece

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The recently published graphic novel, Cleveland, by the late Harvey Pekar and illustrator Joseph Remnant, is a flat-out masterpiece of the form. One (hefty) part “biography” of a city, Pekar being Pekar, Cleveland is also another piece (and a key piece at that) of the grand tapestry recording the life of one of the city’s most notable residents, and certainly the man who will forever be known as Cleveland’s unofficial poet laureate.

In Cleveland, Pekar, who famously said “Life is a war of attrition,” tells his own story (as is his wont, of course) alongside that of the city he loved so much. It’s a broadly sweeping narrative for a writer usually so invested with the minutiae of life, but the Pekaresque observations are no less potent as the author takes an aerial view of over 200 years of the rise and fall of what was once one of America’s greatest cities and placing the events of his own 70 years living there in the larger context of Cleveland’s role in the American experiment itself. This is not the “day to day” life, little—yet potently illuminating—observations we’ve come to expect from Pekar, but in the beautifully-rendered pages of Cleveland, Harvey’s take on a slice of American history that he witnessed first hand (well, about a third of it, let’s say) is no less rewarding.

Cleveland is so beautiful and so heartfelt that it brought tears to my eyes several times (reading it, as I did, mostly in a dental office). I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you hail from Cleveland (or anywhere near it) the book is a must-read, but I’d say the same to anyone who simply wants to be dazzled by a great American writer at the very tip top of his game and working with one of the best visual interpreters of his long career. Cleveland is a masterpiece, a modern American masterpiece.

I sent Dangerous Minds pal Jeff Newelt, who edited Cleveland (Newelt is also behind Smith magazine’s delightful online “Pekar Project”) a few questions about the process of bringing a work like Cleveland to fruition and keeping the flame alive of one of America’s most distinctive literary voices.

In what kind of shape was the project in when Harvey Pekar died?

When Harvey died, the script was totally done, and Joseph had already drawn 18 pages. Harvey had seen those pages and was pleased to say the least. He was thrilled and it wasn’t easy to thrill Harvey!

Joseph Remnant’s artwork in Cleveland is just stunning, he’s clearly one of Pekar’s most inspired collaborators. What kind of research went into the panels?

Joseph was the clear and only choice to illustrate Cleveland. He was already working with Harvey and myself on The Pekar Project webcomics, and after he did such an incredible job on the story “Muncie, Indiana,”  that clinched it. Because half of the book is literally a history of Cleveland, Joseph did TONS of online research searching for images, and also took out piles of books from the library. Regarding Harvey himself, luckily we were blessed in that we spent a nice chunk of time with “our man in person. The whole Pekar Project crew flew to Cleveland for Harvey’s 70th Birthday Party in 2009, and we had a wonderful weekend, him giving us a guided tour of his favorite spots. Priceless experience. 

As an editor, how did you approach the material?

Cleveland was originally developed with Vertigo editor Jonathan Vankin, who did the initial heavy conceptual lifting of what the book should be. Then the powers that be at DC couldn’t be bothered to look at this incredible script, so on behalf of Harvey, I brought in Josh Frankel/ZIP Comics to publish the book, and brought in Top Shelf Comix to co-publish. So with Cleveland, the toughest editing was done, and I just copy-edited/ cleaned up some inconsistencies here and there. With short webcomics he wrote for The Pekar Project, Harvey would call me up and read me each story over the phone, then we’d jam on it for a few minutes and choose which artist to give it to.

I love the fact that the book is a parallel biography/autobiography of the city and one of its most notable and emblematic lifelong residents. It just works so brilliantly.

Cleveland was always so prominent in Harvey’s work as to almost be a character, so it was inevitable that he’d one day do a book with the city as the focus. I think Harvey identified with the perma-under-doggedness of the city.

Cleveland is such an unabashed love letter to what most people would consider a drab, horrible city, but Pekar’s magical voice and pithy, erudite historical observations and Joseph Remnant’s wonderful illustrations really evoke the city’s heyday, its rise and fall and fall in such a vivid, vivid way. It’s an extremely moving historical/dramatic arc that is unique in American literature.

It’s all about the love. The appreciation. The key to understanding Harvey’s work, IMHO is realizing how much of an “appreciator” Harvey was. Too many words are wasted on the Harvey-as-curmudgeon labeling, reinforced by the excellent-yet-ultimately one-dimensional performance by Paul Giamatti in the American Splendor film. All the little mundane moments in his many classic autobiographical stories come down to Harvey noticing, appreciating and wanting to share a special something he overheard, or a magic-yet-mundane moment he witnessed. Also so many of Harvey’s stories are appreciations of underheralded jazz musicians, klezmer artists, Russian novelists, etc. So it’s the same with his city. He was frustrated with Cleveland but he LOVED it nonetheless, so that love charges a jazzy poetry in his narration.

How did Alan Moore come to be involved with Cleveland? He not only wrote the introduction, he also generously helped you raise money to defray the cost of publishing, too, right?

I passed a galley to Alan through comics scholar Paul Gravett a longtime pal of Alan’s who I hung out with for 10 days at the Rio Comicon along with Melinda Gebbie (Alan’s wife and artist of Lost Girls) and Kevin O’Neill (artist for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Alan Moore was always a huge Pekar fan. He even drew a one-page American Splendor story.  Plus, Alan was a character in Pekar story because Joyce, Harvey and Danielle visited Alan and Melinda in England on the movie tour. Harvey Pekar was to Cleveland what Alan Moore is to Northampton. When we were thinking whom we should get to do the intro, he was my only choice. Then Alan helped raise money for the Harvey Pekar Memorial Statue on Kickstarter by offering a 2hr live webcam chat as a reward!

What else is still to come from Harvey Pekar?

Over at the Pekar Project the next installment of the epic Harvey Pekar / Douglas Rushkoff teamup, illustrated by Sean Pryor, is coming soon. Also, released next week is Not The Israel My Parents Promised, illustrated by JT Waldman. This is my blurb on the back of that book: “Pekar peppers accounts of perpetual persecution with poignant autobiographical anecdotes in this concise compelling and sure-to-be-controversial graphic history of the Jewish people and state of Israel. Waldman’s art, juxtaposing realism with ancient styles, rocking exquisite mosaics and elaborate medieval and middle eastern design flourishes, is nothing less than a majestic tour de Schwartz.”

There is a nine page preview of Cleveland at the Top Shelf Comix website.

Buy Cleveland at Amazon

Below, an extended interview with Harvey Pekar on PBS in 2009:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.02.2012
11:05 am
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Cleveland’s Black Rock Legacy: Purple Image

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Today’s resurgence in black rock and Afro-punk has been accompanied by a boosted interest in obscure post-Hendrix black rock from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as shown by the rediscovery of Detroit bands like Death and Black Merda.

Elsewhere in the heartland, Cleveland’s late-‘60s soul and R&B scene (a role-call of which can be found in this bio for the Imperial Wonders) also boasted a clutch of guitar-centered rock bands, including the excellently named Purple Image. Rising from the 105th St. & Superior area (which took a big hit during the unrest resulting from the 1968 Granville Shootout), PI traded on a thumping, harder-than-Parliament psychedelic sound fortified by powerful group vocals and the two-guitar attack of Ken Roberts and Frank Smith. Unfortunately Purple Image’s excellent self-titled 1970 debut would be their one and only, becoming a rare black-rock nugget before it was re-released by the UK’s Radioactive label in 2007.

It would take another Midwestern black rocker to pick up the

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but that’s another story…
 

 
Get: Purple Image - Purple Image [CD]

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.17.2010
07:38 pm
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