Here’s a truly strange tale about Cleveland guitar madman turned Jesus freak madman, Glenn Schwartz. Schwartz, a blues guitar virtuoso of whom Jimi Hendrix was allegedly a fan, could have quite possibly become legendary, playing in the mid-to-late sixties with the likes of The James Gang and Pacific Gas & Electric among other rock and blues outfits before something went horribly wrong (or amazingly right, I guess, depending on who’s telling the story). 

For starters, let me just say that a whole lot of the information that I gathered for this post came straight from the horse’s mouth in an interview that Schwartz did when he was inducted into the Cleveland Blues Society in 2013. In it, Schwartz is completely open about his contentious history and about the strange religious transformation that changed the whole trajectory of his life and music. The interview indicates that Schwartz was born and raised in Cleveland’s working class Collinwood neighborhood and that he got his first guitar at the age of ten. He began taking lessons at the age of 11 and winning contests and kicking ass at his instrument almost instantly, and according to Deanna R. Adams in her amazingly detailed Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Cleveland Connection, Schwartz soon became better than his teachers. As he grew up, he played constantly in everything, in polka bands, wedding bands and in the mid sixties, with a group called the Mr. Stress Blues Band. He also started playing with the first version of The James Gang in 1967 and began to get some attention. From Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Cleveland Connection:

Schwartz gained [The James Gang] local celebrity by playing the guitar with his teeth (before Hendrix!) and playing while hanging upside down form guitarist Bill Jeric’s shoulder.

Eventually, according to Schwartz in the Cleveland Blues Society interview, he headed to California where drummer Adolfo “Fito” de la Parra from Canned Heat got wind of the blues virtuoso and hooked Schwartz up with Pacific Gas and Electric Company. He gained serious notoriety for being kind of an otherworldly blues man. The Cleveland Blues Society interview indicates that people were calling him the white Hendrix. Deanna Adams and the interview both state that he was offered a spot in The Allman Brothers Band before the job went to Dickey Betts.

But drugs and alcohol were beginning to take a serious toll. He says in the Youtube interview that he was almost dead, he could barely play anymore and nobody wanted anything to do with him. And then, according to Schwartz, one night on the Sunset Strip, at his lowest of lows, he runs into street preacher, falls down on his knees and become a certified Jesus Freak right there on the spot. He cleaned himself up and held on to his position in PG&E for a while, but oh man with the Jesus. He says he had the band singing gospel songs and was constantly berating the whole crew with the fact that they needed to be saved. According to Schwartz, it got to the point where they only kept him on board because, again, he kicked so much ass on the guitar. Schwartz goes on to say in the interview that when PG&E toured, the band gave him his own hotel room and separate transportation and basically started having very little to do with him except onstage. In the interview, Schwartz says that he would, despite the band’s misgivings about the whole thing, get on a microphone in front of 80,000 people telling the crowd they needed to find God. And then, finally, “enough with the fucking Jesus already” got him kicked out of PG&E once and for all.

Adams points out in Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Cleveland Connection that Schwartz was a featured artist at the Miami Pop Festival in 1969 before he returned to Cleveland in 1970 and started a band with brother Gene on bass called (appropriately enough) the Schwartz Brothers. But, according to Schwartz in the blues society induction interview, he began drinking again and eventually did time at a workhouse on a spousal abuse charge. After jail time, Schwartz fell in with Larry Hill, a hardcore member of the Jesus movement running a bizarre Christian cult in Orwell, Ohio and he stayed there on the farm for seven years. A new book called Fortney Road: Life, Death & Deception in a Christian Cult, by first time author Jeff Stevenson is soon to released about Glenn Schwartz and his relationship with the Ohio commune. In a recent interview in Cleveland’s Scene weekly, Stevenson says that a reporter familiar with Larry Hill once told him that “On the day you hear Reverend Larry Hill has died, remember to wear thick-soled shoes because hell will be stoked up extra hot.” The commune was allegedly extremely abusive to its members and people living on the farm were forced to work exorbitant hours and punished constantly for minor infractions. You can read about the insane environment on the website for the new book here. Despite taking part in the harsh treatment, Schwartz recorded four records while on the farm with an evangelical musical outfit called the All Saved Freak Band. The records are really kind of great with excellent players spinning out a trippy blues/folk amalgamation as long as a you can get past the preaching the word of God thing (unless, of course, that is your thing, in which case you don’t have to get past it, I guess). They toured the country promoting the farm’s ministry to some notoriety. If you really want to get freaky one night, put on this shit from the 1976 album amazingly titled For Christians, Elves and Lovers.
 

 
Eventually, according to Swartz in the Blues Society induction interview, his parents, apparently worried about losing Glenn forever into the commune, sent in this guy Ted Patrick (an entire article could itself be written about him) who made a name for himself in the 70’s “deprogramming” cult members. Schwartz says in the interview that he was handcuffed by bikers before Patrick went to work on him in a hotel room on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, but Schwartz held on to the hard core biblical belief and stayed on the farm. When he came out of the experience he recorded an album called Brainwashed with The All Saved Freak Band. He left the farm in the late seventies while continuing to play all over the place and taking the Jesus freakishness to fire-and-brimstone levels of fury.

Now in his seventies, Schwartz still plays around Cleveland (he’s about to play a 75th birthday show at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom), and, really, I cannot emphasize to you enough how crazy it is to see him play. Watching a performance can be a fascinating, polarizing, alienating and problematic experience and it is truly like nothing you’ll ever see anywhere else.

Here’s how Deanna R. Adams puts it:

But for as much as he’s known for his guitar wizardry, Glenn Schwartz is also famous for using the stage as a podium to warn his flock of the evils of the world and to condemn the sins of mankind. Few seem to take it to heart. “Just as quickly as he can fill a room with his playing, he can empty it when he starts to preach,” one musician notes. No matter. His rantings don’t last long enough to detract from his playing. Besides, watching Schwartz execute his demons with his guitar is indeed a religious experience.

On the web page for the forthcoming Fortney Road book, David Byrne says this:

Between amazing and inventive Hendrix-like solos, he admonishes the audience and prophesizes ‘blood on the moon and war in America.’ He may have lost his mind, but his fingers are firing on all cylinders.

Both of these quotes put it mildly. I used to occasionally watch The Schwartz Brothers play on Thursday nights just about two blocks from my apartment at the time in the flats area of Cleveland, Ohio in a blue-collar shot and beer bar called Hoopples. I would go down there from time to time because the whole performance, especially the stage banter, is just fucked up. I personally couldn’t see Schwartz play everyday because, even though a lot of people just laugh it off, and many more people just feel sorry for the guy, the dude can be downright offensive (towards women, towards minorities, hell, towards people who drink beer). There’s no way around it. It’s an unbelievably strange spectacle, but to this day, Glenn Schwartz is hands down, and paradoxically one of the best damned electric blues guitar players that I’ve seen two feet away from me in my entire life.

Here’s a little sample of what you’re in for at one of Schwartz’s shows. You put up with this (watch the whole video if you like, but there are two epic religious rants here, one at 2:20 and the other at 10:00)...
 

 
...so that you can get shit like this, videotaped a couple months ago: