The house is like a portal to another dimension, where boxes of memories and stuff you really thought you’d need end up on the curb. We’re not turning into minimalists but when you find Eagle Stamp Savings Books, Instamatic cameras, VHS tapes and on and on, you wonder, “Why did we keep this stuff?” ...

Glen Campbell. Stephen Stills. Brandi Carlile. Kris Kristofferson. Richie Havens. The Main Street marquee boasted a who’s who of music’s most iconic performers. “Graham Nash was playing nearby and he stopped in to visit with the Zombies. Joan Baez played our first anniversary show, and Leon Redbone was eccentric but fun,” Tom Simpson says. ...

Trent Reznor returns to his one-time home to be honored for his work with Nine Inch Nails. Few realize that the first NIN tracks were recorded at Right Track Studio at East 22nd and Payne Avenue.  Reznor traded work as a handyman and engineer for time in the studio where he mostly played all of the instruments on the initial recordings.  ...

Boom!

Pop Culture Chronicles

 

Anniversaries

Been There, Celebrated It, And Now It’s Boring

 

By Mike Olszewski

 

A new year is upon us and we say goodbye to “the teens” and head into the last year of the second decade.  (Keep in mind that there was no year “zero” so 2020 is the final year of decade number two for this century.)  We hope your holiday season was memorable, and if there’s one thing boomers like to do is remember.

For the past 10 years, we’ve been commemorating everything that happened in the 1960s.  Granted, there was a lot to commemorate from tragedies (the deaths of JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X and so many others), historical events (Apollo 11, The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show”) and entertainment events (the explosion of pop culture on TV, the so-called Summer of Love, the change from AM to FM radio, groundbreaking books like “The Feminine Mystique” and “Catch 22.” The list goes on and on.

Did You Know?

Sometimes it was a comparison of extremes.  The 50th anniversary of Woodstock was celebrated in Bethel, New York.  A friend of mine, writer/pop historian Martin Grams Jr., attended the anniversary show and said the promoters did a great job saluting that special moment in time.  Oh, and the couple on the cover of the Woodstock soundtrack album was even on hand. They met at the festival and have been married since.

Then we have another anniversary just a few months after marking the ill-fated Altamont Raceway show by the Rolling Stones.  A free show, lots of people hurt and the exact opposite of Woodstock. But that wasn’t the end of the 60s. We have another anniversary in just a few months.  No one can pin down the date when the 60’s era started, because it was an event or series of events rather than January 1, 1960.

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Years ago, my wife, Janice, and I took in our three nephews while their mother recovered from a car accident. They’re in their 20s and early 30s now but all were under school age when we had them.  

I told the 3-year-old to sit on the hassock so I could tie his shoes. “What’s that? My butt?” I realized that many of the common words that were used by our pre-Boomer parents were part of a different language.

When we visited my grandmother, she told us to hang our coats in the chifferobe and have a seat on the davenport. You scrubbed pans with a “chore boy” and canned foods were kept in the basement in the fruit bin, usually a room that was converted into a pantry that used to store coal. 

We drank out of garden hoses, babies sat on their mom’s lap during car rides with no seat belts and we ran around with sparklers on the Fourth of July. If the weather was “close” (humid) you suffered through it because who had air conditioning? And that brings me to modern conveniences.

 

Say What?

I made the mistake of mentioning to a classroom of college kids that where I live, we aren’t allowed to hang clothes outside. “Why would you do that? Is your dryer broke?” No, they smell better! 

Mistake number two: I mentioned that a lot of old houses had home incinerators in the basement. “Wait a minute! You burned trash in your house? You built a fire in your basement!?” No, it was a controlled fire in a container. The concept was foreign to them.

Then there was the party line. “You’d have a party on the phone? Why don’t you just invite them over?” This comes from a generation that has never actually dialed a phone or has heard a dial tone.

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I was horrified when students in a class I taught had never heard of the Marx Brothers. My grandmother told me that when the brothers and W.C. Fields played the Cleveland vaudeville houses, they stayed home because their acts were insulting. Hey, that was part of their charm! The Marxes were at Playhouse Square a number of times and barely escaped with their lives when Chico got caught hustling players at a pool hall. ...

 

 

My thanks to Emerson, Lake & Palmer for a convenient headline. Spring is in the air, music everywhere and Janice Olszewski has a new book about Northeast Ohio’s historic performance venues.

Oh, who am I kidding? Jan is my co-author for our latest book, “Smoky, Sweaty, Rowdy, and Loud: Tales of Cleveland’s Legendary Rock & Roll Landmarks.”

We do not cover all the venues in this first volume. There are too many to include and way too many stories. The research was great fun but the only real problem was picking out the best stories from each venue.  

One of the most surprising aspects was how well the artists who played here remembered even the smallest details. Even though he debuted at Cleveland Music Hall in 1972 and played two sold-out dates at Public Hall just a few weeks later, David Bowie loved the Agoras. He played keyboards behind Iggy Pop at the location near Cleveland State and later with his band Tin Machine when Hank LoConti moved operations to East 50th and Euclid.

You can write volumes about the Agora and the people who played there. Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 show was the most heavily bootlegged concert ever, Free made its U.S. debut on that stage, Prince’s bodyguard roughed up a TV cameraman, U2 and The Police made a huge impact and Buddy Maver showed Elvis Costello’s manager why you NEVER insult The Plain Dealer’s rock critic Jane Scott.  Let’s just say it never happened again.

 

More Stories

Derek Hess booked Green Day at The Euclid Tavern after the band was starting to get really huge, and flat-out refused another act for “hygiene” issues. That huge cloud of powder that Trent Reznor threw out at Nine Inch Nail’s Empire Concert Club show wasn’t talcum, and Jimi Hendrix played a little-attended third show when he appeared here in March 1968.  

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