The Hard Way on Purpose (12 page)

TRAPPED IN A WORLD THAT THEY NEVER MADE

I discovered rock and roll in a decommissioned bank building, fiddling with a plastic cup of pale beer, dressed in another man's bowling shirt, and wishing I had the tricolor, flat-bottomed shoes that would grant me my transcendence.

I sat at a sticky table in the abandoned remains of a once-­opulent savings and loan, feeling both inferior and exotic. Above me was a commanding balcony. Behind me was a vault with a big, complicated gold handle that looked like the steering wheel from the
Poseidon
. Passing by, asking for a light, was a scrawny young man with a Mohawk, whose request was clearly intended as an insult, but one I couldn't interpret.

We had been coming here for months, a few friends and I, sneaking in underage, although I suppose it isn't technically sneaking when no one cares. I'd been arriving most nights with my brother Ralph, who was old enough to get in. He would show the doorman his driver's license and I would follow right behind, flashing Ralph's college ID. Same picture, same name. A few times through and the doorman didn't even bother checking anymore.

We'd come this night to see the Generics, a rock band from my high school that was led by my friend John Puglia. The group had originally begun as a gag for a school talent show, Four Neat Guys, dressed in leisure suits and lip-synching to a record by the Tarriers, a B-level, 1950s folk group. Then someone decided to try it with instruments and play Clash and Who covers, even though only one of them could actually play—and he really could play, a trained guitarist who could reproduce Rush and .38 Special songs exactly as they sounded on the radio, impressing us all. Except in the Generics he didn't play guitar. He was the drummer. So there was a singer who wasn't a singer, some guitarists who weren't guitarists, and a drummer who was a guitarist but was not. Together, onstage, despite their real selves.

The Generics were preparing to go on, arranging amplifiers, plugging things in, adjusting pieces of the drum kit. The place was crowded, a mix of our high school friends and the Bank regulars, slightly older, slightly better versed in rock-and-roll convention. They had the right bowling shirts. They had stripes. They had spandex. They had Mohawks.

John had made a brilliant and audacious move toward that direction, having purchased a pair of shiny black leather Beatle boots by mail order from Trash & Vaudeville in Greenwich Village. We all shopped at the thrift stores, looking for such items, but none of us had ever taken such an audacious step as to go directly to the fountainhead and spend that kind of money. Fifty-nine dollars! For a pair of pointy-toed boots! From New York City! John, therefore, had attained a kind of elevated legitimacy. Except that in the brief time since he had begun wearing the boots, the nuances of cool had taken a turn from skinny ties and pointy boots to something less refined, more guttural and torn.

In response, John had covered the boots in aluminum foil and speckled them with spray paint. This completed an outfit that consisted of skinny, black jeans with a bandanna tied around the ankle, a sleeveless T-shirt printed with a hyperreal photograph of goldfish, and a porkpie hat. It's hard to say whether his fashion fit with the rest of the band because each of them looked as if he belonged in a separate group—and not just musical group, but demographic group. The guitar player was wearing a business suit. The bass player was wearing a necktie around his forehead like a kamikaze headband. And the drummer, who was a defensive lineman by day, wore his green football jersey with a chunky 65 across the front.

*  *  *

The Bank had retained most of the character of its former financial-­institution self, such that the liquor was stored behind the ornate, round steel door of the old vault, and the president's office upstairs still had its mahogany paneling, and that's where people sometimes smoked pot, which I never quite understood, because I didn't think illegal things were done in public. But the biggest falsehood of its current incarnation was its size. For a rock club, it was huge. I had no context for this then, but would later understand that local bands simply didn't play in rooms that large. (In addition to its floor space, the Bank had a two-story-high ceiling, all of which made it a sonic nightmare. Someone had draped a parachute from the ceiling in an attempt to deaden the sound, but it didn't work. Drummers had to time their beats so they'd be playing off their own rhythm, rather than the echo of themselves, all of which would sound like an overwrought Brian Eno studio technique if it weren't so woefully unintentional.)

The club was attached to a hotel called the Hotel Anthony Wayne, which used to have a stately velvet lobby and five-star rooms. It had slowly descended into a transient hotel, and now its rooms were rented by the night to gutter drunks and crazy people. Its lit sign malfunctioned so that it looked as if the place were called the Hony Wayne, which seemed about right.

The most profound truth of the Bank was how dramatically it represented the collapse of the prevailing culture, a major downtown financial institution overtaken by punk rock, right there square in the middle of Main Street. And there were dozens and dozens of other examples—theaters, bowling alleys, churches, warehouses. Some people might have found that sad. I never did. I always found it thrilling, this notion of decadence and of abandon and of availability and of possibility. There's a quote I love, by the composer Ned Rorem (by way of Jonathan Lethem's
The Ecstasy of Influence
)—“Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.”

That's exactly how I felt there, then.

*  *  *

The house music stopped and the Generics began. Because they knew only four chords, they chose covers to suit their limitations, playing “Clash City Rockers” right after “I Can't Explain,” the former having exactly the same choppy rhythm and progression—E-D-A-E—except with a G tucked in the middle to avoid wholesale plagiarism. They had one original, called “Twirl Around,” which used the same chords in a different order.

They played “Clampdown” and “Death or Glory” and “I Fought the Law.” Having overmined the Clash catalog, they turned to the Sex Pistols' “Anarchy in the UK” and, oddly, “Downtown” by Petula Clark. I didn't know in any critical way whether they were good, but I knew for sure they were amazing, simply because they were doing
something
, doing
this
, right there, live, on a stage that may as well have been in the middle of Shea Stadium. John was a catalyst—that was his true talent—and the dance floor immediately was full and frenzied. Somehow he lost his shirt, and then, as the set reached its climax, he pulled out a guitar and strapped it on, a guitar with one string, not plugged into anything. At the end of the song, he smashed it, which might have elevated him into some godlike status had I not seen him do this every single time they'd played, including once in the school cafeteria and even once in practice, and watched him methodically hammer the thing back together in preparation for the next show.

*  *  *

We had happened into what seemed like a uniquely strange moment, but which now I understand was the only way such moments can occur in cities like mine: strangely.

Cleveland and Akron, through a combination of bizarre misunderstandings and ham-fisted manipulation, had become, momentarily, a focal point of American pop music.

A term had emerged in the international music press—
the Akron Sound
—and it wasn't intended to be ironic.

It stemmed from the large number of like-minded artists and musicians who had just recently departed Akron on their way to illogical mainstream success. A half-decade progression of notoriety unfolded like this:

Chrissie Hynde, an Akron native, had moved to London, wandered more or less by chance into the midst of the burgeoning punk scene, formed the Pretenders, and become a major rock star. Her mother learned of this when she was at the local mall one day and saw her daughter's picture on the cover of
NME
.

Devo, which had begun as a local band at a dinky club that predated the Bank, had departed for Los Angeles and scored a
Billboard
No. 14 hit with “Whip It,” which still stands as the quintessential New Wave pop song.

The Waitresses, a locally formed offshoot of a band called Tin Huey, had an MTV hit—“I Know What Boys Like”—and played the theme song to my favorite TV show,
Square Pegs.

Rachel Sweet, whose brother was our paperboy (yes, we cling to these connections), had sung “Everlasting Love” as a duet with teen idol Rex Smith; it was all over the radio.

The Cramps' singer, Lux Interior, was from Akron. Robert Quine, the guitarist for Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Lou Reed, was from here too. The director Jim Jarmusch, an Akronite who'd moved to New York and had a strong connection to the music scene, was getting lots of attention for his first film,
Permanent Vacation
, and was about to be awarded the Camera d'Or for
Stranger Than Paradise
at the Cannes Film Festival.

All of them had come from here. In addition, the Bank's most popular draw, a gritty power-pop band called Hammer Damage, had lost its lead guitarist to the Dead Boys, the freaking
Dead Boys
! In the hipster underground, the Akron celebrity-association meter went haywire.

In the midst of this, an interviewer in England asked Mark Mothersbaugh, the Devo front man, what Akron was like. “It's a lot like Liverpool,” he responded, referring to the dingy industrial vibe. But the quote was misinterpreted to mean “musical hotbed.” Before long, London-based Stiff Records released an album called
The Akron Compilation
, which included a scratch-'n'-sniff cover that smelled like rubber.

Meanwhile, as Akron was becoming identified with adventurous, mold-breaking new music, Cleveland, driven mainly by the mainstream AOR, behemoth rock station WMMS, had declared itself the Rock and Roll Capital of the World, a wild hyperbole that was accepted by the populous as gospel.

Regardless of the catchphrases and the hype, these
were
great rock-and-roll cities, and not just Akron and Cleveland, but Detroit and Minneapolis and Chicago and Youngstown and lots of places in between. This reflected not an inherent coolness, but rather more like the opposite, something bred in the nature of our existence. Rock and roll needs a void, and we had that, in abundance. We had empty garages and basements and warehouses, and great stretches of empty time, and—most important—no one paying attention.

Few bands in pop music history have been as calculated and inventive as Devo. But Devo spent years fucking around, sorting and sorting through the junk surrounding them to assemble their creation, writing manifestos, and developing broad personas. If Akron is a place that does things the hard way on purpose, then Devo could be our patron saint. They couldn't have come from any other place, at any other time. The junk would have been wrong. Or someone might have cared.

*  *  *

On January 3, 2012, the “classic lineup” of Dayton-based rock band Guided by Voices appeared on the
Late Show with David Letterman
. Guided by Voices has always represented exactly the kind of fucked-up we understand, especially in its earliest incarnation—a brilliant singer and lyricist stuck in a schoolteaching job; a guitarist who looked like an adjunct professor; another guitarist who looked as if he were in Black Flag; a bassist who looked like one of Herman's Hermits. Up until, say, the Internet, the best Ohio rock bands always looked like this: an intuitive, adamant imitation of something we thought we were getting right (but probably weren't) while also pretending we didn't care (but did).

And then, through the usual series of inexplicable circumstances, Guided by Voices became one of the most influential bands of the 1990s and 2000s, and one of the most beloved, sort of the Grateful Dead of indie rock. The singer, Robert Pollard, was the only constant through all those years, and the original members never got to experience the height of the band's success.

So then, nearly thirty years after their formation, those original members, now middle-aged, made their network television debut. You might call this a moment of nostalgia, as long as you recognize the difference between nostalgia and sentimentality. Nostalgia is what a friend of mine from Youngstown calls “happiness rusted over.”

Letterman held up the new album, introduced the band, and off they went.

Guided by Voices kicked in immediately with earnest deliberation, playing a new song, “The Unsinkable Fats Domino,” a terse staccato with open spaces between power chords. In the opening moments, guitarist Mitch Mitchell strummed a chord and struck a pose, hand raised in the devil-horn configuration. Fifteen seconds later, bass player Greg Demos, sporting his trademark striped bell-bottoms, made his own rock move, bobbing intensely to the beat, then spreading his legs wide, and then his feet went out from under him and down he went, hard, on his ass.