UPDATE: After reading this post, brother Denny reminded me that we got our first color TV in 1976, and this promo was so exciting to watch! Today, as a lifelong audio-video engineer, he marvels at the time it must have taken to create this spot.
KISS played the Richfield Coliseum on September 3, 1976, with opening act Artful Dodger. They were promoting the album Destroyer, which is a pretty kick-ass album. Detroit Rock City and Shout It Out Loud have become KISS standards, however they failed as hit singles, and despite a strong initial sales run (it went Gold almost immediately) the record was originally rejected by fans and dissed by the critics.
Then came the single Beth, which was originally the B-Side to Detroit Rock City. It peaked at #7, the first top ten single the band ever had. The song may never have made it to the record if Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had their way. Written by drummer Peter Criss and a colleague from his former band Chelsea, is performed entirely by Criss and a piano, and a small orchestra.
Beth is the Yesterday of KISS, a track entirely unlike anything previously performed by the band, a schmaltzy pop ballad. Seriously, please, don't use the word "rock." It doesn't even have a soaring guitar bridge like any kind of so-called "rock" ballad requires. The single went Gold in January, 1977.
Beth did not appear in the line-up for the Coliseum gig.
Even on the banks of the largest fresh water lakes in the world, Cleveland has an inferiority problem. Erie is the smallest of the five major Great Lakes, and the shallowest. But great it was, even if it was in serious ecological peril in the mid-70s.
Cleveland remained an important port in those days. My grandfather was in the merchant marines before he had children and settled for a desk job at Cleveland Trust. And even after sailing the world, he always insisted Lake Erie was the roughest, most dangerous sea of them all.
My education of the map of the Great Lakes began with Holling Clancy Holling's 1941 classic Paddle-To-The-Sea, the story of a First Nations boy, living north of Lake Superior in Nipigon Country, who carves a small wooden canoe with "Indian" and sets it on a journey to, hopefully, makes its way though all of the lakes and out to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, it is not the story of the boy at all, but of his wooden "paddle person" who he names Paddle-to-the-Sea.
My father read me this book, and through it developed unshakeable, relevant visual associations, like the fact that Superior is shaped like a wolf's head, or that Huron looks like a trapper with his pack. Erie, is shaped like a lump of coal ... which is stupid because anything could be shaped like a lump of coal, but it did impress upon me the importance of coal in the economy of our region.
Another powerful image of the Great Lakes from my youth is that modern sea-dirge, Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, released in August 1976 on the LP Summertime Dream.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on downof the big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
The opening chords are still chilling to me. Providing the ancient name for Lake Superior gives the tale an historic, epic tone.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy.
Now I'm thinking of pirates. It resonates like an old sailing tale, but with familiar place names like "Wisconsin" and of course, "Cleveland."
And thank you, Mr. Lightfoot, for making the word Cleveland sing so clear and crisp during an era when it was more often used on The Tonight Show as a punchline.
The storm whips up, and man is helpless against the elements. It could have been anyone. It could have been my grandfather. 29 sailors perished about the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald on the night of November 10, 1975 and, inspired by a Newsweek article on the tragedy, Lightfoot had written the song before the end of the year. It reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The "Mighty Fitz" had been launched in 1958 and was at that time the largest freighter on the Great Lakes. Its main cargo was taconite -- iron ore, "26,000 tons or more" -- though it was fully-loaded from Duluth and headed for Detroit, not Cleveland, when the witch of November came stealing. "Big Fitz's" final communication came minutes before it sank, at 7:10 PM when Captain Ernest M. McSorley reported, "We are holding our own."
Steven Dietz wrote a play about the wreck called Ten November but if it's been performed in the Cleveland area, I have no clue. Someone should get on that.
Anyone who has seen Dazed and Confused knows the Bicentennial was hardly 24-hour patriot extravaganzas and colonial soap-making workshops, although there was a lot of that. No, it was still the mid-70s, President Gerald Ford was the only un-elected President in American history* we were in economic doldrums and were still reeling from the end of the Vietnam War.
How best then to regain a sense of pride and uplifting nationalism? Bicentennial branding!
7*UP released a limited edition of cans, each featuring one of the fifty states on one side, and on the other side a cryptic, seemly random series of 7UPs in red or blue on white background.
Detail.
Collect them all — one featured a key for how to stack the cans — and you were treated to an optical illusion of a certain American icon! Collecting and stacking empty beer cans was a national hobby at the time, why not stack cans and celebrate our freedoms at the same time?
My brother Henrik collected all fifty. He didn't buy them all, he asked the guys at Village Pizza (two doors down from Bay Lanes) to hang onto empties anyone left around the place, and he would collect and wash them. I still have all 50 stored in my attic. I have no idea how rusted these steel cans may be, I have no looked for them in quite a while. I did find a complete collection on eBay going for $425.
I want YOU.
*For those too young to remember, Michigan House Representative Ford was appointed Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, and became President when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.
UPDATE: I sold my brother's can collection in 2026, for $47.76.
Sitting on the stoop in front of Tommy's Restaurant,
now the location of Mac's Backs Paperbacks.
Harvey Lawrence Pekar (October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010) was born in Cleveland, to Polish immigrant parents. He graduated from Shaker Heights High in 1957 and after a stint in the U.S. Navy settled in Cleveland Heights eventually gaining regular employment as a file clerk at the V.A. Hospital. His legend, however, is as a writer, of jazz criticism and as the creator of his autobiographic comic book American Splendor.
In 1962 Pekar met Robert Crumb, who at that time was an illustrator for American Greetings. They had a mutual admiration for all things jazz, and Crumb introduced Harvey to "underground" comics. Pekar had abandoned superhero comic books as a teenager, but Crumb opened his mind to all of the different stories could be told through the medium. When he decided to reach out and attempt his own work, Pekar first contacted Crumb to be an illustrator.
He self-published American Splendor #1 in 1976. And the cover is correct, Crumb only did a two-pager.
For those familiar with his later work, which concentrates almost exclusively on his day-to-day life with wife Joyce Brabner and their child Danielle, the premiere issue is a little dizzying. Longer pieces like How I Spent My Summer Vacation: 1972 and Love Story (Summer 1946) tell the story of Harvey surrogates "Marv" and "Herbie" and their entirely unedited sexual exploits. One image might even be punishable as child pornography. Only one story (not including the cover) where Pekar explains how he roped Crumb into assisting him on this adventure depicts Harvey by name as himself.
Depictions of Black people and women (lots of naked tits) would also raise a few eyebrows ... but not if you were already familiar with the work of Crumb and his contemporaries. It was par for the course in the 1970s. Looking at his later work, I would almost guess that Harvey felt he was supposed to "go there" to be part of the underground comics scene, but I would hesitate to give any closer analysis than that, other to say it's a bold first issue, and it must have taken a heap of courage for someone like Pekar to take some many of his personal thoughts and shove them out there as if to say, "This is what I think, this is who I am, take it or leave it."
And that, after all, is what everyone who loves him loves about him.
The most poignant story is Remembering Be-Ins which takes place in the not-too-distant future. Two teenagers approach the balding, 70 year-old "Mr. Shapiro" and ask him what life was like way back in the far-out 1960s.
This evening the Cleveland Play House Playwrights' Unit met for our annual pizza party kick-off, where we all hunker down with our calendars and decide when best to meet. And eat pizza. And in my case, drink.
The relocation to the Allen Theatre has given us the opportunity to rethink to goals, or at least the methods, of the Unit. We meet (more or less) every other week to share pages and critique each others' work. Emphasis this year, however, has been placed on readings of completed works. To that end, Laura gently pressed us to fill the calendar for the remainder of 2011 with weekly Monday night readings.
And so I jumped. I will finish my latest piece by the beginning of December. Why not? I work best with deadlines. Besides, I have found my work on the 1950s to be flagging, and have just been waiting for the year to end to concentrate on the 70s.
Well, fuck that noise. Time to get into the big ugly. Welcome to America's Bicentennial.
There's an art installation going on at CPT now through the end of the month called Royal Ann's Preserve. Last night I was moderating a discussion after a staged reading in the Levin, and I was encouraged to step in.
Walking into this space (a storefront in the CPT complex) was like moving through someone's brain, gauzy red synapses defining the "rooms." It's heavy with memories. And ghosts.
The West Clinton Historic Haunts Walking Tour was meeting up the street, Donna told me it is more "historic" than "haunted" with re-enactors stepping out of old houses and describing what life was like in Merry Ol' Cleveland. For the season of death I would recommend Royal Ann's. It is spooky. It is haunted. It is sad. No one will jump out and say "boo." But you may have difficulty sleeping for what has moved into your head.
