And not just a cover band, though I know a guy who’s in three. The problem is Cincinnati is what one former coworker called “a wedding band town.” I would call it a bar band town, but it’s a far cry from what I grew up with. When I was a teen, WMMS in Cleveland would regularly play bands like Beau Coup, Jonah Koslen, and, of course, the Michael Stanley Band. This last was the best known act to come out of Cleveland before Trent Reznor recorded his first Nine Inch Nails project.
Cincinnati can claim the great Adrian Belew and, for a time, counted Peter Frampton as one of its residents, but Peter made his name in London, and Belew answered a phone call from Frank Zappa, which sent him off to LA., which led to the Talking Heads and the Tom-Tom Club, and finally, King Crimson. (For 30 years, Belew was indispensable, just like the last guy.)
But the best known bands here are the Menus (who play Put in Bay more these days), the Rusty Griswolds, Prizoner (who played my homecoming back in Cleveland. During Reagan’s first term), and the Naked Karate Girls. NKG draws large crowds and have a strong Beastie Boys vibe. The Griswolds were the superior band in the bunch (and from Deer Park, where I’m typing this.) Prizoner? Home more in bars than in front of high schoolers, though time may be a factor in that. While they’re great acts, as are the Menus, they play covers. Prizoner’s Russell Jinkens made a stab at original music with the Russell Jinkens Band XL (now Psychoholic sans Jinkens), but he’s back with Prizoner. It’s not the bands. They all have talent. Psychoholic’s John Lynn can write Southern rock with the best of them.
It’s the local culture. Gone are the days when you could catch an up-and-coming act at Sudsy Malone’s in Clifton. Or even one of the musicians. An old girlfriend met Fish from Marillion there doing his laundry after a show at Bogart’s because, hey, what rocker doesn’t want to do his laundry in a bar with a band. (Seriously, I went to Sudsy’s a couple of times just for a drink. Missed Beck by about five minutes.)
The Akron Sound
All this brings us to a book I’m reading now, The Akron Sound: The Heyday of the Midwest’s Punk Capital by Calvin C. Rydbom. My views on the local music scene come out of Cleveland from WMMS, WGCL before they targeted 14-year-old girls as their prime demographic, and later, the independent Scene Magazine. And of course, there was Michael Stanley, who regularly found himself on tour with the likes of REO Speedwagon or a host of other corporate rock behemoths. At the time of his death, Tom Petty was still scratching his head as to why the Michael Stanley Band never made it.
But as Blondie made me realize I wanted to have sex before I even knew what that was, there was an entire punk and new wave scene blowing up even closer to my tiny railroad town exurb than Cleveland. Everyone’s heard of Devo and most people have heard The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like” and “Christmas Wrapping.” You can’t get away from the latter between Black Friday and Christmas. (And still a damn sight better than Mariah’s overplayed “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Make it stop! I’m begging you!)
But Devo, The Waitresses, and, over in England, the Pretenders were the tip of a punk/new wave iceberg called the Akron Sound. Devo, which is… Well… Devo, is not the typical Akron band, just the most successful. And the Pretenders came about because it took Chrissy Hynde almost a decade in England to find the right musicians to form the Pretenders. No, Akron was defined by three bands, one of which still exists after well over fifty years: 15-60-75, aka the Numbers Band, along with the Rubber City Rebels and Tin Huey. The Rebels were straight up punk, which explains how I remained completely ignorant of them until later in life. Solid enough to get signed by a major label, timing and shifts in the industry denied them the chance to grow and develop beyond a local band. How punk were they? They might have blown the Ramones off the stage, and I don’t say that lightly. The Ramones deserved their first-ballot induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, had the Rebels stuck, they might have had to up their game to compete with the likes of Black Flag.
Tin Huey, on the other hand, gets compared a lot to Velvet Underground, but I hear a lot of Yes-leanings in their music. Probably the way they put their songs together, but Tin Huey was as solid a new wave band as anything that came out of the Second British Invasion of the 1980s. And they did it years earlier than Duran Duran or the Pet Shop Boys.
Surprisingly, I learned about the Numbers Band in 1991 after moving to Cincinnati, from a review in the late, lamented Post about a gig at Bogart’s and frequent mentions on local rock behemoth WEBN and in indie rag Everybody’s News. (Pick it up for the music, laugh at it for the personal ads, many of which were earnestly cringy even by today’s standards.) But the Numbers Band formed in Kent, east of Akron and sort of a second epicenter for the Akron Sound. And why not? Chrissy Hynde (whose brother Terry is still a member of the Numbers Band) and Joe Walsh lived there, as did Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh. Walsh was about to explode with the James Gang, Chrissy ready to bolt for England in the wake of the Kent State massacre, and Mothersbaugh still trying to find a musical direction.
But did I hear of them? These days, I dig and sift for things I’ve never heard of. I am a rock boy and always will be, with jazz now my mistress. But as a preteen, I found the Sex Pistols to be noise. (And then as a middle aged man, pulling into Kroger, “Aaaaand IIIIIIII wanna beeee ANARCHY!” with “Anarchy in the UK” blaring on my car stereo. Get off my lawn!) I liked what’s now called Yacht Rock, a term that needs a goddamn stake through it’s cold, black heart for its sheer meaninglessness, and still hadn’t quite let go of disco. (Which also needs a stake through the heart, but sharper and maybe with some lidacaine. I have fonder memories of disco then the term “yacht rock.” Once again, get off my lawn.) I would never get Tin Huey at that age, and the Rubber City Rebels would have scared the hell out of my nice, suburban, little league existence.
So all this happened a mere twenty miles west of my house in the burbs, and I never knew it. The first Numbers Band song I ever heard was on WEBN in Cincinnati in 1992.
And yet, that movement’s legacy lives on. Akron, along with Cleveland, still has more original bands than the rest of Ohio. Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my buddy Nathan Singer’s band, the Whisky Shambles, which seldom plays covers, and my ex-wife’s current spouse, Johnny Lynn, who is still churning out Southern rock with Psychoholic (though their cover of “Kashmir” is the most original I’ve heard in ages.)
But I have a personal connection to Akron’s still-growing music community. My nephew was once a side player in a band called Tropidelic, which is gaining some traction, neat trick since the pandemic sidelined a lot of acts. Also, for several years, he led a quirky trio called Northcoast Shakedown. My nephew, Chris Hottle, told me the same story that made several of the aforementioned bands to fade from view. It’s a variation on Bryan Adams’s “Jimmy quit, Jody got married.” But listening to NCS and having seen Chris play with Tropidelic, I can hear the strains of Tin Huey and the eye-rolling irony of the Waitresses in their music. Chris was born and grew up after grunge, and his dad, my brother, once had to nudge his own band out of hair metal because the lead singer didn’t realize only Motley Crue was still playing it at that point. That was the mid-1990s.
The beauty of the Akron Sound, though, was there was no “sound” to it. After listening to the Rubber City Rebels’ first album, along with Tin Huey’s, and a handful of Waitresses songs, I can hear a vibe that made it all the way to London (where it blended with Herefordshire to drive the Pretenders) and even still shows up in Devo’s music.
Hmm… Devo was the official band of my high school cross country team.
Time to pull up The New Traditionalists on Tidal and take a break from Perfessor Fripp and his various King Crimsons.
There are TONS of great orginal bands in Cincinnati right now. The best places to see them are MOTR, the Northside Tavern, the Comet and the Southgate House Revival, but there are other venues featuring killer acts as well (Radio Artifact, etc.).