Not much to this other than to bemoan the rapid passing of summer. July was beastly, but August has been nice, and I’m looking forward to pleasant weather through October (call me optimistic). Karen’s about to enter her last year at Cleveland Institute of Art, Katy just started her second year at Bowling Green, and Lylah’s now a junior at Beaumont—and working: She got a job at Chocolate Emporium, a kosher confectionery virtually around the corner from our house.

Off Provincetown, Mass. this August—whale watching is great!

Lylah, Karen and Katy: my beautiful household.

Read a great book: Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. Also reviewed a book of his travel writings for the Boston Globe, and for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reviewed Driving Home, a collection of essays and memoirs by the fine British writer Jonathan Raban. I’m still reviewing jazz CDs for Jazz Times and a little bit of rock for Hearsay.

Invisible Soul is vexing. I applied for a Creative Workforce Fellowship to the Cuyahoga Partnership for Arts and Culture and will know by Oct. 12 whether I got it. It’s for $20,000, which would help me a lot and pay for some research help. In the meantime, I already have an outline and am gearing up to just plain write the thing, or at least parts of it that I have under my belt. Poring over old newspaper stories and display ads is fascinating; there’s so much oddball, uncovered history here. In the meantime, I have another book out (sort of): WIXY 1260: Pixies, Six-Packs and Supermen. Published by a subsidiary of Kent State University Press, it’s credited thus: “Mike Olszewski & Richard Berg with Carlo Wolff.” Basically, I edited it. It’s fun.

One last item: My first wife contacted me through Facebook. I haven’t seen her/been in contact with her since 1983. Amazing how the lines of your life connect—far more easily than they used to.

The weather sucked. Except for one day when it crept near 50, the temperature in Cleveland has been zero to 30 and there’s been snowfall virtually every day for the past six weeks. That might explain why the Hesitations drew only about 150 despite major publicity.

In any case, the Hesitations were just fine, living proof of the second chance. They recorded for Kapp in the late ‘60s and hit the charts with such tunes as “Soul Superman,” “Born Free” and “The Impossible Dream,” speaking to the rise of black power. Those songs, along with such chestnuts as “Stand By Me” and “Mustang Sally,” still have the power, though whether they relate to today’s young people is a question.

Red becomes the Hesitations

It was great to see and hear a group with harmonies and choreography, a group that plays real instruments and tells real stories through their music. Makes you think getting older pays dividends after all.

Which brings me to my top 10 lists. I wrote one for PazznJop, the annual Village Voice poll of 1,500 critics; it focuses on pop and will join 1,499 others in the Jan. 19 issue. I wrote the other, exclusively on jazz CDs, for Jazz Times, the monthly magazine I contribute to.

PazznJop was tougher. I’m of a generation out of step with a lot of current pop, so I suspect my list reads dated. Jazz is easier, now that I’m in the current of jazz recordings. Anyhow, I’m sharing:

For the Voice:
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Mojo, Reprise
The National, High Violet, 4AD
The Deadbeat Poets, Circustown, Pop Detective
Tom Jones, Praise & Blame, Island
Roky Erickson, True Love Cast out All Evil, Anti
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Good Music
Dan Auerbach, Keep It Hid, Nonesuch
Bettye Lavette, Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, Anti
Taylor Swift, Speak Now, Big Machine
Eminem, Recovery, Aftermath/Interscope

For Jazz Times:
Sarah Manning, Dandelion Clock, Posi-Tone
Rudresh Mahanthappa & Bunky Green, Apex, Pi
Dave Morgan, Way of the Sly Man, Being Time
Danilo Perez, Providencia, Mack Avenue
Nik Baertsch’s Ronin, Llyria, ECM
Metropole Orkest/John Scofield/Vince Mendoza, 54, Emarcy
The Nels Cline Singers, Initiate, Cryptogramophone
Stephan Crump With Rosetta Trio, Reclamation, Sunnyside
Charles Lloyd Quartet, Mirror, ECM
Cassandra Wilson, Silver Pony, Blue Note

I’m depressed about the elections, though oddly confident that Obama will now learn to lead the country, particularly since all the GOP seems wont to do is continue to say no to anything he tries. That’s not a program, and even when it’s hard to discern, Obama has one. So maybe there’s hope.

On the CJO: This was the first time I’d encountered several members of the board since I quit in August over its hiring of a communications person other than me. I don’t like some board members, so encounters were prickly. The show featured Cleveland stars Bob Fraser, guitar; Dominick Farinacci, trumpet; Ernie Krivda, tenor sax; the storied blind organist, Eddie Baccus Sr., rocking the Hammond; Ki Allen, vocals. It was a little lurchy and long, but basically nifty, even communal. Ki—my favorite Cleveland singer for sure—was terrific; Ernie was big-toned and expansive, particularly on “Laura”; the Frase made a lovely pass of intricately chorded variations on “Norwegian Wood”; and the restrained, suspensefully soulful Farinacci turned in a gorgeous “Manha de Carnaval,” from the film “Black Orpheus.” The show didn’t quite sell out, but it felt good. I’m still hostile toward the organization but miss the band.

Tomorrow I travel to Vancouver for a Best Western conference. I’m looking forward to a brief visit to a city that years ago was the stage for the wildest week I’ve ever spent. In 1975, I flew there on recommendation of a sometime girlfriend in Burlington who suggested I stop over there on my way to San Francisco and hook up with two of her friends, Jane and Carla. Did I ever: I spent a wild, stoned week there, enjoying myself immensely, profligately, bawdily. I leave the detail to your imagination.

And on Nov. 16, I’m flying to Tokyo for six days, courtesy of Hilton. I’ll stay at the Conrad at the Shiodome, tour the new Tokyo airport, and inhale as much as I can of a city I’ve always wanted to see. More soon.

Biersdorfer, who writes a tech column for the New York Times, also has written books on the iPod and the iPod Shuffle. She knows her way around Apple and clearly likes its products. Her 300-page book is chockfull of tips on how to incorporate applications into the iPad, the joys of reading on the iPad (if you buy one now, you can enjoy various newspapers for free, newspapers that are likely to charge for their content very shortly).

I was particularly interested in the section on iBooks, Apple’s iPad-exclusive book downloading software. I’ve seen an iBook and, while I now own a first-generation Kindle, I suspect I’ll offload that in favor of an iPad soon; I just have to decide whether to buy a Wi-Fi iPad (a mere $499) or the 3G model, which requires a plan and costs $629 up front. While Biersdorfer rightfully celebrates the look of a book on an iPad, she wrongfully denigrates traditional books: “Of course, reading an iBook isn’t the same as cracking open the spine of a leather-bound volume and relaxing in an English club chair with a snifter of brandy by the fire,” she writes on page 130. “But really—who reads books that way anymore (except for the impossibly wealthy and characters on Masterpiece Mystery)? Aside from visiting a bookstore or library, reading books in the 21st century can involve anything from squinting through Boswell’s Life of Johnson on a mobile phone to gobbling down the latest Danielle Steel romantic epic on the oversized Kindle DX e-reader.”

Biersdorfer convinces us in her exhaustive guide to the iPad how cool it is, but she should have parked the snark in her driveway. Those of us who still read books one has to hold—those quaint, weighty, tactile print memorabilia—like them at least as much as the hottest new Apple product.

What’s great about her first world credit as Lylah Rose Wolff is she hit it age 15. I didn’t go global until the ‘80s, when I was in my late 30s and writing for Goldmine, a record collectors’ magazine. My wife, the amazing multimedia artist Karen Sandstrom, hit the world in 1995 with a preview of the art that would go into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. That ran in Art and Antiques.

Lylah’s way ahead of the curve. A whiz at Photoshop, she’s wired for contemporary media. She has a Nikon, she’s beginning to turn her bedroom into a studio, and she’s creative and ready to learn. All she has to do is keep on keeping on with her camera, get over any squeamishness that stands in the way of getting a powerful picture (much is distasteful to my very girly girl) and press her case. It’s a powerful one.

I miss my parents lately, particularly now that I’ve read The Orientalist, Tom Reiss’ biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a tortured intellectual and prolific writer who lived while the great empires—the Ottoman, the Hapsburg, the Russian—died and totalitarianism took over. Nussimbaum was also known as Essad Bey and Kurban Said; he was a Jewish Orientalist whose greatest talent was self-invention.

Nussimbaum was born five months after my mother, in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city where there were oil fires above ground when he was a child. Baku, in Reiss’ telling, sounds like it came from The Arabian Nights.

My mother, who was quite a party girl, might have known Lev in the ‘20s when both were living in Berlin, a city Reiss captures with extraordinary vividness. Berlin in the Weimar period must have been a delight. If time travel were possible, I’d be there.

Nussimbaum’s is a story of displacement and exile. The book unearths history I had never imagined and helps explain why my parents, like the fascism-prone, Bolshevik-hating Nussimbaum, fled Germany for Italy in the early ‘30s (Italy wasn’t officially anti-Semitic until 1938, the year of the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria and Hitler and Mussolini formalized their alliance).

One of the most original works of history I’ve ever read, Reiss’ book—which he developed because he’s the “child of German-speaking Jews trapped in Nazi Europe” (I’m the son of German Jews who got out just in time)—documents a fantastic man negotiating perilous, challenging times. We live in interesting times now, with the world collapsing economically, forcing political accommodations that will be strenuous indeed. But Nussimbaum’s short career—he died, gangrenous and in great pain, in 1942—celebrates a degree of ingenuity and inventiveness rarely called for these days.

It also makes me very happy my parents made it to America, where you can breathe relatively freely. I wish I’d recorded more of their stories.

Also, visit Tom Reiss’s website.

Karen and I went to the film festival for the first time in it must be 10 years last week, and didn’t hit a clunker. Here’s what we saw: “The Ape” (Swedish); “House of Branching Love” (Finnish); “A Matter of Size” (Israeli); “Fire in the Heartland” (U.S.); “Desert of Forbidden Art” (U.S.); “Marwencol” (U.S.) Each time we went downtown was more fun. The festival was packed, the standby lines long. Here’s a brief rundown of the flicks:

—“The Ape”: Intellectually fascinating study of paranoia and trauma that never resolved, remaining ambiguous and disturbing. The point of view was riveting.

—“House”: Bawdy, funny sex comedy about tribulations and rewards of marriage. Entertaining as hell and ultimately uplifting. The actor who played Wolfi could be a major star.

—“Fire”: About the May 4, 1970 National Guard shootings at Kent State. Well-documented and profoundly sad, it evoked the politics of the ‘60s with minimum preachiness and suggested there still are stories to uncover about that seminal incident.

—“Matter”: Emotionally my favorite flick, it’s a comedy about four giant misfits in a small Israeli village who channel their creativity into becoming sumo wrestlers. It’s a whole new way of seeing fat, too. A blast.

—“Desert”: A documentary about suppressed Soviet-era Modernist art in a museum in Uzbekistan. Great art, amazing story.

—“Marwencol”: From rural, upstate New York comes this documentary about a guy beaten nearly senseless whose “recovery” consists of creating a World War II-inspired community in his backyard, populated by dolls. The most provocative movie I saw, it makes you rethink your notions of art and “wellness.”

Saturday night, I saw John Zorn’s Masada Sextet at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Saxophonist Zorn, who channels what he calls Radical Jewish Culture, and his five co-conspirators played only a little over an hour, but how and what they played! Great, often romantic music with a Sephardic, Spanish coloration; even one highly abstract piece was a kick, because Zorn and Co. so enjoy each other and their shared discipline.

The film festival and Zorn show were breaths of fresh air in a community that often feels ingrown. Seeing crowds downtown was invigorating. Hearing Zorn’s music was similarly mind-expanding. Cleveland felt like an open city this past week. Maybe it’s spring rearing its desired head.

Today I got Martin Benjamin’s “Atomic Age” in the mail. I worked with Marty in Albany in the ‘70s and ‘80s at rock and roll shows, and he’s the best photographer I’ve ever worked with (dig into his website and you’ll find a picture of me—with more hair and way bigger glasses). His book—infrared photos of his wife; shots from irradiated sites; glimpses of remote cultures; startling closeups of what look like perfect strangers—is an event. Like words, but in different ways, images can move and shape and change the world. Marty’s certainly do.

I saw Erickson at the Beachland Ballroom last night, after catching him Nov. 14 at a Janis Joplin tribute in which he sang “You’re Gonna” and “Ooh! My Soul,” a Little Richard number perfectly suited to his primal scream. Could Erickson sustain a whole set? No problem. He was fabulous.

Not only did he end with “You’re Gonna” (no encore despite wild applause, whistles and the usual hoots), he stomped through a gang of other numbers from his work in Elevators and Roky Erickson and the Aliens, and he was fierce. This was hellfire rock ‘n’ roll snatched from the abyss and delivered by a master. In the beginning, the rock word was Sun Records. The second generation was the British Invasion and the American response spearheaded by the Beatles, the Byrds, Dylan—and misfits like Erickson, a leonine phoenix who works idiosyncratic hard rock as if he’d invented it. He’s on a brief tour with Okkervil River, a startlingly good young band from Austin, the liberal oasis in secessionist Texas, where Erickson made his first mark nearly 50 years ago. I can’t wait for “True Love Cast Out All Evil,” his first album of new material in more than 10 years. It’s due out April 20.

The show was cool for other reasons. Not only was it a highlight of the Beachland’s 10th anniversary, it also featured two talented Cleveland bands: Living Stereo, a sharp, new wave quartet with complex songs and stage presence to burn, and the Alarm Clocks, a Byrds- and Petty-influenced guitar band of chops, seasoning and occasionally interesting texture. Living Stereo was a hard act to follow (especially for an opener), the Clocks a nice bridge that got better as the mix settled in. Erickson, however, dominated as soon as he took the stage.

I wish I’d caught Pere Ubu the night before, when the storied and fractious underground Cleveland band recreated “The Modern Dance,” its 1978 breakthrough. Friends tell me the house was nearly full, the energy level high, Ubu mainman David Thomas in relatively high spirits. A frazzled-looking, withdrawn Thomas was at the Erickson show. He looked thin and weary, a shadow of his former self. I hope he enjoyed the Erickson revival as much as I did.

T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon (Knopf)
Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House)
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Knopf)
Peter Kuper, Diario de Oaxaca (PM Press)
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)
Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, Box 21 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Ken Auletta, Googled (Penguin)
Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf)
Robert Goolrick, A Reliable Wife (Algonquin)
Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll (Oxford University Press)
Andre Agassi, Open (Knopf)
Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction (Free Press)

The cover of Cohen's newest live disk.

For more Leonard Cohen music, click here.

Audio CD (March 31, 2009)
Original Release Date: March 31, 2009
Number of Discs: 2
Format: Live
Label: Sony
ASIN: B001RTP3YQ

Acclaim is building for Milman's third disk.

For more Milman music, click here.

Audio CD
Original Release Date: June 2, 2009
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Koch Records
ASIN: B0026OIBQ8

Leonard Cohen: The mystic as fashion plate.

Cohen’s was one of two concerts (here’s John Soeder’s spot-on review from the Plain Dealer) I saw in the last week by Jewish musicians. Cohen’s was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and that covers hundreds of shows.

The other was by Sophie Milman, a 26-year-old Russian Jew who grew up in Israel and now lives in Toronto. A tiny blonde bombshell whose contralto-alto embodies the airy and the husky, she’s a true torch singer. Milman fronts an excellent band (Diego Rivera stood out on sax), scats like Sarah, and takes over Joni Mitchell’s “Be Cool” for her own smoldering purposes. (Here’s my preview from Cleveland Jewish News). The hottest Canadian import since Diana Krall, Milman is set to explode. Some paintings fell off the wall of Nighttown during her first set; might that have been a sign?

This pictures Sophie's newest disk.

The music on this CD is priceless.

Voices bring you into a sunny marketplace in “Along the Crossroad.” For a contemporary strutter’s ball, try the funky, splashy “Omolareso.” For a sexy cha-cha (Robin van Geerke’s piano rocks), try “Le Nouveau Mande.” And if you want to step inside the rhythm? “Bosumede” will guide you. While the core of Fra Fra Sound is Africa, its sound and approach are decidedly, exhilaratingly international. Founded by bassist Vincent Henar, Fra Fra Sound’s latest spotlights the tunes of saxophonist Efraim Trujillo, who sparkles on soprano on “Nahawi,” the sweetest track.

Audio CD (February 5, 2008)
Original Release Date: 2008
Number of Discs: 1
Format: Import
Label: Phantom Sound & Vision
ASIN: B0012OVEHQ

For more on Fra Fra, click here.

This is the cover of Bobby Selvaggio's latest CD.

Selvaggio can get entangled in his own virtuosity, so there are times his brain outstrips his heart; having the more romantic Werner and the more brazen, charismatic trumpet player Sean Jones as foils helps. “Modern Times,” a very good, very rich CD, puns on rhythm and our turbulent times even as it signifies a step forward for serious, contemporary jazz saxophone.

Audio CD (May 26, 2009)
Original Release Date: 2009
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Arabesque Recordings
ASIN: B002AT8BGO

For more Bobby Selvaggio music, click here.

Willie Nile album art shows him in action.

Nile’s voice is as high and warm as ever, the guitars pop, and the rhythm section burns; Nile’s records never lacked for excitement. Touted as the next Dylan when he debuted in 1980, the Greenwich Village resident has turned into a master of the pop anthem. This is a great follow-up to his “Streets of New York” CD, affirming Nile’s command of territory grounded in those quaint qualities: heart and faith.

For more Willie Nile music, click here.

Audio CD (April 14, 2009)
Original Release Date: April 14, 2009
Number of Discs: 1
Label: R.E.D. Distribution
ASIN: B001TD1XW6

Willie is a great live performer, a true-blue New Yorker who celebrates the city, the young, the innocent, the dreamers. “Vagabond Moon” and the Stonesy “She’s So Cold” should have been hits when they popped out of his 1980 debut, but they weren’t. Later tunes like “Places I Have Never Been” (the title of his 1988 “comeback” album) and the soaring “Whole World With You” should have been, too. Willie spent most of the ‘80s in litigation with Arista, which released his first two albums. The limbo didn’t help. Neither did record-company disinterest.

Anyhow, Willie, who was once described as a “one-man Clash,” soldiers on, rocking hard and passionate as ever, and his writing has gotten even more rugged and true. Willie writes rock that deserves to be classic.

When Willie saw me backstage before his show, he didn’t miss a beat, called my name, we hugged, and it was as if no years had intervened. He’s still charmingly and rightfully convinced of his own talent, sure his writing is getting better. He gave me his latest CDs and a DVD and told me he’s doing really well in Europe, he just performed with Springsteen at Giants Stadium, and he’s about to drop a new CD even though “House of a Thousand Guitars” has been out for only half a year.

It’s a pleasure to hang out with Willie Nile. It’s a pleasure to catch his shows, too. He may be the best folk-rocker most people have never heard. Makes me wish newspapers still published reviews of club acts. They may not draw big crowds, but they can be mighty.

Woody Herman (Mosaic Select)
Woody Herman (Artist)
Audio CD (June 23, 2009)
Original Release Date: January 29, 2008
Number of Discs: 3
Label: Mosaic Select
List price: $83.99

Click here to order from Amazon.com.

At Fairmount Presbyterian, the petite, 45-year-old German phenomenon played for about an hour and a half, traversing a desultory blues, a few Latin numbers, and a finale that shook the rafters, blending Dennerlein’s volcanic flourishes with Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue.” At the Bop Stop, she delivered two sets, serving up deep groove with an homage to Jimmy Smith, a fabulous samba in honor of her half-dachshund, half-terrier dog, and a gang of other originals.

The reason I comment on Dennerlein’s performances is that the guy who sponsored her local appearances challenged me to review her. This is my substitute. There’s no regular outlet anymore for reviews that focus on the unusual artist, the artist who doesn’t draw megacrowds. Part of that is the withering of print. Part is the subsequent conservatism, meaning newspapers aren’t trying to cover everything anymore; they just want to hold on to what they’ve got.

The church show drew about 300, the Bop Stop show close to its capacity of 110 seats. The Bop Stop show swung more and was more conventionally jazzy, showcasing the room’s singularly accommodating design and outstanding acoustics. The place is for sale and opens only for special occasions, like the Dennerlein show. How sad that the best music room in Cleveland can’t do regular business.

By the way, I’m beginning to review CDs and preview shows for Scene again. Seems timely given the number of fine, new CDs by Cleveland-based or –originated musicians like trumpeter Josh Rzepka and saxophonists Mike Lee and Bobby Selvaggio. I’m willing to bet that a promoter willing to mix it up—spotlighting jazz one night, blues another and, God forbid, rock from time to time—could make a go of the Bop Stop. As it, the place is magnificent and shuttered. What a waste.

Special To The Plain Dealer

When Paul Simon took The Plain Dealer Pavilion stage last summer and said, with what he apparently thought would be irony, “Hello, Cleveland!” he was surprised to meet with roaring approval.

Click here to read the whole article

Link: http://www.tribune-chronicle.com/Columns/articles.asp?articleID=12066

New in book stores is ‘‘Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories’’ ($19.95, Gray & Company), a brief, breezy oral history of the city’s music scene, primarily in the 1960s and ’70s.

At 131 pages, it’s far from encyclopedic, but it has some fun anecdotes compiled by Carlo Wolff, a longtime music writer who’s been based in Cleveland since the mid-’80s.

Of course, Cleveland’s popular music history is also the Mahoning Valley’s music history, and the region doesn’t go unmentioned in the book.

Glass Harp and The Dead Boys (including a couple of great photos of frontman and Girard native Stiv Bators) both turn up, and promoter/record label exec Steve Popovich talks about watching the Michael Stanley Band in Youngstown and encouraging Stanley to write more about life in northeast Ohio. According to Popovich, the song ‘‘Midwest Midnight’’ was a direct result of that conversation.

Several paragraphs are devoted to the Mosquito Dam Jam headlined by Blue Oyster Cult on Aug. 28, 1976, at Mosquito Lake. However, the section is based on the recollections of a free clinic worker, who remembers an antagonistic crowd on downers and tensions caused by an interracial couple, so it’s not a particularly flattering portrayal.

Wolff interviews a mix of musicians, journalists, radio personalities and fans to tell the story, and the fan stories about seeing The Beatles at Public Hall and Cleveland Municipal Stadium are as much fun as the ‘‘insider’’ tales.

Even more than the text, the photos throughout the book will jog the memories of those who followed the music scene then. The illustration that made me most envious was ad for a 1970 Cleveland Music Hall show featuring The Who, James Gang and a then-unknown singer-songwriter named James Taylor. The ticket price? — $5 in advance and $6 at the door.

But the photos also are the main aesthetic problem with the book. Computer software these days makes trimming the background from a photo a relatively easy process. The cut-out pictures in ‘‘Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories’’ look like they were trimmed by a kindergartener with a pair of rounded-point safety scissors. It gives the book an inexplicably cheap look.

Despite that, ‘‘Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories’’ is a book for anyone who has a WMMS Buzzard T-shirt purchased at Daffy Dan’s buried in a drawer somewhere and still can recite one of Murray Saul’s Friday afternoon ‘‘get downs’’ by heart.

The Sun Press

Link: CLICK HERE FOR LINK

Carlo Wolff began with a simple goal.

“It was my idea to write a book memorializing Cleveland’s rock scene,” the South Euclid resident said.

The result is the 129-page “Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories,” released last month by Gray & Company.

“It’s nostalgia told through the voices of local people,” Wolff said.

Wolff, a music critic and journalist for 20-plus years, interviewed more than 100 Cleveland-area musicians, fans, radio personalities, journalists, and club owners. His book lets them tell the story of Cleveland’s golden age of rock.

People like Michael Stanley, Wally Bryson of the Choir, Eric Carmen figures that made the Cleveland rock scene in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are quoted at length with Wolff’s own historical account, gleaned from interviews and first-hand experience interspersed throughout.

“You would go into a record store and find wonders every week,” Wolff said of the period the book covers.

“The Cleveland music scene in the late ’60s was fantastic,” Raspberries frontman Carmen says in the book. “It was really unbelievable, the level of talent. You had the James Gang, with Joe Walsh and Jimmy Fox; you had the Choir, too; Wally had left and was already in Cyrus Erie with me; there were guys like Phil Giallombardo, a keyboardist (late Choir, early James Gang); there was Joe Vitale’s band down in Kent, the Measles.”

“Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories” covers the emergence of FM radio and the hey day of WMMS.

It also takes a look at how some national acts made a name for themselves in Cleveland, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen in particular, as well as some notable concerts including The Beatles Aug. 14, 1966, stop at Cleveland Public Hall and Bruce Springsteen’s legendary Aug. 9, 1978, four-hour concert at the old Agora at 1730 E. 24th St., marking the 10th anniversary of WMMS.

Buddy Maver, the club’s manager at the time, called it “the best concert ever held at the Agora.”

Wolff had no shortage of resources for the book. He began by interviewing people he knew, and as word of the project spread, people from cities like Chicago and Philadelphia were contacting him.

“It was viral,” he said. “This (book) is a slice of the collective memory of the area.”

His favorite interviews included Carmen, Stanley, James Gang member Jimmy Fox, Sun News music columnist Peanuts, and former Dragonwyck drummer Dale Flanigan, who now runs a drum shop in Willoughby.

“They were all understandably media-genic,” Wolff said.

Wolff said gathering the material for the book was a lot of fun, keeping it organized, not so much.

“Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories” is part of a Gray & Company series of “Cleveland memories” books. The other installments are Gail Ghetia Bellamy’s “Cleveland Food Memories” and David and Diane Francis’ “Cleveland Amusement Park Memories.”

Wolff writes for Sun News, Goldmine, Billboard.com, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He remembered talking with Bellamy when he began the project. She told him to approach it like a long magazine article.

Wolff now laughs at that idea.

“It was a huge learning curve,” he said. He might have gotten mired down in organizational details forever were it not for the fact that, “You have a deadline, thank God.”

Contact Zickefoose at

jarrodzickefoose@yahoo.com

Wolff will sign “Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories” from 4-5 p.m. Saturday at Record Revolution, 1828 Coventry Road, Cleveland Heights, (216) 321-7661; and 7-8 p.m. Dec. 14 at Borders Books & Music, Severance Towne Center, 3466 Mayfield Road, Cleveland Heights, (216) 291-8605.

Link :http://www.westlifenews.com/2006/11-29/insights.html?

Journalist pens fun folk history of Cleveland rock
By Benjamin Pogany
Insights
Published Nov. 29, 2006

In his new book, “Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories,” local journalist and author Carlo Wolff takes a fun, incisive look at three decades of Cleveland’s music history. The result is a well-researched work that is an absolute blast to read.

“Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories,” released by Cleveland publisher Gray & Company, documents the city’s biggest rock milestones in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The book isn’t an exhaustive history, which Wolff himself admits in the introduction: “This is not meant to be an encyclopedia. It’s not conventional history, either. It’s nostalgia, a book by, for, and about fans.”

Wolff sums it up well. Lengthy quotations from local rock celebrities such as musician Michael Stanley, journalist Jane Scott, and promoters Jules and Michael Belkin comprise most of the book. The book discusses every aspect of rock & roll in Cleveland: bands, venues, famous shows and even record stores. The margins are also packed with photographs, old fliers, concert tickets and other memorabilia.

Carlo Wolff

Reading “Rock & Roll Memories” feels less like following a detailed history text than flipping through a scrapbook, or watching a documentary. The effect is sometimes disorienting – there’s no consistent narrative running through the book, the quotations jump back and forth in time, and the book rarely follows a single subject for more than a page or two. Nevertheless, gripping firsthand accounts of the Beatles’ appearance at Municipal Stadium in 1966, and Bruce Springsteen’s at the Agora in 1978 easily overshadow the book’s slow spots.

Though Wolff is obviously a fan himself, he rarely injects his own opinion, instead allowing the storytellers to speak for themselves. The many fans Wolff talks to across the city spin out detailed, personal and sometimes shocking anecdotes. One highlight is a former band manager’s story about an enraged Elvis Costello throwing Jane Scott out of his dressing room. Another is Bay Village journalist Michael Heaton’s story about his fight with WMMS in the 1980s.

Of course, not everything is covered in equal detail. Wolff devotes several pages to James Gang, but fellow Akron band Devo gets only a mention. The book as a whole trails off around the mid-‘80s. But Wolff includes more than enough to satisfy his target audience – the fans who lived through it. As a child of the ‘80s, I have to admit that a lot of the book’s anecdotes are lost on me. I never went to a show at the old Agora or listened to MMS in the ‘80s, and I’m only dimly aware of what the Michael Stanley Band was all about.

But nevertheless, in reading “Rock & Roll Memories” I still caught glimpses of the nostalgia that Wolff is chasing after. There’s a certain excitement in merely seeing the names of places you’ve been or bands you’ve followed – a feeling that Cleveland isn’t a minor or marginal city, but one that’s been at the center of rock & roll’s major currents since the beginning. Readers from Wolff’s generation will likely find even more to reminisce about.

Overall, “Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories” is a sharply written piece of folk history. It’s a quick read, and certainly an enjoyable one for Cleveland rock fans who were there the first time around. Carlo Wolff will be autographing copies at Borders Books & Music in the Promenade of Westlake, 30121 Detroit Road from 7 to 8 p.m. on Dec. 7. He’ll also be at the Waldenbooks in Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted from 1 to 2 p.m. Dec. 16. Stop by to pick up a copy and relive the good times all over again.

Link :http://www.coolcleveland.com/index.php?n=Main.Windustrious#reads

Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories
Carlo Wolff

Gray & Company

Music fans who grew up in Cleveland hear a lot about the “golden age” of Rock and Roll. Sometimes, it’s downright inescapable: from endless classic rock on the radio, to the glass menagerie at the end of East Ninth, every signpost in town points back to that era. Noted rock critic Carlo Wolff has documented those signposts and paired them with historical perspective and first-person narratives for his new Cleveland rock nostalgia book, Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories.

This book collects memories of Clevelanders who were entrenched in the music scene: musicians, reporters, jocks, reporters, club owners, and the fans. Some memories seem to meander with ubiquitous zeal; others (including those of PD Minister of Culture Michael Heaton) are spot-on and laugh-out-loud funny. When Heaton leaves the over-attended Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon gig at Blossom, you know he’s not as “invisible” as he thinks he is.

Wolff, who writes about music, pop culture and literature for an impressive list of outlets including Village Voice, Goldmine, Billboard.com and Boston Globe, covers a great deal of territory in one small volume. Rock clubs like the Agora, stations like WIXY and WMMS and emerging bands like Devo and Pere Ubu join launched careers (Meat Loaf) and cherished shows (Coffee Break Concerts, World Series of Rock, Michael Stanley Band at Blossom, etc.) as the beginning of this long, strange, time capsule trip.

Acknowledgements of rock writer Jane Scott are also well done. She gets knocked by one fan as not really being a critic (can’t really argue that), but all have fond reverence for her. Put on the “teen beat” as an afterthought, she ended up experiencing a cultural phenomenon in its entirety. Without Jane, there’s no Jancee Dunn, Edna Gundersen, Lorraine Ali… just like there’s no Madonna without Akron’s Chrissie Hynde. It’s not a stretch at all, people: Cool rock chicks beget cool rock chicks.

Wolff’s best move with Memories is letting the participants speak for themselves. It is great fun to absorb so many voices and unique perspectives and it absolves the author of others’ occasionally fuzzy memories.

Sadly, there’s no postscript for after the mid 1980s in Memories. What about Rock Hall, the Concert for the Hall of Fame, gads of live performances, Alternative Press and the Northeast Ohio natives who continue(d) to add to the cultural landscape? Trent Reznor, the Black Keys, Tracy Chapman, Scott Weiland, Maynard James Keenan, Marilyn Manson… the list goes on.

Perhaps Wolff, one of three principal authors of The Encyclopedia of Record Producers, is planning a Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories II: Back Into Cleveland sequel. Unless Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf make up and get the call first, I’m guessing Wolff’s publisher is already on notice.

Carlo Wolff and other Northeast Ohio rock writers help celebrate the launch of Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories this Saturday, December 2 at Gallery 324 in the Galleria from 4-7PM. Visit http://www.grayco.com for more information.

From Cool Cleveland Managing Editor Peter Chakerian peterATcoolcleveland.com