In cruelest April of 1978, “a guy in Kent, Ohio,” began sending toRobert Christgau a “‘Ragazine of High and Low Art’ dedicated to the proposition that ‘anybody doing anything at all against our gray Midwestern nothingness deserves attention.’” Shortly thereafter, Christgau wrote a now-canonical essay on Ohio music. The Village Voice critic led with Cleveland’s “one major distinction,” Alan Freed’s 1951 R&B show, before going on to note that labels like Cincinnati’s King Records “specialized in out-of-town talent” and that “Cleveland lacked either [the] size or [the] cultural resources” of the major American music cities.
More importantly, after noting that Ohio nevertheless seems “to turn out more rock musicians than most big places,” Christgau went on to document a Cleveland-Akron New Wave, along with the importance of Cleveland’s WMMS and the complicated rootedness of Ohio New Wave music in combinations of banal cultural life and “some version of The Arts” in places like Kent, all amid the unsurprising “Diaspora,” or obligatory expatriation, of successful bands like the Dead Boys, Pere Ubu, and Devo.
If Christgau’s 1978 essay now seems patronizing, it is also revelatory; and dismissing while complimenting Ohio may just be a generic imperative of music journalism, as evidenced, for example, by Tim Schuller’s mid-1970s praise for Robert “Jr.” Lockwood: “Robert has lived on Cleveland’s East Side since around 1960 and he is, frankly, one of the city’s few musical assets.”
Ohio has long understood the feeling of never fully being what the author-narrator of Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland (2012) calls “a media center” (Pekar 115). Stated more thoroughly, the long colonization of Ohio’s substantial number of arts and artists (from Toni Morrison to Jim Jarmusch to Chrissie Hynde) by consumer capitalism’s corporate elsewheres is only another sub-feature of nationalist hegemony over the local and of a thoroughgoing subproject that defines Ohio’s economic and election-season status as extraction zone.
In other words, privileges afforded the Buckeye State by the electoral college notwithstanding, Ohio is often being exploited while being marginalized, a phenomenon not least of which represented by the tendency of national media to designate a state more than one-third Appalachian and Rust Belt by the virtually meaningless label “Midwestern.”
Of course, Ohio is both historically and geographically a myriad of Ohio(s), and some parallel version of the expatriation that took the Dead Boys and Devo away also took The O’Jays to Philly, took William Dean Howells to The Atlantic, took Steven Spielberg to Hollywood, took the Wright Brothers to Kitty Hawk, and took Mamie Smith, Art Tatum, Billy Strayhorn, and Nancy Wilson into the jazz pantheon.
Nor, given the history of The Great Migration, is Ohio solely a site of artistic loss. Indeed, the very existence of Ohio’s rich legacy of Black artists is bound up in the histories of American slavery, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and Northern industrial growth and decline intertwined with The Great Migration(s); bringing to “The Heart of it All” not only the families of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Rita Dove, but also the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta blues of Robert Lockwood Jr.
As aforementioned, Lockwood lived and performed in Cleveland from 1960 until his death in 2006. And it is with musicians like Lockwood and country musicians David Allan Coe and Dwight Yoakam, as much as with punk and funk, that Ohio stakes its strange and meandering claim on the history of American popular music.
Just as Lockwood’s “Tanya,” from the Cleveland resident’s 1973 Delmark album Steady Rollin’ Man, demonstrates the versatility that made Lockwood a first-call Chicago session guitarist of the fifties, Lockwood’s performance of common-law stepfather Robert Johnson’s songs on Delta Crossroads (2000) fittingly transmigrates the Delta to the North while making a move quintessentially, if not exclusively, “Ohio” insofar as Lockwood’s performances both celebrate and demystify the material. Devils at crossroads be damned, Lockwood Jr. is a better guitarist than you are mostly because he practices playing the instrument like Youngstown’s Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini practices boxing, i.e., constantly and with purpose.
Meanwhile, David Allan Coe’s early recordings celebrate, and even boast, while otherwise baffling industry label-makers. While Coe’s third album, The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy (1974), shows a clear debt to Merle Haggard and includes country classics by Mickey Newbury and Guy Clark, the Akron native and one-time Ohio Penitentiary inmate’s second effort, Requiem for a Harlequin (1970), plays like a redneck version of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle,” the effect of the album’s “asphalt jungle” aesthetics diminished by Coe, an amazing singer, choosing instead to talk his way through the material in a Luke-the-Drifter-meets-prison-“toast”-tradition style, but lacking in verbal flow.
Coe’s first album, Penitentiary Blues, seems as indebted to Jimmy Reed as to Johnny Cash. Reaching Southward, as so many Ohio artists and songs both African American and white have often done, the cut “Age 21” from Coe’s Penitentiary Blues takes place “down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” but the otherwise thoroughly Haggard track “River” from Rhinestone could as easily refer to the Scioto River beside Columbus’s Ohio Penitentiary, where Coe spent three years following other years spent in correctional facilities as a minor.
There is something both authentic and manufactured about David Allan Coe, and it is of little surprise that one of his influences was Cleveland-born Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who, like Clevelander and dirty-blues pioneer Bull Moose Jackson, always understood the value of camp. Jackson’s “I Know Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well” (1946)—an answer song to Lucky Millinder’s “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well?” which was itself released on Cincinnati’s King—is more a predecessor to Cleveland polka king Frankie Yankovic’s hit “Who Stole the Kishka?” (1963) than it is heir to the refinement of “Take the ‘A’ Train”-type songs by Dayton-born composer Billy Strayhorn; and surely Jackson and Hawkins, like Lockwood and Coe, are representative of Ohio musicians’ demystifying tendencies, typical not only of Ohio’s later Devolutionary New Wave but also of Bob “Mad Dog” McGuire’s “Moon Over Parma,” featured on a Big Chuck and Lil’ John “Talent Night” in 1983.
From Robert Lockwood Jr. to the Rubber City Rebels, and from “Dixie” writer Dan Emmett to Devo, Ohio’s long productive musical journey is both eclectic and singularly bizarre, rooted in agricultural and industrial working-class history, but also uprooted in race- and class-based diaspora and in the constant ebbs and flows of settler colonialism, natural and human resource exploitation, and economic growth and decline.
Funk, Soul, and the City Key
By Ryan Shafer
If you will, a sound and an image:
My view, circa 1976, from the back seat of a Chevy Impala, of a concrete gray Cleveland sky against the concrete gray of Route 237, Snow Road, and Hopkins Airport pinned to the mournful sound of the Spinners’ 1972 hit “I’ll Be Around.” The descending chord pattern. The downward cast of the melisma. The lyrics about suffering while offering reliance. This, to me, is Cleveland collapsed into some sort of monad, a moment of synesthesia. When I see that city grayscape, I can still hear that sound.
I know they’re called the Detroit Spinners in the UK and that they were formed in Ferndale, Michigan. I know the production style is pure Philly with Thom Bell at the helm. But for kid me, and the now me, the sad but uplifting energy is pure Cleveland, Ohio. We suffer through a world of gray and we sadly but soulfully persevere. Don’t expect joy, know what’s worth hurting for, and drive sanely in the snow.
As Spinners lead singer Bobby Smith was phased out, Cincinnati’s Phillipé Wynne was phased in, carrying the downtrodden warmth seamlessly to “One of a Kind (Love Affair).” You were relieved to hear Wynne’s Spinners sound a bit more spirited but no less determined on “Rubberband Man” (1976) and Wynne, later, on the militant Funkadelic epic “(Not Just) Knee Deep” (1979).
Playing drums on that track (but famously bass on most other P-Funk projects of that era) was Cincinnati’s Bootsy Collins, a key architect of funk from his formative years, both along with brother Phelps and Wynne in late-‘60s band The Pacemakers and, without Wynne, backing James Brown in his Sex Machine days. A funky bunch to be sure.
As Wynne ponders ten minutes into “Knee Deep,” after a mind-altering guitar solo by also-Ohio-born Michael Hampton (don’t challenge Larry “Bud” Melman on this): “Could this be me / Immersed in funk so deep?” Yes, it can, ol’ Phil, because as I’d maintain, you’re from Ohio: destined for funk.
I’d be remiss to not note that Wynne, the Spinners, and of course Funkadelic are immersed in the psychedelic convergence of funk and soul, or “the whole psychedelic and R&B merger,” to borrow Paul Shaffer’s turn of phrase from a Letterman sketch. While it’s a very broadly defined genre, one could argue it’s the linking aesthetic that sets the background for this era of music, funk included. It runs through the sound of some Ohio bands as well, notably the O’Jays, formed in Canton. Their sound, extending Norman Whitfield’s innovations with The Temptations, was perfected by Philadelphia’s Gamble and Huff via tunes like “Back Stabbers” and further evolved by Clinton with Parliament-Funkadelic as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. The pulled, slapped, syncopated bass as lead instrument. The cavernous production. The pessimistic and paranoid undertone.
And from Clinton and Canton I cut westward to Dayton, where funk was further refined and electronically evolved into the 1970s and ‘80s. Zapp and Rogers (silently produced by the wayward team of George Clinton and Sly Stone), Lakeside, and Heatwave emerged from there, bringing synths, vocoders, and a pop sensibility into the mix. Meanwhile in Cleveland, the Dazz Band formed, sought help from Earth, Wind, & Fire’s Phillip Bailey, and in 1982 released the Grammy Award–winning, R&B chart-topping slice of funk-pop perfection called “Let It Whip.”
The Dazz Band were presented with the key to the city by Mayor George V. Voinovich on New Year’s Eve 1982. If you ask me, this landscape of funk and soul is the key to Cleveland, and maybe Ohio, then and now.
Splitterty Splat, or, a Short Treatise on Cleveland Protopunk of the Early to Mid-1970s
By Aaron L. Jaffe
By Christmas 1974, Cleveland certainly wasn’t in the holiday spirit. The dying Rust Belt city was deader and rustier than it ever had been, even after a summer in which the Indians had been forced to forfeit 10-cent Beer Night.
Downtown Cleveland was “a shithole, a ghost town,” as onetime Stiv Bators neighbor and future Dead Boys photographer Dave Treat put it. The Cuyahoga River periodically caught fire, as did the mayor’s hair, and that was pretty much the only thing there that had any sort of spark, musically or otherwise.
Still, a few bars like the Piccadilly Inn, Pirate’s Cove, and the Viking Saloon, down by Cleveland State, were willing to host a Cleveland spiderweb of bands that did their own thing, inspired by the Mount Rushmore of protopunk—Bowie, the Velvets, The Stooges, and the mighty MC5—along with late-night horror-movie host Ghoulardi.
“It was finally great to hear bands with something interesting to say,” Treat told me.
On the night of the 22nd, the Viking hosted a “Special Extermination Night” featuring three of these up-and-coming down-and-outers—the Mirrors, the electric eels (the lower-case construct paralleling the e.e. of poet cummings), and Rocket from the Tombs, which for my money was the best of the bunch.
The Mirrors got together in 1971 and were led by singer/guitarist Jaime Klimek, along with drummer and future Psychotronic Video magazine creator Mike Weldon; guitarist Jim Crook, who had a great ‘70s porn stache; and bassist Craig Bell, who later defected to the Rockets.
Klimek described them as “blisteringly loud,” and that can be heard on low-fi, high-energy tracks like “She Smiled Wild,” which sounds like a street fight between “Helter Skelter” and Syd Barrett’s “Rats,” if it were recorded in the Viking’s bathroom.
The electric eels started around the same time, fueled by jazz, anger, and the sheer hatred for a band opening one night for Beefheart downtown at the Agora, which got the big acts.
Founder John Morton, a burly artist and guitarist with bleached-blonde hair and a temper; vocalist Dave E. McManus, who had such a sneer in his voice that Stiv co-opted it for Frankenstein and then the Dead Boys; other guitarist Brian McMahon; and later drummer Nick Knox made a glorious cacophony, a caterwaul of sound that was aggressive and nihilistic, one that fed songs like “Splitterty Splat,” “Agitated,” and “Spin Age Blasters.”
The eels, self-described “art terrorists,” played only about five shows, and the ones they managed featured fistfights (among themselves and with the crowd), gas-powered lawnmowers, and slide rules taped to arm casts.
And then there was Rocket from the Tombs, the most ambitious and star-crossed of the bunch. After some early tomfoolery, front man Crocus Behemoth (nee David Thomas) met up with scenester Peter Laughner, who by age 22 had already played in blues bands, folk bands, Velvets-inspired bands, and the like, and they made the Rockets take off, recruiting guitarist Gene O’Connor, a.k.a. Cheetah Chrome, and drummer Johnny (Blitz) Madansky, and stealing Bell from the Mirrors.
In less than a year, the “avant-garage” band turned into a furious songwriting machine, churning out a plethora of tunes that later bands made a bit more famous, including “Down in Flames,” “Sonic Reducer,” and “Ain’t It Fun,” which went to the Dead Boys in the divorce, and “Final Solution,” “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” and “Life Stinks,” which Pere Ubu got in the split.
Laughner hyped them on WMMS radio, pitched ‘em to Lester Bangs at the Creem house up north, and got them gigs opening for the likes of Television.
But neither the center nor, for that matter, any of the sides could hold for any of the three, and in the end, which came by the time of the Bicentennial, there was the inevitable exodus—Knox to the Cramps; Crocus to his real name, then to Pere Ubu, then to England; Morton to New York; Dave E. to religion; most everyone to the Styrenes for a moment or two; Cheetah and Blitz to the Dead Boys; and Laughner to a grave so early that he didn’t even make the 27 club.
They gave way to bands like the Pagans and, from elsewhere in Ohio, Devo, Death of Samantha, and the New Bomb Turks, and their sound can be heard today in punk and avant-garde bands in dives and garages wherever disaffected youth like to make a lot of noise.
Charlotte Pressler, who was married to Laughner for a time and made it out alive, even if Laughner didn’t in the end, wrote a pretty definitive accounting of all this when it was still as fresh as it was ever going to be. You really ought to check it out.
Industrial Music, Floppy Disks, and Sonic Assault
By Ryan Shafer
Well, he had done it.
My bandmate managed to make friendly enough with the guys who worked at Cleveland’s Pi Audio and Keyboards to not only secure an opening slot for them at Phantasy Nightclub, but also samples for our new Ensoniq Mirage. Working among synths and drum machines we could never afford, these Pi guys, who also played in Exotic Birds, seemed nice enough. Doug and Andy loaded up our smoke-lidded box with microfloppies full of cryptically named 8-bit sounds. But the other guy on the sales floor, Trent, I don’t know. He seemed…surly. Or maybe preoccupied. Not so much selling Emulators and Drumulators but rather cracking their code, learning on the job.
So there we were, circa 1987–‘88, my bandmates and I, emerging into another grayscape at Brookpark and Broadview Roads. Almost leaping from that mysterious store with a studio inside (related to Pi Audio West, where John Carpenter cut his horror soundtracks?), we were a bunch of synth-pop-obsessed high school kids eager to enter a more adult world of sound. With another purchase from Pi, an Alesis HR-16 drum machine, we were on our way to a more hard-edged, tightly sequenced, MIDIfied future. And the sound of industrial music was very much on our minds.
That Trent was Trent Reznor, later of Nine Inch Nails, and I’m sure he was quite preoccupied: playing in several bands, from Exotic Birds to Slam Bam Boo, God help him; working at Pi; and moonlighting as a janitor at Right Track studios. It was there, after his shifts, that he cut the demos for Pretty Hate Machine.
I have to admit it. I really didn’t like Pretty Hate Machine, and I still don’t like Nine Inch Nails, but there was no denying that, like Ministry’s “Halloween” (1984) just a few years earlier, “Down in It” went off like a bomb heard across Cleveland’s dancefloors, from Nine of Clubs to Aquilon. It was omnipresent, as was the aesthetic it emerged from. Intricate, highly syncopated but stiffly quantized machine rhythms. Harsh, atonal, complex lead sounds only possible with digital synthesis. Lots of found sounds, sampled mallets, metal, and snippets of speech. And menacing, sometimes heavily distorted vocals singing about dystopian themes with frustration and spite. No love songs here, but plenty about “Thieves” (Ministry), “Dogshit” (Skinny Puppy), “Headhunters” (Front 242), and militant calls to “Join in the Chant” (Nitzer Ebb). I saw many of these bands at the Phantasy and elsewhere, and the aggressive sound just seemed to fit perfectly with the metal and concrete bridge supports and rainy streets that greeted us after each concert.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this state-of-the-art music didn’t come out of the blue, and in the context of Cleveland and similar manufacturing cities it emerged from, it was very much a reaction. While the genre ran a spectrum of sensibilities and scenes, the basic sonic elements of industrial go back at least to the late 1960s and Krautrock: think Faust, early Kraftwerk, Cluster, Conrad Schnitzler. It owed a particular debt to the late-‘70s Electronic Body Music of Dusseldorf’s Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft and West Berlin’s Einstürzende Neubauten. There were US one-offs like New York’s Suicide and Ohio’s own Devo. And in the UK, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and even early Human League and Gary Numan laid much of the groundwork. Killing Joke owes a special mention for their layering anthemic shouting and heavy guitars over synths. Where would Ministry be without them?
And then there’s Depeche Mode. It’s hard to overstate the impact of their use of sampling, digital sounds, and darker themes on the wildly popular, Berlin-recorded masterpieces Music for the Masses (1987), Black Celebration (1986), and Some Great Reward (1984, which you could really hear in Exotic Birds). But unlike their industrial peers, Depeche Mode were unapologetically romantic, even stereotypically feminine with soul-bearing ballads like “Sometimes.” And more than that, in main songwriter Martin Gore they had a front person whose fashion sense came directly from the BDSM clubs of Berlin.
As the late 1980s rolled on, much of industrial became a race to find the most aggressive sound possible, with Ministry moving from the synthpop adjacent Twitch (1986)—what they now call their squirrely years—into the metal-industrial merger of The Land of Rape of Honey (1988) and beyond. And while Depeche Mode very much had their moment in the charts, I would argue, in Cleveland, Ohio, and the US at large, it’s this macho, horror-informed idiom that morphed into Marilyn Manson (from Canton, Ohio, and produced by Reznor) that prevailed.
Our band? Whenever we tried to make some industrial adjacent music, we’d end up laughing ourselves to death after trying to scream over the heaviest drum pattern and digi-bass line we could muster. We just couldn’t find that anger authentically, and there was just so much about Depeche Mode’s and New Order’s melodies and melancholy we resonated with more. I guess we just liked that “sissy synth pop” industrial was meant to be a corrective to. And of course, we didn’t make it too far out of the 1980s.
Mark Kozelek and Ohio’s Allure
By Stella McGuire
Ohio’s own Mark Kozelek, notably of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, is a Stark County native, born in Massillon. Kozelek, like Lorain’s late Jason Molina, writes about Ohio. Pop culture has effectively legitimized Ohio as a bizarre zone full of simultaneous mystique and mundanity. Artists who have seemingly nothing to do with Ohio feel inspired to write about the state or at least to mention it. Examples include Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service in his song “Cleveland,” released under his solo project “¡All-Time Quarterback!” and Issac Brock of Modest Mouse, who sings “Ohio” repetitively in the chorus of his song named after the Buckeye State. In “Pet Politics,” by Silver Jews, late singer and frontman David Berman “Buy[s] a vase of carnations from central Ohio / where the looking machine can’t hear [him].” Will Oldham of Bonnie “Prince” Billy and variations of Palace (Brothers, Music, Songs) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but adapts the “Loch Tay Boat Song” into a track about the Ohio River.
Kozelek, Molina, and Oldham identify a sort of rust-belt-alternative-country-constellation, yet music about Ohio is done more effectively by Kozelek in comparison with Molina and Oldham. Kozelek’s care for the state is seen most poignantly in “God Bless Ohio,” a song which identifies “the beautiful things from Ohio” coupled with Kozelek’s memories, including state tragedies which feel as if they could only take place in Kozelek’s home state. Kozelek mentions “the perpetually vacant Sexton house,” alluding to Eddie Lee Sexton, convicted murderer and rapist from Kozelek’s own Stark County. Amongst his slew of crimes and controversies, Sexton had three children by his own daughters, claimed to worship both the Devil and God, and trained his mentally handicapped son Willie to use a garotte in preparation for murder.
Kozelek recalls AA meetings, nursing homes, the tattoo on his dying grandfather’s arm, the Pike County Massacre, and the Zanesville Animal Massacre, wherein sixty-two-year-old war vet Terry Thompson unleashed fifty malnourished and diseased exotic animals from his private zoo before promptly shooting himself in the head. Kozelek lists a handful more of Ohio’s classic tragedies, before shifting tone to mention the beauty of Ohio. Kozelek mentions his sister’s children, blue herons, Domino’s pizza, black squirrels, and places a special emphasis on his mother. The acclaimed singer recalls his mother stowing away small quantities of grocery store money so that he and his siblings could have “a few gifts each year under the Christmas tree,” despite disapproval from Kozelek’s father. The chorus and outro to “God Bless Ohio” repeats the title of the track, effectively illustrating Kozelek’s affection for the state despite, or maybe by reason of, the massacres and the AA meetings in conjunction with the blue herons, his mother, and the mystique and mundanity and beauty of it all.
GBV! GBV!
By Wade Krueger
“Arrows and Balloons,” from Robert Pollard’s 2010 solo album Moses on a Snail, opens with a casually audacious boast: “I have made a run / To catch The Beatles, too.” The Beatles? Really? That’s like saying you’re bigger than Jesus.
Pollard can back it up, though, more so than any of the other power pop geniuses who’ve seen one of their tunes described as “Beatle-esque.” “Game of Pricks” alone makes the case, right? Not to mention the hundreds—thousands?—of others scattered nonchalantly throughout his discography. Not to mention that Alien Lanes fulfills the need you never knew you had for an album-length version of the Abbey Road medley.
Back to that opening line. That “too” is doing a lot of work. First, it situates us in a conversation in media res. Did we just stumble upon Pollard holding court, Miller Lite tallboy in hand, as he’s making this claim? Or have we been there all along, only nothing that came before has been preserved for the record?
And then, of course, we must ask: “Who else?”
Instead of getting into that, Pollard addresses another question: how? “With arrows and balloons,” he sings. The metaphor is perfect. Pollard’s detractors—hell, even some fans—complain that his legendary output is too much, that he needs an editor. But Pollard with an editor wouldn’t be Pollard. He’s always taking aim, and he’s always hitting something.
In Pollard’s world, the sky above Dayton, Ohio, teems eternally with balloons. Maybe no one else can see them. Doesn’t matter. His quiver is always full.
Wussy
By Jane Wells
If we acknowledge that what we mean by Ohio is, like any abstraction, a fiction, something that does not exist in reality, but something that gains material existence when we locate the right correspondence in the concrete realm, then Wussy—a five-piece, guitar-freighted, self-dubbed “noise-rock” band hailing from Cincinnati and fronted by Muncie native Lisa Walker and former Ass Ponys’ lead Chuck Cleaver—may just embody what we mean when we invoke that word.
In his 2014 paean to the group, “The Many Reasons to Love Wussy,” the venerable rock critic Robert Christgau (whose name is as close to household as any rock critic’s) claims that, since the first of their five albums (Funeral Dress, 2005), Wussy has been “the best band in America.” It’s a view Christgau likely still holds, considering that he rated their next album Attica (2016) an A+ and ranked their most recent album Cincinnati Ohio as second on his 2024 “Dean’s List,”coming in behind only Louis Armstrong’s Louis in London. Yet, outside their cult fanbase (they average 8.9K listens on Spotify each month), Wussy may be less well-known than Christgau.
“Best” is even more abstract and nebulous than “Ohio.” However, Wussy has the chops and the catalogue to put them in the running. Wussy does and combines a number of things as well as or better than any other band currently producing albums.
The argument begins with the fact that Wussy is not an acquired taste; much of what makes them great will hit you at first listen. That’s because Wussy unfailingly builds songs around a core melody. Their dedication to melody should not be underestimated. Creating fresh, compelling, hummable, singable melodies is a kind of high-wire act in songwriting. It’s so easy to plummet into music that’s stale, trite, disappointing, or readymade for a jingle or sitcom intro. Yet, across nine albums, Wussy somehow avoids that trap. Unlike some of the best-known post-punk bands, Wussy never relies solely or mainly on ambience or atmosphere noise for their effect, but adroitly corrals noise elements into the service of melody-driven rock.
Wussy also succeeds by lyrics that matter and delivers them in emotionally compelling and appealing ways. Their lyrics feel tragic and witty at once, but never in a way that descends into novelty. “The days all run together / In an angry pack / And now they’re catching up,” Walker and Cleaver despondently quip in “Little Paper Birds.” The two leads usually divide and sometimes share songwriting duties. Cleaver tends towards songs about the immediate and palpable sorrow of everyday experience, especially the ineluctable grief we devise for ourselves. Taken together, his songs might be subtitled “a book that tells of all the stupid things we’ve done” (“Death by Misdaventure”) that are part of the broken-up world of breakups where “there is no guidebook for this kind of thing” (“Wrist Rocket”) and in which there’s an abiding sense that “This Will Not End Well.” Cleaver’s voice relays these regrets with the credible anguish of someone who’s actually lived them, whether or not he actually has.
Cleaver’s equal as a lyricist, with a voice as protean as any in rock, Walker often writes about our more abstract longings—Desire with a capital D—that encompass the urge to throw “it all away to find yourself” (“Tiny Spiders”) or the inability to understand or “name the hour” that a place as “unimpressive” as Las Vegas begins “to feel like home” (“Las Vegas”). Among Walker’s most accomplished songs is “Teenage Wasteland,” an homage to “Baba O’Riley” that remaps the martial alienation of “out here in the fields” fighting for meals as rural ennui, “stuck in a corn maze with only a transistor radio,” to celebrate the moment “we finally did something about it.” Walker translates Townsend’s idea of “wasteland” into a quasi-cynical thesis on why we connect with music and venerate musicians for whom it doesn’t “take much to sound like a sleeping prophet” when their “misery sounds so much like ours so far away, so far away.”
Unlike the personae in their lyrics, the band (with bassist Mark Messery, drummer Joe Klug, and the pedal steel sharp John Erhardt (d. 2020)) seems incapable of making bad choices, at least as far as music is concerned. Songs begin well and sink the hook deeper by building sound and adding elements (more droning guitars, harmonies, skillful counter melodies) at precisely the right moments. Using familiar tropes of ‘70s rock and post-REM alternative, they create a perfect mixture of harmony and dissonance, of sour and sugar, that never requires a palate cleanser. The result is that their songs feel like little miracles, and more than their fair share of songs (“Beautiful,” “Little Miami,” etc.) feel like big ones.
Why Wussy hasn’t gained the fame they deserve is among the greatest injustices and mysteries in 21st-century rock. Somehow, the train of algorithms that drives streaming services passed them by. Or perhaps their juvenile name is off-putting. If Wussy’s music has any flaw, it’s that from the band’s outset it’s played to the adults in the room, the “busted up and bleeding,” who have divided “treasure from the good days” and gone their separate ways.
It has been said that SUVs appeal to people who aren’t likely ever to drive their cars off-road, but want to be prepared in case they do. Wussy’s appeal is strikingly similar. Many of us have steered our lives straight into the ditch or had it steered there for us, and those who haven’t may well end up there. Listening to Wussy readies us for just such a contingency. Or, instead of the ditch, we could end up in Ohio, where somehow being the “best band in America” is not enough to let you quit your day job or even to fill 300-seat venues. Yet, somehow, you endure.
State of Inconclusion
By Matt Wanat
Predating the September 1, 1995, dedication of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, much of Ohio’s claim on American popular music came from radio, as well as from punk, post-punk, funk, and soul. But no single pattern dominates the Ohio musical landscape. Ohio is birthplace of Mamie Smith and Billy Strayhorn but also of musical discipleships and disasters—from the loyal fans of Michael Stanley to the Who concert catastrophe of 1979. Ohio music is Bootsy and Devo and David Allan Coe, but also Tracy Chapman, The James Gang, The Breeders, The Afghan Whigs, alt-country, and Bill Moss’s Capsoul.
Chapman’s “Fast Car” is a very Ohio song, but where is the song about my friend Gary, with thousands of records, two decades before vinyl became cool again, in his Killbuck, Ohio, home, telling me one night after our shift at Rubbermaid about the time in 1976 when he eased his car to the side of interstate to hear Elvis playing Richfield Coliseum?
Ohio music is musicians, but Ohio music is also fans.
Fans and detractors, diasporas and disappearances, comings and goings: “we’d thought the Amish were the odd ones out,” writes Akron / Cuyahoga Falls expatriate Chrissie Hynde, but “it was increasingly obvious that it was us” (qtd. in Masterson 59). In his “America in Performance of 20th Century Identity and Individualism in Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless” (2022), James Masterson notes Hynde’s dual US-UK citizenship and her “damning” but reflective image of Ohio and America, with Masterson claiming Hynde’s “punk identity and ethos was shaped despite, rather than because of, the environment” of Northeastern Ohio (46-47).
In addition to boasting Tony Butler’s memorable bass riff, and Hynde’s and Bremner’s archetypically Stones-like guitars, The Pretender’s “My City Was Gone” (1984) also somehow summons Outlaw country’s dark variation on nostalgia for home common in prison songs like Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” (1967) and Coe’s aforementioned “River”; though Hynde’s is a different take on the “You Can’t Go Home Again” motif. The Pretenders track rocks (it Cleveland rocks, in fact), managing to shout out to Northeastern Ohio locales with simultaneous reverence and disappointment, making a song about insufferable consumer capitalist development and environmental distress somehow also into the perfect song to play at a stadium in Ohio—as Hynde did at the 1995 Concert of the Hall of Fame in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, right before that stadium was torn down.
If the irony of such a dual agenda in Hynde’s song partly opens the door to the vampiric obscenity of the song’s being appropriated for the Rush Limbaugh Show, this irony is an extension rather than a desecration of the roots of rock ‘n’ roll; indeed, recall that even in Charley Patton’s apocalyptic document of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, “High Water Blues” (1929), the Delta bluesman shouts out to the deluged towns: to Greenville, to Vicksburg, to Tallahatchie.
Originally a B-side for the multifacetedly self-referential “Back on the Chain Gang” (1982), Hynde’s “My City Was Gone” perfectly, because ambivalently, captures something about Ohio. From Greenville, Vicksburg, and Tallahatchie, Mississipi, to South Howard, Seneca, and Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, deluge is deluge. And from deluge of nature to deluge of cultural erasure, Ohio’s catastrophe calls for a hometown call out.
Ohio’s catastrophe calls for a song.
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