Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll

By Garin Pirnia

“Rock readers from Ohio and beyond will enjoy this quick and informative read” covering bands from the Breeders to the Black Keys and more (Library Journal).

From Cleveland to Cincinnati and everywhere in between, Ohio rocks. Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll takes readers behind the scenes to the birth and rise of musical legends like the Black Keys, Nine Inch Nails, Devo, the Breeders, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, and many others who started in garages and bars across Ohio. Through candid first-hand interviews, Garin Pirnia captures new, unheard stories from national legends like the Black Keys and slow-burn local bands like Wussy from Cincinnati. Discover why Greenhornes’ members Patrick Keeler and Brian Olive almost killed each other on stage one night, what happened to the pink guitar Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gave to band member Richard Patrick, why Devo loved the dissonance when they were booed by 400,000 music lovers in England, and so much more! Entertaining, inspiring, and revolutionary, Rebels and Underdogs is the untold story of the bands, the state, and rock itself.

“Pirnia gives it a fine archaeologist’s try to plop meat all over the bones of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s unsung if inarguably most important locales.” —Eric Davidson, singer in New Bomb Turks and author of We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut

“[An] exceptional book, an account satisfyingly comprehensive, but driven by the instincts and ardor of a true devotee.” —David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781684350179

Book preview

NO OTHER OHIO METROPOLIS REPRESENTS THE UNDERDOG ethos more than Akron, aka the Rubber Capital of the World. In 2016 a basketball player from Akron named LeBron James won Cleveland’s first sports title in fifty-two years. At the turn of the century, a little band named the Black Keys made Akron’s music scene relevant again. Situated twenty-two minutes from Akron, Kent State University shared a lot of the same DNA with the musicians coming from there. Jerry Casale of Devo was born in Kent but settled down in Akron after college. Chris Butler (Tin Huey, the Waitresses, and 15-60-75 the Numbers Band) grew up in Cleveland, attended Kent State, and also landed in Akron. Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders was another Kent Stater around the same time, in the early 1970s. The Akron music venue the Crypt was a showcase for local bands like the Bizarros, Devo, Unit 5, Hammer Damage, and the Rubber City Rebels, and is considered one of the first punk clubs to operate outside of New York City. Akron had pop music, too, with Akron native Rachel Sweet and Rex Smith’s hit 1981 song, Everlasting Love. It’s worth noting that Marilyn Manson, Jani Lane of eighties hair metal band Warrant, and Lux Interior of the punk group the Cramps were born in the Akron-Canton region but didn’t form their alter egos until they moved away from the state.

The Akron Sound, as it came to be known, encompassed bands forming and playing gigs in the 1970s through the mid-1980s. In 1982 the rubber tire industry took a final gasp and died, and in 1984 Walter Mondale and the media coined the term Rust Belt. So what else was there to do other than start a band? A lot came out of here, whether it was a desire to get the hell out or a raging desire to matter, Butler says. In 1978 Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo was in Liverpool, England. A reporter asked him what Akron was like, and he said, Actually, it’s a lot like Liverpool, meaning Akron was downtrodden and working class. But the reporter misunderstood his response and assumed Rubber City had a music scene like Liverpool, that Akron was prepping the next Beatles. Robert Christgau of the Village Voice visited Akron and wrote a long feature, published in April 1978.¹ Because of the article’s scope, many bands got signed to major labels, but some, like Chi-Pig, were left behind. The city’s sound has been immortalized in two PBS documentaries—It’s Everything, and Then It’s Gone and If You’re Not Dead, Play—and in the Akron Sound Museum.² Museum founder Wayne Beck acquired hundreds of posters, flyers, newspaper clippings, photos, and even a Devo Energy Dome to display the ephemera in a public brick-and-mortar location.

While coming of age in Cleveland in the 1960s, Butler noticed how difficult it was for a local band to break out. He describes the holy triumvirate: monopolizing bookers Jules and Mike Belkin, WMMS radio, and the Northeast Ohio publication Scene. You had this big rock and roll market, he says. You had a big audience that wanted to go out and see live music, and you had these gatekeepers who were very reluctant. If you were in any kind of band that was creative, you got closed out. That gave you—definitely in the scene that I was in—a sense of ‘what about me?’ and a real drive to get known. If they wouldn’t let you in, then we were the classic definition of DIY. In the music world the term DIY, or Do It Yourself, means building your brand independently, from the ground up, using self-promotion and handmade items as tools. Butler says bands had to find their own recording equipment and start their own zines to gain traction.

Between Kent, Cleveland, and Akron, bands shared gigs. It’s like anything—the freaks come out at night, Jerry Casale says. Creative people tended to glom onto the other creative people because it was a small pool, so you all knew each other and were supportive of each other. It was fantastic. It was a hard time. This was when Northeast Ohio was crumbling. The economy was terrible and nobody had anything, so what else was there to do but create.

Akronite Chuck Auerbach, father of Black Keys guitar player and vocalist Dan Auerbach, is an antiques dealer and has an inkling as to why so many bands sprouted from the region. The thing that is interesting about Ohio is that it was a perfect mix of it being settled very early on in the late eighteenth century … so it was rural and agricultural for most of its time. And then it became industrial and modern. For me as an antiques dealer, there’s a great mix of country and modern, and I think it also shows up in the music. There’s traditional and then there is contemporary. California—I’m not sure if you can say that about its music.

Jeri Sapronetti of the Akron group Time Cat—which formed in 2011—grew up in Akron and says her hometown could use more music venues. There’s a couple hundred people in Akron who are devoted to the arts and music, so there is a lot going on, she says. But a lot of it is jazz and soul, and not a lot of rock and roll. There’s one venue we really need that doesn’t exist yet.

In 2010 Akron’s population dipped to less than two hundred thousand, the lowest since the 1920 census. However, the metro area is not as depressed as it was in the 1960s–1980s. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, the polymer industry, and the University of Akron keep the city afloat. The struggle gets reflected in the music, too. I feel like we have the underdog thing going on, Sapronetti says. I think that comes out in the music. People want to try harder when you’re fighting against these odds, so there’s an underdog quality and a weirdo quality. There’s definitely a thing people in Akron have that I can’t identify. It’s hard to put my finger on what that sound is. It’s a weird struggle, but when you believe in yourself and you believe in music, then you’ll believe in somehow you’ll manage to escape this.

I think the true authentic rock and rollers, or musicians in general, are the outsiders, says David Giffels, University of Akron academic and author of the books We Are DEVO! and The Hard Way on Purpose.³ I think that’s essential: the weirdos, the outcasts, the ones who want it more. The star quarterback is never going to be the great front man—the great front man is the kid who got beat up by the star quarterback. Giffels has lived in Akron his whole life and knows he devoted his life to something special. To have that great Cavs victory and great shedding of that long period of hardship done by somebody who says, ‘I’m just a kid from Akron’—there’s a pride here.

THE BLACK KEYS

I think the Black Keys will be regarded as the last American band to just start a band, to get a van and start from the bottom.

—David Giffels

Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, the blues-rock-guitar-drums powerhouse duo from Akron known as the Black Keys, have been referred to as the saviors of rock and as the last great rock band of the pre-internet age. But here’s a fact: they’ve been one of the most prosperous bands to emerge from Ohio and the biggest band to come from Akron since the mid-1980s.

It all started when Auerbach—who was born in Athens, Ohio—was coming of age in Akron. Dan didn’t want to start a band necessarily, Chuck Auerbach says. He wanted to play music. We had spent a lot of time with his mom’s family, all of whom are musicians. They play bluegrass, and every time the family would get together they would all play music. And Dan really enjoyed the music and always wanted to join in. So that was some of the inspiration for him wanting to play music. Dan’s cousin was guitarist Robert Quine, who played with luminaries like Richard Hell and Lou Reed. In 1996, now a teenager, Dan started playing music with his schoolmate Patrick Carney. (Pat’s uncle is Ralph Carney, Tin Huey’s saxophonist.) In 2001 Carney helped Auerbach record a demo to send to labels, and soon after they started playing gigs at downtown Akron’s Lime Spider. They took some courses at the University of Akron but dropped out to pursue music full-time, something Chuck supported. My wife and I encouraged him to do that, Auerbach says. It’s turned out pretty well. If you’re lucky enough to have a kid who knows what he loves and is willing to work very hard and pursue that, then you should back them up. Chuck is like a cheerleader—he doles out advice in the most positive way. No wonder Dan—and his brother, Geoff, a social worker—turned out to be so winning. Both of my kids found out what they really want to do and are working hard to get it done, Auerbach says.

Though it may seem like the Black Keys had a swift growth, it took years of hard work for them to have a hit. In 2002 they released The Big Come Up on Alive Records. Then they signed to the Mississippi-based Fat Possum Records and released Thickfreakness. Next came Rubber Factory the following year and Magic Potion in 2006—their first major label release, on Nonesuch, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Finally, in 2008, they had their first gold record with Attack and Release, which peaked at number fourteen on the US charts. Brothers, in 2010, was their breakout record. It hit number three on the charts, went platinum, and in 2011 it won Carney and Auerbach three Grammy Awards, including Best Alternative Music Album. Michael Carney, Pat’s brother, won a Grammy for Best Recording Package for the minimal album cover that simply read, This is an album by The Black Keys. The name of this album is Brothers. in white and red lettering on black. The 2011 pre-awards ceremony wasn’t broadcast live on TV, but in 2013 the Black Keys returned to the Grammys nominated for their 2011 release El Camino and this time not only did they accept one award on live TV—Best Rock Performance was presented to them by the Ohio-born Dave Grohl, of both Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame—but they also played their award-winning song Lonely Boy during the broadcast. El Camino sold 1.4 million copies. The duo cut the record True Blue—a reference to a catchphrase the great Ghoulardi from Cleveland used to say—in 2014, and it became their first number one record. (It did not sell as well as El Camino, though.) Finding an overwhelming amount of fame, fortune, and success, the guys left Akron in 2011 for Music City, aka Nashville, where Auerbach opened his recording studio, Easy Eye.

Their music is very real; it’s very primal, Chuck Auerbach says about the band’s appeal. Pat’s drums kick you right in the gut. Dan is a good guitar player. I think they became really good songwriters. I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but when I listen to their music I get the same feeling I had listening to rock and roll of the nineteen fifties and sixties that I grew up with. There is a tradition that gets lost every couple years in music, and I think Pat and Dan reconnected to that tradition.

When Dan was a child, Chuck noticed that his son’s musical tastes were different than any other kid I’ve ever met who wanted to be a musician, and included bluesmen Robert Johnson, Junior Kimbrough, and R. L. Burnside. Even if you haven’t downloaded a Black Keys song or bought one of their records, you’ve probably heard them blaring on the jukebox at your local bar or heard Tighten Up playing over the end credits of a TV show or in a movie trailer. They have licensed their music to about three hundred outlets and through licensing have inevitably reached more people than they would just getting played on the radio. The Black Keys are everywhere—whether you’re consciously aware of them or not.

The Black Keys moved to Nashville, but they still associate strongly with Akron as their home, David Giffels says. They’ve always made a point to shout out Akron in public opportunities. They refer to themselves as being from Akron, and that’s a pride you’ll pick up on. It’s significant for Ohio’s rock bands to associate being from Ohio, because we’ve spent the last few decades being anonymous and misunderstood. So when we have these ambassadors like Black Keys, Chrissie Hynde, Chris Butler, and others, it’s important culturally for the city to have that association with someone who is known beyond here. It extends to LeBron James, too.

Giffels and NBA championship-winning Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron King James James both graduated from St. Vincent–St. Mary High School, decades apart, and Giffels sees the Black Keys’ climb as analogous to that of James’s rise to fame: "One very important parallel is both Dan, Pat, and LeBron were all born right at the beginning of the Rust Belt years of the real hard times [1980, 1979, and 1984, respectively]. LeBron, when he came back [to Cleveland], he wrote that essay in Sports Illustrated where he says, ‘In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned.’⁴ That’s straight from what they grew up in. You have to work hard and fight and pay tons of dues more because you’re from here than if you’re from somewhere else. And that’s how LeBron and the Black Keys have crafted their careers."

When Carney and Auerbach ditched Akron for Nashville, their departure left some locals feeling salty. People get opinionated about it because people in Akron say so many other bands in Akron were better than the Black Keys at that time, Jeri Sapronetti says. Their early stuff was good. I used to hate on them a little bit but only because I was jealous. ‘You guys are living the ultimate fantasy.’ If I were me and had some money, I would build some awesome venue we need. Nashville’s not that great.

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