Be my guide: Cleveland hot on rock, not on corporations

Some readers were clearly skeptical about Cleveland as a stop on my music-centric road trip. Chris Ridenhour, whom I mentioned earlier in my post on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, went so far as to spite Cleveland for its claim to the Hall of Fame. ”The fact that this facility is not in Memphis is shameful,” he wrote.

Cleveland’s streets might be mostly deserted by 9 p.m., but that’s probably because the night owls are out making or consuming live music. Before ”The Price Is Right,” Drew Carey accurately described the city  with the theme song to his self-titled TV show: “Cleveland Rocks.”

Reader Kathy the Great urged me in blog comments to grab a beer at the Spitfire Saloon. “It’s a total dive punk bar, the jukebox rules and the beer is cheap,” she wrote. It turned out to be way more authentic than I expected.

The walls were adorned with graffiti of bloodied caricatures, tattered album covers and pieces of a kid’s tricycle. Such decor could only come from the minds of punk rockers or young boys who like to mangle Barbie dolls.

After ordering a beer, I checked out the fliers at the door. Half of them were for tattoo parlors. I could see why.

The young patrons were slumped over bar stools, slamming cans of cheap beer. Obscure punk songs screamed from the elevated DJ speakers. You could judge how out of place somebody was at Spitfire by the number of tattoos they had—the fewer things scrawled on their body, the less they belonged there.

Another reader, @flee2thecleve on Twitter, suggested I check out the Beachland Ballroom, which I confirmed with a few locals is one of the hottest venues in town. I missed the live music Wednesday night, which was over before midnight, but a sizable crowd stuck around.

I listened to a group of Clevelanders discuss their corporate contempt. They talked about a prankster magazine called Adbusters that sabotages large companies in diabolical ways. One Adbuster story had them spray painting the Gap logo on Gap storefronts, spurring the company to spend thousands of dollars to have their own logos removed. The locals took great pleasure in the idea.

Other bar goers lamented the multibillion-dollar company that is Clear Channel, a controller of many mainstream radio stations. Cleveland’s airwaves somehow escaped the pollution of the Billboard charts.

When I got into the city, I did something I hadn’t done yet on the trip—turned off my iPod. Within minutes, WJCU 88.7 was spinning tracks from some of my favorite bands. Menomena, Arcade Fire and Built to Spill are groups you almost never hear on the radio. I even discovered a few hidden gems, like a reggae cover of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.”

Even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s staff say they’re a target of corporate hate. Some locals point fingers at their pricey admission fees, assuming that they’re some kind of greedy mega conglomerate. The organization is, in fact, a nonprofit.

But logic won’t get in the way of the Midwestern mind set of keeping it real and taming the capitalistic pigs.

I’m planning to grab a corned beef sandwich from Slyman’s Restaurant for brunch before I head to Detroit later today, so watch my Twitter page for a review—in 140 characters or less. Readers Jason Von Sick, @drdrtsai on Twitter and surely a few others whom I forgot to note were raving about these monstrous artery cloggers. Mmm, I’m drooling already.

To provide travel tips, send e-mails to mark.milian@latimes.com, leave comments on this blog or, for those on Twitter, send tweets to @mmilian.” To follow my road trip status live, visit http://twitter.com/mmilian. For the trip schedule and cities, check out my earlier posts.

– Mark Milian, Los Angeles Times staff writer

[Photo: Spitfire Saloon in Cleveland. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 5:59 pm by Mark Milian and is filed under Arts & Culture, Be My Guide, Celebrity, Midwestern States, News, Tips & Advice, Summer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.