Raising the Roof

April 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Arunas Petkus and I didn’t bother buying tickets to see Motorhead at the Variety Theater on the second day of December 1984. What would have been the point? They were going to be almost as loud outside the doors as inside. To that end we rustled up a pair of lawn chairs, a six pack of Pride of Cleveland, and a tin of Charles Chips. When night fell and the show started we parked ourselves on the lawn chairs in the portico behind the ticket booth. Arunas brought a flashlight and a small folding camp table for our beer and chips.

We were there to hear the band, not see them. Thankfully, it was unseasonably warm, in the mid-40s, not raining or snowing. It probably wasn’t much warmer inside the theater. The place was on its last legs. Who knew if the furnace even worked anymore? Who knew if the landlord had the wherewithal to pay for natural gas even if the furnace did work? Who knew if Motorhead’s audience cared whether it was hot or cold? We layered up just in case and pulled on hats. Mine was a Chief Wahoo baseball cap. His was a Pablo Picasso sort of hat, lumpy and misshaped.

Arunas and I had been friends since high school. He was a second generation Lithuanian like me and exchanging bona fides when we met as freshmen in our mandatory daily religion class at St. Joseph’s, an all-boys school, was easy. He was the same age as me. He lived in North Collinwood the same as me. He was an artist, however, unlike me. I could read and write but he could draw and paint. Later, when we were both attending Cleveland State University, he majored in fine arts and minored in pinocle.

Pinocle was what we and our friends played all the time between classes in the cafeteria of CSU’s Stillwell Hall, the upper floors of which were where engineering students went and reappeared four years later with a degree. Pinocle is a card game played in partnerships, two to a side, using a specialized deck. The idea is to work together to reach a target score by bidding, melding combinations of cards, and winning tricks. If a game happened to be in the middle of an intense stretch we usually played on, nursing our lukewarm coffee, class or no class. Our grades suffered as a result.

Going to the Motorhead show hadn’t been my idea. I didn’t know a single thing about them, not even that they existed. I suspected they were hard core. I knew what heavy metal was, although I avoided it, but didn’t know what thrash metal was. I wasn’t sure I liked the implications of thrashing. What I knew was that Arunas was keen on going.

“They’re a band from England, kind of between rock and roll and heavy metal and punk,” he said. What Motorhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister said was, “We are Motorhead and we play rock and roll. There’s only two kinds of music I can’t stand, rap and opera. If you think you’re too old to rock, then you are.”

I wasn’t too old, yet, but I didn’t listen to much rock and roll. I never listened to rap after the first few times, but I liked opera, especially its gut-wrenching arias. Rock and roll seemed to be mostly a few chords about sex and romance and heartbreak, teenage rebellion and protesting the man. I did listen to some punk bands like the Clash and Social Distortion. Mike Ness of Social Distortion was a kind of roughhewn poet.

“High school seemed like such a blur, the faces have all changed, there’s no one there left to talk to, and the pool hall I loved as a kid is now a 7-Eleven. Life goes by so fast, you only wanna do what you think is right, close your eyes and then it’s past.”

Tickets for Motorhead were $7.00 in advance or $8.00 the day of the show. Since we were doing without tickets we used the money to pay for new flashlight batteries, the P. O. C. barely pop, and a family-sized batch of Charles Chips. The speckled brown and gold tin can was about a foot tall and full of kettle-style chips. Arunas had them delivered to his house every two weeks by the Charles Chip Man, who was like a milkman, dropping off a new tin while picking up the empty one.

“Motorhead has been around for a while, but they’re different now, four of them instead of three, mostly new guys. ‘Fast Eddie’ Clarke on guitar and ‘Filthy Animal’ Taylor on drums are gone, but the new guys are just as good, if not better. I’ve heard they’re the loudest band in the world, although I haven’t actually ever heard them live. This will be my first time.”

It was going to be my first time, too, as well as my first time at the Variety Theater. We didn’t actually go inside the place until it was all over and most of the crowd was gone. When we went inside it was to see what had happened to the ceiling, which was what everybody had been talking about as they left.

The Variety Theater was in a Spanish Gothic-style edifice that opened on Thanksgiving Day in 1927 in the Jefferson neighborhood on the west side of Cleveland. There were a dozen-or-so apartments attached to it and some retail space on both sides of the building. The theater had nearly two thousand seats, about four hundred of them in a balcony, and a Kimbal Organ to accompany silent movies. When they weren’t screening movies they staged live vaudeville shows. After Warner Bros. bought the theater vaudeville was out. The movie house was one of the busiest in Cleveland through the 1950s. Hollywood celebrities showed up now and then to plug their flicks. It was known for its double feature Sunday matinees, screening crowd-pleasers like “House of Dracula” and “I Shot Jesse James.” The matinees always included a newsreel and cartoons.

By the time we went to hear Motorhead the Variety Theater was a pile of bricks. It had eventually become a second-run theater and finally mothballed its projectors in favor of live music. It was like they were going back to their vaudeville roots. UB40, R.E.M, the Dead Kennedys, and Stevie Ray Vaughan all played there.

Motorhead’s first song was “Iron Fist.” We could hear it loud and clear. When it was over I wadded up some Kleenex and plugged my ears. I could still hear them loud and clear after that but my ears didn’t hurt. Their second song was “Stay Clean.” It seemed to be a bad girlfriend or slam the establishment tune. I couldn’t tell which.

“I can tell, seen before, know the way, I know the law, I can’t believe, can’t obey, can’t agree with all the things I hear you say, oh no, ask me why, I can’t go on with all the filthy white lies.”

It was just as loud as their first song. The band seemed to have one volume setting, which was twirl the dial as far to the right as it would go. “They are going to be deaf by the time they hang it up,” I said to Arunas during a sound of silence between songs. Years later Lemmy Kilmister said his hearing was “usually OK, although hearing loss does lead to a better marriage.”

Motorhead was a high-octane force of nature. A year-or-so before they appeared in Cleveland they had won two polls, one for “heaviest band of the times” and the other for “best worst band in the world.” Based on the first two songs we heard I awarded them the prize of “most thunderous barnstormers of the holiday season.”.”

“What do you think?” Arunas asked.

“Not too bad,” I said. “Kind of loud, though.” I didn’t know that some music critics had called the band “loathsome” for being discordant.

“If we moved in next door to you, your lawn would die,” is what Lemmy Kilmister said. “If you’re going to be a rock star, go be one. People don’t want to see the guy next door on stage. They want to see a being from another planet, something that tears the heart out of you and gives it back better.”

What he proclaimed on their song “Brotherhood of Man” was, “Monsters rule your world, are you too scared to understand? You shall be forever judged and you shall surely hang.”

The Variety Theater was on Lorain Ave. The Jefferson neighborhood was blue-collar, full of single family homes built during the building booms of post-WW1 and post-WW2 days. Cleveland was falling apart in the 1980s but Jefferson was still fair-to-middling. There was plenty of work and the neighborhood was spic and span. There were lots of Irish Americans. A flock of their children walked past, 14 and 15 year old boys and girls, then turned and came back, curious about the rowdy tunes. When they saw us camped out in the portico they asked what we were doing.

“We’re freeloading,” Arunas said.

“What’s that terrible music?” one of the girls asked.

“That’s a storm on stage, Motorhead.”

“They sound dangerous, like they want to bite your head off.”

“Who do you listen to?”

“Madonna.”

“Culture Club,” another one said.

“Michael Jackson.”

“I love the Eurythmics.”

“Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s looking for somebody.”

Arunas shared some of our Charles Chips with them. Our tin held a party-size pound of them so we had some to spare. He slapped the hand that reached for one of our P.O.C.’s.

“Why don’t you like Motorhead?”

“Weird.”

“Lame.”

“It’s just noise.”

“I worry about the younger generation,” Arunas said when they were gone. “Noise? Kids don’t appreciate good music anymore.”

Arunas was in his early 30s, like me, but I thought nothing dates a man like complaining about the younger generation. I laughed out loud, spraying potato chip shards.

“What are you laughing about?”

“You sound like Aristophanes.”

“Who’s he?”

“A Greek guy from thousands of years ago.”

“What did he say that sounds like me?”

“Children now have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders. Children are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

“Cross their legs?”

“That’s what he said.”

Motorhead played about a dozen more songs, among them “Shoot You in the Back” and “Killed By Death” and “Ace of Spades.” It was like they were telling the underworld, “We’re getting there as fast as we can.”

“Ace of Spades” had a thumping bass line and machine-gun drumming and a born to lose attitude. “If you like to gamble, I tell you, I’m your man, you win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me, playing for the high one, dancing with the devil, going with the flow, it’s all a game to me.” If it was possible it was even louder than the other songs.

We didn’t hear much of the last two numbers, “Bomber” and “Overkill,” except for some quiet buzzing. The uproar of the band’s thrash metal had started cracking the ceiling plaster halfway through the night. Near the end of the show so many chunks of aging plaster had crumbled and fallen down onto the crowd that the band found themselves playing unplugged. A janitor had been ordered to pull the plug. The bandmates were irate, but knew the breaker box was behind locked doors and there was nothing they could do. When the set was over it was over. They didn’t come back for an encore.

Everybody coming out the front doors was talking about how great the band had been and laughing about the falling plaster. “They really are the loudest band in the world,” one of them said. “Shake, rattle, and roll.” When the stream of fans thinned out we slipped into the theater to see for ourselves about the plaster. There was white powdery debris and chunks of the stuff everywhere, along with the litter that is left behind at rock and roll concerts, plastic cups, aluminum beer cans, cigarette packs, food wrappers, crumpled paper bags, ticket stubs, empty nickel bags, some hats, a woman’s bra, and a pair of shoes. There was even a rusty abandoned portable barbeque. The aisles were sticky with spilled sugary drinks.

The Motorhead extravaganza wasn’t the last rock and roll show at the Variety Theater, but the handwriting was on the wall. The neighborhood sued to stop the shows, irate about the brain-melting sound and raucous crowds. One homeowner who lived next to the theater taped some performances and played them in a court room to demonstrate how loud they were. Motorhead clocked in at 130 decibels, the loudest rock and roll concert ever recorded up to that time. That many decibels is like a shotgun going off right behind you or a jet taking off next door, except when it’s a concert it goes on for several hours. Megadeath played a couple of shows in 1985 until a judge slapped a restraining order on the theater. It closed for a few years, came back for a while as a wrestling gym, but went dark for good in 1990.

Arunas lived nearby, just west of Gordon Square. He was a starving artist and didn’t have a car. I dropped him off and went home, where I slouched my way into bed and fell into a deep sleep. It felt good to be alive yet dead to the world, except for the echo of thrashing in my ears.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

Late summer, New York City, 1956. Big city streets full of menace. A high profile contract killing in the works. A private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen scares up the shadows.

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Barron Cannon

When Hell Freezes Over

April 1, 2026 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“The Hells Angels are so much aware of their mad-dog reputation that they take a perverse kind of pleasure in being friendly.” Hunter S. Thompson

When Frank Glass pulled his Hyundai Tucson into the back lot of Barron Cannon’s pop-up yoga class, on the border of Lakewood and Cleveland, Ohio, getting out with his rolled-up mat under his arm, he was brought up short by a fleet of Harley Davidson motorcycles parked outside the door. Once inside, he peeked into the practice space, where a mob of muscled-up bare-chested men were in awkward cross-legged poses on rental mats. Their denim vests and jackets hanging on coat hooks bore the Hells Angels colors and moniker, red lettering displayed on a white background.

The bikers are sometimes called “The Red and White.” They are also known as “The Filthy Few.” Inside the club house among themselves they are “The 81.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet and A is the first letter of the alphabet.

The bikers are the best known of what are known as outlaw motorcycle gangs. The name comes from the P-40 squadrons of Flying Tigers who flew in Burma and China during World War Two. The pilots were known as “Hells Angels” because the combat missions they flew were literally death-defying. Many of them didn’t make the round-trip.

Skulls scowled from the backs of the biker vests and jackets on the coat hooks. Frank gave the skulls a sly smile.

He took a seat, instead of taking the class, seeing he was late for it, anyway, and seeing the room was full. He might as well, he thought, read the book he was halfway through, and go to lunch with Barron, as they had planned, when the class was over. The book he was reading on his iPhone was David Halberstam’s “The Fifties.” Even though the Hells Angels were formed at the turn of the decade, and ran riot in the 1950s, there wasn’t anything about them in the book.

Yoga in the United States got going in the same decade as the Hells Angels, although it didn’t run riot. It kept a low profile until the next decade, the 1960s, when hippies made the scene, and adopted yoga as one of their signposts. Even so, from then until now, as yoga has grown exponentially, it has never run riot.

The bikers and yoga have diametrically opposing outlooks on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Hells Angels are noted for violence, fighting and brawling with fists, chains, and guns. They are notorious for being ruthless. They will cut the legs out from under you at the slightest provocation. One of the legs yoga stands on is ahimsa, or non-violence. It stands up for its own values, not going out of its way to chop anyone else down to size.

When the class ended the Hells Angels filed out of the studio. It had only been them in Barron Cannon’s morning class. They slugged back cans of lukewarm beer, toweled off each other’s backs, and got back into their denims and Red Wings.

“I’ll be damned if that was a beginner’s class,” one of them said.

The biker standing next to him, his bald mottled head glistening, said, “That was a hell of a workout.”

“Workout?” another one exclaimed. “That was some kind of torture.”

The Hells Angels are the biggest biker gang in the world. There are more than 400 chapters on six continents. They are banned in some countries, like the Netherlands, where they have been labeled as a “menace to public order.” The Hells Angels don’t give a fig about the Dutch, so it’s a wash.

There are only a few requirements for becoming a Hells Angel. First, you have to have a driver’s license and a seriously badass motorcycle, preferably a chopped Harley Davison. Second, you have to ride it a minimum of 12,000 miles a year. Third, if you were ever a policeman, or ever thought of becoming a policeman, you cannot join the club. Fourth, you have to undergo a semi-secret initiation, resulting in being “patched.” Being patched is like getting tenured. Lastly, you have to be a man, and a renegade, to boot. No Barbies are allowed, although they are encouraged to anchor the rear.

It’s best to be a white man when applying for membership. In 2000, Sonny Barger, one of the sparkplugs of the gang, said, “if you’re a motorcycle rider and you’re white, you want to join the Hells Angels. If you’re black, you want to join the Dragons. That’s how it is whether anyone likes it or not. We don’t have no blacks and they don’t have no whites.”When asked if that might ever change, he answered, “Anything can change. I can’t predict the future.” He was being disingenuous.

As many Hells Angels as there are, there are many more men and women who practice yoga, about 300 million worldwide. It’s easy to do, too. You don’t need a $30,000 two-wheeler. You don’t need to ride it all day and night. There are no initiation rites, half-baked or otherwise. You can be whatever race, creed, and gender you want to be. You don’t have to be amoral, bloodthirsty, or ungovernable, either, all of which yoga is good at resolving.

“What did you say?” one of the Hells Angels asked.

“Who, me?” Frank replied.

“Yes, you,” the biker said, looming over him.

“I didn’t say anything. I’m just sitting here thinking.”

“Keep your thinking to yourself,” the Hells Angel said, stalking out of the room. Some of the other bikers glared at him but left without incident. One of them gave him a friendly wave and a wink. Frank breathed a sigh of relief.

There was a roar of engines starting up in the parking lot. In a minute the bikers were swaggering down Clifton Boulevard towards downtown Cleveland. Frank had overheard one of them mention the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. He wondered whether there was an exhibit at the hall commemorating the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, where the Hells Angels had been hired to provide security. They beat dozens of fans with lead pipes. One concertgoer was stabbed to death in front of Mick Jagger.

Barron Cannon stepped out of the studio space, wearing loose black shorts and a tight-fitting Pearl Izumi jersey. He looked cool as a cucumber. Frank jumped to his feet.

“What in the hell was that all about?” he asked blurting it out.

“Missionary work,” said Barron, as unflappable and insufferable as a post-graduate in philosophy can be. Barron had a PhD, although he eschewed academics in favor of his own leanings, which were economic Marxism, idealistic anarchy, and vegetarianism. He had grown up on the other side of Lakewood, camped out in a yurt in his parent’s backyard for years while he was in school, been briefly married, and lived in an 80-year-old vaguely modernized apartment close to Edgewater Park, a short bike ride away.

Barron owned a Chevy Volt, but usually rode his bicycle, shopping for groceries, visiting nearby friends, and training on the multi-purpose path in the Rocky River Metropark.

“Missionary work? What do you mean?”

“Let’s go across the street to Starbucks, get some coffee, and some egg and cheese wraps,” said Barron.

Sitting down inside the Starbucks, which had transformed a vacant Burger King the year before, their food and coffee in front of them, Frank again asked Barron, “What are you up to?”

“Off the mat and into the world.”

“The last time that came up you derided the idea, saying yoga had to stay close to the individual, close to its roots, and not try to reform the world.”

“Times change, bud,” said Barron.

“Trying to teach yoga to Hells Angels isn’t a hop, skip, and a jump.”

“No,” said Barron. “It’s a great leap forward.”

Barron Cannon took secret delight in conflating things like the moon landing and Chairman Mao, as though the past was play dough.

“How did it go?”

“Not bad, they got engaged in what we were doing. I think they might try a follow-up class.”

“When hell freezes over,” thought Frank.

Barron Cannon laughed.

“That’s mostly true, but not entirely true,” he said. “No one is absolutely unsuited for yoga practice.”

“Are you reading my mind?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you sure they weren’t just grandstanding?”

“If there’s anything uncertain about yoga, it’s certainty,” said Barron.

Many law enforcement agencies worldwide consider the Hells Angels the Numero Uno of the “Big Four” motorcycle gangs, the others being the Pagans, Outlaws, and Bandidos. They investigate and arrest the bikers for engaging in organized crime, including extortion, drug dealing, and battery of all kinds. They raid their clubhouses and haul the Filthy Few off to jail. The police hardly ever bust up yoga studios, which are generally spic and span.

Members of the Hells Angels say they are a group of enthusiasts who have bonded to ride motorcycles together, organizing events such as road trips, rallies, and fundraisers. They say any crimes are the responsibility of the men who committed them and not the club as a whole, despite many convictions for mayhem, racketeering, and shootings. One of their slogans is, “When in doubt, knock them out.”

“How did you get them into the studio in the first place?”

“I was at the Shell station up on the corner, filling up my hybrid, when a Hells Angel pulled in behind me. He moved like a wooden Indian. He had to lean on the gas tank to get off his motorcycle.”

“And you suggested yoga?”

“You should try yoga,” Barron said to the biker. “It’s good for your back.”

“Who the hell are you?” asked the biker, testy and suspicious, his arms tattooed from wrist to shoulder.

“I teach yoga just down the street. You should come in for a beginner’s class. You might be surprised what a big help it can be.”

“Fuck off,” the biker snorted.

“So, what happened?” asked Frank.

“The next thing I know, there they were this morning. They took over the class, one of them standing outside turning everyone else away, saying the class was full, until I got started.”

“How did it go?”

“They wouldn’t chant, and they didn’t want to hear any yogic philosophy beforehand. They told me to get down to business, so what happened was that it turned into a plain and simple asana class.”

“How did they do?”

“They’re strong men, but most of them can’t touch their toes to save their lives. They tried hard, I will give them that. They were terrific doing the warrior poses, but things like triangle, anything cross-legged, and some of the twists were beyond them. Most of them were stiff as two-by-fours.”

Yoga plays an important role in reducing aggression and violence. It helps you by becoming more thoughtful about your actions. It makes you more flexible in tight spots. The brain-addled in prisons have been especially helped by the practice.

“Attention and impulsivity are very important for this population, which has problems dealing with aggressive impulses,” says Oxford University psychologist Miguel Farias about prison inmates

Simple things like pranayama breathing techniques release tension and anger. Doing headstand is a good way to get it into your head that you can’t stay mad when you’re on your head. Mindfulness and awareness flip the misconceptions of anger.

“We can see anger in terms of a lack of awareness, as well as an active misconstruing of reality,” says the Dalai Lama.

Even the yoga concept of non-attachment can be a big help. No matter what patches you wear, you aren’t that patch. You are an individual who is free to make individual choices. The Hells Angel emblematic skull’s head is a reminder of the transitory nature of life. Make the most of it. Don’t be always punching your way out of a paper bag, although be careful saying that to a Hells Angel.

Frank and Barron finished their coffees and stepped outside. At the crosswalk they paused at the curb. The traffic was light on Clifton Boulevard, but a biker was approaching. He was a trim young man on a yellow Vespa. He pulled up and stopped at the painted line of the crosswalk. He was wearing a turquoise football-style helmet. Both his arms up to the sleeves of his sleeveless black t-shirt were freckled. He waved at them to go. They went over the side of the curb into the street.

Stepping up to the curb on the other side of the street, Barron said, “There you are, Frank, not all angels are bats out of hell.”