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.
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