Cleveland Conference Week Begins With Rock Hall City

"In my waxed up hair and my painted shoes," in the words of The Replacements, who remain a major glaring omission from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and whom I proudly sported on my shirt, I was ready for my Labor Day visit to the museum here near my Westin hotel in Cleveland.

I knew the three-hour opening-night reception at Content Marketing World, the conference I'm here to attend (featuring John Cleese, Nick Offerman, and Barenaked Ladies, I might add), would not be enough time to tour what is pretty much my ultimate museum. And I was right. I spent six hours there, mostly on the bottom floor and also watching films about American Bandstand, the Hall's inductees, and how "video killed the radio star."

The tour begins with odds and ends like Joan Jett's first car (a sweet black Jaguar), the Fender bass of Mike Mills of R.E.M., and Alex Van Halen's ridiculous mega-bass drums.

I think I realized that music from the Midwest might actually be my favorite rock geography. I stood in awe viewing a collage of Replacements flyers, a contract to play CBGB's under the band name Gary and the Boners, a bill for damages they caused at a 1985 UC-Davis gig, and penned lyrics to "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes a Regular."

The reason a case could be made for the Midwest (despite my obvious bias, being from St. Louis): along with the Mats in this exhibit are Soul Asylum, Husker Du, the Jayhawks, Prince, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, Violent Femmes, Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, Cheap Trick, Afghan Whigs, and Guided By Voices (criminally absent from even having a piece in the museum unlike all these bands that are not inducted but at least represented).

The facility gives plenty of space to Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles.

Run D.M.C.'s Adidas, Madonna's trend-setting jewelry, the school-boy suit of AC/DC's Angus Young, Elvis' military jacket, Stevie Wonder's sunglasses, Joey Ramone's leather jacket, Kurt Cobain's guitar, a piece of Pink Floyd's Wall, and Michael Jackson's glove are just some of the iconic artifacts not to be missed.

Also, I found the note from Charles Manson to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner offering interview material in exchange for a jailhouse subscription to be charming.

If you love rock music as much as I do, buy yourself a ticket to Cleveland. I can't believe the place has been open here on the shore of Lake Erie since 1986 and this was my maiden landing.

Thanks Again to Magnet Magazine For Giving Me All That Indie Rock

The music rag Magnet is my absolute favorite magazine in existence today. But one of its columnists, Andrew Earles, seems to have gone a bit off the deep end in recent years. I really don't like a lot of his "street team" writing. That's why I was skeptical going into reading his new book, Gimme Indie Rock.

It's a survey, or his opinion, of the 500 best indie rock albums since indie rock began, according to him, in the late 1970s. Or more accurately, Earles only includes albums between 1981 and 1996, no matter how much it pains him to leave out the one classic Feelies album. He rightly describes indie rock as a combination of pop hooks and sonic distortion. He also notes that the true heyday of indie rock was 1986 to 1996, also something I agree with largely.

The book is laid out alphabetically. And when I started reading and listening to the music Earles suggested, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was suggesting a lot of indie bands I had not really listened to. And several of them are so good that I'm rushing out to buy this book. I love his writing style in Gimme Indie Rock. It's nothing at all like his column in Magnet, which is the only thing I skip in the magazine each month.

The first album Earles lists is by 100 Flowers, which he compares to Wire, the Mekons, and Alternative TV. I only really like Wire of those three, but this self-titled 1983 album is really good.

I am a huge fan of Slint, which Earles accurately compares A Minor Forest to. So it's really surprising that I never heard the album that he suggests. Moving on, the next band is Adickded, which is a noisy punk trio of Pacific Northwest women, also equally surprisingly good.

Shortly after these reviews, Earles gives multiple-album credit to some of my favorite bands, like Afghan Whigs and Archers of Loaf. So even though he says that some of the bands and albums included are not necessarily his favorites or the most influential, he's really done his research. It's really impressive, and I hope to find a couple of hundred albums out of the 500 selections he examines to add to my library.

Thanks again Magnet, as always.

Afghan Whigs at 9:30 Club Provides a Memorable 90s Flashback

I had quite a brush with the Afghan Whigs back in the early 90s when I had to hold the guitarist up during one song to keep him from falling off the tiny stage at Cicero's in St. Louis.

The Cincinnati kids have come a long way, as the band, now reformed, showed recently at the 9:30 Club in DC. When I first saw the Whigs, there were 20 people watching in a sweaty basement, but this  show saw a whole new generation packing the renowned club to the rafters and bellowing out many of the Whigs' classic tunes. For me, I was just thrilled that they actually played "Retarded" and "You, My Flower," two songs off my favorite album, their first, Up in It.

I could have taken a run-through of all Up in It's rowdy tunes, but the selection actually represented a pretty good mix from all their albums, which I would incidentally rank as:

1. Up in It
2. Congregation
3. Gentlemen
4. 1965
5. Black Love

With so much strong material, it is difficult to believe the band only has five albums, perhaps partly because leader Greg Dulli has so much other great material with projects like The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins. Even with the Whigs dormant since 1998, Dulli has been notably prolific.

And Dulli, ever the soulful performer pleased the crowd throughout with a journey into the pit, not to mention the band's forays into snippets of songs by Stevie Nicks, Prince, and The Doors.

What a pleasure it is to know the Afghan Whigs. This show was ****1/2 out of ***** stars.

The set list:
Crime Scene
I’m Her Slave
Uptown Again
What Jail Is Like
Fountain And Fairfax/Who Do You Love
When We Two Parted/Dead Body
Gentleman
66
Turn On The Water/The End
You, My Flower
Retarded
See And Don’t See
Lovecrimes
Going to Town/Edge of Seventeen
Debonair
Cite Soleil
Miles Iz Dead
Into the Floor

Encore
Bulletproof
Summer’s Kiss
Sometimes It Snows In April
Faded/Purple Rain

Photos by Brad Searles and Richie Downs

'90s Flashback: Afghan Whigs Reform, Still Rock

Greg Dulli and the Afghan Whigs, one of my favorite rock bands of the 1990s, has reformed and they look great. They were in slim, fightin' form on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Show this week.

Their excellent version of "I'm Her Slave" really took me back to when I saw the (formerly Cincinnati-based) band at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis with My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub, which was a show of monumentally loud proportions. The Whigs so rattled my hearing that the pop beauty of the Fanclub to follow was somehow muddled.

An even better Whigs show was at the old Cicero's Basement in University City, St. Louis. I actually had to hold the Whigs' guitarist, Rick McCollum, up on stage for a little while because he didn't have enough room to stand on it.