True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 348: Life Stinks
Aired: 2024-01-25
Duration: 01:20:03


=== Welcome to the Show (15:08) ===

[00:00:00]  Did you ever want to be a disc jockey?
[00:00:02]  I would be a disclaimer.
[00:00:04]  Not DJ at bar.
[00:00:06]  I mean radio.
[00:00:06]  No, I know what you mean.
[00:00:08]  I would be incredible.
[00:00:09]  I did it a couple times at, what's that fucking college in San Francisco that's not SF State?
[00:00:15]  Oh, I was going to say SF State.
[00:00:16]  No, the papist one.
[00:00:18]  Oh, University of San Francisco.
[00:00:19]  University of San Francisco.
[00:00:20]  I knew a lady there who was a college radio DJ.
[00:00:23]  Phil Russell.
[00:00:24]  Shout out Carolyn.
[00:00:25]  That's the woman who let me DJ for her.
[00:00:28]  And I played, I was probably, no, well, we don't mean to mention some of the bands I played on air, but some of them had bad reputations.
[00:00:37]  But it was really fun to do.
[00:00:40]  It gives you, I think there's a power in being a rock music DJ that there isn't in anything else.
[00:00:46]  It's a lost art.
[00:00:47]  Now, Liz, all we can do, The Breakfast Club.
[00:01:13]  Welcome to The Breakfast Club.
[00:01:15]  I am Charlemagne.
[00:01:16]  With me is my beautiful co-host.
[00:01:21]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:23]  The God.
[00:01:23]  Liz the God.
[00:01:24]  And of course, we have with us, this isn't the Breakfast Club, but Sway, aka Young Chomsky producing, and this is the Breakfast Club.
[00:01:36]  Welcome to the show.
[00:01:37]  No, it's Trunan.
[00:01:38]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:38]  Trunan, the Breakfast Club edition.
[00:01:42]  Charlemagne.
[00:01:43]  Interesting name, that one.
[00:01:45]  Charlemagne?
[00:01:46]  Wait, you mean the God or the historical figure?
[00:01:50]  The god.
[00:01:51]  Oh, I thought I was like, wait, I thought in my head, even though I was talking about Charlemagne the God, I was like, does Liz think that the historical figure Charlemagne was some kind of primitive deity?
[00:02:00]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:01]  No, Charlemagne, the current primitive deity.
[00:02:03]  Okay, yes.
[00:02:04]  So cool.
[00:02:05]  Yeah.
[00:02:05]  So cool.
[00:02:06]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:07]  Hello.
[00:02:08]  We have a really fun episode for you today.
[00:02:11]  We do.
[00:02:12]  We're talking Brace's favorite subject.
[00:02:17]  Punk rock.
[00:02:18]  I'm a chatty cat.
[00:02:19]  I could have tried to do that in a brace voice, but I couldn't do it, did you?
[00:02:22]  Do it.
[00:02:22]  Do it again.
[00:02:23]  No, I can't do it.
[00:02:24]  Punk rock.
[00:02:26]  Listen, I feel.
[00:02:27]  Punk rocker.
[00:02:28]  No, I can't do it.
[00:02:29]  I feel like when people think of punk rock, they think of a sort of an airhead kind of moron with their, you know, their little shoelaced hat around their head and their little studded leather jacket.
[00:02:41]  But I was always a sensitive creature.
[00:02:42]  Yes, you got the snowman sweater on.
[00:02:46]  I do have it.
[00:02:46]  I only have like two sweaters.
[00:02:47]  I like that one.
[00:02:48]  It's this one or the big, big one.
[00:02:50]  Or the Chinese shirt.
[00:02:52]  But it's too cold for the Chinese shirt.
[00:02:54]  My nipples would be chafing.
[00:02:56]  So for me, when I was, I'm going to be self-indulgent here for a moment, if you'll allow me.
[00:03:02]  I shall allow.
[00:03:03]  My favorite band.
[00:03:05]  When I was a lad, I got really into the first three CDs.
[00:03:10]  I remember I got like a Ramon CD, a Dead Kennedy CD, and a Dead Boys CD.
[00:03:16]  It was a Dead Boys Record, which was.
[00:03:18]  Wait, are you a Dead Kennedys fan?
[00:03:19]  I am not.
[00:03:20]  No, I was at the time.
[00:03:22]  Sure.
[00:03:22]  That is a band I severely outgrew.
[00:03:24]  And I have a personal deep dislike of Jel Biafra due to an incident.
[00:03:29]  I'm really, everyone listening, don't get mad at me.
[00:03:32]  Outgrow that shit.
[00:03:33]  They suck.
[00:03:34]  They suck.
[00:03:34]  They fucking consult.
[00:03:35]  The Dead Kennedys are not good.
[00:03:38]  It's really bad.
[00:03:38]  And the guy, I also saw him just, oh, he's such an asshole.
[00:03:42]  I mean, I think he's just.
[00:03:44]  Yeah, I think now that with my knowledge of the various neurological issues that people have, I think he might just be autistic.
[00:03:52]  I genuinely, I'm not saying that in a pejorative way.
[00:03:54]  I think he really is.
[00:03:55]  Or the alternative is so grave that I dare not speak it.
[00:04:00]  He might just be the biggest asshole in the world.
[00:04:02]  Not the biggest asshole.
[00:04:03]  Dead Boys, however.
[00:04:04]  Dead Boys fucking rock.
[00:04:05]  And once featured John Belushi on drums, which great footage of that.
[00:04:10]  But when I heard the Dead Boys, I was like, this is so crazy.
[00:04:13]  I love this.
[00:04:14]  And I got a CD.
[00:04:16]  My fourth CD was a compilation of, it's called like CBGBs, even though none of the bands played on CBGBs.
[00:04:24]  CBG.
[00:04:24]  Also, it's like, I don't know why that.
[00:04:26]  And now it's like an airport restaurant bar, CBGBs.
[00:04:29]  But it was a punk club in New York that very famous.
[00:04:32]  And I got the CD, and it was like the seeds and like 60s bands on it.
[00:04:36]  But the first punk song on it was Agitated by the Electric Eels.
[00:04:41]  So entertainment.
[00:04:43]  So entertainment.
[00:04:44]  One of the greatest Cleveland punk bands.
[00:04:47]  And then Dead Boys, and I think Sonic Reducer was on it.
[00:04:52]  But I'm just going to all this stuff.
[00:04:54]  And it was like this kind of artier, different stuff.
[00:04:57]  But it was, and little did I know, had all these connections to Peter Lochner, which Electric Eels, Dead Boys.
[00:05:02]  Sonic Reducer was originally Rockets from the Tomb song.
[00:05:05]  And then I heard, I don't remember if I got it at Grooves on Market Street from front of the show, Kelly Stoltz, or from my dad, but I got Pear Ubu's Modern Dance LP when I was 16.
[00:05:16]  And the record cover looks so different.
[00:05:18]  It's like a sort of like Midwestern version of a Chinese, like great proletarian cultural revolution dancer.
[00:05:28]  And I heard it and I put it on and it was like nothing I had ever heard in my life.
[00:05:33]  It was the and I would listen to it with like these headphones on my little record player and it just the the textures of the sound and the instruments they use.
[00:05:43]  It was so avant-garde.
[00:05:46]  Avant-garde.
[00:05:47]  And it just, it just, I had no idea these vistas were available for rock and roll music.
[00:05:52]  And I went out and I, as I say later in the interview, I got one of the songs tattooed on my arm at like a 16-year-old.
[00:06:00]  And, you know, later I heard Terminal Tower, the singles compilation.
[00:06:04]  It was just, it fucking blew my mind so egregiously that it became like an obsession with me.
[00:06:10]  It's still one of my favorite.
[00:06:11]  I mean, I listen to this record all the time, the first three records all the time.
[00:06:16]  And Peter Lochner is just this figure that kind of flows through this stuff like the Cuyahoga River.
[00:06:25]  And I, you know, from my, like, eventually getting really into like 16, 17 years old, getting to like Lester Bangs and all that sort of rock history, he's such a big figure with that that it's just.
[00:06:34]  For people who don't know who Lester Bangs is, first of all, who are you?
[00:06:37]  Exactly.
[00:06:38]  And second of all, can you explain a little bit?
[00:06:39]  Lester Bangs was like basically the guy who invented sort of the modern form of rock criticism and was like this sort of experimental rock writer from the 1960s and 70s who kind of put his like, it wasn't this sort of academic or like, you know, stuffy version of rock writing.
[00:06:56]  It was like actual rock and roll writing.
[00:06:58]  Yeah.
[00:06:59]  And, you know, he was like very associated with Cream Magazine and I think fired from Rolling Stone, but it was like this, there's a couple compilations.
[00:07:08]  Yeah, they're compilations of his writing.
[00:07:09]  Carburetor Dong, and I can't remember the second one.
[00:07:12]  But I read them and reread them.
[00:07:14]  I wanted to be him when I was.
[00:07:16]  I was always more of a girl Marcus gal, but also.
[00:07:18]  Yeah, the Grow Market.
[00:07:20]  Also great, though, and still around.
[00:07:23]  And Berkeley, I believe.
[00:07:24]  I think so.
[00:07:25]  I think so.
[00:07:26]  And blurbed on this book.
[00:07:28]  He is.
[00:07:28]  This book that we're about to talk about called Ain't It Fun, Peter Lochner, Proto-Punk in the Secret City, which is by our boy Aaron Lang.
[00:07:39]  Who is, you might know.
[00:07:41]  I don't even know is our boy.
[00:07:42]  Our boy, yeah.
[00:07:44]  Longtime boy.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:45]  But an underground comics artist who R. Crumb once called the unquestionable king of politically incorrect comics.
[00:07:56]  R. Crumb said that?
[00:07:57]  R. Crumb said that about it.
[00:07:58]  That's very cool.
[00:08:00]  But one of my, I mean, my favorite artist and the sort of Truanon in-house resident artist, Aaron Lang.
[00:08:07]  And so we're here to talk about his book with him.
[00:08:21]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Truanon.
[00:08:25]  We have been chugging down the Cuyahoga River on our little steamboat Willies going doot toot every couple of stops, and we finally landed in America's jewel.
[00:08:36]  I know most of our listeners are a feat artists from the European capital who listen to our podcast on their summer reveries they take in August, catching up on a whole year's worth of content in but a week while they engage in orgies and red wine drinking.
[00:08:54]  So you may not be familiar with what we in America call the bastion of the Western Reserve.
[00:09:00]  They say there are two cities in America.
[00:09:03]  Trying to think of a funny first one, and I'm going to go with Chicago, the greatest city in America, home of some of the greatest art going on right now.
[00:09:12]  Everybody loves Chicago.
[00:09:13]  Chicago is one of the places that all your friends move to when they graduate high school.
[00:09:17]  It is a great city.
[00:09:18]  Just playing.
[00:09:19]  There is only one city in America, and that is Cleveland.
[00:09:22]  Now, here to talk about Cleveland with us is actually Cleveland's highest IQ capping out at 75.
[00:09:31]  Aaron Lang here to talk about his book, Ain't It Fun, Peter Lochner and proto-punk in this secret city.
[00:09:40]  Aaron, welcome to the motherfucking show.
[00:09:42]  Hello, good to be here.
[00:09:44]  Aaron, it's so great to have you.
[00:09:46]  I want to say real quick that our listeners, while they may not have ever heard your name before, they might be familiar with your work because you've done a bunch of artwork for us over the past four years that they'll be familiar with some incredible, the first and only visual representation of Coindexter, obviously.
[00:10:07]  Bush did 9-11.
[00:10:08]  Bush did 9-11, yes, an incredible Osama piece.
[00:10:12]  So many.
[00:10:12]  A great Gillade.
[00:10:13]  Oh, one that people haven't seen, but is actually my favorite, I will say, is an Austin Powers Truan sticker.
[00:10:21]  Well, there's the Gorbachev one too.
[00:10:23]  That's good.
[00:10:24]  And what else?
[00:10:25]  I feel you also the what do you call it? Cafe Lorenzo T-shirt and the poster in the – you've done most of our art.
[00:10:34]  Yeah.
[00:10:34]  Yes.
[00:10:35]  And actually a really great not-for-sale poster of the three of us that I have framed and hanging in my office.
[00:10:42]  Me too.
[00:10:42]  Which I should send you a free.
[00:10:43]  Very nice.
[00:10:44]  Yes, please.
[00:10:46]  This book, I was, we were chatting before we started recording, but I really, I just want, because I wanted to say it on air, is so fucking good, Aaron.
[00:10:56]  It is absorbing.
[00:10:58]  I had no idea that I was going to enjoy it as much as I did.
[00:11:02]  I couldn't put it down.
[00:11:04]  The, the, I keep calling, I want to call them plates, but they're not plates, but the comics are just incredible, but the writing is fantastic.
[00:11:13]  I cannot recommend this book enough to our listeners.
[00:11:16]  Even if you don't care about punk, it's not just about punk, it's about so much more.
[00:11:20]  And I can't wait to get into it.
[00:11:22]  But I just wanted to get that right off the bat that this book is really, really something.
[00:11:28]  I appreciate that.
[00:11:28]  Thank you.
[00:11:29]  So, Aaron, let's talk for a second.
[00:11:32]  This book is, this speaks to me, I think, on a level that it may speak to few others because I am one of the people that is dumb enough to have really loved and looked up to Peter Lochner from a very young age.
[00:11:47]  But for those of our, which we'll get to why that's maybe stupid later, but we should contextualize for our listeners, who is, who's Peter Lochner?
[00:11:57]  You wrote this book ostensibly about him.
[00:11:59]  I'm going to say the book is like 40% Peter and like 60% Cleveland, I think in general, if that.
[00:12:06]  But it is, and I think it all works to contextualize Peter and tell that story.
[00:12:11]  But why, why Peter?
[00:12:12]  Why did you want to write a book about him?
[00:12:14]  Who is he?
[00:12:15]  Well, who is he?
[00:12:16]  So Peter is best known as one of the original members of the punk band Pear Ubu.
[00:12:23]  But even that comes with caveats because he was only on the original singles and he was gone before they even put out their first album.
[00:12:33]  The seminal album, The Modern Dance, one of my favorite records of all time.
[00:12:38]  Though one of Peter's songs, Life Stinks, does appear on that album.
[00:12:45]  And then prior to Pear Ubu, Peter was in a band called Rocket from the Tombs.
[00:12:50]  Rocket from the Tombs never did any official recordings or releases, though they came out later, like studio recordings and live recordings.
[00:13:00]  But Rocket from the Tombs claimed to fame was the members broke up and members went into Pear Ubu and The Dead Boys.
[00:13:08]  Which I think is important in just like the history of rock and roll in America, because I think that they really, both of those bands are emblematic of two very different strains that came from the same source.
[00:13:18]  The Dead Boys is like the rock and roll punk band.
[00:13:21]  Like they are a punk band, yes, very much so.
[00:13:24]  But like those are great rock and roll songs.
[00:13:27]  I mean, that first album is incredible.
[00:13:30]  And then Pear Ubu really was like, went more towards like the jazz art kind of stuff, which I think is more.
[00:13:36]  Oh, jazz.
[00:13:36]  Yeah.
[00:13:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:37]  And like synthesizers and like, you know, weird electronics and things like that, which itself spawned like genres and genres and genres afterwards.
[00:13:46]  Yeah, they couldn't be.
[00:13:46]  They couldn't have been more different.
[00:13:48]  And there's even like a third kind of connection because Craig, Craig Bell from Rocket of the Tombs, he left and moved out to New Haven and started a band called Saucers, which were more like power pop new wave.
[00:14:03]  So that kind of gets lost sometimes in that story.
[00:14:07]  But everybody in Rock of the Tombs went off and did other things that were very distinct.
[00:14:12]  But they took those songs with them, like Dead Boy songs like Sonic Reducer and Per Ubuntu songs like Final Solution.
[00:14:20]  Those songs started with Rocket from the Tombs.
[00:14:23]  But why Peter for the book?
[00:14:25]  Like what specifically what made you want to construct the whole book about him?
[00:14:29]  Because the book is a history of Cleveland and like the secret city of Cleveland.
[00:14:34]  But what makes Peter a good way to tell that story?
[00:14:38]  Well, there's a lot of reasons.
[00:14:41]  There's a value in scarcity.
[00:14:43]  And with Peter, you have like a scarcity of, well, he recorded a lot, but you have a scarcity of good recordings.
[00:14:51]  There's a scarcity of information.
[00:14:54]  And that's compelling to people.
[00:14:57]  And a lot's been written about.
[00:14:59]  Peter over the years, but it's very disparate and spread out.
[00:15:04]  And so it needed to be aggregated, that information.

=== Cleveland's Occult Architecture (16:35) ===

[00:15:08]  And also, Peter was a Zealig-like figure in that he was just, he was just so fucking pumped up with enthusiasm and amphetamines.
[00:15:19]  He just, he knew everybody.
[00:15:22]  Like he was in, he was in the folk music scene.
[00:15:25]  He was in the poetry scene.
[00:15:27]  He was a journalist.
[00:15:28]  So he knew all these people.
[00:15:30]  And on top of that, he was zipping over to Detroit to the cream offices where he was hanging out with Lester Bangs.
[00:15:38]  And then he'd zip over to New York City where he was going to CBGB's in Naxis, Kansas City, and forcing himself on the scene there and just insisting on being friends with everybody.
[00:15:51]  So he knew Patty Smith and television and Johnny Thunders.
[00:15:56]  So in this single person with a short life, there is just endless connections.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, yeah, because that's something we should mention too off the bat here is Peter Lochner died, I think, 24 years old in, was it like 1976 that he die in?
[00:16:15]  Oh my God, 77?
[00:16:17]  77, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:19]  And so for me, like growing up very much interested in the history of rock and roll music and then reading like I think a lot of young rockers did, Please Kill Me, which he's mentioned quite a few times in that.
[00:16:32]  You know, he sort of was like this like weird figure that was, I think, I can't remember if it's, I think it's Lester Banks called him like the first casualty of like this new kind of music.
[00:16:42]  And in many ways, he really was, because a lot of guys did die.
[00:16:46]  I mean, a lot of guys he played in bands with or that played in like the, you know, bands that came after bands and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
[00:16:52]  A lot of those people did die within the next like decade, definitely within the next couple of decades.
[00:16:56]  But Peter was really one of the first to actually like die as a casualty of this, of this rock and roll scene.
[00:17:04]  And it's just interesting that like a figure like this comes out of Cleveland.
[00:17:10]  And you're from Cleveland.
[00:17:12]  Guilty as charged.
[00:17:14]  That was an accusation.
[00:17:15]  And still in Cleveland, right?
[00:17:17]  I was gone for a long time, but yeah, I moved back six years ago.
[00:17:22]  Yeah, well, I mean, it's not a good time to live in it.
[00:17:26]  I was about to say, it's not a good time to live in Israel anyway, so I'm glad you moved.
[00:17:29]  That's a bad job.
[00:17:35]  I don't know if it's a good time to live anywhere.
[00:17:37]  At least like Cleveland sucks.
[00:17:41]  It fucking does.
[00:17:42]  Now, don't get me wrong.
[00:17:44]  There's good things here and you can make a good life for yourself.
[00:17:47]  And I don't regret moving back.
[00:17:49]  And like, I do like it here, but that's like weighed against other options.
[00:17:54]  Because it's just like, I can't afford to live in New York.
[00:17:57]  I can't afford to live in Seattle.
[00:17:59]  You guys left San Francisco.
[00:18:00]  I mean, it's like, where the fuck do people live anymore?
[00:18:04]  I mean, if you want to live in the country, like I'm sure there's some like appeal to living like in rural Maine, but that's not who I am.
[00:18:13]  So like, I don't know where you go in North America.
[00:18:17]  Montreal's cool.
[00:18:19]  But yeah, you know what I mean?
[00:18:21]  Like there's just not that many options at good places to be that are affordable and where things are happening.
[00:18:26]  Well, that's what do you say Cleveland sucks?
[00:18:28]  Cause I've always heard Cleveland rocks.
[00:18:30]  That is true.
[00:18:30]  And you know what?
[00:18:31]  I got to say that is a motif during one point of your book is that Cleveland rocks.
[00:18:35]  But it is funny too that you point out that that song written by Ian Hunter and you rightly point out from his best record and really only good record.
[00:18:44]  Cleveland has this reputation.
[00:18:46]  And I'll say this from an outsider who's been to Cleveland and has had many connections to people from Cleveland is I've never heard somebody from Cleveland or who's been to Cleveland say a good thing about Cleveland.
[00:18:58]  And it's almost like I get tired of the way that sometimes people talk about their cities.
[00:19:03]  You know, like, oh, it sucks here, but we fuck it.
[00:19:05]  We're scrappy and we love it.
[00:19:06]  Cleveland really does suck.
[00:19:08]  I went there and it was, you know, I had an incredible time.
[00:19:12]  And it produced some of the greatest rock and roll, not only from the 1970s, but incredible bands to this day.
[00:19:20]  But it is like so emblematic, I think, of when people think of Rust Belt.
[00:19:24]  It's like Detroit and Cleveland.
[00:19:26]  It was this city.
[00:19:27]  And this is what's so striking about the Midwest, if listeners have never been there.
[00:19:32]  You go to these places and you see these sort of like monuments to this great grand projects that are just completely like hollowed out and empty.
[00:19:41]  I'm not just talking about like steel mills or whatever, but like the buildings downtown and these like, you know, these grand facades and this architecture.
[00:19:50]  And that is a huge part of the book is just the geography of Cleveland itself.
[00:19:57]  Right.
[00:19:57]  It's important that people, I don't think people know that John D. Rockefeller is from here and that he made his fortune here.
[00:20:04]  And Rockefeller was the richest person in the world.
[00:20:08]  And he made that money in Cleveland because there was money to be made here through industrialization.
[00:20:15]  And once like the railroads got going, Cleveland got going.
[00:20:21]  And there's a whole strip of Euclid Avenue called Millionaire's Row.
[00:20:27]  And it was just mansion after mansion after mansion.
[00:20:31]  So there was a lot of Gilded Age activity here.
[00:20:35]  And let's be very clear.
[00:20:38]  These people were aggressively anti-union.
[00:20:43]  They were, yeah, they did some bad things.
[00:20:47]  But also.
[00:20:48]  Credit needs to be given where it's due.
[00:20:52]  And these people did truly believe in philanthropy.
[00:20:56]  They were elitist about it, but they weren't just hoarding their money or dreaming of going to Mars or doing very selfish things.
[00:21:06]  They were building museums.
[00:21:08]  They were building libraries.
[00:21:11]  And these buildings are made of marble and they have artwork and they're ornate and they're a gift to the city that these people gave us that we still have.
[00:21:23]  And they're not going to be torn down because of their scale and because that their purposes are civic purposes, public library, city hall, et cetera.
[00:21:35]  Those types of buildings don't get demolished.
[00:21:38]  They have a sense of permanence and they have a sense of dignity.
[00:21:42]  But then downtown is a ghost town and it's awful, but there's this grandiose architecture that kind of taunts us from the past and tells us how we were one of the major American cities.
[00:21:59]  Yeah, you talk a lot about, I mean, throughout the book, you return many times to this kind of concept of psychogeography and how, you know, this, it really feels like, you know, there's like a kind of psychology to this place that imprints on you.
[00:22:17]  You know, this, what you're saying about the kind of this, this, the, the past sort of haunting everyone, that it was always once a place of greatness, kind of, but will never be is kind of always sort of running through these figures throughout these decades, even before you get into deindustrialization, it seems like.
[00:22:38]  Yeah.
[00:22:39]  That there's this sort of sense of the city as this kind of like, like it's sort of like unmoored a little bit, kind of like floating along itself where it's been sort of abandoned even before it was kind of made into something, if that makes any sense.
[00:22:58]  Cleveland is very isolated, but not in a geographic sense.
[00:23:03]  Right.
[00:23:04]  Because Chicago is only six hours away.
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:08]  Columbus is two hours south.
[00:23:10]  Pittsburgh is not that far away.
[00:23:12]  You can drive to New York.
[00:23:13]  You can be in New York in nine hours.
[00:23:15]  You know, Toronto's not that far away.
[00:23:17]  So it's not, but people here don't travel.
[00:23:22]  And they, they're just, I have a hard time talking about Clevelanders because they're not stupid and they're not hicks, but they're provincial.
[00:23:34]  They're provincial.
[00:23:36]  That's like the only word to describe them.
[00:23:38]  They're provincial and they don't, they just don't know how the world works.
[00:23:43]  And they're just kind of like lost in time and just like cut off from cultural currents.
[00:23:51]  It's, it's hard to explain.
[00:23:55]  But I think that's what like allows such a like interesting and unique culture to develop.
[00:24:00]  So you get these expressions, you know, throughout, and these like bizarre characters, which include, you know, as your book kind of starts out with a lot of serial killers, which is kind of crazy.
[00:24:11]  Yeah.
[00:24:11]  But these sort of like very weird psychologies that develop, social psychologies and kind of these figures that emerge out of Cleveland are so unique to this place because of that.
[00:24:24]  You know, whether it be these figures of, you know, these weird serial killers or, you know, the these, you know, incredible niche, you know, music scenes or comic artists or, you know, and all these people, journalists intersecting, right?
[00:24:45]  Yeah.
[00:24:46]  So to speak of the geography, the entire industrial section is in an area called the flats.
[00:24:55]  And it's the river valley where the Cuyahoga River goes through.
[00:24:59]  So it's below you.
[00:25:01]  It's lower.
[00:25:03]  And then on top of it, above like a cliff is downtown Cleveland.
[00:25:08]  So I was just talking about this grand opulent architecture, but it sits upon this precipice of industrial hell.
[00:25:18]  So it's, you can understand why I get a little romantic in my descriptions of it in the book, because it's a very, it is romantic in the dictionary, you know, definition of that word.
[00:25:31]  It's visually striking.
[00:25:33]  I tried to convey that in the book.
[00:25:34]  But when I, you know, when I take the light rail from where I live on the west side to downtown, I go over this valley.
[00:25:40]  And it's, I don't know, it's, it's like awe-inspiring.
[00:25:47]  And this is where the river caught on fire.
[00:25:49]  Yeah.
[00:25:50]  I mean, you, you know, you mentioned all the industrial stuff there.
[00:25:52]  And it was, it was, I had known this just because I had looked it up, I think, when I, the first time I went to Cleveland.
[00:26:00]  But the river caught on fire multiple, multiple, multiple times.
[00:26:03]  Which is weird because that's not usually a thing that should happen to rivers.
[00:26:06]  No, and that's, I would say, and I hate to say it, that's one of the things Cleveland's the most famous for is having a river that caught on fire.
[00:26:12]  But there was this like, you know, there was these like leakages from the industrial plants over there that people were just kind of like, ah, that means the river is healthy if it's like glowing a little bit.
[00:26:24]  They weren't leaks.
[00:26:25]  They were dumping.
[00:26:26]  Yeah.
[00:26:27]  Yes.
[00:26:27]  Yeah.
[00:26:27]  Yeah.
[00:26:27]  They were just dumping the waste there.
[00:26:30]  And then, you know, the river is on fire, which is a sort of dramatic scene in the book and then a motif that keeps getting returned to.
[00:26:38]  I mean, what do you think that sums up about Cleveland?
[00:26:41]  Well, it's certainly a visual metaphor for just how fucked up, you know, the environment got from industrialization.
[00:26:49]  And can you imagine what it was like working in these conditions?
[00:26:52]  You know, there weren't a lot of safety regulations.
[00:26:56]  And, you know, like as I said earlier, the industrialists were very anti-union.
[00:27:01]  So it was very gnarly.
[00:27:03]  I'd also like to point out, and I think I do mention this in the book, that these river fires happened in other industrial cities as well.
[00:27:12]  It was not uncommon in any industrialized area before environmental regulations.
[00:27:17]  It just so happened that the river fire in 1969 got covered by Time magazine and it kind of went viral, so to speak.
[00:27:27]  Yeah.
[00:27:28]  But the photograph, the famous photograph is not from 1969.
[00:27:32]  There are no photos of the famous fire.
[00:27:34]  They just ran like an older photo from a fire in like the night from the 1950s, I think.
[00:27:40]  One thing that also runs through the book is the occult history of Cleveland as well.
[00:27:45]  And that extends, I don't know if occult's the right word, but that extends to the architecture itself.
[00:27:49]  And, you know, something that anyone who has like a cursory knowledge of the way that a lot of American and French and I guess English architecture has been done is they were almost like accorded to these like Masonic designs or these sort of designs that seem reminiscent of like the way that like people thought about nature in France.
[00:28:12]  And Cleveland's no different.
[00:28:14]  And so there's these sort of like these boulevards that are constructed this particular way.
[00:28:19]  And I feel like as returning to the map over and over and over as you do in the book, it just shows that there's almost like this occult leakage that happens in, or this occult dumping, I guess, that happens just on the streets of Cleveland.
[00:28:34]  Well, I think it's important to stress that the term occult literally means hidden, that which is hidden.
[00:28:42]  It doesn't necessarily have to be a black magic kind of occult.
[00:28:47]  So you're talking, we're talking about things that are unknown, that are sort of not part of the conventional history.
[00:28:56]  And in regards to some of the stuff in the city planning and the geography, I'm in no way arguing that there was some sort of like sinister occult conspiracy by the city founders.
[00:29:10]  This is not a Da Vinci code kind of thing.
[00:29:14]  It's more like they were influenced by neoclassicism.
[00:29:18]  So they were doing these types of pagan things, though I think very superficially.
[00:29:25]  And then, you know, there are two parts of the city, one at the museum and another part in the flats where the landscape aligns with the solstices and the equinoxes.
[00:29:37]  And that's a fact.
[00:29:38]  It just does.
[00:29:39]  But you can't really find any writing about why they did this.
[00:29:43]  They don't talk about it.
[00:29:45]  And if they did, it's been lost.
[00:29:47]  So why was it just a sort of decorative thing?
[00:29:52]  Probably, because these people were Christian.
[00:29:55]  And yet it's still there.
[00:29:57]  And you can still go there and observe the solstices and the equinoxes.
[00:30:02]  And that's kind of powerful.
[00:30:04]  And not a lot of people know about it.
[00:30:06]  In fact, most people don't know about it.
[00:30:14]  One of the big events in the book is Kent State.
[00:30:19]  Yes.
[00:30:20]  And that, I mean, I think all of our listeners probably know what happened at Kent State.
[00:30:29]  But you keep returning back to that event a couple times in the book.
[00:30:33]  What I really like about this book, by the way, just to step back, is that you kind of, you're able to kind of tell this, there's this sort of like long history that you kind of return to from all different angles and dimensions throughout the course of the book.
[00:30:48]  And so as the book unfolds, you're sort of starting to see the same history told over and over again from all these different perspectives, from all these different angles or different sort of narrative links, which make it very unique and interesting.
[00:31:04]  You get a really like holistic, I mean, I feel like I got a very holistic understanding of Cleveland, of this like sense of place.
[00:31:13]  But I want to talk specifically a little bit about Kent State, because not only was that like such a, that was a big event, obviously, in kind of turning the national sentiment of the war, but for Cleveland in particular and for a lot of these figures in this book, in these kind of underground music scenes or whatever, this was like a defining, defining moment.
[00:31:36]  Maybe we can kind of like run through a little bit about what happened at Kent State and what that kind of did to the city.
[00:31:43]  Sure.

=== Kent State Uprising (11:00) ===

[00:31:44]  Yeah, Kent is not in Cleveland.
[00:31:46]  It's not even in the same county, but it's nearby.
[00:31:49]  It's closer to Akron, which is Akron's interesting and it's too big and too far away to be a suburb, but it's also too small to be thought of independently.
[00:32:01]  People from Akron would disagree.
[00:32:02]  It's kind of like a satellite city.
[00:32:04]  Yeah.
[00:32:06]  Sort of like how Tacoma is to like Seattle.
[00:32:09]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:10]  The home of LeBron James, but also the birthplace, people don't know this, of Steph Curry.
[00:32:15]  Interesting.
[00:32:16]  Same hospital.
[00:32:17]  Do you say that also because like Akron, Tacoma has a unique smell about it?
[00:32:26]  They used to say that you could smell the rubber in Akron.
[00:32:29]  Akron was where the Goodyear and all the tire plants were operated out of.
[00:32:32]  So Akron had an industrial history as well, but it was entirely based on rubber.
[00:32:38]  Akron, though, does have its own airport, unlike Tacoma, which shares it with Seattle, C-Tech.
[00:32:45]  So Kent State, though.
[00:32:47]  Kent State, yeah.
[00:32:48]  So Kent State was, everyone knows what Kent State is, and it was a huge deal.
[00:32:54]  But growing up, I think it had longer legs here because I'd hear about like, oh, a friend would say, oh, my mom, my mom was there.
[00:33:02]  You know, my mom was at Kent State.
[00:33:03]  Or like, oh, you know, our history teacher, he went to Kent State.
[00:33:07]  So as a kid growing up here, you'd hear about it a lot.
[00:33:10]  And it had this kind of weight to it.
[00:33:15]  And I don't know when I learned that members of Devo were there and that Chrissy Hind from The Pretenders was there.
[00:33:23]  So then when you have that direct kind of punk and new wave connection to it, you have to talk about it.
[00:33:29]  And also that punk kind of came out as a reaction to and a response to the collapse of the hippie counterculture.
[00:33:36]  And, boy, you're talking about the death of the hippie ideal and movement.
[00:33:41]  Well, murdered students, you know, shot by the government is a pretty blunt metaphor.
[00:33:46]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:33:47]  I mean, it's like almost even not a metaphor, right?
[00:33:50]  No, no, it isn't.
[00:33:51]  A total inflection point and kind of this, yeah, this sort of like a switch got flipped almost, like, you know, how you say this, this sort of, you know, folk hippie, you know, we can all rah-rah, take it on together, holding hands.
[00:34:08]  A bunch of kids get shot by the National Guard.
[00:34:12]  Blood on national television spill, you know, on the fucking sidewalk.
[00:34:19]  And, you know, the response was anger and, you know, this, this music that came out of it, right?
[00:34:28]  This, this, this punk response.
[00:34:30]  Like, let's talk about that.
[00:34:31]  Well, I think the immediate response was shock and numbness and almost a kind of it just killed it.
[00:34:41]  It just killed the whole movement.
[00:34:43]  Yeah.
[00:34:44]  Kent was a very radicalized campus and there was a lot of weather underground activity in Northeast Ohio.
[00:34:51]  They were in Cleveland and they were in Kent.
[00:34:54]  And my publishing partner, Jake, he's actually researching all that right now for a book of his own.
[00:35:01]  You guys would love Jake.
[00:35:02]  He's just a maniac with that shit.
[00:35:05]  So yeah, Kent was very radical.
[00:35:08]  And, you know, after the shootings, it just shut down.
[00:35:11]  The school shut down literally.
[00:35:12]  There was no more class.
[00:35:14]  And everyone was just in a fog.
[00:35:16]  And it was over.
[00:35:17]  That was it.
[00:35:18]  And then you have Charles Manson, who kind of shows up in the book.
[00:35:22]  And then prior to Kent, you had Altamont, too, just like not even a year before, which is like, it is like those two events really did like help.
[00:35:30]  And Charles Manson really just helped.
[00:35:33]  kind of nail the like hippie counterculture's like door shut with a pile of bodies.
[00:35:38]  I mean, it's really, it's really something.
[00:35:40]  And let's remember that Charles Manson was born in Ohio.
[00:35:44]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:46]  Southern Ohio, but Ohio.
[00:35:49]  Well, it's like, it's so like, you know, the hippies, and, you know, you talk a great deal about sort of like these hippies bands that came out of Ohio during this period.
[00:35:57]  And then in like, and just like kind of everywhere else, from like 70, really like 72 to 77, 76, like the genesis of like what will become punk music is forming.
[00:36:10]  And so like you have all these guys kind of like not sure what to do exactly musically.
[00:36:16]  And so like they're going on these different like directions of like avant-garde jazz or like, you know, this sort of like maybe kind of very too, a little too psychedelic rock and roll.
[00:36:26]  But like it hasn't congealed into something new yet.
[00:36:29]  It's just kind of like trying to sort of freak itself out into something new.
[00:36:34]  I don't know if that makes sense, but like shooting enough you become like a piece of electricity.
[00:36:38]  You know, it's like it's trying to create something.
[00:36:41]  And so like, it's almost, you get the feeling of like this, like a match being like failed to be struck multiple times until it finally does.
[00:36:50]  And, you know, Peter Lochner was among these people.
[00:36:52]  And Cleveland has its particular rock and roll history too.
[00:36:56]  You mentioned in the book, you know, Alan Freed, the payola guy, which I will say this, I am a full Alan Freed defender.
[00:37:04]  He was doing the same thing everybody else was doing, every other radio station was doing.
[00:37:09]  And they took him out for it.
[00:37:10]  They made an example of it.
[00:37:12]  But the music industry and the radio industry did not change.
[00:37:15]  And, you know, the sacrificial lamb.
[00:37:18]  He was.
[00:37:18]  He was.
[00:37:19]  He was like OJ in that sense.
[00:37:20]  Just kidding.
[00:37:21]  Just kidding.
[00:37:22]  But you have, and then you have this like weirder stuff like Goulardi come out.
[00:37:29]  And that is, it's so funny because all of these things were kind of happening in all these different cities in these like slightly different ways.
[00:37:37]  But just like, you know, every other kind of like major like rock and roll scene that developed in the 1970s, the things that Cleveland feels like it had was a radio station that would play kind of weird music up until a point, a kind of like far out like art poetry scene, and a bunch of really like disaffected and bored musicians who were playing like this kind of Van Morrison type or like jazz type music,
[00:38:05]  but not really feeling super satisfied with it.
[00:38:08]  Sure.
[00:38:09]  So, yeah, let's back up.
[00:38:11]  So Alan Freed coined the term rock and roll here in Cleveland.
[00:38:16]  And the first major rock and roll concert ever, like a big concert was here in Cleveland.
[00:38:22]  And it was shut down by the fire department because it was just too crazy.
[00:38:27]  And then Goularti, real name Ernie Anderson, he came out of radio too.
[00:38:31]  But the Goularti character, he did on television.
[00:38:34]  And I think younger people need to know that not that long ago, cities had unique and specific cultural things.
[00:38:45]  They had like, yeah, they all have their own radio station now, but they're all owned by Clear Channel and it's the same programming in every city.
[00:38:52]  It used to be the radio stations would, they would play the Beatles and bands that were being played in every other city, but they also played the little garage band in town that started a band because they heard the Beatles.
[00:39:06]  So there was stuff being played in each city that wasn't necessarily being played elsewhere.
[00:39:11]  Likewise, on television, they had their own, they were making their own programming.
[00:39:16]  So, you know, the weatherman would do his thing and then they'd make him wear a wig or a clown costume and introduce cartoons for kids and this type of thing.
[00:39:26]  And that's what Goularti came out of.
[00:39:28]  He was the horror movie host.
[00:39:30]  And he was just a really weird guy.
[00:39:32]  And he had this character that was sort of like a beatnik mad scientist.
[00:39:38]  And he made fun of the movies and he interrupted them.
[00:39:41]  And he was just, he was just pure chaos.
[00:39:44]  Incidentally, his son is the movie director, Paul Thomas Anderson.
[00:39:48]  Oh, I actually did not know that.
[00:39:50]  Really?
[00:39:51]  Yeah.
[00:39:52]  Wow.
[00:39:53]  I straight up did not know that.
[00:39:55]  I didn't know that either.
[00:39:56]  That weird, that made, wow, Paul Thomas Anderson.
[00:39:58]  Not that babies.
[00:40:00]  Wow.
[00:40:00]  His production company is called Goularti Films.
[00:40:03]  That is, I did know that, and yet I never made a connection.
[00:40:06]  No idea.
[00:40:07]  Well, you learned something about that.
[00:40:08]  But he was, he's not, Paul Thomas Anderson's not from here.
[00:40:11]  He was born in California.
[00:40:12]  So Goularty, Ernie Anderson, he was only on the air for three years and then he kind of packed up his bags and went to California and made a good living as a voiceover artist.
[00:40:23]  Like he was the voice of the love boat.
[00:40:26]  Okay.
[00:40:27]  And America's Funniest Home Videos.
[00:40:30]  He was the announcer.
[00:40:31]  America, America, this is you.
[00:40:35]  Oh, that's a real way to, that was an early way to get humiliated in front of a lot of people in a regular person.
[00:40:41]  That was the OG Bumfight.
[00:40:42]  Yeah, it really was.
[00:40:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:44]  So he got rich out there and Paul Thomas Anderson was born in California.
[00:40:49]  And he talks about like how his dad would say like, oh, I was famous.
[00:40:53]  I'm famous in Cleveland.
[00:40:54]  And he's like, well, whatever, dad, what are you talking about?
[00:40:58]  And then they came out here once for some reason when Paul was still a kid and like they get off the plane and there's just like Clevelanders like waiting for them, just like cheering and going crazy.
[00:41:11]  And he's like, I guess dad wasn't lying.
[00:41:14]  He is a big deal in Cleveland.
[00:41:16]  And he still is.
[00:41:17]  So yeah, these cultural figures that were specific to the area influence the generation.
[00:41:23]  My father talks about Goularti.
[00:41:25]  All the baby boomers in Cleveland talk about Goularti to this day.
[00:41:29]  And they quote him and these catchphrases.
[00:41:32]  But he was, there was something, like there's not much surviving footage of him, which makes him interesting because you can't just watch it and be like, oh, this isn't that cool because it's built up in everybody's memory.
[00:41:45]  And it's become this kind of tall tale.
[00:41:48]  It just gets exaggerated over time.
[00:41:50]  But that's the same thing with Lochner, though.
[00:41:53]  I mean, that's the same thing with like all it's, it's, it's kind of like a lost, I guess, tradition that we have is like these sort of like local legends that aren't really that well.
[00:42:04]  I mean, Goularti was, like, I knew who he was, but like, it's, it's, I'd never seen it or anything.
[00:42:09]  I just read about it in like history books.
[00:42:10]  And, and, and these kind of like these figures who produced maybe for like such a short period of time, and then either they quit or in Lochner's case, died, and then kind of leave behind this legend.
[00:42:22]  I feel like it's, it's much more difficult to create that legend now because of how well everything's documented.
[00:42:28]  It's hard to have a mystique.
[00:42:30]  Yeah.
[00:42:30]  Yeah.
[00:42:31]  You just look somebody up and then there's like a, like a doofy picture of them from high school or there, you know, I mean, just like I've been making the rounds doing promotion for my book and like, I'm not going to say no to anybody.

=== Poe and Wilde's Legacy (12:32) ===

[00:42:44]  You know, you'll end up doing another podcast and they don't have the production values that you guys have.
[00:42:50]  And I'm not putting these people down.
[00:42:51]  They have their day jobs they're doing on the side.
[00:42:54]  But you know, you could do some stuff and it's just kind of embarrassing.
[00:42:57]  You know, just like, or like someone's like, hey, Aaron, I'll give you a couple hundred bucks to, I'm sort of a hot sauce line.
[00:43:05]  You know, why do you, could you make a logo for us?
[00:43:08]  And it's like, I always be money.
[00:43:09]  And it's like, yeah, I'll do your fucking hot sauce label.
[00:43:12]  But then someone Googles me and like that shit comes up.
[00:43:15]  You know, it's fucking embarrassing.
[00:43:17]  And you're the Hot Sauce guy.
[00:43:20]  Yeah.
[00:43:20]  It's just like, but what are you supposed to do?
[00:43:22]  Like you can't like go around trying to scrub the internet to have this like super cool persona.
[00:43:29]  Well, it's – I mean it's something I think about a lot is it's – I feel like this is one of the hardest times for maybe 100 years.
[00:43:37]  People weren't really cool until like the 1910s but like – That's not true.
[00:43:42]  No.
[00:43:43]  In fact, two figures that are in this book very often, Baudelaire and Rameau, are quite fucking cool.
[00:43:50]  Only French people could be cool before the 20th century.
[00:43:52]  Yeah, I'll take that back.
[00:43:54]  Only French people had the ability.
[00:43:57]  Tut, tut, tut with Oscar Wilde.
[00:44:00]  Aubrey Beardsley.
[00:44:01]  Oscar Wilde was corny at the...
[00:44:03]  Okay, yeah, fair enough.
[00:44:04]  Oh, fuck you.
[00:44:04]  You read?
[00:44:05]  Oscar Wilde's a bitch.
[00:44:06]  Have you read Dorian Gray?
[00:44:09]  Dorian Gray.
[00:44:10]  I don't want to read Dorian Gray.
[00:44:11]  I know what happens in the end.
[00:44:13]  You haven't read it?
[00:44:14]  I'm going to read Dorian Gray, dude.
[00:44:16]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:44:16]  I know what happens in Dorian.
[00:44:18]  There's so many other books.
[00:44:19]  The point of Going Great isn't, oh, I want to surprise myself because I don't know the ending.
[00:44:22]  I do want to surprise myself.
[00:44:24]  It's like a thriller.
[00:44:25]  It's who's Dorian Gray?
[00:44:26]  Where's this?
[00:44:27]  Where can we find this picture?
[00:44:28]  It's like trying to find fucking Gillardi videos or whatever.
[00:44:31]  You know, you got to go in the attic.
[00:44:33]  And those guys, fucking Oscar Wilde just wanted to be French.
[00:44:37]  All these guys.
[00:44:38]  Look at him.
[00:44:38]  Look at this fucking book.
[00:44:39]  Dorks was pretty cool.
[00:44:40]  Another guy who shows up in this book quite often.
[00:44:43]  Yeah, true, true.
[00:44:44]  I get the British kind of cool was a little dark.
[00:44:49]  They had a higher, I will say this.
[00:44:51]  They had more, they had a steeper hill to climb, the British, in terms of coolness.
[00:44:57]  It was an uphill battle for them, where the French have a little bit more, you know, jeune sequois injected into them.
[00:45:03]  Oscar Wilde was not writing Season in Hell.
[00:45:05]  You know, like that is a, that poem is cool or that entire book is cool.
[00:45:11]  It could have been written any time period.
[00:45:13]  It's cool.
[00:45:13]  It's timeless cool.
[00:45:14]  Whereas I feel like there's, anyways, what I was saying is it was so much easier.
[00:45:19]  Being cool was hard to do.
[00:45:21]  Fine.
[00:45:22]  We can name like five cool guys from before like the 20th century and none of them are in America.
[00:45:27]  No American had figured out.
[00:45:29]  Edgar Allan Poe.
[00:45:30]  Edgar Allan Poe was not cool, dude.
[00:45:33]  What definition of cool are you working on?
[00:45:35]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  Baudelaire loved Edgar Allan Poe and actually translated him into the French.
[00:45:42]  Yeah.
[00:45:43]  That's why Poe, there's such a huge, huge following of Poe in France because of this.
[00:45:48]  Yeah.
[00:45:49]  I love it.
[00:45:49]  And especially detective novels are huge in France because of that, which also has a- Is that why?
[00:45:54]  Yeah.
[00:45:55]  There's also a line there into French psychoanalysis.
[00:45:59]  And that's why the detective story also becomes very cool.
[00:46:04]  But no.
[00:46:07]  Edgar Allan Poe was not cool.
[00:46:09]  Edgar Allan Poe was a motherfucking dork.
[00:46:12]  And I'm going to say this right now.
[00:46:14]  I've known lots of cool, well, I've known a few cool people who you can like dorks as a cool guy, but that does not make the dork cool.
[00:46:24]  I'm not saying Edgar Allan Poe isn't like a genius or whatever, but he's not cool in the same way that fucking Rimbaud was cool.
[00:46:30]  I mean, we can't argue with that.
[00:46:33]  Well, so here's what I think happens is, and this ties into, I think, what we're talking about more broadly, is, you know, you go to your little neighborhood bookstore, the little indie bookstore, and they've got their tote bags and their coffee mugs, and they've got the little Edgar Allan Poe quote on it, or the pithy Oscar Wilde quote.
[00:46:54]  And that's what you're seeing and you're reacting against this NPRification.
[00:47:00]  But if you go back to the source and what they were doing at the time, it's very different.
[00:47:05]  It's like a certain type of fame happens and when someone becomes an icon, it shifts over into something else and it loses almost all relation to what the person was doing.
[00:47:20]  Like be it James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, you see people wearing like Marilyn Monroe t-shirts and they have a Marilyn Monroe poster in their apartment.
[00:47:30]  Ask them if they've ever actually seen one of her movies and they haven't.
[00:47:34]  Yeah.
[00:47:35]  Because the image, it's this Warhol thing.
[00:47:38]  And the image and the icon kind of takes over and just gets a life of its own.
[00:47:43]  And I think it happened with Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.
[00:47:46]  And it becomes, it loses some of its whatever momentum or value it had initially.
[00:47:53]  But if you want to look for it, you can still find it.
[00:47:56]  And Peter Lochner was very influenced by these people.
[00:47:59]  He's very influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire and the decadence we're doing in France.
[00:48:06]  And there is a continuum from the European avant-garde into the American avant-garde.
[00:48:14]  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's such a, you talk about that, I think, a little bit in regards to television in this, too, because they're the other big people you think of as like kind of being these French poetry obsessed guys.
[00:48:27]  Patty Smith, Richard.
[00:48:29]  Patty Smith as well.
[00:48:30]  Yeah, very much.
[00:48:31]  Yeah, Patty Smith name drops Rimbo in, I think, what's it, Gloria?
[00:48:38]  But, and they were all, that's the other thing too, is all these guys were kind of like frustrated speed freak poets too.
[00:48:46]  And that, that's the funny thing.
[00:48:47]  Before, thank God punk came along because we would have gotten a lot of kind of whatever poetry from the late 1970s if these guys hadn't been able to figure out how to put that to music.
[00:48:59]  Well, funny enough, I mean, speaking of the French avant-garde, Mallarmé famously said that he was jealous of music because music had another language and poetry didn't.
[00:49:09]  That poetry was so stuck to language that it wasn't able to express itself in truly an avant-garde way as opposed to what music kind of was allowed to do through its language.
[00:49:22]  It's very interesting.
[00:49:24]  Yeah, there's a reason nobody reads poetry anymore, but they, I mean, not nobody, but it's not a lot of people.
[00:49:32]  No, no.
[00:49:33]  But I mean, it used to be like in the 60s, you know, it was, you know, because anybody could do it, really.
[00:49:39]  It doesn't mean they were good at it, but you could fake it.
[00:49:42]  You know, you could fake being a poet.
[00:49:46]  Whoa, man.
[00:49:48]  Oh, man.
[00:49:50]  And we had a very active poetry scene here.
[00:49:54]  And I don't know if this is true for other cities or if this is like because Cleveland was so backwater.
[00:49:59]  But if you look at like what they were writing in the newspapers at the time, they were still saying beatnik.
[00:50:06]  And it was like full-on hippie time.
[00:50:09]  Yeah.
[00:50:10]  But they were still saying beatnik here.
[00:50:11]  I don't know if that was true in San Francisco or New York.
[00:50:14]  I don't know.
[00:50:15]  I feel that probably not in San Francisco because I feel like the hippie movement was like very, it was almost like a tourist attraction by the time it really developed.
[00:50:23]  So I think they would have used the branding that it had been given.
[00:50:29]  But no, that sounds like a Cleveland thing.
[00:50:32]  But these guys kind of were beatniks in a way.
[00:50:34]  You know, they're hanging out in coffee shops.
[00:50:36]  They're fucking reading poetry to each other.
[00:50:38]  They're playing folk music.
[00:50:41]  They had short hair and they were wearing work boots, work boots.
[00:50:46]  If they looked like hippies, it was more like Berkeley hippies.
[00:50:49]  You know what I mean?
[00:50:50]  Yeah.
[00:50:51]  Well, that's a distinction that's been lost to time, but it wasn't like more Berkeley rather than San Francisco.
[00:50:56]  Yeah.
[00:50:57]  You understand what I'm saying?
[00:50:58]  San Francisco was nasty.
[00:51:00]  You fucking stepped foot into San Francisco between like 1964 and 1975.
[00:51:05]  Your ass is coming out of there with an STE that could have been cooked up by Dr. Moreau.
[00:51:09]  Your shit is, you're fucking, your little, your funky little pecker is falling off the second you step foot into one of the fucking digger camps or whatever.
[00:51:18]  Disgusting.
[00:51:21]  My ass would have been joining the American Legion in 1967.
[00:51:24]  Good lord.
[00:51:26]  Just playing.
[00:51:27]  You know my ass would have been selling speed to people for the CIA.
[00:51:31]  The like Cleveland rock scene, though, developed in this way that's so funny because you keep describing it as provincial and stupid and whatever.
[00:51:40]  Well, you didn't say stupid, but that's the implication there.
[00:51:43]  But it's so experimental compared to others because I'm not going to, Devo, listen, Akron band through and through.
[00:51:50]  But like you said, Akron and Cleveland, very close together.
[00:51:54]  And Devo was this hugely experimental band, especially if you can find, I can't remember what the, there's two of those albums at a collection of their pre like first LP record.
[00:52:03]  Hardcore.
[00:52:04]  Devo Hardcore Volume 2 was like changed my life when I was like 18 years old.
[00:52:08]  I mean it's an incredible record.
[00:52:14]  The Devo hardcore stuff is so incredible.
[00:52:18]  It's not hardcore to be amazing.
[00:52:20]  But it's it's the it's incredible.
[00:52:23]  But you know, you had Devo and you had even Rocket from the Tombs before Pear Ubu was very, I mean, particularly with Dave Thomas on vocals, like this very sort of experimental stuff.
[00:52:34]  And like if you compare that to like how it was developing in LA, New York definitely had some way more avant-garde stuff, but in a very New York kind of way.
[00:52:46]  Cleveland and Ohio in particular, was just doing this like in a in a, I think, incredibly unique way.
[00:52:53]  Well, so you have to appreciate that these bands DEVO and the Electric EELS and these these crazy, really bizarre groups were not the norm and like they did not have big followings and it was a very, very small group.
[00:53:09]  A more conventional example of what was happening in the area would be the James GANG, who also, by the way, do rock.
[00:53:16]  Dude, they're great, the James GANG are great, but it's a very Midwestern yeah straightforward, kind of 70s rock and roll and there were a lot of groups like that, a lot of bar bands, a lot of cover bands.
[00:53:33]  Um, so it's not like the entirety of what was happening in Cleveland was this crazy freak out.
[00:53:40]  Yeah, that that's true.
[00:53:42]  And, like you know, as you mentioned in the in the book, like the main things that the Cleveland rock press or the Cleveland press would sort of point to was Eric Carmen uh, and the raspberries, as like they're.
[00:53:52]  Like this is what Cleveland produces and like I think meatloaf is I fucking hate meatloaf the food and the musician I think it's shit.
[00:54:00]  You know, meatloaf the food no one really talks about that.
[00:54:03]  It's not good.
[00:54:04]  I think that we can.
[00:54:05]  It also was not great for white 90s food.
[00:54:08]  It didn't the.
[00:54:08]  It hurt the our, the image of the white man into the world.
[00:54:12]  You know what I mean?
[00:54:13]  We see, we still, we still eat.
[00:54:15]  We still eat meatloaf in the Midwest.
[00:54:17]  Yeah, that's like your guys' dish in Cleveland, meatloaf, cast casseroles.
[00:54:22]  Yeah yeah, that's the only way you can eat vegetables.
[00:54:25]  When I lived in Philadelphia, a friend of mine said to me he's like what do you guys eat in the Midwest?
[00:54:29]  Like ham salad.
[00:54:31]  Ham salad is that, is that like, do you eat ham salad?
[00:54:35]  I mean, you can find it.
[00:54:36]  It's cubes of ham, like stirred in with mayonnaise.
[00:54:39]  Yeah yeah, reminds me of my grandmother.
[00:54:42]  Um, oh lord, a ham, a wet piece of ham uncooked, is nasty to me.
[00:54:47]  I guess that's panchetta, I don't know, but it's kind of panchetta.
[00:54:53]  But they, you know it's, it's para Ubu to me I, I just to.
[00:54:57]  I was gonna tell this story in the intro before we did the interview.
[00:55:00]  I guess i'll tell it now.
[00:55:01]  When I was oh no, I i'll just tell an abbreviated version.
[00:55:03]  But when I was, when I was 16 hearing uh, modern dance by PAIR Ubuntu, I say that people say this about records all the time in a hyperbolic way.

=== Why Dallas Needs a Gay Bar Hall of Fame (12:33) ===

[00:55:17]  It really did change my life.
[00:55:18]  It was, I went out and immediately got a, in this girl's house, she gave me a tattoo from the only song written by Peter Lochner on that record, Life Stinks, which is actually a tattoo that has haunted me my whole life because everyone thinks it's a kink related tattoo.
[00:55:34]  Or it's about the band of Kinks who I also love, but have to explain that while I love the Kinks, this is actually a reference to one of my favorite records, which is Modern Dance.
[00:55:43]  But I got Life Stinks.
[00:55:44]  I like the Kinks tattooed on my arm below the sleeve line so I could show off that I had a tattoo at high school.
[00:55:51]  And I'm such a little fucking moron.
[00:55:54]  But and no, literally, that's only people think that I'm just into like butt plugs or whatever because of it.
[00:56:02]  But it changed my fucking whole shit around.
[00:56:08]  And it changed like, to me, I was like, this record is a fucking revelation.
[00:56:11]  Then hearing Terminal Tower, like the singles collection, which has the Peter Lochner singles on it and dub housing.
[00:56:18]  And there's Terminal Tower, though, I later found out is a real place.
[00:56:21]  I thought it was just a spooky name.
[00:56:23]  Well, I found this out when I went to Cleveland, but I thought it was just a spooky name for like a record or whatever.
[00:56:29]  But there is a real Terminal Tower in Cleveland.
[00:56:31]  Yeah, I think a lot of people think that's a fake name, like Terminal as in death, but the Terminal Tower was above a train terminal.
[00:56:40]  Exactly.
[00:56:40]  They're the terminus of a rail line.
[00:56:43]  But which not a lot of people know.
[00:56:45]  But yeah, you used to be able to like, you know, America used to have trains.
[00:56:50]  You used to be able to go to downtown Cleveland and get on a passenger train and go to New York.
[00:56:55]  You used to be able to go to Lake Erie, the shore, and catch a luxury ship and sail to Detroit.
[00:57:03]  Yeah, that's fucking crazy.
[00:57:05]  And this is like a, this isn't like a ferry.
[00:57:08]  This is like a boat with like chandeliers.
[00:57:11]  Being conceived in the luxury suite on the steamer to Detroit.
[00:57:16]  Somebody was.
[00:57:17]  Somebody was.
[00:57:17]  Probably a lot of people.
[00:57:18]  Probably a lot of people were.
[00:57:19]  That's a great place to make love.
[00:57:23]  You know, it's, it's, it's, do you, do you think that Cleveland's gotten its recognition?
[00:57:27]  I mean, you guys have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but as you point out in this motherfucking book, something I did not know is none of the people inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame got inducted in Cleveland until like 2008.
[00:57:38]  Yeah, they've only like for a long time, they were not doing anything here.
[00:57:42]  It was always in New York.
[00:57:44]  And at some point, they'll be like, can we maybe like do the ceremony here like every other year?
[00:57:50]  And there's always this conversation.
[00:57:53]  Well, I shouldn't say always.
[00:57:54]  There's occasionally this conversation amongst a certain type of boomer rock enthusiasts with like a tucked in let it be t-shirt.
[00:58:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:03]  Classic.
[00:58:05]  You know, yeah, they want like about the rock hall.
[00:58:08]  Like, why is it there?
[00:58:09]  You know, we do actually have cultural claims to it, like most obviously being the term rock and roll was coined here by Alan Free.
[00:58:18]  But the fact of the matter is we have the hall of fame because the city wanted it and actively campaigned for it.
[00:58:26]  New York City didn't give a shit.
[00:58:29]  They've got museums.
[00:58:31]  They don't need to bring people in, they've got they.
[00:58:34]  They're gonna have tourists, like if.
[00:58:37]  If New York City got the rock hall of Fame, do you think their tourism would see any kind of spike at all?
[00:58:43]  Exactly what are they gonna make?
[00:58:45]  The museum of very tall women.
[00:58:49]  What?
[00:58:50]  New Yorks are a lot of tall chick.
[00:58:51]  There's like every fucking chick I see in Manhattan is like fucking seven feet tall.
[00:58:55]  Look like a goddamn crazy bird.
[00:58:56]  Well, there's a lot of models, I know, but that's.
[00:58:59]  They should make a museum for that.
[00:59:01]  When I travel, when I go to New York or whatever, i'm like, oh man, the women are better looking like they're just, even when I would like leave Philadelphia and go Cleveland.
[00:59:10]  No, the women are better looking in New York than in Cleveland.
[00:59:14]  Yes, i'm gonna say this, I think women in Cleveland are are much, significantly better looking than any woman in New York.
[00:59:22]  Are you planning on visiting soon?
[00:59:23]  Are you planting some seeds here to?
[00:59:25]  I'm just just remembering, I mean I was.
[00:59:27]  Last time I went there was a was maybe about 10 years ago, but I I remember it being a uh, I was very drunk that which may be uh, affecting my memory and I spent the entirety of my time there at NOW, That's Class.
[00:59:42]  But I I, my cousin, my cousin was there.
[00:59:44]  He saw you oh sick yeah, and I think Wild Thing played there as well.
[00:59:51]  Um yeah, my cousin was at that show.
[00:59:53]  That venue is actually in like walking distance from my house.
[00:59:55]  No yeah, that uh the our bass player.
[00:59:58]  I got uh, despite being born and raised in San Francisco, first time he was ever catcalled by a dude was in Cleveland.
[01:00:04]  It was uh in front of the gay bar next to NOW That's Class, which that bar was sick also and they let us in, despite my lack of id.
[01:00:11]  But that the what's that place called?
[01:00:12]  What's the name of that bar?
[01:00:14]  It's got a good gay bar name.
[01:00:16]  It does.
[01:00:17]  It was, I don't know.
[01:00:17]  It was called like the Strut or something like that.
[01:00:19]  Like it was.
[01:00:20]  It's a classic gay.
[01:00:21]  Gay bars should be named stuff like that like gay bars shouldn't be named just a normal bar name, be like, oh, it's a gay bar.
[01:00:27]  They should be named like the Boot or like Harness or something like that, like they should.
[01:00:33]  The Eagle.
[01:00:33]  The Eagle is a classic dude I I spent then.
[01:00:36]  There's an Eagle in La too.
[01:00:38]  I don't know if it's connected um, but we had one in uh, I used to live in Columbus and we had one in downtown Columbus called you're gonna love this.
[01:00:45]  It was called the Plugged Nickel.
[01:00:49]  Uh, there was one in San Francisco called the White Swallow.
[01:00:51]  The one in Cleveland was called the HAWK.
[01:00:54]  That was the.
[01:00:55]  That was that was right next to NOW That's Class.
[01:00:57]  So I I actually just moved back to town and there was some show at NOW That's Class I wanted to go to and I went over there and I accidentally walked into the HAWK And it was, you walk in there and it's just immediately like, oh, this is like an old school gay bar.
[01:01:15]  Yeah.
[01:01:15]  Yeah.
[01:01:16]  I mean, it's not like cruising, but they're not like wearing like leather daddy clothing.
[01:01:21]  But you feel like they have like that night, like one night a week where they're doing, doing the leather thing.
[01:01:25]  The gay bar scenes in cruising are incredible where he's walking through and there's just a guy glaring at him while slowly fisting a dude.
[01:01:32]  I read that entire book while waiting for my dad to get off work at the San Francisco Public Library because it had like a cool leather jacket on the cover and I thought it was like a punk thing.
[01:01:42]  And so I read it.
[01:01:43]  It kind of is.
[01:01:44]  It kind of is.
[01:01:45]  It's a good book.
[01:01:45]  The movie is decent, but the book is really good.
[01:01:48]  And it's a little scarier than the movie.
[01:01:52]  I got to tell you, I mean, Cleveland is known for, I think you guys get a bad rap, right?
[01:01:57]  I mean, I was joshing on you in the beginning saying you guys are, it's the worst city in America, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:02:03]  It's not.
[01:02:03]  There's way worse cities than Cleveland in America.
[01:02:06]  My God.
[01:02:08]  I forget the guy's name, but there was a dude who wrote for television.
[01:02:13]  He wrote for Johnny Carson and he wrote for all these, like maybe he wrote for Laughing and he wrote Cleveland jokes.
[01:02:22]  He wrote jokes about like why Cleveland is just like so shitty.
[01:02:26]  And that's a lot, like a lot of the reputation is directly because of this one TV writer.
[01:02:34]  No.
[01:02:34]  I'm dead serious.
[01:02:35]  I'm dead serious.
[01:02:37]  Wow.
[01:02:37]  That's fun.
[01:02:38]  I mean, yeah, I don't know.
[01:02:40]  It just seemed like a normal city.
[01:02:41]  I had a way worse time in Dallas, which is a terrible place.
[01:02:45]  Horrible city.
[01:02:45]  I mean, Cleveland and Dallas, there's no comparison, no disrespect.
[01:02:49]  I love Dallas.
[01:02:50]  But Cleveland is definitely superior, except if you're from Dallas, in which case I would say the opposite.
[01:02:55]  But it is like, it is a, it is a real city in that like it, it reminds one of like a city rather than like a weird business district with a bunch of banaras that are closed when it's not office hours.
[01:03:06]  You know, it's, it's, it's, it's so like something that reading this book, I mean, God, as a young man, I read so many punk histories or rock histories, really.
[01:03:15]  And I would like, I wanted to be these guys so bad when I was like 15 and 16 years old.
[01:03:21]  And Peter Lochner is one of those guys.
[01:03:24]  And then I eventually read the Harvey, Harvey, the Lester Bangs.
[01:03:32]  I was going to say Harvey Picard.
[01:03:33]  Lester Bang's essay, sort of like his obituary for him.
[01:03:37]  And that actually clicked something in me because there's a quote from, I think it's from that.
[01:03:41]  Maybe it's from another thing that I'll never forget, which is that, although I'll forget where it's from, that he was talking about Peter Lochner, that Peter Lochner thought he could shoot so much speed that he would become Lou Reed.
[01:03:51]  And I was like, and I thought that was which knowing Lou Reed, I mean, I understand the trajectory, like I understand where the mind goes.
[01:03:59]  I do that.
[01:04:00]  Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:04:01]  And it's funny because I laughed at that when I read that.
[01:04:04]  I was like, that's so stupid.
[01:04:05]  And then I found myself unconsciously eventually doing the same thing.
[01:04:08]  But Lochner is this guy who, and there were so many of these guys back then in every city.
[01:04:15]  Like every city had like a few guys who were like movers.
[01:04:18]  I mean, New York had a lot of them, but like most cities, even like LA just had a few people who were like these hugely dedicated fans of rock music and not just like punk, like all kinds of rock music, and like really tried to start something.
[01:04:32]  And many of them did.
[01:04:34]  And it's funny to see this like guy who lived this very drunk, very, very, very drug-addled, gun-waving short life with very little real musical output that actually came out during his lifetime, let alone even within the decades after, have this tremendous influence.
[01:04:54]  Yeah, Peter did a lot, did a lot in his short life.
[01:04:57]  And everybody knew him.
[01:05:00]  You know, he was a well-known guy in the scene in New York and in Detroit and in Cleveland, obviously.
[01:05:10]  The fucked up thing with Peter is he died too soon.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:13]  You know, like he didn't do a Sid Vicious or a Derby crash.
[01:05:18]  He died before it happened.
[01:05:20]  He jumped the gun.
[01:05:22]  And it's important to stress that Peter did not commit suicide and he did not overdose.
[01:05:31]  It's just way more fucked up.
[01:05:33]  He just kind of abused himself to death by 24.
[01:05:38]  Like the way like Jack Kerouac did, but Kerouac was like, what, in his 40s?
[01:05:43]  Yeah, and he was a poor scene Republican at that point.
[01:05:49]  Yes, yes, he was.
[01:05:50]  So, and that's part of the fascination with Lochner, and it's a morbid fascination.
[01:05:55]  But like, how do you drink and drug yourself to death like that?
[01:05:59]  At 24.
[01:06:00]  24 is crazy.
[01:06:03]  As his ex-wife, you know, has said, like, that's not an easy thing to do.
[01:06:08]  Yeah.
[01:06:09]  Yeah.
[01:06:09]  Like, it doesn't, it doesn't happen on accident.
[01:06:12]  Right.
[01:06:12]  Like, you're going to have to be trying to do it.
[01:06:15]  And he was going to the hospital a lot.
[01:06:18]  I mean, he was getting hospitalized and the doctors are like, you're going to die.
[01:06:22]  You're drinking yourself to death.
[01:06:24]  And then there was the speed.
[01:06:27]  And I've been told that I don't know if this is true, but that the negative effects of alcohol are just even amplified by speed.
[01:06:39]  I mean, it certainly can't make it better.
[01:06:42]  Well, better is a subjective thing.
[01:06:44]  I mean, the negative effects, it doesn't make better.
[01:06:46]  Yeah, it doesn't prove the negative effect.
[01:06:48]  Does it make the experience of both better?
[01:06:50]  Well, that's arguable.
[01:06:52]  No.
[01:06:53]  Yeah, just kidding.
[01:06:55]  But yeah, no, I mean, speed does a huge number on your nervous system and like rots you from, because that's what Peter Lochner, you're right.
[01:07:02]  He died basically of just like his insides failing.
[01:07:05]  Like his guts gave out.
[01:07:07]  And like that is basically.
[01:07:08]  Yeah, like amphetamine abuse will do that in a way.
[01:07:11]  And alcohol abuse will do that in a way that like few other drugs can match.
[01:07:16]  And especially in combination.
[01:07:18]  But one thing I think that you do throughout the book is like, you know, it's no spoiler to anybody who's remotely familiar with Lochner that he died very young.
[01:07:27]  But it's you place him sort of in this like psychic whirlwind and as a central point in this psychic whirlwind as like this focal point from which all these other things radiate, almost like the kind of geography of downtown Cleveland.
[01:07:41]  Like this, this, all of these lines sort of run up to him and then run out from him.
[01:07:46]  And it's totally fascinating to read.

=== Cleveland's Underground Comics (05:27) ===

[01:07:50]  Right.
[01:07:50]  I think in order to understand Peter and the punk scene he was a part of, you have to understand Cleveland, which is why I start at the beginning and talk about Rockefeller and the rise of the industrial economy and the collapse of it.
[01:08:06]  And in order to understand Devo, you have to understand Kent State and the rubber industry in Akron.
[01:08:13]  Because without the context of these things, they're kind of meaningless.
[01:08:18]  And what happened with Per Ubu, with their aesthetic and their sound, it's very, very similar to what was going on almost at the exact same time in England with Throbbing Gristle.
[01:08:35]  And then also the industrial scene in San Francisco, which is distinct, but like with Chrome and Boyd Rice and those kinds of guys.
[01:08:48]  Sure, yeah, not industrial, but definitely eccentric and bizarre.
[01:08:52]  And it's just kind of odd that like it in quote-unquote industrial subculture never really happened here.
[01:09:00]  Like, because Peter Ubu just sort of stood alone.
[01:09:05]  Nobody was really ripping them off.
[01:09:07]  Maybe they didn't want to or they didn't know how.
[01:09:13]  We did get kind of a death rock scene here.
[01:09:17]  Like people were kind of doing that LA death rock thing.
[01:09:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:09:21]  But the industrial thing never happened.
[01:09:24]  And I wonder, had Peter lived, if maybe it would have?
[01:09:29]  It's hard to say.
[01:09:30]  It's hard to say.
[01:09:41]  One last thing before we wrap up, we should mention, because I don't know if we've made it clear, this is an illustrant.
[01:09:48]  This is a comic.
[01:09:49]  I mean, I don't know what you mean.
[01:09:50]  Is it a graphic history?
[01:09:52]  Yeah.
[01:09:52]  It's not a graphic history.
[01:09:53]  There's no fucking word.
[01:09:56]  No, I just, we have to call it a graphic novel, which is obnoxious because it's not, it's not a novel.
[01:10:02]  Yeah.
[01:10:02]  Yeah.
[01:10:04]  But throughout the book, I mean, there's, there's also the figures of R. Crumb and Harvey Peekar that are very important and influential, clearly also in your own work.
[01:10:15]  And we should talk about them a little bit because, I mean, Harvey, I think, became, got like a renewed.
[01:10:23]  I don't know, people kind of, the underground comic scene was very underground for a very long time.
[01:10:28]  And there was then kind of a resurgence of some of this stuff after the movie about him, American Splendor.
[01:10:37]  But he's a figure that kind of percolates throughout this book as well.
[01:10:42]  Maybe you can talk a little bit about him before we wrap up.
[01:10:45]  Sure.
[01:10:46]  Yeah, Cleveland has a very rich comic book history.
[01:10:50]  Superman was created in Cleveland.
[01:10:54]  So going all the way back, you know, we have that.
[01:10:57]  And yet by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.
[01:11:00]  And I thought they moved to New York and were like doing that, you know, there.
[01:11:04]  But I've seen like their letters and whatnot.
[01:11:06]  And they were actually living in Cleveland and commuting by train to New York, like when they had to, which is just kind of like unimaginable that you could like live in Cleveland and commute to New York.
[01:11:18]  The world was a very different place.
[01:11:21]  But yeah, Harvey Picar, who, as I understand, knew Peter Lochner, or at least they met.
[01:11:27]  And they were definitely like living in the same area on the east side at the same time.
[01:11:32]  And Robert Crum, you know, he wasn't here all that long and it was more of the 60s.
[01:11:40]  But one of Peter's girlfriends had some run-ins with him.
[01:11:44]  She had a big one.
[01:11:45]  And then he sat on it with like a cart.
[01:11:49]  He tried to pick her up.
[01:11:50]  Yeah.
[01:11:50]  Yeah.
[01:11:51]  And she didn't know who he was.
[01:11:52]  And then she went to a party later that night.
[01:11:55]  She's like, oh, fuck, it's Robert Crumb.
[01:11:57]  Then there's Dave Sheridan.
[01:12:00]  And there was a whole lot of a lot of cartoonists here.
[01:12:02]  They all left, except for Harvey Peekar.
[01:12:05]  Harvey stayed.
[01:12:06]  Yeah, kind of famous for staying.
[01:12:07]  Yeah, later on.
[01:12:08]  Yeah, I mean, he struggled.
[01:12:10]  I mean, he was always working at like the hospital.
[01:12:12]  He always had his day job.
[01:12:14]  Do you know that guy, Toby Radloff?
[01:12:16]  He's in the American Splendor movie.
[01:12:18]  He's like the nerd.
[01:12:20]  I don't know.
[01:12:20]  I haven't seen that movie in so long.
[01:12:23]  He's like the autistic best friend in it.
[01:12:25]  Oh, okay.
[01:12:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:27]  Yeah, he's, my wife sees him on the train like all the time.
[01:12:31]  Well, what do you think it is about this?
[01:12:33]  I mean, with Harvey and then now you, what do you think it is about this genre that I don't know?
[01:12:39]  I feel like it's like the genre or like this mode of storytelling in terms of kind of graphic or comic.
[01:12:47]  I don't know what the prefer or like what's the best way to put it.
[01:12:51]  But like, what is it about this expression that is Because I think that the history of Cleveland, the history of all of this sort of like underground scene and how it all kind of intersects and changes over decades is so perfectly told in this medium.
[01:13:08]  Like there's something about this way of storytelling that speaks specifically, it feels like, to Cleveland itself and to these kind of figures.

=== Romantic Pretension (03:33) ===

[01:13:18]  And I wonder if you think that there's maybe a link there.
[01:13:22]  Well, traditionally, comic books are lowbrow and populist and blue collar.
[01:13:30]  And I think there's, let's be honest, there's a streak of pretentiousness in my book.
[01:13:38]  Nah.
[01:13:40]  I think it works, though.
[01:13:41]  It's like romantic.
[01:13:42]  Yeah.
[01:13:42]  Well, yeah, no, I like pretentious.
[01:13:44]  Per Ubu's pretentious.
[01:13:46]  Very pretentious.
[01:13:47]  Yeah.
[01:13:49]  I like, you know, I like art fag, pretentious bullshit.
[01:13:51]  It's okay to have pretense sometimes.
[01:13:54]  Okay.
[01:13:54]  Well, it's, yeah, it's become very unit's been uncool for a very long time to do it.
[01:14:01]  And it's like, all right, can we maybe stop like playing dumb?
[01:14:05]  And, you know, maybe like I think that there's such art.
[01:14:10]  I think there's such a fear of like humiliating oneself, a fear that I feel often of humiliating oneself that there has to be this like ironic distance between you and like what you're doing.
[01:14:25]  Or like you can, you always have to be like, yeah, this is kind of lame or whatever, but like I'm still doing it.
[01:14:30]  My early work was like that, real smart ass, just like dirty jokes, shoving it and romp and maybe some stuff you haven't seen, but it was definitely, you know, had that kind of Gen X sarcasm.
[01:14:43]  I love romp.
[01:14:45]  But this one, but you think this one doesn't.
[01:14:49]  No, it's very sincere.
[01:14:50]  I mean, it still employs irony in places.
[01:14:54]  Yeah.
[01:14:55]  But irony in like the actual like non-pejorative sense.
[01:14:59]  Yeah.
[01:15:00]  You know, irony is a good thing.
[01:15:01]  Irony is, you know, allows a little ambiguity.
[01:15:06]  It's the opposite of pedantic.
[01:15:08]  Yeah.
[01:15:08]  Yeah.
[01:15:09]  No, I think, I mean, the book is funny also.
[01:15:13]  For me, I think especially was the black bike gang, biker gang leader named Hitler, which I love.
[01:15:19]  Yeah.
[01:15:19]  And who comes up a few times.
[01:15:22]  Yeah, the book is fantastic.
[01:15:23]  I mean, we can't, I really, I don't think we can recommend it to our listeners enough.
[01:15:27]  I think that they should definitely check it out.
[01:15:30]  It's quite, I mean, it's remarkable.
[01:15:33]  How many pages is this thing?
[01:15:36]  You've done, what, 400 and oh my gosh, like almost 400 and yeah, 30 pages.
[01:15:45]  Incredible, an incredible history.
[01:15:48]  It weaves, it weaves and it bobs and weaves.
[01:15:51]  It circles around.
[01:15:53]  It goes up and down and across all different time and space.
[01:15:58]  And I just really, I had such a fucking fun time reading it.
[01:16:02]  I couldn't put it down.
[01:16:03]  And I just really can't recommend it enough.
[01:16:06]  I want to thank so much, Aaron, one, for making this book, but also for coming on because we've never had you.
[01:16:11]  And you've been such a part of the True and On family for so many years.
[01:16:16]  Well, I'm thrilled to have been invited.
[01:16:20]  Where can people get this fucking book, Aaron?
[01:16:22]  That's a great question.
[01:16:23]  They can get it directly from, so I also published it through my own company, Stone Church Press, which I run with my friend Jake Kelly.
[01:16:31]  So you can get that directly from us at stonechurchpress.com.
[01:16:37]  And if you have a local comic book shop you go to, if they don't have it, they can order it because we are picked up by the distributor that services comic book shops.
[01:16:49]  So any comic book shop can get it.

=== You Gotta Check This Out (03:11) ===

[01:16:51]  And we are looking to get more distribution, but that doesn't really matter right now.
[01:16:56]  Well, maybe it does for people listening, but we'll definitely put links in the episode information.
[01:17:02]  You guys got to check this out.
[01:17:03]  And if you own a comic book shop, which you might if you're listening to our show, fucking get this book in your store.
[01:17:09]  It's fantastic.
[01:17:10]  It really is.
[01:17:11]  It really, really is.
[01:17:20]  Liz, before we wrap up, I have something I want to say to you.
[01:17:23]  Oh, no.
[01:17:23]  Your skin is glowing and you look beautiful.
[01:17:25]  Thank you so much.
[01:17:26]  You look great.
[01:17:26]  Well, it's quite cold out.
[01:17:28]  It is.
[01:17:28]  Does that do that?
[01:17:29]  I don't know.
[01:17:30]  But it is cold.
[01:17:31]  I have that.
[01:17:32]  I feel like the cold kind of tightens everything up.
[01:17:34]  Tightens.
[01:17:35]  So I've been like extra moisturizing in response, which helps the glow.
[01:17:40]  See, it's kind of a dialectic.
[01:17:41]  Let me ask you something.
[01:17:43]  Since moving to New York, I've had what might be called skin issues.
[01:17:49]  Oh my God.
[01:17:50]  I will fix them for you.
[01:17:51]  No, you've never asked.
[01:17:52]  I do.
[01:17:52]  No, I have asked because I currently use the thing that you told me to get every day.
[01:17:56]  Some bullshit like aqua something.
[01:17:58]  It's in like aquaphor?
[01:18:01]  Aquaphor?
[01:18:02]  Well, but you need to put a moisturizer on before you, because aquaphor is like more, think of it as a sealant, right?
[01:18:08]  So you want to have, it's not, it's not a moisturizer, but what it's going to do is actually, it's a humectant.
[01:18:13]  So it's actually going to like keep everything sealed in.
[01:18:17]  Interesting.
[01:18:17]  So what you want to do is put a moisturizer on before and then the aquifer on top.
[01:18:22]  Gotcha.
[01:18:23]  Okay, so I got to layer it.
[01:18:24]  Yeah, but I'd lay keels or whatever on.
[01:18:27]  I don't know what that is.
[01:18:28]  Well, we can talk off air a little bit about what's afflicting you because I am a wellspring of information and was actually just earlier today giving a little in-house lecture about vitamin A derivatives, retinaldehyde, and so on and so forth.
[01:18:45]  Can I take vitamin D because I'm sad?
[01:18:48]  Is that real?
[01:18:49]  Yes, it is real, but you should get your levels checked.
[01:18:51]  Yeah.
[01:18:52]  Just go get a little blood vibration.
[01:18:53]  Oh, I know they're low.
[01:18:54]  Everyone has blood vitamin.
[01:18:55]  I got tested.
[01:18:55]  Sure, but then you'll know exactly how many IUs you need to take.
[01:18:59]  That's why.
[01:19:00]  Can I inject it?
[01:19:01]  No, you don't want to do that.
[01:19:02]  Okay, I don't give a fuck then.
[01:19:03]  I'll take it.
[01:19:04]  You can do liposomol, though, if you wanted.
[01:19:06]  Ah, that sounds fun.
[01:19:07]  It does, doesn't it?
[01:19:07]  Yeah, liposilmore?
[01:19:09]  Liposomol.
[01:19:11]  That's fun to say.
[01:19:11]  Liposomol.
[01:19:13]  You know what?
[01:19:13]  I've always glutathione liposomol.
[01:19:17]  Females are scientists, bro.
[01:19:18]  But it's too expensive.
[01:19:19]  They are.
[01:19:20]  I do be scientific.
[01:19:22]  Gleptamuzuba ball, dude.
[01:19:24]  I know a couple.
[01:19:25]  You do?
[01:19:26]  That's crazy.
[01:19:26]  That's very cool.
[01:19:27]  You guys are amazing.
[01:19:29]  Yeah.
[01:19:29]  They should be more women.
[01:19:30]  Vitamin A, vitamin C. What do you want to know about it?
[01:19:32]  I got it.
[01:19:32]  Vitamin F.
[01:19:33]  Well, that's Franzac, which is my name, and I'm Liz.
[01:19:37]  My name is Vitamin B injection into your ass.
[01:19:41]  You do want to make sure you're getting enough vitamin B, by the way.
[01:19:43]  I believe me, I was born vitamin B.
[01:19:46]  I drink three or four Celsius at eight o'clock every night in the morning.
[01:19:49]  I can't sleep.
[01:19:50]  I'm just kidding.
[01:19:51]  I don't do that.
[01:19:52]  And of course, we have vitamin S.
[01:19:54]  That stands for sex.
[01:19:57]  Young Chomsky.
[01:19:59]  And the podcast is called Vitamin T. True and Add.
[01:20:02]  We'll see you next time.