Grandmaster Flash without the Five

Jospeh Saddler AKA Grandmaster Flash had helped usher in the hip-hop era with his pioneering scratch skills nearly a decade before his appearance on May 9, 1987 at the Starr Palace.

By 1987, Flash was working separate from the Furious Five which had cemented its place in American music history with “The Message” in 1982. Flash along with Furious Five veterans Kidd Creole and Rahiem split from that group to record a series of three albums with Flash. “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done” (1985) and “The Source” (1986) were already out by the time the Flash and his group got to Youngstown in 1987.

The album “Ba-Dop-Boom-Bang” followed in September 1987 but the poorly received album helped push along a Furious Five reunion on Dec. 13, 1987 during a Homeless Children’s Benefit at Madison Square Garden. One more Furious Five album was released in 1988 and the group permanently disbanded shortly thereafter.

In 2007, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

X marks the spot for Grohl family lore?

Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana and current Foo Fighters frontman, has a Medium site where he occasionally shares stories about his life. One from April 22 caught my eye as it claims Grandma Grohl sent Dave an article in the Vindicator about the Los Angeles punk band X playing here and what that meant to their family tree.

Grohl apparently received this letter at some point in 1992 after returning to his mom’s house in Virginia after a world tour (Nirvana did two that year). I looked for the article in the Vindicator archives (now somewhat searchable through the Mahoning County Public Library’s site) and came up empty regarding that article. X’s concert past isn’t well documented online but in the early ’90s it was not that active.

Primarily a West Coast band who would play somewhat larger rooms than what Youngstown could offer in the early 1990s, I find this particular item a bit odd. If anyone can remember if this really happened, let me know the details so I can find the article in question.

Stiv Bators film streaming for free on TUBI

STIV, a 2019 documentary about Stiv Bators, is streaming for free (with commercials) on the TUBI service in case you needed something a bit different to consume on the TV this winter.

Be warned, this is not a flattering portrait of the man and seems to be a project his late wife signed off on many years after he died. It does represent a portion of the truth but it really could have used interviews with guys like Cheetah Chrome and Brian James to fill out more about who he was. His accidental death after getting hit by a taxi in Paris is treated as an inevitable event by his peers and that is perhaps the most chilling part about this film.

There are plenty of references to the Mahoning Valley in this (the particular anecdote about Stiv living in Columbiana County before he moved to Cleveland was rather amusing) so it should satisfy curiousities about his early time as a budding rock star here.

Two Rock and Roll HOFers … in 1943

Given enough time and with a more robust discussion of how things came to be in rock and roll, the narrative as to its origins has changed. Here is an ad from the March 16, 1943 edition of the Youngstown Vindicator for shows featuring The Ink Spots and Sister Rosetta Tharpe at the Palace.

Both of these acts have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Ink Spots entering in 1989 and Tharpe in 2017. Both were instrumental in molding the genre and might have actually already been there by the time of this performance. Certainly Tharpe’s guitar playing was as bombastic as anything heard by male players in the 1950s and the Ink Spots vocal stylings were on par with a lot of the doo wop sounds that would come after.

I’ve tried to pinpoint the exact landing of rock and roll in Youngstown before, but that’s a fool’s errand as the history of this music flowered over many decades preceding the 1950s. With the amount of entertainment venues serving up all sorts of music in the ’30s and ’40s, it’s a safe bet rock and roll pioneers were quite active in Mahoning County well before it could be defined in popular culture.

 

RIP Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry has died at the age of 90.

Here are some posts about his history in Youngstown. 

https://yosteelstrings.wordpress.com/tag/chuck-berry/

Scam bands revisited

In 2014, I spotted the ad above and wrote an entry about the absurdity of it all. It turns out to be a very cool story involving a shady Michigan company, members of ZZ Top and the preying on of innocent rock fans who had no access to the level of information we do today.

Buzzfeed published the whole saga of this bizarre episode in rock history yesterday.  Here’s an excerpt detailing what happened to the fake Animals just about two months after the Youngstown gig:

Backlash from the bands whose identities it had effectively stolen ballooned to the point where Delta could no longer keep up its charade. The beginning of the end came when a fake version of the Animals created by Delta were confronted at a performance by the founder of the actual Animals, Eric Burdon. According to an article in the May 28, 1970, issue of Rolling Stone by Ben Fong-Torres, Burdon had shown up to the show with a baseball bat. Tom Hocott remembers getting a phone call from one of the fake Animals recounting this same story. “Eric Burdon and a bunch of bikers chased them around and threatened them,” he says. Burdon was contacted for this story; his wife Marianna responded with an email saying, “I asked Eric if he has any recollections of the incident you mentioned, but he doesn’t really.”

For more on this amazing tale, read Daniel Ralston’s excellent article:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock?utm_term=.yx7M29vKx#.hsM8eVjwY

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream

Gil Mantera’s Party Dream are one of the last Youngstown acts to nearly make the big time. If you were around the Youngstown scene from the late 90s to mid 2000s, you understood why. There is no sense in trying to explain it here.

Let Ultimate Donny ( Richard Elmsworth) do it in a recent interview from the podcast Height Zone World.

41 years, 9 months, 30 days

On Friday it was announced that Kiss would be coming to the Covelli Centre for a show on Aug. 26. If the show goes off as planned, it will mark the first show for the band in Youngstown since Oct. 27, 1974. That will be 41 years, nine months and 30 days since the last show in the city. I don’t know who keeps such records in rock ‘n’ roll, but that has to be in the discussion some sort of record for time between two performances in one city.

Another New York band with just two original members completed a 35-year, one-month and 23-day gap on July 29, 2011 when the New York Dolls did an opening gig for Poison and Motley Crue at the Covelli Centre. The Dolls had previously played Youngstown on June 6, 1976.

The Kiss show will be held one day after Gene Simmons celebrates his 67th birthday. Since Kiss is coming off a show in Toledo on Aug. 24, it’s a high possibility that Gene will be celebrating his birthday in Youngstown or somewhere nearby.

Rockabilly at Stambaugh

There was a time in the late ’50s when country-fried rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll were pretty much in mutual agreement and a fine example of this is the show with headliners Sanford Clark, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins and Sonny James on March 15, 1957 at the Stambaugh Auditorium.

The bill also included a young Eddie Cochran and Roy Orbison. At $2.50 for top tier tickets, it seems like the price was quite the bargain.

Freak out or fake out?

On January, 18, 1970, the club The New World of the Freak Out (currently the site of the Utopia night club) claimed to have booked a show featuring one of the bigger bands of the 1960s in The Animals.

Only problem is the band broke up in 1969. Eric Burdon was well into his tenure with War at that point and the rest of the band was onto other things. So who knows if this was imposters or maybe some fringe members carrying on the name.

It would be absolutely absurd to think that the band that played arenas in the mid-60s played a Youngstown night club for $1.50 a ticket in 1970.

Edit: A commenter pointed out that the show was a scam and that the actual Animals did not play there.