Brain Storm

By Ed Staskus

   By 1984 many bands had strutted their stuff at the Richfield Coliseum. Everybody called the arena the Palace on the Prairie. It was in Richfield, Ohio. The bands included Led Zeppelin in 1975, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band in 1978, the Rolling Stones in 1981, and Queen in 1982. Frank Sinatra opened the place with a show in October 1974 and Roger Daltrey gone solo closed the doors and shut off the lights twenty years later.

   “The crisscross of lights, mirroring the animation of 21,000 stylish people packed from floor to roof, transformed the gray amphitheater in the hills of Richfield Township into a huge first-night bouquet of green and blue,” is how The Cleveland Plain Dealer splashed Old Blue Eye’s show across its front page. We called him Slacksey because no matter what, his slacks were always neatly pressed. In 1994 Roger Daltrey’s performance drew fewer than 5,000 fans. Nobody wrote a word about it or how he was dressed. Over the years there were might have been a thousand musical events at the Richfield Coliseum. The Bee Gees drove girls to screaming crying and pleading in 1979.

   Vann Halen opened for Black Sabbath in 1978 and came back as headliners in 1984. When they did, they had to sit on their hands waiting for ice to melt. Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom on Ice had just skated out of the building. When Van Halen came to town it was the one and only time I saw the band and the one and only time I went to a show at the Richfield Coliseum. 

   It wasn’t that I didn’t go to rock ‘n roll shows. It was that the few I went to were closer to home, like at the Allen Theater, the Agora, and the Engineer’s Hall, where it was standing room only. There were no seats. Downtown was nearby but Richfield was a long drive for my unreliable long-suffering car. Besides, I was by necessity a Scrooge. First things came first, like food and shelter. 

   I saw the Doors at the Allen Theater in 1970, the Clash at the Agora in 1979, and the Dead Kennedys at the Engineer’s Hall in 1983. The Dead Kennedys blew into town during a heat wave. The air conditioning at the Engineer’s Hall was non-existent and there were no windows. We all sweated up a storm and stayed through the encore. Six years later the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers sold their building. It was demolished and replaced by a posh hotel. The Dead Kennedys never came back.

   The Doors opened their sold-out Friday night show in 1970 with ‘Roadhouse Blues’ followed by ‘Break on Through’ and ‘Backdoor Man’. They did Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love?’ That was a surprise. “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie, I got a brand new house on the roadside, made from rattlesnake hide.” They sounded better raw and live than on carefully managed vinyl. They were more than worth the five dollars for my orchestra seat ticket. My girl paid her own way. Eli Radish, a local band, opened, and were funky and fun, but all through their set everybody was antsy waiting for Jim Morrison.

   “He worked the crowd with his staring sneers and sexy leather posing, witch doctor mumbling and slouching about,” said Jim Brite, who was in the crowd. “The lighting and sound were dramatic. The band was great, with extended solos and workmanlike professionalism, delivering the music behind the shaman. No one could take their eyes off Jim. It was one of the best concerts I saw, and I’ll never forget it.”

   The band was banned in Miami for Jim Morrison’s obscene language and lewd behavior. He told everybody to call him the Lizard King. They had been banned from performing in Cincinnati and Dayton the year before. None of it mattered to the 3,000 of us filling every seat at the Allen Theater.

   “Jim Morrison swigged beer and smiled a lot between numbers,” Dick Wooten wrote in The Cleveland Press the nest day. “When he performs, he closes his eyes, cups his hand over his right ear, and clutches the mike. His voice is pleasant, but his style also involves shouts and screams that hammer your nervous system.”

   When it was over, we whistled roared clapped until the house lights came on. We were disappointed there was no encore but what could we say. Everybody was getting to their feet when Jim Morrison suddenly came back on stage. “Somebody stole my leather jacket. Thanks a lot Cleveland!” He flipped us the finger. “Nobody leaves until I get it back!” The dirty look bikers at the front of the stage jogged to the back of the hall and blocked the doors. When my girl and I looked to the side for another way out, Jim Morrison had left the stage, but then a minute later came back.

   “Sorry, that was a mistake. I found my jacket.” 

   He said the band wanted to play some more, to make up for the mistake, but John Densmore’s hands were messed up. He was the group’s drummer. The beat couldn’t go on without a beat, except it could and did.

   “John their drummer was walking around backstage and holding up his hands which seemed bloody in the creases of his fingers,” said Skip Heil, the drummer for Eli Radish. “I felt all warmed up since we played before them, so I said I’ll do it. I wasn’t sure of the songs, but I thought they were simple shuffles.” After the encore, the lead singer accidentally locked himself in an old  bathroom off the dressing room. One of the roadies said, “Stand back Jim.” He knocked the door down and set him free.

   The band toured non-stop after they left Cleveland. They had been touring non-stop for several years. Jim Morrison died in Paris of a heroin overdose the next year and the door shut forever on the band.

   The Richfield Coliseum was an arena in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Akron and Cleveland. It was built to be the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers, the local NBA team, although indoor soccer, indoor football, and hockey were played there, too. Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics said it was his favorite place to shoot hoops. He played his last pro game there. Muhammed Ali made ground beef out of Chuck Wepner there in 1975. Dave Jones, Ali’s nutritionist, could never get the boxer to try soy burgers. He had to have his red meat. There were rodeos and monster trucks. There were high wire acts and hallelujah choruses. The WWF Survivor Series came and went and came back.

   I had a friend who had gotten free tickets to see Van Halen. Two other friends of ours went with us but had to fork over $10.75 apiece for the privilege. I didn’t know much about the band, except that they were no doubt about it flat out loud as two or three jet engines, but free is free and since I had the free time I went. 

   The headbangers were from Pasadena California. They were Eddie Van Halen on guitar, Eddie’s brother Alex Van Halen on drums, Mike Anthony on bass, and David Lee Roth belting it out up front. Mike Anthony sang back-up while keeping the low pitch going.  “It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth Van Halen record that people would go, Wow! You’re singing backgrounds on those records. That’s not David Lee Roth,” the bass player said. “And I go, Hell, no! That’s not David Lee Roth.”

   The word was  they were “restoring hard rock to the forefront of the music scene,” whatever that meant. I was listening to lots of John Lee Hooker and the Balfa Brothers. The rock ‘n roll parade was largely passing me by. I didn’t have a clue who was at the front of the parade.

    Everybody I asked said Van Halen’s live shows were crazy energetic and Eddie Van Halen was a crazy virtuoso on the electric guitar. During the show he switched guitars right and left, but more-or-less stuck to a Kramer and a Stratocaster, except it wasn’t exactly a Stratocaster. Eddie Van Halen called it a Frankenstrat.

   “I wanted a Fender vibrato and a Stratocaster body style with a humbucker in it, and it did not exist,” he said. “People looked at me like I was crazy when I said that’s what I want. Where could I go to have someone make me one? Well, no one would, so I built one myself.” he wasn’t trying to find himself. He was creating himself.

   His homemade six-string was almost ten years old, made of odds and ends, a two-piece maple neck stuck onto a Stratocaster-style body. He used a chisel to gouge a hole in the body where he stuck a humbucking pickup taken out of a 1958 Gibson. He used black electrical tape to wrap up the loose ends and a can of red spray paint to get the look he wanted. When he met Kramer Guitar boss Dennis Berardi in 1982 Eddie showed him his Frankenstrat. It was his prize possession. “We went up to his house and he got it out,” Dennis said. “It looked like something you’d throw in the garbage. That was his famous guitar.” 

   Van Halen released their first LP in 1978. By 1982 they had released four more LP’s. When they came to northeast Ohio, they were one of the most successful rock acts of the day, if not the most successful. Their album “1984” sold 10 million copies and generated four hit singles. “Jump” jumped the charts to become a number one single.

   When the lights went down and the stage lights went up, the band took their spots. Eddie Van Halen wore tiger striped camo pants and a matching open jacket over no shirt. He wore a white bandana, and his hair long. Mike Anthony wore a dark short-sleeved shirt and red pants. He wore his hair long, too. David Lee Roth wore a sleeveless vest, leather pants ripped and stitched in all directions, and hula hoop bracelets on his wrists. He wore his hair even longer. Alex Van Halen wore a headband, and it was all I could see of him behind his Wall of Drums. There were speakers galore stacked on top of each other on both sides of the drum set.

   When they launched into “Running with the Devil” Mike Anthony ran across the stage and slid on his knees playing the opening notes. David Lee Roth was a wild man, swinging a sword around like Zorro and showcasing acrobatics like Kurt Thomas. He did Radio City Rockette kicks and jumped over the drums while singing “Jump.” Taylor Swift would have flipped out if she had been alive, but she wasn’t going to be alive for another five years.

   In the middle of one song, David Lee Roth stopped singing. The band played on but slowly dropped out, one instrument at a time. “I say f**k the show, let’s all go across the street and get drunk,” he shouted into his handheld microphone. The crowd hooted hollered cheered, forgetting for a moment they were at the Palace on the Prairie and the closest bar was miles away. One of the best parts of the show was when Alex Van Halen and Mike Anthony did a long bass and drum duet.

   Eddie Van Halen did some good work on keyboards, doing the opener for “I’ll Wait” but did his best work on his guitars. He had a way of playing with two hands on the fretboard. He learned it from Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. “I think I got the idea of tapping by watching him do his “Heartbreaker” solo back in 1971. He was doing a pull-off to an open string, and I thought wait a minute, open string and pull off? I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around? I just kind of took it and ran with it.” He filed for and got a patent for a device that attaches to the back of an electric guitar. It allows the musician to employ the tapping technique by playing the guitar like a piano with the face upward instead of forward.

   Most of us stayed in our seats during the show, only coming to our feet to applaud, but there was an undulating crowd squished like sardines at the front of the stage, where they stayed from beginning to end. They never left their feet. It was more than loud enough where we were up near the rafters. It had to be deafening if not mind-blowing being at the lip of the speakers.

   By the time the show ended Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth had long since stripped off their shirts. It took a half hour to shuffle out of the arena, a half hour to find our car, and another half hour to inch along the traffic jam the half mile to the highway. My hearing came back somewhere along I-271 on the way home.

   After the concert I went back to listening to the blues and zydeco. I didn’t rush out to buy any records by Van Halen. My cat and the neighbors, not to mention my peace and quiet roommate, would surely have complained about the noise, 

   Some short years later, after the excitement of being pushed and pulled into existence had died down, when she was still a babe and her mother was in the kitchen, Taylor Swift took a sneak peek at a film clip on MTV of the 1984 Van Halen concert at the Richfield Coliseum. She almost went bananas and just about fell out of her cradle. She made a vow then and there that she would do the sure thing. She wasn’t going to invite 20,000 fans to hit the bottle. She was going to schmooze them into buying the bottle for her. God knew she was going through enough of them.

   The fledgling Taylor Swift had a brainstorm. The first thing she would do when she was ready to sing her way to stardom was head to Nashville. It would be a baby step, but she had her sights set. It was going to be the hillbilly highway first and then on the way to my way. Her father was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch and her mother was a marketing manager at an advertising agency. She knew the way to the teller’s window at the bank. She was determined to be a rich girl when she was done. She was sure as shooting not going to strum a Frankenstrat or bust out any freaky Mighty Mouse moves, with or without a sword, with or without a shirt, although her legs were fair game. They were shapely legs made for boots made for walking. She was going to belt out her break-up ballads and march her way to the front of the hit parade.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“A once upon a crime whodunit.” Barron Cannon, Adventure Books

“Captures the vibe of 1950s NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon

Apple Books 
http://books.apple.com/us/book/id6502837788

Late summer and early autumn. New York City. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye. The 1956 World Series. President Eisenhower at the opening game. An assassin in the dugout.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Reviews

[JayG]

Unfortunately, this isn’t fiction, as publishers and readers view it. The goal of fiction, unlike the nonfiction skills we were given in school, is to entertain, not inform the reader. And because it is, it begins with action, presented in a way that makes the reader feel that they’re living the story in real-time, as-the-protagonist.

In this, you begin with a 2500 word essay, or the first ten standard manuscript pages, on the history of a theater the reader doesn’t care about, then, switch to providing random information on events in a few bands past. No one but the narrator is on stage, and the reader is being given an info-dump of information they didn't ask for, and have no idea of how it’s going to relate to the actual story, if it ever begins.

But as Sol Stein observed: “A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine” of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.” But what, in all that days, will make the reader say, "I have to read more?"

It appears that you’ve fallen into the trap that catches so many of us, on “telling the reader a story," with the focus on detail. For example, in your posted story, Flying the Coop, you open with 65 words of a confrontation between two men. At the end of the second paragraph, when the reader expects to learn what happens next, you freeze the actors, and as yourself, TELL the reader what the protagonist thinks, instead of having the character think the words.

And then, you abandon the characters and the story and provide a 123 word info-dump on things that have not the smallest connection to the action, and are mostly backstory that's irrelevant to the scene. What in the pluperfect hells does the cooking temperature of frying chicken have to do with that confrontation?

To quote James Schmitz: “Don’t inflict the reader with irrelevant background material—get on with the story.”

Here’s the deal: Commercial Fiction Writing is a profession. And like all professions, the specialized knowledge and tools aren’t optional. Unfortunately, the pros make it seem easy and natural, and our teachers never mentioned that they were teaching us only nonfiction skills, to make us useful to the average employer.

Nonfiction is fact-based and author-centric, as are your stories, at the moment — something true of the majority of hopeful writers’ work. So you have a lot of company. And, it’s not a matter of talent, which makes it fixable by acquiring and perfecting the necessary skills.

The critical point that we all miss when we turn to writing is summed up by E. L. Doctorow: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And no way in hell can the dispassionate words of a narrator do that. For that to happen we must calibrate the reader's perceptions to those of the protagonist

Try this: The best book I’ve found, to date, on how to make your words sing to the reader, is an old one — so old it talks about the necessity of a clean typewriter ribbon when typing a manuscript. And the section on research can be replaced by, “Use Google...a lot.” But that being said, his focus is on the hows ands whys — and the why-nots — of keeping readers turning pages. You can download a copy, free, on the archive site I link to below. The scan-in from print isn’t perfect, and whoever owned the book that was scanned highlighted a lot of paragraphs. But that’s not a bad thing. And free is nice.
https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

And as I often suggest, for an overview of the major differences between fiction and the skills of school, you might check a few of my articles and YouTube Videos.

So...after all the work you’ve done, this is pretty far from what you hoped to see, I know. But because our own work works for us, the problems are invisible till pointed out. And since we’ll not address the problem we don’t see as being one, I thought you might want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing. It never gets easier, but with work, we can become confused on a higher level. And that’s okay, because writing isn’t a destination, it’s a lifelong journey.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain