ACCIDENTAL REALISM

BRAIN STORM
MAY 1, 2024 EDWARD STASKUS LEAVE A COMMENT EDIT

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 fuck 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.

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