CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Its publisher knew next to nothing about the publishing business. Its first editor loathed all forms of music except obscure jazz. And its most prominent writer could be bribed by hot pizza. Somehow, however, it worked. It was The Scene, Cleveland’s free weekly entertainment paper. And if you were young, into rock music, particularly in the 1970s and ’80s, and wanted to know what was going on, you read every word of it.
In late 1969, Rich Kabat, the operator of a local promotions company, heard rumors that Cleveland After Dark, a paper that chronicled the city’s nightlife, was shutting down. Though Kabat had no experience in the newspaper business, he decided to publish a new weekly to fill this void -- one that, unlike Cleveland After Dark (an entertainment paper that was notoriously not entertaining to read), would be hip, irreverent and fun. According to Erich Burnett, The Scene’s first intern, Kabat “assembled a staff of students, hippies, and other assorted cheap labor, and set out with blind faith.” His timing could not have been better. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, alternative newsweeklies with a focus on popular music were sprouting in cities across the country and thriving. Over the next few decades, The Scene would grow to become a pillar of the Cleveland rock community -- and make Kabat a fortune.
2020 marks the The Scene’s 50th anniversary. To mark the milestone, here’s is the story of the paper’s rise in the 1970s and its place in Cleveland media and music history, as told by some of the people who wrote for it, appeared in it, and loved it.
Michael Stanley (musician and leader of the Michael Stanley Band): My first memories of The Scene were as a music fan. That’s where you found out where everybody was playing, what was going on, who was coming to town. It was like, ‘OK. I have this much money, so I’m not going to go see these guys, because I want to go to see these guys.’ The Scene was your clearing house for all that.
Denny Sanders (former DJ at WMMS-FM/100.7): Remember, there was no internet, so the only other places where you could get this kind of information were the mainstream newspapers. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had Jane Scott, who could be good. The Cleveland Press had Bruno Bornino and, well, not to speak ill of the dead - Bruno’s passed away - but he was just awful.
Stanley: You couldn’t miss it. It was there in front of you, on a counter in a store or in the little machines on the street. It was everywhere.
Sanders: The Scene had some real advantages. Number one, it was free. So, there wasn’t anything to stop people from just grabbing it.
Mark Tercek (former music critic at The Scene and my older brother): The Scene’s office was in the basement of an office building in downtown Cleveland. Just a bunch of desks pushed together, and records stacked all over the place.
Erich Burnett (The Scene’s first intern): I remember it feeling like I had walked onto the set of a sitcom somebody set up but forgot to shoot. As if “WKRP” had a sequel series set in the magazine business.
Anastasia Pantsios (Cleveland-based photographer, writer and former music critic at The Scene): John Richmond, a jazz musician, was the first editor. We had about five jazz writers, and I was the only rock music writer. I would complain about why we had to do a two-page review of a Bix Beiderbecke reissue. I mean, no one would read it. And John would say, “Well, people should read it because it’s good for them.”
Stanley: They were making it up as they went along. There was no blueprint for any of this. It was like, ‘OK, we don’t want to be The Cleveland Plain Dealer. We don’t want to be The Cleveland Press. We want to be something else, and our target audience is a whole lot of kids with long hair and bell bottoms.’
Pantsios: The next editor was this guy who blew into town from Detroit. His name was Tony Rey, but he wrote under the name of Ice Alexander.
Jeff Niesel (current music editor of The Scene): There was another guy there who wrote under the pseudonym of Peanuts.
Burnett: A guy who worked in ad sales wrote concert reviews under the name of Jim Hammer.
Charlie Wiener: And, of course, Dave Thomas (later of Pere Ubu fame), who called himself Crocus Behemoth.
Pantsios: Crocus was a big, cranky guy who preferred to do things on a very casual level. The big joke was, if you wanted to get into Crocus’ column, you had to bribe him with an anchovy pizza. That’s the level things were on.
Crocus Behemoth, a staff art director who worked his way up to become The Scene’s music editor, co-wrote with staff writer Mark Kmetzko “Croc O’Bush,” the magazine’s weekly music gossip column. It proved so popular that a local bar, The Viking Saloon, named a drink after it.
Pantsios: Crocus lived in an apartment without a phone. He didn’t want people bothering him. The Scene was doing a lot of interviews at that point with touring bands, and Jim [Girard, the editor at the time] told him he needed to get a phone in case the record company had to reach him. Crocus accused Jim of trying to destroy his lifestyle. He lumbered into Jim’s office and started screaming and removing all the posters from Jim’s wall and throwing them on the floor.
Niesel: Crocus was pretty “out there.”
Scene staffers perform in 1973 at the “Scene Night Out” at “The House of Bud” in downtown Cleveland. Pere Ubu frontman Dave Thomas is at center in overalls, performing his first-ever public gig under the name Crocus Behemoth. Then Scene editor Jim Girard is on the far left, with glitter on his face, impersonating his favorite artist Gram Parson. Cleveland writer and photographer Anastasia Pantsios, who took this photograph \, says Thomas “marched around the stage, bellowing into the microphone, while ripping the tinfoil from his overalls.” (Photo: Anastasia Pantsios)
Tercek: These writers were all wise guys. They were artists. They were trying to create a weekly paper, and it worked because Cleveland had a sizzling rock business.
Niesel: Cleveland was the perfect spot for it because there was a lot going on. I had come from San Diego, and there were more bands and clubs here than in San Diego. So, there’s a great music scene … great radio stations …and just a huge variety of different bands playing every night of the week.
Annie Zaleski (author and journalist): Cleveland was really taking off. There were a lot of bands and a lot of bars, so it was easy to get the word out.
By the time The Scene’s fifth anniversary approached, the paper had grown to a roster of 20 full-time staffers and a circulation of 30,000.
Stanley: They were part of a four-part rock and roll equation in Cleveland, especially after things started picking up speed a little bit. You had Belkin Productions - they brought all the big acts to town; you had WMMS dominating the radio; you had The Agora - that was the big club; and you had The Scene. That’s who controlled music in Cleveland and set the agenda.
Pantsios: That is correct. That was the power nexus all the way into the ’80′s.
Stanley: You heard a band on WMMS and went to The Scene to see if they were coming to a Belkin show or were going to play at the Agora. The Agora was the physical hub of the whole thing. The Scene was the Town Crier. And Belkin fed all the shows into the mix.
Niesel: It was a well-oiled machine. All these organizations worked in unison, and that’s what enabled Cleveland to become a rock music mecca.
Pantsios: I remember one of the first things the new editor, Ice Alexander, did for The Scene. It was 1971. He wrote this piece about how Belkin Productions were vultures and they were ripping people off. I went in on Monday night to lay out the issue and saw the column. I’m reading it and I’m thinking, “What is this (expletive)?” In those days, you had these strips of printed copy and you waxed it down. So, I just pulled up the copy and rearranged some ads and took it home with me. Later that night, when we were going to press, I got this panicked phone call from Rich Kabat (The Scene’s publisher) going, “Oh my god! I got a call from Jules Belkin! He heard through the grapevine about this article! We’re going to lose all their business!” I said, “Don’t worry, Rich, I pulled it out.” So, Ice blew town and Rich asked me if I wanted to be the new editor. At that point, I was so fed up with everything, I said, “No, I really need to go back and concentrate on school.”
Kabat subsequently hired Jim Girard, an anthropology student at Cuyahoga Community College and part-time writer at The Scene, to be the next editor. Girard stayed on through 1976 and passed away in 2006. In a tribute to Girard, entitled ,”Jim Girard/Go All the Way,” the singer/songwriter Eric Carmen wrote: “He was an insightful and eloquent writer and a positive voice at a time when it would have been easier and more “hip” to be negative. He took a stand. I admired him both for his ability and as a gentleman. He will be missed.”
Stanley: If you wanted to get a little deeper into things, The Scene was the deal. It had a different kind of personality than the other newspapers. It was friendlier and goofier. The Plain Dealer and The Press were much straighter, more repressed.
Sanders: The Scene didn’t always get it right. They misquoted me more than a few times and I’d have to ask for a retraction - but they kept things loose and casual. So many music reviewers are full of pretension. That’s why I have a hard time reading people like (Village Voice music critic) Robert Christgau. You get the feeling that if somebody did a show standing on their head with a tape player playing backwards, he’d give them an “A.”
Scene staffers put together the 20th anniversary issue of the alternative newspaper in 1990. From left: Keith Rathbun, Scene founder and publisher Richard Kabat, and Mark Holan. (Photo: The Plain Dealer)Cleveland Plain Dealer
Pantsios: We did band interviews every week. The Scene is where bands went, where they were understood.
Zaleski: There was a grassroots legitimacy to the whole thing. A band would get covered by The Scene first, and then they’d graduate to the daily paper.
Burnett: It was surreal. You’d come back from lunch and there would be Robbie Robertson, sitting back with his feet on a desk, shooting the breeze with a few of the writers.
Pantsios: The thing was, most bands had nothing to say. No insight, no nothing. You know, they’d all say, “What makes us different is that we’re really honest, and this is the most honest album we’ve done.” So much bullshit, so much blather. So, I came up with this idea where we’d just do a brief half-page about every band: who are they, who plays what, why you should listen to them, and what they’ve got out. It was easy to digest. You were much more likely to get somebody to read it and go, “Hey, that sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll go see them.”
Tercek: After I graduated college, I had a job lined up but it didn’t start for a few months. So, I went to The Scene to see if I could write for them. I managed to get in to see Crocus, and he kind of glanced over at my writing samples and then he pushed a pile of records toward me. He said, “Review these, and if you’re any good, we’ll print them.”
Wiener: I had formed my band, The Fun Buns, and we wanted to be in The Scene. You know, if they took a liking to me, it could be beneficial for my career. So I took a part time job delivering The Scene every week. I got to meet all the writers and the people who ran the local record stores. I had this van and Rich Kabat, the publisher, and I took all the seats out so we could fill it up with bundles of The Scene. The first time we did that we delivered all our copies and then Rich realized he had no seat for the ride home. So, the next week we saved a few bundles so he could sit on them.
Tercek: The first thing I wrote for The Scene was a review of a Robert Palmer album, and then I wrote a satirical piece about Ted Nugent. The Scene didn’t pay much, but they let me keep the records, so I wrote for them all summer. I did album reviews, concert reviews, and at one point I asked if I could do an interview. Crocus said, “Why not?,” so I tracked down Buzzy Linhart, who was an idol of mine at the time. [Linhart was a singer/songwriter who was popular in the Cleveland area in the 1970′s. He is perhaps best known for co-writing “You’ve Got to Have Friends,” Bette Midler’s de facto theme song. He passed away in February of this year.] It turned out to be kind of a sad experience. I met Buzzy at his parents’ house in Cleveland Heights, and he answered the door in his bathrobe.
Pantsios: There was a place downtown called “The House of Bud,” and The Scene had an event there called “Scene Night Out.” All the writers would go onstage and act out their rock and roll fantasies. This had to be 1973. Jim Girard had this fantasy about Gram Parsons, so he would be up there doing country songs. And then Crocus got up. This is where he played his first ever gig. He was wearing overalls covered in tinfoil, and he marched around the stage bellowing into the microphone while ripping the tinfoil off his overalls. Charlie and the Fun Buns were backing him up.
Wiener: I remember people hated us.
Pantsios: After a few performances like this, Crocus started taking himself seriously. He decided he was going to become a roc kstar, so he had to have a real band. Charlie Weiner and the Fun Buns quit. Crocus hired new musicians and his band became Pere Ubu.
A collage of covers of early issues of Cleveland Scene. (Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library)
Sanders: Crocus was a smart marketer. He wanted to establish Pere Ubu in Cleveland, and then go nationwide once he could claim that everyone in Cleveland was too dumb to appreciate his innovative music. The band would play gigs, but he’d insist the clubs not promote them at all. Then he could go, See? We’re not getting any support here.
Tercek: I don’t know of any avant-garde artist who sold out less than Dave Thomas and Pere Ubu. They never made it easy for people to listen to their music.
As the 1970′s gave way to the 1980′s, The Scene’s circulation continued to grow, and it solidified its place in the center of the Cleveland rock music landscape.
Stanley: The Scene had grown to become this rock and roll monster. You couldn’t walk around without seeing it.
Pantsios: I remember I kept getting these people who would call me and say, “I want to have lunch with you and talk about this amazing paper I’m going to start. We’re going to take on The Scene.” I’d have lunch with them and listen, and I’d say, “That’s interesting.” But I’d never hear from them again. It took capital to compete with The Scene, and these people didn’t have it.
Wiener: Every week Richard (Kabat) and I delivered the paper, even all the way to Pittsburgh. He was involved in every aspect of the business, and after so many years, it started to take its toll. Then some corporation made him an offer for the paper and he told me, ‘I’ve got to take it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, God bless you.’
Zaleski: He sold The Scene to The New Times, a corporate conglomerate. Everything became much more corporate.
Niesel: The new owners had a template that had worked in Phoenix, Denver and Dallas and all the other places where they had papers. It became more of a business.
Zaleski: For about ten more years, The Scene stayed pretty popular. But then in the ’90s, ever so gradually, things began to taper off, and that was pretty much the trajectory.
In 1998, Kabat sold the paper to New Times, a Phoenix-based corporation that owned 10 other weekly papers across the country. At the time The Scene averaged an impressive 48 pages and 55,000 issues each week. New Times embarked on an expansion spree, acquiring other prestigious publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly. The next ten years, however, were rough for the newsweekly business, as The Scene and others were battered by the loss of their classified ad business to websites like craigslist.com. In 2008, New Times, known now as Village Voice Media, sold The Scene to the holding company Times Shamrock in 2008. (Village Voice Media, or VVM, went on to sell all its remaining publications in 2012.) Times Shamrock subsequently sold The Scene to Cleveland-based Euclid Media Group in 2014. Though considerably thinner since its late ’90′s heyday, The Scene continued weekly publication. This past spring, however, with print circulation dwindling and the coronavirus pandemic in full force, The Scene temporarily ceased production of its print edition and became a digital-only publication. The paper recently announced that it will resume print distribution on July 1.
Zaleski: Today, people collect vintage copies of The Scene. My husband has tons of them. That’s the difference between The Scene and a website that covers music - there’s a physical, permanent record. I’ve seen it happen too many times with websites - they go under and all their content disappears.
Niesel: Is there a future for a paper like The Scene? If you look at the website, you’ll see that the advertising has declined, but the number of people who read the stories every week is higher than it’s ever been. The appetite for the content is there. People still want this information, whether it’s political stories, music reviews or food reviews. The challenge is, how do you pay the staff to create it?
Charlie Tercek, a Cleveland native and former paperboy for The Plain Dealer, is a writer and high school English teacher in Los Angeles. His brother Mark Tercek reviewed albums for The Scene in the summer of 1975.
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