You know, Cleveland gets a lot of shit from other cities. We’ve got a bad rap because our sports teams aren’t good—alright, alright, they’re downright terrible—but one thing we’ve got on lock here in Ohio is music. This is indisputable.
Take, for instance, a little band called Death of Samantha that hailed from Cleveland in the early ’80s. Maybe you have heard of them. If so, mad props. If not, you better brush up on your punk history. This band played with the likes of The Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth and has members who have belonged to Guided By Voices, Nada Surf, and Cobra Verde, to name a few bands you might know. This band shook the punk-rock scene from the beginning, having their debut show at a local family restaurant where frontman John Petkovic worked as a janitor.
“We started as a three-piece,” Petkovic recounted. “We played at this place called the Ground Round, which was a restaurant, where people used to throw peanuts on the floor and popcorn. I used to work there as a janitor, and back then I was a little more philosophically rebellious, I guess, and this was the kind of place where they’d have these singer-songwriter kind of guys singing with acoustic guitars and doing these really lame cover songs.”
“I was talking to the one manager, and he said, ‘Oh, hey, we wanna get your band here to play,’ and he was joking, but he went on vacation, and I told the assistant manager, ‘Oh, hey, we are playing here,’ and we played a chicken wing night, and people were so mad because the kind of music people were playing here was the lamest kind of stuff—I mean, guys playing here would cover the most laid back Neil Young songs [sings ‘Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold, and I’m getting old’], and we just played this really shitty, noisy music, and people were throwing chicken wings and throwing popcorn at each other, and everyone left. I mean, the place cleared out totally, the waitresses were so mad, and I got fired from my job. But people were like, ‘Hey, this band sounds so cool, this punk-rock band that got kicked out of Ground Round.’ We got notoriety before we really played any real shows, which was kind of cool.”
From the beginning, Death of Samantha wasn’t one of those bands you could just throw into a genre and tie up with a fancy bow, however. Petkovic said, “People thought we were like a hardcore band, punk-rock, crazy hardcore band, but we were really just a noisy, really sloppy, punk-rock band. I mean, I never had a mohawk, or I never wore a bone through my nose. So, we played this place [The Lakefront], and we had punk-rock people booking the show, and we got tons of people from the beginning—which was weird—who came out to see us, but some of the hardcore people were like, ‘Wait a minute, we thought they were like a hardcore band.’ ”
“We just became like this band of misfits. This crazy group of misfits. It was funny, I had this letter in response to a tour diary story the Plain Dealer had me do, and some guy sent a letter because he was so pissed we got written about in the Plain Dealer. And it was like, ‘these guys are a bunch of losers, and misfits, and they can’t even play; they don’t even know what they were doing.’ I think we had an audience. I think people weren’t looking for one kind of music, and we were a mix of all kinds of things. In that point of time there was not like some bulletin board where you could go on and find a bunch of people who had the exact same musical tastes as you, so everyone had different kinds of taste. Our drummer, all he knew about was Elvis and the Beatles; he had never heard of any other types of music.”
Fast-forward. It’s been twenty years since the band’s played together, and after begging from fans and a venue asking them to play, they agreed to reunite. How’d it happen?
Says Petkovic, “The guitar player [Doug Gillard] was in town doing a show, he was doing like a solo kind of thing, and he was like, ‘Hey man, let’s go jam sometime,’ and the next day I saw the bass player [David James] who I hadn’t seen in a long time—I was just walking down the street, getting a pack of cigarettes, I was working downtown and walking down Superior Avenue, and he was smoking a cigarette, and I was like, ‘Hey, can I bum a cigarette off of you, I haven’t seen you in like years.’ And the drummer [Steve-O] I saw out the next night at a bar, and I really didn’t see him that much. We had all independently of another just brought up why don’t we just jam sometime, so that’s what we did. The Beachland had asked us a couple times, and so we just decided, what the hell?”
If you didn’t catch them live back in their heyday and you missed the show at the Beachland Ballroom on December 23rd, you really missed out. The lights dimmed in the Ballroom, as six men carried a coffin to the stage from the back of the room. Death of Samantha was known for their antics back in the day, but you really can’t ever know what to expect from a band that has a “we don’t give a damn” attitude. So, anyways, this coffin is brought to the stage, and for five minutes it sits there closed. The anticipation is growing; you can feel the energy in the crowd get tense.
Maybe they knew who was going to pop out of there, maybe they were speculating, as I was, judging the diameters of the coffin. Maybe they’re still fascinated with the backdrop sign that boasts the Ground Round’s logo and a menu of Death of Samantha, This Moment in Black History, and Ham & Eggs 99 Cents. Finally, the lid pops up, and a hand emerges holding… a flamingo. And then a bottle of Jack. Out pops drummer, Steve-O, and the show’s on its way. A few moments later, Petkovic takes the stage carrying a bag over his back, a bag that is brimming with snack foods. “You thought the movie was over? Well, here’s some fucking popcorn,” he says, and he begins to tear the bags open and throw them into the crowd. There’s popcorn and Twizzlers and snacks just flying everywhere. The stage is trashed, and the band hasn’t even played a song.
And then it begins. Death of Samantha boasted good harmonies, sick guitar riffs, and a ton of effects. And they’re loud. I don’t know that my hearing will ever be the same. The non-verbal interaction between Petkovic and his bandmates is hilarious to watch, as they play a game of chicken with one another and vibe off of what the other man just laid down. Steve-O puts away that bottle of Jack faster than an alcoholic fresh off the wagon. Petkovic lights up a cigarette on stage, claiming, “We could do this back then; we’re going to do it right now.”
There’s a delicate moment, where Petkovic is perched on a chair, clarinet across his lap, recounting a suicide note that was from Pontius Pilate. That, of course, is juxtaposed with the epic wailing coming from Gillard’s guitar on just about every other song. Hell, Gillard even changed clothes during the set, rocking these amazing red shoes and some leopard print button-down with a sequined blazer over it.
Towards the end of their set, guitarist Doug Gillard presented Petkovic with a Christmas present: a bottle of slivovitz. Petkovic grabbed the mic and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. The band’s going to take a shot of this, and then we’re going to pass it out to you guys. If you pass it fast enough, the cop’s not gonna catch you because she’s slow, and we’ll all have some.” A couple hundred people later, I took the last swig of that fateful bottle before handing it back onstage.
