The following article by Paul Clements, is copped from Magnet Magazine (Apr/May '03 #58 (& 'real-world-non-cyber-world' back issues are available)) & is used kind'a with permission . . . I mean with the kind permission of both the zine and the author & another thing if you don't know it; You are on the official fucking electric eels web-site, hosted by that beneficent eel himself, John "AssHole" Morton®. PEACE! . . . UrBaN LeGenDS . . . To the rock revivalists now gunning for the top of the charts: You've got the safety on. In pre-punk Cleveland garages in the '70s, the music was genuinely dangerous, weird and unpopular. Among the hated were Rocket From The Tombs, Electric Eels, Mirrors  and Pere Ubu. Some things can't be repackaged. By Paul Clements In 1968, God appeared to Jamie Klimek in a Cleveland basement. The 16-year-old went with buddy Jim Crook to watch a band play at a club called La Cave, a former coffeehouse that occupied the floor below the Social Security office. It was a humble venue: The stage stood 10 inches tall, and church pews lined the burlap-covered walls. The band was the Velvet Underground.             Young Klimek and Crook were dazzled by guitarists Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison. "I saw God," Klimek would later write. "Jim saw Sterling (who played just like God, but was taller and had a mustache)." whenever the Velvets returned to La Cave—they did a series of three-night stands there in '68 and '69—so did Klimek, along with another local teenager, Peter Laughner, Between sets, Reed and Morrison would hang out, talking about gear and showing the fans guitar parts and song sketches. Much to the delight of bootleggers to come, Klimek taped the shows onto C120 cassettes.             At a time when Yes and Steely Dan cover bands dominated Ohio's music scene, guitarists Klimek and Crook formed Mirrors and played aggressive strum-and-drone leavened with early-Pink Floyd-style trippy interludes. Also emerging from Cleveland in the early '70S were other Velvets-inspired underground bands: the Electric Eels and-with Laughner on guitar—Rocket From The Tombs.             Fueled by adolescent angst, boredom and cheap beer, these occasionally violent and dysfunctional bands sniped at and stole musicians from-each other. Yet some force united them in an uneasy alliance--and still binds their members today. "It was clear that we all belonged together, if for no other reason than that everybody else in town hated us or ignored us,” says singer David Thomas, who founded Rocket and, later, Pere Ubu.             Overlaying brute-force Midwestern hard rock with an art-damaged veneer, they were post-punk before punk even reached gestation. This approach got them nowhere fast. When they could get gigs at all, they played to a handful of friends. None of the three bands put out a record before it broke up; the Eels and Rocket never saw the inside of a real recording studio. Yet thanks in part to admirers like Julian Cope, Sonic Youth and Wilco (the last of which transmogrified Rocket's "Amphetamine" into 1996's "Misunderstood"), their legend has swelled.             Rocket From The Tombs spawned the avant-rock dynasty of Pere Ubu and the shorter-lived Dead Boys, and the primal Mirrors evolved into the musically complex Styrenes. Thomas mythologized the early Cleveland scene in interviews and liner notes. Eels and Styrenes retrospective albums started appearing in 1989. Last year, the release of the only legitimate Rocket CD commenced the first time that all these bands had full-length retrospectives in print. WE ALL BELONGED TOGETHER, IF FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN THAT EVERYBODY ELSE IN TOWN HATED OR IGNORED US." —DAVID THOMAS             In February, the notoriously argumentative Rocket reunited for a show in LOS Angeles. (Replacing the deceased Laughner was Television guitarist Richard Lloyd; ironically, Laughner was once penciled in to replace Lloyd in Television.) "It remains a volatile mix of people," says Thomas of himself and the other reuniting members, guitarist Cheetah Chrome and bassist Craig Bell. "None of us have mellowed. But boy, we do love to play rock music together." . . . Cleveland's feeling better now, thanks. But back then, this rust-belt city was the butt of everyone's jokes: "Cleveland—a great place to be ... from." The city offered plenty of fodder for wisecrackers. In 1969, oily detritus on the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, scorching city bridges. ("Fall in the Cuyahoga," one joke went, "and you won't drown, you'll decompose.") The early '70s were worse: Two brutal recessions led to factory closings, and Cleveland lost 112,000 residents between 1970 and 1975; once America's fifth largest city, it tumbled to 18th by 1975.             "Cleveland was pretty bleak," says former Pere Ubu drummer Scott Krauss."After 6 O'clock and on Sundays, it became a set for The Twilight Zone."             The Eels worked at a cribbage-board factory, and Cheetah Chrome had a job in a warehouse. "A freakin' warehouse in Cleveland!" he recalls. "How much more boring can you get?"             And music? The city was great-for out-of-town bands. "But if you were from Cleveland," says Chrome, "the attitude was, 'He can't be any good. He lives down the street from me.' I played guitar, so [locals] were like, 'OK, can you play "Jumpin' Jack Flash"?' if you said you played your own music, people were disappointed."             Clearly the young Mirrors, Eels and Rocket were weaned on the outsider aggression of the Velvets, Stooges and Captain Beefheart, but several of the biggest inspirations for these bands' confrontational weirdness were nonmusical. One was Ghoulardi. From 1963 to 1966, Ernie Anderson adopted the Ghoulardi persona and donned a patently fake fright wig to host a low-budget horror-film show on a local TV station. Anderson—the father of film director Paul Thomas Anderson—interrupted the movies with Dadaesque comic inserts and trashy music like the Rivingtons' doo-wop encomium to nonsense, "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow."             "He was a huge influence on everybody who watched him," says Mirrors drummer Michael J. Weldon, who went on to publish Psychotronic Video magazine, which celebrates horror/sci-fi b-movies. "Clevelanders still talk about him and will be talking about him as long as they live." When kids sent in car and monster models they'd assembled, Ghoulardi would display them on the air before stuffing firecrackers in them. Says Eels guitarist John Morton, "He'd go, 'Oh, look at this great model that Joey Something sent me. He's seven years old.' And then he'd blow it up with an M-80."             Weldon, Morton and most of the other Mirrors and Eels grew up in Lakewood, a nearly all-white suburb along the shore of Lake Erie. "It's something that should be removed," Morton says of the town. "I'm incensed by it, just how stupid it is."             As the kids got older, another influence emerged: Vietnam. "Kent State happened when we were in high school," says Weldon. "We saw National Guard vehicles go by on the way there." As if a future in Cleveland weren't bleak enough, many graduates of the drug-riddled Lakewood High could look forward to getting drafted. . . . Ah, Cleveland in the wintertime. It's Dec. 22, 1974, and on the Billboard chart this month are tracks by the Eagles, Doobie Brothers, Styx and Grand Funk Railroad. We're at a bar called the Viking Saloon. On the same bill for the first and only time are the Eels, Rocket and Mirrors. The gig poster—designed by John Morton—calls it Special Extermination Music Night and sports two swastikas and a picture of a guy in a tinfoil mask. Weekly paper The Scene runs a show preview that oozes sarcasm: "It's a concert that should prove to be historic ... the most diversified display of talent since Larry, Curly and Moe." Ouch.             Despite the modest $1.75 cover charge and the admonition on the poster ("Attendance Required"), the turnout is disappointing, "I expected this capacity crowd cheering," says Morton, "and we got I don't know how many people there, most of them booing."             Backstage, two factors contribute to the tension: First, these bands consist of young music snobs who disdain each other's tastes. Second, they share members. For instance, Paul Marotta is playing guitar in the Eels and keyboards in Mirrors, which vexes Eels singer Dave McManus. "He thought Mirrors was just a cover band and the Eels were superior musically and artistically," says Marotta. "So it was Davy's idea that I play [the mirrors' set] behind a curtain. Sort of like the Wizard Of OZ." The curtain is dutifully erected. Before long, the other Mirrors, pissed off, tear it down.             Likewise, Mirrors bassist Craig Bell has also recently joined Rocket, enraging guitarist Jamie Klimek. Bell sits out the Rocket set to appease Mirrors. But the gesture doesn't work; shortly after the gig, according to Bell, Klimek sends him a letter firing him from Mirrors. Klimek also turns up his nose when Rocket's Peter Laughner takes out a new pair of jeans and cuts holes in them for his stage outfit. "Very 'with it,' Pete," Klimek would later write. "What a jerk."             Unlike Mirrors, the Eels don't do Velvet Underground covers. Instead, McManus sings a capella versions of TV theme songs. And he has a more incendiary idea: He wants to "play" a gas-powered lawn mower. "That seemed like, 'Hey, fine, why not?'" says Morton. "Makes perfect sense, right? But I don't think Davy cut a lawn in his life. So we had the lawn mower onstage, and we had all the (guitar and microphone) cords, and I was just thinking about a disaster. But you know, hey, it's art."             The Eels start the song, says Morton, "and Davy's pulling and pulling on the thing, but he didn't have the choke out." So although the legend insists otherwise, the Eels never fired up a lawn mower onstage. next page!!!!