Cool Cleveland People

Warren Zanes

Blake is a singer and songwriter with a rich history herself. For the past several years, she has recorded and performed under the name April March, singing mostly in French, and has become very popular in France and other countries. She also worked as an illustrator for Archie Comics, an animator and writer for the Ren & Stimpy series, and an animator for the Pee-Wee's Playhouse series, and toured for a year with the legendary Ronnie Spector as one of the Ronnettes.

When Zanes and Blake moved to Cleveland from New York, two things surprised them about the city: first, that they like it here, and second, that we don't. That aside, they have felt welcomed into the community here and have been able to keep their creative juices flowing.

Cool Cleveland: How did you get the Del Fuegos at such a young age? What led to that?

Warren Zanes: It was my brother's band. We grew up in New Hampshire. The major ingredients of our musical esthetic were our mother's record collection, Boston oldies radio – it was mostly '50s with some '60s – and the punk sensibility. Those three things kind of define the esthetic that would factor into the Del Fuegos.

We also went to concerts. My first concert was my mother taking me to see ZZ Top with the Dictators opening up. If there was a concert in town, it didn't matter what it was; we showed up for the experience, and because a concert was the best tutor that we knew of.

Right before I joined the Del Fuegos, I was at prep school [Phillips Andover in Massachusetts] and I would escape in the night, illegally leave the campus. I had this suit: black pants, black shirt and a black ski mask that I would put on because there were security police on the campus. And if they saw you and you were wearing a ski mask, they didn't know who you were. But, every concert, I'd slip out of the dorm, and I'd meet up with a towny, and we'd drive into Boston. Often, we'd go see my brother's band, the Del Fuegos. We would also see bands like my favorite, the Liars and others. And everything that was happening on the campus at prep school started to shrink.

So, when my brother, who's four years older, asked me to join the Del Fuegos, I felt like I was being asked to join the Beatles, because I was so in awe of the energy that was coming out of the Boston club scene. So I joined his band – this was in '83 – and six months later we signed with Warner Bros.

Had you played in any bands at school?
No. No. When my brother asked me to join, I said yes. But, my first question after saying yes to joining was, "What instrument will I play?" That's when he told me I'd be playing guitar. I didn't play guitar. So I had three months to get up to speed!

You didn't play at all?
I did the next day. (laughs) But, believe me, we came out of the spirit of the punk movement. There wasn't any question that not knowing how to play wasn't possible.

Why did he ask you to be in the band if you didn't play?
And, by the way, I played lead guitar! My brother, Dan, went and saw the Blasters play, which had two brothers up front. And one thing we know about rock and roll: It's not simply about musicianship; it's about your personal vibe. And he felt that there's a brother chemistry we've got that would really make sense in the band context. I was a pretty wild youngster. I looked like I was 12 when I was 16, but I had a kind of unrestricted sense about me. There was nowhere I wasn't willing to go. I had just this wildness, like a dangerous rodent of some sort. (laughs) And, he wanted that in the band. So I immediately started taking guitar seriously, and felt that, you know, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols – these guys were not like great practitioners of the form, but they were great practitioners of the rock and roll spirit. So that's what I kind of studied under.

Did Dan teach you how to play guitar?
He showed me a couple of things: "Here's some bar chords, here's the blues scale, and here's an album by the Rolling Stones. Now go sit with it all."

That was it?
Yes. And, you know, for the first few gigs, I'd just play four songs. In about a month I was up to the full set. I just brought that unrestricted character to the performance, and we were known for very high-energy shows.

And the Del Fuegos were pretty successful.
Over the next five years, we made three records for Warner Brothers, and we went from being very much associated with the underground to being associated with something more like, I hate to say "mainstream rock." But we had a capacity to play in the mainstream, because we did polish things up, you know, very consciously. We wanted to get as big as we could get! And that meant we went from playing shows in small clubs to playing with bands like INXS, ZZ Top, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Kinks.

I split. You know, the good thing about brothers being a band is that you do get to draw on a certain chemistry that can really power a band. The bad thing about brothers being in a band is that they're brothers. I wanted an increasingly large piece of the pie, and my brother was increasingly unwilling to give it. But I'm sympathetic with his position, because if you're a band leader and you're approaching your third record, that's not the time for a change. But, at the same time, I think he did himself a disservice in not finding the room, because, he was right about the brother energy. We could have played it up more and we could have made more creative use of it. But, you know, that's historical retrospect, and I'm really grateful for the experience that he gave me. And we're pals today.

[These days, Dan Zanes is a successful singer-songwriter of family and children's music.]

After leaving the group, did you continue on in music, initially?
I was prepared at that time to stay in music. And, I went to the woodshed with an Atari 8-track machine. It was one of the best musical experiences because it was just me and that machine and my instruments, and I learned about production from that angle, which has been crucial for me. I did that for a year and I came out the other side with a demo tape, which I sent it out to three people. One was T-Bone Walker, who was a staff producer at CBS at that time. I got a great response. T-Bone said, "I want to do something." I said, "Cool." So, I didn't shop it or anything.

Then I moved to New Orleans because of a girl. I was in hot pursuit. I ended up moving down there, kind of waiting on T-Bone. I really liked this girl. I don't think she liked me quite as much as I liked her. At a certain point she was clearly kind of ready to squirm her way out of this relationship, and I was at the bargaining table trying to stay in the relationship. I asked her what I could possibly do to keep things intact, and she said, "You could find something to talk about other than music." I said, "Great. How do I do that?" And, she said, "Go to college."

So I pulled out a map and I found the icon for "university" and I found my apartment on the map. I found the closest university and I walked into the admissions office and said, "Look, I'm just trying to stay in a relationship here, so don't put me through any long application process. I just want to take two classes." They looked at me like I was insane, but they said, "Okay, we'll bypass the application process – you went to Phillips Andover; that's enough." So I took two classes.

What classes were they?
I took a history of philosophy and a women's literature.

Did it work?
Well, the girl dumped me, anyway. But, when I went into those classes, it was like some part of me that hadn't been nourished by playing in a rock band was suddenly nourished. I showed up to class early, I raised my hand every time the teacher asked a question and I was the unfortunate being who went to the teacher after class and asked for extra homework. I just took to it. I never planned on that.

What happened to CBS and T-Bone Walker?
Nothing. We kept talking as if it was going to happen, but the bottom line is: When you're talking to someone at a label, and you're telling them about what you're reading for your literature class, they know you're not really there. I'm sure he picked up on it and I just... my mind shifted. I found that a university is a place where you sit down at regular intervals with reading groups; you all read the same books and get together at the same time and talk about them. And I was like, "This is the single greatest idea that has ever happened." I just wanted to keep coming back to my reading group.

And then I found that there's a way to eventually get them to pay you to do it. When you get to the graduate school level, you're getting a stipend, you're getting a tuition waver, and if you know how to live on rice and beans, and you don't have any kids to feed, you're happenin'. You've got everything you need. And so I went into a kind of isolation. I didn't go out to clubs, or anything. And 12 years later I had a bachelor's, two masters', and a Ph.D., and I had come out of music because I was so drawn in by the intellectual environment.

You mean you came out of actively playing music, but did you stay current, musically, all that time?
Yes. I couldn't not stay current with music, because I could never let that go. And, I wrote songs the whole time. Then, as I was in the dissertation-writing process, that was when my 15th high school reunion came up. I called Elinor, who I had only talked to twice in 15 years. We went together at school, but we broke up around the time we graduated. So I called her.

Where was she then?
She was out in California. She didn't immediately say, "Oh, yeah. Let's go to the reunion; that'll be fun." She said, "Give me 24 hours to think about it." So I called her back a day later and she said, "Okay, I have to go to Paris for a month and I'll call you when I get back." So she came back, we went to the reunion, and we were engaged three weeks later.

So I wrote a bunch of songs for her. And the next thing you know, I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation, but I get a label deal and pretty soon I'm not writing my dissertation; I'm down in Nashville making a record of these new songs. And, only because [the producers] the Dust Brothers' label kind of blew up right as I was getting ready to release the CD, only for that reason did I go back and finish the dissertation.

What was the topic?
It was on looking at the effects of globalization from a cultural standpoint. I know it sounds like: "Where's the music in that?" But there was music in it. And I hate to give – I haven't learned to give the short description of that project, so, I'm not going to burden you with the long description. But, it was a great writing process for me. And, I do feel that I had the best situation, in that I got to take a lot of the ideas from that dissertation – and typically what you do is you turn them into a university press book, then you go after your first job. But I wrote a book about Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis, in which I used a lot of the ideas from my dissertation. I guess, in a way, that's a radical remix of my dissertation, which is self-freeing.

But you obviously finished your dissertation and got your CD out.
Yes. Because I couldn't get the tapes from the label for two years, because of legal hold-ups, I finished the dissertation. Then I found a new label, Dual Tone. They took the record and put it out. So, around that time, I'm now a "doctor," I'm teaching at the school of visual arts in Manhattan, I'm releasing a record, and I'm writing my book Dusty in Memphis. So, I have a lot irons in the fire. But around that same time the New York Times had a regular article in their fashion section – "A Night on the Town" – and they did "A Night on the Town" with Dan and Warren Zanes.

It was more Dan, because of his new family music project. He told them he wanted to bring his brother along, so we did this. We went out and Will Dana, who is an editor of Rolling Stone, wrote the piece for the New York Times. And then Howard Kramer and Jim Henke here at the [Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and] Museum both read this article. Now, they were looking for someone to fill the VP of education position, and said, "This guy: Rock and roll. Ph.D. Exactly."

And, my experience of having a Ph.D. and being a musician was that they were segregated worlds. When I showed up to the university and said, "I'm here to teach," they said, "I hope the music doesn't get in the way." And when I show up at a manager's door and say, "Hello. I want help with this project," they say, "I hope the school doesn't get in the way." Everybody was concerned that they would interfere with one another. But suddenly, here's this job that the very thing they want is that interference! They want to draw on both dimensions of my background.

Which probably doesn't happen too often besides this place – maybe at the Experience Music Project …
Exactly. So we're in Brooklyn, and we are very happy there, but suddenly here's this job in this institution where the fit is so right. We talked about it a lot, but we didn't really deliberate that much; the fit was just too right.

Did you have reservations about moving to Cleveland.
It's funny: A lot of people, when we were in Brooklyn, didn't as much as bat an eye when we said we were moving to Cleveland. Not as much as the people in Cleveland did. This was surprising to us. Elinor had played a show at the Beachland Ballroom around the time we got here – she was doing a few American dates, and she played there. Afterwards she was selling merchandise – CDs and some other stuff – and, almost to a person, everybody was apologizing for Cleveland. We had just gotten here, and my wife kept saying, "I actually like Cleveland." The oppressive part is everybody apologizing for it. So this was an odd experience, that inferiority complex, because we were digging the place.

So is the job what you thought it was going to be?
Yes. They did a pretty accurate representation of the job in advance; I don't feel like anybody sold me a bill of goods. It involves teaching, it involves productions on the scale of the American Music Masters series, it demands quite a bit of creative input. And, the material, it's kind of a cliché to say, but I'm kind of passionate about the objective study here. I'd loved it as a player, I love it as a listener, I love the culture around it, and in this capacity, I tend to all those things.

And I haven't left the university campus. I teach at Case. I just did an Emergence of Rock and Roll class. I enjoy still having a presence on the campus, and I'll probably develop that, I'll be teaching again at Case in the fall. And there are lots of other classes. I was just there teaching an art history class for someone. And we're also present in the Cleveland municipal school district and beyond, because we're doing two classes a day.

Do you go out to the schools?
They come into the building. I've done a fair amount of teaching. I have two new educators who now take the classes, but before I hired them, I was up there in front of the kids for 12 classes. That's a lot of teaching right out of the gate.

So you jumped right into the fire.
Actually, things started before I even got here. Like, I knew that the American Music Masters was a special program, and I knew it had years of glory and then years of relative difficulty in achieving that glory. I want to restore it. So, I started working on that before I was actually being paid. I was in Brooklyn and on a lot of conference calls, and seeing how to get that thing built back up. I think that's a real challenge–you know, we really don't have tons of money to spend on that.

Being relatively new here, what kind of feedback do you get on the museum?
People love the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Its harshest critics are the ones in closest proximity, which is interesting to me. But, here's the place I said I'd see the most outspoken advocacy – within the musician's community. I know there will still be some people who will say rock and roll is not inherently institutional, and that's an institution, so it's being co-opted. But, I think a visit clears that issue up. Musicians like to take a walk to a physical place that is telling the history of the music that they love. It's a bullseye.

So when I got a call from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was simply, "Cool." Hadn't been here, just knew of it from the press and mostly from word of mouth in the musician community, where everyone goes away with their favorite aspect of the museum. I have lots of friends telling me about their favorite thing they saw and what was cool about it. So I was drawn in by the mission of this place.

And, then as a teacher, I loved the idea of teaching students about an art form, and one that I'm unequivocally passionate about. When I teach the history of the visual arts, and when I was teaching, let's say, 1950s American culture and talking about Jackson Pollack, I never had an experience in front of a Jackson Pollack painting like I did with the song "I Think We're Alone Now." It just didn't happen for me. So, to be with students talking about something that my first contact with was being moved emotionally, being sucked in by the music, by the lyrics, by the production, by the vocal performance – it's great to be in front of a classroom when that's your material. Unlike a painting – I mean, you don't make out to a painting, or a dance. I would be worried about some kid making out with his girlfriend to one of those monochrome canvases.

Clevelanders are always talking about the "community" here. Have you felt that?
I feel integrated with the community in ways that I could never be in Brooklyn. I feel I know people in the schools, I know people at all the other cultural institutions. I kind of walked into my office and was immediately in the community. Sooner than I expected, the phone started ringing and I was being welcomed into town and I didn't quite know what I was doing here yet. But, it was incredibly welcoming.

Interview and photos by Cool Cleveland correspondent David Budin popcycles@sbcglobal.net (:divend:)