The Cleveland Club visited with Jules and Fran Belkin on March 15. Jules and his late brother Mike were the greatest Rock & Roll producers in Cleveland from the 1960s to the year 2000.
Jules related how he and Mike got into the business rather back-handedly. They worked in clothing store in Ashtabula. The owner liked to bring in bands as store promotions. When the owner tired of it, he handed the work over to Mike, who was told no one was seriously promoting rock & roll music in Cleveland. So he tried it, and the first show featured the New Christy Minstrels. It wasn’t a runaway success, but it was a start, and after thoughts of giving it up for concentration on the retail clothing business Mike and Jules kept at concert-making. Soon the two were renting the likes of Public Auditorium and selling tickets by the tens of thousands.
For example, they sold 84,000 tickets for the Rolling Stones concert in Municipal Stadium in June 1975. Janis Joplin and her audience shook the floor so badly in 1968 at Public Hall that Katherine Hepburn performing a play adjacent in the Music Hall sent a message to tone it down.
Jules and Mike organized concerts at the Front Row Theater and the Allen Theater. This is when, paraphrasing Jules, the Allen was a wreck, but the ticket sales were so good that the concerts’ successes paved the way for saving the Allen from demolition and Playhouse Square for its dramatic revival.
The impresario business, of course, was fraught with peril. Some rock & roll bands cancelled at the last minute; others behaved badly. Some British acts wrote into their contracts they would accept no American-made beer. Kiss once demanded a certain wine, for which concert aides scoured Cleveland wine shops in vain. The type did not exist; it was a Kiss prank.
Jules and Mike liked to make tee-shirts for performing groups and ordered embroidered ones for Bruce Springsteen only to be told later that he really did not like to be called “The Boss.”
Although Mike died in 2019, Jules keeps ties to the music business alive by remaining on the Board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He explained to the Club how voting for Inductees works: Most weight for votes coming from a list of 600 industry leaders; lesser weight from the members of the Hall of Fame Board; and only a slight weight from fans. Induction ceremonies now divide between Cleveland and New York, with an occasional nod to Los Angeles. Cleveland offers a far larger hall – Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse -- than New York can and last year’s celebration in Cleveland with an astonishing array of rock & roll celebrities was particularly notable.
Jules and Mike sold the impresario business 20 years ago, but Fran recently ran across boxes of memorabilia from the Belkin rock & roll era. She assembled them and stories for a book she published in 2018 called Rock This Town.