Event Recap - Meeting with Jules and Fran Belkin, March 15, 2022

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.

Event Recap - Meeting with John Grabowski, February 9, 2022

On February 9, Professor John Grabowski of CWRU and a nationally recognized expert on the history of Northeast Ohio, gave a lively talk to and entertained a spirited discussion with Club members on the history of Cleveland.

Professor Grabowski came reinforced with several dozen illustrations, the first of which showed Cleveland shortly after founding by Connecticut pioneers settling on land set aside for their state’s excess population. “They were looking for good farmland,” Grabowski said, “and meant the settlement to be a market center for farmers. In true New England fashion, the first thing they did was lay out a public square for the town,” the square taking a prominent place in the 19th-century sketch and still at the heart of Cleveland.

Two important developments changed Cleveland from the envisioned market town to an industrialized city, Grabowski said: the canal system linking Lake Erie to the Ohio River, and the discovery of minerals in Michigan and Minnesota, namely copper and iron ore. Somewhat later, the discovery of petroleum 130 miles east along Oil Creek in Pennsylvania opened the opportunity for Cleveland to become a refining and shipping hub, an opportunity extraordinarily exploited by the young accountant and commodities trader John D. Rockefeller.

Other interesting facts about Cleveland noted by Professor Grabowski:

  • Rockefeller established the Standard Oil Company along the Cuyahoga River about where Kingsbury Run enters the river today.

  • Location made Cleveland a good center for iron and steelmaking: iron ore came down the lakes; coal for blast furnaces was abundant from Pennsylvania; and there was plenty of water.

  • Extraordinary fortunes were made. Mansions were so grand on Euclid Avenue that England’s Baedeker guide to America suggested people see it. The fortunes made during the Gilded Age in Cleveland laid the foundations of the Cleveland Clinic, the Art Museum and more.

  • Ohio City on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River was not originally part of Cleveland. It developed independently and was a separate city until the 1850s.

  • Ohio City and the Tremont area to its south are now popular neighborhoods for young people desiring the benefits of downtown. Tremont, named for the Boston street and normally pronounced TREE-mont, is now sometimes humorously pronounced as it might be in French – TRAY-mon – for its rising status.

  • Irishtown Bend on the Cuyahoga was so named on account of Irish there loading and unloading lake boats. It is now being developed as a park, and the Cuyahoga itself has become the center of recreation in the city.

  • Immigrants developed their own communities, the original names of some still in use: Poles named their neighborhood Warszawa after Poland’s capital; and Czechs named theirs Praha (Prague) and Karlin.. Little Italy on the East Side was the most concentrated of ethnic neighborhoods; it got its start with Italian stone carvers working on monuments for Lake View Cemetery.

  • Downtown has been attracting significant numbers of young people. Nine stories of the Terminal Tower are being converted to apartments, and condominium projects are popular. The near West Side is rapidly changing, as is University Circle on the East Side.

Professor Grabowski, who has authored and co-authored books about Cleveland has supplied a bibliography of Cleveland history, which is available on our website here.

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