Cleveland Vintage Blog

So, we all know that Cleveland is the Rock & Roll Capital of the World, right? But how many of you know that Cleveland’s heightened music passions were the catalyst in the early 1970s for then-WMMS program director Billy Bass to create the Coffee Break Concert Series that debuted in studio in 1972? Bass was approached with a live performance opportunity for a little-known artist, Carol Hall, who had just released her first album. Bass quickly accepted and Hall performed in the cramped WMMS production studio - and another piece of Cleveland music history was born. Everyone saw the potential...

If you're from the Midwest, you might say something like, "Hey, you guys, wait up!" If you're from the South, you might say something like, "Hey, y'all, what can I get you to eat?" The breakdown - essentially a north vs. south indicator - is fairly simple at first glance, but there are some interesting trends to note about this grammatical usage and its continuing evolution in the English language (not unlike our previous foray into the pop vs. soda debate). For one thing, "you guys" has an inherently male connotation, and there simply isn't a viable second-person plural pronoun...

It's the joke everyone likes to make about Cleveland.  "Hey, remember when the river caught on fire?" To which you can respond, "You'll have to be more specific, because it happened a whole bunch of times."  In the 1960s, the Cuyahoga River actually caught fire more than a dozen times, as it had long been a dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste from the city's manufacturing companies. And while river fires weren't all that newsworthy to Clevelanders by the end of the decade, the blaze on June 22, 1969 (capping off a tumultuous decade that only led to a new one...

Raise your hand if you ever spent a Friday night at home growing up in Cleveland watching either The Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show, or what it evolved into: Big Chuck and Lil' John. Just what I thought - almost everyone. That said, in addition to looking forward to the awful movies they would put forward, we would also look forward to the hilarious skits at commercial breaks. Some were one-offs, new each week, while others were recurring characters or events. One that comes to mind is Cleveland’s pizza-eating champion, “Mushmouth” Mariano Pacetti. The “Pizza Fight” was a weekly event on the show, and...

Cleveland was once known as "Bomb City, USA" for a reason - and it wasn't just regulated to the ongoing mob wars going on in the city. On April 26, 1971, even the Hanna Theatre downtown fell victim to a bomb attack. To protest the production of the play Hair - a rock musical that featured plenty of drug use, nudity, sexuality, and obscene language - someone threw a bomb out of their car, which bounced off the theater's marquee and exploded at the curb. It would blow out more than 40 windows in the Hanna Building, causing some minor damage to...