I Went Back To Ohio

This past weekend, I went back to Cleveland, Ohio with my fiancee to watch her dad get married. This meant I had to miss my new favorite band, Pissed Jeans, who played the Sunset on Friday (can anyone fill me in? Were they any good?) But I made up for it by thinking about punk rock a lot. I do this anyway, but there's nothing like a trip to a place like Cleve-O to really re-grease those thinkin' wheels. In my piece on Pissed Jeans, I went on and on about how the band is a product of its environment (Eastern Pennsylvania). Fact is, punk rock like that cannot be made in places like the Northwest. Just as Mudhoney or the Wipers would not sound like they do had they hailed from Little Rock, Arkansas or Hermosa Beach, California. This topic is fairly obvious and has been discussed at length by others, but it's still no less fascinating. The simple point of this silly rant is that a trip to Cleve Land reminded me of a record by a shamefully overlooked Cleveland band...The Pagans' Shit Street. In the song "Eyes of Satan", Mike Hudson sneers the line "I'm in a car/and I'm going nowhere" over and over. After the wedding, as my lady and I drove with a couple of our friends through the desolate eastside streets of Painesville, Willoughby, Mentor and Eastlake, looking for something to do, I realized for the first time what that line truly meant. So, make all the Cleveland jokes you want, but that city produced some of the best damn punk rock that actually remains relevant to this day.