from “Speak in Tongues: An Oral History of Cleveland's Infamous DIY Punk Venue”
Eric Sandy | Speak in Tongues: An Oral History of Cleveland's Infamous DIY Punk Venue | Microcosm Publishing | 2022 | 189 Pages
The Future Is Past, The Past Is Future
It came and went like a dream, as all good things do.
Speak In Tongues, the institution, existed as a small DIY arts space on the west side of Cleveland from October 7, 1994, until New Year’s Eve 2001. It meant something different to every person who passed through its walls, but at its core Speak In Tongues was a place capable of tapping into the creative impulses of a generation. One could never be sure what the next show would bring, but the baseline ethos (wild abandon, free expression, politically inclined self-awareness) was ever present. This is an increasingly uncommon thing in America—an institution capable of sticking to its principles, even for a short period of time—and the story of how Speak In Tongues came to be (and how it got away) is an important reminder of what’s possible when a group of people come together with a few wild ideas and some spare time.
Nowadays, with the right eyes, on a streetlight-stunned night, the brick building at 4311 Lorain Avenue can prompt a surge of memories for those who know. It was here, for seven fast years, where a loose-knit collective of independently minded artists, musicians, goof balls, seekers, and performers of all stripes gathered to create a space for themselves—and for anyone else who stumbled through the door. You can see them now: hanging out on the front steps, sepia-toned; ambling around the back lot, asking questions about the show that night and, maybe, the boundless meaning of life; and, there, inside, dancing and swaying and loudly proclaiming that it’s all happening right now. They are celebrating the very fact that they’re here at all, here to build and create and transform their surroundings to reflect who they are. These visions come and go. The show winds down. If these moments never ended, it wouldn’t count for much—would it? The ending of a story is what makes the entire thing precious.
This is a story about how we tell stories.
With a different set of eyes, eyes less attuned to the magic of the past, the building on Lorain Avenue is as of this writing home to a sandwich joint and a wax studio and a bunch of apartments. These things hold their own place in the great narrative of the post-industrial Rust Belt city, sure, but this is a distinct era now— something apart from the world that created Speak In Tongues and the world that Speak In Tongues created. Cleveland, like all of us in a way, has moved on. Speak In Tongues, the institution, is no more.
The idea, on the other hand . . .
Artistic expression has a certain time-travel quality to it, an ineffable ability to conjure memories of love and dreams of unknowable fate. Don’t get me wrong: this is not about visiting the building or the sandwich place or the salon, nor is it about recreating something lost to time. I’m talking, rather, about how we might access the idea of Speak In Tongues. It’s right there! Right in front of us. We can still reach out and tap into it.
Dave Petrovich was the guy who got this thing started back in the fall of 1994. He and his friend, the late Shelby Bell, were looking for a space to host events and parties and art shows and performances—whatever might come to mind. The plan grew out of a local arts zine that Petrovich and his roommate, Rob Sabetto, were working on at the time. This was a pre-internet epoch, of course, an age of photocopies and word-of-mouth excitement. Bell worked at the Kinko’s in downtown Cleveland, which Petrovich frequented for late-night photocopy work. This part of the origin story is important, as it speaks to the milieu of something resembling mid-nineties “social media.” The point was always to share the creative work, whether that be in print form or in a physical space like a music venue. The concept of social media wouldn’t show up and go berserk for another fifteen-ish years, but the intent has always been there in our artistic reach. The mid-nineties was downright bursting with zines, and Petrovich and Sabetto wanted to share some Gonzo-style literary perspective with Cleveland.
Earlier that year, in the summer of 1994, Petrovich and Sabetto and their friends had assembled a very much off-the-grid art gallery opening on the rooftop of an abandoned cold storage warehouse in Cleveland. Obscured from the nearby freeway, Petrovich threw together an ad-hoc art show—framed by walls fashioned from dumped tires and lit by long glass candles at night, and complete with flyers around town. That was the initial thrust: guerrilla art under the name AWOL, Art Without Limits. The zine would follow, naturally, promoting these shows to the underground and drawing artists together in strange buildings around Cleveland. They eventually changed the name of the zine to Four Eyes upon realizing that there was another group in town going by the name AWOL. Nevertheless, there was some real artistic momentum there.
But how could the idea be taken further?
Petrovich and Bell found an old storefront owned by the Ohio Communist Party, landlords who would be generally tolerant of the politically mind-expanding performances that might grace the as-yet-unbuilt stage on any given night. This was another one of the auspicious turns that brought the club into being: the Communist Party seems in retrospect like the perfect backdrop for the horizontally structured, direct action-minded mischief that would make the space what it was. The project came together suddenly.
“I was like, this is the building! This is the street!” Petrovich says. “This is, like, the neighborhood that I wanted to do my thing, because Lorain was really pretty rundown—but there were still some really cool-looking old storefronts, and it had some character, you know? It wasn’t a total war zone or anything like that, but it was definitely—you know, it wasn’t Lakewood.”
Five or six miles down the road was Lakewood, an inner-ring suburb that leaned just toward the suburb side of the equation. Here, at Lorain and West 43rd, was something else entirely, something that would take some work to access, something sort of desolate and . . . creatively inviting.
Petrovich and Bell leased the ground floor of the three-story building. Up top, on the third floor, Tim Funtjar was running Tim Funtjar’s Bulbous Emporium—a name that somehow explains exactly the sort of performance art and music that was going on up there. That space would soon become the Pieta (aka La Pieta), a DIY space that gathered crowds similar to those congregating down below at Speak. It was a holistic venue in that way. People came and fell into a new universe.
Danny Noonan, who would later move into Speak In Tongues and become the institution’s final tenant, provides a quick physical tour:
“You walk into the room, and there’s the main room and then another room up, like, six inches, a higher part, and then there’s the stage. To the left of that was a bar area where there was this really old, long bar and this huge, long mirror. That was usually where bands sold their merch, just setting it on the bar. When I first went there I was very shy, and I just felt like the bar area was where the insiders and the hip people hung out. Often, I was too nervous to go over to that part. This was all just in my head. I want to reiterate that a majority of the people that were there were super nice and very welcoming, but this was, like, when I was sixteen or seventeen.
“Also, there was the kitchen. Now, I was the kid, who, when I saw the flyer and it said, ‘Show at 9,’ or whatever, I showed up at 8:55, because I don’t want to miss anything—and so, of course, there’d be nothing going on. A lot of times, the bands would make the kitchen seem really cool, too, because they’d be making coffee or whatever.
“Beyond the stage, there was this long hallway that was always filled with musical equipment and bits and pieces for people’s future art projects. In the very back was a room which people lived in at different times. It was the very last room that I lived in.
“There were two stairwells: the one off of the kitchen led to the men’s bathroom, which was horrendous, and I’m sure a lot of people will talk about how horrendous it was. It was also where the shower was, and you just had to deal with that. The other stairwell went down to the boiler room and then the women’s bathroom, which actually had stalls with wooden doors and then, like, benches that were bolted to the wall.
“Next to that was a door that led into the bedrooms. There were a different number of bedrooms depending on how many pieces of drywall we used to block everything off. That was the physical nature of the place.”
Speak In Tongues, the institution, was supremely of its time. The place was carved out of the unique cultural melange that formed the various underground scenes of that vaunted decade. It was a place and a moment in time—specifically in and of Cleveland—but it’s part of a grander tradition of independent artistry, untethered from corporate demands or capitalist transactions, a tradition that persists to this day, if only in quieter and stranger corners of America. The 1990s just happened to be remarkably fertile for a creative story like this. More than twenty years on, that decade is mined for its rich individualism and Gen-X bildungsroman narratives. Speak In Tongues is replete with all of it.
•
The nineties were also a decade of experimentation and reignited grassroots organization. In the face of globalizing politics and economics, artists were keen to ply their trades in unconventional spaces. Cities like Cleveland had emptied out, too, following midcentury booms, leaving whole neighborhoods available for cheap rent. It makes sense that the institution that Petrovich and Bell were setting up—building off the literary community already tuned into what was happening in local zines—was just the sort of thing that would be spaces for artists to perform. Low-risk, high-reward, in a way. The creative latitude was almost endless.
Over on speakintongues.com, which remains up and running as of this writing, you’ll find a list of the hundreds of bands that played the club over the years. A sampling: 9 Shocks Terror, 764-HERO, Alkaline Trio, Anti Flag, Boy Sets Fire, Bump’n Uglies, Califone, Churchbuilder, Dismemberment Plan, Federation X, Girltalk, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, His Hero Is Gone, Hot Water Music, Jimmy Eat World, June of ‘44, Lifter Puller, Lightning Bolt, Modest Mouse, the Mooney Suzuki, Mountain Goats, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, Party of Helicopters, Red House Painters, Six Parts Seven, and Tortoise. And that’s just a sample of the most well known bands.
From there, the denizens of Speak In Tongues hosted and showcased eyebrow-raising theater, dance, comedy, film. You name it, it had a home on the Speak In Tongues stage (or near it, at any rate). Technology might not have yet given us phones decked out as pocket-sized film studios, but the ability to create cool artistic experiences was rapidly opening doors to anyone with the will. The people were taking matters into their own hands.
The forces that brought Speak In Tongues into this world were present in other cities, of course. Often enough, it was the very ethos of a place like Speak In Tongues that gave birth to new local bands and the vanguard of new neighborhood identities in a given city. LoBot and Huffin House in Oakland, California; Fort Thunder in Providence, Rhode Island; Lounge Ax in Chicago, Illinois.
Cleveland, particularly, nourished the seeds that allowed for a place like Speak In Tongues. At the time, it was a crestfallen post-industrial city that was just on the very cusp of an entrenched downtown investment plan that would further consolidate what it meant to be part of the in-crowd in Cleveland: the sports stadia, the fine dining, the knowing political corruption. The building at 4311 Lorain Avenue was just two miles from Jacobs Field, the baseball stadium that had opened months before Speak In Tongues held its first show in 1994, but it may as well have been a lightyear down the road. Current residents of Cleveland, circa 2022, wouldn’t know it from the looks of it, but the near west side in those days was emptier and grimmer—a fringe existence for those who ventured into Ohio City.
This is an overgeneralization of the city’s recent history (with a bit of nostalgia thrown in), but it provides a simple frame for what happened at Speak In Tongues. It’s easy enough to overgeneralize and romanticize the past. Sean Carnage, a frequent visitor, compared it to anarchist writer Hakim Bey’s concept of the temporary autonomous zone (TAZ), first introduced in his work in 1990. The TAZ, he wrote, is a space devoid of external social control, a space existing on its own terms. (Not for nothing, the TAZ became a fundamental framing device for the event that would become Burning Man.) Sheltered by time from the internet and an increasingly militarized police force awaiting Americans around the turn of the millennium, the nineties provided a nice cocoon for those inclined toward the TAZ mentality. All that was needed was a physical space and an idea.
“I’m a big believer in temporary autonomous zones,” Carnage said from his current home in California. “I think it’s really important, just as an instructional thing for kids and for anyone in the future, that they know that you can create this sort of anarchy bubble—and maybe it can’t last forever. I think people get really, really hung up on that. I think that’s a value. There’s always value in telling those stories, because some young person—or anyone, really—reads it and gets inspired to do something similar.” Carnage is not the only one to evoke the idea of temporary autonomous zones when discussing Speak In Tongues. And, with a bit of imagination, wherever the institution has flown to, we can visit it once again.
"The Future Is Past, The Past Is Future" from Speak in Tongues: An Oral History of Cleveland's Infamous DIY Punk Venue.
© 2022 Eric Sandy. Reprinted with permission of Microcosm Publishing.