With the weather turning colder, here’s an appropriate David Helton WMMS Buzzard print ad from early 1975. After close to a year after his conception, the Buzzard had established himself as the official WMMS mascot – and the Buzzard’s character was slowly evolving.

With the Buzzard, we coveted the idea of going where no station had gone before. How could we take advantage of the identity, how cold we make WMMS greater than the combined respective peaks of WIXY, KYW, and WHK? How could we build the Buzzard into the most recognizable logo in Cleveland since Chief Wahoo? Going beyond the obvious T-shirts and sweatshirts, we felt we could market key chains, belt buckles, roach clips, and jeans – and we did.

This ad appeared in the March 10, 1975 issue of Exit Magazine, Cleveland’s alternative weekly paper at that time.

For more on the Buzzard – see Chapter 7 – Hatching the Buzzard in The Buzzard.

Click on the Buzzard ad multiple times for larger size images

interviews continue below

Fish stink from the head.

Loosely translated, the freshness of a fish is judged from the condition of its head.

It also defines leadership gone badly.

A leader carries the definitive accountability of a company’s success or failure.  Strong management and powerful leadership are fundamental functions in any profitable business.

The first time I heard that saying in a leadership context was from my boss of all bosses – Carl Hirsch, who rose in rank to President of Malrite Communications during those “glory days” of WMMS.

I’d never met anyone who possessed a better bullshit meter than Carl. He could size up a person, a plan, or a situation in seconds.

There were moments where he’d be demanding – but always for good reason.  He was a natural born leader – and he brought out everyone’s best leadership skills.

We never spent money frivolously.   Though WMMS became the most visible station in Cleveland – most of it was due to creative promotion and marketing.   Bumper sticker costs were covered by providing clients couponing opportunities on the backs of the stickers.   Our T-shirts – walking billboards, we called them – and other Buzzard merchandise always sold well – and we funneled our profits to various charities.

Nearly everything we did was self-contained and created “in house,” including our TV spots, contesting, and special programming and events.

During those years, we had a championship team – on the air – and behind the scenes.

I didn’t fully appreciate the freedom and independence we shared at WMMS until I started talking with programmers in other markets.   I also realized that Carl made us earn that privilege.

We didn’t have a rulebook of do’s and don’ts.  What mattered was to be at our very best at all times – and to never jeopardize our broadcast license.

Carl transformed Malrite from a mid-size, mostly secondary market radio chain – to what became one of the most respected radio groups in America – headquartered in Cleveland.

He identified a little suburban “chicken jazz” (as we called it) suburban New Jersey licensed station and fashioned it into the most listened to radio station in America as New York’s Z-100. That “worst-to-first” feat was accomplished in thirty days.

Carl joined Malrite in 1974 as Vice President and General Manager of WMMS and WHK.  When Carl was promoted to Executive Vice President of Malrite in 1977, Gil Rosenwald replaced Carl.

We would not have achieved our many successes had it not been for our senior management and corporate support and guidance.  They backed our attack.

These are interviews with Carl Hirsch and Gil Rosenwald by Chuck Dunaway for Radio Music Report, from February 19, 1979.

Being associated with up-and-coming acts was a tremendous asset for WMMS. We listened to virtually every album release, and we didn’t limit our listening to what the promo guys were hyping.

We strived to to get artists to cut personalized IDs for WMMS – and tried to make them distinctive to stand out from the plain “Hi, this is (artist) and you’re listening to (station).” Generally, prior to or after an on-air interview, we’d invite an artist to our production studio to cut some IDs – including specialty versions for Christmas, New Year’s, and, if time allowed, individual IDs for our airstaff.

We had our motives.  The ID was an endorsement by the artist for WMMS - and served as a station identification bridge between two songs in a music set without interrupting our music flow.

Occasionally, artists come up with something inimitable and original, like Bruce Springsteen’s “I don’t have a radio but Miami Steve does…” Or U2’s Bono and The Edge who heard Springsteen’s and one-upped it with, “I’m the singer, he (Edge) is the guitarist, and we both listen to WMMS.” Then there was Sting’s “I get a buzz out of the Buzzard” and Joe Walsh claiming he listened to WMMS even when the radio wasn’t on. On a few rare occasions we got an artist to sing their WMMS ID. This is one from rockabilly artist Robert Gordon, a WMMS favorite.

The idea actually came from top 40 radio.  It always stuck in my mind that Boston’s WMEX had Eric Burdon of the Animals do one.  When I was fourteen, I thought the Animals were cool, and WMEX was cool for having the Animals say the station was.

Special thanks to Dusty Basmagy for this ID.

MP3 Download here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yammtiwno2l/14

…and with the Boss coming to town, here’s the classic Bruce Springsteen WMMS ID, click here

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More on bizarre Buzzard programming plans can be found in Chapter 10 of The Buzzard

This past May, after a 29-year run, Northern Ohio Live magazine folded.  It served as Greater Cleveland’s bi-weekly (and later monthly) arts and cultural magazine.   It had been founded in 1980 by a group of area writers and investors.

In its April 6-19, 1981 issue, writer Scott L. Powers’ investigative report successfully traced the long strange journey of a WMMS exclusive, the Who’s Face Dances album.

I was a bit stunned to learn that someone was investigating the source of one of our exclusives.  Providentially, this exclusive originated from a pipeline that was not a prime source.

Having an exclusive album by the Who was nothing new for WMMS.  We had a string of Who album exclusives going back to 1974. This was hardly the first and it wouldn’t be last.

The origin of music exclusives came from the days of top 40 radio in the 1960s, when stations would scramble to be the first with a new single by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or the Rolling Stones.  The winning station would milk it for all it was worth, building anticipation by tracking the progress of a record from the airport to the station, playing it with great fanfare, and grandly releasing it to other stations, which they’d claim were taping.  It was great radio.

Labels hated exclusives. They wanted airplay, which amounted to free advertising for their product, but they had elaborate marketing and sales campaigns worked out.  Advance exclusives muddled their plans and brought complaints from other stations wanting exclusives or favors of their own.

Click on individual pages multiple times for your best readable size

For more on the Who exclusive click here

For more on the many WMMS Exclusives – including our secret weapon – The Switch - can be found in The Buzzard, Chapter 12.

WMMS wasn’t the first station to have a mascot.

The earliest one I found was WOLF in Syracuse, NY back in 1961. Theirs was a…well, you know.

WMCA/New York launched the “good guys” in 1963 with a logo that was a precursor to the smiley face.   Other stations around the U.S. picked up on calling their air talent “good guys” -  minus the logo.

A few stations had tigers, including WQXI/Atlanta (1964) and WQAM/Miami (1965)

KYNO/Fresno had a kangaroo and KDWB/Minneapolis-St. Paul predictably had twins.

It’s safe to say that no radio station ever had a mascot quite like the Buzzard. It can also be said that it could’ve only happened here (though over the years other stations began using buzzard mascots)  The WMMS Buzzard’s origin takes up a full chapter in The Buzzard and there’s even more about its origin, its earliest days, and how we found artist David Helton after he found us – here.

The Buzzard made its initial appearance in a print ad a little over 35 years ago. Just one year after its debut, a group of Case Western Reserve University MBA students did a market study, which proved that the WMMS Buzzard was the most identifiable logo in Greater Cleveland, even beating out the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo and Coca-Cola (Cleveland is one of the few markets where Pepsi outsells Coke).

Our initial plan for having a mascot for WMMS came from sports teams and – of all things – an Indian-head logo used by the former Shawmut Bank of Boston, which was that city’s most identifiable image.

Over the next few years, more stations – especially those playing album rock – implemented mascots.  You had a plethora of chickens, frogs, penguins, and bears. Unlike other stations, we did not want a “live mascot” – someone dressed up in a Buzzard costume.  Our philosophy was that all WMMS events should be hosted by our airstaff.

This is an article from the national trade magazine Radio & Records from sometime in 1981, which covered the then-emergent trend of radio station mascots.

More on the Buzzard is in The Buzzard, Chapter 11

Click article and images multiple times for a readable or viewable size.

I’m often asked what my favorite top five or top ten WMMS stories or events are.  To me, it’s like asking a parent to name a favorite child.  But if one were to ask what was one of the all-time favorite on-air specials we did, the Dr. Destructo Halloween shows would definitely be in the top ten.  Maybe even the top five.  It was immense fun to put together and it provided an opportunity for everyone’s creative juices to flow.

One of our goals was to be the radio station that would be played at all parties on the Saturday closest to Halloween - and we did it by fine-tuning our music to provide a neat-perfect spook-tacular soundtrack.

But by 1983, with other stations doing cheap imitations of what we started, our aspiration was to create something that could not be duplicated by our competition.

Instead of just playing predictable horror-themed and heavy metal music, we had to take our Halloween Saturday night programming to higher, non duplicated echelon.  We just weren’t sure what that was – and were faced with only a week and a half to come up with something distinctive.

Tom O'Brien

A few weeks prior, our production director Tom O’Brien got his “wish list” harmonizer. It was a new production “toy,” which allowed us to modify and alter vocal the pitch and style.  We started playing around with the harmonizer on some of Len “Boom” Goldberg’s many WMMS IDs and sweeps.

In doing so, we found our inspiration to create a special Halloween character uniquely WMMS -Len

“Boom Boom” Goldberg as Dr. Destructo, the high priest of heavy metal.  Denny Sanders came up with the name. We realized we’d heard that name before but couldn’t place it and in the pre-internet days there was no way to Google up the name’s origin.  So we went with it.  Decades later we learned that the original Dr. Destructo was an evil character in a cartoon series from the early sixties, Colonel Bleep.

Original Dr. Destructo

When we presented the idea to Boom he said in protest, “I’m not doing some crock of shit character that makes me sound like some idiot…”  Then he heard a sample of what we had already done with a sample of his voice.

He changed his mind and jumped right into the character.

Boom, Steve Perry, Dia

Keeping true to our roots, the show opened with the legend of Dr. Destructo. Every Halloween, mild-mannered Len “Boom” Goldberg turned into an alternate personality when a black cat crossed his path or he accidentally walked under a ladder.  He transformed into Dr. Destructo with his kettle of heavy metal. His personality contained bits of every evil character that ever appeared in a horror film.

Tom O’Brien’s production fed Boom’s bellowing voice through the harmonizer.  From there, we added reverb and multi-track layers of spooky sound effects and eerie sounds.   Denny and I wrote most of the material, though close to the entire staff came up with a line or two to add to the show while it was being produced.

It took over 12 hours to put together the breaks for the six-hour show – but it was worth the effort. Each break featured a five to seven minute vignette three times per hour.   It went against the grain of playing continuous music for Halloween Saturday night parties – but we knew if we made it interesting enough we’d hold the audience, and we did.

Bonnie Tyler

One break had Dr. Destructo unleashing his rabid Dobermans on Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler (“Total Eclipse of theHeart”) to eat her alive – complete with screams and chomping sounds.  In another, promotion director Jim Marchyshyn did a perfect John McEnroe who, following an argument with a tennis referee, who turned out to be Dr. Destructo, had hot molten lead poured down his throat.  He even ate a kitten – complete with expected – and unexpected – double entrenderes.

Though the show had to be pre-recorded, we did a few mock listener phone calls, which Boom-as-Dr. Destructo answered with a thundering “HELL-o!”

We closed the first show with a phony commercial announcing a major outdoor concert starring every heavy metal band we could think of, and promising it would close with a nuclear explosion that would destroy everybody and everything.

The following Monday, I got a call from Belkin Productions, complaining about the number of calls they had to field regarding this made-up concert that some believed was a real upcoming event.

This print ad by David Helton is from October, 1983. It also shows that we took our weekend programming seriously – and that it was designed to dominate.   Radios featuring digital frequency screens were coming down in price, which caused us to change our rounded-off “101 FM,” which had been put in use in early 1973, to the actual frequency, 100.7. During this change, the “100.7″ was drawn in a digital design.

Though we know airchecks of Dr. Destructo show exist (at least a couple of airchecks turned up on Internet auction sites), we’ve yet found one to add to this site.  Like most recordings stored in the WMMS archives, the masters were lost.

Denny Sanders remembers:

We had just acquired a harmonizer for the production studio, which we used for special voice effects (speeding up, slowing down, etc).  I suggested to you that we should run Goldberg’s already deep voice through the box and create a kind of monster sound for some kind of production.   I remember jokingly saying something like “he could be the ultimate heavy metal deejay.  Instead of Dr. Demento, you would have Dr. Destructo, where he just destroys things and plays extreme metal”.  What often happened around the station with a joke or offhand remark, John Gorman said “Well, why not?” and off we went.

I wrote the original treatment, which I think we used most of.  I recall that “kettle of heavy metal” line, and the idea to have phony callers calling in who were ultimately destroyed by the good Doctor.  Jim Marchyshyn “called in” as John McEnroe, who was in the news a lot in those days as a rude hothead.  He was doing Bic lighter commercials at the time, and he called in complaining about something, and then said that he wanted his Bic.  Dr. Destructo then said something like “here’s your Bic, you dick!” (how we got away with that line is beyond me) and “poured lighter fluid down his throat” as Jim (as McEnroe) screamed.

Subtle, huh?

I “called in” as a fundamentalist religious leader and the Doctor destroyed me with a bolt of lightning.

The whole thing was a riot and I am surprised that we never did a weekly show after the Halloween special.

Too late now.  Len is in heaven and the good Doctor is certainly in hell!

More on our wild and crazy production department can be found in Chapter 11 of The Buzzard.

Click on images multiple times for enlargement to appropriate sizes.

Back row, L to TR: Brian Connolly, guitar player Andy Scott, bass player Steve Priest, and drummer Mick Tucker of Sweet, Jim Hawn, branch manager, Capitol Records/Cleveland; John Gorman, Kid Leo. Front: Matt the Cat, Bruce Ravid, Capitol Records, Steve Lushbaugh. Photo taken at Swingo's Keg & Quarter after Sweet's Allen Theater concert in 1975.

L to R - Back row: David Helton, John Gorman, Bob Seger, Kid Leo, Alto Reed, sax, Silver Bullet Band; Robyn Robins, keyboards; Silver Bullet Band; Matt the Cat . Second Row: Barry Haughin, Capitol Records; Bruce Garfield, Capitol Records; Bruce Ravid, Capitol Records; Ray Tuskin, Capitol Records; Dan Garfinkel. Front Row: Drew Abbott, guitar, Silver Bullet Band; Chris Campbell, bass, Silver Bullet Band. Photo taken backstage at the Richfield Coliseum, December 23, 1978.

Here are a couple of recently-found group photos of members of the WMMS staff with Sweet and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.

Cleveland figures significantly with the national success of both acts.

We did not played Sweet’s first hit, “Little Willy.” It was too bubblegum-sounding for us.   Sweet, taking advantage of the popularity of glam/glitter rock gradually and cautiously evolved into a band that appealed to an adult rock audience and broke out of Cleveland and Los Angeles with their Desolation Boulevard album.

The U.S. version was more pop-oriented than its European release, which led us to play the less poppier-version of “Fox on the Run” from the import on WMMS.

I remember that evening with Sweet, post-concert, as a heavy-drinking night, which can be attested by the condition of some of those in that photo.

Bob Seger’s bond with Cleveland goes back to the sixties – long before WMMS – when the he and his earlier bands, the Last Heard and the System, would play Cleveland area clubs and perform on Upbeat.

Cleveland was one of the first cities that provided Seger the traction to break nationally.  Tracks like “Heavy Music” and “Get Out of Denver” established Seger to the WMMS audience but it took 1975’s Beautiful Loser album to transform him from cult favorite to a most-requested, mainstream artist. By summer, “Beautiful Loser,” “Katmandu,” “Travelin’ Man,” and his cover of Ike and Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” were among our most requested and played album tracks.  Though the album hit #131 nationally, it was a top-ten selling album in Cleveland from spring through fall.

Shortly after that photo was taken, Seger poured the contents of the bottle of wine he was holding down Leo’s back.  Somewhere a photo exists of that, too, though it hasn’t been unearthed yet.

Our label connection with both acts was Bruce Ravid, who managed regional promotion for Capitol Records, which included the Cleveland market, prior to his best-known position as an Artist & Repertoire executive for the label.  Bruce was instrumental in signing Duran Duran, Missing Persons, the Motels, The Church, and Thomas Dolby, among others.

Today, he produces and hosts Rave’s Raves, a nationally syndicated radio show, which features new and up and coming talent.

Click on photos multiple times for viewable sizes

The Coffee Break Concert debuted in March 1972, well over a year before I got to WMMS.  Billy Bass, who was program director, came up with the idea when Elektra Records offered him a live performance by singer-songwriter Carol Hall, who had just released her first album, Beads and Feathers.   Bass accepted, and Hall performed in WMMS’s small production studio.

It eventually developed into a weekly feature in a fixed time slot of Wednesday mornings at 11.

Denny Sanders auditioned performers with the patience of Job, often politely sitting through still another young singer’s cover of a Neil Young tune.  Though, through it all, he was able to spotlight some true local talent like John Bassette, Alex Bevan, and Jim Glover. Singer-songwriter Marc Cohn appeared on the Coffee Break the day after his eighteenth birthday.

When we moved to the Cleveland Plaza from our 50^th & Euclid bunker, we had a larger studio but it was still not conducive to electric performances with multiple instruments.   We managed an acoustic performance with Kenny Loggins and his full band.

During the show Loggins said, “You know, this non-electric acoustic performance is pretty cool.  Too bad we couldn’t videotape it.”  Little did we realize that we would be an influence on MTV for its Unplugged series, which I was told was patterned after the Coffee Break Concerts and was suggested by an MTV staffer with Cleveland roots.

We took the Coffee Break Concert to a live audience show in 1979 when Bobby McGee’s, a club in Playhouse Square, expressed interest in hosting it.  The result was a short-lived, largely forgotten experiment.  The first one featured Alex Bevan. The second one had Buzzy Linhart. The third never came off: no one showed up to open the club.

Denny was upset but suggested approaching Hank LoConti to move the show there.  The only reason we hadn’t gone to him first was that the other club came to us first and it seemed like a long shot that Hank would open up his nighttime club, where we’d had a WMMS Night Out concert the night before, for a daytime show.

The Agora move changed everything.  We eventually changed the time of the show from 11 AM to 1 PM to draw the late lunch crowd.   Hank was all for it for a number of reasons.  Among them, admission was free, but the booze wasn’t and serving alcohol at 1 PM in the afternoon was found money.

The new venue allowed us to go electric, though we offered performers the option of doing an acoustic show.  Most chose to be electric though one exception was John Cougar Mellencamp, whose acoustic show stood out as one of the best performance of the series.

Felix Cavaliere, formerly of the Rascals, used the show’s freedom in a different way, doing a solo performance with just keyboards – another amazing show.

Other acts included local and regional favorites, the Michael Stanley Band, American Noise, Wild Horses, the Godz, Lucky Pierre, Love Affair, I-Tal, Breathless, and the Jerry Busch Group.

National artists included U2, INXS, Bryan Adams, the Romantics, Cyndi Lauper, Artful Dodger, Donnie Iris & the Cruisers, the Fixx, Quiet Riot, and  Foghat. We booked Alcatraz, a Swedish band featuring then-unknown guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen.

At the time UHF TV stations were carrying per inquiry commercials for a performer named Boxcar Willie. I half-joked about getting Boxcar Willie to do a Coffee Break - but Denny was dead serious, and managed to track him down and got him booked.

Cox Cable videotaped a few Coffee Break Concerts for its local access channel, though its cost couldn’t be justified by the cable company bean counters. One can only imagine what the video from those shows would be worth now.

Every show wasn’t flawless.  The Scottish band Big Country walked off stage early in their set when lead singer Stuart Adamson stopped the show and said, “we can’t do this.”  Their management claimed Adamson lost his singing voice.  In reality, the problem was with bassist Tony Butler, who was suffering from a dagger-pain hangover.

The Coffee Break Concerts came to an abrupt halt in October 1984 when a fire did irreparable damage to the Agora following a WMMS Night Out concert with Blackfoot.

They briefly resurfaced four months later at Peabody’s Down Under in the Flats but by that time we were doing so many free concerts, live remotes, and WMMS Buzzard Appreciation Days that the Coffee Break no longer served the purpose it once had.

Though some performances by INXS, Marc Cohn, Warren Zevon, and Tom Waits turned up on bootlegs, bit torrents, or legitimate releases, nearly all the Coffee Break Concert tapes were lost or destroyed along with most of the other WMMS archival material.

Much more information on the Coffee Break Concerts can be found in Chapter 16 of The Buzzard.

Click on images multiple times to enlarge to viewable size

I knew The Buzzard book would spark memories of Cleveland rock and the role this region played during the seventies and eighties in the music and radio industries.

What I didn’t expect was that The Buzzard and WMMS of that era would also inspire a regional band to write and record a song.

A few weeks back, I heard from Jerry Camerlengo, bass player for The Barflies, a four-piece modern rock band from the Youngstown-Western, Pennsylvania area.

Jerry and lead singer Paul Sheehan grew up in Youngstown, which is on the fringe of the WMMS signal.

I’ll let Jerry tell the story:

When I was a kid growing up in Youngstown in the 70’s, I thought that Cleveland must be a pretty cool place since all of my favorite TV shows (Ghoulardi, Superhost, etc.) were only broadcast on the Cleveland stations.

By 1980, I was a teenager listening to WMMS and was convinced that Cleveland must be the coolest city on earth! The larger than life on-air personalities and the life changing rock-n-roll that emanated from the North Shore became an indelible part of my coming of age years.

So, when my bass player Jerry Camerlengo told me about John Gorman’s book last year, I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. Not only is “The Buzzard…” a great read for those of us who were fans of WMMS in the 70’s and early 80’s, it’s also a snapshot of what radio was like at the height of the rock-n-roll era, before Clear Channel.

While reading John’s book, I was trying to come up with lyrics to put to music that my guitarist Gary Jones had written. As I was listening to a section of the song over and over again, the phrase “You’re a Zero on the Dial / A Part of the Evil Empire” popped into my head during what would become the chorus to “Broken Radio.” I knew immediately that the song had to be about Clear Channel and how that corporation has devalued and homogenized something that meant so much to me and to so many other people as well.

There’s a section in the bridge of the song that we knew would be a perfect spot for a vintage WMMS audio sample. Murray Saul’s “Get Down” was the first thing we tried and it fit perfectly! Not only did the timing match up, but Murray also embodies the spirit of freedom and creativity that, thanks to Clear Channel, can’t be heard on terrestrial radio today. Enjoy!

Here’s a good chunk of the song.  I’m not including the full version because it’ll be available on-line from iTunes and Amazon.com on October 31 and I’d like to see the band make a few bucks for their time and effort.

Click here for “Broken Radio” by the Barflies

Photo by Janet Macoska

Years ago Bob Dylan mentioned that there was a time when he could tell what city he was in by listening to the local radio stations.

One of the most regionalized music markets was Cleveland - and radio provided the soundtrack to its distinctive musical tastes from the late forties to the mid nineties, when deregulation homogenized radio into a dull national blend.

In the seventies Cleveland was the proving ground for dozens of artists – and a bellwether market for rock and roll.  If you made it in Cleveland, you had a fighting chance for your music to catch on elsewhere.

Then there were the many acts that were superstars in Greater Cleveland – but barely known beyond its borders.

Take the astounding popularity of the Scottish rock act, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

From the release of their first album in the U.S., Next, and their second album as a band, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band quickly grew to be one of our most requested artists of the seventies.

Within the first week of airplay, five tracks from the Next album became top requests on WMMS, including “Faith Healer,” “Vambo,” and the controversial “Gang Bang.” It was a top five selling album in Cleveland for close to a year.   In fact, the majority of albums pressed in the U.S. were sold in Cleveland.

Their popularity grew so rapidly that we got a hold of the first SAHB album, Framed, which was only released in Europe, and started playing tracks from that one, too.

Because of their limited U.S. airplay, the SAHB did only two abbreviated U.S. tours. Their first Cleveland appearance, one of only four U.S. dates, was a WMMS Monday Night Out at the Agora, which sold out in advance.   The second date SAHB played in Cleveland, in support of the Impossible Dream album – and part of a seven city tour – was on March 3, the following year at the Allen Theater. That show also sold out well in advance.

Harvey used to refer to WMMS as the next best thing to sex and beer – and even cut an ID stating that fact.

You couldn’t define the SAHB as being in any one rock genre.  In concert they’d shift from a ‘50s oldies cover song (“Framed”) to Jacque Brel (“Next”) to a staged performance (“Man in the Jar”).

The SAHB switched labels from Mercury to Atlantic for their third U.S. release, Live, whose only U.S. airplay was on WMMS.  Due to lack of airplay throughout the rest of the U.S. and Canada, the label canceled plans for a third SAHB U.S. tour.

Through the years we kept in touch with Alex Harvey, hoping to bring him back to the states – and even lobbied to get him on a WMMS World Series of Rock concert.

Alex Harvey passed away on February 4, 1982, the day before his 47^th birthday.

Click photo and cards multiple times to enlarge to viewable size

Though there are no known videos of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s appearances in Cleveland, here are a few videos that capture their unique live show: