“It’s hard to believe now,” Simon Reynolds writes in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, “but there was a brief period, about eighteen months, during which Akron and Cleveland, its neighbor forty miles north, were considered the most exciting cities on Earth when it came to rock music.”
I guess it is hard to believe. Cleveland is today roughly a third of its population size from its 1950 peak. A Wall Street Journal article this month about all the empty department stores that people can live in tells a story of 21st-century post-industrialism: a once-thriving industrial metropolis now composed of an amenity-developed downtown (most famously the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), hollowed-out inner cities and suburbs kept afloat only by foreign-born migration, and exurban sprawl that can’t fully cloak the on-going exodus of working households.1
A 45-minute drive away, Akron can’t even boast Cleveland’s architectural jewels. Yet move around the two cities, and you see a common landscape of Urban Renewal-era highways and offramps that cut through once-vibrant neighborhoods and isolated Black residents, and a shared history of 20th-c. automobile industry largesse. With its historic concentration of tire factories and corporate HQs, Akron was once the proud “Rubber City.” All but the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company are gone.
Rounding out the larger metro area, Kent State University still dukes it out with other Ohio universities for the 3rd or 4th largest enrollment (today, fourth). The college town provides an oasis of student culture in a state where young adults don’t tend to linger.
Cleveland, Akron, Kent: these are the legs of the Cleveland–Akron–Canton Combined Statistical Area that comprises the economic and cultural heart of Northeastern Ohio. Today, Northeastern Ohio beckons to America and the world with its comparative “affordability” — the unwanted legacy of rustbelt decline — and asks outsiders not to peer too closely at the losses incurred over that period.
This forgotten history can be heard in the music of the region. Northeastern Ohio, like the state itself, has produced a ridiculous number of musicians and bands who have made a mark on American popular culture. Almost all of them had to leave Ohio to do so, their departure typically demarcating their careers into before (i.e., in Ohio) and after (success after Ohio). Some of these musicians, like the ones I discuss in the next two posts, carried their Ohio story with them, infusing it into the essence of the music they recorded elsewhere.
But what about the ones who stayed behind? Today, two women from Akron illuminate the musical landscape that I’ll examine in the coming weeks.
The Poor Girls
The story begins in February 1964, when 13-year old Debbie Smith’s family moved from Greenfield in South Central Ohio to Akron. “It was dark and different,” she remembers. “Yeah, Deb was not happy to be here initially,” says Sue Schmidt, an Akron native and Debbie’s classmate at Litchfield Junior High School. Debbie continues, “Music became such a wonderful way of integrating me into my environment. I made friends with Sue, and Pam lived next door to me, and then Esta.”
[Unless otherwise cited, all quotes from Susan Schmidt Horning and Debbie Smith-Cahan come from two 2024 episodes of the From Akron & Beyond podcast.]
Sue and Debbie took guitar lessons from the same teacher as Sue’s next door neighbor, Pam “Chons” Johnson, and heeded the teacher’s suggestion that they form a band. Mary “Esta” Kerr, a fairly accomplished junior high school band drummer, completed the ensemble: the Poor Girls.
“The idea to start a band as girls was not something that was common,” Sue remembers. “Far from it. But we didn’t see any reason not to.” With a garage rock movement taking shape across the country, the Poor Girls threw their hat into the regional ring, debuting in granny dresses at age 14 at a 1965 holiday event for Sue’s church.
Joe Walsh’s original band the Measles provided the Poor Girls their first real nightclub gig at the Outer Limits in Brimfield. “We walked in with our little Vibro Champ amps,” Sue recalls, “and he said, ‘Oh, you girls use our equipment!’ … [at the end of the evening] I remember them saying, ‘Wow, you girls — in six months you’re gonna be really good!’ And I remember saying, ‘[scoff] Six months?!’”
Over a four-year career that extended into their high school years, the Poor Girls surfed an adolescent wave of Ohio’s industrial affluence, driven to gigs in station wagons chauffeured by parents and managers, taking lessons on guitar and then voice, passing band notes in classes. Debbie recalls:
Music, we were so involved in it — really, because of our management team, Jack Vogel and Rich Bedrick, in Cleveland… They helped promote us. And I met them through my sister, my older sister Cindy, who was a go-go dancer at a club in Cleveland. Probably one of the Hullabaloos or whatever. And she said, “Hey, my kid sister’s got a band, and you should listen to them, and they need some management.” We were lucky that this guy came to us thanks to Cindy. It was really kind of serendipity. We didn’t know to go out and find a manager. Things just kind of happened.
The Poor Girls played gigs on weekends and summers across the so-called Hullabaloo circuit of northeastern Ohio and drew strong crowds in Cleveland. Debbie remembers, “there was a club in the basement of the Statler Hotel in downtown Cleveland, called Otto’s Grotto, and it was the club. It was the Studio 54 of the time. And we got [three extended residencies in 1967 and ‘68] over the summer two weeks — two continuous weeks that our parents would let us stay in Cleveland and play at this bar. Outrageous to think of!”
Sue remembers, “One time when we were at Otto’s, the Who came in and were in the audience listening to us. John Entwistle was there; he was very drunk.”2
The Poor Girls played covers exclusively — the norm for professional local bands. Originally their repertoire included “Wipeout,” “Pipeline,” “Walk Don’t Run,” and “Little Black Egg.” If these early instrumental-heavy setlists indicate early hesitancy about their vocal proficiency, with voice lessons the band would move into four-part harmonies and a groovier, heavier fare. Motown would soon make its impact on their setl, e.g., Eddie Floyd’s “Knock On Wood.” Toward the end, the Poor Girls were performing Tim Buckley’s “Pleasant Street,” the Moody Blues’ “True Story,” and the Beatles’ “I Call Your Name,” Willie Cobbs’s “You Don’t Love Me,” Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” and Traffic’s “Smiling Faces.”
The band released no singles or albums, their recorded legacy being three 1968 demo recordings found on this YouTube clip (total views so far <800) featuring “I Call Your Name,” “Pleasant Street,” and “True Story.” Their evolution into a torrid and mildly psychedelic unit is evident; with some awareness of the limitations of recording technology and marketing expectations, we can take on faith Robert Christgau’s assertion (in his 1978 Akron scene report for the Village Voice) that the Poor Girls eventually became “a pioneering Blue Cheer-type band.”
In my many years of Nuggets garage-rock archaeology, I don’t recall ever coming across the Poor Girls. I learned about them through Chrissie Hynde, their friend, fan, and classmate through Litchfield Junior and Firestone High. In her 2015 memoir Reckless, Chrissie describes the social rebellion that the Poor Girls waged in Akron, in their own style, setting her down paths that she would follow the rest of her life.
Not everybody was as governed by music on the radio as I was. I hung out with those who were. We were elitists, my girl gang. We didn’t run with the guys, and we didn’t flirt or think of having boyfriends. The “popular” kids did stuff like “go steady.” We didn’t feature it ourselves. It was all about the music. Sex? Not on the agenda at all. We had better things to do.
Debbie and Sue and Chons and Esta were in a band called the Poor Girls. I guess their parents didn’t see it as the threat that mine would have. In fact, my folks had bought me a guitar. But set me up professionally? That really would have been a step too far. They would never do anything that might put me in the company of guys with long hair.
The Poor Girls even got a gig supporting Cream at the Akron Civic Theatre. I made Debbie a crushed-velvet vest/waistcoat with pearls sewn on to wear for their big night. And I waited by the backstage door as Cream left the building and poked my rolled-up poster of them through the throng of fans for the band to sign, which they did! I even stole the courage to tell Eric Clapton about a great guitar player to look out for, B.B. King. I’d heard him on WLAC, out of Nashville, and didn’t know if English guys would have known about him. (That’s what total dumbbells us kids in the Midwest were.)
I hung out with Debbie, the bass player, a lot. She had the best collection of R&B records and we would go to a little shop downtown called Edfred’s to buy singles. Debbie had a poster in her room that said “God Save the Kinks”; I didn’t know it was a reference to “God Save the Queen” — the royal family and the English national anthem were unknown to me. Debbie had the coolest shoes, flat suede jobs, like desert boots but slinkier.
Sue, the lead guitarist and singer, and I were born three days apart — our mothers were in the hospital together so I’d known her all my life. She got me a Bob Dylan record for my birthday once — a friend for life. She was blonde and Germanic-looking like Marlene Dietrich.
Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population.
Esta Kerr had a harder time. She was the drummer, and I think she had some problems and ended up in a mental hospital for life. LSD wasn’t a good idea for some of us.
The Poor Girls opened for Cream in May 1968. By November, they opened for Steppenwolf and northeastern Ohio’s home rockstars, the James Gang. And then the end came in 1969. “Chons didn’t want to do it anymore,” Sue recalls. “Esta was having some serious mental problems.” [She passed away in 2005.] Sue and Debbie carried on in jam sessions and short-lived bands with Ohio musicians like Tom Schuster (formerly of the Tiffany Shade). In 1971, Sue attended Berklee College of Music in Boston for a year (Joe Walsh wrote her professional reference letter), while Debbie went to New York. The 21-year olds reunited in Cleveland, their new stomping grounds, the following year.
Friction
Sue and Debbie were on stage with the lounge band City Slickers when Peter Laughner, a young record store clerk who was writing for Scene magazine, came to see them play. “He was interested in working with women,” says Sue. “That’s the thing about Peter. He was unusual, I think, in that he was a lot more open to working with women than a lot of guys were.”
The two hooked up with Laughner in one of his short-lived bands, Cinderella’s Revenge (with Eric Ritz on drums). Laughner then pivoted in and out of other groups, most crucially Rocket From The Crypt and Pere Ubu — a well-known origin story of Cleveland punk told elsewhere.
By 1976 Laughner enlisted Susan and Debbie for another band, Friction, which also included drummer Anton Fier. For the Please Kill Me blog, Fier (who passed away in 2022) explained:
There were really two versions of Friction. The first was a trio with Peter and Tony Maimone and me. We rehearsed a lot and played one gig at a private party. Tony then left when he was asked to join Pere Ubu. The second version was a quartet with Debbie Smith on bass and Susan Schmidt on rhythm guitar and violin. This version played a lot of gigs at Pirate’s Cove.
This period is recalled by then-newcomer to the Cleveland scene, Adele Bertei, who would front Laughner’s last band, the Wolves. As she wrote in her 2020 memoir Peter and the Wolves:
Friction, Peter’s band before we started the Wolves, included Debbie Smith playing bass and the Nico-esque Sue Schmidt on guitar and vocals. They were both accomplished rock musicians and good pals with Chrissie Hynde, a cool Akron girl Peter often spoke of in reverent tones. He said Chrissie played a mean rhythm guitar. Debbie and Sue had one of the first American all-female bands, the Poor Girls. When I met them, I was so intimidated I could hardly speak; they were the first bona fide female musicians I’d meet.
Laughner’s substance abuse and “loose cannon” behavior on stage brought the Wolves to an end. He died on June 22, 1977.
The Akron Compilation
Rewind the tape back to some time around 1970 at Litchfield Junior High, where two boys meet in the school band: Alan Myers (in the same percussion section as Esta Kerr before him) and Ralph Carney. These names may be more familiar to music fans: Myers would become drummer for Devo, while Carney would co-found new wave band Tin Huey, one of the city’s seminal new wave bands, then play saxophone for Tom Waits and other adventurous recording artists.
Upon moving up to Firestone High School, Alan told Ralph that his parents agreed to his wishes to move out of the family house. Alan would soon “take up the lifestyle of a free spirit,” and join “kind of a commune for musicians” on Dodge Avenue in Akron, as he told Jade Dellinger and David Giffels for The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio:
The house on Dodge Avenue became like this enclave. Instead of a living room, we had this collection of musical instruments. It was whatever anybody could get their hands on or borrow. There might have been an electric guitar, but I don’t remember it ever being plugged in. We had all this stuff, and there was almost never a song played. We always just used to make sounds. We might get a rhythm or a key going, and everybody would trade instruments. That was what happened at the house basically.
By 1975, Alan and Ralph had put together a free-music ensemble called Jazz Death. Featuring three horns, bass, and drums, the group played originals and tunes by Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Art Ensemble of Chicago. Here enters Richard Roberts — Sue and Debbie’s next bandmate — who recalled on the From Akron to Beyond podcast:
[Alan and I] were very good friends and played off of each other really well. We had a group together called Jazz Death. I played trumpet in Jazz Death, and Ralph Carney played sax, Dan Klayman from later the Waitresses played keyboards, a guy named Frank Bean played bass and guitar, and people came over and jammed with us. We were the core of that scene. Our thing was, in addition to learning some of those standards as discipline, was to play avant-garde whatever it is — jamming basically. Definitely free!
This free ensemble would disintegrate within a year or two amid musical shifts in and out of Akron. In need of a new drummer, local art provocateurs Devo took on Alan; in turn, “the human metronome” (Jerry Casale’s nickname for Myers) would radically tighten and charge the band’s sound, making them ready for prime time. He debuted in Devo at the end of 1976, at which point the band started drawing greater interest in Cleveland (following an infamous Halloween performance the year before) and gigging regularly at the Crypt, a new venue in Akron.
The Crypt was originally a glorified hang-out for Goodyear workers when two members from the heavy metal band King Kobra popped in and inquired about a place to play. As the story goes, the bar was bleeding money during the 1976 rubber workers strike, prompting the owner to give the rockers the keys to the premises; that band changed its name to Rubber City Rebels; and suddenly Akron had a musician-managed “punk bar” to host a new generation of punk and new wave bands in Northeastern Ohio.
Alan introduced his old Jazz Death bandmate, Rich Roberts, to Sue Schmidt and Debbie SmithIt at one of Devo’s early 1977 gigs at the Crypt. The two women didn’t know Devo personally at the time — “It was one of those things where you know people because they know people,” Sue says — but soon they became quick friends with the band. Jerry Casale recalls being with “one of the girls that ended up being in a band called Chi Pig” at the Iggy Pop concert for The Idiot tour in Cleveland in March 21 or 22, where he was able to slip Devo’s demo tape to Iggy.3 Devo cast Debbie’s mother in Chuck Statler’s “Satisfaction” promo video, where she plays an angry mother in house dress and hair curlers waving a rolling pin at Mark Mothersbaugh and his date.4
By the time the Crypt closed in 1978, Devo were becoming an international sensation. In half jest, they told a British music journalist that Akron was “a lot like Liverpool.” Stiff Records, who saw Devo slip away from their grasp to bigger labels, sent talent scouts to Akron looking for a next big thing. The result two years later was The Akron Compilation, still the most significant documentation of the city’s distinctive scene. Its closing track, one of the album’s strongest cuts, arrived courtesy of Sue, Debbie, and Rich’s new band.
Chi-Pig
As the three musicians began jamming in the Schmidt family basement, a sound began to gel: Rich eschewing hi-hat and ride cymbals for buoyant tom-toms and percussive fills; Debbie propelling the band with Motown-inspired bass lines; Sue filling in space with chiming notes and discordant riffs (Captain Beefheart-style chromaticism being a common foundation among Akron bands); the two women trading lead vocals and joining in harmony. With some thirty years of playing combined shared by the still young musicians, the trio refined the music with little consideration of making it accessible to outside ears. Their “pop” instincts showed up in concise songwriting, head-bobbing grooves, and clipped riffing — a kind of power pop shattered into kaleidescopic fragments.
A particularly exciting number emerged out of a skewed conga beat: “Apu Api (Help Me).”5 Debbie explained the cryptic lyrics’ inspiration:
Jerry Casale had gotten a letter. It must have been from one of his nephews, perhaps, because I remember a line from it. It said, “Dear uncle, I poo, I pee, help me.” And I thought this is a universal, beautiful anthem for humanity!”
The song’s salsa rhythm may have to do with the musicians’ tongue-in-cheek embrace of flashy stage clothes, of the kind favored by Latin musicians. In any case, they set “Apu Api” to tapeon Sue’s Teac 3340 in the basement — their very first recording as Chi-Pig. Liam Sternberg, a producer on The Akron Compilation, dropped by, heard “Apu-Api (Help Me), and said, “That will be great.”
While on the subject of strong closing tracks on important vinyl documentations of the Akron scene, Chi Pig gives an uncredited guest performance supporting one Hurricane Bob on the 1980 Bowling Balls From Hell compilation, released on local label Clone Records (run by the Bizarros’ Nick Nichollis). Hurricane Bob was the recording alias for Bob Lewis, original Devo strategist and manager of Booji Boy Records; aside from some very early Devo tracks, this cut appears to be the extent of Lewis’s discography. On “Andrea,” Hurricane Bob leans heavily for support on Sue and Debbie’s backing vocals and a guest solo by Terry Hynde (saxophonist from 15 60 75/The Numbers Band and, yes, Chrissie’s older brother) until Chi Pig effectively wrest the song away from him by the middle.
Chi-Pig gigged at the Bank in Akron, the Rathskeller at Kent State, and elsewhere across the Cleveland-Akron-Kent triangle. They released a DIY single in 1978, “Bountiful Living” b/w “Ring Around the Collar,” the b-side featuring uncredited lyrics by Mark Mothersbaugh. (“I recall we didn’t want to hang on to [Devo’s] coattails,” Sue says.) There was a drunken jaunt across snowy Akron with Island Records president Chris Blackwell — another British music exec intrigued by the next Liverpool — in search of the Chi-Pig BBQ sign that inspired the band’s name. Reportedly, they and Akron scene-mates the Bizarros gave a command performance to Roxy Music when the British band played Cleveland.
There was a Chi-Pig album, or a documented attempt to make one, recorded at night in Miami/Fort Lauderdale’s Criteria Studios by their old friend Bruce Hensall for the price of the tapes (Hensall recorded Julio Iglesias during the day). “This was the real deal,” Rich remembers of the studio setting. When the band asked to purchase the completed master tapes, the studio’s owners demanded they sign an exploitative recording contract first. Chi-Pig refused and returned to Akron with little but a new wardrobe of frilly Cuban bomba shirts to show for it. At some point after completion, the original multi-track master tapes were lost.6
As Devo and then the Bizarros, Tin Huey, and the Rubber City Rebels signed to major labels, Chi-Pig eventually got to play hip destinations like Danceteria in New York City. But the ring eluded them. Sue remembers:
I think we just didn’t fit in any of the slots that record companies were looking at. We weren’t really a punk band, but we weren’t just a pop band. I just think they didn’t know what to do with us… We managed ourselves. We didn’t have somebody else that was going out and trying to negotiate deals or whatever. We were more interested in playing than all that… It takes a lot, as you know. And we weren’t in a city. We weren’t like a New York band.
Sue and Debbie did taste a little bit of commercial success, if not with Chi-Pig. Back in the day, they had jammed an unrecorded composition, “Pimple On My Plans,” with Mark Mothersbaugh in the Schmidt basement. In 1980, Mark called to tell them he incorporated the music they had collectively composed as the basis for “Gates of Steel,” the third single off Devo’s Freedom of Choice album. Because Susan and Debbie had copyrighted the song, Devo listed them on the song’s credits. So presumably they got some royalties from Devo’s biggest selling album.
Otherwise, the end came for Chi-Pig, as it did for pretty much all their Akron peer bands not named Devo or the Waitresses. Over forty years later, there seems to be little bitterness among the three members, who still play together whenever they can all get back to Northeastern Ohio.
Their accomplishments speak for themselves. With the Poor Girls, Sue and Debbie blazed a trail for all-women rock bands. Their example may not be well known outside of Ohio, but it influenced those who knew them, like Chrissie Hynde, Peter Laughner, and Adele Bertei. As Chi-Pig, Sue, Debbie, and Rich created a music as original and distinctively Akron-esque as any band that played the Crypt. Unlike the other women fronting Akron outfits — the Waitresses, Rachel Sweet, Jane Aire and the Belvederes — Sue and Debbie never leaned upon a feminine pose to earn their place in rock history.
Sue and Debbie are a crucial through line in the northeastern Ohio music scene, maybe more than any of their peers. The two women have been there, always, since the mid-1960s, showing the others how to do it themselves, without compromise, for the joy of music. It could be you never heard about Chi-Pig because they ultimately weren’t musically worthy — a position I think is nuts in light of renewed interest in new wave/post-punk and pioneering women of rock. In hindsight, I think Sue and Debbie were simply ahead of their time — twice.
If these patterns sounds familiar to readers of this substack, that’s because similar post-industrial forces of metropolitan restructuring have shaped New York’s Hudson Valley — the subject of several posts from earlier this year.
Debbie says of the Otto’s Grotto residencies, “Someone, it might have been Esta’s parents, didn’t like us staying there unaccompanied.” “Oh, they wouldn’t let her stay there,” Sue elaborates. “Rich had to go and get her, bring her back to Cleveland, then take her home every night, then come back to Maple Heights. And then I think the next day he went and did roofing! He had a gig! I mean, he didn’t make money with the Poor Girls. He was a saint.”
Jerry’s account of Devo’s big break is highly contested by his bandmates and is the focus of a rather juicy chapter in The Beginning Was the End.
This enduring relationship is perhaps best illustrated by the way Sue still uses the alternate pronunciation — call it Olde Akron — of the band’s name: də-’vō, accent on the second syllable.
Thanks to musicologist Justin Patch for identifying the rhythm on “Apu Api (Help Me).”
In 2004, Chi-Pig released a CD, Miami, that includes the album recorded at Criteria Studios. Sue had the wisdom to keep rough mixes from the 1979 sessions and was able to see Bruce Hensall remix them in Florida 25 years later as she was researching a history PhD dissertation on recording studios. That dissertation became her 2015 book Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP. The Chi-Pig Miami CD remains very hard to find.