What Would Journey Do?

The band cut its first album in 1992. Warrant frontman Jani Lane, whom Brooks knew from Ohio, helped produce it. The band toured with Warrant, Southgang, and other rising metal acts. But record sales were sluggish, and Brooks' trademark showmanship struggled when his mom, back in Geneva, died of cancer.

"He withdrew by partying," recalls Gladys' drummer Steve DeBoard. "He didn't emotionally deal with it. He just partied harder. He could always outdrink anybody else in our band. After his mom died, he put it aside and partied harder."

The band fell apart, with blame falling everywhere -- on the label, on Brooks' partying, even on the band name. But Gladys' future was doomed from the beginning. All Brooks needed to do was listen to the music coming through the studio wall when he was working on the band's demo. While he was recording songs called "Push" and "Bad Attitude," a scrawny kid from Seattle was in the next studio over, recording "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Polly."

"Isn't that crazy?" Brooks says now. "We're recording our shitty demo, and Kurt Cobain's recording this classic record in the next studio."

That classic record, of course, almost instantly turned bands like Gladys into punch lines. "We were at the ass-end of it all," Brooks admits.

So he bounced between California and Ohio. In L.A., he picked up work as a singing waiter and tried his voice at softer, more introspective stuff inspired by Tori Amos. "It's almost like I pulled my head out of my fucking ass," he says, thinking back. But Thoughtful Dave Brooks had even less success. "I was really starving my balls off." He came back to Ohio, crashed with friends, and picked up work at an Akron studio.

Brooks was again heading back to L.A. in 2002 when he got the call. A Cleveland cover band needed a singer. The pay wasn't great -- $300 to $600 a week -- but it was steady, and it was fun.

Brooks had just had his third child -- a daughter, born to a fling who lived near Akron. The other two were born when Brooks was just a teenager, he says. He's never met them.

"I wanted to be around my daughter," he says. "And I wanted to sing."

"No band compares, ever," the woman is saying. "Ever ever ever ever."

This woman, a 28-year-old human resources manager named Tina, is sitting in a booth at McCarthy's Ale House in Lakewood, sipping a chocolate martini and waiting for the Breakfast Club. She says she's seen them approximately 200 times -- almost once a week since discovering them five years ago.

"Ever ever ever ever," she's still saying.

Tina tracks the band's schedule on MySpace and allows herself one show per weekend. This week she picked a Saturday gig at McCarthy's, where the shows are always packed.

The Breakfast Club was basically an accident. In the 1990s, Paul Holobinko -- a classically trained musician from Broadview Heights -- returned from New York after playing drums behind Chuck Berry, the Temptations, and other national acts. He got a job teaching music to schoolchildren, and domesticated himself: bought some khakis, a nice wristwatch, a minivan. But he kept playing. At a gig in the late '90s, his throw-together trio happened to mix in some '80s rock.

The crowd started chanting: "Eighties! Eighties!"

"The lightbulb went off," Holobinko recalls.

Disco controlled the cover-band scene then. Years of slit-your-wrists rock had created a market for bands willing to wear big collars and play the Bee Gees. A band called Disco Inferno was packing bars around town.

It occurred to Holobinko that the same properties -- happy music, ridiculous costumes -- composed the soundtrack of the '80s. He rallied some musicians and instructed them to go sleeveless. They would be called the Brat Pack. No, wait: the Breakfast Club.

"It couldn't miss," Holobinko says.

The band talked its way into some bars, but it was at McCarthy's that they really found their fans. The bar realized there was a perpetual batch of recent college grads -- up-and-coming drunks from such venerable party schools as Ohio State, Ohio University, and Miami -- that it wasn't reaching. So it built a stage and dance floor, with ample room for stumbling and making out with strangers.

The Breakfast Club was among the first to play that stage. Since then, hundreds of young women, mostly in their 20s, have stumbled into the band's -- and Brooks' -- intoxicating circle.

"He's strange, but I tell you what: He's got more women following him," says Linda Costanzo, who owns Scoundrels in Berea.