New Book Captures the Visual History of Speak in Tongues, Legendary Cleveland DIY Venue

For seven years, from 1994 to 2001, Speak in Tongues existed in a liminal space — DIY venue, art space, commune, nonstop party, and breeding ground for Cleveland creatives and musicians. That era will live again through the pages of a new book that captures the visual history of the seminal period.

John Delzoppo, the DJ and pinball champion, spent years collecting archival material with the help of those who were part of the fabric of the underground spot for Where Shit Happened: The Paper Trail to Speak in Tongues, which will be released this August by Pave the Ocean.

Through troves of hand-drawn concert posters, gig calendars, set lists, punk zines, show photography and—yes—police reports, the book is a trip in the wayback machine to a place that defined an era and left its fingerprints on the local scene for years afterward.

“I think the lifespan was a big part of why Speak in Tongues is remembered so well,” Delzoppo told Scene. “I mean, there were probably a thousand shows over seven years. So, it gave them a lot of time to make an impression on the community.”

It’s a snapshot of a moment in time when a ever-evolving amorphous group did, well, just about whatever they wanted and built a community in the process around West 43rd and Lorain, long before chic restaurants and breweries defined the west side of Ohio City.

John Delzoppo’s history of Speak in Tongues collects 500 pages of documents, from show flyers to police reports. Credit: Pave The Ocean

Delzoppo’s book documents an underground space that managed to stay underground, one where local and touring bands could pull a crowded room without much fanfare.

And while there’s been work in recent years to put the history of Speak in Tongues down on paper — former Scene staff writer Eric Sandy penned an oral history for this outlet in 2016, which he later expanded into a book, and photographer Ken Blaze compiled his archive into a retrospective in 2015—Delzoppo says his aim was a more thoughtfully curated and arranged collection of primary documents.

A “reference book,” he said.

Of a wild time, even if some of the wildest were left on the cutting room floor.

Delzoppo laughed. “I didn’t want anyone, you know, having their professional career tainted by something that happened all the way back in 1996,” he said. “Maybe it’s just better to be left out of the publication.”