It would be hard to write about Cleveland’s music scene in the past three decades and leave out illustrator Jake Kelly.
Kelly is Cleveland’s underground artist extraordinaire, known for his prodigious and skilled output, including thousands of hand-drawn flyers for bands and Robert Crumb-esque murals at Melt, the Grog Shop and Blue Arrow Records in Waterloo.
Kelly’s latest project channels the history that came before: 50 new murals highlighting Cleveland’s storied—and often undersold—music history, all in time for the city’s 230th anniversary.
The genesis of the idea came while researching his latest book, Hart Hat Weather, a 500-page retrospective of Cleveland shootouts and obscenity battles throughout the 1960s and 1970s. More specifically, when he was studying a photo of Reuben Sturman, the Cleveland-based pornographer, in the Cleveland Public Library archives.
“I realized: there’s three million images that show great Cleveland history—amazing photographs,” Kelly told Scene. “That’s when the penny dropped. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I could paint historic photos around town. I bet people would be into that.’”
He’s tackled a handful so far — a scene from a 1978 DEVO show at the Agora, an ad for a John Coltrane show at the defunct Algiers club for Clevo Books downtown, the Buckland Witchcraft Museum in Parma and at Mistake On The Lake Records — with about more murals now pending.
Kelly has one planned at Blue Arrow depicting a 1969 Velvet Underground show, and another on the exterior of Visible Voice Books in Ohio City. The rest, he said, “are under wraps for now. But there’s gonna be some pretty crazy ones.”
By the end of the year, Kelly hopes to have mapped out all 50 or so spanning “posters, ephemera and old advertisements,” from the past two centuries. He plans to finalize the project with a printed-out, folded map people can use to tour the collection in its entirety.
The goal is larger than a companion project to Kelly’s lenghthiest book yet. It’s to bring Leo’s Casino, Peabody’s, the old Agora and other spots into the collective consciousness of Clevelanders as they roam about their city.
“As corny as it sounds, like history really does come alive,” he said. “Like, it animates the world around you when you understand, like, the history of the place you’re in.”
Those interested in participating in the project can reach out to Kelly here, or donate on Kelly’s Patreon.
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