Guitar Man Was Here

“Hey, Hollywood!”

Guitar Man is pointing back at a flock of young women seated inside a restaurant on East Fourth Street and mugging for a photo through the front windows. People are always asking for photos. Guitar Man is always obliging.

He grips an acoustic Ibanez and really leans into the pose, muscles flexed against a megaton grin; the ladies inside click their iPhone cameras and smile at their digital souvenirs. With a hearty laugh, Guitar Man scoops a D-major into the air and strums with patent joy.

Errant young professionals dot East Fourth like fauna on a quiet Midwestern prairie. It’s Thursday night. Early spring. Kinda empty around here, really. A pair of suits gawk at Guitar Man as they wheel their Audi into the valet lane. Our superhero lumbers slowly, his grizzled goatee and blond mane accenting a red-and-blue getup with a touch of the 1960s and a dash of weathered uncle shopping at a thrift store. He eyes the landscape, looking for the next soul in need of salve.

“I’m Cleveland’s only real superhero,” I can remember him telling me when I first met him on a snowy December evening. The wind snapped and cars slipped through icy Ohio City that night, but there was Guitar Man, strumming “Beautiful Day” out on Market Street. He asked if I’d like to hear another. Why not?

Tonight is no different, though it’s quieter out here. And people aren’t really picking up what he’s laying down. Yet. See, Guitar Man has a job to do, and — well, goddammit — if Cleveland’s not living up to its potential, Guitar Man will just have to work that much harder.

The siren’s call of the millennial rolls through the wind: ”WOO-oo-OO!”

It’s Emily’s birthday tonight. She and three friends are out for a night of Clevelandpolitans. Ever the charmer, Guitar Man reels them in with the promise of song.

“I’m gonna use all my superpowers, Emily, to create a perfect birthday song just for you — never before heard in the city of Cleveland!” His hands are flitting around his head, conjuring electrons from the air and buzzing with some unseen neurological energy. His eyes roll around, looking for that inspiration known only to worlds of superheroes and legends.

“And I got it!”

Guitar Man launches into a jaunty rockabilly rhythm: “Happy birrrrthday to you…Happy birrrrthday to you …” The girls join in a call-and-response refrain. They’re loving it. They’re dancing now, and Guitar Man seems wrapped in a haze of rock ‘n’ roll — blue cape billowing as he rounds the corner toward the final line: “Happy birrrrthday to youuuu.”

Applause. There’s always applause and, without a doubt, smiles.

“I want to warn you,” Guitar Man says directly, and Emily’s face drops for a moment. “Do not under any circumstances let me catch you not having fun tonight.”

She and her friends burst into laughter.

“All right, ladies. I’d love to stay and chit-chat. But clearly I’ve got a city to save.”

I receive a call in January from a man named Eli Fletcher. He says he’s got something to tell me about Guitar Man, that ubiquitous character Clevelanders have undoubtedly encountered roaming the streets of one entertainment district or another.

Fletcher’s place is on West 90th, far from superhero land. I knock on the wrong front door at first before Eli bursts from another portal on the side of the house and greets me on his porch.

“Come on in!”

Two cats — Bongo and Ouija — scamper about the house and fall into impromptu and short-lived scraps beneath tables. Ouija was a stray brought in by Eli. She spends her days pissing off Bongo now.

“I washed a mug just for you,” Eli says, ambling into the kitchen to pour some coffee. I settle in and gaze across the accoutrements of his home studio: a massive Santa Claus statue holds court beneath a grandfather clock hanging horizontally on the wall. Here, a bust of Ludwig von Beethoven. There, a washtub bass. “I hope this’ll do it for ya,” he says with a raspy voice and hands me a teacup of coffee.

He looks like Guitar Man, and I can’t quite grasp how. The goatee? The eyes? Something seems so familiar. He turns on the stereo and cranks up some of the music he’s been working on lately.

Then I see it: the acoustic Ibanez, leaning against a closet door.

Eli starts to play a song. He says it’ll all make sense. It’s called “That’s My Buddy,” a tune about a beloved little pet dog. By the end of it, Eli is wiping a tear from his eye. He writes a lot of happy songs, he says, but he writes a lot of sad songs too. That’s kinda how life goes.

He grew up on the city’s westside, poor and nomadic. But musical instruments were always around — somehow. Through a cousin’s drum set or a friend’s guitar, Eli found a way to play. He didn’t have his own, nor his own lunchbox nor color television. When he first saw The Wizard of Oz, that part where everything blooms in technicolor blew his mind. This is what it must be like to be rich, he thought.

There’s a story he’d like to share with me, he says. His first guitar was stolen when he was 16. Right here on Cleveland’s westside. More than 30 years later, some guy offered to sell him a guitar that sounded mighty similar. It had to be his, he thought. After a wild goose chase across the neighborhood, the guitar changing hands a couple of times between sellers, Eli tracked it down in a consignment shop on Madison. Things like that — the serendipity of being in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the right time, whichever you please — have defined his trip.

After he was kicked out of his parents’ house as an elder teenager, he took up life at a “hippie commune” on Woodbine Avenue with fellow musicians Gary Emond and Sam Phillips. There, he found himself surrounded by kickass gear: Gibson SGs, 73-key Wurlitzers, and more of the finer things in musical life he simply wasn’t exposed to while growing up.

“I got into an environment that was conducive to learning,” he says. This was in the late 1970s. Ohio City was very different back then. The neighborhood tried to harden young men’s souls.

He picked up a bass when called upon for a one-off jam session. “I said, ‘Nothin’ to it.’ Never touched one in my life,” Eli says decades later. “Picked it up, figured I’d pick one note and just hammer on it. Found a rhythm. Figured, well, I’ll find another note that goes with this one. Oh, that’s gettin’ a little better. I started mixing it up. Next thing you know, I’m playing the shit out of the bass guitar.”

Soon enough, Eli began playing the shit out of the bass guitar onstage in the City Band and later, and more prominently, the Joe Average Band. Wild times, at least those that Eli can remember. He played all over town, even gigging on the streets for dough.

“I was determined to not let go until something happened,” he says. “I’d like to resurrect it all, but, you know, the discipline it takes to play on that level … I always felt I was working toward something; but looking back, I was already there. I just didn’t know it.”

Eli shifts the conversation to the present: “Do you want to see my movie poster? I’m gonna make a movie.”

There he is, in cinematic glory: Guitar Man: The Movie. And bedecked by looming, Star Wars-esque typeface, a simple message: “In a world where terror and chaos reign and all that is left is music, humanity’s only hope is Guitar Man.”

In 2013, half of Cleveland shut down to make way for Captain America. For most of us, all that meant was a longer commute and the chance to see some cars blown up downtown. Captain America wasn’t here to save Cleveland. He wasn’t real, after all.

Guitar Man showed up in town right around that same time. Erumpent with panache, clad in the colors of our country and the spirit of days past, he began kicking around Ohio City and making merriment in the neo-hip corners of town, the parts with the bars and restaurants and people. GUITAR MAN blazed across his chest in bold letters. He could brighten your day with a smile or a well timed G-chord or a,”Hey, good lookin’!”

Like right now: These four guys are hanging around East Fourth the night before the Kentucky Wildcats take to Quicken Loans Arena for a Sweet 16 NCAA game. They were trucking back to the hotel before Guitar Man calls out: “How’s it goin’, fellas!”

“What’s your story? Howyadoin?”

“I’m Guitar Man, Cleveland’s only real superhero. I’m out here saving Cleveland one song at a time. You guys want to hear a tune?”

Hooked. Guitar Man launches into one his classics, “Free Beer,” and the guys whip out smartphones, snapping photos and shooting wobbly video. One of them shuffles his feet in rhythm. A Mercedes honks, breaking up the dance party as the driver tries to make his way to a garage entrance. The guys eye the luxury car warily, returning to the fun as Guitar Man reaches the final verse. You know the one.

The same summer that Guitar Man arrived in Cleveland, City Council barred police from ticketing and harassing street performers. The move came after Maurice Reedus Jr. — better known as the Sax Man — threatened to skip town after receiving citations. The Sax Man is a local legend and, not coincidentally, was the subject of a well-publicized documentary that was filming the very year that council made the about-face.

“I’m glad that they finally did something, but I’ve been doing this a long time,” Guitar Man says. “I’ve been kicked around and mistreated as much or more than Maurice. I’ve been fighting the good fight the whole time and nobody seemed to give a shit.”

Lots of bar owners came out to support the legislation, those same owners and managers that had kicked Guitar Man to the curb in the past and cursed him out against a crowd of onlookers. They said that street musicians made the neighborhood vital and hip, though, sure enough.

The city ordinance covers all sorts of performing arts, including: “acting, singing, playing musical instruments, pantomime, juggling, magic, dancing, reciting and clowning.” The city ordinance does not, however, protect performers from the douchebag gentry.

Guitar Man is saving Cleveland one song at a time, but he’s up against stiff odds. Most people, to be clear, are respectful and receptive to his duty. Most people in this world, if you believe the songs, are good people. But there’s the air of class warfare on the streets of Cleveland these days if you look with the right eyes. The overtones don’t square with what this town used to be, according to some who’ve been around.

Guitar Man’s been around.

And deep down, he tells me, he’s been Guitar Man his whole life.

Through his career, Eli worked in scenic artistry, audio engineering, lighting — pretty much every behind-the-scenes theater and stage gig you could imagine, all working toward the goal of working for himself and working onstage.

He had pulled work in junkyards for years on and off, but he began putting in time at Tri-C and Baldwin-Wallace in set design, as well as on Cash Explosion.

“1994 was a big year for me,” he says. That was when he worked on the set of the Rolling Stones’ video for “Out of Tears” (he encountered Charlie Watts and his family congregating on rickety old floorboards in an abandoned building on set and insisted they move elsewhere, saving the drummer’s life, no doubt). He did time on the set of Double Dragon, an early Robert Patrick and Alyssa Milano movie shot partially on a then-unsavory East Fourth Street. Then he hit the road for nine years as a designer with Rhythm In Shoes, an internationally renowned dance company.

Fell in love with a girl out there. It didn’t work out.

Eli never married, though a litany of lost romances and women-who-got-away riddle his past like an epic poem. He had a daughter along the way. He’s tried to be a good man, he says as he surveys his past.

In more recent years, Eli has taken it upon himself to pursue happiness — for himself and for others. He wouldn’t trade the careerism he sought on the road for so many years, but he’s still not sure what to make of the great roadmap of his life.

“Man, this was all for everybody else,” he says, thinking back to the dance troupe days. “They’re gettin’ rich, and I’m making a few bucks. The only way this is gonna stop is if I stop it. Not for hire. Not anymore. I’m working for me, and my boss is a real prick.”

And so he set about an idea, an origin story. He had seen enough shit to know that more than a few wrongs needed righting in this world.

See, Eli is an ideas guy. The wheels never stop turning for him, and even after he landed on the audacity of becoming a superhero, well, even then he never slowed down.

When Captain America arrived, Eli rode the wave and hit westside thrift stores in search of gear: a mask, a cape, the shoes — oh, the shoes show that you mean business, he says. The name was simple enough: self-explanatory and to-the-point.

Guitar Man began hitting the streets nightly, particularly in the warm weather months that followed. West 25th. East Fourth. West Sixth. Tremont. He’s trying to branch out more this upcoming summer, trying to keep up with the tidal shifts in neighborhoods across Cleveland. Still, the basics will remain the same: Guitar Man only plays his own stuff on the streets, save for the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday.” And when people come calling for “that ‘kush and coffee’ song,” that’s about as high a compliment as he can get. He’s a songwriter, to square the whole tale rather simply.

“Now, I always sing for free, but I don’t discourage tipping,” he says to passing audiences. En route to saving the city one song at a time, Guitar Man will pull in some change to supplement a trickling income. He was tossed a $100 bill once; that was a wonderful moment. And some woman gave him three tickets to the 2013 Indians-Rays Wild Card game. More often than not, though, Guitar Man is slipped a single, a five, or nothing at all.

It’s another cold bitch of a night here in Cleveland, and Guitar Man has gotta find some dough. He trucks down to Market Street in a rumbling pickup and grabs a coffee on the way to his perch. The guys he runs into don’t have any dough on them. One guy’s got some brownies, though, so Guitar Man knocks back a few.

He flits his head around, constantly looking for an audience, and Guitar Man tells me he’s been playing the streets of Ohio City for decades: “It’s a lot different. I liked it better back then, but …”

There’s a dissonance in Cleveland lately. Come not as you are, come as you’d like to be marketed.

“I think the problem is that everyone talks about Cleveland’s ‘identity,'” Guitar Man says between sips. “They talk about identity for Cleveland, but then they do everything they can to make it just like every other fuckin’ place. Now we got a fuckin’ casino. Not on the outskirts, but right smack in the middle of downtown.

“They’re talkin’ about condos and high-end restaurants and bars and bullshit, high-end shopping and bullshit for a select group of people that can afford to be there. That’s not Cleveland. Here’s Cleveland’s identity, or what it should be: the one place that says ‘no’ to that shit. This is the place. You can develop some of it, but don’t turn everything into a fuckin’ clubs district. This whole town’s a club district now. Not every place has to be a destination.”

But a lot of things don’t have to be the way they are.

Guitar Man says that, ever since the City Council legislation, more and more street performers are showing up in Cleveland. Not a tsunami of guitarists or anything, but a good river of musicians have come to kick around the streets. Even as the streets become more sterile in many ways, you can’t keep the creativity down. Creativity and weirdness built this city. Cleveland is for weirdos. And the last thing you want to do is lose that voice in the conversation, marginalize them.

“As a matter of fact, there were less of us back then,” he says. “There were more opportunities for musicians. There were a lot of hillbilly bars around here, country bars. The scene changed, and I’ll tell ya … If they can get somebody for free who’s okay, that’s better than getting someone who’s really good and paying them.” Guitar Man says he’s seen the power of the almighty dollar quite often in his life, from the outside looking in.

We walk down West 25th and people come and go, alternately ignoring the man with the cape and engaging him in witty banter and selfies. A lot of people just say no when they’re asked if they want to hear a song. They’ve got places to be, and that’s quite all right with Guitar Man. He’s just trying to share his music.

“I think that what we really need is jugglers and that kinda stuff,” he says. “We need the town chock – full of that.” He imagines the freak power of the old days, the sense of righteousness that everyone knew would prevail. Shouldn’t there be something to fight for these days?

“A lot of people today are struggling to find an identity, which used to kinda naturally occur,” Guitar Man says. “But now there’s so much going on that they’re trying to find one. Nothing really nails them down to their time.”

Often, you can spot the cape from a good block or two away. His lumbering gait is distinct. His warmly gruff vocals are tell-tale signs that he’s somewhere nearby. He’s everywhere, really.

“I think it’s pretty obvious Cleveland needs a superhero,” Guitar Man says. He’s working another coffee on Market Street, a mean wind whipping around his cape. He casts an arm toward that crosswalk on West 25th — the “honor crosswalk” that has no streetlights, no cause for safety.

He says that Cleveland should have superheroes all over the place — superheroes like Blam-O the crossing guard clown, for instance, who would help people cross the street safely and maybe even dish out a few laughs. Superheroes should leave the city better than it was when they encountered it.

During a recent episode of his online show, he can be seen watching old reels of Underdog and Speed Racer: “vital superhero research.” He never stops learning, never stops mining the world around him for new ideas.

“I’m combating negative G-forces with positive musical vibrations,” he says with all the seriousness of a real-life superhero. That’s a lot to ask of one guy, but he’s up to the task.

In search of a busier scene — some place more poppin’, he says — Guitar Man boards the bus downtown. Back to East Fourth, the great magnet of the New Cleveland.

He tells me he’s rolling out a lunchbox series sometime soon. Guitar Man lunchboxes, a firm nod back to the nostalgic. Growing up in Ohio City, he never had his own lunchbox. Times were tough back then, for a young hero in training who had yet to find his niche. He was a smart kid, he says, and he did what he needed to do to get by. He’s taken some shit in his life.

Most people know who he is, even if they don’t know who he is. He’s not often called Eli on the streets, and even more rarely is he called by his birth name. “Guitar Man!” they’ll say with arms outstretched and an ear bent toward an impending song.

And if they haven’t met the man with the cape? He’s always up for introductions. If you’re not careful, though, and you find yourself caught up in the bubble of Cleveland cultural trivia, you may just mistake him for someone else. Happens all the time.

“I’m not Superman, I tell ’em; I’m Guitar Man. Now, I can understand where someone would make that mistake.

“And I tell ’em, well, you know the difference, don’t you?

“Well, Superman is made up. I’m real.”