When I moved to Chicago in the waning days of the 1970s, I knew pretty much jack shit about my new home. Sure, I was aware of the Cubs and the White Sox and (thanks chiefly to Walter Payton) the Bears, and of course I knew about Bill Veeck and Disco Demolition and Steve Dahl and WLUP. A couple of brief childhood visits had introduced me to the wonders of the Field Museum and the Art Institute, as well as the stunning presence of the city's skyline. But throw in a little Al Capone lore and a few archival news clips from the 1968 Democratic Convention riots, and that was about all I really had to go on.
What would the people there be like? For better or worse, I'd already ascertained that the widespread stereotypes about the residents of New York City (my place of birth) and Los Angeles (my most recent home) had more than a slight ring of truth to them — brusque and wiseass in the former, laidback and looks-obsessed in the latter. But back in late 1979, in those halcyon days before the Super Bowl Shuffle, Saturday Night Live's "Bill Swerski's Super Fans" sketch, and (yecch) John Hughes films, SNL's Billy Goat's-inspired "Cheesborger" bit and the controversial antics of the aforementioned Steve Dahl (then riding high on Dr. Demento's charts with "Ayatollah") were the the only obvious elements of Chicago "culture" muscling their way into the mainstream consciousness. And those examples, of course, told me next to nothing about where I'd landed, other than to be prepared for obstreperous Greek countermen and the distinct possibility that my new 8th grade classmates liked disco a whole lot less than I did...
No, I needed Off Broadway (or Off Broadway USA, as they were officially called, though I never heard a single DJ or classmate use the "USA") to tell me how it was gonna be. Their songs were, direct, engaging, fun, down-to-earth, thoughtful without any chin-stroking, free of pretentious bullshit but also humorously off-center — all qualities embodied by the friends I would make over the next few years, many of whom I still know and love to this day.
I had known absolutely nothing of this Oak Park, IL-birthed band before moving to Chicago, but I was introduced to "Stay in Time" almost as soon as I plugged my clock radio into the wall socket of my new bedroom. The song was all over WLUP and WMET on the FM dial in January 1980, and even all over AM powerhouse WLS, where it was beginning a slow climb up the station's charts.
Opening with pounding drums and ringing, Who-like chords before locking into a click-clack clockwork groove, "Stay in Time" was too straightforward (and keyboard-free) to qualify as New Wave, but it still sounded fresh and modern in the way that, say, Blondie's "Dreaming" or The Jags' "Back of My Hand" or Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl of My Dreams" or The Romantics' "What I Like About You" all sounded on the radio in those days — three minutes of tight, shiny, streamlined (power) pop that nodded affectionately to the 1960s while heading resolutely for the 80s.
But while those songs were all about romance or lust, "Stay in Time" was more about the pressure to fit in with societal norms, and the eternal tug of war between internal dreams and external expectations. Lines like "Stay in time, boy/Don't get out of line, boy" and "Use your head/You might as well be dead" hit me particularly hard, reminding me of the bullying I'd endured from the jocks at Ann Arbor's Tappan Junior High for the sin of being a "brain". (I'd missed the memo, apparently handed out during the summer break between 6th and 7th grade, that all guys should henceforth comport themselves like pre-verbal cavemen, and that any and all usage of multi-syllabic words was to be regarded with intense suspicion.)
The way the lead singer delivered those words hit me hard, too, His voice reminded me of Robin Zander's, only maybe without the freakish jet-engine power, and he had an adenoidal John Lennon thing going on as well; in retrospect, I can also pick out a bit of low-end Noddy Holder and some Tommy James "I Am a Tangerine" piquancy. But there was also a conversational aspect to his delivery that was very personal, very ingratiating, and immediately identifiable. WLUP had "Bad Indication," "Bully Bully" and "Full Moon Turn My Head Around" — all, like "Stay in Time," lifted from the band's debut LP On — in regular rotation as well in early 1980, and I knew the first time I heard each one of those songs that it had to be Off Broadway; the guy's voice was just too distinctive to miss.
Same thing with his lyrics; though not exactly verbose, they were definitely a little off-kilter. "If the world revolved around you/We'd try to escape to Mars," were the first lines of "Bad Indication," followed by "Take away our rocket fuel/We're gonna escape in cars." As lyrical flip-offs go, this was fairly conceptual — as was the line later in the song about "You try to pinch our girlfriends/With your selfish shellfish claw." But unlike, say, Elvis Costello, this guy didn't seem to be straining to impress anyone with his whimsical wordplay; he just sang these lines with a matter-of-fact shrug, like they were the kind of things that just happened to fall out of his mouth whenever he felt like expressing himself.
This singer, as I quickly discovered, went by the name of Cliff Johnson — a fact which I initially found extremely amusing since the only Cliff Johnson I knew was the hulking Black catcher/DH who'd clubbed 12 home runs in just 142 At Bats for the 1977 Yankees. But you'd never mistake one Cliff for other; Off Broadway's lead singer was short, wiry, had curly reddish-blonde hair and a somewhat disconcerting tendency to wear shorts and white nurse shoes onstage. But as "Bully Bully" proved, he was just as scrappy as his baseball counterpart, whose infamous 1979 shower brawl with Goose Gossage put the future Hall of Famer on the DL for nearly two months. The song, which tells the story of a high school dance that goes awry when local mooks decide to hassle the band, concludes with Cliff slamming his guitar into the mouth of the ringleader. Yeah, this was a band I could relate to.
Since On was their debut album, I figured that Off Broadway must be a new band that had shot to fame relatively quickly. I had no idea that Johnson and bassist John Pazdan had first played together as far back as 1972 in an early incarnation of the Oak Park-based Pezband (another cool group that I'd never heard of before landing in Chicago), or that "Full Moon" — my favorite track on the album — had originally been recorded as a demo by D'Thumbs, an earlier "local supergroup" that featured Johnson, Black Oak Arkansas drummer Tommy Aldridge and future Cheap Trick members Pete Comita and Jon Brandt. Indeed, it was no fluke that the band was considered one of the main attractions at Loopfest '80, a two-day affair at the International Amphitheatre billed not-too-hyperbolically as "The Most Incredible Chicago Rock Event In History"; these guys had all paid their dues for years, separately and together, in the bars of Rush Street and the greater Chicagoland area. And yet, when Off Broadway kicked into "Full Moon," there was no evidence of any lingering jadedness or exhaustion from endless one-nighters to be found anywhere in the music; there was only pure rock n' roll exultation, the sense of tapping into the same cosmic power that catapulted The Beatles from The Cavern to Candlestick Park.
Off Broadway should have been big, or at least bigger than they were— every song on On was jam-packed with power and hooks, without any ballads, lonely rockstar laments or ass-covering disco moves to bring the album down. Aside from the talents of Johnson and Pazdan, the band boasted the dynamic drumming of Ken Harck and a fantastic guitar tag-team of John Ivan and Rob Harding, all of whom came through loud and clear on the record. But "Stay in Time" was unfortunately fated to be the epitome of a regional hit; though it would eventually peak at #9 (lodged between Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker" and Gary Numan's "Cars") on the WLS charts for the week ending May 10, 1980, it failed to climb higher than #51 nationally.
In the past, John Pazdan has shared some bitterly hilarious Facebook posts recalling how the club-hardened band had failed to connect with wasted arena crowds while on ill-conceived tours with the likes of UFO, Blue Oyster Cult, Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet, and how On had ultimately been torpedoed by the soul-crushing indifference of some of the higher-ups at Atlantic Records. (Though On sold by the truckload in the Midwest, one Atlantic exec reportedly brushed off the tens of thousands of units moved as having been "bought by the band's friends".) Then again, without the promotional efforts [cough PAYOLA cough] that had gotten Midwest radio stations on board in the first place, On probably wouldn't have made it as high as #101 on the Billboard 200.
In any case, by the spring of 1980 it was starting to become clear to many suits in the music biz that the frenzied signing of "skinny-tie" power pop bands (which had reached fever pitch the previous summer in the wake of The Knack's surprise success) wasn't going to pay the sort of dividends that anyone had hoped, and were already thinking of cutting bait and casting their nets for whatever the Next Big Thing might be. And while New Wave was still surging in popularity via the likes of Devo, The Cars and The B-52s, Off Broadway simply didn't have the quirks, the keys or the visual image to hang with that crowd. By the time Quick Turns, Off Broadway's second album, was released in the fall of 1980, it was clear that the band's moment had passed; Pazdan had already left the fold (he was replaced by Pezband's Mike Gorman), and if the album's title didn't betray the rush to strike while the iron was still hot, the lesser quality of many of the songs certainly did.
Released with an anchor, Quick Turns quickly sank without a trace, only to resurface in the bargain bins it calls home today. It's still worth picking up for "Automatic" — a perfect blast of edgy, Costello-y power pop. Maybe a Cars-like synthesizer line would have made it more commercially viable in the fall of 1980, but I loved the song from the first time I heard it on WLUP. I couldn't find the single anywhere, though; I only learned decades later that, while Atlantic did ship promotional 45s of "Automatic" to numerous radio stations, the label never even bothered to press up actual sales copies.
The band pressed on into the early 80s, and would reconstitute with various lineups in decades to come, but the best days of Off Broadway USA would be forever in the rear-view mirror. Still, they made a dent, something that most bands can never say — ditto for the fact that so many people still love their music four decades after the fact. In October 2018, just a few weeks before Katie and I moved from Chicago to North Carolina, we caught a performance of the reunited On lineup in Evanston. I had never seen Off Broadway back in the day (I'd wanted to make the Loopfest '80 scene, but couldn't figure out how to get down to the South Side on the CTA), and I figured this would probably be my last chance to see them at all.
The place was packed, mostly with fans much older than myself, and while it was admittedly a little jarring at first to see a bunch guys in their 60s and 70s amble onstage to perform songs that meant the world to me when I was 13, we all became young again as soon as they started playing. The musicians were wonderfully tight and energetic, Johnson was in remarkably good voice throughout, and the crowd sang along with just about every word. And during "Stay in Time," it hit me — the band that had welcomed me to Chicago when I first arrived was now providing the exit music as my third and final residency in the Windy City was coming to an end. That seemed beautifully poetic, and made me all the happier that we had gone to the show.
I became even more thankful for that experience yesterday, when my phone lit up with texts and Facebook posts from Chicago friends about Cliff Johnson's passing. I never met the man, and only got to see him do his thing onstage once, but the news still hit me hard. I pulled out my Off Broadway records, cracked a beer, and took a time-trip back to that small, chilly bedroom on North Lake Shore Drive, where the music coming out of my clock radio provided all the warmth I really needed. Rest In Peace, Cliff; thanks so much for adding fuel to the heater.
Fuck Yeah!!!
Posted by: DTCMD | 07/18/2022 at 02:51 PM