Cleveland Rockers Union Local 00 Take Stand Against Shady Business Tactics

The story goes like this: once upon a time in the Land of Cleve, there was a surfeit of musicians who played in tiny clubs across the city for a small group of friends, and felt content with doing so. As time went by, the bars with stages started dwindling, while the stages with bars lured in droves of happy concertgoers with their promises of national acts, familiar names, and higher maximum capacities. The citizens of the Land found comfort in the heavy publicity for these clubs while the musicians decided to give them a chance, since their native bars were becoming less and less popular. Several of the musicians found their experiences with those larger clubs to be less than enjoyable and secretly vowed to stay away from the larger establishments. Though rife with acrimony, the musicians mostly kept their opinions to themselves until the big, bad Wolff came along, offering to be the voice of change.

Frustrated with practices of the larger clubs and big-time promoters, the Wolff and his band of merry minstrels joined forces under the banner of Union Local 00 to offer an alternative to the process of selling tickets, playing overbooked and mismatched shows, and going home broke.

Union Local 00 is the collaboratively hostile brainchild of Nick Wolff and J. Hell, singers of local bands The Nick Wolff Band and the GT-40s, respectively. To put it simply, Union Local 00 is a coalition of local musicians assembled to help further each other's musical careers without the help of outside promoters, which has grown exponentially since its recent inception.

"The mission statement basically is to create a network of bands and musicians that will allow us to dictate where we play, and who we play for, and with, in the hopes of locating great shows with bands that fit well together... and draw the people that actually have it in them to support local and independent music, all the while keeping all of the musicians' hard-earned money out of the hands of greedy club owners, and booking agents, and production agencies, and other various things that shall be left nameless here," said J. Hell at the union's first official meeting, held February 18 at the Jigsaw Saloon & Stage on State Road in Parma, which has essentially become the Union Local 00 headquarters for the time being.

Though the exact history is a bit confusing -- a song by the title 'Union Local 00' was written by the Nick Wolff Band nine years ago, and J. Hell started a Union Local 00 MySpace group in July 2007, but the first meeting was held in February 2008 -- the core premise of Union Local 00 is simple enough: it's a group of bands dedicated to promoting themselves, the bands they play with, and the clubs they play rather than go through third-party promoters to play the bigger venues and kick back with their PBRs while the smaller clubs start disappearing.

"It's a forum, basically, for us as bands to discuss ways that we can bring the scene to a way that's beneficial for musicians," Nick Wolff explained at the February meeting. And the way to accomplish that, according to Wolff, is to sponsor shows all over Cleveland in the struggling clubs with four -- maybe five -- bands, made up of one local newcomer, two established local acts, and an out-of-town headliner, with a $5-7 admission fee, all while aspiring to make sure the traveling band gets paid.

"You can't do anything as a band without money. And we're all in it for the musicianship, but if your band's going to succeed, you have to put something into it... You should never have to drive out of a town and worry about how you're going to get home with gas money. That's ridiculous."

But wait - doesn't logic dictate that if you play a bigger show in front of more people, you will make more money? Not necessarily. While Union Local 00 outwardly seems like a fully positive force within the Cleveland music scene, something had to have happened to spark the fire and get these guys off their barstools to do something. Union Local 00 is not only an outlet for helping local musicians; it is also something of a reprisal effort for these bands who have been scorned by the forces they set out to avoid, and they have plenty of complaints.

After an explosive situation at Peabody's, a concert club that recently relocated to the Rascal House Bar on Cleveland State University's campus from its location in the Flats under new ownership, which involved their practice of asking local bands to sell tickets in order to determine their time slot that led to being left off the bill, the Nick Wolff Band took matters into their own hands.

"When they cancelled it, I wasn't even mad we weren't playing. I was excited because like, finally, I have something to bitch about. I'm a rabblerousing asshole and... maybe I didn't care when other people got fucked, but as soon as I got fucked myself, I felt it was too much. I guess that's the way every band has to go through it. You have to get kicked in the balls enough times to get sick of it."

Chris Zitterbart, the current owner of Peabody's, finds the whole idea unnecessary.

"It was a misunderstanding that could have been avoided."

According to the Nick Wolff Band, when they showed up at Peabody's to play a show as a favor to a friend, they were asked about selling tickets for the show. The band was told they were not required to do so, but the man at the door told them that if they didn't sell tickets, they couldn't play. So they left.

"Here's what upsets me about the situation," says Zitterbart. "It's that we had an agreement that they would play Pirate's Cove (an intimate stage with a punk rock vibe within the main Peabody's building), and they came in and said 'we want to play Peabody's [main stage].' And I tried to accommodate that... Someone called me, I called back ten minutes later, I said 'take care of these guys. Give 'em a good time slot.' By that point, they had freaked out, left,