It may come as a surprise that — for a moment in the late 1970s — English music magazine NME declared Akron, Ohio, “the new Liverpool.”
Talent scouts from big music labels scoured the city for the next big thing in punk, signing bands like Devo, the Rubber City Rebels, Tin Huey and the Bizarros. Robert Christgau wrote in The Village Voice how “the heedless eclecticism of [those] bands … reflects both Akron-Cleveland’s paucity of original culture and its tradition of openness to new pop music.”
But none of this was all that unlikely — that a rainy, industrial, Midwestern town was the perfect incubator for the punk rock explosion that would be dubbed the Akron Sound.
“[These musicians] were looking for some way not to follow their dads into the rubber factories. These were kids of working class factory families who grabbed onto punk and new wave,” Calvin Rydbom, archivist of The “Akron Sound” Museum, said.
In the mid-1970s, the four bands that would become the center of the Akron Sound boom — Devo, the Rubber City Rebels, the Bizarros and Tin Huey — were largely constrained to the same venues in the Akron-Cleveland-Kent area, for better or for worse.
“You know I’m going to say there’s no Akron Sound, right?” Susan Schmidt Horning, guitarist and vocalist for Akron punk band Chi-Pig, said. “It’s appropriate for some cities to have a sound. It has to do with the musicians and the studios and something where you have a body of people doing the music, where you get a similar literal sound. But we had a whole bunch of different bands, so we all had different sounds.”
Schmidt Horning grew up on a diet of Magic Mirror records, church music and Broadway recordings before discovering the Beach Boys on the radio at age 10. She went on to start a cover band called the Poor Girls in middle school, one of the earliest all-female bands in the area.
“My early inspiration was The Beach Boys. I don’t know if that comes out in any of our music, but certainly [in] the music that we did with the Poor Girls, which was a lot of Motown, rhythm and blues, pop and rock,” Schmidt Horning said.
Formed in 1977 at a Devo show, Chi-Pig got their name from a local barbecue restaurant and rejected the traditional plaid-and-jeans aesthetic of the ‘70s in favor of Ricky Ricardo-style shirts and gold lamé pants they found at the sidewalk sale of a high-end Akron women’s clothing store.
Harvey Gold, keyboardist, guitarist and vocalist for Tin Huey, described their music as eccentric — even for the diversity of the Akron punk scene. Tin Huey began in 1972 as an acoustic trio.
“From the very beginning, Tin Huey was very difficult to define. There’s the old saying, ‘you are what you eat,’ and we ate a lot of things. We started it with the Beatles and the Stones and the Yardbirds, and then the Velvets and Captain Beefheart and Soft Machine had big influences on us,” he said.
Schmidt Horning and Gold both recalled that Akron didn’t really have a traditional music scene — punk and new wave bands didn’t have a regular place to play. Chi-Pig and Tin Huey went to clubs in neighboring cities, like JB’s at Kent.
Gold said that Tin Huey struggled to reconcile their artistic perspective with the limited opportunities available to them.
“In the 1970s you needed to have a record deal with a major label to get tour support, to get distribution,” Schmidt Horning said. “You didn’t have the ability to get your records out and get them played on radio.”
But everything changed with Devo.
“I don’t even know if [Devo] had early success; audiences didn’t get them at first,” Rydbom said. “In the beginning, [Devo] had those huge letters on stage and props. And Mark [Mothersbaugh] said, ‘Yeah, they’re a cool prop for what we’re doing, and we can also use it to fend off the crowd, if the audience attacks us.’”
Devo, formed in 1973, was born from anger in the wake of the 1970 Kent State shootings. The name “Devo” (short for “de-evolution”) reflects the idea that humanity is not progressing but de-evolving into “dysfunction and herd mentality.” Rydbom believes that Devo’s 1976 short film, “The Truth About De-Evolution,” launched their career. Filmed at the Goodyear World of Rubber museum in Akron, it follows the band members as factory workers who slowly devolve amid ensuing chaos. The film went on to win an award at the Ann Arbor Michigan Film Festival.
“This is like four years before MTV, before most people were even thinking about doing videos. [Bands] were happy to do just performance,” Schmidt Horning said. “But Devo was really ahead of the curve.”
Devo’s film piqued the attention of David Bowie and Brian Eno, who, in 1978, helped them put together their first album and get signed to Warner Music Group in the U.S. and Virgin Records in the U.K., where their cover of “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” found early success.
“When people think of [Devo] outside of Akron, they remember them as the goofy guys on MTV in the ‘80s in the jumpsuits — but their music is very angry. Their songs have an anger to them that, unless you really pay attention, you’re not realizing,” Rydbom said.
With their costumed performances and quirky onstage antics, Devo was initially better suited for European audiences than Akronites. Their 1978 debut album peaked at No. 78 in the U.S., while in the U.K., they hit No. 12. Two years later, the single “Whip It,” finally brought Devo to mainstream American audiences, reaching No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Rydbom said English music journalists asked Mothersbaugh about Akron. Thinking of both locations as dirty, dingy, factory towns, he responded, “It’s a lot like Liverpool.” Interpreting Mothersbaugh’s words as referring to Liverpool’s prolific music scene, they ran stories saying as much. Suddenly, clubs in London were having “Akron nights,” where you got in free with an Akron ID. British independent label Stiff Records worked with the Akron Sound bands to put together “The Akron Compilation” album, which had a scratch-and-sniff cover that smelled like — what else? — rubber.
At the same time, Chris Butler of Tin Huey and Nick Nicholis of the Bizarros contacted Robert Christgau of The Village Voice. Butler wrote that “anybody doing anything at all against our gray Midwestern nothingness deserves attention,” complaining that the American Christgau was covering everything in England and the East Coast but not his own backyard — the Midwest. Nicholis sent a Rubber City Rebels collaboration album called “From Akron.”
Christgau traveled to Akron in 1978 to listen to Tin Huey and the other bands, publishing the piece, “A Real New Wave Rolls Out of Ohio.” Christgau was impressed by the local camaraderie and earnestness. “These are syntheses unhampered by the preconceptions of more cosmopolitan or more rooted places,” he wrote. At Christgau’s recommendation, label executives from Warner came to see a Tin Huey show, and they were offered a contract on the spot.
In the wake of Devo’s international success, Mark Mothersbaugh’s one-liner and Robert Christgau’s piece, Tin Huey, the Rubber City Rebels and the Bizarros all got signed to major record labels.
Tin Huey and the Rubber City Rebels traveled to Los Angeles to record their albums, where the Rubber City Rebels commandeered a billboard to paint it in the style of a postcard from Akron. Gold also got to work with one of his biggest influences: Captain Beefheart.
“We were sort of the outcasts of the music world. And for some reason, we hung around long enough,” Gold said. “Suddenly it was cool to be a geek.”
But just as quickly as the industry gives, it takes away.
“It’s everything, and then it’s gone,” was how Buzz Clic from the Rubber City Rebels summed up the commercial success of Akron Sound in a 2003 documentary.
In 1980, a year after the release of their debut album, Warner dropped Tin Huey. One by one, every Akron band that scored a major label record deal — except Devo — was dropped by their label.
Rydbom attributes some of the slump to the luck of the draw. Originally signed to a side label of Mercury Records focused on punk and new wave bands, the Bizarros were meant to be marketed as such, without the expectation of mainstream album sales. But after the album was finished, Mercury discontinued the side label and it was released on the main label without any marketing push at all.
“There was every belief that ‘[the Bizarros are] an odd band, but they put on such a great live show. If we get them on the road, it might not be until their second or third album, [but] they will eventually break,’” Rydbom said.
But the oil crisis of the 1970s, according to Rydbom, drove up production costs for vinyl albums. Suddenly record labels were more hesitant to gamble for long-run success with alternative and punk musicians.
“When [Tin Huey] did our album for Warner Brothers, we compromised nothing for it, and as a result, we came up with an album that was — a nice way of putting it would be eclectic,” Gold said. “And so it was really, really difficult — I would consider it logically impossible — to find a proper audience.”
Meanwhile, Chi-Pig and the other bands left in Akron continued hoping for their own shots at success.
“Everybody had the expectation that the spotlight was still going to stay on Akron,” Gold said. “Everybody was waiting for somebody from the record labels to come by and see ‘em again.”
Chi-Pig kept playing shows in Ohio and along the East Coast until the late 1970s. Schmidt Horning remembers getting the chance to record at a studio in Florida during unbooked studio time, and Chi-Pig finished their album in hopes of getting that coveted record deal. But they never got signed.
“We got back from a trip to New York, and shortly after that, [drummer Rich Roberts] decided he didn’t want to continue with the band. And at that point, I think [bassist Debbie Smith] and I were burned out. It’s frustrating and it’s disappointing when you’re working so hard for something and you don’t get what you’re hoping to get,” Schmidt Horning said.
Schmidt Horning went back to college and received a doctorate in history. She said her background as a musician has inspired her current research on sound engineering and the history of all-female bands. With time, technological improvements alleviated the distribution bottleneck. Although the master tapes of Chi-Pig’s album were owned by the Florida studio, Schmidt Horning was able to digitize and release the “Miami” CD 20 years later.
The Tin Huey members split up geographically to pursue their own projects, independently recording and touring until 1982. In 2003, the band reunited to perform at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Other bands and musicians from the area continued playing in some form across Akron, New York, Los Angeles and internationally. Rydbom said that the Rubber City Rebels have, oddly enough, garnered a huge following in Japan.
“People joke, ‘it’s something in the water,’ but an abnormal amount of creative people came out of Akron in the ‘70s in the music scene,” Rydbom said.
Rydbom is working on incorporating the memorabilia and story of the “Akron Sound” Museum into a bigger-picture collection at the Akron History Center, set to open sometime in 2024.
Gold is still interested in the musical DNA of Akron. Highlighting the success of the Black Keys, the industrial sound of Dink and the recent rise of his granddaughter’s band Detention, he still thinks of Akron as unique, in large part due to the rise and fall of the city itself.
“Culture follows money. And there was a period in Akron because of the rubber factories that there was really a lot of money. It wasn’t just money amongst the elite who worked as executives at the rubber shops; it was the middle class,” Gold said. “Mothers had raised expectations [for their kids] to go to the [Cleveland Orchestra], to go on trips to the museums, to be educated. It was really that American dream of wanting everybody to do better than the previous generation.”
Then the money ran out.
“When the rubber shops left, it created absolutely — and very quickly — a real schism, a cultural dissonance, an economic dissonance. But you still have the kids, [who, to this day,] have that cultural, aesthetic hunger as part of our DNA,” he said.
Gold believes blending that cultural schism with the sound of progressive music at the time was the perfect recipe for what was coming out of not just Akron, but the post-industrial Midwest.
“You had some pretty strange bands coming out of Cleveland,” Gold said. “You had some really high-intensity bands come out of the Detroit, Ann Arbor area because of the car industry going down. Everything in the steel industry went down in Pittsburgh. The effect is a little different in each town; there’s a certain recipe that each one of them had that was a little bit unique. If you take that and then throw in the herd mentality of the record labels — you got yourself the Akron Sound.”
This story was updated on August 5, 2024 to reflect additional details given by an interviewee.
