Listen: A Northeast Ohio Music Preservation Project

My name is Chris Noga. From 1988 until 1993, I played guitar and wrote songs for the incredibly obscure Cleveland Ohio band, North By Northwest. We released one 7″ single, one five song EP, one cassette single and appeared on one compilation CD. We spent about a hundred hours in the recording studio trying to find our sound (almost did, too) and we played less than a dozen live gigs. We were, however, proud to be an extremely small part of what was arguably the golden age of Cleveland music when a number of immensely talented musicians and bands wrote and performed their own music on their terms. From power pop, straight ahead rock and folk to post punk, electronic, avant-garde, the Cleveland music scene from 1985 to 2000 thrived and while there were varying levels of “success,” what really developed was a very cool sense of community. This work-in-progress is the story of those bands, artists, venues, recording studios and supporters of that moment in a rich history of Cleveland music.