The late rock superstar David Bowie held a special place in his heart for Cleveland, where he launched his first U.S. concert on September 22, 1972 at Music Hall.
Now, several Cleveland bands will demonstrate their passion and respect for the Brit glamrocker who deeply influenced their music careers in a specially designed program: “David Bowie in NEO.”
Developed and presented by Thomas Mulready, Dennis “Van Crash” Yurich and their band Vanity Crash, the program will be performed at The Music Box Supper Club on Thursday, July 16.
Vanity Crash and Time Cat will perform, alongsideJames Longs and R.A. Washington of Mourning [A] BLKstar. An earlier show featured Ruby Rose Weston and Nate Bocchicchio of Cowboy Princess Brigade.
The concert will feature historical information about the multi-dimensional Bowie as a musician, his songs and how he ended up making Cleveland the site of his U.S. debut. There will also be videos of the members of the various bands talking about their memories and insights into the Bowie legacy. They will then perform covers of their favorite Bowie songs mixed in with their original music.
Musicologist Mulready, the drummer in Vanity Crash, led most of the interviews along with his band’s high-flying guitarist Yurich. Mulready also coined the term ‘docuseries’ to explain the distinct combination of the live concert experience with the rich content of a documentary film.
“I came up with a name for it finally because it’s like a documentary film in five-minute clips interrupted by a concert of music,” Mulready explained. “So I’m calling it a docuconcert.”
Mulready and Vanity Crash have performed this style of shows for several years now during their NEO Rewind Series, which has also featured the famous women rockers from Northeast Ohio (e.g., Ruby Nash, Chrissie Hynde, Patty Donahue) in their “Our Day Will Come” program, and punk rockers from the region in their “The Birth of Punk in NEO” show.
“This nostalgia and tribute scene that we’re inundated with these days, I see its purpose, and as this art form gets older, it’s going to sell tickets,” Mulready said. “But you’ve got to get young artists to come out and show how this music continues to live on and be important as we go forward, so that’s the big picture of what we’re trying to do.”
“I’ve never met anybody who came to these shows who was disappointed,” Yurich adds. “Everybody walks away pumped up. They learn something. Not only in terms of the videos, but they learn of other acts that they weren’t exposed to. They came for one or two acts, but then they’re exposed to these other acts.”
Yurich, who has long been enthralling audiences with his rock guitar virtuosity, said he also loves listening to the bands they collaborate with for these shows.
“I get blown away with these acts that we invite and what they can do, and it’s fun to interact with these artists,” he said. “They’re all amazing.”
Why Bowie?
As part of their new show, Vanity Crash and their collaborators will discuss the fact that early in his career, David Bowie did well in Europe but struggled to gain traction in America. The clever young rocker knew he could secure a foothold in the U.S. market if he connected to Cleveland’s then highly influential FM rock radio station, WMMS.
In the 1970s, the station became one of the first and heaviest supporters of Bowie’s albums. That’s why “The Man Who Sold the World” chose Cleveland’s Music Hall to kick off his first North American tour of that title in September 1972.
“When I was a kid, I used to go to sleep at night listening to WMMS, and I heard Bowie then,” Yurich said. “Besides the unique music, when I saw the image of him [kicking his leg up while playing guitar in concert] for that first show at Music Hall, I knew Bowie was a rock star. Nobody looked like him.”
For Yurich that admiration of Bowie and his music became central to his decades of performing, writing and recording rock music.
“It goes into your soul and it’s a passion, and David Bowie is a real inspiration from a lot of different levels,” he said. “The music is phenomenal, and his stage presence or his general presence is an inspiration, too, and his approach to music on stage or in the studio is an inspiration in terms of his combination of creation and direction.”
After joining Vanity Crash, Mulready, whose stage name is Thomas Anonymous, knew they had a special connection to The Thin White Duke, one of Bowie’s many personas throughout his chameleon career.
“Dennis had the band together for a number of years before I joined,” he said. “One of the first things I recognized was Dennis was one of the few people who can actually sing David Bowie and pull it off convincingly.”
History of the docuconcert
In 2013, Mulready, the founder and owner of CoolCleveland and a musician, began to collaborate with Baldwin Wallace Conservatory on marketing programs. At the time, the students would prepare a different Beatles album each year.
When he learned the students would be working on the Fab Four’s album released in November 1968, “The Beatles,” more popularly known as “The White Album,” Mulready asked if he could provide a presentation.
“I asked whether the students knew the backstory of how the Beatles went to India and hung out with the Maharishi,” Mulready recalled. “I had recorded an interview with Prudence Farrow, who inspired their song ‘Dear Prudence,’ because I ran into her at a conference a few years before, so I put together this backstory of all of the rare video and photos of ‘The White Album,’ and they loved it. No one had ever done that for them.”
Recognizing Yurich’s affinity for Bowie, who had changed his birth name David Robert Jones in 1965 to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Mulready began giving an hour-long video presentation about the glam star. Then after a break, Vanity Crash would take the stage to perform Bowie songs and original material.
“It was always about putting our original material out there with the show,” he said. Vanity Crash plans to record a new album at the end of this year.
Eventually, they started to meld the two with some of the video presentation embedded into their show. They start with the band on stage and alternate the video segments with live music.
Mulready’s obsession with Bowie began after hearing “Life On Mars?” from his 1971 “Hunky Dory” disc, also thanks to WMMS, when played by DJ Denny Sanders or Billy Bass. The latter will discuss his connection to Bowie at the Music Box show. Popular Cleveland rock photographer Anastasia Pantsios spoke at the Akron show.
A collector of cassettes at the time, Mulready borrowed the vinyl version of “Hunky Dory” from a friend, recorded it and played the album front to back while “driving around the back roads of Northeast Ohio.”
“I specifically remember sitting in my car on summer vacation with our family at Put-in-Bay and playing ‘Life On Mars?’ for my little sister on my newly upgraded car stereo with Jensen 6X9 triaxial speakers,” Mulready recalled. “We just looked at each other and lost our minds. Into acting and theatre, she left a couple years later and moved to New York City to try to make her mark on Broadway, but we still bond over that song and that album.”
Today, Mulready, who considers himself a completist, compiles his presentations from his comprehensive archival collection of “all the vinyl and CD releases, the bootlegs, the books about Bowie.”
“I’ve got terabytes of hard drives of documentaries,” he said. “I’ve got dozens of documentaries that have been put out by David Bowie. The more you dig, the more you find.”
New approach in 2026
This year, Mulready and crew decided to add the bands and musicians they admire and respect from Northeast Ohio to their NEO Rewind Series.
Mulready recruited Jeri Sapronetti, guitarist/vocalist/pianist for Time Cat from Akron, to the Bowie show after he saw her cover “Life On Mars?”
“Bowie is the whole reason I got into playing rock ‘n’ roll music because he spoke to me. I heard ‘Rebel, Rebel,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God. Somebody understands!’” Sapronetti said. “I taught myself how to play all of the instruments and how to write songs, and a year later I had a band and started playing shows, and that was 23 years ago, and I have not stopped, so it’s all Bowie’s fault.”
She performed in Mulready’s “Our Day Will Come” program, and the two musicians hit it off.
“Thomas was so cool, so nice, and we had in-depth conversations about a lot of things, so I was like, Okay, we’ll do it, and we ended up having this really good time,” she said.
Mulready is pleased to have James Long and RA Washington performing, too, because he considers their band, Mourning [A] BLKstar, “one of the most important bands to come out of Cleveland.”
The internationally acclaimed Afrofuturist collective released their 10th album in 10 years, “Flowers For The Living,” in May.
“Turns out James, the singer, is a huge Bowie fan,” Mulready said. “I called him and said, ‘Would you want to do something on Bowie and bring your originals, as well?’ He was like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding me?’ So they’re going to bring their whole different vibe to the show.”
He also loved having Weston and Bocchicchio from Cowboy Princess Brigade as part of the eclectic rock mix.
“They call their sound ‘Glamericana’ because it’s a glam American vibe they’ve got going, and you’re talking about guitars, acoustic, a folky vibe,” Mulready said. “They couldn’t be more different than Mourning [A] BLKstar or Time Cat or Vanity Crash, so you get to see these varied styles all celebrating an artist who is very important to Cleveland.”
Although she is a long-time collaborator with Yurich, and Vanity Crash founded the band Queue Up with him, vocalist Alison Garrigan appears as a guest artist in the Bowie and other NEO Rewind Series concerts. Bowie represents a special passion for her, too.
“I will pull teeth to sing David Bowie any chance I get,” she said with her deeply resonant chuckle. “Anybody who knows me knows I’m a Bowie freak, and Bowie wrote some of the richest backup singer material, so being on stage with this particular group of musicians is a dream. They are professional, talented and kind and generous. They are in love with the music they are playing.”
Keep our local journalism accessible to all
Reader support is crucial as we continue to shed light on underreported neighborhoods in Cleveland. Will you become a monthly member to help us continue to produce news by, for, and with the community?
P.S. Did you like this story? Take our reader survey!
