November 25, 1997. Bowling Green's music scene has long been a bastion of mainstream rock music, but over the years it's also spawned plenty of interesting sounds from out on the margins. By the late-'90s, a new generation of BG musicians was incorporating electronic music with traditional rock instrumentation to create new hybrid forms of electronic rock and synth-punk. Whatever you want to call the type of music that emerged from these experiments, Cletro (Joel Roberts, keyboards/theremin/guitar/vox; Matt "Letterman" Gannon, guitar; Jason Clever, drums/percussion) played it very well and did so with an energy and style that anticipated the keyboard-driven sound of Stylex half a decade later.
Cletro mixed together lo-fi, sci-fi and punkrock and named the frantic results "electro-prog trashmen rawk." Letterman picks it up in an email accompanying this flyer:
We formed after a hot Indian summer afternoon jam in September of '97 out of mutual appreciation for low-fi recording weirdness. Clever played a really crappy drum kit crudely equipped with a clangy-ass metal cylinder, I was on an over-driven early 90's heavy-metal hot-rod guitar with EMG pickups, and Joel was our ring-leader with his circus of Casio keyboards, theremin, and a "Flangemogrifier" (an electric guitar with a flange hot-wired to it).
This was probably one of our first shows and the flyer has a bunch of stuff going on. Joel and I collaborated on this. We used a Star Trek coloring book and at the top, from left to right, we have Joel as Kirk, me as Spock (with a penned in goatee which I was sporting in true bad '90s fashion), and Jason as Bones with signature thick-rimmed glasses. Below that is a Korg MS-20. I believe Clever had recently purchased one for some obscenely cheap price up in Toledo and it really symbolized the old-school hand rendered synth rock we played.
I don't know if we were actually booked at Easy Street or if this was just an open mic night that we intruded on. I believe it was probably the latter . . . Easy Street wouldn't probably have us otherwise. At that time, they typically seemed to book blues and jam-band kind of stuff. "We Do Chin-ups" was some shit we yelled in one of our songs.
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