Alan Greene does a major public service every Sunday night at Cebar’s Euclid Tavern. He has for nearly 12 years.
Greene plays guitar, of course, as he does two or three times a week at various neighborhood taverns in northeast Ohio. Has been for going on 40 years. Among his regular stops: The Moonlight Tavern in Parma, where he recently backed Gregg Allman’s kid, Michael; Smedley’s Bar and Grill, in Kamm’s Corners, and Agostino’s Ristorante in Brooklyn.
At Cebar’s, the Alan Greene Band, featuring Greene, singer Tom “Odie” Odegard, drummer Rob Luoma and the new kid, Justin Butcher, on bass, plays a 9 p.m. set, then lends its equipment to anybody who wants to plug in and jam.
The Alan Greene Band is a treat for serious music fans and great fun for those less dedicated. The other bands? They’re mainly satisfying for friends and family. The gig is perfect for Cebar’s, the kind of bar where Greene clinched his reputation as one of the best guitarists in northeast Ohio.
A superb player who says he can’t do anything else that well, Greene is steeped in Chicago blues and the blues-rock that surfaced during the first British Invasion. He’s modest in demeanor and presentation, but when he lets loose on his Gibson Les Paul (the favorite of his nine guitars), the tension is palpable, his phrasing compact and tart, the music nicely edgy.
The material is largely well known. At a recent Cebar’s blues jam, the band played such chestnuts as Paul Butterfield’s “Born in Chicago,” Little Milton’s “I Feel so Bad,” and an abridged, Eric Clapton version of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” They capped the set with “Long Lonely Nights,” a kind of embellished doo-wop that the Five Satins might have sung in the late ‘50s. Weird thing was, “Long Lonely Nights” is an original by the singer, Tom Odegard. A tune that wears its tropes on a satiny, bluesy sleeve, it is an uncanny summation of the Alan Greene Blues Band, a group that plays hard, clean, sweet and authentic.
“I’m a carpenter,” Odegard says of his day job, after the band plays and a guest group sets up. “I do this because I have to. I’m a musician. I have to do this to not go nuts.”
Greene puts it a less urgent way. “I am a full-time player. I don’t have anything else. I’ve had a couple of jobs in the course of 40 years, like regular job jobs; they were usually in-between-band gigs where I was looking to tide over. But I’ve been a full-time musician most of my life.”
Green Beginnings
The man born Alan Greenblatt is the son of a kosher butcher who grew up in the Chagrin-Lee-Van Aken area, attended Shaker schools, helped deliver his dad’s meats around town in high school, “blew my father’s money the best I was able to” in two years at Tri-C, played in the semi-famous group Breathless, and worked with Bill “Mr. Stress” Miller for most of the ‘80s, when Mr. Stress ruled the Euclid Tavern. Until a few years ago, his band was called the Alan Greene Band Featuring Mr. Stress.
Greene’s father owned a meat market for some 50 years at East 116th Street and Union Avenue, a neighborhood that's seen better days. "When my brother and I got our driver’s licenses, we’d have to deliver meat to his customers who moved out to the suburbs," says Greene. "They kept faithful to him.” Marty Greenblatt now owns a car leasing and sales business.
Greene began his musical career on trumpet in fourth grade at the now-defunct Moreland School. He took lessons, played in every school band available; it was the dawn of the ‘60s, and his hero was Al Hirt, the rotund New Orleans trumpet player. Then the Beatles “changed the world, and I was one of those little people who got changed,” he says. Besides, he never reached a zone on trumpet “where it was natural.
“I could never go off on my own like a real musician, whereas with the guitar, it seemed I couldn’t put it down. I’m totally self-taught. I was in high school with the big Beatles thing, the British Invasion of the ‘60s. It just swept everything away. You wanted to grow your hair long and be like the Beatles; all my friends were picking up guitars - including my brother, (who) picked up a little acoustic guitar.”
He acquired his first guitar, a Goya Rangemaster, at Beecher-Brush Music on Mayfield Road, absorbed the lessons of George Harrison and Eric Clapton (Greene liked early Clapton, when he was “hungry,” but doesn’t like him so much as the “professor” he’s become), and entered the new world of rock ‘n’ roll. One of his fondest memories: the first Santana album. Santana figures in his life now. More about that later.
“I was in an apartment on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, back in the glory hippie days of the mid to late ‘60s. I was still living at home with my parents, but in this new world on Coventry, we were listening to that record amongst other ones, in that apartment, where we used to get high and listen to music and zone out. I also remember in that very place listening to the first Led Zeppelin album and it was mind-blowing.” His heroes remain the early Clapton, the “very unorthodox” Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix, for “his lack of regard for rules.”
“Blues is where my heart is, but over the years, I’ve played in some pretty rock and roll bands,” he says. “Remember Jerry Shirley, who played with Humble Pie? I spent 10 years playing with those guys in the ‘80s. You remember Breathless, Jonah Koslen’s band?”
Greene’s first group was Gang Green, which played some instrumental originals along with such late-‘60s staples as “Louie, Louie” “Dirty Water,” “Little Black Egg” and Paul Revere and the Raiders hits. Gang Green played private parties in the Heights; the first bar Greene ever played was the Chatterbox Lounge in Geneva.
Greene also played in the band Hessler Court. He worked the Hulla Baloo circuit, and while engaged in a weekly gig for Jimmy Ley, a blues master on keyboards and harmonica, at the Mistake under the old Agora on East 24th Street, came to the attention of Jonah Koslen, the founder of Breathless. Managed by Mike Belkin, Breathless, which Greene joined in 1978, recorded two albums for EMI Records, which also was home to the Belkin-managed Michael Stanley Band, when it had its best shot at fame.
