Fertile Ground

For a 1974 Kent State University concert, an agent offered up a largely unknown band from New Jersey for the bargain rate of $750 as an opener. Student promoter Michael Solomon listened to the band’s demo and liked what he heard, so he took a chance and put them in the lineup. That intuition was spot on. The act ended up being Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, one of the greatest rock bands of all time.

After the show, Solomon had an after-party at his Kent house. He remembers saxophonist Clarence Clemons being there and Springsteen sitting on his floor in a torn leather jacket with holes in his boots, saying to a friend of Solomon’s, “Man, we’ve been at it a long time. I just hope we can keep the band together a little while longer; I think we are getting close.”

First-person narratives of chance encounters with rock ‘n’ roll legends before their fame was realized fill out Kent native Jason Prufer’s book, “Small Town, Big Music” (Kent State University Press, $17.37). Released in late January, the book also contains historical photos and newspaper reviews of musicians who were already big stars when they performed in Kent, like Paul Simon, James Taylor, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt.

Always a lover of many musical genres, Prufer worked at Spin-More Records in downtown Kent for 13 years and developed a special affinity for early arena rock. When customers looking at posters or collectibles would mention seeing Pink Floyd perform “Dark Side of the Moon” in its entirety at the Memorial Gym (now the on-campus Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center) in 1973, Prufer was curious. A quick microfilm search initially yielded nothing about Pink Floyd but turned up ads for other big names, like Santana and Cheech and Chong, performing in Kent. Prufer realized this part of Kent’s history was largely overlooked.

“When people focus on the history of this town, they always focused on May Fourth,” Prufer says. “[The book] was my mission of wanting people to know that really cool things happened in Kent beyond May Fourth. This is an aging demographic, so I was driven to get these stories down before it was too late.”

A senior library associate at Kent State University Library, Prufer started researching Kent’s rock era music scene in 2009 for an exhibit, using hard copies of old Daily Kent Stater newspapers and posting scanned ads and articles on social media. The 2010 gallery show, a part of the university’s centennial, included 40 large-scale panels of original ads and photos of familiar faces that had performed on campus: Fleetwood Mac, Frank Zappa, Elton John, the Clash.

“People couldn’t wait to tell me about their experiences,” Prufer says. They said hes should write a book, so he started interviewing people and compiling their stories.

One such story revolves around a photo of Chrissie Hynde as a teen sitting atop a chrome-heavy 1950s Thunderbird flanked by two fellow Kent State students posing as greasers. Another involves Mark Mothersbaugh recounting how his nascent group opened for screenings of the John Waters film “Pink Flamingos” at the University Auditorium in 1975, stating the show “very much represented when Devo created Devo.”

In February 2017, with his manuscript largely completed, Prufer got a call from the library’s then-interim dean who said Joe Walsh would be visiting to look at the library’s May Fourth archives for a documentary he was making. He asked, “Do you have anything rock ‘n’ roll that maybe we could show him and make him feel at home?”

Prufer showed his manuscript to the Eagles guitarist, including photos of Walsh as a 19-year-old Kent State student playing with his first band, the Measles, and with the James Gang on campus and at the bar JB’s. “He was just smitten with it,” Prufer says. Poring over the manuscript and reminiscing about his youth, Walsh offered to write the book’s foreword.

Walsh likens Kent in the ‘60s and ‘70s to the artistic salons and creative community of ‘20s Paris that Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” depicted. Though humble about never aspiring to be an author, Prufer thinks the comparison is apt. He’s proud to have preserved a unique part of Kent’s history for future generations.

“Having gone through the Kent city school system and been a little punk-ass teenager sitting around with a bunch of my friends saying, Nothing ever happens here; this place sucks!” Prufer says. “I wish that 43-year-old me could have handed the 16-year-old me my book and said, No, a lot of cool stuff happened here. This place is great, and this place is still fertile for you. You could do something that’s even bigger than what I’m writing about in this book.”