Cleveland native Mark Edwards threw down a startling gauntlet of bare bones words/music in 1986 called …And He’s Not Gonna Take It Anymore. Even more striking was the name the 23-year-old took for his one-man band—My Dad Is Dead—reflecting his own situation (both parents had died by then). The name stuck and several albums followed, strikingly low-fi, with slightly sardonic, often profound meditations on mortality, loss and the crumbling state of the world. My Dad Is Dead left a legacy of unpretentious post-punk. A new reissue of…And He’s Not Gonna Take It Anymore sent PKM’s Jordan N. Mamone on a quest to find Mark Edwards.
I’ve always thought the people of Cleveland had a remarkable resilience in the face of national jokes, declining industry and job base, dilapidated housing stock, losing sports teams, you get the picture. It definitely contributed to the yeah-but-we’re-still-here mentality, but also a constant background noise of, “What’s the next bad thing that’s going to happen?”
Pretty great interview with Mark Edwards, main man behind the dark chime post-punk Cleveland act, My Dad Is Dead. It focuses a bit too much on the band name -- I never really thought of it as potentially offensive, just very Cleveland matter-of-fact -- and since it was done on the occasion of the Scat Records expanded reissue of his debut, it’s mainly about the early stuff. My Dad Is Dead has a long rich catalog worth exploring.
There’s some talk about his earliest shows where Edwards played solo with a drum machine, usually wearing a drab suit. I saw a number of those shows, and as this was right as I was starting to go to shows, it was fun to see the way ostensible “punk” shows in Cleveland challenged any quickly settling in notions of what that meant or was supposed to sound like. The jumbled mix of alt-bands that would play Cleveland underground shows was not weird to me, just the situation, making noise up there to make you figure out what fit in your head or not. It really wasn’t until later, when I moved to Columbus and especially when New Bomb Turks started touring, that I got a sense of how truly oddball, unique, and inspiring that late-80s Cle scene was.
Overall, there’s some excellent insight in this interview into a still kind of mysterious man whose band is one of the most criminally underrated of the end of the 20th century.
