Artist description Damnation's focused contemporary hard rock, but with arrangements that are far more advanced. While most heavy rock acts featured screaming or shouting vocalists, Damnation tested the waters with low-range, gospel-like harmonies and Adam Blessing's grinding yet melodic leads. Songs quickly shift from simple rock arrangements into idiosyncratic middle-eights - sometimes over a pounding rhythm by drummer Bill Schwark and bassist Ray Benich, sometimes enhancing a ballad. And when it comes to hooks, Damnation can lure in the listener almost every time. Damnation of Adam Blessing is a band that infused broad influences of the Beatles, Vanilla Fudge, John Mayall, and Stax/Motown artist. In 1972, after recording FOUR LP's for United Artist Records, Damnation of Adam Blessing retired from the music scene.

Music Style PYSCH/GARAGE

Musical Influences Yarbirds, Beatles, Mahalia Jackson,Buffalo Springfield, Vanilla Fudge, John Mayall,

Similar Artists Led Zepplin,Yarbirds, Beatles, Buffalo Springfield, Vanilla Fudge

Artist History The Damnation of Adam Blessing: Cleveland's Forgotten Sons By Doug Sheppard ***For the full, in-depth 18-page story and all the photos, order UGLY THINGS #17. A few choice excerpts follow…*** Cleveland, Ohio's Damnation of Adam Blessing scored only a few regional hits and barely dented the national charts, but artistically, they were far and away more original and innovative than any band from their hometown and could even make that case with plenty from outside Ohio. Damnation's focus was obviously on contemporary hard rock, but the arrangements were far more advanced. While most heavy rock acts featured screaming or shouting vocalists, Damnation tested the waters with low-range, gospel-like harmonies and Adam Blessing's grinding yet melodic leads. Songs would quickly shift from simple rock arrangements into idiosyncratic middle-eights - sometimes over a pounding rhythm by drummer Bill Schwark and bassist Ray Benich, sometimes enhancing a ballad. And when it came to hooks, Damnation could lure in the listener almost every time. And yet, outside of their four albums and a brief appearance in a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame exhibit on Cleveland bands, little evidence remains. As literally hundreds of inferior contemporaries have seen their albums reissued on CD, not a single note of Damnation music has entered the digital realm. It's a damned shame - or rather, shameful. A band that infused broad influences of the Beatles, Vanilla Fudge, John Mayall, and Stax/Motown into its own sound deserves, at the very least, some sort of tribute. In the inexcusable absence of a CD anthology, we present our own here. Bassist Ray Benich's penchant for conflict would be a recurring theme throughout their existence. "He was the violent one in the group," Jim Quinn said. "If there was a fight starting somewhere, you could guarantee he was in the middle of it." "He was so unpredictable, and you just didn't know what to expect from him," Bill Schwark added. "I was scared of him, very scared of him. I tried to avoid him as much as possible. When somebody did something to the extremes, it was always Ray. It was almost too weird at times - just scary weird." Benich, only 18 when the first Damnation album was recorded, also got his bandmates' attention by evading the draft that year. Schwark: "He went to his physical and acted just really super strange and got out, because they didn't know what to make of him. He got out on a psycho thing. (laughs) He showed us; he actually did a little charade shtick on how he got out of the draft. He did this little bit like he did in front of the draft board, and we all looked at each other and said, 'Yep, that's true, I wouldn't have taken you either.' (more laughter) "They asked him, 'Do you do drugs? You're acting so weird.' And he'd go [in a ghoulish voice] 'Drugs?' And he'd shake his head real hard and go, 'I heard of them.' Meanwhile, he really was on drugs. (Laughs)" Benich's immediate past was one thing. But when the other four saw a fight unfold at the Boston Mills ski lodge around November, they had their first taste of just how far the bassist could go. Quinn: "Adam and I were sitting on the edge of the stage and saw a fight in progress on the main floor. We looked harder, and here it was Ray. Someone supposedly flicked cigarette ashes in his hair and he went off on the guy, then all hell broke loose. We had a police escort out of the place." Kalamasz: "It ended up going to trial, and I think it was not because of that but because of like police brutality or something. They were saying he resisted arrest, and he said it was brutality and it got way out of hand. I think Adam was the only one from our band that actually got called in as a witness to the situation, then there were other people that were in this crowd. The jury ended up ruling in Ray's favor, that he actually just got jumped by all these guys, then the sheriff's [deputies] took their side, too." And as Adam recounted, Benich's onstage antics were no different than those offstage. "Ray Benich got pretty violent when he played the bass," he said. "We had two roadies, one on each side of these big Kustom amplifiers, and he would dive into them and try to knock them down. And it got to be a competition where it was two against one: These two guys trying to hold 'em up and Ray trying to knock 'em down. And the crowd just ate it up." Not that Benich was the only one who liked to get rowdy onstage. Adam, for example, had some memorable microphone swinging incidents. The first came at D Poo's in '69. "He was swinging it around by the cable like Roger Daltrey, and the mike came unhooked from the cable, went straight out and knocked this girl cold," Kalamasz said. "It hit two girls, and it knocked one of them out," Adam said. "They had them both in the back in the first-aid area, and I went back there and gave them my autograph - and they were just so excited to see me and talk to me and get the autographs that they forgot all about being hurt. They weren't hurt bad, but from that point on, those microphones were taped to the teeth, period." Well, except on a Pittsburgh television show in 1970, that is. Quinn: "We did a TV show in Pittsburgh once where they threw us off. First of all, they wanted us to take our guitar cords and plug them into the carpet. And we were like, 'No, man, if you're gonna have us plug it in, we want to look like we're playing out of our amplifiers.' I mean, there's nothing cornier than having this hard rock band that isn't plugged into anything. So we said 'absolutely not.' I remember them giving Adam this very expensive microphone. So Adam starts swinging the mike around his head, and of course the mike breaks off of the cord, flies into the wall, and shatters. They threw us off the show right then. They told us we'd never get airplay in Pittsburgh ever again. (laughs)" The most prominent concert memory for all members, however, is Damnation's appearance at the Cincinnati Pop Festival at Crosley Field (former home of the Reds) on June 13, 1970. Slated to go on in the morning of an all-day event, the Clevelanders showed their southern Ohio relatives how it was done when they kicked into their extended jam of "You Got Me Floatin'." Adam: "At the Cincinnati Pop Festival, we were set up on second base, and the crowd was pushed back up into the grandstands. There was a snow fence set up around home plate. We went on about noon, and when we went into that song ... you know, it goes through the whole first verses and stuff, and then the chorus lines, and then it goes into the solos. The song takes about 45 minutes to play, sometimes longer. "But as it comes out of the solos, and the drum solo was the final solo, Billy Schwark went into this insanely ... like a train coming down the track. All the drums going 9,000 miles an hour and all of the sudden, 'boom,' we broke back into the chorus of the song. At that point, the crowd just went berserk: They rushed the stage, they knocked down the snow fences, they ran over the cops and 70,000 people rushed the stage. I didn't know whether to shit or run or what. (Laughs) It was really something." Ken Constable joined in time for the recording of the band's third effort, Which is the Justice, Which is the Thief? By most appearances, United Artists was still behind the band - hiring noted artists Robert Lockart and Al Vandenberg (who designed Sgt Pepper) to do the cover. Considering the price he paid for the job, Lockart may have regrets; or rather, he may wish he had familiarized himself with Cleveland's worst areas before the photo shoot took place in May 1971. Lockart and the band managed to all fit into Ken Constable's vintage Chrysler Imperial - which was perhaps a good thing given what unfolded. Kalamasz: "He [Lockart] thought it'd be a great idea to look for a corner or something that would [capture a] really gritty feeling of inner-city Cleveland. And we drove around and we found it, and we all piled out outside this corner drugstore or something. On the other corner was a bar, and this was in the morning as I remember it. He took the picture, and all of the sudden this car - and it probably was a big car like a Cadillac or a huge Buick or something - with squealing tires came peeling around us [and] slammed on the brakes. This drunk gets out, opens up the trunk and comes at us with a tire iron from our left. And from our right, all these rednecks come piling out of a bar and just come running at us - and pandemonium breaks loose. And somebody screamed, 'get to the car' - which was catty-cornered from all of us. We all ran for the car [and] jumped into this really cool vintage car that Adam's brother Kenny had just gotten from his grandfather, and all hell broke loose." Quinn: "Two minutes after that picture was taken, we got jumped by about 10 guys who came out of a bar across the street. We had been harassed, you know ... calling us faggots and all kinds of shit. We had traveled all over downtown Cleveland with this photographer. This guy was freakier than all of us. He had like long, stringy red hair and a bushy, big red beard. "They take the tire iron from the front of car to the back of it and start beating on it, and knocking lights out. I'm sitting in the middle somehow, Kenny's on the car door, and we finally get out of the spot. But I remember them pulling the beard of the photographer and just ripping it out. I remember this blood-curdling scream." Adam: "I stopped to throw a couple of garbage cans at the crowd that was charging us to slow them down, which allowed the other guys to get to the car. I slowed the main crowd down; there was another guy coming down the other sidewalk that I cut up onto. And as I cut up on the sidewalk, he came down on me with a pipe across the back of the head - and he hurt me pretty bad. I got kicked a few times [on the ground], but it was the pipe that did the damage. And there was blood pouring from my head." Schwark: "We tried to get away but they got a hold of Adam and they just kicked the shit out of him. It was the worst thing I had ever seen." Kalamasz: "As we were not 10 seconds into it [driving away], I think I realized Adam wasn't around and I started yelling: 'Hey, we gotta get Adam! Where's Adam?' Then Billy said, 'Hey, we gotta go back and get him' or something. So we stopped somewhere, dropped off a bunch of people to call the police, and then went back. And by that time, that part of the attack was over. Adam was just by himself, and all these guys were back in the bar." Adam: "When the cops came, I marched right back into the bar looking for the son of a bitch. Because I knew what he looked like, and he had adios-ed out the back door. And everybody was sitting at the bar like nothing was wrong; in the meantime, there were cop cars everywhere and these guys were all sitting just like statues at the bar. So I mean, you knew it was bullshit. So I just walked up to one guy at the bar and I told him, 'You fucking asshole, you belong here in this fucking ghetto and you'll never leave because you're an asshole.' (Laughs) And I turned around and walked out." In spite of the mayhem, the gang of "middle-aged slum white-trash people" (as Schwark calls them) didn't get Lockart's camera - and the photo taken just moments before the assault ended up on the inner gatefold of the album. Quinn: "For me, it was one of the greatest times of my life. It was always my dream to make records." Earle: "It's fond memories. I learned a lot. I learned what not to do in the music business, that's for sure; I think that's important. But I also learned what was good about everything I did in music and what was salvageable and what I should keep. I still play music and I still enjoy it. That experience has been invaluable. "Plus the fact that you have this feeling that 'I did it once and I probably can do it again.' So that's a good thing to have. I know that there were personality problems in the band and that, I know from my experience, probably the utmost important thing in a group is to have people who think somewhat alike." Kalamasz: "We had a good time. I don't think any of us were thinking we wanted to be rock and roll stars or whatever. We just wanted to play some music and stuff and the easiest way for us to do it was to write the stuff. The 'fun' part was it; I don't think any of us had a real good grasp of the industry at the time - [to] where we could have just kept it rolling. We had business people kind of usher us around to do stuff. "We were definitely family. We had our little squabbles and stuff, but we had a lot of great times. We hung out together even when we weren't practicing or playing; it wasn't like we tried to avoid each other or anything. Everyday, somebody seemed to try and make connections with each other and just hang out and do stuff. It was our little family social circle." Ken: "I have nothing but good memories about it, really. I think that music is a great experience for anybody. It's a very creative level; it's a creative space. It doesn't really make much difference exactly what your level is and how successful that you are. The music, I don't think, ever leaves you." Adam: "There are songs that to this day I still really, really enjoy listening to. I don't listen to them all that often, but when I go back, I'm still amazed at the things that we did for the time slot that we were in. I always thought we were ahead of our time. We played music, and we played it rather well; that was all that counted. We were never into pyrotechnics on stage, blowing stuff up, flashpots ... none of that stuff. We just got up and we played straight-ahead rock, and by the time we got to 'Floatin',' that place was rocking."

Group Members Adam Blessing - Lead Vocals Ray Benich - Bass Guitar Kenny Constable - Lead & Supporting Vocals Jimmy Quinn - Rhythm Guitar - Supporting Vocals Bobby Kalamasz - Lead Guitar - Supporting Vocals Billy Schwark - Drums - Percussion

Instruments Guitars, Bass, Drums

Albums Damnation of Adam Blessing - United Artrist Records, Second Damnation - United Artist Records, Which is the Justice Whhich Is The Thief - United Artist Records, Glory - Avalance Records - Damnation to Salvation - Akarma Records/Italy

Press Reviews UGLY THING MAGAZINEhttp://www.ugly-things.com/blessing.htmlCLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER http://www.cleveland.com/music/index.ssf?/music/pop/080600.htmlSCENE MAGAZINEhttp://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf?/entertainment/pd/y01happ.htmlFREE TIMEShttp://www.freetimes.com/search/MUSIC NEWShttp://www.mp3collaborator.com/MusicNews/MN003.htmGGOLDMINE Magazine #522 July 28, 2000 review by Jo-Ann Greene. Here's a teaser..."The Damnation Of Adam Blessingis one of those band names that a lot or people have heard, but very few have actually heard their music, although the enthusiasm of the group's friends in high placescertainly makes you want to. Akarma (Italy) has now come to the rescue with what ranks among "the most eagerly awaited packages of the year". YAHOO BUSINESS - http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000818/oh_rock_ha.html

Additional Info Coming Soon - Damantion LIVE from the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME REUNION CONCERT of 9-27-2000

Location Cleveland, OH - USA

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