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Deadbeat Poets bring Circus Town back to life
By John Benson
When 25 years ago Deadbeat Poets singer-bassist Frank Secich came across the abandoned Circus Town in Butler, Pa., he saw the dilapidated and weed-infested early-20th-century amusement park as a perfect metaphor for Northeast Ohio.
The faint memory of summertime laughter and carousel music echoing in the wind never left Secich, formerly of notable, local power-pop-act Blue Ash. Now the 1970 Sharon High School graduate has brought those feelings to life with the Deadbeat Poets’ second album, “Circus Town,” which was released earlier this summer,
“It’s just such a great place,” said Secich, who now calls Hermitage, Pa., home. “It’s been closed for almost 70 years. There is precious little about it on the Internet, but it was built by industrialists that would take poor kids to this place from Pittsburgh. It’s made of all of these steel buildings and has sideshow tents like Arabian tents made of this corrugate steel. It’s just so great, so rustic and so Americana. I always thought it would be a great album cover for The Who or Led Zeppelin.”
The new album started to come to life for the Deadbeat Poets when singer-guitarist Terry Hartman wrote the title track.
The band — Hartman, Secich, guitarist-singer Pete Drivere and drummer John Koury — never looked back, writing songs that Secich feels almost have a carnival character theme. The results are three-minute rock jams featuring jangling guitars and catchy melodies.
One of the new songs has already received quite a bit of attention from E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt (aka Little Steven).
“The biggest thing that happened this year is we got picked up by Little Steven’s weekly syndicated radio show ‘Underground Garage,’” Secich said. “The track ‘The Staircase Stomp’ got picked as the coolest song in the world. They played that for nine weeks in a row. And we’ve been on Little Steven’s Sirius satellite show in the top 10 for almost 10 weeks. They’re still playing it there.”
As promising as that may seem, the Deadbeat Poets have become pseudo celebrities in the U.K., where the Liverpool Football Club blasts the band’s song “No Island Like The Mind, No Ship Like Beer” (from the group’s debut effort “Notes from the Underground”) during its games. This publicity led the Youngstown-based act to mount a 2008 10-day tour overseas, which included a gig at the Fab Four-famous The Cavern Club.
Secich said the band is looking at returning to the U.K. in 2011, as well as undertaking an American tour that will include a date at Austin’s popular South By Southwest festival. In the meantime, the quartet has booked an Oct. 16 show at Cedars to support “Circus Town.”
Though Secich may paint a doom-and-gloom vibe for “Circus Town,” he also believes this rust-belt commentary does have a warm side in that it’s the story of Northeast Ohio.
“It was always depressing here, and now it’s worse, but there are still good parts about it,” Secich said. “There’s good people here, good stories and good hearts here. I think it’s a human-redemption story, maybe for the band itself. And the silver lining is, there’s always hope.”