So this was all down to my loved one asking me if I’d looked to see the concert calendar in Northeast Ohio before heading up there to visit family this week. I had not but when I did I was electrified to see that a very big catch was awaiting my ears at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland the night we arrived. I bought my ticket within 15 minutes of seeing the gig and a good thing, too since when I arrived at the club early last Saturday night I saw the “sold out” sign on the doors.

The cheerful club was delightfully old school in its setting in the Waterloo Arts district; surrounded by other pubs and small businesses. It was probably a 90 year old building, well kept and given some nip and tick under the current management to re-attain some of the vibe it probably had sixty years earlier. I entered the hallway to the showroom and stopped to peruse the merch. As I already had the “Groove In the Face Of Adversity” CD I only needed the T-shirt with that motto emblazoned on its front. I paid the lady, happy to see CDs and LPs in evidence, and made my way into the sold out club.

The Beachland Ballroom had that warm patina that only a well seasoned club attained. The violet lighting and glitterball made the medium sized stage pop and we didn’t have to wait long for the show to get underway. At eight o’clock sharp the band walked onto the stage; the nine members fitting snugly into the space.

Don Was was at the rear of center stage with his double bass and before the show began, he took the time to say a few words to the audience. Significantly, only one day after the tour had begun, Don’s  bandmate in The Wolf Brothers, Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead, had died. Was had been asked to join that band on bass by Weir and had risen to the occasion. Playing tours with Weir since the band’s genesis in 2018.

While this tour with the Pan-Detroit Ensemble was centered around playing The Grateful Dead’s “Blues For Allah” album in its entirety to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the mood of the tour had shifted immediately due to Weir’s death. As Was told the audience, the gut punch of learning that Bob had died an hour before their second show on the tour delivered a blow that needed to be surmounted. The first thought was “how can we play?” But the joy of playing music was the way through the pain. Was told the audience how Weir himself had done it when Jerry Garcia had died, and now it was his turn.

We would all be part of a communal healing process and the many Grateful Dead fans there tonight would be adding their empathy to the circuit we would form  together. And with that Don and the band began playing. Be still my beating heart, the first song was the B-side to the Was (Not Was) debut single “Wheel Me Out!” I had been playing “Hello Operator” in my mind on the drive into Cleveland and that was what the band immediately delivered! It was a great pick as the song already had plenty of Jazz DNA in its makeup for this band to run with! 

Singer Steffanie Christi’an was a powerful feminine counterpoint to original singer Sweet Pea Atkinson, with a full bodied voice that called back to Tina Turner minus the AOR tendencies that came later in life. The arrangement here harkened back to how I heard the song on the amazing late 80s live music show Night Music, with the three piece horn section driving the bus.

Next up was a song that was on the band’s “Groove In The Face Of Adversity” album in a live recording from 2024 in Detroit’s Orchestra Hall. “You Asked, I Came” was a pensive instrumental that saw Ms. Christi’an exit the stage while the eight piece combo revisited the song that Don Was had written for the “BackBeat” original soundtrack in 1994.

She rejoined the band for the next number, a second dip into the Was (Not Was) songbook. But performing “Elvis’ Rolls Royce” had never happened earlier, owing to the lead vocal by Leonard Cohen. On this evening, Don Was himself would take the lead vocal on the song but not before regaling the audience with the incredible backstory of the song and how it came to unite Leonard Cohen and Iggy Pop, who sang backing vocals on it.

Leonard Cohen called Don Was and said, “you’re friends with Iggy Pop, right?” “Yeah, sure,” was Was’ reply. “Well, the next time Iggy’s in L.A. will you bring him over to my house,” asked Cohen. Was responded with “he is in L.A., we’ll come over later.”

They got there and went into the kitchen and Cohen had been constructed a reply to a classified ad in the San Francisco Guardian that had said something like ‘…single female, nice looking (at least I think so), looking for a man with the benign nobility of Leonard Cohen and the raw severity of Iggy Pop.’ And Don was tasked with taking a Polaroid of the two of them, waving, from Leonard’s kitchen table. And that girl got it in the mail.

Then the band lit into the swanky Jazz groove of “Elvis’ Rolls Royce” in a manner not unlike the original album arrangement. With the lead groove being carried by the fluid sax of Dave McMurray and the soulful conga drums of Mahindi Masai. I had to say that Don Was acquitted himself admirably on the lead vocal there. Sure, sure. There’s only one Leonard Cohen, but I was very happy to have the song reach our ears in 2026.

Then came a treat for fans of the “Forever’s A Long, Long Time” album by Orquestra Was. With Steffanie taking the lead vocal in a Sweet Pea-free world we now inhabit. Giving it all the subtle grit and fire common to her predecessor as the band re-inhabited the song which had been an outlier from the post-Was (Not Was) era forward nearly twenty years to the Pan-Detroit Ensemble which was still to come.

Next: …Uncharted Territory For The Monk