Denny Carleton

Carleton has put out very little material under his own name, none of it reaching wide audiences, yet he produced effective pop and rock music while playing a meaningful part in Cleveland’s rock past. In the middle of the 1960s he handled rhythm guitar and wrote many of the songs for the Lost Souls, an eclectic Cleveland band styled after the British Invasion that cut several strong but scarcely noticed sides mixing radio-ready, hook-driven mod-rock numbers with strange experimental pieces. Once the Lost Souls disbanded he spent a brief period in the Choir, another storied Cleveland pop-mod act that would later furnish members for the Raspberries. The 1970s brought engagements with more experimental groups including Moses, Milk—which mixed Tiny Tim medleys with original numbers such as “Eat the Hot Dog Go Get Sick Later”—and Inner City, whose ranks included the singer who would front Meat Loaf. He also performed, though without recording, in the Pagans, one of Cleveland’s earliest new wave bands, and wrote one of their best-known tracks, “Boy Can I Dance Good.”

Never quite locating a commercially viable compromise between his straightforward pop instincts and his experimental ambitions, Carleton continued working through the 1980s, launching the cassette label Green Light to issue his recordings and archival collections devoted to the Lost Souls and the Choir. The standout item among these releases was the 1985 album Color with Crayons, a long, suite-like patchwork that stitched together fragments of extremely catchy pop songs with experimental sound effects performed on guitars and a rudimentary Casio. The record remained unknown outside underground circles, its influence further limited by its basic production. Even so, it endures as an inventive collision of avant-garde and pure pop approaches and stands among the few rock works of its period to merge accessible melodies with cut-up experimental techniques.