Shownotes Transcript
Interview with Steve Traina about his new book La Cave.
Steve took time off from childhood activities just long enough to start and run a small business, help raise six kids, and perform various other adult activities. It was just a phase. In his spare time he also managed craft a 30-plus year career as a minor league and college D1 umpire, and fit in an ongoing 22 years as the on-air host of the music history show Steve’s Folk Radio Show on WRUW-FM 91.1 in Cleveland. Now that he can form a baseball team with his nine grandchildren, he realized the foolishness of it all and, between grandfatherly duties, reverted to his childhood dream of sitting around reading and writing. In these pursuits he is guided by his ever-vigilant editor Ethel the Very Large Cat.
About the La Cave Book :
In a dingy basement music club in inner-city Cleveland, something incredible happened, and kept happening throughout the ‘60s. Except it didn’t just “happen.” It was created by a slightly-built visionary named Stanley Kain, and he named this happening “La Cave.”
Stan’s vision was the future and its language was written in musical notation, fueled by post-adolescent angst amidst a backdrop of the military draft, war, race riots, and social upheaval in general. For a buck, maybe two, suburban kids, college students and other young adults could absorb the wisdom of their elders – future musical Hall of Famers, still unknown, perched behind guitars, mere feet away on a tiny stage, dispensing that wisdom with a 4/4 beat.
Performers like The Velvet Underground, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Moby Grape, The Fugs and countless others were the professors of this new ideology. Mix in political drama, street theater, psychedelic drugs and cheap beer, and you have a microcosm of 1960s America. You have La Cave. History was made nightly, and was it ever fun!
Steve's info