- [Announcer] Production of "Applause" an Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation.

The Kulas Foundation.

Rhe Stroud Family Trust and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuy%ahoga arts and culture.

(cheerful jazzy music) - [David] Hello and welcome to Northeast Ohio's arts and culture show, "Applause".

I'm Ideastream Public Media's David C. Barnett.

When it comes to rock and roll photography in Northeast Ohio, Janet McCoskers has captured it all ever since she was a teenager.

McCoskers persistence and passion to tell stories with photographs gives her an all access pass to rock and roll history.

- When I was 10 years old, The Beatles came to America and that was the moment where I knew I needed to be involved in music.

I got the direction for where I was going from "Life" Magazine that my mom subscribed to and I realized that I wanted to tell stories.

I wanted to tell the stories of the people who are famous and why they are famous.

And the key to that was in our front closet, I thought.

Which was my dad's camera.

The business that I wanted to do, the career I wanted to have was to be a photographer in the music business.

So, I began calling radio stations.

I started calling a couple of the disk jockeys on KYW, WKYC.

They were kind enough to let me come down to the station, I don't know, maybe on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

And I started answering their fan mail for which I would get huge boxes of 45 records.

Promo records with picture sleeves, which was the best.

So I was living the high life and I was only 12 years old.

Well in '66, Sonny and Cher were playing a concert across the street at Musical.

And before the concert, they came over to WKYC and answered some calls from listeners and I took some photos.

A couple of those photos I sent to "Teen Screen" Magazine and they printed one and I made $2 (chuckles) from my efforts.

But it pretty much convinced me this is what I was gonna do.

When I first got access to cover concerts and get interviews with bands, it was during that first year of "Tri-C".

In order to get that kinda access, I did the logical thing.

I went to what was well Belkin productions was the promoter back then.

I went to Belkin, I went to Henkel Connie at the Agora, I went to WNMS and told them who I worked for.

Paper, that I worked for at "Tri-C" and if they could help me in any way get access or show me how to get permission to do interviews and photos at a concert.

That would be really, really helpful.

Well, they all just jump in.

So as I'm progressing slowly with "Tri-C" Newspaper and being allowed to cover music, I see that there's a show coming up at the Allen theater.

I'd heard about this artist that was gonna open because WMMS had started playing his records.

He had two records out, I think by that point, but he wasn't very well known and so I didn't know what to expect.

And here he comes out on stage and he looks like a little beatnik guy and his name was Bruce Springsteen.

It was February 1st, 1974.

First time he played in Cleveland.

And it was the first time I shot a rock and roll concert.

So, we had our first moments together.

(rock and roll music) Open productions, created a series of shows called the world series of rock that they held at Municipal Stadium that would feature on each bill four or five.

I don't think more than five acts in a day, kind of like a mini Woodstock.

And I'm given almost free reign to go wherever I want and it was just like a candy store.

So, I see Joe Walsh and he's got a band called Barnstorm.

So I've never seen this many people in Municipal Stadium and I wanted to get a shot of Joe playing with the audience in front of her.

I ended up over by the drummer (laughs).

Just drumming and looks down and sees me with my camera and just said, shh and I shot some photos from that position, got exactly what I want and stealthily crawled away.

There was a legendary rock and roll hotel called Swingos and you can see it in the movie, "Almost Famous".

It had a central location to the Agora, to Music Hall.

To all the venues that would be downtown.

It was when fans and bands could hobnob and it wasn't a big deal.

There weren't guards.

There weren't big giant security guards waiting to smash you if you got too close to somebody.

So I can just walk in here any day of the week and they're gonna walk through the lobby.

They're gonna hang out at the bar.

It was just so rock and roll.

It was a man's world and a guy's club and whatever you wanna to call it.

But there were plenty of guys in the business that were very kind to me and promotion men who knew I could shoot a picture well and that I didn't mess around.

I did the job.

And people started hiring me for my photography.

♪ Can anybody ♪ When I started shooting rock and roll and music, it was all about the live events.

That appeals to me the most because it's a weird space I get into.

Kind of really quiet inside.

I don't even hear the music.

It's just reacting to whatever's in front of me and the light.

And so because it's the most authentic way to capture the talent and the art that, that person on stage is producing.

If I can do that, encapsulate some of that energy and what that person puts out, when you look at the photo, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or David Bowie or whatever, you're gonna get it.

It's shooting in the moment.

It's a 60th of a second moment you have to anticipate and that's why you need some kind of gyroscope or radar or something inside you that tells you when to click.

(cheerful jazzy music) Cleveland was chosen a lot of times by record promotion men because again, our audience was such an American audience.

Those blue collar workers.

And if you could get a record played on the radio here and it becomes a hit single, well that promotion men could go all across the country and make it a hit single.

I didn't wanna live in LA.

I didn't wanna live in New York.

I kinda liked London.

It was too expensive.

It's now way more expensive.

And what I found is every time I'd come home and you look out the airplane window and you see Cleveland down there, that's where I wanted to be.

I mean really, that's my DNA.

That's my home.

Yeah, I'm a big cheerleader for Cleveland.

♪ Good morning just one more cup of coffee ♪ - [David] For more stories of Janet McCoskers's work, you'll find details about her photography books at arts.ideastream.org.

And now meet Reno, Nevada, mosaic artist, Elizabeth Wright.

She creates colorful mosaics with stained glass, rusted metal, old wood and anything else she can get her hands on.

The result is a beautiful work of art with great texture and meaning.

- Mosaic art is any time you take smaller pieces of hard material, glass, tile, stone to create a picture or an image with those items.

So anything in that description is considered a mosaic.

I don't think I'm a typical artist in that you don't look in mine and go, oh, she does this one thing.

That's what absolutely pulls me into mosaic is that I can go in so many different directions.

But I use rusty things I find in the desert.

Dishes, pottery, beads, stone.

The biggest thing I use is cut stained glass.

(smooth guitar music) The first thing I think of is what substrate am I gonna put it on?

And that substrate is the bottom.

What am I gonna create it on?

We were out in the Santa Rosa mountains in Nevada and I found this big deposit of these flat rocks and I was like, oh my gosh, these are going to be perfect for mosaics.

(smooth guitar music continues) But then I get down to my little pieces on nipping.

So I hand nip nip, nip, nip, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.

I'm gonna use silicone to glue those pieces down and then I'm gonna tape it off.

Here you have this beautiful piece of art you've created and you're gonna take a black route and you're gonna smother the whole thing of your beautiful piece you've created, which is a little unnerving.

And then you clean and you clean and you clean and you clean.

The cleaning will be toothpicks and Q-tips.

So you wanna get everything out so you can see every piece of glass in that piece.

So it is a little crazy when you see this process when I'm doing that, but it's very meditative and it's...

I get some good music on and it's just...

I can just get lost in what I'm doing.

So it's a wonderful way to relax.

(smooth guitar music continues) Cutting has over 50 colors of glass.

To get the shades and all of the inspiration, I actually have to mix the glass almost like a painter where if I put two colors of glass next to each other, they will start to give the illusion of another color.

And cutting also has seven different colors of grout.

And I took the time and you have to tape it off.

Grout one section, pull that off.

Grout the next section, tape the rest of it off.

It's a really intensive process.

(bright upbeat music) I like that as my art has evolved I use reclaimed materials literally in everything I do.

It's not about the economics of it.

I feel that the reclaimed materials I use add character to the piece.

So let's say, I wanna make a sunflower.

You can put it in a simple frame and that's okay.

That's okay.

But to put it in a... With a rusty piece of metal we've found out in the desert and then to put it on an old piece of barn wood just makes that sunflower so much more special.

And it makes it where you can envision that sunflower near an old barn or out in a field.

It's amazing the rusty things we have found in the desert and you're like, what is this?

What was this?

But what I see coming from this is, I can see it in my mind.

I see something happening.

And it's not just what people think.

You don't just smash dishes and glue them onto something.

Not to make it art worthy you need to actually cut those into shapes and create things.

And it makes a beautiful, colorful piece and I think people really are like, wow, those were old dishes and they can see that.

(smooth guitar music) But I just think it's also environmentally a good thing to do.

If I'm taking something that's just rusting away in the desert and why not?

And that adds something in it's character.

And I'm also just taking some garbage out of the desert and I'm making something out of it.

It's amazing when you put some cut stained glass and some beads and it just turns it into this old thing you found in the desert into something very beautiful.

(smooth guitar music continues) - [David] Like so many neighborhoods Collinwood in Cleveland has been challenged during the pandemic.

Two artists capture the resiliency of Collinwood in the exhibit Homebody, a portrait of our community.

Plus a youth radio program in Dayton gives voice to high school students.

And the Cleveland orchestra performs a work by 20th century, master Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt.

Watch all that and more on the next "Applause".

Freeman vines is an artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher who's transformed materials called from forgotten landscapes in his relentless pursuit of building handcrafted guitars.

Each instrument is seasoned down to the grain by echoes of it's past life.

♪ I want to be at a meeting ♪ ♪ I want be at a meeting ♪ ♪ I want be at a meeting ♪ ♪ When all saints get home- ♪ - [Woman] 79 Year old Freeman Vines has been making and playing guitars most of his life.

For five decades this self-train luthier has cut, sanded and chiseled amazing instruments out of materials that encompass his past.

Things like tobacco barns, radio parts and mule troughs.

- I was back here one day they had a horse barn out there and I see this thing over there and I asked a man, could I have what I found out was a mule trough?

Now these are his words.

He said, "That mule slobber may have preserved that wood."

I could not resist, I made a guitar out of it.

I have made guitar out of some of everything.

I can't remember all of them.

- [Woman] But nothing has impacted his life and his work like the guitars he created from the wood of the hanging tree.

♪ Southern trees they have strange fruit ♪ - That tree produced some of the most horrific and different things you just won't believe.

I bought some wood from a white fella and as I was loading it on my truck, he told me...

He said, "That wood that where you bought..." He said, "A man wound up hung on that tree."

I didn't believe it.

- [Woman] He shared his story with his friend, Tim Duffy, who decided to do a little digging and uncovered the bone chilling truth of the horrific lynching that had occurred in 1930, not too far from Freeman's home.

- He had new paperclips and he had done infiltrated them folks and found out that it was true about the wood.

A man was killed on that wood.

Shot him 200 times and cut off stuff and stuck in his mouth.

And it was horrific the way he died.

And that would have (indistinct) a hanging tree wood.

(smooth country music) Then it was something about that wood that you just won't believe.

some of that wood will tell another story.

By scraping out the little pieces of deteriorated wood and stuff, you'll find out that it had a pattern.

It had features in there that all you had to do was embellish them with a gun brown wire brush and here would come stuff that would scare you to death.

Most had features like skulls and terror on face and stuff.

Snakes coming out of sculls, mouth and eyes and all that right there.

All I had to do was scrape a little bit.

They get their bad wood from the good wood.

And when I get those scraping I said, good God almighty, let me leave this alone.

I ain't never had my hands on some wood that had experienced it all and seen and heard what that wood had.

I had to break myself from working out at night.

Have you ever been somewhere standing in line or maybe any store shopping and you know somebody looking at you behind your back and you ain't seen them.

Well, that's the way it did me.

I would be working and I would care for myself, glancing all around and stuff.

I said, I got to quit this.

And then some people...

Highly educated people told me and said, some super natural probably happened.

(smooth guitar music) One day I was sitting on my posts.

(indistinct) So I got my hammer, got hit the knot, flat piece fell out.

I mess around a little bit.

Then smoked a cigarette and load.

I hit the other part of the knot, when it came out it was a shoe.

And if you see the John Brown figures of that way in that wood and stuff, you know nobody could have carved it in.

It was too direct and perfect.

I said to Tim, I said, (indistinct) shoe.

He said, the guy that was lynched on that tree, he worked on shoes.

That solved the mystery of why the shoe print was in a tree.

(smooth guitar music continues) - [Woman] Freeman says while he's glad he knows the truth about the hanging tree, he has no desire to see the spot where the tree once stood or ask his neighbors about who was involved.

- But see you get to dig in too deep and you live around here.

One old guy traveling in the field back there, one old guy over here and working at night and so you might create a problem.

You know the deal.

You know about the (indistinct) They ain't change all that much.

They changed faces, but they ain't change that much.

Like I said, leave their toes alone they leave you alone.

(smooth guitar music continues) - [Woman] Meanwhile, his many guitars travel across America each instrument telling it's own unique story of wood once used for both good and evil purposes.

(smooth guitar music continues) - He works with a lot of found materials, which I love.

And there's a really deep tradition of that in the South.

So, not just a wood and pieces from trees, but some of the masks that he uses.

So an African mask that he may have found on the side of the road, or perhaps in a flea market that he then turned into a guitar.

I thought that was a really powerful image.

And again, something that I think resonates with our viewers of looking at sort of this make-do attitude that we have in the South.

Of just finding something and making it work, he really embodies that.

And that's something that's we've a little bit I think, in this modern age, but when people see it done well, they really respond to that.

He is a contemporary artist and he's creating these wonderful sculptures and so I think that that's something that's important for people to remember.

We do have these contemporary artists who are perhaps of an older generation and they're not gonna be around for much longer.

So we do need to appreciate them and show their work while they are still here.

♪ I want to be at a meeting ♪ - [Woman] As Freeman Vines' guitars travel from museum to museum, they bring with them stories of life in rural North Carolina.

And some of them specifically the hanging tree guitars, hold a history that is seldom told.

One that embodies the horrible acts of racism committed in the Jim Crow South.

A story brought straight out of the wood and into the world.

♪ Then we'll have a meeting ♪ (smooth jazzy music) - Ohio guitarist, Gavin Coe has dug deep into his family history and fashioned himself a unique instrument with echoes of the past.

Gavin Coe sat in on guitar during "Applause" performances with singer songwriter, Liz Bowlet and shared the story.

♪ I belong yes I am ♪ ♪ Yes I am ♪ I an't help but notice the C-O-E on the top of the guitar.

Is this is a custom made guitar?

- Yeah, I- - Tell us about this.

- This was built by my luthier, Atila actually in Parma.

And it's basically, I... Long story short, I'm really into my family genealogy.

- [David] Okay.

- And I went back to nine generations in 250 years of Coe houses, Coe farms from all my grandfathers.

Going all the way from Ohio to Virginia.

And I got a piece of wood from every single one of my grandfathers going back 200 and some years.

- Wow, how cool is that?

- And I had Atila put it all in the one big guitar.

This is the siting of the civil war captain grandfather's house.

This is a window sill from his settlement that his dad was a part of.

- Oh my God.

- That cross is from a church that my revolutionary war grandfather built.

- [David] The key?

- The key that was my great grandfather's dad's house key.

- [David] Oh, wow.

- And that was my great-grandfather's Buckeye that he kept in his pocket for luck.

- [David] Nice.

Wow, look at that.

- He had it up there up until he died.

My grandfather got these silver dollars for Christmas when he was a kid in the '60s from his aunts on the Italian side of the family.

Then the Copart's actually really cool.

That was kind of Atila's idea.

The inside of the guitars made out of barn beam.

And when I got it, it had all these old 1800s iron nails out of it.

So I had take a soldering iron and nail plier things and just pull it out- - Pull them out.

- It took six hours.

- (Laughs) That's great.

- But I had a bunch of them when I was left over and Atila and I were talking about it.

And what he did was he took a torch like a black Smith and melted them down.

And he spelled my last name out of nails that the civil war captain grandfather put the wood himself - Oh, that's metal?

- Yeah.

- I thought it was woodburn.

- No, that's 1800s iron nails.

- Oh my goodness.

- Yeah.

- Fantastic.

- Yeah, Atila does a really good job.

I mean, he's best luthier here in town by far.

Atila custom guitars.

♪ I want you to come over and hear my song ♪ ♪ I know that my faith in him is strong ♪ ♪ Come over and hear my song ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm right where I belong ♪ ♪ I belong yes I am ♪ ♪ Oh yes I am ♪ ♪ Been through a lot but I've been blessed a lot too ♪ ♪ You know God gives me purpose ♪ ♪ And that's what gets me through ♪ ♪ Faith is a mustard seed that grows everyday ♪ ♪ Well my faith is as big as a greyhound bus ♪ ♪ So get out of my way ♪ ♪ I'll be in line on the hill ♪ ♪ Oh in the darkness all will see ♪ ♪ And I gotta use this gift from God ♪ ♪ And let my voice be free ♪ ♪ Oh I want you to come over and hear my song ♪ ♪ I know that my faith in him is strong ♪ ♪ Come over and hear my song ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm right where I belong ♪ - [David] And that's it for today's show.

For more arts and culture stories, connect with us online at arts.ideastream.org.

I'm David C. Barnett hoping to see you next week for another round of "Applause".

♪ Come over and hear my song ♪ ♪ 'Cause I'm right where I belong ♪ ♪ I'm right where I belong ♪ - [Announcer] Production of "Applause" on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by the John P. Murphy Foundation.

The Kulas Foundation.

The Stroud Family Trust and by Cuyahoga county residents through Cuyahoga arts and culture.

(smooth piano music)