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Arts & Entertainment

VIDEO Cuyahoga Falls Man Terrorizes Bars in the Akron Area

Local man knows the benefit of savagery and rage as he pursues a music career in angry accordion music.

It was a balmy night in Ohio.

We had been touring the rock and roll spots all over the Cleveland area. On our way home to Cuyahoga Falls we decided to stop in Akron and have some ice cream to cool off. Mary Coyles, a fine sweets shoppe and ice cream parlour, seemed just the place.

A full moon hung overhead as we approached the flashing hot pink neon sign.

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“This place looks like a brothel”, I thought to myself. Boy wouldn’t that be an interesting way to sell ice cream and home made sweets. My mind was in the gutter, and for good reason. I was bored senseless and had been trapped in a car looking for fun for hours.

I am used to extreme weirdness when I go out and so far this evening had provided little in anything that could be considered insane or life threatening or just downright absurd. When traveling Ohio, with all the nice farms and fields and polite people, one begins to wonder where all the freaks are. I am definitely a person who relishes absurdity and things that make other people extremely uncomfortable.

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So here I was eating ice cream and bags of homemade bonbons under a light designed by Liberace’s prostitute nephew from the flouncy side New Orleans.

Suddenly I heard the music. Then I saw a marquis with bands on it. One look at the front door and I knew that I had found a very strange place with live music and booze and pierced and tattooed misfits with frightening glares.

This night was shaping up. The front door was a piece of renegade art. The sign said, “Annabelles”.

Annabelle’s has been on the Akron scene for upwards of twenty years. It looked like the Alamo somehow, an abnormal holdout against an advancing horde of militarily uniformed normalcy. Except these patrons were not Texas rebels and the advancing hordes were not Santa Anna’s Mexican Army. I was just employing a bad metaphor. You get it.

We pushed our way inside and just in time. The bands were starting in the basement. A narrow flight of stairs took us into a crypt set up, nay, custom designed for loudness. This was a dungeon, for sure, most likely with torture devices for the unwilling and a bald, hairy, fat man in a leather outfit wielding a lash, forcing patrons closer to the stage.

The first ting I came to realize is that Ohio bars have a bizarre and unique sense of booking. Tonight I would see not one, but two men belting out angry songs with an accordion accompaniment. Two angry accordion players in one venue in one night, I was home somehow. But it wasn’t until I wandered upstairs for a drink and some fresh air that I saw the true star of the evening. It was a full-grown man in a chicken outfit, murderously covering drinking songs. Immediately I knew that I had to tell this story to a larger audience. This was terrorism in a way that hasn’t been seen since the days of old variety shows.

The women were all crowded around the small bar stage by the front door. They were throwing money at this chicken man and waving drinks into the stage lights. “This guy has a bead on things”, I found myself saying out loud. I grabbed a camera and began filming. I felt like the Roger Patterson expedition that discovered themselves staring at a Bigfoot running across Bluff Creek in the middle of a mountainous wilderness.

When he started playing Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones, it settled in that someday the tabloids would come running for this footage. He played a whole set and accepted drinks and kisses from the whole crowd. I began asking around and was told that this Raging Chicken Accordion Player was somewhat of a ghost. He just shows up and plays. No one knew where he was from or where he lived. I downed a shot and gathered a second cameraman and approached him outside. Bigfoot agreed to an interview under the Liberace’s Nephew’s Sign next door at Mary Coyles. (FULL INTERVIEW VIDEO AVAILABLE)

It turns out his name is Shubes; he is from Cuyahoga Falls and has been playing for a long time.

He decided to switch to the accordion because it caught people’s attention better than an acoustic guitar. Getting in people faces makes for better cash when playing in bars and on street corners. In all honesty he blew the other angry accordion player away that night. I asked him where he got the chicken suit.

“Goodwill”, he answered.

I wondered if that suit was the key to any musician’s success, but soon realized that this man had woven together a weirdness that could not be assigned to mere props or a screaming rage in delivery. Shubes understood something that none of the performers that night got. It's an insane magic that only the truly insane or the criminally ingenious understand. It cannot be communicated well in words or by references. Hunter Thompson understood this and it took him to an early grave along with Hemingway, Nixon and Liberace.

After the interview I got back into the car to look over what I captured that night. My Bigfoot in a chicken suit remained an enigma, but for anyone in the Cuyahoga Falls area who wants to push through the wilderness and find this kind of truth, I say to you, “It is in your town”. Ohio does rock.

In ways that most people in the world should seek out and see. You just have to be lucky on a full-moon night and recognize a good thing when it shows up with ice cream and anger and accordions and booze to boot.

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