Dave Smeltz, who passed away from Covid in 2021, has been frequently referred to as the godfather of Cleveland’s reggae scene. When he founded the band I-Tal in 1978, it was the first band to perform the music outside of Cleveland’s tiny Jamaican community, garnering it a following among rock fans that persist to this day.
But there was another person whose support was critical to the formation of I-Tal: Dave Valentine, who passed away December 1 at the age of 71. Valentine ran a club called the Coach House in University Circle. It was there at the Sunday night reggae jams that I-Tal was formed — and Valentine was an early member of the group, playing bass.
In a 2008 article about the local reggae scene in the Cleveland Free Times, Valentine recalled an early 1978 trip he took to Key West, Florida where he heard a Bob Marley record played by someone at the campsite where he was staying.
“When I got back to Cleveland,” he recalled, “I started stocking the jukebox with reggae songs. I was the first bar in Cleveland to stock reggae songs. Word started spreading that this little bar in the Circle had a reggae jukebox and people started coming to be near the jukebox. Not large crowds, a few dozen or so. Most people at that time had no idea what reggae was.”
One of the people who stopped down was Smeltz. Another was conga player Bob Caruso, also an early I-Tal member, as well as a member of its popular spinoff First Light and currently with Shake (pronounced Shaky) Ground. He remembered “It was an amazing thing at the Coach House. Valentine said if we can get some kind of thing together, we’ll play every Friday and Saturday, so we had a guaranteed gig on weekends. And it took off, American guys playing reggae.”
Those “American guys” can still be heard around town in Shake Ground and Carlos Jones & the P.L.U.S. Band. Tip your hat to Dave Valentine for planting the seed.
Read his obituary at dejohnfuneral.com/obituaries/david-valentine.