From time to time, we’ve been saddened to report on the death of a key figure in the Cleveland music scene, as we recently did when blues musician “Crazy Marvin” Braxton passed away at the age of 80 following a 60-year career.
But the loss of 24-year-old Michael LoConti, whose drumming propelled one of northeast Ohio’s fastest rising rock bands, LoConti, hits a lot harder, weighed down with decades of lost potential and its sheer unexpectedness. He died in a car accident in Chardon on Friday afternoon February 28, hours before the band was scheduled to perform at the annual Kurentovanje festival the next day.
The band formed in 2022, fronted by Michael’s brother Henry LoConti III. (Both are grandsons of one of the Cleveland music scene’s most significant figures, Henry LoConti Sr, who founded the Agora in 1966, and died in 2014 at the age of 85.) By the following year, it was starting to get attention for its modernized classic rock sound, which featured guitar, keyboards, sax and the dual vocals of Henry III and Erin Donovan; it released its debut album Cherry Red in mid 2023, followed by an EP called Tonight. Soon it was performing everywhere: Ingenuity, Kurentovanje, Brite Winter, the Rock Hall’s summer concert series, Cleveland Rocks: Past Present Future’s Rock Solid Benefit. It was voted Scene’s Best Band in 2024 and was starting to venture outside northeast Ohio. It was clear great things were in store for LoConti, and Michael’s skilled, flexible drumming was a key part of that.
Read his obituary here.