Already the year 2021 has been cruel to the local music community.
In March its best-known rock musician Michael Stanley died of lung cancer. And now we’ve lost “Papa Dave” Smeltz, who succumbed after a long fight with Covid.
Although Smeltz wasn’t as well known as Michael Stanley, his roots in the local music scene and his reach and influence on it were almost as great. In 1978, Smeltz formed Cleveland’s first rock-facing reggae band, I-Tal. In doing so, he took the Jamaican music style beyond Cleveland’s tiny Jamaican community, where it was a well-kept secret, and introduced it to the area’s rock fans.
Heavily indebted to Bob Marley, I-Tal grew out of Tuesday night jam sessions at University Circle reggae club, the Coach House, run by future I-Tal member Dave Valentine. Its track “Rockers,” on WMMS-FM’s heavily promoted 1980 Pride of Cleveland album, helped the band expand its regional audience. I-Tal toured around the eastern United States and Canada as well as building a strong fan base in the Cleveland area. This set the pattern for other reggae acts to follow such as First Light and Satta. They released a self-titled album in 1981.
In early 1984, most of the members of the group left to form First Light, which reigned for more than a decade as Cleveland’s best drawing group. Smeltz kept I-Tal going until 1990 with other members, performing mostly out of state in the mid-Atlantic region. During that time he became addicted to drugs, and spent most of the ’90s fighting that demon.
In 2003, he got clean, a story he told in his book Clean: From Reggae to Recovery. About a decade later, he formed the Clean House project to help other men recover from addiction as a way of thanking those who had helped him at his lowest point. He bought a rundown building on Buckeye Road that he was rehabbing to serve as its headquarters.
Just a few years ago he also got back into music, forming the Dave Smeltz Project with many of the musicians he’s worked with over the years, including I-Tal veterans Russ Richards on keyboards, Chris Dunmore on drums), Chris DeSantis (who also passed away recently) on percussion and Michael Wasson aka Chopper on guitar, along with the Generators’ Eva Dilcue on vocals and Adam Rich of Love Muffin Records on bass. He also released an album called Recovery, which tells the story he wrote about in Clean, but in song.
When a double bill of Carlos Jones & the P.L.U.S Band and Outlaws I & I (both of which feature former I-Tal members) packed Whiskey Island on this July 4th weekend with a crowd that was racially and age-diverse, you’re seeing the legacy of Dave Smeltz. There’ll be a memorial concert for Dave at the Beachland Ballroom which, in November 2019, hosted a living tribute with Dave and his daughters Kelsey and Shelbey sitting in the front row.