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What Would Journey Do?

With its semi-homeless frontman, the Breakfast Club cheers up Cleveland one power ballad at a time.

By Joe P. Tone 

The Hi-Fi Concert Club should be prime real estate for music lovers. Its soft, rosy lighting hides baggy eyes and other burdens of nocturnal life. The stage is stripped of distractions and painted an angry black. And the dressing room feels haunted by after-parties past -- cluttered with antique couches and empty liquor bottles, adorned by an old Donnas poster and an autographed photo of a '70s porn star.

In the parking lot, young metalheads -- pierced and painted, but also earnest and sweet -- linger near a dusty minivan. They come inside and meekly ask to borrow pen and paper from the bartender, so they can write out their set list.

At 9 p.m. they take the stage, shredding into dark but passable metal, original music they probably slaved over between homework and shifts at Dairy Queen.

But the audience of one, at this club on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood, is not here for the music. He's here to explain the success of his own band.

Dave Brooks is the lead singer of a group most rock critics wouldn't bother to critique. Rarely has he had a real job or his own place, and he's survived for months without a car or phone. He's admittedly miserable at relationships. And he's obviously not comfortable with getting old: He tans, shaves his chest, bleaches his hair, and routinely lies about his age. He never wears sleeves, but always wears sunglasses. They hide the crowfeet nipping at his emerald eyes.

Yet in a couple of hours, Brooks will look into a crowd of euphoric partyers, women dancing and men playing air guitar, and the whole damn place singing along. He will do this at a bar with a fraction of the Hi-Fi's cachet -- a converted bowling alley called Put-in-Bay Lakewood, which features a wooden boat and beer bongs fashioned from pink plastic flamingos. And he will do this by imitating some of music's all-time-favorite punching bags -- Bon Jovi, Journey, even the Outfield.

Yes, the Outfield.

Brooks has, in many respects, achieved the lowest possible rank in the hierarchy of music artistry: frontman for an '80s cover band.

But when he finishes singing tonight, he'll step outside and let the compliments rain. Awesome, man, they'll beam. Fuckin' awesome. Suddenly, it will feel just like 1992, that God-sent year when he cut a record, toured with Warrant, and -- according to witnesses -- had sex with half of Los Angeles.

Awesome, man. Fuckin' awesome.

But for now, he pulls on a Corona and listens to the metal reverberate through the empty Hi-Fi. For a moment, he considers how this happened: how he failed at rock stardom playing '80s music in the '80s, only to find success two decades later.

"I don't get it," he hollers over the shrieking guitar. "I don't understand why people love this '80s shit so much."

An hour or so later, up Detroit Avenue, instruments sit idle on the Put-in-Bay Lakewood stage. Only the name on the drum kit foretells what's coming: the Breakfast Club.

It's only 10 p.m. Lakewood is just beginning its nightly transformation from unassuming suburb to Post-College Bartown, U.S.A., where the beer is cheap and the measure of a man lies in the number of empty shot glasses before him.

In split-levels from Avon to Mayfield, young women are setting the night's agenda. They're dousing themselves in assorted scents and having a hell of a time choosing between halter tops. And they are texting, searching for the perfect night -- the place with the cutest boys and the best dance floor and the most songs to which they know the words.

This is crucial: They must know the words. It is Friday. No surprises on Fridays.

The guys? Yes, they're coming out too. But they don't set the agenda. They know that they'll eventually climb into polos and flip-flops, and trudge out to Lakewood. They know they'll shoot Jäger and watch girls dance and hope against hope that someone will have sex with them tonight. But they also know how the night will likely end: in the Taco Bell drive-through, contemplating the relative merits of soft taco versus crunchy.

Truth be told, they would prefer to stay right where they are, playing Madden or Texas Hold 'Em or Who Can Get Drunkest Fastest. Truth be told, they would prefer that the women skip the bar and just come over to have sex. This would save everyone a lot of trouble.

But the world is a cruel place for horny young men, so:

Off to Put-in-Bay. At least it has TVs.

At the bar, the guys silently calculate the male-female ratio. It's not good. They consider leaving to find a bar with more women, if one exists. But then some older-looking guys take the stage. A handsome, long-haired man slings a guitar over his shoulder; rumor is, he used to play in Warrant. A guy in ass-hugging lace-up jeans lifts a drumstick in the air. And a bleached-blond dude -- with no sleeves and pants so tight you can definitely see his bulge -- grabs the mic.

He sings: "Hey, hey, hey, hey."

And that's all they need. By the next familiar line -- "Oooooooooho" -- eyes diverted by ESPN are now trained to the stage. And by the chorus -- "Don't you . . . forget about me" -- guys are nodding their heads, even singing along. The women line the bar near the stage, arms raised as if they're on a roller coaster, belting every word.

The opening set builds from there, like a ripple miles off coast that eventually turns a bodyboarder on his head. It rolls gently through "Hurts So Good" and "Just What I Needed," and rises swiftly with "Just Like Heaven." That gets the women dancing. Men inch closer to watch, shrugging and looking at each other: These guys aren't bad.

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