By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
In the 12 years that guitarist and vocalist Dave Deitke and bassist Coda Crose of C-Level have been playing together, they’ve hit all the usual spots – concerts and bars, including a few shows at Howard’s Club H.
And when guitarist and vocalist Dave Deitke was a student at Cleveland Sate, they would on occasion roll up on a cart into the quiet study room of the library and blast away on the song fittingly called “Buzzkill.”
So, jamming in the children’s corner of Grounds for Thought shouldn’t faze them.
The Cleveland-based rock ‘n’ roll and more trio will perform a free concert Sunday, July 23, at 6 p.m. at the coffeeshop at 174 S. Main St. in downtown BG as part of the series presented by Grounds and BG Independent News.
It was at those impromptu library lounge shows that drummer Pat Boland first encountered his future bandmates. He liked what he heard. He was playing in another band at the time, but occasionally would sub in with C-Level, a band that in the tradition of Spinal Tap was running through drummers.
Eventually, Boland said in a recent four-way phone interview, that he finally “weaseled his way” into the trio. Crose said he and Deitke felt the opposite: they had weaseled him out of the other band.
In any case it was a turning point for C-Level.
The band roots go back to 2011 to a bar in North Ridgeville where Crose’s mother worked. He was 12 and Deitke was 15. They played open mics. His parents were around but “we were certainly in the bar we weren’t supposed to be in, but we got the first exposure and that gave us confidence moving forward.”
While they played covers of tunes by Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Black Sabbath, Deitke was already writing songs.
He was working through the usual teen emotions – who am I? what am I doing? Coming of age stuff.
Crose said people Deitke met would inspire his songs.
Deitke described them as “storytelling songs, trying to empathize, trying to see through other people’s experience.”
“I loved them,” Crose said “That’s what made me want to play with Dave.”
He recalls hearing him play “Let It Feel,” which would end up on their first album. “That song just blew me away.” he said. He decided that “I’ve got to hang out with this guy because he can really write a good song.”
The band produced their first album within a few years, but then the constant turnover in the drum chair kept them back.
The various drummers they used were good for certain styles, but none had the mastery of the range of grooves the two founders wanted to explore, Crose said.
Every time a new drummer came on, they had to teach them the tunes already on their setlists. That limited band in how much new material they could add.
That changed when Boland became the regular drummer around 2016.
“Pat jumped right in,” Deitke said. For him it was easy, and C-Level’s sound, which is an amalgam of funk, punk, bluegrass, reggae, and rock, came to fruition. The band was able to start recording new material. They have a fifth album on the cusp of being released, and a sixth one already in the works.
Deitke is the songwriter for the trio. He writes the lyrics and creates the basic structure of the songs before bringing them “to the basement” where Crose and Boland find ways on polishing and expanding them. Sometimes they will decide that another instrument – a horn, keyboard, or percussion – is needed to flesh out the song, so they bring in the musicians into the studio to record..
And, Boland said, they may mean they can’t do justice to the music in live performance, so it gets left off the setlist.
Still, the trio has plenty of songs and styles to draw on, not to mention Deitk’s small arsenal of acoustic, electric ,and lap steel guitars. All have different tunings, so it saves time tuning between numbers.
C-Level closes every show with an early instrumental “Stomp.” Another fan favorite is “Cleanest Hands,” a blues shuffle. “If we don ‘t play that one,” Deitke said, “people let us know.”
