Cleveland Scene: Mad Jam Man - Raven brings his badass biker blues to the Beachland

After the reissue of Raven's lone album Back to Ohio Blues, he actually did the thing - came back to Ohio (from California) and played a show. In this case, it was in 2008 at Cleveland's Beachland Ballroom along with Times New Viking and Mike "Rep" Hummel, the man who helped resuscitate the album. Cleveland Scene wrote up a piece on it at the time:

"He made the music because it was inside of him and needed to be expressed," writes Rep in the liner notes. "Like a shark has to swim to breathe, Raven has to record his gut-wrenching creations - perhaps exorcising his demons onto wax, one could say." 

As so, many of Raven's messed-up eulogies to drugs, death and sleaze were derived straight from his outlaw biker escapades throughout the early '70s. "I was in Florida working for this guy [who] would fly his Learjet to Columbia and bring me the kilos to cut up with my musketry," recalls Raven in a phone interview. "I walked into his place, and there was nothing in the house but brown paper bags full of pot. There must have been one living room, one kitchen, three bedrooms full of dope."