Once upon a time, Roger Klug was one of the kings of Cincinnati power pop. His brief stints with the Willies and the Tritones, among others, paved the way for the Detroit native/Cincinnati resident’s stellar solo career. This solo career started with 1995’s home-recorded Mama, Mama, Ich bin dem La La Land, then the full-blown splendor of 1997’s Toxic and 15 Other Love Songs, followed by the Guided-By-Pollard brilliance of 1999’s Where Has the Music Gone?: The Lost Recordings of Clem Comstock, where Klug and a smattering of friends crafted a compilation of fictional bands across a disparate range of musical genres, all under the auspices of the album’s titular and completely mythological producer/songwriter.
“That’s the most fun I’ve ever had making an album,” says Klug over omelets at Café Alma. “There was a little of the alter ego thing going on with that. My memory of that was sitting on my side porch, no guitar in hand, just a big notebook, hearing the record in my head, grabbing lyrics out of the air. That was a really great feeling. I never felt so prolific.”
Although the gigging never stopped, it would be a decade before Klug dropped his fourth studio album, 2009’s superb More Help For Your Nerves. (It’s worth noting that Klug created his own label, Mental Giant, and self-released his entire catalog.) Klug and his self-proclaimed Power Trio, featuring bassist Greg Tudor and drummer Mike Tittel, supported Nerves into the following year, to a certain extent.
“We were performing as the trio at that point, but we didn’t have it together enough,” says Klug. “I remember thinking we could play almost all of those songs live, but it didn’t have as much piano as Toxic, and it certainly didn’t have the horns and strings like Clem Comstock.”
At a certain juncture in 2010, Klug’s profile in local music became virtually non-existent. So what occupied Klug’s time and attention when he stepped away from music?
“Raising a family, earning a living, teaching at CCM,” says Klug. “It takes up a lot of time, I won’t lie. And sometimes when you’re doing other musical stuff, it does take away your own musical energy. That is a pitfall. At one point, I’d quit the music business and I was going back to school to be an accountant. So while I was reading intriguing accounting books, I was like, ‘I’m going to record this now.’ COVID did kind of deflate my live situation, but I was still able to do stuff with the Cincinnati Symphony because we were all masked up and socially distanced.”
Klug was also drawn back into music by way of Tittel’s own project, New Sincerity Works. It was a satisfyingly easy gig for him for one simple reason.
“It was a segment of my life working on other people’s projects,” says Klug. “The pressure is almost off. I’m not worried about the vocal or the song. You don’t think, ‘I want to play something good,’ because that’s a given. You just kind of respond to it: ‘This will make it sound better,’ or ‘Where is the space I can occupy where the mixing engineer will turn me up?’ Mike wasn’t like, ‘Hey, I want this,’ he was like, ‘Just play.’ Mike’s very much an art director in his professional and creative life, but he’s also smart enough to let people do what they do.”
The wheel began to turn back in a familiar direction earlier this year when Klug accepted an invitation to play a benefit for the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The concert’s theme was Bob Dylan, an artist near and dear to Klug, so he was determined to make the most of it.
“It was one of those deals where people were picking songs from Facebook or whatever, so I nabbed ‘Simple Twist of Fate,’ because that’s one of my all-time faves,” Klug says. “We did that one pretty faithfully, kind of like Jason Isbell or Wilco would do it. Then I noticed that no one had taken ‘Lay Lady Lay,’ so we did this whacked version of it, as if the Cure were performing, then we mashed it up with ‘Bob Dylan’s Blues’ as Greta Van Fleet-doing-Led Zeppelin would have done it. And it went over really well; we had the crowd, and it was really gratifying. That was the catalyst.”
The next occurrence was a bit of technological serendipity. Klug was rummaging through an old hard drive and he stumbled upon an off-the-board recording he had made of a Power Trio show at the Northside Tavern a decade ago. It was a document of a time when the band was playing every three or four months at the Tavern, and they had gotten fairly tight after their layoff.
“I had kind of dismissed the recording,” says Klug. “It was just a snapshot of the band. And off-the-board tapes are very isolated; there’s a certain claustrophobic sound. If I could turn back time, (he channels Cher at this point), I would have put up a couple of ambient mics to catch the sound of the room. But instead of listening to the micro of it — ‘Oh, missed that guitar lick’ or ‘That vocal take was a little short’ — I listened to the macro of it. And I thought, ‘This is pretty cool.'”
Realizing that this recording represented a period just after the Trio had reconvened, and that there were few surviving audio artifacts from that time, Klug made the decision that this show should be the Power Trio’s first live album.
“It was like when you get a weird idea,” recalls Klug. “I thought, ‘I want people to hear this.’ Then you immediately self-doubt it. Then you run it by your mates, like ‘I’m thinking about putting this out,’ and they don’t say anything at first, and you’re like, ‘What’s their deal?'”
Eventually, everyone was on board with the release, and thus was born the Roger Klug Power Trio’s first live album, the two-disc triumph, Live! Off the Board. (“The working title was Naked and Unashamed (Without No Clothes)…”) There were several considerations that sealed the decision.
“Mike and I have talked a lot about recording an album being boring, because everyone does it the same way and has the same plug-ins, and everything is so scrubbed and perfect,” says Klug. “How do you fight AI? How do you fight perfection? What better way than to put out a live thing that wasn’t even meant to be a release? Was it an A+ performance? No. But there’s weird stuff in there, like a couple of songs we only played that one time. And we played the Kinks song, ‘Johnny Thunder.’ I have no memory of whose idea that was. If we were going to play something from Village Green, I’d have wanted to play ‘Big Sky.’ Plus that was the only RKPT gig where I dragged a piano to it. We had a Wurlitzer onstage, and that’s the only time we ever did that.”
With the Jan. 10 show at the Northside Tavern and the Feb. 28 gig at MOTR Pub, the Roger Klug Power Trio has officially ended its hiatus. Klug makes no bones about the path forward for the band.
“There’s too much stuff that I’m sitting on that’s half finished,” he says. “The live unit is playing again, so there’s a compelling reason for it all. We don’t really have a sound because I’ve always been here, there and everywhere. I recorded a yacht rock song, and Mike and Greg play on it, and I’m toying with the idea of releasing it as our first return release, just to thoroughly confuse everyone. ‘This is our new sound. We went away to work on our mental health.’ Anyway, we shan’t be going away again for a while.”
The Roger Klug Power Trio plays Northside Tavern on Jan. 10 at 8:30 p.m. More info: northsidetav.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Jan. 7 print edition.
This article appears in Jan. 7-20.