Dragonfly cut their teeth not in the Boston club scene but overseas, in Singh’s native India, where among other things they opened for Bryan Adams in front of a crowd of 40,000. So Cleve, who like the rest of the band is on retainer, knows that he could be on the move at any time. In the meantime he’s keeping himself busy DJing around town. He has a regular Saturday-night gig at Devlin’s in Brighton, and when I meet up with him at Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square, he’s on his way to the Western Front in Cambridge to spin South Asian music. At Devlin’s, he caters to the crowd’s taste for classic ’80s hits. He figures he has more than a million songs at his disposal, and he’ll bring around 80 vinyl albums to a basic 90-minute gig.
“When I get interested in something, I just run with it,” he explains. That’s a bit of an understatement for a guy who’s made a living at music for a quarter-century. He was in the 1977 incarnation of Fox Pass, what he describes as “one of those bands getting away from those 10-minute arena-rock opuses.” He played punk funk with the Suede Cowboys, joke rock with the Swinging Erudites, R&B with Barrence Whitfield & the Savages, C&W with the Wheelers & Dealers, and gritty roots rock with the Dawgs.
The Brother Cleve moniker came courtesy of DJ Tony V, who had him play a radio character who was in Cleve’s words “a cross between a black party comedian and a gospel preacher.” This Brother Cleve took to the airwaves on WTBS FM (now WMBR). The name stuck.
It was through touring with the Del Fuegos from 1985 to 1988 that Cleve got his first taste of the rock-and-roll high life. They opened for Tom Petty, INXS, and ZZ Top. “The glory years,” he jokes, recalling gigs at arenas and sheds. “Tour bus, the rock-star life, hung out with Little Richard . . . ”
When the Fuegos ended, Cleve moved on — “I just kept working.” In fact, he took a bit of a left turn by joining a popular local reggae band called the I-Tones, then joined a cover band who did weddings and just generally kicked around the Boston scene. He also landed the Cinemax house-composer job in 1996 and held it for five years. As he explains, you get paid every time your music is played on one of the cable network’s many channels. The money paid for the Dorchester house he now shares with his wife.
And there was Combustible Edison, the hip lounge band formed by Michael Cudahy and Liz Cox. “I had gotten into easy listening in the late ’80s and had been a big soundtrack collector. I started seeing Combustible, and my line at the time was I thought they’d broken into my house, stolen all my records, and were playing them back to me. One day Michael called me and said, ‘I have a proposition for you.’ I went out with Combustible and it was a hit, a big hit, more so than any of us would have predicted.”
Indeed, his role in Combustible led to his working with Mexican lounge king Esquivel. And he consulted on Capitol Records’ Ultra Lounge series. And being in Dragonfly has already given him some new ideas, like moving to India to work on Bollywood soundtracks. “The culture, it’s amazing. The place is completely chaotic, yet it doesn’t collapse. There’s a vibrancy to the culture I find very appealing.”
