No Reason to Complain: The Alarm Clocks Return to the Beachland Tavern

Of all the improbable second acts in Cleveland music, none beats the Alarm Clocks — and on Friday, Aug. 28, the garage-rock legend is booked into the Beachland Tavern, the little 148-cap room that has become the closest thing this town has to a shrine for exactly this kind of history.

Here is the story, and it is true. In the mid-1960s, three kids from the Cleveland area — guitarist Bruce Boehm, drummer Bill Schwark, and singer-bassist Mike Pierce — cut a single. Two songs, "Yeah!" and "No Reason to Complain," recorded live in the studio, roughly 300 copies pressed. Then the band fell apart around 1967 when Boehm left to work on a freighter, and that, seemingly, was that. Three teenagers, one 45, gone.

Except the record wouldn't die. Original pressings became collector holy grails worth up to a thousand dollars apiece. In 1996 the songs landed on the influential Crypt Records compilation Back from the Grave, canonizing the Alarm Clocks among the great lost garage bands of the era. Comedian Patton Oswalt loved "No Reason to Complain" enough to name his 2004 Comedy Central special after it and feature the recording. Around 2006, record hunters tracked down Boehm, Norton Records reissued the single, and — decades after they'd quit — the Alarm Clocks reformed and started playing festivals across the country.

That reunion turned out to be the real second act. "I've written more than 100 songs" since getting back together, Pierce told Cleveland Scene, a staggering number for a man who'd previously composed exactly two. It's the rare case of a band's best creative stretch arriving forty years after its supposed peak.

Which brings us to the Beachland Tavern on Aug. 28. There's a poetry to the room: the Tavern is small, unpretentious, and built for precisely this — a legendary local band, a few feet of stage, a crowd that knows every word of a single most of the country never heard. This is not the Rock Hall's velvet-rope version of Cleveland music history. This is the living, sweating, still-gigging version, in a 148-cap room on Waterloo Road where the history and the present tense occupy the same square footage.

A caution worth stating plainly: sixty years is a long time, and details of who exactly takes the stage under the Alarm Clocks name in 2026 should be confirmed before you build a night around any one member. What isn't in doubt is that the show is real and on the Beachland's calendar, and that the songs — two and a half minutes of raw, high-voiced Ohio teenage yearning — have outlived every prediction of their disappearance.

Go for the history, stay for the noise. Sixty years on, the Alarm Clocks still have no reason to complain, and neither will you.

Sources: "The Alarm Clocks' Mike Pierce Talks About the Local Garage Rock Band's 50-Year Legacy" — Cleveland Scene; Beachland Ballroom — shows