San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A love story on lost vinyl
An Oakland soul album recorded decades ago finds new life.
It started with Beanie Babies. Carrie Cleveland had been collecting them for more than 20 years, a hobby she had picked up long before she moved from deep East Oakland to a sleepy golf course community near the SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta in Rio Vista in 2002. Cleveland, who is now 79, kept each of the plush toys sealed up in storage, away from real life.
One day in 2018 her son, Heston, was fiddling on his phone when he came upon a Princess Diana Beanie Baby selling for $2,500. He ran to his mother’s room to show her the listing, reminding her that she had one in her collection. They started jumping up and down and pulling out all the plastic bags — foraging for the purple bear. When they found it, they realized they hadn’t struck gold — she owned the toy, but it had an error on its tag, thus negating the value. After a few hours of checking online for the going rate of some other toys, they realized none were really of any value. They returned the collectibles to their ziplock bags.
But even so, the search — that split second of hope for reward — had fueled Heston. He started searching for the value of other things they owned, plugging in items into Google. On a whim, he decided to search for an original copy of “Looking Up,” the lofi soul record his mother and father
had made in 1978, back when they were musicians in East Oakland.
When the page loaded, he couldn’t believe what he found: The record, which neither he nor his mother had touched in years, was selling for $450. He was perplexed — who was selling it, and how had they found it?
His parents had recorded the album in their garage studio at 1428 68th Ave., the house where Heston grew up. His father, Bill Cleveland, a probation officer who was a selftaught musician on the side, played all the instruments and wrote the lyrics to the sweet soul tracks, most of them from love letters he had written to Carrie. Her voice, buttery and incandescent with a Motown feel, brought his doting words to life.
Bill cut 1,000 copies of the album in his home, but they didn’t really end up going anywhere. The couple performed around the Bay Area in old watering holes, but only a few records were actually sold; Carrie gave most of them away to friends and family. It had been quite a while since they were active performers and more than 24 years since Bill died. Shortly afterward, Carrie gave up singing.
Carrie had a box of untouched copies of the record in her closet — still sealed in plastic.
Heston’s parents had made the album to express their love for each other, a musical valentine that hadn’t traveled far beyond their circles. Now it was in demand all over the world. Carrie still remembers the first time she and Bill performed in public. It was at a junior high school in Oakland. She sang “Angel Baby” by Rosie and the Originals. “I was just shaking, and some little kid (in the front) said, ‘She sounds good, but she’s shaking!’ ”
Music wasn’t a big part of her childhood. She was born in 1941 in Shreveport, La., to a family with 10 children. Her parents, who moved to Oakland when Carrie was 7, didn’t listen to or know much about music. But Carrie liked to sing casually at home with her sister. Still, she never thought of herself as a singer until she met Bill.
The two crossed paths in 1961. Her cousin invited him to a Christmas party, hoping to set him up with Carrie’s younger sister. But her sister was sick — so Carrie ended up meeting Bill instead. They connected instantly, sharing common story lines. Bill also had moved to Oakland from the South. His father took him and his brother to Oakland from Mississippi for a “vacation,” but they never returned.
Bill became passionate about music. He didn’t sing, but he excelled at any instrument he tried, including drums and the synthesizer. Still, he hadn’t found his voice, so to speak, until he met Carrie. She soon joined his band, the Creative Set, and the two began performing together, at houses and then at lowkey venues around the Bay Area like the Pasand Lounge in Berkeley and the Holiday Inn in Emeryville.
Shyness had often obscured Carrie’s talent, but with Bill, she gained more assurance. His confidence in the power of her voice — sultry and soft but passionate — made her feel like she didn’t have to hide. He made her feel super, she says now, remembering the way he would show her off wherever they went.
They would go to parties where she wasn’t meant to sing, but that didn’t last long when Bill was around. “He made sure I sang,” she said. “He always made it happen.” He was her foil — decisive, confident and gregarious, a mover and shaker who wanted the world to enjoy her voice. It finally happened after he was gone. Bill died in 1994 at age 53, from heart disease.
Carrie continued performing with the members of the Creative Set to fulfill the backlog of dates they had already booked, but she grew dismayed by the little power she had on her own as a female bandleader.
“Men dominated the music industry,” Heston said. “They didn’t really respect a woman leader of the band.”
She grew tired of the conflict and eventually abandoned singing after a last performance in 1998. Life took her in other directions: She began working at Children’s Hospital in Oakland; married her second husband, Wayne Meadows; and moved to Rio Vista with him, far from the “hustle and bustle” of East Oakland.
She was settling into a new life without Bill. But at about the same time, the rest of the world was waking up to her old one. It’s not clear exactly how “Looking Up” trickled into the rare disco/soul DJ and collector scenes, but people have theories.
One of the more credible involves the French DJ and label owner Gilles Peterson, who is a luminary in the rare music scene and renowned for his compilations of hardtofind soul, funk and jazz that he collects from all over the world. In 2006, he included Car