It was just a few weeks ago that we learned that Michele DeFrasia, long-time owner/operator of the Phantasy Nite Club complex in Lakewood, was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Just as she was about to begin treatment, she passed away, leaving a hopeful music community which had rallied to support her, bereft.
It’s hard to explain the full impact of Michele’s and the Phantasy’s impact on the local music scene. Her family owned the complex, which her father bought in the 60s, and most of her family worked there at one point — her father John who passed away in 2011, her mother Diane, age 92, her sisters Catherine, Diane, Mary and Maggie, and her brother John. But was Michele who took the lead in turning the venue, especially the upstairs Phantasy Nite Club with its legendary ship, into a critical hub for the Cleveland music scene, and downstairs former movie theater, the Phantasy Theatre, into a showcase for touring acts.
The Phantasy Nite Club opened in July, 1976, and soon became one of the key venues for bands playing original music at a time when the local music scene was dominated by cover bands. As more original bands emerged in the 1980s, the Phantasy was their home base, especially for the alternative, new wave, electronic, and later goth scenes. Cleveland’s vibrant 80s heavy metal scene found a toehold there too. I saw snotty Cleveland punk rockers the Pagans there.
Not that genre really mattered to Michele; she welcomes all comers from pop to hard core. The Phantasy was home to too many local bands to list, but you can start with the Adults, whose leader Paul Michael worked the door for years, System 56, Lucky Pierre, Exotic Birds, the Pony Boys, Ronald Koal, Death of Samantha, and many more. When Trent Reznor launched Nine Inch Nails in the late ’80s, they rehearsed there and played their first shows there before hitting the road.
In the 1990s, the downstairs club the Chamber was THE gathering place for the DJ dance/goth/industrial scene while the Symposium served as the more casual corner bar (literally). On the ground floor, the Phantasy Theater hosted concerts by touring bands including Iggy Pop, the Dead Boys, King Diamond, Anthrax, Oingo Boingo, the Alarm, Peter Murphy, Los Lobos, Til Tuesday, and Matthew Sweet, among many others, and big local draws such as The Spudmonsters and Mushroomhead.
The club provided an alternative venue to the Agora, the city’s flagship club until its East 24th Street location burned in 1984; it offered a reliable, stable alternative for bands on their way up, as other clubs came and went. By the late 2010s, the family was actively looking to sell the complex. It held a packed a grand closing party on a hot weekend in late summer 2017, but the sale fell through and it persisted a while longer. Eventually it was sold to the developers of the proposed LGBTQ+ complex, who opened Studio West 117 in 2022. But that lasted just three years, closing last fall.
Michele retired to spend her time developing her impressive skills as a painter, cheered on by the hundreds of musicians and music fans who’d known her all those decades. Her sister Mary passed away in December also from pancreatic cancer, making the family’s loss doubly tragic.