A little bit of history…
Since their formation in 1992, The Vipers have supported the best of Eugene, Oregon’s blues musician. Their 1993 CD Venom featured the incendiary guitar work of the late Canned Heat guitarist Henry Vestine. After Vestine’s untimely death in 1997, veteran bluesman Eagle Park Slim joined the band. Several of his original songs are featured on the 2000 release Good Times Live! and he toured Europe with The Vipers in 2002. Deb Cleveland has been with the band since late 2002 and is featured on The Vipers’ 2004 release Tickle My Toes. She toured Europe with the band in 2004 including an appearance at Sweden’s Linköping Blues and Jazz Festival. In 2006 The Vipers Featuring Deb Cleveland won the Eugene Weekly Readers’ Poll as Best Local Blues Band and in 2007 and 2008 Deb won as Best Local Blues Personality. She received the Rainy Day Blues Society’s Rooster Award for Female Blues Vocalist in 2009. Currently the band is working on a new CD with a planned release date of late Summer 2009.
Born and raised in east Waco, Texas, Deb Cleveland first began to sing as a child in her Sunday School Southern Baptist gospel choir. Whenever Deb’s mother cleaned house she would play the blues, exposing Deb to Bobby Blue Bland, Johnny Taylor, B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and many others. She was always singing and kind of prayed that way with gospel hymns, “like breathing air.” Deb and her mother used to go and listen to the different gospel choirs in the area. Her father was in the Air Force. He played harmonica and sang blues and gospel spirituals in a deep baritone voice. Deb’s grandmother sang in church and played piano at home. Every Sunday, after listening to her grandmother play a hymn or two at home, Deb would persuade her to play Boogie Woogie on the piano, much to her mother’s dismay. To this day Deb loves Boogie Woogie.
Deb moved to Phoenix, Arizona at age six. Her parents ruled the radio at home. Then Deb got the first transistor radio on her block and a world of music opened to her. She listened to everything from the gospel of the Mighty Clouds of Joy and Shirley Caesar to the rock of The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. She listened to Motown, The Supremes, Martha Reeves and The Vandellas, Wilson Pickett, and quite a bit of Perry Como and Dean Martin. As a little girl Dinah Washington was her favorite. Then at age 11 she was crushed when her mother would not let her go see Tina Turner at the Calderon Ballroom, a local bar. To this day Deb says she still has some issues with that.
By 15 her mother thought Deb was incorrigible. So she sent her to live with relatives in Salem, Oregon. By 16 Deb was more or less on her own. She got pregnant, earned her GED, worked in a plywood mill, became a custodian and spent the next ten years working various jobs and partying. In 1985, when in her 30s, she went to the University of Oregon in Eugene and got a Bachelor’s degree in Human Services. She was encouraged to take a “fun” class and auditioned for the University gospel ensemble. To her surprise the instructor, Jack Gaynor, said she had potential. Until then Deb had never thought of herself as a singer. Within three or four years Deb was doing solos with the ensemble. She joined a local band, Willie Dee and Shakabuku, and played congas and sang backup. Then one evening she sang lead for the first time and was amazed with the audience’s response.
Deb went to graduate school in Social Work at Portland State University where she became friends with Judy Vogelsang and sang harmonies in Judy’s band, Everybody and Their Uncle. Marty Weissbrath, the band’s saxophonist, was impressed by Deb’s voice and asked her to sing with another small group. That led to the formation of the Deb Cleveland Band in 1994 and their 1998 release, Live! All Night Long. A song from that CD appeared on the Eugene Blues anthology CD, and in his review Real Blues editor Andy Grigg praised Cleveland as a “big voiced” vocalist who “deserves to be on a big label.”
Deb would occasionally sit in with The Vipers. When the band needed a new lead singer. Deb stepped up. Together they produced The Vipers’ 2004 release Tickle My Toes and toured Europe in 2005.
Jon Silvermoon began playing harmonica in 1971. In 1992 he founded The Vipers with his good friend the late Henry Vestine, guitarist with Canned Heat. They collaborated on The Vipers’ first CD, Venom, released in 1993 and played together throughout Oregon until Henry’s passing in October 1997.
Guitarist for The Vipers is Johnny “Guitar” Ward, a long-time veteran of the Eugene blues scene,
Stand-up and electric bass player and vocalist Byron Case had several Top 10 hits with his band The Sunrays in the 1960’s.
Rounding out The Vipers’ rhythm section is the steady beat of drummer and vocalist Rick Markstrom. A Wisconsin native, Rick toured the Midwest with his band The Tayles before moving to Oregon in 1976.