Ah, Cleveland. The terminally dreary Midwest metropolis has always played a critical role in American popular music, producing a pantheon of disparate aesthetic extremists (Lux Interior, Little Jimmy Scott, Screamin' Jay Hawkins) and serving as the commercial and spiritual stomping ground where the Big Beat first broke into our mainstream psyche. Well, heads up, kiddies, because when the Cleveland Confidential Book Tour hits town, it'll deliver an appropriately grim and antiglamorous load of frantic, deep-inside punk rock verity. With some of C-Town's most mad-dog renegades — the illustrious former Dead Boy Cheetah Chrome, the Pagans' Mike Hudson — reading from their respective books A Dead Boy's Tale From the Front Lines of Punk Rock, Jetsam and Diary of a Punk, not to mention Human Switchboard's Bob Pfeifer, throwing down passages from his novel University of Strangers (based on the sensational Amanda Knox murder case in Italy), you're guaranteed an intensely lurid literary experience. Fact of the matter is, it's a small miracle these cats are still breathing at all, and the ruckus they managed to both raise and survive is the stuff from which plenty of magnificent fin de siècle nightmares were made. Vacation Vinyl, 3815 Sunset Blvd., Thurs., Feb. 24, 7 p.m.; also at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, UCLA, Sat., Feb. 26, 1:30 p.m.; and at Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., Hlywd., Sun., Feb. 27, 5 p.m. (310) 659-3110.

Thu., Feb. 24, 7 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 26, 1:30 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 27, 5 p.m., 2011

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