Brother Cleve

Brother Cleve—born Robert Toomey in Boston in 1955—was the rare figure who worked both sides of the mid-century revival. He was a keyboards-and-multi-instrumentalist member of Combustible Edison, the Boston-based lounge-revival band whose two records I, Swinger (1994) and Schizophonic! (1996) introduced a generation of twenty-somethings to Martin Denny and Les Baxter. He was also a working bartender and an encyclopedic cocktail historian who carried the Donn Beach catalog in his head for decades before Jeff Berry’s books made it broadly available. The exotica revival and the cocktail revival were two halves of the same project, and Cleve was one of the few people in either world fluent in both.

Combustible Edison emerged from the early-1990s Boston alternative-music scene as a deliberate retreat from grunge. I, Swinger (1994) ran an Esquivel-influenced palette—channel-bouncing arrangements, vibraphone-led lounge instrumentals, a crooned vocal that the post-Sinatra mainstream had effectively retired—and built a cult audience that overlapped almost completely with the readers of Re/Search’s Incredibly Strange Music book series and the broader 1990s lounge-revival scene that was rediscovering Esquivel, Korla Pandit, and Martin Denny for a new generation. Schizophonic! (1996) extended the project—denser arrangements, more aggressive stereo separation, vibes pushed further forward. Both records are in print on streaming.

The band’s touring through the mid-1990s coincided with—and helped fuel—the modern tiki bar revival’s first stirrings. Cleve was DJing exotica sets at Tiki Oasis and the Hukilau by the late 1990s, often alongside his Combustible Edison work. The audiences at those events were the same audiences buying Esquivel reissues and assembling home bars from vintage Trader Vic mug collections. The music and the drinks were a single project for that crowd, and Cleve was one of the connectors.

He stepped away from Combustible Edison in the late 1990s and spent the next two decades quietly building the Boston cocktail scene—mentoring a generation of bartenders at the B-Side Lounge, Drink, Eastern Standard, and The Hawthorne. (His full story as a bartender lives at /library/brother-cleve.) But the DJing never stopped. He played exotica sets at revival events until his last years, and his record collection was one of the country’s deepest archives of mid-century mood music. He died in December 2022; the tribute writing across both the music and cocktail communities was extraordinary.

Start here

I, Swinger (1994) and Schizophonic! (1996) are the two essential Combustible Edison records, both available on streaming. Re/Search Publications’ Incredibly Strange Music book series (and its companion compilations) maps the wider 1990s revival scene Cleve was working inside.

Why he matters

The 1990s lounge revival was a precondition for the 2000s cocktail revival. Without people keeping the broader mid-century aesthetic alive in alternative-music subcultures—without Combustible Edison records on the turntables of twenty-somethings who would later become serious bartenders—the cocktail revival might not have had the cultural ground to grow into. Cleve is the figure who worked both sides explicitly. He’s the proof that the music and the drinks were always one project, and that the people keeping the music alive were also the people keeping the bartending tradition alive.