A question often asked by customers is, “Why does it say #HEYJELLYBEAN on the printed circuit boards of Cleveland Music Co. products?” Or, “Who is Jellybean?”
The following is a not-so-short answer to that question and why it will always appear somewhere on our products.
Jellybean: The Origin Story
In the early 1990s, I left my hometown near Cleveland, OH, and attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. After a year of failed friendships and painful self-adjustments, I met an incoming freshman from Succasunna, New Jersey, named Joey Ruoto. Small in stature, big on heart, and rocking a retro hairstyle as funny as his laugh. I liked him.
Joey and I were fast friends, and we decided to become roommates. We got a place in Boston’s Back Bay at 98 Hemenway Street: a second-floor dorm room in a four-story building with two windows that opened into a courtyard just big enough for a fire escape to run from the roof of the building to the ground-level back door of Cappy’s Pizzeria & Laundromat on Westland Avenue. It was perfect for a couple students who would rather write and record music than go to parties or have our fake IDs confiscated. Again. (We did all of the above, mind you, but did the former slightly more often than the latter.)
A few weeks after moving in, it was a warm fall night. We were in our dorm room doing homework that required writing and recording music. We were tracking a guitar part when I heard someone talking in the background, coming through the microphone and into the headphones.
Our dorm room was not an ideal recording studio. The windows were always open because either the steam radiator was stuck on high throughout fall, winter, and spring, or the lack of air conditioning made the room feel like being stuffed into a sweaty tube sock all summer. So, the room was always filled with the murmuring of the city outside. The laughing of passersby, vehicles on the street below, and the din of big rig tires on the Mass Pike a half mile away were featured on every recording we did in that dorm room.
But the voice I heard in the headphones that night was new. And it wasn’t coming from the city. It was coming from the building’s tiny courtyard. I stopped playing guitar and nudged the headphones off one ear. Joey and I looked at each other frozen, saying without saying, “Did you hear that?” Ten seconds passed.
Then, again, more clearly: “Hey, Jellybean,” in an oddly low and breathy man’s voice, disembodied in the courtyard and ringing around the dorm room like a ventriloquism trick.
We continued looking at each other, half-smiling with our eyebrows raised, mouths open, still frozen. Twenty seconds passed.
“Hey, Jellybean.” This time with the emphasis on “bean“: “Hey, JellyBEAN.”
I thought we’d bust out laughing together, but before we had the chance Joey leaned toward the window and answered in his best attempt to mimic the monotone voice, “Hey, what’s up?”
The anonymous voice in the courtyard replied, “Oh hey, Jellybean. How was your day?”
And precisely at that moment, Jellybean was born.
While I expected the newly-affirmed Jellybean to immediately break character and start cackling, exactly the opposite happened: for the next five minutes or more, two strangers had a conversation similar to what you’d expect in letters between classroom-assigned pen pals who have never met but desperately hope they someday do.
Finally, when the conversation reached its natural end, the voice in the courtyard said, “Goodnight, Jellybean.” Joey and I carried on with our homework like we’d simply taken a break to listen to a favorite song or something—a short entertainment recess.
A few days passed, and we didn’t think or talk about it. And then, late in the evening, the voice floated through the courtyard and into the dorm room again.
“Hey, Jellybean.”
A five-minute conversation ensued, ranging from how much they missed their respective moms’ cooking to what they wanted to be when they grow up. This wasn’t vapid talk about the weather or how much Professor Jones sucks; it was rite-of-passage stuff, focused more on pensive introspection than juvenile observations of the external world.
When the conversation eventually ended with “Goodnight, Jellybean,” I turned to Joey, a little bit puzzled. I asked, “Why do you not break character and say how ridiculous this whole thing is?”
Jellybean replied, “Well, it sounds like that guy needs someone to talk to, and I’m pretty sure anyone could be Jellybean for him.” A deceptively simple and poignant answer.
This pattern looped for weeks. Every two or three nights, Jellybean and the voice in the courtyard would talk. They never repeated or rehashed, never covered the same ground a second time. And each conversation ended with “Goodnight, Jellybean.”
In the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving break, they talked less and less, and finally stopped altogether. The holidays came and went, we returned to Boston from New Jersey and Ohio, and finished the school year next spring.
We never did find out who gave Joey the name “Jellybean.” I’d occasionally see people in the hallway or the lobby of the building and wonder, “Is that …?”, but decided it’s more amusing just not knowing.
Over the course of the next 30-something years, Joey and I remained the best of friends, and I still called him Jellybean from time to time. We shared multiple apartments in Nashville after college. He got a job in the management office of the artist I was touring with. So, we officially became workmates in addition to friends and roommates.
A few years later, my cousin Angie came to visit and stayed with us. She and Joey fell in love and eventually got married. If you’re keeping score at home, the running list is up to best friends, roommates, work colleagues, and now, cousins.
Joey and Angie moved back to Angie’s hometown in Virginia and started their family. I got married and started a family of my own in Nashville, on roughly the same schedule. We would visit the Ruotos in Virginia. They would visit my young family several times in Boston, where we had moved in 2004.
Years passed, we exchanged Christmas and birthday gifts, but we were communicating only in bursts and seeing each other at family reunions.
In 2016, Angie died at the age of 41. Joey and I reconnected. We chatted several times a week from that point forward. Usually about guitars and music, but also about our kids, our favorite foods, and what we wanted to be if we grow up.
Goodnight, Jellybean
In January 2024, Joey was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. After a well-fought battle—during which he saw his youngest child graduate high school and start college at Belmont University in his beloved Nashville—he died peacefully on December 29, 2024, at the age of 51.
My wife and I were fortunate to be able to travel to see him many times over the course of his last year. There were plenty of good days where we could laugh, make jokes like we were 19 again, and he would happily play the part of Jellybean. We talked more about guitars and music, about our kids, and how we hoped they could be whatever they want to be when they grow up.
On other days, he couldn’t remember going to bed last night and we would laugh at the notion that he had apparated in the living room only that morning. But somehow, he was able to reminisce about things we did in April 1994, or call out the chord changes to songs we wrote as twenty-somethings. Jellybean often reminded me that we had always loved each other and always will. Those are visits I will keep with me forever.
Looking back all these years later, I realize now that Joey showed his true self the very first night he became Jellybean. Our dorm room was the phone booth where he transformed himself on demand. I was too young to recognize it at the time, but Jellybean would drop everything and put on a cape to help a stranger if he thought they needed it. That was his natural, default setting. Selfless, obliging, putting others before himself, and sometimes accommodating to a fault.
Thinking of everything he’ll miss in his three kids’ lives is excruciating. Thinking of everything he accomplished, cherished, and gave to others brings pride and a sense of pure joy in having been his friend. Now, on nights when I find myself thinking of Joey, there are two words I like to end with in my heart and in my head, sorrowful and comforting at the same time:
Goodnight, Jellybean.
