Detroit: An Homage

One of those arguments that some music geeks like to have is which city is the most important to rock and roll. This is, of course, an unanswerable question. It depends on what you consider important, depends on your taste, and really depends on whether you’re looking at it from an artistic standpoint, business standpoint, or some other standpoint.

The Detroit riverfront

From time to time I’d like to profile rock and roll cities on this blog, and to get us started I’d like to look at the legacy of the city of Detroit. I didn’t decide to make the Motor City first because I had focus groups or digital data proving Detroit is more important than, say, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis or New York. I’m featuring Detroit because it’s the city where I was born.

Currently, Detroit is the poster child for failed, American rust-belt cities. It’s in bad shape, no two ways about it. I looked for my childhood homes on Google Earth, and none are still there. The vegetation has overtaken whatever ruins are left, the green grass only sporadically broken up by hunks of those brick awaiting their times to dissolve into nature.

Everyone following the tragic saga of the Motor City has a different opinion on exactly what happened or who’s to blame. Some say it was corrupt politicians; others say it was obstinate labor unions; others say it was heartless, tone-deaf corporations and a ridiculous trade policy that drove the stake in Detroit’s heart.

I’m no professor of Detroitology, so all I can do is offer some observations. Spending a good chunk of my formative years there, I can say it’s some of all of the above. I left as a teenager when the oncoming decline was very clear to see. I have to say that in this blogger’s humble opinion, Detroit’s biggest problem was, and probably still is, a simple inability of different kinds of people to understand each other’s humanity and failure to see that they were more alike then they were different. 

But an autopsy of Detroit is beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here, but rest assured, there’s plenty to read about what went wrong, some of it more scholarly than others. What I can do, in my little insignificant way, is discuss what is beyond dispute, which is Detroit’s indispensable role in rock and roll.

Detroit is probably most famous for Motown, hardly irrelevant to garage rock. As Little Steven pointed out on a recent episode of CNN’s terrific documentary series, The Seventies, Motown set out to make black music tailored for white people and ended up making some of the greatest black music ever. No argument there.

It would be impossible to name all of the great artists from Detroit. You can start with John Lee Hooker, one of the few great delta bluesmen to bypass Chicago. And while funk was not a creation of Detroit, one of its greatest champions, George Clinton, is. It’s tough to imagine American music without either of these geniuses. Bridging the ‘50s to the ‘60s was Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

The jazz, blues and r&b history of Detroit is more the material of a book than a blogpost, and I would encourage you to seek that out. And though it’s not talked about nearly enough, Detroit – seeing perhaps the beginnings of a rebirth with a nascent technology sector -- is in fact the undisputed birthplace of techno music.

Of course, Detroit has a bit to answer for, too. Foisting Ted Nugent and Kid Rock on the world should be investigated by a UN Human Rights Commission. But let’s move on.

The city contributed its fair share of great rockers through the sixties, including Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and though Bob Seger’s ‘70s arena rock is not my cup of tea, his work with the Bob Seger System helped keep the Motor City squarely on the top shelf of rock and roll cities.

Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels

But bubbling underneath that host of great mainstream ‘60s acts were some very familiar garage rock bands, several of whom would end up on Nuggets, Pebbles, and other well-regarded compilations. These would include the Rationals, the Pleasure Seekers (featuring Suzi Quatro, who would help bust up the all-boy glam club in the UK a few years later) and the Underdogs.

? and the Mysterians

For a brief period in the mid-‘60s, bands like the Sir Douglas Quintet from near my other hometown, Austin, Texas, took the sounds of Tex-Mex Conjunto to the far northern reaches of the pop charts. Much to my surprise,? and the Mysterians, as part of that wave had an all-time classic with “96 Tears.” They were actually from Bay City, not too far from Detroit, proving the city’s musical heritage was far from just black and white.

In the world of garage, protopunk, and power pop, Detroit may be tough to top as far as importance. In the aforementioned series, The Seventies, it was pointed out that you could pinpoint the birth of punk rock in 1969 in Detroit, specifically with the MC5 (short for Motor City 5, sort of a play on the Chicago 8) and the Stooges (whom, to be accurate, were from Ann Arbor, where my family currently resides).

The Stooges

And though he was really more of a glam artist, Alice Cooper’s horror-movie inspired themes (and frequently, his incredible song hooks) still cast their shadow over artists from Rob Zombie to fellow Detroiters the Gore Gore Girls.

But the Detroiters who began punk, or protopunk, or whatever you want to call it, didn’t have instant success. The Stooges were a little too out there for most tastes for at least a couple of decades, and it’s only in the last 10 years or so that anyone not a rock critic or part of that fan cult has had any idea who Iggy and the Stooges are. 

The joke has been said that only a few people bought the Stooges albums, but they all became musicians themselves. In fact, New York punk pretty much started when groups of self-described weirdos who liked the Stooges and the MC5 got together to play their own music.

Of course, we should mention one of the most important, if unheralded, bands of that era, Death. They more or less appeared at the same time as the Ramones in New York, but there’s zero evidence that either one copied the other. Had Death ever gotten any kind of national distribution, they might well be regarded as the first true punk band. Sadly, it would take a documentary 30 years later for anyone, myself included, to know who this great band was.

If Detroit isn’t quite ground zero for power pop, perhaps the best-known power-pop band hails from there, the Romantics. “What I Like About You” – which if you can believe it, never cracked the top-40 during its initial release -- has, sadly, been gobbled up by the mainstream and is now used to hawk everything from beer to major league baseball. Don’t let this be your sum total knowledge of the Romantics, though, who have a slew of great songs.

In the last few decades, Detroit has become one of the most important garage rock cities in the world. As you know, modern garage rock tilts more towards ‘70s punk than first wave of garage from the ‘60s. Still, anyone who likes the music we talk about here at Garagerocktopia has a moral obligation to really dive into some good Dee-Troit garage rock.

We can’t possibly name all of the great bands to come from the big D in the last few years. Most notable would be the punkish leanings of the Gories and the Dirtbombs; the more mainstream-ish Von Bondies; KO and the Knockouts, whose music, if you murked it up a bit, could be mistaken for mid-60s garage;  and the Detroit Cobras to name just a very few.

Jack White

And no, don’t worry, I wasn’t going to leave out Jack White or the White Stripes. Though I don’t have hard figures in front of me, I have calculated that 63.5

7% of all good new guitar licks composed in the last 15 years would have emanated from Jack White, either with the White Stripes or as a solo artist.

These days, he’s hanging out in Nashville but he hasn’t forgotten his hometown. He has donated massive amounts of money to help repair and maintain Detroit landmarks like to Detroit Masonic temple, which he single-handedly rescued. I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to speculate that he may end up being Detroit’s greatest contribution to rock and roll ever.

As sad as this post has sometimes been, the news is not all grim. Musically, Detroit (and to be fair, the surrounding areas) is far from done having a say-so in what music, especially garage rock, sounds like. I suspect the number of great garage rock bands is well into triple digits.

The Dirtbombs

By all appearances, Detroit has hit bottom – which means it’s due to rise. Already, young entrepreneurs, enterprising everything from tech to adventurous cuisine to organic farming, are moving in. The car industry is gone, but there are many young businesspeople working hard to make Detroit a hip place once again.

I visited Detroit about a year ago, and if you poke your nose beyond the dilapidated brick buildings, there’s a vibrancy and a hometown pride that, I’ll be honest, seems more potent and more pointedly cool than anything going on when I grew up there. Detroit’s not dead, and if that’s what you think, you need to run out and grab you some Dirtbombs  and some Cobras … and Kick Out The Jams!