DETROIT LIFE
By John Sinclair


Life in Detroit has been framed and regulated by the exigencies of the automobile industry for an entire century. The first 50 years saw the city grow into a booming manufacturing center with jobs for all and home ownership a way of life for 70% of the citizenry.

But since the 1950s the powers that be have focused on moving the plants and their Caucasian workforce out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs, draining the City of Detroit of its tax base, stripping its civic resources and leaving behind the fabulous ruins of this once-great metropolis to be negotiated by the 800,000 black people who live here with precious few visible means of support.

Detroit life now is a difficult proposition for the urban inhabitant, but the sharpened street-level intelligence and boundless hunger for knowledge and meaning generated by the struggle for simple survival have helped shape an effective way of day-to-day dealing with the dilapidated environs of the former Motor City and coming through relentless adversity with one’s humanity miraculously intact and one’s creative potential fully actualized.

Life in the ruins of modern-day Detroit is not for the weak-minded nor the faint of heart. Living here demands a level of awareness and tenacity well beyond that required for regular American life, and the people who are able to survive in this city without jobs and manage to develop their human and creative potential despite the customary lack of recognition or material reward are special people indeed. But they’ve been coping with the ugly realities of life in Detroit for a long time, and they’ve learned how to make things work for themselves in very creative ways.

The mass exodus of the white people began 60 years ago when the first freeways were dug and the first modern suburbs were developed around the first of the sprawling shopping malls. Twenty years later the outward momentum moved into high gear following the July Rebellion of 1968, and by the time the auto industry collapsed and the city elected its first black mayor in the mid-’70s, a million white people had been safely removed and their former homes and businesses in the city literally abandoned by the thousands.

The tide of white Detroiters streaming outward from the city throughout the ’60s was countered only by a small trickle of young white Americans who were drawn to the collapsing city center by the possibility of making some kind of life irrespective of the Caucasian paradigm that would allow them to pursue their personal artistic and social visions and sustain themselves without having a real job by taking advantage of the low rents and relatively unregulated social life of the deconstructed metropolis.

The bohemian influx into Detroit centered on the Wayne State University campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. Here the young urbanites took rooms in funky old apartment buildings and rented for a song substantial old houses and workplaces the previous generation had been so eager to leave behind due to their proximity to the nearby dwellings of the dread people of color.

The bohemians fit right in to their new urban environs. Essentially open-minded and free-spirited in their social relations, these artists, poets, musicians and other seekers of authentic creative experience refused to be crippled by the racism and sexual repression practiced by their forebears and instead embraced the concepts of racial equality, peace not war, social and economic justice and personal freedom to live as they pleased without exploiting or oppressing fellow human beings.

Among the few white Americans in the northern United States who made actual physical and social contact with the black inhabitants of the city centers, the bohemian sector in Detroit quickly learned that racism was pretty much a one-way street and soon found its denizens forming fast friendships and strong working relationships with the people around them. In the bohemian art world people were judged and deemed worthy on the basis of the quality of their work and the nature of their personalities, the exact criteria almost universally applied throughout African America, so it was easy to begin to see eye to eye as fellow humans and coexist in unaccustomed peace and harmony.

This was a new Detroit life that took root amid the ruins in the 1960s and began to blossom after the 1968 Rebellion, certainly never part of the official narrative but a certain reality for everyone who lived it and loved it and took sustenance from it every day of their lives. Bohemian Detroit, underground Detroit, inter-racial Detroit, a place where you can do what you want to with anyone who would do it with you and the creative possibilities are as vast as you can make them.

This is the Detroit life I know and love, from my initial residency in the city between 1964-1968, and then from 1975-1991, and now every time I come back to visit my daughter and granddaughter and my hundreds of friends in the Motor City and play some shows with Jeff Grand and my band, the Motor City Blues Scholars.

Over the years I’ve composed any number of poems that commemorate and pay homage to different aspects of this Detroit life of ours, and I’ve performed them (and many others) with scores of Detroit musicians since I started setting my verses to music in the summer of 1964. Now, 44 years later, I wanted to put them all together and record them with the musicians I know and love and work with in the Motor City, and this album is the result.

I was living with Charles Moore in a basement apartment in the Forest Arms at 2nd & Forest and writing some of the first poems I wanted to keep when he asked me if I’d ever thought of setting my verses to music and performing them with a band. When we opened the Detroit Artists Workshop at 1252 West Forest in November and then established the WSU Artists Society to gain access to campus venues like DeRoy Auditorium, Community Arts and Mackenzie Hall for the presentations of jazz and poetry we had developed at the Workshop, Charles invited me to perform several of my poems with his ensemble, the Detroit Contemporary 5, with Ron English on guitar, Larry Nozero on tenor saxophone, John Dana on bass, and Danny Spencer on drums.

I performed my poetry with Charles Moore and his ensembles over the next couple of years, but when I started managing the MC-5 in the fall of 1967 and embraced the life of a cultural and, later, radical political activist, my work in poetry was suspended for what turned out to be the next 15 years while I wrote polemics, propaganda, press releases, underground newspaper columns, and later proposals for arts projects and grant applications for jazz artists in Detroit.

I started writing poetry again in the spring of 1982, soon undertaking the composition of an elongated jazz work in verse centered on the music, life, times and impact of Thelonious Monk and starting work on a book of blues verse focused on the music and culture of the Mississippi Delta. This time around the first thing I wanted to do was set the new poems to music and perform them with first-rate musicians so I could hear them—and present them to my listeners—the way they’d sounded in my head while I was writing them.

By the end of the year I’d organized my first band of Blues Scholars with “Showtime” Johnny Evans on tenor sax, Rick Steiger on baritone saxophone, James O’Donnell on trumpet, Martin Gross on drums and R.J. Spangler on congas & percussions to play a concert at Paul Lichter’s legendary Maximus & Company bookstore in Birmingham on January 2, 1983.

That was 25 years ago and I’ve been doing the same thing ever since. The original Blues Scholars—named in honor of Professor Longhair’s great bands from New Orleans—grew to include young musicians like John “T-Bone” Paxton on trombone, Ron “Big Red” Redman on tenor, Jeff Grand on guitar, Chris Rumel on bass, the great Phil Hale on keyboards, and a host of guest players from earlier incarnations like Lyman Woodard, Danny Spencer, Wayne Kramer and Charles Moore.

After I moved to New Orleans in 1991 I formed a new edition of the Blues Scholars with guitarist Phil DeVille, drummer Michael Voelker and a horn section led by Michael Ray. My old pal from the Mojo Boogie Band in Ann Arbor, Bill Lynn, moved to New Orleans and came in on guitar, and for almost 10 years Bill and Mike Voelker and I worked together to develop the Blues Scholars repertoire by devising appropriate musical settings for my poems and performing them anywhere in New Orleans people would have us.

When I started my travels as a performer in the mid-1990s I would work with musicians wherever I went who could do justice to the Blues Scholars book, but the best times musically were always when I returned to Detroit and got together with Showtime, Tino, Jeff Grand and Chris Rumel to play some shows around town. In the present period we’ve added Phil Hale on keyboards whenever we could, and the band would sound better than ever.

In the course of my recording career I’ve made albums with Ed Moss & the Society Jazz Orchestra of Cincinnati, the Boston Blues Scholars with Ted Drozdowski, the Los Angeles edition with Wayne Kramer & Charles Moore, the Blues Scholars in Oxford and Clarksdale, Mississippi, and the New Orleans band of Blues Scholars, but never with the cats from Detroit I’d started out with and still played with every time I was in the Motor City.

Early this past spring when I was staying in Detroit with my pal Holice P. Woods, it dawned on me one night that this discrepancy was now a quarter of a century in duration and demanded to be addressed at once. I gathered together all my poems with Detroit in them and decided which ones would go in the album and roughly in what order, and then Hollywood and I smoked over the concept for a while and he bravely volunteered to help me put the project together and make it happen when I returned to Detroit in April.

Holice did a beautiful job from beginning to end, setting up the recording sessions with Mike Boulan of No Cover Records and drawing together all the musical participants to join in at the right times. The basic band was Showtime, Tino, Phil Hale, Jeff Grand and Chris Rumel, with James O’Donnell’s trumpet added later. I made two numbers with R.J. Spangler on drums, Phil Hale and the great Johnnie Bassett on guitar, and Hollywood persuaded Johnnie to add a guitar solo to “let’s call this” and lead the final number, “That’s All,” with Duncan McMillan on organ. Thornetta Davis added a brilliant vocal background to “Hold Your Horn High,” and I recorded “bags’ groove” with Milton and Phil Hale and their bassist, Ibrahim Jones, at the Jazz Loft where I’d starting writing it at one of their Monday night sessions earlier in the year.

Mike Boulan was a joy to work with in every situation and never once brought up the question of compensation. In fact, and I don’t want to embarrass these top-notch professional musicians by saying so, but this entire project was accomplished entirely without funds—everybody gave everything they were asked for out of love and affection and we made something happen that turned out to be quite a beautiful thing.

Most of our recording was done at the Jazz Loft in Greektown, where we cut on a couple of nights and all afternoon and evening one day to get most of the tracks the way we wanted them. We finished up with a session at No Cover where my old friend Lyman Woodard came in on the Hammond B-3 organ and the entire horn section joined us for the definitive version of my poem from 1965, “The Screamers.” Then we made “nutty” with Woodard, my poem for the Forest Arms that I’d just finished in time for the recording sessions.

When I think of Detroit Life, these are the people I think of, these musicians and the people like them who make their art and their lives in the wilds of the former Motor City and live to tell the story. These people and the ones who used to be here with us, and the ones who showed us the way, and the young Detroiters who are coming up now within the venerable bohemian tradition, and all the people who have survived and sustained themselves as the city collapsed and rotted all around them.

These poems came out of my life in Detroit and have now been fully realized with the help of all the people in Detroit who made this album happen. The titles printed in lower case are taken from my book in progress called always know: a book of monk and we used Monk’s music whenever we could.

This is my Detroit Life. I hope it brings you as much pleasure in listening to it as we took from putting it together.

—Amsterdam
September 24-25, 2008