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>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.
Peace and love never had much of a chance there, even before the riot. "People talked about San Francisco, the utopian world there," says Frank Bach, who worked at the Grande Ballroom and later sang with the radical band the Up. "We thought that was cute. Detroit was closer to reality: kids faced with going to Vietnam, blacks dealing with poverty and police enforcing the rules." Escape was easy in San Francisco, Sinclair, 65, says with contempt: "They just walked out and started doing new things nobody had done before. In Detroit, escape was a big deal." Dominated by the auto industry, the city was "a lunch-bucket town" (as Kramer calls it) in which generations ritually followed their parents into assembly-line jobs. "The energy of production was the backdrop of our lives," says Sinclair, whose father worked for Buick. The closest Detroit got to a love-in in 1967 was on April 30th at Belle Isle Park, in the strait between Detroit and Ontario. "There were bells and flowers," Sinclair says. "Then the motorcycle gangs came, terrorizing the crowd, and the police drove everyone off the island with clubs, riding down on them with horses."Yet that intensity and chaos inspired a counterculture unique to the era in its militarism and musical ferocity. The latter was captured for all time on the 1969 debut albums by the MC5 and the Stooges: Kick Out the Jams, cut live by the 5 at the Grande, and the Stooges' eponymous carnal-punk classic. But there was no fuzz without fight. In late 1968, Sinclair founded the White Panther Party, in homage to the Black Panthers, and the MC5 posed bare-chested, with guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith wearing a cartridge belt, on Kick Out the Jams. In 1969, after Sinclair was hit with a ten-year jail sentence on a 1967 pot-possession bust, Detroit youth campaigned for his release. They were later joined by John Lennon--and won. Sinclair was freed in 1971.
"We were on the upward end of the arc," Kramer says of the scene in '67. "The sense of unlimited possibilities was palpable."
Aside from a short-lived cluster of head shops on Plum Street downtown, Detroit had no designated freakdom like New York's East Village. "It was a driving city--everybody was mobile," says Kramer, who admits the MC5 had little incentive to leave their own house. "We were in a constant party," he says fondly. "There was always something going on--rehearsals, reefer to smoke."
But everyone's home away from home was the Grande Ballroom, a big-band-era dance hall on Grand River Avenue ("One block south of Joy," Sinclair notes with a chuckle), in a black area of west Detroit. In October 1966, Russ Gibb, a high school teacher with a strong bohemian streak (he was also a popular underground DJ), promoted Detroit's first Fillmore-style dance concert there, headlined by the MC5. The venue was soon a favorite of touring bands like Cream and the Who. But Gibb loyally showcased new Detroit music, regularly booking other now-legendary area bands like SRC, the Up, the nascent Stooges and white-soul killers the Rationals.
>>This is an excerpt from the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on stands until July 27th.