va – Motor City is Burning
A Michigan Anthology 1965-1972
If Motown’s brilliant PR is to be believed, Michigan’s contribution to music starts and ends with Detroit soul. Actually, that’s unfair. You’d get a token gesture of MC5 or maybe even The Stooges thrown in as well. Sorted.
Except that Michigan was bristling with music of all kinds, in particular the period from 1965-1972, which, remarkably, is exactly the time covered in the new 3-disc box set, a very welcome dig into the state’s contribution to twang, thump, and melody.
Quite rightly, the set kicks off with ? and The Mysterians‘ ’96 Tears’. I’ll stick my neck out and say this is one of the top ten best singles ever released, and that’s even with having to listen to it every day (it’s my ringtone). The air-raid wail of the organ riff; the intriguing lead singer; a nod to a Japanese sci-fi film; a bunch of nobody Mexicans; the haunting yet unflinching lyrics – it’s 1966, and a garage band in Michigan has just released the first punk single. A year earlier, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels had released ‘Jenny Take A Ride!’, a raucous but still polite Lonnie Donegan rip-off. Such was the speed at which the scene changed.
Terry Knight & The Pack put even less effort into their song choice but their cover of The Stones‘ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ knocks the original into a cocked hat, a frenzied organ kicking at the heels of a yawning fuzz guitar in a truly elephantine reshaping. The Pack alone take on Hendrix‘s ‘Fire’ (retitled as ‘Next to your Fire’) and turn it into a talcum-demanding Northern Soul classic. If there is a thread running through this collection, it’s that there’s a noticeable urgency. Everyone is looking over their shoulder, aware that the three minutes being pressed into history can so easily slip down the back of the settee. Dick Wagner and The Frost didn’t become famous with their track ‘Mystery Man’ but Wagner was not deterred. Even being sacked as guitarist of Lou Reed’s Berlin tour didn’t deter him – he just waited to hook up with Alice Cooper and co-wrote ‘Only Women Bleed’. There’s something in those lakes, clearly.
Even those aping The Byrds, British Invasion bands or soul contemporaries have an attitude to them. The Underdogs sound like the ancestors of Mick Collins‘ numerous combos (in particular The Dirtbombs); The Rationals take The Kinks‘ ‘I Need You’ and give it a good throttling. Blink-and-they’re-gone acts like The Innsman continue to use the organ to keep the lead guitarist on their toes. So fulsome is everyone in their commitment to making the most of the opportunity they have that when The Stooges‘ ‘1969’ kicks in, it really doesn’t stick out like the sore thumb you might expect. They introduce a heavier start to disc two, with MC5 joining in and Brownsville Station‘s bowel-jangling cover of Bo Diddley‘s ‘Roadrunner’. Even Alice Cooper returns to the homestead with ‘Halo of Flies’, though there’s no doubting that LA glitter has been liberally sprinkled by this point.
I’ve never ‘got’ Grand Funk Railroad, and time hasn’t helped to unravel my difficulties with them. Even alongside no-hit wonders playing covers, they sound lumbering, self-indulgent and turgid. Far more interesting are Bump, a psych rock band with a proggy slant that threatens to extend ‘Spider’s Eyes’ to Iron Butterfly expansiveness (although it still hurdles the five-minute mark), but instead takes the less scenic Jefferson Airplane path. Despite label interest, the band split up. Fifty years on, we’re still discovering a band that decided to have entirely different careers – that’s the beauty of recording on a physical medium – it can always find a dusty corner to settle down in and wait for its moment in the sun.
There are also those who didn’t choose to give up as such, they simply mistimed their step. The Glass Sun’s ‘I Can See the Light’ has a ferocious fuzz guitar rasping at clattering drums and forcing the poor singer to bellow like a loon…but it’s 1972. Sabbath and Zeppelin have already got legions hanging onto their every riff, and The Glass Sun are still basking in the rays of 1967, garland of flowers draped around their guitar necks.
Disc three largely covers black artists, though this is far from just a jumble of middle-of-the-road soul. To prove the point, we are given the double whammy of Temptations ‘Ball of Confusion’ and Parliament‘s ‘I Call My Baby Pussycat’ – both of which could easily have lived on the other two discs. Equally thrilling is Dennis Coffee, appearing here with The Detroit Guitar Band, absolutely slamming it with the much-sampled ‘Scorpio’. Also lining up for required listening – Chairman of the Board (backed by Funkadelic!), Rare Earth, and Warlock, who really do sound like Motor City is burning.
What have we learned? Well, Michigan is far more than just soul and The Stooges. Is it a hotbed of talent? Yes, but how big is your bed? Michigan is about twice the size of England – it shouldn’t be surprising that there has been such a variety of music emerging from there, in fact, it would be shameful if all it had to offer was a couple of bands and a soul label. This collection is impressively consistent and shows the obscure sitting pretty alongside better-known names.
Daz Lawrence
