The Sandoz Collection - Sandoz Diego Cerveza (the ebook reader .txt) 📗

Statement, and from that seedling, sprang the Weathermen...and by the way, you really don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. In Detroit and the neighboring People's Republic of Ann Arbor, John Sinclair and a cadre of blue collar artists - slash - bolsheviks formed The White Panther Party, a group in spiritual alignment with the Black Panthers.

San Fran-freakin'cisco had Haight Ashbury, New Yawk had the Village and Detroit had a small pisser of a bohemian ghetto known as Plum Street, artists, headshops, too much sandalwood and intense patchouli incense, panhandlers and rag tag student neo-revolutionaries from Wayne State and pants pissin' winos from the Cass Corridor...That was the backdrop...now the players.

The Motor City had it's unholy share of madmen and rock n' roll Rasputins. It was the rock hunting grounds of Her Leather Thighness, Suzi Quatro, the Amboy Dukes, Frigid Pink, the Stooges and Frost. The brothers Hodge, Dallas and Catfish.

The radio station of choice was WABX, home of Dave Dixon and across the river the Canadian eh, airwave ballbuster of CJOM with it's no hold's barred middle finger attitude to the American Woman across the bridge. The Fifth Estate newspaper was the only paper worth stealing and 12th Street was ready to boil over with snipers, tanks and the National Guard, as race relations reached below sea level lows that erupted in a rage with looting, shootings, beatings, and a city left scarred and scared..it was the home of rock n' roll.

It was bar bands, garage bands and basement bands. God created this rock n' roll universe in six days...on the seventh he rested but not before he created the MC5 and built the Grande Ballroom.

The Grande is the quintisential Igrid Bergman of rock venues in the Motor City. Just enough erection causing sex appeal , style, grace and Ilsa elegance, ala "Casablanco" that was built in 1928 with the ballroom located on the second floor. Jazz bands improvised as Detroits elite swarmed to over capaicty to the ballroom, boppin' and jazzin' and finger poppin' into the Thirties.

Then along came Bennie Goodman and the other big bands whose sound filled the cavernous ballroom with a bobby sox sexuality. In the Sixties, Russ Gibb took over and started booking bands from Jeff Beck to Cream and everyone in between. Bob Seger and Ted Nugent plying their rock trade alongside the top acts and the other local acts that comprised the Detroit rock n' roll scene, but one band came to epitomize the mucho grande days of the ballroom Grande....The Motor City Five.

The Motor City Five added an element of fuel injected energy and high octane creativity to a highly combustible mixture of rock and revolution. The turbulent Sixties were fueling the band with left-wing politics and a penchant for psychedelics, the Breakfast of '60's Champions.

Bizarrely, or not, the group made the cover of the highly coveted Rolling Stone Magazine (in the days it was worth reading) without having an album out. Their on-stage antics, pitbull approach to convention and their outrageously high-powered hi-amped energy paved the way of their reputation with the effectivenss of a bulldozer clearing a rain forest. The were loud, and they were proud. They had energy to spare and you didn't have to be an Einstein to figure out that E=MC5.

In the beginning there was rock n' roll...Wayne Kramer and Fred "Sonic" Smith were high school friends and guitarists who played in several bands at sockhops which were the rage of the day before the days of rage. By 1964, the Motor City Two, were now Five with the addition of Michael Davis on bass, Dennis Thompson on drums, and a singer with a voice that seemed to erupt from a very angry volcano, Rob Tyner.

Tyner originally was going to be the bands manager but didn't care for that aspect..can't get laid being a manager, eh? So he tried out as the bass player, and failed miserably. So as is inevitable in rock n' roll, the one who is the least talented musician, becomes the singer and front man. If Phil Spector built the Tycoon of Teen "wall of sound" then Tyner and the Five created the rock n' roll wall of heavy metal iron and steel that was a natural musical spawn from the blue collar-unionized autoworker City of Motors.

Enter..stage far left. The Lone Socialist Ranger in the persona of John Sinclair who would take over the duties as "manager" for the group and use it effectively to spearhead a cultural revolution through raw high energy rock n' roll. Sinclair was one of the first Marxist multi-taskers if such a thing can exist.

He was head of the Detroit Artists Workshop, anarchists and artists working towards a gentle world of peace, art and anarchy. His militancy grew over the years, and he, along with others, formed the White Panter Party as the vanilla extract to the Black Panthers.

The Five/Sinclair marriage lasted a few years with the band getting more revolutionary by the minute as they and Sinclair spiraled through the helter skelter Sixties, the decade that had a societal deathwish and would climax in death and disallusionment with not only the establishment, but itself.

The stage is set....
There was the Haight ...there was the Village...and in Detroit there was Plum Street.

Plum Street was the envisioneed Bohemian art colony smack dab in the middle of middle america in the middle of the middle earth of the Motor City. Shops, artisans, a gentrified community unlike the rucksack roadies that were crossing the continent.

Haight Ashbury, Colfax Ave in Denver and the Village had evolved over the years, a fine wine aging in an oak cask. Plum Street, in typical Detroit fashion was "assembled and manufactured" and rolled off the assembly line in 1966 with fanfare and the goddamn mayor of Detroit officially opening it! How fucking revolutionary is that?

It was capitalism and commercialism trying to sell new Cadillacs in a used car lot. Yes, the artists came, yes the tourists came, and yes, the "hippies" came and were, (ready for this shit?) Persona non gratis as they did what they will do and did in those days...you know, "Spare Change?" You have to remember, Plum Street was a fake, it was not a real "woman" but a drag queen on a runway strutting her stuff, attractive maybe, but not the real deal.

April...1967...just months before the summer solstice and the flower powered Summer of Love, the psuedo-hippie scene of Detroit emulating the San Francisco Human Be-in, decided to stage a love-in, which in the blue collar votex of Detroit is an oxymoron. Let's face it, Detroit was never the sensitive type. Detroit, Rock City! Detroit, Murder City! No sissy Seattle here amigo.The "Love Locale" chosen was Belle Isle, an island playground smack dab in the middle of the Detroit River with a bridge from Jefferson Ave taking visitors to it's gardens, outdoor grilling pits, decorative fountains, aquarium, dance emporium and yacht club. The same bridge that Harry Houdini did his appendix bursting underwater escape trick from.

One of the groups playing that day was the MC5. The park was packed, the rolling papers kept rolling along, acid was dropped and music filled the park with thousands of weekend hippies, artists, musicians, bikers, hipsters, squares and narcs. Narcs in the parks was a mainstay of the Sixties. As the sun began to set with the city skyline framed in the foreground, the cops were getting restless..oh, oh, bad sign.

The polizia, on foot and mounted troops stormed the crowd to move them off the island, back across the river, back to Jefferson Avenue but apparantly they weren't moving fast enough so batons were raised, heads were cracked, and all hell broke loose as the cops went anal on the "anarchy" before them.

The Outlaw motorcycle gang was also on hand and there were instances of members of the brotherhood beating up bystanders. During all this, businesses on Jefferson Ave, including the restaurants locked their doors. Liquor stores on the other hand didn't fare as well with windows smithereen'd and bro's Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker made there escape to the streets.

The crowd of close to 3,000 was finally dispersed by 9:30 pm. Sinclair rationalization claimed that all the real hippies had left before the melee and the problem was caused by wannabe's and police. The MC5 had experienced their first head knocker riot, but, more were waiting in the wings on the turbulent horizon just months away, August actually, as the Motor City became an occupied city.

Detroit has this peculiar habit, religious in nature me thinks, of setting itself on fire, overturning cars, and looting. Sports mainly will be the gasoline to fuel the flames...Piston pumping win on the court, Red Wings victory on ice, Detroit Tigers ballpark win, doesn't matter. Like a Bhudist monk in Saigon, it decides to torch itself to celebrate a victory or bitch and moan about defeat.

In late summer, 1967, it was a street rampage bonfire that ignited on 12 Street. Cops were in the habit in those days of harrassing anyone with long hair or black skin. In the city, a blind pig was raided by the infamous "Big Four" which were separate groups of four cops who fancied themselves Texas Rangers or some macho fraternity of law and disorder who roamed the inner city neighborhoods of Detroit checking identification of people who may just be standing around, They would arrest people in squad cars, or trump up charges on an individual, pulling one magically out of the hat, or cop helmet in this case.

In a few cases, the Big Fours tactics led to the outright murder of three people during questioning. A teenager, and two prosititutes, all shot "while attempting to escape the back of a squad car". Police honchos bought the act, lock, stock and gun barrel, with a sly wink.

The blind pig raided was merely a group of black citizens hosting a welcome home party for two returning Vietnam veterans. The cops expected a dozen people to be on the premises, easy billy club pickens, but, instead there damn near a hundred of these mo'fo's.

Shit...Calling all cars, calling all cars. Gotta have backup, right? The cops burst in roughing up the patrons, things started to get out of control and before you know it, riots break out. It was Dresden during the fire bombings. as the city flicked it's Bic and went up in glorious technocolor flames. Cops shot at looters, and snipers shot at cops and firemen from rooftop nests as the city and the police went schizoid with a synapse that snapped.

The National Guard (the weekend warriors from the farm) were called in, along with Michigan State Police (glorified meter maids) and eventually the White House wanted in on the head busting action and ordered the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne to the scene. Christ, it was the Tet Offensive in reverse. Tanks rumbled through the streets, martial law was in force, and at the end of the 5 days the tally was 43 killed, 1,100 injured and over 7,000 arrested. Today, 12th Street has been renamed...Rosa Parks Boulevard.

You can't blame this one on the MC5 or even John Sinclair. They were in town, yes, and living in the city, yes, so they were witness to the flames and brutality.

In an interview Wayne Kramer relates that he was arrested during the riots as he had a telescope in his apartment window downtown. The cops saw it and busted in, cracking heads and opening them up like