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| Somewhere down South, the Dirtbombs stopped at a gas station to pick up provisions. Mick, lead singer, self-described alpha-male of the group says to me "Are you ready to go cracker?" It wasn’t a revelation per se, but I realized, amidst the awkward stares of pick-up drivers and drawlers that we, the Dirtbombs, operate in a unique racial atmosphere. Mick, the lead singer/guitar player, is black. Yet in our world, the garage-rock nouveau that has become all the rage in England, he is a minority, and more often than not, treated like the Last Surviving Confederate Soldier. "Wow! A black man… playing rock ’n’ roll? Can we touch him? Does he talk? Are pictures allowed? Will he bite?" It can get annoying sometimes. Not other people’s reactions, but the fact that Mick loves every second of it. Our most recent album, Ultraglide In Black (a play on the Robert Blake late-night cinema classic Electra Glide In Blue) billed Mick as "the last black man in rock ’n’ roll"—a claim that is, in all actuality, true. Long gone are the days of Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee. Somewhere, something happened. Hip-hop became the medium of expression for young black men. Rock ’n’ roll seems to have suffered. The album was unique. Mick wanted to cover the songs that he grew up listening to. His father owned an auto repair shop across the street from the largest record distributor in Detroit. When the owner found out Mr. Collins had a stable full of kids, he made a point of bringing by all the new releases. This would mean entire singles collections from the historic (and predominantly black) labels of Chess, Specialty, and obviously, Motown. Eleven of the 12 songs on the album are covers. All but one ("The Thing," by Larry Bright, who Mick described as "the white Andre Williams") were originally performed by black artists and released on predominantly black record labels. Four of the tracks come from Motown bands (the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, Jr. Walker and the Allstars, and Marvin Gaye). The underlying theme of these songs seems to be blackness in the context of the late ’60s to ’70s. Most of the songs address some kind of oppression, and yet, it wasn’t until I decided to write this that the subject matter revealed itself to me. "Living for the City," originally done by Wonder, is about a black family who travels North from "hard time Mississippi." Mick, believing that he’s some kind of hardship arbiter, deemed that blacks have had the song for too long, and that the song is now more appropriate if sung from a Mexican perspective. Mississippi becomes Teocaltiche and the final verse is sung entirely in Spanish. "Kung Fu" by Curtis Mayfield starts off as an homage to Bauhaus’ "Bela Legosi’s Dead," but the lyrics offer something much deeper. "My mama born me in the ghetto / There was no mattress for my head / But no she couldn’t call me Jesus / I wasn’t white enough she said / And then she named me Kung Fu." In the context of "Kung Fu," a black Jesus turned the rusted gears in my religiously retarded brain. If Jesus were black, what would all the white Catholics think? If he came back now, black, would people accept him? Would they treat him the same way they treat the black beggar on the street? Would they remember that Jesus was poor too? The most recently written track was "Ode to a Blackman" by Thin Lizzy frontman-turned-solo-artist Phil Lynott. Lynott himself was peculiar, a black, Irish, bass playing lead singer, with Huey Lewis playing harmonica behind him. The song name checks Stevie Wonder, Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix and says "there are people in this town who try to put me down / They say I don’t give a damn / But those people in this town who try to put me down / Are the people in this town who could never understand a black man." Sly and the Family Stone’s early track "Underdog" begins with the melody line to "Frere Jacques" and speaks volumes when it says "I know what it’s like when you get demoted / When it’s time to get promoted / Because you might be moving up too fast." All these situations aren’t things that Mick has personally experienced or even written about for that matter, but they are ideas that he can identify and connect with. The most interesting thing to me is that it took a backing band of a Greek, Italian, French-Canadian and me, English or Polish or whatever the hell I am, to make it. It’s What’s In the Grooves that Counts… What I’ve begun to notice is that race is at the base of all music. The reason Eminem gets so much praise is that he’s a white boy stuck in the middle of a world of blackness. The reason Mick gets half the publicity he does is because he’s a black man in the white world of garage rock. Sam Phillips was completely on the mark when he said, "If I could find me a white boy who sings like a nigger, I’ll make a million dollars." Sight holds more weight in the business than sound could ever hope to. Phillips found his white boy, by the name of Presley, sold him to RCA Victor and made his million dollars. He then went on to discover Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Almost in a similar way, Mick’s choice of these songs would be a discovery for me. I always appreciated Motown hits in the backseat of my dad’s Renault, being shuttled from softball field to dusty softball field. To this day, I always expect the "Good times, great oldies, 104.3 WOMC" jingle to be followed up by the fanciful horn section in the opening bars of "Tears of a Clown." It’s permanently embedded itself in my head. Who knows how many times the jingle was actually followed by "Tears," but it was certainly enough to make an impression on my eight-year-old brain. Despite the constant exposure to Motown that every youth in this burg experiences, the genre didn’t quite grab and shake me until me until we recorded Ultraglide. Mick burned me a CD of the originals before we recorded our covers. I played it for my mom and she recognized more than a handful. I had always prided myself on retaining the musical knowledge in the family, but she knew what I didn’t. What was she doing knowing about this stuff? Who’d she think she was? I felt challenged. I soon began a quest, still uncompleted, to acquire all of the originals from Ultraglide on 45. The trek opened my eyes. I began to recognize old soul record labels (Karen, Ric-Tic, Moira), producer names (Popcorn Wylie) and the terribly collector-nerdish matrix numbers (ZTSC means mastered by Columbia). By covering these songs, I essentially uncovered 40 years of musical ignorance that had built up in my wax-encrusted ears. It wouldn’t take long for me to notice that I’m not the only poor white boy to feel this way about Motown and other soul records. I read more and more about Northern Soul clubs of England, where kids danced maniacally from night through morning. DJs were terribly territorial and competitive, covering a 45s labels while they spun the record so a rival DJ wouldn’t know what song/artist was playing. This was something I could get into. The idea of ultimate obscurity turned me on. Goldmine magazine, the Bible for vinyl-hoarding losers like myself, lists Frank Wilson’s "Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)" single as most ever paid for a single 45. One of three known copies sold for $24,000. The most interesting fact was that the single was released on Motown subsidiary Soul records. This was made in my own backyard. If there were anywhere to come across such rarities, such gems, such buried treasures, it would certainly be my own fair city. I was soon buying the compilation CDs, scouring the Internet for every last shred of available information on these long-forgotten artists and ultimately, feeling like an explorer with a new world in front of me. I was excavating. I loved it. Couple that with the increasing popularity of "Last Friday Funk Nights" at the Detroit Contemporary Art gallery, where blatantly white kids from the suburbs spin deathly obscure ’60s and ’70s funk singles to a room full of all races gyrating just the same. Funk was something different, yet something accessible. It’s pretty evident if a song is "funky" or not within its first few bars. Detroit is a ground zero for cheap, good, dirty funk 45s. So before going to the studio last week to sit around while Mick puts the finishing touches on the latest Dirtbombs album, I stopped in at the Record Graveyard in Hamtramck. The Graveyard has been my Plymouth Rock while I’ve been the ever-faithful Pilgrim. Stacks upon glorious stacks of scratched, dusted old Detroit 45s fill the room like Marlon Brando fills a Volkswagen Beetle. Almost all the 45s I grab seem to be cheap. Nothing is bad when it’s only two bucks. Today I would find something with a non-existent monetary value in the world market, but a terribly intrinsic historical value that to me that I could never put a price tag on. Sandwiched between run-of-the-mill shit was Marv Johnson’s "Come to Me" on the Tamla label, catalog number 101. I’m sure if I’d played the single it would’ve sounded like bacon frying, but listening to the song was far from my mind. I was  holding one of the most important pieces of Detroit/black/soul history.Back in 1959, Berry Gordy Jr. took an $800 loan from a family fund to release the single I was currently holding. Around thirty-years later he would sell his share of the Motown/Tamla label for $61 million. Even more exciting was that this was the initial pressing of the single, complete with the "1719 Gladstone St., Detroit 6, Mich" address on the label. Thoughts bum rush my head. "Did Gordy himself actually touch this single? Where’s the Tina Martin who wrote her name on the label? Did she even like the song? Where did each and ever scratch in the wax come from? How in the hell did mail work without zip codes? Is the Gladstone house still standing?" It’s amazing how such a thin, grooved piece of plastic can still provoke someone 45 years after it was squirted out of a pressing plant. I’m sure Gordy, Johnson, or the backing vocalists the Rayber Voices (who’d later become the Supremes) never imagined that anyone would care about their 2 minutes, 15 seconds of joy, let alone a 21-year-old white journalism student in 2003. I’m busy starting my own independent record label in Detroit. I couldn’t help but feel inspired. Tamla-101 is hanging on my wall now as a reminder. First, the single is a reminder that there’s always a chance to ride the big wave. Someone needs to catch the "sound of young America," whether it’s 1959 or 2003. Second—and most importantly—to remind me how far I’ve come in understanding soul music, its history, how it is intertwined with black culture (especially in Detroit). Ultimately, I don’t think I’d be where I am today—playing music with Mick, starting a record label, continuing this modern archeology of digging up music—if it weren’t for a simple seven inches with a yellow label in the center. |
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—September 2003 |
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Photos by Robert Matheu
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