There was an abundance of tuneage available on the airwaves in Detroit, everything from Motown to AM pop to the British Invasion on stations like CKLW ("The Big 8") and WKNR ("Keener 13"). Discovering the FM dial stands out as some sort of socially-disaffected milestone in my life, particularly WABX, whose "Air Aces" spun a free-form mix of jazz, rock, country, blues and the two-headed monster that was the MC5, and The Stooges.
In the heart of Detroit, music fan could catch their heroes live and on the boards in dumps like Cobo Arena, the Michigan Palace, Ford Auditorium, and Masonic Auditorium. Then, as now, this merry journey takes you through some of this lunchpail burg's worst neighborhoods.
The early to mid-70's were the salad days for live music and Detroit was a major whistle stop on any band's touring schedule. By the Detroit River you'd run into a gauntlet of tawdry societal outcasts offering everything from purple microdot to cheap ditch weed. Once inside, the fun wasn't over yet since you usually had to negotiate a maze of prone urban drug casualties who had no prayer of regaining consciousness in time to catch one note from the band.
The Michigan Palace seemed to specilize in glam like T.Rex, Slade, The Sweet, David Bowie, Mott The Hoople, Sparks and The New York Dolls and Alice Coooper touring behind "Love It To Death," the album containing their epochal single "I'm Eighteen" which, not surprisingly, kids in the suburbs around here took to like flies to garbage. Exhilarating as that show was, representing all the bombast, volume, and spectacle I had come to jones for, we still exited the place like small, shaken children which, come to think of it, we were.
The northern suburb of Birmingham was where the now-defunct Creem magazine was headquartered before packing up operations and moving to Los Angeles, leaving behind the grit, sense of purpose, and plot. Excited teenagers would stand outside their Woodward Avenue offices hoping to meet or at least catch a glimpse of Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds or Billy Altman.
Some brave kids worked up enough nerve to go in. One time the receptionist very politely handed out a Pavlov's Dog promo LP as a cue to leave.
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