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Willie Bledsoe, only in his twenties, is totally burned out. After leaving behind a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Detroit to try to change the world, Willie quickly grows disenchanted and returns home to Alabama to try to come to grips about his time in the cultural whirlwind. But the surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives him a chance to drive a load of stolen guns back up to the Motor City, which would give him enough money to jump-start his dream of moving to New York. There, on the opening day of the 1968 baseball season—postponed two days in deference to the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.—Willie learns some terrifying news: the Detroit police are still investigating the last unsolved murder from the bloody, apocalyptic race riot of the previous summer, and a Detroit cop named Frank Doyle will not rest until the case is solved. And Willie is his prime suspect. Bill Morris' rich and thrilling new novel sets Doyle's hunt against the tumultuous history of one of America's most fascinating cities, as Doyle and Willie struggle with disillusionment, revenge, and forgiveness—and the realization that justice is rarely attainable, and rarely just.
Fictional account of the automobile industry and Detroit in the early 1950s.
Now in paperback, this first oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements brings the sound of the punk generation chillingly to life with 50 new pages of depraved testimony. "Please Kill Me" reads like a fast-paced novel, but the tragedies it contains are all too human and all too real. photos.
Late July of 1967, and Detroit boils over. For Aram Pehlivanian, aka Motown, the Grande Ballroom and the music of the MC5 and Iggy Pop and The Temptations no longer provide a haven as destruction engulfs his city. However, escaping death in the streets during the '67 Detroit Riots only leads him to the jungles of Vietnam and away from Katie, the girl who might be his salvation. Beaten on the streets of Detroit, hunted in the jungles of Vietnam, and fueled to survive by the music of the Motor City, Aram burns with one goal...to see Katie again. Winner of the 2005 Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition and the 2007 Independent Publishing Gold Medal for Regional Fiction.
First in the award-winning soul music trilogy—featuring Motown artists Diana Ross & the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and others. Detroit 67 is “a dramatic account of twelve remarkable months in the Motor City” during the year that changed everything (Sunday Mail). It takes you on a turbulent journey through the drama and chaos that ripped through the city in 1967 and tore it apart in personal, political, and interracial disputes. It is the story of Motown, the breakup of the Supremes, and the damaging clashes at the heart of the most successful African American music label ever. Set against a backdrop of urban riots, escalating war in Vietnam, and police corruption, the book weaves its way through a year when soul music came of age and the underground counterculture flourished. LSD arrived in the city with hallucinogenic power, and local guitar band MC5—self-styled holy barbarians of rock—went to war with mainstream America. A summer of street-level rebellion turned Detroit into one of the most notorious cities on earth, known for its unique creativity, its unpredictability, and self-lacerating crime rates. The year 1967 ended in social meltdown, rancor, and intense legal warfare as the complex threads that held Detroit together finally unraveled. “A whole-hearted evocation of people and places,” Detroit 67 is “a tale set at a fulcrum of American social and cultural history” (Independent).
Detroit Rock City is an oral history of Detroit and its music told by the people who were on the stage, in the clubs, the practice rooms, studios, and in the audience, blasting the music out and soaking it up, in every scene from 1967 to today. From fabled axe men like Ted Nugent, Dick Wagner, and James Williamson jump to Jack White, to pop flashes Suzi Quatro and Andrew W.K., to proto punkers Brother Wayne Kramer and Iggy Pop, Detroit slices the rest of the land with way more than its share of the Rock Pie. Detroit Rock City is the story that has never before been sprung, a frenzied and schooled account of both past and present, calling in the halcyon days of the Grande Ballroom and the Eastown Theater, where national acts who came thru were made to stand and deliver in the face of the always hard hitting local support acts. It moves on to the Michigan Palace, Bookies Club 870, City Club, Gold Dollar, and Magic Stick -- all magical venues in America's top rock city. Detroit Rock City brings these worlds to life all from the guys and dolls who picked up a Strat and jammed it into our collective craniums. From those behind the scenes cats who promoted, cajoled, lost their shirts, and popped the platters to the punters who drove from everywhere, this is the book that gives life to Detroit's legend of loud.
A 2018 MICHIGAN STATE LIBRARY NOTABLE BOOK NOMINEE The deconstruction and death of a great city: In 1920, Detroit was a bustling city of almost a million people. Also the most technologically advanced and fastest growing city on the entire planet at the time. All thanks to the auto assembly line that had been invented there and had made the city a boom town ever since Henry Ford rolled out that first Model T in 1908. A city with the brightest of futures everyone agreed. By 1950, Detroit was known as Motor City, and was one the main engines driving American prosperity, the population had swelled to two million and Detroit still had the brightest future in America. But problems were already setting in. Unemployed blacks who began fleeing poverty of the Deep South in the thirties were arriving in larger and larger numbers through the forties and fifties. Even the success of the auto-making sector and all the spin-off industries that it created around Greater Detroit couldn't provide enough jobs for everyone arriving. Migration into the city was a slow-burning fuse. GIs ―both black and white―who had returned from WWII did not want to fight again for jobs on the lines. Nor did other blacks or whites already living in the city and lucky enough already to have jobs with the Big Three: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. So many new arrivals faced limited job prospects and simply gave up and went on the welfare rolls and on the hustle to survive. By the early 1960s, Motor City had become known as Motown, rising quickly as one of the new music capitals of the world. But the city was also slipping into a place of Darwinian struggle-survival of the fittest and the most desperate: too many still fighting for too few jobs available. But by the mid '60s bitterness and racial tensions had set in. Not just tensions between blacks and the still almost all-white police force, but just as much between blacks and blacks. Downtown Detroit began to empty of white people entirely as they fled by the thousands to the suburbs and the small towns outside the city, which left blacks to war with each other for very a very small patch of downtown turf black people came to know as Blackbottom. The city core was spinning out of control and Detroit was eventually overtaken by a mindless kind of violence never before seen in America. Daily attacks seemingly for no reason. Violence for the sake of striking out at someone. Anyone. I came to be that no one was safe downtown any more. By 1967 the city had earned an entirely new and sickening epithet: Murder City USA. The highest murder rate in America for many years in a row by then. A once great city with a once shining future turned into a disheartening soul-crushing urban hellscape. The people who lived there, feeling trapped and with no way out, could see and feel the city unraveling and that it had caused ordinary peaceful people to turn on each other. Black people of downtown Detroit knew they were living in a powder keg. Then, in the small hours of a searing Saturday night in July of that year, it blew. For four days Detroit was filled with gunfire and looting as the city burned. More a Vietnam battle zone than a once-great American inner city. When it was over, forty-three were dead, many hundreds were injured, and more than fourteen hundred homes, buildings, and businesses were burned and leveled. Much of the area around 12th Street was a burned-out smoldering ruins, the area black people knew as Blackbottom, the heart and soul of old black Detroit, died in those four days. Many had seen the trouble coming. Had lived with it with a growing sense of anxiety, unease, and dread as they saw where their city was headed. Saw the fuse burning. One of those who grew up there and saw it coming was my good friend Spider Jones. He was there that fateful night when the bottle smashed against the wall at 2:00 a.m. and he was sprayed with glass shards. And so it began.
Detroit in the 1960s was a city with a pulse: people were marching in step with Martin Luther King, Jr., dancing in the street with Martha and the Vandellas, and facing off with city police. Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA. As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign. Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.