In the past three years since relocating from London to Detroit, while covering the local music scene for the Metro Times and Metromix, and having written books about two of Detroit's legendary and classic bands in the MC5 and the Stooges, I genuinely feel that I have been able to write about some of the greatest music ever recorded across the decades. And you can be sure that, in the process, the area will be producing the best music in the world. But this is Detroit, filled with the salt of the earth, and you can't keep a good man, or woman, down.įor as long as we need to, we'll keep picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and moving forward. As I said in an earlier blog, I lost a job last month. I know things get tough, and we all have real worries. We're all, all of us, absolutely lucky to live in the Metro Detroit area. The Octopus doesn't know how to do anything but lay us all to waste. Eric Hoegemeyer's Deep See Sound System incorporates dub rhythm in a way that would make experimental maestro John Sinclair proud. Country rocker Ty Stone? His voice makes us all burn.

Gypsy-rock-frenzy-makers Punk Lightning? They burn like bastards. How about the Rogue Satellites, the electro-melodo-rockers regularly slamming across Detroit right now. Is there a band in the world capable of writing a pop song that is more pure, honest, and exciting? Nope. Lightning Love, the Ypsilanti-based, female-fronted group. I was capturing the essence of a band that burned bright for a brief moment, but man did they burn. When I wrote my MC5 biography, Sonically Speaking, I wasn't writing about a quintet of old men, shuffling through life. In the last blog, I talked about Marco Polio & the New Vaccines, and the influence that the MC5 has obviously had on them, even if it's indirectly (as it probably is). That's something to be immensely proud of. The truth is that, while San Francisco shone brightly in the '60s, New York had the '70s, LA the '80s, and Seattle the '90s, Detroit produced consistently incredible, challenging and artistically relevant music throughout those decades and right up to the now. Others will claim the '70s was the golden period. It's inevitable that people will look around and say 'it was better in the '60s'. The important thing that I wanted to get across is that everybody in the Metro Detroit area should embrace the music, not to mention the art, the film and everything else, that the area is spurting out at an impressive rate right now.

As I sit to write the last of these blogs, I realize that I haven't said anything like as much as I would have liked to have said.

MC5 by Brett Callwood