But unlike the current objects of mainstream fascination/repulsion, there was a subtle yet powerful tension created by the apparent paradox of their “fast-life” personae and their pleading, cajoling declarations of love lost and found.

The search for and promise of lifelong devotion – the “Dream Come True” - emanated from these men - the “new Negro” men of those times.

They had roots in the rural South with new lives in the industrial North; like the dudes on the corner of 12th and Pingree: toothpicks rolling around their mouths, stingy-brimmed hats cocked “ace-duce”; with a new icy attitude called “cool“, designed to hide the stress and tension of a new kind of hard, urban life.

They were not at all like the previous generation of singers – say the Mills Brothers with their harmonic, wholesome crooning, or the Drifters’ doo-wop paeans to love. Despite Berry Gordy’s polishing and presentation, the Temps seemed on the one hand like street corner hustlers – hostile and inscrutable; and on the other, like the brothers hitting the clock on the afternoon shift at Chrysler.

Lead singer David Ruffin wore thick, gumpy glasses and STILL looked cool, glasses that were sharp just because he wore them. Up to that time, most singers would rather go on stage stumbling half blind, rather than appear with specs – especially the thick, awkward frames of those times.

He doubtless proved a blessing to the optometry business in the ‘hood back then; my own little brother was finally convinced that our genetic nearsightedness was not the end of the world, once the girls said he looked like Ruffin.

Paul Williams, always known as the “soul of the group” sang “Don’t Look Back” at the Michigan State Fair, and, in the audience,  my Mom and I watched the tears run down his face with unabashed emotion on the “The Impossible Dream” – a lounge cliche when sung by others, but for him, a stirring Negro anthem for those Civil Rights days and times.

The cool, basso profundo of Melvin Franklin made us –  kids of the sixties – accept “Old Man River” as more than an anachronistic,  river-boat song; but an ode to the South of our fathers as they toiled in their new, Northern cities.

Eddie Kendricks sang “like a woman” in his career falsetto, yet the songs he led were the fanciful poesy of black  male loving that established the group from the beginning.

“The way you swept me off my feet, you know you could ‘a been a broom
The way you smell so sweet, you know you could ‘a been some perfume”*

In this song, “The Way You Do the Things You Do, written by Smokey Robinson, Eddie had a voice so limber that the word “feet” in the stanza above had five syllables. His voice was always gossamer, fairy light, and he was known to be a quiet, gentle man, yet he could look like the dude on the corner who might cut you, with his lean 12th street looks and brotha’ on the corner stance.

Thought the “made for TV” movie about the Temptations has become an urban classic, in no way does it capture the edgy, gifted complexity of the group, or the times.

When I was a child, the Temptations and the kings and queens of Motown rode the streets of Detroit like a magic carpet, driving Easter egg colored Cadillacs, wearing suits in matching pastels.

Everyone had someone they knew who was “one of the Temptations cousins” or “my sister-in-law’s brother’s uncle’s friend”- or some other convoluted degree of Motown separation that was emblematic of Detroit’s connection to our homegrown heroes.

We saw the Supremes out shopping at J.L. Hudsons, or the Miracles at a school dance.  How I remember the Originals singing “Baby I’m For Real” at the Arcadia skating rink on Woodward Ave.

The Temps had the look of both the hustler on the corner and the auto worker, sugar-sharp at a union hall cabaret. Kendricks and Ruffin, lithe and cold-blooded, the rest – and their replacements – proletarian thick and church deacon sharp.

They were reflections of the new factory Black men, sweet enough to talk up on a woman, with “game” enough to catch her, and money enough to keep her – and keep her comfortable, Detroit style,  in a large brick home with two sharp cars – and my pension, if you hang in there with me.

Only years, faded memories, and mainstream acceptance have rendered the Temps into innocuous oldies and soft-bellied men. For they were saber-sharp back in the day, and behind the scenes a few were as edgy and difficult as many a rapper of today.

One does not have to dig deep into their discography for songs that have not been worn into tiresome oldies, but in addition to their many lush B sides and lesser known hits, one album stands out – “Temptations in a Mellow Mood”, an unusual collection of show tunes and standards.

One song on this unlikely album that I’ll never forget  features Eddie Kendricks’ glistening lead on “Try to Remember” from – of all things – the musical “The Fantasticks”, which he turns into his own beautiful, wistful beckoning to remembrance.

After their early, prolific years and various personel changes, the Temps emerged in the 90′s with “For Lovers Only” with stunning lead singer Ali Ollie Woodson. With “Some Enchanted Evening” the lead single, it was  redo of standards with a nouveau-Temptations treatment,  befitting their maturity, longevity and stature. They were , for a new generation, the Grown Men of love.

Unlike during Motown’s early days, the music of all too many of today’s young men does not allow for such vulnerability —there is no job at Ford (or Chrysler or GM or anywhere) in their future – in the same way that there was in those long gone Detroit days.

All too many of today’s young Black men cannot experience the virture of “sweetness” and the musicality that came from an urban culture that had as its cornerstone the church, and the security – or at least the possibility –  of a “good” job and a nice car to boot. There are few economic enticements to bolster their appeals to love.

Today, pride, anger and machismo alone – morphing all too often into violence – must suffice as a facsimile of manhood, with all too many young men.

The Temptations and other sweet-singing groups of their times reflected a generation of young Black men freed from the defacto shackles of the Southern sharecropping life. Their new, quasi – affluence on the assembly-lines of urban Detroit permitted them the luxury of the glorification of romance. The end of that industrial domination marked the end of that sweetness.

Dennis Edwards, who lead the group in it’s first Grammy win, was the next inheritor of the lead voice after David Ruffin’s exit from the Temptations. Edwards can be said to personify the shift in not only the group, but the urban culture as a whole; for not only were love songs a part of his legacy but “Ball of Confusion” and “Papa was a Rolling Stone” exemplified the startling shift into the social tumult of the times.

The death in 2010 of the magnificent Ali Ollie Woodson, the truest inheritor (IMO) of the mantle of Ruffin, marks the end to yet another incarnation of the Temptations. Yet they will doubtless sing on with many in their new audiences neither knowing nor caring who is in the group, as long as they can sing the Temps repertoire. Nor may it matter, for the Temptations exist as a phenomenon, an entity, regardless of personnel. Their music - old and new –  signifies a specific – now gone – time and place; the songs of Black, urban proletarian men, who expressed love, for an entire generation.

Marsha Music

Latin was one of my favorite studies in high school. It seems odd, in this day of sorely challenged school curriculae, but believe it or not, in those days – the 1960′s - Highland Park, Michigan had one of the best school systems in the state, if not the whole country. This was before the disintegration of the city’s tax base with the decline of the automotive industry that was headquatered there -the city’s core of support.

In those days Latin was required for at least a couple of years, and those of us who loved it stayed beyond the minimum requirement. I took Latin every year that I was there.

This was in no small part due to our teacher, the dear, genteel Mrs. Banton, who looked a little like Rosa Parks, and though she was likely younger than I am now, seemed kind of old to us, even back then – for she joined none of the other teachers in their efforts to be hip, slick, cool or “relevant”.  

She wore her hair in a wavy  chignon at the nape of her neck; loose wisps of hair a grey halo ’round her head. Back in those days when we girl students desperately fought and marched for the right to wear pants and mini-skirts to school, she unwavering stuck to skirts well past her knees and sensible oxford shoes. She never ridiculed or scolded us for our 60’s protests, but merely admonished us to not forget our studies.

She would tip-toe ‘round the room, glancing at papers, checking pronunciation, the tips of her fingers together as if in prayer, holding a tiny baton for the blackboard. She had a slight overbite that gave her a tiny, charming lisp, and one could tell she’d been a beauty in her youth – though to think of her as carefree and young was inconceivable, as proper and mannered as she always seemed to be. She spoke in a singsong voice in an absent-minded kind of way that disguised her utter attention to every move that we made and every error in person, time and place.

I learned, many years later, that she was a renowned scholar in  Latin and the Classics,  one of the few African-Americans to be degree’d in such studies in the United States. Eventually, after marriage, she made her way North, for in the 1930’s, in the segregated South, there were few ”Colored” schools that could hire her to teach such subjects to Colored children - and none of the whites schools would, of course. 

When I grew older, I looked back and understood that our ceaseless, raucous Black student protests during high school neither offended, nor distracted her – she had probably faced more challenges in a single episode of her younger life in the days of segregation, than we – middle class children of the integrated North – could ever conceive of, in our agitated outbursts of dissent.

Just to attend school or teach, in the days in which she started her career, doubtless took an immensity of courage that was rarely required even on our most boisterous picket lines and marches.

She was fervent in her love of language, and her syllabus was tailor made for the most useful application of Latin possible – she was less concerned with merely teaching us the phrases of another time, than to cultivate a love for language, to provide a cornerstone in the construction of vocabulary. She supported my love of writing, she gave an intensity and direction to my obsession with words, and instilled in me the curiosity to trace chains of words through centuries, to their varied and often unexpected origins.

It had been more than 40 years since I’d seen her, when, in the spring of  2005, I was in the Fisher Building and I turned around and there she was, walking on the arm of her son. She was 92 (!) and quite tiny, but there was no mistaking Mrs. Banton, her hair - now white - still in it’s prim, wispy bun.

I was as bashful as a child, hoping she really meant it when she said she remembered me; I wanted so much, out of thousands of students, to have left an imprint on her memory. She looked up at me and said, “why I course I know you Marsha! The other teachers and I just CRIED when you left school, there was NOTHING we could do to make you stay!”

Yup, I gulped, she knew me, she remembered well when I left school, much too young to be large with child, never to return. Even so, I told her, I’d had my child, and in fact eventually had two, but I was writing still. She was proud and glad to know that her lessons had come to some good use, that I had ended up a writer after all, thanks in part to her gentle exhortations of person, place and stories of Rome, centuries ago.

Her son, middle-aged like me, stood quietly by her side as we chatted; it was time to say goodbye and as we parted she turned to introduce us. Much to my surprise she leaned close to him and began to speak to him by signing, their fingers flew in the language of the deaf and he looked at me and smiled.

In a 60 year career she had shared her love of language with countless children, yet she spoke in silence to her child. Oh, how fortunate was I to have been her student; how fortunate was she to have mastered another, soundless tongue. How fortunate was her son to have a mother with such a love of words, who was gifted enough to make them fly from her hands to him, like doves.

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Post Script:

It was a lovely, warm evening in Detroit, in May, 2010, spent at a book signing  at the Palmer Park Golf Club, a verdant enclave in the midst of the city.

I met a delightful group of ladies, including a wonderfully lively  little octagengarian named Norma Goldman, (center, in photo above) who delighted us with her stories. When I asked what she did, or rather,  had done,  for a living, among her numerous avocations was her decades long career as a teacher of Latin.

 This surprising revelation gave rise to my mentioning  my own beloved high-school Latin teacher, Mrs. Elizabeth Banton. In that serendipidous, small world, three-degrees-of-separation Detroit way, it happened that the lovely, white-haired woman whom had just met – Mrs. Goldman – is a best friend of my former teacher - Mrs. Banton – whom, it turned out,  is alive and well and living in the area. 

Mrs. Goldman invited me to an annual potluck in June 2010, celebrating Detroit area Latin/Classics teachers, where, as it turned out,  Mrs Banton was to be the honoree, for her years of service in the teaching of Latin and the Classics. She asked me to come and read this story that I had written about Mrs. Banton at the event, and I did. Mrs. Banton was astonished and tickled that this prodigal student had returned to her life - almost 40 years later – to say thanks and to acknowledge the role that she played in my life. 

Mrs. Banton is a still spry, bright and lovely 96 years old. And yes, she still remembers me.

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Dancing on Detroit’s Riverfront 

Photo by Kresge Fellow Corine Vermeulen, with her generous permission

As the weather changes in Detroit into a semblance of spring, this in honor of the annual technopalooza that comes at the end of May – the Detroit Techno Fest – now called MOVEMENT.  

I (along with a gazillion other people) was at the first one of these spectacular events, and a few subsequent ones too (before they began charging entrance fees)  amazed at the cultural phenomenon that I was witnessing.  I believe it was one of the seminal events in the changing of Detroit as it transitions into a new, post-industrial city.  I am certain that the “movement” that was taking place on the riverfront was not only to the music, but the synergistic spark in the movement of  young whites taking up residence in the city.

I wrote the article below for an online music group, in about 2003, after the event’s 3rd year. By then, it had become an amazing, annual Memorial Day Weekend event in Downtown Detroit.

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The Early Techno Fests – New Faces on the Plaza

Detroit is the home of Techno and the 3rd Annual Electronic Music Festival was held here on Memorial Day weekend on Hart Plaza, a concrete mesa on the riverfront. The fact that Detroit spawned a new dance music of the computer age is ironic – for the growth of computer/information based economies spelled disaster for industrial centers like the Motor City.

Detroit is an overwhelmingly African-American city yet the crowd is incongrously, overwhelmingly white. This annual event is an extraordinary phenomenon drawing a new generation of suburban kids into the urban center after decades of their parents’ fearful avoidance of the city.

It is a curiosity for black Detroiters to see so many whites at these festivals -  these new, young whites that is. For years the Fireworks, Hoedowns, baseball and hockey games have drawn whites downtown from surrounding, often working class white communities – and after the events, they hurried home.

These new visitors making their foray into the city are largely children of the affluent and middle class suburbs, and many are not only refusing to be afraid but refusing to leave, setting up residence in downtown lofts and apartments,  partying in downtown clubs, skateboarding in the city night. 

This festival from its inception had been “racially diverse” which means – in the curious codes of gentrification speak - mostly white with a little bit of everyone else (this designation never applies when the opposite is true, i.e. a crowd that is 90% black and the rest “other”;  “Diversity” must imply not just “difference”but discernable comfort levels for some,  as well).

There are enough black Detroiters to give the event the edginess, cool and hint of scariness to make for an exciting musical event for the whites who have come to the city – meaning not TOO many, and up to this point the blacks in attendance have been mostly  members of the Detroit’s Black cultural and musical intelligentsia. Though doubtless, the African American founders of the fest, accustomed mostly white audiences in the US and Europe, are delighted to see so many brothers and sisters from their home town.  

Techno/house music, with it’s pan-continental DJs and audience, is not viewed as a “black” dance music of choice in the ‘hood – rap, hip-hop, and the new R&B were the genres that were marketed to blacks. The founders of Techno are doubless ecstatic that their music is finally getting a massive, potentially Black audience in Detroit. But too much rap throughout the festival weekend runs the risk of attracting too many of it’s fans from the ‘hood - which might make this neo-hippie fest a little too “diverse” for comfort to the suburan whites who are pouring onto the plaza.

Others come to the Techno Fest from many miles away – not just the suburbs but Australia, France, Japan, Germany; backpacks full of provisions – Hackey Sacks, glow sticks, peanut butter, a zillion rainbow-colored, plastic kiddie bracelets. They wear tent-size bell-bottoms, skateboard pants, piercings, platforms and ear-plugs, the uniform of this new, electronic Woodstock.

 During the festival, thousands of kids rest and hang out near a monument on the promenade dedicated to the Underground Railroad, a depiction of a group of slaves fleeing toward freedom to Canada, in plain sight across the river. Only those familiar with the intense divisions between the Detroit’s city and suburbs truly appreciate the irony of this scene.

Origins of the Music and Movement

Three years ago, Techno’s founders, headed by Detroiter’s Carl Craig, Juan Atkins, Kevin Sanderson and Derrick May lifted the music from the realm of clubs and underground  raves to this spectacular public festival. After the first year’s event Craig was ousted; his fans were crestfallen when he was not a part of the second year’s event.

The subsequent festivals lacked the astonishing spontaneous energy of the first year and have been marked by more commercialism, corporate booths and handouts – a lot of entities figured out that a lot of money could be made at this event. But the festival still has  massive attendance numbers and despite his ouster, Craig gave one of the most successful after-parties of this year’s festival.

Day One of the festival was cold and dismal – but 130 thousand arrived and partied. Day Two, the sky brightened, the crowd doubled and the party jumped another notch. In certain spots the music could be heard from three main stages and a dozen booths at once, banging off the high rise buildings that rim the plaza, beats clashing until the rhythms merge into one colossal beat.  It is the sound of electronica – techno, drum and bass - a transnational dance genre, pulling mankind musically into the computer age.

George Clinton, recognized FunkMaster of the universe and a grandfather to Techno, headlined on the second day; the crowd is hyped, lit up.  P-Funk pushes the sub-bass through the body and forces it to dance. Wearing a jogging suite and gym shoes and his wild, multi-colored locks - looking like shamanic auto retiree - Clinton and the aging Funkateers pumped the crowd into a four-hour dance-a-thon.

By mid-day Monday, the last day of the festival,  it’s hot, and performances have been going on for hours. The DJs use the archetypal beats and sounds of R&B, funk, disco and pop culture - the building blocks of our contemporary aural heritage. These samples and sounds are as much the ”notes” that they play as any other musical originators.

Multiply these sounds by tens of thousands of culturally recognizable beats, phrases and riffs, rearrange them into new configurations and they are as creative as the original makers of the music from which they sample. The turntable technicians transform electronic sounds into music, and many, with their sampling, display a prodigeous knowledge of the vocabulary of modern cultural sounds.

Detroit’s Motown sound developed in part from the relentless rhythms of the mechanized clash and clang of assembly lines of the auto plants in which Berry Gordy and his contemporaries toiled. Today’s youth grew up with different sounds – the ambient noise of video games, computers, cell phones; technology with its hums, bells, bleeps and blips, the aural wall that surrounds today’s environment. For them, all of this electronic sound engendered a musicality that is based on – but is inevitably unlike – the sounds of the rock and roll generation.

Techno music evolved from black middle-class Detroiters able to afford the turntables, electronic equipment and massive record collections that are the tools of the DJs craft.

The originator of the techno sound  were from the best black neighborhoods of Detroit, able to afford or hustle up on the turntables and voluminous libraries of vinyl that are the requisite tools of the DJs trade.

 Some techno/house artists are youth with nowhere to “formally” channel their musical gifts – school music programs have long been non-existent in many inner city schools. With no musical training or instruments, they create music from music that was already there – a music “squared” so to speak.

By Monday, the 3rd day of the third Techno Fest, the police abandoned bag checks at the entrances and the “highly visible police presence”  was perhaps only an illusion of control. Though there were police in sight everywhere, the crowd of a nearly a quarter of a million would be formidable should things get “out of hand”. The  obvious police strategy: better to APPEAR in control, and hope the crowd believes it. So far this works – no problems, despite the extraordinary press of partying young humanity.

 Masters of the Dance

On the last day, a new element changed the character of the Techno Fest, so that it’s final day was different than the first. The crowd showed no sigh of thinning, yet there was something in the air; the atmosphere had changed. The mostly white crowd had gradually become a bit “blacker” and it wasn’t clear what this would mean.

For the first time all weekend, pouring into the main entrance is a growing phalanx of “young black males” – bristling in their young black maleness. These new arrivals crowd the plaza, many in excited agitation, some with the sullen defiance of the unwanted; wearing the mask of bashfulness and fear that they are not welcome, that their presence is cause to tighten jaw lines and police lines.

It is understood that this festival not for them, though doubtless, Techno’s founders, Atkins, May, Sanderson, and Craig are gratified that, finally, the music that they created will have an audience of boys from the hood. For over the three days word has spread through Detroit’s ‘hoods that the festival is  ”all the way live”, worth risking the possiblity of suburbanite and police hostility. They know that their arrival is akin to crashing a gigantic private party; nevertheless, they come.

They flow into the bowl of the plaza; and the air fairly sparks with their presence. The suggestion of impending danger, the sense of “anything might jump off”, has crept into the collective psyche of the crowd. Yet instead of fleeing – as may have happened a decade ago – the energy of a
quarter of a million young suburbanites jelled into a concentration of excitement and awe – they ain’t goin’ nowhere.

The festival had blown off the hook  – it was electrified. The black youth crowd the plaza, huddle in tight, dark circles.  No rainbow-hued costumery and hackey sack looks for them; these new arrivals are from the Coogi, Carhartt, Fubu, Air Jordan school of style, or the worn, ragged, shirtless disarray of urban poverty. They feel out the crowds, find spots, size up adversaries;  work their limbs into cudgels or stand still in zen concentration. 

They are the Masters of Dance and they have come to take their rightful positions. The battle has begun. It is a war, not of weapons, but of strength, grace and mental acuity – all woven into Performance. The crowds part like the Red Sea as these new participants step into the whorls of dance that have formed in the ocean of people.

The music is bumpin’ bass through to the bone marrow. These new dances defy any concept of what was known as dance decades ago but then again, this is not the movement of courtship – but of power, motor skills, muscular control. Their bodies replicate the movement of computerized machines. It is not romantic but it is oddly sexual – one marvels at just what kinds of bodies can do these things.

Thirty years ago black dance broke out of partnered confines into robotic motions of machinery and mime. After they had been embedded in the dance lexicon of the Black community for many years, Michael Jackson displayed these moves to the world. “Poppin’ & lockin’”  the abrupt, mechanized, stylized imitation of robots, is familiar to two generations of Black dancers now, mastered even by small children in the ‘hood.

Body waving, breaking, moon walking, running man , robot and ticking – the bizarrely elegant quivering of every joint and muscle at conflicting angles – all these dances and more grew from hip hop’s beginnings. 

With music videos, MTV, BET and the exposure to black music at a exponetially higher level than previous generations, the great rhythmic divide doesn’t exist in the same way as generations past. The white kids, most as segregated as ever in real life, are profoundly integrated regarding aspects of music and elements of dance – even if they are learning dances
that black kids mastered almost 40 years ago.

On the Battlefield – Dance Wars on the Plaza
 
The white kids that could  “lock” had dominated the festival’s dance and delighted the crowds all weekend -  but now they stand back in humility and awe. The blacks have come to “take them to school” - and they all know it.  Many  of these suburban boys rarely get a chance to see in real life the rippling pop of brown limbs and muscles and they study these moves with as much concentration as college entrance exams.

Emboldened by attention and recognition, the black dancers from the city challenge one another to ever more physical effort. The suburbanites are mesmerized by this urban drama. The blacks are sure of their dominance, suffering no fool gladly to step into the ring with them unprepared, but they are generous as well. The suburban boys who prove their mettle and go toe to toe with the “brotha’s” are given respect – smug, serious nods of approval pass to one another as each dances into the ring and out again.  Dancers strip from the waist up, every visible muscle popping to the beat,  pythons of rhythm under the skin.

Added to the layers of consciousness, physicality and race, some of the whites whose forebears would not or could not flee from Detroit have morphed into caucasion facimiles of blacks of the “ghetto” – these are the white boys from the ‘hood. They are indistinguishable in speech, dress and attitude – skin color alone differentiates them from their darker neighbors.

They too are stars in this game of bravado and skill and their combination of “blackness” in white bodies makes them fascinating bridges between the two worlds – humble enough to accede leadership to their dark teachers in the ‘hood, but cocky in their dance mastery and urban skills in comparison to the suburban boys.  

All weekend the white girls’ moves approximated Brittney Spears’ hip-hop lite (i.e., Janet Jackson ultra-lite) but they stepped back in stunned incredulity to watch the arrival of the “ghetto fabulous” girls. Their homegirl allure is primordial; the suburban girls – even those beauties duly
envied and coveted in their hometown schools and malls – are agog at the finesse of these brown, urban females. 

There is nothing coy about these moves of these young ”sistas”. This is the hard core “booty shake” of Senegal via Luke Campbell. Their rhythmic undulating is intense and incredible to behold. As their bodies roil they stare straight ahead in the dead seriousness of trance. After minutes of these pelvic machinations, transported to another place and time, they collapse in childish giggles, just young girls having fun.

The boys from the ‘hood danced in tandem, transferring waves of rhythm to one another; staging mock vignettes, sexual simulations and Chaplinesque parodies. Watching this populist art unfold, genius was evident – there is a deep intelligence at play in this display of skill and wonder.

The battles intensified all over the plaza and black, white, yellow and brown dancers established victories in recognition of their mastery – Shaolin warriors of dance. There are no guns shot, no violence – dance alone is the measure of will and negotiator of the social contract.

They danced into the night and the skies grew dark;  the festival neared its end. At the edge of Hart Plaza the huge, dark figures of the Underground Railroad sculpture stood larger than life and still as the dead, massive, bronze figures eternally frozen in flight - fleeing the ancestors of some of these very young people in ceaseless ”movement” on the plaza.

I stood and reflected that during my youth such an edifice would be unthinkable; much has changed within my own lifetime. I wondered if those dancing had stopped for a moment during the weekend and reflected upon the souls represented by these figures; the human roots of the music to which they now danced. 

For this statue of slaves on the verge of freedom stood in the midst of a scene that years ago was only a dream – of kids of all colors dancing in Detroit’s dark night.

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Epilogue, 2010:

This piece was written about the first Techo Fests. The fact that there is now an admission fee for entrance - and a steep one, by inner-city standards – virtually guarantees that the innumerable circles of young dancers from the ‘hood – schooling their young suburban visitors and reveling in the partnership of dance - will never be seen again.

But let me tell you,  it was a beautful sight indeed.

Photo:  Marsha Music takes a moment with DJ Spooky, who performed at the first, and subsequent Techon Fests. This pic is not at the Fest, but at the DIA, where during the Q & A he and I had a – shall I say…. difference of opinion,  regarding his presentation of his redux of the movie Birth of a Nation.  But afterwards, as you can see, all was well.

*

This decade, African-American music did not die — as has been rumored.

Though James Brown — the architect of contemporary black music — passed away, and the end of the decade was marked by the death of Michael Jackson, their passing solidified their seminal influence of popular music.

The re-emergence of R&B’s Maxwell (Black Summer’s Night)  is a return to the sheer musicianship and showmanship of bygone days. His bespoke, Marvin-esque persona makes him, along with R&B artist Kem, exemplars of the Rebirth of the Cool or, if you will, the Return of the Grown Man.

Neo-soul newcomer Chrisette Michele’s stupendous, lyrical vocal instrument (Epiphany) is a throwback to Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, devoid of hip-hop tremolos and atonalism. Marvin L. Winans released a breakthrough tour de force, Alone But Not Alone, the gospel musical equivalent of “spiritual, not religious.”

His brother, Bebe Winans, recorded Cherch — an homage to traditional gems of the sanctified church. African-American music found new life and expression in the last decade, and I am hopeful that it will continue to evolve, true to its roots.

                                     

His father and I were both, nevertheless, rather amazed, for we had envisioned one of those caramel-colored children who clearly mark the melding of two races – and here we had a child who looked like a 50’s Gerber baby.

Since I am an unmistakably Black woman, this was often the cause of crazy situations of which slapstick comedies or headlines are made. From the start, Hutzel Hospital nurses would not believe he was my child and for security’s sake requested armband checks at nursing time – years before this became common practice.                

  Later, bizarre faux pas and mixups were routine; strangers, accustomed to  “matching” families, tried to fathom our relationship, wondering if perhaps I were the child’s nursemaid. Often people would ask if I was  “babysitting” my own child.

Detroit is on the Canadian border, and once, on our way to a dinner there, border officials detained my car, for they suspected that I was kidnapping my toddler who sat next to me.

They would not believe I was his mother, and only a frantically produced birth certificate convinced them otherwise. Only those perceptive enough to look at people behind their colors, could see he looks like me – but a different hue.

I had visions of the old move tearjerker “Imitation of life”, where the beautiful, “mixed” young woman rejects her Black mother and “passes for white”, until the death of her mother brings her crying to the funeral hearse, too late to claim her mother’s love. A morality play if there ever was one.

When he became a teenager, I began to gingerly ask him about “passing”, but he had no idea of what the term even meant. He’d ask, in complete puzzlement, “now why would I want to do that?”, so different is our society now in some respects.

He felt no need at all to disappear into a permanent White life. I felt a little foolish; this is not the days of Sally Hemmings, watching some of her children with Thomas Jefferson escape into White existence forever, nor is it the times of segregation’s hide and seek – my son simply lives his life without demand for racial identification under most circumstances.

It doesn’t occur to him I guess, to purposefully, permanently, give up being one or the other – or give up loving one parent or the other, which was – of course – my real fear.

I also wanted to protect him from the slings and arrows of racial hurts, in which he would be compelled to be “Black” by society, whether he looks like it or not.

But as all parents try to shield their children from all number of hurts and harms, I can neither predict future wounds, nor protect him from life itself.

***

This is not to say that he has not had his challenges, for on the contrary, a life in racial ambiguousness is not easy. When it was decided that my son would live with his father for a while, there was only one problem – in my eyes at least – he would be living in an affluent, overwhelmingly white suburb. I feared that this could only give rise to conflicts that I wasn’t sure my preteen son could handle.

But over time he learned that friends are friends regardless; that peers can be jerks no matter the color of your mom or dad.

And I grew out of the need to make him “choose” what color he would be, for the love between mother and son cannot  be erased by color.

***

He tells me with stories of his life as a “White” Black person: the open and ugly prejudice that is expressed right to his face from those not knowing his origins; the curious phenomenon that Whites can never “guess what he is” naming a hilarious litany of ethnicities – Italian? Jewish? Indian? And even on occasion – Chinese!?!

Rarely, if ever, do they venture to say “Black”, for perhaps the very thought of this is discomfiting. The idea that a Black person could be so firmly embedded in their midst, that there are Black” people who look so much like them – this is perhaps too much to fathom, for some.

There are many arguments made against the mixing of the races, including the fact that “the children are the ones who will suffer”. I know that he has had times when he has been wounded, but all children have been in one way or another, for there is pain in life.

He surely lives a different, more complex life than I will ever experience, but at times, I’m sure, it is a richer one too, betwixt and between races, enjoying the best – and witnessing the worst – of both.

I have long since given up debating with him on whether or not biracial folks should maintain identity/designation with Black people, on forms or census and such; for I do not live in his reality and accept that I cannot know the vagaries of race when experienced at his level.

I don’t use the old term “mulatto” which means “little mule” (the mix between a horse and a donkey), a part of the absurdist, demeaning racial designations of the old days, in favor of the term “bi-racial” or “multi-racial”, which is perhaps a more accurate reflection – though I’d argue that most Black people (and many Whites) are of mixed race, whether in the immediate, previous generation or not.

There is a current spate of bi-racial “relationships” such as seen on Jerry Springer and other talk shows, in all their dysfunctional, impoverished, fighting glory, that both exposes the sheer numbers of mixed unions while at the same time defames such relationships as underclass bi-racial insanity, which is not indicative of most bi-racial relationships.

Regardless of such talk show ugliness, society is perhaps ever more tolerant of the union of human beings across the “color line”. Halle Berry is not a star despite her heritage, but because of it. Barack Obama is regarded as an elegant amalgam of humanity itself.

***

My son has had some poignant moments. He is the namesake of my father, who was a Detroit record producer in the 50’s, and my son carries on our family name in the music business.

While working backstage with Aretha Franklin – my father produced her very first record – my son, not knowing of this family connection with her, was introduced to the Queen of Soul.

She mused aloud, “I used to know a man with the same name as you, many years ago…”, and her unspoken statement hung in the air “…but he was Black”.

How stunned and delighted she was to discover that this young “white” kid was the grandson of the first man to record her voice, a peculiar irony indeed.

And in one of his life’s more amusing episodes, as he got older he experienced the shock of realizing his Banana Republic pants no longer fit on his increasingly Fubu sized behind.

*** 

My son looks like me, or rather, a sort of white male version of me. It’s both unnerving and exhilarating to think that one has had emerge from one’s self a human being not of your race, so to speak, in a society when race really matters.

There are times when I feel I have contributed to an eventual caramelizing of the world, a blending of we racially separated humans into one color. Though truthfully, even now, in all of our divisions of colors and physical forms, I believe we are really only one human race.

I’m glad I’m his mother, and that I helped to create this intelligent, beautiful, racially indefinable young man. My son is not “White” yet I accede that he’s not “Black” either; he is both.

He in his 30’s now, smart as a whip and funny, works incessantly, treats airplanes like taxi’s, thinking nothing of jetting across the country or the world, unlike his aerophobic mother. He’s a loving young man with very good manners (from good schools and good families on both sides). He’s all the things a mother wants a son to be (except he likes to ride motorcycles. Scary.).

He works in both the White and Black music worlds and depending upon his environment, he just blends in. His speech and walk shift an almost imperceptible shade towards “Blackness” usually, but in general – even though it is not always easy - he moves confidently between the worlds of Black and White, at will.

Perhaps he got that naturally, for after all, he’s my kid – I’ve have always had a comfort with “humanity” in all of it’s colors; perhaps I passed this gift on through his heart, not merely his skin. 

I know he’s proud that Barack Obama, another who has experienced the challenges and gifts of bi-racial existence, has ascended to the Presidency of the United States, one who personifies the gifts and dilemmas of many bi-racial citizens.

I love my son with all my heart, and I’m grateful that he can move with ease “between” the races, living a life based on the content of his character, rather than the color of his skin. 

 Marsha Music copyright,  2008

Photo: Original photo of  Marsha and Son, by Harrison Smith Sr.

I’m a lifelong Detroiter, and I’ve attended countless events on the Detroit Riverfront’s Hart Plaza in the last decades, but none, in my memory, equaled this. The local NBC affiliate website does mention – almost casually – that the crowd numbered in the “hundreds of thousands”. 

Curiously there’s been none of the usual crowd estimates for an event of this magnitude in the Detroit dailies, Folks near me in line only half-joked that they should have had him deliver his speech from a barge on the river to accommodate the multitudes.

Even so, when he cut short his planned labor speech to offer a silent prayer for those in hurricane Gustav’s path, you could have heard a rock skip across the Detroit River.

Moreover, this is a city inordinately plagued by crime, in a metro area presumed to be one of the most segregated in the U.S. Yet the crowd was significantly multi-racial, the event was peaceful, and as far as I know, without negative incident.

Yet, I’ve not seen a single aerial photo, on print or TV, that captured the unprecedented enormity of this event. There are pictures of the rally, but most coverage – from the local outlets to CNN/Cspan – were limited to tight shots of the dais; truly incongruous, given the remarkable vastness of the crowd.

There is a panoramic shot in the Detroit News that attempts to show in-the-round the massiveness of the crowd, but this non-aerial photo shows only a segment of the thousands who fanned out into downtown just to see or hear Mr. Obama; in no way does it capture the true enormity of the event.

We, packed elbow to elbow for blocks on end, counted ourselves lucky to see Mr. Obama on one of the giant screens, set up, as has now become necessary at his rallies, right in the downtown street. His speech ended with a silent prayer for those facing the coming hurricane and an appeal for donations to the Red Cross, only 5 minutes after it began.

The thousands who had waited in line for hours in blazing heat left the plaza orderly and without complaint, simply grateful to have been a part of a spectacular – and I daresay, historic – assembly.

I’m sure that many others who were there, like me, who were sure that such a stunning event would be captured in the subsequent news, only to be shocked that there was so little mention of this astonishing gathering, or of its enormity.

Such a glaring difference between the reality of what folks witnessed/experienced and what was been reported is so great that I can see from whence comes a distrust and suspicion of the media.

It would certainly seem that these many thousands who converged on the plaza for the rally (who engulfed the numbers already there for the annual Labor day parade) represent a significant amount of “energy” for the Obama/Biden campaign, and a fervor that the McCain camp seems hard-pressed to match.

For even if media “campaign” coverage was pulled back that day due to the threat of the Gustav storm, as an extraordinary urban phenomenon alone, such a mass of multi-racial humanity in the core of a struggling, divided metropolis would seem to be difficult to ignore.

Though the stupendous crowds for the Obama campaign are perhaps becoming so commonplace as to be no longer newsworthy, the New York Times editorial Mr. Rich confirms for me, at least, that there are reasons for such a curious and obvious lack of coverage of this outpouring of Detroit area people in support of Mr. Obama.

Marsha Music, September 08

[originally posted on BarackObama.com, community blog]

One day, I started writing about my trip to work each day down John R., the street that runs through Detroit, parallel to Woodward, the city’s East-West divider. A paragraph turned into an epic poem, just havin’ fun.

I had lived on the Highland Park end of this street since my 50’s childhood and remember when the downtown part of it was part of Paradise Valley. 

In the 90’s I moved back to the old house, that sits on a corner of John R; on the way to work each day I began to see a young girl with red hair.

I’ve never been sure why it’s called “John R”.

The community was built about a century back
for execs of the first Model-T Ford plant,
the plant still stands – though still, for sure
just a few blocks away from our front door.

I received an email from an old friend; my first boyfriend, in fact.

P

He had moved to the South few years ago, after retirement, and when he heard the news about the death of Isaac Hayes, he emailed me an anecdote that he had posted on one of the websites he frequents.

Heck he even sang silly stuff – Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymstic. I was chagrined in later years, when one of my sons knew him only as the voice of a cartoon, but I was delighted when he met Hayes and asked him to record his voicemail message – so I could hear Isaac Hayes every time I tried to call my son

But I digress.

My boyfriend had gotten tickets for the concert -to be held at the regal Masonic Hall, and I had been getting my outfit together for days; the excitement had rubbed off on my mother, who not only agreed that I could go on the date, but gathered up all her gumption and drove me to the rough and tough part of the East Side, to get my hair done at “Dicky’s”, the premier barbershop of Detroit at that time.

It was a country song, a “cross-over” hit by Glen Campbell, and we knew it well already because in those days we listened to all kinds of music – most often on CKLW Radio, broadcasting from across the Detroit River in Windsor, Canada.

It was a stunning incongruity that Hayes – who called himself “Black Moses” – remade this country song as an urban ballad, with its Hammond B5 intro and plaintive soul wails. He, the Ultimate Black Man, all big nose and bared chest and draped in chains, revealing both heartsick vulnerability and the power of the Black male.

As Hayes moaned about making it to Albuquerque, having left his woman behind, I worried as to what invisible audience my mother sang, for she and my dad were often in the midst of drama, involving Johnny Walker Red, slammed doors and separate beds. But, being young and in love, I could care less that my mother was helping me to get dressed, so that I could go to see her favorite new singer sing her new favorite lovesick song.

My date arrived. In the email he’d sent to me last month, he said he’d gone out with “the prettiest girl in the world” – and at that moment, 40 years ago, I felt like it. He surely was the cutest guy, with an Afro even bigger than mine.

Mama stood on the porch, looking out on John R street, and waved us goodbye with my little sister and both brothers. We’d doubtless conspired to keep this date thing WAY under Daddy’s radar; he was known for meeting potential suitors at the door with his .38 caliber father figure.

My boyfriend and I walked to the Woodward bus. Yes, neither of us could drive, and in those days – unlike today’s couch potato kids – we were used to treking miles at a time. We walked and took the bus everywhere, all day long.

I held onto the rail of the bus really tight so that my hair and outfit wouldn’t get mussed. I was very aware of a guy across the aisle snickering at my date and I all dressed up, in a city where autos were a birthright. I snuggled closer to my date to pledge my allegiance to our pedestrian love.

We arrived at the grand, old Masonic Temple, and were surrounded by a crowd of late 60’s Black humanity. There was nothing like Detroit back in the day. Folks of every shade of cream, brown and black, everybody “sharp as a tack”, vibrant and young and full of Temptations cool and Sly Stone funk, hip talkin’’ jive walkin‘, “dressed and pressed“.

A group of local black militants, whom I had seen outside our high school, were there too, passing out leaflets on the struggles of the day. I nodded at them in smug, grown up recognition, and told my date – “let’s talk to those people when we get back to school” (we did – and kept talking to them for the next few decades)

I don’t remember much of the concert. I remember Isaac Hayes was smaller than I thought he would be. I had thought he’d be 8-feet tall from his double-faced album cover and stretched out form. But no, he was a regular-sized guy.

I remember the “wah-wah” guitars, a new thing back then, and Donny Hathaway in his apple cap and maple syrup voice. And Roberta, who sang such a different type of music we weren’t sure what to make of her; not saucy like the Supremes, not soulful like Aretha, but something new.

We felt all smooth and grown up listening to her sing; a new hip mix of Nina Simone, Bessie Smith and maybe Edith Piaf, too.

_____________

These things came back to me when my friend wrote to me about the death of Isaac Hayes and our first date, back in the day. I had just heard too, that the comedian Bernie Mack had died, and I thought about that old superstition, “death comes in threes”.

I began writing this story, and my friend’s wife called. Her husband, my friend, the guy of my first date, who had become like an elder brother to me after all these years, had had a heart attack. He lay in a coma, a thousand miles away.

Immediately, my memories began to rearrange themselves around this new shock. I had never even thought of him – more “fit”, I thought, than any of us in our circle – leaving this earth before me. In fact I counted on him saying droll and clever things about me at my own “home-going”, whenever that might be.

He was trying to leave this world and I had the feeling that he would be taking sizable chunks of me with him, in the form of a million memories,  critiques of me, down through the years. He was on life support. My mind flashed to my mother, dying on a respirator this year, her frail body still working but her lungs unable to breathe.

I talked to his wife each day about his progress, trying to reassure her that it wasn’t his time to leave, when I wasn’t so sure about that myself. fter many days, he began to recover; thank God he is better now, and eventually came back to Detroit.

So I write this so he will know that I remember, too; that years ago when we were young in Detroit, with Afro’s like dark cotton candy, we went to see Roberta and Donny and Isaac Hayes, on a crisp, 60’s night, under a Detroit moon.

And I am glad that he has not joined Donny and Isaac and Bernie Mack, all gone too soon.

Marsha Music

[first posted on the BelleLettes forum of ThePuristS.com, Oct, 08]

***

Stevie Wonder is not his real name of course, but Steveland Morris. In fact his name at birth was not even Morris, but Hardaway, he was given his stepfather’s name in childhood. He was not born in Detroit, but moved here as a child from Saginaw, an hour away. He was not born blind, but lost his sight due to oxygen depravation as an incubated, premature infant.

He was not my age, but just a few years older and his ever-present wrap-around shades disallowed even a peek at his hidden, sightless eyes. He moved in a rhythmic bob and weave on some still, invisible axis, pulling sound like a satellite from the dark around him; an unfathomable existence that we imitated but never mocked.

He was led onto the stage and for the only time in our well-mannered young lives we could openly stare at a blind human being. He was called a genius and we never questioned this title as we watched him tread his unseen path to every instrument on stage and play like an adult virtuoso.

His dancing lacked the precision turns and moves of the other acts, but was instead a rhythmic clap and wobble, awkward and ecstatic. We held our breath terrified he’d fall into the orchestra pit when he hurled himself from the piano to the edge of the stage.

Always, before he stepped one last dire inch, he’d be snatched back from certain catastrophe, though perhaps this too was a choreographed performance, each hop to the abyss carefully counted out in Stevie’s genius head.

His blindness was a profound thing, a multiplier of his already extraordinary gifts, though it was clear that he played and lived much as a sighted child. I was fascinated with the blind and deaf Helen Keller and was endlessly curious about the signing and speech of my own deaf cousin.

My early interest in the deaf and blind coincided with the emergence of Little Stevie Wonder, perhaps a reason he left such an imprint on my heart. Regardless of how the blind and deaf joke at themselves, few things bother me more than jest at their expense.

No matter what acts performed at the Motown review, in my mind he was always The Star. Each year during the holiday season, in line in the freezing cold, I was always glad to wait once more for Stevie.

***

My father’s record shop was just blocks away from the Motown studios. I always called him when I got home from school; one day someone who was clearly not Daddy answered the phone.

“Joe’s Record Shop” said the strangely familiar voice.

“Who is this?”

“This is Steveland”.

“Stevie Wonder?????”

“Yeahhhh”.

To my astonishment, he said a few more cool-boy-in-high-school kind of things in that Signed, Seal. Delivered voice. I dropped the phone in my excitement; it bobbed on its cord and I hung up, stunned! I was shocked to be on the receiving end of this bona-fide heart-throb conversation.

I called right back but by then it was Daddy’s voice; his young guest had apparently been playing on the phone long enough.

“Daddy, who was that???”

“Well it was Stevie Wonder, didn’t he tell you?”

I begged my Mama to get in the car and take me to meet him but at that moment, probably knee deep in dinner cooking, she had no such time, and it was probably in the days when we only had one car.  I had been exposed to more than a few artists by that time, but I’ll always remember that phone call with Stevie.

***

Over the years of afro’s, braids and locks – on he and I – my love for Stevie has never waned, regardless of his hits or popularity. He pioneered innovations for the blind from his work with computerized sound and was recently willing to try radical surgery to restore his sight, though it was determined that it would not be successful. His birthday song became the anthem of a national holiday; Signed, Sealed, Delivered was  the clarion call for Barack Obama.

Still, I was not alone in ridiculing his rather loopy metaphysical ramblings that were increasing in songs he wrote after a near fatal car crash in the early 70‘s. But one anguished, sleepless night his latest record played in my headphones through haze of drink and psychic pain, and in a songwriting conceit that few achieve without controversy, he sang as the Voice of God into my fevered mind:

“You will know, troubled hearts will know, problems have solutions, so I made it so”.

I listened to this mystical musing and in an epiphany became willing to consider – finally – that some Higher Help might fix my troubled life; it was the beginning of the end of my hopelessness.

I keep a magazine photo of Stevie in a special place, a reminder of that night when some Other Voice used his to speak to me through headphones in a song. Finally, the Gospel According to Stevie made some sense to me, after years of waiting for that too.

A old, worn copy of a surreal magazine photo of Stevie, that I've had for years.

In the summer of 2001, Stevie Wonder, who had been living in Ghana, West Africa, came back to headline Detroit’s Tricentennial Celebration. No event equaled the excitement of the chance for Detroiters to see him again.

Almost a million people packed the Riverfront for his concert; but of course that many people means that in order to see, you had to have a seat many hours before the concert began.

I didn’t of course, so I pushed my way as close to the stage as possible, which in fact wasn’t close at all. The sight of almost a million was terrifying, til I realized that the multitudes were oddly peaceful, a synthesis of urban souls so remarkable we looked at each other stunned that we could get along in such close Detroit quarters – old folks, suburbanites, crack-heads, kids. We pushed and shoved, laughed and danced – and waited for Stevie.

I tried to find a place where I too could view the stage, but folks were packed so tight that I could barely see; I burst into tears like a child. Finally, surrendering to the immensity of the crowd, I watched with others on giant screens from a block away, and the hundreds of thousands partied as if we could see him in the flesh, satisfied just to be a part of the multitudes on such a glorious night.

I realized the real “wonder” was not just Stevie, but Detroit’s polarized humanity dancing in peace “without incident”, singing his songs still, after 40 years.

I had waited to see Stevie on that hotter than July night with almost a million others, just as I waited in the cold during holiday week as a child. And as long as we’re in both in the land of the living, I’ll still not mind waiting for Steveland.

Marsha Music

With the exception of a squabble over a siblings gift, or later years of toppled trees from too much paternal drink – traumatic then, now fading into hazy place where, if one is lucky, unpleasant memories go – our Christmases were idyllic indeed.

But few of my holiday memories are better than the Motown Revue.

***

In an annual Christmas week ritual of the 60’s, for a few years Motown’s “Cavalcade of Stars” staged shows for throngs of Detroiters, black and white, but mostly black, who lined up around the Fox Theatre. It was better than the movies, the circus and Ice Capades wrapped up in one.

Standing in line we shook with cold and anticipation as we waited in our new coats and dresses, crinolines starched tutu stiff and quivering like antennae. Excited boys pulled loose from grown-ups, finger-poppin’ and Temptation Walkin’, imitating their favorite singers on the icy sidewalk.

Finally the doors burst open and the show began. Some of the artists were famous, some new; grueling bus tours, concerts and the Motown machine were molding them all into professionals.

The Contours, one of the earliest Motown groups, clowned and sang in the old soul way, a doo-wop vaudeville that was smoothed out of Motown’s newer acts though we loved them just the same.

The Marvelettes were fine with hair piled high, fringes shimmering in the lights. They sang “Mr. Postman” with the counterpoint claps and we thought they were as good as the Supremes – though of course there was no use arguing, the Supremes were the Supremes.

There was light eyed, light skinned, light voiced Smokey, he and his Miracles made the girls swoon and scream, though I assimiliated my Momma’s judgment, that he could neither really dance nor sing so well, but was still a genius.

“Just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my sadness hid”, a cultured if ungrammatical lyric, one line out of thousands that Smokey inscribed. We danced to his intellect, sang to his rhymes; each new record proof he was a gifted urban bard.

Then there was the moment when the incredible 4-Headed Microphone appeared onstage, heralding the coming of the Temptations. The medley of their songs began and they took the stage: the sleek, dark archangels of cool, archetypal urban Black men, symbols of the Motor City.

Marvin Gaye and Mary Wells, Velvelettes and Vandellas, took and shook the stage. We applauded the “stars”, though they performed at local clubs and high schools and roller rinks,  and could always be seen outside the headquarters of Motown, or driving around town in pastel Cadillacs.

         This was written after a spectacular Funk Brother’s performance on a hot, end-of-summer night in Detroit in 03‘.

This made this concert even more magical, for the group will never play together like this again.

******

The Funk Brothers headlined tonight at the Detroit Festival of the Arts, on a stage nestled between the Detroit Science Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Museum of African American History.

A triangulum befitting the Funk Brother’s genius, artistry and Black Detroit roots.

They’d come a long way since playing the clubs and joints of Black Bottom, or even, from their more recent years of relative obscurity.

The concert was a celebration of their stupendous gifts, and, as we knew out, our good fortune of being fortunate enough to have grown up with their music in our own aural and literal backyard.

There were thousands waiting for show-time in the balmy night, and standing ovations before a note was even played. The band seemed moved to tears at such an ecstatic reception.

We raise our heads to the sky in wonder – rain had been predicted all week, but no rain ever came. It seems that even the skies would honor these men and bless us all on this clear and special night. The crowd is more than electric, it is a part of the performance itself, undulating with outbursts of adulation.

Jack Ashford, venerable,  dignified, respectful and respected, looking like a science teacher or a old time preacher,  his tambourine blinging in the lights, ringing like church, sizzling like a rattlesnake in the night.

Bob Babbitt, the bass-man got much applause and we were glad to honor him so; how cool must this white man be to have played and lived around these extraordinary Black men, to have had to come behind the great James Jamerson.

Eddie Willis, Mississippi prince on a throne, sitting down front, the guitar his sceptre; talking like down-home.

Uriel Jones, Ivory Hunter, Messina, all of them on the stage; they create an amazing monument of sound – a massive, complex, joyful noise. They are actually symphonic, a heavenly, orchestral blast of pride and joy.

They are getting old, there is no denying this, and one can feel the crowds silent, collective prayer, that these men be allowed to savor their new good favor and fortune for as long as they can.

The band is so tight, so familiar, so………..Motown; they sound surreal, as if actual humans can’t possibly be playing. This music has been in our heads and hearts and histories for so long, the idea that there are actual people playing like this is almost unbelievable.

We know every single word and note of every single song.

***

There are moments that can only be described as transcendent – dreadlocked women do the STOP! In The Name of Love; we cast aside our 70′s and 80’s poli-sci judgments of crossovers and compromises to return to our original, pure and giddy loving of this sound.

With now wide hips and swelling ankles, we danced the Shingaling, the Shotgun, the Four Corners, like we did when we were fast, fine and young.

White guys with beards and bellies sang My Girl into invisible mikes, and a few young dudes from the hood did the Temptation Walk with old suburban guys.

The audience breaks out in loud, spontaneous applause when they hear the lyric “War is not the answer..” from Marvin Gaye’s song from more than one generation ago, a song that must now be sung again for a brand new war.

A solid row of folks, blacks and whites, do the Temptation walk, like The Wave at a football game – an amazing sight in this most segregated of metropolitan areas, a reminder of a brief time when, many years ago, we danced to one great sound.

I’m there with my brother, a rare excursion for he likes quiet life; dislikes crowds. We dance and holler like the kids we once were, screaming about our days at the Motown Review, and remembering how we know the first note and beat on every Motown record, a necessary requirement for working in our Daddy’s record store.

We know that we are experiencing something special, and we are grateful to share it with our mother frail but excited sitting next to us, remembering the days when she finger popped to the 45’s in our living room. She, old and fragile now, and she and her sister saw the Funk Brothers at the Twenty Grand club in their young fine days. 

She remembers the days when Jamerson, Joe Hunter and others of the Brothers found their way around the corner from the Motown Hitsville house to my father’s 12th street shop, where they’d have a “taste” or two between gigs. 

Our father is long gone, and this summer my mother’s sister joined her husband, in that concert in the sky. We all speak of her and miss her, and all of our youth gone by.

During the band’s tender tribute to it’s members now gone, we wipe our eyes at the thought of those we loved, maybe listening to Funk Brothers above, making celestial noises to the Lord.

It was one of those nights that years from now, people will say that they were there – even people who weren’t.

***

It occurs to me that on this night, something happened. When Motown left Detroit a part of our collective heart stopped; I could feel on this sweet Saturday night that the triumphant victory of the Funk Brothers was a sign, another cornerstone in a rebuilding of Detroit had just been set in place; a soul had been breathed back into its rebirth.

I was glad I was there to honor these men, and yes, to pay respect to the one who finally told their story. It was a hallowed night, a spirit filled night, I realized that this music was always something like a religious music to me and to many others.

I was blessed to have seen the Funk Brothers on that beautiful Saturday night. It was one of those times when I remember why Detroit was the center of the modern musical universe.

Marsha Music,

[I wrote this in September of '03, my mother passed away in 08’, earlier this year, joining her sister who had just passed away before this concert, of whom I speak above. I think of them, along with my father and uncle and all of them who were "hanging like wet clothes", together now on the "other side" maybe remembering the 20 Grand Club, wherein they saw every Motown act that ever was, back in their day.]

  

Photos:

1. John Lee Hooker, on album cover, in front of Joe’s Record Shop (posing on same spot where my mother is standing on another post in this blog). The spiral of St. Josophat, on Canfield and Hastings (now Chrysler Freeway) is in background.

2. “The Blues Man” by John Lee Hooker, album cover, on Battle Label.