Concrete Situation IV
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Send by emailDigging in the Detroitus pt. IV (Detroit)
Destroy All Monsters “Bored” (1978)
The Punks “My Time’s Comm’n” (1976 [?])
The Secrets “Ain’t Life a Bitch” (1981)
R.U.R. “Go, Baby” (1979)
The Denizens “I Know You Hate Me” (c. 1978)
Scott Morgan “Take a Look” (1974)
The Sillies “No Big Deal” (1979)
Cadillac Kidz “Atomic Fazor” (1981 [?])
Shady Lady “The Move” (1975 [?]) Los Angeles
Death “Where Do We Go From Here” (1975)
Death “Let Me Know Your Heart Is Mine” (1971) Milwaukee
Sonic’s Rendezvous Band “Electrophonic Tonic” (1977)
Matt Gimmick “Detroit Renaissance ‘79” (1979)
Sonny Vincent & Wayne Kramer “Good Ideas” (1998)
Traitors “Money (That’s What I Want)” (1977)
Maxx “200 Years” (1969)
New Order “Rock ‘n’ Roll Soldiers” (1976)
Here's the fourth installment of Concrete Situation and the fourth part of Digging in the Detroitus, featuring bands from Detroit (with two exceptions).
Back to Detroit for the fourth and final part of Digging in the Detroitus. Beyond its music history, Detroit is important to me for its history of left-wing political radicalism—Malcolm X, James and Grace Lee Boggs, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, People Against Racism, Fredy Perlman, and so much more—and for its more general political and economic history. For a while, it was the center of the world. (I focus on it in the early chapters of my new book, Blue Power, out in April 2026.)
This history is the inextricable foundation of the sound I’m calling Detroitus, and the politics of the Stooges and MC5—at once on the Left, aware of what was happening in Black America at the time, and still suffering from a white cataract and sexist traits. All of this likely could not have been forged anywhere else. The bands on this tape either shared members with those two, shared a stage with them, or hailed from the same point on the space-time continuum, with a few noted exceptions. I’ve dug deep here, but—May the well never run dry of life-giving riffs!
“Bored” was the A-side of the first Destroy All Monsters single from 1978. It captured the class of ’76 punk rock zeitgeist: their boredom with the prevailing state of things catapulted punks into a new era of doing something. But with Ron Asheton on guitar, of course, the band was not part of the classes of ’76, ’77, or ’78. Instead, with the intense and alluring Niagara on the microphone, Destroy All Monsters was a bit like a band from an alternate timeline, both of this now and not. Certainly, they were not the Stooges and much of the music feels a bit underdeveloped to me, but the band has some incredible moments, including this plaintive, brooding track, and their track about Kennedy’s assassination, whose riff distills Detroitus to its purest, hewn from unpasteurized Ashetonium.
This band was called The Punks, before punk. Now we’re getting somewhere. Later rebranded as Matt Gimmick (see Concrete Situation I and below), the tracks released as The Punks (finally) in 2005 were recorded as demos in the in-between period, as Iggy and the Stooges decomposed after the release of “Raw Power,” leading to Ron’s sojourn that produced New Order (again, see Concrete Situation I and below). Anyway, the point here is that these guys were beyond obsessed with the Stooges and every track is more Stooge-like than the previous, though all imbued with a bit of darkness, misanthropy, and defeatism. It was hard to choose which track to include here, but this one has an impatient energy, marred slightly by damage to the tape. Even though they were keeping the torch lit, it feels like they were just wishing everything would be righted again, and the Stooges would come back. Instead, The Punks got punk, and the avalanche of Detroitus let loose, only to soon settle.
The Secrets released just one 45 on the aptly named Motor City Records in 1981. Like so many 45s from the era, it has a split personality. The Secrets come across as street urchins cleaned up, trying to figure out just how much scrubbing they would have to endure to get industry attention but how dirty they would have to be to sustain it—or vice versa. But the coke sweat betrayed them. The drummer was the MC5’s Dennis Thompson, who took a break from this band for New Race’s Australian tour. As skinny-tie powerpop, it’s not very convincing (I mean, really, why bother, Machine Gun?), but the B-side—“Ain’t Life a Bitch”—has just enough of an edge and a memorable enough riff to qualify for the Detroitus label. Thompson called The Secrets his favorite band other than the MC5, and perhaps as a live act at the dawn of the Reagan era, they nailed something. But mostly this 45 is just a curio, worth about the ten bucks it’ll cost you.
Firmly of the punk era, R.U.R., released two 7"s, in 1979 and 1980. This frantic riff monster appears on their first. The other tracks on the record are decent but less compelling. The band took its name from a Czech play about robots that look like humans from 1920, though the music doesn’t have the sci-fi atmosphere that would become popular among so many new wave bands. R.U.R. played a good number of gigs in Detroit, and you can see their name on a lot of flyers from the era.
The Denizens are another name more likely to be seen on flyers than in record collections. The reason is that their music didn’t make it to vinyl until well into the 2000s. The A-side of the first of two 7"s, “Danger in Disneyland,” was probably their hit track, but it’s more on the glam tip than the gritty tip. On the B-side are two frenetic tracks recorded live (obviously) at Bookies, one of the main venues for Detroit punk in the late ‘70s. This short, sharp shock is one of them, the one with the best riff. Apparently, the band had some sort of relationship with uber-creepoid Legs McNeil. Nevertheless, it’s giving Detroit.
Originally in The Rationals, Scott Morgan released a sleeveless solo 45 on the also aptly named Detroit imprint in (supposedly) 1974 that bore this track, which would make its way into the repertoire of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. In fact, the Scott Morgan 45 included Fred Smith of SRB, but not Scott Asheton on drums, meaning it was still a precursor, with a toehold in the more pop-oriented rock of The Rationals, Guardian Angel, and other Detroit bands from the right side of the sonic tracks. For this reason, BOMP! fanzine (1979) labeled Morgan “one of the ‘70s most lamented casualties.” Still, one can hear the ‘5 and perhaps even a bit of New Order here. Despite imploring us to slow down, the track is a snapshot of an exceedingly fleeting transitional moment. The 45 was re-released in 2000 on the impeccably named Real O Mind imprint. The track oozes Detroitus sleaze, but these guys were clearly holding back, keeping the lineaments of the sublime, transcendent riff in “City Slang” in the hopper until the right moment.
Firmly of the punk explosion, yet also with incongruous slide guitar, The Sillies released a single on the same label as R.U.R. Like many such bands, the members stuck around the scene but without too much to show for it. This track is far more earnest than most of the music of the downtrodden that you hear on this mix, but the riff is spectacular.
Named after the most luxurious export of Detroit, Cadillac Kidz sound like they broke into dad’s liquor cabinet after finding mom’s pills. They put out a 45 on the Scam label in 1981, but its tracks don’t come close to this one, which appears on the worth-its-weight-in-scag double LP “End of the Night,” featuring several other bands on this mixtape. Not too far from Sonic’s Rendezvous Band but thuggier and even a bit druggier, “Atomic Fazor” is an incredible nugget rescued from oblivion.
Shady Lady, like The Punks, also would likely have been utterly lost for eternity if not for the incredible detective work of our man Pierpaolo in Rome, who put both bands on LP around two decades ago. To be clear, Shady Lady were more glam than anything else—and they were from Los Angeles. But with the traffic between Detroit and L.A. (Dogs, Asheton, etc.), maybe no other city was as likely to bequeath Detroitus before the punk explosion. This track is the least glammy, and something about the riff and the vibe here is perfect. It encapsulates the ‘70s: it feels like nothing happens because everything happened all at once. (“The Move” was an anti-war song.) Shady Lady take credit for influencing Iggy and Bowie because of the way they dressed and the make-up they wore—I’ll leave that up to others to determine. Check their charming ancient website.
Something like 16 years ago, not long after I started Shit-Fi, I tried to write a review of the Death LP that came out on Drag City. The LP was soon followed by the documentary, and the documentary was soon followed by a sea change in punk all the way to the extremely diverse punk scene of today. There are multiple causes in the rebirth and reconfiguration of punk, and the Afro Punk project deserves some credit, though what Afro Punk now entails is a pale (sorry! I mean limp!) corporate stew with zero connection to…where was I…oh yes, Death. Anyway, “Keep on Knockin’” appeared on the “No One Left to Blame” compilation, perhaps the high point of the late Killed By Death compilation era. And, arguably, if a certain collector hadn’t put that track on there, and blown so many minds, including my own, none of these dominos would have fallen.
I never did publish the essay that began as the Death review, though I did publish some of it as my review of the reprint of Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus. But I pulled out my old drafts and I found this bit (edited lightly), which is relevant here, showing, as I had not realized, that my ideas about Detroitus have been percolating for quite a while (sorry this is a bit self-indulgent, I know, and sorry that it requires a bit of context afforded by Greil Marcus’s book and his figure of the Northwest Passage, taken from the Situationists, as a way of arguing that punk was born neither because of material and political conditions, nor because of influences of other musical predecessors):
The difference between the class of ’77 and the Watts rioters was that in 12 years’ time both the punks and the ruling class had learned the lesson the Watts rioters offered: for the first, there is little worth taking from the abundance on offer, and for the second, why should we offer abundance at all when austerity seems to work even better for us? On the one hand, that Detroit was the American landing strip for much of the Situationist International’s ideas should come as no surprise, considering that monopoly capital had made the city the center of its universe. On the other hand, by the mid-1970s, the edifice of monopoly capital was beginning to crumble. And one of capital’s responses to the power labor had amassed in places like Detroit was deindustrialization.
Here the dialectical link, identified by Andrew Ross in a contemporary review of Lipstick Traces, between the “cult of originary self-creation fashioned by dada” (or punk) and “new mechanical processes of mass cultural production” becomes irrepressible, despite Marcus’s attempts otherwise. On the cultural front, Detroit’s spatiotemporal configuration proved quite powerful: a tradition of sticking it to the man and an abundance of free time led to some of the finest punk rock ever, or at least one of its most recognizable aesthetics, which I would toss under the broad rubric “thug-punk.” Among Detroit’s punk exponents were The Dogs, Destroy All Monsters, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, Matt Gimmick, the Cult Heroes, Cynecide, and the Mutants. The connectors here are the MC5 and the Stooges, bands that typify two different paths of the excess of the ‘60s. Marcus admits that, against the ex nihilo mythology of punk rock, the punks did acknowledge their debts to the Stooges. And, if, like Debord’s ex-wife Michèle Bernstein told Marcus, the Situationist International had two fathers, the one it loved—Dada—and the one it hated—Surrealism, the MC5 served (and continues to this day, I would argue, to serve) as the latter for punk.
But what is really at stake here in the explanation of how punk happened is twofold: first, the disavowal, even if out of complete ignorance of it, of the prehistory of punk that existed in bedrooms and garages around the world after the 60s but before 1977, which punk midwifed into existence qua punk rock with its clarion call to shamelessly do it yourself; and, second, the missing link—the Northwest Passage, if you will—between the MC5/Stooges axis and the class of ‘77 being a band composed of three brothers, in both senses, from Detroit called Death. If the punks produced this twofold problematic, Marcus and punk historiography in his wake (he alone is not responsible) has reproduced it. Now that Death’s unreleased LP has been released, there are no excuses left.
“Where Do We Go from Here” was the title of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s remarkable final book. Through an intermediary, I asked Death years ago if they got the song title from that book. Their answer was not a firm yes or no. They acknowledged influences drawn from the political zeitgeist of the era. Anyway, this track, as funk as it is punk, is, to me, as powerful as they come. What I was trying to get at in writing about Death and the Situationists was simply this: the world in which punk was Black, in all the freedom-demanding senses of the word, is the world yet to come, not the one in which and against which punk did exist. That is where we need to go from here. Getting the history right is one insufficient but necessary step.
All right, all that said, let me fuck things up for a minute. There was another pre-punk, Stoogified band called Death. It existed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, beginning around 1971. This Death’s live set included a Velvets cover and, yes, a Stooges cover. JFC. The (barely) extant recordings are lo-fi at best. This track, whose title indicates it might be a love song, is a shambolic affair, with an aggressive, gravelly voiced frontman who sounds like he was on the verge of a fracas with outraged local fratboys. (He adopted the impeccable nickname of Sterling Silver during the early glam era; see some band pics here.) To add even more cosmic whatthefuck to this story, the recently deceased James Chance also was confrontational style with him.
For the first part of Digging in the Detroitus, I have already written about Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, humbly calling “City Slang” the “best song ever committed to vinyl in the history of the world.” This track, “Electrophonic Tonic,” was recorded at the same time but not released until much later. The band was, as the kids say, locked in.
The Punks became Matt Gimmick. This track, “Renaissance ’79,” is one of the two originals on the 7" (see Concrete Situation I). It is an emphatic ode to Detroitus. I do believe that the band aimed to rejuvenate the music scene, but putting the Renaissance Center, a downtown skyscraper complex, on the cover is a bit over the top. What did these sex-and-drug-crazed miscreants have in common with the elites behind urban redevelopment schemes? Having spent a lot of time in Baltimore, a city not unlike Detroit, I recognize boosterism with a sardonic tinge when I see it (have you heard about the city benches in Baltimore that read “The Greatest City in America”?)
The renaissance was not to be, of course, unless we count, as we should, Negative Approach and the birth of hardcore. About that: Destroy All Monsters apparently played with NA in November ’81 and got blown off the stage, forever sundering what might otherwise have been an interesting combination of old and new. The next month Iggy got booed and booted from the stage while opening for the Stones in the Pontiac Silverdome. Detroitus was effectively dead. As an incredible essay in Motorbooty fanzine issue 5 (1990) points out, much of “Detroit’s post-Pistols musical output” consisted of the “cheesiest yuk-rock ever to pollute the planet: nothing but skinny ties, skinnier sounds, and ‘nuts-with-a-‘z’ shenanigans.” (Though some of these skinny-tie dorks, as Digging in the Detroitus has excavated, had at least one track worth a relisten; see The Secrets above.)
Sonny Vincent and Wayne Kramer got together with a few no-name jobbers like Michael Schwarzmann and, um, Captain Sensible and
The Traitors recorded an acetate in 1977 that could have been the first proper punk record from Detroit, but it never saw the light of day. The recording appeared on the “End of the Night” compilation that has provided multiple tracks here as I dig in the Detroitus. This is a cover of the classic Barry Gordy track “Money (That’s What I Want),” helping solidify the Detroit bonafides of this affair. With its speed and attitude, this is clearly punk rock, sending the Beatles version of the track to the dustbin of history, where those dorks belong. To me, the guitar tone and the wild solo push it toward Kramerismo. It ain’t much, but it’s over quickly anyway.
A recent discovery for me is Maxx, thanks to the liner notes of the latest installment of the “Brown Acid” compilation series, written by the esteemed Paul Major. Apparently, the band recorded the song in 1969, sounding Stoogified about as early as anyone could have. It came out as a promo 45 with the same track on both sides, released by Mainstream Records, but that was as far as it went. It also came out in a harder-to-find private pressing with a different B-side. Here’s what Major says about Maxx: “Menacing light-touch Stooges style rhythmic groove with watery wah-wah action on the intro into dirty bad trip sheets of psychedelic fuzz guitar, this dark beast functions as a bleak epitaph for civil society, as pertinent now as in 1969!”
We have reached the dark end of the tunnel, having plumbed the depths of the Detroitus. It seems fitting to return to New Order, whose measly recorded output is nevertheless the hinge, the pivot, the bridge, the Northwest Passage between the ‘5 and the Stooges and the subsequent explosions of Birdman and punk proper, including all the bands from distant lands featured on other parts of “Digging in the Detroitus.” I previously mentioned the interview with Ron Asheton where he discusses the “two Frenchies” who bootlegged New Order. Here’s the full quote, from End Times #5:
These two Frenchies tracked us down in L.A. They had this nice magazine and they wanted to pick up anything to do with the Stooges or whatever. So one of them started a record label in France. For fun we gave him a cassette of a session we did which was myself doing all the guitar, Dennis Thompson (ex-MC5) on drums, Jiny Recca on bass, Jeff Spry on vocals, and we had a horn section. The other side was a later session with Ray Gunn on guitar and Ray Gilbertson on vocals. We just gave the demos to these Frenchies for fun because they liked the band. So all of a sudden I get this letter and an album and I go, “What the fuck ...?” They said, (French accent) “I hope you do not mind, but I took it on my own because I love the New Order and I wanted to make a record.” I was happy, but I wished that they had gotten some good tapes and made it right. They made about 20,000 copies, they sold, and then disappeared.
So, it’s been about the war against the jive this whole time. Yeah hup, the rock ‘n’ roll soldiers were on the march. They won the battle, but to judge by the present, lost the war. That’s OK, I suppose. We dig—to feel alive, to prepare our graves. This is an alternate mix of “Rock ‘n’ Soldiers” that appeared on a more recent reissue of the New Order LP. I’m still holding out for the multi-LP boxset collecting every garbage track they recorded. Even their worst is better than 99.9% of bests. And then there’s this one track, the pinnacle, the lodestar, the lodestone. We will never give in.