Detroit Rock and Roll
Growing up in rural northern Ontario and northern Michigan, rock and roll saved my soul. So it’s no surprise that rock and roll permeates the Sunshine novels.
In July 1967 when Purple Sunshine begins, Detroit was the fifth largest U.S. city but it arguably had a greater influence on the nation’s culture than that rank suggests. Part of it was the automobile industry. Cars were a bigger part of our culture in the 1960s than they are now. But Detroit rock and roll was another reason.
Berry Gordy, an auto plant worker, founded Tamla Records in 1959, which became Motown in 1960. The energetic pop-soul sound soon captured both Black and white audiences. While Michigan factories churned out cars, Motown churned out hits. I loved Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Four Tops, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Edwin Starr, the Contours, the Spinners and Little Willie John. Aretha Franklin honed her chops singing gospel at Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church where her father was the pastor. A key chapter in Sunshine Blues takes place at the church.
Little Willie John actually began his career with Fortune Records, a successful Detroit music enterprise predating Motown. One of my favorite Fortune hits was Andre Williams’ “Bacon Fat” in 1956.
In 1961, Michigan’s Del Shannon had one of the top selling records of the year with “Runaway.” That record features an instrument called a Musitron, which was an early synthesizer devised by Shannon’s keyboardist, Max Crook. Crook grew up in Ann Arbor.
The Capitols hit the charts in 1966 with “Cool Jerk” and Detroit’s Hank Ballard and the Midnighters did the original version of the “Twist.” Question Mark and the Mysterians, a band from Flint, had a hit, “96 Tears” that seemed to hang around forever. But it was Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels that really grabbed me with a string of hits in 1965 and 1966. A few years later, it was Bob Seger and the Last Heard who knocked me out. One Christmas vacation, a friend and I persuaded the Woolies, a Detroit blues-rock band with a regional hit, Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” to travel about 400 miles from Detroit to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to play a dance for the local college students home for the holidays.
In the mid 1960s, Detroit teen clubs featured bands like the Underdogs, the Fugitives, Unrelated Segments, the Rationals, Terry Knight and the Pack (which, sans Terry Knight, evolved into Grand Funk Railroad), the Lords (with Ted Nugent) and the Pleasure Seekers (with Suzi Quatro). The MC5 were the house band at Detroit’s storied Grande (pronounced gran dee) Ballroom.
A couple of great AM radio stations fed the rock and roll fever. WKNR – Keener 13 – was the number one radio station in Detroit for a long time. You can still find weekly lists of the station’s top songs on its website. The number one song for the week ending July 24, 1967 when Purple Sunshine begins was “I Wanna Testify” by the Parliaments, which featured Detroit’s George Clinton who would go on to major funk fame. “Some Kind of Wonderful,” by the Soul Brothers Six, the song to which Gloria and Jimmy were listening at the beginning of Purple Sunshine was number six. That song stayed in the top ten in Detroit for weeks though it barely cracked the top 100 nationally. Most people never heard of it until Grand Funk Railroad recorded it in 1974.
Some of the other songs in the top 10 that week were “All You Need is Love” by the Beatles, “Light My Fire” by the Doors, “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees, “More Love” by the Miracles and “Society’s Child” by Janis Ian.
Sometime that summer in 1967, CKLW, a big 50,000 watt clear channel AM station across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, overtook WKNR as the top-rated local station. Their young music director, Rosalie Trombley, had a golden ear for picking out future hits. You could pick up CKLW’s signal over most of southern Michigan, and in Toledo and Cleveland in Ohio. In Detroit, if you liked rock and roll, you just kept punching the buttons on your radio to go back and forth between these two great stations.
Detroit’s WABX-FM didn’t initiate its freeform progressive rock format until February of 1968. The disc jockeys picked the songs they played. This format was so successful that it was soon widely imitated by other stations around the country. I don’t know if WABX was the first with this format, but they were one of the first.
Detroit rock and roll in the 1960s was truly something special.