Mack Hassler, AKA Kent State University Professor Emeritus Donald M. Hassler, published a review of my three Sunshine novels. He calls it a trilogy, which is closer to reality than calling those three books a series. I only made those books into a series because a marketing guru told me readers like series.

I always thought readers just like good stories. And that’s what most of the writers I know are trying to write.

Anyway, I have t admire Hassler’s stamina in plowing through all three of those books. That must be close to 350,000 words. One of my editors once told me that he thought he was editing two stories. There was a story for each of the two main characters.

So maybe those three books are actually six books. And if you look at it that way, my readers are getting a great two for one deal, like those old Ace double books published in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I just mashed the two stories together to save publication costs.

Right now, I have no plans to write another Sunshine Series novel. I’m working on a story set in the War of 1812.

Mack Hassler’s review is published in UP Book Review. For you non-Michiganders, UP is short for Upper Peninsula, which is where I grew up. Well, there and northern Ontario, which is somewhat similar.

Here’s a link to the review:

https://www.upbookreview.com/2024/05/10/purple-sunshine-sunshine-blues-hazy-sunshine-bob-calverley/

Enjoy!

My fourth novel, Hazy Sunshine, just went up on Amazon. This is the third book in the “Sunshine Series.”

Like the first two Sunshine books, Purple Sunshine and Sunshine Blues, this story is another slice from the lives of Jimmy Hayes and his hippy girlfriend, Gloria, AKA Sunshine. And as usual, they are in a heap of trouble.

It’s 1970. Vietnam vet Jimmy’s dreams of rock and roll success have come true. But what’s happened to Sunshine? She used to hold him tight when he had his nightmares. Now she hangs up when he calls. Worse, she’s wanted for kidnapping a two-year-old boy, and for murder.

 Maybe she’s had it with Vietnam vets. Everybody knows they’re ticking timebombs.

Well, Jimmy’s about to explode.

 Again.

I must have a thing about tunnels.

 The Vietcong tunnels around Saigon and Cu Chi are a prominent part of Sunshine Blues, the second novel in the Sunshine Series. And in Purple Sunshine, first in the series, the legendary steam tunnels under the campus of Michigan State University, are a significant part of the story.

 Read all about those steam tunnels in the Michigan State News and how they fit into Purple Sunshine. Theo Scheer’s fascinating story goes far beyond the connection with my novel.

 One more thing. There are no tunnels in Hazy Sunshine, my soon-to-be-published third novel in the Sunshine Series. I’ve managed to beat my tunnel addiction.

Yes! I am participating in Swim With Mike this year. I will go to USC event on April 1 - four days before my 78th birthday! - and see how many laps I can do. And I will let you know how it went.

Read about Swim With Mike here:

https://www.swimwithmike.org

Since it started in 1981, Swim With Mike has helped hundreds of young profoundly injured athletes to overcome adversity. I like that Swim With Mike is narrowly focused, that it is run almost entirely by volunteers, that it has expanded far beyond USC, and most of all, that it is making a huge difference for so many deserving young people.   

My campaign site is is here:

https://swimwithmike.akaraisin.com/ui/swimwithmike42/p/5adb5f89064e4e0baa22bb29cafc2c10

Yes, you can't see any evidence that it is my campaign website, and I haven't found a way to  navigate to my campaign website on the Swim With Mike website. If anyone figures it out, please let me know! As I said, this organization is run by volunteers. You can donate here and receive your tax receipt etc.

You can also mail a check made out to Swim With Mike to me here and I will turn it in:

Bob Calverley

688 Kenwood St

Newbury Park, CA 91320

Please make sure you include your address so Swim With Mike can send you a tax receipt.

Thank you for your attention!

It’s Black History Month so I thought I’d post this short excerpt from my novel, Sunshine Blues.

First the setup:

Gloria, one of the novel’s two main characters, is a 16-year-old runaway who is pregnant. Her boyfriend, and the father of the child, is a soldier in Vietnam. Perhaps a bigger problem for Gloria is that she has recently learned that she had an African American father, Clyde Bonaventure.

In this scene, her father’s best friend, State Senator Logan Carlton, is offering her some advice. Carlton, incidentally, was inspired by Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, a colorful and very foul-mouthed politician whom I covered a few times as reporter for the Detroit Free Press in the 1970s.

I could not bring myself to post this without redacting the N word. (It’s not redacted in the novel.)

This begins with Gloria and Carlton sitting in his Lincoln on Grand River Avenue in Detroit in the winter of 1968:

Carlton pushed the front seat back. “I met Clyde durin’ the war. We both signed up for this colored outfit in the Army Air Force. The Tuskegee airmen.  You probly ain’t never heard of it, but lotsa black folks have. We didn’t know each other at first ’cause Clyde, he flew fighters, and me, I was a navigator on a bomber. Our bomber unit never made it to Europe. But eventually, me and Clyde got to be good friends.”

Gloria already knew most of this but she hadn’t heard what came next.

“We were in one of the first fights for civil rights. See, after the war, when Clyde got back to the States, the fuckin’… sorry… the Air Force didn’t want n-----s in the officers club.”

“Saying n----r’s worse than saying fuck,” Gloria said.

His eyes opened wide, then he snickered. “You know, you are absolutely right.” He scratched his neck. “We put up with a lot durin’ and after the war. White officers gettin’ promoted but we didn’t. They set up separate, colored officers clubs. White boys called them Uncle Tom’s cabin. We mostly just swallowed all that shi… crap, but at the end of the war at Freeman Field in Indiana, we made a stand. We went into the whites-only officers club, a whole bunch of us. Direct violation of orders.

“And Clyde? He was the biggest pain in the ass of us all, ’cause he’d been a hero, shootin’ down four Nazis. One more and he woulda been an ace. Most of those white boys hadn’t seen any combat. He embarrassed them so they went after him. Clyde got court-martialed. He chose to leave the military, though they didn’t give him much choice. Me and mosta the others backed off. Chickened out.”

Carlton looked down at the floor.

“You probly heard lotsa things about your father, and most of it’s probly true. The women at his clubs didn’t teach Sunday school. Clyde never paid no mind to city ordinances or liquor license rules. If you’re black in Detroit and play the numbers, or bet on baseball or football, you dealt with one of Clyde’s boys. You need a loan, and your credit’s in the crapper, you went to Clyde. Hell, the banks don’t wanna make loans to nig… people like us.

“The law saw Clyde as an outlaw, though they never caught him. But in my book, he’s right up there with Martin Luther King.” Carlton stopped and rubbed his chin, grinning. “Well, not that high, but he had a lot more guts than me when it came to standin’ up for what’s right. And I’m a state senator.”

Carlton reached to turn up the heat in the car and shifted to another subject. “Where’d you go to church today?”

Gloria couldn’t remember the church’s name. “Um, it was a Baptist church. The minister was Aretha Franklin’s father.”

“New Bethel, Reverend Franklin. Not sure what to make of him. Does some good things though I hear tell he’s quite friendly with some of the young women in the congregation, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

Shaking his head as he smiled, Carlton drummed the dashboard with his fingers. Gloria thought he was afraid to say what he really wanted to say.

“That first time we met you, me and Clyde were lit up. Been drinkin’ for a coupla hours. I hope you don’t judge us by that. You should judge Clyde by his good works. Hard to find a black pastor in town who hasn’t received donations from Clyde. And when folks went south for the struggle, you know, the freedom riders, Clyde supported families here. Did the same thing for some men in prison, or men who went to Vietnam. Howard, the man who’s puttin’ on your storm windows? He got out of prison coupla of weeks ago. He’s just one of many I put to work with Clyde’s money. Clyde’s been the principal financial supporter for my election campaigns.”

He took his eyes from her to look out the front window. She felt his apprehension. “Since that first time we met you, we learned a lot about you… ’bout what your stepfather did to you…”

Gloria felt herself flush. Her fingers dug into the leather upholstery.

“It’s okay—” he started.

“It’s not okay. I was raped, and that’s not okay!” Her loud high-pitched voice surprised her. She’d never before used the word “rape” in the few times she’d talked about what happened to her. But Mrs. Lincoln called it rape. So did another woman she’d confided in. Usually she couldn’t talk about it without tears, but now she only felt anger.

Carlton drew back but he recovered and quickened the pace of his words. “I know what happened wasn’t okay. What I meant was that it’s okay that Clyde and I learned about it ’cause…” He swallowed, leaned closer. “Because we wanted to help. Clyde changed after he found out about you. Just before he got shot, he was gettin’ ready to go to the U.S. attorney and confess to shooting those cops, and a lot of other stuff. He was gonna come clean. He wanted to do the right thing. He was afraid you were ashamed he was your father. Kept tellin’ me he’d never been there for you. It tore him up.”

Seeing her distress, he stopped. Then he reached over and very lightly patted her shoulder.

Gloria felt light-headed. Her stomach reeled; a sour taste of chicken soup filled her mouth. A bead of perspiration ran between her breasts. She did not like that Carlton knew what her stepfather had done to her. She didn’t want anyone to know. But since she’d run away from home, she’d begun to understand that she couldn’t keep her secrets bottled up forever. Mrs. Lincoln knew. Gloria had told another woman who’d briefly been her landlady. She’d told Jimmy more about it than anyone because she could talk to Jimmy. Every time she told someone, the burden lightened a little.

But she said to Carlton, “I don’t like to talk about it.”

He nodded and touched her shoulder again. “Just know that you’re not alone. Your father wanted to help, and now, I do too,” Carlton said.

She wondered about his sincerity and why he was talking to her. She said nothing. As the silence lengthened, Carlton changed direction again.

“Have you spoken to the Detroit police about what happened at the motel when Clyde shot those policemen?”

She shook her head.

“Things have changed,” Carlton said. “There was gonna be a federal grand jury looking into it. I don’t think that’s gonna happen now. But I think the Detroit police still want to talk to you.”

“What should I say?”

He shrugged. “Tell them the truth.”

“You mean, I tell them that I saw my father shoot three policemen?”

“If you have to, yes. But my advice would be that you answer each question truthfully, but don’t volunteer anything more.”

Now, she grinned. “I’m good at not talking. Been doing that most of my life.”

“Do you have a lawyer? Frances told me you wanted to get one.”

“No, I don’t have a lawyer.”

But an unexpected thought burst into Gloria’s brain like one of those lightbulbs in the comics. She remembered a hippie friend, Lenny Papineau, from her time on the streets who had talked about his big-shot lawyer father.

“Have you ever heard of a lawyer by the name of Papineau?” she asked.

“Papineau? Cutler and Papineau is one of the biggest law firms in Detroit. I’ve heard of them, but that’s all. Oh yeah, I think Cutler died last year so maybe Papineau’s the main guy now. Do you know him?”

She shook her head.

Carlton straightened up behind the steering wheel and pulled the shifter into drive, keeping his foot on the brake. The Lincoln shuddered.

“You know, I see some of your father in you. You charge straight ahead. You’re smart and quick, like a fighter pilot. More I learn about you, the more you seem like women from past centuries who had to grow up fast. You ever heard of Sally Hemings?”

“No. Who’s she?”

“She was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, starting when she was about your age, maybe younger. She was a slave, three-quarters white, but still a slave. Jefferson fathered several children with her. Those kids woulda been seven-eighths white but they were all still slaves. Jefferson, one of the greatest Americans in history, owned hundreds of slaves. He only freed a few while he was alive, and a few more in his will. He never freed Sally Hemings.”

Carlton’s voice had taken a bitter tone making Gloria afraid to respond, but she did anyway. “Aren’t things different now? We don’t have slavery.”

         “Yeah, but it’s the same fuckin’ country. Sorry. Hasn’t changed as much as white folks think. Did you know there were once slaves in Detroit? Wasn’t just a southern thing. I found this old Ph.D. dissertation at U of M that mentioned it. Finding out your father’s black had to be hard. I’d be careful who you tell about it. Doesn’t matter if you’ve been raised white and or how white you look. You’d still be a n----r to a lotta white people. Didn’t matter how white Sally Hemings and her kids were. They were still slaves.”

Black History Month is almost over and I have been struggling with this post all month. I am honestly wondering why I made Gloria Doran, AKA Sunshine, one of the two main characters of the Sunshine novels, biracial. 

Let me explain. I write into the dark. I start writing a story with only a vague idea about what’s going to happen. I do have some characters that I’ve thought about a lot, and I have some settings that are familiar to the point they’re second nature to me. I thought knew Gloria well when the story started. But I did not learn that Gloria’s father was a light-skinned black man while her mother was a blond Nordic woman until I was more than two-thirds of the way through Purple Sunshine. 

It surprised me, but it shocked Gloria who finds out shortly after her sixteenth birthday that she’s not white. Now I’ve met a few people who I thought were white and later learned were black. And it always fascinated me. I’m sure whole idea was lodged somewhere deep in my brain. When someone is biracial and partly black, they are always perceived as black. Barack Obama had a white mother and a black father, but he is seen only as black, despite the fact that he was largely raised by his white mother and grandmother. We don’t do that with any other bi- or multiracial people except those who are part black.

By the way, this whole thing isn’t a spoiler. The Sunshine novels are supposed to be adventure stories, not explorations of racial identity issues. So why am I telling you this? Maybe it’s because how we thought about race in the 1960s, when these stories are set, was different than how we think about it today. How we think about race has been changing as long as America has existed. Okay, now I am getting into that exploration that I tried to avoid in the novels.

The slave trade in the Americas began in the early 1500s. It was present in all 13 colonies. It was present in Michigan where much of the Sunshine novels take place.

Some white masters treated slaves with kindness. A wealthy Boston merchant, John Wheatley, purchased a young girl in 1761 to be a servant for his wife. The slave, named Phillis Wheatley, was seven or eight at the time, and the Wheatleys, recognizing her intelligence, provided her with a far better education than almost any women of those times received. She wrote her first poem at age 14 and in 1773, her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published. You can still find her works on Amazon today. Her book brought her considerable fame in both America and England. She was widely praised by many, including George Washington. Okay, she’d buttered him up by writing a poem about him.

The Wheatleys emancipated Phillis Wheatley shortly after the publication of her book. Then the Wheatley’s died and Phillis Wheatley’s life went downhill after she was freed. She married a poor grocer, lost three children and died in poverty and obscurity at the age of 31. But like I said, you can still find her poetry on Amazon. She sells more books than me!      

Slavery was the single the most contentious issue in the founding of the United State of America. Of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, 41 were slave owners. On the other hand, King George III, the “tyrant” against whom Americans rebelled was opposed to slavery and not really much of a tyrant.

One of those founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, not only owned hundreds of slaves but also had a slave concubine, Sally Hemings. Jefferson inherited Hemings’ mother and her children, when his father-in-law died. Jefferson’s father-in-law was also Sally Hemings’ father making Sally Hemings Jefferson’s late wife’s half sister. 

It was not unusual for wealthy planters like Jefferson or his father-in-law to have relations with female slaves. Because so many women died in childbirth, men were far more likely to be widowers then than they are today. That was the case with both Jefferson and his father-in-law. Of course, slaves were property and their owners could do what they wanted with them. And there was also an economic incentive. By law, any baby born to a slave mother was automatically a slave, and slaves were valuable. Slaves with lighter skin were even more valuable. By today’s moral codes, the actions of these men, no matter how consensual, was rape.

Jefferson fathered four children who lived to adulthood with Hemings. While there are still some who contend that another male Jefferson relative was the culprit, almost all historians today accept the historical validity of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship.

Sally Hemings’ story comes up in Sunshine Blues. A black friend of Gloria’s father warns her. “Finding out your father’s black had to be hard. I’d be careful who you tell about it,” he says. “Didn’t matter how white Sally Hemings and her kids were. They were still slaves.” Most of Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings eventually melted into the population and lived as whites. But when Sally Hemings died in 1835, she was still a slave. 

I don’t know why Gloria is biracial. It was never a conscious decision on my part. All I wanted to do was write an adventure story that would snag a few readers. But I ended up struggling with issues of race.

I wish I could be as facile with words as Jefferson, who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Jefferson meant it, except maybe for the “all” part. And we’ve built a nation on those ideals. 

Incidentally, Jefferson did not care for Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, writing, “compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”

Working on the third novel in this series, I’m stuck with my biracial character, Gloria. She makes writing the novel difficult. It is sort of like our country, which is still a work in progress. We are still struggling with the imperfections, the biggest of which is race.

It isn’t easy. 

Wow! I was on a podcast. Specifically, I was a guest on Danielle Ste. Just’s “The Writer, the Reader, and the Podcast.” 

If you want to learn about assault helicopter companies in the Vietnam War or how being a newspaper reporter influenced my stories, click on the link below. You’ll also hear about Square Peg Pete. Everyone knows that you can’t put a round peg in a square hole but even worse is sticking a square peg in a round hole. That never worked out well for Square Peg Pete.

Danielle seeks to connect readers with writers, and vice versa. I was honored to be on her podcast. She’s not just a podcaster, but she’s also an accomplished author and co-founder of Writers Ventura. I recommend her serial, “Marjorie, Vampire Dentist” on kindle vella.

To celebrate the holiday season, I’ve just reduced the price of all three of my kindle ebooks.. The price has gone from $4.99 to $2.99. It can take up to 72 hours for the new price to be reflected on Amazon so you may have to wait a couple of days.

Now’s your chance to check out Purple Sunshine: Sex & Drugs, Rock & Roll, War, Peace and Love and its sequel Sunshine Blues. The third book is the standalone murder mystery, Hyperventilated Underwater Blues. 

Merry Christmas to all! 

Here is a short story of mine, Once Upon A Dog just published in the Fictional Café. It’s loosely based on something that really happened during my year in Vietnam and some of the story appeared in another form in my novel, Purple Sunshine. 

Every Veterans Day weekend, my Vietnam unit, the 187th Assault Helicopter Company, holds a reunion somewhere in our nation. We’ve been doing it for more than 20 years. We sit around drink adult beverages, though less every year, and tell war stories that keep getting better. After all, we have an entire year to work on enhancements. 

 We’ve marched in parades, taken helicopter rides on old hueys, toured vintage aircraft carriers, battleships and submarines, held bowling, golf and fishing tournaments, visited great air museums, seen amazing air shows, been warmly addressed by numerous high-ranking military officers and gone to The Wall together and cried. 

 The most important thing we do at our reunions, and the most moving moment for everyone in attendance, is when we read the names of our 43 comrades in the 187th who were lost during the five years the unit was in Vietnam. Eleven died during the year I was there. I knew them all because in a company-size unit everybody is at least casually acquainted with everybody else. 

 According to the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, 2,202 helicopter pilots died in the war and another 2,704 air crewmen also perished. In April of 2018, a monument to these nearly 5,000 men was dedicated in Arlington National Cemetery. The granite block is engraved with a Huey helicopter, which made up the bulk of the 12,000 helicopters that saw service in Vietnam.

 At our reunions, I’ve met some of the families of men who were lost. They come hoping to talk to someone who knew their son, husband, or brother. I know that their pain never completely goes away but they also know that we share their pain. In fact, all of us at our reunions have shared the same traumatic experience. It’s a miracle that I don’t fully understand but the burden is lighter for everyone because we share it.

The first reunion I attended was in Springfield, Illinois in 2006. We received a full-blown police escort with lights and sirens and the traffic blocked at every intersection when we were bused the short distance from our hotel to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. It had been closed to the public but was open, just for us. 

It was there on that bus, in the warm embrace of my 187th brothers, that I realized that Vietnam veterans weren’t as despised as I’d thought. 

I’d finally come home.

The UP Book Review posted a nice review of Sunshine Blues. Yeah, I was once a Yooper. I lived in Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. And once a Yooper, always a Yooper.

Jimmy Hayes, one of the two main characters in the Sunshine series, is also a Yooper. He grew up on Sugar Island, which is just east of Sault Ste. Marie. The island is surrounded by the St. Marys River. It’s a short ferry ride from Sault Ste. Marie to Sugar Island and you’ll want to stop for one of the best burgers in the world at Clyde’s adjacent to the ferry terminal. You can watch the freighters go by in the narrowest passageway in the entire Great Lakes.

There’s more Yooper lore in Purple Sunshine than in Sunshine Blues where all the references are indirect. But I promise the UP will play a bigger role the setting of the next Sunshine book.

Writing blogs are rife with tips and advice. There are countless books about writing as well as workshops, webinars and conferences. They promise to upgrade your prose to bestseller status. I have found much that is useful in the blogs, have purchased some of the books and attended a few workshops and conferences. Haven’t hit any bestseller lists yet, but I continue to dream.

“Deep” seems to be an operative word. There’s deep POV (point of view) and I’ve seen deep characterization and deep narrative.  Eric Maisel, a psychologist who’s a creativity coach, wrote an entire book, Deep Writing and conducts deep writing workshops. 

This week I came up with a new “deep.” I’m calling it “deep research.” My two (soon to be three) Sunshine books are set in the late 1960s, which makes them historical fiction. Historical fiction requires a lot of research. 

I’d been working on a short scene where one of my characters suffers serious head trauma. Taking a break, I walked my dog late in the afternoon. We were coming down a steep hill when a neighbor’s dog in a fenced yard started barking furiously at my dog. Naturally, my dog, in full protective mode, lunged at the other dog, jerking me into the curb where I tripped and pitched head first into the wrought iron fence. 

A big contusion, multiple lacerations and a puncture wound, and that’s only my head. I also suffered abrasions and bruises to my knees, hands and elbow. When I woke up Saturday morning, my neck hurt more than my battered head. Whiplash. I spent many hours getting stitched up and trundling around the hospital for scans and x-rays.

But this was all good. It was research that went far deeper than Google and Wikipedia. So I’m grateful to my dog, whom I’d never thought was especially smart, for pulling me into the realm of deep research. Apparently she’s smarter than I thought.

And for you readers out there, know that there is no limit to what I will do to provide you with accurate and exciting prose. 

Bestseller status, here I come!

The author at the ER

The smarter-than-I-thought dog

A recent Gallup poll found that only 21 percent of respondents trust newspapers today. And even fewer trust television news.

My two Sunshine novels are set in 1967 and 1968 and a third story will take place in 1970. Newspapers and TV play a role in those stories but journalism back then wasn’t the same as it is today.

There was no Internet, no social media and no cable TV news. Newspapers leaned to the left or right in their editorials. Most newspaper columnists were either liberal or conservative. Newspapers, and TV and radio, separated opinion from factual reporting. Newspaper reporters were supposed to be scrupulously objective. Letting opinion seep into the reporting was a serious ethical lapse.

Today, the whole idea of objective truth is being called into question. Some journalism professors today maintain that advocating for social justice is more important than objectivity. Social media, as well as cable TV news, makes money by delivering information that reinforces what people already believe.  

Fifty years ago, most people believed in the same set of facts and argued about what those facts meant. Today we have trouble recognizing factual information. If a cause is righteous — social justice, for example — reporters might only present facts that support it. And some people with causes they believe are righteous manufacture facts. And social media amplifies everything. Misinformation, disinformation and completely false information have become so common that there is increasing talk of censorship. 

During the Vietnam era, pesky journalists kept uncovering facts that contradicted what our leaders were telling us. Eventually, the American people turned against the war. Journalists also made many mistakes. We won that Tet battle and it was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. But that’s not what you read in newspapers or saw on TV.

I was a journalist for most the 1970s and it is disheartening to see my profession in decline. I miss the time when you could usually trust what you read in the newspaper. 

Even if you didn’t like it.

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. 

The Saturday Book Review on JackBoston.com not only reviewed Sunshine Blues but ran a very nice Q & A about it. 

https://jackboston.com/saturday-book-review/

The ‘60s weren’t like what you may think. And that’s what I’ve tried to convey in my Sunshine stories.

Take the Summer of Love, the summer of 1967. I’m sure that there were many hippies dropping acid and smoking illegal substances but in 1967 I didn’t know anyone who did that. At least, not anyone who admitted it. I remember someone at Michigan State University got expelled for smoking marijuana in his dorm. Back then, you could be expelled for drinking alcohol even if you were old enough to do it legally. But I never heard of anyone getting in serious trouble over drinking, which was as pervasive in college then as it is now. Maybe some of my peers were into free love, but I never seemed to meet any of those girls. And neither did most of my friends. Maybe we weren’t cool.

There was some really bitchin’ music coming out of California – the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and the Doors. But that summer the soundtrack mainly came from the Beatles. They released their iconic Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at the end of May and a month later recorded All You Need Is Love, live, in the first worldwide TV satellite broadcast.

A few weeks later, when All You Need Is Love was rocketing up the charts, 43 people died in a “race riot” in Detroit. The term race riot comes from the Kerner Commission, appointed by Congress to investigate the urban unrest in the nation. The commission documented more than a hundred race riots in 1967.

Some summer of love.

The same week of the riot, armed with my brand-new degree in journalism, I started a job as an editor at the American Concrete Institute in Detroit. Okay, it wasn’t my dream job but I’d been assured that it was draft deferred. Apparently, the publications I’d be editing were critical for maintaining the nation’s building codes. And I believed that. Besides, I had car payments. My Plymouth Barracuda Formula S was a really cool shade of British Racing Green. It had wide oval tires with skinny red stripes. And it was fast. The riot was mostly in Detroit’s inner city and I worked out on Seven Mile Road. I cruised back to my apartment on Eight Mile Road racing Mustangs and 327 Chevies at the stop lights. Gas was 35 cents a gallon.

 The TV news about Vietnam was a little scary, and so were the stories in the newspapers. But I didn’t have time for newspapers or TV. My reading gravitated to J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip K. Dick, and I listened to all the albums I could finally afford on my stereo. The Tigers were in first place. Jimi Hendrix played the Grande Ballroom. And I had a job that paid well and came with a draft deferment. My life was outta sight! But near the end of the summer, I got a notice to report for my military induction physical. Bummer, but my boss told me not to worry. He said he’d write to my draft board and straighten them out.

Years later, I learned that the situation in Vietnam was actually much worse than what was on TV and in the newspapers. According to the American War Library online database, 449 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam in June 1967, followed by 458 in July, 466 in August and 460 in September. But in news stories, generals and politicians assured us that we were winning the war and turning the corner. They could see a light at the end of the tunnel. Today, it’s clear that a lot of generals and politicians were lying. Sound familiar?  Sound like a summer of love?

Summer ended. The Tigers faded to second place. The fall colors around Detroit were spectacular. So was my health according to my draft board. I was told to report for induction in November despite the danger this posed to the nation’s building codes. Major bummer.

Turned out that the most important thing I’d learned in 16 years of schooling was how to type. I ended up as the company clerk and an occasional door gunner in the 187th Assault Helicopter Company. This was airmobile warfare, the cutting edge of combat then. And it’s probably not what you’ve read about in Vietnam war stories. No slogging through rice paddies and collecting leeches in the jungle for us. We slept on mattresses in a base camp, ate hot chow at a mess hall and had electricity and running water. Okay, the water ran out of an old aircraft drop tank to a few taps and shower heads and had to be refilled daily. The generators providing the electricity often broke down. Call it comfortable camping.

However, helicopter aircrews had just about the highest casualty rates in the Vietnam War.  It was a strange, bizarre way to fight a war. It was far out. And the ‘60s were a decade filled with contradictions, polarization and those lies. Sort of like today, except I’d argue the music was better.

And that’s the setting for the Sunshine stories.