FIRST ANNUAL DETROIT ROCK & ROLL REVIVAL

The Monterey Pop Festival gave Rock & Roll its final accreditation. The music industry had to take notice as this little publicized youth cultural event drew more people and attracted more press than all the Judy Garlands, Frank Sinatras and Bing Crosbys could hope to muster.

The magnitude of the Monterey success can best be comprehended in the light of its influence on the concert form: virtually every American city where the kids dig rock & roll music has had its pop festival. The great majority of these festivals fell short of the original at Monterey because of promoters too interested in making the quick dollar and not concerned enough with staging a true cultural event. The First Annual Rock & Roll Revival is one festival that will reverse this trend and return the feeling of festival to the rock & roll summer scene. We have here a truly contemporary music festival which will not only entertain and delight the participants but will educate and enlighten them as well. Rather than hire performers at random, the Detroit revival has been created carefully and precisely. The producer of this massive event, Russ Gibb, has chosen the acts with the intention of creating a total educational experience inviting only an eclectic handful of “name” bands and concentrating on the incredible array of talent and genius that is the Detroit Community! The headliners cover the complete spectrum of what is happening in music today. The staging of this festival has been a community effort with Russ Gibb producing the event and lining up the “national” acts, Jeep Holland and the people in A-2 Productions booking the Michigan Bands and coordinating the time table, and the notorious Trans-Love Energies multi-media community coordinating the publicity and staging. So many people have worked hard to bring authenticity to this First Annual Rock & Roll Revival that it must be considered as a true cultural event of the community. It is the task of this special issue of Creem Magazine to tie together and provide background for this spectacular event.

In this issue, you will find stories and pictures on each of the performing groups along with the usual features of Creem Magazine. These stories have been provided by the group themselves or by someone very close to the groups. Because of last minute difficulties, stories on Detroit’s Fabulous Counts do not appear.

People all over the world will be hearing and reading about Detroit. Dig it. It’s Yours!

John Sinclair

a personal reminiscence

The first time I heard Chuck Berry’s music was when I was in the seventh grade at Davison Junior High School, Davison, Michigan. That would’ve been in what--1955? Anyway, there was this record on the Chess label called “Maybelline,” by some new dude named Chuck Berry, and it was so high-powered everyone I knew flipped out over it. I remember being in Tawas City, Michigan on my parents’ summer vacation, sitting in a dairy bar/restaurant across from the state park camping grounds in East Tawas and “Maybelline” was on the jukebox. It was six plays for a quarter in those days and me and this other dude named Pete would sit in there and play the pinball machine and put a quarter in the box and play “Maybelline” 6 times in a row, quarter after quarter. It was the highest-energy, most direct rock and roll music of the time so far-Chuck Berry made Bill Haley sound like the corny hillbilly he was--and you could relate to the words real easy. Cars were a big thing with us then, and the underdog scene with the Coupe de Ville (which Chuck switched over to on his third record, “No Money Down”) and the stripped-down Ford Maybelline was of course a common fantasy in our culture.

We were the first rock and roll generation. I saw “Blackboard Jungle” the movie seven times straight when it came to Davison, at the Midway Theatre, and me and this girl named Sharon Rowe danced in the aisles to the incredible “Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and the Comets, the first legitimate expression of rock and roll on the popular mass media. It was like when Elvis Presley was legitimized by Ed Sullivan a couple years later, whenever it was. I was nowhere as near conscious of the dates and years then as I am now--it didn’t matter what year it was anyway, it was all the same then. 1960 was when it started to get a little bit interesting, and by then Chuck was going to the penitentiary for crossing the old state line with a young-girl somewhere in the south. And the powerful rock and roll was almost down the drain by then too.

Chuck Berry and especially his records were a killer influence on us first-generation teenagers in the 1950’s. The only thing I ever wrote in high school was a term paper named after Chuck’s great smash, “No Money Down” and “Downbound Train.” “Thirty Days” and “Together”-that was the second one, after “Maybelline.” “Rock and Roll Music.” Sweet Little Sixteen.” “Roll Over Beethoven.” And the number one classic jam of all time, “School Days,” which was right on. “Up in the mornin and off to school/Teacher is teachin’ the Golden Rule/American history and practical math/Study ’em hard hopin’ to pass”

Workin’ your fingers right down to the bone But the guy behind you won’t leave you alone

Soon as 3 o’clock rolls around

Finally lay your burden down

Close up your books get out of your seat

Down the hall and into the street

Down to the corner and round the bend

Right to the juke joint you go in

Rock the coin right into the slot

Got to play something that’s really hot

With the one you love you’re makin’ romance

All day long you been wantin’ to dance

Feelin’ the music from head to toe

Round and Round and round you go

Rock rock r ock and roll

LONG LIVE ROCK AND ROLL!

The feelin’ is there, body and soul!

That’s just the way it was, too. Chuck Berry always told the story of our lives. We never went nowhere, but when we heard Chuck sing “Back in the USA” after he went across the sea we knew that’s what it would feel like. “Jukebox jumpin’ with records back in the USA.” He always told a story, even if it was corny as shit (“Havana Moon”) or even downright reactionary (Like in “Almost Grown,” which was killer rhythmically but had words that embarrassed me even then: “We done got married and settled down/Now I’m really having a ball/I don’t browse around at all/Don’t bother us leave us alone/Anyway we almost grown.”) We knew that version of America was bullshitwe had learned it from Chuck Berry himself. But he always had his ear right on the pulse of the youth in America, and it was true that they fed themselves that horseshit as they pudded out of the high schools and into the factories, taking a wife and a mortgage in their home town dump by the time they were nineteen. All my friends from high school went like that, or went in the army or went to college and got married and settled down, “almost grown” but never got the chance to finish.

Chuck Berry live was something else again. He would headline a show with the nineteen hottest acts in rock and roll and rhythm & blues and burn everyone away-that was Alan Freed’s “Big Beat” show that opened with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins singing “I Put a Spell on You” and closed with Jerry Lee Lewis trying to fight back after Chuck’s magnificent assault in his next-to-last spot. All the spades in the auditorium left in disgust as the blond faggoty Jerry Lee Lewis demonstrated his inability to get down like Chuck Berry. Chuck was IT. He was all over the stage, leaping and dancing and duck-walking from side to side, playing his guitar behind his back and between his legs from behind, whew! Chuck Berry was a BITCH! He epitomized exactly what rock and roll had come to mean to us. Art Johnston, 1 know you know this too. Anyone who was there knows about Chuck Berry, man, he was too much!

You know you can listen to his old records from the fifties right now and they’ll blow your head off. The Beatles wish they could rock on like Chuck. So do I. I missed his performances at the Grande Ballroom last month, but he was quoted later as saying that the people in Detroit, at the Ballroom those three nights, were the best audience he ever had in his entire career. Which is really something. He’ll be closing the show Saturday night at the Revival, and no one else could do that better. Bring him on, brothers and sisters! The one and only, the brown-eyed handsome man himself, the incomparable CHUCK BERRY! Right on!