SAUSAGE PARTY

Well, this is my fifth “Greetings From Detroit,” and I’m afraid if we’re going to go any further along on this one-way epistolary about Detroit rock music, we’ll have to actually leave Detroit this time. Don’t worry, we won’t have to travel far. In fact, the city I want to take you to, a slab of pavement barely squeaking past two square miles in area, is wholly surrounded on all sides by Motown. This cartographical anomaly slumps uneasily at the center of Detroit—an unhidden treasure box chock-full of musical history and a stage for tomorrow’s noisemakers today. So pack your drinking livers and say goodbye to your functional hearing...we’re going to Hamtramck.

Let’s get the potted history out of the way before we arrive. It’s named after some long-dead FrenchCanadian, as are a lot of places around here. Hamtramck started as a home for German immigrant farmers looking to air out their livestock. It was a pretty boring city until a couple of gingers named the Dodge brothers came along in 1911 and built a car factory on top of the German cows. From that point on in Hamtramck, you couldn’t throw a kielbasa in the air without a Polish guy catching it. Thanks to the auto jobs, the city became the most densely populated location in Michigan. Thanks to all the Polish, it had, according to accepted local lore, the most bars anywhere in America per capita. Some of those bars, at least the ones not frequented by anti-longhair union head-splitters, would be incubators for the new sounds of rock ’n’ roll as the decades wore on. Mitch Ryder was born here? Hey, that’s a fun fact! The years wore on and down until 1980 when the Dodge plant closed. Sure, a new plant was built a few years later on the old site, but it was too big—enough to wipe out part of the old Hamtramck and, straddling its haunches across the border, much of the Polish part of Detroit nearby, Poletown. (Detroit has an extremely lazy history of naming its ethnic enclaves. For instance, guess what ethnic group lives in Mexicantown. You get three chances.) The city was irrevocably changed. The Pope came in 1987. The pqczkis were still dutifully scarfed down every Fat Tuesday. But the Poles moved out to the suburbs, and new waves of immigrants moved in looking for a place to call home. Also artists and bands. Lots and lots of bands. Stinking, greasy rock ’n’ roll bands.

Now we’re here—the present for me, the near past for you, unless you might have found this yellowing issue of CREEM in the far-flung future at some supremely depressing swap meet. It’s the first weekend of September 2023, and our specific location is the annual Hamtramck Labor Day Festival. It’s actually celebrating its 41st year, this free three-day event run by volunteers. It began as a civic attempt to carry on after the Dodge plant closed, and has endured over the years through the sheer will of dedicated Hamtramckans and a Metro Detroit area that appreciates free festivals on the extended weekend dedicated to taking notice of the sweat from our brows. Now, I’m sure where you live has some rinky-dink Founder’s Day or maybe a weekend dedicated to, I dunno, the rutabaga (sorry, Cumberland, Wisconsin, and Askov, Minnesota). You might even be unlucky enough to live in some other rust-belt junker of a city with an ethnic enclave festival. These are all great, I’m sure. Especially great if, like the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival, they are FREE and feel like they are held together by neighborly kindness and a drunk’s spit. I don’t want to hammer home the “free” and “inclusive” aspects too much more, but in a 2023 of increasingly overpriced entertainments and the luxury boxing of most festivals, I can’t help but hope the tech bros swamped in the libertarian sinkhole that is Burning Man at the time of writing get subsumed by the alkali mud. Here in Hamtramck, it’s going to be mostly sunny, highs in the low 90s, with a strong easterly breeze and not a whiff of God’s punishing torrents in the forecast. So let’s enjoy ourselves!

I chose the middle day, Sunday, to attend after originally arranging to go to all three. I’m a boring man with an empty social calendar, after all. But the prospect of over 33 hours of live music bouncing over hot asphalt changed my plan. Every day was stacked with a good cross section of the current waves of underground music, leaning perhaps too heavily on strains of rock. Yet Monday’s headliner was beloved Detroit rapper Gmac Cash, who brought along his 7-year-old daughter to steal the show. Other highlights I missed include a Detroit Cobras tribute to their recently deceased singer Rachel Nagy, classic soul group Ultimate Ovation, hardcore lifers Detroit 442, and personal favorites Deadbeat Beat. Ah, well. Sunday’s offering seemed to be the most “quintessential” in that the lineup was a good mix of what passes for Hamtramck heritage acts and up-and-coming snot-noses you might find on an off night playing for beer money at one of the area’s shittier watering holes. The festival lines four or so blocks of Jos. Campau Street (named after the state’s first millionaire, who definitely owned slaves and was excommunicated for selling whiskey to the Natives). Between the “Big Stage” (heritage acts, bigger draws) at the south end and the “Small Stage” (punks, mostly) in the north are the vendors, food stalls, and a small, ramshackle wrestling ring. Throughout the day, the Small Stage, with its churn of distorted wails, will soundtrack the agony and ecstasy of the assembled jobbers working the mat on this hallowed day of rest.

When I arrive at the Small Stage, the small but enthusiastically young crowd is moving as much as a crowd can under the blinding sun to Toeheads. Their grinding, mutated take on “garage punk”—and, judging by the newer crop of bands in the area, that’s the new sound of tomorrow—will be the template for this side of Jos. Campau for the day. Following Toeheads is a two-piece, 208, whose configuration offers up easy “kinda White Stripes-y, eh?” comparisons, but they have the stamina to find new shapes in that form. The guitarist is barefoot, though. I do not like that one bit. So please support ’em, for there is nothing sadder than a band that can’t afford shoes. Later in the day, as the wrestling crescendos into a symphony of burly men slapping bellies, the Stools, festooned in matching duds, pummel the growing crowd with songs from their newest album, R U Saved?, which they describe as “Nuggets vs. Killed by Death?' which seems apt. Killed by Death appears to have won this hour, as the Stools’ refreshingly sour attitude has me increasing my jello shot quota and switching over to White Claws to maintain the fizz after their set is done. They’re followed by their slightly heavier, psychedeliathrough-static kin Werewolf Jones. Their newish record Rot Away has song titles like “Torture” and “Eating Life Shitting Skulls,” so you get why a cloud of bats were circling over the street as they wrapped up. Then the sunset turned all kinds of purple and red as Tyvek (mentioned in these pages in the Winter 2022 issue. Get your back issues now!) closed out the Small Stage.

Over at the Big Stage, the day unfolds differently, weirder. Perhaps due to the bits of shade here and there or the quality of the entertainment on offer, the crowd on this end is more wizened. There’s more hometown characters wandering around munching on pierogis. A good barometer of the crowd’s level of enjoyment is gained by keeping an eye on “Old Man Balancing a Stick.” If the old man is dancing while balancing the three-foot bit of polished lumber, you have yourself a hit. If he’s sitting down while still managing to balance the stick horizontally with just a forefinger? You might need to rock a little harder. There were at least four other elderly fellows with sticks on Sunday, but only one was measuring the day with balance. He seemed utterly in thrall to the Yeji Boys. How to explain the appeal of the Yeji Boys? A supergroup playing odes to specific examples of Hamtramck lore under pseudonyms and bad wigs, the name is derived from Leroux brand Jezynowka blackberry brandy. Their tightrope-walking set to the befuddled, then won over, then befuddled again AARP crowd was by turns tender and hilarious. And the stick stayed aloft.

If the Yeji Boys are Hamtramck’s winking ego, then the next artist, Danny D, with all the pomp and finery of 1980s showbiz afloat in aspic, is the city’s id. He is, according to his long-unupdated website, “the only Rod Stewart impersonator to ever be pulled up on stage by Rod Stewart on tour—to close the show with ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”’ That, being a son of the city, and having the sense to ask, after performing “Rebel Rebel” to the assembled grandmas and stick-wielding old men, if there were any “hot tramps in the audience?” (scattered boos) “No, no...not in a bad way, like Polish tramps” (rapturous applause) are what make a truly great performer in Hamtramck. He and his band the Vagabonds seemed grateful for the moment—old criminals back for one last job. The crowd seemed almost wistful as he worked through a croaking version of his doppelganger’s “Some Guys Have All the Luck.” I had to wonder if, in that moment, twirling his all-white mic stand, ol’ Danny was singing about himself.

Hamtramck is changing, just like any other place is. The Poles are getting older. The waves of new immigrants from Yemen, Bangladesh, and farther afield are making their rightful mark on the city that recently became the first U.S. municipality with an all-Muslim government. Places get gentrified. Old things die. But through a welcoming, easygoing party like the one Hamtramck throws every Labor Day, one could see—through the late-summer haze and waves of amp distortion—a real community at the heart of it all. Maybe it’s the six beers, four White Claws, four jello shots, two whiskeys, one blackberry brandy, and one kielbasa talking, but that feels like a good thing to witness for free.