PLUM STREET REDUX
Art: The De-Sterilization of Experience
Plum
Street was an actual place, though for many in Detroit it was, and is, a
myth, a dream, a meadow in the mind where their imaginations were
fertilized for the first time--or, at least got some dirt on them. In
1966, the City of Detroit actually designated a block on Plum Street as
"Detroit's Art Community;" it was intended to be our equivalent of
London's Soho or New York's Greenwich Village.
Plum
Street became, for awhile, our version of San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury, with the Haiku Coffeehouse and the Red Roach coffeehouse
where folk-rock groups like the Spikedrivers or rock bands like the
Rationals, the MC5, or the SRC played, and local poets such as John
Sinclair, Andre Codrescu, or Phililip Lamantia raved. Here, many protest
demonstrations were planned or debated, including the "Love-In" that
occurred on Belle Isle in 1967.
Plum
Street had the House of Mystique, where exotic and intoxicating potions
of incense and body oils abounded as well as psychedelic posters,
records and art objects, perpetrated as a deliberate insult to Elmer
Fudd and everyone like him. There were art galleries and clothing
boutiques and, get this, a "Head Shop!" More importantly, Plum Street
had the Fifth Estate bookstore with copies of that inflammatory
newspaper and such other underground notables as the San Francisco
Oracle, Chicago Seed, Los Angeles Free Press, and the East Village
Other!
Here
was a place that our parents and teachers warned us about. Here we
could discover, first-hand or otherwise, what Timothy Leary was really
about; the strange musings of William Burroughs, or the very weird
cartoons of R. Crumb. Here you could dream out loud and discover that
you could actually be intelligent and still be cool, in fact, that was
the only way you could be cool! Perhaps quaint by today's standards,
Plum Street represented--made permissible--a place where you could be a
man and not have to be in the army, or be a woman without having to be a
bride! Very big stuff in those days...and maybe even today.
We
dedicate this album to that myth--and to alternative culture
everywhere--to remind ourselves and everybody else that there must be a
wildlife refuge of the mind, some place not zoned for a subdivision or
marked on a corporate spreadsheet. What used to be "Detroit's Arts
Community" is now a Detroit Edison (DTE) parking lot, just north of the
MGM casino. It's vaguely similar to converting an Athens into a Rome
with the flip of a coin. It's so... American.
We
dedicate this album, for what it's worth, to all musicians scorned or
debased by the Musical-Industrial Complex; to the unpublished poets who
get thrown off of busses for talking to themselves; to all the one-eared
painters, to Bigfoot and all the hideous ghosts in abandoned buildings
who've nobody to torment; to all the singers in bathrooms who never
notice the goblin peering from beneath the drain; to all the actors and
actresses everywhere--which is all of us--who, most of the time, don't
even realize that we are always acting.
--Pat Halley, former Cultural Editor of the Fifth Estate
