In-Depth on The Spike Drivers "Often I Wonder"

The Spike Drivers

"Often I Wonder" b/w "High Time"

So working remotely this past week has been...challenging. No matter how much you tell a three year old that dada is "working from home" the fact that they just wet their pants and are staring at their father like HE created the problem, well, you just suck it up and you clean up the piss.

I usually write these ramblings from the friendly confines of my office. But having only stopped in there twice, briefly, over the past week, means I'm a little out of my element for contemplation, selection and concentration. At least three times since I've started this essay I've had to threaten "going to the office" in order to get the six-year-old to stop braiding my hair, the three-year-old from climbing on top of my shoulders, or the 18-month-old (as of today) from staring me down like a Wild West duel.

Additionally, the bulk of my new arrival vinyl sits in my office. It's where I have my packages sent, where I can listen in peace, where I have a door I can close to prevent people from entering without permission.

But at home, shit, anything goes. My records here are a little more haphazard, a lot more older, and shockingly more difficult to trawl through. I must've spent 25 minutes just trying to find something I thought was worthy to write about. Granted during that time I discovered a copy of a gospel record I had recently put on my Discogs wantlist, asking price for only available copy $300 plus, so I actually saved money in the process.

While digging through 45's, Violet the 6 and 11/12ths-year-old calmly sat nearby on an overturned crate and asked me, "Dada, why do you like records so much?"

I paused. I thought. I blanched at the fact that I had no immediate answer at hand. It's almost embarrassing to say it even. But oftentimes it's the simplest questions, asked from the most unexpected perspectives, that give you the most reason for deep, introspective thought.

So now, with the tiniest bit of hindsight, I'm saying to Violet...

When we want to be sad, records can help us be sad. When we want to be happy, records can make us happy. Records tell us stories. Records help us understand who we are and where we've come from, while giving us hope for who we can become and where we are headed.

When I ask Violet why she likes records, she says "I like records because it's the best."

Amidst the clutter I was initially scared that I could not find this 45 in my stack of all the other Spikes releases, including exotic South American, Japanese and Australian releases, though I quickly remembered I'd spun it at my last DJ gig and happily found it safely amongst my "going out" case.

I am hard-pressed to invoke a more perfect song than "Often I Wonder." The minor key, Eastern-influenced string pairings present the bass guitar formulating one-of-a-kind figures while the lead guitar threads breezily in-and-out, all of it light years beyond anything else that was happening in Detroit in 1966, shit, probably better than just about anything else in the WORLD at that time. Push comes to shove, I would put this on par with the first Velvets album...but otherwise...unparalleled.

And when the 90 second long fuzz guitar solo drops in...just pure delight, chordal overtones ringing out in ways that I could never fully explain or understand, other than that they FEEL special, like they were woven with the microscopic filament of a thousand electric eagle feathers.

Spending the past twenty minutes trying to transcribe the lyrics here has me taking stock, so moved by the beauty, precision, choice and deployment of these words. Hitting me harder and harder with each replay.

In full, from my ears (and if someone can definitively decipher my question mark, I am offering up a prime Jack White or White Stripes or whatever test pressing I can make happen for the effort and for reading closely) the lyrics are...

Often I wonder

And try to remember

The splendor that I once had known

Days free from scheming

Were days full of dreaming

When seemingly all could I own

I flew to the moon on a thousand delights

Was washed in the sun's warm and mellowing (maddening? meadowing?) sights

That caressed me and blessed me through ten thousand nights

Filled with longing and raging for love

But circling round me

A feeling has found me

That can comprehend where I'm in

Stripped of illusion

I flee the delusion

That man is a creature of sin

Wow. Stunned. Don't think until right NOW have I fully absorbed these lyrics. Now they feel sewn into my soul.

Furthermore, the flip side "High Time" is, while more stereotypically 1960s pop-psychedelia, as precise a double-entendre as you could wish for from '66, with a solo and biting tone just as fierce as "Often" and as a sublime pairing as you could hope for.

(necessary asides...there are no a-side or b-side distinctions on this single, the record is self-released by the band, the label name Om is as much a sign as I need to know that they weren't dabblers in the esoteric, "Often" clocks in at a phenomenal 5 minutes 45 seconds at 45rpm and whomever the genius is that cut this single deserves a medal)

I speak in pure honesty when I say that this single should cost $500 and it would be worth every penny. I seem to recall back ten years ago or so that Ted Lucas' family was selling copies on eBay for $50 a pop. I think that is where this copy came from. I feel blessed.

In some ways I feel like as a counterculture we're STILL just trying to catch up to what both Lucas and the Spike Drivers accomplished over fifty years ago. Divining inspiration from unexpected places while imparting our own coloring on it all, pushing the envelope and trying to advance our worlds and open ourselves up to varied experiences.

While trying to press on and make all this happen, an unexpected Uber Eats delivery of White Castle burgers arrived on our doorstep, I told them no one here ordered them, they left then returned minutes later saying they were from my mom. I instantly sent her a text saying "You son of a bitch."

Not long thereafter, deep in my writing, girls running around helter skelter, Navy stinking up the place with a diaper that needs changing (yeah, we gave her the White Castle), a balloon delivery shows up on our doorstep, individual balloons for each of the three girls, with a note that said "Navy, Happy 1 1/2 birthday. Love, Gigi."

I texted mom immediately "You son of a bitch again."

I can't imagine however many more weeks we have to live like this. Take care out there.

First Ever (?) Press From The Grande Ballroom, The Detroit News December 13th, 1966

So I was only told this was the "first" press or write-up about the Grande anecdotally, but even if it's not, the early, outsider's view of the scene is something worth your five minutes to read if you have even the slightest appreciation for Detroit rock and roll. Enjoy.

How Michigan is the Fifth Member of the Stooges – OR – A Cultural Cycling Through Three-Hundred Years of Bullshit Historical Anecdotes and Arbitrary Facts to Argue that Geographic Demarcation Can Be Personified as a the Embodiment of a Musician

Regardless of my job, I was asked to write an essay for the "Total Chaos" book with the suggested topic of "How Detroit Was the Fifth Member of the Stooges." I quickly clarified with main author Jeff Gold if I could change "Detroit" to "Michigan", he concurred, and it was with great excitement and sense of accomplishment I completed the piece below. It was the SECOND essay I had published in a book about the Stooges, an honor that is not lost on me.

At the party celebrating the release of the book, Iggy told me two things...

1) That I looked EXACTLY like the guy that threw a bottle (pie?) in his face at some show in Michigan back in the day.

2) That I'm a good writer

That's all I needed to hear. Enjoy.

The borders of Michigan are arbitrary…the survey lines of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a southeasterly adjustment for a bloodless war with Ohio for the desirable international port of Toledo (the loss of which Michigan got its Upper Peninsula as compensation) and a veritable shit-ton of lakes cut a cute geographic form that can equally be called America’s high-five or America’s hand-job.

Despite this, the entire state of Michigan is incredibly average. There’s nothing of note that really makes it any different from Ohio or Wisconsin or just about any other boring state that doesn’t have mountains or an ocean or hieroglyphs or any sort of cultural accelerant.

So, too, with Ron, Scott, Iggy and Dave. They all came from an entirely average, middle class world. That is the only place from which they could emanate. To be more specific, Michigan is the only place a cultural roundhouse kick like the Stooges could ever be birthed.

As the birthplace to both Domino’s and Little Ceasar’s pizza chains (two of the top four pizza dispensaries in the world, both raking in BILLIONS of dollars every year), it is the unique incubator of Michigan that has a knack for taking what may have been considered low-brow or intended for the edges of society in the mid-1900s and perfecting it, simplifying it (the $5 Hot’n’Ready is marvel of modern economics) and making it understandable for a widespread global audience. As some of the first Western records pressed in the newly opened Russia after the fall of communism in 1991, the hand-illustrated, Cyrillic-bedecked covers of the band’s first two albums are proof positive that this is exactly what Iggy and the Stooges did with their brand of juvenile delinquent-inspired rock and roll. Which coincidentally, goes hand-in-hand with pizza.

And being birthed in Ann Arbor is fitting. With the University of Michigan looming large over the entirety of the town, everything in that city has an air of elitist self-importance. The classic joke goes, “How do you know someone went to the University of Michigan? Let ‘em talk for five seconds...they’ll tell you!” Coupled with the town’s overwhelming left-leaning politics (the Stooges were close friends with folks who bombed a CIA office in the city in 1968) and it’s clear the only place to birth the Stooges, wholly unconcerned with politics or elitism, is a town boiling over in it.

The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was educated at U of M, leaving the institution in late 1967. The possibility of him crossing paths with Iggy are nil, but it’s not too big a stretch to correlate that the anarcho-primitivism argued in Industrial Society and Its Future (“The Unabomber Manifesto”) is in some bizarre way in concert with the precisely sparse lyricism and uncluttered instrumentation of the Stooges’ self-titled album. That’s not to say “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is tantamount to serial killing...more like the absolute inverse. As Kaczynski and Iggy are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum, but both so completely laser-focused, so singular, so undistracted by the noise clouding around them that it’s clear the environment had to be somewhat instrumental in fostering those traits.

Jack Kevorkian went to U of M too, but I can’t find the connection there.

This cannot happen in socially-conscious San Francisco of the same era. It would not happen in the fading Village folk scene in NYC as it slowly transformed into glam and punk. Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the rural abuts with the avant-garde on a daily basis, was the only incubator that could birth these bozo geniuses. Michigan is not just where important and relevant moments of this band and its story happened to take place, it is a driving factor and overbearing presence throughout their existence, whatever the locale may be.

You see, Michigan is not a state where anything happens. Outside of Detroit, and a much lesser extent Ann Arbor, it’s all ho-hum humdrum non-descript bullshit. So of course, leave it to Halloween night, 1967, at a house party in Ann Arbor to be the moment this wrecking ball descends into public consciousness. Of course this primitive shit music is taking place at an “invite only” party. Of course John Sinclair and the MC5 (both already important leaders in the countercultural underground of the time) are there. Of course joints are being passed around liberally. Of course it sounded like the Melvins, (as Iggy himself would claim decades later). Of course, of course, of course. Because all roads of all these variables intersect in Michigan.

With the Grande Ballroom in Detroit acting as the de facto Fillmore Midwest, every major rock group of the era stopped in town. Out of sheer stubbornness, dumb luck, or not knowing any better, the Stooges (in tandem with the MC5) were able to act as the unofficial house band for 1968-1969, opening for just about anyone and everyone...Butterfield Blues Band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Sly and the Family Stone, The Fugs, Blue Cheer, Love, Cream, the James Gang, John Mayall, BB King, The Who, Frank Zappa and on and on and on. No need for U of M, that’s a college education right there. You learn how to perform. Day in, day out. A working band. Imagine that.

Not only did the Stooges figure out how to play, while on stage, in front of a crowd, but also had an almost weekly opportunity to glean from whatever hot-shit or shit shit touring act was coming through town at that moment. The Stooges are not a band that made their bones on tour. They were by no means even “reliable” at home. Old-timers in Detroit took pride in relaying stories of HOW BAD the band actually was saying things like, “we would purposefully show up LATE to the Grande so as to AVOID seeing the Stooges for the umpteenth time.” Only in Michigan would you have the greatest band in the world playing weekly and folks bragging about avoiding it.

So for Iggy to expose his dick (purposefully or not) onstage in Romeo, bumfuck of a town if there ever was one, population just shy of 4,000 back in 1968...it boggles the mind. This is a town known for a Peach Festival and being the home of Kid Rock. Nothing happens there and nothing will continue to happen here until the end of time. It’s the kind of town where someone would make the trip to the police station to let them know the lead singer’s dick is hanging out. Only in Michigan.

The Goose Lake International Music Festival of August 1970 took place in Jackson, Michigan a burg fittingly known for being the longtime home of the state penitentiary and the birthplace of the Republican Party. Before a crowd of upwards of 200,000 people, Dave Alexander fails to play a single note on stage. Be it because of nerves, chemicals, a combination of the two...it’s irrelevant. This would be the biggest crowd the Stooges would see in any iteration (including reunions) and they utterly blew it. Dave was fired, probably rightfully so, but the fact that barely two years prior merely thirty miles down the road these guys were playing their first show in a living room with no prepared material...these guys traversed the entire gamut of a show business career, a musical lifetime, in the span of time it takes to potty-train a child, across a space that’d render as a speck on a map of the United States, Earth or the Universe. All self-contained in Michigan.

Sadness reigns outward from Alexander’s exit. Roadies, also rans and ne’er do wells filter through the ranks, pathetically culminating in a show at Wampler’s Lake Pavilion in Onsted, Michigan, population 555. In an embarrassing adherence to the contractually obligating dictum “the show must go on,” Ron, Scott and Jimmy Recca play the gig without Iggy or James Williamson. A fan (Steve Richards) sings with them for a portion of the night. There are recordings to evidence this. The jams are actually not totally shit. What happens in Onsted doesn’t necessarily need to stay in Onsted.

And Metallic K.O.? What a glorious implosion, swiftly aided by the menacing pressure of local biker gang the Scorpions, at where else...the Michigan Palace, the same spot in Detroit where Henry Ford built his first car back in 1896. It’s captured on tape and does kinda sound like shit. But beer bottles breaking against guitar strings is an apropos sound/image in a coincidental building at a time where the city and region are falling apart, as the domestic auto industry begins its freefall in the thick of the Oil Crisis.

Nigh-on three decades would need to pass for the band to wholly prove themselves to their Michigan brethren. In a way that belied maturity or progress, the Stooges performance at DTE Energy Music Theater (I die a little just from having to type such a bummer of a name) was proof-positive that the band had their shit together. One wouldn’t want them to become cerebral or philosophical and thankfully, the band understood that.

As my first live experience of about half a dozen with the band, it was not only the best performance I’d ever see from the Stooges, it is still the best performance I’ve seen by anyone in my thirty-four plus years. Sure, the show takes place in a huge embarrassingly-named shed, too far out into the exurbs to feel culturally like anything other than a blob of land, with $15 beers (watered down) and $10 parking (clusterfuck), but all the corporate grabby-ness of dollars could not sully the metaphorical boot mark the Stooges imprinted across the entire state of Michigan. America’s high-five has appropriately been met with a swift kick and it’ll never be quite the same.