Steve Miller, “Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City” (Da Capo Press, 2013)

Today Detroit is down for the count, but as Steve Miller reveals inDetroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City (Da Capo Press, 2013), his comprehensive oral history of the city’s rock scene, the Motor City’s musicians never gave up the fight. Based on dozens of interviews with veteran promoters, leading musicians, and Uberfans, Miller’s insightful conversations trace the evolution of the city’s scene from its blues-rock beginnings through its current rock-rap incarnations. Along the way Miller demonstrates that while Detroit’s rock community never got the respect it deserved from its New York and Los Angeles counterparts, no metropolis did more to make American rock music loud, heavy, and primal.

Miller begins his saga at the legendary Grande Ballroom, the now crumbling 1960s mecca for live rock, which hosted superstar acts like the Who and Janis Joplin and served as the springboard for two seminal Detroit acts, the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges. By the early 1970s, Detroit was well on the way to becoming Rock City, USA. It played host to the Goose Lake Festival, a massively successful gathering that rivaled Woodstock. It was home to Creem, the country’s best rock magazine. It incubated the careers of Bob Seger and Ted Nugent, performers who would become two of America’s biggest arena rock acts in the mid-1970s.

Miller then expertly navigates the city’s obscure punk scene of the 1980s. Many of the acts will be unfamiliar to readers, but Miller’s own experiences as a musician who played in a Michigan-based punk band during these years give these pages a rawness and immediacy that many such accounts lack. Miller closes with eye-opening perspectives on the city’s current scene by garage rock revivalist Jack White and America’s pariahs of rap, the Insane Clown Posse.

One sad postscript to this interview: Iggy and the Stooges co-founder and drummer Scott Asheton died on 15 March 2014 at the age of 64. RIP.

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