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Grande Days: Detroit"s Fabulous Grande Ballroom 1966-1972 |
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Sunday, 29 January 2006 03:16 |
Grande Days
Detroit's Fabulous Grande Ballroom 1966-1972
By John Sinclair
The Psychedelic Revolution was in full flower in San Francisco when Russ Gibb blew in from Detroit in the summer of 1966 to check it out. A group of messianic hippies from Texas and Detroit operating as the Family Dog was staging rock & roll dance/concerts at the old Avalon ballroom at Sutter & Van Ness and showcasing freaky bands with unlikely names like the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Charlatans and the Grateful Dead. The music was illuminated by mind-boggling light projections and startling visual effects while hundreds of dope-smoking, acid-tripping long-hairs bobbed and weaved on the dance floor to these strange sights and sounds.
Local impresario Bill Graham teamed up with the Family Dog to mount a pair of dance/concerts as fund-raisers for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the radical theatre collective Graham then served as business manager. He would soon strike out on his own as a rival promoter, putting on similar shows every weekend at the venerable Fillmore Auditorium in the city's fading black entertainment district.
Hip San Francisco jumped with free rock & roll concerts in the parks, mad poetry readings, ecstatic happenings, outrageous outdoor s by the fiercely iconoclastic Mime Troupe, and a series of wildly multi-media Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests presented by Ken Kesey & his Merry Pranksters. A whole new culture seemed to be springing up out of nowhere, and hordes of young cultural adventurers were deserting their homes all over America to join in the new kind of fun to be found in the City by the Bay.
Gibb took it all in, fascinated by the bands and the light shows and the ballrooms and the frantic dancing hippies who made it all happen. A Dearborn schoolteacher by trade and a bike-riding member of the Highwaymen motorcycle club, Russ was a few years older than the people he was looking at but still very much in touch with what was happening with the kids. His feet planted on the dancefloor at the Avalon Ballroom, Gibb's mind raced with a wild surmise: Could he transplant the San Francisco sensibility to the Motor City and open up a psychedelic dance/concert ballroom of his own?
By the time he returned home, Gibb was convinced that his idea would work. He started researching potential locations, shortly settling on a run-down dancehall at Grand River & Beverly called the Grande (pronounced Gran-dee) Ballroom. During the Swing Era, the Grande had been a popular center for dancing to big band music well into the early 1950s, but the building had fallen into disuse. Yet the old proscenium stage, the wooden dance floor stretching out in front of it and the spacious promenades along the sides were still intact, and the funky ambience of the ancient second-story dancehall would only add to its attraction for Gibb's intended audience of urban bohemians and suburban renegades who would soon flock through the door and onto the floor.
Gibb struck a deal with the building's owner, a local real estate mogul named Gabe Glantz, and secured the use of the space. But what about the bands? What about a light show? What about posters like the kind of mind-bending advertising art pioneered by former Detroiter Stanley Mouse Miller for the Family Dog events in San Francisco? Gibb had a few contacts in the local rock & roll scene, but he knew he would have to delve into the downtown bohemian precincts around Wayne State University and the nearby Ann Arbor student ghetto to find the kind of people he would need to make the Grande happen like it was supposed to. He was sure there had to be enclaves of genuine San Francisco-style hippies in and around the Motor City all he had to do was find them and sign them up.
Gibb's path led inexorably to the storefront headquarters of the Detroit Artists Workshop, just across the John C. Lodge freeway from the Wayne State campus. Founded November 1, 1964 by a diverse collective of young Detroit poets, writers, musicians, painters, photographers, experimental film-makers and their friends and adherents, the Workshop had become a central force in the city's creative community. Weekly free jazz concerts, poetry readings and art exhibits, experimental arts classes and workshops, a steady stream of mimeographed flyers, poetry books and magazines, a series of campus concerts and other activities designed to bring art to the people had made the Workshop a popular gathering place for area bohemians and cultural activists of all stripes.
At the same time a new subculture was beginning to emerge out of the city's suburban enclaves to make a place for itself in the urban landscape. Young renegades from middle-class life were following the siren call of rock & roll music to embrace a whole different way of life from the one proposed by their parents. They were letting their hair grow, dressing like bohemians, smoking marijuana and dropping LSD, dancing to a soundtrack of Motown singles and pop bands like the Beatles, the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones. They came into the city looking for kicks they couldn t find anywhere else, and they too discovered the Artists Workshop.
Two months before the Grande Ballroom would open for business, the fledgling scene that would provide the Grande with its initial audience came together at the Artists Workshop on a Sunday afternoon to celebrate the release of this writer from a six-month sentence for marijuana possession served at the Detroit House of Correction. Legions of poets, performers and musicians of several descriptions from Joseph Jarman and the Detroit Contemporary 4 to a new band from the neighborhood called the MC5 gathered from early afternoon until late in the night to pay their respects, make a joyful noise and mingle with their friends and neighbors in attendance.
This unprecedented collection of mid- 60s characters was quite a sight to see: blacks and whites, grizzled beatniks and long-haired hippies, jazz musicians and rockers, iconoclastic creative artists and oblivious comic-book readers, juiceheads and pot smokers, all crammed together in and outside of this little bohemian outpost in the center of the city and having the time of their lives. The Festival of People at the Artists Workshop on August 6, 1966 unveiled the new look of the immediate future, and the atmosphere was fraught with a palpable sense of wonder at what was happening there and what was able to happen to our lives.
After the Festival of People the MC5 was invited to rehearse at the Workshop, and Russ Gibb now operating as Uncle Russ Travel Agency came down to give them a listen. Jerry Younkins, a Workshop poet and truly Detroit's first hippie, had organized a psychedelic light show called the Magic Veil and demonstrated it for Gibb at the Workshop. Russ met the artist Gary Grimshaw, high school comrade of the MC5's Rob Tyner, and engaged him to create the first of a weekly series of Grande Ballroom posters. Gibb was checking out bands all over town and making all sorts of creative preparations, and the word soon spread throughout the city's hip community that something new and different was about to happen in the Motor City.
Finally an opening date was announced for late September, but it had to be postponed, so the actual Grand Opening of the Grande Ballroom was held the first weekend of October, 1966. Gary Grimshaw's startling red, black & white poster announced A Dance Concert in the San Francisco Style, Detroit's First Participatory Zoo Dance, with music by The Famous MC-5 Avant-Rock and the Chosen Few. See The Cosmic Light Beams! See The Magic Theatre. For the small but determined core community of rock & roll beatniks centered at the Artists Workshop and the intrepid legion of incipient hippies just beginning to desert their suburban wastelands for the funky delights of the urban environment, there was no way to resist the call to flock to the Grande Ballroom and be a part of what was about to happen.
Getting to the Grande was an adventure in itself. Situated at the corner of Grand River and Beverly One Block South of Joy Rd. on the city's dilapidated west side, the Grande stood in serious isolation from where its patrons resided and well apart from any other sort of related community activity. So the young psychedelic explorers headed for the Grande Ballroom had to navigate some pretty challenging inner-city terrain to reach their ultimate destination, and awaiting them was a battered old two-storey building set on the corner with a very scary parking area in the back and a beat-up ground-floor door on the Beverly side to let them in.
Once inside, the motley flock of patrons paid the price of admission to Gibb's business partner and building owner Gabe Glantz and his minions ( Seagulls Admitted Free ) and staggered up a broad flight of stairs past the first landing and onto the second floor. There they entered a new world of earthly delights laid out for them in a warm, atmospheric space inherited from a lost generation of dancers and music lovers, centered on a vast hardwood dance floor stretching out from the proscenium stage at the far end and flanked by a wide promenade on either side and across the near end of the room.
Facing the stage, there was a soft-drink bar along the left wall and a couple of small recessed areas set into the back wall which were to house the Trans-Love store posters, underground newspapers, mimeographed poetry books and magazines from the Artists Workshop Press and George & Ramona Agee's incense and accessories stand. Russ's office was in the right side of the back wall just to the left of the top of the stairs, and the promenade on the right offered several well-spaced couches set against the wall for sitting out a dance or two.
The dancefloor was ringed with pillars which separated it from the encircling promenade, and at the back of the floor a scaffold had been erected where the High Society light show crew Gary Grimshaw, Emil Bacilla, Leni Sinclair and their helpers beamed their magical slide projectors and illuminated color mixers from a shaky platform above the heads of the crowd to the makeshift bedsheet screens pinned to the back wall of the stage. Photographic and hand-painted slides of every description flashed through the darkness, over the bands and onto the screen while the mixers poured oil and assorted pigments into a big convex old-fashioned clock face positioned on the surface of a light projector and shook their bowls to beam liquid streams and boiling cauldrons of brilliant color across the floor and onto the stage.
Huge global mirror balls salvaged from an earlier era glittered from the ceiling over the dancefloor, reflecting and defracting the hallucinatory imagery pouring forth from the light stand, and the first actual industrial strobe light any of us had ever seen flickered hypnotically over our heads, sending the dancers into momentary trances and transfixing those who simply stood and stared.
The dancers had plenty of room to move on opening night at the Grande, with the small crowd of a hundred or so first-nighters about evenly split between psychedelic pioneers from the inner city, serious MC-5 fans and curious young seekers from the suburbs looking for a new way to have their fun or even, perhaps, a new way of life they d just begun to hear about. No one knew quite what to expect, but everyone there was determined to be a part of it.
Then there were the bands selected by Russ Gibb to give life to his concept of a psychedelic ballroom presenting dance/concerts in the San Francisco style. As a music venue showcasing original talent from around Detroit and environs, the Grande emerged against a background of whitebread teen centers and high school dances that featured identically-dressed pop combos playing cover versions of radio hits and the occasional semi-professional band with a record of its own on the local charts. In this milieu, more adventurous outfits were afforded limited outlets to perform their self-composed songs and display their decidedly outside-the-mainstream approaches to the music.
What made the San Francisco scene so distinctive and exciting was its focus on home-grown bands of long-haired, dope-smoking musicians who existed entirely outside the commercial music business and played music of their own creation for people who wouldn t be caught dead listening to Top 40 radio. In Detroit, a variety of forward-looking bands like the avant-rock MC-5, the psychedelic folk-rockers Southbound Freeway and the Spike Drivers, pioneering Ann Arbor blues band the Prime Movers, and maverick rock groups like the Chosen Few, Gang, the Wha?, Walking Wounded and Jagged Edge were pursuing the same path but with few opportunities to meet their public.
The Grande Ballroom changed that situation for good with its adventurous booking policy. Gibb installed the MC-5 as a virtual house band and paired the experimental high-energy rock band with contrasting acts like the Chosen Few, Southbound Freeway and the Prime Movers, creating a completely new sort of scintillating evenings of inventive music for dancing and inspiring the entire musical community to consider following the course of creativity and originality. The MC-5 also hosted the Dearborn band called The Woolies that had enjoyed a national hit with their version of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love, and the popular Bossmen from up by Saginaw whose singles were heard on Detroit radio.
This pool of original talent provided the music for the first two months of dance/concerts at the Grande and established the ballroom at the cutting edge of the Detroit music scene, soon to become the central focus of the entire musical community. From December 1966 to August 1967 the Grande presented an ever-expanding array of regional talent, fitting every sort of interesting musical attraction into the well-defined dance/concert format of its weekend shows. Every band that laid claim to an identity of its own from the Cosmic Expanding to the Thyme to the Poor Souls waged its own battle to land a spot on a bill at the Grande with the MC-5, Southbound Freeway or the Jagged Edge.
The Grande expanded its impact and influence on the scene when Gibb began to bring in national and international touring bands, starting in August 1967 with the Detroit date on the Grateful Dead's first American tour. Russ had entered this new stage of the ballroom's development when he brought the Jefferson Airplane riding the national charts with its RCA singles Somebody To Love and White Rabbit into Ford Auditorium on June 30th, supported by the MC-5 and the Rationals.
The success of this venture convinced Gibb to tap the international roster of touring bands to raise the level of his dance/concerts at the Grande to a whole different level, and in the months to follow the ballroom would feature a panoply of popular American and British bands that included the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Butterfield Blues Band, the Fugs, Procol Harum, the Cream and the Who. Each headline act was supported by two or more local bands who gained the chance to showcase themselves for significantly larger audiences than ever before and draw unprecedented attention to their musical offerings.
But that was a little way down the road from the early days of the Grande Ballroom, where a new generation of Detroit youth discovered its common identity and celebrated its existence in steadily growing numbers. The little crowd in attendance the first few weeks soon increased in steady increments, and by the end of its first year the place was usually packed with 1,000 and more music lovers every Friday and Saturday night. There was nothing like it anywhere around, and no one who ever sweated and screamed and jumped up and down on a hot night at the Grande Ballroom will ever forget it.
--Detroit
August 3, 2004
(c) 2004 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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