Joe Molloy - Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music

Resituating and extending Mark Fishers concept of Acid Communism into vibrant new territory, Acid Detroit takes a clear passion for a city and its culture and reveals the radical political potentials that are to be found not only in its past but, perhaps even more importantly, in its present and proximate future.

Matt Colquhoun, author of Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher

Through the toxic runoff of snowed-in flyover country and psychedelic outsiderism, Joe Molloy untangles the creative minds that go fast and furiously into new musical territories while honoring the decades of untouchable classics that came before. Acid Detroit is a music lovers insider look into the sublime joy of seeing time catch up to itself we also never thought wed see a mosh pit at a Gories show!

Will Lorenz, The Stools

This gave me so much knowledge of the history of music in Detroit, and made me so proud to be a part of our citys history and culture.

Bruiser Wolf

Joe Molloys in-depth and emotionally charged writing, specifically about John Brannons career, really pulls in and enraptures the reader. You can tell by the attention to detail how much research and heart has been put into this book on Detroit music.

Joey Hanania, Toeheads

Published by Repeater Books

An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

Unit 11 Shepperton House

89-93 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

United Kingdom

www.repeaterbooks.com

A Repeater Books paperback original 2023

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Joe Molloy 2023

Joe Molloy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 9781914420511

Ebook ISBN: 9781914420528

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited

CONTENTS

0.PRELUDE

What is Acid Detroit?

There are many books on Detroit music history, but none are quite like the one you are holding now. While others have dug deep into specific moments in the citys history, this is the first book to survey the entire territory, setting out to cover the terrain of six decades worth of musical history. Acid Detroit is an attempt to trace a through line from the early days of Motown to the birth of punk and techno, up through the creative efflorescence of the present day. In the process of tracing the citys rich musical legacy, well also point to an underlying philosophical often psychedelic ethos that unifies the musicians of Detroit.

No history can contain everything, and crucially the storyteller decides what might be included and excluded. In Acid Detroit, for example, youll find that some of the most well-known musicians from Detroit Bob Seger, Eminem and Kid Rock are either paid a passing glance or not mentioned at all. Meanwhile, lesser-discussed artists like the Supremes, Laughing Hyenas and the Gories get plenty of space on the page.

It is my hope that this book persuades people to listen to some of the most life-affirming music in the world. Thats the goal of Acid Detroit, plain and simple. Working as a record store clerk and amateur radio DJ in college, Ive come to realize that nothing moves me quite like sharing music with people. So, if this book gets one person to fall in love with the Supremes Where Did Our Love Go, Cybotrons Clear or Danny Browns Atrocity Exhibition, then Ill consider Acid Detroit a success. Setting my sights higher, my hope is that this book will inspire a radically new popular perception of Detroit. Not as a city of crushed dreams, but as a resilient bastion of consistent, cutting-edge American culture. Detroit is a city full of people brimming with brilliance and innovation.

Acid Detroit names the music of Detroit, its motoric pulse and soulful energy, as what bleeds out of and dissolves the drudgery of the citys once-prosperous industries. In doing so, Acid Detroit also points to the notion that the spirit of the counterculture politically, sonically, aesthetically never left Detroit. Thus, we can use the citys music history as a roadmap for teasing out new futures and inspiring alternative ways of living. But before the music starts, lets quickly lay the philosophical groundwork for our tale and look at the Acid in Acid Detroit.

The Specter of a World Which Could Be Free

In late 2016, before his tragic passing by suicide, the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher was fleshing out the ideas for his next book tentatively titled Acid Communism with a group of students at Goldsmiths University in London on a module he convened called Post-Capitalist Desire. This new notion of acid communism found Fisher assessing lost revolutionary potentials of the 1960s and 1970s. This was perceived as a shocking move for those within Fishers circle, considering he had previously written disparagingly of the counterculture and its hedonistic refusal to engage with real social problems. Yet, if acid communism or psychedelic socialism, as his friend and collaborator Jeremy Gilbert first called it points to anything, it is a project dedicated to resituating, recontextualizing and renegotiating the past. In actuality, the concept is a natural extension of Fishers ideas around hauntology the mourning of lost futures and capitalist realism the pervasive sense that we can no longer envision alternatives to capitalism. If his 2009 surprise bestseller Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was a diagnosis of the disease and 2014s collection of earlier essays, Ghosts of My Life, was a process of identifying its symptoms, then Acid Communism would perhaps be the first attempt at a cure.

All that survived of Fishers would-be book on psychedelic socialism is an uncompleted introduction that has steadily garnered something of a dedicated cult readership. The cryptic and unfinished nature of the work has led many to ponder on what lines of flight Fishers psychedelic strategy would have set course for. The question lingers, then: what is this neologism really pointing to? We dont need to speculate too much. Fisher himself clearly defined acid communism in what he had written:

Acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with a very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life