"World Cafe," a nationally syndicated radio show that originates from WXPN-FM at the University of Pennsylvania, has fallen in love with Detroit music.
The show has posted on its website a series of fresh and archival interviews with local musicians and others knowledgeable about Detroit music and culture, both past and present, and combined the interviews with archival photos and other data.
"We took our 'Sense of Place' series to Detroit for the rich history of Motown and The Stooges and White Stripes, but also because we had heard so many young people talk about the city’s cultural renaissance, and we found both," World Cafe host David Dye is quoted as saying on the show's website.
The centerpiece of the multi-part series is a walk through (video, above) Detroit's music history with Dye and Don Was, the producer to the stars who grew up in Oak Park. Was calls it "a cultural evolutionary tour."
They start out on a bridge over the Chrysler Freeway downtown on the location of the old Black Bottom neighborhood, left, and they pay tribute to John Lee Hooker, the blues guitarist who came to Detroit from Mississippi during World War II. Was says Hooker is the "core" of modern Detroit music, which is "raw, unfiltered" and totally concerned with "soul and feel."
They go on to visit locations connected with the city's gritty rock music of the 1960s, including United Sound Studios north of Wayne State University, where Was says, "this is where I got bit by the bug."
Dye also conducts video interviews with Wayne Kramer, the MC 5 guitarist, Mike Ellison on African-American culture and techno music, members of the Detroit Party Marching Band and Jason Stollsteimer, formerly of the Von Bondies, who shows Dye around the Loving Touch and the Imperial Bar in Ferndale, which he calls "the Brooklyn of Detroit."
