Thursday, March 5, 2009



Well, here I am at the birthplace of the two things I love the most: 1) Rock and Roll (as we know it, MC5, Stooges, etc.) and 2) The Automobile. I haven’t been here since 1987 when Half Life played at the Graystone, and now all I can do is wonder why I haven’t been back sooner. Why? Because this place rules! Detroit is obviously ground zero of all things cool, from Motown to Dodge Main, from Funkadelic to The Pistons. One quick look around is all it took for me to realize that this is the only other place outside of California that I could do Gearhead from. In other words, this town lacks nothing. It has the cars, the builders, the clubs, the artists, the tattoo parlors, the garage bands, the venues… if it wasn’t for this crazy thing called “snow” that people kept warning me about, I’d have thought I landed in paradise. Like my beloved Oakland, this town gets a bad rap, but hey, it’s all about attitude, and this place has plenty of that.

I’m here because of my friend Nina who owns Acme Mercantile in nearby Ann Arbor. Long story short, she went to the Autorama last year and noticed that no one was selling Gearhead. Seeing an opportunity to right a great, great wrong, she took it upon herself to make sure that Gearhead was in fact a presence at Autorama in the most obvious way possible, by flying me in! To complete the picture, she also invited Claudia from No Fun Records to share the booth with us – and what a booth it is! Between Nina’s Rat Fink-heavy store stock, all the Gearhead Magazines and Apparel, and the No Fun discography, we got a winner here folks. Thanks Nina, I owe you one. I’ll keep you updated daily from here until I once again go West…

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