After a pretty dull 3 hours drive from Cleveland, yesterday I eventually made it to Detroit around 6pm. The area around my hotel was pretty sad (apparently the highlight was the Subway around the corner, and a “Pancake house” a few blocks away), so I decided to head down to “The Loving Touch” in Ferndale for a gig I had saved on Facebook and that I knew pretty much nothing about.
And oh my was I in for an absolute treat! Starting from the excellent beer from the brewery next door, but mostly for the incredibly talented musicians I got to see play live.
Funny enough – coincidence or sign? – earlier in the day I was chatting with a friend about Jim Jarmusch’s movies, and this gig felt like getting thrown straight into “Down by Law” or “Dead Man“.
The evening started with Bob Fleming and the Drunk Girl Chorus, “a two person one man band from North Carolina, Bringing songs of sadness, darkness, bourbon, and murder”. Funny enough, they were not originally supposed to play but got called in earlier in the day and drove 5 hours straight to make it to Detroit in time for the show (and I am really happy they did 🙂 ).
The headliners of the show were the Legendary Shack Shakers from Kentucky. Even though the place was half empty, they put up one of the craziest, most energetic shows I have seen in years, a truly mesmerizing experience.
During the evening I also had a chance to chat with a few really nice people who really made me feel Detroit’s friendly vibe.
Before making my way to Chicago, the highlight of today was the Detroit Institute of Arts, a truly remarkable institution not only for its amazing collection, but particularly for its focus on African American art. The building itself is also a great structure, and the host of the magnificent Detroit Industry fresco cycle painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera in the early 1930s.
The collection itself includes some great paintings by Picasso and Pissarro, and a few great examples of American Impressionism, alongside a very broad overview of African American artists spacing from members of the Harlem Renaissance like Marsh to more recent works like Wiley’s irreverent, provocative “cover” of Gericault’s “Officer of the Hussars”, challenging the “whiteness” of traditional portraits of military officers and heroes on shiny horses through history.
All in all, I was quite impressed by the great vibe I felt in Detroit, and I was a bit sad to leave so quickly… This is definitely a place I’d want to come back to sooner rather than later!