Posted 5:25 PM by Paul
Trust

We had my sister in law around for dinner. A good evening. She is a lecturer in Actuarial Mathematics in Canada. Her main claim to fame is that she predicted in her PhD dissertation that most life insurance companies were teetering on the brink of insolvency and that with profits investment polices which were over-reliant on the stock market were a bit risky. She was written off as a left wing scaremonger but got her doctorate all the same. Now she must have great difficulty in refraining from crowing I TOLD YOU SO YOU DUMB ASSES!. But she manages it because she is an academic, a scientist and believes in the truth. Not sure if I would be so phlegmatic.

Good food, convivial company, fine wine and cold dry sherry ( this year's re-discovery) and The White Stripes played at volume are the perfect recipe for a great evening - unless of course you don't like The White Stripes. The Stripes are now added to my list of Great American Contributions to World Culture. Detroit and environs have given us some class acts - The Stripes, Tamla Motown, Was Not Was, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Eminem, Kiss, Iggy Pop MC5 and more. OK - Kid Rock is from the Motor City but we will leave him to Pamela Anderson. It's like the USA version of Liverpool.

I visited the Detroit in 1984. It was closed. I was managing a Sheffield R&B / Soul outfit called Floy Joy and by a succession of events which came about due to a mixture of their talent for music and my talent for bullshit, we ended up recording their first album on the night shift at the Detroit Sound Suite with Don Was at the controls. I just missed seeing Aretha Franklin recording a jingle for a new Ford commercial. But Detroit was not swinging. The city centre was shut down - car plants had closed and economic activity had shifted to the suburbs based around 4 new malls - Northland, Southland, Eastland and Westland. It was like a wierd movie. I am a great fan of consumer capitalism when it works but when it goes wrong and there is nothing to take it's place? Well it's a mess.

The finest night was when the band had a break from recording and we had drinks at the Dynasty Cocktail Lounge. Don's assistant Garzelle described it as a place where "Black working class people go to kick ass". In fact it was the set of Shaft. Waitress service, small tables with low lights. a kicking house band (which included members of Aretha's backing group and old members of The Pips) and a clientele which had dressed to impress. White suits, fedoras, sparkling jewels, beaded afros, immaculate make up. The house band thanked Floy Joy in an annoucement from the stage for coming to Detroit to record an album and also for giving work to local black session musicans. The whole club rose to its feet to applaud the boys from Britain who had come to the Motor City. The Sheffield lads were embarrassed but pleased. The entrance to the club had been through a double steel door and we had all been frisked for fire arms but it would be hard to find a more congenial place to have a drink. People's manners were impeccable.

Around 3. a.m we left the club and emerged from the set of Shaft and entered the set of Mad Max 2. Burnt out homes and burnt out lives. We had burgers and fries at White Castle and returned back to our apartment opposite one of the malls. I think it was Southlands - but I was later told that the 4 malls were virtually indistiguishable.

Detroit was my first experience of what happens when it all goes wrong without a safety net. 12 years later I visited post-Sandinista Nicaragua and saw something much worse. But for a short time in Detroit we lived in the USA and trusted the people we met. Don Was was a treasure. Detroit was packed with great Americans and a few people who would not have been out of place in the Sopranos. There was a lot of trust. It worked. The album was released. It bombed. But everybody got paid. Unusual in the record business.

Blair has been back in the newspapers on the eve of his 50th birthday telling the world that he admires Bush - "an intelligent man whom I trust". He would have got a better reaction in the UK if he had anounced he was hanging out with Marilyn Manson. I think that what Blair really feels is that he now has to trust Bush. He really has no choice. A little bit like the brow beaten wife who waits at home for the philandering husband who is out yet again with the boys until 6.00 a.m. But she has invested so much of her life in the idiot that there is no way back. Besides, he controls the money and has the bigger fists. In the same interview Blair was rattling on about how we "all shared the same values" as the Bush aministration and that is why we must support them in a new "strategic alliance" - management speak for kissing their butt.

A few days ago George's kid brother Jeb addressed a National Rifle Association convention thanking them for helping elect George W. Jeb said. " The sound of our guns is the sound of freedom" . These are not my values. But paradoxically, my values are the same as the people we met in 1984 at the Dynasty Cocktail Lounge. But many of them won't get to vote because they are black and got busted for some minor misdemeanour way back when and did not have a rich daddy to get them off the hook.

But we still love America or bits of it anyway but as Was not Was said in "Out Come the Freaks".

" Who can now say that the Ship of State is not out of control...out of control..out of control......."