The Grande Ballroom closed in '72. That was owned by Russ Gibb who also owned Keener radio. The Grande was the MC5's home venue. They were considered the house band. I went to the Grande once but the 5 were not playing that night. I saw Pentangle and someone else. Gibb was very in tight with the MC5 and John Sinclair and all those folks.
W4 was not that progressive until about '72 and they were never as progressive as ABX was in the '69-'71 era. ABX went downhill and became a standard classic rock station by the mid 70s although some of the old DJs were still there like Jerry Lubin and Harvey O. I remember listening to ABX in late '69 or early '70. That was when I first heard King Crimson, John Coltrane, Taj Mahal, White Noise, Eddie Harris, Pharoah, Arthur Brown, Graham Bond, Amon Duul, Beefheart, Quicksilver. Totally changed my outlook on music and life. I was 11 then and when I turned 12, I used my paper route money to buy these records and I knew I had to smoke pot. I just asked around and a neighborhood guy who was a friend of my older brother (who was a folk-singing college antiwar radical) hooked me up with this really good dope and also gave me LSD and mescaline and I would listen to all that stuff f-ucked out of my mind on psychotropics and having religious visions and psychedelic experiences coming out my ass.
Meanwhile, CKLW slid more and more into "adult rock" which was kind of an AM version of WNIC--a station I hate with every fiber of my being. Eventually, it went over to talk radio. Today there is AM 580 CKWW broadcasting from the old Big 8 studio in Windsor. They are an oldies station with the identical format of CKLW but without the shlocky DJ Top 40 voices (although some of them are still same DJs that used to do the CKLW gig). They stream over the internet if you want to hear them. That was the Detroit-area rock radio of the 60s and early 70s until FM snatched the market away. Now, it all sounds like s-hit. I listen to satellite these days.
Detroit also had a counter-culture thing in the late 60s with the Plum Street scene. There was also a counter-culture store on Gratiot called the Plum Pit. I think they were connected to the Plum Street hippies but I've never known for sure. Actually, the Plum Pit is still there and still open. All these years and I've never been in the place. But, yeah, Death would have gotten noticed playing for the Plum Street folks. There wasn't much available to them from '74 on.
Well, there was the Trading Post. It was a headshop on Gratiot about 3 or 4 miles from the Plum Pit. I used buy my smoking accessories and Zap comix there. Back then, you could score just about any drug in the parking lot. They started up a little venue there and I caught the original New York Dolls there and Iggy--of course, he played everywhere in the Detroit area. I think BTO's very first show in Detroit was there but maybe I'm wrong. I thought I heard an ad on the radio for BTO playing at the Trading Post--most people had no idea who they were at that time. It didn't last long, though. Death could have had a shot playing there but it might have closed down by then.
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