Why? Try, and the Best Birthday Party I Wasn’t Actually Invited To, or My weekend report from Detroit
Sunday, March 30, 2008
To those of you reading outside of the confines of the southeast side of the fine state of Michigan, I must preface this sad tale of traveling travail with an explanation about the Detroit “metropolitan” area.
The difference between the Detroit music fan versus the Chicago/New York/San Francisco/Seattle fan is that we are one of the only major musical centers in the US that gets skipped regularly by many touring bands. Worse, the area is so spread out that often bands hit up surrounding cities like Ann Arbor, Lansing, and (gasp) Mt. Pleasant, skipping Detroit even though it makes natural sense to play the Motor City, particularly if the band is heading Toronto-ward from Chicago. I’m not saying that Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Mt. Pleasant don’t deserve shows. I am saying that the area is too spread out and spread thin for any one show to get the audience it deserves and, in the meantime, we dedicated followers of music find ourselves spouting far too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from our hour-long drives (of course, no decent public transpo around here either). (Continued)




