ArtistInfo

Primo
Plum Street

Album US 2003 on Kavish Media label
Rock

Live performance on "Rock 'N' Roller" recorded at the Royal Oak Music Theatre, Royal Oak, MI LINER NOTES PLUM STREET REDUX ART: The De-Sterilization of Experience Also found on the Pat Halley Tribute site "Plum Street was an actual place, though for many in Detroit it was, and is, a myth, a dream, a meadow in the mind where their imaginations were fertilized for the first time--or, at least got some dirt on them. In 1966, the City of Detroit actually designated a block on Plum Street as "Detroit's Art Community;" it was intended to be our equivalent of London's Soho or New York's Greenwich Village. Plum Street became, for awhile, our version of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, with the Haiku Coffeehouse and the Red Roach coffeehouse where folk-rock groups like the Spikedrivers or rock bands like the Rationals, the MC5, or the SRC played, and local poets such as John Sinclair, Andre Codrescu, or Phililip Lamantia raved. Here, many protest demonstrations were planned or debated, including the "Love-In" that occurred on Belle Isle in 1967. Plum Street had the House of Mystique, where exotic and intoxicating potions of incense and body oils abounded as well as psychedelic posters, records and art objects, perpetrated as a deliberate insult to Elmer Fudd and everyone like him. There were art galleries and clothing boutiques and, get this, a "Head Shop!" More importantly, Plum Street had the Fifth Estate bookstore with copies of that inflammatory newspaper and such other underground notables as the San Francisco Oracle, Chicago Seed, Los Angeles Free Press, and the East Village Other! Here was a place that our parents and teachers warned us about. Here we could discover, first-hand or otherwise, what Timothy Leary was really about; the strange musings of William Burroughs, or the very weird cartoons of R. Crumb. Here you could dream out loud and discover that you could actually be intelligent and still be cool, in fact, that was the only way you could be cool! Perhaps quaint by today's standards, Plum Street represented--made permissible--a place where you could be a man and not have to be in the army, or be a woman without having to be a bride! Very big stuff in those days...and maybe even today. We dedicate this album to that myth--and to alternative culture everywhere--to remind ourselves and everybody else that there must be a wildlife refuge of the mind, some place not zoned for a subdivision or marked on a corporate spreadsheet. What used to be "Detroit's Arts Community" is now a Detroit Edison (DTE) parking lot, just north of the MGM casino. It's vaguely similar to converting an Athens into a Rome with the flip of a coin. It's so... American. We dedicate this album, for what it's worth, to all musicians scorned or debased by the Musical-Industrial Complex; to the unpublished poets who get thrown off of busses for talking to themselves; to all the one-eared painters, to Bigfoot and all the hideous ghosts in abandoned buildings who've nobody to torment; to all the singers in bathrooms who never notice the goblin peering from beneath the drain; to all the actors and actresses everywhere--which is all of us--who, most of the time, don't even realize that we are always acting."

Musicians

	Primo , album by
	John Sase eb, voc, bass guitar, vocals
	Michael Gerard dr, key, voc, GB drums, keyboards, vocals
	Jere Stormer voc, lead guitar, harmonica, mandolin, vocals
	Jack Koenig-Fisher production manager, engineer, cover, theremin, synth
	Gary Senick voc, rhythm guitar, vocals

Producers

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