results could be disappointing. No… the results could be catastrophic.’
We had a long chat, turned down several invitations to various parties and left. The police, waiting for us at the end of the drive, were impressed. ‘When you went in there we expected you to come out through an eleventh- floor window. How in the hell did you get talking to those guys? You ain’t even black,’ said one.
Observant bunch, the Detroit cops.
No, they really are. Two days later, we were being driven round an area of the city called Brush which had obviously just been on the receiving end of a B-52 strike. Not a single house was in one piece. Every car in every street was a wreck.
There’d been a drive-by shooting, two people were dead and our chauffeurs were out looking for suspects. It’s OK, that’s what they were paid to do. They were policemenists.
We were chatting about this and that, about how no one has a job because there are no jobs to be had, when one of them, Hal, suddenly asked if we’d like to see an arrest.
In the blink of an eye, the car had stopped, and two fifteen-year-olds were spread-eagled on the bonnet.
This would have made good footage but sadly, the Chevvy had child locks and we couldn’t get out without scrabbling over the front seats and tumbling into the street with my legs tangled up in the umbilical cord that links the camera to the sound equipment.
By the time we were ready to roll, Hal had pulled a small gun and some drugs from the suspects and radioed for back-up… which arrived just as the crowd started throwing stones at us.
Another guy was arrested and as he lay on the ground, his head pinned to the road by Hal’s shoe, his friend told cameraman Keith Schofield, ‘Get that on your camcorder, Johnnie Fucking Video.’
This was getting ugly and we already knew that everyone was packing heat. You can buy a gun in Detroit for less than half a dozen tomatoes and the statistics show that a gun is a lot more useful.
I must confess that I kept staring at the tiny pistol that had been confiscated earlier and was now lying on the passenger seat of the police car. Was it loaded? Where was the safety catch? Had anyone in the crowd started firing, you should be in no doubt that I’d have fired back.
And I’m the guy who had to lie in a cold room for three days after I once shot a sparrow with an air rifle.
Happily, we emerged from the confrontation in one piece, even though our Chrysler Town and Country people carrier had taken a direct hit.
Compared to Detroit, the rest of America is Trumpton. You ask an American if he’s ever been there and he’ll be too flabbergasted to answer. You can buy T-shirts elsewhere in the States which say things like ‘Don’t Mess With Me. I Have Friends In Detroit’ or ‘DETROIT — Where The Weak Are Killed And Eaten’.
That’s strange because, just 30 years ago, Detroit was the most vibrant city America had ever seen. The people were rich. The factories were humming. You could hear the buzz all round the world. So what turned the motor capital of the world into the murder capital of the world?
Well, way back at the dawn of automotive time, and seemingly quite by chance, a number of individuals set up shop in and around De Troit (it used to be French) making cars. A great many covered wagons had been built there and the city simply added the newfangled internal combustion engine.
This city was home base to Lincoln, Cadillac, Pontiac, Chevrolet, Ford, Mercury, Chrysler, Hudson, Plymouth, Buick, Dodge, Packard and Oldsmobile. It was The Motor City.
There were more car-makers than people and, to attract workers from elsewhere in the States, the pay was high. By the late fifties, the average industrial wage rate in America was $1.50 an hour but in Detroit they were getting $3.
You could start work in one factory on a Monday morning and, if you didn’t like it, catch the afternoon shift in another later that day.
Demand was phenomenal, too. These were the US boom years, before the oil crisis, Vietnam and Watergate, and everyone wanted a car: a big one with a V8 engine from Detroit. In the fifties and sixties, 97 per cent of all cars sold in America were made in America.
No car sums up the times better than the original 1964 Mustang. This two-door saloon was an adventurous departure, not only for Ford but for the whole car industry.
Until the Mustang came along, every car had a specific engine and a specific level of luxury. There was no choice. But with the ‘pony car’, as it became known, customers could choose what motor they wanted and even what body style — two-door saloon or convertible.
And there was an options list. You could go for bucket seats, for instance, or a limited slip differential or a rev counter. It could be a 6-cylinder shopping car or a V8 wind-in-the-hair tyre-shredder.
Ford guessed they were on to something with this new idea and reckoned they’d sell 100,000 Mustangs in the first twelve months. In fact, they sold 680,000 making it the fastest-selling car of all time — a record that’s never been beaten.
But today, the only records being made are crime statistics.
So what went wrong? Well, most importantly, there was the oil crisis which made people slightly less willing to run a V8 with its Oliver-Reedesque thirst. They wanted smaller engines and turned their attention to the newfangled Japanese offerings.
And hey, these cars never broke down, so even when the oil problem went away many stuck with Honda and Datsun and Toyota.
Then there was assembly-line automation, which was bad enough, but cheap land prices didn’t help either.
When the car company wanted to update a factory, it didn’t simply put in a robot here and a conveyor belt there. No, it shut up shop completely and built a new plant, usually out of town where land was cheaper.
Detroit might have been able to cope with all these things but unfortunately there was economic trouble in the South and thousands of black workers were heading to Detroit in a fruitless search for work. They’d heard about the promise of three bucks an hour but when they got there, the cupboard was bare.
Social unrest was inevitable. In 1967, the African-Americans took to the streets and had themselves the riot to end all riots.
Bob Seger, who at the time was an up-and-coming rock and roller from Detroit, remembers coming home from a gig one night to find tanks on the streets. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. This was Detroit and the whole place was on fire. There were police everywhere. They’d got the national guard out. It was like a war zone. It was worse than a war zone. It was hell.’
Shortly after, the White Flight began, as respectable middle-class white families packed up and moved to the suburbs, where half the factories had gone anyway.
In ten years, the population of Detroit halved from two million to one million. Even the Motown record label, which had made Detroit a world capital of music too with its wealth of black artists like Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves, Diana Ross and the Temptations, moved to Los Angeles.
They weren’t ‘Dancing in the Streets’ any more. Madonna may have been born there but she left, too.
And that was it. Detroit became a wrecked shell whose population is still falling. There are no jobs downtown today and when Hudson’s, the big department store, closed down, most of the city-centre retailers followed suit and went under too.
It’s hard for a European to understand this because we have no equivalent, but there is a very real possibility that one day, Detroit will implode: that it will simply cease to exist.
Already, there are people in the suburbs who are proud to say they haven’t been downtown in twenty years. The nineteen-year-old doorman at our hotel in Dearborn admitted one night he’d
He simply couldn’t believe it when, every morning, we bundled our kit into the trucks and went off to the centre, even though it was only twelve miles away. He was even more amazed, though, when we actually came back each night.
He obviously had a word with the manager who, one day, advised us not to go down there any more. When he found that we had to and that we preferred to drive in on Michigan Avenue, rather than down the safer expressway, he rushed off to explain to the girls on the reception desk that our rooms might become available sooner than he’d thought.
