Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

1. Riding on the Freeway: A Riff on the Place Called Motown

C h a p t e r 1 Riding on the Freeway: A Riff on the Place Called Motown We’re goin’ riding on the freeway . . . in my pink Cadillac; We’re goin’ riding on the freeway . . . and we ain’t coming back.” —“Freeway of Love,” sung by Aretha Franklin in 1985 The Mother Lode of Symbolism “Made in Detroit.” This seems quaint, now that the label “Made in China” screams at us from virtually every product we pick up, belying the proud industrial heritage that once was America’s. This heritage was forged and stamped and pressed and cut and molded in the long-abandoned temples of production that defined Detroit. To understand Detroit, you must understand one thing: in its soul, it is a place that makes things—metal things. Ever since it grew to be a metropolis in the late nineteenth century, its dominant businesses were about shaping metal into useful objects. Railway cars, stoves, marine engines, and work boats eventually gave way in the early twentieth century to automobiles, myriad gadgets that kept them running, and accessories that made them more comfortable to drive. Forty years ago, Detroit also took the lead in making the ultimate auto accessory: driving music. This music was so infectious that it spread like an epidemic from the ghettoized airwaves of “Negro music” into the homes of mainstream white teenagers, becoming “The Sound of Young America.” The leading carrier of this epidemic was a home-grown, black-owned and operated record company whose moniker became the region’s unofficial 4 Chapter 1 nickname: Motown. Detroit’s marketing juggernaught used its cars and its music as the flux to weld youth culture to the myth of American freedom and rugged individualism. The result: the still-powerful visage of a muscular motor vehicle rolling along an endless, empty road, its retracted convertible top exposing flowing golden tresses, the wrinkle-free faces in the front seats breaking into satisfied smiles as their favorite Top-40s hit comes on the radio. One cannot imagine an America without the car-music culture Detroit created and so effectively embedded in the nation’s psyche. But can one now imagine an America without Detroit? Detroit did more than just make cars and music to play while driving them; it made both in notably innovative ways. It is well known that Henry Ford designed the world’s first moving assembly line for autos in Ford Motor Company’s Highland Park plant. This was the largest auto factory in the world—six acres of floor space under one roof—when it came online in 1910. A decade later he could boast of the first vertically integrated auto production facility, at the River Rouge plant in Dearborn. In this wondrous complex, iron ore, coke, limestone, and glass were gulped in at one end and belched out as an automobile a few days later, spawned by the sweat of 102,811 workers at its peak in 1929. It is less well known that Detroit made music in similarly inventive ways. Berry Gordy, Motown Records’ founder, developed a record production system that mimicked “Fordism” in its division of labor and its focus on a product attractive for the mass market. Motown Records even designed its music to be appropriate for the first generation of low-fidelity car radios. Long before MTV (or even videotape), it pioneered the pop musical video as a marketing device. The cultural symbiosis among youth, cars, and music was never more powerfully glorified than when Detroit’s Martha Reeves and the Vandellas were filmed singing “Dancing in Street” sitting in the back of a Mustang convertible as it rolled down the assembly line at the Rouge in 1965. And it’s not surprising, with its alien-like work environments stressing machine-like precision, that Detroit later would become the acknowledged birthplace of Techno music. Unfortunately, the tragedy of Detroit is that it has never resolved the fierce competition over who was going to make these things and who was going to enjoy the benefits of this production. Thus, Detroit also has innovated in many political ways, both radical and conservative. The Nation of Islam (the “Black Muslims”) was founded in Detroit in 1930 by the visionary Wallace D. Fard. The sit-down strike, whereby a well-organized cadre of unionists occupy and then shut down production at a strategic choke point, Riding on the Freeway 5 was...