Feels Like Detroit

Jimmy, the drummer, finds the band their first set of matching suits—pale orange, the color of powdered drink mixes. He pinches the jacket lining between his fingers, then tries one on, twirling in front of the thrift-shop mirror in his best imitation of a Spinner or a Pip. The suits, more polyester than wool, are what passes for high fashion among the girls Jimmy knows, seventeen-year-olds who dream of being ogled while doing the spotlight dance on American Bandstand.

Critics will label the matching outfits a gimmick, an anachronism, but to Jimmy they are nothing but a reminder of the days before Detroit burned, when Casey Kasem was on WJBK, playing the bands Jimmy's father taught him to love: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Jamie Coe and the Gigolos, all the suit-wearing acts of Motown.

This is 1977, the year that punk breaks. No one here is really punk, though; Detroit has too much of its own musical heritage to jump on that bandwagon. Besides, the city is already intimate with the seeds of punk, in the catatonic wail of MC5, in the Marshall-amped chainsaw of Iggy and the Stooges. Jimmy makes his way to a pay phone and calls Mike Skill, his friend from Finney High on the East Side. Has there ever been a better name for a guitar player than Mike Skill? Mike and Jimmy have this vision: something simple, three chords, like those hometown heroes crossed with all the suits of the British invasion. And Jimmy and Mike don't want to have to keep their abundant hairstyles under wraps at the Ford plant. They want out of Detroit, but in 1977, the rest of the state might as well be on the other side of Hadrian's Wall.

Even Ann Arbor is a dream, a foreign country of corduroy and yellow shirts and long-haired girls who break out their smoothest jeans from Hudson's or the Pants Corral to check out Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band at Cobo Hall, long before Bob makes it onto AM radio. And what Mike and Jimmy wouldn't give to be on the radio.

One day, over the city's constant background noise of metal being stamped into engine parts, Mike tells Jimmy that he might have found them a front man, a guy who has his own group already, complete with three girl backup singers in sequined dresses. The would-be singer, a white kid from the Ukrainian ghetto of Hamtramck, shows up for his audition sporting a particularly impressive pompadour, a mountainous wave of black hair lacquered up with NuNile pomade and held stiff by Aqua Net.

He's got a clunky Ukrainian name, too; because this is a Horatio Alger story, Gatsby with tube amplification, he's going to smooth his name over, burnish it to a Simonized sheen, which is how Volodomyr Palamarchuk becomes Wally Palmar. And Wally—weaned on Burt Bacharach-style rhythm and blues, the rockabilly riffs of Eddie Cochran—loves the suits. He belts out a couple of cover tunes for his audition, and almost immediately, Jimmy and Mike ask Wally if he knows anyone who can lock down the low end on bass. The new band's first big gig—the Pontiac Silverdome, a primo slot opening for the Steve Miller Band, Peter Frampton, The J. Geils Band—is still a month away.

Jimmy calls his band The Romantics, because he thinks of the name on Valentine's Day, and they only play songs about girls. "When I Look in Your Eyes," "Tell It to Carrie," a blazing reinvention of Ray Davies's "She's Got Everything." Jimmy's band is a throwback too, filled with an insistence on rave-ups and immediate fun; but he takes things way too seriously, even from the start. After gigs, while the rest of the band knocks back Carling's Black Label and chats up overly mascara-ed girls, Jimmy writes little stories in his notebook. The band doesn't think much of the simple narrative he grafts onto the three chords that Mike, the...