Detroit’s own SPIKE-DRIVERS, having just finished a mind-blowing engagement at the Living End Lounge, are now preparing for their first concert appearance in a benefit for the FIFTH ESTATE.
Besides doing their unusual brand of folk-rock (including their new Reprise release, “Baby Let Me Tell You”), they will add two amplified violins and a flute on several tunes to produce strange and mysterious sounds.
This historic concert will be held Friday, January 20th, at Upper DeRoy Auditorium on the Wayne University campus. Tickets will be $2.00 at the door and $1.75 advance (available at the FIFTH ESTATE bookstore on Plum St.).
This writer made a sojourn to the Living End for an interview with the group to find out what they are feeling about their music and its relation to the other various forms of pop music.
I asked Sid Brown, the lead guitarist what he thought was in the future for pop music and folk-rock in particular.
“Well, based on the profound changes that pop music has undergone in the recent period and the vital new forces involved—Beatles, Stones, Spoonful, Donovan, the San Francisco scene and the Spike-Drivers—I see revolutionary upheavals hitherto incomprehensible and unrealizable in Pop Music. I look forward to the urban renewal of Tin Pan Alley to its proper place in the garbage can of history.
“I see the final dissolution of the formula sound hacks and the pretentious top forty freaks. I see music of beauty-love-guts-poetry-life force superseding the static outmoded forms. The whole music scene we are involved in is but a pale reflection of universal revolutionary turmoil bubbling everywhere. Above all, in its most general terms, it is a movement for freedom, peace and posterity.”
Future SPIKE-DRIVER engagements include a dance-concert for THE PAPER in East Lansing and a one week appearance at the RAVEN GALLERY beginning Jan. 24th, with a preview matinee, Sun., Jan. 22.