Our band could be your life
Real names'd be proof
Me and Mike Watt, we played for years
Punk rock changed our lives.
—D. Boon, “History Lesson, Part II” by the Minutemen
HISTORY LESSON PART 1
Birmingham, Michigan, six miles north of Detroit, remains my ancestral hometown.
Founded in 1864, two months before a comparatively minor Civil War incursion in Virginia, the Battle of Yellow Tavern, where the 5th Michigan Calvary killed a famous Confederate Major General, J.E.B. Stuart.
Five years earlier, in 1859, Stuart had led US Marines in capturing a wounded John Brown in his ill-fated attempt to forcibly END SLAVERY. Brown’s small army of 21 friends and family tried liberating the massive munitions storage at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, through a daring plan to arm those enslaved on farms throughout the surrounding countryside.
As if to avenge the hanging of John Brown, Michiganders shot Stuart (a slaveowner, like almost all Confederate generals — and unlike most rebel enlisted men) at Yellow Tavern and defeated a detachment of the retreating Gray.
None of my students have ever heard of John Brown. Most cannot name who fought in the Civil War, or even why they fought and died in the largest numbers ever documented in this hemisphere.
I blame this disturbingly common ignorance mainly on educational institutions, dominated by the high-stakes testing industry, in the more measurable obsession with disparate facts over discussing meaningful foundations.
So my paternal grandfather Charles J. Boyer, a traveling textbook salesman with Allyn & Bacon (now part of a massive educational publishing conglomerate) died over ten years before I was born, and my Latin teacher grandmother, Zilpha Campbell, just before my birth. My maternal grandma Martha Pennington, wife of Arthur Tull, the Pontiac Business School CEO, generously bequeathed me $750 before she passed around my 5th birthday.
Mr. Tull, a direct descendent of Jethro Tull, the inventor of the seed drill (and obscure chosen name for a famous English rock band), had preceded her, always emphasizing the importance of living near the best schools, which in Detroit at the time of my mother’s ascendant teenage years, meant Detroit Central High School (according to then superintendent Frank Cody).
A 100% white suburban existence served as my pretentious playground, next to the wealthiest zip code in Michigan, where the 2020 average median household income now boasts $108,482.1 Our uncharacteristically modest ranch house perched a block across Adams Road from the slightly more diverse suburbia of Troy, which plastered its bizarre motto on city limits signs:
“City of Tomorrow, Today.”
My reserved father, the probate attorney Robert Campbell Boyer and my adoring mother Edith Margaret Tull, his rapid-typing-secretary-spouse and equally avid golf partner, believed strongly in the Birmingham Public Schools, still highly-ranked in circles which still do such rankings.
In the 1950s, they had unconsciously joined what some sociologists term as a mass White Flight, where white families migrated to suburban neighborhoods with two- car garages guaranteed to remain the same ethnicity through real estate redlining.
This more hidden housing discrimination qualifies as covert systemic racism.
Detroit, once the fifth largest city in the USA, saw the nation-wide urban exodus expanded in the decades following the violent 1943 race riots, first through (a) moving the residence out to the suburbs sometime after the Second World War, then later (b) the business (especially after the even more destructive 1967 riots) and finally, (c) the city church or temple — and in my little world, my good Sunday friends Dave, his brother Tony, and Donald.
As a disenchanted, failing 18 year-old athlete unable to earn anything resembling a partial scholarship in any of my four separate sports (football, basketball, baseball and tennis), I launched a definitive escape by enlisting in the Marine Corps, following my two closest school friends, Eric and Rob.
Seemed logical at the time, with no war going on.
Unlike my two comrades, I stayed a Marine recruit for only four hours, until an alert entry doctor noticed a small patch of psoriasis on my elbows and knees, automatically disqualifying me from service (between wars, anyway).
On my 19th birthday, I used grandma’s funds to purchase a five-piece Pearl drum set, two cymbals and a hi-hat, to expand upon my 8-year-old Ludwig student snare.
What began as a running joke with a Michigan State University dorm mate, a soulful vocalist and highly skilled guitarist, Mike “Woody” Wood, we started doggedly recruiting some other student musicians to form The Blanks, to rock the Who, Clash and various blues covers with a few new high-energy originals.
My literary diet of radical literature, of say, Marx and Engels, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Malcom X, etc. could not satisfy my increasing restlessness. The summer after I turned 21, much to my parent’s dismay, I dropped out of MSU with a 3.5 GPA for future reference and a strangely strong desire to be a punk rocker.
Some students take a gap year. I took a gap decade.
After turning 23, I also left Birmingham for good, moving about ten miles south to the more working class yet trendy Ferndale, Michigan, into a rented band house (rocking the basement) two blocks east of fabled Woodward Avenue.
1986 version of the Blanks (Detroit), with the author yucking it up on the drums at early 11:00 pm show in The Paradigm, a short-lived Harmony Park venue. The quintet would shrink to a power trio, recording several LPs, 45 and cassettes, before disbanding in 1995. . . .
In late 1985, Woody traded the quixotic band dream for an eventual actual career as a biochemist. Undaunted, I leaped to Motown proper, to the underground art, music and political activism mecca widely known as the Cass Corridor (gentrified in the 2010s as “Midtown”), continuing pursuit of rock ‘n’ roll glory in a reconstituted Blanks.
I have remained a Detroit resident (and Birmingham ex-patriate) ever since.
Incidentally, the US Supreme Court would eventually rule Birmingham practiced institutional racism in the city’s determined history of trying to prohibit lower income housing, even for seniors.
In the spirit of pioneer punk rockers like Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, Johnny Rotten and Jello Biafra, I soon adopted a stage name. For over a decade, I enjoyed a somewhat bohemian urban adventure as Bill Blank, a struggling, energetic and slightly charismatic musician and songwriter.
From 1985-1996, a rough residential caretaker arrangement with a remarkably gifted bass player and good friend, Dean Western, at the Art Center Music School (formerly Hamilton and Sons Funeral Home), taught me how to live creatively off a truly meager income. Music lessons during the day, dueling band practices at night, with parties on the Saturday evenings when neither of us played a club. The yearly Halloween galas were the most wildly unrestrained, in the same parlor which laid out the late great Harry Houdini.
For a few years, I flaunted a roughly $60 a week existence.
Bouncing around the Corridor, my romanticized status also gifted me numerous opportunities to stay glued to an informal community of resistance.
My ardent activism included many anti-nuke and anti-war protests, supporting women’s clinics, periodic benefits for area soup kitchens, joining union picket lines and several years of imaginative demonstrations against the world’s largest trash incinerator, as it heavily polluted Detroit for 30 years until its final 2019 shutdown.
So much for my Birmingham upbringing.
HISTORY LESSON 1.5
At the start of each school year, the Promethean Board illuminates my over forty paid job titles and occupations, beginning with kitchen work at a few different restaurants (free food still the best benefit besides health care coverage). The list stays up for a couple of days, yet most students seem too disinterested or too overwhelmed to ask many initial personal teacher inventory questions.
Mr. William Boyer’s Employment History:
Dishwasher, bus boy, short-order cook, lawn care specialist, camp counselor, telephone book distributor, gas station attendant (“petroleum transfer agent”), stock boy, cashier, bedspread and linen sales, parking lot attendant, driver/chauffeur, mover, delivery man, movie theater tabulator, door security, interior house painter, bartender, janitor, building caretaker, certified lifeguard, stage actor, movie extra, theater director, theater producer, musician, percussion and piano teacher, live sound mixer, paralegal clerk, legal process server, basketball coach, baseball coach, drama coach, debate coach, diversity club sponsor, baseball umpire, journalist, songwriter, playwright, school substitute, union representative, and of course, social studies teacher. . . .
One student will doubtingly mumble, “You had all those jobs?”
Another, “Movie extra? What movie?”
Secretly, I wish someone would ask, “How does an anarchist teach government?”
Deeper probing usually occurs later in September, during some appropriate—or perhaps inappropriate—digression, such as when I casually mention my unusual arrest experiences (usually when a peaceful protest excessively annoyed law enforcement).
Yes, I inevitably refer to my apparent lost years, where I dropped out of college to make music (occasionally enjoying brief weekend tours beyond Detroit) with The Blanks and then Angry Red Planet, where we once opened for over a thousand mostly Dead Milkmen and Electric Love Muffin fans at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, in October, 1987. Added stints with ML Liebler and the Magic Poetry Band (highlighted with gigs in Woodstock, New York and Kent State, Ohio) and Frame 313 closed out my spiraling rock star delusions.
Interestingly, my teenage angst included writing two underground ditties describing a disappointing formal education experience, such as “Be False To Your School:”
Find yourself in class/ignoring the teacher’s scream/but the fear still lasts/apparently it’s just a dream
We spilled into the halls/reminded not to run/for the slightest privilege/was the ultimate freedom
They want you to be true/They want you to obey/They like the way things are/they want to keep them that way. . . .
And the reggae-inspired, “Weekend Education:”
At Obedience School they trained me for the Big Dog Show
But I left when I learned some things I wasn’t supposed to know.
_____________________________
In 1991, after a decade of too much fun and too little funds, with some gentle urging of a mature, more intelligent, strongly feminist companion, I shuffled back to college, to Wayne State University, to recommence a political science BA while slowly shifting my artistic desires to (surprise) local theater stages.
My mother passed in 1995 at 71, after a tragically year-long ordeal with continuous complications from a brain aneurysm. My Bill Blank aspirations faded into an undeniable personal and economic reality. I gradually abandoned my waning musical ambitions for a marginally more restrained passion as playwright-poet-performer-author. . . . .
With the initiating persuasion of another sophisticated, more intelligent, astonishingly dedicated feminist partner, I would ultimately complete the necessary transition from my extended adolescence to the profoundly responsible, if underappreciated, vocation as educator. A part-time substitute, I finally pivoted to a full-time public school social studies teacher in 1999, the same year as the Bill Clinton impeachment and the Columbine High School massacre.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Back when I sincerely thought protest rock could change the world. . . .
Scratched up version features Bill Blank on vocals for antiwar anthem, “Say Can You See.” Late friend Linus O’Leary on the B-Side, “Where There’s Smoke.” Were The Blanks too late or too early for the times?
http://zipatlas.com/us/mi/city-comparison/median-household-income.htm