City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

 Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002  of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recurring, subtextual motif: the largely public, interior spaces in which rock musicians are, working together, mysteriously inspired to craft extraordinary art. Sparked by these recollections, our collective memories of lifetimes of published media photographs, video footage, and texts help narrate Shimamoto’s account, but what he supplies is the vivid impression of a steady stream of band tension, always present, sometimes at a mere simmer before testing the limits of human control with maximum furies of full boil. By 1976, we learn, the SRB—Smith, Morgan, Rasmussen, and Scott Asheton—had solidified into a working, core unit, bearing the customary changes a band endures as it develops into maturity; ego dynamics, a local and expanding following, cohesive, intuitive interplay, management, a recording budget. The legendary single that Julian Cope has called “one of the highest of Detroit anthems ever,” City Slang was recorded in 1978 when American and British rock bands were already reinvigorating the genre with creative energies and styles that collectively was coming to be called punk. The propulsion that drives City Slang is the result of a band that has achieved—not tightness—but punk fusion; and not the machine processed fusion of latter day recording techniques, but of the organic, collective will of risk tolerant, regional minds laboring for rhythmic unity within the compressed interior atmospherics of late nineteen seventies barrooms, backstage spaces, private residences and rented recording studios. Punk rock was the genre wide effort to expose the denuded emperor in us all as a means of detailing our metaphorical subjection to global power systems the Clash identified as the Clampdown. The urban localities that populate Shimamoto’s The One That Got Away are vital to the lives of the punk listenership; it’s where many of us began acquiring the tools of resistance and surrender that when used in varying combinations define our current century. In our time of algorithms and nanotechnology the writing is literally everywhere you look.

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