By Max Conroy:  

     The night prior to the Sharon Jones show, Cousin Justin and I made it to the Magic Bag to check out Scott Morgan’s Powertrane and Blue Cheer.  I’d never been to the Bag, which apparently hosts a brew and view, along with live music.  From what we saw, there doesn’t appear to be a bad seat in the house, which is actually filled with seats, and a tiny pit in front of the stage.  The beer was reasonable: under $5 for a Bells.
     Scott Morgan opened the show.  His band consisted of himself on vocals and guitar, Bobby Gillespie on lead guitar (apparently a Detroit rock scene vet who played with Rob Tyner post-5) and a dramatically younger rhythm section in comparison to Gillespie and Morgan.  The Sonic Rendezvous Band is a band that you either absolutely love or you just don’t get it.  I’m part of the former crowd.  When I got the Sweet Nothing album (recorded in ‘78 at Second Chance in Ann Arbor and released in ‘98) when it was released, my freshman year of college, I could hardly believe what I heard.  While playing it for the first time, I saw a buddy on my floor walk by and I grabbed him and forced him to listen to a track at high volume.  He likes cool music and is still a good friend, but he’s definitely a person who doesn’t get it.  He politely found a reason to get the hell out of my dorm room quickly and I learned that people don’t have to dig your tunes to be cool.  SRB never released an album, only a single, which the cousins have shamefully unloaded twice.  That’s part of the mystery behind the band, that they could be so fucking sweet and never actually be a proper band.  Scott Morgan was just as important as Fred Smith was to SRB, writing and singing approximately half of their material, so naturally I was very excited to have the opportunity to see some of this stuff live.  Surprisingly, Scott Morgan still sounds great.  He has to be over sixty and sings from the gut.  They did two SRB songs, Love and Learn and Highjackin’ Love, which were great.  His voice doesn’t quite have the force it did back in the day, but that was 30 years ago.  They also did a Rob Tyner song, which Mr. Gillespie wrote and several songs that appear on the new Powertrane album.  The highlight of their set was a blazing rendition of Respect, which was the song that put Scott Morgan on the map with the Rationals back in the sixties.  There was one flub, where the drummer wasn’t able to hit a cymbal at the right time, but that seemed to piss off Scott Morgan more than the crowd, which is what we should expect from a professional. 
     Now for Blue Cheer.  As I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t really know a whole lot about the band or what they’d sound like after all this time.  The most recent Cheer song I’d heard up till the show was recorded in 1968.  Walking up to the doors Justin and I were talking about the Grande and how we were certain that they played there and that we’d have been on acid if we were walking up to the doors of the Grande to see them.  After the first song, Dickie Peterson reminisced that his first time playing Detroit was at the Grande in ‘68 with the Stooges and the MC5, which he called the first power rock concert.  As Dickie recanted the days of yore my heart started to regain its natural rhythm and my brain stopped boiling for a second.  Dickie is the rock star of the band and the bassist, so the bass is cranked to the point of affecting the body’s internal chemistry: eyes cross, synapses misfire.  Then, wham!  They’re into the next song.  They played virtually all Vincebus Eruptum, excluding BB King’s Rock Me, and several more recent numbers, more recent being ‘85 to the present.  The band is made up of original members, Dickie and drummer Paul Whaley, and Andrew McDonald on guitar who has been with them for the past 23 or so years and wails with the classic uncontrollable guitar-face.  Whaley looked to be in poor health, but could still pound those skins.  Peterson even mentioned in between songs that there’d been rumors about Whaley, presumably that he wasn’t with us anymore.  He also mentioned that he’d seen Whaley do unspeakable things with Janis Joplin, which was kind of cool.  Justin asked me if I saw that guy walking down the street would I believe that he’d been with Joplin…no.  They sounded great, played well and rank up there with Slayer and Motorhead as one of the loudest, heaviest shows I’ve ever seen.  Immediately after the music stopped, I looked around and noticed that every last person was wearing ear plugs.  I should have brought ear plugs.