We Almost Lost Detroit – Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson

SONG OF THE DAY

“We Almost Lost Detroit” by Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson (Bridges, Arista Records, 1977). Written by Gil Scott-Heron.

WHERE’D I HEAR IT?

This album version was featured on ABC’s Detroit 1-8-7 in episode 10, “Shelter”, an episode about the Detroit riots of 1967.

LINKS

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia) – [time to get you educated]

LAGOONA BEACH, outside Detroit, MI, 1966

– This song actually refers to an accident with the Fermi I breeder reactor at Lagoona Beach, 30 miles from Detroit. Detroit survived that accident and did not become the victim of a Chernobyl-like catastrophy.

– The world’s first commercial liquid metal fast breeder reactors for a nuclear power plant, and the only one yet built in the USA, was the 94MWe Unit 1 at Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station.

– Designed in a joint effort between Dow Chemical and Detroit Edison as part of the Atomic Power Development Associates consortium, groundbreaking in Lagoona Beach, Michigan (near Monroe, Michigan) took place in 1956. The plant went into operation in 1963.

– It shut down on October 5, 1966 due to high temperatures caused by a loose piece of zirconium which was blocking the molten sodium coolant nozzles. Partial melting damage to six subassemblies within the core was eventually found.

– This incident was the basis for a controversial book by investigative reporter John G. Fuller titled We Almost Lost Detroit.

– The zirconium blockage was removed in April 1968, and the plant was ready to resume operation by May 1970, but a sodium coolant fire delayed its restart until July.

– It subsequently ran until August 1972 when its operating license renewal was denied.

DETROIT’S HISTORY OF RACE RIOTS

– On March 6, 1863 the city of Detroit experienced its first riot. At the time, it was reported as “the bloodiest day that ever dawned upon Detroit.”

– While not as famous or destructive as riots later in Detroit’s history, the riot of 1863 was certainly a momentous occasion for the city of Detroit.

– The casualties of the day included at least two innocent people dead, a multitude of others, mostly African-American, mercilessly beaten. 35 buildings were burned to the ground, and a number of other buildings were damaged by fire.

– These numbers might not seem important by today’s measure, but for a young, growing city as Detroit was in 1863, such a riot was epic in nature.

– The second Detroit Race Riot broke out in Detroit, Michigan in June 1943 and lasted for three days before Federal troops restored order.

– The rioting between blacks and whites began on Belle Isle on 20 June 1943 and continued until 22 June, killing 34, wounding 433, and destroying property valued at $2 million.

– In the summer of 1943, in the midst of World War II, tensions between blacks and whites in Detroit were escalating. Detroit’s population had grown by 350,000 people since the war began, in the booming defense industries brought in large numbers of people with high wages and very little available housing. 50,000 blacks had recently arrived, along with 300,000 whites, mostly from rural Appalachia.

– The altercations between black and white youth started on June 20, 1943, on a warm Saturday evening on Belle Isle. A fist fight broke out between a white man and a black man. The brawl eventually grew into a confrontation between groups of blacks and whites and then spread into the city. Rumors had started that a black woman had been assaulted by a white man. Another rumor was that a white woman was raped and killed by a black man. Stores were looted and buildings were burned in the riot, most of which were in a black neighborhood roughly two miles in and around Paradise Valley, one of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in Detroit. The clashes soon escalated to the point where black and white mobs were “assaulting one another, beating innocent motorists, pedestrians and streetcar passengers, burning cars, destroying storefronts and looting businesses.”

– Both sides were said to have encouraged others to join in the riots with false claims that one of “their own” was attacked unjustly. More than 1,800 were arrested for looting and other incidents, the vast majority being black.

– Thirteen murders remain unsolved.

– The Riots lasted three days and ended once Mayor Edward Jeffries, Jr. and Governor Harry Kelly asked President Roosevelt to intervene. Federal troops finally restored peace to the streets of Detroit.

– Over the course of three days, 34 people were killed, 25 of whom were African Americans. Out of the approximately 600 injured, black people accounted for more than 75 percent and of the roughly 1,800 people who were arrested over the course of the 3 day riots, black people accounted for 85%.

– After the riot, leaders on both sides had an explanation for the riots. White city leaders including the mayor pointed the finger at young black “hoodlums.” The Wayne County prosecutor believed that the leaders of the NAACP were to blame as the instigators of the riots. Detroit’s black leaders pointed to other causes ranging from job discrimination, to housing discrimination, police brutality and daily animosity received from Detroit’s white population.

– The third and most well-known Detroit race riot began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967.

– The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th and Clairmount streets on the city’s Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in American history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot, which occurred 24 years earlier.

– To help end the disturbance, Governor George Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops. The result was forty-three dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. The scale of the riot was eclipsed only by the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

– The riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and extensive stories in Time and Life magazines. The Detroit Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

– A citywide curfew was enacted, sales of alcohol and firearms were prohibited, and business activity downtown was informally curtailed in recognition of the serious civil unrest engulfing sections of the city.

– In the early hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers expected to find only two dozen individuals in the unlicensed club, but instead there were 82 people celebrating the return of two local veterans from the Vietnam War. Despite the large number of people, police decided to arrest everyone present anyway. A crowd soon gathered around the establishment, protesting as patrons were led away.

– After the last police car left, a group of black men, angry after having observed the incident, began breaking the windows of an adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale rioting began throughout the neighborhood. Because it was a summer Sunday, it took hours for the Police Commissioner Ray Girardin to summon full police manpower.

– On Sunday, 12th Street was described as a “carnival atmosphere” as police watched looting but rarely arrested people, partially due to their inadequate numbers, and partially due to the belief the riot would be localised and temporary.

– Despite a conscious effort by the local news media to avoid reporting on it so as not to inspire copy-cat violence, the mayhem expanded to other parts of the city, with theft and destruction beyond the initial vicinity.

– After a baseball game at famed Tiger’s Stadium, left-fielder Willie Horton, a black Detroit resident who had grown up not far from the club, drove to the riot area and stood on a car in the middle of the crowd while he was still wearing his uniform. However, despite his impassioned pleas, he could not calm the mob.

– Michigan State Police were called into Detroit to assist an overwhelmed Detroit police force. After an initial reluctance to make arrests the previous day, and as the violence spread, arrests began in earnest. Due to the large number of arrests occurring, many constitutionally guaranteed rights were ignored and detainees were housed in makeshift jails. Beginning Monday, people were detained without being brought to Recorder’s Court for arraignment. More than eighty percent of those arrested were African-American, and about twelve percent were women. Michigan National Guard troopers were not authorized to arrest people, so State Troopers and Detroit Police made all arrests, including sweeping up many people simply watching the looting.

– Michigan Governor George Romney and President Lyndon B. Johnson initially disagreed about the legality of sending in Federal troops. Johnson said he could not send Federal troops in without Romney declaring a “state of insurrection,” to meet compliance with the Insurrection Act.

– As Historian Sidney Fine details in Violence in the Model City, partisan political issues also complicated decisions. George Romney was expected to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, and President Johnson, a Democrat, did not want to commit troops solely on Romney’s direction. Added to this was Mayor Cavanagh’s own political and personal clash with Romney. Cavanagh, an Irish Catholic Democrat, was initially reluctant to ask Romney, a Mormon Republican, for assistance.

– Looting and arson were widespread. Black-owned businesses were not spared. One of the first stores looted in Detroit was Hardy’s drug store, owned by blacks, and known for filling prescriptions on credit. Detroit’s leading black-owned clothing store was burnt, as was one of the city’s best-loved black restaurants. In the wake of the riots, a black merchant noted “you were going to get looted no matter what color you were.” Rioters took shots at firefighters who were attempting to fight the fires, possibly with some of the 2498 rifles and 38 handguns that were stolen from local stores. It was obvious that the Detroit and Michigan forces were unable to restore order.

– On Monday, U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan), and Arthur L. Johnson, of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP who were against Federal troop deployment, attempted to ease tensions by driving along 12th Street with a loudspeaker telling people to return to their homes.[8] Reportedly, Conyers stood on the hood of the car and shouted through a bullhorn to one of the mobs, “We’re with you! But, please! This is not the way to do things! Please go back to your homes!” But the crowd refused to listen. One civil rights activist (whom Conyers had once defended in a trial) allegedly responded, “Why are you defending the cops and the establishment? You’re just as bad as they are!” Conyers’ car was pelted with rocks and bottles, one of them hitting a nearby policeman. According to reports, as Conyers climbed down from the hood of the car, he remarked to a reporter in disgust, “You try to talk to those people and they’ll knock you into the middle of next year.”

– Shortly before midnight on Monday, July 24, President Johnson authorized use of Federal troops in compliance with the Insurrection Act of 1807, which stated that the President may call in armed forces whenever there is an insurrection in any state against the government. This gave Detroit the distinction of being the only city to ever be occupied by Federal troops three times.

– Starting at 0130 on Tuesday, July 25, some 8000 National Guardsmen were deployed to quell the disorder. Later their number would be augmented with 4700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, and 360 Michigan State Police.
Even with the Army, National Guard, and state and local police deployed across the city, chaos still existed.

– Detroit Police were found to have committed many acts of abuse to blacks and whites alike while in their custody. The Detroit Police’s 10th Precinct routinely abused prisoners; as mug shots later proved, many injuries came after booking. Women were stripped and fondled while officers took pictures. An infamous discarded Polaroid was plucked from the garbage and ended up on Mayor Cavanagh’s desk. White landlords from New York visiting their building were arrested after a sniper call and beaten so horribly that “their testicles were still black and blue two weeks after the incident.”

– Although only 26 of the over 7000 arrests involved snipers, and not one person accused of sniping was ever successfully prosecuted, it was a fear of snipers that precipitated police searches. The “searching for weapons” caused many homes and vehicles to be scrutinized. Curfew violations were also common sparks to police brutality.

– But the most documented event of police brutality was the “Algiers Motel Incident”. Three African-American men were found dead in a manor house-turned-motel at Woodward and Virginia Park known for prostitution. Two white, teenaged cosmetology school dropouts recently arrived from Columbus, Ohio, were staying in the motel with local African-American men when the police and National Guard responded to call of shots being fired. Evidence presented later suggested that three Detroit Police officers called out all occupants of the motel to the main lobby, searched them for weapons, threatened to kill them, and threw knives at their feet in a “game” before searching the rooms for weapons. Shooting then took place in two of the rooms and three bodies were discovered afterward. A police confession to the shooting was later covered up. Pulitzer prize winning author John Hersey’s true crime book Algiers Motel Incident investigated the case.

– There is some discussion that the deployment of troops incited more violence, although the riot ended within 48 hours of their deployment. The discussion might hinge on the type of troop used in various locations. Most of the Michigan National Guard were white, while many of the Army troops were black. As a result, the National Guard troops faced a more violent reaction when deployed to the inner city.

– Tanks and machine guns were used in the effort to keep the peace. Film footage and photos that were viewed internationally showed a city on fire, with tanks and combat troops in firefights in the streets, thus sealing Detroit’s reputation for decades to come.

– The Detroit riot ignited similar problems elsewhere. National Guardsmen or state police were deployed in five other cities: Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and Toledo, Ohio. Disturbances were also reported in more than two dozen cities.

– An estimated 10,000 participated, with an estimated 100,000 gathering to watch. Thirty-six hours of rioting later, 43 were dead, 10 of them white. More than 7,200 were arrested, mostly black. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, lamented upon surveying the damage, “Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough.”

– Over the period of five days, forty-three people died, of whom 33 were black. The other damages were calculated as follows: 467 injured: 182 civilians, 167 Detroit police officers, 83 Detroit firefighters, 17 National Guard troops, 16 State Police officers, 3 U.S. Army soldiers. 7,231 arrested: 6,528 adults, 703 juveniles; the youngest, 4, the oldest, 82. Half of those arrested had no criminal record.
2,509 stores looted or burnt, 388 families rendered homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burnt or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from arson and looting ranged from $40 million to $80 million.

– Detroit was regarded by many in the United States as a leader in race relations during the early 1960s. Organized labor, led by UAW President Walter Reuther, planned major redevelopment for inner-city slums. The New York Times editorialised Detroit had “more going for it than any other major city in the North.” Detroit had a large and prosperous black middle class; higher-than-normal wages for unskilled black workers due to the auto industry; two black congressmen, half the total black representation in Congress at the time; three black judges; two black members on the Detroit Board of Education; a housing commission which was forty percent black; and twelve blacks representing Detroit in the Michigan legislature. Moreover, Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through President Johnson’s Great Society programs and poured them almost exclusively into the inner city. The Washington Post claimed Detroit’s inner-city schools were undergoing “the country’s leading and most forceful reforms in education.” Housing conditions were not viewed as particularly worse than other Northern cities. In 1965, the American Institute of Architects gave Detroit an award for urban redevelopment. The city had mature black neighborhoods like Conant Gardens, as Detroit had always absorbed new arrivals in areas founded around ethnicity. The Department of Justice’s Office of Law Enforcement Assistance designated Detroit as the “model for police-community relations”. Fortune, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Look, Harper’s, U.S. News and World Report, and The Wall Street Journal all published positive articles on the city; Mayor Cavanagh was so highly regarded nationally, he headed the Conference of Mayors and National League of Cities after earning 69% of the votes in his 1965 reelection campaign.

– Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, wrote in 1994: “The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit’s losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.”

– At least three songs directly reference the 1967 Detroit Riot. The most prominent was “Black Day in July”, written and sung by Gordon Lightfoot [which I blogged about in November 2009] (and later covered by The Tragically Hip); as well a later version of the song “The Motor City is Burning” by John Lee Hooker (later covered by the MC5), a song that specifically mentions the intersection of 12th and Clairmount, and “Detroit ’67” by Sam Roberts, which concludes with a call for riot police to attend to “trouble down on 12th Street”.

– The riot was also depicted in the film Across the Universe.

– The December 7, 2010 episode of “Detroit 187” on ABC aired archive footage and photos of Detroit during the 1967 riots. The episode’s primary story line depicted a 2010 discovery of a black male body and a white female body in a fallout shelter constructed under a building burned down during the riots. In actuality, there were 2 individuals who lost their lives, listed above, in a basement of a building that was burned down.

– Photo collections and essays depicting the events of July 1967 are available from several websites listed below:

GIL SCOTT-HERON

-Gil Scott-Heron (born April 1, 1949) is an American poet, musician, and author known primarily for his late 1970s and early 1980s work as a spoken word performer and his collaborative soul works with musician Brian Jackson.

– His collaborative efforts with Jackson featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul music, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron.

– The music of these albums, most notably Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul.

– Gil’s mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sang with the New York Oratorical Society. Scott-Heron’s Jamaican father, Giles “Gil” Heron, nicknamed “The Black Arrow”, was a football (soccer) player who, in the 1950s, became the first black athlete to play for Glasgow’s Celtic Football Club.

– Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, as it was the alma mater of his biggest influence, Langston Hughes. It was here that Scott-Heron met Brian Jackson with whom he formed the band Black & Blues.

– Although Scott-Heron never received his undergraduate degree, he has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

– Scott-Heron began his recording career in 1970 with the LP Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. The album’s 15 tracks dealt with themes such as the superficiality of television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some would-be Black revolutionaries, white middle-class ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city residents, and homophobia. In the liner notes, Scott-Heron acknowledged as influences Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and the pianist who would become his long-time collaborator, Brian Jackson.

– 1974 saw another LP collaboration with Brian Jackson, the critically acclaimed opus Winter in America. The album contained Scott-Heron’s most cohesive material and featured more of Jackson’s creative input than his previous albums had. The album has been regarded by many critics as the two musicians most artistic effort.

– In 1979, Scott-Heron played at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy to protest the use of nuclear energy following the Three Mile Island accident. Scott-Heron’s song “We Almost Lost Detroit”, written about a previous accident at a nuclear power plant, was included in the No Nukes album of concert highlights.

– Scott-Heron is known in many circles as “the Godfather of rap” and is widely considered to be one of the genre’s founding fathers. Given the political consciousness that lies at the foundation of his work, he can also be called a founder of political rap. Message to the Messengers was a plea for the new generation of rappers to speak for change rather than perpetuate the current social situation, and to be more articulate and artistic.

– On hip hop music in the 1990s, Scott-Heron later said in an interview:
They need to study music. I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There’s a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music. There’s not a lot of humor. They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.

– In 2001, Gil Scott-Heron was sentenced to one to three years’ imprisonment in New York State for possession of cocaine. While out of jail in 2002, he appeared on the Blazing Arrow album by Blackalicious. He was released on parole in 2003.

– On July 5, 2006, Scott-Heron was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug-possession charge by leaving a drug rehabilitation center. Scott-Heron’s sentence was to run until July 13, 2009. He was paroled on May 23, 2007. The reason given for the violation of his plea was that the clinic refused to supply Scott-Heron with HIV medication. This story led to the presumption that the artist is HIV positive.

– After his release, Scott-Heron began performing live again, and has announced that he and his musicians were working on a new album and that he had resumed writing a book titled The Last Holiday, previously on long-term hiatus, about Stevie Wonder and his successful attempt to have the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. declared a federally recognized holiday in the United States. Having originally planned to publish The Last Holiday in 2003, before it was put on hold, Canongate Books now tentatively intend to issue it in January, 2011. The book was due to be previewed via a website set to be launched on April 1, 2009, but this did not appear.

– On October 10, 2007, the day before a scheduled (but ultimately cancelled) second SOBs performance, he was arrested on felony possession of cocaine charges.

– However, he has continued to make live appearances at various US venues during the course of 2008 and 2009, including further appearances at SOBs in New York. He has also stated in interviews that work is continuing on his new album, which will consist mainly of new versions of some of his classic songs plus some cover versions of other artists’ work.

– Gil Scott-Heron released his album I’m New Here on independent label XL Recordings on February 9, 2010, his first studio album in sixteen years.

– In April 2009 on BBC Radio Four, poet Lemn Sissay presented a half-hour documentary on Gil Scott-Heron entitled Pieces of a Man.

– He has been described by music writers as “the godfather of rap” and “the black Bob Dylan”. The Washington Post wrote that “Scott-Heron’s work presaged not only conscious rap and poetry slams, but also acid jazz, particularly during his rewarding collaboration with composer-keyboardist-flutist Brian Jackson in the mid- and late ’70s.”

– The Observer’s Sean O’Hagan discussed the significance of Scott-Heron’s music with Brian Jackson, stating: Together throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron and Jackson made music that reflected the turbulence, uncertainty and increasing pessimism of the times, merging the soul and jazz traditions and drawing on an oral poetry tradition that reached back to the blues and forward to hip-hop. The music sounded by turns angry, defiant and regretful while Scott-Heron’s lyrics possessed a satirical edge that set them apart from the militant soul of contemporaries such as Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

– Scott-Heron’s influence over hip-hop is primarily exemplified by his definitive single “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” sentiments from which have been explored by various rappers, including Aesop Rock, Talib Kweli and Common.

– Kanye West sampled Scott-Heron and Jackson’s “Home is Where the Hatred Is” and “We Almost Lost Detroit” for his song “My Way Home” and the single “The People,” respectively, both of which are collaborative efforts between West and Common. Scott-Heron, in turn, has acknowledged West’s contributions, sampling the latter’s 2007 single “Flashing Lights” on his latest album, 2010’s I’m New Here.

– Black Star MC Mos Def has sampled Scott-Heron’s “A Legend in His Own Mind” on the Q-Tip-featuring song “Mr. Nigga,” and producer Dr. Dre (some of whose early G-Funk compositions mirror Scott-Heron’s musical style in both texture and sentiment, specifically “Lil’ Ghetto Boy,” which in fact samples Scott-Heron contemporary Donny Hathaway) recorded the song “Blunt Time,” on which former Death Row Records rapper RBX interpolates the opening lyrics from Scott-Heron’s recording “Angel Dust.”

BRIAN JACKSON

– Brian Jackson is a keyboardist (a Rhodes electric piano), flautist, singer, composer, and producer. He is best known for his collaborations with Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s.

– The Brooklyn-born Jackson met Scott-Heron while the two were attending Lincoln University (Pennsylvania). They began a decade-long writing, producing, and recording partnership. Jackson composed most of the music that he and Scott-Heron together performed and recorded.

– In 1973 they released their first two albums together, and by 1979 they had recorded ten albums, with other unreleased material surfacing on subsequent Scott-Heron releases following their 1980 split.

– Jackson continued to be active in the eighties and nineties, working with Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Will Downing and Gwen Guthrie. Jackson’s other credits include work with Roy Ayers, Kool and the Gang, Janis Siegel (of Manhattan Transfer), Pete Miser (of Radio Free Brooklyn), Masauko (of the South African duo, Blk Sonshine) and with Ladybug Mecca (of Digable Planets).

LYRICS

It stands out on a highway, like a Creature from another time.
It inspires the babies’ questions, “What’s that?” for their mothers as they ride.
But no one stopped to think about the babies, or how they would survive,
and we almost lost Detroit, this time.
How would we ever get over, loosing our minds?
Just thirty miles from Detroit stands a giant power station.
It ticks each night as the city sleeps, seconds from anniahlation.
But no one stopped to think about the people or how they would survive,
and we almost lost Detroit, this time.
How would we ever get over, over loosing our minds?
The sheriff of Monroe county had, sure enough disasters on his mind,
and what would Karen Silkwood say, if she was still alive?
That when it comes to people’s safety, money wins out every time.
and we almost lost Detroit, this time, this time.
How would we ever get over, over loosing our minds?
You see, we almost lost Detroit, that time.
Almost lost Detroit, that time.
And how would we ever get over…
Cause odds are, we gonna loose somewhere, one time.
Odds are, we gonna loose somewhere sometime.
And how would we ever get over loosing our minds?
And how would we ever get over loosing our minds?
Didn’t they, didn’t they decide?
Almost lost Detroit, that time.
Damn near totally destroyed, one time.
Didn’t all of the world know?  Say didn’t you know?
Didn’t all of the world know? Say didn’t you know?
We almost lost Detroit…

VIDEO OF THE DAY

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2 Responses

  1. Mitzi Jackson says:
    February 7, 2013 at 11:54 am

    I am a Detroiter and I really enjoyed your article and video. I am doing a report on Paradise Valley for class and Gil is also one of my favorite performers, miss him greatly. Thank you so much for detailed accounts of Detroit and Gil/Brian, thanks!

  2. Richard Dudzic says:
    December 26, 2010 at 12:12 am

    None of the radio stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, even our best stations, ever play Gil Scott Heron. Thank you so much for posting this!

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