Detroit 1969

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Michigan circa 1969

When I think of the history of maximum R&B, I often remember an accessory that was introduced to the Hot Wheels line in 1969.

In 1969, I was 6 and had recently moved to Michigan (previous years in New York and Cleveland are foggy, except I remember Cleveland quite vividly because all my relatives lived their lives there). Hot Wheels were important to me so this new Super Charger accessory device was vital. I had income as a kid (delivering the Detroit Free Press in the morning…selling crayfish out of Dixie cups…and oddly enough an afternoon-long Hot Wheels competition in the basement where I charged a nickel for every car entered into the event) so I’d like to believe that I bought the Super Charger device with my hard-earned money but more likely I saved up my 25-cent weekly allowance (which I earned by doing dishes and mowing the lawn with a non-motorized push mower) or my parents combined my birthday and Christmas (both in December) to gift me this prized toy. You'd attach this Super Charger garage device to the orange plastic track, and just before reaching the Super Charger, your car would slow to a crawl, but then would enter this garage and this Super Charger would fling the car into overdrive. When I think of that car, I think of music.

Black artists built the car, were electrified in the postwar years of the 1940s, and that powered us into the mid 1950s when both white and Black artists and audiences fueled the car to keep it rolling…and when it looked like the car might run out of gas, it was flung back into action with folks like Link Wray and the continued works of folks like Ray Charles, James Brown and Bo Diddley. (Bo released 20 album sides in five years, from 1958 to 1963.) That brought us to Motown, surf rock, groove, funk, British Invasion, garage, freak out… and then along came bands like Velvet Underground and Jimi Hendrix, the former who were ignored and the latter who released all ten sides of his entire studio catalog in about 18 months. But then if things got overblown and hazy and the car seemed to be slowing, it hit my favorite super charger—the power of Detroit circa 1969! That dynamo flung the vehicle through the clatter of chicken rock and the reek of overblown crap that followed, and it forever remains to remind us of the raw power of maximum R&B.

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