Wealth & Money Quote by Wayne Kramer

Kramer’s memory lands like a corrective to the lazy myth that great rebellion is born only from deprivation. Detroit in the mid-60s wasn’t a wasteland yet; it was a factory-fed boomtown with paychecks, bars, and a dense nightlife economy that could actually employ musicians night after night. That detail matters because it reframes the origin story of Detroit rock not as pure desperation, but as a byproduct of infrastructure: disposable income, venues, audiences, and a city wired for loud entertainment after a shift on the line.

The intent is quietly polemical. By stressing “everybody had jobs,” Kramer is pushing back against retroactive narratives that treat Detroit’s later collapse as inevitable, or that read the MC5’s fury as simple poverty politics. The subtext is sharper: when work is plentiful, you don’t necessarily get contentment; you get fuel. A booming economy can produce its own psychic pressure-cooker - conformity, hierarchy, racial segregation, the grinding discipline of industrial time - and nightlife becomes the release valve where that tension gets converted into volume, speed, and attitude.

There’s also an implicit media critique: outsiders tend to freeze Detroit into one image (ruins, decline, grit). Kramer insists on a prior Detroit that was humming, crowded, and culturally liquid. The nightclub circuit isn’t nostalgia; it’s a reminder that scenes are built as much by payrolls and booking calendars as by ideology. The revolution needs a stagehand, a door guy, and a club that can afford to keep the lights on.