Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition focuses entirely on Ann Arbor's own Scott Morgan, a truly local singer and guitarist who made waves in rock 'n’ roll culture worldwide over the past 50 years.

The Ann Arbor District Library recently made public the "Scott Morgan Collection," a large assemblage of documents related to his music career. The cache of interviews, newspaper clippings, gig flyers, photographs, and recordings provides a window into Morgan’s experiences in the music industry and the era that shaped him.

Born and raised on the shady streets of A2, Morgan’s career began as front man for The Rationals, a teenage garage-rock combo formed in 1964. In a scene that lionized idiosyncratic voices, Morgan stood out as one of the strongest singers of his cohort. He had the confidence of an old-school crooner, the rawness of a hopped-up garage rocker, and the soulful swagger of an R&B frontman.

A true lifer, Morgan spent decades on stages across the country and abroad, releasing dozens of great records with an impressive lineup of collaborators and bands. He sang on a big national hit during the mid-'60s, played guitar on the greatest Detroit rock song of all time, and served as elder statesman to a new generation of musicians as the century turned.

Let’s take a brief, completely subjective look at Scott Morgan’s best recordings.

Ypsilanti’s true believers The Velvet Snakes slithered into view in 2021, storming the dives of mid-Michigan in a blur of hair and paisley. As they pursued a path of ecstatic rock 'n’ roll raunch with frequent left turns into psychedelia, the band quickly found a home amongst connoisseurs of the Dee-troit/Ann Arbor/Ypsi underground rock axis.

After a handful of lineup changes, today The Velvet Snakes are Logan Belz and Gage Rettinger on guitar and vocals, while Tyler Love handles bass and Noah Wright holds down the tubs. The band recently completed their debut album, a collection called FIRST STRIKE, and The Velvet Snakes are making it official this Thursday, July 31, with a record release event at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti. (The band also headlines night three of Fuzz Fest 2025 at The Blind Pig on Saturday, August 23.)

The title of their song “Gorilla on the Beach” makes the best description of the Snakes’ sound, a flailing, fuzzy garage-rock stomp warped by the otherworldly bend and twang of surf guitar and soaked in a bath of Blue Cheer. With their broken blues riffs and acidic fretboard freak-outs, the Snakes produce the kind of budget-label psych-noise that should excite fans of bands like The Stooges and The Seeds (or any of their myriad progeny).

This story originally ran on July 17, 2019. We're rerunning it on what would have been Asheton's 77th birthday.

July 17 is Ron Asheton’s birthday. He died in 2009 at the age of 60, but not before he and the band he helped make famous had one last run when The Stooges reformed in 2003.

The Stooges arose from the rich musical compost of the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area in the late 1960s and while the classic original lineup (Asheton on guitar, his brother Scott Asheton on drums, Dave Alexander on bass and Iggy Pop as frontman) only lasted a few glorious, intense years, the racket they made proved durable. They were a quartet of teenage cavemen with four chords between them, amps set for aggression, gnawing at the deepest atavistic urges of the human animal. Like all geniuses, they were unappreciated in their day but went on to inspire generations of future primitives around the globe and made punk rock inevitable. 

After the Stooges, Ron Asheton enjoyed a long music career with bands such as Destroy All Monsters, New Race, and Dark Carnival. He passed away from a heart attack shortly after a high-profile Stooges reunion. The man’s legacy in the annals of rock history is secure, legitimized by no less an “authority” as the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but that isn’t the reason we’re here. 

What is discussed less about Asheton is his acting career, which found him playing both major and minor roles in five low-budget, locally sourced horror films shot in Michigan between 1988 and 1995. From all reports a genuine fan of the genre, Asheton holds his own in these cheap, gory, and frankly ridiculous films, sometimes emerging as the most believable actor on the screen (the competition is hardly stiff). He’s unrecognizable as a former rock guitar mangler, opting instead for a somewhat schlubby onscreen persona, sometimes as comic relief or second banana to a more traditional lead. 

So in honor of Asheton’s birthday, let’s review his filmography:

For more than a decade, Justin Lawnchair has been the sole member of progressive death metal band The Biscuit Merchant.

Across 10 albums, the Ann Arbor artist charts a cacophonous course through dark waters that touches on numerous extreme metal styles: Biscuit Merchant songs feature the technological precision of thrash, the blackened passions of death metal, and the Viking majesty of European power metal.

Lawnchair recently completed the latest chapter in a conceptual multiple-album project called ALPHA. Each title in the series begins with a different letter of the alphabet, eventually numbering 26 when complete. The new album, Tempora, is number 10, and like the others, opens with riffs and themes that connect it to its predecessor, 2024’s Visible Scars.

The difference with this record is that it has a more defined narrative than the other episodes. Tempora tells the tale of humankind’s reaction to the threat of domination by an alien intelligence—to build and deploy a weapon that might destroy the entire universe if it works, and will definitely destroy humanity if it doesn’t. Either way, mankind chooses to leave nothing for their enemies to conquer. Rings true, right?

“Victorious," the first single on Tempora, is a gargantuan slab of rolling riff, demonic verse, and heroic chorus that manages to be punishing and hooky in equal measure, and it depicts the turning point of the story.

From the outside, Ann Arbor conjures the image of a pastoral place. It’s in the name, suggesting a shady nook of trees and hedges and daisies.

For those with ears tuned to the bellicose joys of distorted guitars, drum battalions, and the expression of unfettered frustration, however, Ann Arbor is where punk rock began. A pair of brothers named Asheton eschewed formal lessons for more physical forms of musicality back in 1967, resulting in a band called The Stooges and coloring the history of this otherwise-typical college town forever.

Countless malignant youths have tried to re-create that magic in our tiny burg ever since. Ann Arbor sired other noisy acts who put their own stamp on the form, some who broke beyond our borders and many who didn’t, but loud music remains our birthright. Since 1995, a band called Mazinga has been coming together to conjure heavy sounds out of the ether, with regular hiatuses taken to weather the vagaries of fate, negotiate the cruel realities of an underground music economy, and recharge creative batteries with outside projects.

The four townies in question include drummer Donny Blum, vocalist and lyricist Marc McFinn, guitarist Chris “Box” Taylor, and bassist and in-house graphic artist Big Tony Fero, aka Rubber Wolf. Beyond their duties in Mazinga, all of them have helped move and shake local heavy culture in other area bands. Taylor in particular doubles as mastermind of the annual punk/metal/noise pageant Fuzz Fest (the 10th installment will be this August) and served time in local acts Blue Snaggletooth, The Avatars, and Powertrane.

Like all great things, the Ann Arbor Film Festival rose from humble beginnings. 

Founded in 1963 by filmmaker and connoisseur George Manupelli, the festival quickly earned an international reputation as a premier venue for independent and experimental cinema. The Michigan Theater has provided the AAFF with a luxurious home since 1980, but the original home base was the University of Michigan’s Architecture Auditorium (now known as Askwith), and the vibes back then were decidedly scruffier. 

Local film historian, projectionist, and author Frank Uhle remembers it well.

“In the early days of the Film Festival, audiences were very interactive,” he explained. “There was always a smell of stale beer, cigarettes, and pot smoke in the air. Inevitably some of the films were boring, or pretentious, or deliberately provocative, and people would yell their opinions at the screen or whistle and make noise. 

“Sometimes another person would defend the movie and an argument would ensue. Always, a beer bottle would get tipped over in the dark and roll noisily down the sloped floor while everyone snickered.”

That’s the kind of anarchic spirit Uhle will be conjuring on Friday, December 1 at 7 pm when he hosts “Experimental Shorts by Ann Arbor Filmmakers From the 1960s-80s,” a free screening of vintage celluloid at Askwith Auditorium in Lorch Hall. (It's part of U-M's semester-long "Arts and Resistance" series.)

No, he’s not going to let you smoke in there, but he’ll be showing early homegrown AAFF favorites in the same venue they first flickered in back when the counterculture was the culture and the art was the point.

Uhle went to his first AAFF in 1978 and has been involved in local film culture ever since. His recent book, Cinema Ann Arbor, covers the 100-year history of A2’s campus cinema societies and the filmmakers they inspired and nurtured. 

Students first officially organized film clubs in 1932 to screen non-mainstream fare, local interest grew along with the AAFF and the university began its film program in 1968. By the 1970s, there were multiple, competing student film societies outdoing each other with screenings of foreign rarities, forgotten Hollywood masterpieces, and uncompromising experiments. It was inevitable that a devoted scene of filmmakers would bloom in such soil, and it’s these artists that Uhle celebrates, a few of whom he’ll have on hand for a Q and A session after the screening. 

The films share a loose, improvisational approach but cover a wide range of styles. Handmade animation, abstract imagery, punk lampoonery, cinema verite slices-of-life, introspective moodiness, anti-war agitprop, plus vintage promos and ephemera from film society screenings of the day. Some haven’t been seen for decades, enjoying only a handful of local screenings after production before languishing in various states of storage. 

“I got them from a bunch of different sources,” said Uhle. “Mostly from filmmakers, but some of them were literally found in the attic of the Michigan Theater. A lot of the projectionists from U of M would also moonlight at the Michigan, and at a certain point people were stashing these prints up in the attic.” 

Others came from faculty members who had purchased and preserved some of the better films that former students had made.

“I’ve had some strokes of good fortune. Alan Young from the film program has this wonderful office that’s like an archive of old equipment," Uhle said. "I noticed up on a shelf there were a few reels of 16mm film. They were student projects that they saved. Some of these films, my god, they were just amazing-looking films.” 

Here are a few highlights:

“Golden anniversary” sounds tacky and “semicentennial” reads incomplete, so what does a musician call her slow-rolling, year-long celebration of 50 years on stage?

For Claudia Schmidt, you just go ahead and portmanteau it—hence Claudfest, and let the bells ring.

Schmidt’s career as a singer-songwriter spans time as well as genre, and she’ll perform selections from her accumulated repertoire on Saturday, October 7, at The Ark when she appears with Rachel Davis. 

While she remained active through the COVID-19 shutdowns with a regular series of YouTube concerts, the stage is where Schmidt’s art truly breathes, her rapport with the audience an essential element. Her long-awaited return to A2 brings Claudfest to a city that bore witness to various stages of her musical evolution.

A native of New Baltimore, Michigan, Schmidt pulled the modern equivalent of running away with the circus as soon as she was able, joining a theater group after high school and traveling with them for a year. Another round of seasons given to the University of Michigan didn’t work out, so she relocated to Chicago, where an already vibrant folk music scene welcomed her and inspired a career that led to dozens of records and countless miles.

Ann Arbor would have been a regular stop for anyone playing the Midwestern folk circuit of the 1970s, and Schmidt had no shortage of gigs at the venue she’ll visit this weekend. “I’ve played at all of The Arks,” she said. “I played at the original one on Hill Street, then when it moved to South Main. I’ve followed them all around.”

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This week, we have a special edition focusing on The UP.

*****

As Ann Arbor creeps towards its bicentennial in 2024, residents can be proud of a history rich in accomplishment, with achievements in medicine, politics, and sports that mark this city as a force for progress in human endeavor.

But who cares?

For millions of music fans around the globe, the only reason to discuss A2 is its role as an incubator for two bands whose uncompromising sounds proved an important step in the evolution of punk rock and heavy metal. The MC5 and The Stooges spent formative years here in the late 1960s, experimenting with volume and energy in our basements, living rooms, and public parks while perfecting distinct approaches to raw, aggressive rock 'n' roll.

September 23 is the 54th anniversary of the University of Michigan Union Ballroom gig that got both bands signed to a major label, and it's a cultural moment worth celebrating. 

Elektra representative Danny Fields was in town to evaluate the MC5's viability, but after watching this show, he saw the future and offered both The Stooges and the MC5 record contracts the next morning.

The third act on that bill, The UP, did not get a big break that night—or any night, since no record label ever signed the band. But the Ann Arbor group's dedication to revolutionary rock 'n’ roll was just as savage as that of its peers.

This story was originally published June 6, 2019, just before Bob Seger brought his farewell tour to Michigan. We're rerunning it because another Seger-related event is happening on June 26, 2022 from 3 pm to 4:30 pm at the Ann Arbor District Library's downtown location:

"Turn the Page: The Bob Seger Story with Edward Sarkis Balian"

Dr. Edward Sarkis Balian grew up in Detroit and was in a local band at the same time that Bob Seger was breaking into the music business during the tumultuous 1960s. Dr. Balian’s association has continued with Mr. Seger, as they have both shared the same entertainment attorney for over 40 years. In this interactive presentation, Dr. Balian answers questions in-depth, discusses video highlights of Seger's career, and shares many facets of Seger's personal and professional life.

The long-running 33 1/3 book series devotes each volume to the study of one classic album’s creation, impact and essence, and recent entry number 152 concerns an album made in Ypsilanti nearly 50 years ago. Author Zach Schonfeld relates the messy tale of quixotic ambition that birthed an album unknown but not unheard, commercially unsuccessful but the backbone of big hits for other artists: The 24-Carat Black's Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth.

Released by Stax Records in 1973, the album was the brainchild of Detroit native Dale Warren, a classically trained violinist who began his career arranging songs for Motown before migrating south to the funkier climes of Memphis. Employed by Stax, Warren’s talent for conducting helped build the lush, string-cushioned vibes of Isaac Hayes’ most iconic works along with other classic records of the R&B/soul label’s late era.

Warren composed his own ambitious set of socially conscious songs with the aim of producing a concept album about inner-city poverty, so he scouted for talent. At a University of Michigan frat party he discovered a nine-piece band of high school kids from Ohio with chops beyond their years. The band was re-christened The 24-Carat Black, an album deal was secured from Stax, and they headed for the legendary Morgan Sound studio in Ypsilanti to make a record.