MC50: Portland, Oregon Gig Review – Blues Rock Review
I grew up in the Greater Detroit, Michigan area and other than serving two years in the army I lived there until a couple weeks before my twenty-fourth birthday when I moved to L.A. My friends and I would hang out in the the downtown black neighborhoods where illegal “blind pig” all night bars existed in peoples houses. My friend Jim Swartz connected with one of the guys that ran a “blind pig’ named Bill. It was on 12th Street and it had a bar, gambling, prostitution, drugs and whatever else you wanted that was illlegal. Even when I was in the army and came home on leave we would all go downtown to party. Then the July 1967 riot happened and a square mile of the city was decimated and that ended out hanging out in the ghetto. The riot happened only a block away from Bill’s place at another “Blind Pig.” Soldiers returning home from Vietnam were celebrating at one of the illegal bars and unfortunately the police arressted them. The idnignation of arresting the returning soldiers sparked retaliation by the crowd that gathered as they threw rocks and bottles at the police and then everything exploded. When I returned from my two years in the military the only time I went downtown it was to go to a concert at the Grande, Easttown, Roostertail, Cobo Hall or another venue.
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