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Detour Mag Presents New Detroit Music Fest

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A few years ago GLONO bashed the Motor City Music Conference pretty badly when my band Riviera was treated like a smelly uninvited guest at our showcase. Since so many GLONO founders and contributors hail from the Great Lakes State, we so wanted it to be a success, but the conference was a text book display of everything wrong with Detroit, and specifically its all too insular music scene.

2008 Rock City Festival, June 12 – 14

But just because somebody else made a shit sandwich doesn’t mean others shouldn’t keep cooking! So it was with a bit of excitement and a tad of dread that I opened my email to find a press release announcing a NEW music festival coming to Detroit this summer. My initial trepidation has been put at ease by the fact that The Rock City Fest is being put on by Detour-Mag. Longtime readers know that Detour is now the home to GLONO co-founder and soul brother Johnny Loftus. If it has his stamp, then I am confident it’ll be a hell of a good time.

More than Johnny’s involvement, the announced line-up is sure to add to the prospect of success. Headliners include:

Sloan

Von Bondies

Matt & Kim

What’s more, they seem to have learned a thing or two from the MC2s failures and have limited the number of venues to three:

Majestic Theater

Magic Stick

Garden Bowl

Detroit’s sprawl and lack of a comprehensive public transit system makes it difficult for hammered rock fans to navigate the sometimes shady streets and back alley of the country’s perennial Murder Capitol contender, so keeping this thing small is a GREAT idea and probably why the annual Hamtramck Blow Out works so well.

Ticket info after the jump…

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Loftus on Muxtape

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Home taping is killing music.Over on Detour, Johnny Loftus writes about the internet’s latest fad:

So these guys made this site called Muxtape, which the Internet may have told you about. It looks like Super Breakout, only on cassette. Don’t fear that last word. Muxtape is on the Internet; it only pretends to be on tape. That means you don’t need my special Marantz 5030 cassette deck/Macbook hybrid in order to make mixes. I wish I wouldn’t have spent all those years developing that thing. Who knew no one would need a Mac with two external cassette decks?

True story: Johnny once spontaneously deejayed a party in my basement using only my Hitachi dual cassette deck and the box of old tapes I had packed away on a shelf. He could only use the first songs on either side of the tape because that was the only way he could queue it up properly. It was awesome. I kept running over and shouting in his face: “I DO NOT OWN THIS ON TAPE!” But the audio evidence could not be denied. The fact that so many totally great songs lead off either Side A or Side B of a bunch mildewing garbage kind of blew my mind that night. My cassette collection was better than I knew.

Later that year, of course, I sold them all at a garage sale, three for a dollar.

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Loftus on Lollapalooza

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Our man Johnny Loftus covers Lollapalooza for Detour magazine.

We didn’t see many of the same bands, and didn’t agree on a few of the sets we watched together, but I’m glad the barfing girl made it into his piece, too: “…overserved teen-agers were vomiting all the colors of the American Apparel rainbow that hot afternoon (really; we saw that happen)…”

Previously: Lollapalooza 2007: Hit it and quit it.

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Loftus on Danzig

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Over at Detour, Johnny Loftus covers the new Lost Tracks of Danzig:

Whether these tracks were actually lost, or if they’re just some rough sketches Glenn had laying around next to his collection of sub-Boris Vallejo grease pencil folk art isn’t important, at least to the rest of us: Danzig fanatics are going to get this set, and the rest of us are going to poke fun at it. And that’s why those song titles are so awesome.

He’s starting shit with Andrew WK and Steven Seagal, too, so read the rest. And when those three thicknecks finally gang up on scrawny Johnny Anus, he’ll find out what “Pain is Like an Animal” is really all about!

Previously: Andrew WK: Crazy in the Coconut and The Strokes: Fell in Love with You before the Second Show.

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JTL on NWA

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Over at Detour, our man Johnny Loftus takes a look back at NWA’s classic “Straight Outta Compton” video:

“Ren’s a ruthless villain and we know this, but so is Officer Cliche driving around LA there, right? If he’s looking for something to arrest, he should start with Cube’s haircut.”

To answer Johnny’s “Where were you when you first heard it?” query: Freshman year of college, some sporty dude in my dorm made me a tape with Straight Outta Compton on one side and Eazy Duz It on the other. My life was never the same. This would eventually lead to me scouring the used bins for everything sampled on every hip-hop album I would ever hear.

And to this day, every single time I hear anyone utter the simple phrase, “Me neither,” I can’t help but thinking — and if I’ve had enough to drink, shouting out loud — HO, GO HOME AND WASH OUT YOUR BEAVER! Yeah, that’s me.

Where were you when you first heard NWA?

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JTL on Dino Jr in A2

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Johnny Loftus catches the reunited Dinosaur Jr at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor in the middle of their current club tour:

The heat in the room, the terrible sight lines, the spotty sound, the band’s mild irritability and a set list that sometimes stalled – it all worked in Dinosaur’s favor. This was not a Reunion Show, with formal wear and fancy seats and tickets that are priced to discourage losers from attending. This was a rock show in all of its hit-or-miss un-glory…

Johnny covered the 2004 Sebadoh reunion for GLONO back in the day: The Beauty of the Rebound.

Previously: Beyond review.

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Detour Magazine

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Check out Detour Magazine, a new site “devoted to sharing its wit and insight into music, film, and other media ephemera, with an emphasis on the independent, the underground, and all of our guilty pleasures.”

Some punk named Johnny Loftus is the senior writer and critic-at-large, but don’t listen to a word he says—the kid’s all hopped up on goofballs, I swear to god.

Johnny’s review of the “The Six Million Dollar Man” intro (YouTube) is clear evidence…and definitely worth reading.