Feature
Blackmarket Kittens
You Didn't Find Us
Four women from Detroit have made a record in three days, sold 340 copies of it and become, by any measure you care to apply, one of the best rock bands in the Middle West. They would like it noted that they were here first.
The laundromat on Cass Avenue closes at ten. Upstairs, at a quarter to midnight, the band was still going. The floor shook in time. A dryer that someone had left running downstairs finished its cycle somewhere in the middle of the bridge and nobody heard it.
Blackmarket Kittens are four. Roxanne Delacroix sings, and at the end of a line she is pleased with she leans back from the microphone by about three inches, as if to let it go. Danielle Morel, Dani to everyone, plays lead guitar; just before she plays something especially good she takes a small breath in and shifts her weight, and if you watch for it you will start to see it coming. Suki Park plays bass and is always the last one off the stage. Carla Beaumont plays drums with a ferocity that she does not appear to find remarkable.
They began in 1984 and spent two years playing every room in Detroit that would book them and several that, at first, would not. They were not the first all-female rock band in Detroit, and when we raised the subject they said so, specifically and correctly. Their first release, The Cass Avenue Tape, was five songs recorded in the apartment above the laundromat and sold from a paper bag at shows. One club owner handed a copy back after ninety seconds and said it was a vibe thing. Delacroix tells the story without heat. "It was a vibe thing," she said. "He was right about that."
The Motor Lounge, a bar run by Marie Kowalski, whom everyone calls Mae, gave them a Tuesday. They have had it ever since. It is on the new record, as "Tuesday Night Slot." Before every show Theodore Marchetti, who is large and courteous and whom the band calls Big Teddy, walks the perimeter of the room once, checks every exit, identifies the bartender and takes up a position stage left, where he remains.
The record is You Didn't Find Us, on Backdoor Records. It was made in three days. It has sold 340 copies, twelve of them to the owner of the studio. It is the best guitar record we have heard from the Middle West this year, and the songs are better than the guitar: "One Hundred Forty Nights," "The Room Is Not Right," "Better Than the Headline," and a closing song called "Three People Came," which is about a Thursday, and which is not sad.
Morel is the one the guitar players come to watch. We watched a man in a denim jacket at the Motor Lounge set his drink down on the first bar of her solo in "Blackmarket" and forget it was there. Park's bass lines do something underneath that you will not notice until three years later, when you hear another bass player not doing it.
"You're here," she said. "Stay for the set."
We are aware that a magazine from New York arriving in Detroit to tell people about a Detroit band is, in its way, what the title song is about. We asked Delacroix whether she minded. "You're here," she said. "Stay for the set."
We did. It was forty-five minutes on the bill. It was a little over two hours on the clock. Nobody left.
