Sonic's Rendezvous Band: Detroit City Slang

Sonic's Rendezvous Band: Detroit City Slang

Yes. Sonic’s Redezvous Band counts not just Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, of MC5 fame, on guitar and vocals, but former Rationals’ guitarist Scott Morgan, the least famous Asheton, Scott, on drums and the Up’s Gary Rasmussen on bass. It was a sensible, Michigan centered rock ensemble forming in the wake of punk’s relative success and giving an outlet to the nascent scene’s alleged forefathers.

Being broke rock and rollers, though, didn’t allow for the group to record too much – well a few studio tracks survived. “City Slang” was the only track making it out to the world at large. The single didn’t do much, Smith eventually played more with his wife Patti than anything else and the group basically fell into disrepair and then disappeared. As luck would have it, the vampires in the record industry dug up enough stuff by Sonic’s band to issue a handful of posthumous works.

In addition to that six cd box set, a live date called Sweet Nothing, which had nothing to do with the Velvet Underground song of the same name, was released back in 1998. It’s surprisingly well recorded. And as would be expected, the band’s locked into its own brand of hard rock. Of course, coming so late in the decade, one might have expected a few more high-energy tracks – the title song’s mid-paced at best.

Surprisingly, there aren’t any MC5 or Stooges covers tossed in specifically to delight the audience. When material as strong as Morgan’s “Asteroid B-612” is being contributed by folks not fronting the band, though, the decision makes sense. While the second guitarist’s composition isn’t much more than a slowed down MC5 track with less bombastic singing, there’s really nothing listeners can complain about over the course of the disc’s fifty-eight minute run time. And the fact that “City Slang,” the aforementioned single takes up about ten of those minutes says a lot about the bands ability to play off each other.

With Smith’s voice not being Rob Tyner’s the track’s exposition is a bit sparse. But with that stuttered bridge into the chorus, the song winds up being nothing short of staggering and amply explains why Detroit was and will always be rife with musicians. Either way, running the basic melody into the ground, adding solos here and there takes up the rest of the song’s duration. It’s not perfect, but considering the band’s history, the fact that anything this engaging came about is impressive. Cop it well.