The Love Train Just Came Through Milwaukee

All the old people who listened to AM top 40 radio in the 60’s came from near and far to listen to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and three amazing singers do Motown. Folks were tappin’ the whole time and at the end stood up to dance to Love Train. They were joyful like all those times when they were fifteen and grooving to Motown had just been dormant under their skin for sixty years and had decided now to bust out. It was fun to be there.

I lived in Southfield when I was a teenager. Southfield was a working-class suburb of Detroit, a town with no real center but with a very big high school that when my sister attended, six years before me, ran in two shifts. There were too many kids to fit them in all at once. Everyone was moving to Southfield, a lot of them white folks ‘fleeing’ Detroit. It was a thing then. White flight. Did I say that the audience today was nearly all white?

We had a ranch house on a dead-end dirt road that every summer got dosed with a big soaking of oil to control the road dust. The oil made it look like an actual paved road for a while. Across the way was a farmer’s field and nearly every year, the field would catch fire somehow and we’d all run over there with our shovels to tamp down the flames. It was a dry, spent field so it’s not like there was a wall of flame, just enough to amuse the local kids. Within bike riding distance (which was fairly expansive at the time), there were other farms, a weird house with a gate, a pond with a cave nearby, and a Nike missile base, which may or may not have been abandoned. I don’t remember.

Anyway, back to the radio. I had a little plug in radio that just got AM stations, which is all anyone got, I think. Listening to Motown on that radio was everything. I loved Motown so much. The Temptations, Four Tops, the Supremes, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Isley Brothers, Jr. Walker and the All Stars, and, of course, the king, Marvin Gaye, and queen, Aretha Franklin. The radio in my room was always on and when it got very late, I stuffed the radio under my pillow, so all the songs were like whispers. Every night. I slept in a nest of Detroit music.

And then I went to college and got all weepy with Joan Baez. There were only records in Mt. Pleasant. No radio except the station with the farm reports and, at Christmastime, someone reading letters to Santa. No music.

Across the aisle today, woman who came in on a walker, stood up and danced when the three singers created the magic that is Love Train. I don’t have a photo except in my head, but I bet you can imagine it.