I-94 Bar Interview of Michael Erlewine
Media
The Prime Movers Blues Band (Feat. Iggy Pop): "Watch Yourself"
"A question I get a lot is why did the Prime Movers never record and get famous? The short answer is: it was not in the cards. The longer version is actually pretty funny. Here it is in brief: There were two attempts to hitch our wagon to the stars. For a short time early on, we had the now-legendary 'Jeep' Holland, manager of the rock group "The Rationals" as our manager. For sure, he wanted to get us into the mainstream of popular music and to this end he tried to get us to conform, to wear little suits, and whatever he thought would help us. And we did try, but our natural temperament as a band found us wandering off that trail pretty quickly. Included here is an old video of a staged chase of the Prime Movers by a lot of our women fans. We did have some great fans. This video is appropriately stupid, as you will see. Our second near brush with fame came when a subsidiary of Motown courted us to join them as a White band playing Black music. They drove us around in their limousines, set up cool events like my brother Daniel and I having lunch with the Everly Brothers. Now THAT was very cool, because we loved their music. You get the idea. The shit hit the fan, so to speak, when we realized that the Black music they wanted us to play was not the Chicago blues music we loved and were learning, but some really bad arrangements they came up with for us to play. In other words, we would have to play what they gave us to play. Well that was not about to happen and we walked. We were out of there, instantly - short karma for the fame trip. So here is all the actual video of the Prime Movers that I am aware of." - Michael Erlewine
The Prime Movers Blues Band was founded in the summer of 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The main band members included:
Media
The Prime Movers Blues Band (Feat. Iggy Pop): "Two Trains Running"
The Prime Movers Blues Band formed in the summer of 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This audio track is from fairly early on, a gig at the Schwaben Inn and Jim Osterberg (AKA Iggy Pop) is definitely the drummer on this track. This video is a tribute to Dan Erlewine, lead guitar player for the Prime Movers Blues Band. Subsequent to the Prime Movers Dan played lead guitar for the Sam Lay Blues Band and was considering playing guitar with the Butterfield band, when he decided he really wanted to build some guitars.
The main band members included:
Michael Erlewine: lead singer, harmonica
My Time with Bob Dylan in Ann Arbor
With an introduction to legendary guitar player Perry Lederman.
Moving a Business to Ann Arbor: A Story
The Folk Music Revival in Ann Arbor (Late 1950s - Early 1960s)
In 1957 freshman student Al Young and Bill McAdoo founded the University of Michigan Folklore Society. Al Young went on to become the Poet Laureate of California.
Ann Arbor's 'The Bird of Paradise'
I would spend many evenings at the Bird of Paradise. It was always dark in there. After all, it’s a jazz club.
The Forgotten Jazz Scene
How could the repeal of prohibition in 1933 affect the onset of The Sixties in Ann Arbor? It sounds like Chaos Theory, where the flapping of a butterfly wing in Brazil affects the amount of snow that falls in Greenland. But such an effect did occur. And the sad thing is that the scene I am about to describe is hardly remembered. I keep waiting for someone to write about it, but it might have to be me!
AMG: Sometimes a Great Notion
This story is music from the other end, instead of playing it, documenting it so it would not be lost in the shuffle of time as most things on. This is that story, the story of AMG, the All-Music Guide.