Rhymes, Rhythm, and the Motor City: Poet M.L. Liebler's Detroit

Ted Bonnitt00:00:00

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt. Phil Proctor is somewhere out there in radio land. Hello, Phil.

Phil Proctor00:00:09

You got me.

Ted Bonnitt00:00:09

There you are.

Phil Proctor00:00:10

I'm talking to you from Delaware in Adele's Saucer by the Sea.

Ted Bonnitt00:00:16

Great.

Phil Proctor00:00:16

All right.

Ted Bonnitt00:00:17

And you won't be doing the show from the bathroom today?

Phil Proctor00:00:19

No, I'm doing the show from the bedroom today. Anybody's enticed by that?

Ted Bonnitt00:00:24

Well, again, thank God we don't have cameras.

Phil Proctor00:00:26

Don't we? Is it everything on television now?Hey, let's introduce our guest today because he has also, in a wonderful book that he's written, expressed certainly to me, the arc of what we've all been going through to get to this point. You know, he is a poet, he is a musician, he's an activist, he's a teacher, and an all around mensch. And do we mention his name?

Ted Bonnitt00:00:59

M.L. Liebler.

Phil Proctor00:01:00

M.L. Liebler.

Ted Bonnitt00:01:01

Yeah, I understand M stands for Mike, but you're known as ML, so we're just gonna call you ML.

M.L. Liebler00:01:07

My wife doesn't call me ML but everybody else does.

Phil Proctor00:01:11

Well, you know, idiot doesn't count. Okay.

M.L. Liebler00:01:14

Yeah, right, right.

Ted Bonnitt00:01:17

You are internationally known, you're widely published Detroit poet, you're a university professor, you're a literary arts activist, you're an arts organizer, and you just released your memoir called Hound Dog, A Poet' of Rock, Revolution and Redemption. And it's about growing up in Detroit and discovering the world through your love of music.I just finished reading the book about an hour ago and I loved it.Detroit is such a fascinating story because it epitomized the heyday of a robust post war empire where the middle class was actually growing in wealth at a faster rate than the wealth class, which of course, that was put to a stop, Right? Absolutely. ML, man, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

M.L. Liebler00:02:01

It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure meeting both of you guys. Yeah, yeah, I listen to the podcast. I know what's happening.

Phil Proctor00:02:08

Uh, oh, all right.

M.L. Liebler00:02:09

We did it in Detroit.

Phil Proctor00:02:11

If you move the letters of Detroit around, it spells rioted. And you did. You had your fare of civil unrest there because you have good values. People of the Midwest, of which I am one.When Fireside Theater was touring and when Procter and Bergman were touring extensively, our very best audiences were always in the Midwest because the Midwest has a built in sense of the surreal.

M.L. Liebler00:02:39

Yes, that's right.

Phil Proctor00:02:41

What makes it surreal, it might just be the drinking and the cigarettes, but I remember when I grew up sitting around the table with my Relatives in the kitchen. And everybody was drinking and smoking and telling funny, surrealistic jokes. I don't know what causes that. Maybe it's because it's the farmland.It's a land of reality, the Midwest. It's a hard scrabble life. In many ways, it's a worker's paradise.In many ways, it's living off the earth and appreciating godliness in its purest form, which is, you know, if it rains too much, you're not going to have good crops that year. Well, that creates a certain degree of, I don't know, of distance.And I think the only way that you can respond to it is through laughter, really, because how else can I explain it?All I know is that was and still is the kind of attitude that I'd run into in the Midwest of acceptance and lightheartedness about the reality, the harsh realities of life. God knows, in your book you lived through it.Besides the fact that you have an amazing power of recollection and detail, which I found absolutely amazing and wonderful, you went through so many spiritual and mental and physical changes in your life. And to me, that's a very Midwestern kind of experience.

M.L. Liebler00:04:21

I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right.

Ted Bonnitt00:04:23

What makes a poet from Detroit?

M.L. Liebler00:04:25

Well, you know, my story's a little bit different than probably a lot of poets stories. I mean, here's my recollection is when I was in the second grade, I used to scribble, you know, my, I guess, feelings in my textbooks.And I was raised by my grandparents who were working class grandparents. And, you know, the teacher called and said, you gotta come in. You know, this kid is writing stuff in his book and it's.It's not normal stuff that he's writing. So we got to talk about it. And so that happened. That's how I started. And then when I got into fifth grade, I had a great.I was just talking about it in my class yesterday at Wayne State. I had this great teacher that I really didn't realize how great it was. He was influenced by art and laughter and music. And I went back.I was in his class when Kennedy was assassinated. And I went back to see him on the 25th anniversary. I stopped in and he invited me in the classroom.He was still asking after all those years, how's your grandparents? And all that sort of thing. Of course, they had been dead for a long time.But I went in and I saw all this art hanging from the ceiling, on the windows, on his desk. The room did not look Like a typical public school classroom. It looked. It looked much more casual, and it was filled with art.And I thought, son of a gun, this guy probably changed everything for me, because that's where I learned what a poem was. He pulled this book out that had a pelican on a post looking out at the sea, and he said, today we're going to read the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.Ah, yes. And I said, oh. And when I looked at it physically, I thought that was the first time I noticed that it had a lot of white space around it.And whatever I was scribbling in my second grade textbook had white space around it. So that's when I knew, well, this is poetry. So I don't know what that means. I mean, my grandparents were not necessarily literate people.Very smart, but not literate. They didn't take me to the library. In fact, I didn't even start seeing Disney movies till I had kids.You know, I saw Bambi and all the movies I'd heard about, I didn't seem that interested in then. But it was kind of nice to see it from that perspective. That's how it started.

Ted Bonnitt00:07:01

You were very close to your grandparents. They raised you.

M.L. Liebler00:07:04

They did.

Ted Bonnitt00:07:05

You write so lovingly about your grandmother, how cool she was.

M.L. Liebler00:07:10

Oh, she was great, you know, and at the time, I thought she was a grandma. But in hindsight, now she was in her 40s, and she really loved Elvis Presley and what I always say is early Elvis. And that's what she turned me onto.That. And she had the Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald and the Harmonic Cats. I'm sure Firestein must have listened to Harmonic Hats, of course.

Phil Proctor00:07:37

Absolutely. I was raised to a great extent by my grandparents in Goshen as well.And my grandfather was a laborer at company that his father created a milk condensing plant, and he used to go to work every day, even though he basically owned the plant. And I had a similar kind of wonderful existence with. I guess the main difference was you had two siblings. Two or three siblings.I had a whole support group of cousins.

M.L. Liebler00:08:09

I had a bunch of siblings that I really didn't know. Yeah, my birth mother must have been married five or six times or something and seemingly had a kid with each one.I know some of them, but I don't really know them per se. And why would I? I loved living with my grandparents.

Ted Bonnitt00:08:28

You were a product of teenage pregnancy, correct?

M.L. Liebler00:08:30

That's right. When they moved in the 40s to the suburbs, the reason people were leaving for the suburbs is because Detroit, you Couldn't find housing in Detroit.There were so many people. I think there were 2 million people at one point. And there wasn't enough housing.So the working class people who were making money working on the line were able to afford to buy their own place that had a backyard and a driveway. And you know, they're all working class houses. In hindsight, when you see no basements, you know, plat that kind of thing.

Ted Bonnitt00:09:08

This is the peak of the union movement in America. These are all working class people who were union working in assembly lines for all the automotive manufacturers.

M.L. Liebler00:09:17

And everybody that lived around there was from that kind of background too. And this is something too, that Phil probably knows from grandparents. And it was true in the 60s too.Grandparents were a lot closer to us in our thinking than what I called the World War II parents.So, you know, who were like bulldogs and you know, pro the war in Vietnam and all that stuff where grandparents were like, no, you know, we've been through this stuff before. This isn't what we're about.

Phil Proctor00:09:51

Good point.

M.L. Liebler00:09:52

Yeah. And even, you know, my grandfather was in the 1937 sit down strike at Dodge, Maine, which was the first place in Detroit that it hit.And they were locked in there for a long time. So he was a, he was a strong union man. He wasn't a labor activist or anything like that.He just was a working class guy who believed in a decent wage for what he did and benefits and some security. Dodge Bain, you know, was the first one here. And then, you know, I teach labor studies.This is my little side gig I've been doing for 35 years teaching labor studies at Wayne State. I'm in the English department formally, but I got hooked up with them and been teaching that.And as time went on, I found the students who many of them at first worked in the factories and they were hoping maybe to get a promotion or something to a negotiator or a shop steward, but they didn't know their own history. So I was doing labor through the arts and then I switched it to just labor history. Cause they didn't know that stuff.They were like, oh, that happened. Wow.

Ted Bonnitt00:11:04

The 50s and 60s. Detroit is unimaginable to kids who are grown into desolation.

M.L. Liebler00:11:11

Yes, absolutely. And now we're far away from it.And like I used to in my classes, I've been at Wayne since 80 and I used to ask my class, how many of you, you know, your parents work in a factory? And a lot of hands would go up if I asked that question. And I have since maybe one or two kids raised their hand.

Ted Bonnitt00:11:33

You wrote in your book.As I wander through the tapestry of life, I am transported to a time when the very essence of America shimmered with hope before the shadows of Vietnam loomed large.I recall a somber grayness in the 1950s, an era painted in stark contrasts, much like the black and white television shows that filled our screens before 1965.

M.L. Liebler00:11:52

Yes.

Ted Bonnitt00:11:53

And you talked about the rebirth of America, marked by the election of our youngest President Kennedy ever. And then we were plunged into sorrow with the tragic assassination and a string.

Phil Proctor00:12:03

Of assassinations that followed. Yes, which completely transformed our future.

M.L. Liebler00:12:09

I was telling the students that yesterday because I talked about Mr. Wadke, the fifth grade teacher, and I went back to visit him.And I remember in the fifth grade that when that happened, the only thing we could relate to is it happened to Lincoln, which was about 100 years earlier. And we were kids in line waiting for the bus and saying, wow, I wonder if they used machine guns this time or how did it. Wow, this is terrible.And the whole nation really was plunged into darkness.

Ted Bonnitt00:12:43

It was shock, totally. You talked about your childhood was filled with vibrant events woven in the warmth of my grandma and grandpa.The timeless tunes of Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Dion echoing in the background, and the delightful aroma of pizza filling the air. What child could imagine such a joyful existence in the late 50s and 60s?

M.L. Liebler00:13:03

That was the working class, what we did. And Phil, probably again, because he's from this part of the world. Saturday night you had a bath.And after the bath they took me to this bar, although it's not what it sounds like. There was a famous. We had this famous pizza here called Deep Dish Pizza. And there was one place on Gratiot that made it.And they would take me there on Saturday after my bath, and they would each have a shell of beer. Kids don't even know what a shell is anymore. And then a pizza. And that was. And as long as you did it before 9 o', clock, you could bring a kid in.So we did that. And that was our Saturday night.

Phil Proctor00:13:45

If you drank too much, were you shell shocked?

Ted Bonnitt00:13:49

What is a shell of beer?

M.L. Liebler00:13:51

It was like about a half of a normal glass that people drink now. What do they drink now? The pints. Glasses. About a half a pint.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:00

Okay.

M.L. Liebler00:14:01

They only had one, you know, that was all they had. And then we left.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:05

When you talk about this with your students and all this idealized life you wrote. And this is the last thing I promise I'm gonna read. Cause it's so good this is in the epilogue.

M.L. Liebler00:14:14

I appreciate it.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:15

As we moved into the late 60s, my reality became a bittersweet relationship with the America I had known.Still, we pushed on to find ourselves in the 21st century, regressing to the old dark ages of America filled with hate, sleepwalking into authoritarianism.

M.L. Liebler00:14:29

Yeah, I became politicized at a pretty young age as I talk about in there, and it was because of Vietnam. The kid about three doors down from us was killed in Vietnam. He had just graduated high school in June, and by December, he was dead.

Ted Bonnitt00:14:49

And that was early on, right? 65.

M.L. Liebler00:14:51

Yeah, it was 65. And it was like, wow, you know, And.And the thing that really bothered me because I did love my grandma so much, is that his mother became very sickly. And then she died a couple of years after that, and all the neighbors said, you know, she died of a broken heart. And I thought, wow, you know, this.Then I really dug into it and, you know, I was totally into, like, the SDS and willing to even be a member of the Weather Underground, which in hindsight is kind of crazy, but that's where my head was at as time went on. And then I wrote for the school paper. I wrote political editorials, which got me in trouble with the John Birch Society and all those people.

Ted Bonnitt00:15:40

Good work.

M.L. Liebler00:15:41

And I didn't understand that. I'm just like, no, this is a bad thing. And that's one thing to say about the book is it's not a kind of memory of the way it used to be.That was so great because anyone who grew up in the 60s knows it was not always wonderful. There was a lot of pain. I told my students the other day we thought the Vietnam. I did anyway.Thought the Vietnam War would go on as long as Afghanistan ended up going on. I thought it always would be here. We'd always be in Vietnam. And it was very painful from that perspective.And then, of course, the police and the secret police, I'm sure they had to be knocking on a fire sign store. Oh, yeah.

Phil Proctor00:16:32

Oh, for sure.

M.L. Liebler00:16:33

Yeah.

Phil Proctor00:16:34

I mean, literally, I was visited by representatives of the CIA or something like it.

M.L. Liebler00:16:41

Yes.

Phil Proctor00:16:42

Questioning my patriotism.

Ted Bonnitt00:16:44

The 60s was a very violent time between a war in Vietnam and all the political assassinations and the fighting in the streets.The Democratic convention in Chicago, there was this contrasting peace movement because we were riding high on, again, the post war empire, and we had everything we needed and we were celebrating that. So it was a real tug of war.

M.L. Liebler00:17:04

Yeah, no, it was. So there's little bright spots in it that we all remember, you know, Jimi Hendrix comes along, that kind of changes things.And then a little bit later, fire sign comes along and we laugh our asses off at all of the. Ralph Mark, Ralph Smart here, you know. Yeah, right, right. And I love that elevator one too. Where the elevator. And I think that's a second level.

Phil Proctor00:17:32

Don't shout. He can hear you.

M.L. Liebler00:17:34

Yes.

Phil Proctor00:17:35

It's interesting because you, you actually don't reference Fireside Theater in your book, but you do reference the Dada movement, which of course inspired us. And this, the effective surrealistic comedy. Jonathan Winters. He's one of your. Right. One of your heroes in his hero Man.

M.L. Liebler00:17:52

Hero.

Phil Proctor00:17:53

Right. And he encouraged you to improvise. Yeah. I was particularly enjoying the chapters about your performance art when you were in school.You guys did some pretty daring and outrageous anti authoritarian things, you know.

M.L. Liebler00:18:08

We did. And actually we have a big celebration coming up at Wayne State. The 52nd year of Ridgeway was the name of the collective.Then I started a press from that because I was the one writer kind of guy in the group. But yeah, that. So the 52nd year and people are some place around here.A Journal of the Arts did a big thing expose on us because they said one, we can't believe you're all still alive and two, you're all still friends. And they're all coming in now for this thing in a couple of weeks at Wayne State.

Phil Proctor00:18:46

Oh my gosh, that's going to be great. I hope you cover it well.

M.L. Liebler00:18:50

Oh yeah, it's getting coverage for sure.

Ted Bonnitt00:18:52

You know, the other thing that's interesting about your book, which we're talking about Hound Dog Poets of Rock, Revolution and Redemption, available now, is because of your grandmother turning onto Elvis. You've always had a deep appreciation for music. Each chapter is based on a particular musician.

M.L. Liebler00:19:08

Right.

Ted Bonnitt00:19:09

How did you cross paths with so many very notable musicians? Yes.

M.L. Liebler00:19:13

Well, it just, it kind of happened one.You know, I've been kind of in the literary world and doing things for, for so long that when I would meet a friend, let's say Al Cooper, you know, it was kind of like he was a hero. But I, you know, I didn't, I wasn't starstruck. I just thought, wow, what a great guy.And then we hung out and then we went on tour a couple of times in Europe and I just went to be his friend, you know, I mean he, he likes to talk about music a lot and I love to listen to it, so. And he doesn't sleep and two hours a night. So I'm like, okay, I'm up for it. I've been stayed at his house several times too, in Massachusetts.And we talk late into the night or all night about any plays, cuts of different stuff and so forth. So. But I'll say one thing with the Al Cooper thing.I was listening to Fresh Air on the radio and they were doing an interview when his book came out, Backstabbing Bastards and something. And he was teaching at Berkeley in. Not the Berkeley there, but Berkeley Music School. Right. And so they hired him to teach there.He was taking care of his mother who lived by there. And so I just reached out to him as a fellow professor and said, hey, professor, you know, I dig your stuff. I'd like you to come to Detroit.Well, I was running a major, a literary organization, the Writer's Voice, at the ymca, which started in New York, and I don't think they had one in la. They tried to, but Beyond Broke was already established. So it turns out, like, when I was young, I never thought about Los Angeles.I was a New York guy. I went to New York when I was in high school looking, of course, for John Lennon on West bank street in the Village. And I didn't see him.But I love New York. That's when I thought America. When I saw New York City in person, I thought, you know, now I see what's great about America.This is the most incredible place that I. So I did a lot of stuff in New York and I started doing some things in la. And now it's like I've been going to LA for 35 years, doing stuff.And Beyond Baroque. I'll be at Beyond Baroque in July with my La Coyote Monk Poetry Band and some others. So they just firmed that up the other day. So.Yes, and Beyond Baroque was a, you know, always a legend. It's like the St. Mark's Poetry Project of LA.

Ted Bonnitt00:22:04

So I just saw Richard Hell read from his book there about a week or two ago.

M.L. Liebler00:22:09

Yeah, that's what I mean, you know, connected and then, you know, so that. That's kind of how it is. I'm thinking of la, you know, I got connected with the Minute Men.And Mike Watt has been a dear friend for 40 some years now. He even has backed me up. And when I played in la, he would drive up from San Pedro. These are working class people.He'd drive up with his amplifier and his guitar and it, you know, he'd already been through all that Minuteman stuff and he. He'd hike over to the Rose Cafe in Venice.

Phil Proctor00:22:45

Yeah.

M.L. Liebler00:22:46

And we Did a. We would do a gig there, you know, and then he'd get back in his car and drive back to San Pedro.

Phil Proctor00:22:52

ML.It's so true, because when that one Fire Sign was cranking out records with Columbia, it was before people were selling million gazillion, you know, platinum records and all that stuff. And there was a community, it was a bohemian community of artists who were suddenly given this wonderful international platform to express their art.And we were all kind of grateful for it, if you will.

M.L. Liebler00:23:20

Right, right.

Phil Proctor00:23:21

And we hung out together.

Ted Bonnitt00:23:23

Amel, you've incorporated music into your poetry readings quite a bit.

M.L. Liebler00:23:27

Well, you know, I thought about that early.I started doing it when I was young, and then when I got to college, we had a four track tape player someone gave us, and I didn't know how to play anything. I mean, my grandmother spent money on me to learn guitar, but I never did. I learned like the C chord or something.But I would sit around in our apartment and make recordings with poetry and music. And back then I would use, you know, records or Nat Coleman or whatever. And I remember I did a thing with the Chieftains before they were known.I mean, not me personally, but on their record when Barry Lyndon came out, I'd never heard music like that before, and I did a piece with that. But it dawned on me later that what I was doing, because this has been my main point in life, is to bring poetry to the people.I always said if an idiot like me could understand and write poetry and write books, then certainly people, like most people smarter than me, could too. They just have to be exposed to it. So that's how I got into the music thing.And then that, you know, doing that, I thought, well, I'll bring music to it. That's unexpected. And people liked it.And then musicians started coming up to me in Detroit from all these different groups and said, hey, we want to play with you. And I go, you do? And they said, yeah.And then a friend said, I have a studio down in Wyandotte, Michigan, and why don't you come down there and record an album and you can sell that at your poetry readings instead of just selling. And I thought, wow, whoever heard of that where I'm at now? Then I ended up, I met Country Joe because I did a lot of work with Vietnam vets.And he did too. And he, he had a special place in his heart for Detroit and the vets here. And we worked. That's how we started working.And then we thought, well, let's do a record. You Know what the hell? So we recorded it in the basement of a suburban house in Michigan outside of Detroit in a day.And then he took it back and Bill Belmont put it on rag baby, and the rest is history.

Ted Bonnitt00:25:47

We have something that you did called Twilight Blues. Right, let's play that. We're talking to ML Liebler on Sexy Boomer show.

Speaker D00:26:06

Were there twice Twilight Twilight Blues descends upon neon snake electric city sign ongoing going on It's a language spoken in miles that comes road after all the other road it's another Just another angel Another angel's wing Just waving goodbye Waving goodbye goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Just waving goodbye to our unity and just waving waving goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Just waving goodbye to our unity we're lost city broken spirit split confusion everywhere and we're separate never equal and we live here, we live here Nobody saying nothing Turning blind eyes like double plays well it does.

M.L. Liebler00:27:11

Bottles and makeup and we got no.

Speaker D00:27:14

More under Blue jazz wailing no wonder Blue jazz wailing no wonder blue jazz a wailing through the thin breeze on eight Mile Road no wonder Blue jazz wailing no wonder Blue jazz wailing and wailing on a Blue jazz wailing through the thin breeze on eight Mile Road we got ghosts, we got birds we got ghosts and birds we left with ghosts and birds who live in living night we got ghosts, we got birds who live here Living now in the twilight Twilight blues Twilight blues that is.

Ted Bonnitt00:28:02

ML Liebler, our guest today, the poet from Detroit, about Detroit. Yeah, Eight Mile Road. People know eight Mile from Eminem. And as I'm reading your book, I see 8 mile, 13 mile. What is that?

M.L. Liebler00:28:16

Well, you know, everybody asks that question who comes to visit here. I mean, nowadays they see 8 mile and go, hey, that's 8 mile.And it's like, yeah, Detroit's always had mile roads that measured from the center of downtown. And so 8 mile was 8 miles away from the center.And I live now and have grown up pretty much by 12 mile, and that's 12 miles from city center type of thing. And so that was kind of common, but I guess it's not so common for visitors because they're always amazed at two our street names.You know, one is called Grass Shit, which as kids we thought, oh, great, we can say Grass Shit. But it's spelled, I think in French it's grado or something like that, because there's a lot of French stuff and then there's Kadju and.God, I'm just thinking of being here with. Driving around with Ken Kesey, and he was amazed because what is this street called? I said, it's Gratiot. He goes, that's not Gratiot.I go, that's Gratiot.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:22

So you were driving around Detroit with Ken Kesey.

M.L. Liebler00:29:25

Yeah. He wanted to go bowling one night when he was here. So I have a picture somewhere here, him holding bowling balls. And it was, take the acid heads.Bowling was a caption for the photos.

Ted Bonnitt00:29:38

The eight Mile Road is also a divisive line between it always has been the inner city and the upscale suburbs. Right?

M.L. Liebler00:29:46

Yeah. And that's the thing that's different than say Los Angeles. I don't know so much about the suburbs there.But in like New York City, the suburbs and Chicago are really far away from the city. Well, here, I mean, I live at 12 mile, I ride my bike 4 miles, I'm at 8 mile.So and then you cross 8 mile and you're in Detroit, then that's the city limits of Detroit. And so it's in that way, it's kind of a different scenario. We're much closer to the city than probably other major cities and suburbs are.

Phil Proctor00:30:21

You know, Detroit means the narrows in French. Oh yes, it means the narrows. And of course you were talking about suburbs in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the suburbs.

M.L. Liebler00:30:32

Yes, that's true.

Phil Proctor00:30:33

One of the other aspects of your story that is so astonishing is how many places in the world you have been able to adventure in. Including really hair raising experiences in Afghanistan.

Ted Bonnitt00:30:50

In service to your government, no less.

Phil Proctor00:30:52

Yeah.

M.L. Liebler00:30:53

What happened is it all started in Germany, but no, in Germany I was.

Phil Proctor00:30:58

It did, didn't it? It all started in Germany and it's still going on.

M.L. Liebler00:31:05

As they call me Herr Liebler, Herr Professor Liebler. But when I was in Munich for the first time, I thought, oh, I'm going to see Lieblers all over the place here.And so I went in the hotel and I said, they said, what's your name? I said, liebler. I go, that must be like Smith here. And the lady at the hotel said, that's a jewel name. Nice. Yeah, but I'm not Jewish.I'm a convert to Catholicism. I was never. But that's another story. When I first.

Phil Proctor00:31:37

It is another story and it's in your book and it's wonderfully told.

Ted Bonnitt00:31:41

You were raised Lutheran.

M.L. Liebler00:31:43

I was.

Ted Bonnitt00:31:44

And then you converted. You devoted a lot of your life to alcohol and LSD and things like that.

M.L. Liebler00:31:50

Thanks to fire sign.

Phil Proctor00:31:52

No, it's our fault. Is it?

Ted Bonnitt00:31:53

And you had the ill effects of what now we know as panic attacks.

M.L. Liebler00:31:57

Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:31:58

And that really Debilitated you. But what's interesting is that you consciously switched over to Catholicism and you are still a faithful Catholic.

M.L. Liebler00:32:06

Yeah, I am.In fact, I was just talking to my friend who's a Baptist minister, blues artist and a minister, and he goes, you're the only guy that goes to church more than we do because he's been on the road with me. And I usually try to go to mass when I can and, you know, during the week even. And that's kind of unheard of by normal people.

Ted Bonnitt00:32:28

What does it do for you? Why are you so devout?

M.L. Liebler00:32:30

The thing is, my wife was Catholic and we've been together since we were 14. But so she was raised Catholic. And I wanted my kids being a professor.All the kids who went to Catholic school, they know how to write, and the kids who went to schools like me, don't know how to write. So I said, when we have kids, I want them to go to a Catholic school.Well, she was more than fine with that, and the kids did, and they all know how to write. In fact, my son is a writer and. And my daughter's a teacher. But. So that was the. That's kind of like where it started for me.But then as I started going to church and doing all that sort of thing every Sunday, I became much more aware of the activist side of Catholicism. Then, like meeting all these other people. I met Father Daniel Berrigan. He came to Detroit a couple of times for me, and we hung out.And then I became aware of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. And so that's, you know, when people say, oh, you're a devout Catholic. Yeah. I say, I'm a left wing Catholic, you know, for sure.And that's why those were my influences.

Ted Bonnitt00:33:44

How many are there of you?

M.L. Liebler00:33:48

Just me, I think.

Phil Proctor00:33:51

Hey, but let's get back to Afghanistan. Yeah. How did you end up in Afghanistan? Certainly not because you were a Christian.

M.L. Liebler00:33:57

No, I did go to Mass there, though, with some of the State Department people who were Catholic. But at any rate, no, what happened is I started traveling and. And so I got a gig in. Well, Wayne State has a program in Munich. That's how I ended up.

Phil Proctor00:34:18

I see.

M.L. Liebler00:34:19

They call it the junior year in Munich. But. But there's very few Wayne State. They're mostly from Harvard and Yale and stuff like that, but we had that place.So a guy, a professor at Wayne said, you got, you know, you're on the road all the time. Go to Munich, would you? And take your music with you. So I took the Baptist minister who's a great blues player, pretty famous around here too.And we did, we started doing some shows there and then they put me on a tour where I did all of Germany over kind of our Thanksgiving break or whatever, and that was through the State Department.

Phil Proctor00:34:56

And then you met and you met the Beatles and the rest is history, right?

M.L. Liebler00:35:01

I never met any of the Beatles, but I have met many people from their camp because I used to teach the Beatles at Wayne State and take my students over to England for spring break.

Phil Proctor00:35:13

Oh, wow, that's cool.

M.L. Liebler00:35:15

Yeah, yeah.So through that kind of process, I met a lot of beetle people and they would, when they were here, would come to class and as close as any student's gonna get to a Beatle.

Ted Bonnitt00:35:26

So Afghanistan, you write in your book about how you are surrounded by a failance of security. Tanks, helicopter gunships take you into these far flung villages. This is 2012 and it was fairly intense, security wise.

M.L. Liebler00:35:41

Yeah, because here's why I was in. I went over to Israel. I always wanted to see Israel. And again, everyone thinks I'm Jewish, but I'm not even there. They do, but.And they're not, most of them. I went over there just because I wanted to see Israel, being religious and all that sort of thing.And so I contacted a couple of people and one of the persons worked for the State Department and they said, yeah, we'll give you, we can get you a gig at a place, a place in the heart of Jerusalem and they have poets and stuff. So they booked me for that and then they said, well, can you do a workshop too? Which I do too.And I did one, but it was all Arab kids and I got them reciting poetry, which happened in Afghanistan too, and jumping around to music.And so they came up to me after, they said, you got to come back here because we have never been able to communicate with these kids before and they wouldn't stop with you. So that began my ventures into Israel after Israel, after doing a lot of stuff in Israel that grew and grew and grew.The people in Palestine who work the State Department, which is in Jerusalem now, unfortunately, unfortunately, where Trump moved the embassy out of Tel Aviv. But that place they're at now used to be for the West Bank. And they called up and said, hey, we want some of this action with this ML Evilr guy too.And so I started doing the west bank and Ramallah, Beshawarma anywhere and a lot of places around there for the State Department. And I thought, well, you know, how dangerous can it be?You know, I was of course I was in these black sedans with guys with earpieces, driving everywhere.

Ted Bonnitt00:37:38

You did make a wrong turn into Syria at a bad time.

M.L. Liebler00:37:41

I did. I did. That was with Eminem's publisher, who may be listening right now because he's out in Laurel Canyon. Yeah, we're driving.I said, hey, Joel, I think we just crossed a line here. And we had to turn around real quick and get out of there.

Ted Bonnitt00:37:55

What was the State Department's interest in having a poet from Detroit going to remote villages in Afghanistan to talk to the kids? What was their reasoning?

M.L. Liebler00:38:05

Their reasoning was.Well, in Israel, for one, is Bush was the president for in those early days, and America had a bad image, and they thought cultural programming for people would break down barriers. And I guess that's what they did for a long time.

Ted Bonnitt00:38:24

Well, we certainly fixed that problem, didn't we?

M.L. Liebler00:38:26

Yeah, right. Exactly. Listen, I spent a lot of time over there. This was not ending in our lifetime anyway. But I thought, how dangerous can this be?Then I got home from there one winter in November. I got a call from the State Department and here at home, and I picked up the phone, and they said, we have a mission for you if you accept it.And I said, what's that? And they said, afghanistan. And I said, well, hell, yeah, I'll go to Afghanistan. How hard can it be? How much trouble?Well, it was so much trouble that I didn't even tell my wife what I was doing over there. Goodness. Because I would freak her out. You know, I mean, I get off the plane there and the embassy people pick me up.We're driving to town, and all these people have machine guns and they're riding in carts with horses pulling them. And. And I just thought, man, I'm not in Kansas anymore at all.

Ted Bonnitt00:39:25

It wasn't too distant from Old Detroit, I'd imagine.

M.L. Liebler00:39:27

Yeah, right, right. But I thought, this. This is something else now. I enjoyed it, and it was good. I mean, I met a lot of really interesting people.I met those women who write in secret over there. They're kind of known. And we went into a compound that we had to go in, and they locked the gates after you and the girls came in.And, you know, as soon as they got on the compound, they whipped off their hijabs or their Afghanistan burkas. And then, you know, they started writing poetry, and they wrote really great poetry. We spent a whole day together there.

Phil Proctor00:40:02

They got by their Birkenstocks.

M.L. Liebler00:40:04

Yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:40:04

Where are those women now, given the politics over there?

M.L. Liebler00:40:08

Well, you know what was really interesting about that, Ted Is when we were in that workshop, they started talking. They were starting to. A few of them protest the. What are they called again? I'm forgetting them.

Ted Bonnitt00:40:19

The Taliban.

Phil Proctor00:40:20

Sharia law.

M.L. Liebler00:40:20

The Taliban. And one of them ended up on the front page of the Guardian in England at some protest.And she showed me the picture and she was a young, you know, kind of teenager girl. And I had a teenager girl at the time. And I just thought, wow, what did your dad say? And she said, well, he supports what I do.What does your mother say? Not so much. And only thing I can tell you is it's in my poetry book. There's a whole section.

Ted Bonnitt00:40:53

It's fascinating. We have just a couple minutes left. We wanted your take on Detroit. We hear that there's a renaissance happening, sort of a cool scene downtown.

M.L. Liebler00:41:04

Oh yeah.

Ted Bonnitt00:41:04

What's happening in Detroit from your perspective as an OG poet?

M.L. Liebler00:41:09

Well, one, when I first started poetry, pay people to go to a poetry reading. But. And that's all changed. But Detroit has really. I think it's the greatest place now. It's.Maybe it's where I'm from and I mentioned it somewhere in my book and I've always said this is a bad day in Detroit is better than a good day anywhere in the world. And I feel that way. And of course I teach at a university is right in the middle of Detroit. It's in the inner city and it's always been.There's been there since 1868. And you know, it's just. I just relish it.

Ted Bonnitt00:41:46

Is it coming back?

M.L. Liebler00:41:47

Oh yeah. Even the campus where I teach, back when I started there, students wouldn't go two streets away from the campus.Now people park there and walk all the way down through what used to be pushers and prostitutes and cheap bars and stuff.Now everybody walks down to Little Caesar's arena and they park at Wayne, which is, you know, a healthy little walk, but they don't think anything of it.

Ted Bonnitt00:42:15

That's good news. As a professor of English and poetry, do you see firsthand evidence of what's being discussed as a post literate society?

M.L. Liebler00:42:23

Well, I do, because another thing at Wayne State, Creative writing is the biggest wing in the English department, which is irritating all the literature teachers because our classes are fill up like right away in early registration and the other people are like begging people to take their classes. So they're, they're kind of mad at us. But the whole creative scene in Detroit has just really flourished and blossomed.And young people today, this is why I'm still teaching I mean, I've been at Wayne almost 47 years. I know I look young on the radio.

Phil Proctor00:42:58

You look like Santa Claus.

M.L. Liebler00:43:00

I look like Santa Claus. The young people, Gen Z, I love those kids.

Ted Bonnitt00:43:06

Are they post social media zombies?

M.L. Liebler00:43:09

They are somewhat. But not like what most people in our generation think. They're just work on a different level. Like I tell them, use your computer.You got your computer in your pocket. That's your phone. When you hear me say something or any teacher say something, you don't know, look it up. And they're used to that.So they do have a different kind of attention span. But they're hip kids, man.And Covid made them really appreciate to be in a room with people because once Covid hit and then I had to switch to online and all that. But afterwards, classes, I don't have many students miss classes at all.

Ted Bonnitt00:43:49

That's so good to hear. It's so wonderful to hear.

M.L. Liebler00:43:54

It's what I think. I believe it's true. I was just telling my students the other day the same kind of thing. They learn differently than we did. We learned in college.A professor came in and gave a lecture and we scribbled notes and did all that kind of stuff. They learn differently than that. And those old methods don't work.

Ted Bonnitt00:44:14

That's wonderful to see new generations come up. Of course they're gonna be different. Emil Lieber, thank you so much for coming on the Sexy Boomer show today with us.

M.L. Liebler00:44:23

Oh, thank you, God.

Ted Bonnitt00:44:24

Check out his new book just released, Hound Dog, A Poet's Memoir of Rock, Revolution and Redemption about growing up.

Phil Proctor00:44:31

We just scratched the surface his extraordinary story. Thank you for sharing something with us,.

Ted Bonnitt00:44:36

ML thanks for listening to the Sexy Boomer Show. Check us out@SexyBoomershow.com for all of our episodes. And we have a brand new Facebook page, please.

Phil Proctor00:44:45

And we have a newsletter.

Ted Bonnitt00:44:46

Come to our website and sign up for the newsletter and we'll keep you in the know on all the things that are happening. Send us a us an email at info at sexyboomershow. Com.

M.L. Liebler00:44:53

See you in the canyon, Phil. You bet, ML See you. Let me know when you're out here. Okay, I will. Thanks.