David Blair
should be in Paris right now. Blair, a 36-year-old Detroit musician and
poet, planned to leave Detroit and immerse himself in Parisian life to
write about 18th century black classical musician Le Chevalier de
Saint-Georges. But after a March 2008 performance at the
Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Max M. Fisher Music Center, West
Bloomfield banker Dan Bober introduced himself to Blair and asked what
it would take to get an album out of him before he left town. “Time and money,” replied Blair, who’s known professionally by just his last name.Bober’s response: If you have the time, I have the money.At
which point Blair — a classically trained vocalist, musician, poet,
playwright and performer — decided Saint-Georges could wait. Bober
created a record label, Repeatable Silence Records, and Blair gathered
a group of musicians he knew from his years with Urban Folk Collective,
and formed a new Detroit band, The Boyfriends. Their album, tentatively
called WarZone, is on track for a March release. Blair’s music
has been described as urban folk and Afro-punk, and his influences
range from Stevie Wonder to The Smiths. He might include an Italian
madrigal in a set of performance poetry. He’s hard to pigeonhole, and
seems to like it that way.Detroit poet Vievee Francis, once told
him that most artists — and particularly most writers — are trying to
work out their lives. It fits Blair, who writes and sings about race,
identity and living in Detroit and performs spoken word with a personal
urgency, whether it’s a poem about working the line at the Lynch Road
Chrysler plant or verse spoken from the perspective of Jackson family
patriarch Joe Jackson. “I write about myself and the world and
my place in it,” he says. “I try to make it as universal as I can, even
though I consider myself to be kind of a strange person. I think
everyone is looking for identity, trying to figure out what parts of
our authentic selves are worth hanging onto.”As long as he’s true to the message, the form seems to take care of itself. “I'm
a total music geek,” says Bober, whose daughter introduced him to
Blair’s spoken-word work about five years ago. “I can find something I
like in every format. First and foremost I think I was drawn to the
intelligence of Blair’s lyrics. There isn’t one of his songs that
doesn’t have very compelling, often heart-wrenching, often witty
lyrics.” Blair, 36, grew up in New Jersey. He sang in the
church choir (until his parents stopped making him go to church) and
wrote poetry in school (though he never showed it to anyone but his
teachers).He was living in New York when a guy he was seeing
introduced him to some people from Detroit. He came for a visit and
decided to move here. He heard plenty of, “Where are you moving here
from?” and “Why the hell did you come here?” But as an artist it made
so much sense. He could afford to live downtown, close to the city’s
cultural hub. Layers of history in music, labor and civil rights made
the city rich in human experience. And he’s come to appreciate the
down-to-earth people, the lack of pretension.“I love this city,” he says. “I chose it as my home. It inspires me all the time and it breaks my heart all the time.”Early
on there was a succession of just-getting-by jobs — janitor at Wayne
State University, cashier at Meijer — then he spent four years working
on the line at Chrysler’s Jefferson North and Lynch Road plants.
Stalled creativity settled on people in the plant like dust. There were
aspiring fashion designers, musicians, people who swore they were only
working there until they could buy some studio equipment.“There
were all these creative minds and what scared me is, it’s a hard job
and an admirable job, but I was starting to feel like a bunch of the
people who started out there — they were stuck. I didn’t want to wake
up one morning and be stuck.”Blair quit in 2002, took a huge pay
cut and started hosting open mics at the Bittersweet Coffeehouse in
Midtown. The coffeehouse itself only stayed open a year, but through it
he tapped into a rich community of poets and found an outlet for the
poetry that — until then — he’d never shown the world.“(The
Bittersweet Coffeehouse) had jazz and poetry and acoustic music, it was
really a community of artists,” he says. “Poets would come and use the
audience to rehearse. It was the first time I’d ever seen performance
poetry.” That year, as a new performance poet, he earned a
place on the Detroit team that would win the National Poetry Slam team
championships. Winning a poetry slam doesn’t exactly make you a
household name, but it did expose him to a new audience.While
most of his musical gigs are closer to home, he’s toured the U.S.,
South Africa and Germany performing poetry, plays, and a one-man-show,
“Burying the Evidence.” In 2007 he won the Bent Mentor Award for Queer
Writers. “(The success as a poet) didn’t really hit me until I
had 20 shows booked all over the country,” he says. “Then I felt like
I’d found my niche. Since then I tend to go back and forth. The thing
that makes me happy is being a singer/songwriter and a poet. If I get
bored of the poetry — if I'm writing a poem and it ends up being a song
— that’s OK.”