"South Detroit" ain't no thang (or place)
NY Mag solves a major factual error in “Don’t Stop Believin’” (My fave karaoke jam right behind “Hey Jealousy” and anything ABBA).
For three decades, this has stymied the Motor City adjacent, whose confusion is now a multigenerational phenomenon, one that strikes at the very heart of a city’s identity. Why the fictional neighborhood? And, on further thought, why did a bunch of Bay Area rockers with no ties to Detroit choose it as the fulcrum point for a ballad of hope and perseverance in the first place? This is how rabbit holes are dug. So to finally free Michiganders from these nagging questions that stop them from fully embracing what is our new unofficial national anthem, Vulture decided to solve the mystery by going to Steve Perry himself.
Reached in San Diego, the former Journey front man explained that some of the enduring song’s unique imagery came to him in the witching hour one morning in May of 1980 while the band was in Detroit for a five-night stand as part of the Departure tour. Perry, unable to sleep, stood staring out of his hotel room window at 2 a.m. “I was digging the idea of how the lights were facing down, so that you couldn’t see anything,” he says, recalling the night. “All of a sudden I’d see people walking out of the dark, and into the light. And the term ‘streelight people’ came to me. So Detroit was very much in my consciousness when we started writing.”
Yes, but what about South Detroit? For the love of Tim Allen, what about South Detroit? To that, Perry pleads poetic license, and ignorance, despite the fact that a quick glance at a map would have alerted him to the issue. “I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit,” he says. “The syntax just sounded right. I fell in love with the line. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn’t matter.”
