MGM Grand Detroit
1777 3rd Ave.
Detroit
For Valentine’s Day
For Valentine’s Day, I’m reflecting on first dates and great music.
One of the best dates of my life was also the riskiest.
Escalating a first date into getting a hotel room overnight and praying for chemistry was a gamble, especially as we pulled up the MGM Grand Detroit casino.
Maybe it was the psychedelic mushrooms we ate as we passed off the keys to the valet. Maybe it was the fact that we were actually falling in love. Either way, we did have a raging good time, dressed ridiculously and barely leaving the hotel room to absorb all the clangs, clicks, bright lights and neon of the casino floor as the drugs kicked in.
This is all fun until you watch a man, so frustrated by the loss of his money to the casino, that he tosses an entire bench across a parking lot. Reality crashes in then, and you’ve got to find refuge fast.
That’s when we barricaded ourselves in the hotel with nothing but Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” playing front to back, over and over again.
I was struggling to find the perfect soundtrack – to seem cool, to set the mood, to accomplish all of the things. That’s a tall task for any musician to fulfill. Stevie was up to the challenge. As the greatest musician of the last 100 years, he is a genre unto himself.
Thinking on Valentine’s Day and the many ways to love out there, I keep coming back to these moments and how I simply can’t separate the role that music has played inside of these memories, like coming down from mushrooms, laughing like maniacs while proto-disco banger “Another Star” charms in the background.
It’s important to note that this relationship did not, in any sense of the word, work out. But there were incredible moments lodged in there, the first being quite possibly the best.
Maybe it was the setting. Maybe it was the company. Maybe it was the mushrooms.
It all came together, however, when Stevie entered the room.
