‘Song of Hiawatha’: Film chronicles a Michigan counterculture maverick
If you’ve spent enough time around rock ‘n’ roll in southeastern Michigan, there’s a colorful figure you’ve invariably encountered at some point: Hiawatha Bailey. Bailey, 78, is one of the Motor City’s true originals, a gay Black man who’s been in the thick of the region’s counterculture from the ‘60s onward, entrenched in hippie radicalism and the later punk movement. Now, after years in the works, a documentary exploring his uncommon life has arrived: “The Song of Hiawatha: The Life and High Times of the First Black Hippie,” will make its local bow Friday (Nov. 6) at the Detroit Institute of Arts’ Detroit Film Theatre, three months after its world premiere in Austin. The evening promises to be “a real rock ‘n’ roll experience,” as organizers describe it, with a performance by the seminal Detroit punk band Cinecyde and an afterparty at the Old Miami in the Cass Corridor. Along with a gritty, high-octane Detroit rock soundtrack, the 1½-hour film features an array of high-profile Michigan artists and activists whose lives intersected with Bailey’s through the decades, including Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Wayne Kramer, John Sinclair, Niagara Detroit and Pun Plamondon. The freewheeling doc is a passion project of New
