Flint Local 432 and the Remarkable Power of a Great Music Venue

Joel Rash calls it his "country music year."

In 2010, Rash’s girlfriend broke up with him on New Year’s Eve; on his birthday, he was laid off from his job running an incubator and entrepreneurial program at the University of Michigan, Flint. At 44-years-old, he was unemployed and unattached. Clearly, Rash thought, it was time to reopen an all-ages DIY punk rock venue in downtown Flint, Michigan.

Oddly enough, the city was thinking the same thing.

To fully understand this story we have to start back in the 1980s, when the collapse of Flint’s automotive industry, the subsequent failures of several high-profile economic development projects, and the damaging effects from years of suburban migration positioned the city’s once thriving downtown as an inexpensive, blank slate.

"It was a ghost town down here when we started out," Rash recalls. He opened his first Flint music venue back in 1987, in the basement of the historic but waning 2,000-seat Capitol Theater. Chris Everson, general manager of the Flint Downtown Development Authority, recalls the time after a show when the singer of his former band rode naked on a moped for half an hour through the streets of downtown. "No police, nothing," Everson muses. "Nobody was here."