Forty-five years later, singer Michael Des Barres listens to the self-titled debut of Detective and hears the a tantalizing potential for greatness in its grooves..

A bluesy hard rock band, it found its way to Swan Song Records thanks to Des Barres’ friendship with guitarist Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, the band behind the label.

Its 1977 debut was made amid all the excesses of the music industry at the time, recorded over a year at the Record Plant in Los Angeles at a cost of $1 million.

But despite all its advantages, Detective, the band and the album, soon disappeared — until today, April 23, when thanks to a bit of luck and a few twists of fate, a new limited-edition vinyl release of “Detective” drops on Record Store Day 2022.

Record Store Day, of course, is the annual celebration of independent record stores, for which record labels large and small will dig through the vaults for music which like Detective’s may have gone out of print, been forgotten or overlooked, but feels and sounds like something worthy of rediscovery and reissue.

“That record is so (bleeping) powerful, and it just just slipped through the fingers,” Des Barres says. “It slipped through the fingers because, I think, it was bluesy hard rock and of course they compared us to Zeppelin, and they’d say Zeppelin’s playing on it and all of this crap.

“Yeah, we were influenced by the magic, but not by the chord structure,” he says. “So it’s a delightful thing to have it come out now.”

Org Records, which acquired the master recordings of Detective’s two studio albums and a live show recorded in New York City, decided to release the debut on Record Store Day to make its return to turntables something special.

“They were big Detective fans,” Des Barres says. “And they thought it would be a terrific way of doing it, rather than just putting it out, you know, easy-peasy, here it is again.

“And that’s what we did,” he says. “We have this huge party put together in Benedict Canyon. T-shirts and all the merch and everything you would possibly want of a rebirth and reincarnation, as it were, of a band we all loved.”

***

Detective’s albums had long ago vanished from record stores, and that might have been the way it stayed but for a kind and unexpected gesture, Des Barres says.

“It did not happen bureaucratically, it happened magically in my view,” he says. “Anything to do with Led Zeppelin, and certainly Jimmy, it has a flavor to it that I don’t think anybody else has, or any other band has.

“So, what happened was, years went by,” Des Barres says. “I was in different bands, and the guys were in different bands. About a year ago, I got a call from a lawyer, saying, ‘Would you like the masters back from Detective? Jimmy would like to give them to you.’

“I said, ‘By all means,’ you know, because I really wanted them out, and those albums to be heard,” he says.

***

Page and Des Barres met in the early ’70s when Des Barres was the frontman in the British glam rock band Silverhead.

“Jimmy and I hooked up in some mad orgiastic situation,” he says of their meeting. “We talked, and I was sort of discovering what (English occultist) Aleister Crowley was all about, what the tarot deck was, what spirituality I believed in.

“There were so many connections before Detective,” Des Barres says, noting that Page had dated Pamela Ann Miller, a celebrity rock groupie known as Miss Pamela, before she and Des Barres met and married, and she became Pamela Des Barres.

“We became sort of interested in each other and the vibe,” Des Barres says of Page. “Not on a musical level, but on a spiritual level.”

One night in Birmingham, England, Silverhead played a gig for about 20 fans in a small club in Birmingham, England. From the back watched the four members of Led Zeppelin: Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer John “Bonzo” Bonham.

“That was the most surreal nightmare,” Des Barres says. “People were looking, ‘Oh, Silverhead, they’re great,’ and then they look at the back and the (bleeping) four members of the biggest band in the world are standing in this little sleazy club, which, by the way, is the only way to play rock and roll.”

***

Flash forward a few years. Des Barres split from Silverhead and England for Los Angeles and Miss Pamela. A promoter connected him with guitarist Michael Monarch, drummer Jon Hyde, bassist Bobby Pickett, and keyboardist Tony Kaye, and the fledgling Detective started to play together.

“The second week of rehearsals, Zeppelin comes to town to play, you know, 105 consecutive nights at the Forum or whatever the gig was,” Des Barres says. “Jimmy comes to see us and he says, quietly he says, ‘Would you like to be on our label?’

“And that was that,” he says. “Crazy, man. How amazing.”

The Swan Song connection provided all the money needed to make the record. All the money needed to buy the drugs and booze needed to make the record, too, Des Barres says.

“We spent so much time in the hot tub of the Record Plant,” he says. “I mean, it was ludicrous. It was Nero. It was ancient (bleeping) Rome. And then we would fall into the studio and get something.

“We fell into this and indulged,” Des Barres says. “Who wouldn’t? What 22-year-old kid is not going to fall into those temptations. It’s a wonder we got both albums made.”

The band played for huge crowds as opening act for Kiss. The single “Got Enough Love” showed up on the sitcom “WKRP In Cincinnati,” on which Des Barres appeared as a member of a fictional punk rock band in one episode.

“I think my most famous band I’ve been in is Scum of the Earth,” he says, laughing. “I swear to God, except for my dalliance with Power Station.”

Bad decisions, though, soon led to Detective’s dissolution. At one point they were offered the song “I Need A Lover” by the still little-known singer-songwriter John Mellencamp. They turned it down and a few years later Pat Benatar had a huge hit with it.

“Stupid,” Des Barres says of that move. “Young band, offered a clear hit, and we were so pretentiously royal we thought, ‘No, no, no, this is all us.’”

Lack of commercial success hurt morale, drugs finished it off.

“I don’t blame drugs; you can’t blame a drug,” Des Barres says. “‘You naughty needle, how dare you!’ That’s your choice, and we chose badly. We became the victims of narcotics, and blew it.”

***

Des Barres hopes this Record Store Day reissue will reintroduce the band to listeners, and lead to the release of the second album “It Takes One To Know One,” and the live album recorded in New York City.

There’s also a recording of the band doing “I Need A Lover’ that’s never been released at all in the material Page gave back to the band, the kind of thing a future Record Store Day might see in stores.

“It’s rock and roll, you know,” Des Barres says of Detective’s music. “It’s, ‘Boom, bap. Ba-boom-boom bap boom-boom.” Bluesy, big fat spaces. Now music’s all sort of cluttered up it feels.

“It’s so produced and ‘who gives a damn,’ you know?” he says. ” ‘Let’s take the guitar riff that’s at the top of the chorus and put it in a solo, and then have it come out of the bridge, and we’ll just drop it in.’

“Producer says that me, I leave. I say, ‘(Bleep) you, that’s not rock and roll.’ Are you kidding me?”