by Steve Miller
DETROIT ROCK CITY
BOOKS BY STEVE MILLER
A Slaying in the Suburbs:
The Tara Grant Murder
Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore
Punk Zine ’79–’83, editor
Girl, Wanted:
The Chase for Sarah Pender
Commando: The Johnny Ramone Autobiography, co-editor
Nobody’s Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer
DETROIT
ROCK
CITY
The Uncensored History
of Rock ’n’ Roll in
America’s Loudest City
Steve Miller
DA CAPO PRESS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 2013 by Steve Miller
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.
Designed by Timm Bryson
Set in 10.75 point Adobe Jenson Pro by The Perseus Books Group
Thanks to the following publishers and writers for granting permission to use original interviews and material previously published for this book:
•Ron and Scott Asheton interviews by Brian Bowe, pages 42–55, used by permission of Brian Bowe.
•Ron Asheton, page 49, courtesy of Long Gone John, Sympathy For The Record Industry, Sympathyrecords.com, SFTRI 163.
•Bob Seger interview, page 77, by John Morthland, July 1977, courtesy of Creem magazine.
•Bob Seger interview, page 124, by Lowell Cauffiel, August 1976, courtesy of Creem magazine.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Steve
Detroit rock city : the uncensored history of rock ’n’ roll in America’s loudest city / Steve Miller.—First Da Capo Press edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-306-82184-4 (e-book) 1. Rock music—Michigan—Detroit—History and criticism. 2. Rock musicians—Michigan—Detroit. I. Title.
ML3534.3.M59 2013
781.6609774‘34—dc23
2013004433
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Introduction
ACT I: BLACK SHEEP (1965–1972)
Respect
Playground of Noise
“You Can’t Be a Leader on LSD”
“Mitch Ryder, Eat Shit”
“I’m No Statesman, I’m No General”
“They Didn’t Call Them the Stooges for Nothing”
Riots in the Motor City
Here’s New Pretties for You
America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine
“What Happens in Detroit Stays in Detroit”
In Detroit, Woodstock Was the Weak Shit
“We Weren’t Musicians, We Were Like an Outlaw Bike Club”
Drugs Hate You
ACT II: GIMME SOME ACTION (1973–1981)
New York: “None of These People Have Seen Shit”
Stranglehold
Mongrel
Creem: “They’re No Good Since Lester Bangs Left”
You’re Gonna Die
Sweet Nothin’
Nothin’ to Do in Detroit
The Voice Box and First in Line
No Hands Clapping
“You’re Not Punk Rock”
ACT III: THE BIG THREE KILLED MY BABY (1981–2000)
Vengeance
Face Forward
Punk Rock Sucks
Don Kirshner of Detroit
Mutiny in Hardcore
You Just Can’t Win
MC5: Are They from Detroit? Fresh Blood and Garage Innocence
Cool American
“Warm Beer and Bestiality Go Together”
I’m Hell
On the Corner
The Same Boy You’ve Always Known
“It Was Raining Faggots on Me”
Devil with a Cause
Aspiring and Achieving Lowly Dreams
Acknowledgments
The Players
Photos follow page 154
INTRODUCTION
This book, like so many others, starts in a bar. In winter 2002 a musician I knew in Lansing, Michigan, approached me as I sat at a table alone.
“Hey, you’re a journalist or something, right?” he asked.
Yes, I nodded; few of my friends knew what I did for a living. I lived at the time in Washington, DC, a world away. I was a national reporter, covering things and events that would affect their lives in ways they couldn’t perceive. But they didn’t care. I was still the guy who liked good music and drank with them and went to the after-parties and had some good stories about early hardcore and touring the states before there was a network of clubs and crash palaces.
“So why hasn’t anyone ever written a book about Detroit’s rock scene and the influence it’s had on rock and roll?” my pal asked.
I had no answer. Detroit was just part of growing up. Did I take it for granted?
My dad was a copy editor at the Detroit News in 1967, commuting from our apartment in East Lansing, eighty miles west of Detroit, where he was getting his doctorate at Michigan State University. One steamy night that year we drove to Tiger Stadium to catch the White Sox play the Tigers, watching the gun-toting National Guard troops on the rooftops. The riots were two weeks prior.
In the fall of 1968 I was wandering across a park in East Lansing and heard what sounded like a sonic explosion, a cacophony of thud and high-end screech coming from a small, brick community center. I ran to the doors to check into what was causing this heavenly noise. Locked. I went around to the rear of the building, where an open window was giving everyone a free listen to the soundcheck of the MC5. Looking inside—the amps draped with the American flags, the buckskin jackets, and the wild hair—for an eleven-year-old, it was a life-giving experience I have never forgotten.
We started going to big shows in Detroit, national acts that hit Detroit at every chance—Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Lou Reed, and Roxy Music—at great venues like the Michigan Palace, Cobo Center, and Masonic Auditorium. Detroit was The Show.
We all read Creem magazine in high school, learning about the real deal in a way that effete bullshit like Rolling Stone could never conceive of. Creem was Detroit; the rest were from, well, somewhere else. Creem wrote about the Stooges more than anyone else. When it came down to Mick Jagger vs. Iggy Pop in the rock-star idolatry sweepstakes, Iggy came out on top every time. He was Detroit. I would puff furiously on my Newport at the notion that anyone outside Iggy could be any more badass. Starting at age fifteen, we listened to the Stooges as we drove in cars on back roads and cradled bottles of Mad Dog 20–20.
“So why hasn’t anyone ever written a book about Detroit’s rock scene and the influence it’s had on rock and roll?”
The question was a killer. I had no answer, but this is the response, eleven years later. Along the way to making this happen, I confirmed a number of my beliefs about music. Number one is that Detroit is the most influent
ial rock-and-roll city on earth—not New York, not Los Angeles, not London, and not San Francisco. It’s incontrovertible.
Another is that Detroit’s fade as a city was part of the natural order, an ebbing of power for a city that held half of the US auto-making jobs. Wayne Kramer, his mind finely honed, told me as we sat in his Los Angeles studio in 2011 that the MC5 “were like a barometer for Detroit. Unearths an interesting question, the one of free will. Which I am more and more convinced does not exist. We think we’re making decisions, but our options are so affected by our surroundings. If you’re born in the wrong family, wrong neighborhood, you’re not going to make it. You can’t be rich someday. You ain’t the kid who found out about computers like Bill Gates. He was in a unique situation. So the decline of the MC5 and the parallel decline of Detroit is not a mystery to me, the things we were going through; we were not alone. A lot of other people were in desperate situations as well. And some of them had guns.”
Man, that’s a Darwinian downer.
Detroit pulses with the same energy that captivated me as a kid. Detroit won’t change, because that would have happened billions of dollars and many years ago. That’s what so good about it—the purity of its character. On a given night you can see some great music and maybe get jacked while you pump gas a few blocks down. Detroit is Alphabet City circa 1977 squared. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn’t in Detroit because that would taint the city with the greedy mindlessness of the Establishment. Detroit is way past such institutions. It’s the Rock City. And that’s enough.
ACT I
Black Sheep
(1965–1972)
Respect
Dan Carlisle (WABX, WRIF, DJ): How many places in the US had all the forces of immigration come together in just a twenty-five-year period? It was because of the auto money. In Detroit we had Okies, folks from Tennessee and Kentucky, black people from Georgia and other parts of the Deep South. We had people from Germany and Poland and Jewish people, and so on the radio you had Polish music, German music, gospel on Sundays, hearing all this music in this one city. Mitch Ryder made all these records composed of these sounds; the MC5 heard all this and put it together. The so-called San Francisco and Los Angeles scenes didn’t have that, and you’d find most people out there were from places like Ohio or Wisconsin. We had the real thing, working-class music.
Russ Gibb (Grande Ballroom, promoter): We were called factory rats when I was growing up. I worked in the DeSoto plant, which was part of Chrysler, on Wyoming and Ford Road. I put hubcaps on the DeSotos. Most of the cabs in New York at one time were DeSoto. The big thing on that car was it had a shield that went over the headlights.
Mitch Ryder (Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Detroit, solo, vocalist): My dad got me a job working in the factory before I started getting serious about music. It was a tool-and-die factory that did outsourcing for GM. We did gear shift levers. I was fifteen.
Stirling Silver (scenester): I worked for General Motors on the Cadillac line. One of my high school friend’s mom was the head of personnel at Plant 21, which was a Fisher Body plant. They made fifteen Cadillac limousines a day. At the same time the Lordstown, Ohio, factory was kicking out Chevy Vegas at a hundred per hour. There was a big union thing because it was too fast a line. The average line was running sixty to seventy cars per hour, so that’d give you a relative frame of reference. The Fisher Body line was making an average of fifteen a day, and if they’re really busy, seventeen or eighteen a day. So the line can move like this minute hand on a watch. You couldn’t see it move, but if you look over there and then look back, you could see that it had moved.
VC Lamont Veasey (Black Merda bassist, vocalist): My father worked at Ford. I was born in Mississippi. I didn’t actually live in the inner city of Detroit until I was thirteen almost fourteen, but my parents, they took me to Ecorse, Michigan, until I was thirteen, and then we moved to inner-city Detroit. It was like a culture shock to me because where I was at, it was like semirural and the people were like from the South.
Robin Sommers (designer, Creem magazine, scenester): I went to art school and then went to San Francisco in 1966, but there were no jobs; all the hippies had them. So I got back and I went to work at Ford. I was working on the assembly line, the merry-go-round, as a spot welder. I welded a whole side of a car. We made ’67 Mustangs and Cougars. It was horrible.
Ron Cooke (Detroit, Gang War, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band bassist): My dad emigrated from Canada in 1922. He was a boiler operator man. A big oil refinery deal, he was a stationary engineer. I went in and out of the ironworkers union in Detroit in the midsixties. I did about two and a half years in the apprenticeship there.
Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors vocalist, producer, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): The one thing you don’t wanna do the Detroit way is to head to the factory when you’re looking for work.
Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): I started working at the Ford plant when I got out of high school. It was deadly, just going in there every day. The money was great, though. This is why so many people came to rely on that for a living—easy work, no education needed, and the money was great.
Hiawatha Bailey (Stooges roadie, Cult Heroes, vocalist): I was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1948. The thing was, Detroit was an industrial complex. My grandfather worked for the railroad; he was a Pullman porter working on the railroad when they were settling from the East Coast to the West Coast. He knew there were better things to be had up North. My parents decided they wanted to hit it. My dad got a job at Chevrolet Gear and Axle in Hamtramck. I won a record player through this contest by General Motors called, “Why I’m Glad My Dad Works for General Motors.” I made that crap up that I wrote; I can’t even remember why I said I was glad. Because he can buy me stuff and I can get out of the house? Me and my friend Carl Grimes would take turns going through this rack of old 45s at the store and finding all this off-the-wall stuff, and we’d go down and we’d play it on the record player that I won.
Mark Norton: In Detroit either you go to college or you go work in a factory. Give a bottle of whiskey to the foreman and you got a job on the line. My dad’s friend knew somebody who ran the line, and that’s where I ended up. I met this guy named Willie who’d been in the paint department for twenty-three years. When I came in, it was “Hi Willie, how you doing, what’s going on, Willie?” He was painting cars. “Willie, how long you been wearing a respirator?” And the guys doing the pinstriping down the cars, they came in to work just about half-assed bombed because to hold a paintbrush and have the car go by you on the line, and they’re doing that thing. Man, they were ripped to the tits doing the pinstripes on the car. I used to pick up shifts shoveling silicon sand into the furnaces that melted down the engine blocks; it would be like 125 degrees in there. Everyone was working in a factory; that’s what it was, nothing special.
Brian Pastoria (producer): Because of the auto industry, you didn’t have to speak English or have a degree but could get a great job with benefits. And with American popular music and the auto industry also taking off, it spawned this wild community made of people from other places. The younger people wanted to escape. They didn’t want to end up working on the line. And when Elvis and the Beatles hit, they realized things could be different for them. They could play music. And that was the way out, so they played anywhere they could.
Tom Morwatts (Mutants, guitarist): There were these teen clubs, and there were about five of ’em in the Metro area. Dave Leone ran one near my house on the east side. He eventually started Diversified Management Agency, DMA, which was the biggest booking agency in the Midwest. We ended up signing with them later. Dave Leone, when I was a kid, had all those teen clubs, drawing kids from about fourteen to eighteen. Bob Seger, Amboy Dukes, Rationals—they were playing at those places all the time.
Stirling Silver: There was also Fries Auditorium, over by Grosse Pointe, where I was from. I saw Bob Seger do “Hey Jude” by
himself on the piano that was in that room. The song had just come out.
Russ Gibb: I started teaching in a little town called Howell, Michigan, and my salary was $2,200 a year. Howell was a two-hour drive from Detroit at the time. They didn’t allow dancing, and later on the town became the center for the John Birch Society. They thought that was the work of the devil. I also worked part time in a radio station, so I knew the kids loved music. I thought “Well, gee, I knew the guy at some of these record hops, Robin Seymour, who was a local DJ.” There were a few others doing this. So I put this show on. I think I spent $25 to rent out a Saturday night at the Elk’s Club or the Moose Club or some club up on Grand River in Howell. I spent $10 to have mimeographed fliers put out. I gave them to certain kids I knew and said, “So and so is going to be here,” and I got a hold of Bob Maxwell, who was a big radio guy back then. Not rock music—he was more pop. So he advertised it a couple of times that he was going to be up in Howell. He got $50 for coming up. So I spent $25 for the hall and $10 for the flyers, and after I paid Maxwell, I was way ahead of the game in money terms. Because I made in one night more than what I could in about two weeks of teaching. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was back then. Now I knew how to make money on rock things, and I was still working part time at the radio station. I got a reputation for knowing how to make record hops work.
Tom Morwatts: But even cooler than the record hops was the high school I went to, Notre Dame High School in Harper Woods. It was legendary for its dances. They were so needy for money, it was kind of a new school, and they had college-level sports facilities, and they needed to raise money. This one priest, Father Bryson, turned out to be a natural promoter, so they assigned him to the job. He had started out doing, just like every other high school, teen dances. But his teen dances, because they had a bigger facility, turned into concerts. He got the Supremes and the Temptations, Shadows of Knight. Bob Seger. People would come from all over the Metro area, from the west side, from all the suburbs, because of the acts that were playing there.
Jerry Bazil (Dark Carnival, drummer): We had these great bands playing at our high schools. Teegarden & Van Winkle, the SRC, the Up, Third Power—they all played at high school dances at places like Mercy High School and Catholic Central. This was the late sixties, early seventies.