Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Robin Sommers: Deday LaRene was this law instructor who had taught law in Detroit, and he came down and started writing for Creem. So we did an article on this new band called Black Sabbath. When they first came out they really were thought to be Devil worshippers. Between articles that were written in other magazines and doing some research, Deday wrote this article. Deday had written something like, “Fuck God in the ass.” This whole devil thing was bugging him. But we couldn’t get the magazine printed because the printer at that time was a kind of religious guy. He usually printed Catholic newsletters. So the printer wouldn’t print it. They took the whole paragraph out and left it white space. It was too late when we saw it; we had to get this thing out and didn’t have time to fix anything.

  Jaan Uhelszki: I went to New York when I was fifteen because I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t tell my parents; I just stuffed the pillows and took off. It was a bolt. I didn’t go away to New York to get away from Detroit. I didn’t go really at fifteen to think I was going to stay there. It was like, “Wow, let’s go see New York. Let’s go stay in the Village.” This is Eye magazine come to life. I wanted to see what I was reading about, so it really was more like an unfettered vacation where I should have never, never been out on my own at that age, you know.

  Dave Marsh: Creem moved to the country, this place called Walled Lake, out west of Detroit. It wasn’t a great idea, this fuckin’ farm. That’s what was wrong with it.

  Jaan Uhelszki: In Walled Lake we were in essence a commune. We all made $22.75 a week. They paid for our rent, they paid for our food, and we got our little stipend. We were not, you know, we were not living high on the hog. Barry Kramer lived with us, and I’m sure somehow he had a scheme. You can’t forget that he was a rich kid. Everybody had stereos in their room, and then we had a common room. Barry’s wife, Connie, usually cooked, so it really was hippyesque. It was a twenty-hour day often. We would all unwind by playing pinochle, you know. We functioned as a group; we would go to these shows together en masse. We’d go to wrestling matches.

  Dave Marsh: We went to Olympia to see wrestling; sometimes we went to dinner. If there was the right local band playing, we’d go to that. Like, “I’m going to write about Alice Cooper. Who wants to come with me?”

  Jaan Uhelszki: Lester Bangs and I started the same day. I think that always forged our friendship. I was going out with the art director, and Barry told me that he wanted me to work as the circulation manager, and that was the day that Lester came from California. You know I just remember that because I was so on cloud nine that Barry had hired me.

  Lester wasn’t anybody then. Nobody was anybody. The thing is we all started together, none of us had anything going. We all were like people inventing ourselves, inventing the art form.

  Dave Marsh: Lester and I had fist fights. His dog shit all over, and I was tired of picking up after it. So the shit went in his typewriter, but it wasn’t about the typewriter—it was more complicated than that. It was what precipitated one fist fight, but we had other encounters. We liked each other, but why would that stop us from fighting?

  Mark Parenteau: We would go up into Lester’s room, and he would bring a hand can opener, a bunch of Campbell’s soup. He would bring a coil that you plugged into the wall and stuck into the can of soup so it would heat it up like you were in prison. He would bring a typewriter, a pound of paper, and he would wait until the very last two days before the issue had to go to bed, and then he would just pound it out. He would take a bunch of speed, he would stay up for two or three days, lock himself in that room, heat up a bunch of soup, and then come out and hand Ben Edmonds forty or fifty pages of typed stuff.

  Jaan Uhelszki: Lester ghost wrote a piece for me for my journalism class because I had to write something and I didn’t have time; I had something else to write. I decided to write that, and Lester did it for me ’cause I had no idea what I was doing. He wrote a piece about the wrestling matches that we had seen, and he got a B on it. He was a fast writer—much quicker than the rest of us.

  Mark Parenteau: I’d go to parties with Lester because back then it was all limos, and the record companies couldn’t kiss our ass enough. The Creem people and the WABX people lived and hung out together; it was kind of like a two-for-one for the likes of Larry Harris and all the national rep guys who would come into Detroit. They’d get not only the big rock station but the magazine and my wife, Gail, the promoter. So it was a very powerful situation. Lester was a part of that; he was unbelievable. They would have these great big dinners, you know. And everybody wanted to go to dinner. We’d go to Charlie’s Crab or the Greektown, and Lester would start getting drunk and start throwing food. We’re backstage at Ford Auditorium and Todd Rundgren was there and he had sold out the place, and you know he had all that exotic makeup on, skin-tight, air-brushed suits on and stuff. Backstage it was Lester’s birthday, and they brought him this big huge birthday cake and everybody sang “Happy Birthday” to Lester, and immediately he just started grabbing fistfuls of the cake and started throwing it at everybody, including Todd Rundgren. It turned in to a free for all because Lester’s stop-gap thing was broke. He didn’t know when enough was enough. But he wasn’t evil or anything; it was just like, “Wow, this guy is crazy, over the top.” Lester was brilliant in perceiving rock and roll. We’d be listening to new albums, and he’d go, “You’re not going to play that shit are you?” and he was very opinionated about what we should play and what we shouldn’t play. Once in a while he was wrong, but not very often.

  Ted Nugent: Creem became a showcase for Lester Bangs’s stupidity. What he thought was hip and clever—you know, stream of consciousness—was basically stream of nonsense. That started off right away and from then on, I went, “Fuck these guys, man. They don’t write anything down.” It said in Creem magazine how I smoked hash with the MC5. I’ve never smoked hash. I was at the MC5’s Hill Street house many times, and I knew they would put stuff like that in food, so I never ate the food. And I never smoked dope with them. But they wrote that I did. You think if I smoked dope with the MC5, I would try to hide it? I mean, what’s there to hide? I was eighteen. I think one time I told them, I made up a story about how we’d go to a convent to ask directions to someplace, and put a slice in the map where we claimed we were headed to. And when the nun would point at it and give us directions, we’d stick our dicks through the slice in the map: never happened.

  Dave Marsh: The classic moment a week before I left was when Nick Kent showed up. That nitwit. He and Lester were listening to Metal Machine Music at one end of the hall and I was listening to Al Green at the other end, and that was it. When you look at when I left, black music coverage was entirely eliminated. It became all white rock and roll.

  “What Happens in Detroit Stays in Detroit”

  Al Jacquez: There were bands playing around the city—Detroit bands—that you would see and say, “I can’t see these guys again.” Then again, when you are involved in a scene like that, you go see a band and you say, “Man, these guys are really good. I have to get my stuff together.”

  The whole scene in Michigan was ignored on purpose. I mean some in New York picked up on the Stooges and MC5 and that led to glam rock. I’m just thinking, “Okay, regardless of what you think of our music, you have this East Coast major publishing center with a history of great journalism. And on the West Coast you have Rolling Stone, and even if you think every band that’s playing in Michigan is terrible, the fact of the matter is people are coming out by the tens of thousands to see these bands. How can you ignore this music?” Sometimes I felt people were wrapped up in the Five or the Stooges, which is cool, but there were other amazing things going on at the same time. When you look at what was going on at the time, the Five was part of a group of bands getting standing ovations and just this wild adulation. Detroit, the Detroit area, from Flint to Ann Arbor, was this machine.

  Niagara: Detroit has a deadly desert around it. Jerry Vile told me, “What happens in Detroit stays i
n Detroit.”

  Wayne Kramer: One of the reasons that Detroit failed was because we didn’t have a Bill Graham, somebody with that business acumen who could kind of market the movement.

  Bobby Rigg: It was not just the music scene they were ignoring. They ignored Detroit. Which is the strangest thing because, all of these acts that were coming from Europe and wherever they were coming from, Detroit was their favorite place to play.

  Bob Seger (Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Bob Seger and the Last Heard, solo, vocalist): I think those bands came and went because they just didn’t have the stamina to go all the way. Either that or, in some cases, it was drugs. There’s only three acts I can think of that really kept at it, kept pounding away. That was Glenn Frey, Ted Nugent, and myself. The others just burned themselves out. They had attitudes too. You just can’t go out and piss people off and expect to be superstars. It just grinds people, and sooner or later it’s gonna catch up with you. Like when I’d talk to the MC5, they were fine, real level headed and everything. But then when they went to a concert, they would just give a promoter a whole bunch of shit, and at times they’d even give the audience a whole bunch of shit. So you could just sorta see that it wouldn’t last. Whereas Nugent would go out there and sweat, and so would I.

  Toby Mamis (manager, Alice Cooper, journalist, Creem magazine): I don’t think being from Detroit was a handicap at all. The scene there was great, and it was healthy circuit of places to play. I think the bands all got their fair shot, just with varying degree of success.

  Rick Kraniak: The problem was that no one respected Detroit. You had five national ballrooms, four national promoters. Bill Graham on both coasts with the Fillmore. You had Electric Factory Concerts with Larry Magid in Philadelphia. You had Don Law in Boston; Howard Stein doing New York, Atlanta, Miami; and no one had any respect for these Detroit bands.

  Donny Hartman: The Frost opened for B. B. King for three nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco. We got three standing ovations. We’re all excited, and we go into Bill Graham’s big office at the end of the night. Graham looks at us and he goes, “Well, boys. You know I hate Michigan bands. I hate ’em. I don’t like you guys, either. I don’t like the music you play.”

  Rick Kraniak: It was like an attitude: “They didn’t come from England, they weren’t represented by Premier Talent,” who had Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, and so on. So it was really hard to get Michigan bands booked. The MC5 did a gig in New York—it didn’t go well for Graham, as I recall—and so it was really, really difficult.

  Dennis Dunaway: We followed the Stooges a couple of times at the Fillmore West. We took Detroit to the land of the hippies, and Bill Graham hated us. He thought we had ruined everything. We finally got big enough that he had to hire us.

  Tom Weschler (photographer, Bob Seger road manager): If you think about how many records are sold by artists out of Detroit, it isn’t even close. You can tie New York, LA, every place else together, and it ain’t even close. Everyone is hard tilt.

  Dan Carlisle: One of the things about the MC5 that people didn’t understand is that MC5 was laughed at out there by the radio community outside Detroit. That group of people was very elitist, and I worked at some of these places; KLOS, places in San Francisco, and I would play MC5 and receive hell for it. They didn’t understand that if you couldn’t play the MC5, the Stooges, and Elvis at the same time, then you weren’t a rock-and-roll radio station. When MC5 came out they wore sequins and big flashy clothes; they didn’t wear jeans and T-shirts. They would tell me they weren’t a hippy band; CCR was a hippy band. Every band out of Detroit had a shot. SRC, for example, made it as far as they could. I think that their manager, Pete Andrews, was very hard working and did what he could for them. He got them on Capitol, and they toured and didn’t make it, simple as that. I understand why Iggy and the Stooges made it and others didn’t: they never sat down and said, “We’re going to be forerunners of a new sound.” They were something else; they were world beaters.

  Iggy Pop: What we were, we were just so special, we were just so out there that at some point you could see jaws drop, and you could see the thought bubble go, “Oh my God,” and people would just walk away.

  Dick Wagner (The Frost, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, guitarist): The Frost never made it really big and we should have. We got to tour quite a bit, but our label was just trying to put records in the Detroit stores, and we sold fifty thousand in the first month the first album came out. We could have sold it all over the US. We were making it happen, but never got the right support. Even the covers to our albums were terrible.

  Bobby Rigg: The reason the Frost never became huge was because we signed with the wrong record company. Vanguard had no idea what to do with a rock-and-roll band.

  Donny Hartman: We were touring out west, and we found our first album in a wastebasket at one radio station in California. The DJ said, “I didn’t think you guys were coming in. Nobody ever called and told us.”

  Michael Lutz: We always said we were an Ann Arbor band. You know, Ann Arbor rings a bell for a lot of people because of the University of Michigan.

  Mark Farner (Grand Funk Railroad, guitarist, vocalist): People in Michigan hardly knew about us. We were more apt to be recognized in St. Louis or Atlanta, Georgia, or, you know, Miami or Dallas. That was all definitely directed by Terry Knight. We loved playing Detroit. We played the Eastown, you know. Are you shitting me? That was dreams come true.

  Don Brewer (Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, drummer): Well, we’d been kinda outside the Detroit loop. It was kinda like … they were rock snobs. Oh, they’re just that band from Flint. We were being written off. It hurt. We definitely felt like we were on the outside, and we really didn’t play in Detroit that much.

  Peter Cavanaugh: Thing was, Grand Funk would play around here, and it was not such a big deal because everybody knew them. Terry Knight was one of the best bullshitters I ever ran into. He had been a DJ at WTAC, then went to Detroit for a bit, then went to New York to work for Ed McMahon of Tonight Show fame, then came back here. Grand Funk was rehearsing at the IMA Auditorium in Flint, which I’m sure Terry arranged—it was a big stage. He lined those guys up and said, “I want all of you to play like your assholes are on fire.” He wanted motion on that stage.

  Dave Marsh: Terry did not bother us at Creem; we weren’t on Terry Knight’s radar. He was seeking bigger game than that. He cared what CKLW thought, not what Creem thought.

  Ray Goodman: Actually we, SRC, were signed to Capitol before Grand Funk. I was at those meetings in LA. We walked out of there thinking we had got a deal with a billboard in every major college market in America, when in fact we got one in Ann Arbor. And Grand Funk got the deal. Terry Knight went in there, and he was a little more gung ho, and he could negotiate a little bit better I guess.

  Mark Parenteau: Terry Knight had pretty much conceived Grand Funk, sort of like Kiss was later conceived. Like, it was like an image first, and let’s go ahead and put together a band that conforms to this. And Grand Funk was huge, huger than huge.

  Don Brewer: Terry really knew how to stretch the truth and make everything bigger and louder than real, and so forth and so on. He really was a Barnum & Bailey kinda guy. But we had starved with Terry too in the Pack. We were so broke Mark and I made a Butterfinger commercial. Farner and I were playing at a club in Cleveland, and some guy from Chicago that knew our manager called and said, “I need a couple of singers,” so they flew us down there at six in the morning. We go into the studio at nine o’clock, and they said, “Here, sing this,” and it turned into a Butterfinger candy bar commercial that ran for years.

  Mark Farner: As soon as we signed with our management team, they were able to get us an opening slot at the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1969. We borrowed a van from Jeep Holland and you know, in Ann Arbor, and he got us a guy to drive. We rented a U-Haul, and off to Atlanta we went. About half way down there—this was long before I-75 was finished and so we were ta
king a back road to connect to it and I was riding shotgun. I was napping and I woke up and I see this sign, I-75 to the right. I said, “Dude, I-75’s that way.” He turns this van with the U-Haul on the back and rolls the U-Haul trailer down through the ditch. After we turned the trailer back up on its two wheels, we were kind of limping it on the side of the expressway to the next exit that had U-Haul trailers, and we were going to turn it in there. Then a tire came off the trailer—it actually went flying by, the tire, and passed us and bounced over in the median and over the top of this semitruck—and we thought it was going to go right through the wind shield but it didn’t. We’re going, “Oh shit! Oh shit!” and sparks are flying off our trailer.

  Don Brewer: But we made it and got on to the festival, this unknown band. The audience just went batshit for this band that nobody’d ever heard of, and that was really the starting point for Grand Funk. We didn’t have a record deal, we didn’t have gigs, we didn’t have anything. They invited us back the next day; they put us at a later time slot. And again the audience went nuts, again. They brought us back the third day, put us on—again, a better time slot—and so from there the word of mouth went all through the south.