Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Charlie Martin: So at 4 a.m., with union stagehands working triple time, they had to strike the stage and move it back fifteen feet and set it all back up, and it just cost thousands of dollars. We had gotten $50,000 in advance and were supposed to get the rest on the night of show. But because of this fiasco, Steve Glantz did not have the liquid funds to pay us, and Punch was adamant that we were not going to play without it. Punch told him he was going to have a riot, so Steve had to call his dad, Gabe, who drove it out to him that evening and handed it over to us in a certified check. Glantz filed bankruptcy after that, and we never got the 25 percent.

  Drew Abbott: I still rue the day of Charlie’s accident. We were coming home from rehearsal and I saw Charlie’s car at the side of the road and I almost stopped, but I had to get home for something. He had gotten off the freeway and was coming back with a can of gas and was crossing the street, and a gal came around and hit him. He was okay—his feet were moving in the hospital, but he got a blood clot and that was it. He could never walk again. After that Robin left, and we got David Teegarden after trying a few drummers.

  David Teegarden: One day I was in Oklahoma at Dick Sims’s house, and Jamie Oldaker drove up and said, “I just got a call from Bob, talking about Charlie Martin’s accident.” I was feeling awful for Charlie, but I was also down because they didn’t call me; they called Jamie to take over. That’s how it is—they forget about you. They had been on the Night Moves tour, and it had soared to the top and really took Bob to a new arena. They went out for the rest of the tour, and the last gig was in Tulsa. We were friends, and we went to eat, and then I took him to the gig, and we were in the dressing room and he tells me this is Jamie’s last gig because he had to go back with Clapton. They were going to take a break and audition drummers. They auditioned dozens of drummers, but I got it. When I signed on, my pay was $400 a week, and I thought I had hit gold. It didn’t take long to get a raise to $600, then Punch would pull me over to the side and say, “You’re getting a bonus on this” and hand me $2,000 extra. I was seeing all kinds of bonuses, then I was up to $1,500 a week. The first album I did was Stranger in Town. At that time they didn’t give me a full cut on gigs, but now I was seeing $50,000 royalty checks. I can’t believe it happened. We flew everywhere. I never had to touch my luggage, and we’d get there and have three limos waiting for us and the road manager would make sure bags got put in the van, and we’d bitch if we had to wait for our room keys. We played in Oakland at the coliseum, and Bill Graham built a whole western movie backstage with girls wearing tights being cocktail waitresses and Eddie Money came up and did a comedy routine, which was pathetic. That was the Against the Wind tour. Then I was cut in on a concert take, so Bob would split the proceeds among the core members of the Silver Bullet Band. I was really making serious coin. When we started that tour, Drew Abbott—he was kind of an accountant, he was always talking about money—he said, “You know the ticket prices are going to be $15 a ticket. That’s outrageous, people can’t afford that.” I said, “Well, I don’t have to pay that.” Drew bitched to Punch, and Punch said, “Shut the fuck up and play the gig.”

  Drew Abbott: Punch is a good businessman, and he’s been right more than he’s been wrong.

  David Teegarden: We were setting attendance records; Punch could book Atlanta and sell out in ten minutes. Then we started just doing two nights in every city. That was the first time that kind of thing had been done.

  Shaun Murphy: We would come back and do these great shows in Detroit. One year Mitch Ryder opened for us. Mitch came into the dressing room, and they’re all glad-handing each other. So Mitch sits back at a table and is talking to Bob, and he says, “You know, there’s only a couple great song writers in the world, and one of ’em’s me.” Bob didn’t know what to say.

  Drew Abbott: Craig Frost came and played keyboards, and then after the ’89 tour David and I left. In any corporation you have to look at a band like this as just that. I was a cog that worked in the corporation up to that point, but where he was going musically—wanting to play everything like the record, including the solos played by session guys—it was difficult. It caused friction. I think he was right to do this, it was working, but we had been pretty damn successful doing things the way we had been doing them. Bob was going in a different direction, and I was just going to cause a lot of friction. We never got into that for the money; it was such a shock to me, that money. All I wanted to do was make enough money to get to the next gig, and when I was off the road I would still go down and play the blues off of Cass Avenue, but the other guys never played when we had down time. I don’t know why.

  David Teegarden: You know, protection is utmost in Punch’s deal, Bob’s image. It’s very rare to find people that passionate about it, and he loves Bob like a son.

  Drew Abbott: When we were opening for Bachman Turner Overdrive, they were hitting big, and I had breakfast with Fred Turner one morning, and he said here’s how it happens: “You have to have the right material, the right record company, the right band, and the right manager all at the same time, and if any one of those is missing, you’re not gonna make it.” We were listening to him and thought it makes sense to us. So Bob had the right everything all at the same time.

  Mitch Ryder (Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Detroit, solo, vocalist): Bob is one of the greatest writers we’ve ever produced. When he was serious about his writing—and I use that in the past tense—he wrote some songs that can never be matched. So he clearly had a talent. The question still remains: Did he make Punch Andrews or did Punch Andrews make him? I think Punch has done a remarkable job handling his image, considering what I know about him. And he’s done a remarkable job taking care of his money for him, which allowed him the luxury of going ten years between albums, to serve his fans as one of the upper class. I just don’t feel he served his fans as well as he could have, and I don’t begrudge him the idea of living the life of luxury, ’cause he earned it. He had a choice to make. He had to choose between fans or money, and he chose to “enjoy my life.” Good for you, Bob. You enjoyed your life, but the fans could have been a lot happier.

  David Teegarden: I still get my royalties, and I never signed a contract. They don’t have to pay us shit. But they do.

  Creem: “They’re No Good Since Lester Bangs Left”

  Robert Matheu (photographer): I met this guy David Tedds a few years ago; he was from Redford. He said, “Dude, I went to see Black Sabbath in at Cobo Arena, and my best friend made this big cross out of tin foil and cardboard.” And I went, “It was on the cover of Creem magazine?” He goes, “Yeah, oh shit! You’re right! How do you remember that?” I said, “If you go twenty-two pages in, there’s another picture of the huge cross, and I’m right in the middle of the photo,” and he goes, “No, really?” And I am. This is way before I was ever part of Creem. I’ve got a bad mustache and I got a Cody High School T-shirt on.

  David Tedds (fan): I didn’t put the Sabbath cross together. I went to high school with the guy that did. I saw it waving around at the front of the crowd, and he told me in school the next day that he’d made it. He was a trip; he was permanently stoned and drove around in one of those seventies custom vans with the shag carpeting. His eight-track collection consisted exclusively of the first several Sabbath albums. He’d just rotate them day in and day out and drive around blaring them as loud as possible for the populace to hear, whether they liked it or not. He lived in his parents’ basement. The floor was painted black with a huge silver cross in the middle. His famous line to me was, “Dave, one of the reasons I love Sabbath so much is that they’re so scientific!”

  Bobby Hackney (Death, bassist, vocalist): We read Circus, but we grew up with Creem in the midseventies. Our hope was always to be in Creem.

  Mark Norton: I was in the 27, and we opened for John Cale at Bookie’s. Barry Kramer was there with his ex-wife, Connie, and we sat around doing coke at the table.

  Robert Matheu: I’d see the Creem people at the s
hows—mostly Lester—before I was involved with the magazine. I’d see Lester at the Faces shows, and I snuck backstage. Actually, at that time you didn’t have to sneak backstage: a 35-mm camera was better than a laminate pass. I was seventeen, and I’d see Lester and I knew who Charlie Auringer was, I knew who the Creem people were, and I had my 35-mm camera. After the show the Faces were always across the street to the Pontchartrain, where they were staying. And I could just keep taking pictures, because for them it was all about the party. Lester didn’t give me the time of day. He’d be nice occasionally and go, “Did you get any good photos tonight?” I’d say, “Yeah, you want some?” He’d go, “No, not really.” After a couple of the Pontchartrain parties he said, “Maybe I want to see a photo of that.” It would be safe to say I did some blow off the back of a Ronnie Wood guitar with him once at the Pontchartrain. I think the beauty of Creem, of why the magazine stayed what it was for so long until Barry passed away, was because Barry never cared to play with the New York people, the big boys, real hard. He liked going to New York, but he liked coming back. Whether he was cognizant of it, I don’t know.

  Linda Barber (journalist, Creem magazine): What eventually doomed Creem was that Barry separated Creem from Rolling Stone. They were very similar publications, but Jann Wenner had the vision to see it on a more standard level, kid of a rock ’n’ roll Playboy. He got political; he got environmentally conscious. He expanded into so many other realms besides just music. Whereas Barry was like, “No, we’re just about music.” I think that’s what killed it, because generations grow up faster after us. They are smarter, younger, and they are hungrier for more. Some other things can relate to music. Something even as dumb as Bill Clinton taking up the saxophone.

  Robert Matheu: I think that’s what kept Creem so good for so long is that it stayed removed. I don’t think it was a conscious thing on Barry’s part.

  Bob Mulrooney: I went down and met Lester Bangs at the Creem house when they moved to Birmingham, about close to the time he was leaving. I called down to the Creem office and tried to order a back issue that had some article on the Velvets I was looking for, and the guy on the phone goes, “Hey, I wrote those articles.” I go, “What?” And then I knew who it was and I said, “You’re my hero.” I was going nuts. So I was doing a radio special on Lou Reed a little later for this community college station, and I talk to Lester again. I wanted him to come on the show, but he couldn’t, but he tells me that if I’m really into the Velvets and Lou Reed, call this guy in New York, and that was this Constantine Radulavitch, this famous Velvets collector and archivist dude. So I call him, and he sent me copies of all his stuff—four huge reel-to-reels of stuff, unreleased songs, Lou Reed playing on an acoustic at parties of Richard and Lisa Robinson, and he’s drunk on his fucking ass, and then he’ll get all scrambled ’cause he’s arguing, and what else? Do the Ostrich was on there. The guy says, “Here, take these and just take what you want off of it for your special, but give them to Lester afterwards.” So I took them to his house on Brown Street in Birmingham. Dave Marsh lived there; so did Ben Edmonds. I went there with a couple friends. I wasn’t even a drinker at the time, and Lester’s hands were shaking. It was, like, the early evening, but he was shaking when we met, and he goes, “Let’s go get some beer.” And we got loaded. We put on the tapes for a minute, and Lester goes, fuck this shit, let’s put on Raw Power. So we played Raw Power, like, over and over and over, for hours. Only that and Blue Oyster Cult, the second album, Tyranny and Mutation. All of Lester’s room was all albums—you couldn’t even sit on the floor—and he had these huge speakers, but only one of them worked. It was weird to read how depressed Lester was when he died. He used to call me at my house, like, looking for Quaaludes.

  Mark Parenteau: When they got the office in Birmingham, Creem was really becoming a glossy national magazine. Ben Edmonds and Dan Carlisle lived on Smith Street in Birmingham. It was just a suburban house directly across the street from the chief of police, and we were having so much stuff going on and then his kids, his son and daughter, tried to come over and hang out with us. I’m like, “Dan, this is the police chief’s son. You may want to be careful.” But stars were coming to that house because it was so powerful between Creem and WABX. I mean, it was really the house you wanted to visit if you were Bryan Ferry. Bryan came over during the heyday of Roxy Music, since Creem magazine had championed that music first and had written about it and inspired Dan and I into playing it on WABX.

  John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): Creem was like the bible to me when I was growing up. They had the Stooges, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper—all that in the seventies. I would find the old ones and just devour them.

  Linda Barber: I was hired by Barry Kramer on the spot in 1976. I was from Michigan, but I had been working in New York for Mademoiselle and Glamour. He was very impressed with my résumé because even though he was into the Detroit scene, he wanted the magazine to be global. Barry was a great guy, but he had a huge temper, very short fuse. So my associate there, Sue Whitall—who took over as editor when Lester left—she told him what I had told her, that my father was very violent and abusive to my mother. Barry would always have these screaming tirades at the editorial meetings. I would just end up like unbelievably freaked out. Once he was screaming about the cover; it was Ted Nugent and he asked that we submit our headline ideas. We had the mock covers, and he just was outraged that this headline saying, “Poontang” was even typed on the markup. All he said was, screaming—he screamed so loud at Sue and everybody else, and everybody, you could see the spit flying out of his mouth I mean—he said, “Do you know what you’re saying? Why don’t we just put ‘pussy’ on the cover?” I froze because of the screaming. Then he put the cover down and he walked over to me and he kissed me on the forehead and he said, “I’m sorry for yelling.”

  Cathy Gisi (journalist, Creem magazine): Lots of people would say Ted Nugent could be aggravating, but he is who he is and he is true to himself, and back then he never hesitated to answer my calls when I needed something. I did a feature with him and spent a night picking him up at the airport and driving him back to his farm in Jackson. I had two vehicles I could use, one a real hot Camaro, and I thought, “No, he’ll kill this thing.” So I had just gotten a brand-new four-cylinder Chevette to run around town that top-ended at seventy miles per hour. Ted won’t let anyone else drive. He found gears in that Chevette I didn’t know existed. My mechanic husband wondered why there was straw in the undercarriage that night, and it was because we headed for town to get pizza that night and Ted drove through the field. His house was an old farmhouse, and I figured out the reason he wouldn’t let anyone drive is because they might know how to get back. He took so many back roads and did it so quickly that I didn’t pay attention how to get there.

  Mark Norton: We knew how to rig the phone machine so you’d get a conference call going. You could call one person at A, one person at B, and the phones would ring and they’d both pick it up, and they hadn’t phoned each other. So we had Nugent’s number, so we hooked up Nugent with Billy Joel. Then we’d all listen in; we’d hear the phones ring, and then we’d hear “Hello?” And the guy who picks up says “Hello, who is this?” “This is Ted Nugent.” “Well, this is Billy Joel. What are you calling me for?”

  Dave DiMartino (journalist, editor, Creem magazine): People might have said about Creem: “Well, they’re no good since Lester Bangs left.” I never said those words, but I imagine others did. So I had to operate, as did Sue, who worked directly with Lester for a couple of years, in his shadow. I was hired as an editorial assistant in ’79, so I sat in the desk of their departed editorial assistant, and it happened to be Lester’s desk. While I was working at his desk I would find some great stuff, like memos between him and Barry Kramer. I said, “I can’t believe I’m sitting in this chair.” There’s some YouTube clip I saw in the past three years of Lester Bangs being interviewed about Roxy Music, and it freaked me out becau
se he was sitting at my desk, and I saw some of the same pictures on the wall right behind that are always there. That was kind of cool.

  I think Sue Whitall felt massively in the public eye because she replaced him.

  Mark Norton: I was hired in before Dave was, in August ’79. I said, “Barry, I gotta tell you something: your magazine used to be great and it really sucks now.” He said, “What’s wrong with it?” I told him, “Look, it’s 1979, and there’s all kinds of great music going on, and you still insist on running these stories about these hackneyed dinosaurs that don’t have anything to do with contemporary street culture.” He said, “Do you think you could change it?” I said, “Hell yes, I could change this.” And I discovered that Barry used to keep his drugs in a hollowed-out Bible.

  Dave DiMartino: The first day I worked at Creem Sue Whitall, Linda, and I went across the street to a restaurant to talk about Creem and what it was all about. Mark, who was not working there at the time—he hadn’t even freelanced—happened to be by, so they invited him over too. So we sit down, and I guess he needed to show his license or something like that, for drinks or something. We were all pretty young. He said, “Hey, check out my address,” and he lived with his parents then, in Troy, and his address was 69 Hampshire Place, and he pointed at the 69 and goes, giggle giggle. I said, “Alright! This guy is such a jerk—I love it!” He did it on purpose just to be an asshole, you know what I mean? It was so great.

  Mark Norton: One time Chrissie Hynde agreed to be interviewed, but when she found out Sue was going to do it, she backed out. I was hired there at Creem, and Sue Whitall was the editor, and then my brother decides to start going out with her. And when things got bad between them, things got bad for me. One night he just left for Ohio, not telling her—or me for that matter. And then it was just bullshit at work; she was always on me. Dave and I begged Barry to get rid of Sue.