by Steve Miller
When I saw End of the Century, I figured out the dates and I went, “Oh my god, like, okay. No wonder everybody hated me.” I still have letters and cards from him.
Don Was: You know all I wanted out of life was to not have to go to work, get by playing music. I had to take this gig repairing copy machines; I didn’t know anything about it. The first week on the gig they said, “Well, you know, when you’re out on service calls, we want you to learn to sell toner and paper to the clients, so you have to take the Dale Carnegie sales course.” I really thought I had bottomed out. I went to the class; it was after-hours in some office building, and it was me and seven Willy Loman kind of characters. I wasn’t quite suicidal, but I was depressed. I really thought my life was over. The first night of the class they said, “First thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna make a list of your goals: where do you wanna be a year from now? Where do you wanna be five years from now? Where you wanna be ten years from now? What do you want to be doing?” I roll my eyes. It’s actually quite a challenging thing, if you’re gonna be honest and do it right; it’s a little embarrassing to get up in front of a room of strangers. But I tried to take the proper attitude. I read mine to the class: “One year from now I don’t wanna have this fucking job anymore.” That was my one-year goal. It got the big laugh of the night, because everyone was there in a last-ditch attempt to save their job. I went on: “Then five years from now I want a record to come out, and ten years from now I want a hit record with someone who’s nationally established.” At the end of that first class I thought, “Wow, fuck that. If you just look at this list, how hard can this be?” I started applying the methods that they taught, and within a month we had a record deal for Was Not Was. David was living in LA as a freelance jazz critic for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. He arranged an interview with Michael Zilkha, who owned a label called ZE Records in New York City, and they had the Waitresses, King Creole, the Coconuts, James White and the Blacks, Material with Bill Laswell—it’s a very cool label, man. David interviewed him. He talked to him, and twenty seven minutes in he said, “By the way, there’s this band out of Detroit you really gotta hear; they’re perfect for what you’re doing.” He said, “Oh, wonderful, have them call me.” So I called. We conned our way into our first deal. We sent him “Wheel Me Out.” Then I used my Dale Carnegie on him: “If I could show you a way… .” What actually happened was that “Wheel Me Out” became a very big club hit in England and had nothing to do with the Dale Carnegie scam like that.
Steve King: I was playing music and working at the Kingsley Inn up on Woodward and either hitchhiking or taking the bus home down to 8 Mile and Woodward. If I worked too late and missed the bus, I’d have to hitchhike. I never got robbed, but lots of perverts. It was like, “Oh no, I missed the bus. Not again.” When it got on my nerves I’d say, “Just drop me off here.” This one guy said, “I got Playboys in the glove compartment, and it makes me hard just kind of thinking about them.” I’m like, “Okay, pull over. I’m getting out. I’ll just walk, thank you. I think I’ll catch a cab here.” I was walking through some terrible neighborhoods. I was living on the first street south of 8 Mile. Then Mark Norton told me Don needed some help at his studio, Sound Suite. I was just trying to do that anyway—get studio work. Don was great to me. He showed me how to align the tape machines. Back then you had to calibrate the tape machine and check them all. It was ground-level money. I used to get paid by the night, and sometimes we’d work two weeks in a row when Don would be gone for a couple weeks. He was gone to New York to make something; he was starting to take off. And I was meeting these pretty big music names—Sweet Pea Atkinson, Dave McMurray, Luis Resto. I would sleep on the couch in the studio, and in the morning somebody would come in and say, “Can you do a session?” My first session was with Aretha Franklin at Sound Suite for a car commercial. Here I was with all these uptight ad people, and I was like this little white guy sitting there sweating. I was so fuckin’ nervous. I thought I was cool and had it all together. The good thing or the bad thing about Sound Suite was nothing ever worked, so I was always like, “Ah … which mic? So which channel should I use to get this working right?” That sets you off on a bad foot if you can’t get the stuff to work. But the session went great. The studio assistant took the lyrics from the session that Aretha had sung and framed them for me.
Mike Murphy: No band got famous out of that whole era except the Romantics, and that’s freaky. People kept saying someone will discover Detroit at that time, like they did in New York and Los Angeles, and it never happened. Then the bands imploded or were erratic, and it was kind of strange that nothing ever happened out of that whole time, the first wave of punk rock. Bands were going to New York and playing shows and showcases.
Katy Hait: These bands from other cities would come in—Teenage Head from Toronto, Skafish from Chicago—and we were just as good as those bands. We joked about it because Detroit was such an underdog. Bands from LA and New York would become famous even though they weren’t that great.
S. Kay Young: The music was really good, but no one hit like the Ramones or the Cramps did because Detroit was not New York. There were no record label scouts here.
Jerry Vile: The whole Detroit punk thing—nobody made it, and there are a lot of reasons. The record covers always looked like shit.
Mike Murphy: I would say it’s not that the Romantics weren’t Detroit, but they were not representative of that scene at all. But maybe that’s why they did get signed. When they were first working they were getting on all the good bills and paid for a rehearsal space and they were on salary, which sure isn’t like the rest of the bands. We were poor. I was working at a 7-Eleven.
Vince Bannon: The Romantics were the only ones to pull out of Detroit in that era with any kind of substantial deal. You know it’s interesting: Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads told me that all these bands rolled into New York City because there were so many clubs besides CBGBs that they would play. They could actually afford to live in the East Village and build a buzz. So you’re an A&R guy in New York, and this band is playing various buildings, and there’s a big buzz. Same thing in LA. The thing you have to remember is, what big bands came out of LA? The first punk rock bands were all signed to independents. It was out of New York where at that time the record capital was, and if you were to make it, you had to go and live in New York and do it. Also, anybody who really made it—from the biggest pop star to the rock-and-roll guy you think is totally underground—their ambition is through the roof. A lot of these guys that were from Detroit, they lived at their parents’ house, they go and play a gig, they come home, and Mom would make them breakfast in the morning.
David Keeps: Bands from Bookie’s didn’t break out. The bands that did do something had heavy management, people who were willing to invest money in them to get them out of Detroit, like the Romantics. Also in Detroit you didn’t have these bands with money or commitment. You had to have both, and many didn’t. I don’t think anyone was poor; I think that they were mostly suburban kids living in their parents’ houses and didn’t have jobs. They weren’t like dole kids. It wasn’t as if you went to Bookie’s and all these people were from the projects or got ADC. There were kids who wanted to move out of their parents’ and lived in shitty neighborhoods. People like Steve King got out because they had a talent for other things—in his case, recording.
Steve King: I worked for Aretha Franklin a few times after that commercial, worked on a lot of R&B stuff, Anita Baker. I kept moving up the ranks, doing a lot of sessions. I ended up at the Hit Factory, and we were working on the fuckin’ same Neve that John Lennon was working on. I was in New York working for about a month and a half. Finally I came back here. And I got a new car.
Vince Bannon: In 1981 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo’s. Bookie’s was, I don’t know, getting done. I was in business with another guy, and he took good care of everything, from what our security woul
d look like and so on. But again, we were under the radar. We would have grown exponentially if the media in Detroit would have been supporting what we were doing. In cities like LA you had like KROQ, so you talked to the promoters. It wouldn’t be economic reasons; it would be media reasons. But we couldn’t influence radio. When we moved away from Bookie’s was the same time radio became really corporate. The stations were owned by corporations; Lee Abrams and those guys came in and said, “If you want to grow your radio station in Detroit, play much more Rush and much more Bob Seger and much more Journey.”
Skid Marx: There were newer bands coming along, and there was a little bit of friction going on between the hardcore, younger punks and the Bookie’s crowd. There were new metal bands, too, that weren’t really Detroit bands or playing Detroit music.
Mark Norton: We went through what I think is called the Middle Child Syndrome. As the middle child, we were fucked anyway. Ezra Pound said, “Make it new.” Our younger brothers, the third son, the hardcore guys came along and ripped the torch out of someone’s hands—it certainly wasn’t ours. We never had the torch in the first place. No one was interested in what we were doing. Everyone looked everywhere, but in their own city or state for the latest trend. “Punk rock sucks.” It especially sucked coming from Detroit. I know where the Ramrods stand: we were and are the lost children between generations. We didn’t exist then, and we don’t really exist now—never did in the first place. We were a chimera, beat-down motherfuckers who knew right from the start in mid-’77, that knew every card in the house was stacked against us, and we liked it. The Ramrods set the stage for those who would know how to navigate the entire mess—hardcore. Bless you guys.
Stirling Silver: I don’t like hardcore because I don’t like that they can’t sing. It’s yelling.
Paul Zimmerman: One of the first hardcore bands I saw was Black Flag at Clutch Cargo’s. My wife-to-be and I had gone to a wedding, and we were dressed supernormal. We went in there, and their audience were all in uniforms, and we were like, “Uh oh.” They were all in black, and I’ve always liked black. I wore black to weddings, but that night I didn’t. So that night we were getting some funny looks, and finally she went to the bathroom and I heard this ruckus. These two girls in the bathroom go, “Look at Barbie. Come on, Barbie, huh, Barbie,” and she finally kicked one of the bathroom stalls open and went, “You want to fuck with Barbie? Come on, fuck with Barbie!”
Bob Mulrooney: There were a few hardcore shows at Bookie’s, and people were just going around grinding their heels into my shoes and just wanting to cause trouble. And they were all guys, and I don’t go out for that. I go out to look at girls, and there was no girls there. Hardcore was too negative. I like the look of the Gothic scene—not so much the records, but the Gothic chicks.
Jerry Vile: Part of the reason for punk rock was pussy. Man, if I was gay, I would have really been into hardcore. If you go to gay bars now, it looks like they’re into hardcore.
Gary Reichel: You’d hear that we were the old people and that we were resisting the new breed. But they never tried to be cool with us.
Dave Rice (L-Seven, guitarist, producer): Black Flag played Bookie’s in summer ’81 with Dez singing. The front was full of new kids. The back was where the older people stood wondering what was going on.
Brian Mullan: Bookie’s introduced me to what led me to hardcore. Actually it went backwards. A high school teacher of mine was sitting around with me and my twin brother after school doing an extra credit project. We went to school in a pretty shitty area, Benedict at Outer Drive and Southfield, so we were not having a whole lot of fun. The Catholic schools back then were about as good or bad as public school—no real difference. We grew up at 6 Mile and Greenfield. After the great white flight the house across the street was empty and a moving van pulled up one day and we were all happy: wow someone is moving into that house. The next day we woke up, and all the bricks were gone from the house, so we had to stare at a tar-paper shack for the next year. We all had paper routes for the News and Free Press. The News route was an afternoon route, and it was brutal because on Friday, they all knew you were out collecting. So some Fridays you’d get robbed and others you wouldn’t. Then we got smart and would collect Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so when they caught up to you Friday, their take wouldn’t be so great. So this teacher presented the question to us that day: “You guys aren’t having much fun are you?” “No, not really.” My brother and I had each other, but that was about it. He goes, “You didn’t hear this from me, but I think you guys need to go to this place, place called Bookie’s. It’s on 6 Mile before you get to Woodward.” My brother went before me, and he came back all jacked up and excited. “Man, I went to that place he told us about. It was crazy, man. The guitar player was wearing a wedding dress.” It turns out that it was the Damned. I went a couple weeks later, ’cause I lived on 6 Mile, took the 6 Mile bus. This guy Rob was working the door, and I’m thinking that I looked like I was twelve and there’s no way I’m gonna get in. But the guy just says, “Hey, man. How’s it going?” and he opens the door for me. There weren’t too many people around, and I didn’t know a soul. I was real nervous about going to this new place, and I looked up and there’s Gloria Love, who I didn’t know at the time, had never seen her. She was clad head to toe in leather, and she looked up at me, and she’s like, “Darling, we’ve been waiting for you.” She runs over and grabs my head and buries it in her breasts. I was still a virgin at the time. That’s very much a night that changed my life. That’s why I started going to Bookie’s, which pretty soon introduced me to hardcore when they booked Black Flag.
Dave Rice: The upstarts were coming into the old guard’s headquarters. I use the image of the old guard being kind of crowded into the back half of the bar during a hardcore show looking like somebody farted, you know like “What is this horrible … oh my God.” Where the bald kids with bandanas on their legs were right up front. The hardcore thing was just deliberately nihilistic. And homophobic as fuck. Which, I mean—rightfully so—rubbed people the wrong way. But there were hilarious aspects, you know, I mean just the old punk scene was taking place largely at Bookie’s, which was an old gay club, so there was a lot of cross-over there. A lot of those people would come from that kind of Rocky Horror mind set, where even if you weren’t gay, you acted it. Then little reactionary kids come in and call everyone dick smokers. It didn’t go over so great.
Tex Newman: There had always been a rivalry between the Elvis Costello people and us. And the big rock bands were also the enemy, and then the bands that wore their tiger-print pants. Bookie’s was punk rock, and the Freezer was for the hardcore shit.
John Brannon: You want to talk about punk rock, I’m gonna go Stooges, MC5, real Detroit rock. Alice Cooper. The only thing that really carried that on after that was Sonic’s Rendezvous Band and Destroy All Monsters, which were all my heroes from the other bands. Anything else that claimed it was punk rock in Detroit was just a joke. So I lived through that whole ’79 to ’81 thing where new wave took over. So you got all these old Bookie’s bands, you’re all coked out, you’re wearing suits and skinny ties, doing Animals covers or some obscure Brit-sixties shit, and you think you’re fuckin’ punk rock. No, you’re not. No, you’re not.
ACT III
The Big Three Killed My Baby
(1981–2000)
Vengeance
John Brannon (Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist): Larissa and I were living in the City Club, the old women’s club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for New Jack City. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody’s like, “We’re taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck
it, we’re squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You’re cool, white boy, but you’re going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn’t go over in the ’hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn’t have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.
Chris Moore, aka Opie (Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist): This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I’m sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.
John Brannon: I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.
Chris Moore: Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.
Rob Michaels (Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist): One time I was over there and there was this guy and he had some cocaine. He was trying to get me to shoot it. I was like, “You’re not a fucking doctor.”