Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Margaret Dollrod (Demolition Doll Rods, guitarist, vocalist): L-Seven were pussies. They called the cops on me one time because I wanted to get this guy’s attention and he was dancing with another girl. I took my clothes off and I got on the stage thinking that maybe that would work. He was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” L-Seven called the cops, and they came to arrest me. The cops thought that I was dancing for the show, and they gave me a T-shirt. I went outside, and L-Seven was talking, “Yeah, we showed her. We called the cops.”

  Dave Rice: Larissa hadn’t played guitar much before the Hyenas, just toward the end of the band when she just was hanging out with John and clinking out some Alice Cooper stuff or whatever. The next time I see her she’s just killin’. Her tone, man. They were putting the Hyenas together, and L-Seven was done shortly after that. Around then I auditioned for PIL while I was living in Detroit, playing in the Linkletters. PIL were planning to do this tour, and he got me the audition in Pasadena at Perkins Palace. I flew myself out there. At that point it was an excuse to get out of Detroit, and I had a brother out there to stay with. I headed over to the audition, and here’s Johnny Rotten in the front row with a big can of Fosters. When it was my turn, he said, “Dave from Detroit, play us some rock and roll.” So I played “This Is Not a Love Song” and “Swan Lake.” Martin Atkins was on drums, so it was pretty fuckin’ cool. I didn’t get the gig, and I don’t think that tour ever happened. They were gonna do a tour and it got postponed, and then they did Album, so I can say I got bumped by Steve Vai.

  EWolf (photographer, Dirtbombs, drummer): There were so many different bands and so many different scenes by the mideighties. You had hardcore, and there were bands playing variations on it. Even some bands doing the more metal end of it like Ugly But Proud. There were bands that defied classification, like Sleep and Private Angst, Vertical Pillows. We did the Angry Red Planet EP for Corey when Touch and Go was still nothing. He had just started to do some things with the Butthole Surfers. Then he picked up the Didjits, and Big Black. I had been shooting music photography for some time, but without having any real plan. The Didjits came through town, and they stayed at my house. The next morning they got up and said, “Hey, you shoot pictures, don’t you?” I said, “No. Yeah. Kind of.” They said, “Well, we need some new publicity shots. Can you hook us up?” So I did it just as a favor. We did a session, and the photos came out great. I sent them the proofs, and Corey called me and said, “Man, we really liked the photos. We want to pay you for them so we can use them.” He just offered me some money and I figured, “Money? Okay.” Through Touch and Go once these photos went out, I guess anybody who was shooting photos who wasn’t Charles Peterson or Michael Lavine at that point must have been shooting total shit, because everybody went gaga over these shots. I shot a lot of bands and record covers—Jesus Lizard, Atomic Fireballs, Iggy Pop, Lee Harvey Oswald Band. Stuff for Atlantic. I stopped counting at sixty-five covers.

  John Brannon: The next time Nick Cave came to town he stayed at my place at Cass and Willis across the street from the Clubhouse. I missed it all because I was doing the Tied Down tour with Negative Approach. It was ’84 and From Her to Eternity has just come out. Larissa scored for him. He was like, “Fuck my band. I’m hanging out with you. Your boyfriend won’t mind that I’m here?” She’s like, “Oh, he’s cool. He’d get a kick out of the fact you’re even here.”

  Sherrie Feight: I saw her that night, and it really made me sad. She was all fucked up. I hated to see all that talent being wasted, and I knew that’s where it was going.

  John Brannon: She’s telling him, “This is like the area where you can walk a block and, you know, you could get a blowjob from a one-legged hooker. You cop dope two blocks away.” He looks through all my records and he put all the records into stacks, the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t like. He put all the Detroit shit in one stack. All my Alice Cooper, Stooges, and shit. I get back and Larissa said, “I do remember he put all the Bowie stuff in the bad stack.” She said, “He pulled out your Ted Nugent first solo. That was in the good stack.” That was the start of the next phase for me. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Detroit other than hardcore. Nugent and Seger were no longer really part of Detroit and hadn’t done a good record for years. There was a hair-metal scene, bands like Seduce, that didn’t even sound like anything remotely Detroit.

  Andy Wendler: We came back from a tour, and a guy named Ken Waagner was in Detroit making a ton of money producing shows. Waagner started managing Seduce, but at first they were skeptical. They were doing live concerts on the radio, a local band at Harpo’s thing, and they were making $300 to $400 a night. But they were selling out Harpo’s and being on the radio. So Ken’s like, “Well, let me be your trial manager.” The very next night Ken comes out of the box office with $3,000. Wagner just went in there and said, “There are a thousand people in this club who paid five dollars a head to get in here tonight. You’re not paying my band $300.” This is what the club scene was going like. There was money. The bands sure weren’t making it.

  John Brannon: It was like everything had kind of hit a dead end, and there’s this guy coming in first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, showing everyone what was going on. And we took that for sure. That Bad Seeds show was at St. Andrews, which was by then the big place to play in the city.

  Chris Panackia: Because you gotta remember, Bookie’s, people just partied, and it was just fun and all that kind of stuff. But St. Andrews, it went to another level.

  Vince Bannon: We didn’t make it to ’83 at City Club. The guy who I had the joint venture with wanted to change the entire deal, so we walked out. We took everything to St. Andrews Hall and had a wonderful relationship there.

  Chris Panackia: Now you’re talking about a twelve hundred–seat club with St. Andrews. You’re talking about way more people to get involved in debauchery rather than seventy-five or one hundred. More money. It was the place to play. It was the number-one hall in North America all those years.

  Andy Wendler: We went on the Tangled Up tour that summer of ’86, and we were finally making money. It was four months with Megadeth and four months with the Circle Jerks. We made anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000 a night. It was like, “Hey, here’s some money.” Somebody would be like, “Oh man, my sneakers are bad,” and we’d say, “Okay, here’s a hundred bucks. Go get sneakers and socks.” We played arenas. A week before this tour I was playing a gig in an eighty-seater. When we got back to Detroit the Hyenas were happening, and there was a whole new wave of hardcore: Almighty Lumberjacks of Death, all those guys. You know, all these new young hardcore bands were around, and I’d see ’em, and it wasn’t my thing.

  Jon Howard: ALD, Feisty Cadavers, Son of Sam—I mean it got more into this like dirtbag, white trash, punk thing. It was more like what Scary Cary was doing at Graystone. It was like a little more chaotic and fucked up. No, it was more white trash, like Sex Pistols-y. The clubs were like Old Miami, Blondie’s.

  Mike Hard: The clubs in Detroit had really gone in a direction. At the Old Miami you could score at eight o’clock and ten o’clock. The coke man is there. You go there at eight o’clock. You walk in, and there will be all these dudes sitting at the bar. Then the coke man will walk by them and he’ll go into the bathroom. Then one at a time each guy—right into the bathroom. And the bathroom at fucking Old Miami was bad.

  Margaret Dollrod: I pissed in the street rather than use the bathroom at the Old Miami. Which wasn’t really a stretch.

  Mike Hard: Or even do lines in there. But these motherfuckers are doing lines. There used to be a piece of wood in the Old Miami bathroom with, like, tile on it above the shitter? The guy who was running the place took that off and he put a piece of stainless steel there so they could do their lines without getting it fucking caught in the grout.

  Charlie Wallace (ADC, vocalist): We played the Hungry Brain, which was the basement of a retail store. The store was closed, but you go down to the b
asement and it was this huge, open floor. We pulled up and jumped out of the car and were swarmed by undercover cops, who were screaming at us, “Where are the needles?” We told them we’re playing a show down the street, and they’re like, “You guys are playing a show down here? Man, you’re nuts.” These are the guys who just ran up to us asking about needles telling us this. They were sure the only reason four white guys are getting out of a car down there was to buy heroin.

  Brian Mullan: The Hungry Brain was this shithole to go hang out at after the Graystone closed, getting to the late eighties. Scary Cary took over booking shit at the Graystone and then did stuff at the Hungry Brain.

  Norm Zebrowski (Disinfect, vocalist): The Hungry Brain was one more Detroit venue in a really bad place. West Jefferson and Dearborn in Delray. Fucked up place—lotsa violence inside and out.

  Mike Hard: We played a place called the Bank one New Year’s Eve. It was on Michigan Avenue. It was one of those big huge Detroit granite fucking banks that these kids bought, and right on top of the bar there were big old fucking nitrous tanks, nitrous balloons everywhere.

  Lacy X (Son of Sam, Hillside Stranglers, vocalist): There were bands like us, Son of Sam, that weren’t in the Touch and Go clique. There was the Feisty Cadavers, Beer Whores, Almighty Lumberjacks of Death. The bands from ’81 to ’83 got more attention, but there was a big divide between that older scene and the one that had started.

  Keith Jackson: My pal Itchy and I were coming into Detroit from Farmington Hills, and it was hard to be accepted because there was this group of hardcore guys we called Russ’s Army. It was after Russ Gibb. He might have been a legend for what he did with the Grande, but he was also a teacher and had all these students from Dearborn getting into the punk scene. Later he bought the Graystone, but those kids were just sort of his acolytes. I had already been hanging around at Bookie’s, and I dug all the music there. But this was sort of a cliquish kinda hardcore thing, and the people in it were really clannish.

  Lacy X: A lot of the newer bands were inner-city, working-class Detroit, and the other ones were suburban kids. People were getting killed, people in bands.

  Andy Wendler: It was a lot of Detroit, south-side skinhead dudes. You know, a lot of access to fireworks and guns and that kind of thing. John and Larissa were hooked up, and they had a house in suburban Ann Arbor.

  You Just Can’t Win

  John Speck: I was just fucking blown away by John Brannon. The Laughing Hyenas inspired me even fashion-wise. The way he looked. The way he carried himself at that show, and of course he was just fucked out of his fucking mind and totally oblivious on heroin. I knew and revered Negative Approach, and so it was weird to see him in this new band, the Laughing Hyenas. He comes out, and his hair was long and all in his face, and he had a straight mic stand. He comes out, and he’s got long, like, button-up work shirt and jeans and engineer boots, and he had a six pack with him, and he set the six pack right at the base of the mic stand and never fucking said anything or looked at anybody, and the band was playing, doing some sort of, like, instrumental opening thing. Larissa’s guitar is a killing loud Fender Twin in a buzz, and the band’s playing, and he reaches down and he never looked at the audience, and he fucking cracks a beer, and he just fucking starts pulling off it, and he just drains most of a beer, and just fucking plants one foot on the base of the mic stand and his hand and just never opened his eyes and just fucking, “RRRAAAAAAH.” You could tell he was just fucking doping and out of his mind. Then I would hear the stories about, like, you know, Brannon was at Off the Record in Royal Oak, flipping through the records in there, and there’s some little kid in the hardcore section, and Brannon’s a couple of aisles or rows away, and he sees the kid, and the kid is looking at the Negative Approach record, and Brannon’s like, “I was in that band.” The kid looks at him and he’s like, “Fuck you, hippie.”

  Rachel Nagy (Detroit Cobras, vocalist): I used to live in the house Kevin Monroe’s dad owned in the Cass Corridor. But that motherfucker. I guess there were talks to turn the place I was living in into a coffee shop but no one told me. So Kevin kicks me out. He’s a piece of shit for that. He had a bunch of his mom’s antique sofas and stuff in there. I bought five 40s and I peed on everything. I peed in every sofa, corner, everything—everything I could pee on I peed on. Fuck you, dude. You know what? You think I’m going to go live on the street in the Corridor? Well, there you go, bro. And then he fucking locked up my shotgun to make sure I didn’t try to steal anything. Meanwhile, his dad works for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and has a beautiful, beautiful house in Indian Village.

  Kevin Monroe (Laughing Hyenas, Mule, bassist): I grew up at 6 Mile and James Couzens until I was eight. Then we lived in Indian Village. My dad was in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for forty years. He started there at a young age, like in ’68. We moved into the city when everyone else was moving out, like six months after the riots. My parents were very optimistic.

  I got into the scene—well, I had a good friend, Veronica Webb. She became a model later on and was in some Spike Lee movies. She used to go to shows with Negative Approach and L-Seven. Then the Graystone. I knew Mike Danner, who was playing drums for the Hyenas at first. Mike was from Milford—way out there. At least John and I had some Detroit roots, but a lot of the kids were from the suburbs. You can’t choose where you come from, of course, but they were from West Bloomfield and Royal Oak. Mike asked me if I wanted to try out for bass in this band he was in. The whole thought was that bass wasn’t all that important and that whoever they got was just going to leave and they would replace him anyway. Mike told me this at the beginning. It was an honor to be asked, and I thought to myself, “Wow, I would love to be in this band, but I can’t play. There is no way I want to be disposable.” So I gotta compete with some of the coolest bass licks I could come up with and have my own, like, totally original sort of sound. Not that that was—you know, I could not do that necessarily, but that was my thought, anyway—was to come up with something that would make me different enough that I would stand out as being a crucial part of the band. They were in Ann Arbor already, and I had moved to Ann Arbor. Danner and Brannon and Larissa had moved to Ann Arbor only because you could get a practice space without having to worry about getting your equipment stolen. I mean, Detroit in the seventies, eighties—we were broken into at least eight or nine times at my father’s house.

  John Brannon: We came outta Detroit in 1984. We didn’t find any place to live right away. Me and Larissa, we just loaded up all our shit, a suitcase and a guitar. We just drove to Ann Arbor. We were like, “We’re going to live in Ann Arbor.” We’d just find out where there’s a party, park the van out there, and live there for a couple of days and move on to the next place. Then we discovered these things called frat houses. So people would come up to us: “Do you guys know anybody here?” And we were like, “Oh yeah, we’re with John.” There was always a John, you know. They would have these community kitchens. We’d go in there and make our food and drink all their fucking beer and go to the next party. We lived out of the van for about two to three weeks. We didn’t give a fuck. We were twenty-five years old, we had no money, so we just lived in my van. About two or three weeks into it we all got jobs. I worked at Harry’s Army Surplus, and we rented out this big country house. It was $500 a month and belonged to this old doctor in Ann Arbor. It was out where the Stooges used to have their place. It was right out on Packard and Platt. Two acres of land, three-car garage, six bedrooms—so we all moved into that bitch. We were like, “Alright, we’re setting up shop here, man.” Then we pulled in Kevin Monroe.

  Kevin Monroe: When I met John I had never played bass. I had played guitar, but the bass was new to me.

  John Brannon: The only song he knew how to play was “Hell’s Bells” on guitar. I’m like, “Alright, this is a start, dude. You can go from here to here.” Kevin and Larissa learned how to play from scratch together.

  Kevin Monroe: They were concerned because
I had combat boots. They were worried that I was going to be dressing too trendy at that particular point. They didn’t suggest anything. It wasn’t that. They weren’t trying to insult me. Larissa was like, “Well, we weren’t really sure, because you had a uniform.” I didn’t have a uniform.

  John Brannon: Mike was not the best drummer but I figured this is everything I need to make the greatest band in the world. We moved to the land of the Stooges, and we’re going to start from scratch. We’re going to get a house, which was about half a mile from where the Stooges house was. There were people hanging out around us by then, and it was cool.

  Kevin Monroe: I started driving a cab, which was a little rough. I was just seeing the nightlife. It was like being a cop or something. You see the underbelly of society in such a way that, at first, it was very exciting. It was more of an adventure than a job. But was it a healthy lifestyle? I was young, and I was kind of … I thought I was Travis Bickle. I got a lot of fares that wanted to know where to score, and I knew.

  Preston Long (Wig, Mule, P. W. Long’s Reelfoot, solo, guitarist, vocalist): I met Kevin Monroe at the cab place in Ann Arbor. He introduced me to Touch and Go music. I knew nothing about punk rock, and I was in my midtwenties, and I was flunking out of the university. I thought he was kind of a dandy and an asshole and a smartass, and we got along. Next thing I know he was crashing on my couch. I had been listening to country blues and this stuff, and then I ended up in Wig. I didn’t feel too good at the time. I wasn’t perceiving the world correctly, and the music came along as a therapeutic outlet. It wasn’t a form of art exactly for me. I had roommates, this one guy who played guitar, and we ended up seeing White Zombie. They played one song and the cops shut the whole thing down; this was the Soul Crusher tour, so it must have been their first tour. That was cool, so I joined Wig. We shared a practice space with the Hyenas.