Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  We toured in a Volvo station wagon that had 220,000 miles on it that my sister had given me. Jim had this shitty little Chevy Monza. We toured in two cars, and we spent more money keeping the Volvo running than we were making. It broke down in Montreal, Baltimore, Ohio somewhere, and I’d have to be the one to get up at six in the morning and find someone to fix it, and we would be puttering up to a gig, and it would die in front of the club. Inside we had to travel with all these hoses and things to fix it; we collected parts and had them in the cab, and the radio didn’t work. A few gigs we showed up after everyone had left. That was the demo tape tour.

  On the Corner

  Jack White (White Stripes, The Dead Weather, Raconteurs, solo, guitarist, vocalist): I didn’t know anything about Detroit music—its identity—until I worked with Brian Muldoon and he was playing the Gories for me. My brothers weren’t even into the Stooges or the MC5 or Motown. They were into a lot bigger stuff, like the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who. The Muldoons lived next to us; they were a family of like seven or eight kids. We had a bunch of big Catholic families on the block. I’m the tenth child in my family, seventh son. So he was doing upholstery in the basement of that house, and I ended up doing upholstery in the basement of my house later on. As a total side note, there was a third upholsterer on the end of the block, this little German guy named Klomp, and he had been the first one. So that’s why I named my upholstery shop Third Man Upholstery. But Brian’s family was into all the punk: Iggy Pop, David Bowie stuff, Television—they were into all that. I had gotten the Stooges record out of the dumpster in the alley. His brother had gotten hold of the family house and threw a ton of records from the attic out in the garbage, and I just happened to be walking home that day and saw those, and I got the first Stooges record out of that trash and fell in love with it, you know. I recorded “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on a four-track—it was hilarious. It was sort of like, “Oh, okay, so that’s supposed to be Iggy Pop, when he was younger or something?” I had known a little about Iggy Pop, but it was kind of funny. It was sort of one of those things people thought I was making it up later on, you know? A little too perfect.

  Bobby Harlow (The Go, Conspiracy of Owls, vocalist): I was born in Miami and lived with my mother until I was twelve. Then I was raised by my grandparents. I was supposed to be named Robin after Robin Trower. I was going to get beaten to a pulp in school, so my grandparents talked my parents out of it. I could sing all the Beatles songs when I was a kid. One day I got really high on acid and put on the White Album. I only had the first half, but I listened to it that day and something clicked.

  Jack White: When I was fourteen we skipped school and went to Harmony House at Trappers Alley, and I bought the White Album by the Beatles. The Robert Johnson box set was up on the wall; Columbia had just come out with that box set, and that picture of him on the cover legitimately was scary to me. I thought, “I have no interest in listening to that music; that’s very scary.” So it took a couple years for that stuff to siphon through. When I got older, in my twenties, and all my friends worked at record stores, and all these record collectors and garage rockers, you know, a lot of them worked at record stores, so they had the ability to listen to so much music. I was jealous of them because you just don’t have the time in the day to be able to do that, and when you have a job at a place like that, well, I started thinking maybe I should work at one of those places. That’s when I made the decision to be careful of myself, to be careful collecting things like records and emulating other people.

  Dan Kroha: I met Jack hanging out at the Gold Dollar. At that point I was renting an apartment on Prentis. Doll Rods were kinda old hat by that time. When I first met Jack he’s like, “Wow, you’re Dan from the Gories? Wow! Really?!” He looked up to me so much that I didn’t even notice that he was, like, this much taller than me.

  Jack White: I was sort of fumbling my way through, and I didn’t know that the Gories still lived in town or whatever; by the time I skated into them, I was really impressed. I didn’t know you could go to a show and maybe see one of them.

  Margaret Dollrod: After the Gories broke up, I told Danny, “I could do a band with you, but it’s an all-girl band.” Because he was always going through my clothes, I was like, “Maybe you, like, want to be more flamboyant in your dress, maybe you want to be a girl.” He used to tell me when he was little that he’d put his hair behind his ears and wrap a towel around his legs like a mermaid. If we’re friends, we help each other’s dreams come true. So I said, “I don’t know if I want to be the mermaids. But I wanna be your friend. So I’m having a girl band. You wanna be a girl in the band, you can be a girl in the band, but it’s an all-girl band.” That was the Demolition Doll Rods.

  Tom Potter (Bantam Rooster, Dirtbombs, Detroit City Council, guitarist, vocalist): Dan was one of those guys where people would be like, “Dan’s got to be a total fucking fag—he dresses like a girl.” I’m like, “No way, man. That dude gets more fuckin’ ass than a toilet seat.” He always had chicks.

  Dan Kroha: Before that I had Rocket 455. I was one of the founding members of that band. It was named after a car that Margaret had, an Olds ’88, a humongous two-door with the 455 engine. But Margaret came to me with that idea. Good name. Crazy, cool, weird song titles. Wants me to be a girl in it. This is something different. So I said, “Yeah! Alright, let’s do this.” I’d wear her clothes. We would go to the thrift store almost every day. She had really good taste in weird stuff. We made a bedroom of the house we were in into a closet. All our clothes were together because I was really into clothes. I would start picking stuff out of her stuff and be like, “Okay, I want to wear this, I want to wear this.” It was the early nineties. There was a lot of freaky stuff coming out.

  Jack White: I went to a Doll Rods show up in Ferndale at Magic Bag, and I came outside, and I had bought the album in there, Tasty, and I was walking outside, and the Hentchmen were right there. Somehow I started talking to them, and they said, “Let me see the cover,” and they were laughing because it was Mick eating a hot dog on the cover. I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that was Mick.” I didn’t put two and two together. And then John Hentch asked me what I did, and I said, “I do upholstery,” and he goes, “Give me your card. I have some work for you.” That ended up with the White Stripes playing our first gig—we opened up for the Hentchmen the next day.

  John Szymanski: We met Jack and Meg outside, and we were playing at the Lager House a few weeks later and needed an opening band. So he told us about the White Stripes and it sounded cool. They said they had never played out, so this was their first weekend playing.

  Jack White: It was just baby steps and learning; it wasn’t my scene. I’d only been in one band as a drummer, Goober and the Peas, and they weren’t really part of that scene. They were part of a different part of the music scene. At the same time I was playing in coffee houses for a couple years there in Hamtramck, which is totally different from all that scene as well. Dan and the Rocket 455 came in there. Kroha had a Rocket 455 patch on the back of his jacket, and someone had mentioned something having to do with the Gories, and I didn’t know who he was or whatever. Later on, when I had met him, I remembered him from being in the coffee house with that jacket on, which was pretty funny.

  John Szymanski: Jack knew Neil from the Gold Dollar because of Goober and the Peas. I think the White Stripes played its first show there, then with us the next night at the Lager House.

  Bobby Harlow: The Gold Dollar was initially intended to be more of an art rock kind of thing. That was what it was supposed to be, but then rock-and-roll bands took over. Neil Yee, the owner, wanted, like, stuff that was a little more left field, a little more left center, and then what he ended up with was the Wild Bunch and the Hentchmen and the Cobras and the White Stripes that were doing more direct music.

  Neil Yee (owner, booker, Gold Dollar): I saw the building, the Gold Dollar, in 1994, and it was just this empty place that needed plumbing and ele
ctric, which I did a lot of myself with some friends. Still, it looked destroyed when I bought it, and it looked destroyed when I opened it.

  There were people around there who were fighting against the bar, and I went in thinking it was going to be a losing proposition. I wasn’t expecting big crowds, but I ended up doing better than the numbers in my business plan.

  Harold Richardson: People always talk about the Gold Dollar as this place the so-called garage thing started in Detroit. But they started by booking noise bands from Ann Arbor and shit.

  Neil Yee: I didn’t picture the place as getting big. But it did get best known as this place for “garage” in Detroit, this focus on one style of music. But a lot of what I liked wasn’t for the masses.

  Jim Magas: I played at the Gold Dollar as Magas and set up the first two US shows for Peaches. I had just started doing solo electronic stuff, and someone said I should meet Peaches because she was doing stuff like me. I e-mailed her and brought her to Chicago. Then I decided she’d be great to play in Detroit, and by now Brannon and Harold were doing Easy Action. I called John and he said, “Does she have a demo?” I told him, “Just trust me on this.” I put her at the Gold Dollar with Magas and Easy Action. We got $50 each. A couple years later Peaches and I played at the Magic Stick, and Marilyn Manson was there. She didn’t need a demo.

  Neil Yee: Within weeks I got a call from Elvis Costello’s keyboard player, who was in town doing a show at the Fox Theater, and they wanted to check the place out. I don’t think he showed up. One of our door guys almost didn’t let Alex Chilton in—we were strict about that. One of the guys from Sponge came around and said, “You know who I am. We have a top-ten song.” He says, “Well, then you must have $5.”

  Harold Richardson: We were one of the first rock bands to play the Gold Dollar. We moved to Detroit after a bunch of shows at the Dollar, since John and I were banned from the 8 Ball and the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor anyway. We were drugged out dudes, and John had a thing for one of the waitresses at the Pig, and she thought he was stalking her. Not long after we got back to Detroit our drummer, John LeMay, got busted for dope and so did Brannon. Brannon was living at the Beethoven Apartments on Third and Prentis, and he was copping over by Masonic, and he got busted with the dealer. They put him in the cell they called the David Ruffin suite because he had guitar picks in his pocket. The cops were like, “Oh, you’re a musician? We’ll put you in the David Ruffin suite.” At that time, late nineties, the Detroit scene was small, and everyone was excited that something was starting to go down. Eventually we got left behind when everyone else got big. The White Stripes were just starting, and no one liked them. But pretty soon we were doing tours, and people were asking about them. This was after that first single on Sympathy, and I got back and said to Jack, “You should go on the road; everyone’s asking about you.” He was like, “Okay, okay, yeah.” He wasn’t crazy about it at first. But in a few months they were huge. Once they got huge, everyone else did with this garage thing, and we were left with the rock thing. We weren’t so popular.

  John Krautner (The Go, Conspiracy of Owls, guitarist, bassist): The Go wanted to open up for the cool bands, the bands that were pulling in people like Cobras and Rocket 455. Those were the big bands in our eyes.

  Rachel Nagy: The Cobras were all into doo-wop and shit, doing only covers. We weren’t trying to do it verbatim; we’re not some Motown revue. I heard the songs and would start to change them. We weren’t like the other bands, really, at all.

  Jason Stollsteimer: Bantam Rooster was the first band out of that Gold Dollar scene that toured. And they were on Crypt, which made them extra cool.

  Chris Fuller (Electric 6, manager): Tom Potter from Bantam Rooster was important in all this. He came to Detroit in 1997 as Bantam Rooster with records you could find in stores outside of Detroit, or even outside the country. There were bands in Detroit already, but they didn’t do records or tour. It was no accident that Tom Potter came to town and things started happening.

  Tom Potter: Bantam Rooster played its first Detroit show at the Tap Bar, and a couple of people from the Detroit Cobras were heckling us. We were outsiders. Detroit had already started something like what we were doing, but we were like, “Fuck you, man.” They were probably pissed because we had gotten signed to Crypt. I had sent tapes out to a couple labels. I got a letter back from Larry Hardy. I didn’t know him at the time, but he actually sent a letter back: “We really like it, we’re full up right now, but keep sending me this stuff.” I just gave up hope on the other ones, and a month after I’d given up hope I come home and there’s this call on my answering machine, and it’s Tim Warren: “Hey, daddy. What’s going on? This is Tim Warren from Crypt records. I really like this tape you sent me. I was kinda thinking, like, maybe we could do a single or, I don’t know, fuck, maybe an album, I don’t know.” Just going nuts on the phone.

  Tim Warren (Crypt Records, owner): I’d spent a lot of time in Michigan when I was compiling the Back to the Grave comps—that state had such great old sixties bands. So I knew Detroit. And Tom sent me that tape, and I said, “Hey, this shit’s really good.”

  Tom Potter: Coming home and getting that on your answering machine, like Tim Warren wants to do a record with ya, it’s like, “Fuck, yeah, all right.” That was huge for us, because we were from Lansing, not Detroit. That started things. We started playing Zoot’s, then the Gold Dollar a lot when we weren’t touring. We made money.

  Matthew Smith (Witches, Outrageous Cherry, the Volebeats, THTX, vocalist; producer): Before the Gold Dollar there was a club called Zoot’s.

  Troy Gregory: Zoot’s was the place that had noise bands, surf bands, and some guy with turntables all playing on the same bill. It was where all the people who couldn’t get booked anywhere else played.

  Matthew Smith: It was like a house in the Cass Corridor that used to be a whorehouse in the old days. The Gold Dollar became the whole nexus of everything. Between that and the Magic Stick, it was like all the bands were playing there. But that was a real interesting atmosphere. It just felt like Weimar-era Berlin or something.

  Troy Gregory: And when Zoot’s went down, Neil Yee was getting the Gold Dollar going, and at the same time Jim Diamond was moving in with his studio. It all came together.

  Neil Yee: The thing about Detroit at that time, there were so many small scenes that had great music, and everyone focuses on the garage thing. And we had touring bands play to no one. Godspeed You Black Emperor! played to eight people.

  Tom Potter: They had prom nights at the Gold Dollar. Just get really drunk and pretend it’s your prom.

  Matthew Smith: They did, like, this prom night for all these kids that were these rock-and-roll outcasts and apparently never did proms. But it kind of felt like being at The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. It was just really, I don’t know, it kind of felt like you were at CBGB and Studio 54 and the Warhol Factory all at the same time.

  Tim Caldwell: Tom Potter was always at the Gold Dollar. One night they had some kind of prom, like the Gold Dollar prom, and Tom was MC, and he was fucked up beyond all control, like Foster Brooks fucked up. Rachel Kucsulain, the bass player from Slumber Party, walked by him while he was raving, and he jumped off the stage and started playing bongos on her ass. Yeah, seventies-porn prom-emcee Tommy was in rare uber-obnoxious, randy, foul-mouthed mode that night. I expected a vaudeville-style hook to yank him at any given minute. Later that night I was leaving and there was this little grassy patch behind the Dollar. It would have been a great picture.

  Martin Heath (cofounder, Rhythm King Records, Lizard King Records): Parties with the Wildbunch and the Go. For an English music geek, it was full of amazing beautiful women who, after a slurry hello, turned around and threw up in the sink. Meanwhile there’s a banging on the door as the bass player ran in complaining about how he was sitting in his car with a friend having a quiet joint when a dude pushed a shotgun through the window and fired it.

  Tom Potter: Heath was
in Detroit—I think he was scouting the Detroit Cobras—when one of us was doing a coke deal outside on Trumbull while we had a party. Some guy taps on the window and puts a shotgun in and demanded they turn over the drugs. The dealer jumped out the car and gets shot in the ass and everyone runs. They bring this guy into the party, clean the buckshot out of his ass, and Heath is petrified.

  Chris Fuller: He was buying coke, and the dealer pulls up to the curb, and someone comes from another side, and the dealer gets shot in the ass. Heath was saying someone should call the cops.

  Tom Potter: When he said it everyone kind of stops everything and, after a pause, started laughing.

  Bobby Harlow: Why is it that people always act up when we have visitors here? It’s like they know they’re here and they bring out the guns.

  Troy Gregory: You’d have after-parties at the Electric 6 house on Trumbull, and there would be fights and drunk people and drugs. Cocaine came in real heavy. You added that into the mix, and you had people fucking each other’s girlfriends and boyfriends, and that fueled fights. You know, someone is in the bathroom with someone’s girlfriend, and it’s bad blood from there.

  Eddie Baranek (The Sights, guitarist, vocalist): Potter, in this town, is the original two piece. He’s the original go out there, do it, figure it out later. Neil was cool about getting us into the Gold Dollar even though we were underage. I’d go down there with Ben Blackwell. Neil tells us, “Don’t fucking drink.” So twelve minutes later we were in the women’s bathroom slamming cans of beer because the women’s bathroom had a door on the stall that locked, and we’re like, “Neil’s not gonna go pee in the women’s bathroom. He’ll pee in the men’s bathroom. He’s not gonna come in the chick’s bathroom.” So we would go in there and just chug them and then walk out. Well, he caught onto it, and he’s like, “Okay, you guys can’t be doing that shit.”