Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Jaan Uhelszki (journalist, Creem magazine): The Who played at Southfield High School in 1967. I don’t think that the people who showed up were necessarily students.

  Pete Cavanaugh (WTAC, DJ): I was on the air at WTAC in Flint, and we were doing sock hops all over Michigan, and we could promote them on WTAC because our signal went so far. Punch Andrews, who went on to manage Bob Seger, was doing the Hideout. And there was the Hullabaloo franchise. Sock hops moved into live bands. It had to happen that way. Mark Farner’s first band or Don Brewer’s band—these were just starting, and now they had a place to play. Seger got his start that way. I’d have sock hops, and Seger would play afterward.

  Robin Seymour (CKLW/WKNR, DJ, host of Swingin’ Time TV show): Bob Seger did one of his first big live things at the Roostertail, where I was puting on events. He had his Beatles haircut, a little cap on, and he walked on the stage and had to walk right off; he was so nervous he had to go throw up. I went over to Punch Andrews, his manager, and I said, “Get him out of here, I won’t have anybody doing my shows on drugs.” Punch says, “He doesn’t touch drugs. He’s nervous, he’s scared to death.”

  Pete Cavanaugh: After a while you would have bands, and the only time records would be played was between bands. The sound was shitty. No one knew any better. Question Mark and the Mysterians got their first gig there at one of our places, Mt. Holly, south of Flint. We got everybody: Bob Seger, the Rationals, Dick Wagner and the Bossmen. At the same time Jeep Holland and A-Square Production in Ann Arbor were doing things. Jeep put his bands at Mt. Holly and booked the whole year in advance at one point.

  Scott Morgan (Rationals, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, guitarist, vocalist): Jeep was also our manager. He was like the Svengali of the Rationals: produce, find us songs, book us—you know, anything you can think of. We had this Dodge van with the Rationals logo printed on the side. You could see us coming from a mile away. Jeep was also a really bad driver, and one night he was driving the van to a show in Lansing and I was in another car behind them. Jeep was cutting in and out of traffic and eating pizza and drinking a Coke all at the same time, not paying attention to what he’s doing. He passes this car in front of him and just keeps going up the side of the road, down the embankment, rolls the van three times. My brother was in the van, in the passenger seat. When it rolled and the top came off, they just got thrown off on the ground. My brother was hardly hurt at all. Jeep was a little banged up. He did everything else pretty well. Just not driving.

  Deniz Tek (Australia’s Radio Birdmen, guitarist, vocalist): The Rationals were doing this British Invasion thing, just before everything happened. They would play high schools. Pretty soon bands moved from the schools and would play TV shows, like Robin Seymour’s Swingin’ Time. He was a DJ and he also had a TV show.

  Robin Seymour: We found the Rationals. Art Cervi was my talent coordinator; he later became Bozo the Clown. He was the best Bozo in the country. We discovered them and played their first record.

  Then they did a cover of the song “Respect” in 1966, and it looked like they were going to take off. Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records called me when the record was taking off, and I connected him with Jeep Holland.

  Scott Morgan: Jeep turned us on to “Respect,” and he just played it one time and we said, “Well, yeah. I’d like to do that song.” It came out and it was a hit in Detroit.

  Robin Seymour: Jeep called me and said they asked Wexler for $5,000 up front and Atlantic said, “Heck no, we won’t pay it.” Wexler called me back and said, “What’s with these kids?” An unknown by the name of Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic a week later, and her first hit was “Respect.” That would have put them on the map. The Rationals sold fifty thousand copies of “Respect” in Michigan alone. It was frustrating.

  Scott Morgan: Doing “Respect”—first it was Otis Redding in 1965, us in 1966, and Aretha Franklin in 1967. I think Aretha decided that if we could do it, she could do it better. Of course, she did.

  Scott Richardson (SRC, Chosen Few vocalist): In Detroit it was fall of ’67, and acid set it off like a bomb. Changed everything, all the music.

  Deniz Tek: Once the wave of high energy hit, in ’68 or ’69, I was seeing most of the bands at outdoor concerts in the summer time. In Ann Arbor in 1968 that was at West Park, this leafy green park where people might take their kids to throw a Frisbee. The place had a little concert shell, and I saw the MC5 play there one weekend. It got shut down because of noise, and the shows moved to Gallup Park, which was over by the river. That was when it got pretty big; you’d have six or seven bands on a Sunday and sometimes have a national on the bill. I saw Janis Joplin there and I saw Johnny Winter.

  Steve Forgey (scenester): Everyone was in Detroit by 1968 because it was really cranking out better music than anywhere else in the US. You had jazz in New York, hippy music in San Francisco, peaceful rock-country in LA. In Detroit it was all upside down. I was living in Jackson, about forty-five miles west of Detroit for a while, and they had these shows in the park in the middle of town. Funkadelic, Nugent and the Amboy Dukes. Everybody played there except the MC5—that was where they drew the line. One afternoon they bring in Alice Cooper, just before the band got really big. I was just out of eleventh grade, you know, and I’d heard how cool they were. Me and my buddies get over to the park early to see them set up. They had this van and it’s pulling a U-Haul trailer, we think with the equipment in it. But it wasn’t. The road crew was in the van. The trailer gate opens up, and out come the guys in Alice Cooper, all in their stage clothes, hair all over the place. It was surreal, seeing them standing in broad daylight like that.

  David Teegarden (Teegarden & Van Winkle, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, drummer, vocalist): Detroit was a giant city to Skip and I when we moved there in 1967. I mean, we had lived in LA, and we were from Tulsa. In Oklahoma, musicians and players I learned from were all very much into southern blues, and Motown was part of the upbringing in Tulsa. I was like, “Let’s go to Detroit, that’s where Motown is,” not realizing that we were segregated from that whole scene. The whites were adamantly distressed about the rioting; it drew some lines there. We didn’t discuss Motown for a while.

  Playground of Noise

  Russ Gibb: The Grande started in 1966, and within ten weeks it became a positive cash flow.

  John Sinclair (MC5 manager, poet, the Blues Scholars): The most we ever got there was $1,800, but Gibb paid us $125 a night usually. We were just so fucking offended at this $125, and they were making money hand over fist. They were bringing these bands from England, and they were giving them thousands of dollars. And we’re getting $125.

  Iggy Pop (The Stooges, Iggy and the Stooges, solo, vocalist): When we played for Russ we’d make $50—that was for the whole group you know. And then we worked our way up. Over time we were headlining and we were paid pretty well. But with John Sinclair, on bills with the MC5, we played for free.

  Jaan Uhelszki: I got a job where I was working as a Coca-Cola girl at the Grande. As a Coca-Cola girl, you did two things: You sell Coca Cola, Sprite, and orange pop, and what you really do is make sure no one doses those said drinks. That was the bigger part of my job. They didn’t sell alcohol at the Grande Ballroom. While it wasn’t all ages, I think it was seventeen and above; all they sold was soft drinks. Nobody drank; everybody did drugs. It was a psychedelic ballroom.

  Gary Rasmussen (The Up, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, bassist): The Grande was not a bar. It wasn’t really a big drinking culture at that time.

  S. Kay Young (photographer): You could get every drug you wanted—Sandoz right from the source—but nobody really drank.

  John Sinclair: There was a guy named Neal. About ten o’clock on Friday night at the Grande, Neal went up a staircase that extended from the floor of the Grande Ballroom. And he would appear at the top of the staircase and just hang out with a big smile. Everybody would go to Neal, and he’d give them samples of this week’s acid, and all the acidheads would drop. The first
band had played at nine. The second band played at 10:15. And at 11 o’clock it was time for the MC5, when everybody was peaking on acid—the audience and, often, the band.

  K. J. Knight (Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, drummer): Neal was this guy who would hand out hits of acid at the Grande Ballroom. He had a house downtown, and he hung with a girl name Dirty Debbie. We used to go down to his house in Detroit and he would always turn us onto drugs. John Finley was a huge drug dealer back then. Finley and Rusty Day had the Day and Night Dealers Blues Band. One time I was backstage waiting to go on, and Alice was backstage, and I offered Alice Cooper a stick of gum, and he said, “KJ, you gotta promise me that this isn’t coated with acid,” you know.

  Ted Nugent (Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, solo, guitarist, vocalist): Creem magazine printed a story about how I shot two guys at the Grande Ballroom after they tried to steal my briefcase. I never shot anybody. But they printed it.

  Dennis Thompson (MC5, New Order, drummer): We practiced at the Grande as well as being the house band for a while. Everybody used to come to the Grande to rehearse, from Janis Joplin to Procol Harum to whomever. And we used to take LSD, turn all the lights out, middle of the night, and go downstairs and just listen to the music. Couldn’t see anybody. All you saw was those little lights on the amplifiers, right?

  Gary Rasmussen: They were better drugs at that time, cleaner. One time we all took a lot of LSD and went and played at the Grande Ballroom; we thought that would be a good idea. Frank Bach, our singer, didn’t because he was macrobiotic and not into drugs, but the rest of the band did. So we go on, and we’d start a song, and we’d be fine. Then we’d get to the guitar solo, and as soon as it would start, we’re looking at each other going, “What song are we doing?” None of us knew how to get out of the solo. So we’d play the solo for ten minutes and just sort of end the song. We’d look at each other and sort of go, “Wow, that was weird.” We’d start the next tune and play the song fine until the solo, and as soon as the solo, we’re gone again. We don’t know where the fuck we were or what we were doing.

  Bob Sheff (Iggy and the Stooges, Charging Rhinoceros of Soul, piano): The Charging Rhinoceros of Soul were the warm-up band for the Mothers of Invention at the Grande one time. Oh God, I refer to it as cookie Sunday. I was late getting to the van, and I jumped in the van, and I hadn’t had breakfast and there was this jar full of cookies and I was really hungry. I ate about half the jar of cookies. Our bass player noticed a lot of those cookies were gone, so she asked, you know, “Who ate those cookies?” I said, “I did, I’m sorry, I’m really hungry,” Well, they were marijuana cookies, and by the time I got there I was so stoned I couldn’t get out of the car. I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. One second I was in the car, and a second later I was up the stairs, and then a second later I was on the stage. The only thing I could hear was the bass drum, which sounded like it was in a huge cave. I knew everyone else was playing, and when I played the keyboard it was like the keys were undulating and it was like a river. I got scared after the set and went outside to the parking lot. I wanted to hide until I felt better. So I got underneath the van.

  Russ Gibb: Cream played at the Grande a couple of times. The first time they came through, Eric Clapton wanted to go shopping, and I took them to Dearborn around Michigan and Schaefer. There was a Montgomery Ward there and in the window store display was a corduroy jacket that was all faded from the sun. He really liked that, so we went in and they couldn’t understand why this English guy would want to buy that. But he got it, and then we walked out onto Michigan Avenue and some car went by with some guys in it, and they called out to him, “Are you a girl?” You know on the inside of Disraeli Gears, in that picture he’s wearing these chaps? He got those in Detroit too. Cream loved Detroit. They wanted to go swimming one night, and so we took them out to one of our lakes. At the time I had a portable phone, one of the first. It weighed twenty-one pounds, and only eleven people in the state of Michigan could be on that phone system at any given time. It cost $4,000—a lot of money. We’re in a boat, and Jack Bruce wanted to make a call and he dropped the fucking phone in the water. That’s $4,000 going down. We brought it home and took hairdryers to dry it out. And it worked.

  Rick Kraniak, aka Rick K (booking agent): When I was in high school, I had a part-time job in the Dearborn post office, and I would see all these Grande Post Cards that Russ would send to Blue Cheer, Jefferson Airplane, whoever. It was cool being able to read what he was saying to them.

  Leni Sinclair (photographer, wife of John Sinclair): Russ Gibb paid us $25 a night to do the light show every week at the Grande. There was Gary Grimshaw, Robin Sommers, and me and two or three other people. The light stand was way up at the top of the room, so you could project it on all the walls on the stage. There was no air conditioning, so when the light show was on and all these lights going and all these machines going, the temperatures up there used to go to 120 degrees. We would always be sweating.

  Robin Sommers: It was Grimshaw, Leni, and Sigrid—who would later marry Fred Smith—with me. We made $25 a night at the Grande, and I never saw a penny because it went to Trans Love. We had four overhead projectors and four slide projectors, and there was a light stand built in there, twelve feet off the floor. The ballroom had a wooden dance floor, and all the way around was a fifteen-foot-wide ledge where you could sit or stand. There were also booths that were three steps up from the dance floor. The light stand was at one end; the place was a rectangle shape with corners cut off. We projected on walls and the stage behind the band, which played like in a bay. I had these slides with thin glass on them and special inks and colors, and I used this 1,500-watt overhead projector and put these slides in there. I put vegetable or baby oil in there and then water and then food coloring.

  Russ Gibb: The weirdest guy I ever booked was Sun Ra. But I loved him for a good reason. Whenever I’d have a big band, I wanted to do two shows a night. Now, we had a ticket policy where if you came to the Grande and you got a ticket, you were there until 2:30 a.m. We were already violating the law with the number of people we were jamming in to the Grande. I think there was a legal thing of twelve to fifteen hundred, and we were packing two to three thousand in there a night. So I could have a big band and book them two shows, an early and a late. After the first show I put Sun Ra up. With Sun Ra, you can take the first five minutes and you’re wondering what’s going on. After about a half an hour you’re going, “This is shit! I can’t stand this!” People would leave. We’d practically empty out the place, and that allowed me to bring in more people. That was my strategy with Sun Ra. I never told him. We paid him. He was happy and he was getting the gig and people were hearing him. John Sinclair was happy because he loved Sun Ra.

  John Sinclair: In the spring of ’69 I brought in Sun Ra. We rented the house next door and they lived next to us. They were about the weirdest Negroes in America, there’s no getting around that. Sun Ra just wanted to make music and stun the audiences with his great ideas. I was happy any time I could get them a show.

  Russ Gibb: The Grande had such a great sound because there was horsehair in the plaster. We knew that they had done that at the Orchestra Hall and so we had them do it at the Grande. It absorbed the sound rather than having it bounce.

  Dennis Dunaway (Alice Cooper, bassist): It’s interesting how people called it the Grande, when I think it was really the Grand ballroom with just a European spelling. But they called it the Grande. The Grande was sort of our rival because we got a lot more gigs at the Eastown Theater. We related to the Eastown Theater a lot more. And the Stooges played the Eastown a lot more. We played with the Who there one time, and the place had this curtain, like a movie screen. So when we opened for the Who, they brought down the curtain so Keith’s drums were behind the curtain and then we were set up in front of the curtain. When we did “Black Juju,” I thought, “Wow, the drums sounded incredible tonight.” When we got done with our set, one of our roadies came and told us tha
t Keith Moon went out to his kit and was playing right along with Neal through the whole song. That gave me the idea to stand behind the screen when the Who played. If that screen wasn’t there, I could have set my hand right on Keith Moon’s head. I watched the Who do their whole set there. Nobody could see me. The Who would come together between songs, and you’d think they’re discussing what they were going to do next. No. They were coming together going “Fuck you!” “No, fuck you!”

  Norm Liberman (Frut, vocalist): When people got tired of the Grande, we had places in Macomb County, which is north of Detroit. There were two geodesic domes out in the middle of nowhere, that was the Frut Palace. Every band that played there got $400, and we had every band in Detroit play there. My mother would take the money so that no one would steal it. I was standing there one night and my mother’s taking the money, and Alice Cooper says, “Mrs. Liberman, why don’t you let the guy over there inside?” “No, Alice, he can panhandle a little more before he comes in.”

  John Kosloskey, aka Kozmo (Frut, bassist): One of the guys around the Frut, his dad was the pastor at a local church in Mt. Clemens. The pastor wanted to have a gathering for the youth that would, you know, put them in the right direction. They had a hall at his church, and we played and gave everyone a hit of THC as they went in. We were exposing people to a lot of the creative things of the mind.

  Norm Liberman: We also had the Frut Cellar inside this old hotel in Mt. Clemens, the Colonial. We used to have 600 people inside and 250 on the steps waiting to get in. At that place we could pay the bands for six, seven hundred dollars. Alice Cooper would come in for $800, and we packed the joint. Everybody was drunk on their asses. Drinks were a buck apiece. We would take the cover and pay the bands that were playing. We were usually on the bill too, and we would take the rest of the money and party with it ourselves. The guy who owned the joint would take the bar money.