Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Neal Smith (Alice Cooper, drummer): We had the Eastown, the Grande, and the Sherwood Forest Rivera, with short drives to Ann Arbor and Lansing, so Detroit was a good spot for us to be.

  Pete Woodman (Popcorn Blizzard, Floating Circus, Bossmen, drummer): There was a place in Bay City, way north of Detroit, that all the bands played. Ted Nugent came out on his motorcycle.

  Susie Kaine (Popcorn Blizzard, Floating Circus, keyboardist, vocalist): Pete’s mom would let the bands stay at the house. Ted would sleep in the woods out back.

  Pete Woodman: He knocked on the door and my mom opened the door and he wanted a cup of coffee or something. She said she’d seen this beautiful guy.

  Jack Bodnar (scenester): We lived at Lahser and Lois Lane not far from Southfield High School, and I was this geeky kid. I loved music, going to clubs, going to see anyone who played around town. You could see so much free or cheap music; going to the Grande was $2. When I graduated from high school, I wanted to have this little party in my parents’ basement. It was a cinderblock thing, fairly small. I had invited these twin sisters that went to Edsel Ford High School, and they said, “Can we bring a band?” They were groupies; they hung out with bands. They were flat-out gorgeous girls—long straight blond hair. Mostly they hung with Wilson Mower Pursuit.

  Bill White (bassist, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes): Liz and Ilka, Swedish twins. They followed us around. We met them at the Grande.

  Jack Bodnar: I said, “Sure, bring a band,” because we were just gonna play 45s. This was a straight party, no alcohol—my friends didn’t drink. All of a sudden a van pulls up and it’s some of the guys from the Amboy Dukes and all this equipment. They had a full drum kit that took up about a quarter of the room. They started playing, and it literally shattered some of my parent’s crystal. Stuff came crashing down. It was wonderful. I was suddenly the coolest kid ever.

  Bill White: We’d play a lot of weird places. That very well coulda have happened.

  Rick Stevers (Frijid Pink, drummer): We played at some Catholic high school with the MC5, and the school told them not to play “Kick Out the Jams.” Of course they did, and the place tried to shut them down, and in the process shit started getting tossed around, and Dennis Thompson threw his cymbal into the crowd and it hit this kid in the head. There was blood everywhere—can you imagine if that happened now? But Thompson went into the crowd. He was really sorry; he gave the kid the cymbal, and that was it.

  John Kosloskey: We played in Sault Ste. Marie in the upper peninsula of Michigan with the Amboy Dukes at the armory. We were on our way to the show and we got harassed by some local rednecks, and Mosley threw a bottle at their car. These guys called the cops on us. By the time the show ended the National Guard was called and the troops were circling the block where the show was. We thought they were protecting us from our crazed fans.

  Rick Kraniak: Frut were so stoned out. Leo Fenn booked them on a pop festival in Ohio, and they were so altered in their state of smoke that they not only missed the exit; they ended up in a different state.

  Norm Liberman: I seem to think there was a train involved that also held us up.

  John Sinclair: The most the MC5 ever made at the Grande was $1,800. We were on the bill with Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, who were making a rare appearance at the Grande. The Amboy Dukes were great guys, but Ted Nugent—how could you trust a guy who didn’t get high? Anyway, they had a place they played all the time in Northland Mall called the Mummp. It was like a dome, and they played there every weekend.

  Don Was: The Mummp was formerly Northland Playhouse, which was like a regional theater. It was taken over by the Weinstein family of Oak Park, and the house band was the Amboy Dukes. I could lay in bed and listen to the Dukes on Friday and Saturday nights, it was that close to my house when I was a kid.

  Bill White: I met Ted at the Mummp. They were playing, and they didn’t have a bass player and he announced it on the PA. So I went back and met him, then went over to the house and played and I was in.

  Ted Nugent: It didn’t really matter where we played. As long as we didn’t blow the power and the amps kept working, I was a happy man. I mean, early days you look at the Crow’s Nest East, the Crow’s Nest West, and the Crow’s Nest South, you look at the Birmingham Palladium, you look at the Hideouts, you look at the Shindigs, and the Hullabaloos, and the Fifth Dimension, I mean, they were all just makeshift facilities that were, you know, just rooms with the dividers blown out so we could pack in a lot of people and play. I loved ’em all. I loved the intimacy.

  Russ Gibb: John Finley was this young kid who worked for me, one of the original Grande kids. I always used these kids as a gauge for what was popular, who people would go see. John helped me develop the Grande actually. He went to Redford High School and would hand out handbills for the shows, so we’d always have all these Redford kids coming in. So he was a very early opinion maker. He introduced me to Ted.

  Donny Hartman (The Frost, guitarist): When the Frost broke up, Ted called me up and goes, “Hey, man. Ted Nugent.” I go, “How the hell you doin’, Ted?” And I knew some of the guys in his band, and they were all bitchin’ ’cause they had just done some stadium show, and he took, I think, almost a quarter million bucks outta there. Paid everybody in the band $850. Ted says, “Yeah, man. God, my guys are high. I’m having some problems with my guys.” “I wonder why, Ted.” He said, “Man, I’d really like you to sing in my band, man.” I said, “Yeah?” He goes, “Well, I’d love to pay all your expenses and everything, and I’ll pay you $250 a night.” I said, “You shouldn’t have made this phone call.” He says, “Why?” I said, “’Cause if I never talk to you again, it’ll be too soon.”

  Michael Lutz (Brownsville Station, guitarist, vocalist, bassist): I went for an audition to sing with Ted one time at the Fifth Dimension in Ann Arbor, where the Amboy Dukes were doing both rehearsal and auditions. I auditioned with “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Manic Depression.” They were getting ready to do what would eventually become the album Journey to the Center of the Mind. They played the song “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” and I thought, “Holy shit, man. This is cool.” I got the call from Ted and he said, “You’re it.” But John Drake owned their PA system, and they couldn’t afford a new one. So they had to keep Drake. But for one week I was the new singer for the Amboy Dukes.

  Shaun Murphy (Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Stoney and Meatloaf, vocalist): A lot of people kind of misunderstood Ted. They thought he was drunk, they thought he was high, but he never took any drugs, never took any alcohol—that was him.

  Russ Gibb: He was around a lot of people who partook of the sacrament, but I don’t know that I ever saw him indulge.

  Ted Nugent: I was hopelessly inebriated by the music.

  K. J. Knight: Back then Rusty Day and a lot of Ted Nugent’s peers looked down at Ted because they felt as though he had a disingenuous onstage persona because he wouldn’t take drugs. Ted was just a young guy trying to feel his way around, you know, and he wanted to put on a good show, so these guys felt as though even though he was so much against drugs, he acted like he was stoned when he was on stage. They always were trying to feed him drugs, persuade him and encourage him to take drugs.

  Bill White: Ted never took drugs, but he should have been on Ritalin.

  K. J. Knight: He was always down on that whole thing. I don’t know if they just decided to come up with this bullshit way of looking at things because they were jealous of him. We’d always talk about a good rap onstage and being a good front man. He would try to come up with a cool rap, and he would maybe be a little bit jive.

  Shaun Murphy: Ted was living with the band in a huge carriage house. The bottom was a bedroom, a place for a car, a big rehearsal area. Upstairs was another bedroom, a kitchen, living room. Everything was pretty sparse but neat. Ted was a perfectionist; he’s very fastidious.

  Ted Nugent: The band had a house out there on the west side, in Livonia on Middlebelt. We always rehear
sed, and we were just obsessed with creating this new music and writing our own songs and discovering new musical adventure. Dave Palmer, Greg Arama, and I would do twenty-hour marathons in the basement at the house on Middlebelt. I didn’t go hang out much.

  Bill White: We got signed to Polydor there. The guy came to see us practice, and he went upstairs while we were playing, got the phone and called New York, put the phone to the floor. That’s how we got that deal.

  Ted Nugent: We played almost every night, and the nights we didn’t play we’d go and see other bands. I would go the MC5’s house over on Hill Street once in a while and then when they had the place in Hamburg. The SRC had a band house too, and I’d go over there. But again, it was all about smokin’ dope, and I couldn’t last more than a couple minutes because I thought we could play music and talk music, but the hippies couldn’t talk. It was a heartbreaker, really.

  Bill White: The lick from “Journey to the Center of the Mind” came from the TV show Rawhide. We were sitting there, hanging out, watching TV, and Ted had his guitar in his hands and we said, “Play the next thing that comes on.”

  Al Jacquez (Savage Grace, bassist, vocalist): I sat in the back row of the Grande Riviera with Ted watching the Who one time. Pete Townsend went over and hit Keith Moon in the head with a stick during the set. Nugent was like, “Did you see that?” I think he really liked that idea.

  Bobby Rigg (The Frost, drummer): The first time we met Ted Nugent all he could talk about was himself and how he was the greatest guitar player in the world. We were in a hotel in New York City. We were staying there, Led Zeppelin was there, Nugent and the Amboy Dukes were there. And Nugent was on the same floor as Jimmy Page, and this hotel was built in a U-shape. Nugent’s window was across from Jimmy Page’s room; he put a Fender Twin Reverb in the window and started screaming at the top of his lungs, “I’m the greatest guitar player in the world! Jimmy Page sucks!” and started playing his guitar as loud as he could facing Jimmy Page’s room. That’s the way Ted Nugent was. What you see is what you get.

  John Sinclair: Ted Nugent is an asshole. He always was.

  Ted Nugent: The Amboy Dukes were invited to play Woodstock, but we had been burned by all these hippie promoters, where you didn’t go on stage on time, sometimes you didn’t go on at all. I’ll never forget the Black Arts Festival at Olympia that Mike Quatro put together. He let the stage managers from the Grande Ballroom manage the thing, and they were all so stoned out of their minds that we never even got to go on stage, it was so inept. So I was so let down by the disrespect towards the music—and the musicians—not just because it was us, but any musician. Look at Hendrix, going on at 6 a.m. at Woodstock. Are you shitting me? Who would do that to Jimi Hendrix? I’ll tell you who would do that: an uncaring, an inconsiderate, soulless, piece-of-shit, stoned fuck, that’s who would do that. So I was invited to Woodstock, and I go, yeah, it’ll cost you $2,500, just send the check here, and if the check shows up, we’ll show up, and if not, fuck you. So I would refuse to do those things and get stiffed anymore. You know, we still had to buy our speakers and buy our guitar strings, we still had to eat, we still had to get gas and fucking tires and oil for the vehicles. What do think—it’s a donation from us to you? Fuck you.

  Patti Quatro (Pleasure Seekers, Cradle, guitarist): My sister Nancy was dating Ted for a long time. My dad had a car chase with him one time. Nancy snuck out of the house to go out with Ted, and they’re tooling around, and my dad gets in his car and follows him, and they had a chase all over town. He never caught him. Ted got real pissy when she dumped him. She just didn’t want to date him anymore; she was over him.

  K. J. Knight: Everyone fell in love with Nancy. She was beautiful. I had a big crush on Nancy, and we kinda dated for a couple of weeks.

  Suzi Quatro (Pleasure Seekers, solo, bassist, vocalist): Nancy and I went to New York at one point to find a girl drummer, and Jerry Nolan showed up. He looked like a girl anyway, with the long hair and the makeup, so we said okay. He came to Detroit and stayed at my folks’ house. But he fell in love with Nancy, and we said, “Well, okay, you gotta go.”

  Pete Cavanaugh: Ted Nugent and Mitch Ryder had the most fearsome road crews of anyone. They were mostly bikers and ex-criminals who had a lot of experience beating the fuck out of people, some of whom had spent some time away for beating the fuck out of people. I had Ted at one show, and it was getting late, and some guy came up to the front—the stage at Sherwood Forest allowed people to get six feet away from the band—and started giving Ted shit. And there was a big roadie behind the amps, but this guy couldn’t see him. Ted knew he was there, though, and he starts to yell back at the guy and invites him up on stage to kick his ass. The guy made the mistake of getting up there, and it was like watching the spider and the fly. The roadie came out and threw this guy ten feet into the crowd. Brutal.

  Ted Nugent: I got thrown in jail one time because I looked like a hippy. We were playing in Traverse City, what I think was the Cherry Festival, and we were getting ready to go on stage. At that time I wore a loin cloth, a belt knife, and moccasins, headband, and a fur vest—dressed up like an Indian. Because a lot of my songs were starting to reflect my hunting lifestyle and I started shooting a bow and arrow on stage back then, so I dressed like an Indian. Because I looked like the ultimate hippy, and there was a broken knife on my belt that was perfectly visible, this one hot-dog, corrupt cop, power-abusing, punk cop, arrested me for a concealed weapon, a felony. My stage outfit had the knife on a belt. If it was concealed, how could he see it? I was literally walking up the steps to get on stage, with my guitar on, and he stopped me on the steps and handcuffed me and put me in jail for two days, in a drunk tank with a bunch of migrant workers that I had to beat up to get toilet paper. I got my life savings—I think it was a couple grand—to bail out, and they finally dropped all the charges because the photos taken of me prove that nothing was concealed. All that, and the knife didn’t even have a blade.

  K. J. Knight: There was a point that I kinda thought that, you know, Ted’s career was starting to go down the toilet. I know that he blames the fact that he went through a lot of musicians, but he canned a lot of musicians too. It’s not as if they all quit on him. I think I might have been—me and Dave Palmer might have been the two guys, the only two guys that ever quit the Amboy Dukes. Everybody else he eventually fired. While I played with Ted, starting in about 1970, drugs never really even entered my mind. You know I did a lot of drugs, but there were times when my music was kinda like the main focus, and I kinda got away from that for a while, and I kinda got away from my criminal activities.

  Ted Nugent: When KJ joined that band, that started a great run. He and I shared an apartment on 6th Street in Ann Arbor. I think it was 609 6th Street.

  K. J. Knight: Ted handled everything on his own. He drove the limo he had bought, he drove it, he helped unload the truck. I had two stints with Ted. I started with the Survival of the Fittest album, and things were pretty good at that point. And I got to hear these stories. Ted told me about one when Rusty Day was in the band. The Amboy Dukes were on their way to a gig. Ted was driving, and Rusty was sitting in the back of the limo. During the drive Rusty whipped out a pipe and started smoking some hash. Rusty began passing the pipe around to the other guys in the band. When the pipe got to Ted, he turned and fired it at Rusty and hit him square in the head. I believe later, perhaps after the gig and back at the motel, Ted was ready to go up and kick Rusty’s ass. He went charging up a flight of stairs to get to Rusty’s room, but he tripped and fell down the stairway, hurt himself, and retreated to his room. I don’t know if Ted could have kicked Rusty’s ass, because Rusty was a badass too. Rusty and Ted really hated each other. Ted told me that one time Rusty called all of the guys in the band together to meditate and got them to sit in a tight circle and start chanting “Om.” However, Ted thought it was a big joke and began chanting, “Om Om on the Range.” Rusty was really pissed.

  You know what was really weir
d, it was like afterward when Rusty got in the Cactus. Sometimes we would play on the same bill with them, and then I would have to struggle whether I wanted to go into the Cactus dressing room and hang with those guys because I felt such a tight connection to Rusty or stay in the Amboy Dukes dressing room and stay loyal to Ted, and so, you know. I was friends with Rusty right to the end, when he was murdered in Florida. Certain things about Rusty Day are not known. People don’t realize because he shot his wife, Sharon, and paralyzed her, Rusty had to leave Detroit. Because he was dealing drugs and I guess he felt as though this shooting was going to bring a lot of heat on him. Those were his exact words to me: “I’m feeling the heat and I gotta get out of town.” I think that because of the fact that he was dealing drugs in such a large volume and the fact that this had taken place, that made him believe that he had to get out of Detroit.

  Johnny Badanjek (Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Detroit, the Rockets, drummer): We tried to put the Wheels together with Rusty Day for a while. Playing a bunch of the same kind of like ballrooms out in Iowa and that kind of stuff. Rusty was fine at the time. He wasn’t as nuts as he got later, you know. That all happened later with Cactus. He went down the wrong road.

  Ron Cooke: Rusty’s from Garden City, man. West side is tough guys. His was a horrible story. We went down and played the Orange Bowl or something in Miami or some fucking arrangement with the Cactus deal. Rusty got fucking arrested before we went on. He was probably telling some cop to fucking suck his dick. I don’t know.

  Ray Goodman (SRC, Detroit, Cub Koda, guitarist): Rusty was a good guy and I loved him, but he was very violent and very prone to addiction. He was as tough as they come. He wasn’t a guy you would fuck with ever. Not that he was that big and strong; he just had the kind of mentality where there was no hesitation. None whatsoever.