Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Bill White: I served. I felt it was my responsibility. And I probably didn’t have the balls to do all that was required to get out. I got my notice at the Amboy Duke house on Middlebelt.

  Ted Nugent: I would do interviews with Lester Bangs for Creem, and all these stoned, drooling, unprofessional, idiot antijournalists. He printed that I played “Johnny B. Goode” on my umbilical cord, and then they printed that I shit my pants to get out of the draft. I went down to my draft physical, and I got a deferment because I was enrolled in the Oakland Community College. I’ve never shit my pants since I was eleven. And that I did because I couldn’t get back from deer camp fast enough. I did not—I made that up too, by the way: I didn’t shit my pants when I was eleven—I haven’t shit my pants since I was one. I never shit my pants; I never pissed my pants; I never did anything to get out of the draft. And by the way, it’s important to note, had I shit my pants to get out of the draft, you think I would deny it? That would be a funny fucking story.

  Bill White: What’s he talking about? He never went to college. I got a lot of respect from the other soldiers because I was in a band. I was coming into Vietnam on a chopper, and we had just landed in camp. I was walking off and someone had a radio, and it was playing “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”

  “They Didn’t Call Them the Stooges for Nothing”

  Scott Richardson: I met James Williamson in a record store in Birmingham Michigan, called Marty’s Records. I had the same impression I have of him now. An intellectual delinquent. He had other problems. His stepfather, the Colonel. You’ve seen the movie American Beauty, right? That’s the Colonel. James was in the Chosen Few with me for a time. But James had to go to an institution. He was institutionalized. Not for delinquency, more like a perceived mental problem. He just didn’t want to do what he was told to do, that’s all.

  James Williamson (Iggy and the Stooges, guitarist): I started out in a juvenile home after the ninth grade, as I was truant and I wouldn’t cut my hair. The principal and I were at odds, so no hair cut, no school. Once out of there, I went to high school at a place called the Anderson School in Poughkeepsie, New York, which was a kind of clearing house for fuckups. From there I went to Bloomfield Hills High School outside Detroit for the better part of a year. I finally cut a deal with the principal that if I finished my high school course work at night school, he would give me a diploma.

  Gary Quackenbush: James Williamson used to take guitar lessons from me. He later said, “Yeah, you taught me how to play ‘Ticket to Ride’ in 1965.”

  James Williamson: He taught me to play “Help” by the Beatles. That’s all I really wanted to know.

  Scott Richardson: I had the Chosen Few, and I get a call from Jeep and Ron Richardson separately, each saying, “Look, we wanna manage you.” And they’re both located in Ann Arbor. They both said, “I can guarantee you this gig and this, that, and the other thing.” Now I have a decision to make. So I hitchhike to Ann Arbor to have a meeting with Jeep, who’s also the manager of Discount Records down there. I walk in the store, and there’s nobody there except this weird-looking guy stocking records on the shelf. I go, “Is Jeep here?” He goes, “No. Who are you?” I said, “I’m Scott Richardson.” He says, “Oh yeah. He wants you to hang around.” I go, “Who are you?” He says, “I’m Jim Osterberg.” And I shook his hand. So he goes, “I’m a drummer.” I go, “Oh cool. Which band?” “The Prime Movers.” So Jeep doesn’t show and Jeep doesn’t show. Iggy picks up the phone and calls Ron Asheton and says, “Hey man, you better get down here. There’s this really cool guy here.” So twenty minutes later in walks Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton, and Dave Alexander. The three homeboys. They were never without each other. Iggy introduced us. Jeep never showed up and Ron Richardson calls Discount Records and says, “Is Scott there?” and Iggy says, “Yeah,” and he says, “Well, tell him to come over to my place.” So me and Ron Asheton and Scotty and Dave Alexander—Iggy was going to come over later—we all left and walked across the plaza to University Towers. A week later Iggy and I became roommates. Then he decided he wanted to become a lead singer. I got in a whole bunch of trouble because Iggy was a really good drummer. He was a fine percussionist, okay? The guys in his band, the Erlewine brothers, had big plans for him. They sent him over to Chicago to study drumming with Sam Lay of the Butterfield Blues band. I got held up in an alley and had a knife put up against my throat in Ann Arbor and was told to stop inviting Iggy to my gigs because he was going to quit playing drums and he wanted to become a front man after hanging around with the Chosen Few. I said, “It’s not my fault.” They said, “Ever since he met you he doesn’t want to play anymore. He wants to dance around on stage.”

  Ron Asheton (Iggy and the Stooges, Chosen Few, guitarist, bassist): I ended up playing in the Chosen Few with Scott Richardson, and that was our high school band. Those guys were in Birmingham, Michigan, and I was in Ann Arbor, and they’d come here and we’d do all the TGIF parties, frat parties on Friday night, then on Saturday we’d either do a frat or go do a teen set at a club. The Chosen Few played the very first night of the Grande Ballroom opening for the MC5. That was Scott Richardson on vocals, Richard Simpson on guitar, Al Clark on guitar, Stan Sulewski on drums, and I was playing the bass. We did that Stones EP where they ran together “Everybody Needs Somebody,” “Pain in My Heart,” and “Route 66.” That was a nice little EP that came out in England, and they had Bill Wyman playing that do-do-do doot-do doot-doot doot doot; they had the bass starting out “Everybody Needs Somebody” rather than guitar, so I am proud to say that I played the first notes at the Grande Ballroom.

  Iggy Pop: Finally we had the Stooges and needed a manager. At one point it was going to be Russ Gibb. There were two people that needed to help us for us to get on stage where the right audience could see us. One was Russ Gibb and the other was John Sinclair. I remember going out of my way to communicate with each of those guys personally. I went to Russ’s home one day, sorta being kind of summoned, “Well we’re kinda interested in you guys.” I think we already played once at the Grande. “Why don’t you come over and talk about where it’s going?”

  Jimmy Recca (Iggy and the Stooges, New Order, bassist): Russ Gibb had every intention of becoming the band’s manager. Russ was wanting to take the band to England and play.

  Russ Gibb: At that time John Sinclair was hyping that band too. He was hyping Iggy because that was an Ann Arbor thing that he had going with the White Panthers, or whatever he had going along with the MC5.

  John Sinclair: The Stooges had no social aspect or facet whatsoever. Iggy was a genius, and the other guys were his stooges. They weren’t called the Stooges for nothing. Literally, he gave each one of them a part.

  Iggy Pop: Russ certainly put us on with fucking everybody, all the time. We basically opened for half of the great young bands and musicians in the world at his place, and I am forever in his debt because of that. We’d be second or third on the bill with these terrific people. It would be Van Morrison or Love or the Who.

  Russ Gibb: Iggy’s father taught with me at Fordson High School. I had subbed there when I first came back to teach, and that’s where his dad taught. When I first hired him, Iggy’s daytime job was working as a counselor at the YMCA summer camp around Ann Arbor.

  Iggy Pop: I was a junior counselor. I went to a day camp in Michigan called Varsity Day Camp, which was run by a fellow who was a basketball star at the U of M, Irv Wisniewski, called Wrong Way Wisniewski because he scored a basket against his own team. And when I got a little older they gave me a job. I think I started at a buck a day when I was fourteen, teaching little kids how to swim and catching frogs. Russ sort of kept an interest in us. When I got married, I had a marriage ceremony on the lawn of our house in Ann Arbor. Russ called in from the radio station where he was hosting a show, and the gag was—everyone thought it was a Kardashian thing—you know who would marry Iggy Pop? That was a contradiction in terms, so he had a certain outlook on us.

  Pa
tti Quatro: Iggy was like a frat kid, and he was wild. But he was still a frat kid.

  Jimmy Recca: Guys would bring their girlfriends to shows, and the girls would sit and be enamored with Iggy. And he was just like this fucking guy that—this skinny guy. These guys working at Ford Motor Company, they want to do something nice for their girlfriends on their birthdays or their anniversary, and what do they want to do: “Let’s go see the Stooges.” The Grande was festival seating. Everybody’s crowded up and they’re all sitting, and the girls, and Iggy out there working the crowd. And it’s like he’s got his shirt off, you know, and these guys just stand by, and it would be the biggest thrill to see the Stooges, and they would put the lights right down there on the fucking crowd, man. I’d move in closer to see the whole fucking psychodrama unfold. The girls just want to touch Iggy’s chest, and Iggy’s, like, looking right at her, and all of a sudden he just hacked out and spit right in this girl’s fucking mouth, and next thing you know the guy is looking like, “Whhhatttt? What’d you just do to my fucking girlfriend?” He’d just be set to throw a swing, and the next thing you know these cats would come out of nowhere. I mean these fucking guys, these storm troopers fucking commando. And Iggy was saved.

  DJ Dianna (Club DJ): I was just a little girl and I loved the Stooges. They played them on WABX, and I was really into what was going on. But I was fourteen or so. But my mom finally let me go to a Stooges show at the Eastown; my friend’s parent took us and dropped us off. It was really cold out—this was 1971. We’re sitting, and finally the Stooges come out, Ron comes out, then Scott, and they start the intro, and Iggy comes dancing out and he has no shirt, the jeans—the whole thing—and looks like a complete madman. I was twenty-five feet from the stage, and I think, I have to get closer. The Eastown had a low stage, and you could walk up, and I was tall for my age, five-seven, and the edge hit me in the middle of the chest. So I’m up there watching, and I am literally on the stage, hands resting on the stage, and Iggy comes dancing over to me, and he has this big smile, and he’s wriggling away, and he reaches down and runs his hand over my cheek, and I’m frozen. I can’t move; I’m like “Oooooo.” I had very long hair, wavy, down past the middle of my back, and he runs his hand into the back of my hair, and—wham!—he smashed my head into the stage. My cheekbone hit the stage, and he laughed and danced away.

  Dennis Dunaway: The shows with the Stooges at the Eastown Theater always had a lot of violence. Iggy would jump off stage and pick a fight with somebody, and if he picked a fight with you, then you were the hero for the next week or two.

  Stirling Silver: The Stooges opened for everybody, and no one gave a shit.

  Niagara (Destroy All Monsters, Dark Carnival, vocalist, artist): Iggy always says, “Everyone says, ‘I was there and I loved you.’” He says we’d have shows where no one was there all the time.

  John Kordosh (Mutants, bassist, journalist, Creem magazine): At one point I was seeing the Stooges, like, every weekend.

  Cathy Gisi (journalist, Creem magazine): There were people who didn’t bathe for days afterward because there was sweat on them from Iggy.

  Russ Gibb: Iggy did invent the stage dive. The Grande was the only venue in the world where the audience could go right up to the stage. On each side were the dressing rooms, and the girls were crawling all over the place to get with the musicians. And Iggy would do that thing where he would bend over almost all the way backwards. And he fell over backwards, and people thought it was an accident. I don’t think so. He would be in the crowd, and next think you knew, he was floating on the audience. All these things were transpiring while I was trying to figure out if I made any money.

  Mitch Ryder: We learned how to jump into the audience. Iggy started it and got caught. That was good. That was a new one. Of course, nobody would catch you in those days. We would leap into the audience and they would make way for you and you would hit the floor. I didn’t get that memo. And I didn’t get another one. I was talking to James Brown one day way back and I said, “James, you know when you do your knee drop? I do the knee drop in my show too. Man, when I hit those wooden floors, my knees, I feel like they’re gonna break.” He just looked at me for a second, and he said, “Huh, you don’t wear knee pads?” I said, “knee pads?”

  Leni Sinclair: The Stooges had a house out in the country at one point, and I went over there one time. The Stooges were in their garage, and the garage was sound proofed with egg cartons. They were sitting there in the dark listening to Dr. John doing “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.”

  Billy Goodson: They lived in this white house that had this light bulb glowin’ over the back door. All dirt all over the place and cars and stuff. You couldn’t find a neighbor or nothin’. You had to drive there. But it was a very, very bizarre place. Really cold.

  Steve Forgey: I had a friend who was going to trade a Marshall bass amp to Dave Alexander, so he gets in his car and drives over to the Funhouse in Ann Arbor. Everyone is stoned to the bone, sitting around looking at the walls. This is in the middle of the day. So he says he’s got the amp, where is Dave? Pretty soon Alexander comes stumbling down the stairs, one step at a time, dragging his bass behind him, thump thump, thump. And he says, and I quote my friend, “Mph duh ga dewgathao.”

  Iggy Pop: I used to hang out with Glenn Frey at the Birmingham Hideout a lot. At one point after the Stooges had formed, we used to break up every few years. He was trying to start a band with Bob Seger, you know, he said, “I’m sick of working for Bob Seger. Come on, we could start a great band,” you know.

  Rick Kraniak: The Stooges didn’t like me. The band owed Diversified Management money, we were booking them, and I was a junior partner. Dave Leone was booking them. I had to go to the Stooges farm, trail them to the job, and make sure they got there so we could get some of the money they owed us. So I don’t think the band—I don’t think Iggy—saw me as one of them.

  Iggy Pop: We had no idea about a career at all. What was very important was how we wanted to look and how we wanted to sound and what we wanted to do. Although we didn’t use the term then, today it would be “as artists.” That term would have been a little bit too pretentious for us to use then, but that was where we were coming from. I always believed that if you do that superbly, the career would take care of itself.

  Hiawatha Bailey: The Stooges were gods in both Ann Arbor and Detroit. Ron saw me on the Diag at U of M one day when I first came to town, and he said, “You know what, you’re the most suspicious black person I ever saw in my life. Hi.” Then I saw Scott, and I couldn’t believe it was the drummer in the Stooges and I was like, [sound effects] … Scott goes, “Hey, I know you … you know where to get some good drugs? Go get me some drugs.” No, I didn’t. I made sure he got them, but I didn’t give them to him. I was working for the White Panther party at the time.

  Iggy Pop: Between the first album and Fun House, I’d say we had the sound, but what I’d say changed was the drummer. We wanted the more aggressive approach, and the sonics of the band had been sort of a thick-layered guitar sound, guitar-based sonic approach on the first album. I was really, really influenced by what James Brown was doing at the time and also people like Coltrane and Miles Davis to a lesser extent. But especially James Brown. He was in the period of “Can’t Stand It,” “Funky Drummer,” that sort of thing. Ron had a riff for something that became “T.V. Eye,” and the original way he was playing it sounded a lot like “No Fun,” and I thought we needed to push a little farther, so I said, “Will you start out, play that single note like you were Hooker?”—John Lee Hooker, who was pretty much a Detroit musician. From a lot of other things on that whole record we used a contrast between parts of each song where the guitar is very spare and you can hear holes. Really, you can hear every, every note the rhythm section is playing, and you can hear big holes in the music and then each song, when it’s time, blows to a climax. There’s more dynamics, but it’s less like usual rock, then we added the saxophone. I was taking a lot of LSD at the time,
and that may have had something to do with it too.

  Steve Mackay: When we did “LA Blues” in the studio in Los Angeles, it was originally a hippie vibe. But the producer said, “Let’s make a completely different song out of this.” So when we did that, that was when I took some acid. Iggy scared the shit out of me. I was tripping, and just the whole thing was like, “Whoaaaaa, this guy is being really scary now. I better play really scary.” That’s exactly how it came out. As the years have gone by, people have said to Jim, “Well, Steve Mackay says he was high on acid for that session,” and he says “Oh well, that’s great, Steve. I was on acid every single day.”

  Iggy Pop: All I’d ever had before Fun House was recorded was marijuana and LSD. I would call it occasional LSD, but that’s a relative term. To me occasional meant about twice a week. Marijuana for me was like when I became conscious in the morning then right through the day, right into the evening. Any time I woke up in the middle of the night either I was … I was smoking it or trying to get it. Acid about twice a week was probably my average. We recorded the album in that way, but towards the end—towards the end of the vocal overdubs and the mixes—two people turned me on to cocaine for the first time, and I was one of those people that takes it and goes, “That’s great!” There were some points in some of the songs, the outtro and the verses to “T.V. Eye,” the outtro and maybe the second part of “Loose”—those were done with some coke up my nose. But the rest of them was strictly LSD and marijuana.

  Jimmy Recca: They played the Goose Lake pop festival that summer, 1970. It was, like, a miserable fucking time. It was like 115 degrees all day long, and the Stooges go on at, like, five o’clock in the afternoon and it’s fucking like a hundred percent humidity and, you know, it storms on and off all day long. Nothing’s in tune, and Traffic was ready to pull out themselves. That’s the gig that Dave Alexander quit. They said he was fired. Iggy fired him, but he forgets. Dave just said, “Fuck it.” He was resigned to the fact that they were going to cancel the show and that no one was going to go on, so he just started drinking and took some acid. So he got up on stage, and they put him up there and Iggy may have made a point to embellish on it, and Dave gave him the finger and that was history. After that Iggy, having the power to fire people, did so.