Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Dennis Thompson: Don’t forget, Iggy was a valedictorian in high school. Smart. Fucking. Guy. The reason he’s rich today is because he’s a very smart man and got himself some very smart business people all the way down the line. He had his rough times. Michael Davis and I saved his life after he shot some heroin up in Michael’s house and we threw him in the bathtub with the ice cubes and shot him up with salt water.

  He met his maker a few more times than that.

  Iggy Pop: I don’t want to put a number on it, but a few times, yeah.

  Riots in the Motor City

  Ted Nugent: When the riots of 1967 hit Detroit, I was behind the counter of the Capital School of Music, on Grand River, with a shotgun. It was a heartbreaker ’cause I saw my beloved birth city of Detroit goin’ up in flames at the hands of idiots.

  K. J. Knight: I went down to Grand River, where it was happening. They had the area blocked off, and we wanted to see the action. And it would be a chance for me to steal something. I was into snatch and grabs. But they blocked off the downtown area. You couldn’t get all the way down there. I tried. That kind of shit was right up my alley.

  Leni Sinclair: We had flown a flag about a week before the riots—around the middle of July—that had a black panther on it and the slogan “Burn Baby Burn.” It was hanging on our building at Trans-Love Energies on the John Lodge. We had no idea really what it meant. When the riots started and everything started burning, the cops came and knocked on the door. They thought we were conspirators or something, and we told them it was just a design. Then we sat on the roof of our apartment, watching the riots on TV.

  John Sinclair: It was just exhilarating. I thought, this was the greatest. We were at our Trans-Love Energies building at John Lodge and Warren. Right in the eye of the storm. We helped people loot stores. We got some bolts of cloth that the MC5 made into clothes and wore ’em for months. I like to point out different ones that we got from a store on Trumbull. If I saw ’em, I could point it out to you.

  Robin Sommers: I lived at East Grand Boulevard and John R in a commune called Broken Claw. The riots started on July 23, which was my birthday, and I lived in the front room, and there was a wooden porch along the front of the house, and they had filled the room with balloons, and by the end of the evening they had started to pop in the heat. And there were fire trucks with soldiers going by, and we had to pop all of them in a hurry to make sure they didn’t alarm the soldiers and get us shot.

  Barry Kramer came by in his Firebird, and about five of us got in the car and drove over to the burning part of town. We drove down 20th or 18th or something, and this crowd of black guys started throwing bottles at us.

  Wayne Kramer: I was arrested and they were going to throw me in jail. It was the last day of the burning, and I had a telescope in my house; I liked to check things out. But there I was that day, looking around through the telescope, and the next thing I know, the National Guard are at my door. They thought I was working for snipers. The only snipers I saw were the National Guard troops on the rooftops, but they took me in, beat me up a little, and then realized that they had no room in the jail for me. So they let me go.

  Dennis Thompson: I was at my parent’s house. It looked pretty scary on TV, what with the tanks and whatnot, and I was in touch with Wayne, and he said, “There’s a tank parked in the corner of our house of the Artist’s Workshop”—where they lived and we practiced. We lived above the Artist’s Workshop in an old dentist’s office. The whole band was there, and they said, “Yeah, there’s a tank right across the corner from us, and there’s guys floatin’ around here with guns, and if you want to come down here, it’s cool. If you don’t, that’s cool too.” I chose to stay away from it because, you know, with my hair and everything, I was obviously a prime target. Anybody that had long hair and colorful clothes was lumped in with the black people automatically. There was National Guard around—not on every street—but their presence was strongly felt. There really wasn’t that much damage, and what there was was limited to a few areas, with the looting and the broken glass. That riot didn’t last that long.

  Dan Carlisle: I was downtown and parked my car and the police pulled up. The riots must have been just starting up. Police were different then than they are today. They harassed me and ran my plate, and I had some outstanding parking tickets. So they took me to this jail over by Cass, and once I was in, they started filling the cell with angry black men. There I am. And the cop came and said, “You, come out.” Out I came, and he said, “You better sit out there because it’s getting bad out there.” Hal Youngblood was producer of JP McCarthy, and I called him to come down and bail me out. That was no place to be.

  Russ Gibb: The rioters came right down Grand River and never fucked with the Grande Ballroom because we were all cool with the neighborhood people. I think the neighborhood was a little scared of us. We had our regular schedule that week, even as the neighborhood burned.

  Rick Stevers: The Grande didn’t get hurt at all. They canceled Tom Rush, but we came by after it was over and saw Russ. We’re out looking around, and we were all shocked the place didn’t get hurt. Russ said to this young black kid, “Why didn’t this get touched?” and the kid told him, “Because you got music in there.”

  Shaun Murphy: The night before it all happened we went and saw Tim Buckley at the Grande with the Up. No one had any idea what was coming.

  Gary Rasmussen: From our house you could almost see the Lodge Expressway, and you could see the tanks and the National Guard going down there.

  Robin Sommers: The Boulevard had become the main street to run the fire trucks down, and by 2 a.m. it was a parade, and by 3:30 there was National Guard on the trucks with their weapons out. I had this big front window in my room, so we put two layers of blankets over the windows in hopes of stopping a stray bullet if that happened. There was this telephone building five blocks north, and I watched tracer bullets bouncing off all the way to the top. This lady got shot and killed in a motel after she opened a window and stuck her head out. The National Guard opened up on her. I was working at Mixed Media, a head shop where we sold records, books, candles, papers, pipes. The Wayne State Police opened up with a couple of rounds of shotgun into our front windows at Mixed Media. So we boarded it up and wrote, “soul brother” over it. There was a drug store that was burned down near my house, and there was a safe they had found. They broke it open, the safe, and there was $200 to $300 worth of change in there. Everyone was happy.

  VC Lamont Veasey: The Soul Agents had had a show in Lima, Ohio, and afterward we got a bus back to Detroit, and then a cab back to my house on Wisconsin near 6 Mile. At the foot of my street was a tank, with the turret pointed down my street. I walked in, and we watched it all on TV. It was wild to see this all happening, and it’s right down the street. We went out during the day, but at night it was martial law. Our neighbors were coming home with new TVs and appliances, but we sure didn’t. My mom set that straight right away.

  Greg Errico (Sly and the Family Stone, drummer): We were on the road, taking turns driving, and it was the middle of the night and we needed gas. We happened to be passing through Detroit on the highway, and so we innocently pulled off, you know, and we happened to be downtown at two or three in the morning, and it looked like a ghost town—we were in a warehouse area. All of a sudden, we’re surrounded by Army jeeps, which pulled us over, and within moments we were up against a brick building with our hands up and our legs spread. These were guys with machine guns. They saw us—black, white, male, female, dressed funny. We said, you know, “What is this?” and they said the city was under martial law and there was a curfew. They couldn’t figure out what we were up to. Sly responded with a knee-jerk reaction—you know, at first you gotta react—and that didn’t go down well. But when they realized who we were and that we weren’t aware of the situation and we eventually walked. We got out of there.

  Peter Rivera (Rare Earth, drummer): Gil Bridges, our saxophonist, had a pilot’s license,
so we went up and flew over the city. We saw the smoke pouring out of the burning buildings, where they were burning down. And I was thinking to myself, “You know, a high-powered rifle could reach this high easily. Maybe this isn’t a good idea.” … Yeah, we did that once, saw the riots from up above.

  Jimmy Recca: I lived on the west side at a drug house. We hunkered down and watched the armored personnel carrier go between Greenfield and 7 Mile. I had friends who worked at the Chrysler plant near there, including this guy T Bone. He was a drug dealer, and he had a house in Redford Township. He was a gypsy biker, and during the height of it all they were torching an area by Livernois, and we were watching it on this little TV. They showed all these people looting, and T Bone said, “Look at that, I don’t want them to get all the shit,” and next thing we hear him firing up his chopper and off he goes—it’s curfew, after dark, and you could see the half tracks going down 7 Mile, but you hear that bike sound out all the way down Livernois and 7 Mile. He comes back the same way, and we hear the guys on bullhorns shouting at him, “Pull over.” Then we hear the bike coming around the corner. He’s got his lights off and he’s got forty to fifty really nice suits—Gaslight-era suits, these old, cool, pimp-styled things—thrown over the gas tank, which is completely covered, and you can hardly see him.

  Johnny Badanjek: We lived in the same area, some of us. I was on Hall Street, and we all piled into a car and went down to see the bullet holes in the Howard Johnson. That was down by the GM and Fisher Building.

  Robin Seymour: We were doing a show, Swinging Time, at the Fox Theater with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and it was packed when things started. This was about 1:30 in the afternoon. The theater owners came in and told us we’d have to stop. Martha got up and explained to the kids, told them be quiet, to relax, that there was a problem and not to go running around.

  Then we walked onto Woodward Avenue and looked up in the air, and you could see the smoke from the fires; it was like a war zone. Art [Cervi, coproducer] and I came back the next day and realized that the city was shut down. So we got on and described what was going on to our viewers, and since we couldn’t have any guests, we played videotapes. That day going home to where I was living in Dearborn, I drove down the highway, and it was empty. All I could see all around was smoke.

  John Sinclair: At one point I was really inspired by watching the news, until we were watching it on television, and at one point they said, “The Tenth Precinct, over on Livernois, was pinned down by sniper fire.” And I just thought, “Yes. Yes. This is it. We’re gonna win now.” And I went next door to the Artist’s Workshop, downstairs, where our mimeograph machine was, and I made up a stencil. It said, “Bastille Day. Tear down the Wayne County jail, let the prisoners out.” I made this into a mimeographed flyer, and I made a stencil, and then I put it on the machine, and I said, “Wait a minute. If we don’t win, this is going to be seen as an act of sedition. I’m going to get into a lot of trouble.” And I just put it off—one of the smarter things I ever did. I would have been in prison even earlier than I was. Very few legs to stand on as far as a defense of your position. We were on the side of the black people, man. We were in business, one hundred percent. The only white people we had any use for were hippies.

  Iggy Pop: During that time I was getting it together with the Stooges, and there was a nice atmosphere around downtown Detroit. If you didn’t have any money and you wanted to do something, it wasn’t difficult to get control of a structure. Yeah, it was pretty much emptied out.

  Ted Nugent: It just broke my heart. But I was there; I watched it burn. That was our Detroit, our city.

  Here’s New Pretties for You

  John Sinclair: We played a gig with Alice Cooper in Philadelphia—MC5, Alice Cooper—spring of ’69. We’d both come a long way to play this night in Philadelphia, and there was nobody there. But we were wild about them; we just thought they were the fuckin’ greatest. They loved the Five. We said, “Man, you guys ought to come to Detroit, man. They’ll love this shit in Detroit, man.” And they came.

  Alice Cooper (Alice Cooper, solo, vocalist): It was a hard-drug city, but it was the best rock-and-roll city ever. We probably had the best years there. We were used to staying in little tiny places and we were always traveling.

  Ray Goodman: They crashed on our band house floor for a week until they found a place. There were literally sleeping bags in the living room. Shep Gordon got a hold of Pete Andrews somehow, but it was also pretty common for WABX to put out calls on the radio: there’s a band moving to town and they need a place to crash.

  Alice Cooper: We never lived anywhere, let alone a house, so this house we got on Brown Road north of Detroit was quite a treat. At that time—1970, 1971—you’d play the Eastown. It would be Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, the Stooges, and the Who, for $4. The next weekend at the Grande it was MC5, Brownsville Station, and Fleetwood Mac, or Savoy Brown or the Small Faces. You couldn’t be a soft-rock band or you’d get your ass kicked. We knew how good the Stooges and MC5 were, and if we had all just stayed in Detroit, that would have been fine with everybody, I think. When we started breaking nationally, you almost hated to leave Detroit. I loved that house. I think we had ten acres.

  Dennis Dunaway: Before we got our house in Detroit, we were staying at this dive motel on Gratiot Avenue, and all I remember is there was this Big Boy across the street and I was always wishing I could afford to eat something there. But instead of us hearing about Detroit and migrating there, it was more like we were going anywhere we could get a gig, and the Detroit area and the Midwest liked us a lot better than the rest of the country did.

  Bob Ezrin (producer, Alice Cooper, Detroit): I had to go to meet the band there when we started getting ready to do Love It to Death. First of all, I drove past it about four times because it was boarded up from the outside. It looked like a derelict farmhouse that no one had been in for fifty years. After traveling this road four or five times and realizing there was no other house, I finally pulled around the back, and then I saw that there were vehicles and there was a three-legged dog and the screen door was open to the house, so I let myself in.

  The practice hall was a big barn on the property—this was a big farm. It could have been hundreds of acres for all I know. In the practice barn they had some of their props; they had a whole stage backline set up and there was also a shooting gallery where they used to put up bottles and cans and shoot them with BB guns to let off steam. No one was awake when I first walked into the house, and I came in through the kitchen, which looked like a science experiment. There were filthy dishes that had been piled there forever. There were dishes of casserole that had been there for so long that things were growing in it. I wandered through the kitchen into the next room, which was totally dark, through a beaded curtain into the room, and I reached around to try to find a light switch, and instead I had my hand on a ceramic cock and balls which had a cigarette sticking out of it—it was stuck to the wall. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that and kind of leapt back, and then there was clothes rack with falsies on the other wall—you know I backed into that. I realized there was a bed in the middle of the room, and on that bed were two creatures of indeterminate sex, both wearing Dr. Denton’s, with the button back. The only way I could tell that one was a guy was because one of them had mutton chops. Everything else was identical. They both had long blonde hair, they both had nail polish, they both had Dr. Denton’s on, lots of jewelry, and they were dead to the world—they did not notice me.

  Neal Smith: That was Glen’s room, which was the living room. It was Glen and his girlfriend. Alice and I had the two bedrooms upstairs, and Glen and Mike and Dennis were downstairs.

  Bob Ezrin: So then I tried to leave the room by the other door. There was another beaded curtain, which I thought might lead out to civilization. As I parted the curtain, standing in the doorway was a six-and-a-half-foot frog. There was a guy with a frog’s head on, which later I learned was Dennis Dunaway, but he was just standing the
re with a frog’s head on and I parted the curtain and bumped into him, and he looked at me and said, “Ribbit” and then turned and walked away.

  Dennis Dunaway: I didn’t know Bob Ezrin was coming over. It was kind of dark in the living room. He comes in, you know, and I said, “Ribbit” and he’s like, “Oh hello, Mr. Frog,” and you can tell he was really nervous. Because he just didn’t know what to do. He was already apprehensive. He was just a kid. We called him the Boy Wonder because he really was just a boy.

  Bob Ezrin: Then I heard this kind of—what would be a good word to describe it?—chattering sound beside me to the left of me, and I turned around and there was a green monkey looking at me and masturbating.

  Alice Cooper: We had a bunch of pets. We had a raccoon that was the most horrible thing ever, and it would wad up its crap and fling it at people. It was a horrible little animal. And the monkey, if a girl walked in, the monkey would immediately start masturbating. It was so embarrassing. My mom or my sister would come in, and the monkey would start.

  Bob Ezrin: As I backed away from that I bumped into my first real human being, who was Mike Roswell, the road manager with the band. He was sleepy eyed, had just come out of his bedroom, which was just off of this main room that I was in, and he said, “Oh yeah, the guys are just getting up. We played last night. Yeah, sorry, you know. Sit down here and we’ll all be there in a minute.” Finally everybody finally assembled; we went back into the room with the thing with falsies that turned out to have been the living room. So then we all sat in there and had a meeting, and we started playing material off of cassettes. We picked “I’m Eighteen” as the first thing; I think actually it might have been “Is It My Body?” was the first thing that we worked on, then “I’m Eighteen.”