by Steve Miller
Don Was: Rolling Stone, because they couldn’t get in to Goose Lake because they wouldn’t give comp passes to them, they went to Newport Jazz Festival. You can go back in the archives and you can see the extensive wonderful coverage of the Newport Jazz Festival, but nothing about Goose Lake.
Tom Wright: Rolling Stone magazine had a lot of people there, like a gaggle of people who claimed they were from Rolling Stone. We didn’t care if they were from Time magazine; they showed up at the last minute and were ready to camp out and be underfoot of all things going on backstage. That wasn’t going to happen.
Russ Gibb: The cops came in and jammed up traffic. After the first day the newspapers were calling it a drug festival. And guess who started to act like they didn’t know anything about it? Yeah, the state police and the governor. I said, “Wait a minute!” And I called our liaison to the governor and I go, “What the fuck is going on!?” The cops had planned this, to bust people, all along.
Dick Wagner: I met Steve Hunter for the first time at Goose Lake. He was playing with Mitch Ryder.
Ray Goodman: He may have met Steve there, but I played with Mitch Ryder and Detroit that day. Great show, and we left early for some reason, just as James Gang were going on, which pissed me off.
Dick Wagner: Steve and I met later on in Florida, when I was in Ursa Major and he was on the bill playing with a later version of the Chambers Brothers. So we had both of us there with that heavy Detroit guitar attitude, and we jammed for two hours together. It was incredible. Through Ursa, I worked with Bob Ezrin.
Bob Ezrin: Lou Reed knew who Steve was because of Detroit’s cover of “Rock ’n’ Roll.” When I did that album, we got both Dick and Steve in there, and I kept using them.
Dick Wagner: We did the Rock ’n’ Roll Animal tour with Lou Reed. He was sullen and unhappy, but he liked the way I played. I think he thought I was a quaint Midwesterner and wasn’t hip, but it didn’t matter to me. He was a mess at the time, but he wasn’t difficult to work with at all.
He eventually got jealous of the attention Steve and I were getting. We played Detroit, and people were shouting out our names more than they were his. Detroit supports its own, you know.
“We Weren’t Musicians, We Were Like an Outlaw Bike Club”
Mitch Ryder: To start the band Detroit, I think somebody just fucking opened the prison doors. It was scarier than true. It kinda put a lot of people, you know, on edge because that was the peace and love generation. It’s who we were trying to target. You can tell the energy was there on the music, but that group frightened people. And we had so many different people in and out of that band.
Ray Goodman: I joined up what became Detroit in early 1970. Johnny Badanjek had brought me back into it, and he was good to be with. They were supposed to be the Detroit Wheels, but pretty soon Barry Kramer, who was managing, started calling it Detroit with Mitch Ryder. There were major issues, most of which revolved around money. There was quite a bit being generated and very little going towards Mitch. I don’t know if he was suing Bob Crewe or not. I know that Mitch was having trouble paying bills, therefore he couldn’t keep the band together and stay on the road. It ended very badly, with Barry Kramer actually keeping my equipment because of advances I’d gotten. They were making money hand over fist. It was criminal. I think I was getting $25 a show. Maybe it was $50. You know, at the time, the music was more important than the business end. You kinda took what you could get.
Johnny Badanjek: Mitch was in bad shape, really bad shape by that time. He had that big band, and guys were booking rooms and skipping out of the rooms and they left him with a huge amount of debt. He owed the musicians union $3,000 for not paying dues. So Barry Kramer had to straighten his whole life out. Barry went to the tax people and said, “Listen, he’s not going to pay. You’re going to get this much and be happy.” And they said yes. To the musicians union, Barry said, “I’m going to pay you this much.” He settled a lot of accounts and got Mitch out of the doldrums.
Robert Matheu: Barry was a badass at times. I heard stories from Ric Siegel about him jumping on record companies’ presidents desks in New York with his cowboy boots to get Mitch Ryder out of those contracts.
Ray Goodman: We practiced at the Creem house on Cass. Third floor, open space. Then we began touring all over the place in a 1967 Cadillac limo.
Johnny Badanjek: After our first gig, Barry said, “I’m going to rename this band Detroit and we’ll say featuring Mitch Ryder.” We didn’t really want to go back to the Mitch Ryder, Detroit Wheels whole thing.
Ray Goodman: We drove out to the Northwest and toured Oregon, Washington State, Vancouver. We followed the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour all the way from Milwaukee; they played the night before us everywhere it seemed. It was a Holiday Inn Tour.
Mitch Ryder: You know how you have these balconies on the outside of the Holiday Inns and other hotels, like three feet in between them, where you could drop fourteen, forty floors to the ground? Well, yeah, but this one in Vancouver had no wall in between. It was just balconies outside. So there was this underage girl—I think she was fourteen—and she was in one room, and her father tracked her down and came with the cops, the Vancouver police. And so they knew the girl was in that room. So while they’re banging on the door, trying to get in, she takes this leap from one balcony, over three feet of clear air, onto the next balcony, to be in the next guy’s room so he could get her out of there and he wouldn’t get caught with her.
Ray Goodman: Times were so innocent they put it on the marquee, “Welcome Mitch Ryder.” They didn’t realize the craziness that could attract.
Mitch Ryder: One night I was hungry, and one of the guys goes down and fucking breaks into the kitchen of the Holiday Inn and cooks me breakfast at 3:00 in the morning. There was so much shit on these tours with the Detroit band. We were playing this park somewhere; they were trying to make it available to homeless people. We played a concert to support the effort. A three-year-old kid comes up to me and says, “My dad said to give you this.” It was a little tab of acid. So I dropped that, and his dad introduced himself to me as a guru. Okay. And I ended up in the woods for three days with this guy and his wife. I think I was in the woods, and I think it was three days. I came back down finally and I’m in the hotel, and they’re still with me and they crash on the bed. I’m sleeping on the floor, and one of my band members comes in, one of the more aggressive ones, and he says, “Willie,”—he used to call me Willie—“what the fuck are you doing down there? What’s this fucking mother fucker doing on your bed?” And I said, “That’s the guru.” He says, “Your guru?” and he pulls out his hunting knife, and the guy’s naked on the top of my bed. He puts his hunting knife and stabs it into the fucking mattress, right below the guy’s balls, and rips a fucking line down the mattress. He picks up the knife again and holds it up and says, “Get the fuck out of here.” And so these two naked, fucking, hippie guru, spiritual people flee the room. He looked at me and said, “Get on your bed. You’re embarrassing me.”
Ray Goodman: We got back after that tour and played Goose Lake, and I quit. I was so burned out. Some others left as well. It had been a really rough time.
Ron Cooke: At one point just before I joined Mitch, me and Dallas Hodge were playing in a three-piece band, getting gigs around town. We were staying at the Hotel Le Buick up on 8-Mile Road. It was a ’48 Buick behind Lefty’s bar. That’s how broke we were. We’d go to a gig, and these cats would go, “Where you guys staying?” We’d go, “Oh, we’re at the Hotel Le Buick.” Then after that the Catfish band started, and I got a call from Barry Kramer. He asked me if I wanted a gig. I said, “I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.” So Ryder got on the phone: “What the hell you mean you don’t want to play in my band?” I said, “Maybe I don’t want to.” I took the gig.
Johnny Badanjek: We got Steve Hunter in, and we got rid of some of the bad elements. Ray was cool. But there were some bad elements we had problems with. Some of them were doing bad drugs and
stuff, and people were coming after them.
Mitch Ryder: We found Steve Hunter, actually down living on the farm with his fucking family in Decatur, Illinois. Somebody had told us about him, and basically he was just doing gigs playing to corn. We said, “Hey, we can up that. We can have you play to popcorn!” So he said, “Wow, I’m really excited.”
Dave Marsh: Everybody had been on the telephone when they found Hunter in Illinois. They were like, “We found the next Hendrix, the next Duane Allman.” They were calling from there, saying, “Wait till you hear this guy we found. We’re bringing him home.”
Mitch Ryder: He was so innocent. If you wanted to terrify yourself, you had to try to put yourself in the frame of mind of a country boy, witnessing what he witnessed, for the first time. I’m surprised his hair didn’t turn gray immediately. It was just a culture shock for him. But, you know, what he did, which I really admire about him, he had done so much wood shedding that, in times of trial and stress, he would go to his guitar for safety, security, and comfort.
Bob Ezrin: The Mitch Ryder band played in Decatur, Illinois, and Steve Hunter was part of the opening act. They invited him up on stage to jam, fell in love with him, and as those guys would do, they would just collect people along the way, throw them into the hearse along with the rest of the band. So they threw him into the hearse with the rest of the band, and he just kept going until they got back to Detroit. One day I showed up for rehearsal and there was a new guy. He looked a little like a drowned rat—was just standing in the corner with stringy hair and coke-bottle glasses and a nice-looking little SG and a small Crate amp, quietly playing away, but doing some really quite remarkable stuff. But it was so quiet and polite. He was just trying not to get in anybody’s way; he didn’t want to be too loud. He was very, very shy—painfully shy. So we took a break on the first day. I took every amplifier in the room and strapped them all together, and I plugged it into that and told him to play Hendrix. It was louder than most of the music we had been hearing for the morning rehearsal. It was so loud—oh my God, it was so loud. So he strapped into this thing and started playing. He felt like God. He felt like Thor—you know, the God of Thunder—and just started to wail, showing off. Everybody in the building, from all three floors, came running upstairs to the rehearsal area to see who this was, and he was just amazingly good. I think that was a pivotal moment for him. Something exploded in his brain; then he went from being apologetic to believing that he could be a rock star. That really brought him out of his shell and into the place he belonged, which was on a stage, showing off, playing amazing guitar.
Mitch Ryder: He practiced and practiced and practiced, and avoided the gun fights, avoided the fist fights, avoided everything that the band was involved in—the drugs and everything else—and just play and play and play and play. He made it through.
Ron Cooke: Steve wasn’t a party animal. The rest of us were just wild dogs. You had to be tough to be in that band. That band was a rolling circus, man.
Dave Marsh: Bob Ezrin had made hit records at the time; he was a real professional, and he was a guy who knew how to make records and clearly how to make hit records because he had made one with Alice Cooper, “I’m Eighteen.” It was an important record. That’s why he was there and he was also not coming from the street; he was not very blue collar. He was the first professional record producer I ever knew. Mitch and I were playing games, Barry and Mitch were playing games, and everyone was gaming everyone. It was a boisterous boys club, and then Bob walks in as a professional.
Mitch Ryder: Creem had some sway, and Barry was a good businessman and was able to sell it to Ezrin. He hadn’t had any deep belief in the group Detroit, because Ezrin had been doing Alice Cooper. He was used to that kind of thing, but he wasn’t used to the power that we had. He was not hands on because he was too intimidated. He was still a kid.
Bob Ezrin: To do the Berlin album with Lou Reed, Lou’s manager called me and asked if I would be interested in working with Lou. The reason was because they’d heard the Detroit version of “Rock ’n’ Roll,” which they thought was the best cover of that song ever. He surely knew who Steve Hunter was because he knew the cover of Detroit doing “Rock ’n’ Roll,” and he loved it.
Dan Carlisle: It was a good time for Mitch; it was a time he really could have caught on again.
Dave Marsh: Mitch, like any great singer, needed great material, and he wrote something he was doing, “I Found a Love” and the Lou Reed song “Rock ’n’ Roll,” so he had the material.
Mitch Ryder: There are two different bass players on the Detroit album: John Sauter and Ron Cooke. That reflects the changes that occurred in the band while we were trying to record it. People were hurting people—physically, emotionally, financially. It was a high-turnover situation. The only constant there was the singer and the drummer, Johnny Badanjek.
Ron Cooke: I like to call Johnny the union steward on that job. He ran the band, you know. He drove most of the time—that limo was badass. Yeah, we used to have to damn near threaten to kill him to pull him over to take a leak. We’d go six hundred fucking miles like that.
Mitch Ryder: And the air conditioner didn’t work. But I didn’t want to lose my style. We would sit there, fucking dressed up with shades and fucking hats on and leather jackets, and it would be like 110 inside it. There would be puddles of water on our seats, but we were in the limousine.
Johnny Badanjek: The problem with those guys was they were always drinking. These guys are out of their minds. And of course after the gig they’re drinking beer, and you would never get anywhere. They wanted to stop. They would beg me. They would beg me, “Please, please. I gotta pee. I gotta pee.” And I’d pass the rest area up.
Ron Cooke: We were working two hundred nights a year. We came home to Detroit to have fun and relax. Stay a couple days and ship out. We didn’t go hungry, but there wasn’t that much money being made long term. There were probably times we were playing for damn near nothing, except towards the end when we were getting good dough. We were playing at Montreal Forum and places. But that was short lived.
Johnny Badanjek: What finally happened with Detroit is that the band became bikers. It was like we weren’t musicians; we were like an outlaw bike club. We were playing clubs, and the club owners were starting to shoot at us, and it was just getting out of hand. The drinking especially. We pulled up at a Holiday Inn in Indiana, and a hairspray can fell out of the car and it’s rolling, because there was just, like, this little hill in this parking lot. One of the guys is drunk, trying to walk a few steps, and he leans down to pick it up and it’s still rolling. I’m watching him, and he’s going through the whole parking lot, staggering around trying to pick this can up. It’s like eleven in the morning on a Saturday in some college town, and we’re going to play there tonight. Just what everyone needs to see: staggering around after a hairspray can. We had real bikers hanging around us—we’re playing Hell’s Angel’s parties. All the outlaw clubs, and then all of a sudden they’d all be fighting. It was time to stop.
John Sinclair: I took over managing them, and it was one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve ever had in business. Over a period of six months the entire band changed, position by position, and finally Ryder quit singing. He had developed polyps in his throat, and he had to have this surgery. He was gonna stop singing, and he just walked away. And I was really enjoying working with his band. It was a great band: Steve Hunter, crazy organ player and bass player for the biker contingent, you know, Ron Cooke, Johnny Badanjek, the hippest drummer in the world.
Mitch Ryder: We stopped, but not before Lou Reed showed up, backstage at the Lone Star Cafe in New York. It was a very blurred, slurred, druggie high, fucking thing he said. “You know, that’s the way that song really, really was meant to sound.” He was talking about “Rock ’n’ Roll.” I said, “Okay, can I have some of your drugs?” Yeah, that was kind of like his little payment. I want to congratulate you, because I’m about to fucking rip away your f
ucking guitar player. He took Steve Hunter.
Drugs Hate You
Gary Quackenbush: Heroin came in, and Osterberg and them got into it, and the Five got into it later. It didn’t poison the scene. It was management that ruined the scene. No one could handle anything outside of Detroit. Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter didn’t take it. Bob Seger never did; neither did Nugent. Alice Cooper didn’t take it. People keep saying it was heroin that ruined the scene, but hell, no.
Leni Sinclair: What was left of the MC5 legacy then? Trying to get rich and shooting heroin.
Dennis Thompson: There were dope houses everywhere by the early seventies. Heroin was what killed it all. As the police clamped down, the birth of the war on drugs was beginning then. The drugs that people were taking became less and less available, and Quaaludes became available, cocaine became available, heroin was easy to get. People moved in that direction.
K. J. Knight: I knew two guys who were strung out on heroin: Greg Arama and Terry Kelly. I loved Terry. I had bromance with the guy, you know what I mean? I liked him so much that to try to be able to relate to him, I would go to his house and I’d shoot up heroin so that we’d both be high on heroin. One night we were high, and he told his wife to sleep with me. I said no, you know, let’s not do that. Not a good idea. But he would be nodding out and he would play, and his playing was still phenomenal.
Jimmy Recca: All of a sudden the heroin come to town, and that winter of 1971, it was just fucking blight.
Leni Sinclair: At the end of 1971 we had the concert for John, to get him out of prison. John Lennon came to Ann Arbor. Getting John Lennon was Jerry Rubin’s doing. Jerry told him about John. Then he sat down and wrote that song, “John Sinclair.” Man, it would have been a total disaster if John Lennon hadn’t shown up because we didn’t sell too many tickets. Chrysler Arena holds fifteen thousand people, right, and by the time John Lennon came on the scene we’d only sold about four hundred tickets. It would have been a total disaster. What’s weird to me is Yoko Ono, who’s such a feminist and so into female causes and all that stuff. She never asked to meet me. She never talked to me. I was the wife of the political prisoner. Everything that comes out of her mouth is all metaphysical, do-goody stuff. John Lennon was down to earth. The difference was John Lennon had an education in England. Europeans have an education so they all kind of know a little bit about the class struggle and Marxism and capitalism. Yoko Ono doesn’t know any of that shit. No, to her it’s all about peace and changing yourself. Right, but she was living in America.
