by Steve Miller
Hiawatha Bailey: We were putting the Free John Sinclair show together at the White Panther headquarters, and I’d get these calls from people trying to be guest listed and bands trying to get on the bill. Someone called and said, “It’s Yoko Ono,” so I just hung up the phone. Someone called back and said, “Hello. This is John Lennon. Can I speak to the chief of staff of the White Panther party or Dave Sinclair?” So I clicked off, put him on hold for second, and came back and said, “Hello. This is David Bowie and Dave and I are busy right now.” Then it rang back and I listened to the message being left and I ran into Dave’s office and said, “Shit, Dave, I think John Lennon is on line one.”
Don Was: I lived in Ann Arbor in 1971, when I was going to school there, when Sinclair was in prison, and they had that concert with John Lennon, which I attended. David and I heckled John Lennon. We requested “Mr. Moonlight.” Just a couple of smart asses, that’s all we are, man.
Hiawatha Bailey: I’m at the arena, and John and Yoko are pulling up in their limo there, mobbed—I mean these fans are ravenous and I was trying to keep these people off him. So they get in and go backstage, and Lennon starts trying to teach these guys with him—David Peel and those Eastside New York guys—a song he wants to play. I was standing around, making sure no one bothered them. And he looks at me as he got up and said, “You look like someone I can trust,” and hands me this little glass bottle of blow, and I went yayayayaya—I watched them play from the stage.
Then, three days later John Sinclair was let out of prison and he dissolved the party. I had nothing to do except for return from whence I came. I lived over on Fountain Street, and I turned into the most affluent distributor of the catalyst of enlightenment that this town has ever seen.
Dave DiMartino (journalist, editor, Creem magazine): I had come to Michigan from Miami and was going to Michigan State University. I was working on campus radio—this was late 1971 and it’s a dead Sunday afternoon in December. There’s a knock on the door, and it’s two guys from WABX and John and Leni Sinclair. They came by specifically because he had just gotten out of prison and wanted to know if I wanted to interview him. Sinclair was talking about the benefit, the John Lennon benefit for him in Ann Arbor that had been held maybe a week or so before, and he was nice and friendly. But the thing that was great was that—and this just displays my ignorance about chronology, about the legal system, about his particular situation. All I knew about him was he was in jail for a couple of joints. So I asked him—and this is in front of his wife and the big, impressive WABX DJs, which I didn’t grow up with so I could give a shit—“Did you enjoy the show?” Of course it was a benefit for him when he was in prison. I didn’t know what the fuck. They looked at me like I was a pinhead moron. And it’s like, “Oh, oh, you wouldn’t have seen the show.” But it was like the essence of Detroit uncool beyond belief.
Leni Sinclair: After John got out of prison at the end of 1971—that’s when the real struggle started.
Billy Goodson: I came back to Ann Arbor and John had gotten out of jail, the house on Hill Street closed down, and everyone had moved out. The SRC had fallen apart. The Stooges had moved. MC5, no more. By then it was Detroit people stayed in Detroit—came to Ann Arbor for some fun and monkey business and all that, but always went back to Detroit. But the two twains never met. It was like, you don’t bring Detroit people into Ann Arbor. One of the MC5 stompers and I rented out this apartment. She was like a groupie, but the Stompers were chicks you saw in Crumb books; they would beat the living crap out of you—thus the Stompers. They were groupies and bodyguards. They all had their legs spread and whatever and everybody got in there. They lived in the house, and when the Five moved out, a lot of the gals—well this one, she looked just like Janis Joplin, her name was Marcia Rabideau—they moved on. So we got a place. It was like a trilevel place, and Marcia and I lived on a middle floor that went up to the top floor, and my bedroom was in the middle and along with that middle was another apartment where Scott Richardson and Shemp [Richard Haddad] lived. I was selling coke. The guy that I got my supplies from got busted, and the gal that was his main dealer in Ann Arbor got busted too. I got a phone call telling me to get out of town. So I went to Scotty’s apartment to tell him about it, and in walks this naked chick who looked just like David Bowie. I looked down and she had a snatch and I was like what the?—it was Angie Bowie. She was supposed to be there to sign Iggy up to MainMan, but Scotty got hold of her, and he always gets what he wants.
John Sinclair: When I came back from prison, the White Panthers had both houses on Hill Street. They were renting out 1510 Hill to a bunch of small-level ounce dealers from Dearborn and other suburban places who wanted to go to school. The Up was living there too. I observed what they had going there, and it was mind-boggling to me because it was like this anarchy of small-level marijuana dealing. One guy lived in this room and another guy lived in this room and this other guy would drive his little pickup truck with the weird cabin on it to California and he’d come back with a load of weed. The guy next door would do the same thing. They didn’t know about efficiency, you know?
Becky Tyner: Rob worked freelance at an advertising agency. You know, it was looking to the future. I got a real job at the Federal Reserve Bank, the Detroit branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 1972.
Rick Kraniak: After about 1972 you didn’t have that many Michigan bands headlining these bigger shows, as the venues got larger and some of the bands did too. There’s a gap for people like Nugent.
Russ Gibb: The venues went down, and Detroit was going through what I call a movement, where the bottom line was shifting and the center of whatever was going on was being spread out. Television was making inroads. The giant concerts were being done, you know. The people were showing up just to show up. The wrong people were going to the concerts. When I say the wrong people, the people that were followers and not innovators. In the early days we were doing our things; they were the innovators. They were the opinion makers who were coming and doing things. Later on it became the ones that said, “Well, you’re supposed to have bellbottoms. If you don’t have bellbottoms, you are supposed to go and see Seger.” And bands were starting to get into these catering things, and the whole thing was going the wrong way by the early seventies. At first they were just little additions written on the bottom. Then they became twenty-four pages long. Oh, yeah, that was one of the things that got me out. The riders got so great. At first they were just little additions written on the bottom. Then they became twenty-four pages long. They had certain beers and certain kinds of food, and it just got worse over a period of time. Then you’d get two or three bands having different riders that they want certain kind of instruments and organs. It became more and more, and I hated it. You know, “Go play! What the fuck—I’m giving you money, go play. Don’t give me your shit! If you need beer, go buy it.”
Dave DiMartino: All the Stooges and MC5 records went to cutout; so did Love. I was the guy who bought cutouts at Schoolkids in Ann Arbor.
Dave Marsh: Detroit was just quitting around the end of 1971. Mark Manko and Johnny Angelos and I were in my office at the Creem house on Cass sitting around. It was five or six in the evening, about February, and I knew Mark as one of the guys in the Detroit band. So we look up and there are these three guys standing in the doorway of the office carrying sawed offs. One of them said, “Which of you guys is Mark Manko?” And Johnny and I looked at each other and didn’t say nothing, and to his credit, Mark did step up and said, “That’s me,” so they tell him, “Come on, let’s go,” and they marched him out. They had come in through the back door, which was locked, and up through the house, heard voices in the Creem office, and there we were. So Mark was found the next day in a car, all beat up in a parking lot. I guess that the problem was that he and his brother had been involved in a smack deal, then used too much product and burned the guy out of money. Apparently, it was time to catch up. Later on Mark’s brother got taken out. That’s kind of wh
ere the scene had been going, and it ends up with Wayne in prison and Michael did time and Hiawatha Bailey—they all ended up doing time and others got sick in various ways. That was really the pathetic, terrible, regrettable end of the Detroit rock scene that had inspired and moved us all and no one was exempt. The Five, the Stooges—they went down. Not Mitch, but it touched Mitch’s band. It’s one thing to be strung out or burned from too much LSD. But that was the end of the scene as a collegial community–inspired rock-and-roll scene; it became something else. To give you an idea how bad it was: one of the straight people was Ted Nugent—think about that—the idea that Ted, who doesn’t have much to be proud of, should be the one emerging. It was inevitable that people would leave Detroit. It was not a show-biz center. Beyond any post-insurrection hippie or post-oil crises or whatever, it was simply show business.
Mitch Ryder: Detroit had become like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
ACT II
Gimme Some Action
(1973–1981)
New York: “None of These People Have Seen Shit”
Chris Panackia, aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): There was a big lull between the clubs and the shit that was going down with the MC5 and all that and anything else. There was nothing through the midseventies. No scene. All the bands that were playing were cover bands in bars. Bands like Strut and Salem Witchcraft. Those were the bands everybody would go see. Either you played something that somebody wanted to hear or you didn’t play.
Tom Gelardi (Capitol Records promotions): We weren’t developing anything for a long time. The industry was getting into an era where no one knew what to sign.
Cary Loren (Destroy All Monsters, guitarist): All of a sudden the cult rock ended. Arena rock started to happen in Detroit, and it wasn’t focused exclusively on Detroit bands. Acts like Alice Cooper had broken, and there were these big concerts with bands like T. Rex and a lot of things from England.
Mike Skill (Romantics, guitarist): After the thing with the MC5 and all those other bands in Detroit, the music scene got into show bar stuff. You had actual bars, like the Red Carpet, where bands were playing. We had a band in the early to midseventies, the Bullets, that played a lot at the Zodiac on the east side on Mack. We’d do a set of originals, and then we’d do a set of Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and David Bowie.
Skid Marx (Flirt, bassist): Because of the Grande and the Eastown and those other places shutting down, there was no place for bands to play. It was like a whole different atmosphere. That was when Seger started to get some national attention. We had a band called Medusa, and we used to play around and do the same damn thing. We’d play our first set: “Okay, this is a Bob Seger song.”
Art Lyzak (The Mutants, vocalist): It took two years for the mayor of Detroit to close down the Eastown. He had to fucking close it the day the Mutants were supposed to open for Vince Vance and the Valiants.
Tom Morwatts (The Mutants, guitarist): We had our first show in Ann Arbor in 1971, in one of the dorms at U of M. Jerome Youngman, our other guitar player, had some friends from Kalamazoo, where there was the big state mental hospital. Jerome hadn’t been through there, but three or four of his close friends had spent a certain amount of time in the hospital, and they weren’t gonna miss this first show. I don’t know what their mental health status was at the time—if they were properly medicated—but on the way from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor they picked up as much roadkill as they could. About the second or third song in the show they came flying in the room with this bag of roadkill, and they would grab the tail of a squirrel or raccoon and smash it against the floor. That would be part of the dissection element in the show, because the guts were all over the place. We just kept on playing, of course. I thought that was a really cool way to start a musical career, myself.
John Kordosh (The Mutants, bassist, journalist, Creem magazine): I met Art Lyzak in the Mutants when he came down to become first our guitarist and then our white lead singer. We had a black lead singer, a guy named James Graves. This was 1973. James was older than us, and he was a pretty good singer, but he was only in it for the money. God knows how many women James was supporting, and he was not into the ramalama aspects of it all, you know, like Jerome was. We were doing something original at a time that wasn’t being done in Detroit.
Art Lyzak: James was giving up on the band when I joined as a second guitarist. His thing was, “Man I got to make fifty bucks, I always got to make my fifty bucks.” So that’s what we got paid—enough money to give him fifty bucks. Then it got to the point where there wasn’t enough money to hold on to him and he left. I said, “Well hell, I’ll be the singer.” The Mutants were writing songs, but we had to learn a ton of covers. We did that whole Ziggy Stardust album, Mott the Hoople, Robin Trower, Deep Purple. For some reason we just hated all that stuff at the time. But you had to mix that in there.
Don Was (Traitors vocalist, Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; producer): I ended up playing some gigs with a guy named Ted Lucas. He was from the Spike Drivers, a band that was alternative before there was alternative. The worst booking we ever had was opening for Black Sabbath, when Ozzy was still in the band, at the Toledo Sports Arena, ’73/’74 era. We were a folk band, man. Ted came out with an acoustic guitar, I played bass, there was a black conga player, Dr. Don, and a drummer. And the crowd is a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys from Toledo high on reds. A song and half in someone was injured by missiles thrown; it was just like a hailstorm of bottles. The drummer was bleeding and we stopped.
Gerald Shohan (Coldcock, guitarist): I was in a band that played downtown in the early seventies, and I’m probably the only guy still alive from that band. Two of them were drug overdoses. There was a thing where there was a combination of things where you had heroin and coke that got swung back and forth in the seventies. There was no shortage of that stuff. Another of the guys, Abe Lewis, died in an accident on the Detroit River. There’s the boat that delivers the mail to the freighters as they go by, and that boat capsized, and he and another person died in that accident.
Mark Parenteau (WABX, DJ): Detroit got to be all about cocaine. The first cocaine I ever did was from this church gospel singer from Atlanta, Georgia. This was maybe 1970, and he said, “Here, you wanna check this out?” I had interviewed him, and he was all decked out with his studded pants and everything. And boy, did I like it. My wife, Gail, and I started doing it and doing it. We would get some and go back to our house and just babble our faces off as if it was the coolest thing ever. Quaaludes were big at the time too. I never liked them. This guy owned this hip bootery in Birmingham, and he was heavily into Quaaludes. He had a lot of money and always hung out with us rock types, and everyone would take Quaaludes, and no one could walk because we were all wearing those high-heeled shoes. Here I am, six-five, trying to walk around on platform shoes making me six-eight. How ridiculous.
Bob Mulrooney, aka Bootsey X (Ramrods, Coldcock, Bootsey X and the Love-masters, drummer, vocalist): The only people that played that I knew in the early seventies was one guy from my high school who played just like James Williamson, but he was a junkie. He had the best tone, man. They were getting heroin at that time, 1973. I tried it—a friend of mine was working at a factory. It’s not something to go to parties with, but the reason I liked it was that it helped me focus on music. Of course it fooled me later.
Nikki Corvette (Nikki and the Corvettes, vocalist): Nobody had really left town, which was cool. Bands that were getting really big or trying to were finding out Detroit had the best audiences in the world, which is why all these people did live albums here. Detroit in the seventies was the place to grow up because everybody played there. You know, they’d do Detroit, New York, and LA. It was a must-have place.
Stirling Silver (scenester): I had been in New York to check out the New York Dolls after reading about them in Rock Scene and Creem. When I got back I was working at Harmony House in Hazel Park. The Dolls were on Mercury, and I knew the Polydor rep, and I pu
t together an in-store for the New York Dolls when they came to play the Michigan Palace. They often call Hazel Park “Hazel Tucky.” It’s a hillbilly community. I told management: “This band is coming to Detroit. They’re going on tour, and they got a signed deal with Mercury and they’re really fucking good and they’re funny to watch and all that. I know them, so let’s bring ’em in.” The store managers made this cheesy banner that said, “Welcome New York Dolls.” So the Dolls show up, and we had this deal for instores for artists, where they can take whatever records they want. The deal is whatever they take, Mercury will pay us back in label material. So if someone takes whatever, they can be sure that their material will be among whatever goes back into the store. David Johansen went to the Elvis Presley, the biggest bin there. He went through every one of them pretty quickly. He was looking to see if the whole catalog was pretty much there, and it was. Johansen took every one of those records out of there, including the religious ones. He took them all out of there; they are completely empty, and of course we swapped out Mercury product. He knew this and was making sure we had a ton of Dolls material, even though they only had one album out at the time.
