Detroit Rock City

by Steve Miller

  Cary Loren: He saw we had a scene; it was a freak scene. And we all looked up to Ron. He was a superstar of the area. He was living with his mom. I would pick him up and drive him to our practice.

  Niagara: I was freaked because I was singing. I was a nervous wreck. I took a nice pill and I felt better. I never had stage fright because I knew I’d be high enough that I wouldn’t care, so I never really got stage fright. In the beginning I had Tuinal. They were called rainbows; they were turquoise and red and in the middle they were purple. They were real pretty. I was into these beautiful pills. I also had Seconals that were bright red, and I got them at the free clinic where this beautiful doctor was. He looked like a gnome with the little glasses, but he was real big, and he was so slow and sweet. I’d say, “I have trouble sleeping.” He’d go, “Have you ever tried the old-fashioned remedy, Tuinal?” I said, “No, but would it help?” So he was giving me all these great pills. There was nothing wrong with that. After a while that wasn’t going on, and I started drinking some like everybody else.

  Sue Rynski: Ron joined and brought in Michael Davis, who was just out of Lexington prison. Ron was important, but none of those guys took themselves for anything special. They’d done their thing and failed, and they were humbled and serious.

  Niagara: At that time Ron was living with Ann. Ann, my Ann. That was one of my first questions to Ronnie when I found out his mother’s name. I said, “Ann, my Ann?” He said, “Yeah, Iggy was trying to be funny and put that name in.” Scott and Ron were both living there, and I had an apartment. Then when Ronnie and I got together, we were staying at people’s places that were gone or something. I had a little job somewhere for a couple months, and I got food stamps. I didn’t get money, but I got food stamps. After that I couldn’t imagine spending money for food. We started to hang out with some of the MC5 guys along with Michael. Fred Smith was really fascinating, and he was a real trickster. He wanted to take people and just mess with their minds. He would do that with Cary when Cary was on the verge of losing his mind, and it was terrible. Fred would go, “I just had sex with Niagara in the back room.” Cary would be like, “Is that really true? Did that just happen?” Fred was trying to pull all this horrible stuff. He didn’t know that Cary was losing his mind.

  Cary Loren: I broke up with Niagara earlier in 1977. She had become Ron’s girlfriend. This stuff happens in bands; we were still playing. Then the end of summer 1977 I went to New York to promote the band. I went to see a show at Max’s Kansas City and I got dosed; I think it was PCP. I couldn’t even find my car. I couldn’t drive; I was lost for several days in the city. I got back and had to go in the hospital. I was sedated. Then I was going to practices, and I couldn’t even hold my guitar. It was a Syd Barrett situation. I was voted out of the band.

  David Keeps: I went to London for a while, and when I got back Cary had been thrown out of the band and Niagara and Ron were together. Niagara has amazing allure. I don’t think she could be bothered to seduce anybody. It’s like one of her paintings says, “I’m going to play with his brain like a drunk kitten.”

  Niagara: Cary had troubles before that, and then the guys agreed he had to go. Cary came over; I was crying. I was pretty shocked he was out of the band. We had broken up about that time. He was like, “I lost my job, my band, my girl, and my mind.”

  David Keeps: I was listening to the Stooges and the MC5, and it was kind of amazing to be involved in this group. Not actually playing in the group but being involved with a group of people like that. Just a couple years earlier we were smoking pot every day and every night listening to the same records: Berlin by Lou Reed, the New York Dolls, some Velvet Underground, Stooges, MC5, and doing artwork. Cary would be doing something, Niagara would be painting some kind of water color, I would be doing some kind of ridiculous, crappy collage. Now all of a sudden these people were in our lives.

  Sue Rynski: Iggy came to town to visit one day after a Destroy All Monsters show at the Second Chance in July ’77. Before he got there, I caught DB chanting to himself so he wouldn’t be nervous. Everyone came over to my house to watch the video from the night before and we’re sitting there, and Scotty came over, then Iggy walks in. That made me nervous. He thought Ron’s band was nothing special, and who’s this girl who can’t sing, and he wasn’t very nice. We went to another place with a good turntable, and he played us the test press for Lust for Life.

  Hiawatha Bailey (Stooges roadie, Cult Heroes, vocalist): I was watching the video at Sue’s, and people were all talking, and I felt this hush come over the room, and I just kept watching. And someone lays down on the floor next to me, and I turn around and it’s Iggy. So I asked him what he thought of Ron’s new band. He said, “Well, I always like Ron’s guitar playing, but that singer is awful.” And Niagara was standing right behind us. She had to hear, but she didn’t say anything.

  Niagara: It was in our coke dealer’s house the first time he came to town. Iggy was nice and he said, “Call me Jim.” I just thought it’s too … I can’t just call him Jim. I should call him Iggy because it’s like calling someone like Mr. something. So when I called him Iggy he would just hate that, and I was like, “Oh God, that’s not right.”

  David Keeps: Iggy mistook me for somebody that he used to know, so he would, like, sidle up to me and put his arms around me and say, “I haven’t seen you in so long.” I was walking down the street and I’m thinking, “Okay, Iggy thinks I’m somebody else and I’m not going to tell him differently. At least not right away.” I mean, I’ve got Iggy’s arm around my neck. I think I will stay this way for awhile. That was a moment for sure. My perception of that was that he and Ron were not cool. Like they were in contact with one another, but they hadn’t reached the kind of rapprochement that happened when they finally ended up touring.

  Niagara: Every time Iggy would get in touch, they were asking him, “Hey, when are the Stooges getting back together?” Iggy would call every year and say, “Yeah, we might do that.” So every year he would put Ron and Scott through this thing like they’re getting back together, and it never would happen. He’d be in town, and we’d hang out with him.

  Iggy Pop (The Stooges, Iggy and the Stooges, solo, vocalist): Ron and I would run into each other once in a while, and I didn’t get that vibe, but I didn’t get a bad vibe either. Finally, when he became more active in something that was, what I thought was a step up from what he was doing in the Detroit area with … what’s her name?

  DJ Dianna (Club DJ): Poor Ron. It’s never good to have your girlfriend in your band. But she couldn’t sing and was fucked up. Her voice was atrocious, and she would start twiddling knobs on Ron’s amp.

  Niagara: DB was our manager and he wanted to take us to Europe. But it was terrible because he took the first offer. He liked the guy and made a gentleman’s agreement that this guy would handle our tour. Then this other company came along and offered DB everything. Big posters, all that. And he didn’t take it. We didn’t know until later that he never signed anything with the first guy, that it was just gentlemen’s agreement. So DB made a terrible tactical mistake, and at the same time we’re finding out, we’re not sleeping anywhere. And where were we getting anything to eat?

  David Keeps: We were getting by okay, but one day we were driving along in the van, and I look over and Niagara is eating split-pea soup out of the can with a spoon. Which was weird on its own but also because she never ate anything but sweets.

  Niagara: The shows themselves were great. Every time we played, people went berserk. I don’t really remember a show we played at anywhere that people didn’t go crazy, so I was thinking of it that way. There were some big shows and some little crummy shows. We played in Liverpool. We played across the street from where the Beatles played. The reviews were really funny. They would say that Ron had gained weight since the Stooges was their main thing. You know how in England their style of writing is being really bitchy and really laying it on. Ronnie stopped reading them. We were there a month and p
layed almost every night. People were real nice, of course, and they were always saying, “I could have got you this tour” all along the way. DB was getting like more and more, like, to himself, like, he wouldn’t talk to us anymore. He stopped touring with us eventually. He just hated us, I think. Mike Davis was starting to call him “snot finger” because he always had all these allergies and he was always gross. DB finally left us at the airport on standby for three days while we sat there with no money, no food. We were calling anyone we knew. DB was like, yeah, bye. DB thought he’d be making money.

  David Keeps: The tour of England really wiped things out. There was absolutely no indication that anything was going to happen in the US. I had sent the first single to Sire Records and to Bomp and anyone else on the map at the time. I got no’s. So we had two singles out. “Bored” went over to England as an import, and somebody at Cherry Red found it. Cherry Red signed us and they said, “We can put you on the road. We’re going to release the single and put you on the road.” American punk bands were cracking the charts in England in those years. We’ll do it in England like so many other punk bands have. We had hotels. There was a road manager. It was proper, and we played a lot of places. We played in Sheffield, and the guy from the Human League came and saw the show. Lemmy from Motorhead was at one of the shows. Hull was like the most punk of all. Hull was people breaking beer bottles and lining the front of the stage trying to get Niagara to crawl into them. I kinda got held up by the promoters there, though. At the end of it all I had to call my dad and get him to wire me $10,000. I was told by the promoter, “Well, things really didn’t work out that well, and the shows weren’t really ‘dot, dot, dot, dot’ and it’s going to cost you $10,000.” I was shocked to be handed a bill for $10,000. And the tour agents were holding our passports, for “safe keeping.” I actually had a moment when I thought, “I’m just gonna get on a plane and go home and fuck it. I’m leaving. Just let it be. I’m not going to pay the $10,000, this is bullshit.” The band were never concerned about money that I owed or what I spent. I think Ron and Mike certainly wanted more and expected more.

  Dave Hanna (Ramrods, Space Heaters, guitarist): David Keeps came back from England after the Destroy All Monsters tour with these singles. There were only a handful of people around town who knew what they were, these great 45s, the Sex Pistols and the Damned. That really started something. There was no form to follow. It was reckless. It was stupid. It was creative. There were no places to play. People were just starting to write music. We just came across each other from seeing the bands. It such a small group of people that whoever was playing, all the same people would be there.

  We started bands and were just playing the history of Detroit music. We played MC5 songs and Stooges songs. New York Dolls. For as much good stuff came out of the seventies, the radio sucked. There was nothing. You had to look elsewhere.

  Sweet Nothin’

  Hiawatha Bailey: I was sentenced to prison for selling drugs. They busted everyone in town, it seemed, and I was one of them, although I was on the run for six months before I turned myself in. The music was over, the bands were gone, and there it was. When I first got sentenced, I thought they’d send me to Milan, a federal penitentiary in Michigan. The next thing I know, they put me in this van that was dropping people off at various places. First we were going to Alderson, and the next stop was where I was going—Lexington, Kentucky. You know the Valley of the Dolls? The women’s prison in Alderson, Virginia, is called the Valley of the Dolls. They had all of these women in the van with me, and there was this pregnant woman who was saying, “I don’t care what he is, I’m getting me some dick before they lock me up.” I’m like, “Whoooa.” I’m in this van with all these horny women, and I’m the only male. I’m scared, okay, let me out, please, help me, Jesus. So they get me to Lexington, Kentucky. It was an experimental prison for drug offenders. There was a place in Lexington called ARC, the Addiction Research Center, and they were doing all kinds of weird research. The prison was like a dorm, you couldn’t leave and you are a number. Mine was 29750–117. I was in Younity unit, which was general population for cocaine and acid people. There was also a heroin unit. One day I’m walking through the lobby of the place, and there were people sitting in the lobby waiting to be assigned a room. This person sitting there waiting looks at me and I look back and I look again, and I think, “How cool could the fates be that that person looked like Michael Davis?” You’re not supposed to talk to incoming residents, but I come over and look at him and said, “Hey, Michael.” And he looks at me and says, “What?” He didn’t recognize me—it was such a strange place to see someone. So I start walking away, and he said again, “What?” So I came over and I said, “I was just wondering. You look like Michael Davis from the MC5.” And he says real low, “Oh yeah? What if I am?” I said, “Michael, hey hey!” And he remembered me, and it was insane. I had someone in there with me. One day Mike and I were sitting about, and he was reading Rolling Stone, and it says Wayne Kramer was busted and was being sent to an undisclosed location in the federal correctional system, and Mike showed me this and says, “Hi, I hate Wayne.” And I said, “Michael, what would the odds be they would send him here?”

  Wayne Kramer: Everyone who was in Lexington was kind of hipster. It was the end of an old program. End of the era of rehab in American corrections. It was built in the thirties as a public works narcotics farm. One of the first attempts to deal with drug addiction as a social problem, not a criminal one. We had therapy and behavior modification treatments. I went down in ’75, came up in ’78. When I caught my case, Michael told me he had caught one too. He figured, “Well, we’ll be in Lexington or Sandstone.” I had a terrific lawyer, but it didn’t mean a thing. I went through the same trauma of being locked up, though. Had a terrible time. On the trauma scale it’s right below losing a child, I’d say.

  Hiawatha, being a gay man, it’s not what people think, being in prison. Gay people have always gone to prison, and they find their space and learn how to live. I wasn’t with him all the time, but we worked together for a year or so, and nobody beat on him or raped him or anything that I know of. Michael was pretty low key; he didn’t play in the prison band or anything. He was discouraged about music I think; our relationship was strained in that way. We had history together, which was of value in those circumstances, but he was just disenchanted with the idea of music.

  Hiawatha Bailey: After I got out I was living at this farm with Michael Davis and this woman, Pam. We had a practice space where Destroy All Monsters would rehearse, and Scott Asheton was living with Liz, his girlfriend for a bit. I had started my band, the Cult Heroes. Fred Smith was coming down, and him and Rock and Scott started playing songs in the rehearsal room. Which was the seeds of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. One night Michael and Fred had a fight at our house. Fred was coming over a lot, and Dennis would come over once in a while, and I thought, “This is great, I’m going to get the MC5 back together.” Fred and Rock would sit in our driveway and drink. So one night I came home and just Fred was out there, so I asked him inside, and then I went to the store and got some Jack Daniels. I was trying to figure out this guitar chord, and we’re all in the living room drinking—Fred, Michael, me. I was asking Fred how to play this guitar chord, and he said, “So you fancy yourself a guitar player now?” He takes my Melody Maker and shows me how to finger it and leans over and gives me a kiss on the head. And Michael says, “What do you think you’re doing? You’ve turned into a real asshole.” They stand up and look at each other—I mean, I’m scared, these are tough guys—and Fred goes, “It’s your house. You take the first hit.” Mike says, “You’re the guest. You take the first hit.” And Fred popped him one. Man, they fought all over this house; they flopped over on each other. We had this potbelly stove, and they knocked that over. It was the battle of the titans, this MC5 battle in my living room. I finally pulled them apart. Then they sat down and everything was okay again.

  Gary Rasmussen (The Up, S
onic’s Rendezvous Band, bassist): Ron Cooke was the first bass player. I took his place in Sonic Rendezvous. Ron had been playing with Mitch Ryder and selling his equipment and buying motorcycles. He had a thing with Scott Asheton too, where they weren’t real tight. I don’t know if Ron didn’t think Scott was very good. But Ron would come to me and say, “Hey, can I borrow your amp this weekend?” Or “Can I borrow a bass from you this weekend?”

  Ron Cooke (Detroit, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, Gang War, bassist): I only knew Fred Smith before that from passing. Quiet dude. How he ever got the name Sonic, I don’t know, man. It would take a bomb to move that guy. I knew Scotty before that too. That was a Fred-and-Scott conscious decision to hook up for some reason. Fred just said, “Hey, Scott’s coming over to jam with us.” I always loved playing with Scott. Musically, Scott and I really played well off of each other. When I was there, the band didn’t even have a name. So it was kind of like a band.

  Gary Rasmussen: One day Fred called me and asked me if I wanted to play a gig with them in Bad Axe. So he sent over a tape, and I had three days to learn the material. Scott Asheton had been saying, “Ron’s fuckin’ out of his mind, and you should get Gary.”

  Ron Cooke: I’m not a type-A personality, you know, and where Fred is like not a capital A type. He don’t want to move too fast. To get Fred to do something, man, was, like, I can go to the United Nations and get something done easier. And Fred was not a hustler in regards to taking care of his own professional image. I just got tired, and I just didn’t think the band was going anywhere.

  Gary Rasmussen: I drove everyone to Bad Axe because I had a car. I don’t think anyone else did.