by Steve Miller
Rachel Nagy, Detroit Cobras: “They were trying to find singers and nothing was working out. I was always there, watching the Simpsons and drinking beer and passing out. Finally they got me drunk enough that I could get up and sing.” (Jay Brown)
Demolition Doll Rods, Margaret Dollrod, Dan Kroha. Margaret: “We had a number one single in Rolling Stone magazine. Nobody ever knew about it because we never went around going, ‘We’re in Rolling Stone.’” (Jay Brown)
Nothin’ to Do in Detroit
Jim Olenski (Cinecyde, guitarist): I went to this party in late ’77 in the basement of an apartment building off of Jefferson on Grand Boulevard. In the basement we saw these white kids, late teens, early twenties. One of them was Mark Norton, and he was putting on these rubber gloves and wearing a garment bag. He was getting ready to play with his band, the Ramrods. They were great. They had originals; they were doing songs off of Raw Power, and doing them well. It was like brothers-in-arms. I couldn’t believe it: there was someone else who’s doing it because Gary and I had already pressed a 45. No one would buy it.
Gary Reichel: There were these black people down there that were against the back wall. It was like that scene in Apocalypse Now where the band was playing “Suzie Q” and there were the Vietnamese at the cyclone fence watching. I was struck by the whole thing. I talked to them and gave them a 45. Later on we went to Greektown, and it’s bumper to bumper every time you go down that Main Street in Greektown. Suddenly Mark comes out from nowhere—he recognized us in the van—and he jumps on the bumper and he’s screaming. That’s when our friendship began.
Mark Norton: The party was in the Concord Castle, right down East Grand Boulevard in this shitty apartment building. It wasn’t much of a party; there were like twenty people down there. We knew the manager of the building. He was just this total drunk. He said, “Yeah, you guys get some beer. You guys go practice down there.” So we played and invited some people over. Cinecyde came to our party. They did a record before anyone, and they were into the same things that we were into. We didn’t know there were other people into what we were doing, but really, how was I supposed to appreciate Bruce Springsteen in 1978?
Gary Reichel: I had written this song called, “Gutless Radio.” We loved what rock and roll was, and we hated what was happening in rock-and-roll radio, so “Gutless Radio” was sort of a poke in the eye to the industry. The Ramones album comes out, and they don’t play it. I had discovered that there were bands that made their own stuff; they didn’t have managers and all that. So I showed the song to Jim, and we recorded it and found a place to press records, Super Disc in East Detroit. It was the old General Motors studio. They contracted it out; you would listen to the acetate, then they sent it to a pressing plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania. And you would get records back. We made our own sleeves. This was really radical back then. We didn’t have enough money for the printer to run the sleeves, so he let us operate the fabricating machine ourselves. So we issued this 45, “Gutless Radio,” and the flip was “My Doll.” A couple months later we put them into some stores. I sent some out in the mail and places like Trouser Press, New York Rocker.
Bob Mulrooney: The Ramrods were me, Dave Hanna, Mark Norton, and Peter James. We played a sixteen-year-old’s birthday party in Birmingham in ’77. I think it was Dave’s little sister. We played my old junior high. Dave and Mark had to act like real punks, acting like they were the Damned or something—spitting drinks on the stage.
Scott Campbell (Sillies, vocalist, promoter): Pete, Norton, and Mulrooney and I were sitting over on Mack Avenue at a Jack in the Box, and as soon as Norton left to go to the bathroom they said, “Hey, you’re gonna be our singer.” They wanted to get rid of Norton because Norton was an endless problem. Mark was terrible. I mean, he learned as he went along, but Mark was terrible. He couldn’t sing. He couldn’t actually breathe. He got beat up at a show, and I was trying to save him. I had the Sillies at that time, and we were playing the Velvet Hammer with the Ramrods. After the show these bikers were, like, dragging him by the hair, and I was trying to get these guys cooled down. I was doing okay, and then Mulrooney stepped in like an idiot, and then they started punching him. I’m standing there, 120 pounds, and no one’s throwing a single punch at me.
Bob Mulrooney: I told this guy that was beating up Norton that he wasn’t going to fight back, then he started beating on me. These bikers were huge.
Mark Norton: I walked out on stage at the Velvet Hammer, and there was this big biker and his girlfriend standing next to the stage, and I look at the biker and then his girlfriend and said, “Your woman just gave me a great blow job in the parking lot.” He jumped on me, and it was a massive fight. We never even got to play. I got the shit beat out of me. Me and Jerry Vile were the only ones who would ever fight when the shit went down. And we got murdered.
Jerry Vile (The Boners, vocalist, artist, editor, White Noise, Orbit): The Ramrods were at the Velvet Hammer, where the bikers just pounded the shit out of Norton and Mulrooney. I didn’t want to get beat up by bikers. I don’t got your back. We snuck out and picked Bob’s carcass out of the parking lot that night. You’d think bikers would love punk rock, but they don’t. Bikers like gentle music.
Scott Campbell: We booked two nights, so the next night practically everybody pussied out except me, Tom, Michael Profane, and, I think, Steve Sorter showed up because Mulrooney was too scared to show up. We just played the second night and nothing happened.
Steve King (The Pigs, Boners, bassist, producer, Aretha Franklin, Eminem): Norton was digging at the biker girls. It’s like a surefire way to get beat up. Everyone was, like, all nerved up, like “We better get the fuck out of here.” The bikers aren’t going to really know the difference between us and the Ramrods—they’re just these punkers, and they’re just going to kill us all.
Andy Peabody (Coldcock, vocalist): Mark got beat up at a lot of shows. He punched out one of the ceiling tiles at the Red Carpet one time, and their crew just came right up and dragged him off the stage and pounded him around and threw him out of the club in the middle of their set.
Paul Zimmerman (White Noise, editor): We were always looking for new places to play. One night we went to the New Miami, this crazy place where Vietnam veterans hung out. Norton went in there and pretended he was a veteran, talking about his days in ’Nam. So one of them asked him where he was stationed, and he was like, “Uh, Danong” or some such thing, and the guy was like, “I should kick your ass for making this stuff up.”
Mark Norton: Willem de Kooning said the only time an artist is free is when there is utter indifference in his work. The Ramrods basically pulled from the art crowd and from the music crowd. We were so over the top for the guys that were playing the Silverbird and doing bar-band standards and all the rest of it; they were just going, “Look at us.” They still had hair down to here and they looked like seventies hippies, and we were like motorcycle jackets, our hair was all fucked up, and, you know, we weren’t accepted. We were bête noire. It’s like this shadow following us; they hated us. We played a set, twenty minutes. Some of the shows would start and end in about two minutes into it if there was a fight. Sometimes the fight didn’t come till later.
Paul Zimmerman: Some of these shows would be held in halls like a Moose Club, and to get people you’d have $5 for all the beer you can drink and some bands. The people that wanted all the beer they could drink were not the kind of people that would like those bands. They’d get drunk and then get pissed about the bands.
Steve McGuire (Traitors, bassist): There were bands around like the Ramrods, and we wanted to get in on it. I was a bass player, and I was jamming with this drummer Terry Fox, and we saw an ad for a guy who had songs. He was a guitarist, and he wanted to put together a new kind of band, like a punky kind of band. It was a guy named Don McAlpine. We started playing originals with him, and it hit me that it doesn’t matter how good you play, you don’t have to be a virtuoso, but rather the confidence you have in
what you play. So then we heard about Don Fagenson, who turned out to be Don Was, and how he was looking for a band, so we connected with Don and a guy named Jack Tann. At the time Don was playing bass with Lenore Paxton, and me and Craig Peters and Terry were living in a condemned, abandoned farm house at Novi and 12 Mile. No heat, no hot water, but we pirated electric. All we did was practice and do drugs. We were starving and used to go to the grocery store not to shop but to eat; we’d just chow down in the aisles.
Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): From about 1971 to 1981 I worked with a piano player named Lenore Paxton, who was a very well-known jazz musician. I learned more about music from her than anybody else in my life, really. We played mostly at a place called Bobbin’ Rob’s Lounge in Madison Heights, right in the shadow of the Warren Ford factory. It’s like a cheater’s place for the executives. She’d play these songs that I never heard, and I’d have to watch her left hand and listen, and I got one time through a verse and a chorus to learn the song, and she was off soloing. When I was going to University of Michigan I used to drive to Madison Heights to play the gigs, and it went to the point where I was a father trying to support a family on $150 a week, which ultimately I couldn’t do. I started engineering for Jack; this is the late seventies. Jack came from a family of entrepreneurs. When I met him he and his brother were marketing mood rings. They were the first ones on that, and they made a killing on it. Jack was a sweet guy, and he had Sound Suite Studios, and he loved music. So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB’s and these bands with the crazy names, and I told Jack about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.
Steve McGuire: When we hooked up with Don and they had this whole floor of an old Westinghouse factory at I-94 and Trumbull, with all this old equipment from United Sound and Sound Suite. It was our rehearsal place. I had quit high school and started living there and experimenting. When I first met Don I thought this was our ticket; we’re going to make it. I was so naive. There were blurbs of the Sex Pistols, and I thought the Traitors and the Sex Pistols were in a race, and whoever won would be kings.
Scott Campbell: This was the new breed coming in. Stevie McGuire had come in and taken Don’s place in the Traitors. Don was moving into a managerial role.
Bob Mulrooney: Don was the lead singer of the Traitors, and it was wild. He had this wife who thought she was a groupie or something, and they had, like, this open marriage, so she was always hanging around, picking up punk rock guys, and he was always at his studio picking up black lead singers and shit.
Steve McGuire: We didn’t play that often, but what Jack Tann did, which was very smart, was he had a complete show. So he could book his little Motor Town Revue of three punk bands into an evening.
Scott Campbell: The Mutants were making fun of the Traitors at the Red Carpet one night, and McGuire was like sixteen years old, and he was feeling bad; I could see it on his face. I said, “Believe me, I know these guys, I know them well. I went to the band leader’s bachelor party, and if they’re making fun of you, it’s because they’re old, jealous assholes. So you’re doing something right just by them making fun of you.”
Steve McGuire: We were the band that was gonna play all of Don’s songs, and he had all these cheesy recordings that he had done demos on. We went on a dance show on Channel 62 and lip synched one of our songs, and the host came over to interview us, and me and Don McAlpine grabbed his arms and punched him in the stomach. And Don Was took over the set, and because of that, during the nine o’clock movie, rolling across the scene, the rolling bulletin at the bottom of the screen said, “Punk rock band takes over local TV station, details at eleven.” But we staged the whole thing, planned it ahead of time. For another show at this theater in Taylor, to create buzz, we staged a protest—“no punk rock in Taylor”—and had our friends’ parents come out and protest.
Gary Reichel: The Traitors went onto a local black dance show called The Scene. It was all set up. The host was given a preproduced thing about what punk rock was. They played two Motown songs, “Money” and something else, singing to prerecorded music. When they got done, the host comes up and says, “That’s kind of freaky.” So Don and Stevie McGuire come off, and they’re kind of being aggressive and start arguing with the host and push him down. Then they had all their friends call all these various TV stations and say that these punk rock guys took over the show. There was only one station that bit on it, but they led off their 11:00 newscast with “Punk rock hits Detroit and it packs a punch.” They interviewed the host. The newscaster says, “Needless to say, they won’t be invited back.” It was very funny.
Mark Norton: All those guys from the west end—the Traitors, the Pigs—those guys are all from Livonia. So they were all way west side guys, and they all came to know each other through Don, who got these guys to come down and form this deal with him and Jack Tann. Don was starving at the time.
David Keeps: It was three bands Jack Tann and Don had for this concept—the Traitors, the Niggers, and the Pigs. Everybody thought they were ringers and in-authentic posers and that they were to be despised.
Steve McGuire: The Niggers were a jazz fusion band, and Don wrote some songs for them and put them in leather jackets.
Scott Campbell: The Niggers were all hired; they were not a band. Don put out ads, and then he picked people and hired them; this was like the Monkees. They gave them the songs, they told them what to play, what to sing, what to do, and told them who was going to be in the band, and they named the band. So they were employees that they could change like Menudo.
Gary Reichel: They basically hired the bands and marched them down to one of the Birmingham salons to get the punk rock haircuts. They had a slick flyer to give to club owners. “And we’ll handle everything. The three bands will all tour. We’ll use the same equipment. You don’t have to worry about time between bands.” That’s how they were selling it. And they had bigger aspirations than that. They wanted to get them signed.
Steve McGuire: Jack Tann was considered to be an interloper, a phony. Don’s stage name was Prez, and they came out with signs, like the Ramones.
Rick Metcalf (creator of Detroit! Motor City Comix, artist): Don was throwing chicken bones and holding up signs that said, “I hate you.” People yelled back, “We hate you.”
Mike Rushlow (Pigs, Rushlow-King Combo, guitarist): I was in the Pigs, and we had these songs I wrote—“Stay Away from Janet,” “That’s What Summer Is For,” “You’re Nuts.”
Jerry Vile: They had this one song called, “You’re Nuts.” “You’re nuts. Ask anybody, I know they’ll agree, you’re nuts, I don’t want you hangin’ around me.” Really.
Mike Rushlow: Then we saw this ad Jack Tann and Don Was had placed in the Detroit News: “Punk rock band wanted.” We answered it, and Jack Tann came over to watch us practice. I handed him a lyric sheet, and he sat down in a folding chair and read along. So he says he’ll get back with us, and he called a couple days later. So next we go down to this place to meet Don, and it was where the Traitors practiced, in this downtown Detroit area. It was really decrepit, with broken windows, pigeon poop everywhere. I couldn’t believe there were even businesses in there, but there was a photography studio and this practice place. They also had electricity.
Jerry Vile: The Pigs had to wear these old suits; they were supposed to be like Elvis Costello.
Mike Rushlow: Don told us what he envisioned, and it wasn’t like this formal thing, but he said, “I see you guys wearing ill-fitting suits.” And we all had glasses, so a lot of people thought we didn’t really need glasses, that was our gimmick.
Paul Zimmerman: They were fake geeks.
Jerry Vile: People would hire me to go on tour with them if they were playing Chicago or Cleveland. Don Was hired me for something, the Pigs or someone, and we went to play Cleveland. I got really drunk after the show, and Don says, “We’re going back to Detroit tonight,” and we were like, “Fuck that.” But Don insists, “No, this equipment’s really expensive; it could get stolen.” So I’m driving back drunk. It was supposed to be in a convoy, but we just said, “Fuck it, forget it,” and pulled over in a rest area and went to sleep. A few hours later the door opened up, and Don Was has got his fists balled up: “Hey motherfucker, we’ve stopped at every rest area between here and Detroit! I’m a Golden Gloves, and I don’t care how big you are.” I was so sleepy, I was like, “Whaaaa—?”
Mike Skill: The Romantics played with the Pigs and the Traitors, with Don Was. It was some place in Oak Park at the school where Don’s dad was the principal.
Don Was: Yeah, my dad was a counselor at the junior high in Oak Park. We got him to book the Traitors and the Romantics just to have a chance to get out and play somewhere. It was disastrous. We got to play, but it was a huge incident for my dad.
Mike Rushlow: There was going to be this Motor City Revue tour, and this was before Bookie’s opened in Detroit. So the Traitors, the Pigs, and the Niggers did the Motor City Revue tour—three cities: Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. I don’t remember getting paid very often, but we got $10 a day and each band got a hotel room.
Paul Zimmerman: Don and Jack put together these glossy brochures for the Motor City Revue.
Scott Campbell: Don and Jack Tann also had this idea to produce an album that nobody would release after getting advance money and spending all the money over at Jack Tann’s studio. They would just basically scam the record company to get the advance money out of them. That never happened.
