by Steve Miller
John Kordosh: The Mutants opened for Iggy that week, one of the shows. Bookie’s was really kind of poppin’ then—all sorts of national acts were coming through: the Stray Cats, bands that were really getting big. So it was definitely a happening scene, as they say.
Iggy Pop: That was at a time in my life that I was the most completely insane. What I love about looking back on that was I was having a very hard time with my career, with my health—it was all bad. But my motives were pure. I would do these crazy things. I had an idea that all the one-night shows you would play in these weird theaters, the promoters would rig the whole thing so nobody could have a good time. It just wasn’t happening—it wasn’t cool; it wasn’t a connection. So what I was trying to do was like what people would do back in the days of the Dorseys or Sinatra—you’d go and play a stand. I did a week in Atlanta at a place called Richard’s, and I did a week at Bookie’s and one other, and it was a great idea. The things that stand out about it all for me are the things happening offstage. Particularly how disgusted I was and how weird I felt because there was a band called General Public at the time. It was created by the leader of a band called the English Beat, and at the time they were all the rage; they had big hits doing this horrible fake ska. They were playing a bigger venue in the area, and they came down in their tour bus to watch, to hang out or something. I went onto the guy’s bus, and he was going to be a cross-over, to be above all music scenes, you know—“I wanted to be a real star,” like Elvis or something, “for the general public.” I just remember his snotty attitude and just how smart he thought he was. It just disgusted me and I also felt, “Well, oh gee, here I am doing this, things don’t look good.” In Detroit I got really nervous when Jimmy McCarty came down, the guitar player from Mitch Ryder. Johnny Bee came with him. Those guys were and still are musicians that I really respect. That was like, “Oh shit, oh shit, here comes McCarty and his guys.” I was a little star struck. It’s pretty funny: there’s a compilation out there on me called Roadkill Rising. And I was singing “One for My Baby,” the blues jazz song. And there’s a recording of it from that stand at Bookie’s, and people wouldn’t shut up. You know the trouble with people if they’re out having a good time. I stopped like five times saying, “Shut the fuck up!” The whole tour was kinda like that; it was real rough and ready, and I’m real proud I did that, but on the other hand it was, like, it was a statement to me and it was pure.
Tex Newman: We opened one of those nights, and he was bad. I walked out and people waiting out back were offering me $100 to let them in the bar.
Kirsten Rogoff: Zion Stooge, this girl, changed her name and had Iggy tattooed on her. She was just in love with Iggy Pop and just saw herself as that. There were a lot of people who had severe mental problems around there, and they dressed the way they did because they had a mental problem, not because they were trying to be something. One person might go with a crash helmet or a soldier’s helmet into the club, not because they’re trying to dress up for it—because that’s how they dress all day long.
Michelle Southers: When I first dated Jim it was after he was in Germany with David Bowie. He was pretty clean, and I actually met him at Bookie’s. I had come in from LA; I was modeling out there. I was working for Richard Tyler, and a designer friend of mine from Australia had given me all these crazy clothes that he had made. I walked in and I was the prodigal daughter. I had this spacesuit-looking thing on, with a really tightly woven full-body stocking, fishnet, and then I had this silver—looked like aluminum foil—big shoulder-pad thing, micromini—like if I bent over, my ass was out—with all these fake gemstones all over and glitter and heels this high. I walked in, and it just so happened that Iggy had played there for how many nights. He wasn’t playing that night; he was just hanging out. Iggy walked up to me, grabbed me and kissed me in the middle of the club, and told me he was at the Briarwood Hilton and he would be there for X amount of days, and he gave me his room number. Of course I didn’t call until the very last day. I had probably just turned eighteen. I did meet with him; I had lunch with him in Ann Arbor at the Briarwood. It was just one of those things, a couple times, when he was in Michigan type of thing. If he’d see me, you know, whatever.
Paul Zimmerman: There was this guy, Tom Mitchell, once we all started hanging out at Bookie’s. He was so into “We should not all look the same. There shouldn’t be a punk uniform.” So he went down to Army surplus and came back with a silver fireman’s jacket that weighed, like, forty pounds, and he used to wear that around. There was a horrible liquor store about a block and a half from there with the ghetto glass and everything. When you couldn’t afford the liquor in the bar, you would go get a six pack and drink it in the parking lot. In fact, the big thing at Bookie’s was to get there before ten and drink for an hour and a half in the parking lot. Sometimes the parking lot was as much fun as inside. So these guys went to get a six pack, and there were some girls and there were some guys, and they went over, and Tom slaps a $20 into the little ghetto tray, and this little kid came in, a little brother, grabbed it and ran. And Tom made the mistake of going after him. As soon as he went into the street he got circled, and they punched the girls and he got stabbed in the stomach. I’m inside at Bookie’s, and one of the bouncers comes over to me and he goes, “Hey, you gotta go check on your buddy. He’s bleeding out in the street.” I went out, and Mitchell’s sitting up against the wall, and he’s just gray. He shows me the stab wound, and the girls are frantic. One of the bouncers goes, “An ambulance will take forever. I’ll take you now.” So we jumped in his car, and we piled him in and went down McNichols doing about eighty to Ford Hospital, about three miles away. And, you know, that’s not a road you can go thirty or above. We’re roaring into this hospital. And we get there and Mitchell’s girlfriend is like, “F’n N word, f’n N word.” And we’re in the waiting room, and I’m like, “Would you chill? We got him some treatment.” So the hospital comes and tells us, “Well, somebody’s gotta call his parents,” and then they all looked at me. So I had to do this call at 1:30 in the morning: “You need to come here. Your son’s been stabbed.” They ended up messing up his treatment, and he was in the hospital for a month.
Keith Jackson (Shock Therapy, guitarist): I always carried a gun, a little .45. Only once did I get caught with it, and it was at Bookie’s. One night I power slid my car up to the front of the club; I was going too fast and bumped against the curb. I got out and a cop had seen me, just down McNichols. He said, “Do you have any weapons?” I said, “Yes, I do. I have a gun in my pocket.” So they put me up against the car to pat me down, and his partner reaches into my leather and pulls it out. He slides the clip out and puts it in his pocket. So they run me and I check out okay, and I said, “Can I have my clip back?” They said, “Nope. Have a nice night, Mr. Jackson.”
Bob Mulrooney: I lived right around the corner from Bookie’s with Vince Bannon. It wasn’t even a ten-minute walk from the place, and across the street was Highland Park, which was really rough. We were in Palmer Park, which was okay; it was mainly gays. The black people wouldn’t go over and rob the gay people, at least, but later on, when they could see the crowds coming in to Bookie’s and there was more nicer cars and shit, then they started paying attention. I know somebody got killed in the front part of the parking lot. I think the heroin really started in the end of the Bookie’s days, and I wasn’t into it. I had done it once or twice during that time, but the richer kids, the ones that were, like, doing tons and tons of coke and after that, what else can you do except something to calm down? There was this one coke dealer from New York; he used to come in, rent a limo, and sit with the car running while this Louie guy was inside getting everybody high. It was the best coke I ever did. It was so pure, but actually in a way it kept me away from the street garbage in Detroit for a few years. The bouncers from Bookie’s started working with those guys. They moved the product in Detroit. Before the airlines tightened down, everybody was making some good, good money.
Jerry Vile: We started a magazine to talk about the scene, whatever it was, and we called it White Noise. Paul Zimmerman and I started it. First, though, we drove out to the West Coast in 1978 to see what was going on there. We’d go to shows and tell people we were from Punk magazine. That was the magazine that made journalism understandable to me. It was Mad magazine with, like, cartoons and hand lettering. So where everybody else like Legs McNeil might be the influence to some, John Holmstrom was the influence to Paul and me. We were in LA and we bought a copy of Slash, which was impossible to get in Detroit. We didn’t even think about selling ads; they had to tell us, “You sell ads in a magazine, and that’s how you make your money.” We were trying to make our money by selling them for a buck apiece. Don Was and Jack Tann bought an ad for Sound Suite. But we didn’t have a business plan. It was printed on newspaper, like how Slash was. Paul went to journalism school, and I never even took journalism in high school. Paul’s like this really handsome, nice, baby-faced kind of guy that girls love, and the guy’s got, like, with this really twisted brain. So our first issue we put Niagara on the cover, and she drew the back cover. The first reaction was from Sirius Trixon from the Motor City Bad Boys, who wanted to beat me up.
Paul Zimmerman: We did a “Welcome to Detroit” double truck. We had all the bands that we liked, and we were just about to go to press, and Jerry said, “Something’s wrong with this picture of Sirius.” And he goes, “I know!” and he takes a flare out and he goes on Trixon’s face, dot dot dot dot dot dot.
Jerry Vile: He had really bad acne. He said, “What the hell did you do to my face?” I said, “I was trying to make it look more like you,” and he grabs me. At that time I was shoveling asphalt for a job, so I picked him up and threw him against a pinball machine. Sirius never bothered me after that. But that was the one reaction I remember well. They had benefits for White Noise at Bookie’s. It was pretty popular. I also had a band, the Boners, that I started. Then I had even more excuses to be an asshole.
Paul Zimmerman: The Ramones were playing in East Lansing, down the road from Detroit at this preppy place called Dooley’s. We went to see them and maybe interview them for White Noise. So we went backstage for this interview, but Jerry and I realized that we didn’t have paper. Or pen, for that matter. But Mike Murphy was with us and said, “I’m gonna write everything down and let me go with you and be the transcriber.” So we get back there, and they’re all eating pizza, and we start talking and doing this interview. And so one of our first questions was, “Where is Tommy?” This was July 1978, and Marc Bell had just taken over. Joey said, “Well, we had to let him go because he was walking around clucking like a chicken!” I knew this is going to be a good interview, and I looked at Mike, and he was not writing anything down.
Mike Murphy (The Denizens, the Rushlow-King Combo, the Boners, Hysteric Narcotics): I think I wrote stuff down. Or at least I wrote an article on it for White Noise. I could have made it all up. Johnny did most of the talking, and Joey just stood in front of a mirror and played with his hair. Dee Dee was too messed up to talk.
Paul Zimmerman: At the time Jerry was into this thing where instead of interviewing people he thought it was cool to give the band a McDonald’s application and have them fill that out, which isn’t a terrible idea. But the last thing a band wanted to do is homework, and the Ramones didn’t want to do it. Finally, I was dying of hunger, and we were wrapping it up and I had on a White Noise T-shirt, and Joey was looking at it, telling me how great it was and that he wanted one. I said, “I’ll trade it for a piece of pizza.” He said, “Deal.” So I took off my shirt—literally the shirt off my back—for a piece of Ramones pizza. I kept waiting for him to wear that shirt, but it never happened.
Jerry Vile: We had this place called the White Noise Mansion. It was in a hillbilly area of Detroit.
Paul Zimmerman: The first one was on Fielding and Old Redford, and it was two bedrooms, a stand-alone house. It was just Jerry and I originally, and then later Steve King moved in. The landlord had fixed the place up pretty nice, but something had happened and there was a hole in the wall in the living room right away. The landlord came over one day unannounced, and he was looking at it and saying, “What?! What?!” I go, “We were moving a couch.” He didn’t kick us out.
S. Kay Young: You walked into the place and the first thing that hit you was the stench of old fast food, and it got worse. In the basement, where people tend to have a washer and dryer, they had a wash tub piled with dishes that were crusted with food. They didn’t wash dishes; they just put them down there. The beds had no sheets and they had been pissed on.
Katy Hait (Sillies, vocalist, photographer): I was Jerry’s girlfriend for twenty years, including then. There were definitely no sheets on the bed. I don’t think you cared how creepy it was at that time. There were fast food bags piled up so thick that you couldn’t see the carpet.
Jerry Vile: If we didn’t announce a party after Bookie’s, we would come to our house, and people would break in and already have a party started. You’d try to bring a girl home, and there would be a party going on at your house that you hadn’t planned on. A lot of gang bangs happened there and bad, bad stuff. There was one girl named 747, and one night she got grain alcohol in her eyes, and I tried to wash it out in the bathtub and she fell. I heard her head hit the bottom of the tub; I can still hear that sound in my head to this day. I’m thinking, “I’ve fucking killed her,” and I’m fucking around with just a leather jacket, no clothes, and a naked girl in my arms.
Steve McGuire: I lived at this place called the Earth Center in Hamtramck. I was in the 27, which was Mark Norton’s band after the Ramrods. We played at Bookie’s, and I had never done coke, and this guy named Tommy Ballantine came up to me and Craig Peters and told how he liked our band and offered us some blow. We did a couple lines and went back to his house and sat up in his attic and did blow for two days. He told us he was going to buy this place in Hamtramck, and it has a hall with a stage and we could practice there, so we said, “Sure.” Craig and I lived there, and there was a stage and there were these two little rooms over the stage, and we each took one. After 27 broke up, I met Ahmet Ertegün’s niece and married her. He was the founder and president of Atlantic Records. I was nineteen, and we got divorced pretty quickly.
Mark Norton: Of course there were shitloads of parties. One thing the Zimmerman and Vile excelled at was peeing in the shampoo bottles of our host.
S. Kay Young: There was this after-hours place on the East Side, where you walked in and it had these huge fish tanks, and they sold really bad coke. You’d go in and sit down at a table and there were playing cards on the table. And you would turn them over if you were there to score.
Kirsten Rogoff: The Chili Sisters had parties all the time after the bars closed. They’d make chili, and we all knew that it was going to be a really good time. The night my mother died I went to a Chili Sister party. I ended up at the basement stairs in a wheelchair covered with confetti.
Diane Koprince (Chili Sisters): It was me and Karen Parapata; they called us the Chili Sisters. We had parties all the time, and we knew there would be a lot of drinking, so we made food so people wouldn’t drink on an empty stomach. Plus a lot of those guys in the scene had no money.
Sue Rynski: The Chili Sisters were friends of mine from high school, and they had a house at 13 Mile and Woodward. They had parties for all the guys and gave them beer and chili.
Kirsten Rogoff: There was always a lot of drinking and rooms where people would screw each other. I’m surprised they weren’t raided.
Diane Koprince: They were all costume parties. We kept a big box at the door that had things you could make a costume out of if you happened to show up without a costume. In the box we had my old waitress uniforms, with frilly aprons, party masks, clothes from Salvation Army. Jerry Vile came as a sofa one time, with cushions stuffed in front and back.
Jerry Vile: The Chili Sisters would have chili parties th
at were also acid parties, and I remember taking a whole bunch of acid because I wasn’t getting off, and then getting off really bad. That’s one of my bad mistakes in life: these drugs aren’t working, get me more, and then getting off, and then getting instantly paranoid, because I have a paranoid personality. One time I was tripping and I made myself throw up all this chili, seeing trails in the chili and going, “That’s not where I want to see trails, I want to see them on my hands, not on my puke.” Sometimes there’d be costume acid parties too.
Paul Zimmerman: One time we were coming back from Bookie’s, and Jerry was passed out in the backseat. When we got home I tried to wake him up. No luck. So I left him there and went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke up, felt sick, but his foot got stuck under the front seat and he puked all over the car.
Jerry Vile: I woke up in the backseat of Paul’s Maverick, and I was throwing up and my feet had gotten pushed under the seat and I couldn’t get up, so I’m throwing up all over myself, in the backseat of a Maverick, and I shredded my legs; they were all bloody from pulling them out from the springs. I just managed to get out and left his car door open as I passed out on the lawn. He found me the next day. His whole car is full of puke, and the smell never went away.
Paul Zimmerman: He cleaned it out a bit the next day. Still stunk. Finally he said he had the solution: Locker Room, that chemical in a tiny container that disco types used to inhale on the dance floor. He stuck that in the car and rolled up all the windows. It smelled better, but on hot days it still reeked of refried barf.
Rick Metcalf: There used to be a place on the east side of Detroit called the Meet Market, and Jerry and the Boners would play there. The guy who booked the place loved the Boners, and he’d bring them in on a weekday and hardly anyone would show up. They paid them in dope and booze, and we were completely incoherent after that. They had these small tables, and one night Jerry jumped from one to the other, four or five in a row, and people were sitting at them, and people had pitchers of beer spilling on them. But he made it all the way across before he fell in a heap. Another time a black street dude walked in and starting singing Otis Redding, and we turned it into “Otis Otis he’s the way Otis Otis has a big dick and liked to play.”
