by Steve Miller
Ben Blackwell (Dirtbombs, drummer, Jack White’s nephew, honcho, Third Man Records): They’d let me in and they would say, “We’re going to draw like thirty Xs on your hand.” I’m exaggerating, but they’re like super, super cautious about it. After a few times Neil Yee came up to me and said, “You really don’t drink, do you?” I was like, “No, I really just want to see the show.” I wanted to do nothing to jeopardize seeing any of that stuff. People like Eddie Baranek from the Sights or my wife, who was my girlfriend then, Malissa, they were getting in saying, “Oh, I’m not going to drink” and hammering beers. Then they started putting Xs on their hands. I’ve been told that I ruined it for everyone by not drinking.
Rachel Nagy: It was a dirty little place, and everybody knew each other, and the drinks were cheap. There was a security camera, black and white, so you could see who was out back. We never got paid much there. We could play the Magic Stick and do much better. There were never that many people at those shows.
Tyler Spencer, aka Dick Valentine (Wildbunch, Electric 6, vocalist): Neil Yee, who ran the Dollar, liked us, and we played there at least once a month starting shortly after it opened. We were the yang to the yin of what Detroit was at the time. We weren’t a garage band—I never owned a jeans jacket in my life—but people coming to see us were taking a break from what was happening in Detroit.
Timmy Vulgar (Clone Defects, Human Eye, Timmy’s Organism, vocalist, guitarist): A buddy took me to the Gold Dollar for the first time. The Gore Gore Girls go on, and the only thing I could think of, I was like, “These guys are like the Damned’s first album. This is exactly what I’m looking for, this kind of punk, this kind of rock ’n’ roll.” I was sick of hardcore and that kind of stuff, and I wanted to hear balls-out rock ’n’ roll, seventies-style, punk rock.
Neil Yee: The only person that we had to ban repeatedly was Timmy Vulgar. And he’d some back in disguise, with sunglasses and stuff sometimes. We’d let him back in eventually. He would try to apologize, and it would be so primatively ignorant. One time he commented on my racial ethnicity and then apologized by saying he really liked Japanese punk rock bands. I’m not Japanese.
Timmy Vulgar: One night, it might have been that same night as Gore Gore Girls, the Cobras went on, and Rachel pulls her pants down, moons the crowd. We were up in the front, and her butt’s right there, and it says, “Eat me”—like “eat” and then “me” on each cheek—and we’re just like this, “Uhhhhh.” We look at each other, and we’re like, “Okay.”
Bobby Harlow: Rachel is Amy Winehouse, but she’s like the dangerous version. Amy Winehouse was tragic but was, like, this, can’t walk straight, and she’s singing, she’s a wreck. Well, Rachel Nagy will kick your fucking ass. You know she’s real dangerous, really out of control. And check out Winehouse’s tattoos—same place as Rachel’s.
Chris Fuller: She was scary. One night she got into it with Joe Frezza from the Wildbunch and had his lower lip gripped in her teeth. He had to beat her on the head with a beer bottle to get her to let go.
Tom Potter: You could drive as fast as you wanted to in Detroit. Getting pulled over for drunk driving was really rare. That story—you know, “Really, they pulled you over on someone’s lawn?”—had a lot of truth to it. It was a drunken rocker’s paradise, and the only fee was having your car broken into every couple months and possibly being held up at the ATM.
Chris Fuller: You could drive up Woodward doing 110 with a straw up your nose.
Tim Warren: In Detroit, stopping at lights is optional; the place is just down and dirty.
Timmy Vulgar: There would be great parties after the Gold Dollar closed for the night—people getting drunk, running around naked, falling down stairs. Not the dudes. Well, maybe I just was doing that. One time I came down the stairs at Dave Buick’s house, and all I had was a condom on my dick, and I just peed in the condom.
Dave Buick: Very true. There was this period of time that people were going completely crazy. There were parties four or five nights a week at various houses, either John Hentch’s or the Wild Bunch house, first in Hamtramck and then the place on Trumbull.
John Szymanski: We had a record release party at the Lager House, and a limo shows up and it’s [former Detroit Tigers] Kirk Gibson and Dave Rozema, and I guess they were married to sisters. So they’re in the bar digging the show with about a hundred people. When the bar closed, my girlfriend at the time was a party girl, and she just invited them back to my house for a party. They accepted, and she jumped in their limo over to the house.
Tom Potter: The Dirtys would bring down coke from Port Huron. It wouldn’t even be like a natural color. It wouldn’t be a color found in nature; they’d just be like, “Yeah, I’ll do this. It’s made from the bones of old people.”
Ko Melina (Ko and the Knockouts, Dirtbombs, bassist, guitarist, vocalist; DJ on Sirius Radio’s Underground Garage): Our friends were at the Gold Dollar, but that’s about it. Just everybody that you hung out with. Anybody who was in a Detroit band ended up going to the Garden Bowl or the Gold Dollar.
Jason Stollsteimer: There was no way for us to check out what was going on in Detroit because we were too young to get into the shows. So I threw house shows at my place in Ypsilanti. The Go played. The Clone Defects played. The Rapture played our house. We had Wolf Eyes play. Wesley Willis played at my house. All these Detroit punk rock bands played, and we paid them in beer.
Ko Melina: I don’t think anybody was really making a huge effort to be known. Tom Potter with Bantam Rooster and the Hentchmen were the only bands that were really touring. Everybody else was playing Detroit and that’s about it. This was before Jack was in the Go and he was doing Two Star Tabernacle. The bands didn’t begin with this great idea to become national and tour. People were in each other’s bands and it was a community.
Bobby Harlow: I didn’t really care about the White Stripes, but then I saw Two Star Tabernacle and saw Jack play the role of a member of a band versus a character, like Jack White. He was an amazing guitar player.
Jack White: Him and Johnny came after the show; they came backstage and said, “Man, you are a conquistador.”
Bobby Harlow: We were forming the Go, and I told John Krautner, “Look at this guy play.” I know, but Jack was already prepared to join somehow. I think he wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band. I called Dave Buick, who Jack was hanging out with, and I said, “Do you think Jack would be interested in playing with the Go?” Dave said, “He’s right here.” So we went over to Dave’s house, and before we even asked, Jack said yes.
Dave Buick: Jack and I were hanging out every day together, so it was a pretty simple issue. It was a really good idea.
Jack White: It was something I’d always wanted to do, just be a guitar player in a band. And there was the gang mentality of it. As a drummer you almost sometimes don’t feel like you’re part of that gang, and I’d done that before in a couple of bands, and so it was a novelty for me to play the guitar and not have to sing or be a songwriter, and I could play solos, and so I was part of the mob, you know?
Bobby Harlow: We practiced on the third floor at Jack’s house—a big, big old Detroit home. It was decked out in red and white. He already had an idea of the White Stripes. Meg was his wife, and he was calling her his sister. He had the whole thing figured out. Jack was less involved in the White Stripes than he was the Go for a short period.
Matthew Smith: We did a three-song demo for the Go in Jack’s living room in Mexicantown. He already had the red-and-white theme going on there, and he was really into the recording process.
John Krautner: We got a deal with Sub Pop from Dan Trager, who was an A&R guy for them from Michigan. That was the first time we could tour. We had finished recording Whatcha Doin’. Dan flew into Detroit and took us to dinner at the Cajun place in Ferndale. They gave us $5,000 to buy a van, and we bought a shuttle bus from Farmington Hills hospital.
Dan Trager (former A&R, Sub Pop): I grew up on the east side of Detroit and the
Go were friends of my friends from high school. I moved up at Sub Pop from publicity to A&R, and I was digging through demos to sign my first band. I was in Detroit in Thanksgiving 1998, and people were telling me about the Go and the White Stripes. I got a tape of the Go, and I realized I was in love with this band.
Jack White: It was kind of shocking, having Sub Pop interested. We had dinner with Jon Poneman, and it was all great. I was so surprised that they cared about a Detroit band. I didn’t know that much about the music business. I also had the White Stripes going, and it just shows you that nobody cared about the White Stripes, really; that band was already happening, and so was Two Star Tabernacle. I was in three bands. The Go was the one that people were talking about at that moment.
Dan Trager: The Go was a real baby band, a very green developing artist. But I was knocked out by the songwriting and the guitar playing, which was a lot of Jack White.
Matthew Smith: There was a little debate about what was going to happen next, because we had to have a series of meetings to reassure Jack that he would be able to do the guitars the way he wanted to do them. I think he would have rather been producing the Go. He was used to running things. When he came into the Go thing, it was difficult for him to just step in and be a part of it.
Jack White: There were other recordings of songs that they chose alternate takes of. There’s a song “Meet Me at the Movies” that was recorded in my living room by Matt Smith, and there was a studio version done of it that I thought was very superior to it. I kind of lost breath arguing with them about it. I think it was a turn-off to them that I was actually so—me and Buick together, actually, so adamant about certain stuff like that. But it’s sort of like, it was their band, so …
Dan Trager: Soon after we got them in the studio it was like, “Jack is going to be out.”
Jason Stollsteimer: There is a version of that first Go record where there are so many Jack White solos, it sounds just like the White Stripes. And they were real good solos. They ended up taking a lot of them out.
Jim Diamond (Ghetto Recorders, producer; Dirtbombs, bassist): There was some weirdness between Jack and Matt because they had very different aesthetics. They were doing the recording at Ghetto, and we set them up, and they played the songs live, and Jack’s doing his solos. After we get done with all these songs, Jack said, “I’m ready to over dub on my solos, now.” Matt’s like, “No, you just did your solos. No.” That was just the practice, and then you’re going to do the real ones, the serious ones? I don’t know. I was the engineer, going, “Ooohhh,” looking at the clock.
Dave Buick: It was a long mixing process, and yes, there were some disagreements.
Bobby Harlow: There was the White Stripes thing with the Sub Pop deal. Is Jack able to do the White Stripes if he signs?
Dan Trager: Sub Pop was really all about contracts at that point. So we got the contract, and everyone else signed, but Jack was reticent. Soon I got a call from Jack, and he said, “Do I have to sign this? What do you think I ought to do?” I knew it was a classic moment, and I knew Jack was a major talent. I know I was supposed to strong arm him into signing, but I just didn’t think that this was the time to be strong arming. I said, “Do what you want to do,” hoping I’d get a chance to work with him again.
Bobby Harlow: He decided not to sign the contract, and I suppose maybe if he would have, it would have allowed Sub Pop to have their grip on the Stripes as well.
Dan Trager: We would have had right of first refusal for the White Stripes. But Sub Pop never ended up making a pitch for the White Stripes.
Jack White: By the time they were going to kick me out of the band—which was the only band I’ve ever been kicked out of—they had a contract, they had another contract there that I didn’t sign, and I just happened to be un-naive at that second to actually look through this other paragraph, and actually something caught my eye and I thought, “Maybe I better to hold off on this for a second.” I’m glad I didn’t, because if I had signed another contract, Sub Pop would have owned everything the White Stripes ever did. It was just like a little paragraph thing, and I saw it later on. No lawyers were even around, it was just something—I just don’t even know, they must have hired somebody, I don’t know—but I didn’t have one for sure. Maybe God just kind of held my hand back there for half a second. Because I didn’t know they were kicking me out. They were just saying, “You’ve got to sign this stuff.” So I signed one of them; I said, “I’ve got to look at this other stuff,” and they go, “Oh yeah, and by the way we need to talk—you’re not in the band anymore,” so it was sort of funny. I really didn’t know what to think. It was a really, really bad time because I had just quit Two Star Tabernacle because it just wasn’t as fulfilling as I thought, and the White Stripes was taking up so much more of my time. I was trying to concentrate; I was just between the White Stripes and the Go, so it was kind of a depressing time.
Dan Trager: You’re talking about immense egos in the studio. Matt Smith couldn’t be a more influential person in that first Go record. Jack disagreed with Matt’s approach, and Bobby’s ego was just as strong or stronger than Jack’s.
Matthew Smith: That was the beginning of bands getting on bigger labels, the Go on Sub Pop.
Tyler Spencer: The Go signing with Sub Pop made it frustrating for a lot of other bands; there was definitely some jealously on my part.
John Krautner: Detroit wasn’t accepted as a city worth of bands yet. It was just us that got signed to Sub Pop; a year later Jack is getting some recognition in the UK, and then his whole thing started up, which in turn made bands like the Von Bondies get big.
Chris Fuller: The image being drawn of Detroit was that everyone spent all day listening to Back from the Grave comps and came out at night in their Prince Valiant haircuts. It wasn’t true; the scene was really varied, there were all kinds of different bands.
John Szymanski: I bought everything I could out of the Crypt catalog.
Dave Buick: I don’t know that anyone ever managed to dispel that image, but it was irritating.
Chris Fuller: You could go between the Magic Stick and the Gold Dollar and see all these great bands, and it would not be accurate to say they were all garage bands. And most of the people who were in bands really knew a lot about music. At that time you couldn’t half-ass it and work.
Joe Burdick (The Dirtys, bassist, vocalist): Tim Warren came to town to see us after he heard the demos. He had a rental car, and we took the car out with him, and we started doing lawn jobs with his car. We were trying to run people down on Jefferson, trying to make him believe we were out of our minds.
Tim Warren: They were all over the fucking place; they were totally fucked up.
Joe Burdick: We were acting like junkies even though none of us were at that point. We told him we needed an image to get him to spring for jackets for us. Then we took him to an after-party at Jim Diamond’s and he fell asleep with jet lag, and we were all in his ear trying to do some osmosis on him telling him to sign the Dirtys. He woke up the next day and said, “Something tells me I should sign you guys.”
Tom Potter: The Dirtys were from Port Huron, and Bantam was still living in Lansing, and in Detroit they’re like, “Oh, these cocksuckers from Lansing and Port Huron get deals?” Both bands moved to Detroit pretty soon, though.
Joe Burdick: Tim gave us $5,000 to record the album, which we did at Ghetto. It was supposed to cover a lot of stuff, a van and more. It didn’t, but we did make sure we never ran out of beer. We ended up calling Tim a week before we left on tour and said we were out of money and said we needed another $1,000 for a van. We left a month before the album came out, so no one showed up at our shows. And there we were, splitting 99-cent Whoppers. That tour our van broke down at least ten times. We missed a lot of shows. We also crashed the van. Me and Marc had just smoked a joint, and we were driving at night through the middle of Wyoming. Marc says, “Hey, put on our record again.” You know, “Let’s listen to ourselves again b
ecause we’re awesome.” Marc’s driving, and he goes, “Man, we rule,” and right when he says that we’re going sideways on black ice on the highway. We ping-ponged between guard rails, and there’s steam coming from the engine. We popped a tire. By the time we got to LA everything was going cool. We knew Rick Hall, who was editing Leg World, a Larry Flynt magazine. We played Al’s Bar, and after the show, Rick says, “Hey if you want to, we can have you guys check out Larry Flynt publications.” We had already gotten an offer to check out Universal, but Larry Flynt, sure. So we went there the next day—no naked chicks. On the way out Rick goes, “Here, take this, and try and cover it up,” and it’s this box full of porn magazines and video tapes. Before we left I knew this girl who worked at the health department in Michigan who give me a bag of condoms. They were in a brown paper bag, and of course it ripped the first night out and it spills condoms all over the floor of the van. We get pulled over one night in Birmingham, Alabama. The cop shines his light in the van, and here’s this box of porn and rubbers all over the van, and we try to tell him the story. “Yeah, we know the editor of a porn magazine” and so on. He didn’t know what we were talking about, but he let us go. We also bartered some of the porn for chicken dinners at this chicken place in California. The guy’s name was Hector or something; he was this gang-banger with a scar running from his ear to his mouth. We invited him to the show, and he comes up and says he can play. Larry gives him his guitar, and we’re like, “What can you play?” He doesn’t know, so I say, “Johnny B Goode.” He plays nothing even close, just racket, and we looked at each other and he’s all into it, thinks he’s a rock star. At the end he even put a towel around his neck. So we’re hanging out behind the club, and he starts getting mad at us. He goes, “You’re gonna forget me,” and he pulls out a knife and starts waving it around. We’re like, “Listen, we’re sure not gonna forget you now.”
