Detroit Rock City (15 page)

Toby Mamis (
manager, Alice Cooper, journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
I don't think being from Detroit was a handicap at all. The scene there was great, and it was healthy circuit of places to play. I think the bands all got their fair shot, just with varying degree of success.

Rick Kraniak:
The problem was that no one respected Detroit. You had five national ballrooms, four national promoters. Bill Graham on both coasts with the Fillmore. You had Electric Factory Concerts with Larry Magid in Philadelphia. You had Don Law in Boston; Howard Stein doing New York, Atlanta, Miami; and no one had any respect for these Detroit bands.

Donny Hartman:
The Frost opened for B. B. King for three nights at the Fillmore in San Francisco. We got three standing ovations. We're all excited, and we go into Bill Graham's big office at the end of the night. Graham looks at us and he goes, “Well, boys. You know I hate Michigan bands. I hate 'em. I don't like you guys, either. I don't like the music you play.”

Rick Kraniak:
It was like an attitude: “They didn't come from England, they weren't represented by Premier Talent,” who had Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, and so on. So it was really hard to get Michigan bands booked. The MC5 did a gig in
New York—it didn't go well for Graham, as I recall—and so it was really, really difficult.

Dennis Dunaway:
We followed the Stooges a couple of times at the Fillmore West. We took Detroit to the land of the hippies, and Bill Graham hated us. He thought we had ruined everything. We finally got big enough that he had to hire us.

Tom Weschler (
photographer, Bob Seger road manager
):
If you think about how many records are sold by artists out of Detroit, it isn't even close. You can tie New York, LA, every place else together, and it ain't even close. Everyone is hard tilt.

Dan Carlisle:
One of the things about the MC5 that people didn't understand is that MC5 was laughed at out there by the radio community outside Detroit. That group of people was very elitist, and I worked at some of these places; KLOS, places in San Francisco, and I would play MC5 and receive hell for it. They didn't understand that if you couldn't play the MC5, the Stooges, and Elvis at the same time, then you weren't a rock-and-roll radio station. When MC5 came out they wore sequins and big flashy clothes; they didn't wear jeans and T-shirts. They would tell me they weren't a hippy band; CCR was a hippy band. Every band out of Detroit had a shot. SRC, for example, made it as far as they could. I think that their manager, Pete Andrews, was very hard working and did what he could for them. He got them on Capitol, and they toured and didn't make it, simple as that. I understand why Iggy and the Stooges made it and others didn't: they never sat down and said, “We're going to be forerunners of a new sound.” They were something else; they were world beaters.

Iggy Pop:
What we were, we were just so special, we were just so out there that at some point you could see jaws drop, and you could see the thought bubble go, “Oh my God,” and people would just walk away.

Dick Wagner (
The Frost, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, guitarist
):
The Frost never made it really big and we should have. We got to tour quite a bit, but our label was just trying to put records in the Detroit stores, and we sold fifty thousand in the first month the first album came out. We could have sold it all over the US. We were making it happen, but never got the right support. Even the covers to our albums were terrible.

Bobby Rigg:
The reason the Frost never became huge was because we signed with the wrong record company. Vanguard had no idea what to do with a rock-and-roll band.

Donny Hartman:
We were touring out west, and we found our first album in a wastebasket at one radio station in California. The DJ said, “I didn't think you guys were coming in. Nobody ever called and told us.”

Michael Lutz:
We always said we were an Ann Arbor band. You know, Ann Arbor rings a bell for a lot of people because of the University of Michigan.

Mark Farner (
Grand Funk Railroad, guitarist, vocalist
):
People in Michigan hardly knew about us. We were more apt to be recognized in St. Louis or Atlanta, Georgia, or, you know, Miami or Dallas. That was all definitely directed by Terry Knight. We loved playing Detroit. We played the Eastown, you know. Are you shitting me? That was dreams come true.

Don Brewer (
Grand Funk Railroad, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, drummer
):
Well, we'd been kinda outside the Detroit loop. It was kinda like . . . they were rock snobs. Oh, they're just that band from Flint. We were being written off. It hurt. We definitely felt like we were on the outside, and we really didn't play in Detroit that much.

Peter Cavanaugh:
Thing was, Grand Funk would play around here, and it was not such a big deal because everybody knew them. Terry Knight was one of the best bullshitters I ever ran into. He had been a DJ at WTAC, then went to Detroit for a bit, then went to New York to work for Ed McMahon of
Tonight Show
fame, then came back here. Grand Funk was rehearsing at the IMA Auditorium in Flint, which I'm sure Terry arranged—it was a big stage. He lined those guys up and said, “I want all of you to play like your assholes are on fire.” He wanted motion on that stage.

Dave Marsh:
Terry did not bother us at
Creem
; we weren't on Terry Knight's radar. He was seeking bigger game than that. He cared what CKLW thought, not what
Creem
thought.

Ray Goodman:
Actually we, SRC, were signed to Capitol before Grand Funk. I was at those meetings in LA. We walked out of there thinking we had got a deal
with a billboard in every major college market in America, when in fact we got one in Ann Arbor. And Grand Funk got the deal. Terry Knight went in there, and he was a little more gung ho, and he could negotiate a little bit better I guess.

Mark Parenteau:
Terry Knight had pretty much conceived Grand Funk, sort of like Kiss was later conceived. Like, it was like an image first, and let's go ahead and put together a band that conforms to this. And Grand Funk was huge, huger than huge.

Don Brewer:
Terry really knew how to stretch the truth and make everything bigger and louder than real, and so forth and so on. He really was a Barnum & Bailey kinda guy. But we had starved with Terry too in the Pack. We were so broke Mark and I made a Butterfinger commercial. Farner and I were playing at a club in Cleveland, and some guy from Chicago that knew our manager called and said, “I need a couple of singers,” so they flew us down there at six in the morning. We go into the studio at nine o'clock, and they said, “Here, sing this,” and it turned into a Butterfinger candy bar commercial that ran for years.

Mark Farner:
As soon as we signed with our management team, they were able to get us an opening slot at the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1969. We borrowed a van from Jeep Holland and you know, in Ann Arbor, and he got us a guy to drive. We rented a U-Haul, and off to Atlanta we went. About half way down there—this was long before I-75 was finished and so we were taking a back road to connect to it and I was riding shotgun. I was napping and I woke up and I see this sign, I-75 to the right. I said, “Dude, I-75's that way.” He turns this van with the U-Haul on the back and rolls the U-Haul trailer down through the ditch. After we turned the trailer back up on its two wheels, we were kind of limping it on the side of the expressway to the next exit that had U-Haul trailers, and we were going to turn it in there. Then a tire came off the trailer—it actually went flying by, the tire, and passed us and bounced over in the median and over the top of this semitruck—and we thought it was going to go right through the wind shield but it didn't. We're going, “Oh shit! Oh shit!” and sparks are flying off our trailer.

Don Brewer:
But we made it and got on to the festival, this unknown band. The audience just went batshit for this band that nobody'd ever heard of, and that was really the starting point for Grand Funk. We didn't have a record deal, we didn't have gigs, we didn't have anything. They invited us back the next day; they put us at a later time slot. And again the audience went nuts, again. They brought us back
the third day, put us on—again, a better time slot—and so from there the word of mouth went all through the south.

Mark Farner:
They introduced us as “Grand Frank Railway.” The guy never did get it right that weekend. But we got on the Led Zeppelin tour in the fall. But it didn't go very good after the . . . at Olympia in Detroit.

Dave West (
West Laboratories, amplifier developer
):
I saw Grand Funk open for Led Zeppelin in October 1969, and they tore the place apart. I mean the fans were going crazy, standing the whole time, every song into the next. About halfway through, the manager for Led Zeppelin, Richard Cole, and a couple of Zeppelin roadies came around to Terry Knight and told him they had to come off now. And Knight refused. So they went over to where all the sound equipment was plugged in—this was pretty small PAs and stuff back then—and unplugged the whole thing. All of a sudden Grand Funk was standing there just holding their instruments.

Mark Farner:
Their manager, Peter Grant, came out and grabbed Terry Knight, and Terry thought he was going to kill him. So he told him to shut the band down or he was going to. Terry was just going, “A-a-a-baha . . . ,” and their manager shut down all the PA systems. They didn't go on for an hour and a half after we got off. Half the people left. They didn't want us on the tour anymore because we stole the show from them.

Rick Kraniak:
The only Grand Funk track that even got played early on in Detroit was “Time Machine”—kind of a I-IV-V progression, you know, blues rock, and other than that, they didn't even get played in Detroit. They were getting really big nationally, though. Detroit ignored them.

Jim Atherton (
manager, Terry Knight and the Pack
):
I was working with Mountain about a year after Grand Funk began to take off in 1969. I sold amps, and you know we were out there doing the thing with the Mountain, and at the time they were having this big hit with “Mississippi Queen,” first half of 1970. We were in their offices in New York, and they were telling about how they were going to Memphis and they were gonna be opening for Grand Funk and they were just gonna kick Grand Funk's ass—ya ta da ta da. They were going on and on with me about that and I was like, “Well, guys, let me know how that works out, will ya?” Just on volume alone, Grand Funk would prevail.

Mark Farner:
I always wanted to create this atmosphere where the only thing going was the music. That's why it was important to play really loud. I don't want people talking while we're playing.

Dave West:
I sold Mark his amps, amps that I made, West Amps. Mel used them too for a while. Mark did endorsements for me. And when they got really huge, they were flying all over, and they would come into the little airport near where I lived, in Lansing, Michigan. Send a couple guys on a private plane just to pick up sixteen JBL speakers, amps and some parts.

Don Brewer:
Once we got a record deal with Capitol Records, and once the first record,
On Time
, broke, we were immediately in limousines, and actually we got into chartering airplanes, and all that kind of stuff.

Dave West:
Money was no object—they had really made it. Farner used to have this set up, these amp heads were placed fairly close together, and he'd have a couple guys in the crew sit on a stool next to the amps during the live shows. Mark really cranked it up, and he would overload the tubes to get the sound he wanted. These were British made, $12 apiece. So the road crew guys are up there with asbestos gloves and, in a rack beside them, had these tubes. And when a tube would flame, they would quick grab it and put another in, just like that. They'd be almost on fire. They also changed all sixteen output tubes before each gig. $12 apiece, $200 overall—no big deal to them.

Mark Farner:
Terry would tell them to throw the tubes out after every show and put matched pairs, brand-new matched pairs in. And they're, you know, for a matched pair it was a couple hundred dollars. These guys are going, “Are you crazy? We can't throw these things away.” And it was our money.

Don Brewer:
We eventually found out we had been completely ripped off by Terry Knight. He brought us into New York, and he got a couple of his attorneys, and they had us sign these agreements that were totally in their favor—and this was back in the day[s] of hippies and brothers and everybody loving each other, and nobody's gonna rip anybody off, and so forth and so on.

Dave Knapp (
Terry Knight's brother
):
Remember that these guys were treated like kings everywhere and they went everywhere, and they were just kids—twenty, twenty-one years old. They didn't know how to handle money.

Don Brewer:
This deal was where Terry was getting all of the money, and we were basically making a paycheck. That's what ended our relationship with Terry.

Mark Farner:
We were paid $350 a week, man, and we thought we were big time, dude. You know from what we were making, we were big time. That was a lot of money. But we had no clue as to the amount of money we were actually making. That was all kept from us. We eventually got past it, but it was nasty.