Detroit Rock City (18 page)

Dave Marsh:
Bob Ezrin had made hit records at the time; he was a real professional, and he was a guy who knew how to make records and clearly how to make hit records because he had made one with Alice Cooper, “I'm Eighteen.” It was an important record. That's why he was there and he was also not coming from the street; he was not very blue collar. He was the first professional record producer I ever knew. Mitch and I were playing games, Barry and Mitch were playing games, and everyone was gaming everyone. It was a boisterous boys club, and then Bob walks in as a professional.

Mitch Ryder:
Creem
had some sway, and Barry was a good businessman and was able to sell it to Ezrin. He hadn't had any deep belief in the group Detroit, because Ezrin had been doing Alice Cooper. He was used to that kind of thing, but he wasn't used to the power that we had. He was not hands on because he was too intimidated. He was still a kid.

Bob Ezrin:
To do the Berlin album with Lou Reed, Lou's manager called me and asked if I would be interested in working with Lou. The reason was because they'd heard the Detroit version of “Rock 'n' Roll,” which they thought was the best cover of that song ever. He surely knew who Steve Hunter was because he knew the cover of Detroit doing “Rock 'n' Roll,” and he loved it.

Dan Carlisle:
It was a good time for Mitch; it was a time he really could have caught on again.

Dave Marsh:
Mitch, like any great singer, needed great material, and he wrote something he was doing, “I Found a Love” and the Lou Reed song “Rock 'n' Roll,” so he had the material.

Mitch Ryder:
There are two different bass players on the Detroit album: John Sauter and Ron Cooke. That reflects the changes that occurred in the band while
we were trying to record it. People were hurting people—physically, emotionally, financially. It was a high-turnover situation. The only constant there was the singer and the drummer, Johnny Badanjek.

Ron Cooke:
I like to call Johnny the union steward on that job. He ran the band, you know. He drove most of the time—that limo was badass. Yeah, we used to have to damn near threaten to kill him to pull him over to take a leak. We'd go six hundred fucking miles like that.

Mitch Ryder:
And the air conditioner didn't work. But I didn't want to lose my style. We would sit there, fucking dressed up with shades and fucking hats on and leather jackets, and it would be like 110 inside it. There would be puddles of water on our seats, but we were in the limousine.

Johnny Badanjek:
The problem with those guys was they were always drinking. These guys are out of their minds. And of course after the gig they're drinking beer, and you would never get anywhere. They wanted to stop. They would beg me. They would beg me, “Please, please. I gotta pee. I gotta pee.” And I'd pass the rest area up.

Ron Cooke:
We were working two hundred nights a year. We came home to Detroit to have fun and relax. Stay a couple days and ship out. We didn't go hungry, but there wasn't that much money being made long term. There were probably times we were playing for damn near nothing, except towards the end when we were getting good dough. We were playing at Montreal Forum and places. But that was short lived.

Johnny Badanjek:
What finally happened with Detroit is that the band became bikers. It was like we weren't musicians; we were like an outlaw bike club. We were playing clubs, and the club owners were starting to shoot at us, and it was just getting out of hand. The drinking especially. We pulled up at a Holiday Inn in Indiana, and a hairspray can fell out of the car and it's rolling, because there was just, like, this little hill in this parking lot. One of the guys is drunk, trying to walk a few steps, and he leans down to pick it up and it's still rolling. I'm watching him, and he's going through the whole parking lot, staggering around trying to pick this can up. It's like eleven in the morning on a Saturday in some college town, and we're going to play there tonight. Just what everyone needs to see: staggering around after a hairspray can. We had real bikers hanging around us—we're playing
Hell's Angel's parties. All the outlaw clubs, and then all of a sudden they'd all be fighting. It was time to stop.

John Sinclair:
I took over managing them, and it was one of the most bizarre experiences I've ever had in business. Over a period of six months the entire band changed, position by position, and finally Ryder quit singing. He had developed polyps in his throat, and he had to have this surgery. He was gonna stop singing, and he just walked away. And I was really enjoying working with his band. It was a great band: Steve Hunter, crazy organ player and bass player for the biker contingent, you know, Ron Cooke, Johnny Badanjek, the hippest drummer in the world.

Mitch Ryder:
We stopped, but not before Lou Reed showed up, backstage at the Lone Star Cafe in New York. It was a very blurred, slurred, druggie high, fucking thing he said. “You know, that's the way that song really, really was meant to sound.” He was talking about “Rock 'n' Roll.” I said, “Okay, can I have some of your drugs?” Yeah, that was kind of like his little payment. I want to congratulate you, because I'm about to fucking rip away your fucking guitar player. He took Steve Hunter.

Gary Quackenbush:
Heroin came in, and Osterberg and them got into it, and the Five got into it later. It didn't poison the scene. It was management that ruined the scene. No one could handle anything outside of Detroit. Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter didn't take it. Bob Seger never did; neither did Nugent. Alice Cooper didn't take it. People keep saying it was heroin that ruined the scene, but hell, no.

Leni Sinclair:
What was left of the MC5 legacy then? Trying to get rich and shooting heroin.

Dennis Thompson:
There were dope houses everywhere by the early seventies. Heroin was what killed it all. As the police clamped down, the birth of the war on drugs was beginning then. The drugs that people were taking became less and less available, and Quaaludes became available, cocaine became available, heroin was easy to get. People moved in that direction.

K. J. Knight:
I knew two guys who were strung out on heroin: Greg Arama and Terry Kelly. I loved Terry. I had bromance with the guy, you know what I mean? I liked him so much that to try to be able to relate to him, I would go to his house and I'd shoot up heroin so that we'd both be high on heroin. One night we were high, and he told his wife to sleep with me. I said no, you know, let's not do that. Not a good idea. But he would be nodding out and he would play, and his playing was still phenomenal.

Jimmy Recca:
All of a sudden the heroin come to town, and that winter of 1971, it was just fucking blight.

Leni Sinclair:
At the end of 1971 we had the concert for John, to get him out of prison. John Lennon came to Ann Arbor. Getting John Lennon was Jerry Rubin's doing. Jerry told him about John. Then he sat down and wrote that song, “John Sinclair.” Man, it would have been a total disaster if John Lennon hadn't shown up because we didn't sell too many tickets. Chrysler Arena holds fifteen thousand people, right, and by the time John Lennon came on the scene we'd only sold about four hundred tickets. It would have been a total disaster. What's weird to me is Yoko Ono, who's such a feminist and so into female causes and all that stuff. She never asked to meet me. She never talked to me. I was the wife of the political prisoner. Everything that comes out of her mouth is all metaphysical, do-goody stuff. John Lennon was down to earth. The difference was John Lennon had an education in England. Europeans have an education so they all kind of know a little bit about the class struggle and Marxism and capitalism. Yoko Ono doesn't know any of that shit. No, to her it's all about peace and changing yourself. Right, but she was living in America.

Hiawatha Bailey:
We were putting the Free John Sinclair show together at the White Panther headquarters, and I'd get these calls from people trying to be guest listed and bands trying to get on the bill. Someone called and said, “It's Yoko Ono,” so I just hung up the phone. Someone called back and said, “Hello. This is John Lennon. Can I speak to the chief of staff of the White Panther party or Dave Sinclair?” So I clicked off, put him on hold for second, and came back and said, “Hello. This is David Bowie and Dave and I are busy right now.” Then it rang back and I listened to the message being left and I ran into Dave's office and said, “Shit, Dave, I think John Lennon is on line one.”

Don Was:
I lived in Ann Arbor in 1971, when I was going to school there, when Sinclair was in prison, and they had that concert with John Lennon, which I attended. David and I heckled John Lennon. We requested “Mr. Moonlight.” Just a couple of smart asses, that's all we are, man.

Hiawatha Bailey:
I'm at the arena, and John and Yoko are pulling up in their limo there, mobbed—I mean these fans are ravenous and I was trying to keep these people off him. So they get in and go backstage, and Lennon starts trying to teach these guys with him—David Peel and those Eastside New York guys—a song he wants to play. I was standing around, making sure no one bothered them. And he looks at me as he got up and said, “You look like someone I can trust,” and hands
me this little glass bottle of blow, and I went yayayayaya—I watched them play from the stage.

Then, three days later John Sinclair was let out of prison and he dissolved the party. I had nothing to do except for return from whence I came. I lived over on Fountain Street, and I turned into the most affluent distributor of the catalyst of enlightenment that this town has ever seen.

Dave DiMartino (
journalist, editor
, Creem
magazine
):
I had come to Michigan from Miami and was going to Michigan State University. I was working on campus radio—this was late 1971 and it's a dead Sunday afternoon in December. There's a knock on the door, and it's two guys from WABX and John and Leni Sinclair. They came by specifically because he had just gotten out of prison and wanted to know if I wanted to interview him. Sinclair was talking about the benefit, the John Lennon benefit for him in Ann Arbor that had been held maybe a week or so before, and he was nice and friendly. But the thing that was great was that—and this just displays my ignorance about chronology, about the legal system, about his particular situation. All I knew about him was he was in jail for a couple of joints. So I asked him—and this is in front of his wife and the big, impressive WABX DJs, which I didn't grow up with so I could give a shit—“Did you enjoy the show?” Of course it was a benefit for him when he was in prison. I didn't know what the fuck. They looked at me like I was a pinhead moron. And it's like, “Oh, oh, you wouldn't have seen the show.” But it was like the essence of Detroit uncool beyond belief.

Leni Sinclair:
After John got out of prison at the end of 1971—that's when the real struggle started.

Billy Goodson:
I came back to Ann Arbor and John had gotten out of jail, the house on Hill Street closed down, and everyone had moved out. The SRC had fallen apart. The Stooges had moved. MC5, no more. By then it was Detroit people stayed in Detroit—came to Ann Arbor for some fun and monkey business and all that, but always went back to Detroit. But the two twains never met. It was like, you don't bring Detroit people into Ann Arbor. One of the MC5 stompers and I rented out this apartment. She was like a groupie, but the Stompers were chicks you saw in Crumb books; they would beat the living crap out of you—thus the Stompers. They were groupies and bodyguards. They all had their legs spread and whatever and everybody got in there. They lived in the house, and when the Five moved out, a lot of the gals—well this one, she looked just like Janis Joplin, her name was Marcia Rabideau—they moved on. So we got a place. It was like a trilevel place, and Marcia and I lived on a middle floor that went up to the top floor,
and my bedroom was in the middle and along with that middle was another apartment where Scott Richardson and Shemp [Richard Haddad] lived. I was selling coke. The guy that I got my supplies from got busted, and the gal that was his main dealer in Ann Arbor got busted too. I got a phone call telling me to get out of town. So I went to Scotty's apartment to tell him about it, and in walks this naked chick who looked just like David Bowie. I looked down and she had a snatch and I was like what the?—it was Angie Bowie. She was supposed to be there to sign Iggy up to MainMan, but Scotty got hold of her, and he always gets what he wants.