Detroit Rock City (2 page)

Dan Carlisle (
WABX, WRIF, DJ
):
How many places in the US had all the forces of immigration come together in just a twenty-five-year period? It was because of the auto money. In Detroit we had Okies, folks from Tennessee and Kentucky, black people from Georgia and other parts of the Deep South. We had people from Germany and Poland and Jewish people, and so on the radio you had Polish music, German music, gospel on Sundays, hearing all this music in this one city. Mitch Ryder made all these records composed of these sounds; the MC5 heard all this and put it together. The so-called San Francisco and Los Angeles scenes didn't have that, and you'd find most people out there were from places like Ohio or Wisconsin. We had the real thing, working-class music.

Russ Gibb (
Grande Ballroom, promoter
):
We were called factory rats when I was growing up. I worked in the DeSoto plant, which was part of Chrysler, on Wyoming and Ford Road. I put hubcaps on the DeSotos. Most of the cabs in New York at one time were DeSoto. The big thing on that car was it had a shield that went over the headlights.

Mitch Ryder (
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Detroit, solo, vocalist
):
My dad got me a job working in the factory before I started getting serious about music. It was a tool-and-die factory that did outsourcing for GM. We did gear shift levers. I was fifteen.

Stirling Silver (
scenester
):
I worked for General Motors on the Cadillac line. One of my high school friend's mom was the head of personnel at Plant 21, which was a Fisher Body plant. They made fifteen Cadillac limousines a day. At the same time the Lordstown, Ohio, factory was kicking out Chevy Vegas at a hundred per hour.
There was a big union thing because it was too fast a line. The average line was running sixty to seventy cars per hour, so that'd give you a relative frame of reference. The Fisher Body line was making an average of fifteen a day, and if they're really busy, seventeen or eighteen a day. So the line can move like this minute hand on a watch. You couldn't see it move, but if you look over there and then look back, you could see that it had moved.

VC Lamont Veasey (
Black Merda bassist, vocalist
):
My father worked at Ford. I was born in Mississippi. I didn't actually live in the inner city of Detroit until I was thirteen almost fourteen, but my parents, they took me to Ecorse, Michigan, until I was thirteen, and then we moved to inner-city Detroit. It was like a culture shock to me because where I was at, it was like semirural and the people were like from the South.

Robin Sommers (
designer
, Creem
magazine, scenester
):
I went to art school and then went to San Francisco in 1966, but there were no jobs; all the hippies had them. So I got back and I went to work at Ford. I was working on the assembly line, the merry-go-round, as a spot welder. I welded a whole side of a car. We made '67 Mustangs and Cougars. It was horrible.

Ron Cooke (
Detroit, Gang War, Sonic's Rendezvous Band bassist
):
My dad emigrated from Canada in 1922. He was a boiler operator man. A big oil refinery deal, he was a stationary engineer. I went in and out of the ironworkers union in Detroit in the midsixties. I did about two and a half years in the apprenticeship there.

Don Was (
Was
(
Not Was
)
bassist, vocalist; Traitors vocalist, producer, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop
):
The one thing you don't wanna do the Detroit way is to head to the factory when you're looking for work.

Mark Norton (
Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
I started working at the Ford plant when I got out of high school. It was deadly, just going in there every day. The money was great, though. This is why so many people came to rely on that for a living—easy work, no education needed, and the money was great.

Hiawatha Bailey (
Stooges roadie, Cult Heroes, vocalist
):
I was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1948. The thing was, Detroit was an industrial complex. My grandfather worked for the railroad; he was a Pullman porter working on the railroad
when they were settling from the East Coast to the West Coast. He knew there were better things to be had up North. My parents decided they wanted to hit it. My dad got a job at Chevrolet Gear and Axle in Hamtramck. I won a record player through this contest by General Motors called, “Why I'm Glad My Dad Works for General Motors.” I made that crap up that I wrote; I can't even remember why I said I was glad. Because he can buy me stuff and I can get out of the house? Me and my friend Carl Grimes would take turns going through this rack of old 45s at the store and finding all this off-the-wall stuff, and we'd go down and we'd play it on the record player that I won.

Mark Norton:
In Detroit either you go to college or you go work in a factory. Give a bottle of whiskey to the foreman and you got a job on the line. My dad's friend knew somebody who ran the line, and that's where I ended up. I met this guy named Willie who'd been in the paint department for twenty-three years. When I came in, it was “Hi Willie, how you doing, what's going on, Willie?” He was painting cars. “Willie, how long you been wearing a respirator?” And the guys doing the pinstriping down the cars, they came in to work just about half-assed bombed because to hold a paintbrush and have the car go by you on the line, and they're doing that thing. Man, they were ripped to the tits doing the pinstripes on the car. I used to pick up shifts shoveling silicon sand into the furnaces that melted down the engine blocks; it would be like 125 degrees in there. Everyone was working in a factory; that's what it was, nothing special.

Brian Pastoria (
producer
):
Because of the auto industry, you didn't have to speak English or have a degree but could get a great job with benefits. And with American popular music and the auto industry also taking off, it spawned this wild community made of people from other places. The younger people wanted to escape. They didn't want to end up working on the line. And when Elvis and the Beatles hit, they realized things could be different for them. They could play music. And that was the way out, so they played anywhere they could.

Tom Morwatts (
Mutants, guitarist
):
There were these teen clubs, and there were about five of 'em in the Metro area. Dave Leone ran one near my house on the east side. He eventually started Diversified Management Agency, DMA, which was the biggest booking agency in the Midwest. We ended up signing with them later. Dave Leone, when I was a kid, had all those teen clubs, drawing kids from about fourteen to eighteen. Bob Seger, Amboy Dukes, Rationals—they were playing at those places all the time.

Stirling Silver:
There was also Fries Auditorium, over by Grosse Pointe, where I was from. I saw Bob Seger do “Hey Jude” by himself on the piano that was in that room. The song had just come out.

Russ Gibb:
I started teaching in a little town called Howell, Michigan, and my salary was $2,200 a year. Howell was a two-hour drive from Detroit at the time. They didn't allow dancing, and later on the town became the center for the John Birch Society. They thought that was the work of the devil. I also worked part time in a radio station, so I knew the kids loved music. I thought “Well, gee, I knew the guy at some of these record hops, Robin Seymour, who was a local DJ.” There were a few others doing this. So I put this show on. I think I spent $25 to rent out a Saturday night at the Elk's Club or the Moose Club or some club up on Grand River in Howell. I spent $10 to have mimeographed fliers put out. I gave them to certain kids I knew and said, “So and so is going to be here,” and I got a hold of Bob Maxwell, who was a big radio guy back then. Not rock music—he was more pop. So he advertised it a couple of times that he was going to be up in Howell. He got $50 for coming up. So I spent $25 for the hall and $10 for the flyers, and after I paid Maxwell, I was way ahead of the game in money terms. Because I made in one night more than what I could in about two weeks of teaching. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was back then. Now I knew how to make money on rock things, and I was still working part time at the radio station. I got a reputation for knowing how to make record hops work.

Tom Morwatts:
But even cooler than the record hops was the high school I went to, Notre Dame High School in Harper Woods. It was legendary for its dances. They were so needy for money, it was kind of a new school, and they had college-level sports facilities, and they needed to raise money. This one priest, Father Bryson, turned out to be a natural promoter, so they assigned him to the job. He had started out doing, just like every other high school, teen dances. But his teen dances, because they had a bigger facility, turned into concerts. He got the Supremes and the Temptations, Shadows of Knight. Bob Seger. People would come from all over the Metro area, from the west side, from all the suburbs, because of the acts that were playing there.

Jerry Bazil (
Dark Carnival, drummer
):
We had these great bands playing at our high schools. Teegarden & Van Winkle, the SRC, the Up, Third Power—they all played at high school dances at places like Mercy High School and Catholic Central. This was the late sixties, early seventies.

Jaan Uhelszki (
journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
The Who played at Southfield High School in 1967. I don't think that the people who showed up were necessarily students.

Pete Cavanaugh (
WTAC, DJ
):
I was on the air at WTAC in Flint, and we were doing sock hops all over Michigan, and we could promote them on WTAC because our signal went so far. Punch Andrews, who went on to manage Bob Seger, was doing the Hideout. And there was the Hullabaloo franchise. Sock hops moved into live bands. It had to happen that way. Mark Farner's first band or Don Brewer's band—these were just starting, and now they had a place to play. Seger got his start that way. I'd have sock hops, and Seger would play afterward.

Robin Seymour (
CKLW/WKNR, DJ, host of
Swingin' Time
TV show
):
Bob Seger did one of his first big live things at the Roostertail, where I was puting on events. He had his Beatles haircut, a little cap on, and he walked on the stage and had to walk right off; he was so nervous he had to go throw up. I went over to Punch Andrews, his manager, and I said, “Get him out of here, I won't have anybody doing my shows on drugs.” Punch says, “He doesn't touch drugs. He's nervous, he's scared to death.”

Pete Cavanaugh:
After a while you would have bands, and the only time records would be played was between bands. The sound was shitty. No one knew any better. Question Mark and the Mysterians got their first gig there at one of our places, Mt. Holly, south of Flint. We got everybody: Bob Seger, the Rationals, Dick Wagner and the Bossmen. At the same time Jeep Holland and A-Square Production in Ann Arbor were doing things. Jeep put his bands at Mt. Holly and booked the whole year in advance at one point.

Scott Morgan (
Rationals, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, guitarist, vocalist
):
Jeep was also our manager. He was like the Svengali of the Rationals: produce, find us songs, book us—you know, anything you can think of. We had this Dodge van with the Rationals logo printed on the side. You could see us coming from a mile away. Jeep was also a really bad driver, and one night he was driving the van to a show in Lansing and I was in another car behind them. Jeep was cutting in and out of traffic and eating pizza and drinking a Coke all at the same time, not paying attention to what he's doing. He passes this car in front of him and just keeps going up the side of the road, down the embankment, rolls the van three times. My brother was in the van, in the passenger seat. When it rolled and the top came off,
they just got thrown off on the ground. My brother was hardly hurt at all. Jeep was a little banged up. He did everything else pretty well. Just not driving.

Deniz Tek (
Australia's Radio Birdmen, guitarist, vocalist
):
The Rationals were doing this British Invasion thing, just before everything happened. They would play high schools. Pretty soon bands moved from the schools and would play TV shows, like Robin Seymour's
Swingin' Time
. He was a DJ and he also had a TV show.

Robin Seymour:
We found the Rationals. Art Cervi was my talent coordinator; he later became Bozo the Clown. He was the best Bozo in the country. We discovered them and played their first record.

Then they did a cover of the song “Respect” in 1966, and it looked like they were going to take off. Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records called me when the record was taking off, and I connected him with Jeep Holland.

Scott Morgan:
Jeep turned us on to “Respect,” and he just played it one time and we said, “Well, yeah. I'd like to do that song.” It came out and it was a hit in Detroit.

Robin Seymour:
Jeep called me and said they asked Wexler for $5,000 up front and Atlantic said, “Heck no, we won't pay it.” Wexler called me back and said, “What's with these kids?” An unknown by the name of Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic a week later, and her first hit was “Respect.” That would have put them on the map. The Rationals sold fifty thousand copies of “Respect” in Michigan alone. It was frustrating.

Scott Morgan:
Doing “Respect”—first it was Otis Redding in 1965, us in 1966, and Aretha Franklin in 1967. I think Aretha decided that if we could do it, she could do it better. Of course, she did.