Detroit Rock City (39 page)

John Brannon (
Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist
):
Larissa and I were living in the City Club, the old women's club on Elizabeth downtown, and it turned it into a squat. These little boys called the Guardian Angels moved in, which kind of turned into an abandoned building in the middle of Detroit where the crack industry started. It was the basis for
New Jack City
. As time goes on, people get greedy, you know, and all the cousins start moving in. And the thugs. Everybody's like, “We're taking over this building.” All the dope gangs moved in. Everybody in their right mind moved out. Me and Larissa were like, “Fuck it, we're squatting.” The owner had bailed. He lost all his money and moved to Puerto Rico. Negative Approach practiced there on the third floor in a ballroom. We lived up on the sixth floor. Then it kind of came around, you know, “You're cool, white boy, but you're going to have to start paying us protection.” Larissa goes up and goes, “Fuck you, motherfucker!” Okay, that didn't go over in the 'hood. They were shooting up the halls with shotguns. She had the gun down in her face. We were cool with the main dudes, but when the cousins and the thugs moved in, they didn't have any respect for the scene. They were going to kill us. They blew the door out with a shotgun after Larissa told them to fuck off.

Chris Moore, aka Opie (
Negative Approach, Crossed Wire, drummer, guitarist, vocalist
):
This guy pulled a gun on us and said, “I'm sick of you guys making all this noise.” John cooled him down by talking to him.

John Brannon:
I was cool for a minute holding off some of the dudes, and then it became a whole ten-story building full of thugs wanting to kill us.

Chris Moore:
Before that, John and Larissa lived at the Clubhouse over in the Cass Corridor. But in the City Club they had this cool apartment. The windows were always open and this city noise was coming in, and they had all these records and artwork. I loved hanging out there and them showing me this great art and different music. I got a great education from both John and Larissa.

Rob Michaels (
Bored Youth, Allied, vocalist
):
One time I was over there and there was this guy and he had some cocaine. He was trying to get me to shoot it. I was like, “You're not a fucking doctor.”

Dave Rice (
L-Seven, guitarist; producer
):
Larissa was into shooting cocaine. She just thought it was cool as fuck. It was really ostentatious—shoot up right there in front of people, you know, the great shock-value thing. We were not planning for the future.

John Brannon:
I started doing speed and using needles in '81. At that point it wasn't heroin. The Necros told me before I met Larissa, “Oh, yeah, she does that dope.” They were all straight edge. I was, whatever, you know, drink a 40, smoke a joint. Do some speed. The shit was highly available. I always had good weed.

Marc Barie (
scenester
):
Larissa was an addict from the day I met her. She told me right off that speedballs were the greatest thing and she showed me this piece of art, the plaster of Paris thing of a hypodermic needle. I checked it out for a little while; Larissa turned me on to shooting dope. I could see where that was going. It got to that point, for them, that the needles were just appearing regularly, and it was about shooting up several times a day.

John Brannon:
Me and Pete Zelewski would go to whatever punk gig, and we're always like, “Who's this chick?” Larissa stood out. Then we started going to see L-Seven shows. We had Negative Approach together, but they were doing all these big gigs. They opened for Bauhaus at Bookie's. We met them at some big outdoor gig and, we got along. Then my mother kicked me out of the house. Fifty cents, I take the Jefferson bus, come downtown, walk about three miles over to the Clubhouse from Jefferson, knocked on her door, and was like, “'Sup?” And I'd only met her twice. I'm like, “Um, I need a place to stay.” She says, “Come on in.” I had nowhere to go. I lived with her for about a year first, but we were best friends at that time. Then we actually became a couple.

Sherrie Feight (
Strange Fruit, Spastic Rhythm Tarts, vocalist
):
You'd go to Detroit for a show, you never knew what to wear. So you'd kind of wear what the guys were wearing. The first time I saw Larissa, I was like, “Oh my God.” She was in a slip and combat boots, her hair bleached out, with this milky white skin and those eyes. I wanted to be like her, but there was no way. I was this rich kid and she was from down on Cass; we were from different worlds.

Andy Wendler (
Necros, McDonalds, guitarist
):
We went to see the Clash at the Motor City Roller Rink, and Joe Strummer kicked his roadie. He was pulling the typical rock-star nonsense—kicking his roadie in the chest because his guitar was messed up. We said, “Okay, this is cool. We love it.” When we saw hardcore, it was right away the idea that this is our thing. We were seven years younger than the guys from the Clash, and the first punk wave and stuff. We played little shows, like basement shows and party shows, then actually started playing real shows with the Fix in Lansing at Club Doobee before the Freezer happened. As record collectors, we had all the 27 and Coldcock singles, the Bookie's bands and all that stuff. We liked it, but it wasn't us. The one thing that set us apart was that we wanted to do our own thing, and that was always very clear to us. We weren't gonna try to get in on the end of the Bookie's thing; we were just gonna do our own thing. We were also too young. There were many times playing Bookie's and other places with the Misfits, where we'd meet with the manager and he'd say, “All right, just come in right before you play, or whatever, in the back door or something.” It was always that hassle.

Chris Panackia, aka Cool Chris (
sound man at every locale in Detroit
):
Hardcore kids were cool because they didn't bathe and they had no hair on their head. A lot of them squatted. The hardcore kids played the Freezer, the Clubhouse, Cobb's Corner. They played places that were just inferior in every respect possible. Even a bathroom was a luxury. The bands wanted beer and to sell a few T-shirts, and that was good enough. They didn't have any high hopes. One more thing about that whole hardcore thing is, who would have thought John Brannon would be revered by every punk rock, hardcore kid in the world as like the greatest punk rock lead singer ever? I was the only sound guy that helped those punk rock guys out. They would always say, “Yeah, Cool Chris always treated us good, man. You were always really good to us.” I didn't want to be that rock sound guy—I was one of them.

Rob Michaels:
Dave Rice and Larissa took me to see the Necros, and the next thing I knew I was friends with all those people. At that time if you saw someone
who looked punk at all, you would cross the street to talk to them—it was a fraternity.

Corey Rusk (
Touch and Go Records, owner; Necros, bassist
):
I was younger than the other guys in the Necros, so from the time they had driver's licenses, we were going to Detroit, going to Ann Arbor to get records, or going to Detroit to try and sneak into a show, because we were underage. I quickly realized that my fake ID didn't work all that often. Once I had a driver's license, I could go on my own. It really wasn't ever like I wanted to be a promoter. It seemed like if I put on a show at some rental hall, then it's all ages and I get to see the band that I really wanna see. So I started renting out halls in the Detroit area when I was seventeen to put on shows of bands that I wanted to see.

John Brannon:
It was all promoted on the phone. You call up one dude. He'd call up six dudes. We'd pass out flyers at the gigs. All this shit was word of mouth. No Internet. No MTV. No radio play. Everything was done with cassette tapes and letters, so you're talking about creating something out of nothing. It started with fifteen people. We know the first five bands that began it all: the Fix, the Necros, the Meatmen, Negative Approach, L-Seven. You got another scene out of that scene when a bunch of those kids following those bands started magazines and bands and that shit became national. “Okay, we're bored, we live in Detroit, we're going to create nothing out of nothing.”

Tesco Vee (
Meatmen, Blight, vocalist, editor
, Touch and Go
magazine
):
The Freezer is where a lot of the next part of Detroit music started. It was about fifty feet by twenty feet wide—just a shit hole. A beautiful shit hole. It was like a frat boy fraternity for hardcore. There were a few girls, but for the most part it was guys.

John Brannon:
We never expected anything out of it except to write those songs and play the shows. The fact that Negative Approach were able to make records through Touch and Go Records and get the exposure through
Touch and Go
magazine was just great. We didn't know it was going to turn out to be this whole thing.

Keith Jackson (
Shock Therapy, guitarist
):
That scene had girls, but they all died. It's weird when you look at it, like these chicks that were hanging around all seemed to pass away over the years.

Hillary Waddles (
scenester
):
There were girls, but we were all people's girlfriends. It just wasn't the time for that yet—girls didn't get in bands; you didn't get the sense that you could be anything but a groupie or a girlfriend.

Gloria Branzei (
scenester
):
It was a little dick fest, and they didn't like girls. They were too cool for that shit; it slowed them down.

Hillary Waddles:
Those kids that got into the straight-edge nonsense really didn't like girls, some of those guys from Ohio. I was terrified to be down there in that area, but we went. I was a bougie girl from northwest Detroit, and here were all these suburban kids with no survival instincts. I mean, I may have been from there too, but I still grew up in Detroit, and you pay attention.

Gloria Branzei:
It was a really violent scene. I would kick someone's ass for the hell of it. At that time girls and punk rock did not go together at all. It was just rock-and-roll chicks.

Tesco Vee:
Washington, DC, had more girls in its scene, but it was a similar scene. In Detroit there were a hundred core kids that made up the entire scene.

Sherrie Feight:
Going to shows in Detroit meant you were gonna get hit. I still have a scar on my leg from being in the mosh pit.

Jon Howard (
scenester
):
There were a lot of people who knew about these older clubs before but couldn't get in because they had ID checks. I knew about these places when I first started shopping for records at places like Sam's Jams, but I was fifteen. My dad lived in San Francisco at the time, so the winter of '81 I went to the Mabuhay and saw Dead Kennedys, Husker Du, Church Police, Toxic Reasons—all these great bands. I came back here, and we had the Freezer for all ages. It opened the door for music for a lot of people, so kids could see live bands now. And hardcore was the music that was their first experience.

Andy Wendler:
The Freezer was on Cass and Willis in downtown Detroit. The guy who ran it was a speed freak, and we could get away with anything we wanted. It was right around the corner from where John and Larissa lived in the Clubhouse at that time, which was right between Cobb's Corner and the old Willis Art Gallery.

Hillary Waddles:
The Freezer was a crappy place. We went over to the Burger King to use the bathroom. No way I was gonna use the Freezer.

Corey Rusk:
Even though it was so inner city, and at the time Cass Corridor was really, really bad, it seems to have gotten cleaned up over the years. At the time all the people living in the slummy areas where the rental halls were at were not accepted. Punk rock was not accepted and was not mainstream, and if you looked like a punk rocker, you weren't cool; you were a freak. It's amazing that all these white kids invaded all these inner-city neighborhoods for these punk rock shows, and whatever violence problems there were, were usually between the white kids.

Keith Jackson:
A lot of us were from the suburbs, and we all wanted to be downtown where it was tough. And it was. There was no interference, which was fine. Cops never came around, and you were really on your own going to see bands. That stuff out of LA seemed phony to us; they would hang out and then go back to their parents' homes, and it seemed pretty easy. But at the time in Detroit you could go to a show at a place on Zug Island, and there were no cops, no security. You would bring in generators into a burned-out building, and that was your club. I stabbed a dude in the ass one time at a Subhumans show at Zug Island. There was this huge fight that broke out, and I mean it just kept on going for most of the show. He punched my girlfriend and I had a four-inch blade I carried around, and I stabbed him in the ass. He screamed like a little girl.