Detroit Rock City (43 page)

Lacy X:
A lot of the newer bands were inner-city, working-class Detroit, and the other ones were suburban kids. People were getting killed, people in bands.

Andy Wendler:
It was a lot of Detroit, south-side skinhead dudes. You know, a lot of access to fireworks and guns and that kind of thing. John and Larissa were hooked up, and they had a house in suburban Ann Arbor.

John Speck:
I was just fucking blown away by John Brannon. The Laughing Hyenas inspired me even fashion-wise. The way he looked. The way he carried himself at that show, and of course he was just fucked out of his fucking mind and totally oblivious on heroin. I knew and revered Negative Approach, and so it was weird to see him in this new band, the Laughing Hyenas. He comes out, and his hair was long and all in his face, and he had a straight mic stand. He comes out, and he's got long, like, button-up work shirt and jeans and engineer boots, and he had a six pack with him, and he set the six pack right at the base of the mic stand and never fucking said anything or looked at anybody, and the band was playing, doing some sort of, like, instrumental opening thing. Larissa's guitar is a killing loud Fender Twin in a buzz, and the band's playing, and he reaches down and he never looked at the audience, and he fucking cracks a beer, and he just fucking starts pulling off it, and he just drains most of a beer, and just fucking plants one foot on the base of the mic stand and his hand and just never opened his eyes and just fucking, “RRRAAAAAAH.” You could tell he was just fucking doping and out of his mind. Then I would hear the stories about, like, you know, Brannon was at Off the Record in Royal Oak, flipping through the records in there, and there's some little kid in the hardcore section, and Brannon's a couple of aisles or rows away, and he sees the kid, and the kid is looking at the Negative Approach record, and Brannon's like, “I was in that band.” The kid looks at him and he's like, “Fuck you, hippie.”

Rachel Nagy (
Detroit Cobras, vocalist
):
I used to live in the house Kevin Monroe's dad owned in the Cass Corridor. But that motherfucker. I guess there were talks to turn the place I was living in into a coffee shop but no one told me. So Kevin kicks me out. He's a piece of shit for that. He had a bunch of his mom's antique sofas and stuff in there. I bought five 40s and I peed on everything. I peed in every
sofa, corner, everything—everything I could pee on I peed on. Fuck you, dude. You know what? You think I'm going to go live on the street in the Corridor? Well, there you go, bro. And then he fucking locked up my shotgun to make sure I didn't try to steal anything. Meanwhile, his dad works for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and has a beautiful, beautiful house in Indian Village.

Kevin Monroe (
Laughing Hyenas, Mule, bassist
):
I grew up at 6 Mile and James Couzens until I was eight. Then we lived in Indian Village. My dad was in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for forty years. He started there at a young age, like in '68. We moved into the city when everyone else was moving out, like six months after the riots. My parents were very optimistic.

I got into the scene—well, I had a good friend, Veronica Webb. She became a model later on and was in some Spike Lee movies. She used to go to shows with Negative Approach and L-Seven. Then the Graystone. I knew Mike Danner, who was playing drums for the Hyenas at first. Mike was from Milford—way out there. At least John and I had some Detroit roots, but a lot of the kids were from the suburbs. You can't choose where you come from, of course, but they were from West Bloomfield and Royal Oak. Mike asked me if I wanted to try out for bass in this band he was in. The whole thought was that bass wasn't all that important and that whoever they got was just going to leave and they would replace him anyway. Mike told me this at the beginning. It was an honor to be asked, and I thought to myself, “Wow, I would love to be in this band, but I can't play. There is no way I want to be disposable.” So I gotta compete with some of the coolest bass licks I could come up with and have my own, like, totally original sort of sound. Not that that was—you know, I could not do that necessarily, but that was my thought, anyway—was to come up with something that would make me different enough that I would stand out as being a crucial part of the band. They were in Ann Arbor already, and I had moved to Ann Arbor. Danner and Brannon and Larissa had moved to Ann Arbor only because you could get a practice space without having to worry about getting your equipment stolen. I mean, Detroit in the seventies, eighties—we were broken into at least eight or nine times at my father's house.

John Brannon:
We came outta Detroit in 1984. We didn't find any place to live right away. Me and Larissa, we just loaded up all our shit, a suitcase and a guitar. We just drove to Ann Arbor. We were like, “We're going to live in Ann Arbor.” We'd just find out where there's a party, park the van out there, and live there for a couple of days and move on to the next place. Then we discovered these things called frat houses. So people would come up to us: “Do you guys know anybody
here?” And we were like, “Oh yeah, we're with John.” There was always a John, you know. They would have these community kitchens. We'd go in there and make our food and drink all their fucking beer and go to the next party. We lived out of the van for about two to three weeks. We didn't give a fuck. We were twenty-five years old, we had no money, so we just lived in my van. About two or three weeks into it we all got jobs. I worked at Harry's Army Surplus, and we rented out this big country house. It was $500 a month and belonged to this old doctor in Ann Arbor. It was out where the Stooges used to have their place. It was right out on Packard and Platt. Two acres of land, three-car garage, six bedrooms—so we all moved into that bitch. We were like, “Alright, we're setting up shop here, man.” Then we pulled in Kevin Monroe.

Kevin Monroe:
When I met John I had never played bass. I had played guitar, but the bass was new to me.

John Brannon:
The only song he knew how to play was “Hell's Bells” on guitar. I'm like, “Alright, this is a start, dude. You can go from here to here.” Kevin and Larissa learned how to play from scratch together.

Kevin Monroe:
They were concerned because I had combat boots. They were worried that I was going to be dressing too trendy at that particular point. They didn't suggest anything. It wasn't that. They weren't trying to insult me. Larissa was like, “Well, we weren't really sure, because you had a uniform.” I didn't have a uniform.

John Brannon:
Mike was not the best drummer but I figured this is everything I need to make the greatest band in the world. We moved to the land of the Stooges, and we're going to start from scratch. We're going to get a house, which was about half a mile from where the Stooges house was. There were people hanging out around us by then, and it was cool.

Kevin Monroe:
I started driving a cab, which was a little rough. I was just seeing the nightlife. It was like being a cop or something. You see the underbelly of society in such a way that, at first, it was very exciting. It was more of an adventure than a job. But was it a healthy lifestyle? I was young, and I was kind of . . . I thought I was Travis Bickle. I got a lot of fares that wanted to know where to score, and I knew.

Preston Long (
Wig, Mule, P. W. Long's Reelfoot, solo, guitarist, vocalist
):
I met Kevin Monroe at the cab place in Ann Arbor. He introduced me to Touch and Go
music. I knew nothing about punk rock, and I was in my midtwenties, and I was flunking out of the university. I thought he was kind of a dandy and an asshole and a smartass, and we got along. Next thing I know he was crashing on my couch. I had been listening to country blues and this stuff, and then I ended up in Wig. I didn't feel too good at the time. I wasn't perceiving the world correctly, and the music came along as a therapeutic outlet. It wasn't a form of art exactly for me. I had roommates, this one guy who played guitar, and we ended up seeing White Zombie. They played one song and the cops shut the whole thing down; this was the
Soul Crusher
tour, so it must have been their first tour. That was cool, so I joined Wig. We shared a practice space with the Hyenas.

Kevin Monroe:
Before we moved to the real Hyenas house, we had a place near Packard that they sold out from under us. This guy shows up wanting to buy the house. He told us that the owners thought that we were a cult. Finally we got the Platt Road house, which was the Hyena house for years.

John Brannon:
One day I'm walking down the street, going to the party store, and I hear this band. You know, coming out of the basement. I'm like, “God damn, that sounds like Ron Asheton.” Sure enough, like two houses over, Destroy All Monsters. That's where Michael Davis lived, and I ended up becoming great friends with that dude.

Jim Magas (
Couch, Lake of Dracula, vocalist, electronics
):
I was working at Harry's Army Surplus, and Brannon called me and said, “You wanna meet Michael Davis?” It was during this Ann Arbor Art Fair, some street fair thing. I went down, and Davis was shirtless, wearing a bullet belt and sunglasses, standing in front of Schoolkids records. We were drinking 40s, and he was still looking like a revolutionary.

Rob Miller:
Michael Davis was one of my stage hands when I was helping run the State Theater. I would pay him $40 a day to hump gear, and this was when the MC5 had yet to have been rediscovered and appreciated. At some point Michael Davis was selling U of M painter caps on football days in Ann Arbor.

Gloria Branzei:
He was picking up cans. He was doing anything for money. It was sad. Ron was living with Niagara, and they were all pissed about Iggy all the time. He left them, or at least that's how they felt. Those older Detroit bands didn't do very well for a while.

Dave Feeny (
Hysteric Narcotics, the Orange Roughies, keyboards, guitar, founder, Tempermill studio
):
I became tight with Rob Tyner and he would bring these bad, young rock bands to produce in a studio I had in my parents' basement in Livonia. They paid him $500 a pop. That was it.

Jim Magas:
Scott Asheton would come into Harry's and talk about shit. I'd ask, “Are the Stooges gonna get back together?” and he said, “Yeah, we want to, but Iggy's not into it,” and he was all, “How great would it be?” GG Allin and Dee Dee Ramone was living there too at the same time. Dee Dee came into Harry's; he was holding these tie-dyed shorts up to the mirror, and he asked me to go clothes shopping with him. I said yes, but he never came back.

John Brannon:
Michael Davis had his motorcycle parked in my garage for two years when he was going through a split with his wife. We were drinking together, and I was doing a lot of dope. He was banging this chick that was living with us at the time. Out of those couple houses we had, that's really where my Monkees vision came full circle. When I was growing up it wasn't about the Beatles or the Stones; maybe my sister was in that shit, but I was at that period where my first vision of rock 'n' roll was the Monkees when I was six. We all live with the band in a house where we jam, and we can't pay our rent. We started writing songs immediately. The first Hyenas song was “Stain.” I would come up with the riff to a song even before this all started, and I was sure somebody could play it better.

Preston Long:
I don't know how they got by. They never worked. They had people bring them pot and beer and whatever else.

Kevin Monroe:
Pretty soon we needed a drummer, and we put out an ad in the paper that Jim Kimball answered. He was an athlete. He used to be a diver, like his brother the Olympian, Bruce Kimball. Bruce Kimball won the silver. And his dad was a diving coach. So he worked out and he liked to party, but not on the same kind of level that we did. He was always into staying in good shape. He became more physical on the drums once he joined the Hyenas. He became a monster.

John Brannon:
The whole time that Jim Kimball lived with us, he never knew what was going on with the dope. He would just take acid and go wind surfing with his dog. He had his room, but he kept it locked. He wouldn't even keep his Campbell's soup in the kitchen. He had it all up in his bedroom. We were like, “Jim, we're not gonna eat your soup.”

Peter Davis:
Kimball was a Popeye-looking motherfucker. He was batshit crazy, but he stayed away from the drugs that everyone else was doing. He had some kind of accident in diving before all this. He was on his way to being an Olympian, and he got hurt and he never really recovered. Jim was a pretty clean and athletic guy, driven and really talented, but a few bricks shy of a load upstairs.