Detroit Rock City (5 page)

Patti Quatro (
Pleasure Seekers, Cradle, guitarist
):
My sister Nancy was dating Ted for a long time. My dad had a car chase with him one time. Nancy snuck out of the house to go out with Ted, and they're tooling around, and my dad gets in his car and follows him, and they had a chase all over town. He never caught him. Ted got real pissy when she dumped him. She just didn't want to date him anymore; she was over him.

K. J. Knight:
Everyone fell in love with Nancy. She was beautiful. I had a big crush on Nancy, and we kinda dated for a couple of weeks.

Suzi Quatro (
Pleasure Seekers, solo, bassist, vocalist
):
Nancy and I went to New York at one point to find a girl drummer, and Jerry Nolan showed up. He looked like a girl anyway, with the long hair and the makeup, so we said okay. He came to Detroit and stayed at my folks' house. But he fell in love with Nancy, and we said, “Well, okay, you gotta go.”

Pete Cavanaugh:
Ted Nugent and Mitch Ryder had the most fearsome road crews of anyone. They were mostly bikers and ex-criminals who had a lot of experience beating the fuck out of people, some of whom had spent some time away for beating the fuck out of people. I had Ted at one show, and it was getting late, and some guy came up to the front—the stage at Sherwood Forest allowed people to get six feet away from the band—and started giving Ted shit. And there was a big roadie behind the amps, but this guy couldn't see him. Ted knew he was there, though, and he starts to yell back at the guy and invites him up on stage to kick his ass. The guy made the mistake of getting up there, and it was like watching the spider and the fly. The roadie came out and threw this guy ten feet into the crowd. Brutal.

Ted Nugent:
I got thrown in jail one time because I looked like a hippy. We were playing in Traverse City, what I think was the Cherry Festival, and we were getting ready to go on stage. At that time I wore a loin cloth, a belt knife, and moccasins, headband, and a fur vest—dressed up like an Indian. Because a lot of my songs were starting to reflect my hunting lifestyle and I started shooting a bow and arrow on stage back then, so I dressed like an Indian. Because I looked like the ultimate hippy, and there was a broken knife on my belt that was perfectly visible, this one hot-dog, corrupt cop, power-abusing, punk cop, arrested me for a concealed weapon, a felony. My stage outfit had the knife on a belt. If it was concealed, how could he see it? I was literally walking up the steps to get on stage, with my guitar on, and he stopped me on the steps and handcuffed me and put me in jail for two days, in a drunk tank with a bunch of migrant workers that I had to beat up to get toilet paper. I got my life savings—I think it was a couple grand—to bail out, and they finally dropped all the charges because the photos taken of me prove that nothing was concealed. All that, and the knife didn't even have a blade.

K. J. Knight:
There was a point that I kinda thought that, you know, Ted's career was starting to go down the toilet. I know that he blames the fact that he went through a lot of musicians, but he canned a lot of musicians too. It's not as if they all quit on him. I think I might have been—me and Dave Palmer might have been the two guys, the only two guys that ever quit the Amboy Dukes. Everybody else he eventually fired. While I played with Ted, starting in about 1970, drugs never really even entered my mind. You know I did a lot of drugs, but there were times when my music was kinda like the main focus, and I kinda got away from that for a while, and I kinda got away from my criminal activities.

Ted Nugent:
When KJ joined that band, that started a great run. He and I shared an apartment on 6th Street in Ann Arbor. I think it was 609 6th Street.

K. J. Knight:
Ted handled everything on his own. He drove the limo he had bought, he drove it, he helped unload the truck. I had two stints with Ted. I started with the
Survival of the Fittest
album, and things were pretty good at that point. And I got to hear these stories. Ted told me about one when Rusty Day was in the band. The Amboy Dukes were on their way to a gig. Ted was driving, and Rusty was sitting in the back of the limo. During the drive Rusty whipped out a pipe and started smoking some hash. Rusty began passing the pipe around to the other guys in the band. When the pipe got to Ted, he turned and fired it at Rusty and hit him
square in the head. I believe later, perhaps after the gig and back at the motel, Ted was ready to go up and kick Rusty's ass. He went charging up a flight of stairs to get to Rusty's room, but he tripped and fell down the stairway, hurt himself, and retreated to his room. I don't know if Ted could have kicked Rusty's ass, because Rusty was a badass too. Rusty and Ted really hated each other. Ted told me that one time Rusty called all of the guys in the band together to meditate and got them to sit in a tight circle and start chanting “Om.” However, Ted thought it was a big joke and began chanting, “Om Om on the Range.” Rusty was really pissed.

You know what was really weird, it was like afterward when Rusty got in the Cactus. Sometimes we would play on the same bill with them, and then I would have to struggle whether I wanted to go into the Cactus dressing room and hang with those guys because I felt such a tight connection to Rusty or stay in the Amboy Dukes dressing room and stay loyal to Ted, and so, you know. I was friends with Rusty right to the end, when he was murdered in Florida. Certain things about Rusty Day are not known. People don't realize because he shot his wife, Sharon, and paralyzed her, Rusty had to leave Detroit. Because he was dealing drugs and I guess he felt as though this shooting was going to bring a lot of heat on him. Those were his exact words to me: “I'm feeling the heat and I gotta get out of town.” I think that because of the fact that he was dealing drugs in such a large volume and the fact that this had taken place, that made him believe that he had to get out of Detroit.

Johnny Badanjek (
Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Detroit, the Rockets, drummer
):
We tried to put the Wheels together with Rusty Day for a while. Playing a bunch of the same kind of like ballrooms out in Iowa and that kind of stuff. Rusty was fine at the time. He wasn't as nuts as he got later, you know. That all happened later with Cactus. He went down the wrong road.

Ron Cooke:
Rusty's from Garden City, man. West side is tough guys. His was a horrible story. We went down and played the Orange Bowl or something in Miami or some fucking arrangement with the Cactus deal. Rusty got fucking arrested before we went on. He was probably telling some cop to fucking suck his dick. I don't know.

Ray Goodman (
SRC, Detroit, Cub Koda, guitarist
):
Rusty was a good guy and I loved him, but he was very violent and very prone to addiction. He was as tough as they come. He wasn't a guy you would fuck with ever. Not that he was that big
and strong; he just had the kind of mentality where there was no hesitation. None whatsoever.

K. J. Knight:
Once he moved, I didn't have a number. I didn't know where he was. And then just miraculously it turns out he is living in a city just a few miles away from the city that my wife's parents lived in Florida. That's how we reconnected. When I quit playing music in '77, we were still in touch with one another. We would talk from time to time, and we'd see each other a couple times a year. I knew that he was into drugs, but here again, he kinda shielded me from all of that. When I came over there, he was never in the middle of a drug deal or he didn't sit there and say this is who I sell to or anything like that. But can you imagine going over to his house, and there everyone's got a gun in their hand, and he's got his son living there? He must've known someone was gunning for him, but just to let things go that far, you know. You would think that maybe he wouldn't have had his son living with him if he knew that he was in danger. They killed him and his son.

Gary Quackenbush (
SRC, guitarist
):
Everybody lived in Ann Arbor at some point. Seger was there, and he was way behind the curve. We never thought Bob would make it. Goofy ideas. And he didn't have a good show. He used to come over to the house every week because he was living at home with his mom. Bob was the sole surviving male; they lived over on Pauline by the stadium. Bob would come over and play DJ. He was one of the first guys that ever sat me down in front of a stereo and said, “Listen to how the drums get louder at the end of this recording, listen to the reverb at the end, listen to how the bass gets . . .” You know, just all kinds of, like, production. He's a fiend.

Leni Sinclair:
We moved to Ann Arbor, the MC5, after our place in Detroit got firebombed in 1968. We moved to Hill Street.

Scott Richardson:
We had a nineteen-room Victorian farmhouse in Ann Arbor divided up into apartments on five acres of land bordering on five hundred acres, and we had a Quonset hut studio and a swimming pool and five-car garage, and we used to have parties with, like, three to five hundred people up there.

Dennis Dunaway:
The SRC at the time had a record deal, and I was jealous of that.

Susie Kaine:
When they had the opening of Morgan Sound studio—that was the SRC's place—they had big bowls of acid. It seemed like SRC camp had done a lot of acid.

Billy Goodson (
scenester
):
I knew Scott Richardson by seeing him at performances and then his brother introduced me to him at the Palladium. So we went to that party, and at the time we were taking acid almost every day, like five times out of seven days. Mr. Natural stamps.

Scott Richardson:
My first acid trip was fall of 1967, and it was also Bob Seger's and Glenn Frey's. We all went to the arboretum at the University of Michigan—this was before SRC got going. We got it from Ed Fritch, a kind of famous character around Ann Arbor, him and Steve McCann. They hung around the bands—they weren't musicians; they were heads. Fritch went out to California and came back with a boatload of Owsley—that Sandoz acid. It was the best.

Gary Quackenbush:
One night the Five were over and we were all hanging out, and Wayne said to me, “You know I just hooked up with these hippies because we want to make it.” I said to myself, “That's a bad idea.” But there were plenty of hippies in Detroit for them.

John Sinclair:
No, no, I doubt that. All of this social stuff was stuff that Rob Tyner and I cooked up together.

Scott Richardson:
Some of the most famous rock-and-roll parties of that era took place at our farm. We recorded an entire jam album with Procol Harum, who stayed with us for a week. I don't know what happened to those tapes. Traffic came out and stayed with us, and we recorded with them too. I don't know if those things are ever going to surface or not.

Ray Goodman:
I was traveling with the SRC toward the last album, learning the songs. And unbeknownst to me at the time, they were plotting to plug me into Gary's spot and let Gary go. The band didn't go over very well in California; they didn't know quite what to think of them. We drove straight from Ann Arbor to our first shows in the LA area. Trucks, two vehicles—the whole thing. We were one of the few companies in the world that had PAs; I think there was us and Showco out of Texas. So the SRC was very pioneering in that regard. And they made quite a bit of money renting out their PA. But it was tough. Things didn't go well, like at the Whiskey. Spencer Davis was on the bill, and he was an arrogant Brit, and he was insulting when he said, “Coming up next—SRC, who will no doubt entertain you.” And the original T. Rex was on the bill too.

Scott Richardson:
We were getting on good bills though. We played the Kinetic Playground in Chicago. Here's the bill: the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Velvet Underground, SRC. Lou Reed and I are standing backstage drinking beer. It was the first time I saw that super backstage concert layout of food and shit. Some girls would always have stuff for you: brownies, and everything was laced. I turned around and saw someone spraying the food and the complete thing with Listerine bottles filled with liquid LSD. And Lou Reed, well, keep in mind that the Velvet Underground were not a psychedelic band. This was a band that got up in the morning and took Valium. His eyes are going counter-clockwise in his head, and he's going, “Scott, you've got to get me to the hospital.” Everybody's on acid. Everybody. And he's freaking out. We went out and got in a cab and took him to a hospital. Sterling Morrison got him a Thorazine shot. They couldn't go back to the ballroom. They couldn't take it. They canceled it.