Detroit Rock City (54 page)

Although one day I came in and there was this woman waiting to record. She looked like a homeless lady, in the lobby. It turned out to be Patti Smith, recording
an extra track for an album. Eventually there was this group called the Beat Boys, and Marvin Lewis was the guy who everyone wanted to record. Marvin was sick one day, and he said, “Mike, Beat Boys are coming in. You gotta do the session.” I'm like, “No way.” But I was it. They show up, and I'm like, “Marvin's sick and I'm doing your session.” They just laughed at me, and they're like, “Bah hah, ain't no honkey gonna da, da, da.” So I grab this LinnDrum machine and I'm starting to try to program a beat for them, and they're laughing at me. They finally just ended up leaving—laughing. I was so humiliated and so mad that I just looked at that fucking LinnDrum machine, “Okay, I will show you motherfuckers.” And that was the beginning. I started learning that drum machine, then I learned the next drum machine, and I started this and this. I got a sampler.

Violent J, aka Joseph Bruce (
Insane Clown Posse
):
When we met Mike, we couldn't believe his efficiency. Our first session with Mike was insane in how fast he moved.

Shaggy 2 Dope, aka Joseph Utsler (
Insane Clown Posse
):
We had been working with this other guy, Chuck Miller, who took forever.

Violent J:
We'd have a sample, and Mike would loop it up in thirty seconds. We'd be staring at each other with our jaws dropped. And he'd say, “Do you want some drums behind it?” And we'd say, “Yeah,” and he'd just start putting drums behind it. Two minutes later he'd have a beat under it.

Shaggy 2 Dope:
Oh yeah. He was on it, you know.

Dave Feeny:
By then Mike was at Tempermill, before he set up at his own house, and ICP we're Mike's guys. He didn't think they were very good. But those guys, they were selling cassettes out of the back of their car. They always had money; they would come in and pay in advance—no one did that. It was, “Hey, we want to do another record—here's the money.”

DJ Dianna:
Violent J and Shaggy were part of the crew at St. Andrews for a while. They were like Mutt and Jeff, following each other around.

John Speck:
I worked with them both at St. Andrews. Shaggy was a bar guy. Those guys were high school dropouts, but they really knew what they were doing. They were hard workers. They were total white trash.

Violent J:
And we go to know the Detroit rock scene. We worked at St. Andrews Hall, and we knew everybody. We were right there in the middle of it. We were getting turned on to all kinds of music working there. Bands like Sick of It All, Helmet. We put guitars in our songs. We learned that early, you know what I'm sayin'?

Shaggy 2 Dope:
It started out straight rap, you know but then it started morphing and morphing to what it's become. Initially we were rappers, that was it. But you know then once we saw what was going on, the bigger picture, we broadened our horizons a lot more. We both had such deep rock influences.

Violent J:
At St. Andrews, we were mostly bouncers.

Shaggy 2 Dope:
Mostly I would check IDs at the door.

Violent J:
I'd work the pit where the people would come crowd surfing, and I'd work the between the stage and the barricade. We were definitely assholes at some points, but on Friday nights they had Three Floors of Fun, and it was nuts.

John Speck:
It was a Friday night, three floors of fights we always called it. Three Floors of Fun.

Violent J:
We were just really getting ICP going, you know, we had jobs and shit, but we were forming all this music. We got into all kinds of things then. The Faygo.

Shaggy 2 Dope:
Run DMC had Adidas. Beastie Boys talked about White Castle. You know what I'm sayin'?

Violent J:
Everybody had their own little thing in rap. So we just, at the time we always had a two liter of Faygo in our hands and—

Shaggy 2 Dope:
It was real because all we drank was Faygo.

Violent J:
We'd walk up to the store with no money and by the time we got to the store we'd have found enough returnables to buy a two-liter. We'd come back with a cold two-liter and we'd pass it like it was a fucking 40. So we had it on stage to drink. Somebody was flipping us off in the crowd, and Joey took a two-liter and opened it up and threw it at the kid.

Shaggy 2 Dope:
Not the whole bottle.

Violent J:
And the fucking whole place blew up. Yeah, so we started doing that. We started grabbing the rest of it and started spraying it on the crowd. The crowd went from sitting there to jumping around and going crazy.

Violent J:
We got signed to Disney down the road. That's when
Great Milenko
came out. Slash played on it and he was totally cool. That's the one thing we argued with the label about at that point. You know we wanted Slash in the video, and Slash volunteered. He's like, “I want to be in the video. I want to do all that.” And the label's like, “I don't think that's the right image for you guys.” You know they were saying, he's yesterday's news. You guys are something new. And I'm like, that's fucking Slash, man. What're you talking about, “How you gonna tell Slash no?”

Shaggy 2 Dope:
And he didn't even charge. He wanted a fifth of Wild Irish Rose.

Violent J:
A fifth of Wild Irish Rose. Killed it right there. And then he wanted us to come to the titty bar with him and we couldn't even do that. We were like, “Oh we're going to stay and work the song.” I wish I'd have went now, more than anything. He called the next morning and was like, “Turn the radio on. I'm about to do this interview.” He told me what station to go to. We tuned it in, and he's sitting there talking all kinds of fresh shit about us on the radio, you know, giving us love, saying, “This group ICP is awesome.” Then he called us to the concert that night, or the next night, and he wore a
Riddle Box
shirt when he was playing with Alice Cooper. Alice did a vocal part on
Milenko
, too. We flew to Phoenix to record it. He came right from the golf course, you know. He actually had on a golf outfit with the fucking spike shoes. All he talked about was getting back to the golf course. He was sitting on a bench, and I sat down next to him, and I said, “I just want to explain to you what this is that you're talking about here.” And I gave him the quick one minute version of what the Dark Carnival is. And what the
Great Milenko
was because he did the spoken word intro. If I could have translated the look on his face it'd have been, “I could give a fuck less.”

Mike E. Clark:
We finished all the post-production on
Milenko
and the label, Hollywood, came to town. I was in Royal Oak in a bungalow. I had it all cleared out and I just had everything, like I had like cinder block shelves, cinder block boards. They wanted to see the studio that we recorded
Milenko
. They thought we were fucking with them because, we're in a basement. They're like, “You did not
make this record here.” They got an amazing record. It's almost double platinum right now.

Violent J:
When everyone started freaking about
Milenko
and it got pulled from stores because of all the folks getting pissed about the lyrics and Disney and all that, they went to Alice Cooper and said, “How do you feel about that record?” And Alice Cooper said, “If I'd have known what the content of the record was, I wouldn't have done it.” This is Alice fucking Cooper, okay? And we said, “Fuck him.” We dissed him. We were younger, too, and we said, “Fuck him.” You know what I'm sayin'? We got a call from his camp or something, I don't remember exactly how it worked, but they were like, “Please stop burying Alice.” And we told them, “Tell him to grow some, grow a set and have our back.”

Eddie Baranek:
Halloween '99 me, Ben Blackwell, and our buddy Mike, we dressed up as Catholic school girls and played the Garden Bowl as the Little Dolls. The same night the Majestic Theatre next door had a sold out ICP Halloween show. Never before was I called faggot more times in my whole life than that night, dressed as a Catholic school girl. The Juggalos went crazy. It was raining faggots on me. I was very proud of that.

Jack White:
For the blues series at Third Man, we were talking about different acts that come in, and I said, “There's one band in the whole world,” and I swear to God I still believe this. There is only one band that you can say, “We're doing a record with blank,” and people would say, “Are you serious?” I could say any other band you could think of and nobody would say are you serious? Death metal, Christian, gospel, anything, people would go, “Oh, okay, sure, sure.” But you say Insane Clown Posse and people are like, “Are you serious?” And that reaction alone makes me definitely want to do something with them. And they lived in southwest Detroit, too, when I was a teenager. I saw their graffiti all the time, that said Inner City Posse. In the studio, they were like yeah, that was us, that's us; we were laughing. I thought that was a gang of like, twenty Mexican guys or something.

Rob Miller:
Kid Rock was one my stagehands at the State Theater, and I had to fire him. He was walking around handing the bands his cassette tapes when he was supposed to be working.

Karen Neal:
Cathy from Inside Out was walking around backstage at the Latin Quarter, and Kid Rock asked her about her jacket, kind of hassling her. She was really proud of her jacket, and she said, “Yeah, it's a Brooks.” He's like, “There's something on your lip.” She picked off this little piece of lint and said, “It must be your dick.”

Kenny Olson (
Kid Rock's Twisted Brown Trucker Band, guitarist
):
Those Brooks jackets were great. I was going from St. Andrews to my place one night, and someone threw a rock at the back of my head and hit me. These guys ran up on me so fast. There was blood in my hair, and all I was worried about was them stealing my Brooks leather.

Ruzvelt:
Way before he got big, Kid Rock played at Blondie's, opening for Insane Clown Posse. He came to the door and gave me a hard time. I was checking IDs and he said, “You're not going to check my ID.” I said, “What are you talking about man? Are you going to drink tonight?” He says, “Yeah.” So I says, “What the fuck? Give me your ID.” He showed me the ID. He goes to my wife, who was bartending, “What the hell was that?” “That's the club owner.” Not such a good guy.

Mike E. Clark:
Kid Rock came into the studio when he had nothing out. He had a little Casio drum machine with all his beats programmed, and he had turntables and records. He had all his shit ready to go. He goes, “Play the first beat—okay, I'm
going to record that.” He knew exactly everything he was going to do, and I'm like, “Hell no.” Then he's like, “Okay, now I want to put cuts all over this.” He was just killin' it on the turntables. Kid Rock knew exactly what he was doing.

Chris Peters (
Black Eyed Peas, Kid Rock, guitarist, Electric 6, songwriter, producer
):
I met Kid Rock when I was the music editor at
Michigan Review
at U of M. He was trying to figure things out, moving from a hip-hop career into rock. Hip-hop didn't work for him. He'd do shows and come out in his pimp suit and charge people to take pictures of him. I gave him cassettes of the MC5 and the Stooges as he was segueing into this rock thing.

Kenny Olson:
When we started in the midnineties, it was just a bunch of people getting in cars and going to closer markets like Chicago and places in Indiana and Ohio. It was just us.

Chris Peters:
Rock couldn't have come from anywhere but Detroit. He came from hip-hop and made it rock.

Mike E. Clark:
Kid Rock was in that studio to cut the demos to go to New York, to Jive. He had a posse, for sure. I knew he was going to get a deal. Sure enough, he goes out to New York, calls me, “Yeah, we got a deal with Jive.” I'm like, “We're doing the record, right?” “Nah, I'm going to New York to do the record.” Son of a bitch. He got dropped pretty quick. Vanilla Ice comes out and makes a bad name for everybody in the business because nobody wanted a white rapper on their label. Vanilla Ice just became a joke for some reason. When ICP got signed to Jive, Kid Rock called ICP and told them, “Man, don't do it,” because he had just gotten burned off Jive.