Detroit Rock City (7 page)

John Sinclair:
You know Jac Holzman convinced me that we should have “motherfucker” on it. It would be all right in the notes and everything. I said, “Man, you know they're not gonna like this.” And also, “Man, if they do, are we going to be powerful.” And he said, “We'll back it up. It will be good publicity for the album.” I said, “Well, okay.”

Robin Sommers:
Then Hudson's, which was the big department store in Detroit, decided it didn't want to carry an album like this and threatened not to carry any of the Elektra catalog. They threatened all these things. And I was pissed. So John asked me to do an advertisement for the album for the
Fifth Estate
newspaper that he edited. And I did it and decided to put “Fuck Hudson's” at the bottom. And Elektra really hit the roof. I didn't do it to get in trouble. It wasn't like I ran this myself.

John Sinclair:
Elektra's thing was blaming the legal department. You know, they said, “This is way beyond us. This is just gonna be blah blah blah,” and then they are starting to threaten to pull the other Elektra products out of these big department stores like Hudson's. So they pulled the record off the market. They stripped off the liner notes. They changed . . . they put the single version on the album, without the word “motherfucker.” They presented this to me and I presented it to the band and we all said, “No, we can't do this. We can't. We will eat these. If you have to take it off the market, we'll eat the album and we'll start the second one right away, and we'll do a different approach so we won't have this problem.”

Dennis Thompson:
Every hip-hop or rap artist now, they use all these nasty words in a nasty manner. We were the first band to use the word “fuck” in print and on our album. We weren't doing it to be bad-mouthed, bad-talking, tough-talking kind of people. We actually used the word like everybody did, but we were the first to put it on vinyl. Then you backpedal and take it off, and you insert “brothers and sisters” into it because the rack shoppers are getting lawsuits. Guys that put the records on the racks. Big chains were dropping it because of the language. And the reason why it didn't go to number one across the nation was because of the language. That was in the Top Ten of destroying that band. Listen to me: one simple word. You know? It stereotypes you. Immediately.

John Sinclair:
We left and went to the West Coast at our expense. No support from the record company. I booked some gigs in San Francisco and Oakland and
around LA. We got to San Francisco, and I went out to the distributor to pick up a couple of boxes of records to promote with and they said, “Well, we don't have any.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, they called them all back. They're in New York.” And that's when I had to fly from there at my expense to New York and argue with them. I lost. We recorded three songs at Elektra in Los Angeles: “Human Being Lawmower,” “American Ruse,” and one more. The tapes are gone, they told me. Lost, lost in a fire, water. We got back to Michigan. I went to prison two months later, so I lost track.

Wayne Kramer:
Practice, that's all we did. As many hours of the day as we could get ourselves together to get there and practice. Organization was the main problem. For me, as the band leader, that was always on me. I would set the rehearsal and then find everybody. Wasn't so much a matter of forgetting; there was a passive aggressiveness from Fred Smith. It's a controlling tactic.

Becky Tyner:
Wayne will present himself as a leader of the band. There are not really a lot of people that would dispute it. In a sense he was, in terms of questioning John, questioning the money, questioning what's going on with this. The other guys were into other things.

John Sinclair:
Fred Smith assaulted the police on my behalf; that's as good as it gets in my world. You know, a guy who'll do that is all right with you. They're risking their fucking life as well as jail time.

Becky Tyner:
Fred was an individual. He would act in kind of an authoritative manner—you know, he had a really deep voice. His word was law kind of thing.

John Sinclair:
We had a beef with the management at a club called the Loft in Macomb County. They owed for the last gig we played there and this one, and this guy was supposed to pay me for both that night. And then they pulled this flimflam and we got into it. We were packing up, putting the shit in the van. I was doing the idiot check, make sure we had everything. All of a sudden these coppers come in and the guy says, “That's him. He refuses to leave.” I was just flabbergasted, you know? And then they assaulted me and I was just, fuck this. I was getting ready to leave and then all the sudden the coppage came in, and he said, “Well, that's the guy there. They refuse to leave.” So these cops came to throw me out and said, “Put your hands up.” And I smacked the guy in the face. They weren't really coppers.
He was like a rent-a-cop. So I smashed him in the face, and then these other guys started wailing on me. Fred Smith heard that I was under attack, and he came racing across the room and flew through the air and landed on their backs. That was so cool; it was like suicide, you know? Just beautiful.

Wayne Kramer:
Fred was always defiant and grandiose. He had what you could call defiant individuality. He was kind of an outsider and was known as a delinquent. Had his run-ins with authority figures: teachers, principals, parents.

Becky Tyner:
He loved baseball. He would organize these baseball games, and we'd all go and try to play.

Wayne Kramer:
Fred was a gifted athlete and really good at baseball. When the MC5 was living in Ann Arbor, we would have regular Sunday baseball games at West Park with the other bands. It was so much fun. Seger. The Jagged Edge. The Sunday Funnies. Not the Stooges—they're not baseball types.

Dennis Thompson:
The band went through various phases, and I don't think anybody's ever explained the drug-related connections. In the beginning of the band there was no hallucinogenics. There was beer . . . it was a beer band. Then, a pot band and then, beer, pot, and hallucinogenics. I mean everything from mescaline to LSD, and that was our hallucinogenic phase.

Leni Sinclair:
As long as they were with the MC5, as long as they were with the White Panthers and John Sinclair, we preached and preached against all drugs. That was one of our main things—to keep kids from using drugs.

Dennis Thompson:
Jon Landau produced our second album, and we quit everything. So our second album was sobriety. Our third album, we had sort of shifted into, not really heavily at all, just chipping heroin. Just chipping. Everybody wasn't a junkie or anything. But eventually the heroin influenced Michael Davis to the point where we asked, “Did he want to play in the band or did he want to use a substance?”

Becky Tyner:
Dennis and Michael, they were really bad. Like come into your house, go in to the bathroom and pass out on the floor. There was a really bad night, and Rob was furious. And he called up the morgue and said, “Come get this asshole out of my bathroom,” and they thought he was nuts and, you know, like
a crank call. It was Michael on the floor in the bathroom. Just gross. Gross. And Dennis was, like, pathetic. Nonfunctioning.

Wayne Kramer:
The decline of the MC5 and the parallel decline of Detroit is not a mystery to me—the things we were going through; we were not alone. A lot of other people were in desperate situations as well. And some of them had guns.

Dennis Thompson:
The most prolific album in terms of creating new ideas was the LSD days, but the band coming together with all the ingredients that we were working on, finally gelling into a nice soup, was
High Time
.

Wayne Kramer:
Clearly, the MC5 was on its last breath. If we didn't make a great record, it was all over. Our reputation was shot: we had confused so many people with
Back in the USA
, the record company was sick of us, we had no management, no one in our corners, grave internal problems. The purity of '68 was a distant memory, but challenges in the band itself—heroin, poverty, we had no money. If we didn't make money through the MC5, there was none. Fred had a baby and the baby died—terrible things to endure. The Detroit underworld was slipping into our sphere.

Becky Tyner:
High Time
is when they began to divvy up the songwriting credits. They were moving out of the communal situation, moving into their own houses, and establishing their own lives. Whether it's doing heroin or you're doing this or you're doing that. It's the individualism, and it's like, “Okay, enough of this, everything is everything.”

Wayne Kramer:
We had to dig down deep and do the best work we could. The producer we had, Geoff Haslam, was really a band guy—he let us lead and was a great collaborator. But we didn't get much support for
High Time
. We were managed for a time by Dee Anthony, but that was short lived. The guy is very cagey. He kept money in escrow from some of the gigs. I don't know who paid the hotels and everything, but I know he handled all the money, and he was tough. So then he went to the union said, “They didn't pay my commissions” and got a lien on us from a mediation decision, and we didn't even know. So finally he's not returning our calls; Fred and I flew to New York to see him. We had no money. We were going to beg Atlantic records for some money. We went to Dee's office and sat in the waiting room. He went out a back door so he wouldn't see us. We went back to the airport and slept there, then took a bus back into the city to Atlantic records.
Jerry Wexler had signed us and then retired, so we were kind of inherited to this guy Ahmet Ertegün. I told him what kind of shape we were in, and he explained to us the concept of “sending good money after bad.” He said they weren't going to do that. And he just picked up a phone call during our meeting and started talking French. He actually turned around his chair, turned his back on us, so all you could see was the back of his bald head.

Dennis Thompson:
The thing is, we didn't have a record company. Pretty soon Atlantic dropped us, and we were searching for a record company and playing in Europe. You know, we lived in England, and we would take the ferry across to the Continent, and then we would play shows in France and Germany and Belgium, whatever. And we were making a living, but it just wasn't enough. What we needed was a label that would stand behind us and spend money in the PR department.

Becky Tyner:
When the MC5 broke up, it broke Rob's heart. He had a tough time. Alright, now it's done. Shattered dreams in the Motor City and all that. I don't even know. So it stopped. Rob was born in '44, and MC5 stopped in the fall of '72. That's a big part. Okay for four years of your life you played in a band. Okay, and it attained a small degree of success.

Leni Sinclair:
Everybody thought the MC5 should have been big, and they didn't do it. Then here comes Grand Funk getting all the big accolades, you know.

Dennis Thompson:
Grand Funk took our spot. Had the MC5 not made some of the tactical mistakes we had made in the business community and in philosophy, we would have been bigger than Grand Funk. As big as or bigger than Grand Funk Railroad. That's cruel.

Gary Quackenbush:
The draft came in hard on me. On my eighteenth birthday I got a 1-A. Inductable at any time. And I was one of the first ones where—they didn't publicize it enough for my taste—but we were classified all high school seniors until you get your deferment. In '66. Most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. I'm in high school, I'm a musician, rocking to the band scene, and I get a 1-A? If I was my dad, I would have gone insane. I would have called the draft board, I would have called the governor, I would have called my congressmen. They were killing us. And so later on it came out that we are classifying all high school seniors as 1-A. So I knew I was going to college just to beat the draft.

Wayne Kramer:
All young men in that time period faced conscription. It was inevitable, and you had to go, unless you had a helluva plan. And everybody in our world, it was a constant subject of conversation. What'd they do to him? What'd he say to them? What was the result? What I discovered was that if I showed them who I really was, they wouldn't want me. Went down there stoned, told them my ideas about how the world should work, and they said I wouldn't make good soldier material. I had been up for ten days; I was out of my mind. Just let our freak flags fly—it wasn't easy, and it was high stakes. But it worked for me. A couple of our guys were in school, or were married so they had those outs.