Detroit Rock City (11 page)

Bob Mulrooney:
I saw the last show at the Michigan Palace, the second
Metallic KO
show. I hated it. All you could hear—it's just like the album, all piano, all those high notes. It was horrible, and they kept stopping and starting, and I just wanted to see some rock 'n' roll; I wasn't into how unusual it was. I thought, Iggy's just—he's like my hero—he's just embarrassing himself. He was just really belligerent, and it just wasn't a good show. Scott Asheton, by that time, the band was not playing well. Scott Asheton was no longer hot. James, at the civic arena in Saint Clair Shores, James looked great—he had that spider outfit. They just got progressively worse 'cause of the dope and the traveling and shit. Everything was going wrong for them.

Skid Marx (
Flirt, bassist
):
Nikki Corvette would say, “Fuck you” and “Play ‘Louie, Louie'” between songs. You can hear her on the tape.

Dave Hanna (
Ramrods, Space Heaters, guitarist
):
There was an ad in the paper for the Stooges' last show. It was tiny, but it said, “Iggy and the Stooges at the Michigan Palace,” and you could buy tickets at Hudson's, $5. So my dad drove us down there and waited in the car. I was so impressed; it changed my life. Iggy was down in the crowd, and some guy jumped on his head—like on top of him—and in a split-second that guy was on the floor, and Iggy just kept moving. That was my first concert.

Robert Matheu:
For years we had gotten together as kids and sang, “Cock in My Pocket,” and when
Metallic KO
came out we were so happy. It was like we had a recorded version to sing along with.

Scott Asheton (
Iggy and the Stooges, Sonic's Rendezvous Band, drummer
):
If you think about what was going on at that time, in the early seventies, we were so far harder rock out there than anyone else—that's why we didn't fit in. When you think what was going on was kinda glittery, kinda gayish, kind of going taking the edge off of it, other bands of that era were not even close to rockin' like we were. I'd say the biggest reason that stuff didn't do well is because we were rocking too hard.

Iggy Pop:
What we were, we were just so special, we were just so out there, that at some point you could see jaws drop and you could see the thought go, “Oh my god,” and people would just walk away. The band was never dropped by CBS, despite what people say. I'm not at liberty to tell you what is correct. I just don't want to get into it except to say that we were never formally dropped, and I have copies of all the paperwork. And there was an overture made to me to do a kind of, they described it to me, I could do a David Cassidy or sort of solo trip.

Dennis Thompson:
Don't forget, Iggy was a valedictorian in high school. Smart. Fucking. Guy. The reason he's rich today is because he's a very smart man and got himself some very smart business people all the way down the line. He had his rough times. Michael Davis and I saved his life after he shot some heroin up in Michael's house and we threw him in the bathtub with the ice cubes and shot him up with salt water.

He met his maker a few more times than that.

Iggy Pop:
I don't want to put a number on it, but a few times, yeah.

Ted Nugent:
When the riots of 1967 hit Detroit, I was behind the counter of the Capital School of Music, on Grand River, with a shotgun. It was a heartbreaker 'cause I saw my beloved birth city of Detroit goin' up in flames at the hands of idiots.

K. J. Knight:
I went down to Grand River, where it was happening. They had the area blocked off, and we wanted to see the action. And it would be a chance for me to steal something. I was into snatch and grabs. But they blocked off the downtown area. You couldn't get all the way down there. I tried. That kind of shit was right up my alley.

Leni Sinclair:
We had flown a flag about a week before the riots—around the middle of July—that had a black panther on it and the slogan “Burn Baby Burn.” It was hanging on our building at Trans-Love Energies on the John Lodge. We had no idea really what it meant. When the riots started and everything started burning, the cops came and knocked on the door. They thought we were conspirators or something, and we told them it was just a design. Then we sat on the roof of our apartment, watching the riots on TV.

John Sinclair:
It was just exhilarating. I thought, this was the greatest. We were at our Trans-Love Energies building at John Lodge and Warren. Right in the eye of the storm. We helped people loot stores. We got some bolts of cloth that the MC5 made into clothes and wore 'em for months. I like to point out different ones that we got from a store on Trumbull. If I saw 'em, I could point it out to you.

Robin Sommers:
I lived at East Grand Boulevard and John R in a commune called Broken Claw. The riots started on July 23, which was my birthday, and I lived in the
front room, and there was a wooden porch along the front of the house, and they had filled the room with balloons, and by the end of the evening they had started to pop in the heat. And there were fire trucks with soldiers going by, and we had to pop all of them in a hurry to make sure they didn't alarm the soldiers and get us shot.

Barry Kramer came by in his Firebird, and about five of us got in the car and drove over to the burning part of town. We drove down 20th or 18th or something, and this crowd of black guys started throwing bottles at us.

Wayne Kramer:
I was arrested and they were going to throw me in jail. It was the last day of the burning, and I had a telescope in my house; I liked to check things out. But there I was that day, looking around through the telescope, and the next thing I know, the National Guard are at my door. They thought I was working for snipers. The only snipers I saw were the National Guard troops on the rooftops, but they took me in, beat me up a little, and then realized that they had no room in the jail for me. So they let me go.

Dennis Thompson:
I was at my parent's house. It looked pretty scary on TV, what with the tanks and whatnot, and I was in touch with Wayne, and he said, “There's a tank parked in the corner of our house of the Artist's Workshop”—where they lived and we practiced. We lived above the Artist's Workshop in an old dentist's office. The whole band was there, and they said, “Yeah, there's a tank right across the corner from us, and there's guys floatin' around here with guns, and if you want to come down here, it's cool. If you don't, that's cool too.” I chose to stay away from it because, you know, with my hair and everything, I was obviously a prime target. Anybody that had long hair and colorful clothes was lumped in with the black people automatically. There was National Guard around—not on every street—but their presence was strongly felt. There really wasn't that much damage, and what there was was limited to a few areas, with the looting and the broken glass. That riot didn't last that long.

Dan Carlisle:
I was downtown and parked my car and the police pulled up. The riots must have been just starting up. Police were different then than they are today. They harassed me and ran my plate, and I had some outstanding parking tickets. So they took me to this jail over by Cass, and once I was in, they started filling the cell with angry black men. There I am. And the cop came and said, “You, come out.” Out I came, and he said, “You better sit out there because it's getting bad out there.” Hal Youngblood was producer of JP McCarthy, and I called him to come down and bail me out. That was no place to be.

Russ Gibb:
The rioters came right down Grand River and never fucked with the Grande Ballroom because we were all cool with the neighborhood people. I think the neighborhood was a little scared of us. We had our regular schedule that week, even as the neighborhood burned.

Rick Stevers:
The Grande didn't get hurt at all. They canceled Tom Rush, but we came by after it was over and saw Russ. We're out looking around, and we were all shocked the place didn't get hurt. Russ said to this young black kid, “Why didn't this get touched?” and the kid told him, “Because you got music in there.”

Shaun Murphy:
The night before it all happened we went and saw Tim Buckley at the Grande with the Up. No one had any idea what was coming.

Gary Rasmussen:
From our house you could almost see the Lodge Expressway, and you could see the tanks and the National Guard going down there.

Robin Sommers:
The Boulevard had become the main street to run the fire trucks down, and by 2 a.m. it was a parade, and by 3:30 there was National Guard on the trucks with their weapons out. I had this big front window in my room, so we put two layers of blankets over the windows in hopes of stopping a stray bullet if that happened. There was this telephone building five blocks north, and I watched tracer bullets bouncing off all the way to the top. This lady got shot and killed in a motel after she opened a window and stuck her head out. The National Guard opened up on her. I was working at Mixed Media, a head shop where we sold records, books, candles, papers, pipes. The Wayne State Police opened up with a couple of rounds of shotgun into our front windows at Mixed Media. So we boarded it up and wrote, “soul brother” over it. There was a drug store that was burned down near my house, and there was a safe they had found. They broke it open, the safe, and there was $200 to $300 worth of change in there. Everyone was happy.

VC Lamont Veasey:
The Soul Agents had had a show in Lima, Ohio, and afterward we got a bus back to Detroit, and then a cab back to my house on Wisconsin near 6 Mile. At the foot of my street was a tank, with the turret pointed down my street. I walked in, and we watched it all on TV. It was wild to see this all happening, and it's right down the street. We went out during the day, but at night it was martial law. Our neighbors were coming home with new TVs and appliances, but we sure didn't. My mom set that straight right away.

Greg Errico (
Sly and the Family Stone, drummer
):
We were on the road, taking turns driving, and it was the middle of the night and we needed gas. We happened to be passing through Detroit on the highway, and so we innocently pulled off, you know, and we happened to be downtown at two or three in the morning, and it looked like a ghost town—we were in a warehouse area. All of a sudden, we're surrounded by Army jeeps, which pulled us over, and within moments we were up against a brick building with our hands up and our legs spread. These were guys with machine guns. They saw us—black, white, male, female, dressed funny. We said, you know, “What is this?” and they said the city was under martial law and there was a curfew. They couldn't figure out what we were up to. Sly responded with a knee-jerk reaction—you know, at first you gotta react—and that didn't go down well. But when they realized who we were and that we weren't aware of the situation and we eventually walked. We got out of there.

Peter Rivera (
Rare Earth, drummer
):
Gil Bridges, our saxophonist, had a pilot's license, so we went up and flew over the city. We saw the smoke pouring out of the burning buildings, where they were burning down. And I was thinking to myself, “You know, a high-powered rifle could reach this high easily. Maybe this isn't a good idea.” . . . Yeah, we did that once, saw the riots from up above.

Jimmy Recca:
I lived on the west side at a drug house. We hunkered down and watched the armored personnel carrier go between Greenfield and 7 Mile. I had friends who worked at the Chrysler plant near there, including this guy T Bone. He was a drug dealer, and he had a house in Redford Township. He was a gypsy biker, and during the height of it all they were torching an area by Livernois, and we were watching it on this little TV. They showed all these people looting, and T Bone said, “Look at that, I don't want them to get all the shit,” and next thing we hear him firing up his chopper and off he goes—it's curfew, after dark, and you could see the half tracks going down 7 Mile, but you hear that bike sound out all the way down Livernois and 7 Mile. He comes back the same way, and we hear the guys on bullhorns shouting at him, “Pull over.” Then we hear the bike coming around the corner. He's got his lights off and he's got forty to fifty really nice suits—Gaslight-era suits, these old, cool, pimp-styled things—thrown over the gas tank, which is completely covered, and you can hardly see him.

Johnny Badanjek:
We lived in the same area, some of us. I was on Hall Street, and we all piled into a car and went down to see the bullet holes in the Howard Johnson. That was down by the GM and Fisher Building.