Detroit Rock City (12 page)

Robin Seymour:
We were doing a show,
Swinging Time
, at the Fox Theater with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and it was packed when things started. This was about 1:30 in the afternoon. The theater owners came in and told us we'd have to stop. Martha got up and explained to the kids, told them be quiet, to relax, that there was a problem and not to go running around.

Then we walked onto Woodward Avenue and looked up in the air, and you could see the smoke from the fires; it was like a war zone. Art [Cervi, coproducer] and I came back the next day and realized that the city was shut down. So we got on and described what was going on to our viewers, and since we couldn't have any guests, we played videotapes. That day going home to where I was living in Dearborn, I drove down the highway, and it was empty. All I could see all around was smoke.

John Sinclair:
At one point I was really inspired by watching the news, until we were watching it on television, and at one point they said, “The Tenth Precinct, over on Livernois, was pinned down by sniper fire.” And I just thought, “Yes. Yes. This is it. We're gonna win now.” And I went next door to the Artist's Workshop, downstairs, where our mimeograph machine was, and I made up a stencil. It said, “Bastille Day. Tear down the Wayne County jail, let the prisoners out.” I made this into a mimeographed flyer, and I made a stencil, and then I put it on the machine, and I said, “Wait a minute. If we don't win, this is going to be seen as an act of sedition. I'm going to get into a lot of trouble.” And I just put it off—one of the smarter things I ever did. I would have been in prison even earlier than I was. Very few legs to stand on as far as a defense of your position. We were on the side of the black people, man. We were in business, one hundred percent. The only white people we had any use for were hippies.

Iggy Pop:
During that time I was getting it together with the Stooges, and there was a nice atmosphere around downtown Detroit. If you didn't have any money and you wanted to do something, it wasn't difficult to get control of a structure. Yeah, it was pretty much emptied out.

Ted Nugent:
It just broke my heart. But I was there; I watched it burn. That was our Detroit, our city.

John Sinclair:
We played a gig with Alice Cooper in Philadelphia—MC5, Alice Cooper—spring of '69. We'd both come a long way to play this night in Philadelphia, and there was nobody there. But we were wild about them; we just thought they were the fuckin' greatest. They loved the Five. We said, “Man, you guys ought to come to Detroit, man. They'll love this shit in Detroit, man.” And they came.

Alice Cooper (
Alice Cooper, solo, vocalist
):
It was a hard-drug city, but it was the best rock-and-roll city ever. We probably had the best years there. We were used to staying in little tiny places and we were always traveling.

Ray Goodman:
They crashed on our band house floor for a week until they found a place. There were literally sleeping bags in the living room. Shep Gordon got a hold of Pete Andrews somehow, but it was also pretty common for WABX to put out calls on the radio: there's a band moving to town and they need a place to crash.

Alice Cooper:
We never lived anywhere, let alone a house, so this house we got on Brown Road north of Detroit was quite a treat. At that time—1970, 1971—you'd play the Eastown. It would be Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, the Stooges, and the Who, for $4. The next weekend at the Grande it was MC5, Brownsville Station, and Fleetwood Mac, or Savoy Brown or the Small Faces. You couldn't be a soft-rock band or you'd get your ass kicked. We knew how good the Stooges and MC5 were, and if we had all just stayed in Detroit, that would have been fine with everybody, I think. When we started breaking nationally, you almost hated to leave Detroit. I loved that house. I think we had ten acres.

Dennis Dunaway:
Before we got our house in Detroit, we were staying at this dive motel on Gratiot Avenue, and all I remember is there was this Big Boy across the street and I was always wishing I could afford to eat something there. But instead of us hearing about Detroit and migrating there, it was more like we were going anywhere we could get a gig, and the Detroit area and the Midwest liked us a lot better than the rest of the country did.

Bob Ezrin (
producer, Alice Cooper, Detroit
):
I had to go to meet the band there when we started getting ready to do
Love It to Death
. First of all, I drove past it about four times because it was boarded up from the outside. It looked like a derelict farmhouse that no one had been in for fifty years. After traveling this road four or five times and realizing there was no other house, I finally pulled around the back, and then I saw that there were vehicles and there was a three-legged dog and the screen door was open to the house, so I let myself in.

The practice hall was a big barn on the property—this was a big farm. It could have been hundreds of acres for all I know. In the practice barn they had some of their props; they had a whole stage backline set up and there was also a shooting gallery where they used to put up bottles and cans and shoot them with BB guns to let off steam. No one was awake when I first walked into the house, and I came in through the kitchen, which looked like a science experiment. There were filthy dishes that had been piled there forever. There were dishes of casserole that had been there for so long that things were growing in it. I wandered through the kitchen into the next room, which was totally dark, through a beaded curtain into the room, and I reached around to try to find a light switch, and instead I had my hand on a ceramic cock and balls which had a cigarette sticking out of it—it was stuck to the wall. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that and kind of leapt back, and then there was clothes rack with falsies on the other wall—you know I backed into that. I realized there was a bed in the middle of the room, and on that bed were two creatures of indeterminate sex, both wearing Dr. Denton's, with the button back. The only way I could tell that one was a guy was because one of them had mutton chops. Everything else was identical. They both had long blonde hair, they both had nail polish, they both had Dr. Denton's on, lots of jewelry, and they were dead to the world—they did not notice me.

Neal Smith:
That was Glen's room, which was the living room. It was Glen and his girlfriend. Alice and I had the two bedrooms upstairs, and Glen and Mike and Dennis were downstairs.

Bob Ezrin:
So then I tried to leave the room by the other door. There was another beaded curtain, which I thought might lead out to civilization. As I parted the curtain, standing in the doorway was a six-and-a-half-foot frog. There was a guy with a frog's head on, which later I learned was Dennis Dunaway, but he was just standing there with a frog's head on and I parted the curtain and bumped into him, and he looked at me and said, “Ribbit” and then turned and walked away.

Dennis Dunaway:
I didn't know Bob Ezrin was coming over. It was kind of dark in the living room. He comes in, you know, and I said, “Ribbit” and he's like, “Oh hello, Mr. Frog,” and you can tell he was really nervous. Because he just didn't know what to do. He was already apprehensive. He was just a kid. We called him the Boy Wonder because he really was just a boy.

Bob Ezrin:
Then I heard this kind of—what would be a good word to describe it?—chattering sound beside me to the left of me, and I turned around and there was a green monkey looking at me and masturbating.

Alice Cooper:
We had a bunch of pets. We had a raccoon that was the most horrible thing ever, and it would wad up its crap and fling it at people. It was a horrible little animal. And the monkey, if a girl walked in, the monkey would immediately start masturbating. It was so embarrassing. My mom or my sister would come in, and the monkey would start.

Bob Ezrin:
As I backed away from that I bumped into my first real human being, who was Mike Roswell, the road manager with the band. He was sleepy eyed, had just come out of his bedroom, which was just off of this main room that I was in, and he said, “Oh yeah, the guys are just getting up. We played last night. Yeah, sorry, you know. Sit down here and we'll all be there in a minute.” Finally everybody finally assembled; we went back into the room with the thing with falsies that turned out to have been the living room. So then we all sat in there and had a meeting, and we started playing material off of cassettes. We picked “I'm Eighteen” as the first thing; I think actually it might have been “Is It My Body?” was the first thing that we worked on, then “I'm Eighteen.”

Alice Cooper:
He said, “I'll produce the album, but we have to relearn everything.” And it was like what? He said, “Everyone likes you guys, but you don't have a signature,” and we didn't know what that meant. He said, “When you hear the
Doors, you know it's the Doors, and when you hear the Beatles, you know it's the Beatles. When you hear Alice Cooper, you could be any psychedelic band. There's no signature to anything.”

So Bob came in and we went out to the barn every day, rehearsed for ten hours a day.

Dennis Dunaway:
There was a hospital for the criminally insane across the road from us. You could throw a rock and hit it practically. On a decent day we'd open up these big gigantic doors to the barn we practiced in, which was part of the deal we got for the house. They didn't clap at everything. But when we played something that we really nailed, you'd hear them at the prison farm cheering. The song “Dead Babies” never would have happened if that prison farm hadn't cheered for it. The verse was from a song that had kind of a crappy chorus. And so even though it was a good verse, the song fell by the wayside. I was trying to talk the guys into putting the good verse with the good chorus, and they weren't going for it at all. I wrote a bass part to tie it all together, and I finally got it. We had a rule that you couldn't throw out anything until you actually tried to play it, so the doors were open and I got them to play it, and the prison farm cheered like crazy, so that was it. That was the stamp of approval.

Alice Cooper:
We pretty much were the pretty entertainment for this hospital for the criminally insane. Perfect for us. We would rehearse ten hours a day, and they would sit and listen to us rehearse all day.

Mark Parenteau (
WABX, DJ
):
We went to the house on Brown Road in Pontiac, which was farm country. Gail, my wife at the time, knew Alice Cooper and all the guys that were in the original band as well as their pet snake, Katrina. I'm sure now it's all suburbs, but then it was pretty far out there. The place was like a scene out of a horror movie. It was this house, which was a crash pad. It had no real furniture in the living room or anything. And they would go out and Michael Bruce would shoot chipmunks and squirrels so they could feed the snake, which was fun. Alice would sit, and there was a black-and-white console TV in the living room of this house with a couple of folding chairs. Alice sat in one chair surrounded by a huge amount of Budweiser empties. Alice had a gun that had those suction cups on it, like the little bullet would fly out and had the suction cup. Every time he would see someone on TV that he didn't like, he would shoot one of those suction cups, so the front screen of that TV was covered with like fifty or sixty of those little suction cups that were stuck to the glass.

Bob Ezrin:
I froze my ass off in that house when it got to be winter. During that time I actually spent a couple of those nights in—you know those Christmas tree lots that have the trailers that always have a trailer outside? That's where I spent a few nights because it was warm in there; there was actually heat. Alice's girlfriend's girlfriend had this Christmas tree lot.

Neal Smith:
First time I heard “Fields of Regret” on the radio, it was the first night we played in Detroit. I was stoned out of my head on acid and I just heard “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges. At that time I had never heard the Stooges. I put the radio up to my head, and I'm listening to it like it's the fuckin' nastiest song I've ever heard in my life, and it's drivin' like a mother fucker and I loved this song. It's as loud as it can be on the radio, pushed right up next to my ear, and then all of a sudden it stops and it goes [imitates chords], two big power chords and then my head just suuucked into the radio. Then [imitates the music] it starts firing up again and then it goes [imitates music again], and my head gets sucked back in there again, and then I go “Who the fuck is this band?” I'm sitting there and the next song comes on, “Holy shit, that's us!” It was “Fields of Regret.”