Detroit Rock City (17 page)

Michael Lutz:
During our set a guy fell off the light tower. He was so stoned, nothing happened to him. We played on Friday afternoon and had to leave right after to drive to Kansas City for a show the next night.

Dan Carlisle:
We covered Goose Lake from top to bottom. I went out to Goose Lake, and it was dirty and crowded and full of speed freaks. It is in the eye of the beholder, those things. Maybe someone who went out and got laid and got some good food had a good time—it all depends on who you ask. I was backstage and I looked at it for a brief time and thought, “If this is what it was coming to, then we have to stop it.” But it was very successful, and everyone went.

Al Jacquez:
Rolling Stone
gave Goose Lake two paragraphs. There were all of these great bands. I mean this goes down and no one pays attention. People were not that far away from the stage as most festivals. They had a manually operated circular stage set up on the back half, and then guys pushed it and you would come around, then there was no time between acts. We went out there in the dark and then, wham, lights.

Don Was:
Rolling Stone
, because they couldn't get in to Goose Lake because they wouldn't give comp passes to them, they went to Newport Jazz Festival. You can go back in the archives and you can see the extensive wonderful coverage of the Newport Jazz Festival, but nothing about Goose Lake.

Tom Wright:
Rolling Stone
magazine had a lot of people there, like a gaggle of people who claimed they were from
Rolling Stone
. We didn't care if they were from
Time
magazine; they showed up at the last minute and were ready to camp out and be underfoot of all things going on backstage. That wasn't going to happen.

Russ Gibb:
The cops came in and jammed up traffic. After the first day the newspapers were calling it a drug festival. And guess who started to act like they didn't know anything about it? Yeah, the state police and the governor. I said, “Wait a
minute!” And I called our liaison to the governor and I go, “What the fuck is going on!?” The cops had planned this, to bust people, all along.

Dick Wagner:
I met Steve Hunter for the first time at Goose Lake. He was playing with Mitch Ryder.

Ray Goodman:
He may have met Steve there, but I played with Mitch Ryder and Detroit that day. Great show, and we left early for some reason, just as James Gang were going on, which pissed me off.

Dick Wagner:
Steve and I met later on in Florida, when I was in Ursa Major and he was on the bill playing with a later version of the Chambers Brothers. So we had both of us there with that heavy Detroit guitar attitude, and we jammed for two hours together. It was incredible. Through Ursa, I worked with Bob Ezrin.

Bob Ezrin:
Lou Reed knew who Steve was because of Detroit's cover of “Rock 'n' Roll.” When I did that album, we got both Dick and Steve in there, and I kept using them.

Dick Wagner:
We did the
Rock 'n' Roll Animal
tour with Lou Reed. He was sullen and unhappy, but he liked the way I played. I think he thought I was a quaint Midwesterner and wasn't hip, but it didn't matter to me. He was a mess at the time, but he wasn't difficult to work with at all.

He eventually got jealous of the attention Steve and I were getting. We played Detroit, and people were shouting out our names more than they were his. Detroit supports its own, you know.

Mitch Ryder:
To start the band Detroit, I think somebody just fucking opened the prison doors. It was scarier than true. It kinda put a lot of people, you know, on edge because that was the peace and love generation. It's who we were trying to target. You can tell the energy was there on the music, but that group frightened people. And we had so many different people in and out of that band.

Ray Goodman:
I joined up what became Detroit in early 1970. Johnny Badanjek had brought me back into it, and he was good to be with. They were supposed to be the Detroit Wheels, but pretty soon Barry Kramer, who was managing, started calling it Detroit with Mitch Ryder. There were major issues, most of which revolved around money. There was quite a bit being generated and very little going towards Mitch. I don't know if he was suing Bob Crewe or not. I know that Mitch was having trouble paying bills, therefore he couldn't keep the band together and stay on the road. It ended very badly, with Barry Kramer actually keeping my equipment because of advances I'd gotten. They were making money hand over fist. It was criminal. I think I was getting $25 a show. Maybe it was $50. You know, at the time, the music was more important than the business end. You kinda took what you could get.

Johnny Badanjek:
Mitch was in bad shape, really bad shape by that time. He had that big band, and guys were booking rooms and skipping out of the rooms and they left him with a huge amount of debt. He owed the musicians union $3,000
for not paying dues. So Barry Kramer had to straighten his whole life out. Barry went to the tax people and said, “Listen, he's not going to pay. You're going to get this much and be happy.” And they said yes. To the musicians union, Barry said, “I'm going to pay you this much.” He settled a lot of accounts and got Mitch out of the doldrums.

Robert Matheu:
Barry was a badass at times. I heard stories from Ric Siegel about him jumping on record companies' presidents desks in New York with his cowboy boots to get Mitch Ryder out of those contracts.

Ray Goodman:
We practiced at the
Creem
house on Cass. Third floor, open space. Then we began touring all over the place in a 1967 Cadillac limo.

Johnny Badanjek:
After our first gig, Barry said, “I'm going to rename this band Detroit and we'll say featuring Mitch Ryder.” We didn't really want to go back to the Mitch Ryder, Detroit Wheels whole thing.

Ray Goodman:
We drove out to the Northwest and toured Oregon, Washington State, Vancouver. We followed the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour all the way from Milwaukee; they played the night before us everywhere it seemed. It was a Holiday Inn Tour.

Mitch Ryder:
You know how you have these balconies on the outside of the Holiday Inns and other hotels, like three feet in between them, where you could drop fourteen, forty floors to the ground? Well, yeah, but this one in Vancouver had no wall in between. It was just balconies outside. So there was this underage girl—I think she was fourteen—and she was in one room, and her father tracked her down and came with the cops, the Vancouver police. And so they knew the girl was in that room. So while they're banging on the door, trying to get in, she takes this leap from one balcony, over three feet of clear air, onto the next balcony, to be in the next guy's room so he could get her out of there and he wouldn't get caught with her.

Ray Goodman:
Times were so innocent they put it on the marquee, “Welcome Mitch Ryder.” They didn't realize the craziness that could attract.

Mitch Ryder:
One night I was hungry, and one of the guys goes down and fucking breaks into the kitchen of the Holiday Inn and cooks me breakfast at 3:00 in the
morning. There was so much shit on these tours with the Detroit band. We were playing this park somewhere; they were trying to make it available to homeless people. We played a concert to support the effort. A three-year-old kid comes up to me and says, “My dad said to give you this.” It was a little tab of acid. So I dropped that, and his dad introduced himself to me as a guru. Okay. And I ended up in the woods for three days with this guy and his wife. I think I was in the woods, and I think it was three days. I came back down finally and I'm in the hotel, and they're still with me and they crash on the bed. I'm sleeping on the floor, and one of my band members comes in, one of the more aggressive ones, and he says, “Willie,”—he used to call me Willie—“what the fuck are you doing down there? What's this fucking mother fucker doing on your bed?” And I said, “That's the guru.” He says, “Your guru?” and he pulls out his hunting knife, and the guy's naked on the top of my bed. He puts his hunting knife and stabs it into the fucking mattress, right below the guy's balls, and rips a fucking line down the mattress. He picks up the knife again and holds it up and says, “Get the fuck out of here.” And so these two naked, fucking, hippie guru, spiritual people flee the room. He looked at me and said, “Get on your bed. You're embarrassing me.”

Ray Goodman:
We got back after that tour and played Goose Lake, and I quit. I was so burned out. Some others left as well. It had been a really rough time.

Ron Cooke:
At one point just before I joined Mitch, me and Dallas Hodge were playing in a three-piece band, getting gigs around town. We were staying at the Hotel Le Buick up on 8-Mile Road. It was a '48 Buick behind Lefty's bar. That's how broke we were. We'd go to a gig, and these cats would go, “Where you guys staying?” We'd go, “Oh, we're at the Hotel Le Buick.” Then after that the Catfish band started, and I got a call from Barry Kramer. He asked me if I wanted a gig. I said, “I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.” So Ryder got on the phone: “What the hell you mean you don't want to play in my band?” I said, “Maybe I don't want to.” I took the gig.

Johnny Badanjek:
We got Steve Hunter in, and we got rid of some of the bad elements. Ray was cool. But there were some bad elements we had problems with. Some of them were doing bad drugs and stuff, and people were coming after them.

Mitch Ryder:
We found Steve Hunter, actually down living on the farm with his fucking family in Decatur, Illinois. Somebody had told us about him, and basically
he was just doing gigs playing to corn. We said, “Hey, we can up that. We can have you play to popcorn!” So he said, “Wow, I'm really excited.”

Dave Marsh:
Everybody had been on the telephone when they found Hunter in Illinois. They were like, “We found the next Hendrix, the next Duane Allman.” They were calling from there, saying, “Wait till you hear this guy we found. We're bringing him home.”

Mitch Ryder:
He was so innocent. If you wanted to terrify yourself, you had to try to put yourself in the frame of mind of a country boy, witnessing what he witnessed, for the first time. I'm surprised his hair didn't turn gray immediately. It was just a culture shock for him. But, you know, what he did, which I really admire about him, he had done so much wood shedding that, in times of trial and stress, he would go to his guitar for safety, security, and comfort.

Bob Ezrin:
The Mitch Ryder band played in Decatur, Illinois, and Steve Hunter was part of the opening act. They invited him up on stage to jam, fell in love with him, and as those guys would do, they would just collect people along the way, throw them into the hearse along with the rest of the band. So they threw him into the hearse with the rest of the band, and he just kept going until they got back to Detroit. One day I showed up for rehearsal and there was a new guy. He looked a little like a drowned rat—was just standing in the corner with stringy hair and coke-bottle glasses and a nice-looking little SG and a small Crate amp, quietly playing away, but doing some really quite remarkable stuff. But it was so quiet and polite. He was just trying not to get in anybody's way; he didn't want to be too loud. He was very, very shy—painfully shy. So we took a break on the first day. I took every amplifier in the room and strapped them all together, and I plugged it into that and told him to play Hendrix. It was louder than most of the music we had been hearing for the morning rehearsal. It was so loud—oh my God, it was so loud. So he strapped into this thing and started playing. He felt like God. He felt like Thor—you know, the God of Thunder—and just started to wail, showing off. Everybody in the building, from all three floors, came running upstairs to the rehearsal area to see who this was, and he was just amazingly good. I think that was a pivotal moment for him. Something exploded in his brain; then he went from being apologetic to believing that he could be a rock star. That really brought him out of his shell and into the place he belonged, which was on a stage, showing off, playing amazing guitar.

Mitch Ryder:
He practiced and practiced and practiced, and avoided the gun fights, avoided the fist fights, avoided everything that the band was involved in—the drugs and everything else—and just play and play and play and play. He made it through.

Ron Cooke:
Steve wasn't a party animal. The rest of us were just wild dogs. You had to be tough to be in that band. That band was a rolling circus, man.