Detroit Rock City (20 page)

Stirling Silver (
scenester
):
I had been in New York to check out the New York Dolls after reading about them in
Rock Scene
and
Creem
. When I got back I was working at Harmony House in Hazel Park. The Dolls were on Mercury, and I knew the Polydor rep, and I put together an in-store for the New York Dolls when they came to play the Michigan Palace. They often call Hazel Park “Hazel Tucky.” It's a hillbilly community. I told management: “This band is coming to Detroit. They're going on tour, and they got a signed deal with Mercury and they're really fucking good and they're funny to watch and all that. I know them, so let's bring 'em in.” The store managers made this cheesy banner that said, “Welcome New York Dolls.” So the Dolls show up, and we had this deal for in-stores for artists, where they can take whatever records they want. The deal is whatever they take, Mercury will pay us back in label material. So if someone takes whatever, they can be sure that their material will be among whatever goes back into the store. David Johansen went to the Elvis Presley, the biggest bin there. He went through every one of them pretty quickly. He was looking to see if the whole catalog was pretty much there, and it was. Johansen took every one of those records out of there, including the religious ones. He took them all out of there; they are completely empty, and of course we swapped out Mercury product. He knew this and was making sure we had a ton of Dolls material, even though they only had one album out at the time.

Bob Mulrooney:
The New York Dolls at the Michigan Palace was one of the best shows I've ever seen. Better than the MC5. They blew out the PA, but I was in the orchestra pit, so I heard every note. Johnny Thunders—this was before he got into heroin—he was just jumping in the air, doing all these twirls, and his hair was just totally blown out.

Bobby Hackney (
Death, bassist, vocalist
):
When we went to rock shows, we were black hippies. Michigan Palace was our hangout. We saw a lot of Wayne Kramer shows; Kiss were always there, Blue Oyster Cult. David Bowie played there, and we walked out—he was terrible, this soul revue.

S. Kay Young (
photographer
):
We used to go to the bar at the St. Regis Hotel where all the bands stayed. After Bowie played at Michigan Palace in 1974, we were there and he was drunk; he was actually collapsing. I don't know why, but I remember that this was before he had his teeth fixed, because they really looked bad. Mark Norton and I had to take him up to his room.

Mark Norton (
Ramrods, 27, vocalist, journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
We were riding up to his room in the elevator and he passed out again. The guy's this big. I could pick him up and put him over my shoulder. I was 150 pounds at the time, and he weighed about 98 pounds. I took his room key out; I opened the door; I took off his shirt; I took off his pants—he had orange underwear on—I tucked him into bed, made sure he was fine, sleeping on his side so he didn't barf and choke, and left his key there and walked out of the place.

S. Kay Young:
First, though, Norton started going through his stuff, and he goes, “Oh my God, David Bowie's wallet!” I made him put it back. We were not about to steal David Bowie's wallet.

Mike Murphy (
The Denizens, the Rushlow-King Combo, the Boners, drummer, vocalist
):
Our parents were dropping us off at these shows, and we were seeing these subversive bands. But they didn't know it. The New York Dolls, New Year's Eve 1973. There was a guy climbing on the light stand, and David Johansen kept trying to get this guy off the light stand. The crowds were Detroit crowds, and they were untamed.

Vince Bannon (
Bookie's, City Club promoter, Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist
):
There were a lot of people going to the same shows, this seventies-glam stuff that was going over real big in Detroit. The New York Dolls, Bowie—you'd see the same people at the shows. Things were going on organically, because a lot of bands that were Detroit bands had broken up. You'd see Jimmy Marinos, Mike Skill and those guys in one corner. So you would start noticing familiar faces.

Mark Norton:
We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGBs in '75 or early '76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo. She worked there for ages and she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there's this crazy guy from Detroit—he's calling again.” I'd say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It
sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks.

In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGBs. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I'm from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “None of these people have seen shit.”

Don Davis (
producer, Stax, Motown musician
):
Detroit was so full of talent at that point, the midseventies, that I didn't need a band telling me what the deal was. I was working with a lot of the people who were coming from Motown Records and a lot of the people who were at the front of the disco movement. And rock was still just as much a part of Detroit as anything else, but a lot of these guys were getting attitudes that were hurting them. I would work with Jim McCarty, and he was great. But then there were the stories about what Iggy Pop was up to in Los Angeles and how the MC5 had disintegrated.

Doug Banker (
manager, Ted Nugent
):
In the midseventies I was promoting things like Bob Seger for $500, Kiss for $750. The first Kiss date I did was in '74 at the Thunder Chicken in Grand Rapids. They put on the full show with all the fireworks and the outfits and the makeup, and they acted like they were already superstars. Here's the rules: no pictures of the band without their makeup. They would do sound check without makeup, but nobody was allowed to see them. Nobody could have a camera. At the time I thought that was really silly because hardly anybody knew who they were. I was like, “Why would you do that? Nobody knows who you are—they're just going to try to take pictures. You want to promote yourself?” They said, “Strictly not!” It didn't take me too long to realize they were way ahead of the game. They knew they were going to make it big, and even back in '74 at that club, that was part of their plan. I figured all that out later and realized how genius the whole plan was.

Stirling Silver:
There was huge promotion for Kiss's debut show in Detroit at the Michigan Palace. Aerosmith was also on that bill—spring '74. Harmony House organized a party with two hundred–plus people invited at the Hilton Hotel in
Grand Circus Park after the show for the record industry, retailers and people on the front lines that had to interact with the customers. I got good access as a guy working at Harmony House, so I had met the Kiss guys backstage briefly. We get over to the Hilton, and it's a huge bash with food and tons of alcohol and everything else you could want. It was a private party, and all of Kiss were there. Aerosmith were not because it was specifically a Kiss launch, industry party. Kiss kept their outfits on, and as the night wore on, they slowly shed items. The makeup got smeared, a lot people wanted to kiss them. I ended up staying until the very last person. There was a portable record player at one end of this room all night long, which I didn't really notice until later on in the evening. I sat down with Peter Criss. People are drifting off; there might have been twenty people left. We started talking, and he said that his hero was Gene Krupa, and he whipped out six records that he carried with him on the road. Of course he put a Gene Krupa record on the turntable that was sitting there. He stopped talking and sat there just listening, because he's a total freak nerd.

Mark Parenteau:
I didn't like Kiss. I thought the music was lame. So Larry Harris at Casablanca made me a deal that if he paid for a whole concert and the crowd went crazy, I would play Kiss on the air. They really, really wanted Detroit; it was predetermined in their mind that they had to have Detroit and that if this band didn't go over in Detroit, it wasn't going to go over anywhere. It was true, actually, and they knew it. It was fire breathing, black leather, loud and over the top and just what Detroit was all about. Except the songs were really lame. Larry did this concert at Michigan Palace. Bob Seger opened, and then there was a long wait because Aerosmith was also on the bill, and here were big arguments between Aerosmith and Kiss. Kiss didn't want Aerosmith to use any pyrotechnics, and there was a fist fight backstage amongst the road crews. Then Kiss played, and I'm with Larry Harris, and he's trying to make sure his bet goes well. So far we had been playing the album, but it really hadn't caught on fire. But people hadn't seen Kiss. It wasn't like now where there is unlimited access to visual representation anywhere. It took a while for magazines to get pictures of a band, so the album hadn't done much. When Kiss went on stage, for the first song the audience just sat there and watched them. But the second song or third song was “Firehouse,” and Gene Simmons breathed fire, and the place went out of their minds in full Detroit fashion. Suddenly they were deep into it and on their feet and it was all about Kiss for a long time. Kiss went on to do their live album there, and then did “Detroit Rock City,” and it became the city they had needed.

Rick Kraniak, aka Rick K (
booking agent
):
By then Seger was getting a pretty good ride outside of Michigan. Atlanta was a good pocket—there was a promoter down there, Alex Cooley, who would buy my bands from me—and Florida was a really good pocket. So we started to try and get like a little regional thing going for the bands—that was the strategy—and it worked with Seger a lot like that; it worked with Nugent.

Tom Gelardi:
Bob hadn't broke through all the way by the early seventies. Then there was a fellow out of Orlando or Tampa, I'm not sure, a broadcaster by the name of Bill Vermillion. Vermillion had family in Traverse City, and every summer he would come to Michigan for a couple weeks' vacation up there. He kept hearing Seger records, and he picked them up, 'cause all he heard was Seger records all around the state. So he picked up the 45s and would go back and he played them. He got Seger so hot down there off those 45s that he called Punch Andrews and said, “I want to do two concerts down here.” He did two concerts down there on two successive nights—a Friday night and Saturday night—and drew eleven thousand and thirteen thousand people. I said to myself, “They don't know Bob Seger from Adam except for the records.” He's got to be a phenom for goodness' sake to draw that many people. That was the sign. The radio was really taking off, and it just said to me, “Wait a minute. Nobody can do that.” I don't give a shit. As an unknown? Just off records? What they hear and what they like. So you gotta know that he had it.

Rick Kraniak:
The bookings were really coming more and more out of New York by '73 or so. We were handling Seger still. He worked really hard as it led up the Silver Bullet Band. But he was still a warm-up band mostly, even in Michigan. We fed Bob Seger McDonald's one time when he opened for BTO at Northern Michigan University. I felt terrible about it.

Kim Fowley (
musical raconteur from Los Angeles
):
Diversified Management at that time began to run this “L” touring scheme, where the Detroit bands would play from Detroit down to Atlanta and into the armpit of Florida. It was really effective, and they kept bands on that circuit. Seger and Nugent broke that way even if they weren't booked by Diversified.

Ted Nugent (
Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, solo, guitarist, vocalist
):
We started doing these guitar face-offs. That was a concept created by Dave Leone
and Nick Harris at Diversified Management. Because we didn't have real smash records, and we were kind of stuck in that Grande, Eastown Theatre, Silverbird, Palladium, two to three thousand–seat places. They wanted to generate more revenue and more ticket sales, so they got into the Dick the Bruiser wrestling kind of competitions, where I would challenge Mike Pinera of the Blues Image and Frank Marino of Mahogany Rush and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 to guitar battles.

Rick Kraniak:
The most amazing band for us was Brownsville Station. We would see these makeshift pop festivals pop up on weekends, and their manager would take it. They would just jump on a plane with their Marshalls and drums kitted up and go. There was a New Orleans festival they had agreed to do, and they took off. Meantime the promoter who had originally booked them was arrested, so now we weren't on the bill. But they landed, got a van at the airport, and showed up anyway. They arrive, and the stage manager is, like, tremendously stoned, so they just talked their way in and ended up on stage at 3:30 in the morning. Paid. That's how we did it for a bit. We'd just fly bands to these hastily organized festivals and just show up.