Detroit Rock City (33 page)

Tex Newman:
Bookie's had these great old lights that had, like, eight different colors. It was like a ballroom with these ornate ceilings that formed an arch, a dome, antebellum, and these huge booths that were handmade and were just great to sit in. It had the room upstairs with the secret door, and the basement was a real basement, and the kitchen was down there when everyone first started playing there. There was a big sign over the bar that said something like, “Help those that can't do anything about what they are.” It was a transvestite bar, gaudy but really cool. It made you feel like you are in something. The fact that it was also a gay bar, and many people hadn't been to that kind of thing, gave it an element of voyeurism. But really, it was the bands that pulled everyone in at Bookie's, because without that there was no excuse to go.

Chris Panackia:
The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie's was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “Look at them; they're different. They're expressing themselves.” Bookie's became the place that you could play. Bookie's had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren't in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren't. Bookie's bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became, Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had this Bookie's because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let's do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people?” Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn't another venue.

Mike Skill:
Bookie's would have us play one night on a weekend and then Destroy All Monsters the next. There were a lot of really good bands playing by then. Things had moved out of the kind of show bars, those places with three sets a night.

Bob Mulrooney:
There would always be a bigger variety of people when the Romantics would play anywhere.

Tesco Vee:
You went to see the Romantics because all the hot girls would go.

Scott Campbell:
First Romantics show at Bookie's was early '78. The Romantics didn't draw anything. They were signed at Diversified Management Agency, and they were working a lot, but they didn't draw until early '79. Then they got backing at WWWW for their single, “Tell It to Carrie.” Rich Cole had been a roadie for the Mutants, and I knew Jimmy Marinos 'cause I'd run into him over at the music store at Eastland. They wanted me to produce their first single, but I didn't like what they were doing.

Mike Skill:
My main impetus was getting in the studio and recording music—that's what I wanted to do, and be a songwriter. I wrote, “What I Like About You” on a summer afternoon. My dad had a quarter acre in Fraser, real nice out there at the time. I just had an acoustic guitar and one day jumped on the picnic table and wrote it. I had to go to rehearsal that night. I had no car, and I was always late getting to practice. But that day I borrowed my mom's car and I got there early, and it was just me and the drummer. I said, “I got this thing,” and we played it.

Chris Panackia:
The Romantics eventually would play three nights at Bookie's and sell out every night. They played the Silverbird on a Monday night and didn't announce the show until just before doors. This was right when “Tell It to Carrie” was starting to hit and people were just waiting for them to explode. When they announced it on the radio, 6 Mile and Telegraph became a parking lot. There were probably a thousand people outside there that couldn't get in.

Bill Kozy (
Speedball, guitarist
):
I was real young, and my pals from Warren Avenue took me to the Silverbird when the Romantics did a surprise show. Beers were 25 cents. It was this rowdy rock crowd, but things were different than that. The Romantics' fans looked like late-seventies rock people.

Cathy Gisi:
The Romantics played at this little tavern in Hamtramck in this residential neighborhood with wartime-era houses and families. The Romantics were
gonna play this corner bar. The cops were called four times because the neighbors couldn't stand the noise, and they kept shutting them down. They'd wait ten minutes and start all over again. Finally the cops came back and shut the power down on the bar itself. So the drummer ended up doing a fifteen-minute drum solo until finally the cops took his drumsticks and broke them.

Mike Skill:
We started creating our own look, our own vibe. Being into rock music, we liked dressing up more. The natural progression was to do the leather because, well, the Dolls used it. It was much softer. It breathed better than vinyl. We made it more like sixties, and theirs was more like Rolling Stones.

Irene DeCook (
makeup artist, leather fashion designer
):
I was doing stuff for gay S&M people in Detroit. I was making leather clothes, leather chaps. I started out with fabric when I was sixteen when I was designing and modeling. I only knew how to make women's clothes. Then when I was eighteen or nineteen, my instructor said, “Why don't you put your clothes into one of our fashion shows?” which was a drag show. So I got into the gay community making drag clothes. Then got into the gay leather scene. The Romantics had this idea for red leather, and the owner of a leather company who I was friendly with called me and said, “I got this little band in here. I'm asking your permission to give them your number” and gave them my number. I had never heard of them. The Romantics were a big thing in the city—lots of hype and their managers were sure they were going to be huge.

Mike Skill:
Our suits were wearing out. We had vinyl, but it was too hot and we couldn't afford leather at first. Then we were about to get signed, and we happened to meet Irene DeCook. So we got together with her.

Irene DeCook:
Their managers, Joel Zuckerman and Arnie Tencer, called me, and they're like, “I want you to meet these guys. It's the Romantics, and we'll give you an album cover.” They're acting like big shots. I'm not impressed. They thought I'd be, “Wow! It's the Romantics!” So I went to meet them, and it was in their rehearsal hall in Gratiot, and they were all, you know, the four guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, had been rehearsing all day. They didn't look like rock stars. They just looked like little kids. They were a few years older than me. And we met and I said, “Yeah, we'll do it.” Before this they didn't have any money for leather, but they had finally gotten this record deal, and they'd gotten an advance and got to get some real clothes. And before then they were wearing pants that were made of table cloth material because that's what they had the money for. It was fake vinyl,
and it gave them all rashes. They were just so excited they would get some leather. They'd seen some of my work. But the main thing was that they had to be so tight that they had to lay down to put them on. So I'd have to fly out and do fittings and take in their clothes for the four years that we did this, regularly. Then as they got money, they got more and more and more.

Mike Skill:
We went for fittings. She'd come over to the studio or rehearsal hall, and she'd do a fitting. Then for the final fitting you'd go to her house, and if you needed anymore, you'd go again. She would get them tighter and tighter and tighter. At her apartment there were kinds of collars and stuff on the wall and in her room and stuff too, because you'd change in her room.

Irene DeCook:
The Romantics did an interview on WWWW, and Jimmy talked about me wearing all leather clothes and spiked-heel boots, and how strange my apartment was with whips and chains and weird sexual devices hanging on the walls.

Mike Skill:
She was a character, and it added to the whole allure of the Romantics. She was part of the whole thing.

Irene DeCook:
But the main thing was that they wanted these fucking pants so tight they had to lay down to put them on. So I made the pants; we fitted them, and they go off to Florida to do the album. I sent them down the pants, and they called me and said, “Well, we can't put them on!” It's like, “You gotta lay down.” And they laid down and they put on those fucking pants. That was the first time, but I was flown out to many different places. As they got money they got two or three made of everything, and leather does stretch. You have to take it in every so often so that it fits right. Jimmy would have to have four of everything, with him sitting down and sweating like a maniac. And I actually have a gold album from the fourth album. At the time my daughter was five, and Rich's pants looked about the size of hers. They were just tiny, tiny little boys. I mean everybody was super-skinny. The waists were like 26. That first album hit, and they ended up going to Australia and Japan before I could make them a wardrobe, and they ended up having to wear one pair of leather pants for sixty dates. They were soaking wet. They would take them off and turn them inside out and they would sort of dry, if they could. And that's all they had. Then they'd put them on and wear them the next night. They'd still be damp from the night before. When they came back they were like beef jerky. Pubic hair–encrusted beef jerky.

Mike Skill:
When things started happening we were already thinking, like, “Man, get a record deal, get a record deal, get a record deal.” We just kept pounding it and meeting all the people we could. Our managers—even though they were inadequate as far as business, they didn't know business, they were learning it as they went—they would really keep us financed. “You guys go rehearse; you guys go write songs. We'll take care of all the other stuff.” The only problem with it is the managers were our friends, and we ended up firing them because they were hiding money from us. It turned out to be a sour, sour thing, unfortunately. What they did is they tried to keep us from getting—this is not my words—but to keep us from getting spoiled, they would dole out checks.

John Kordosh:
I didn't know Arnie and Joel until they were managing the Romantics, and then, of course, we ran into them a lot. I thought they were slimeballs. We were concerned for the Romantics' sake. Then they got signed through CBS, and it looked pretty good for them. It wasn't until much later that I realized they were really getting ripped off on their own songs, which is a pretty damn old story.

Tom Morwatts:
The Romantics had a couple of really knucklehead managers that were always pulling some shit. I told Wally the first time I met those guys, “Look, I'd be real careful with these guys. I personally wouldn't work with 'em.” I got such a bad vibe from them, but who knows? They may have gotten nowhere without those guys.

Irene DeCook:
I think about one incident that really sticks in my mind, and this was the first hint that something was rotten. I give the managers credit for believing in this band. Although they were managers at Big Boy before they took on the Romantics, believing in this little band that they were fans of so much that they were going to invest a lot of money and really push them and promote them and make them famous and basically tell them what to do. But of course, the Romantics, they wanted to be musicians. They didn't want to do the business. And they didn't look at their accounting for four fucking years. When they finally did, they saw that the management was flying first class and letting the band pay for it and taking 20 percent and this or that and taking all of their publishing. I talked to Jimmy about it, and this was very early on—maybe the second album—and they were getting ready to go on tour, and they all come over and we're doing fittings and they're ordering up all these clothes. I called management to get money to pay for materials, and they're like, “What are you talking about? They don't have any money.” I said, “What?” Arnie goes, “Well, maybe we can loan them some money.”
I went and told Jimmy about it. The Romantics weren't watching it. It was after the fact that they really found out, you know, four years later, when they started looking at shit. Then it was, “Wow, you've been screwing us all this time.” So it's like they don't have any money, but maybe we can loan them some. The Romantics were still living with their fucking parents, and Arnie and Joel, of course, had their own condos. They were driving better cars while the Romantics are driving twenty-year-old cars. At the end there was no money after being, you know, famous and traveling the world. Where is the money? Well, Arnie and Joel took all the money.

Mike Skill:
Coming off
In Heat
and a couple years after that I'm going, “Look, this doesn't seem right. We're not getting paid what we're supposed to be getting paid.” I wanted to change management. I talked to Wally and we split and that was that. And then over time we looked through records and files and followed down this, follow the money, follow the money. There was discrepancies. We took them to court, and, you know, no one wins in that situation. But we won in that we got our copyrights back. And when you have the copyrights then you can sell off, you can sell out, license your copyrights and that, so we did make some money on that after that.

Tex Newman:
When this whole thing was starting, the Romantics had the most money because of Arnie and Joel. They thought they were the Beatles playing this homogenized power pop. I think people were jealous because they were successful; they wore the leather suits, and I mean it's Detroit—they do well with that in New York. They were outsiders, because pretty soon really big bands started coming to Bookie's. So instead of having a weekend of local bands, you'd have these big out-of-town bands.