Detroit Rock City (40 page)

Corey Rusk:
We were probably mildly entertaining to the residents. They just looked at us like we were freaks too, and we weren't the white people that they had problems with. We had no race problems.

Brian Mullan:
Roaming the Cass Corridor at whatever ungodly hour, we all wore jackboots, had our hair cropped or shaven. I had this kid from Amsterdam came to visit one night when Marc Barie and I were living at this funeral home down there. We were going to see a show at the City Club. So we're walking down there, and all of a sudden there's this big shiny gun being pointed at us with the guy holding it yelling at us, “Suck my black dick, white motherfuckers.” It was a miracle, because you never saw cabs down there, but a cab pulled up and we dove through the fucking windows. Nobody really got hurt down there because nobody had money. At the time I was taking the Jefferson bus to Nunzio's to run sound. I made like $15 a show, and then I sold loose joints. I was just surviving.

Andy Wendler:
There was the Rayis Brothers place, the party store, right down the street from the Freezer. Everyone went there; they were Chaldeans who ran it. It was a safe zone. They just didn't take any shit. If there was anybody lingering around outside, they'd just go out and confront them with a weapon because they were making the business turn away. They'd just handle the weapon and tell them, “Get the hell out of here.” The other thing about Rayis Brothers: the store had a two-inch plastic bullet shield, like other places, but the bullet shield was around the entire store, so when you went in you were like in a gerbil cage, and you'd say, “Give me that, give me that” and all of the product was behind the plastic shield. Say, “give me some Fritos and a quart of Bud,” and they'd go around the actual store and get it. The customer was in a little booth buying stuff.

Tim Caldwell (artist):
I was in jail one night, and a guy told me the cops came into the apartment building right by the Willis Gallery because he had let loose from the rooftop with a machine gun. He hid on top of the elevator while they searched the premises.

Dave Rice:
I lived in a few different buildings around there, briefly in the Clubhouse with this guy Darryl. Darryl and his brother and this friend of ours, Jenny, were there, and a couple of guys came in with their shotgun and just, like, cleaned the place out of as much gear as they could carry. Okay, gotta get a new amp. Gotta get a new guitar. I always played like this slap-together pawnshop crap anyways, so it wasn't like I lost a '59 goldtop or anything.

Andy Wendler:
We'd get fucked with occasionally, but we had numbers on our side. We were never there alone. There would be forty kids skateboarding down the middle of the street. John and Larissa had respect in the neighborhood, back when thieves used to abide by that kind of thing, because they lived in the neighborhood. So if you were with John and Larissa, you got a little bit of a pass. It was a big heroin neighborhood in those days, and they were amongst it. The guy who owned Cobb's Corner got shot in the backroom one night. That was a money thing—he had it. One time the Detroit police pulled up at the Clubhouse and said, “What the hell are you kids doing? Go back to Roseville, you idiots. What are you doing down here?”

Gloria Branzei:
Those guys thought they were scaring the people in the neighborhood, but they were fooling themselves. I was in the shooting dens, and I knew
what they thought; they just thought we were fucking crazy. But they sure weren't scared of us.

Corey Rusk:
The Freezer was the all-ages reaction to the City Club situation. Somehow we managed to get into a lot of those City Club shows, though we were underage. But the Freezer was just so cool, it didn't matter.

Brian Mullan:
City Club was the old woman's club off Elizabeth right downtown, a block off Woodward. It was one of Vince Bannon's big to-dos. Any time there was a big show, whether the Dead Kennedys or the Exploited, the Cramps or whoever, the security guys would always beat up on the punks. So there was a backlash. Bannon was the Establishment, a businessman, and in retrospect I don't begrudge him that.

Rob Miller (
Bloodshot Records, cofounder
):
I had a humiliating night at City Club. I got a fake ID at the Lindell AC bar and tried to get into a Fear show with it, and the door guys, they laughed at me.

Chris Panackia:
Vince was booking bands at City Club before it was opened. And he still was running Bookie's. The fucking agents went crazy. He goes, “Oh, I got this great place,” and he wouldn't tell them until they got there. About four or five hundred people in the ballroom could see the band at City Club, but you could put a lot more people in it. In a two-month span he did the Dead Kennedy's, the Fear, the Cramps, the Rockettes, the Stray Cats, Duran Duran, Haircut 100, Killing Joe, Gun Club, Human League, Circle Jerks, Sparks, the Flesh Eaters, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark. It was the best place to be. The Circle Jerks show was during the Grand Prix downtown, and you got in free if you brought a helmet. One guy brought a helmet.

Vince Bannon (
Bookie's, City Club promoter, Coldcock, Sillies, guitarist
):
In '81 we architected what we were going to do and how we were going to open Clutch Cargo's at the City Club, which is what it was. Clutch Cargo's was the name of the production, and it was at the City Club.

Rob Miller:
The Dead Kennedys was oversold, and it also brought to bear the uncomfortable underbelly of Detroit hardcore, which was how right wing it was becoming. You had skinheads goose stepping, these National Front guys.

Keith Jackson:
One night I was with Kirk Morrison from Dead Heroes. City Club had just opened, and we were outside and we heard gunfire, which wasn't unusual. But a bullet went through my jacket and shattered my collarbone. Some guys dragged me into Detroit Receiving by my arm and said, “Our friend got shot.” The cops actually came to the emergency room and talked to me. They said, “Were you returning fire?”

Corey Rusk:
We'd go to City Club because they got bands we wanted to see, plus we would be on some of those bills; Negative Approach played there a lot. The Freezer wasn't there to put those larger places down.

I would help organize those bands at the Freezer, though, and we started getting out-of-town touring bands that were open to playing different places. Like when the Misfits played at the Freezer. It was just such a huge time for music. At least to us.

John Brannon:
We were writing the soul music of the suburbs, and the Freezer was perfect. If you want to nail what soul music was for that time, the scene—even though it's basically a white scene—it is our soul music, man. We're creative, we're bored, we've got nothing going on—man, we're creating this shit. The whole thing about being in a band at that point, there was no separation between the kids and the audience and who's on stage. It was music for the people.

Rob Michaels:
There was no consciousness at all of “Hey, this is the town that the Stooges and MC5 were from.” There was this Stooges residue, and there were people we thought of as that. It wasn't like people didn't know about those records, but there was no sense of “Hey, this is Detroit and this is what came from here.” It was this sense of “We made this.”

Tesco Vee:
Dave Stimson and I started a label, Touch and Go, named after the magazine we had. We had friends that were in the Necros and the Fix, and these bands were so fucking good and nobody's going to put their records out, so I have to put them out. I felt like it had to be done. We were part of something that was great, and we weren't deluded into thinking our own little thing was great; it really was great. We had some really good bands, and the world needed to hear them. The Necros and the Fix were the two big bands, and then Negative Approach.

Andy Wendler:
In the fall of '80 we ran into Tim Story, who is now a Grammy award–winning producer and composer. But at the time he had a four-track in his basement, and that's where three songs on the Necros' first single came from. He just came over and brought his bike and his four-track over and a little mixer, and we just laid it down, and then that was it.

Tesco Vee:
Those first records by the Fix and the Necros records sat in various shops. We'd drive them down to Ann Arbor and we'd run and look and, yep there's still five. Still five Necros. Oh, we sold one Fix for $2. Now those records go for a couple of mortgage payments.

Corey Rusk:
The first two Touch and Go releases, the Fix and Necros, were so limited, two hundred of the Fix and one hundred of the Necros. And that seemed like so many: we have five friends. You know, “We don't know anybody beyond our five friends who would want this.”

Marc Barie:
Corey took it from those two releases, the Fix and Necros, and Touch and Go became one of the biggest indie labels in the world. That doesn't happen accidentally.

Corey Rusk:
Sometime in late spring of '81 I got a job at a lumberyard, specifically because I wanted to make some money so that the Necros could record another record. I had the idea of the
Process of Elimination
EP too. So I have to get some money together so I can record all these bands to get a compilation out documenting what's going on. I was just an amped-up kid. I wanted to do shit. So I worked all summer, loading trucks and saving my money.

Tesco Vee:
I officially handed Touch and Go Records over to Corey when I moved to DC in '82, but he was handling it before that. The
Process
EP was when the passing of the torch went down. Corey called me up one day, and I realized that I had no interest in running a record label. I was doing it out of necessity, as a companion to the magazine. Corey was like, “I want to take it over,” and I said, “Go for it.” We were friends, and he thought, “This is what I want to do.” And this was a perfect, already established name. I was getting ready to pull up stakes and go to DC. I lost my teaching job, unemployment in Michigan was 16 percent, and I didn't have money to pay the rent, much less put out records.

Chris Moore:
People made fun of Corey behind his back because he was so serious and ambitious. He had such a drive to make something of this music that was happening. He wasn't much fun, but he really looked out for us in a lot of ways.

Gloria Branzei:
Corey Rusk was one of the best fucks I ever had.

Marc Barie:
Corey's dad was really interesting. He manufactured something for the auto industry. One day we were all around Maumee and he took us over there. The line workers looked at us like we were demented. We had all the punk rock chains and boots, and Todd Swalla had a Mohawk. I think Corey got his business sense from his dad, who made a lot of money.

Corey Rusk:
I was living with my grandmother in Maumee, Ohio. I had a little recording studio in my basement and so I started recording bands for Touch and Go. All the crappy sounding records were recorded there—the Meatmen EP, the Negative Approach EP. The Blight thing was recorded there, and that was one
of the better-sounding things that was recorded there. That was one of the first things that I did there that I thought, “Wow, this sounds really heavy and great.”

Chris Moore:
We had the run of Corey's house, and we had a skateboard ramp we built in the front yard or the driveway. We would record and skate all day and burn ourselves out on that. No one was into drugs or anything. The older guys drank beer, but we just skated.

Corey Rusk:
I put bands up all the time, even when I lived with my grandmother. I brought Flipper back to my grandma's house, which sounds like a potential disaster. But they were so nice to her; we all hung out and had pizza. Suicidal Tendencies also stayed at my grandmother's. We all went swimming in the river, since the house was on the banks of the Maumee River.

John Brannon:
We started going on tour, and we'd have to sneak Opie out of the house because he was fifteen. Opie, Graham—those kids were still in high school. I'm sure, looking back, the parents probably realized what's going on. Opie would tell his folks, “Oh, I'm going to spend the night at Graham's house,” and then we'd go out. DC, Philly, and New York, and then be back in time for him to get to school.

Chris Moore:
My parents worried, but they knew about my friends. I didn't tell them what went down.

Andy Wendler:
We did our first real tour with the Misfits. We had made great friends with them, and Corey and Barry were pestering 'em like, “Hey, can we get on those bills?” I don't really know why we got along with them so well, other than the fact that Jerry and Doyle might as well have been from Ohio. They were just such great, good-natured guys, and we really hit 'em off with it. Glenn, for whatever he's become now, was incredibly articulate and artistically talented and had an eye for just really clever, almost iconic graphics. I don't know—that really appealed to us. We were like, “Wow, they're like the Ramones but scary.” On the Misfits tour we took Corey's dad's ratted-out old Suburban. It was tight, and we had to sleep on top of the gear in the back. It got horrible gas mileage, but it was cheaper than buying or renting something.